by Micah Thomas
He needed evidence. All he had was a strange story. There were projects and subjects. The subjects were given drugs, put into trances, and monitored. We're not talking FDA-approved drug trials either. Once the subject goes through this, something changes in them. The informant didn't want to disclose what, or didn't even know exactly, but it's not good.
The music in the bar was blaring. Garish carnival colors and stuffed depictions of unicorns decorated the walls. Smells of booze, food and something unsavory reminded Sanders why he hated going out to bars with young people. The place was packed. He sat sipping a cola while fending off young horny professionals who jostled near his table, obviously wanting this limited real estate. Sanders sighed and wished he could have met his contact at any other place, but understood they needed a public place. His ears were ringing from the loud music, or what passed as music for this generation. A young woman, Asian, glasses, mustard yellow sweater sat down across from him.
"Let's talk."
"No code word or anything?" Sanders asked.
"Like I say the crow flies at midnight, and you reply the mouse is in the kitchen? Dude, you couldn't look less like a cop if you tried. Might as well be in uniform," she said.
"I never said I was a cop."
"I know. I had hoped you would be an investigative journalist, but here you are, looking like a cop and not denying it."
"That fact changes nothing. I'm not on duty."
"Why then? Can we start with why are you poking this hornets' nest? It'd be better if this was an official investigation, give me some sort of protection."
Sanders spoke in a low voice, "I met Henry."
She couldn't hear him, "What?"
He raised his voice a little too loud, "Henry. I met Henry."
"Ah. That one. We called him Project Ifrit, you know, like the fire elemental. Where is he?"
"I have no idea."
"No one does. That's one of the many things going wrong out here. Or going right. Depends on perspective, right?" she said.
"I'm really having trouble hearing you. Can we take a walk?"
"Sure. I get a good vibe from you. I could see it, you know, that you don't work for them."
They walked around the block heading down a busy street full of drunk and getting drunker revelers.
"What' your name?"
"Call me Jane."
"Ok, Jane. What is your connection to...?"
Jane cut him off, "Don't say it out loud. Treat it like Voldemort, just call it, B.S. The streets have ears."
"What's your connection to B.S.?" he asked.
"I started working there five years ago as an analyst. I worked on large data sets, some sort of scoring results. Nothing that sexy unless your kink is Excel sheets. I mean, I had no idea what the data meant. Everything was top secret. Masked data. Locked files. Monitored work stations."
"What was the data exactly?"
"Just data sets, nothing important, but curiously random things about people, technology, trends, biographical facts. Later, I was promoted and learned that I was managing an applicant intake tool."
"Applicants for what?"
"The program. We were looking for needles in the haystack of humanity, a combination of factors that made a person open. A quotient. A predictive measure of their potential to, well, to succeed in the program."
"Henry was an applicant?"
"Yeah, but he found us and did his thing. Our tests, our data, just confirmed that we were right. The others, well, it almost never worked."
They had a Seattle hotdog and sat on a park bench.
"What was so special about Henry?"
"Nothing that you'd see if you read his life story. I mean, we are all unique snowflakes, but nothing a guidance counselor would see and say, this boy has potential! To the program though, Henry made contact on his first session."
"And what about the fires?"
"Yeah, for him, motherfucking Ifrit, it was all about the fire," she said.
"And the others?"
"Duds mostly. Can't find the path? Dud. Can find the path, but can't get through the guardian? Dud. Can get down there where the magic happens, but can't contact? Dud. Can contact, but not bond? Dud."
"Christ," Sanders said, "The path?"
"To quote the manual, a repeatable, internally consistent bridge through the mind to the astral plane. A psychically tangible, internally consistent, external location wherein reside others. Get it? We sent psychic astronauts to the moon and beyond."
"I can't believe that."
"Believe it or not, I never got high enough up the food chain to know if this bullshit was real, or what science was behind it. I'm the data monkey, nothing direct with any of them. It's freaky though. I saw things."
"What sort of things?"
"The whole place is run like a cult. We have project managers and business analysts and it all fits in with the fucking PNW tech industry, but underneath, man, it's something else."
"Did you ever see anything illegal?"
"I don't know if the law covers this sorta stuff."
"OK. Fair enough. Do the patients, the applications, whatever, consent to these experiments?"
“Yes and no. There's a standard consent form, not unlike you'd sign at urgent care. If they have a guardian, a parent, sometimes they ask to leave early, get sketched out. Some duds obviously are ditched never having gone very far. If you only go so far, you come away with a Scientology reading feeling, oh you checked my energies and gave me a pamphlet."
"What are the active projects, Jane?"
"Ifrit burnt out, that's Henry. Wiseman is on the lam, AWOL. Brahma is in India, but that shit is exploding."
"This have anything to do with the news? I've heard there was political unrest of something," Sanders said.
"Dunno. Maybe."
"Who else?"
"Here in Seattle, there's just one, my project. Lilith."
She looked nervously at her feet.
"Oh, Lilith," she said in a quiet voice, "She's why I posted on Reddit. I was frustrated. She also why I met with you, even."
"Why?" Sanders asked.
"Her parents came to us when she was 16. She's 17 now. She has a narcoleptic, or cataplectic disorder. Her family just wanted help. She's smart and sweet and just a kid."
"What did B.S. do to her?"
"She was a success. 100% match. She paired up with an entity. A smart one, more Wiseman than Ifrit. Look. I want you to get her out of there."
"What?" asked Sanders in surprise.
"Forget about Henry. He's already escaped. Wherever he is, you can't help him now. She's still in there. She still has a chance to be a regular high school girl with a normal future. Help her?"
The night life revelers petered out, retreating to their respective homes, or the homes of new found lovers, leaving Sanders and the woman that called herself Jane in the park almost alone, excepting the lingering homeless scavenging ashtrays for refry cigarettes and whatever else might catch their eye.
"How do you know she wants out? Let's say I get in there and she says she wants to stay. What then?" Sanders asked.
"I know because she told me," Jane said.
"I thought you said that you didn't directly interact with the subjects," Sanders said, his mind searching for gaps, holes in her story, something that would make this all inconsequence, a disgruntled employee trying to make noise for her boss.
Jane sighed, as if explaining this was a chore. Millennials, Sanders thought.
"Just like Henry, she has abilities. One of them is some sort of telepathy. God damning, they are all kinda psychic or telepathic. But, I mean, she's never officially indicated this in tests, but I've felt her mind reaching out to me."
"And she said for you to help her escape," Sanders said with disbelief.
Jane stood and said, "Look, I know. I get it. None of this sounds real. But it is. When I say she talked to me, I mean, I'm sitting there working on something and I felt a presence in my head, and ther
e were thoughts that were not my own. Not words though, or images. I could feel it was her and the she wanted out. I'm seriously regretting this meeting. If you're not going to help me, I should go home."
"I didn't say that. There just isn't any proof for what you say," Sanders said.
"I honestly thought... its dumb. Whatever," she said and turned to go.
"What did you think?"
She turned around and looked Sanders in the eye, "I thought, in that same weird sense, that maybe she had sent you, or called to you and that this was something more. Am I wrong?"
"I'm afraid you are," Sanders said. After all, he was clear about his motivations. No one had set him on this path besides himself, right?
"Anyway, I guess it was good to get this off my chest. It was nice meeting you, Officer," she said and extended her hand for a business handshake.
Sanders returned the handshake and watched her go. He shook his head. What was this all about? He was tired and wanted to go home. Sleep in his bed beside his husband. Forget he ever heard about Black Star and people with super powers. This just wasn't part of his world view, and getting involved like this made him feel like a rank amateur. He didn't have any skin in this game of conspiracy theories, urban legends, and the unexplained.
***
Sanders had arrived in Phoenix on a blessedly overcast day. Maybe the start of the monsoon season, he thought. He'd likely be asked if he brought the rain back from Seattle with him. He hadn't brought the rain, but he had returned with a new mystery, one that that merely compounded his search for Henry. He could easily back out now. Not that he'd obligated himself to anything, but he had sent Jane an email in the night, asking what she had in mind. Her reply was fast and outlined a crazy plan. Conspiracy was when two or more people took actions in furtherance of a crime. What was the crime here? To break into a private facility, or rather, enter under false pretenses and what? It's not kidnapping to facilitate the release of someone held against their will. Still, this could be a career-ending choice. After the near miss of culpability with Henry, something that had not, to this day, come up, why should he continue making such foolhardy decisions? Because something was wrong, and he knew it. There were layers to this onion, though. He should have pressed for contacting the girl's parents, attempted to resolve this openly. His contact was insistent that on the surface, all concerns would be covered up, and that escape was the only option.
He knew that Dan would not ok this. Sanders, himself, would not approve this if anyone he knew had proposed such a wackadoodle plan. But there was the law, and there was what's right. He'd always known there was a difference, and done his best to align the two.
His work shift was slow and gave him time to think, though he would have preferred to be distracted. A drunk and contrary panhandler outside of the Walgreens. An assault and battery in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. Shoplifting at the Home Depot. Each call, similar in its barrage of excuses, blame, and irritable voices. Sanders did his job. Dispensing tickets, making minor arrests. Documenting facts and events in detailed reports.
When Sanders got home, he changed into loose shorts and a t-shirt. He sat out on his patio, watching the sunset transform the sky into an oil painting of reds and violet. The pollution was responsible for the spectacle, but it was a thing of beauty. Dan came out and handed him one of the two Coors Lites he'd brought out.
"Did you find what you were looking for, love?" Dan asked.
Sanders' heart felt heavy in his chest.
"No. It was a long shot anyways," he replied.
"You can't save the world, Bill," Dan said, using Sanders' first name.
They drank their beers and watched the sun go down into the cloudy sky. Sanders thought it looked for all the world like fire expanding across the horizon, burning up the heavens. Later that night, despite thinking otherwise, Sanders fell asleep quickly and deeply.
Sanders dreamed of Henry, the night they met. He'd been driving southbound on McClintock, ready to go home, done for the night. In his dream, he saw a fire sputter to life on the southwest corner of the street, and make its way crossing the street diagonally to the bus stop. The being was brighter than the sulfur orange streetlights, golden flames in the shape of a man, masked in an aura of flickering flames. Sanders felt no alarm and pulled to the side, his body following the scripted events, with this one detail changed.
"Hello again, Henry. Any idea what time it is?" Sanders heard his own voice ask.
The entity turned to him and Sanders saw there were two of them in the same skin. The fire without and the man within.
"She's looking for you, too," the Henry thing said slow and dreamily.
"Who?" Sanders asked, back in the driver's seat of his own head.
"I burn, the old man guides, the father rules from his seat afar, the mother nurtures and gives birth to monsters, but she, the one you seek, she only takes and takes," the Henry thing said.
Sanders would have asked more, but the fire thing burned brighter, bright as the sun and he closed his eyes against the shine, feeling white hot heat expand, taking everything with it. The dream resolved, in the way that dreams do, to another location from Sanders' past. He was in his childhood home, his parents' home. The house was dark, and a nightlight lit the bathroom with a faint glow, where Sanders sat on the toilet, feeling some vague scared and shy feeling. When he finished his business, Sanders looked in the mirror as he washed his hands, and to his surprise, he saw his own face as a child in the reflection. When was this, when he was seven or so? Was this a memory of something that happened, he thought, though it felt so familiar.
He heard noises, muffled moans and groans, a rhythmic thud against the wall. Oh god, what a time to relive walking in on his parents having sex. He'd take a dream about showing up to work naked a million times over this. He wasn't in the driver's seat anymore, as his child body walked tentatively down the darkened hall, all the way down to his parents' room. Yes, he'd heard a sound, was frightened and wanted comfort.
He listened to the sounds through his parents' closed door. It sounded to him like someone was being hurt. Was daddy hurting mommy or the other way around? He was glad they weren't fighting; these weren't angry words and slaps through the thin walls he'd heard so often. Whimpers and wet sounds. He waited, not wanting to know, but in his mind, he conjured up terrible images of what might be happening. Someone had enough and was killing the other, he was sure of it. He had to do something.
Sanders turned the brass knob on the door and looked inside. He was so caught up in the perspective of the dream, the child's fear, that his adult sense of propriety and logical reason didn't even react. No. His worst fears were behind that door. His parent's window was open and the curtain flapped in a cold breeze. In the moonlight, half light grey of the room, little Sanders saw his mother slumped on the bed, eyes open but quite dead. Black blood soiled her white night dress. The source of the noise was worse. A naked white woman was crouched on the bed, devouring daddy, who moaned but made no move to stop it. She had her muzzle buried in daddy's chest where more black blood pooled out and over the comforter.
Sanders rejected this vision. This is not what happened. This never happened. This was monstrous. He was paralyzed and could no more look away than leap to his parents' defense. The wet sounds of her consumption revolted Sanders to his core. In the same grotesque moment, the view of the woman's naked buttocks, parts of a person his young eyes had never seen, stirred something strange in his body.
No, Sanders thought. No. I've never been attracted to women. I was never abused. I was never molested. I was born gay and knew it as long as I can remember.
The woman climbed down off daddy and licked her lips, wiping gore and blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. Sanders' eyes flitted from her lips, to her small breasts, to her lithe hips and the hairy space in between. His tiny erection was now a painful reality. He hurt and he didn't understand it.
She looked at Sanders and he understood lust in th
e adult sense. It filled his mind completely, leaving no room for any other thought.
"Find me," she said.
"Let me out," she practically growled.
Sanders woke with a start. He was covered in sweat and felt his painful erection was a real thing. He got out of bed without waking Dan, who was sleeping soundly. The fear and longing from the dream were fading, but the images remained in horrible clarity. He went to his own bathroom and washed his face, assured by his mature face in the mirror. What in the holy hell was that about, he thought while catching his breath. Once he was thoroughly calmed down, he sat in the living room and fired up the laptop. He Googled Ifrit, Henry's project name. A dangerous demon, a spirit of fire. Some code name. Apt, he thought. He then looked up Lilith. A tangled history, seeped in religion and pop culture. A name used in reference to female sexuality. Demons. Monsters.
He meditated on this for a moment. Was Black Star naming these projects because they believed in the deeper historical reference, or was it a description of what these people were, or was it was Black Star was making them into? Jane had said the girl, Lilith, was a teen. The idea crossed his mind that this could be a sex thing and it not only repulsed him, it made him angry. Damned angry. He didn't believe he'd been visited by psychics or spirits, but that his subconscious was doing detective work for him, putting pieces together, and he did not like the picture it revealed.
Sanders opened his email and sent a message to Jane. If they were going to do this, he wanted a firm plan. He knew where break ins messed up and how to cover his tracks. This had to be done right, and soon. His gut, his deeply-rooted sense of right and wrong was offended. He didn't know what he would tell Dan, but he'd be going back to Seattle, and soon.
***
Jacob walked down the street in downtown Chico. It was nearly two in the morning and he couldn't sleep. He'd had another fight with his girlfriend and generally felt frustrated by life. He was in the process of failing his second business venture in less than a year and dreaded the prospect of applying for another job. How many cycles did he have left to reinvent as he approached his mid-30s? He'd been fired from as many jobs as he'd quit. He was uneducated, but well read. Most day's he felt like Ishmael from Moby Dick. Instead of knocking off the bowler hats of those he passed by, he fantasized of slapping phones out of people's hands.