Refraction | Part 1 | Darwin's Steroids
37) Clearing Up the General’s Schedule
The General sat in silence and watched Dr. Hanso Fook finish his gourmet lunch. The General had returned his plate to the chef with compliments, blaming an unsteady flight for his lack of appetite. The Doctor ate slowly and deliberately, chewing slowly, savoring the food with a look of rat-like satisfaction on his face.
The General spent the intervening time trying to compose his thoughts on the present moment. He thought he must be making some mistake, the man in chamber must be the son of the man he knew, or just some doppelganger. Memory was funny. It was much more than likely that he was mistaken as to the man’s identity. He waited for the Doctor, waited for the answers. He knew the Doctor would provide them in his own sweet time, and The General was determined to simply sit there and wait him out. He drew a deep breath with his mind and blew it out, letting it rustle across the tall grass of his memories.
“Fuck this creep.”, He thought.
At long last Dr. Fook laid his flatware aside, wiped at his mouth with a grey cloth napkin. It shimmered in the light of the room, the General took it to be silk. He had never touched his and now it had been removed, he had the urge to reach out and pluck the Doctor’s out of his grasp, rub it between his fingertips. He resisted. How had this research group afforded to bring such luxuries to this locale?
Fook spoke.
“I must admit, even I am shocked. I suppose I should have considered the, er, possibility…but the records of those times…in such disarray.”
The General waited, silent. The Doctor looked at the General for a long quiet moment, then spoke.
“You know the man in the chamber, yes?”, asked the Doctor.
“Yes.”
“You served with him?”
“Yes.”
The Doctor’s eyes grew wide. He stood and walked behind his chair, placing his hand on its high back. He shrugged and bit at the fingernails of his other hand.
“I didn’t know, what does it mean, will it change things? No, it could help us, er, help us.”, The Doctor mumbled at back of the chair through his finger tips. The General could bear it no longer.
“I believe I served under that man for a duration early in the war. I also believed him to be dead. Seeing him brought back…uncomfortable memories.”
“Yes, yes, yes, of course, how could I have been so stupid?”, snapped the Doctor.
He spun toward the General, stared at him.
“You have the first gen nanites?” , asked the Doctor.
“Yes, well no. They were replaced by the gamma group bugs. I went into the tanks a month before the research was shut down by the assembly.”
“General,” sighed the Doctor, he motioned with his arms to indicate the place they were in, “The assembly outlawed such research only on the planet. I have, er, continued the program from this platform for over three decades.”
“The man in the chamber?” asked the General.
“He has been my subject since I took over the program from Harold Jorgenthal at the end of hostilities. A volunteer, he asked that we wash his mind as well as possible in the tanks. We decided to repeat this process on a number of occasions.”
“We?” asked the General.
“Myself and my staff. We thought it best, for the security of the program.”
“Yes, well, we saw some terrible things when we…fought together. But I thought he had left the military.”
“I see, er, he was part of another agency when he volunteered into the program. Since he has been our subject, he has performed certain, er, tasks for us. Every time he has agreed to the work, and asked for the tank after. Our last session was, shall we say, overly thorough. He did not respond to our summons. This man represents sixty years and trillions in research money. We were forced to bring him here, er, clandestinely.”
The two men sat quietly for a moment arranging the new information they had received from each other.
“Doctor,” , said the General, “I am the head of an arm of a military establishment that has little to keep it busy. It has become a machine of maintaining peace on a planet that has tired itself of war. We are at the beginning of a true global renaissance. What is this really all about?”
The Doctor sighed his sigh of how-could-you-be-so-stupid and asked, “General, what do you know about the work that went on at the Cheyenne Mountain facility after the war?”
“Nothing, I know they moved NORAD out when I was a child, I had thought they shut it down, or turned it into a museum or something. It was a relic of the cold war of the twentieth century. Obsolete equipment, etcetera.”
“Yes, er, it was rehabbed, and for a short time it was indeed a museum, complete with a gift shop. But it was a place that was destined for…greater things, General. A physicist from MIT visited, and was floored when he discovered the rail system that had been constructed beneath the surface to connect the facility to the seat of government in the event of a massive nuclear or biological event. Starting about two miles east of the facility, almost half a mile under the ground, there is an arrow straight tunnel that deviates less than an inch in any direction for almost 900 miles. The man began to petition the government, with the backing of his university, and in the spirit of er, peaceful scientific inquiry, the young new government responded. The facility was again refitted and became the center of the planet’s advanced physics research.”
“Go on”, said the General.
“The rail line was expanded. A series of enormous looping tunnels now sprout from it, spiraling along its length. Super-colliders feeding into one Mega collider. Without going into technical detail, it was, at its core, research into the fabric of space, of matter, and of the empty places amongst it. It took almost two decades to complete the machine, and in the end it was only used once.”
The General waited.
“Extremely unanticipated things happened when the machine was fired, the stories range from the absurd to the unbelievable. The truth of the matter is even harder to accept. Events were set in motion that day, events that are occurring even now, their pace increasing. Two camps have formed, General, not everyone on Earth is as weary of ..war as you hope. I have brought you here, and showed you this man, told you these things in the hope that you will join us. You and the men you command would be a valuable asset for our side.”
“Doctor, you have brought me here to recruit my assistance, shown me your super soldier, rambled at length about vague and mysterious research, but you have not answered my question.”
“General,” said the Doctor, his manner intense, “I have brought you here because my work is complete, my prototype is a success. Now I need to, er, apply my research. I need men for the program. Our goal is not to create a single super soldier, but an army of them, General.”
“But why, Doctor, why?”, insisted the General, finally growing impatient with the irritating, ugly little man.
“Why?” replied Dr. Fook, gazing his feral gaze at the General, “Why to save the world, of course.”
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