Project Boussh: Moment of Clarity
by Josh Cochran

It was one of those days when his eyes caught every detail of the world
around him. Tiny details that were there every day, but his mind or his
senses usually skipped right over. The crack of the paint where the door
frame didn't quite meet, the ticking of the clock in the living room, the
flecks of cat food in the carpet around Rogue's bowl.

Josh sat in front of the computer, looking not so much at it as through it.
His mind was far away from this place and this time. He was focused on the
past...the last five years of his life. He was trying in vain to remember
what had led him from the life he'd grown up loving to the hollow,
meaningless shell he now had. Certainly most of his troubles had been his
own fault. Wasn't that what he'd always believed? Nothing just happens.
People make things happen. He'd been quick to dismiss the troubles of others
with that philosophy before, and now it mocked him from a corner of his mind
he could not reach to silence it. And in all fairness, the nagging question
made an excellent point. Nobody had forced him to this backwater of a
million people, a thousand miles away from the love and warmth and hope that
he knew were still his to return to. No, he'd agreed to come here on his
own. He wondered now if that hadn't been a form of exile, a way to punish
himself for his mistakes.

Were he to be honest with himself, though, he knew that he hadn't seen life
in Nashville that way at the time. Whether they were self-created or not, he
had survived more problems and more loss and more heartache in the last five
years than anyone should ever need to. Too many things had happened for him
to be able to go on plodding through daily life pretending that things were
fine, surrounded by reminders of his failures. So when the chance to come
here had opened up he'd jumped at it, hoping for a fresh start. Hoping to
get away.

In the end, though, very little had changed. He'd managed to create his
bright new life in the image of the old, and found new troubles to occupy
his mind. This latest trouble he was literally lucky to have survived.

So here he was. A quarter century old and feeling every nanosecond of it.
He'd never done a damn thing useful with his life, and at this rate he never
would. He'd always felt he was meant to do something important and
meaningful. That was his biggest failure of all. All his life, others had
told him of the nearly boundless potential they saw in him. Sometimes he
could even feel it. The great promise of what he *could* be and what he
*could* do. In his starry-eyed way of thinking, the battles he could win and
the people he could save. That point of view at least accounted for some of
his early mistakes, even if it didn't excuse them.

And why should he try to save anyone? Had anyone tried to save him, all
those times his life had gone to hell? And when he did try to help people,
what did he usually get for it? A slap in the face and another mark in the
loss column.

As quickly as it had come on the fever broke and the worst of the storm was
past. Josh sighed and rose from his chair, feeling stiff and sore. Either
he'd been sitting there too long, or his life was catching up with him.

As he wandered through the living room, a picture on the television caught
his eye. A baby penguin covered in oil was being rubbed down with a towel by
a young woman in a lab coat. The penguin hung limp in her arms, its eyes
open and looking empty. Josh had heard about the Galapagos oil spill by now
of course. Though he wasn't much of an ecologist, he loved nature. The image
on the TV screen was heartbreaking. He was reaching for the remote control
to quickly change the channel when he suddenly remembered something that
made him turn and rush back to the computer.

He hadn't checked his e-mail in days. He'd been busy, then out of town,
then...well, then feeling sorry for himself. Sure enough, as soon as he
opened Outlook dozens of messages came flooding in. He scanned through them
quickly, a growing ball of ice forming in his stomach. When he'd first heard
about Project Boussh, he'd laughed at it. The notion that a Star Destroyer
was in orbit and the Empire was trying to take over Planet Earth was
ridiculous. It sounded like something he would have written in one of his
fanfics when he was a kid. Only with the help of the web, it had become one
of those multimedia stories that takes on a life of its own.

"Can you say 'Blair Witch Project'?" he'd chuckled to himself a week or so
before.

Only now he wasn't sure it was so funny anymore. He flipped over to a web
browser and rushed to terraserver.com. While he waited for the page to load,
he read through a couple of the messages in his inbox a little more
carefully. He'd been keeping up with archiving the "reports" and
transcribing the "communications" as Sci had asked him. What the hell. He'd
been bored and needed a hobby. But if the sweat breaking out on his forehead
were any indication, it might not be all fun and games.

Josh located the information he wanted and plugged the coordinates for the
cabin in New Hampshire into TerraServer. What luck! The latest satellite
image was just a couple of days old. He drummed his fingers impatiently on
the desk, waiting for the image to load.

And there it was. The cabin and the lake, just as they were described in the
reports. Next to them were some very large, very strange shapes, which cast
odd shadows in the satellite picture. Clearly someone had tried to
camouflage them, but a Lambda-class shuttle has a pretty distinctive shape.

Suddenly the world was very, very still. From the other room he heard some
redneck babbling about hitchhikers and dogs and lights in the sky. Josh
chuckled ruefully. Five minutes ago he would have dismissed it as mild
insanity, but suddenly nothing sounded so crazy anymore.

Josh looked at Rogue, sitting on her blanket on the futon. "Whadda ya wanna
bet that guy's in New Hampshire, Roguie?" he laughed.

He sat in stunned silence a few more minutes, his mind wrapped tightly
inside itself. He'd had the feeling for a few weeks now that his life was
about to change dramatically again. It was odd to be able to spot one of
those life-altering moments when it happened. The moment was here, though,
and there was no denying what it meant.

Josh headed for the closet and the box he knew lay buried in the back
corner.