Free Bad Glass by Richard E. Gropp Page B

few of the neatly typed questions:
        13) What were your thoughts before, during, and after the incident? (Please be as specific as possible.)
        14) What emotions did the incident evoke? (Fear? Amusement? Regret?)
        15) Do you feel compelled to seek out similar experiences?
    The person who had filled out this particular form had drawn a shaky red line through question 15, as if he or she were trying to strike it from existence—the question or the compulsion it described, I didn’t know.
    “And what have you found?” I asked.
    “A lot of stuff.” Danny shrugged. “And nothing.” He pointed to a white dry-erase board tacked to the opposite wall. There was a list of six bullet-pointed items sketched out in bold black letters. “We’ve narrowed the phenomena down to six basic categories. First, you’ve got your
visitors
—people and things appearing where they shouldn’t be, where they
can’t
be. Celebrities driving through town in BMWs. Dead politicians. We’ve even got a cluster of random people who swear they saw the Empire State Building rising out of the west end of Riverfront Park, but I’m guessing that one’s just complete bullshit. On the flip side of that, you’ve got our second item:
disappearances
. People and things that should be here but aren’t. Things that just … cease to exist. There’s a whole block in the industrial district out east—it used to be warehouses, with streets and trucks and loading docks. It’s all gone now. Nothing but flat, bare earth. And you know the mayor, right? You’ve seen the video?”
    “The mayor? That was
real
?” I didn’t bother trying to mask my surprise. “That video made the rounds, but everyone dismissed it as a fake. I’ve seen page after page of analysis. There are splices! And they found the actress, the woman who goes on stage after the mayor disappears. She says she did it for her friend’s video project.”
    “Nah,” Danny said, his face lighting up with a bright smile. “All of that stuff came from us. Misinformation. Brilliant, really! We couldn’t stop the video from getting out there—it was broadcast live, after all, on national television—so we flooded the Internetwith fake copies. We added splices and artifacts. We even dubbed over some of the crowd noise, to make it sound like bad acting.”
    Danny opened a new window on his computer screen and launched a video clip. It was the same press conference I’d seen a dozen times before, but in amazingly clean, high-definition video—better than broadcast quality, better than anything I’d ever seen. And there was no distortion, no artifacts, no obvious splicing. It showed the mayor answering questions, getting angry, then disappearing.
    In front of cameras. In front of a whole crowd of reporters.
    “We put an emergency injunction on everyone in the room, requiring them to stay quiet. The woman who comes on stage—” Danny pointed to the sharply dressed woman as she stepped up to the lectern; he stayed silent as she looked around and shook her head. “She was his press secretary. She’s in New York now. We hired an actress to come forward and claim credit for her role.”
    Danny shut down the video and swiveled back around. “Truth is, the mayor’s gone. He disappeared—right that day, right that
millisecond
—and he hasn’t been seen since. And the video gives us nothing. Just—one frame he’s there, with that pissed-off look on his face, and the next frame … 
poof
!” He popped open his hand, showing me an empty palm.
    I stood dumbstruck for a moment, trying to process this information.
    “Yeah,” Danny said. “Just blows your fucking mind.”
    I glanced over at Taylor, thinking she’d break down laughing at any moment, revealing this whole thing as a big fat joke, but her face remained perfectly still.
    “Anyway, after visitors and disappearances, we’ve got
sounds without sources
.” Danny pointed back to the whiteboard. “Voices