Thousand+ Words for Nov. 16, 2025

Jay Brinkley took the Lanyard from around his Neck and gave it to the Guard that Sat....

Jay Brinkley took the lanyard from around his neck and gave it to the guard that sat behind a desk in the hallway adjacent to a heavy door, like the door to a bank vault. “Hey, Charlie, how are you doing this morning?”

“Fine, Mr. Brinkley,” he said as he inspected the card carefully, looking up at Brinkley’s face. Satisfied, he swiped the card through a slot in a panel on his desk. ”All right, sir,” he said, and Brinkley responded by pressing his right index finger on a pad at the edge of the desk. There was a soft click, and the guard typed a number into a keypad at his elbow, then he rose from the desk, walked around it, and entered a number onto a keypad on the door. There was a louder click, and he rotated a handle on the door and opened it. ”There you go, Mr. Brinkley.”

“Thanks.” Brinkley stepped through into a small chamber, like an airlock, and stood still while the guard closed the outer door.

When the outer door was closed, the guard’s voice sounded over a speaker in the small white-plastic-walled chamber. “Okay, Mr. Brinkley, you’re all set.”

Brinkley pressed his finger against a pad just exactly like the one on the guard’s desk, and a door at the other end clicked open. Brinkley stepped through it and down a paneled hallway that terminated in a paneled door with the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency on it and underneath that, a small placard: “The Raborn Conference Room.” Brinkley entered quietly and sat down in one of the chairs that lined the walls of the darkened room.

About a dozen people were seated around a long table in the center of the room while a young woman in a uniform stood near the screen at the other end, delivering a briefing. Several of them turned and nodded at Brinkley as he entered; one of the near his end of the table got up and sat down the chair next to him. “Tim, it’s hollow and it’s full of water.” he said.

“Water?” Brinkley responded.

“Yeah, water. It’s hollow, the hull is about 1800 feet thick. We think it might be pressurized, but it’s definitely full of water.”

“There’s no way that’s natural, right?”

“Nope. No way.”

“Anybody found a way into it yet? A door or window or something?”

“Nope. No door.” One of the men seated around the table was motioning to the man who was speaking with Brinkley. ”I’ve got to get back,” the man said. ”Nobody knows what to do with this."

“Yeah, I know,” Brinkley responded. ”I’ll see you later.”

At the front of the room, the young woman was concluding her briefing. The slide on the screen was a satellite view of the object as it lay on the ground with the borders of Kenya drawn around it—the scale of the thing was nearly incomprehensible. ”That’s the status of our knowledge at this moment. Several of our teams are in place and working with the Kenyans and our international partners to investigate. That’s where we are,” she said. ”This briefing is classified TSI-yellow six,” she said. ”I’d be happy to address your questions now.”

The man at the far end of the table spoke up. ”What’s inside it? Besides the water, I mean.”

“We don't know yet, Mr. Secretary,” the young woman said crisply. She did not appear to be unfazed by this admission of ignorance.

“Commander,” a woman near that end of the table said, “how do we get into this thing?”

“There are no obvious doors or ports,” she said. ”Initial examination of the hull indicates a nonmetallic ceramic of unknown composition. It is paramagnetic, dull gray in color, and does not conduct electricity. The surface is rough, about the texture of cinder block.” She called up to the video booth window above the screen. ”Dave, give me Slide 14 again, please.”

The screen flickered, and there was a close-up view of the object, with a ruler against it for scale. As the commander had said, it was the texture of cinder block. “The initial ultrasonics indicate a standard hull thickness of about 1800 feet, as briefed,” she said.

“Excuse me, Shelly,” one of the men at the table interrupted. ”This thing is about 45 miles tall, right? Eighteen hundred feet is only a tiny fraction of that total height. Can a container that big full of water stay together with walls only 1800 feet thick?”

“No, not really, sir. Maybe in space, but not on the ground.”

“Are there any indications of bulging or mechanical stress in the hull?” one of the older men at the table asked.

“No, sir,” the briefer responded. ”The dimensions are the same to within inches as they were measured, both in space and during its descent.”

After a few moments of silence, the man at the far end of the table spoke again. ”Okay, that’ll be all, Commander, thank you. Lights.”

The lights in the room came up as the young woman gathered papers and disappeared through a door near the screen. Secretary of State Thomas Wilburn stood up, looked down the long table, and then at his watch. ”I have to brief this in twenty minutes,” he said. His head pivoted around as he nodded to individuals around the table. ”Pete, you come with me on this one, and Gloria, I’d like you there too. Jay, I saw you come in,” he said, looking over at Brinkley. ”You come along too, okay? That’ll be all, folks. Keep this one close hold, and let’s see how long it takes for the media to get this business about it being full of water.”

The people around the table recognized that last comment as being a warning to them against leaking the information that had been revealed to them during the briefing. Along the wall, they started getting up, some leaving immediately, some forming into groups of one or two, speaking softly. Tim got up and moved to where the secretary, Pete Verner, and Gloria Westphal were huddled together. “Yeah, well, something that size comes all that way, lands softly on the open desert, something’s going to happen soon,” the older woman was saying. ”A door will open and something’s going to come out of that thing one way or another.”

“Sure,” Pete said. ”All I’m saying is that it’s most likely an automated probe of some kind. We send rovers to Mars—somebody somewhere has sent this thing to us.”

“A probe 200 miles long?” Gloria responded. ”There’s no need to make a probe that big. It’s got to be something that something alive is living in.”

“We have no basis for that sort of conclusion,” Pete said.

They continued to banter back and forth. “Tim, tell this guy,” Gloria said as he approached. ”It’s too big to be a probe, there’s got to be beings inside. The thing is the length of New Jersey, for God's sake, and so tall that it’s going to interfere with north African weather.”

“Forty-five miles high,” Pete said. ”That’s just incredible.”

“And the whole thing is sitting in the sand in northern Kenya,” Gloria said. ”Forty-five by 200-mile footprint, and 45 miles high.” She shook her head. ”It’s incomprehensible.”

“Yeah, it really is,” Tim responded. ”And if this thing is full of water, that’s a hell of a lot of water.”

“What happens if it leaks out?” the secretary asked. ”Or if they let it out? What happens to our planet?”

As Secretary Wilburn was asking, Pete sat back in one of the chairs at the now-empty table, his pen flying over a pad of yellow legal paper. ”Let’s see, 220 times 45 times 45, that’s the volume, and then a cubic mile of water, um....” He continued to jot figures. ”Okay, if it’s full of water, that’s about 440 trillion gallons.”

“How much is that?” the secretary asked.

“A lot,” Pete answered. ”We’re talking a small ocean here. If 440 trillion were released on the Kenyan plain, we’re going to see a hell of a flood. I mean, I'm talking about Noah's Ark here. And when it reaches the ocean....” He shrugged. ”Everybody in the path of this water will die. Most of it will run southeast to the Atlantic ocean, some of it will probably go north into the Sahara. You could see ocean levels rise ten or twelve feet immediately, and who knows what the long-term effect would be."

“Hey,” Gloria said suddenly. ”Is it fresh water in there or salt, and does it make a difference?”

Pete shrugged again. ”Who knows? It won’t change the salinity of the ocean, it’s not enough water even if it’s fresh,” he said. ”That’s not really the worry, though.”

“What’s the worry?” the secretary asked.

“The worry is what’s in the water. Some sort of poison? Some weird life form that will eat up all the algae? The ocean is a pretty delicate thing, and we depend on the algae in there for about half the planet’s oxygen supply.”

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