Heiser-The-Facade - Sparkling Eyes

"But now you think there are aliens?" Melissa repeated the question. "Why shouldwe believe this new twist?""Yes . . . I believe there are beings . . . because I saw one kill Dr. Garvey.""What!""I was the one who induced Dr. Garvey to go to the auroral viewing room forprecisely the reasons Dr. Bradley deduced. The Group has access to fully functionalHAARP technology here. Our nanotechnology is also thirty years ahead of where the bestcivilian scientists are. I staged the morning after rendezvous for the two of you to showyou the ease with which we can create any alternative reality we wish. Incidentally, thehuman genome has already been mapped; we achieved that almost a decade ago.""You mean to tell me you basically . . . materialized a Melissa in my bed and viceversa?""Yes, we have complete DNA information on each of you via the blood sampleswe took when you got here, as well as the necessary genetic information for body type,hair color, etc. The only tricks to doing what I did are facial appearance, vocal quality,sentient memory ... things like that. I tried to engineer the circumstances so that each ofyou would glimpse the body very briefly, and then only from behind, hoping you wouldeach figure out who was being represented. If you had turned the specimen over youwould have discovered the ruse, but the point would have been made—you each wouldhave had a human body in your bed, at least for as long as I wanted it there."How did you get the bodies out of the room especially when the security logsindicated no one entered or left?""Nanotechnology by its very definition allowed me to place the necessary nanomaterialin your beds while each of you were out of your rooms earlier that evening. Ihave full access to the security logs, so I deleted my entries into each of your rooms. Asfor the bodies, there was no need to remove them. I simply programmed them todisintegrate on command by remote control. The specimens returned to the molecularlevel in a matter of minutes. I had merely to wait till each of you left the room forshowering, and took care of the evidence.""What was that smell we detected in our rooms?" Brian wondered."That's an after-effect of the compositional breakdown of the organic materialwhich comprised the specimen. The molecular decomposition of the material creates athermal reaction, which in turn causes some of the elements to be burned away, ergo thesmell. We've been working on that problem, but haven't been able to totally eliminate it.""But how did you know when to zap the bodies?" asked Melissa. "What if we hadwalked in on what was happening.""It was a risk I had to take, but I felt confident I could time the disposal processadequately. I could know that the opportunity presented itself because I placed listeningdevices in your room—just the low-tech variety—stuck under an end table and behind adresser."Melissa took a half step toward the bedroom, but stopped herself, rememberingthe intruder's threat."You wouldn't have found the devices anyway, Miss Kelley. I've already removedthem both. They're in my pocket.""I just can't believe that we possess this kind of technology," Melissa said,shaking her head. "I mean, making a machine the size of a strand of DNA like Malcolm300