First Report

A reporter’s discovery of a secret meeting between three world leaders could spell the end of life as we know it with the revelation of an alien power on Earth.

It has been a year since the events in First Signal. President Colton, in final negotiations with Iran on a nuclear deal and on the eve of announcing her candidacy for a second term, is facing a barrage of criticism on her handling of ISIS since her secret pact with the United Kingdom and Russian Federation at the G-7 meeting in Brussels – a pact that was secured by an otherworldly communications blackout – a pact that must be kept secret – at all costs.

When Kate Cloverton, a reporter at the Washington Herald, is assigned to cover the President’s reelection campaign, she thought it was just another assignment. When her investigation reveals missing blocks of time in the President’s schedule since the G-7, her inquiries land her in the office of the mysterious Elisabeth Seward the President’s National Security Advisor and picked up by General John Reager’s intelligence services at Operation Troy. Seward’s office cites the dates classified under Executive Order with Reager stating to an aide, “I’m not letting an intrepid reporter interfere in this operation.”

Although Cloverton is unaware that Seward is part of an alien power on Earth that is watching her every move, her investigation reveals sources that confirm a secret meeting at the G-7 with the President, U.K. Prime Minister and someone from the Russian Embassy. With Cloverton’s first story published, Seward meets with James Griffin of the Shinar Center of Science instructing him to use their resources to stop Cloverton. Says Griffin, “We haven’t done something on this scale since Apollo,” with Seward responding, “Time is running out.”

No sooner does Cloverton confront the President at the announcement of her second term, “Why did you reshuffle your secret service detail?” and Reager is identified by a colleague of Cloverton’s as being present at the G-7. Desperate, Reager’s organization detains and interrogates Cloverton’s sources—former secret service agents who were at the G-7. Shortly thereafter Cloverton arrives in Brussels and retains a private investigator only to learn that those that knew about the G-7 meeting are either missing or dead. But when Cloverton questions a Belgian scientist who blogged about what caused the communications blackout, her publishing his evidence has Cloverton asking, “Who has this technology?” with the scientist responding, “Someone or something other than us.”

Alarmed that Cloverton may soon learn what happened at the G-7, the President places the military on Defcon 3 to secure infrastructure and moves up an announcement to deflect Cloverton’s coverage. When Cloverton locates the last surviving witness to the G-7, with the only remaining copy of security footage, the meeting attendees are finally confirmed:  The President, Prime Minister, President of the Russian Federation, General Reager, Elisabeth Seward, James Griffin, Major Ellen Sampson of Reager’s command, and a mystery attendee who is impervious to photography.

As the President leaves on an alien spacecraft for a classified destination, Cloverton is racing back to Brussels for a final meeting – one that introduces her to the Director of the CIA – who claims that since the Nixon Administration select agents and operatives have gone missing or are feared dead through a mysterious military organization. On the revelation of the G-7 attendees and background from the CIA, Cloverton’s Breaking News broadcast shakes the foundations of three terrestrial powers, but it is an extraterrestrial one that will have the final say. Terrified, of being discovered by this power, Reager’s Operation Troy evacuates for another location.

Just as an exhausted Cloverton arrives home, she searches for major events in the Nixon Administration and surmises from everything she learned that something happened on July 24, 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. On the verge of uncovering one of mankind’s greatest secrets, she quickly finds herself in the presence of Griffin at the Shinar Center of Science.

As the President addresses the world from Iran announcing an historic nuclear treaty, Cloverton and Griffin’s clash of personalities is soon over with Cloverton now under the power of an alien surveillance system called Central—the very system that blacked out the G-7. While the President proclaims, “the stability of civilization” and gives cover to this alien power by stating that it was a then classified air force communications satellite that blacked out the G-7, Central systematically erases not only the memories of Cloverton and her witnesses but removes all digital files from her investigation. The process over, Cloverton and party resume their lives absent of select memory and without evidence —a process that has kept an alien power in quiet control on Earth for the last two thousand years.

A spared General Reager wonders, “If we’re not at war, then we’re occupied, which is worse – they look like us.”

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First Report is the sequel to First Signal. Written by Mark Lund (markashtonlund@gmail.com), First Report takes place a year after the events in First Signal.