Sarah's Landing - Episode I

He had not heard any of their stories before but here in his comfortable office each one sounded similar. How many of them, he wondered, were missing? Was there a rational explanation? Why had these people vanished?

He spent the entire morning talking to other agents and playing and replaying the voice recordings.

"What the hell is going on? Am I crazy? People don't disappear. Humans are tangible. Solid entities." He rubbed one hand against the other. "No. It's not possible. It can't be."

The tapes have been around for years. He knew everyone had a crack at them and they came up empty-handed. No one really expected him to do anything about them. But the voices on the recordings haunted him.

Information from the computers confirmed his suspicions. There were many similarities. People who did not know each other, who lived in diverse places, were experiencing similar phenomena. Witness after witness repeated the description: "...suddenly there was a brilliant, blinding flash of light!" Some of the stories had been discounted. Missing people were found, or returned on their own. But certain cases could not be so easily resolved.

Were they coincidences, or were the implications far more reaching? Why should these people suddenly vanish? Joshua sat down at his desk and tabulated a long list of names. He could not find one common denominator. The missing people came from all walks of life. The less fortunate were as likely to disappear as executives, and children vanished as often as adults. There was no pattern.

Joshua ran another correlation check through the computers. This time he fed all the data he could find into the memory banks, beginning with SICOM's first reports of unusual events up to and including the information on the tapes his "buddies" left on his desk.