Drawbridge Down

 Every night between the hours of 2 AM and 3:30 AM,  the President  of the United States of America vanishes. He ceases to be present in the Presidential Residence. He is not detected anywhere on the premises. No bio-monitor detects him, none of the swirling, neigh-invisible microdrones can sniff out any one of his particular biometric signatures. 

I still remember the night it began. The sudden flatline of every node, sensor, and readout in the most important room of the Free World. A sentinel force of men and women and scampering little machines, armed to teeth, fanned out across countless corridors like the most fearsome ballet ever imagined. Doors auto locked in synchronized hissing clicks, nanomaterial coating instantly hardening three-hundred year old glass into starship-grade surfaces impenetrable by anything short of tactical nuclear weapons. 

At 2:15 AM, a chorus of phone calls ended every flight in a two hundred mile radius, turned the skies silent and empty save for prowling shadows that by any means necessary would return our sacred bounty. By 2:30 AM, dark cars swarmed the streets, vanguard drones sweeping and patrolling above, measuring the thrumming psychology collected from the ten closest population centers. Searching for guilt, for conspiracy. 

At 3:28 AM, nuclear and suborbital arsenals came online, hungry for targets. Hardened military voices brayed in righteous threat, eager to intimidate any number of possible hostage takers. They wanted blood. 

At 3:30 AM, Eastern Standard Time, the familiar chirp of readouts resumed. Heartbeat, psychometrics, blood pressure. None of the twenty exoskeletal armed guards in the room saw him return. He simply was there. And then, because of the riotous activity and blaring lights and crawling-hissing robots, very frustrated that everyone was there, too. 

The following 70 hours were some of the most confusing and expensive in American history. The coverup itself, monumental. And, more specifically, no one knew what had happened. Nothing. Not how, not why, not who. Generals kept tucked under reinforced White House floorboards in their fortified War Rooms were furious that the defenses had somehow been breached, furious still at the inability to shoot or blow anyone up with the fancy toys engineered for the almighty American Castle. Tech teams swarmed like so many colorful beetles in their uniforms, prying over sheets upon sheets of tangled nodes, splayed wires. And we kept the President awake. Stimulants were issued until our very angry residential health staff decided no more with the iron sternness of military medical. 

So, under guard, obvious and subtle— we sent the President to bed. And it happened again. Silent systems, flatlined monitors. An hour and thirty minutes, zero seconds, of scrambling. Then return. 

We sent him to a bunker known about by exactly five people in all of the Continental United States, automated and built wholly by machines to ensure its secrecy. He vanished there, too. 

We sent him to orbit, another bunker, a submarine— vanishing. 2 AM to 3:30 AM. Every night. 

We swarmed him with hostile guard machines in his bed, and every night at the correct hours, they simply fizzled out. White noise on ultra-sensitive screens. 

We hovered over his bed with guards and sentinel bots once; pumped with so many enhancements they could’ve taken on small armies by themselves. When the President vanished, they did too, and when he came back, they did not. 

Over and over and over. 

We pried into his mind and found nothing. Nonsensical dreams, memories that constricted and waylaid our probes with an eerie efficiency, like someone wanted us lost in his nonsense. Drugs brought nothing but muddied and entangled dazes. When someone suggested hypnosis, I was bleary-eyed. Half sane. I glanced up, looking for this foolish target, hoping some obscure federal law still allowed for execution by firing squad. Instead, it was a woman entirely in black, with no identification. My own implant told me all I needed to know in a single word: [MAJESTIC]. 

We tried it. Everyone in that room as of that day, has suffered any number of accident and mishap and terrible miracle you can imagine. They no longer exist. I’m all that remains for eyewitnesses to the single greatest secret kept from the American public. The way the President twisted, bent. Mouth yawning wide with words that weren’t his own. The chilling realization that this was being done with impunity. A message was being sent. 

That was three years ago. The President is running again. His mind wiped wonderfully clean of all that we learned. It’s 1:59 AM, Eastern Standard Time. I sit. I watch the readouts. And I wait.