95: Chapter 95 A Shocking Turn of Events at the White House: The President Awakens

Then, the IDs flooded over like a barrage of comments: "Brother, as long as you walk a few more steps forward, I'll pay back the entire month of donations I owed you last time!!"

Another ID floated by, highlighted: "Jack, if you can run into that Alien mothership and turn on the machine, I'll live-stream a helicopter gift for you!!"

Someone in the corner called him out: "Don't donate. Last time in Death Valley, he also said he would walk in to film the Alien caves for us, but in the end, he only filmed himself getting lost in the valley and then being rescued by a helicopter!"

More IDs scrolled in: "This is the most terrifying thing I've ever seen in my life!" "Haha, we're going to die!" "Lord Jesus... the blood of the Lamb!" "Where on earth did this fleet come from?" "My sister is a soldier at Indian Springs, and she said they've all thrown away their guns!" "Really? The military is in chaos too?"

The comment section was churning endlessly, like fragments of information from a pile-up on the highway.

Jack Cooper didn't care at all about those saying he was scamming donations.

He turned the camera toward the fleet in the distant sky, which was releasing destructive energy beams at each other, and announced loudly: "Listen up, family! As long as this live stream hits ten million likes, I'll give you a live version!"

"I'll hike out from here across the dam area and climb into the bottom hatch of the mothership!!"

"Remember to like! Remember to donate!!"

White House, West Wing corridor.

Madeline Rasmussen's high heels clicked densely and hurriedly against the marble floor of the corridor outside the Oval Office.

In her left hand, she clutched an emergency directive just pulled from the Department of Defense's encrypted fax machine, the edges of the paper still warm from the printer. With her right hand, she pushed aside every assistant blocking her path. The expression on her face made the senior secretaries at the White House, who were accustomed to all kinds of crises, automatically step aside and press against the walls.

She didn't even knock. She pushed open the heavy oak door of the Oval Office and froze in the doorway.

Biden sat behind that world-famous desk, his head tilted to one side, his chin hanging loosely against his chest. A trail of transparent drool hung from the corner of his mouth, running from his jaw down to the lapel of his deep navy blue suit, soaking a small dark wet spot into the collar.

His breathing was slow and even, the rise and fall of his chest minimal, as if he had already sunk into deep water entirely unrelated to this office.

Outside the window, Pennsylvania Avenue was empty. No one outside the White House knew that the person who was theoretically still commanding the world's most powerful military force was currently sleeping so soundly that he didn't even know who he was.

There was no expression of surprise on Madeline Rasmussen's face. She was used to it.

She walked quickly to the side of the desk and made a concise, sharp gesture toward the President's personal assistant, who was standing in the corner looking bewildered. The young man immediately pulled out prepared soft tissues from a drawer, bent down skillfully and quickly, wiped the drool from the President's mouth and collar, and then stepped aside, whispering "Biden" into his ear in an extremely soft voice.

Biden's breathing paused, and then he slowly opened his eyes. His eyelids were like two rusted rolling shutters, the process of lifting them extremely sluggish, revealing the grey-blue, cloudy eyes beneath that had not yet fully focused.

He looked at Madeline Rasmussen, then at Ronald Sawyer who had followed quickly in from the door. His lips moved, emitting a hoarse and indistinct syllable. "Hmm... is that Madeline Rasmussen? What time is it?"

"I was just looking at those Department of Energy appropriation reports. You know there are too many numbers, my eyes got tired after looking for a while, I closed them for a moment..."

"Biden," Madeline Rasmussen ignored his self-justification regarding the Department of Energy reports. She didn't sit down, and didn't even immediately hand over the emergency directive in her hand. She stood opposite the desk, leaning forward with her hands on the table. Her voice was lower than usual, but every vibration squeezed from her throat was extremely urgent.

"The 3rd Cavalry Regiment, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and 75th Ranger Regiment that you previously ordered to be deployed under the guise of counter-terrorism exercises..."

"The frontline soldiers have all mutinied and are refusing to enter the target area southeast of Hoover Dam!"

Biden straightened his neck slightly and looked at her with his cloudy old eyes, a faint trace of confusion flashing across his face. He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, Ronald Sawyer stepped forward and slapped the military briefing in his hand onto the desk with a loud smack.

"The reason for the mutiny is the sky!"

"They saw it!"

Ronald Sawyer's tone was even more impatient than Madeline Rasmussen's, each syllable tightly clenched. "A fleet of two hundred thousand space warships has appeared over Hoover Dam."

"They aren't ours."

"They aren't any known aerial combat platform on Earth."

"The technology is at least several generations ahead of us."

"The frontline soldiers aren't willing to be cannon fodder for a hopeless war. They aren't being cowardly; they threw down their guns and sat on the ground, saying it's not worth dying for a deception."

Biden looked at Ronald Sawyer, then back at Madeline Rasmussen. His aged, cloudy eyes shifted back and forth between the two of them several times. The corners of his mouth twitched slightly, forming an arc somewhere between amusement and confusion. With those old eyes that still had faint eye boogers clinging to them, he looked at his Chief of Staff, as if waiting for her to suddenly laugh and tell him the whole thing was just a prank.

"You're talking about Aliens, a fleet of two hundred thousand, at Hoover Dam..."

"This sounds... are you sure you didn't watch a rerun of that movie 'Independence Day' downstairs last night?"

Madeline Rasmussen didn't wait for Ronald Sawyer to speak for her. She had no patience left. She pulled the emergency report from the Cheyenne Mountain underground monitoring center out of her folder. On the edge of that paper, there was still a coffee stain from when Air Force Major General Terence Brady had accidentally knocked it over while signing it in the monitoring hall. She pressed it directly onto the President's desk, on top of that stack of Department of Energy reports.

At the same time, Ronald Sawyer spread out the emergency reports from military bases in his hand, the summary of anomalous data from the Department of Defense's sensor array, and the cross-verification reports from several independent departments. The two of them laid out a whole row of paper reports stamped with red "Emergency" marks on the desk.

"Cheyenne Mountain monitoring center confirmed."

"All sensor arrays of the North American Aerospace Defense Command confirmed."

"Six independent monitoring stations under the Department of Defense confirmed."

"Every base is reporting the same thing:"

"A full two hundred thousand unidentified space vehicles have descended into the airspace over the southwestern Lighthouse Country and are currently engaged in continuous combat over Hoover Dam."

"Their weapons, shields, and propulsion methods are beyond all our known technological systems, far, far superior."