Nine Eleven

Friday Challenge 9/11/09 - memories

At the time the first plane hit the World Trade Center, I was driving to work. The radio was on, but it wasn’t a station that had news, or at least not the what’s-happening-right-this-minute kind of news. I got all the way to my cubicle on the fourth and top floor of the Hornet building and settled in to start work before Tom popped his head over the cubicle wall and told me about it.

Now you have to keep in mind the fact that Tom always popped his head over the cubicle wall and said something strange. Often he just woofed at me (he has Saint Bernards, and yes that is plural) and disappeared. I think this might have been his way of saying it was a good day and he was feeling great. He always got me laughing, and he is a good programmer, which is sometimes a rarity.

By the time Tom told me about the first plane, there were already rumors about a helicopter crashing at the pentagon. At least they knew there was a lot of black smoke there. So it never really seemed to me like it could have been an accident. There was a debate going on amongst the fourth floor occupants about it, but that ended shortly when the second plane crashed into the other tower. After that, nobody did much work. Radios were on all over the building.

The Hornet building, named after the street it is on, is the counterpart of the building ~brb was in that day. It is about a mile from the end of a main runway at Lambert. The usual wind direction made it a main runway for planes taking off. Depending what direction they were aiming for, they would often go right over us. If you happened to be looking at the windows, you would see the plane’s shadow block the sunlight for half a second. Larger planes made the building shake. Being on the top floor made it louder. Sometimes in a meeting or on the phone we would have to wait for the noise to die down before continuing. I had been there for a few months, but I still noticed when the building shook.

When the planes stopped, all the radios became noticeable. And every morning for weeks after that, I noticed the fighter jets taking off. It was the same time every day, and there were always four of them, about a minute apart. No matter how deep my brain was into a program, it came back up at the sound of that first jet, counted four of them, and only then would it be able to return to the task at hand.

And boy, do I remember the day a couple weeks later that plane near Chicago failed to identify itself! I swear there were at least a dozen fighters streaking off to Chicago. It was obvious something was happening, but none of the radios or web sites had any information. I didn’t hear what it was until that evening. Didn’t get much done that day, either.

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As for making sense of it, I just now figured it out. I know, I know, I'm really gullible and naïve.

Hey, there are two dots over that “i.” When did that start happening? The computer knows what word I'm using the “i” in, and puts one or two dots accordingly? But … those two dots are German, aren't they? And naïve is a French word, isn't it? Blastit.

Being here at The Friday Challenge has opened my eyes to a lot of things. Not just books I never heard of, but new ideas to argue about, and gobs of conspiracy theories. But they are hidden very well, and if it hadn't been for the new view on life that I picked up in Nashville this summer, I probably wouldn't have noticed a thing.

The tip-off was Topher's tale of Pompeii's last summer. I searched for disasters in 1883 (and found Krakatoa), and there were loads of them. I never knew about most of them. And it wasn't just 1883. There were disasters every year that wiped out whole villages or families. I began to notice the islands. They seemed to have an affinity for wiping out whole islands, or at least getting rid of all the people on them. There was that island off the eastern seaboard in the sixteenth century. All the people just disappeared.

Manhattan is an island.

I believe their original plan was to convince New Yorkers that Manhattan was sinking, and to fix it they needed to saw off the island, tow it out a ways, turn it around, and push it back.** The only problem was that Long Island was in the way. Of course, what they didn't tell the New Yorkers was that they had no intention of pushing the island back. They wanted to tow it out into the ocean and just sink the whole thing.

When that plan fell through, they thought up a different one.

The only thing I haven't figured out yet is this: Did Topher stumble on this pattern by accident? Or is he one of them? Or is everybody at The Friday Challenge one of them?

Am I one of them?

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** Wikipedia

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