I sit here staring out at the
Visitors Center. A small abandoned city. In 2009 I would never have been
allowed up here, but 10 years later I can sit atop of the only monument to
America that will not be taken away or destroyed. Mount Rushmore has become my
place. Where I go to collect the thoughts drifting through my shattered mind.
I'm still wondering if I did I the right thing.
Maybe this is just what I was born to do. Maybe I'm
incapable of doing any real good. Maybe they conjured forth a demon when they
made me.
My birthday is July 17th,
1968. I was late. I was supposed to be born on the 4th of July. It
was a patriotic thing. But I guess you could say I was born to be
uncooperative.
The project had been running since
1954, although it roots go back to 1938 when some German
"biologists" escaped from what was becoming Nazi Germany. They
thought America was the place that would let them avoid doing the kind of work
on humans they felt was unethical. They were right… for four years. In
1942 their "new" government "asked" them to help with an
American "super soldier" program.
Back then it was all harmones and
steroids. The results were not encouraging, but for a government program it was
cheap and the volunteers for the program had a good idea of what they were
getting into. The word leaked and later was developed into an idealized version
in comic book form. "Captain America" from Marvel comics was what
they hoped to achieve. The 40's must have been such a patriotic era.
In the 50's they tried to
irradiate everything. They made a lot of grizzly mistakes, but they were
learning. A few hideous monsters and a few monster movies like "The
Blob" and "The Amazing Colossal Man" made for a few great
government cover-ups. In fact around this time the phrase "We're
making a movie." turned into code for "We screwed up again."
But something uglier happened. It was the McCarthy era. Communism was rearing
its ugly head and while no one declared it, the Cold War had been started. It
was during this time that I was conceived. Not in the traditional sense, but as a concept. In 1954,
hidden in a vague funding bill that was then classified, congress approved
"Operation Spoilsport." It's mission statement… Create
a biologically enhanced super soldier capable of blending into American Society,
and in the event of the Communist take over, starting a war to restore and
uphold the values exemplified by the Constitution of the United States of
America.
By the time the 60's rolled
around Spoilsport was safely hidden away from the rest of the changing world.
The social revolution in the streets would never know about the technical
revolutions in the lab. Occasionally a turtle with 2 duck heads would turn up
in some backwater town, but genetic and engineering were, for the most part in
separate sentences. Spoilsport's corporate entity was able to supply
medical information for dozens of small well-funded Pentagon programs and even
NASA. It was 2 days after Kennedy was killed that the lab boys found out about
it. Lab boys never change, do they.
My parents were convinced that they were getting a deal. Why
not? My mother was an upstanding citizen, and dad, well, dad was a company man.
He'd killed a lot of good people for Uncle Sam. This was just a fringe
benefit. They had the best stuff on earth for prenatal care. A little time off
and the chance to be a family, it sounded great to him. All they had to do was
be part of "the study".
On October 6th 1967, during the middle of the night 200, hybrid human embryos were fertilized outside of a human being. Each of them had their genetic makeup altered based on research derived from over two million previous attempts. From trial and error. Out of them, 34 survived to make their first cell division. Only 6 made it through invitro-implantation to begin fetal development in a human womb. Four of those ended in miscarriages. It was amazing how many mistakes you can make in 13 years. The only thing more amazing is that without having a map of the human genome, they managed to learn enough from those mistakes to make me.