by Dave Stone
No joy with the old NSA either—until I took off the time-lock and trawled back through the trash logs of the dormanted stuff. The stillborn junk that never got off the ground in the first place, so never needed to be capped at the end…
Long story short, I found a way in.
There’s some weird shit back there, Stanley. Did you know, for example, that back in the Eighties there was a serious proposal to covertly modify the TV receivers of certain notable left-wing militants so they pumped out hard X-rays through the cathode? The intention, simply, was to increase the number of cancer deaths among left-wing firebrands.
The project foundered when some bright spark realised that left-wing firebrands, as a group, tend to watch a lot less TV than the population as a whole.
Whole lot of stuff like that—some of it even going as far back as 1945 and the reports of death camp experimentation unearthed during the Liberation. And some of these are front-reffed to our old friends Special Services Section 8 and something called the Janus Program. Janus was, of course, the Keeper of the Gate and such crap. The god of doors and portals—go and look it up in a book on comparative mythology if you even care.
The Janus Program was set up maybe thirty years ago and ran for about ten, based in and operating from a number of disused sewers and maintenance-tunnels running roughly parallel with the Greater Metropolitan Subway. Various plans and schematics attached. There are references to a Bunker of some kind—always capitalized—but I was never able to track it down definitively. I’ve marked one or two most likely locations on the plans attached.
I also found specs for some seriously heavy duty processing equipment, apparently based upon optical-switching technology—years ahead of its time.
Who the controllers of the concern were, who its operatives were, of their aims and objectives and ultimate remit, I still have no idea. I’ve found the skeletons of personnel files, salary scales and so forth, that allow me to hazard some basic guesses on the overall picture, but every hard-data specific has been wiped.
One thing, however, is abundantly clear, from working back from the gaps and looking at the shapes the holes make. They were experimenting on kids, Stanley. Kids procured by a seemingly random process of informing mothers that their infants had been stillborn and then just spooking them away. More than seven thousand of them over the course of a decade.
Exposing them to something. Infecting them with something. With what, precisely, and to what purpose, I have no idea. Again, there are skeleton records to suggest that the effects of this infection, whatever it was, were studied over a period of years, but no hard data remain.
Whatever the nature of the infection was, the mortality rate was high, running from seventy-five percent at the start to maybe fifty percent by the end.
Those who survived, and were old enough by this point to remember the procedures, were given post-hypnotic blocks and reintroduced to the general population by way of foster homes and adoption services. It’s not outside the bounds of possibility to imagine that a number of mothers got their supposedly deceased infants back under a new guise.
In any case, Stanley, it struck me that these kids are now old enough to have children of their own. That got me thinking, so I ran some comparisons and extrapolations from such data as remains extant.
Your missing kids, Stanley, the disappearances you’re investigating, are the children of the Janus Program subjects.
I think somebody, somewhere is covering his tracks. Like I said, the background material on this thing goes as far back as the death camps—and like the death camps, I suspect that all of this was done for no consistent or coherent reason at all. It was done for the simple reason that someone could do it and get away with it.
It hasn’t ended, Stanley. It hasn’t stopped. The disappearances of the kids, the murders in [section deliberately defaced from source] are just the visible tip, for the simple reason that this was where the victims were most concentrated. Is the same thing happening, to some less noticeable extent, throughout the entire country? The entire world ..?
This is all too big for me, Stanley. It’s just too big. I said I’d never thought of myself as a coward, but I’ve been lying awake nights, just wondering what people with those kind of resources—people capable of even countenancing these things—are capable of doing to me.
You, too, Stanley. My advice to you is to drop it. Leave it alone and walk away. Find yourself a rock or something and crawl under it and hide.
They’re just going to do this, and do it, and keep on doing it—and you can try to pretend it’s not happening or you can stand in their way and let them roll right over you.
There’s just no way you’re ever going to stop it.
Radio None
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“And our top story of this cycle must be the tragic collapse of the Golden Gate Bridge, killing seventy-five thousand. The death-count is so high because this once-historic construction was at the time blockaded by a coalition of demonstrators protesting US involvement in the Congolese War.
“We here at WWAXXZY News fully support freedom of speech and the expression of ideas of all kinds, however repugnant they might be to right-thinking citizens of this great country of ours.
“We have to ask, though, in the light of such an appalling tragedy—should we not be thinking of curtailing the free expression of ideas to gatherings of no more than, say, three men and a dog? We here at WWAXXZY News say yes, and if Amendment 7054 is passed, you won’t be able to say anything other than yes either.
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es the atrocity doubly vile, White House sources say, is that there are strong suggestions that it can be traced to Congolese-backed terrorists themselves, loosening the cables, as opposed to simple faulty maintenance. Despite the White House’s statement, rumours are already circulating some of the more scurrilous datanet sites that it may actually have been carried out by rogue elements within our very own government. The conspiracy theory goes that they wanted to kill two birds with one stone by inflaming the Congolese situation and removing opposition in one fell swoop.
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“And on a lighter note, old William Hicks is at it again. Originally intended to address the Golden Gate rally himself, the senator was discovered last night, wandering Times Square in New York, without his trousers and muttering that he had seen proof that both the US Government and the Multicorps are colluding to cover up the fact that we are all of us living in a recursive virtual reality which vast and unimaginable Entities from outside space and time are playing like a game.
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“That was WWAXXZY News, every hour, on the hour. And now, in memory of Big Master X, we’re devoting the rest of the afternoon’s programming to some of the best music released on his Big Black Beats label starting with his very own remix of Freak-E’s ‘Be My Pimp’…”
17.
The scope of Federal Government, as an instrument of power, might have atrophied; the might of Multicorporations might be split as the individual corporate concerns squabbled amongst themselves for the prize of the world—but the California National Guard (or Arnie’s Freedom Commandos, as certain sectors of the corporate media had dubbed them) were still going strong.
Admittedly, the California state legislature had banned them from operating within their home state but they had enough rich backers among the tech and entertainment industries to buy themselves bases in all of the neighbouring states, ready to strike at a moment’s notice should law and order in California break down completely. Add this to Governor Arnie’s statewide draft programme and the US Army spreading its forces across almost a hundred nations worldwide, and the California National Guard becomes the most powerful military force in North America. Only a few private corporate armies and southern gangcults come anywhere close in terms of both man and firepower and, the California state legislature notwithstanding, there was nobody to challenge their military dominance.
There were any number of reasons for this. Some to do with the functions a well-armed and well-trained military force performed and the responsibilities it had within a chaos-bound overall social dynamic. Others to do with the fact that the CNG’s presence in sympathetic states dissuaded gangcults, terrorists and other assorted whackos from attacking government, corporate and private interests there. Others still to do with their favoured status within the Pentagon and the multitude of homeland security contracts they were awarded by the top brass there. But chief among those reasons must be counted the simple and obvious one that they had a shitload of heavy weaponry, and who was going to take it away from them?
So, foreign wars were still waged and police actions still fought to protect the interests of America but homeland security, unofficially at least, fell under the remit of the CNG.
Johnny Raghead still got the crap kicked out of him before being shipped off to Kandahar, Guantanamo or Diego Garcia if he even so much as looked at a subway air conditioning unit. God-fearing patriots in the northern militias and survivalist groups would get a jackboot up their collective asses anytime they refrained from paying their Federal taxes. ICBMs remained maintained in their various silos and racks. Bomb testing was still conducted—and certain complications attendant to bomb testing, on a whole other level than mere fallout, were still, after a fashion, dealt with.
This latter function fell under the remit of what, over the years, had come to be called Arbitrary Base.
Colonel Roland Grist, Commander in Charge of Arbitrary Base, surveyed the pair of GenTech so-called “civilian specialists” across the expanse of his desk. He was not exactly impressed.
The girl was wearing something in skin-tight PVC that left nothing to the imagination but which, even so, was strategically ripped to leave even less so. With her bleach-blonde hair and overplayed cosmetics she looked like she’d be more at home sliding round a pole.
For all this, she radiated assurance, a sense that if she happened to decide a direction in which the world would go, then the world would fall into line as a matter of suit. Grist was reminded, a little disquietingly, of a nanny employed by his family back when he was growing up on their Cape Cod compound. The girl had done drugs and spent most afternoons screwing his father—but so far as little Roland had been concerned, her word had been strict and absolute law.
The boy was just what the word “boy” implied: a kid around the age of the youngest grunts under Grist’s command, without even the most basic of the training that would have him straightened up and flying right.
The boy was twitchy and pale, hunched sullenly in a gangcult leather jacket several sizes too big for him; shadowed eyes glowering up at Grist under a straggled mass of hair that had long since crossed the border from being merely greasy into the country of the positively matted with filth.
He looked most definitely like a drug addict, this boy—and you could pick any drug you liked, it would probably fit.
For himself Grist couldn’t imagine this pair making it through the Base perimeter alive in normal circumstances, let alone being allowed into the more sensitive areas.
Pentagon orders, however, had been quite clear. They were to be given the run of the place, given any assistance or information for which they might ask, whether that meant launch-codes for the SNARK XIV’s in their silo-racks… or access to the so-called “Artefact” in Shed Seven.
The bureaucrats in the Pentagon were watching him, Grist knew. They were watching him all the time, just to see if he would fumble the ball again. There were Special Forces operatives on the Base that he still had not properly identified, at least to the point where he could be certain where their loyalties truly lay.
He was not in a position, at this point, to blatantly disobey direct orders from above.
He didn’t know how many of his men were in on the joke.
All the same, there was nothing in the orders telling him to make the job of these two easier. If this pair wanted anything, they had to know what to ask and then damn well ask it.
“Sir, ma’m,” he said, the honorifics of respect all-but sticking in his craw. “Our sponsorship arrangement with GenTech Industries requires that we offer you any assistance you might require. I can have a maintenance crew go over your rigs, have you on your way in—“
“Any one of your guys lays a hand on our rigs,” said the girl, “at this point and without clearance, is going to be chopped down instantly. This isn’t the pit-stop, this is the finish line.”
Grist remained impassive. He’d guessed from when they had told him that the convoy was coming that they weren’t going to just be using Arbitrary Base as a maintenance way station; this was just a way of letting this pair know that he was going do to nothing more or less
than they actively asked.
“What we’re going to need,” said the girl, actively telling rather than asking for anything, “is your tech-support team scrambled and ready to go. Nobody under Stratum XIV clearance, and you’ll better believe we’re going to be checking the list, and checking it twice, from our own database.
“Step up the perimeter guard, and they can be cleared to any level you like—just keep them away from all GenTech personnel and what they’re doing. Plus we’re going to need a squad of Special Forces Deltas as an escort while we set up shop in the place you dammed well know that we will.”
Grist still remained impassive, biting on the polycarbon tube replacing the cigars to which, in off hours and in the open air, he was partial.
“And that would be?” he said.
“Where do you think?” said the girl. “Shed Seven.”
“So let me get this right,” Eddie said as they headed through the Arbitrary Base compound, watching various military personnel snapping to order in the way that only military personnel can do. “This is what…” He racked his brain for the half-remembered UFO mythology he had picked up growing up in New Mexico—where they had a lot, admittedly, but of a sort that set off so many bullshit detectors that you never bothered to even learn it. “This is what they used to call Area 51 or something, yeah?”
Trix Desoto snorted. “Stop being a tool. You’ve been quite the tool for long enough and it’s been mentioned before. Area 51 never existed. The whole idea of it was fabricated to draw attention away from the things that were really going on.”
“Oh yeah?” said Eddie. “So what really happened?”