“And that's all been proven. Those tests are unsealed.”
“Yeah, unsealed; unsealed by an internal affairs investigation after one ‘Oscar Morales’ was subjected to a particularly harsh and prolonged exposure to Arche Energy, evolving him into the beast known as El Odio, back in oh-nine.”
“That’s the nature of experiments: you push the limits until you learn something new.”
“A mutable on death row in Sing Sing; armed robbery and six counts of second degree murder, but given an offer by your D.o.D. representative to commute it to a life sentence if he agreed to be a guinea pig. Exposed to the Cape's radiating Arche Energy in over a dozen successive sessions. His skin lost pigmentation; he grew two extra arms; his sustenance demanded a regular intake of Arche Energy the way a diabetic needs insulin. He was an abomination. You called him that, before you moved to kill him.”
“Hyperbole.”
“Morales expected to return to prison, but your bosses said he was a criminal, a murderer, and now a monster, so ‘it wouldn’t have been a loss’ if he died… but he escaped, taking the name ‘El Odio;’ ‘abomination’… and for three years he hunted mutables, stringing them together, alive, as a sort of Arche Energy bio-generator. Did you know, he could ‘smell’ people on the genetic level, like how some dogs can smell when people have cancer. He strung their bodies together from the ceiling of an old warehouse, with wires, stitches, and meat hooks. Could you imagine the smell? The groans of agony?”
“Am I on trial here? I thought this was a panel discussion.”
“El Odio is in Deepwater Penitentiary now, sucking Arche Energy out of a micro-Whip.”
“Where he ought to be. The Department of Defense has already apologized for their mishandling of El Odio.”
“‘Mishandling’! It was your facility that created the monster in the first place! And then—and this contributes to a running theory of a colleague of mine—and then you created the ‘Bridle’ to inhibit Arche Energy absorption; a direct response to the creation of El Odio. Mutates caught in the field can't tap-into the CMBR spectrum, thereby choking them, much like a mortal trapped in a vacuum, unable to breathe. Such low-level ambient radiation is as sustaining to active mutates as are food, water, and oxygen. Your low-grade Bridles were then installed throughout the Crypt, Blockhouse, and Deepwater prisons, producing an ‘overall power repression’ field rather than tailoring a system of containment to each mutate, thereby decreasing the cost—and increasing the ease—of imprisoning supers. Now, my colleague's theory is that El Odio was a purposeful creation; one to examine the Chrysalis Gene's thirst for ambient CMBR, and then a catalyst for inventing an appropriate repression device. After all, El Odio didn't attack anyone who wasn’t already a mutate—and, to the government, that's a ‘no harm, no foul.’”
“Sure.”
“Now this is why I believe his theory holds water: If those in charge of the government feel threatened by something, but it isn't an outright cause for public alarm, they create a fear or an incident that allows them to swoop-in and install new rules protecting their positions, paychecks, and pursuits. Whether that requires legislation or leniencies or loans, or troop deployments, or the militarization of police, or the Chaukeedaar—and now, direct and intangibly, the explicit repression of mutates via the Bridle. My colleague even has it on good authority that you're equipping small Bridles to the Chaukeedaar.”
“Does he post these theories on message boards?”
“Humor is a form of deflection, Phoebe.”
“If you're asking if we'll mass-manufacture Bridles for an automaton police raid on all of America's supers, you'll have to ask the D.o.D. directly. I don't know their plans, I just work for them.”
“You've been distancing your research group from the government in an uncanny tandem with my probing.”
“If you're alleging that I-”
“I just find it interesting, Phoebe. You and I both know how deep your relationship with the D.o.D. goes. They kidnapped supers throughout the Eighties and Nineties, long before your lab existed, and then loaned their captives to-”
“Okay, first of all, they were criminals—arrested, incarcerated, and then assigned to early trials.”
“Oh, really? You’re saying Creature was a criminal?”
“He failed to register with DAESH, and he held total disregard for the Milligan Act of seventy-seven.”
“He was hunted, by the government, for twenty years. He was one of their own, too, though I suppose that meant they owned him.”
“Going AWOL and absconding with government materiel are both serious offenses.”
“He was an astronaut who gave his whole career to American pursuits—to the government—until a solar flare breached the shoddy flight suit he was testing… irradiating him to the bones; awakening his gene; unlocking all the ancestral DNA within him.”
“Uh-huh; and?”
“Was his DNA government property because its mutation was a consequence of government property failing him? They didn't want to help him when he returned, they wanted to dissect him! Of course he fled! And then, when he’s kidnapped in eighty-one, he’s handed to your AERG team on a silver platter, for unregulated experimentation, giving your group a purpose and earning you the funding for further tests—further tests built on other captives: Adonis, eighty-four. Manimal, eighty-six. Duke, eighty-seven. Dynasty, eighty-nine. Kraken, nineteen-ninety. Jigboy, ninety-one. And then came the ‘Braid.’”
“You make it sound like some menacing Bond-villain device. It's just two Capes linked by a Whip, so we can transfer powers from one mutate to another.”
“Sure, sure, in addition to forcing a mortal to gain powers, by underwriting their genetic code, in a horrific and blood-curdling process.”
“Okay, let's pump the brakes.”
“No, no, you remember Bradley Fox; you knew Bradley Fox. You knew him better than anyone on this panel. DARPA scientist, twenty-eleven; behind on his taxes; indebted to a few banks. Government promised to wash it away if he volunteered for a project. He thought mortals couldn’t be mutated so he agreed. Then you stripped the humanity from his bones and you replaced it with an incompatible mishmash of the mutates Manimal and Duke—the raging wall of muscle and the king of corrosion. I have an article here about it.”
“Alright, are we a book club, or…”
“‘Bradley Fox was a mild-mannered albeit self-loathing research assistant employed with DARPA from two-thousand-one to twenty-eleven. Since then, he's been called ‘Leviathan’—but only when he's hurt. If wounded or pained, an involuntary adrenal reaction triggers a painful and mystifying transformation, where skin bubbles and bones heave. As the Leviathan, Bradley Fox becomes an immense abomination: a fifty-foot amalgamation of scar tissue and loose bone, as if he were three megalithic men fused together in the womb; walking on five gnarled legs, with a huge upper body and an arched back, plated in hard, psoriasis-possessed skin; his ribs flared opened like a diving cage, with three swooping arms, matted wiry hair, and a half-dozen crooked eyes above a snout of pug nose and gaping maw. Mentally unstable—berserked by his irrepressible trauma—the Leviathan presents inhuman levels of strength, durability, and endurance; an immunity to pain, and near-invulnerability; corrosive breath; and a potent greenish gas cloud that can infect, corrupt, and deform mortals into his carnivorous kin. At least thirty civilians thus far have been transfigured into hideous monster-men the media calls ‘Ghouls’; humanoids of warped flesh and bone, with elevated physical capabilities, acidic spit, and a voracious appetite for meat and mayhem alike. As the ‘mother’ of these monster-men, the Leviathan has an inexplicable love for and control over them. The devastation he alone can wreak is measured per the Saffir–Simpson and Richter scales; as for his Ghoulish kin, their arrival indicates the commencement of interstate lockdown procedures. After morphing back into a man, for a short period, Bradley Fox appears naked and half-morphed, still retaining some of the Leviathan's features despite the inevitabl
e return of his decaying human consciousness. Today, he lives in remote sections of the American wilderness, never staying in one place for too long.’”
“That article is from twenty-fourteen. The Adjudicator killed Bradley Fox in twenty-sixteen.”
“No, the Adjudicator killed the beast, the Leviathan—and single-handedly, mind you. Something three military offensives and the ever-watchful Chaukeedaar could not do.”
“Then we're lucky to have him. Maybe he should register with DAESH and perform his heroics legally.”
“He's not a tool, or a weapon—he's a man.”
“He'd be more useful if employed by the government.”
“He'd be more expendable if employed by the government, which is why he doesn't.”
“There are hundreds of mutate criminals across the country, that he could imprison or eliminate, yet he only engages those of considerable threat levels, and only those who are in his immediate area. The national media has referred to him as ‘Hero Number One’ ever since he took-out Leviathan two years ago but he's not a national hero; he’s a local hero, and by choice. He's selfish. He doesn't care about humanity; he cares about only three things: glory, fame, and himself.”
“That's a steep accusation.”
“You've been beating me over the head with hard truths for twenty minutes, and I reserve the right to do the same. The Adjudicator is strong, and he can fly, and he's taken a dozen big criminals off the streets, but none of that makes him a hero. Earlier today, for instance, the Grand National Bank was robbed by a serial criminal, and where were the supers? Sleeping, boozing, canoodling—who knows. But they weren't where we needed them to be. You know who was? Local police.”
Singleton smiles. “Hey-oh!” He turns-up the volume. “Say my name!”
“Two officers had to drag him out on their own.”
“Say our names!” he shrieks, throwing the gearshift into Park.
“And the Adjudicator never showed his face.”
Singleton stares at the radio, wide-eyed and biting his lip.
There's a knock on the window, and his finger instinctively, autonomously unlocks the door.
Three smaller, younger, naïve versions of the officer clamber into the car, wrestling their backpacks off and beginning to speak. He interrupts them, “Your dad’s on the radio—listen, listen, listen!”
He raises the volume: through static, the professor says, “and the beauty of that is freedom of choice.”
“Damn,” Singleton sighs, “nevermind.”
He looks at the floor, throwing the gearshift into Drive, and he returns his gaze to the rearview mirror.
“How was school?”
( I | VI )
“Well, we discovered it earlier than that,” she says, glowering. “I couldn’t give you a specific day. Initially we called it ‘nova igniculus’ meaning ‘a new spark’ and then ‘igniculus primitiae,’ literally ‘the first hearth’ in Latin, but neither lent well to the tongue, so we settled on the Greek ‘Arche’ for ‘origin’ or ‘source of action.’ As for the gene, we announced it—the Chrysalis Gene, that is—on, uh, May sixth of oh-seven, but we’d been studying it for a few years prior.”
“From what I’ve gathered—and let me know if I’m correct or not—Arche Energy is drawn towards the base of the spine.”
“That’s how it appears.”
“So—bear with me—in Buddhism, a person is said to pool their primal energy there—in the Muladhara or 'root' chakra, at the base of the spine—and from there a person may channel it up through their body, to awaken the panthiest divinity within themselves, connecting them to the ‘anima mundi’ — the ‘world soul’ of sentience. Could this ‘dormant energy’ we call kundalini, or qi, which we draw upon through the base of the spine, be the Arche Energy we’ve ‘so recently’ discovered? Could our ancestors have felt, harnessed, and understood this concept long ago, leading to the creation of meditation, yoga, qigong, and similar practices?”
“Wow, um… you know, spirituality is more applicable in your field of study, professor.”
“I’d just like your opinion, as a scientist.”
“Okay, well… It would definitely give me a new interpretation of ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’” she laughs. “Um, it’s a very compelling argument… It makes me question the history of the peoples of Southeast Asia. Now I wonder if that’s where this genetic mutation may have evolved; we’ve studied—as far as I know—no people of this heritage.”
“See, that’s- that’s what has me wondering, too.”
“That would mean the first supers were Indian, Tibetan, Cambodian…”
“One hell of a rewrite to our timetable. Even if you don’t prescribe to the ‘Jesus Christ as first super’ theory, whether or not he’s your messiah, we hadn’t found evidence of supers appearing earlier than the first century. But geographically, too, this makes sense for the chronology of first appearances: the levant, Greece, and Italian coast first see supers around the year one-hundred; Roman trade routes brought supers over the Alps, through Gaul, to the English, Celts, and pagans circa four-hundred; Germania and Scandinavia saw supers as early as the ninth century, but we always wondered how the first known Asiatic super appeared in Japan in the year five-thirty-eight. If your origin source is Jerusalem, that doesn’t add-up in the east; but, if the origin is in Southeast Asia, you can plot the spread of superism east and north in near-synchronicity with the spread of Buddhism from India, through China, and towards Japan.”
“Making the Vedic gods real, or-”
“Troubling, for sure, but probably not; likely as had the Greeks, applying the template to previously misunderstood phenomena or unexplained events or fascinating characters. Was there a pale-blue, four-armed mystic with the ability to bend reality? Maybe. Was it a Supreme and Almighty God-king? In my professional opinion, no.”
“Something you said earlier is still buzzing around my head,” the scientist mews, “you said ‘awaken the divinity within,’ like it's a path to tread, with an endgoal.”
“Nirvana; enlightenment.”
“A path of chakras.”
“Seven of them, supposedly.”
“Stages of enlightenment.”
“And?”
“My colleagues were working on a chart for ranking power levels in known supers. They determined seven distinct levels.”
“Scandalous,” the professor purrs.
“Suppose that conga- what is it?”
“Kundalini?”
“That primal energy expands at each chokepoint, like floodgates, or transistors. The more awakened, the more power.”
“Perhaps. Sounds like it's something your team can investigate without a human sacrifice.”
“Alright—enough with the barbs.”
“No, seriously; despite the joke, I'm serious—if you could find a spiritual or physiological connection to Arche Energy and power levels, I mean, you could confirm a religion, and subsequently debunk all the others. You could reshape civilization. You could win a Nobel Prize.”
“Heh… now I'm thinking we should've had our conversation off the air!”
“Yeah,” he laughs, “but—in the gravest of seriousness, I must say—this revelation could represent a great opportunity for your facility to transition to nobler pursuits; to end the torture of these mutates, and the ‘playing of God’ with their genetics. Such experiments, I'd argue, ought to be considered crimes against humanity.”
“Those were the projects of my predecessor.”
“But are they ongoing practices?”
“We have imposed stricter guidelines on future experiments.”
“My question was, Phoebe, Is the Arche Energy Research Group still developing repression devices as well as still forcibly-evolving mutables?”
“This sounds like a cyclical conversation.”
“I came on this show with an agenda, just the same as you. I'm looking for clarification. Is your agenda to whitewash the Guantanamo, Josef Mengele-style activit
ies you perform behind closed doors?”
“Who are you to talk?”
“Well, Phoebe, I’m a tenured professor at one of the world’s foremost learning institutions, with two Masters and a PhD—the foremost expert in my field—and you’re an interim appointment at an outdated biomedical chopshop so morally-bankrupt that even the government is trying to distance itself from you.”
“If you want to talk ‘live-subject testing,’ well, your ‘prestigious’ Columbia University isn’t exempt from condemnation; while the world was reeling from September Eleventh, your school was pulling eyeballs out of baboons. Where do you think we learned it from?”
“Oh, please—this isn't a father catching his son with reefer; the government has been running these kinds of experiments since the First World War, using universities as isolated proving grounds for all sorts of testing. It's top-down. And the baboon study wasn’t a shining moment in the university’s history; it was an ethically-questionable decision made in haste by an isolated team performing undisclosed research on stroke victims; on aiding recovery from strokes. It was a medical endeavor to better treat humans—humans which you and AERG have been kidnapping and corrupting; torturing on a genetic level. Baboons may be sentient but humans are far more capable of processing such pain, not only physically but philosophically; human-on-human torture is one of the most vile actions possible; it's a sin beyond mere killing; the unguided experimentation akin to a kid with a caged rabbit: poking, splicing, blinding, and molesting it to see how it reacts-”
“There have been no sexual assaults against our subjects-”
“Not sexual molestation; you’re twisting my words. I mean involuntary torment, abuse, violation, injury—psychological and physical alike—on human subjects!”
“The majority of our subjects have been willing participants.”
Supers Box Set Page 3