Paulo also had significant support from the Tracker and Captains classes worldwide. His support was far from universal, but his support came from the classes and Clans that mattered and wielded power.
Though thought to be a bit od an autocrat and in control through coercion, the truth was that the ordinary Gens could easily rise up and sweep these pretenders away at any time. These transformed Gens did not want to, no matter what they thought of Paulo. They liked their jobs, their suburban homes, their conveniences, cars and cell phones. They loved TV and movies, restaurants and hotels, and education and a future for their kids. And the absence of war and fear of “coming out”. And at the top of what they the loved was human sex. Paulo protected this way of life, not altruistically, but he was adept and keeping the secrets of the transformed Gens community safe.
Virtually all other Gens were relegated to natural state or to menial jobs in the human world. It had taken less than one hundred years for the Fortizi and their Clan followers to secure virtually unchallenged political power and this was creating problems throughout the Gens universe. The concentration of power and authority in this way was never intended by the Gens Collective but it nonetheless had turned out this way. Traditional complaints to the local Councils reporting abuse would be ignored; the Tracker and Captain elite classes were replete with Fortizi sympathisers who owed their careers to the establishment. Only insurrection could change this dangerous course and that would demand strong, perhaps even ruthless leadership. But who was willing to give up a comfortable life in transformation to risk certain death for themselves and their followers?
No one on the Great Council and even fewer on the Lesser Councils.
Only the Black Shirts could now challenge the Fortizi dynasty. Who they were and what they wanted was far from clear, at least to the ordinary Gens. If they were Fundamentalists, as the vast majority of the Gens believed them to be, then they would be no bargain either. The Black Shirts could easily be far worse than the tyranny of the Fortizi. At least Paulo left the Lesser Councils alone to do their work. He had taken liberties but had been aware of these transgressions and promised an eventual return to normalcy after the human threat was contained.
The Great Council wanted to believe Paulo. Paulo for his part could care less. He would forge ahead with what had to be done; worrying about forty-six other old men and women, no matter how powerful, was not an obstacle for him. If pressed, he would dissolve the Great Council and press for the old Roman powers of dictatorship. Like Gaius Marius, Cornelius Sulla and Julius Caesar before him, the Gens Collective would be ruled with an iron fist and with a single voice in a time of chaos and disorder. Paulo had zero problem with assassination among his own kind and even less among the human irritants. He was a new kind of Gens leader and reliance on the old ways and old institutions was for others. Paulo Fortizi would make new rules for the new world order he knew was soon about to explode onto this planet; the outcome of which could not be accurately predicted.
A clash was inevitable. And it would probably happen sooner rather than later. The Gens Collective had to be prepared for the transition. Humans would soon discover they were not alone. Then the killing would begin.
“What’s the status of the V-1409-B program?”
“Half complete. We have perfected the E-5 virus strain and it is extremely deadly to humans.”
“And to us?”
“Minimum 85% mortality rate at present, not considering mutation. We’re working on blockers and vaccines. We expect a solution in the next two years. Maybe sooner. We’ve elected to provisionally use human researchers to expedite the research process in critical areas where our progress has been slow due to lack of qualified Gens personnel.”
Not 100% true, but close enough for a bunch of old men and women.
“And the risks?” The Elder from Australia had seen this all before, at least he thought he had. One manufactured crisis after another. Always seemed to benefit one Clan or another. And the power seemed to continuously refine and concentrate. The old ways are dying out, he thought to himself. This Fortizi Clan thinks they are the future. Too bad we will have to deal with them, and harshly, sometime in the very near future. Before they accumulate too much power.
“Minimal. The humans carry out our trials and experiments but report only results. They have no idea what the project is really all about.”
“Then what about the Serum Project? Shouldn’t we have had some success by now? We’ve spent a fortune on this program for well over fifteen years and yet success remains elusive. What more can you tell us?” The Elder from Vienna was a tense, but quiet man, reserved in all matters. But today, Paulo read the anxiety in his voice. This Elder did not like change. And he too did not like what the Clan Fortizi represented to the future of the Gens Collective. Too modern; too human.
“Other than that, our progress has been both slow and steady. We’ve continued in our understanding of the Gens genome and focused new research almost exclusively on the genetics of human blood. We believed that once the human and Gens genomes were unlocked, we would find the answers we thought these genomes contained. We were wrong. All we found was an infinite list of new issues and tasks made even more complicated by the interplay of active and inactive genetic materials and the interplay between the human and Gens genetics. Instead of the potential solution being among twenty thousand or so active genes, we have the interplay of one hundred twenty thousand active/inactive genetic pieces. Which combinations and in what sequence they need to occur has changed our perspective. So, we have narrowed our research and changed focus. We have also begun new research into the catalysts for other species that transform. Perhaps we can by-pass our impasse. But, if we are focusing on the wrong approaches, we may never find what we are looking for.”
“And if you’re on the right track?” The European Elder asked, calmer now.
“Could be tomorrow, could be ten years.”
“Sounds like you need to find the Human and take care of the problem, at least for the time being. Our research doesn’t appear to be, yet, proven or fruitful. Is that correct?”
“It is. But we should not allow ourselves to be deluded into thinking that eliminating the Human will solve our problems. It will not. It may, and I emphasize may, buy us more time. We must assume success for both our genetic research programs and decide what to do when we have met with that success.”
“What’s the question, Paulo?” The Elder from Ethiopia was skeptical. Results had been poor and had not been advancing for years. Still the Great Council failed to learn why.
“When we have solved transformation to instantaneous and the ability to force individuals to remain in one state or the other, that’s part one. Then, part two, when we obtain the ability to cull mankind, what do we do next? What do we do with the humans?”
“I thought that was clear,” said an Elder who had been silent for most of the discussion. “We cull and herd the survivors if we need them. Otherwise, what use are they if we can transform synthetically? Mankind is dangerous, and I think we need to proceed with extermination on a large scale. Even just a wide scale reduction would accomplish most of our goals.”
“And what goals are those?” Paulo was interested in what this Elder thought he had to say.
“Only one. Domination of the planet by eliminating our principal biological competition. Humanity needs to become extinct. The sixth and final for them.”
“Then funding shall continue at present levels and we will redouble our efforts to identify the Human. Ladies and gentlemen, that will be all. Our next meeting will be our first via secure teleconference. Physical meetings are a waste of valuable time and resources. Any objections?”
There were none.
“Then we will conference again in three months. Get your facilities completed and your military training expedited. We prepare for war. You have scarcely two years left in preparation and we will need every capable Gens to be ready to do their
part.”
“Have you finalized the war plans?”
“We have. Our computer modeling has shown that ninety percent of humanity will be dead within 30 to sixty days of infection. Once begun, there will be no turning back. If humanity discovers us and this plan, the consequences of our own failed research will be devastating. Then it will be us who experience an extinction event. Our own.”
Chapter 7
One of the few with knowledge who took a keen interest in the evolution of the DataLab Project, from its later stages of development to its rapid journey away from first principles, were Edward and Adam St. James.
The concept of the DataLab Project had been the brain child of a then relatively unknown computer software engineer in residence at Victoria Institute, Anori Sato, now living in his native Tokyo, Japan. The first development funding was provided by the Institute though the Victoria Institute Endowment, a multi-billion-dollar research and development “thought incubator” simply referred to as the Endowment. The Endowment derived the lion’s share of its funding through ownership of, and royalties earned from, various patents, trade secrets and intellectual property developed by the Institute and its researchers. All research and IP developed in whole or in part at the Institute belonged to the Endowment although the wealth generated was liberally shared by the Endowment with its many Fellows, researchers, thinkers and innovators.
Confidentiality and secrecy was paramount, and in the history of the Endowment and the Institute, no breach of its security protocols had ever been recorded. After all, significant private research was undertaken in multiple disciplines on behalf of governments, agencies, industry and educational institutions making confidentiality, if not outright secrecy, a minimum requirement. The Institute drove a hard bargain financially, but consistently delivered positive results. Hence, anything developed under its auspices which could conceivably produce commercially viable, revenue producing applications would continue to be owned, at least in part, by the Institute.
Government agencies and staff attorneys howled and occasionally threatened to confiscate, through eminent domain, the very technology they sought to have developed by the Institute. To old hands in government this made little sense. No single project or program could be more important than the relationship established over many decades with the Institute. It was accepted as reality that government and other clients needed the Institute more than the Institute needed them. Besides, the Institute was in Canada, not the US.
If the Institute decided not to undertake a project, there might be no suitable alternative available to undertake and complete the project. There were a lot of tech firms and start-ups that promised to do great works of innovation. And most had some idea of how to get started and perhaps even a grasp of the complexity of the task ahead. But it was the Institute that could finish the job, on time and on budget.
The Institute was reliable; other firms were a crap shoot.
But the Institute didn’t rely on its reputation alone for protections, commercial and legal. That would be foolish in the modern age of widespread litigation and deep corporate pockets. No, the legal system was too often perverted by the very practitioners who swore to uphold the high ethical standards of the profession. In a profession, ethics were supposed to mean something, something important and almost sacred. Men and women acting in a manner above reproach.
That is, until the law became an impediment to five thousand dollars per hour business, then the legal system was an obstacle to be circumvented.
The purveyors of fine legislation, in the State Houses and both houses of Congress, were morally and ethically little better than the lawyers who perverted the laws already on the books for profit. These fine representatives were largely bought and paid for by the lobbyists who lined their own pockets lining the pockets of those duly elected officials.
It had occurred to some at the Institute that there was little conceptual difference between lobbying elected representatives through large campaign contributions on one hand and outright bribery on the other. To suggest that there was no nexus between large campaign contributions and how a representative would vote on an issue before the legislature was an argument that could only be believed by the lobbyists and the elected representative thus purchased.
Of course, the height of lunacy was the notion that those who were bought and paid for were the very souls who enacted the legislation defining criminal bribery versus legal lobbying, making sure to draw conceptual distinctions without much practical differences. As a result, campaign ‘bribery’ could not be criminal because the legislature said so. In fact, the legislature said this form of corrupt influence was perfectly legal and above board.
So, whether an activity was corrupt or not was to be defined by those who were ostensibly being corrupted. And, even better, if one misuses the legal system quietly enough, and without a lot of fanfare, the corruption might, and most likely would, just go unnoticed.
But shoplift a bag of skittles and the kid goes to juvie. After all, stealing a bag of candy is a serious crime. Corrupting public officials is … wait for it … legal. Yay!
So, the Institute, not trusting in the normal course of legal events and mindful of the high cost of litigation and the higher cost to purchase the integrity of public officials, decided to go a different route. What they required was a stringent set of legal protections to be set forth in a series of prophylactic American and Canadian federal laws designed to protect the Institute, its researchers and Fellows, and the Endowment. This the Institute got before it would undertake any further work for any government at any level. The purpose of the legislation was not to overcomplicate the process but to prevent the legalized perversion of the use of Institute developed IP.
Then the Institute hired its own high-priced lawyers to draft contracts that mirrored the protections set forth in law and to make those agreements as air tight as was possible. Attempts at circumvention of the statutory framework wasn’t permitted; neither was it now permitted for the Institute to waive its rights, directly or indirectly, in the statutory framework. The statutory framework was the only law that applied in any legal case going to trial in either the US or Canada. These statutes were now fully baked in as controlling.
Arbitration was mandatory, simplified and streamlined. The rules of arbitration were spelled out, and modifications not permitted. The time for pretrial discovery was limited and the issues to be determined clearly spelled out. Though unlikely under the rules of mandatory arbitration, any successful removal of a claim from arbitration to a court of law for any reason required the entity suing the Institute to pay for the Institute’s legal fees and post a cash bond to secure its obligation in advance.
The purpose of the law and onerous contracts was to make legal nonsense expensive – for any entity seeking to neutralize, harass or intimidate the Institute. Litigation the old-fashioned way, favoring the deep pockets of corrupt corporations and governments seeking to use the legal system as their bludgeon, was to be turned on its head. Any loss at arbitration or in a court of law for the litigant carried with it treble damages.
Don’t like the deal? Good, go elsewhere.
Most client organizations were satisfied that their bargain was one they could grudgingly live with. All research contracts were clear on the matter and key provisions were required to be accepted as boiler plate and without negotiation.
Edward and Adam St. James, as two of seven trustees of the Endowment, were two of the few individuals who were authorized by law rather than licensed for isolation access. And they would use it whenever necessary to pursue projects of such sensitivity that the mere existence and nature of the research project would, or could, affect lives.
Adam had himself only used isolation access a few times before, almost always related to his work with his father, Edward St James, the archeologist in criminal matters, or his mother, Maria Suarez, the engineer in commercial matters. Both had worked on top secret American an
d Canadian projects involving the highest levels of security and national importance. Both were familiar with insiders in governments, agencies, industry and academia. Virtually nothing they thought or wrote ever landed in scholarly journals but instead were carefully squirreled away in a special access library located inside the DL Main. Only those who needed to know did, and those who were given access to this library only received access to what they needed.
Except Adam St. James, who saw everything and accessed everything he could possibly need. And much more.
And, he was now tempted to use it again, on yet another undertaking for his Dad. With immense volumes of new data for the DL Main to unwind and assess, he hoped he would quickly resolve any questions relating to the data he had. He could reveal the secrets of these Gens folks and find the truth, if he wanted to. Right now, he did not.
Adam was confident that this Library was nothing more than some well written fiction. He was too busy to waste his time and the resources of the DL Main, to chase this wild Canadian goose. He had better things to do with his valuable time and scarce resources. After all, the capacity of the DL Main was not limitless.
And his own capacity to tolerate such foolishness was even more limited. He would wait out his family in this matter until they came to their senses. It was only a matter of time until they found out that this silly business was a gigantic waste of time.
Some said Adam was stubborn to a fault. Adam thought he was simply being prudent.
In this matter, Adam was wrong.
Chapter 8
In early 2008, as economies and businesses around the world began to implode, the usefulness of DataLab Project began to hit full stride. Gone were the challenges of uploading and storing data and new solutions for super-fast data retrieval were well along in development. That left only data manipulation to be the newest, least tamed frontier of supercomputing with the DL Main. The DataLab Project would, however, always be an ongoing project and no aspect of the DataLab Project could probably ever be considered finished or complete.
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