When did a joke go way too far?

State Department Interrogations and the Media Spotlight

That afternoon, we went back to Mario’s Pizza to pretend life was normal.

We were halfway through our slices when a woman walked up to our table.

She introduced herself as Jasmine Ellis from the local newspaper.

She asked if we’d be willing to talk about the ancient language controversy.

I started to say no because Gail told us not to talk to media.

But Jasmine said she wasn’t interested in the language itself or whether it was real.

She was interested in how regular guys were being treated like specimens.

Something about the way she said it felt different from Mills and his colleagues.

We were actual humans in a weird situation to her. Steven suggested we call Gail first.

Jasmine nodded and set a business card on the table.

Then she mentioned she’d found an old high school newsletter with a photo of us in detention.

She wondered if we wanted to tell our side of the story before someone else did.

That made my stomach twist. I hadn’t thought about other people controlling the narrative.

Steven picked up her card and said we’d call her. Jasmine thanked us and left without pushing.

We called Gail right from the pizza place. She answered on the second ring.

Gail said one carefully managed media interview might actually help us control the story.

She offered to sit in on the interview to protect the State Department situation.

We agreed to meet with Jasmine the next day at Gail’s office.

That night, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and thinking about the conditional past.

I kept trying to remember exactly how we came up with that whistling sound.

The more I tried to pin down the memory, the fuzzier it got.

I could see Steven and Ryan and me standing behind the gym.

But I couldn’t remember who suggested the whistling or why it seemed funny.

Part of me started wondering if Mills was right about subconscious influences.

Maybe we had heard something somewhere and just forgot.

But that didn’t explain how we’d recreated an entire grammatical structure.

I didn’t fall asleep until almost 3:00 in the morning. Steven woke me up by shoving his phone in my face.

He’d found a Reddit thread about us with hundreds of comments.

People were arguing about whether we were frauds or geniuses.

Someone had posted our address and phone numbers in the comments.

Other people added photos of our apartment building and our class schedules.

The comments ranged from calling us liars to saying we were proof of reincarnation.

Nobody in the thread seemed to consider that we might just be three confused guys.

Ryan came out of his room and said we needed to call Gail immediately.

Gail answered even though it was barely 8:00 in the morning.

We told her about the doxing and she said we should stay somewhere else for a few days.

She’d also gotten a formal request from the State Department for a meeting.

She was working on negotiating the terms to ensure we weren’t walking into an interrogation room.

Ryan’s parents called 20 minutes later because they’d seen something online.

They offered to let all three of us stay at their house until things calmed down.

Ryan put them on speaker and we could hear his mom. But staying there felt like giving up.

It felt like admitting we couldn’t handle our own lives. We talked it over after Ryan got off the phone.

We decided to stay in our apartment but change our phone numbers.

We also made all our social media accounts private. Gail said that was a reasonable compromise.

She warned us not to answer the door for anyone we didn’t know.

2 days later, we drove to Gail’s office for the interview with Jasmine.

The office was in a boring building downtown with buzzing fluorescent lights.

Gail had a conference room set up with coffee and water bottles.

Jasmine showed up right on time and asked if it was okay to record.

I liked that she asked instead of just doing it like Mills had.

We spent the first 20 minutes just going through the whole story from the beginning.

I explained how we were bored in detention and Ryan just started making up sounds.

Steven added how we’d write down new words in the composition notebook.

Jasmine took notes, but she wasn’t treating us like we were special or magical.

She was just listening like a normal person hearing a weird story.

It felt good to tell someone who didn’t have an agenda.

When I got to the part about Mills crying, Jasmine actually smiled. She said that sounded like Mills.

Then Jasmine asked if we’d ever considered being exposed to protosumerian without realizing it.

My stomach dropped because that was exactly what had been keeping me up at night.

I admitted that my memories felt fuzzy and unreliable now.

Steven suddenly sat up straighter and mentioned the AV room at our high school.

He said Mrs. Garcia used to show documentaries all the time in her history class.

Jasmine’s whole face changed and her eyes got an excited look.

She asked what kind of documentaries we remembered. Neither of us could remember specific titles.

But Steven said there was definitely one about Mesopotamia that we watched junior year.

Jasmine was writing fast now and she asked about records in our high school library.

I said maybe if the school still had them, but I wasn’t sure how that would help.

Jasmine explained that being exposed to reconstructions could explain why our language matched.

We might have absorbed the sounds without consciously remembering them.

The idea made my skin crawl because it meant our memories were unreliable.

But it also made more sense than channeling ancient civilizations.

After the interview ended, Jasmine said she was going to research documentaries from the mid-2000s.

She promised she’d share whatever she found with us before publishing anything.

Gail said that was unusually ethical for a journalist. Jasmine shrugged.

She said she just wanted to figure out what actually happened.

As we walked out to the parking lot, I felt lighter than I had in days.

Talking to Jasmine had been therapeutic in a way I hadn’t expected.

We were just regular people caught up in something weird instead of con artists.

Ryan felt the same way and Steven was already googling our old school’s library.

The next week was all about preparing for the State Department meeting.

Gail called us in for two separate prep sessions. She went through every possible question.

She said they’d want to know about our families and our travel history.

I kept thinking it was overkill because we were just three guys from New Jersey.

But Gail insisted we needed to have clear, consistent answers ready.

She made us practice responding without getting defensive or sarcastic.

Ryan kept wanting to joke about it, but Gail shut that down fast.

She said the State Department wouldn’t find spy accusations funny, even if they were false.

Steven was the most nervous and kept asking what would happen if they didn’t believe us.

Gail repeated multiple times that we weren’t under investigation.

The morning of the meeting, I woke up with my stomach in knots.

We all met at Gail’s office and drove to a boring government building.

Security made us go through metal detectors and sign in.

We waited in a bland conference room for 20 minutes.

When Luis Merier finally walked in, I was surprised. He was way younger than I expected.

He shook all our hands and sat down across from us.

He said we weren’t under investigation and he just needed to document our background.

His voice was calm and professional. Somehow that made me feel better.

The meeting turned out to be mostly boring questions that we’d already practiced.

Luis asked where we’d traveled and I said barely anywhere.

He asked who we knew internationally and Ryan said nobody.

He asked how we learned the language and we explained the detention story again.

It was starting to feel rehearsed. Luis took notes and occasionally asked follow-up questions.

Nothing felt accusatory or suspicious. When Luis asked if we’d been contacted by foreign nationals, I almost laughed.

The only foreign national who’d shown interest was the Venezuelan government.

I said that out loud before I could stop myself. Luis didn’t smile.

He made a note on his laptop that looked more serious than the other notes.

I felt Gail’s foot tap mine under the table like a warning.

Gail interrupted and asked what the actual concern was here.

Luis explained that the Venezuelan government had filed a formal claim about a cipher.

He said it was almost certainly paranoid nonsense with no evidence of connections.

But the claim had been filed through official channels. They had to document everything.

Steven asked what happens if we can’t prove we’re not spies. Luis actually smiled.

He said that’s not how it works because you can’t prove a negative.

He explained that they just needed to document the origin of the language.

The file would get closed unless new evidence emerged.

He expected the file to close within a few weeks once he finished his paperwork.

After the meeting ended, Gail said it went as well as she could have hoped.

She expected the State Department to leave us alone now.

Then she brought up the Harvard offer and said they were asking for our decision.

She explained that we needed to make a choice soon because Harvard was getting impatient.

Ryan wanted to talk about it in the parking lot, but Gail said we should go home.

As we drove back, I kept thinking about $50,000 and what it could do for me.

But I also kept thinking about Jasmine’s question about documentaries.

Back at the apartment, Ryan pulled out his laptop and opened the Harvard email.

Ryan turned the screen toward us and pointed at the $50,000 figure.

He said we’d be idiots to walk away from this kind of money.

Steven said taking money for something we might have stolen felt wrong.

Ryan asked if Steven really thought we plagiarized an entire language without knowing it.

Steven said he didn’t know what to think anymore.

Handing over our madeup grammar for cash when we couldn’t explain it felt dishonest.

I interrupted and pointed out that we didn’t copy anything on purpose.

If academics wanted to pay us for teaching them, that was their choice to make.

We spent two hours going back and forth about student loans and academic integrity.

I finally suggested we compromise. We’d tell Harvard yes, but we’d be completely honest.

We would tell them we didn’t know where all the language elements came from.

Ryan and Steven both agreed to that. Ryan started drafting an email response.

I made coffee because my head hurt from thinking in circles.

The next morning, Jasmine called while I was still in bed. Her voice sounded urgent.

She said she’d found something and needed to tell us right away.

My stomach dropped because that tone meant whatever she’d discovered was going to change things.

She told us about a cable documentary from the 2000s called Lost Voices of Mesopotamia.

It had been available on DVD in the school libraries across the state.

It included a segment on protosumerian with audio reconstructions.

She said Mrs. Garcia’s name appeared on borrowing records from multiple schools.

I sat up in bed and my hands started shaking. I knew exactly what this meant.

We’d heard this documentary in class and forgotten about it completely.