A Blue Van with the Letters KNSA....

Thousand+ Words for Dec 9, 2025

A blue van with the letters KNSA painted on the side roared up the dirt road and rumbled to a stop, the cloud of dust dispersing westward on the stiff wind. The side door rolled open; two guards got out first, scanning side to side and up and down for Meeks, then two men, dressed in orange jumpsuits and plastic helmets and carrying their gas processing units, emerged. The guards accompanied them, one on either side, as they trudged to the ship’s entry hatch. The lead jumpsuit placed his processor on the ground, manipulated the entry lock with a gloved hand, and then he pulled a handle and the hatch popped open. The other jumpsuit put his unit down and reached up with both hands to grasp the hatch handle awkwardly and pull it open. Then the two of them picked up their processors and stepped forward into the hatch and disappeared into the ship.

Two thousand miles away, a large monitor mounted on the wall that banks of computer stations faced displayed an image of the interior of the ship from the point of view of the orange-jumpsuited individual in the back. The front jumpsuit was visible in the live shot as they proceeded into it. A few technicians in shirtsleeves sat working their own displays as they watched, while others milled around the large room or spoke softly in groups of two or three. Each person in the room wore a badge with the letters KNSA prominently displayed as well as a photograph and a color bar that indicated the wearer’s security level.

On a central raised dais, several project managers, with varying expressions of tension, watched the large monitor. One of them pressed a button on a device that he wore on his belt. “Frankie, are we getting audio on this?”

A technician at floor level turned around. “No audio at the source, sir.”

The manager looked back up at the monitor and then spoke to one of the other managers on the dais with him. “You see those markings on the walls?” he asked. “Those lines? That’s their language.” Once again, he clicked the device. “Frankie, screenshot it and enhance, will you?”

The technician complied and then the view on the large monitor changed. The live view continued in a small pane at bottom right, while the larger display showed an image taken from the live view only a moment before.

The image showed the interior of a dark passageway. The passage walls were oddly dimensioned: from about the waist down, the wall angled inward so as to make the passage more narrow. From the waist up, the wall jagged in and out in peculiar angles and at the very top, there was a near right-angle jag backward that made it look as if the top of the wall did not quite reach the ceiling. On the waist-down portion, there was a trapezoid shape and inside that, a collection of lines and shape.

Then the audio of the live feed came up, and one of the orange jumpsuits was in mid-sentence “…yeah, its shimmering and moving now, the shimmering is…uh, wait a minute….”

“Frankie, move us back to the live feed.” The monitor flickered and then the screen was filled with a view of the front jumpsuit, who was silhouetted against a brightness coming from beyond. White in the center, colored fringes on the edges. It undulated, but there was nothing to give it any scale so that its distance from the front jumpsuit could be assessed. The manager pushed a different button on is control. “Sunbelt 2, can you step out of the way, please?”

There was no response, but the front jumpsuit nimbly stepped over the to the side of the passage and the shimmering was fully revealed. There was a darkness in the center. Then the shimmering grew to fill the screen, and the darkness in the center grew too, enough to see that there was something further inside that darkness, like an image inside a spyglass.

The shimmering continued to grow until only the central darkness appeared on the screen. There was a final flash and the image that had been compressed in that darkness filled the screen.

The room, typically hushed, grew silent as everyone stared at the image on the main monitor. It didn’t register at first—it was incongruous. An open field in daylight, under the cover of lightly scattered clouds. The view was from a short distance behind a crowd of people who were faced away from the camera and toward a platform that was some distance in front of them, a stage on which men sat in chairs in wings right and left and between them, in the center, a raised podium, at which there were several men that appeared to be preparing the stage for something important. The men all wore dark clothes, suit clothes of a bygone era, white shirts under rough black jackets that buttoned high and elaborately tied black ties made of rough cloth. Most wore old-fashioned satin stovepipe top hats, those who weren’t actually wearing the hats held them on their laps or in their hands in the heat. The image, and the people in it, were not static, but they jostled lightly; from time to time, a young man or boy, or a dog, would stride between the camera and the back of the crowd.

This was supposed to be the inside of a derelict spaceship built and operated by an alien species that was only vaguely familiar to humans despite the fact that the alien race had contacted the Earth more than ten years prior.

Finally, the manager pressed the device at his belt. “Sunbelt 1, do you copy?” There was no response, so he pressed the other button. “Frankie, what the hell are we looking at?”

After a moment, Frankie’s voice was in his headset. “I really don’t know, sir.”

Then there was a voice from the floor. “I know what that is.”

Frankie and others turned to the person who had spoken. He stood up and turned to the central dais. “It’s one of Matthew Brady’s photos. It’s President Lincoln preparing to deliver the Gettysburg Address.”