Sycamore Street

Moving vans did not come to Sycamore street very often because the properties were held close and did not tend to change hands very often. Because of this community tightness, the sight of a huge moving van attracted much poorly concealed interest from residents who suddenly needed to mow their lawns and tend to their front gardens.

The new neighbor’s household goods arrived on the last day of September, 2011, but the new neighbors were nowhere to be seen. Instead, a perfectly groomed man and woman supervised the unloading and moving process. The couple appeared to be the housekeeper and the Butler of the household.

What kind of family was this? Nobody had butlers and housekeepers anymore! Well, except for the Stoutermeyers, the Bentleys and the Marvins, of course. Those were “old money” families who stuck to the ancient ways of the wealthy.

Everyone else on Sycamore Street was satisfied with day staff who came with the dawn and went with the sunset. Most residents of Sycamore Street hired commercial services, but the fact was that the mansions and giant gardens were not places that could be kept functional without outside help.

“Those two are the Butler and the Housekeeper, Martin Bunder and Atha Pendington. They’re British, but they have been working for the family for years. But there’s a rumor that those two are really MI-5, isn’t that a kick?”

The neighborhood know-it-all was a middle aged law firm partner named Dave Hansen. Hansen stood outside of his massive, 4,000 square foot estate and blathered on with smug assurance at a cluster of five curious neighbors. Dave had put the toadies in his law firm to work investigating and presenting reports on the newcomers to his neighborhood.

“These folks are old and new money. They come from a distant wing of the McCombey family. Let’s see…the grandfather started out with a bundle from ranching, the next generation got into business with the military. The grand kids are making their own money by getting in and out of derivatives and high tech at just the right time. One of them started up a private space firm…makes rockets or something.”

Martin Yang loved to use Dave for information, but he also loved to trip Dave up with challenging questions.

“What about the great grand kids? Is there any trouble on the way? Those rich kids turn into Paris Hilton by the fourth generation, you know.”

Martin’s eyes gleamed as he found a detail that Dave would have missed. He was rewarded with a rambling answer about how the great grand kids would probably only visit from time to time. This meant that the all knowing Dave did not know what he was talking about.

Dave launched into endless rambling when he was lying.

Satisfied that he had once again shown the other neighbors that Dave Hansen was a blowhard, Martin Yang excused himself and went home.

The moving in went on for the rest of the day and well into the night, since the McCombey’s new home stretched out over five acres and accounted for 10,000 square feet of living space. The entrance was deep enough to conceal everything that was going on, but the more persistent neighbors and household staffs noted that It took ten full sized moving trucks to bring all of the household fripperies and substances.

At 3 am, a special truck arrived and some additional items were quietly moved into one of the outbuildings of the estate.

Over the next two weeks, the McCombey estate was invaded by scores of decorators, florists, small business services and what appeared to be party organizers, landscapers, pool maintenance workers, laborers, caterers, lawyers, secretaries and an assortment of floating people. A few agencies had unknown reasons for disappearing up the quiet and tree lined roads to the estate manor and the grounds.

The neighbors had not seen such activity since the previous estate owners, the Millikens, were in their prime. The Millikens kept the estate alive with visitors, parties and other events. But the past year brought major illnesses, then death, then dispute and estrangement between the surviving members of the clan. The estate was sold for more than any of the immediate neighbors or local residents intended to pay, and extensive renovations went on for most of the year.

After the McCombeys moved in, the household staff population rose to ten people who ranged from laborers and housemaids at the bottom of the ladder to the Butler, Personal Assistants, and Senior Housekeeper at the top of the ladder. The senior staff proved to be expert at meeting the neighbors and their staffs. They also proved to be as sharp as lawyers at knowing how to give out tiny bits of information in exchange for quality information. The younger and less tactful staffers were careful to take their romances and personal interests to other parts of town, and they never gossiped in ways that were troublesome.

On the Second Tuesday in October, the McCombey clan arrived in a flotilla of Mercedes, Rolls Royce, fully tricked out SUV’s, exotic Italian sports cars, stretch limousines, and enough additional vehicular magnificence to hold a car show. The family spent the rest of the week settling in and issuing party invitations to the 50 nearest households and to carefully selected community leaders and local dignitaries.

On the Second Saturday in October, a party went on at the McCombey estate that would be remembered for years to come. Every aspect of the food, the entertainment and the hosting was carried off with perfection. Over 75 members of the extended McCombey family were present, and not one of them exhibited the behavioral or other problems that are bound to happen in large families.

All of the McCombeys had a special skill for making each guest feel as if they were the only important person in the room. Their social skills were amazing.

The food and entertainment was the talk of the town for weeks afterward. Several musical groups had been brought in to perform the classics, the standards and the latest hits on high tech instruments that had never been seen on the market.

Sycamore street had no shortage of young and old music geeks who were fascinated with the setups. Any interested and skilled enough person was allowed to play with the equipment, and left with opportunities to purchase some for themselves at steep discounts.

The food was even more of a sensation, with massive buffets that offered everything from the early classic, labor intensive and rich food preparations to new age adaptations of foods from around the world. There was even food that had been printed out on 3-D printers!

The “Bloody Mary” cocktails that were vacuumed forced into the cells of celery stalks turned into a favorite of the guests who carried the celery stalks around with inebriated pride.

But the Hansens and the Yans were the first to notice that disturbing regularity and reasonableness among the McCombey family members. Dave Hansen remarked (in private) that

“These people have a Stephen King kind of vibe going on here!”

Martin Yang responded by asking “Which novel?”

Over the next few weeks, the neighborhood settled back into its usual routines as the residents were forced to apply their daily efforts to their own jobs, personal challenges, romantic entanglements and business dealings.

In November, the houses on Sycamore street emptied out, a few at a time. This was the time of year when whole families went on two week vacations before the hectic holiday season started up. The Yans were the first to leave for a visit with family in California. The Hansens, the Watsons and the Markleys were the next to take their long vacations.

By the end of January, all of the 50 families of Sycamore Street had left for two week vacations and had returned invigorated, happy, more focused, more reasonable, and more efficient than they were before they left.

The McComber household was up to 23 permanent residents who also took frequent trips during the months of November through February.

No one showed any curiosity about a strange matter. Not one member of the 50 families on Sycamore Street had a reason for staying at home while the other family members went on vacation. The community held over 78 young adults who would normally have begged for a chance to stay home alone.

But everyone was eager to go. And everyone came back as expected with wonderful and detail rich stories about their vacations. The holidays were festive and busy.

Sycamore Street settled down.

In March, a group of crackpot websites claimed that people were being abducted, transported to the Nevada desert, and kept there for two weeks. The people were returned to their homes with no ill after affects, but the conspiracy buffs demanded to know what had happened while innocent citizens were held against their will in sinister underground locations.

The case gained legitimacy and widespread attention when one of the conspiracy theorists released a series of very convincing videos that showed the people being led into a building at a top secret military installation. The installation was not at Area 51 or Area 52, but was deeper in the vast desert than anyone had gone before.

The Twitter crowd took up the case because it was fun to start a Twitter trend and to keep it up for as long as possible. The Facebook crowd took up the call and spent several weeks reviewing and sharing their favorite conspiracy theories and jokes. Someone wrote a Wikipedia page. The late night comedians kept the humor and the issue alive. The mainstream media blacked it all out.

The videos were treated as a joke until the infamous “Definitive Proof” videos began to show up on YouTube. The videos appeared to have been taken by insiders who worked at the secret government facilities. Even the most aggressive attempts to debunk the videos failed as more and more of them showed up on YouTube and were shared through the social networks.

The early videos were taken by an unseen and silent individual. The camera would zoom in to show a closeup of a very ill patient, then zoom out to show the hospital bed and hospital equipment. The video would then turn and zoom forward to show a corridor that was lined up on both sides with bed after bed of very ill patients. Finally, the video would show an endless corridor, lined on both sides by patients.

The unseen and unknown videographer would then walk forward, but the corridor would continue to stretch into endless distances. The videographer would then turn left, then right, showing an intersecting corridors that held the same endless columns of very ill patients.

The next series of “Definitive Proof” videos were even more disturbing. These videos showed the patients after they had recovered from their mysterious “illnesses”. The patients went through physical therapy and eventually were escorted out of the facility and into waiting cargo planes.

The final “Definitive Proof” video would have scared the world, but the world was too busy to notice. The final video was a recording of police interviews with several of the “abducted patients”. All of them lived in a major city on a very exclusive street called Sycamore Street.

Each person insisted that they had gone to visit family members. They gave incredibly detailed information about their vacation activities. This information even included specific conversations, photos and videos. The photos and videos could not be explained by anyone.

The police were equally adamant in insisting that the family members had reported them missing and that authorities had been frantically trying to find them during the same two weeks. The medical authorities were prepared to make a big deal about what appeared to be a serious and communicable disorder, but number of missing persons cases grew so large that the government systems were overwhelmed.

The Sycamore Street residents appeared to have suffered no permanent or lasting damage. Those who knew the subjects could not identify any unusual problems or changes in their behavior or abilities. As a result, the authorities retreated to a posture of carefully watching the earliest abductees for any signs of latent or hidden problems that might come up.

No such problems came up for the rest of 2011 and most of 2012 and the government quit watching the Sycamore Street residents. Definitive Proof videos kept coming in, but they were only spoofs, fakes and highly creative mini documentaries that were more about getting a laugh or some attention from Hollywood than solving any mystery.

The Centers For Disease Control used some math and estimated that, if such a ridiculous conspiracy were true, then over 5.4 billion humans would have been abducted, gotten catastrophically ill, and recovered to full health in exactly two weeks.

This stopped all of the conspiracy theories and started a trend toward wearing t-shirts or putting up Facebook avatars that said “I am a mutant!” (Someone decided that it was all an alien mutant kind of conspiracy.)

Alien mutant movies pushed vampire films off of the top earner’s lists. Richly detailed television series and science fiction books covered the mutant issue from hundreds of angles.

The issue faded from the public conscious until November of 2012, when all election results in the United States put the pollsters, expectant winners, and talking heads into a permanent state of shock. This phenomenon was called the “November Surprise”.

Over the next two years, elections surprises continued to spread throughout the world. Dictators were overthrown, prime ministers were demoted and every elected official was given the “November Surprise” by overwhelming majorities of voters.

It is true that exactly 5.4 billion people made up that “overwhelming majority of voters”, but no one bothered to actually count them. People were too busy building economies and businesses around incredible new technologies that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

There was some grumbling from a billion or so people who spent the years between 2013 and 2015 losing every bit of their wealth, but no one had time to listen to them. The former billionaires became the new world versions of crackpot conspiracy theorists.

The people of Sycamore Street, including the McCombeys, continued to hold their properties very close.

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