by Gary Lovisi
When the wooden doors automatically opened, Ryan was ordered to enter the room. He took a few hesitant steps forward and went inside. The guards did not follow him. That in itself seemed odd, and made him curious. Then the doors suddenly slammed shut behind him with a resounding boom, and James Ryan thought it was just like the sound of doom.
“You can come, James Ryan. I will not bite you,” a young woman’s voice—she actually sounded like a girl or teenager—said with forced friendliness from above him through a hidden speaker. She did sound young, maybe just a girl at that. Strange. Ryan didn’t know what to think or what to expect. He would have been surprised at how young Arabella Rashid really was, had he been able to see her. Young in appearance and years certainly, but not in experience and intent. In fact, he had no idea how formidable and dangerous this wisp of a girl could be when it became necessary.
Ryan moved forward as instructed, one more tentative step deeper into the Director’s sanctum, his eyes slowly adjusting to the light. He couldn’t see a woman, or girl anywhere, to connect to the voice he’d heard, but he did see an old, white-haired man slumped over a long circular console of screens and monitors. These flickered with the light of various images as scenes shifted; showing what appeared to be selected surveillance locations in the building, the city and around the planet. It was amazing, here was the control center...for everything.
“James Ryan?”
“Yes,” Ryan replied nervously.
“I have work for you,” the voice said in a tone that brooked nothing but obedience. Ryan was sure now that it was indeed the voice of a young girl, a teenager most likely—certainly not a woman. Most strange, he thought, but he was wise to keep his curiosity to himself and his mouth shut.
His only reply was, “Yes.”
“I am the Director of the Department of Control,” her voice proclaimed with a matter-of-factness he immediately accepted. “Simon is no more. There lies what it is left of his mortal remains. You will dispose of the body as per my instructions.”
James Ryan didn’t know what to say or even think. This was incredible and explosive. He took a quick look at the body of the old man slumped at the desk. So quiet, so peaceful, so dead.... Ryan nodded, looked down and said, “Sure.”
He waited, there was no response from the girl’s voice.
Then he looked over at the corpse of the old white-haired man once again. So that was Simon. The monster himself, or so rumor went. He, like all who were part of the organization, feared the legendary Director of the DOC. Ryan took a deep breath and released it slowly, hoping to calm down. Hardly anyone inside the organization ever saw the man in the flesh, and certainly no one outside the DOC had ever heard his name.
Ryan smiled, so this had been the feared Director he had heard so many rumors about. The man legend said was the most evil man in the world, and the most dangerous. He didn’t look so deadly now....
But if he was dead? Then this girl...?
“I am the Director now,” the mysterious girl’s voice said from the secrecy of some overhead speaker, and Ryan’s attention was brought back to reality and his particularly uncomfortable and dangerous place in it. For he realized now that as bad as the rumors about Simon had been, it now appeared that he had somehow been overthrown or murdered by this woman—this girl. If such was the case, then how much more dangerous and deadly must she be than the man she had replaced?
Much more ruthless. Much worse.
Ryan steeled his nerves. He feared what he must do and what his future would hold for him after he did it. A brain wipe for sure. Perhaps even a deep unmarked grave in a far away place where he would be dumped in and forgotten forever? The thought didn’t comfort him. Nevertheless, there was nothing he could do about any of this, other than obey. He was owned by the DOC and the DOC had given him an order. You did not ask questions. You just did as you were told. And, if you so desired, very quietly so no one noticed...you prayed.
“I will tell you later precisely how to dispose of the body and you will carry out my orders exactly as I give them to you,” the girl’s voice said with a force of steel he could scarcely believe possible from one so young.
“Yes,” Ryan said. There was really nothing else he could do or say, and still continue to exist on this side of heaven or hell.
Then he did as she told him.
* * * *
Later, after it was all done, Arabella Rashid sat back in Simon’s chair and allowed herself to appreciate the utter exhilaration of unlimited power as it washed over her. Simon was gone, she was free. It was delicious. Almost infectious. Her eyes locked on the surveillance images playing out on the screens in front of her.
She smiled, looked down at the man on the table being worked on by the DOC scientists, as per her orders and said softly, “Well, Ryan, when you wake up tomorrow you will not remember anything about Simon, or me, or what you did with his body. Instead, you will have an entire new set of memories and desires...some of them you would never have thought possible in your wildest dreams....”
She picked up the old book now. From her own forays into forbidden texts she knew that it was what was called by people from the old days as a “paperback.” That was evidently because of the soft cover wrapped around the pulp paper hard-copy pages. It had been on the console beside her and now she thumbed through its pages at random. It was old, from LastCen, last century in the 1990s. A long time ago. Before the DOC, before the Authority, even before Simon—but just barely. It was something that proclaimed itself “a future science fiction classic”—whatever that might be.
It had the title Mars Needs Books and seemed to be about the future—but not the future as it was now, as it really was here today, but one extrapolated from the past through rational conjecture. It seemed to be some alternate reality story, some primitive wish-fulfillment fantasy about a world that might be. Or, perhaps one that should be? But that was not this world at all.
Arabella Rashid looked at the garish cover and smiled. There was a stalwart hero with ray gun and some sexy space-suited vixen with large breasts.... How trite? Funny, really. So quaint and how totally irrelevant. She threw the old paperback down on the console and looked back at the still form of James Ryan as the marvelous DOC mind machines pumped him full of desires, memories, and duty that had never been his own. Yet soon, they would be as much a part of Ryan as was his very soul. If he had one.
“You’re taking a trip, Ryan. You’re going to Mars. And you’re going there to accumulate and collect old mystery and crime paperbacks. Preferably hard-boiled private-eye novels. Yes, that’s correct. And I’m going to send you shiploads of them, and many men—all settlers—will be transported out there and they will read and treasure them too! Troublemakers, malcontents, and fools, all with their brains fixed—just like you. Every one of them will be a fanatic just like you—obsessed with collecting paperbacks, buying, selling, trading, and above all reading the damn things! You won’t be able to help yourselves; it will be ingrained inside each of your minds. Then you will be mine. My modern equivalent of the Irish monks of our Dark Age, keeping the knowledge from books alive—the stories and the humanity they possess. But not scientific and technical data. That information is changeless and available unfettered in the digital record—for how would our society survive without it? No, what I am talking about here is fiction. The stories and novels that sing their songs to the human heart. The art of the storyteller to bridge that indefinable gap between life and truth and dreams—and yes, even nightmare. The haunting dreams and nightmares of men—and women—that is what is at stake here. These shall not be lost. And though the DOC has caused Truth to perish from this Earth—it shall not perish from our history. One day it shall return. Unfettered. These old mystery and crime paperbacks hold truth in their stories with individualistic heroes, and their many shades of good and bad. You shall protect and preserve them.”
She watched Ryan closely. He did not move. He was in a stasis field. He had no idea what was
being done to him.
“You’ll all be fanatics. It just wouldn’t work any other way. You will be terrified, full of fear and hate. You will be programmed with a fear, an unreasoning paranoia about using any media other than hard copy paperbacks. You’ll be terrified of mind control from vids, any form of implants, all mass media in any form at all. You will never trust it—you can never trust it. Instead, you will be readers. You will read the old and trusted hard copy paperback books of LastCen. These hard copy editions, printed and bound in their own day are the only words you can trust. I will have it engrained and programmed within you all. This is the only mode of information storage device which has not been changed since it was published decades ago. Ryan, you and your fellow ‘Marsmen’, will only trust hard copy text because it can not be altered without discovery. You will hate the Authority. Some day, you and your band of misfits and malcontents will lead the revolution off-planet, on Mars, and then finally, on Earth.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE WHEELS ARE SET IN MOTION
It took twenty years for her plan to come to fruition. She had been careful—she has had to be so very careful. She used Simon’s DOC science. However, instead of bringing back the monsters of the past as Simon had planned—freaks like Hitler, Stalin, Usama Bin Laden, and their insane evil ilk—she had cloned the personalities and minds of truly great people—men like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Albert Schweitzer, and Albert Einstein—women like Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher, Corazon Aquino, and Golda Meir.
Then just for pragmatism purposes and security concerns she rounded things out by including the psyches of great warriors like George S. Patton, George Washington, Robert E. Lee. Moshe Dayan, and Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington. When all these outstanding minds and personalities were combined, the amalgam was placed into a human replicant and named Moses Sage.
Then Moses Sage was set to lead the revolution for human freedom and dignity on the Earth.
Some day.
Arabella Rashid called it the Janus Project. It was named after the ancient Roman god who had two faces. The two-face. She smiled at the idea. She liked the duel purpose of it all. When she explained the Janus Project to the DOC scientists and DOC Board, she did so as if it were merely the continuation of Simon’s genius plan. That plan had been to milk the DNA of the worst past masters of murder and mayhem in order to create a group of future DOC soldiers and leaders unlike anything the human race had ever seen. All working for Simon, and the DOC, of course.
“Simon’s grand intent,” Arabella Rashid told the members of the DOC Board through secure link holochannels, “his Janus Project, was to offer through the bodies of a new generation of clones, the DNA and actual minds of some of the most ruthless men in history. These would serve the DOC and become the new shock troops of the empire. The new leaders for a new era of the world and then outer planetary domination. These were Earth’s most ruthlessly talented, and now from every past era of human history, they will be brought together again to work for us.”
The applause from the Board members was staggering, the smiles and nods from the scientists was all the approval Arabella Rashid needed to secure her position as the new Director of DOC.
“We see that now the proper choice has been made for Director,” Emilio Chávez said over a secure link from his region of planetary control in the North-South American Security Sector.
“You will prove a worthy successor to Simon. This Janus Project is sheer genius,” Mildred Millian added, offering the younger woman a fist salute, a term of respect lately popular in the Southern European Security District, her area of planetary dominion.
“The Janus Project,” Arabella Rashid continued, “will transform seemingly innocuous young men to grow up and become educated as per our direction. Their minds and thoughts bent with purposeful design to your every want and desire.”
There was immediate and resounding applause from the Board members. They liked what they were hearing.
Arabella Rashid smiled glowingly at them all. Yet inwardly, she shuddered and prayed that none of them would ever suspect the deadly dangerous game she was playing.
For it was well known by those in the know, the Janus Project would create a group of the worst monsters culled from human history. Artificially bred and created, with memory and obedience implants. These clones of the most dangerous people who ever existed, were set to change human history forever. They were just what the DOC wanted, just what the hated Authority needed to further tighten its grip on everything human. An army of truly murderous monsters without one scintilla of humanity to stay their hands.
Arabella Rashid clicked off her view screen and sat back comfortably in Simon’s old chair. Her feet were perched upon the console in front of her as she picked up the old science fiction paperback she had taken away from James Ryan days before. She sighed, thinking of him again. He would be on his way to Mars soon, with a cargo of a few hundred men who would become new settlers. They would be miners, many would work themselves to death in the mines. On the ship with them were crates of old paperback books. She smiled. What a cargo! Human reprobates and crime paperbacks. They did seem to go together. Ryan would never be able to figure it out. He would never even imagine such a plan, and whether he suspected he’d been tampered with or not, he’d perform as he’d been programmed. They would all perform as they had been programmed and that was all that mattered.
The girl who now called herself Arabella Rashid looked at the garish cover art on Ryan’s paperback copy of Mars Needs Books. The spaceship and supermen motif was colorful and quaint. The sexy girl in very abbreviated outfit, was crass and exploitative, and the old paperback book she held was so....
She just laughed now, remembering one of the characters had been named Arabella Rashid. She’d taken her name from that powerful young woman in the book. She’d seen a copy of the book long ago, years ago, maybe this was even the very same copy she’d seen back then? She looked at the old paperback carefully. The entire package was antique. Certainly obsolete as an information medium. For a second she thought she should do a search/scan for info on the author. The book was credited as written by someone named Philip K. Dickson. Perhaps a pseudonym or a play on words? She decided it did not matter. The author did not matter. Not now. What did catch her attention was the sentence printed in bold print at the top edge of the cover. These phrases she knew now had been called by the unlikely name of “blurbs,” back when actual hard copy books had still been published. Arabella Rashid was drawn to one sentence on the cover. It said, “The story of Moses Sage—the Superman who brought the promise of revolution and freedom to Earth and the spaceways....”
“Moses Sage?”
Arabella thought of the Janus Project. Now it seemed there might be even more to Janus than the DOC Board and even she knew about. Arabella Rashid’s secret part of the Janus Project—its other face—had been more two-faced than the ancient Roman god’s namesake could ever be imagined. Instead of the clones being implanted with the DNA from the minds of monsters—she had managed for one replicant to be implanted with all the forbidden data of the saints and heroes. That one single replicant was now to be called Moses Sage. His mind would contain the DNA combinations from the minds of the best men and women in human history. Including some of the greatest military leaders and strategists of all time to ensure the success of the revolution.
Meanwhile, next to him in the vats, dozens of monster clones would continue to grow and evolve, but they had already secretly been infected with a timed self-destruct virus. Those Janus clones would all mysteriously die upon the attainment of their twentieth birthday. All but one. All except Moses Sage. But he will be gone and in hiding long before his sibling clones began their death dances.
“You will grow into manhood unfettered by the world to learn and develop into a great leader. Then, decades from now, when all is ready, you will take the name Moses Sage and lead the underground and its revolution against the Authority and the DOC,” she s
aid, gently putting down Ryan’s old paperback.
Arabella Rashid knew she had planned well but it was a complicated plan. It was a long plan of many years duration and anything could go wrong at any time. She had just passed her thirteenth birthday. She would be a woman well in her thirties once Moses Sage presented himself to the citizens of the world and began his revolution to free Earth of the DOC. Meanwhile, Ryan and his group of malcontent mining settlers would be gone from Earth and safe on Mars. Where for the time being, they would be reading paperbacks and dreaming of revolution.
She smiled, the wheels were set in motion.
Arabella Rashid picked up the old paperback from the console again, flipped the paper pages. “Mars Needs Books, indeed!” she said with a shake of her pretty head. “We’ll see where this all leads us, one day, James Ryan.”
Then Arabella Rashid placed the book in a plain manila envelope, writing upon the outside of the envelope, “For James Ryan, Eyes Only!” and placed in gingerly in her outgoing mail slot for immediate delivery.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE YEARS DO PASS US BY
For a thirteen-year-old genius girl-child, Arabella Rashid knew that the game she was playing was devious and deadly. But it was also fun. It was her way to change the world that Simon had built all around her since she had been a mere innocent. She hated that world, and she hated Simon. His death had been a true pleasure for her. It meant he would never hurt her or anyone else ever again. Death gave a certain insurance, a reassuring certitude for the living that such evil monsters would never get at another victim.
But she still had the nightmares.
Those never went away. Even when she had become a woman and understood it all. The little girl child deep inside her, was still terrified. That little girl, was always scared. But she was brave and strong and overcame all that life and Simon had thrown at her.