The Abduction

16-11-2020 Favourite Sci-Fi : X-Files

FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder woke up, his eyes going from shut to wide open in a few seconds. He could not remember where he was or how he came to be here. There was bright white light shining all around him and he was lying on a hard uncomfortable surface. He experimentally tried to move his limbs, but they felt stuck, as if fixed to whatever it was that he was lying on. Other than the white light, he could see nothing else.

In a few minutes, he had a strange feeling in his head. It was as if something was crawling inside it. He flinched when he felt a zinging sensation inside his brain like there were some electrical shocks being set off. Mulder tried to raise his hands and hold his head, but he could not move. The white light now seemed to be pulsing, bright and dark and slowly turning into a rainbow of colours which swirled and danced in front of his eyes. And then, the pain started. He felt as if drill bits were being inserted from both his temples. The pain was unimaginable. Something ran down the side of his eyes, which he could not identify as tears or blood. His breath came in shallow gasps, he tried to move, but he was immobile. He tried to move his head to escape the pain, but he could not. As his mind faded into nothingness, to counter the agonizing pain, he felt his mouth open and let out a silent scream. “Aaaaaaaghhhhh…….”

A week earlier:

   As Mulder walked into the office, his partner FBI Special Agent Dana Scully, motioned with her head that the Chief wanted to see them. The Chief ran the department, known as the X-Files which dealt with unsolved cases relating to aliens and other unexplained phenomena. As the duo walked in, the Chief ran some images on the projector screen on one side of the room. The images were of crop circles, a commonly occurring phenomenon which had been debunked by skeptics as being man made. Crop circles were extremely large circular designs, created by flattening the crops in large fields of wheat or other crops. At first sight, they looked to be created by Aliens, but humans had taken credit for making them and also shown how they could be created.

   The Chief went on to explain that these crop circles were different from the ones normally seen, as the crop underneath had been completely burnt. The circles were also of an intricate design and pattern, quite impossible to be created by humans in one night. No one had come forward to own up to making them and so the Chief felt that the X-Files team needed to have a look at it. After the briefing, Mulder and Scully set off to take a look at the field. They first spoke to the farmer in whose field the circles had appeared. He claimed that the previous night, he had seen a bright flash of light, which he had ignored as being lightning, and had only discovered the circles when he had gone to check on the crops in the morning. There were two crop circles, he guessed, as he could not really see them from the ground. Mulder and Scully called for the FBI helicopter, from which they could view the circles from the air. As seen in the pics, there was an outer circle which spiralled inside to a point at the centre. The second crop circle was exactly the same, but was in a field, quite a distance away from the first one. Once back on the ground, Mulder and Scully headed straight to the centre of the first circle. Here, the crop had been burnt, leaving a dark spot on the ground, as if a ray of light of extremely high intensity had been trained on it. They carried some scorched soil and sent it to the technical team for analysis. 

The detectives spent a couple of days pondering over this mystery, but they could find no leads. They spoke to conspiracy theorists and crop circle researchers, but everyone had differing ideas. The skeptics said they were man made and the believers thought that it was communication from aliens. Exactly two days later, there was a call regarding crop circles in a field a little distance away. Mulder and Scully rushed to investigate and found the circles to be exactl

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y the same as the first ones. Once back in the agency, Mulder marked the locations of the four circles and drew lines between them. They were in the shape of a parallelogram. Mulder marked the centre and two nights later, they sat in wait near the field where they expected some action to happen. Nothing untoward occurred that night and they were surprised when they were informed the next day that three circles had randomly appeared at places nowhere near the centre of the parallelogram.

Once again, the crop circles followed the same shape and pattern and Mulder marked their locations on the map. Two of the three circles seemed to be at a straight line from one of the earlier crop circles and the last crop circle was a distance away. Mulder connected all of them and they stepped back to make sense of the seemingly random locations. “Of course,” said Scully, smacking her forehead, “It is the Big Dipper.” The Big Dipper was a collection of stars, which in the night sky looked like a big ladle. The first four stars, in the shape of the parallelogram, made the bowl of the ladle and the other three stars looked like its handle. The most important purpose of the Big Dipper star formation was to identify the North Star, Polaris, which was one of the brightest stars in the North Sky. They immediately called in their in-house astronomer, who confirmed that the crop circles indeed seemed to represent the Big Dipper. He informed them that big dipper was currently almost right above them and he could map the co-ordinates of the stars to the ground. He took some time and confirmed the co-ordinates. He also marked the location where the North Star would likely be 2 nights from then. Mulder was convinced that the next crop circle would be formed at the ground location corresponding to the North Star and he wanted to be there in person to witness it.

The next night found Mulder and Scully standing almost at the point where they expected the centre of the circle to be. Scully had arranged for telescopes, night vision equipment and reinforcements and ensured Mulder that they were waiting at the parameter. A couple of hours had passed into their vigil. They could clearly see the Big Dipper above them and the North Star shining brightly. Suddenly a beam of white light seemed to emanate from the North Star and in a straight line hit the ground at a spot a few hundred feet away from them. As they watched, it seemed to burn the ground in a circular motion, similar to the spiral circles they had seen earlier and it kept getting closer to the centre point where they were standing. An acrid smell of burning crop filled the air and Mulder and Scully crouched as the beam hit the centre spot. 

Mulder leaned closer to watch, as the beam seemed to drill into the ground at the centre point. Just then he heard the unmistakable sound of a gun being loaded and held to the back of his head. “Move !!” barked Scully. “Scully, what the..” said Mulder trying to turn back, but was whacked with the butt of the gun for his efforts. “Move..” said Scully prodding with the gun. Mulder looked around trying his best to get away, but Scully had the element of surprise on her side. With a shove she sent him sprawling, right into the centre of the light beam. The light seemed to freeze and then in what seemed like seconds, Mulder was drawn up and away into the beam, the beam fading out as if the external entity training it on the Earth had retracted it.

All was dark and quiet. The scent of the scorched crop was in the air but it had cooled down as Scully walked through it. “What a fitting end,” she thought. The FBI agent who had been a thorn in her side for long, had scripted his own abduction. There were no reinforcements and no witnesses around. Unknown to Mulder, Scully had misled the other officers to be present at a completely different location. “Mulder was always engrossed in the unexplained phenomena, let him enjoy it for eternity,” thought Scully viciously as she headed out confident, that she had got rid of the one person who stood in her way of being the next Head of the X-Files department.