X

by J. D. Glass

  Starting program: /hacking/$ ./vuln-test:execute

  The Walrus

  * * *

  Consortium Chat – Member Email

  To CharliX - - Private Chat Request - - From DsrtFx

  * * *

  Although she hadn’t answered his private chat request yet, he wasn’t concerned; she was a bona fide technophile, and even with the plans Ben Cooper had told him she might have, it was almost outside the realm of probability that she’d leave in the morning without checking her e-mail, her PDA, or her cell phone—and he had all night. Besides, he had a complete dossier on Charli, or “X” as she’d been nicknamed on the board, and he knew her, had even met her several times, though he was certain she wouldn’t remember it. Then again, she wasn’t meant to, and he was good—perhaps one of the best, if he thought about it—at remaining or becoming anonymous. He had based an entire career on it. Besides, why would she remember the man who came to water the plants at the new office, the elevator repairman from the Puck building, or any of the many people who populated the occasional raves and parties the Consortium she belonged to threw?

  He shifted in his seat and swiveled away from the screen that would alert him when her response came, back to the detailed schematic spread across the desk.

  CharliX, he thought as he traced different routes with a fingertip, memorizing hallways and ducts, a vast but ordered maze of old structure, new construction, and hidden connections that might prove useful. Charli for her own first name, for the boy on Star Trek who had made things happen by merely thinking them, which was exactly what Charli herself did, create things from her mind, and X, the Roman numeral for ten. Of course, there was also X for the unknown, and that’s exactly what she was, to everyone but him. There was yet another reason, of course, an ironic one to be sure, he chuckled to himself as he stared at the lines before him, selecting then memorizing two routes, one easily accessible, the other hidden by a new wall, but he doubted very highly that any besides himself, a few upper-echelon players within the Company, and a select group of scientists and government officials knew the true reason why an entire generation had been tagged with that specific moniker.

  But those reasons weren’t the center of his focus for now—Charli was. Twirling his seat back to his screen, he clicked on the icon he’d parked on his desktop. He drummed his fingers, an old marching cadence he liked, as he waited for the file to open. When it finally did, he reviewed the information he already had and searched for anything he might have missed, any new connections that could be made.

  Charlotte Audrey Riven. One of two VP-Ops for one of the most stellar financial performers globally, had been the one to come up with the concept, then written the code that gave her company the earning edge on every level. Previously team lead at a now-defunct dot-com after paying her dues as a member of the code team. Bachelor of science from Hunter College in computer science; two parents: father Aaron Cole Riven, a school psychologist, mother Helen Renee Riven, née Daughtry, a high school principal, both were alive, still married, and living part-time during the summer in Ulster County, New York, the colder rest of the year as snowbirds in Florida. They were in many ways typical Boomers, but with no history of the usual diseases such as diabetes or blood-pressure ailments, indicating good genetic stock. And the larger hallmark he’d been looking for: both paternal and maternal grandfathers had served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Each grandmother had visited Army doctors, each one had borne a child within the right time frame.

  People, John repeated to himself another countless time with a little snort of black humor as he toggled from one screen to another, were genuinely stupid. Most who thought at all seemed to think that genetic manipulation began with Watson and Crick; they didn’t realize that Watson and Crick had discovered the double helix structure of DNA, not DNA itself, had forgotten that it was in fact an Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel, who had discovered what would eventually come to be known as genes through his research with humble garden peas. The rest seemed to think it had been only the Nazis who had engaged in genetic research.

  He puffed out a laugh even as he shook his head in bemusement, eyes flowing over the colored lines on the graph before him. It had been almost gestalt at the time, and the United States had devoted substantial resources to the field.

  The products of those experiments were spread among the Boomer generation, the results of that phase examined in cultural and formal laboratory testing. A nested lie had been created, the truth partially revealed to the guinea pig public by the cryptonym MK Ultra, the designation MK stating directly that the project had been run by the Company’s Technical Service Division.

  But among the many things the public didn’t know after all the forced hearings and apologies was that neither the experiment nor the testing were over: it was the next resulting generation—the X generation—that was to be the true subject of the experiment.

  It was by deliberate design and not by accident that Generation X was the most tested generation yet in American history, tested in grade school, at routine medical and dental appointments, in every way, manner, and form that could be conceived of, intellectually, psychologically, and physically.

  The results they received were all on record, both academic and medical. For those who hit certain criteria, their identities and dossiers were forwarded to a division within the Company. Taken together, the collected data on X painted a picture. John pursed his lips and traced the blue line that angled up sharply to the right with a fingertip held just barely above the electric discharge of the screen, before he minimized the window and returned to the original file.

  That picture, he believed, that picture looked exactly like Charli. John continued to review the things he already knew about her. One brother, twenty months younger, Cole Alan Riven, a marine engineer and career officer with the Navy and recently stationed in Angola—which was good leverage, he considered, and probably more good genetics, too. His accomplishments on record very much seemed to back that; he was one of the youngest officers to be promoted to commander who had not come out of Annapolis, the service academy. His early records matched Charli’s as well.

  She’d had a more than decent GPA in high school, all relatively uneventful except she’d been out of school for a two-year stint, and digging there revealed very little. She’d dropped the art classes she’d focused on as well as the soccer she’d played when she finally returned as a senior, still able to graduate with her class without losing any time, and had managed to be in the top five.

  Good IQ scores all along, much better than average, the same with aptitude testing. The usual childhood illnesses, though perhaps fewer of them and generally faster-than-average recovery times. Everything was normal, as to be expected, if it was a world that expected excellence. In a world that worshipped mediocrity, though, it made Charli exceptional, and Charli was definitely the sort of person he wanted to see grow strong, thrive, in the new order he had in mind. He more than strongly suspected Charli was part of the generation that had been specifically bred to lead exactly such a world.

  There was one thing he didn’t know, the final proof that the experiment had succeeded, had bred true, the one thing he kept searching for in all the information he had available. Those records were the only ones he’d not been able to access—yet. In the end, he suspected it would require personal interaction to verify, and then it wouldn’t matter.

  And to facilitate that verifying moment, finding Ben had been fortuitous indeed. Ah, Ben… He’d needed to test Ben, see where his loyalties lay, what sort of man he really was—what in the hell was a username like Chickenman supposed to mean? John decided it belonged to someone who saw himself as a victim, as something to be eaten—or something being eaten—by the world. Not a man like he himself was, older, clever, cunning, the tricky survivor and hunter, the fox.

  He had never intended to let Charli take the fall—but he’d never let Ben know that, either. Ben had been the route to cash and to Charli. />
  Ben was, in John’s estimation, brilliant. He was brilliant but delusional. He couldn’t hide his true intentions or feelings about her from him, and John Romello understood what Ben quite obviously did not want to: Charli was a lesbian, she would never fall in love with him. Which was too bad, only in the sense that she had good genetics; it would be a shame not to pass them to a future generation if she chose not to. Well, that and she had a classic sort of beauty John himself found attractive, but her sexual orientation neither bothered him nor offended his sense of pride.

  But still, with her intelligence, he was certain the logic of improving human stock would overcome any reservations she might have over the issue of issue—John chuckled at his own joke—and that was even assuming she had any; there was no reason to think she did. And in this respect, the fact that she was a lesbian was actually a tremendous advantage, since it increased the probability that pure genetics rather than random lust or chance would play a strong role in actual procreation.

  Of course John had studied and watched her closely over the last year, the way he’d watched a few others he thought would be worthy of joining him. He wanted to find as many of the X children as he could. It had been an almost lucky accident that he’d found out about them at all.

  He himself shared the particular marker so typical of the test generation: his own father had been barely more than an infant in the early 1920s when his family emigrated to the United States.

  But the part of family history that stood out for John was not the fact that his father had been an officer during World War II, but, rather, the story of his birth, as imparted by his mother. His parents had tried desperately to conceive, but luck and timing were against them. When his father returned home from the Pacific Theater in 1947 at all of thirty years old, they tried again and this time, John Senior, who by then had completely rejected his Italian first name, insisted they visit one of the military medical specialists.

  “I just went to the doctor one day, and the next thing you know, there was you,” his mother would tell him with a loving smile. “The doctor did it.”

  He’d simply accepted that until he began his own career in the military and there heard similar statements from certain men he’d worked with, men who wondered during serious and reflective moments, moments that hovered on the knife edge between an uneasy safety and certain mortal peril, if they, too, should they be lucky enough to survive, possibly have similar difficulties one day; and in these random yet frank conversations, a pattern seemed to form. It teased at his mind, as did many other things.

  It was his performance on a recon job in Laos as a member of the Special Forces that had given John the opportunity to join the CIA, or the Company as it was referred to, and on a hunch, he’d begun investigating. It had been a whim, a slight fancy, and as he made the right connections and began to ask the right questions, he discovered that what had seemed a peculiar coincidence was in fact a marker, a hallmark, even, and that what seemed wild speculation was actually part of a long-range plan.

  The investigation at the time had been something that kept him distracted from the constant slippery shift of who were the friends and who were the foes in the global arena, even as he learned—the hard way—that the old saying that it mattered not to peasants whose ass sat on the throne was nothing but brutal truth. They all suffered and died anyway. Democracy, such as he not only saw it practiced but helped to enforce, was a failure and a farce. Friends and allies who had aided and sacrificed in one conflict became nothing more than collateral damage in the next, and he learned that loyalty, true loyalty, was not something one pledged to the vagaries of politics, but to individuals who shared ideation, who’d proven themselves. Loyalty took blood to prove, and blood to break. Or perhaps it was simply blood that had opened his eyes…

  So even before he’d thought they’d be useful to him, before he was even certain of what they were, never mind who, he’d started searching for answers to the half-formed questions his life, his men, and the stray little bits of information that came his way combined and raised in his mind.

  He’d had nothing terribly in depth to go on, or at least not yet, not at the time, but the puzzle of all the Army-made babies distracted him during his dissolution of faith, or rather, disillusion, a process that had begun where he had—in Laos. Laos: the country that first they’d been ordered to secretly help, then only a few years later would drop over twenty thousand pounds of ordinance on. Dropped on the same people whose lives they’d saved, who had aided the Americans at great risk to themselves. Dropped and the results called collateral damage. That had been their reward for helping democracy. The price of freedom to sell Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, to wear jeans and listen to rock ’n roll. Not that they could then, not that they were able to, now, not really. But it had been the promise held out to them, the false carrot of capitalism and free enterprise incentive.

  And it wasn’t that they’d been merely blown up, which was horrible enough in and of itself. An old weapon from World War II had been upgraded, reengineered, and reincarnated. A new Death had been deployed. In its first incarnation, it stuck to walls and ceilings, it stuck to metal and to moving targets and it burned, burned at more than three times the melting point of steel.

  In its new incarnation, it stuck to skin and continued to burn, burn through muscle, through bone, while those not struck directly died of asphyxiation and heat stroke from the ambient air. But that was not the worst of it. The true horror of napalm was that the majority of its victims tended not to die immediately. It was slow death by a weapon that tortured those it killed and indelibly marked the living it left behind, left them with diseases that, too, slaughtered in increments and inches, cell by cell, left them with the inability to produce healthy offspring. It was indiscriminate, affecting the enemy, the volunteers, the armies that deployed. His men. His friends. And all of it collateral damage.

  It was avarice, greed for money and greed for power, one backing the other, greed for more more more that drove the policy and the treatment and the lies about the long-term effects of the poison. And that knowledge, the what and the why and the how…it made him sick—physically ill—was a part of the burning mix of pain and shame and loss that over time had cooled to become the sharp and glacial power that carved and shaped his mind even as it drove him.

  He’d hoped for some time that he was wrong, that perhaps the cover-up was merely temporary, an act of expedience by an administration that would do right by its patriots and the people it claimed to protect; and to distract himself, to give his mind something else to focus on, he’d started doing some research on the seemingly random facts he’d accumulated.

  In the end, what he discovered both fascinated and proved to him once and for all that one single administration, one single person or generation, was not the source of the lies he’d uncovered.

  It was so much more than merely an interesting experiment: it involved multiple agencies, all branches of the military, and select areas of private industry, all working together. And there was a list, a master list that named many who’d ranked highly in the military and other services; they had been knowing and willing participants in the project during its initial phase.

  The facts he could uncover revealed that as the project had expanded its scope, its need for appropriate subjects had expanded as well. Initial selection had been based more on individual merit rather than political connection, but when more guinea pigs were required…the more easily accessible records and much more transparent revelations of personal ability made the servicemen who had sworn their lives to their country both a logical and an expedient solution.

  Now that he was armed with information, knew what to look for, he began his search, all the while honing his network, developing his plans. For the longest time technology, as was publicly available, was thirty years behind what the government and the military had at their disposal, but finally, the people and the times had caught up to the curve. And that meant everythi
ng had finally fallen perfectly into place.

  He searched for the Xs, guided by the hallmarks and the test results gathered over time by other agencies. He had no definitive proof, only an outline of searched-for final outcomes—markers—because ironically enough, the generation that had been so looked forward to and tested was the most distrusting of everything.

  He found about fifteen hundred known test subjects, each with a varying number of offspring in a wide range of ages, the youngest barely in their teens, the oldest tending to run into their later forties. Not all of them, in fact, not many of them, fit the complete spec for the end-result criteria, though most seemed to have some. A handful of the ones who seemed to have all of them had committed suicide.

  But if others continued to monitor the experiment, the silence around it was for the time being absolute. John could track the disappearances of a few who had seemed to completely conform to spec, but could find no overt links to the Company in the circumstances surrounding their seeming vaporization. What he could find, what they did all have in common, were some final civilian medical reports that claimed various forms of mental instability—which John immediately recognized as part of Delta protocol discreditation process. And then—nothing. They were simply gone.

  John knew the Company, John knew the government. Those disappearances were neither accidental nor voluntary. He was certain that even now, those Xs that were in what he considered captivity were being trained, tested, possibly tortured, and turned from the ideals and ethics that were their natural domain.