Chapter 4
"It's strange," Olivia told them as she poured out some coffee. "I've been alive for nearly seventy years. Comparatively speaking, my time in Dharma was very short. I've been teaching for thirty years, I've married, had children and am now a grandmother. Yet it seems everything in my life can be divided before and after my time on that island."
"We know exactly how you feel," Claire said in that comforting voice everyone on the island had come to know her by.
"Except you didn't make a choice for your plane to crash. I had so many opportunities to say no to joining and then to leaving before I did."
Locke had no intention of telling this woman that the survivors hadn't really had a choice about going. Mainly because there was a part of him that was pretty sure many of the members of Dharma hadn't had a choice either. "In all the years since you've been back, no one asked any questions about where you were?"
Olivia shook her head. "There were so much paperwork and hoops to jump through before you even agreed to become part of the Initiative in the first place. And believe me, people were asking questions. A few months after I came back, some of my neighbors told me that this TV show had been asking about where I had been the past few years."
That got Hurley's attention. "What was it, like, local news?'
"It was one of those fringe TV shows that aired in mid 70s, Mysteries of the Universe. Something you might find on the History Channel these days. They investigated UFO claims, the Bermuda Triangle, the Illuminati. Most of their stuff was unbridled speculation, but when it came to Dharma, they came perilously close to the truth."
Locke vaguely remembered this series. At the time, it had struck him as something of the tinfoil hat variety of shows. "This show was running an investigation into Dharma."
"I ended up seeing a rerun of the episode a few months later. They'd really connected the dots here. They knew about the links to the DeGroots, they knew where the funding came from, they had an idea how we were getting to the island. They even knew about a couple of people who ended up going besides me. If they hadn't aired after Matt Houston on Friday nights, hell, maybe someone would've taken it seriously."
"And they contacted you. Why didn't you tell them anything?" Claire asked.
"At the time, my feelings were still pretty raw. So I told them I didn't want to talk with them." Olivia paused. "During the rerun, they mentioned our conversation. Then they said they received a letter from me telling them that I had been out of state and didn't wish to have any further contact. I never sent that letter."
Somehow this didn't surprise any of them. "If they had gotten back to you, would you have told them what happened?" Charlotte asked.
"Probably not then. But as the years went by and I heard nothing from anybody else who stayed, I wanted to go public. I thought that would force the people who had recruited us to that place would finally be willing to tell us what had happened to the ones we left behind. But no one else – none of my friends - wanted to share." Olivia shook her head. "They didn't want to admit what had really happened."
"Which was?"
"A couple of years after I came back, two men in suits came to my house. They offered me a cashier's check for a million dollars. All I had to do was sign some more non-disclosure forms."
"They wanted to buy your silence," Charlotte reasoned.
"I told them to keep their money. I wasn't rich, but I wasn't going to be bought off by the same people who convinced us to go there." Olivia looked down. "I suppose I shouldn't blame the rest of them. Most of the people who left had children and no way to support themselves. They needed whatever support they could have. Maybe if Amy had come, I would've done the same."
Charlotte looked confused. "Who's Amy?"
"My sister-in-law. She had a week-old child. I never understood why she didn't come with the rest of us when we're ordered to leave."
Locke looked at her. "I think it's time you told us everything you know about Dharma."
"And you'll tell me what happened to my family?"
Locke knew the truth was going to hurt a lot, but he also knew it was better to know than to spend your life wondering. "Of course."
"I wish I had some more secrets as to the true origin of Dharma, "Olivia began. "I never met the DeGroots, who basically came up with the idea, none of us ever knew met anyone connected with the Hanso Foundation, and I don't have any idea how they found the island or what they were looking for in the first place. All I can speak to with any certainty is how my brother and I ended up joining."
"Your brother," Claire asked.
"Horace had been something of a prodigy. He was always great with math and science, but what must have drawn the interest of the DeGroots was his interest in community. Like most of us who came of age in the sixties, he didn't faith in the government of other institutions. Unlike most of us, he actually came up with a plan to something about it."
Locke had an idea what that plan might be, but he needed to hear it.
"He was something of a pioneer in the 'back-to-nature' movement that you see popping up everywhere these days. He believed that if a community was capable of making and sustaining all of its own needs, it could form a society of its own. He was an environmental activist before anybody had a word for it. And he managed to form some small community throughout the Pacific Northwest. None of them were very large – the biggest had fifty people – but they did manage to sustain themselves, some for more than three years."
"How did he get recruited?" Locke asked.
"Around the time George McGovern was starting his run for President, Horace got a letter at one of his communities. That in itself was odd, because mail service was erratic at best and only the families of the participant knew were they were. It was from a man Horace had studied with at Berkeley. He'd said that there were some people in Ann Arbor who'd heard of his work and were interested in trying it on a larger scale. Horace mulled on it for a week – at his heart, he was anti-establishment – but he decided to go in for an interview."
"What happened?" Charlotte asked.
"I never got a full account of the details. All I know for sure is about a month later; he visited me in Portland practically floating. He told me that a group of scientists had learned of his work and were interested in an attempt to carry it out on a larger scale than he'd ever dared to hope. They were offering the chance to be at the ground level of something really big."
"And he asked you to come with him." Hurley reasoned out.
"Our father was dead and our mother had left him five years prior. I was thirty, which then was pretty close to being considered an old maid. I figured it would be an adventure." Olivia looked to the east. "I had no idea how naïve I was."
"When did you first suspect that there was something odd about the Initiative?" Locke asked.
"Not right away. Horace and I were at the forefront of the recruitment process, which was exciting enough. We were given questionnaires that we were allowed to do some editing to and we developed personalities tests – what people today would call profiles – of who we thought would be 'Dharma material.'
"The first wrinkle that came was when we learned a good portion of the people coming with us would be scientists. Now I understood why we would need biologists and agriculturalists. It was when we started recruiting physicists that I started getting concerned. Horace seemed fine with it, though: "The place we're going is on the cutting edge of science.' It was then I realized they'd chosen where we going and they hadn't told us where it was."
Hurley was beginning to see the Dharma Initiative had more than a little in common with the Others.
"I was beginning to concerned we might have been going to one of those areas in the South Pacific where they used to test atomic bombs, which was the only plausible explanation I could come up with. That, however, soon went out the window."
"Why was that?" Locke asked.
"Because after we'd done the lion's share of the recruiting, everyone who joined had to go through six weeks of firearms training." Olivia told them. "This is where the warning bells should've gone off. It's one thing to go use rifles for hunting. It's another to be trained in how to strip and load an AK-47. You don't need to do that against fish."
"Your brother didn't have a problem with that," Charlotte said doubtfully.
"Actually, he did. He'd gotten conscientious objector status against the war in Vietnam the day after the Gulf of Tonkin. He'd marched against the war and for civil rights. So when he learned about this, he demanded that he speak with DeGroot himself. And he was important enough so that he got on the phone with him."
"And they assuaged his concerns?" Locke said.
Olivia shook her head. "Just the opposite. He came back to me, pale as a ghost, saying he no longer had any objections. When I asked him what was going on, he said something very strange: 'Olivia, I can't do this without you. I need you to stay. All right?' And he was so clearly terrified, I didn't ask questions. In hindsight, I have a pretty good idea what he was afraid of, but I think he wanted his dream so badly he was willing to put aside a major principle. In any case, he never objected about the weapons again."
Not even Locke could imagine what Horace could've been told to reject something that deeply ingrained in his philosophy.
"Horace was on the first team. I didn't hear from him again until it was time for me to go out there three months later. Even after everything I'd been told, that was a strange experience."
"Let me guess. You were taken to a location, told the drink a glass of juice with a sedative in it. You gave a slight protest, but eventually you did. You passed out and after an indeterminate amount of time; you awoke on board the submarine. You didn't recognize anybody on it, but as you regained consciousness you disembarked and you found yourself on the island."
"Did your mother tell you that?" Olivia asked Charlotte.
"We've all heard some version of that story," Claire said. "Didn't you have any questions when you got there?"
"Are you kidding? I never stopped asking questions," Olivia told them. "Horace answered most of them, but he left out a lot of details. Such as where we were, how the Dharma Initiative had found this place, why everybody was keeping it a secret. He kept putting me off on a lot of them, and eventually I realized it was because he didn't know. As far as he was concerned, this island was a place for him to realize his dream and the details were irrelevant to him."
"You really think he didn't care about any of that?" Charlotte told them.
"I really think that this was almost everybody in Dharma thought," Olivia told them. "There were many remarkable things about this island, but they didn't think it was particularly special. We learned very quickly that there were people on this island who didn't feel the same way."
"You called them the Hostiles," Charlotte said.
"That Horace was forthright about. He said that there was a native population to this island that would consider anyone who arrived an invading force and would treat them as such," Olivia told them. "There was a lot of fighting the first several months he was there and for quite awhile afterwards. Finally in June of 1973, we agreed to a truce between our people and theirs. I won't go into the details of it, but they had certain terms that they were willing to accommodate our presence. We had to leave after fifteen years; we couldn't remove any native artifacts from the island. We weren't allowed to have more than two hundred people from the Initiative on the island. And strangest of all, they didn't want us to dig beneath the surface of the island more than a certain depth."
Based on what Locke had seen and what Richard had told him, there was a very good chance that the Dharma Initiative had violated every aspect of the Truce. Perhaps that was the real reason the Purge had happened.
"Maybe everything would have worked out fine for us if we had meant what we said. But not long after we agreed to it, there was a huge amount of protest from the scientists in our group. Particularly Stuart."
Locke didn't know this one. "Who was he?"
"If I had to make an educated guess, Stuart Radzinsky was the cause of almost everything that went wrong on the island after I left."
No one reacted at the fact that Olivia had so casually mentioned the name of an island mystery.
"I never understood how Stuart managed to become part of the Dharma Initiative in the first place. He was a brilliant scientist, light years ahead of his field in geophysics, but I could never understand how he managed to get past all the psyche evaluations that I had helped design."
"Was he unstable?" Charlotte asked.
"Borderline paranoid and incredibly angry. From the moment I met him, he wanted to eradicate the Hostiles. Hell, he's the one who came up with the term. Horace called them 'the natives.' He didn't want Horace to negotiate any kind of settlement with them and the only reason he agreed to the Truce at all was if we agreed to build a station for the sole purpose of counteracting any aggression they might take."
"Did they ever attack you after the Truce was signed?" Hurley asked.
"We were told that there were certain sections of the island we weren't allowed to enter. Most of us didn't have a real problem with that; only a handful of us went much further than the Barracks to begin with. Stuart went ballistic. His attitude was that of the colonizing powers of Europe; the island was ours and the natives should be eradicated to make way for the greater glory of science." Olivia shook her head. "He and Horace clashed constantly while I was there. But that wasn't anything new. Stuart didn't get along with anybody in the island. The only reason we tolerated his presence was because he was one of major forces behind the stations that we'd been building."
"What exactly were these stations?" Charlotte asked casually.
Olivia looked at her. "They were on the island. Haven't they told you?"
"All we knew was what they left behind." Locke said quickly. "You'd be doing us a service by explaining why they were built in the first place."
Olivia eased a little. "The scientists who came to the island wanted to test the unique properties of the island. For all of Horace's issues with the natives, he was completely on board with this idea. I think the only reason Stuart was willing to go along with the peacekeeping mission was because that was the only way he could realize his dream. Essentially this was managed by three people; Horace, Stuart and Pierre."
This was a new name. "Pierre?"
"Pierre Chang. You might call him the face of Dharma. Early on, he agreed to make some of the welcoming footage for the new recruits. He took to it so naturally that he agreed to appear in all the scientific instruction films we made for the island. He never even needed a script."
Locke looked at Hurley and mouthed: Marvin Candle. Even the sometimes slow Hurley got it. "How many, like, stations were planned?"
"The original plan was for a dozen. We needed three to stay in contact with the mainland: the Flame, which was to communicate with the outside world, the Looking Glass, which we needed in order to make sure the submarine could be guided in and the Pearl, which was to make sure the security measures at the Barracks and across the island were working."
That was clearly its first purpose Locke thought.
"The Hydra was set up to run biological experiments, mainly to see what other species could survive in a tropical environment." Olivia paused. "That was one of its purposes. There was also a group that was doing experiments on animals native to the island. Sharks, horses, even birds. And once it became clear there was an entire small island, Radzinsky decided that it could be utilized for…other purposes."
They had an idea what it was. "What kind of purposes?"
"What they now euphemistically refer to as enhanced interrogation. Whenever a Hostile made the mistake of wandering into our territory, he disappeared to a Room in Hydra Island. We later found out that Radzinsky had recruited an instructor of his from Virginia named Philip Oldham. A man who'd been on the cutting edge of using psychotropic drugs and other devices to extract information."
"Horace hit the roof when he found out what Oldham had been doing. But this time Pierre, who usually backed Horace in these arguments, backed Radzinsky. It didn't help matters that around this time our head of security was shot and killed by two hostiles. The Truce nearly fell apart, and I'm still not sure how we avoided going to war. All I know for sure is that Oldham was exiled from the Initiative, but never kicked off. He was still on the island, 'just in case'."
"What exactly were you doing all this time?" Claire asked. "Didn't you have a voice in any of these decisions?"
Olivia gave a bitter laugh. "In every community Horace had established before, he had firmly believed in the democratic process. No major decision was ever to be made without a vote taken among the community. And he still carried out that process when he was in charge of the Initiative. But the more meetings I went to, a pattern clearly developed. The loudest and most prominent voices in the community – and they were almost always the people who believed in Horace or Radzinsky – would end up carrying the day. Whenever there was a possibility of a major dissent, one or both of them would bring up the idea of making a call to Ann Arbor. And that would shut any dissent down."
"Ann Arbor?" Hurley was clueless.
"You know I never met either of the DeGroots once. I'm not sure anybody in Dharma ever had. But even the threat of them voicing an opinion was like calling on the voice of God. No one wanted to even considering doing it."
Locke realized there was yet another commonality between the Initiative and the Others – Ann Arbor was Dharma's Jacob. Just the mention of it was enough to calm the sheep.
"I'll be honest. After awhile, I stopped going through the motions of the decision making. I focused on my job which was enough of a distraction. When you're the only real schoolteacher for a community, you can even set aside the fact that you're in the middle of nowhere."
Charlotte actually wanted to hear about this. "Did you ever meet my sister Lucy?"
Olivia actually smiled for the first time. "I remember all the children I taught. Including you."
For the first time since they'd known her, Charlotte looked genuinely moved. "My father. Do you remember him?"
"David was a very brilliant biologist. He came to the island to work on a theory he had about temperate animals surviving a tropical environment."
Locke got this immediately. "Like, say, polar bears?"
For the first moment a look of genuine surprise crossed Olivia's face. "How did you know? Wait; don't tell me they're still…"
"One or two," Locke decided now was not exactly the time to mention he'd had to do battle with one of them more than once. "They must've thought highly of him."
Olivia had an expression. "Just the opposite. I remember that Pierre in particular treated him with disdain. Every time one of his colleagues made a mistake, he threatened to send them off to Hydra Island to do experiments on bear excrement."
An inappropriate joke about a bear shitting in the woods crossed Hurley's mind. He managed to suppress it.
"How did the children handle it on the island?" Claire asked. "It doesn't seem like it would be the ideal place for them to live."
"The idea of family was always central to Horace's theories. 'What are we doing this for, if not leaving a better world for our children' was something he would say over and over. I honestly think that's why he went along with so much of the nonsense that everybody else put on him – he really thought this was the only path forward for society." Olivia smiled fondly. "He went out of his way to make sure that many of the people he recruited either were married or had children. That way, they would be invested in what happened on the island. And in that measure, he did manage to succeed. Almost every family he brought to the island was flourishing while I was there."
Maybe that's when things went wrong Claire thought. After the women and children left.
Locke had noticed something. "You said almost every family."
Olivia gave a sigh. "At his core, Horace was a very warm-hearted man. He really wanted to help people. And that may have led him to take one family that absolutely shouldn't have been there."
The Oceanics had a pretty good idea who that was. "Who were they?"
"It was about a month after Kennedy had been shot. Horace and I were driving out for a picnic in a park not far from here. Then out of the woods come this man, a little younger than Horace frantic. He says his wife and he were out for a hike and she went into labor. Horace and I leap out of the car, run into the forest, grab the two of them and run to our car as fast as we can. The mother's clearly in bad shape. The last thing she says before she loses consciousness is: "Name him Ben.'
A nasty thought crossed Locke's mind. That's how evil enters the world. "What happened?"
"We got them to the hospital as fast we could, but it was too late for Emily. She never regained consciousness, and in 1963 there wasn't a lot doctors could do back then." Olivia said. "Ben was two months premature – we managed to get that out of Roger before he went catatonic - and from what I understand, he had to spend a month in an incubator before he was finally healthy."
"Understandably Horace felt a certain degree of responsibility. I couldn't blame him in this case. When we were doing the tests for Dharma, he asked me to try and locate Roger and Ben."
"He thought they were Dharma material," Hurley said doubtfully.
"This was just old-fashioned guilt. After Ben got out of the hospital, his father climbed into a bottle and I'm not sure if he ever left. Horace would send him some money or try to find him a job." Olivia sighed. "I should've known better – I'd already started running into parents like Roger Linus back then and I knew there was very little the system could do to help these kinds of people if they didn't want to help themselves. But his mother had died in the back seat of our car. This wasn't just a PTA meeting."
"So when you invited them to join…?" Claire asked.
"We knew we weren't going to be able to help them in the real world any more," Olivia said. "And Horace had managed to redeem similar cases in his community before. I didn't think it was impossible it could happen in Roger's case."
"But it wasn't to be," Locke said sadly.
"Roger didn't have the education to work in science, even just as an assistant." Olivia said. "Maybe if we'd put him somewhere like security or working in the Looking Glass, he'd have felt like he had a purpose. But for some reason I never understood, he ended up as a workman. This was basically our code name for a janitor."
Hurley remembered the skeleton they'd found in the van. Somehow he figured Roger would've been a lot happier if his last name really had been 'Workman'.
"Roger did on the island what he did on dry land. He crawled into a bottle. Honestly, that would've been bad enough. But Ben was in such bad shape."
"Do you think he beat him?" Locke asked quietly.
"I suspected abuse. But whenever I asked as gently as I good, Ben never replied." Olivia shook her head. "He was such a sweet child. He never put up a fuss, he was a good student, but he was so quiet that I don't think any of the other children knew how to relate to him. Except Annie."
This was a name none of them had heard of. "Who was she?"
Olivia smiled fondly. "Annie Golding was the daughter of one of the first couples to go out to the island, even ahead of me. Both her parents were scientists, so they were needed for the early stages. Annie took to Ben almost immediately. I remember on the first day of orientation. She walked right up to him, handed him a chocolate bar, and told him not to be scared. They were inseparable for the rest of the time I was there."
This was a picture of Ben Linus that none of them could have imagined.
"Do you think they were, like, in love?" Hurley asked
"In that way that children are before puberty sets in and hormones complicate everything," Olivia said. "Both of them were only children and their parents were either too busy or not worth the time. So in a way, I think they saw each other as family. Everything so often, Annie would ask her parents if Ben could come have dinner with them and I don't think they ever refused. They might have gotten more worried about it the closer they got to being teenagers, but sadly I don't think that ever happened."
"Did Ben ever act strangely around you?" Locke asked.
Olivia narrowed her glance at Locke before she answered the question. "He was always so quiet. But one day in October something strange happened. He asked if he could borrow one of the pet rabbits we were caring for in the class. I didn't say anything strange about that, except he seemed really anxious about something that I basically let every child do. Then he said: 'You've always been good to me.' And then he walked off. It seemed odd. Almost like he was saying goodbye. But the next day, he was back in class and he handed the rabbit back as everything was normal."
"Why was that so strange?" Charlotte asked.
"Because after that there was a subtle change in his behavior, something that I'm willing to bet not even Annie picked up on. He always stayed in the Barracks like all the other children. But every so often, I would see him around the edge, just looking off into the distance. Once I joked:' Keeping a sharp lookout for Hostiles, Ben?' And he almost seemed to jump out of his skin. He said: 'No, we've got security for that.' But I noticed I never saw him doing that again. It was like I had caught him at something."
Locke wasn't a hundred percent sure, but based on what Richard had told him, there was an excellent chance that Ben had been doing just that. Even at twelve years old, he had always been good at putting up a false front.
"How did you come to leave the island? Why did all the women and children end up going?" Charlotte asked.
"And now we come to the heart of the matter," Olivia said sadly. "The same question I've been asking myself over and over for almost thirty years. I can't give you a straight answer. All I can tell you for certain is what was going on the week before."
"During the last few weeks I was still there, my brother was in a lot of meetings with Pierre and Stuart. They mentioned a station we were doing called The Orchid. Most people in Dharma thought that it had something to do with a greenhouse station."
"But you knew better," Locke said.
"There were way too many people there and none of them were naturalists," Olivia told them. "And considering how much work was being done underground, I'm pretty sure it was just for plants. Certainly nothing that would've taken so much of Pierre's time and energy."
"You have any idea what it was they were working on?" Hurley asked.
"All the scientists were convinced there was a high level of energy in the island, something that they had never seen before. Everybody was salivating at the idea of what might happen if was tapped into."
"Even your brother?" Claire asked doubtfully. "I mean that Truce you mentioned, didn't you say one of the terms they agreed to was not to drill under the island?"
"I actually asked Horace about it directly twice. And he assured me that they would never do so. But he kept having more and more secret meetings with Pierre and Stuart, along with Phil and Jerry."
"Who were they?" Claire asked.
"Our heads of security. Loyal to a fault with no ideas of their own." Olivia said disdainfully. "You'd think that Horace and Pierre of all people would've cared more about protecting us then anything else. They had people they cared about on the island."
"They had families? Besides you, of course." Locke asked.
"Horace got married to one of the women in Dharma. Her name was Amy." Olivia shook her head. "As a matter of fact, she was Paul's widow and they got married about a year and a half after her husband was murdered. I loved my brother, but I never liked how he just seemed to move in on her. She had a son about a week before I left the island. I really wonder what happened to them."
"Wait a minute. They didn't evacuate the day you left?" Charlotte asked, puzzled.
"She wasn't on the sub when they closed the door. I really wonder what happened to her and Ethan."
It took a lot of effort for all of them – Claire especially – not to react when they heard that name. Olivia might not be happy to hear that her brother was dead, but she might hate them when they learned they had killed her nephew.
Charlotte, the one person who had no idea who Ethan was, kept going. "Dr. Chang had a family, too."
"He was married to a woman named Lara when I got there. About three months before the evacuation, they had a son named Miles. Pierre was a devoted father, but his mother never forgave him for making them leave. She said he was so cruel in his language. Of course, he probably had to say such things in order to get them to go. But Lara went to her grave and never even told her son who his father was or why he wasn't a part of their lives."
This took some effort for them to believe to; none of them could picture the man in those films as a real person, much less a husband and father. "Do you know what happened the days before?"
"I can't say for certain. What I do know is that it to do with the Orchid and the station that Radzinsky was working on." Olivia said slowly. "I'm not even sure what that was all about. All I know for sure was that Stuart spent the better part of a year in the Flame, working on plans for a geodesic dome. Something so secret, that on the rare occasions when someone came down to see him, he locked the door and made sure no one could come in. The only thing any of us knew was the name."
"What was it?" Locke was pretty sure they all knew the answer.
"He called it the Swan. And if anything, his plans were more outrageous than Pierre's were. I'm not entirely certain, but I actually think he had convinced Horace to be drilling in territory that we knew the Hostiles were in. And there were really strange things going on."
"Like what?"
"In the days before the evacuation, there were at least three people who would go out on digs and never came back. When the girlfriend of one of them – Alvarez, I think his name was – asked where he was, Pierre just said he'd been sent to do a tour in the Looking Glass. Except she talked to the people who'd requisitioned the scuba gear which you needed just to get there, and no one had."
None of them could guess what could've happened, but given what they all knew about the Swan, it couldn't have been anything pleasant.
"The day I left started out pretty much like any other. Class hadn't started yet, so Pierre asked me to help sit in on one of the Orientation films we were doing. For some reason, he trusted me more than the people there. "
"What station were you doing?" Hurley asked.
"It was called The Arrow. Radzinsky's idea. We were going to use it to come up with strategies to deal with the Hostiles. I don't know if it ever got finished. Because halfway through the filming, someone burst in and said that Pierre was needed down at the Orchid."
"You have any idea what happened?" Locke asked.
"Something bad. About twenty minutes later, one of the vans came in bearing a man on a stretcher. There didn't seem to be anything physically wrong with, except for a nosebleed but he was completely unresponsive. None of the doctors knew what to do. And whatever it was, it scared the hell out of Pierre. Because about an hour afterwards, the evacuation of nonessential personnel was ordered."
"And just so we're clear," Charlotte said doubtfully "your brother was fine with you getting on the sub, but not his wife and newborn son."
Olivia hesitated. "He asked me to stay."
None of them had been expecting that. "I'm sorry?" Charlotte asked.
"There had always been different protocols for some of the higher-ups in the Initiative and there were quite a few women and children who didn't get on the sub. Horace told me I didn't have to go. I decided of my own volition to leave."
Everybody could understand – even Locke – Olivia's reasoning. They'd all wanted to get off the island eventually. The difference was that none of them had been leaving family behind – especially with the near certainty they'd never see them again. "Why?" Hurley asked.
Olivia suddenly looked decades older than her years. "Because I was tired of it," she said simply. "I was tired of having to worry about having to run drills in case of the Hostiles. I was tired of trying to reassure the children that they were safe from the 'wildlife.' I was tired of being given of having an illusion of a voice in the process. And I was tired of being told this was the way of the future. And honestly, without the children to teach, I didn't even have a job to hold on to."
"But even when I left, I didn't believe for a second that I'd never see or hear from any of them again. People had been going to and from the island all the years I was there. But after we left, it was like whatever outside organization had been interested in funding the Initiative no longer cared about telling the families. Whatever happened that caused the evacuation or whatever happened to our families, not one of us got an explanation. Which is what I want from you." Olivia looked at Locke, Hurley and Claire. "Are any of them still alive?"
Locke, as was his want, was sincere. "Most of them are dead," he said simply. "The reasons why are unclear, but sometime in the early nineties, the Hostiles carried out what is known as The Purge. Almost the entire hierarchy was killed, and those who weren't defected."
Olivia's expression didn't change. "I've honestly been expected that for more than thirty years. I guess it's better to know that it is to wonder. Did you meet any of them when you were there?"
Claire paused. "It was hard to tell. They weren't wearing uniforms and they all seemed to disdain even the idea of Dharma. They had no problems taking over their stations and their homes, though."
Olivia got up. "That's not going to make them happy."
This was probably why they had come and yet everybody was confused. "Who are 'they'?" Hurley asked.
"I still keep in touch with the families. The last couple of months, a lot of them have received calls from someone saying they worked for the Hanso Foundation. They say that they're trying to find out what happened to the families of those lost."
"They don't think this some kind of con?" Hurley asked.
"No. This person knows far too much about the island. Names and information they couldn't get unless they had access that only the people up close could have."
"Have they reached out to you?" Charlotte asked.
"Not on the phone. But I got a letter a week ago from someone wanting to meet for some kind of debriefing. I thought it was crap, but I held on to it anyway." Olivia walked over to her desk and opened a drawer. "Even if it legitimate, I have no interest in going back there. Not now, not then."
She gave a letter to Charlotte. "Have you gotten any calls?"
Charlotte kept her poker face. "No, but I'll know what to do if he knocks on my door."
She barely looked at the body of the letter. Her eyes were drawn to the signature.
Matthew Abaddon.
Notes:
I think every fan of the series gets almost all of the reference, but there are a couple of things I think I should mention.
Olivia was introduced in 'The Man Behind The Curtain' with the last name Goodspeed. The assumption was she was Horace's wife until Season 5 when Amy showed up and Olivia was nowhere to be found. The theories were she might've been Horace's sister, and I've decided to follow through under that assumption.
For those of you who watched the extras on the Season 5 DVDs, you might remember that one of them was an 'episode' of a 1980s ABC series called 'Mysteries of the Universe: The Dharma Initiative." It involved many of the excerpts here, including Olivia's 'interview' and the letter she got back.
Given everything we saw between Horace and Radzinsky in Season 5 I'm pretty sure their problems didn't start there. I have a feeling even if there had been no time-traveling from our Losties, everything that happened, probably would have. As to the notebook, well… you'll get some clues in the next chapter.
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