One of their first missions was to try to reconnect all the political strongholds across North and South America. Groups of the surviving members of government put together an emergency plan that accounted for the loss of junior statesmen. Anyone under forty was eliminated, as a matter of course, from these plans. The next target was any retired generals, presidents, or other leaders, both public and private, who could reasonably have survived both The Wave, and the weeks following the Impact. Regressed individuals who had been between sixty and one-hundred were inventoried from national databases. The NSA, FBI, and other three-letter agencies went to work scouring previously sacrosanct records from the Social Security Administration, the Departments of Education and Health, and even IRS tax returns. It was important that survivors be catalogued according to their abilities, specialties, education and wealth if any of the old ways of governing were to survive.
The General stood for a moment and realized that this left him with only a few options. He considered that some the inner cabal had probably survived the nuclear attack, but that the technological losses would weigh heavily in his decisions.
The General began to regroup his power base.
*****
NEW MEXICO –
Dr. Martin Groenig was one of the top astrophysicists in the world. When The Wave struck, he had 40 years and about seven months in age.
One time, long ago, Groenig had been on a triumphant arc in his life.
He had just been married, was recognized by the Nobel committee for his work on deconstructing the Solar irradiance influence on global warming, thereby cementing his chances to win the coveted award for the year. He had been the recipient of an enormous grant and had founded a scientific chair at his alma mater.
His girlfriend, although upset at his marriage, had capitulated, and even found a sense of humor about the situation. His OTHER girlfriend had decided that she was just fine with their current arrangement as well.
To top it off, he had just come back from his honeymoon, which, coupled with a Safari in Africa, allowed him to return with four trophies; one of them was a Cape buffalo he had nicknamed “Colonel Cooper.”
His pleasure at having killed the beast with a .50 caliber handgun was long forgotten, given his current predicament. Groenig fumed and struggled, trying to raise his head enough to see where his caregiver had gone.
When Groenig had found out the truth about Mars, it changed him. He became furious that such an important discovery was being withheld from public knowledge. Such information would change the political face of the globe.
He believed that when the fact of life on another planet could be unequivocally proven, religious superstitions would come under question, and logic and reason would finally prevail. Mankind would raise itself from the muck of ancient traditions based on the oral history of people long dead. A new age of Enlightenment, this time borne on the shoulders of Science and not Religion, would finally allow humanity to achieve its real purpose. All the petty squabbles of the world, warfare, famine, wanton slaughter, prejudices and ignorance would be healed by being illuminated by the fact that we were not truly alone in the Universe, that there was indeed another form of life that could only be proof of the Natural Evolution of things.
*****
Groenig styled himself to be the one man who could bring this blinding light of the truth to the unwashed masses, the political heathens, and the entrenched nobilities of Earth. He would be a modern Prometheus. Or, a modern Lucifer, if one trusted the stories of the old books. Only he did not intend to be cast aside, nor have his entrails ripped out by vultures.
He felt the prestige of his achievements warranted a measure of gravitas, and thus protection, from the baser instincts of the uninformed.
Of course, he was very wrong, and soon after his first attempts to have a press conference on the discovery of Martians, he found himself suddenly on a precipitous arc. His work was being examined and questioned. His Nobel was rescinded. His wife was alerted to the presence of his other female companions, and divorce proceedings were initiated that took half his net worth away.
Luckily, there were no children from his marriage, but in the aftermath of the public revelations of his indiscretions, he found no solace from his girlfriends. They also left him, and ultimately he was abandoned by his peers as being a ‘nutter’.
Groenig was not a man who folded easily, however, and now he made it a personal vendetta to inform the world about the hard facts regarding life on Mars. He regrouped and began working simultaneously on rebuilding his wealth, and getting the word out. He found the former childishly easy, setting up a series of blind trusts, shell corporations, and other legal constructs so circuitous only his highly honed intellect could keep them straight. He made killings in the markets but never had obvious signs of wealth. It took much of his will power to not flaunt his improving fortunes. He rarely met with women, and only to put paid to any rumors that he was on the outs. His reputation preceded him. Women would usually only date him a few times, and he found that tolerable. He had set his sights on a higher purpose and contented himself with the knowledge that he would finally reap his rewards as they met their peak. He was a frequent guest among many of the fringe talk shows, insisting that NASA had been covering up the most incredible discovery of the last millennium. The talk show hosts nodded knowingly and encouraged their most bizarre callers to engage with Groenig.
The discussions often devolved into shouting matches, or outright verbal fights that ended with Groenig calling into question the heredity of the other party. After several months of this, he decided he was only being used for his entertainment value, and stopped pursuing this path.
Meanwhile, many of those in the know within NASA, the Elite circles, and the US government began to worry that Groenig was not as harmless a threat as he had originally been defined. It was certainly true that his genius was legitimate, and that he had been exiled from the higher levels of academia and militaria. However, the man was not without his resources and kept surprising them with his tenacity, and ability to always be three or four steps ahead of them. His public relations campaigns had begun to create positive notions for him, and even his ex-wife had been known to speak of him in admiring tones.
This was unacceptable, and a campaign to further attack his credibility began.
Only this time, Groenig was ready. As he was giving a presentation about the Martian life forms in Sao Paulo, Brazil in the late summer, he was alerted to an increased presence of Polícia Federal officers.
The armed men began to block exits from the auditorium where he was giving his closing remarks about his findings. He spoke directly to one of the officers from his podium.
When he received no response, he excused himself and left the stage. As he exited the stage, four officers blocked his path. Groenig pressed a small hidden button on his briefcase and the lights in the auditorium went out. Using special night vision glasses he had taken the precaution of wearing, he navigated out of the building. The police forces fumbled and ran into each other, and the audience was confused. He left the area on foot, and then took a bus to the airport. He flew from Brazil to Panama, and then to Costa Rica.
He found that he had no problems traveling by air, until he decided he needed to re-enter the United States. He tried to get a flight to Denver, Colorado and found he was on a no-fly list. Furious, he arranged to obtain passage by a chartered boat and traveled to Jamaica. Once there, he used an identity he had prepared and flew to Bermuda. From there, he traveled to Virginia. He took a taxi back to one of his houses, near Richmond.
Groenig was livid at having had to expend one of his identities to return to America. He set about uncovering why he had been flagged and discovered that the designation had been sent from a classified account. He hacked into several government mainframes and cross-linked the results using a customized NOSQL database he had created. He had been monitoring the Internet and other publications using custom bots that he had reprogrammed
from a command and control server array. As he began to unpeel the layers, he found out that there were very highly secret classifications attached to files related to him.
He suspected that some three letter agency had been at work – the CIA or maybe the NRO, but a quick review of the bot database IP results led him to conclude that the target was perhaps not even in the United States. He considered that the addresses could have been spoofed, and ran several analytical tools, including a Visual TraceRoute and Nmap port scan of his suspected routers. They validated his suspicion that the country of origin was not the United States. Instead, the flag had come from England.
This surprised and dismayed him. He was very careful with his identity management, and if someone from England had enough horsepower to get him blacklisted, this was indeed a problem. He ran a few more scripts and decided that he would have to address the problem later. He had some pressing financial matters to which he needed to attend, and his foray into cyberspace had cost him some valuable time. He grabbed his briefcase and headed out to his car.
He opened the front door, armed the alarm system, and checked his watch. As he left his house, he noticed a large number of black SUVs driving down the street, towards him. He looked up and down and saw at least ten vehicles in every direction. A helicopter flew past, only a few hundred feet up.
It banked, and circled around, and then the pilot guided the craft to a landing in a vacant lot half a block from him. The doors opened, and three men exited. Two were wearing complete combat gear and carried M-16 assault rifles. They looked very dangerous as they pointed the guns at him. He noticed two red dots on his chest. He suspected there was at least one more on his head, probably from a sniper (or two) poised on a nearby rooftop.
The third man was dressed in a blue business suit, with a white shirt, and a red tie.
Groenig thought the man acted a lot as though he thought he was the President of the United States, but decided he was probably mistaken. It was just a very silly thought. Why would the President be traveling in such a pedestrian fashion?
“Dr. Groenig?” asked the man in the blue suit.
“Yes?” Groenig answered, trying hard to show his disdain, but not actually succeeding.
“I’m Barack Obama,” said the man. “I need to speak with you urgently. And, I want you to understand that you really do not have any options left.”
Groenig was indeed surprised, which was somewhat rare for him. He decided to let the man speak his piece, and then he would try to escape.
“Doctor, I am not going to mince words, here. You are going to stop telling everyone about the shlorgs and drurglers, and come back to work for us. Or, you can go somewhere that no one will ever find you.” Obama laughed a bit at that.
He turned and looked at all the black Suburbans, and the men that had come out of them.
“Actually, Doctor, I am afraid that you really have no options,” he said.
“I am sorry, but you have to come with us. You will be treated well, and we will assure that you will have every creature comfort you desire. We will provide you with female or male partners, to assist you with your carnal needs. “
Groenig remained unmoved and began to calculate the odds of escaping. They did not look very promising, he admitted to himself.
“You will have access to all manner of technological tools, and unlimited access to the data from Mars,” Obama continued.
“But, as of now, you are to be considered an intelligence asset of the United States Government, and as such, subject to complete monitoring and surveillance for the rest of your natural life.”
Groenig laughed out loud and pointed a finger at the man.
“I know my rights, Mister,” he began, “and there is nothing legal about what you are attempting here. My attorneys will have me out of your holding area within hours. I do not submit to your opinion or even your command without counsel being present.”
Obama looked at him for a moment and then sighed audibly.
“Oh well,” he said and walked back towards the helicopter.
He moved his right arm in a circling motion and walked to the black helicopter. He got back inside, buckling his seat belt and putting the green headset over his ears. The two Secret Service men jumped into the chopper and leaned back, their rifles still pointing in Groenig’s direction.
As the helicopter rose into the blue sky, Groenig felt the taser hit him, and then blackness claimed him. His last thought was “That’s a Blackhawk…”
*****
Since that day twelve years earlier, Groenig had played an ongoing game of escape and re-capture. He had long ago given up on using non-lethal means to accommodate his escapes. By his last count, he had killed at least thirty men, three women, and possible one or two children in attempting to win his freedom. Why he had not been executed eluded even his keen mind, but he understood that one of the rules was that he was never to be killed or harmed in such a way that his intellectual usefulness was compromised.
For twelve years, Groenig had remained incarcerated, working on the Mars data, and also anything that caught his fancy. His occasional escapes inevitably ended with his capture, and he found himself put under ever more challenging secure conditions. He only succeeded in getting sequestered in one military base after another.
Although he was resourceful enough to escape, the forces incarcerating him took a dim view of his antics. His times under lockup began to outweigh the times he spent in freedom.
This amused him, on a particular level, but it also annoyed him. He was being held by mental inferiors! They fed and lodged him, gave him toys. But, he was just a resource. Some government cog in an unknowable machine. For a while, he decided to withhold the results of any of his research. But, eventually, he grew bored with not being able to share the information, and finally begrudgingly decided to provide the results to a team of researchers from SPARTACUS.
*****
One day, he looked up from his work to find that Barack Obama had been elected as President. He filed it away, as a useful datum for later.
*****
Over the course of a few months, he had built a modified Tesla coil that used the intrinsic properties of silica glass to best effect. He had heated the silica to form a substrate layer of insulative glass.
He then layered a spiral of a glass formulation into which he had added gallium arsenide, a nickel-boron suspension, and some mercury. By understanding the atomic properties of these compounds, he created a tool that not only collected solar energy, but that also stored it locally in a molecular matrix. Effectively, the wand held all the components to gather its power from the air, in the form of radio waves. As Nicola Tesla had proven with his Wardenclyffe experiments, static electricity, and magnetic energy could be harnessed, stored, and emitted through the air, wirelessly, with lethal results.
He was ready and picked the date on which he would take his final leave of his captors.
On that morning, he had prepared himself, knowing the exact route he would take to escape into obscurity. He waited until the scientists had come to discuss their most recent information about the Mars impact.
He suspected The Wave would have deleterious effects on life, and he found that ironic. He had devoted a large portion of his life to understanding just how Mars life worked, and it was likely that it would be blasted into eternity because of some cosmic energy.
When the scientists arrived, they found him huddled over and groaning, apparently in great pain. The guards posted outside his cell were always alert to his machinations, and so disregarded his theatrics. But, he was not putting on the show for them. He had managed to develop a slight psychological connection to one of the women scientists. All of them had been briefed as to how dangerous and ruthless he was, but he had used coded phrases, couched with sympathetic words, to access the women’s memories. He knew she could provide the one moment of distraction that he would need to put his plan into action. As he groaned, she rushed to the door of the c
ell and demanded that the guards open it for her.
There was a brief conference of the guards, and they agreed to cover each other as the woman entered the cell. She waited until the gate was open fully, and then entered. Groenig continued making retching noises and holding onto his stomach.
“Do not approach the prisoner until we clear you!” said a guard. “Stop! Don’t go any further!” said the other. The woman began to approach him slowly, moving towards Groenig and looking carefully to see if he were concealing a weapon. She had been briefed and had successfully interacted with him for some months. Although she had seen the tapes of his previous escapes, she did not actually grasp how devious and manipulative he could be.
As the guards ignored his noisemaking, the woman came over, her natural empathy causing her to make a fatal mistake. “Don’t go near him!” shouted one of the guards. He pressed a button to close the automatic gates on Groenig’s cell. The other guard drew his Beretta 9mm pistol and advanced on where Groenig and the woman scientist were huddled together.
When she was near enough to him, Groenig quickly rose and touched her with the glass rod. He then threw her body into the doorway, which served to jam the mechanism sufficiently to allow him to approach the guards.
The glass rod device he had constructed worked perfectly, delivering its payload of focused energy into the guards’ bodies, killing them instantly. He took their security tokens.
Groenig quickly took the weapons, breaking them down to render them inoperable. He threw the guards bodies into the cell, alongside the dead woman. Groenig watched her for a few moments, impassively noting the effects of the Tesla wand. Her eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling, but her lips quivered slightly, and nerve impulses caused her legs to twitch. He then closed the cell door and locked it. The surveillance cameras recorded the events diligently, and he stood in front of the main one. He raised his right hand, and then gave the camera the finger.
Terminal Reset Omnibus: The Coming of The Wave Page 15