Three
"Tell me again exactly what happened."
The captain sweated under the Director's hard gaze. She had always unnerved him. The way she treated those templates, - even if they weren't human, still they didn't deserve to be subjected to all the tortures she and her scientists had devised. He cleared his throat before speaking. "We followed the protocol, Ma'am. We moved to terminate before she could escape."
"Yet she still escaped. What went wrong?" She leaned back in her chair, waiting for his answer.
This was the part he really didn't want to explain. Because he really didn't know how to explain it. "We opened fire," he said, "but that didn't stop her. She ran right at us, and – she passed right through me, Ma'am. Like she was some kind of ghost."
Her next question surprised him. "How did it feel?" she wanted to know.
He blinked. "Feel? It was, - it was like I was scattered in that moment when she went through me. It was a deeply unsettling experience, Ma'am."
"I'm sure it was." She gave him a wintry smile. "You're dismissed, Captain Park. Report to Colonel Roslin for your orders."
"Yes, Ma'am."
As soon as he was gone the third person in the room, who had been silent all this time, finally spoke up. "So, she's been activated."
Emma Frost frowned at her chief of research. "Apparently so. I wonder what the damn trigger was."
"Well, maybe when your soldier boys get her back, we'll finally find out," he said.
"Are you enjoying this, Callis?" she asked. "You look amused."
The scientist merely shrugged. "I always told you that Eight was not a good candidate for the program."
"And here we go again," she sighed.
"You ripped her out of her body, Emma, when she was still conscious! All our experiments showed that the best method of extraction was to strip away the personality during sleep. You should have let that Rogue absorb her energies like she did with all the other subjects."
"But I didn't. She was still successfully imprinted."
"Imprinted, yes, but conditioned? She's resisted us every step of the way! Now she's escaped! And you can't even find her telepathically."
"And whose idea was it to make the templates resistant to telepathic probes?"
He gave her a twisted little smile. "Well, we've both made mistakes then."
"Yes, we have," she nodded, "but are we going to keep blaming ourselves?"
"No." He shook his head. "I suppose not."
"Excellent. Anyway, apart from this little mishap, the program has been a complete success," she pointed out. "We've created something truly wonderful here. With my gift, and your brilliance, we've progressed from simple brainwashing to this procedure. Imagine. An army of soldiers, with mutant powers. We don't even need to have the originals, and go through all the trouble of training them. Let the Rogue just suck a bit of their personalities and their abilities, then we imprint them onto our pre-conditioned templates, find the psychological trigger that activates the undefined X gene, and we have an assembly line."
"Except we seem to have misplaced our number Eight," he reminded her sarcastically.
"We'll get her back." She sounded very certain of it. "She has nowhere to go. As far as the world is concerned, Katherine Pryde is dead."
