The President's Brain Is Missing Read Free Page A

minutes. Let’s hit the Five Guys on H. I’m starving.”

    â€œFirst off, that whole Roswell thing is bullshit,” General White said in the secure Executive Office Building meeting room, pointing with a Five Guys fry for emphasis.
    â€œTold you,” Jefferson said to Alex, under his breath.
    â€œWhat isn’t bullshit is the 1908 Tunguska Event,” White said.
    â€œThat thing in Russia,” Boehm said. The cheeseburger White had brought him from Five Guys lay in front of him on the table, untouched. Brad Stein, sitting next to him, was busy consuming his.
    â€œRight,” White said.
    â€œI thought that was an asteroid impact,” Boehm said.
    â€œIt was,” White said. “Or a comet impact, one of the two, take your pick. But that chunk of ice and rock didn’t just happen to fall out of the sky. We think it was aimed there to wipe something out.”
    â€œWhat, aliens?” Boehm said.
    â€œAliens,” White agreed. “In 1927 a scientist named Leonid Kulik led an expedition to the area. Officially he didn’t find anything other than toppled over trees. Unofficially—secretly—what he found was evidence that someone or something was in the area, using technology well in advance of ours. After he returned to Leningrad he filed a report and then Stalin had his people crawling all over the place, digging everything out. When Kulik went back in ’39, it was all packed up and gone.”
    â€œWhy didn’t Stalin use it, then?” Stein asked. “Alien technology would have saved him a lot of trouble during the Great Patriotic War.”
    â€œThe comet turned everything that was mechanical into slag,” White said. “You could tell the stuff did something, but you couldn’t tell what that thing was. The real prize were the data storage units—hard drives, if you will. Stalin’s problem was that he and his scientists had no idea what they were.”
    â€œHow could they not know?” Boehm asked.
    â€œHow would they know?” White said. “Dave, if you gave a caveman a data disc, he wouldn’t know it had data on it. All he’d know was it was round and shiny. Stalin’s boys had the same problem; the data storage units looked like metal cubes to them. They destroyed a couple breaking them open, found nothing useful and then stored the rest.”
    â€œSo the Soviets had them, but now we do,” Boehm said.
    â€œYup. We bought them from Russia in the early ’90s,” White said. “Back when we were paying them to dismantle their nukes. They were hard up for cash and offered us a bunch of their crackpot science projects for dirt cheap. Most of it was the sort of pseudo-scientific crap that makes Lysenko look like a Nobel Prize winner, but this one panned out. We were finally able to get our way into the data drives about fifteen years ago and started working on some of the stuff we found there.”
    â€œLike teleportation,” Stein said. He took Boehm’s abandoned burger and unwrapped it.
    â€œIt’s not exactly teleportation,” White said. “It’s more like creating static holes in timespace that you can pull or push things through.”
    â€œWhatever,” Stein said. “The point is it’s something you could use to pluck someone’s brain out of their head, and still keep it connected somehow.”
    â€œTheoretically,” White said.
    Stein motioned to toward the X-Ray and MRI of the President’s head. “More than theoretically, I’d say,” he said, around his burger.
    â€œI say theoretically because there are problems with the technology as we understand it,” White said.
    â€œLike what?” Boehm asked.
    â€œLike matter spontaneously reorganizing when it goes through the holes,” White said. “It’s bad enough with things like metal and plastics, but when we push something live through one of these