If Lucas said NO!

by Pascal in Quebec

Lucas knew full well that being sent out of the country on a military boat would only end up with him injured or dead, no matter what lies Lawrence spread around. So Lucas did the logical thing: he packed up and left in the dead of night, leaving behind in public forums incriminating evidence against his bastard father to keep him too busy to hunt him down. Arc-1 of the story.

4. Chapter 4

The author wishes to express thanks to anyone who may read his story and encourages them to leave reviews, comments or even flame it hard. As with any who try their hand at publicly expressing an idea or story concept, all feedback is important and welcome.

Disclaimer: I do not own SeaQuest, Star Wars, nor any other sci-fi or fantasy series, movies, comics, cartoons or news items used in this fiction as they belong to the creators or broadcasters or publishers who put them out for consumption by the public.

SeaQuest

Abstract

Lucas knew full well that being sent out of the country on a military boat would only end up with him injured or dead, no matter what lies Lawrence spread around. So Lucas did the logical thing: he packed up and left in the dead of night, leaving behind in public forums incriminating evidence against his bastard father to keep him too busy to hunt him down.

This story takes place before season 1, in the months before the SeaQuest is commissioned out to sea in the period when Lucas was ordered by his father to join the ship without any care for his opinion or general welfare.

This story is Alternate Universe, most characters are OOC and there are several mini-crossovers in the form of cameos and snapshots with the maritime-inspired series NCIS and JAG who are the most relevant to the situations facing Lucas and the casts of MacGyver (2016), NCIS and Bones will make large appearances. There is a lot of CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, Canadian Mounties and Coast Guard and other multi-varied organizations mentioned along the way. As such, given so many crossovers of equal proportions, I am again placing this in the general SeaQuest section of the fandom since it would not fit in a single sub-genre. My thanks for your tolerance of the situation.

Unlike my other story, "Justice for Lucas", this has absolutely no psionics, magicks or time engines involved even if such things were part & parcel of the SeaQuest canon in all three seasons.

PS; I like flames, they're fun to read so don't hesitate to write them.

{ SQ } - { WARNING } - { SQ }

All warnings at the beginning of Chapter 3 are repeated verbatim.

WHAT IF LUCAS SAID 'NO'?

FOURTH CHAPTER; The first day of the rest of my life

The morning after

(The Hobbit – Smaug awaking under the dwarven hoard)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 07:00am

Daleminton Hotel, room #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

Dring! Dring! Driiiing! - Groooaaarrr! - and Smack!

The bed sheets lifted a small bit near the pillows on the left side of the bed near the entry of the bedroom as the clearly angry teenager's blond mop of hair slowly emerged menacingly from under his protective hillock of textiles. In case it hadn't been made clear before, Lucas was most definitely NOT a morning person.

Glaring malevolently at the small brass travel alarm clock that was now clicking away peacefully, the boy muttered unholy imprecations about clock-makers and an international conspiracy to deprive adolescent males of their much needed beauty sleep. Squinted eyes turned to the large accordion doors leading to the patio, trying to find if there was any light coming around the thick curtains. Seeing a few miserable sun rays, Lucas grumbled further about needing sleep and debated with himself the necessity of getting up to prepare the day versus the comfort of his warm bed.

Sigh! - Giving it up for a bad job done, the youth yawned widely until he felt his jaw strain painfully as he scratched a few itches around his stiff legs and torso. Wrapping the multiple layers of blankets around his thin meatless frame, he sat in the bed, leaning backwards against the headboard as he gazed meditatively into the embers of the fireplace set directly into the far wall in front of the bed. After a few minutes of calm thought to gather his fragmented mind back into working order, he shook off the blankets and carefully set his feet on the carpeted floor to test the strength and stability of his lower limbs. The cold climate and different barometric pressure were not doing him any favors to date.

Now standing, the boy took the time to give the bedroom a more thorough look-over than yesterday when he did a quick tour of the place with the manager in tow. In order to maximize heat distribution, the fireplace was in the wall across from the entry door. The bed was set on the right of the entry door with the wide patio doors over from that. On the left of the entry were a set of built-in closets and open fronted wall units to hold decorative pieces or souvenirs the tourists bought. On each side of the stone hearth were solid pine wood lower cabinets that served as counters to hold the small 4-cup coffee maker, condiments and sundries. The personal mini-fridge was under the counter near the closets. A massive Internex enabled screen, 3 feet high by 6 feet wide, hung directly over the chimney's mantel. All in all, it was a very well appointed bedroom for a hotel claiming 4+ stars accommodations & services.

Since he was only wearing his ordinary black boxers from yesterday, he could clearly see the surgical scars running along the length of both legs' outer sides and the battle damage spread haphazardly about his entire person. During their last fight, Lawrence had hit him many times hard enough to commit compounded fractures that left one femur broken with many dangerous fragments digging around the flesh that needed removing and replacing. Likewise, he could pass a hand over his bare chest and feel the raised ridges of the scars from being whipped all over with an electrical cord his father had ripped off the small coffee table lamp to beat him with, after tearing his shirt off during the scuffle when he knocked the teen to the ground to kick his contempt into him. That was when Lucas had sprayed him with acid in the face in his attempt to repel the clearly lethal attack that damaged his legs and thorax. Not that it spared Lawrence further grief since Lucas was also well and truly pissed-off by that point; first getting sexually assaulted then his own parent comes in to pile shit on top of things? No, the teenager had not reacted well nor with any restraint at that turn of event.

No pity for Lawwy; the bastard could suffer just like he had inflicted on him.

Screwing his eyes tightly shut to avoid yet another episode of crying like a girl PMS'ing, the forlorn adolescent took a steadying breath, grabbed hold of the pommel of his cane and lifted himself off the bed to start his day. Come good or ill, he had to move, live and prepare; nobody else would do that for him and he wasn't ready just yet to lay down and give up trying. Walking out of the bedroom on shaking legs, he leaned on his weaponized cane with his right hand, using his left hand to lean on furniture and walls to hold himself vertical. Thusly he made his way to the kitchen to activate the automated drinks brewer for his first coffee of the day. Equipped with a small espresso heavy on brown sugar and cream, he began to reach the second level of wakefulness sufficiently enough to start planning his tasks.

Grabbing a small oat muffin from the large fridge, he munched thoughtfully as he ordered his mind, dragging items from the depths of his vast memory to place them on a virtual whiteboard centered before his mind's eye. As the organigram for the day and tomorrow developed, the teen sat at the wood and glass dining table next to the huge principal fireplace. Gazing into the reddish depths, he decided to open the cast iron & glass doors to put in a pair of logs from the wood reserve on the wall on the right-side of the chimney. After the small effort of movement had been done, he was back to his chair, turned completely so he could lean back into the backrest whilst looking into the merrily dancing flames. After finishing his miniature breakfast, he had a clear plan in mind for the day to come so he closed tight the stove doors and took up his cane.

Standing up on much more solid legs now that blood flow was strong again, he walked towards the bathroom to use the toilet and get himself a cleansing hot shower followed by a long therapeutic soak in the warm jetted tub. Inside the washing section of the room he turned the taps on the large tub to start the fill-up and set the vintage wall-inset brass analog clock to sound an alarm at 08:30am to get him out of the water. He then started the shower and went to use the toilet cubicle while the two waterworks got up to speed and proper temperature. After relieving himself from the night's burdens, he walked back to the vanity area to grab the towels and small toiletry kit he had placed there last evening after arriving. His shower was quick and brisk, lasting only long enough to clear off the night's sweat and the grime gathered from traveling two solid days in public transports. The tub would take care of giving the warmth he really wanted as well as massaging and loosening his meager muscles with the jetted flows.

Specifically as Lucas had asked when choosing his suite, the shower stall was big enough that a large wheelchair could roll right into it. There was an electrical lift system built into the ceiling to help transfer handicapped patients from the conveyance to the enameled steel table that folded out of the wall to allow easier cleansing of the ailing person. The lift system was installed in such way that it could go into the shower stall, over the large tub or into the enclosed toilet stall without any issues. Since it had been rated up to 1,000 pounds of dead weight, the meager, meatless teenager didn't think he would break it if he ever needed to use it for himself following his medical treatments.

As was proper of most hotels, there were electronics built into the washing area of the bathroom. There were built-in units for an old vintage analog radio and modern Internex enabled screen in each segment of the bathroom to permit easy monitoring of the suite, watching a movie or taking a call in the tub or in the 'second office' as the toilet was often referred to. You could allow entry to the room service valets from the shower or order in new clothes as you primped in front of the vanity. Again, well made and thought for the 4+ stars level of service advertised.

After showering, Lucas slid into the warm pulsating waters of the large podium mounted tub, sighing in body-wide relief as the water's currents soothed his damaged skin. Eyes squinted in relaxation, he noticed that there was some sort of brass railing on each side of the wide, long tub to move a heavy wheeled table that was set across the basin. This serving tray was already loaded with a small brass framed mirror to look into while washing and treating his face plus a small wicker basket filled with different perfumed soaps, oils and bath salts. Next to this was a pile of washcloths, a large white enameled brass bowl with a cover. Amusingly, the remote control for the tub's electronics like the jets, temperature, diverse lights inside and around, and the web monitor was built into the top of the moving rail-tray. It was covered by an integral clear plastic layer to waterproof it while allowing the internally lit buttons to be visible in all lighting conditions.

Lucas smiled as he saw that the remote had a blue button with a logo he recognized easily; Amazon Alexa voice command modules & Insteon domotics devices all over the suite. Probably all over the hotel, too. He hadn't seen the Alexa beacon or peripherals yesterday evening because he honestly hadn't been looking for them nor expecting the system. The hotel website hadn't said anything about having fully wired smart devices in the rooms or public areas. That was easy to handle; the Cyberghast Hub was designed to detect, map and control several hundred different commercially available CPU types, operating systems and mobile devices through adapter-apps or command-virus hijacks.

Now ensconced for a relaxing, healing sojourn in the warm water to which he added therapeutic bath salts, the adolescent activated the wall-mounted screen to see what the local breakfast hour news around Vancouver were like. There was a small segment about the state of traffic for rush hour, including videos from circulation cameras in well traveled business and touristic areas of town. The morning view of the Lions Gate Bridge with the vast blue waters of Vancouver Harbour in the background was astounding. After traffic there were a few segments about police investigations in progress due to street gang activity, a portrait of a local catering business that was doubling its size thus hiring 20 new employees, and the almost mandatory skit about the holidays and family traditions associated with Christmas and gift shopping.

Lucas switched channels over to CNN to see on the international front if anything worth mentioning was happening. Blergh! - Weather! There was a storm front climbing up the eastern seaboard of the USA that was presently pummeling the shores of New Jersey and almost inside New York State already; predictions had it sprawling all the way up to Maine by the 25th of December, putting several million people at risk of power outages and being isolated in the depths of winter. Besides that, there were the usual deblatarations about what US president Trump tweeted over night, the Nth attempt to resurrect the moribund NAFTA agreements, and yet another intercontinental missile test by The Montagnard Federation. In other words, everybody in North America and Europe was taking things easy for the coming holidays, except those struck by the crazy weather in some parts of the world.

Lucas switched channels again, finding the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and its equivalent to the CNN all-day newscast. The show 'Money, Power & Politics' was presently hosting a group of pundits who were debating the pros & cons of ending NAFTA negotiations with the newly re-elected unstable US president to switch over for free-trade accords with Great Britain that had its wish granted when the European Confederation was rebuilt without them in it. The experts were explaining that Canada, being an old British colony, could use grand-fathered laws and codes of the Old British Empire Commonwealth to lay its claims and establish a solid, favorable position during the talks. The teen thought they had a good idea; but then again, he thought anything that dumped Trump to the curb like trash was a good idea for everybody's health and sanity.

{ SQ } - { Gearing up } - { SQ }

(MacGyver – original theme 1985)

(West America 08:50am)

After spending almost an hour in the tub until his skin had begun pruning, the teenager got out and dried himself slowly with a warm fluffy towel. Having that heating rack to keep the linens warm nicely positioned between the tub and shower was the type of idea to keep in mind when redesigning his multiple secretly owned homes later on. Covered only in a thick brown terrycloth bathrobe tagged with the Daleminton logo, the boy took his weaponized cane and walked back to the master bedroom, testing both legs along the way to make certain they would be reliable for the day.

This situation was really aggravating the teen despite all the luxury surrounding him. Back in San Francisco, his office was only about half the size of the suite he was renting so he didn't need the damned cane to walk around his own domain; leaning on furniture and door frames was enough to stay autonomous. But here, if things got worse, he would need to change residence quickly to have a live-in orderly to help him or else face the reality of living in a hospital for months AGAIN despite all the medical care he had already received.

Annoyed at his own weakness, the adolescent decided that thinking about his lawyers and the coming meeting was a better use of his faculties than worrying about his lackluster health. After pulling stuff out of his heavy wheeled trunk, he got dressed in comfortable four-seasons clothing selected to be easy to take off when the hirelings would want to verify what exactly his health situation was. He chose matching dark blue boxers, socks and customized long-sleeved turtleneck shirt that had two chest pockets along some semi-fit deep purple jeans and soft sneakers. Searching through his carry-on bag, he took out a specially made brown leather belt conceived with three snap-lock loops on each side to hang tools for jobs or in this case, place his cane on the right hip like a sword so he could use both hands freely without abandoning the defensive mobility-insuring tool.

With the clothes in place, Lucas began the laborious process of putting on the electronic equipment and survival tools he usually carried everywhere but in bed. He began by setting his custom-built digital recorder in the zippered pocket hidden in the lower rear rim of his turtleneck shirt then wired it to the pinhead camera hidden in the shirt collar's front.

Opening his heavy wheeled trunk, he took out a small thermoplastic case with a fingerprint lock; inside was a pair of meta-data glasses. The glasses were composed of 4 lenses and articulated frame that protected his eyes from the front and sides while he worked on chemicals, welds, or just when he had to leave the safety of his office or apartment. This was a device that Lucas had crafted himself out of safety eyeglasses usually worn in medical laboratories or pharmacy classes to which he had added mini-LED lights, pinhead cameras,, microphones, mini-earphones and transparent display system that made the lenses into small monitors. The device could link wirelessly to any other device he had programmed with the synchronization application or by wire to the same recorder as the safety camera in his shirt collar. The data displayed by the lenses helped to view critical information during a demanding meeting with an ornery client without opening his phone or laptop, or even plan body movements when crafting or fighting. Since he didn't have any sorts of training in how to fight anything, he needed each and every advantage he could create for himself.

The teenager had kept the unique exemplar of the meta-glasses that he presently had on hand in his trunk for the trip to avoid losing them to a long-fingered border guard that may be tempted to use the old "you stole them so I'm confiscating them to find their owner and send them back" when in fact the grabby bastard would keep them for himself or as gift for a friend. Lucas wasn't born yesterday and had encountered his share of crooked security people in his life; he would not easily fall for that trick. Putting the glasses on his face, he wired them to the recorder module in the shirt's hidden rear pocket before dropping the large smartphone into the left breast pocket of the shirt.

In the right side pocket of his shirt he set a titanium alloy tactical pen that held cartridges of opaque fluorescent inks in white, green, yellow, red, blue and tar black. Then a titanium alloy wide handled penknife with multiple blades stored in the rubber coated shaft. Followed a custom designed pyro-engraving & electro-reaction pen. Finally, the boy added his very useful (and dangerous) acid etching fountain pen that he used to mark or disable circuitry as well as self-defense.

Next Lucas put on a pair of synthetic canvas bracers on each wrist; these each held a small 3 inch straight-bladed knife, two cylinders of paralytic gas and two cylinders of acid. The metal cylinders were about 3 inches long by ¼ inch wide and could be used with the integrated timer or directly with the pressure nozzle built into each device. Taking six more units of paralytic and twelve more of acid, he placed them into the small slots crafted into the thickness of his tool-belt to hold the munitions at hand. This was followed by stuffing the pockets of his jeans with a card wallet in his rear-left, a billfold in the rear-right, a small plastic rectangular coin box in the front-left and spiked keychain in the front-right. A specific sheath on the right hip of his belt received a large custom-built multi-tool while another sheath on the left hip held a 'First-Responder' special edition Swiss army knife designed for paramedics.

As a last detail, he added around his waist the other customized leather belt that held his multi-pouch ultra-compact field med-kit with all the pills, tools and bandages he needed to fight off infections, cramps and other effects from the beating two years ago.

He wasn't overreacting, nor was he paranoid; his parents really were out to get him.

With all his pockets filled, wrists loaded and systems fully in place and online, the teenager walked out to the kitchen to get a small something to eat so he didn't get a headache from lack of food as often happened to him when he forgot to look at the clock during important work. A short while later saw him equipped with an oversized mochaccino in his personal steel thermal mug, as he waited for his pair of toast to finish baking inside the wall-inset toaster oven so he could have a minimal amount of fuel to run on until the lawyers arrived and they shared a call-in power brunch. Once his small breakfast was buttered and placed on top of his closed portable workstation next to the coffee mug, he grabbed the laptop as if it were a serving tray to relocate to the Cyberghast Hub to peruse the night's work.

After opening the complex electronic lock on the sliding doors, Lucas entered the dedicated work space and shut the doors behind him, going so far as to lock them again. After setting his burden on the low counter besides the inert cold fireplace, he tapped the touchscreen to wake up the scanners to initiate the identification routine. Once logged in and the Cyberghast safeties had been placed on 'peacetime' standby, he began to read through his messages and alerts accumulated through the night while munching his toast and sipping sugary coffee at a leisurely pace. Given the number of homes and businesses he owned across the planet, most secretely to date, he would need all the time until the lawyers arrived and then more in the evening.

Overwatch of active threats

(Two Steps From Hell - Winterspell)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 09:07am

Daleminton Hotel, room #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

He had several queries and surveillance programs running that needed daily attention to see what exactly was coming at him from where. Also he needed to see what inhumanities Lawrence had tried to imagine while he was out of sorts. There's no way the man had stayed quietly inside his power plant after the little conversation they shared with lieutenant Denalt, who was another menial retard he needed to watch over and render inert somehow. A contractor, of course, but who?

Setting his edible burden on the serving counter next to the inert fireplace at the far end of the room away from the doors, Lucas tapped the large central touchscreen to wake up the system so it could process its report sequence while he pulled a traditionally crafted wooden wheeled director's chair out of the closet where the work crew had stashed it per his request. The massive piece of furniture was luxurious like the suite and came equipped with built-in adjustable cushioned seat and panels for the back & head, arms and legs that could also heat or cool by 25 degrees Celsius or massage the sitter. Small speakers and dirigible LED's were set into the flexible flaps on each side of the headrest to make for a more agreeable reading time or ease stress while working late at night. All the magnificent chair needed to work was a standard 110 volt cord and a WiFi router nearby although Lucas had actually connected it physically to one of the many spare standard RJ45 Internex cable ports on his tech hub.

As the Cyberghast whined and grumbled to life, the teenager held a piece of toast between his teeth as he typed access codes and file paths one-handed since the left hand had the mug of coffee ready to dispense its life-bearing liquid on request. Munching through his toast instinctively like a ruminating cow, he swallowed the last chunk with a gulp of exquisite mochaccino as his communications management suite ran down the list of what he had received during his sleep. A quick look confirmed that the multiple devices about his person had run their synchronization routines and were now fully updated for the coming day.

As it had been discovered this morning, he activated the Cyberghast network mapping and command apps to discover all the domotics in the hotel complex and usurp control into his eagerly awaiting invisible hands. Finally, in his active alerts panel, he saw that the little minion in Houston still hadn't been arrested or even discovered yet, but it was just a question of time; he would know when it happened since he had bugged the local police stations, DCFS and set a media-mining app for just this.

Sitting comfortably, the boy tapped a few app shortcuts on his touchscreen to activate the reports for the permanent queries that were programmed to overwatch his parents and all of their communications with anybody. This was to find out directly from the sources what they were trying to do with his life and health, especially Lawrence. Besides, hacking their CPU's or wiretapping their comms was so damned easy it was almost shameful; one was a criminalist with active court cases and the other was the director of a 'secured' facility under 'military control' so neither of them should be this undefended or unprepared against cybernetic attacks.

{ SQ } - { Cult of fools } - { SQ }

(West America 09:12)

Since Cynthia was well and truly shot of his life, she never had anything in the works concerning him or his many businesses. She might have been tempted to try something to get his money but the last threats he made against her at age 10 had her weary he could hack her servers then sell her customer's private information on the dark web. That left Lawrence as the only real active threat and it only took five minutes for Lucas to find out what his father had set in motion. The teenager sat back quietly in his deeply cushioned chair as he watched the recording of his father speaking firstly with some elderly skin-head neo-nazi bastard in Tampa in Florida who happened to be a priest. The film was recorded in the early hours of Friday morning, hour of Cape Town, South Africa, so almost 10 hours ahead of presently.

(Carl Orff – O Fortuna, Imperatrix Mundi)

This tattooed bastard was called Brady Khunestade and went by the self-styled exaltation of 'Honorable Faithful Lord Bishop' inside a church that sounded more like a doomsday cult than anything else. This weird group, the Church of Jesus the Redeemer of Blighted Souls, was located physically on the shores of Mckay Bay on the tip of 34th Street South in an area devoid of buildings or tourists. It's web site showed a walled complex surrounded by cheap corrugated steel sheets held upright by I-beams set on the internal side of the domain. Everything else inside the estate was built out of cheap molded concrete to look like an abbey out of the German Renaissance. They were basically tall airy edifices with thin tall stained glass windows, wrap-around balconies at all levels and gabled roofs with religious statuary instead of the finials normally used in the area. The compound held a huge cruciform church for 2,000 seated worshippers plus another 1,000 standing attendees, adult dorms, children's dorms with boys and girls split between two different buildings and a medium sized apartment tower, thirteen storeys high with 16 units per floor, reserved for the family and servants of what could only be called 'ruling family'. In the back of the compound were a few barns to hold small livestock, mostly goats, sheep, pigs, chickens and turkeys. It was written on the web site that the cult kept a quad of mules as they had been mentioned in the bible as 'the common man's conveyance' versus horses which were almost exclusively for the military at the time. It was showed they had a full automotive garage, a full-service workshop for their tools and materials to maintain the estate and they bragged about having reinforced 'storm shelters' beneath each building in the compound to tough out the "coming dark, stormy, times" as 'revealed' in the Biblical Scriptures.

Lucas snorted nastily as he read that; it clearly meant they had armored bunkers under their estate to resist intervention by police, the FBI or even the army as that was the typical thoughts of cultists. In sectarian code-speach "dark storms" really meant that the government would come in to liberate the victims of the ecclesiastes while reconnecting them to material reality. As all religions said they were 'The Light of Goodness' and everybody outside their walls were 'Darkness Inspired' or 'Incarnations of Evil' it didn't take his 3 doctorates to understand their patently transparent code and its reactionary, rebellion-slash-civil uprising themes. Even a soccer mom or the average high school kid could see through the crapulence's thin cladding of prophetic claptrap.

Everything inside the cult was based upon the written deblaterations of a distant past clanhead who founded the church which was then transmitted by inheritance as if it were a regular business or ordinary farmstead. A bit like what happened to the Mormons and Scientology. It was presently ruled in the following order with appended titles:

*) The 88 year old 'Righteously Honored Faithful Cardinal' Harkady Munnroe Khunestade. His brothers were 'Honorable Faithful Lord Bishop' and his cousins were 'Reverend Faithful Abbot'; the men who married his sisters were called 'Reverend Faithful Patriarch' while the husbands of his female cousins were 'Reverend Faithful Elder'.

*) The 62 year old son of the cardinal Brady Derues Khunestade was exalted as the only 'Honorable Faithful Lord Bishop' of his generation. His brothers were 'Reverend Faithful Abbot' and his cousins were 'Reverend Faithful Patriarch'; the husbands of the sisters were 'Reverend Faithful Elder' while the men married to the female cousins were 'Faithful Apostollate'.

*) The 41 year old grandson Brock Hampton Khunestade was exalted as the only 'Reverend Faithful Abbot' of his generation. His brothers were 'Reverend Faithful Patriarch' and his cousins were 'Reverend Faithful Elder'; the men who married his sisters were called 'Faithful Apostollate' while the husbands of his female cousins were 'Faithful Creed Speachers'

*) Finally, the 19 year old great-grand-son Ahbramas Gelad Khunestade was exalted as the only 'Reverend Faithful Patriarch' of his generation which also happened to be the lowest and youngest position to sit on the Abbatial Council that governs the cult. His brothers were 'Reverend Faithful Elder' and his cousins were 'Faithful Apostollate'; the husbands of the sisters were 'Faithful Creed Speachers' while the men married to the female cousins were simply 'Faithful Armsmen'.

It was patently obvious that women had no ordained positions nor any decisional capacity inside the cult structure and management. While women did a lot of work, mostly in manual labor like cleaning, cooking and tending the animals or herb gardens, all 'technical' jobs like accounting, management, automotive or building mechanics and modern electronic communications were all segregated to men. Young children were indoctrinated from birth into knowing and accepting the 'traditional' gender-based roles and jobs under threats of dire, cruel physical punishments meted out in public on the church's plaza at noon. It was even said so openly on the website; the cult refused and reviled so-called 'human rights' as an "affront to God and God-Given Law / Authority to manage church affairs internally" so they willfully ignored them and all court rulings to that effect.

Torturing people, especially children, was Biblical; PERIOD.

Furthermore, it was also blindingly obvious from the pictures on the website that the entire church-group was composed exclusively of racially selected caucasian/northman white persons. There was a clear presence of nazi iconography in the sculptures and bas-reliefs all around the compound and every member of the church had several tattoos branding them in stark black and red with swastikas, swords, black sun wheels and celtic crucifixes of all sorts. All men wore completely shaven heads except for those in the direct line of heredity to the cardinal's throne. These men blood-related to the top-man wore complicated germanic or celtic style beards that were braided with small gems twined into the hairs. Women had hair no longer than the lower part of the shoulder blades that was also braided in germanic styles but sporting ornaments made only of wood or animal bone. All metals, jewels and precious artwork was reserved strictly for the men who were acknowledged as potential inheritors of the cardinal at his death.

{ SQ } - { Unholy Priests } - { SQ }

(Two Steps From Hell – The strength of a thousand men)

Lucas created queries and automated searches about the church and its activities. Since it had been founded in the early 1800's by the direct ancestors of the cardinal and had always been under the control of Khunestade named men, finding paperwork trails and court cases would be easy. Dealing with the overflow of 200 years of such, much less practical. Unfortunately, since Lawrence hired a bunch of skinheads who report back directly to the highest echelons of the church in question, the adolescent was left with the obligation of finding and processing absolutely every piece of crap that could be found and acquired about the group of depraved, sectarian madmen.

Thankfully, a lot of the work had already been done over the decades by the US Department of Justice and its many law enforcement agencies, neither of which were shy about sharing information concerning doomsday cults and nihilistic sects. Also, the ever present SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) had a trove of data on hate groups like this one and the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) also tracked their heinous anti-law/anti-society preaching when they lobbied local and state governments to back-off their church doctrines and activities. Every official government source to date, be it local, state or federal, said clearly that these people were a typical heavily armed but poorly trained militia of racist religion-empowered fanatics.

Why had they never been arrested or at least stopped from stockpiling weapons?

Because they had a 200 year old history of southernism, bigotry and anti-human predications that had been either ignored or smiled at by every government in Florida since their creation in the early 1800's by extremists who would later become secessionists to fight the 'impure' northerners. Over twenty decades they systematically amassed a hoard of cash produced by criminal activities that they then spread around to grease all the politos in sight to make them approve publicly of laws and measures limiting the rights of government agencies to intervene in church activities or religious edifices.

Faith, religion and religious organizations; the trinary poison that was destroying Humanity.

On a sideways-related note, the mercenaries that Lawrence ordered to attack Lucas were "affiliated to the cult" but didn't actually live or operate from the main compound. Each man was a self-contained autonomous contractor with his own building to operate from and they united only as many men as the job required to be carried out successfully. In this case, they planned to have four heavily armed men with a big SUV-type truck and a 40 foot contractor's trailer split in two segments : the prison cage and the dormitory-slash-armory.

The communications that Lucas managed to hack between the criminalized ex-cops and the main church compound explained their plan simply enough. They would drive the several thousand miles up north to British Columbia so as to pass the Canadian borderline at an area that was not guarded during the night. That way, they could illegally smuggle in all the sedatives, guns and munitions they wanted. Once the child was captured, they would hole up in a rural forested zone near a touristic village for a week to break the boy properly before heading back south by different roads than they used going up to avoid detection of their movements. Once in the USA they would hit the interstate highways and head for the church's juvenile reform boot camp, located in the swampy bowels of the Everglades since under USA laws what they did was 'almost legal' as long as Lawrence did in fact sign the damnable documents to have a 'schooling, spiritual discipline & reformation' contract with the church of depraved subhumans to show the cops. Most police officers doing trafic stops would rarely bother asking questions beyond seeing the forms and even fewer bothered to use the web to find information about the so-called church-school or boot-camp reformatory unless they knew they were being actively monitored by some social watchdog group.

If all went well for the mercenaries' planned mission, the 16 year old boy would be enslaved, broken and docile for the rest of his life in 2 weeks flat and Lawrence would then be able to visit Florida on his regularly scheduled trip while including a side-trip from NCQ to the cult's prison camp to see by himself the remains of his son's destroyed bodily form. The fact that his father had specifically asked the mercs to gang-rape then permanently handicap Lucas by damaging his legs beyond all repair sent a dual shiver of fear and raw rage racing down the teen's spine. These depraved 'soldiers of the faithful crusade' would be made to suffer and the clergy that sent them would endure and suffer even worse before they were allowed to die slowly in rotting diseased pieces.

{ SQ } - { Push-button warfare } - { SQ }

(The Rolling Stones – Paint It Black)

Lucas was not a merciful opponent, nor was he particularly squeamish about wetworks anymore as could be attested by several police reports in Stanford, Silicon Valley, San Francisco and even Buffalo at that. Pity the poor fools that would learn this soon. The skinny, unhealthy teenager had already injured, maimed, handicapped and killed several times in his short, young life and would keep on going until his miserable end found him at last. Cracking the joints of his thin fragile fingers, the blue-eyed wunderkind analyzed the flows and ebbs of the data streaming before his gaze. There, waiting to be discovered and exploited, were the personal, strike-team and church-wide patterns of behavior that he needed to find and utilize against the people planning to kidnap, demean, break and destroy him.

It was incredible just how piss-poor at 'operational security' these mongrels really were; it explained why the US Army had kicked them out after court-martialling them for selling secrets or blabbing drunkenly in a bar before a 'top secret' mission going live. Several of the church-group's mercenaries were barely passed boot camp while the rest were washed out from the lowest ranks after being caught doing nasty things in retaliation for being refused promotions or transfer to elite units like the SEAL's or Delta Force. Each and every last one of those losers had spent time in Fort Leavenworth before being handed a one-way ticket out of the service by the backdoor straight into the dumpster next to it.

Lucas could work with that.

All of these guys had three things in common that would help destroy them quickly before they even reached him, with a little unhelpful attention from his on people and tools.

1) They had no tech savvy beyond maps, guns and car engines.

2) They all had the emotional instability of a rabid dog overdosed on steroids & meth.

3) Their teamwork was like gasoline & lit matches; volatile and incendiary.

The psychological profiles the data streams revealed were full of holes, instabilities and severely lacking in basic social skills including very poor impulse control and heightened aggressivity. None of that made the kind of people for whom stealth-centric missions would work well. Also, time was clearly not on their side; place 4 of these mercs inside a pressure cooker for a week and you would have an explosion that would leave one to four of them lying dead on a back-country road. If they were forced to drive in a small pickup truck from Tampa, Florida to the Canadian border for 1,400 miles then some 3,000 miles more towards Vancouver, BC... All in enclosed confines, tightly packed like rotten sardines in a hot tin can, then add the winter weather, several feet of snow on the ground to slow traffic and everything down even more...

Yeah, these buggers had no idea what they were doing and the cultists who planned the job probably never lived in a wintry country in their lives. Lucas remembered Buffalo City in New York State when he was a kid; winters on the shores of Lake Erie were something white and cold, alright. No, the men who told the mercs what roadmap to follow, how to proceed with capture and stuff, those were the type used to being blindly obeyed through fear and pain. They never had to endure having to accept a multitude of different opinions and attitudes while tolerating not being the topmost authority. No, the higher ecclesiastes of the church had never had to submit and tolerate so they had no idea what it meant to sublimate their tempers and personalities for the 'Greater Good' of the mission or group survival. These mercs had only the most limited ability to work together if kept in arm's length of the men riding herd on their combined tempers and that's why they were all housed separately, never sharing contracts unless the cardinal or bishop commanded it from their high thrones.

Running long range defense against these fools was gonna be way too easy.

Looking at the clock in the lower right corner of the main screen, he saw he had thirty minutes left before his appointment therefore all he could do was a quick survey of his resources and type in a few preparatory orders to his ghost network. The real heavy coding would have to wait for tonight and opening the Cyberghast's secondary module could be done sometime in the evening too.

Lucas snorted in contempt as he began the preparations for the overwatch functions that would map their travels and predictive algorithms that would foresee their activities along the road. He would wait until they had decided if they united in the USA or in Canada then begin striking out at them from the cybernetic depths of the Dark Web's deepest, darkest shadows.

Activating on the left screen a management application he had custom built, the teenager brought up the status of his phantom botnet as he had programmed it since last night to switch over from fully defensive configuration to 85% attack & 15% distant controlling of assets. He was up to 1,247,105 attack bots, 2,689 overwatch nodes, 1,230 remote management bots, 379 data-vault bots, 143 dead-drop reception bots and 128 query processing bots. He had now co-opted to his service 281 phantom Internex nodes that could broadcast messages under false identities or emulate public services to manipulate the responses of police, firefighters, ambulances and others in any given zone of North America.

By the end of the following week a similar setup would be in place, worming its way through the systems of the European Confederation. Another week later and the African Confederation would be added to his shadowy webworks, then it would be Asia, then South America and finally the Balkanic Confederacy. The Montagnard Confederation's systems were too weirdly built and almost not compatible with anything that anybody had in hand so he would keep them for last, if it became necessary to work on producing something that could link and hack with their signals and codes.

Once the entire planet's networks were penetrated, he would finally have an all-encompassing early warning system that was reliable enough to go to sleep at night without wondering if he would wake up caged in a concentration camp run by priests and neo-nazis. Then, after the passive listening stations were online, he would establish the active overwatch systems, including wiretapping into the trafic cameras, facial recognition softwares and Internex logging & monitoring apps in the hands of the diverse government agencies. Each program or device would keep on working as they were conceived, built and configured for, but would have hidden backdoors that would allow him access and the ability to give his own jobs or query the data vaults they had accumulated in the name of 'National Security'.

And that meant that he would be made aware of menial little curs like these thugs within minutes of their getting a contract on his life and be in position to retaliate less than an hour after he got the warning. After that, it would be child's play to send messages out to law enforcement agencies about dangerous out-of-control criminals to be apprehended with extreme prejudice, block or track bank account activity, credit card purchases, and even trawl through the commercial data of retailers about their regional sales to find the emplacement of someone who only paid cash or worked through maids and errand boys. Humans were creatures of habit and only very slowly changed their needs and habits; the worse the habits, the more luxurious the needs, the longer it took to change and the bigger the track left in the financial logs.

These four suckers were a prime example of such endemic behavior that couldn't be controlled even if the men themselves had actually wanted to change anything in their lives. They didn't change anything therefore Lucas would track them by their habits until they reached a locality where the teenager would then warn the cops, the army and the local populace at large to be weary of them, worsening the level of the messages until somebody somewhere had a violent reaction that started the final cascade leading to conflagration and the mercs' deaths.

Murder by cops.

Why should a skinny, sickly sixteen year old have to do these jobs? The cops had the training, equipments and medical care after it was all said and done. Why should he bother putting his pasty hide in harm's way if others were already in place to do it as part of their jobs? No. The people who went to police or military academies and swore oaths to protect society could do it just as they had been trained and hired for it. The very best Lucas would do in terms of helping law enforcement was to find and hack the systems of criminals and cults, then hand over the results of his hacks. Anonymously.

If they didn't like his way of doing things, they could pass themselves of his help.

Enter the lawyers

(Edvard Grieg – In the Halls of the Mountain King)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 09:30am

Daleminton Hotel, room #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

Lucas was now relocated, sitting at his dining room table, a large cardboard box at his side on the table, as he used his portable workstation which he wired into the table's hub & electricity. He slowly browsed the web for manufacturers of industrial steel cabinets in the Vancouver area to handle one of his multiple rear-of-mind projects that would become contingencies in case the shit in his life didn't come from just Lawrence. With heavy hitters like US Naval Intel or the UEO Navy in the mix, there would be bloodshed before the year was out, he was certain of it.

One of the professors at Stanford's Faculty of Neurosciences where Lucas did some of his most important R&D work had just emailed him about two men from something called 'Phoenix Foundation' that were poking around and his office manager in San Francisco had sent him an alert about the same thing. From the basic data search his security team at the central offices in Buffalo had done, that thinktank was a transparent shell to cover something more obscure. Based out of Los Angeles, this group was supposedly part of the US federal government's "scientific analysis apparatus" but Lucas had several doubts on this. One of them was that through his Dark Web delvings, he had seen several requests for information and personnel dossiers for people who work inside the Phoenix building with some heavy dollar amounts tagged on. Whatever Phoenix was, it had powerful, violent enemies that were putting forth the funds, equipments and man-hours to punch through their defenses. He had almost taken up a hacking contract for 10,000,000$ to find or create a backdoor into the think-tank's military grade servers for a group that seemed determined to obtain control of the building's domotics along the databases and communications, just to see what kind of shit would hit the fan afterwards.

The secrets revealed would have been VERY educational, indeed...

A gentle tone sounded through the suite as the Alexa voice synthesizer told him his internal entry was being solicited, dragging him from the morose depths of his plans for an invisible off-grid retreat until the bloody mess passed over him and into somebody else's backyard. A quick tap at the monitoring app showed him two men and a woman standing before his door, waiting for his response. He buzzed them in and called out for them to join him at the table directly once the door was shut securely.

The woman led the way. She was white with brown hair and green eyes, around fortyish, tall and thin with a friendly if reserved face. She was followed by an asian male, black hair and brown eyes, thirtyish, medium height with a serene, detached air about him that seemed to imply that reality and people were beneath his notice, even though he noticed everything in excruciating detail. The second man was white, blond hair with green eyes, also in his thirties, taller than the others at around 6' 2" with a jovial, open expression and body language that belied his profession as a lawyer. All three were dressed in conservatively cut business suits in dark blue tones that complemented their hair and skin color well enough to indicate they had been counseled by fashion professionals. Only the most minimal accessories could be seen; a few rings, a gold chain and the woman wore a dove shaped broach made of of silver and pink quartz crystal.

The woman seemed to be the leader of the team as she handled the presentations and took charge from the get go. She didn't seem the least bit bothered that the teenager didn't stand up, extend a hand to shake or take off the large bluish glasses from his face. The basic life-story outline he sent them in writing a few days ago when the first contact was done showed clearly an unease at being in public and permanent low-grade fear at – unprotected – human interactions.

"Hello, Mister Wolenczak. Is it Professor or Doctor? Given your diplomas to date, your introduction file was a bit vague on certain key details." she opened with, smiling demurely as she tried to read and gauge her new client. Getting no response, she simply continued unabashed "I am Gertha Delray, attorney in immigration, naturalization and refugee status claims. I have been assigned by our firm as the head of the team for the initial proceedings until your residency status is cleared up and permanent. This is the person the firm recommends as your personal attorney of record for pretty much all of your general needs; Ken Izu Tah, expert at corporate, commercial, contracts and importations laws. Besides him is one of our firm's criminalists, Joseph Mercy Aylmer, expert in weapons laws, police procedures and contesting abusive or overly vague search & arrest warrants."

Lucas nodded at them in turn as they were introduced. Looking at the asian man, he asked "Do you still follow the old traditions of your kin?" in Mandarin with a Britannic undertone to his accent since his teacher had been a Hong Kong expatriate. A single raised eyebrow on the man's face was the only reaction he received, not even a verbal answer, in response to his demonstration. Filing the man's lack of visible reaction for later, the younger male observed the reactions of the other two and found them also very limited. Good. If they displayed their emotional states publicly like roadside billboards, they wouldn't be of any use for him. He had specified to the firm he needed people who value self-control, restraint and public appearances as much as he did for the client-attorney relationship to work. It looked at first glance like the office had not badly chosen.

Standing up while using his left hand to hold onto the table to keep steady on his feet, Lucas extended his right hand to the woman first as team leader, then his assigned attorney and the criminalist last. Deciding to give the lawyers a few details upfront, he belatedly answered the question he had been asked in opening. "Welcome to my temporary lodgings. My actual title is Professor but it be could argued to legally be Doctor, as in 'Medical Doctor' due to complicated events I will explain later. Basically however, I have received several licenses directly emanating from my three Bachelors', four Masteries and three doctorates. I am officially certified as authorized developer of medical electronics, cybernetics, tools, programs and also chemicals and drugs in the USA. In parallel to that, I have received licenses as a 2rd grade paramedic, 1st grade urgentology nurse and hospital orderly. Additionally, there are several afferent university certifications in industrial molecular chemical engineering, molecular biochemistry, biogenics, genetics, neurochemistry and a few little thingies about psychology and psychiatry on the side. I will of course give you the full run down of my qualifications during the exposé of the Greek Tragedy that is my life."

The three lawyers nodded and took places at the dining table, the woman at the foot with the criminalist at her right and the commerce specialist at her left. Lucas sat back into his chair, watching quietly as they opened their briefcases to place laptops, paper files and diverse utensils on the table to begin the preliminary client interview. The teenager sipped some coffee from the heavy steel thermal mug in his left hand while his right hand fiddled idly with the pommel of his heavy steel cane, his apparent indolence hiding a level of alertness that told the attorneys just how little trust the boy had towards them at this point.

Once they were settled and Mister Tah had placed a wired professional digital recorder on the table to get an audio-video archive of the conversation, the adolescent exhaled loudly, preparing to speak for a prolonged period of time. This was not comfortable for him; he preferred written messages or at least the safety of speaking through Internex monitors. Direct human contact usually led to heartache and physical harm so he wasn't positively disposed towards the situation even if it happened at his behest.

"We will be receiving a serving cart with a buffet-style brunch around 11:00am that will help us make a pause to see how we are coming along and give us some fuel for the rest of the day. Unfortunately, I do anticipate this – conference – to be quite lengthy as my affairs, both personal and corporate, are not simple. Besides having two angry, violent parents intent on ruining my life, I also have a long bloody swath of secondary and tertiary adversaries that are not as 'permanently dead' as I would prefer them to be. We are going to have to find ways to legally, financially and societally 'neutralize' them for life. If it means leaving their companies, families, friends and acquaintances lying on the ground as rotting, broken, husks, then so be it."

The three lawyers kept studiously neutral body language, their faces betraying no emotion or personnal opinion that could be perceived, even less interpreted. The initial confidential brief sent by the refering attorney in San Francisco severely stressed just how important self-control and business demeanor were to the young man during official contacts. Things could go sideways in a flash if they showed anything other than polite detachment or bland curiosity when guiding him to answer the questions they had in order to build and enact his legal positions versus his opponents. They had received and verified a series of police file numbers from several cities that were verified only superficially at this point but they were aware that the youth sitting before them had human blood on his hands and that steel cane was no toy or simple crutch to cope with his deficient legs, although it did fill that function too.

"If you are all in place, we could start?" Lucas asked in a drab, indolent tone that reflected nothing of what he actually felt or thought. He used that particular façade as a default mask when dealing with anything tedious, onerous or just bothersome so it was well practiced and did in fact hide all of his inner workings to those who saw it. Each lawyer gave a short verbal sign they were ready so the teenager could give them his story from the very start.

"I will skip 99% of what my grand-parents did since they are dead and therefore part of history rather than life. They had no real presence in my life then they passed just when I reached the age of 4 anyways, so they won't matter much in the big picture."

Sitting himself straight with both arms resting on top of the table, the cane leaning against his right thigh ready to grab at need, the adolescent's eyes became glassy, unfocussed as he delved deep into the furthest memories he could find. Not stuff he thought about daily, and most of which he tried to avoid if he could.

Ages passed

(Johann Sebastian Bach – Toccata & Fugue in D Minor)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 09:50am

Daleminton Hotel, room #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

"I was born in Danbury, in Connecticut on December 24th of 2004. It was an accidental birth compared to how such things normally go. My mother Cynthia was bucking for a promotion at her law firm and being 8 months pregnant didn't stop her for anything. She and Lawrence were already established in Buffalo city on the shores of Lake Erie right after their marriage and that would be my official address and hometown for the first half of my life until Stanford. Anyways, dear Cynthia was 'attending the needs' of her only high-power client to date with vigor and gusto when the 77 year old had a heart attack during which he spasmed so hard that he punched her in the stomach repeatedly thus causing massive traumatic damages to her abdomen. This resulted in my surgically accomplished premature birthing by caesarean section to avoid losing my life."

"To make things clear, she had been married to Lawrence for two years and was still fucking many of her clients to fuel her rise to power and prominence without a care in the world for either her husband, their parents or her future children. She had been pregnant with differentiated twins; a boy and girl. My sister died inside the womb from the damages the dying man's fists inflicted. She was never named, never properly buried, just dumped in the hospital's incinerator like biological waste from an operation or failed experiment. Lawrence didn't even care. He hadn't wanted any children, ever, and having two at the same time was just twice the chore and hardship to slow down his career and high-rolling corporate lifestyle. His opinion about Cynthia screwing around was that 'it kept her occupied and away from him', his clients and public image as well, so no damage there."

"My grand-parents were devastated for multiple reasons; socially, morally, religiously and every way you can think of. Their daughter had shamed all four of them and in the most obscenely public manner possible too. They held back from disowning her only on my account. They couldn't protect me if they cast her from the family and Lawrence had little to no interest in my welfare already. It was decided commonly by both Cynthia and Lawrence that if I was to live at all, the grand-parents would have to be the primary caregivers or else I would go to an orphanage and be dropped off as an unwanted nameless procreate of a street-slutting whore to boot. The grand-parents objected and took me into their homes and hearts. Because they were old and sickly, all four gramps shared a large spacious five bedroom apartment in the core of Buffalo. They had two live-in nurses to assist them with their daily lives when back pains, leg cramps from diabetes or the first symptoms of Alzheimer's disease were too strong to handle by themselves. It wasn't an assisted living facility though; just a very luxurious apartment complex for the very rich and famous."

"I lived a very ordinary, peaceful existence with my grand-parents for the first four years of my life until they started dying all together when I was three years old. The details are in the heritage files I sent you several days ago. In those years they had established a pair of obscenely large trust funds for my welfare, studies and seed money to start a business or buy my first house before I turned 25. These trust funds and their attached lawyers were supposed to take care of me once the gramps had died but the attorneys never spoke with me passed the last funeral. Whatever happened, it didn't cost me anything as I have had Carmello investigate & audit the two funds thoroughly and there wasn't a penny missing. Whatever caused those two lawyers to desist from their obligations towards me was paid for externally, without ever crossing my desk or that of the public curator in charge of watching over my situation."

(Opus – Life is Life)

"Now, between my birth and the age of 4, I developed physically as per normal charts, if a bit short and somewhat of a lightweight. My maternal grand-mother used to call me 'stubby mushroom' because I was thin and short along with my pasty white complexion. It was mentally that I blew through every expectation usually put on a baby boy of that age. Given I was traumatically premature by five weeks, the doctors and education specialists had all pretty much bet I would be attarded or deficient in some way. Boy, were they ever wrong... I learned to speak fluent English by 10 months old and the written form by my 1st birthday. Then I learned spoken & written Hebrew, Yiddish and Latin side-by-side with basic grade school math before I was 2 years old in 2006. I went through spoken & written French, basic geometry & volumetry, basic geography and basic World History in 2007 by the age of 3. And those are just the first few languages I learned in my life; the complete list is in the files but usually I learned one tongue in spoken, written, gestural and musical versions per year."

"My fourth year was heavily loaded; it included the very basics of ecology, biology, chemistry, physics, mechanics, electronics and spoken & written Italian. It was at that point that I began using a child-age V-Tech web computer to learn and work in the evenings. There had been very manual arts & crafts involved: using either Lego Technics or Mecchano to built scaled models, along 'open source' circuit boards, chipsets and peripherals like the PCB (printed circuit boards) with the Snap-On circuits design kits then introduction to Arduino Automation kits. Let's just say that even though these classes were the very simplest of basics, they touched enough of so many fields that it opened my mind and laid the foundation of the bio-medical engineer I have become at the age of 16. In fact, except for gym class that I never did, I managed to learn the entire 'International Science & Exploration' primary curriculum chosen by my grand-parents by the age of 4 in 2008, at the time when every other child just begins kindergarten or can't even use a toilet without adult help."

"I was taught all this mostly by private tutors who came for the day and left in the evening. Since all four adults were very sick, I saw precious little of them each day, only at breakfast and supper. That last year, in 2008, there weren't any celebrations for me despite the massive mental accomplishment I had just succeeded at. My paternal grand-father had just passed on in November 2008, the last of the four to die; so Lawrence took over for a brief period of about two months, from early December 2008 until January 2009. It didn't take him any longer to botch the situation beyond my capacity to forgive or tolerate. He was already deeply ensconced inside the World Power Project near Cape Town in South Africa and didn't want to move from there, not even for the funerals of his parents, let alone to insure my welfare at all. He kept the same nurse that had assisted my parents because she was young enough that she wouldn't be 50 when I turned 18 so that was one problem less to solve. Then in January 2009 he tried to hire a live-in male tutor to teach me what he called 'the basics of schooling and civility' for evolved society."

(The Rolling Stones – Paint It Black)

Lucas held out his hands, laying them flat on the glass tabletop for the three lawpersons to see. "That is the legacy I have from that man's one attempt at 'civilizing the dangerously willful boy' according to the wishes of Lawrence and his cabal of ass-kissers in Washington DC. The man took a length of electric cord from his baggage and split the plastic sheath to splay out the copper bristles like a miniature feather duster. Then, he backhanded me hard enough to make me see stars around my head for a good five minutes then set to work on torturing me. The 84 year old bastard used his greater size, weight and strength to hold my forearms hard enough to deeply bruise the muscles and initiate defensive micro-fractures in the bones as he cruelly whipped my thin, meatless little fingers to bloody ribbons, one hand after the other. When he was done, he stood there with an erection visible through his trousers as he waved that damned wire-whip at my face to scare me worse. He told me I would be getting 'Biblings' of 6 swishes on each hand until I learned to not let them be 'Devil's playthings'. I was supposed to be 'purged' by this destructive pain of the 'Evils' of indocility, disobedience, challenging behavior and 'refusal to admit and accept my subordination in Society and Life' at the feet of Him and his White Jesus God, my self-styled Betters."

The morose teenager sipped some coffee silently while the lawyers shuffled papers and scrolled files on their computers to read the official police reports from the time, as well as see the pictures extracted from the films of the nanny-cams placed around the apartment at the time. When almost ten minutes had passed, all three signaled Lucas to continue.

(Twisted Sisters – We're not gonna take it anymore)

"As you see from the reports, I had just finished a highly sophisticated, technically oriented schooling program that most ten year olds find challenging. I had always watched the morning and evening news on TV for as long as I can remember, so I knew there would come a time when I was attacked. The crime statistics had been explained by the tutors and instinctively I knew I would be amongst the 65% of boys who get attacked physically or get molested and raped. Because of my non-existing physical training, I knew that I couldn't defend myself against a full-on attack without getting maimed and killed; I had to find a defense that would stop the attacker BEFORE he managed to reach me. Since I had done the basics of chemistry and biology during my studies, It was easy for me to produce a small vial of acid corrosive enough to strip paint off wood or blister and melt skin. When the geriatric bastard let me go to gloat, I had the time to reorient myself, take account of my state and realized he was gearing up to beat on my hands again just as soon as he was done rubbing his crotch, getting his cock and balls back in place. As the nanny-cam films show, he planned to beat me until he broke my fingers & hand bones in such way I would be handicapped for the rest of my life. Being forewarned of his intents, I managed despite damaged, profusely bleeding fingers, to take out the only vial of acid I had produced to date, pop the glass stopper and asperse the chemical right in his face."

Mister Aylmer spoke up: "That has got to be the most blatant case of child self-defense against a pedophile / religious extremist that I have ever seen. The local police in Buffalo ruled it so, as did the Youth Court judge and the DCFS. They ruled unanimously that your father was unworthy of having custody of you at that time and so you were shipped to your mother's estate, also in Buffalo. What ever happened to this geriatric criminal? There's no mention of trial/sentence in the files."

Standing up from his chair, using his cane to steady his balance as he reached vertical position, Lucas walked over to the kitchen's drinks brewer and made himself another coffee. As the machine brewed its life-giving liquid, the teenager shrugged dismissively. "At the time, Lawrence actually protected the bastard from prosecution by paying him a chartered Lear Jet out of the USA and back to Britain before the police could charge the man properly. He was supposed to stay in the hospital for a month before being released for arrest. He did lose an eye, an ear, part of his tongue and half his hair, all on the left side as he turned to protect himself from the spray. Lawrence simply hired a private 'med-evac' plane and shipped his problem back to Good Ol'e Britannia before the district attorney could even realize he'd lost his suspect. Of course, even with a money trail a mile wide and not concealed in the least, nobody ever tried to bother Daddy Dearest about his clear witness tampering and removal of a wanted man from the country. He simply has too many connections that protect him in exchange of favors and cash."

Misses Delray quipped "I gather you want us to look into the circumstances of this, adding them to the case of parental inadequacy, incompetence and criminal depravity that we are building? You wouldn't happen to have any idea where this english pervert is located at present, by the way? It could make things easier if we can get live testimony from him."

The young man just fixed his coffee to his taste before walking slowly back to the table, needing his cane as a nasty cramp had partially gimped him. Once sat, he opened the medical belt at his waist and took out the clinical-grade muscle relaxer he had been forced to carry for two years now and took one gelule caplet out. After swallowing his pill with some coffee, the teenager gazed balefully at the lawyers through his meta-glasses, weighing his options before answering the woman's questions. "Yes; he's in a hospice for ailing anglican pastors in county Hertford, north of Greater London. The man is now a disfigured drooling vegetable that farts as the highlight of his day. He is 96 years old and not long for this world, so I doubt anybody will ever get a lucid, coherent statement from him anymore."

Mister Aylmer asked "Were there any testimonies or affidavits taken at the time of his hospitalization in Buffalo, before being absconded back to England? Given his present state, we could use those in court or at least with the Youth Protection agencies here in Canada, to start demolishing your father's pretensions and reputation that way. It's not like Lawrence could get different testimony from the elder man at this point and notarized police reports with DCFS investigation files will seal the deal quite neatly."

Lucas smirked before he answered "Mr Carmello di Sovorone, my attorney in San Francisco, collated the files and sent them to your offices before I had left the USA. He might also have sent them to several child-protection and civil rights watch-dog groups to set Daddy Dearest on the back-foot in the court of public opinion so as to forcibly detach him from his welded-on supporters in several US protestant churches and The Capitol. It won't be a death blow to his network of political contacts in DC but it will be critical enough to initiate the process and make ANY state's attorney worried for their career if they try to force me back into custody under Lawrence's demented criminalities."

"You have gone public already with these files and charges?" asked Mr. Tah in quiet, flat tones. "That is quite the rare reaction, in those circumstances. Most boys, or young men, who were victimized by parents, teachers or preachers rarely speak out publicly, and never by their own volition. Why did you take this course of action? You do not give me the impression of someone who likes his private affairs getting aired out on the town plaza." he expounded as he contemplated his mysterious young client.

"To take advantage of the '#MeToo' web denunciation campaign; it has the capacity to do with collective public effort what I alone can't do when facing the swarm of church-whores that are lining up to back daddy-dearest and defend his depravities. Lawrence has been advertising himself as a 'Messianic Jew' claiming that 'Jesus is his personal savior' as is the manner of fundamentalist protestants for several decades. Thusly, he has made deep inroads towards the white christian sects of the USA, specifically several that are influential in the white supremacy and neo-nazi movances. I have information about paid contracts that Lawrence took out to have me kidnapped and deported secretly back to Florida to a hidden concentration camp. It is run by an extremist racist church called the Khunestade Clanhold Abbey or by its other more common name: Church of Jesus the Redeemer of Blighted Souls. I will give you the relevant recordings and files sometime later next week after I have been able to back-track and validate everything properly."

Suffer the little children

(Soul Asylum – Runaway Train)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 10:10am

Daleminton Hotel, room #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

The forlorn adolescent sat back at the table in silent meditation, otherwise known as sipping his coffee, as the three lawyers wrote, typed and filed notes, queries and official demands for access to public records about their client, his parents and all teachers and institutions he had any contacts with. After about ten minutes of intense activity, the professionals took the time to go make themselves some coffee of their own to have some fuel to process through the next batch of information about their young client's ordeals. To date, it didn't look like he was exaggerating but the case would hinge on how much of the parent's malversations were recent and how many recordings would be deemed legally valid before the courts in either Canada, the USA or the UEO.

"Now then" began Lucas, "in late January 2009, just after my fourth birthday and the geriatric bastard's attack on me, I was sent to live at Cynthia's main home which was also located in Buffalo city due to pressure by DCFS and the local police force. My mother actually lived in that house much to my chagrin. Back then, she had already bought several large condos in New York city and Albany (NYS), Montpelier (Vermont), Boston (Massachusetts) and Portland (Maine) to meet important clients locally. For more personal usages, she had bought a vast horse farm in the forested Green Mountains in northern Vermont but planned to visit there only for vacations, parties and important holidays that would implicate a certain level of high-class shagging with a VIP client."

"You see, that was a recurring theme in my mother's life, and therefore mine, that she liberally pimped herself to those clients she considered important or at least had a visible potential for becoming big-shots in either their careers, domain of activity or in High Society by having inherited a bundle of cash from well established relatives. In fact, dear mom was a bit of a traditional snob in that a millionnaire lottery winner wouldn't get her attention but a poor bastard with a big name from an Old-Blood family would always have her coming for more. She had desires for riches, yes, but what always got her blood flowing was the chance of being seen as the highest maven, the best socialite in town. She imagined herself the next Jackie O. Kennedy that would have all of America's women envious of how well connected, positioned and 'loved' by all she had become."

Sipping from his hot drink, the young man took a deep breath to calm himself before continuing the despicable tale of his childhood. "My relationship with Cynthia had been distant, almost nonexistant until that point but became toxic right from the first meeting. When I went to live with her, she was in the process of – wooing – a well-to-do plastic surgeon in his mid-forties who specialized in 'rebuilding' the youthful appearance of the richest socialites in New York State. He even had many celebrities from the NYC television studios as clients in the decade his private practice had been in service. When he saw me, he should have ignored me pretty much the same as he did with his own children back at his 'official' house with his wife. And yes, he was THAT kind of dishonest cheater."

"However, he saw my injured hands and fell in trance at the sight of the convoluted, intertwined scars wrapped around my thin fragile fingers and palms. He explained to Cynthia that such deeply engraved gouges could lead to loss of sensations, loss of mobility and even partial paralysis if left untreated. She would have been against spending that much money, and Lawrence would never have spent to heal me, not when he was in the process of saving and moving out the very cause of my injuries. Instead, the doctor made a deal with her; she would get to be his 'escort' at important functions for the medical association and he would accompany her at NYS Bar Association events thus elevating their mutual profiles and he would then heal my fingers, hands and wrists free of charge."

"At first, mom thought she got the better end of the deal as his medical association functions were few and far between. He dutifully went to each Bar event she attended, even when his own wife and children had events of their own on that same date. All because he was mentally and emotionally mesmerized by the intricacies of the injuries on my hands. When Cynthia realized that his emotions and attention were focussed on me more than her, she threw a fit and simultaneously threw him out of her life, going so far as to dump him as a client. Basically, she reacted like a jilted wife when in fact it was her the mistress that was bulling into the official wife's domain. From that moment on, her anger and distrust towards me were constant, sullying every aspect of every interaction we had."

Taking a few minutes to let the lawyers verify the reports of what he had known of the doctor's name, address and other details, Lucas wondered honestly just how much of all this would actually be helpeful in getting him away from his father. Since his mother had relinquished all parental rights when he turned ten, she no longer mattered legally in any sense that mattered to the courts. In fact, she had made it so that her only living child to date could not inherit anything of hers if she were to die. She had willed everything to a political organization devoted to supporting 'absolute parental authority' at every level of a child's life and activities, going so far as to declaring that 'basic human rights' should be afforded a child only if his parents petition the courts for it. Cynthia's descent into barbarity and anti-child bigotry was very much a product of his toxic, violent relationship with her, and nothing good would ever come of it anymore.

Seeing the lawyers were now ready, the teenager spoke up. "I lived four years in Cynthia's house, in Buffalo city. We did not meet often, and every time ended badly in some way for me, even though she never hit me herself. And that distinction is very important; she never beat me with her own hands but always had somebody else do it for her, usually while she was standing there, witnessing the event with great relish, often to the point of orgasmic reaction. The pathetic dumb bitch got her jollies off by seeing me beaten down to the ground and stepped on like a dead rat. Given that her bed warmers were normally criminals with – not many – scruples about human life and dignity, she always had one or two on hand to carry out her wishes to have me degraded. Cynthia, as a criminalist, had access to court records and many police personnel, which conferred her the type of indirect power she craved in order to accomplish her more fundamental goals."

"Cynthia never committed the crimes herself, but she certainly had her fingers on the strings that linked the petty street thugs to the bosses and dons in the plush offices and restaurant backrooms that are the usual hubs for these people. Most of her rather moderate fortune was acquired by acting like a pimp, she matched small time hoods with high society citizens who had unsavory situations to resolve, then took a commission once the job had been done to everybody's satisfaction. That was her gig you see; she was the middle-woman that made orders pass from client to contractor thus allowing the paying client to remain anonymous, safely out of blackmailing reach, all the while insuring that the criminals did not try to become enterprising without her costly help. From what I saw, she never bedded anybody who wasn't a big regional player in the Mafia, Triad or other large, ancient organization with a history to match her desire for glory and reputation."

"You have on the table near you a box of paper files and electronic archives that I have compiled over the years about her activities and the people involved. There are several hundred criminals and clients who paid for crimes to happen, the list of said crimes, dates, payments, and so forth. This is my bargaining chip to keep my mother off my back and out of my life as safely as can be, given the types of people she associates with in her daily job. Your task will be to weaponize this data then manipulate dear old mom into lending her testimony against Lawrence as well as find a way to force her into disavowing that damnable Political Action Committee that seeks to enslave children and deny them human rights. I don't care to inherit anything she has, that's not the point. I won't elaborate on the details of my deleterious relationship with Cynthia beyond what is in those files and the written summary that was sent your office. In that box, you have an exact, detailed compilation of every crime and assault she committed against me over the six years that I lived under her custody, along with nanny-cam recordings of each event since her house was well wired and fully protected. Necessities of her job, you see..."

Giving the lawyers a few minutes to oversee the cardboard box of files and USB chips, Lucas turned towards the large cast iron stove behind him and leaned his left arm on top of the chair's backrest, allowing himself some time to recover from the revelations he had unveiled. It wasn't lost on the lawyers that he was facing towards them and kept his right hand near his cane pommel. The merry red and yellow flames dancing amongst the pine and spruce logs showed him the kind of peaceful life that could be his, if he persevered in his efforts to secure his liberty from those depraved cretins that sought to enslave him. Looking at the decorative bronze clock sitting on the mantel above the stove, he saw it was still just 10:18am; how the hell had they covered so little of his miserable life in so much time? And why was it so damned early when it felt like he had passed the entire day speaking about nothing consequential?

"If you don't mind, we'll try to accelerate a bit. I would like to have finished explaining my academic achievements before the brunch cart arrives. We can delve back into the marasm of my more personal misfortunes after the meal, once we have all been fortified." Lucas hoped he could explain things faster but he'd never really unpacked the entirety of his life to anybody before and could not really evaluate just how much longer the preliminaries would take.

Receiving assent from all three lawyers, the teenager 'hemmed' a few times as he rewound his mental pathways to organize the lengthy monologue in his mind. It wasn't a real conversation yet, but that would change after the coming meal. Damn, he hated doing this; exposing himself to others like a circus sideshow...

"Now, as of January 2009, whence I had turned four years old, I began to study the modules that followed the 'International Primary Science & Exploration' that my grand-parents had made me follow almost from birth. It was called 'International Secondary Sciences, Health and Humanities' curriculum and, just as the four first years before, it was taught at home by private tutors. I learned what were the actual 'beginner' levels of those techniques and sciences I had skimmed before and delved deeper into the makeup of the human body, mind and soul with several classes on history, geography, sociology, anthropology, politics, ethics, civics and even some archaeology because it cut across many sciences and medical fields. These 'soft' subjects were the basis used to anchor the 'hard' sciences; the tutors took problems from history or present events then showed how a mechanical, electronic, chemical or biological solution was provided by the means of 'solid' mathematics, logic and deduction. At that point, the teachers didn't believe I had any intuition or aptitudes to speak of and concentrated mostly on feeding me facts and forcing rote-learning."

"I do mean 'forcing' as Cynthia had made it very clear that she wanted and expected physical punishments to be applied systematically for each mistake I made, even if these were innocent accidents during the learning process. If I forgot something overnight... If I had any spelling errors in a 5 page composition... If I made any errors of mental calculation in an equation most 12 or 13 year olds in high school were allowed a calculator to process during their exams... I got beaten until I had welts. Any tutor that refused to hit me at least once during a lesson was kicked out and had their reputation blasted by Cynthia through her contacts. She even lobbied – but failed! – to have the licenses revoked of at least three tutors over the six years I was subjected to her authority."

"In some extreme cases, the real demented sadists, I did ended up doing like with the old brit bastard that Lawrence had hired: I defended myself with fatal force and I know that at least two died from my retaliations before I was 5 years old at the close of 2009. After that, Cynthia got wise to the fact bodies piling up wouldn't be good for either her reputation or keeping her underworld contacts happy because she was attracting police attention to her house and family."

Mr Aylmer interrupted incredulously: "Are you saying that you killed multiple times before you were 5 years old and NOBODY recorded it or did anything about it? HOW could that happen? Even in the USA something like this would raise red flags at DCFS and the local police department! Not to mention HOW all of that must have impacted your SANITY and emotional equilibrium! WHY are you not in an institution or at least under long-term therapeutic watch?"

The teenager replied blithely "It would have been public knowledge easily enough if mommy dearest (contempt very much emphasized) hadn't been whoring herself physically and monetarily to every DCFS supervisor and Precinct captain in town for a solid month after her first plaything got maimed for life by my acid. She didn't want anybody snooping around her den of iniquity so she liberally spread herself around like a mold colony and contaminated the minds of every official she could touch. It's very simple to understand, when you know the woman's M.O. And it never changed over the years, either."

"So, the barking bitch got afraid of me, but also wised up, then fine-tuned her instructions to the teachers: she ordered them to hit me for exactly the same reasons as before, BUT never leave anything more than reddened skin that must come back to its pasty white coloration within 10 minutes of the punishment happening. With these orders, she made it so every tutor in the day could beat me repeatedly and never leave any marks or injuries, while at the same time staying safely inside the limits before my defensive reflexes triggered armed responses. The only benefit of this whole depraved miasma was that as of the age of 5, she herself demanded that our contacts be limited to the least possible. She had become so afraid of me that she wanted all possible reasons to avoid being in the same edifice as me to stay safe. Although, as explained by some files in the box, she did forget herself several times, like when I was seven years old, especially when she had a big strong dangerous cock-shaker that lit-up the hot spot in her cunt. She could wet enough to fill a dried river bed in a minute when she got truly drowned in the depths of her stupid 'princess & conquering warlord fetish' after said man-whore had beaten me down for her royal satisfaction."

"Anyways, I finished the secondary curriculum in three years as well. By December of 2011, at my 7th birthday, I had received my Secondary Diploma and quite obviously couldn't just walk out in the streets to get a job or start a business without adult assistance. Therefore, I applied for remote classes at a Columbia University located in central New York City itself. I would have the opportunity to do the class material remotely over the Internex but, to my great pleasure, I would be obliged to go pass end-of-year tests in person at their facilities. Cynthia had signed the permission forms blindly (not much of a lawyer, was she?) and had to deal with it at the end of November 2012 when the exams were coming. She went to pout and whine at her damned horse farm while I got the condo in NYC, all the way through to the third week of January 2013 so I could do my registration in person for the following year of classes at the same University. Since these new classes were far more technical and demanded specialty equipment, Cynthia decided to move me, the nanny and driver to New York permanently for all of 2013. Using money from my trust funds, she bought for me the largish centennial Ramshackle Manor I had been told about by my grand-parents. I moved into MY new house on the first of February. It may have been mine legally, but it still didn't feel like a real home, not with her hirelings still looking over me all day."

"Now; the classes I took for those 2 years were university grade. At age 7 in 2012, I studied for a bachelor's degree in mathematics, algebra, calculus and statistics. As it was mostly reading the textbooks and filling out questionnaires online, I managed to do in 11 months what takes young adults three full years to do simply because I have an ideitic memory and I can process calculations much faster than the average mind."

"The second diploma, at age 8 in 2013, was a bachelor's degree in networking, telephony, Internex servers and the programming of online apps. Again, I managed to do in 11 months what takes 3 years for young adult students to achieve normally. After those kinds of performances during 2 years living in different cities most of the time, Cynthia woke up in a panic at my accomplishments and commanded a meeting with me."

"My dear beloved mother (nasty sarcasm very much explicitly expressed) came to visit me at my large sprawling ancient mansion in northern Manhattan and threw a tizzy at the sight of 2 bachelor's degrees hanging on my wall, in full view of anybody walking into my living room. It scared her to no ends to know that I could now in fact use the phones or Internex systems to haunt her and cause damages to her cabinet and clients if she didn't start loosening the reins on my life and accepting my demands instead of spitting her contempt in my face every time we met."

"First thing that changed was that I ORDERED her to make her damned pets, tutors & clients alike, keep their mitts off my body or ELSE it was her that would suffer an acid spray in the face. She well and truly panicked at that but since I had several vials on my person at all times by then, she had no choice but to surrender or find out just how determined I was. Since she dealt with mongrels, criminals, sadists and mentally deranged hit men all day, she could easily spot the tell signs of a strongly determined killer about to get to business on a target. She caved, and never recovered her strength since. So at age 9, in January 2014, I moved back to Buffalo and settled slowly into what I would eventually consider to be my first real permanent home."

Lucas' First Home

(Two Steps From Hell – Casablanca)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 10:25am

Daleminton Hotel, room #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

"In order to RENT peace and the continuation of her good health despite my vicinity, she accepted to buy for me, with my trust funds, a plot of land in south-east Buffalo City in the outer districts of town where the Erie Canal comes into the municipal zone. The plot is between the Kaisertown and Seneca districts, at the junction of St-Ogden street and Mineral Spring road, just after the inclusion of Cazenovia Creek but before the river splits into Buffalo Creek and Cayuga Creek. I wanted a waterfront view with the tranquil walkways besides the canal for some peaceful strolls in the evening and there were several small city parks nearby, even a historic horse trail that passed just next to the property. It was old, decrepit and so monstrously huge that no house flippers or professional renovators would take on the project by themselves unless a paying client, like me, bought the house first then hired them as renovators afterwards."

"This vast Historic Registry property had three distinct advantages that could be seen immediately."

"Benefit 1) A very large 3,000 by 3,000 feet plot of land (206,61 acres or 1 square kilometer) enclosed by solid red brick walls and wrought iron ornamental fences within a canoe-able wet moat connected to the river/canal. There is also connection to a pair of small natural streams that were converted into bricked rain drainage in 1900 then fully covered during the zone's rapid urbanization in the 1940's as part of the many urgent constructions of industries to help the War effort along the Eastern seaboard. It is to this day the LAST private residential plot of that size anywhere inside the actual Buffalo Metropolitan city limits. Its decrepit, neglected appearance hid many splendors, indeed."

"Benefit 2) The massive plot came with the large 5 storey, turreted manor house and many separate buildings, amongst which were two gems in the rough. A huge 3 storey full-services industrial workshop that had been regularly updated along important technological changes and huge 3 storey barn equipped for processing vegetals into medicinal preparations for wholesale to pharmacies. Since many of the owners' family had been doctors, apothecaries and chemists before and during the House's existence, all the zoning, permits, and licenses were established and put in the name of the incorporated Wise Manor Heritage & Trust that managed the land during the period without a nominal Master, so none of those grandfathered rights were ever lost or cancelled by the city. All I needed to have a steady revenue to pay for the exploitation of the terrain was hire people to clean up, activate the old steam-powered systems, then find suppliers and I was in full production before August."

"Benefit 3) The land was located in what was originally a district of many splendid manors and urban farmsteads seated on large walled plots like itself, just outside the official limits of Buffalo in a zone that was only sparsely developed. In the intervening decades, the area's population and land usage have changed rather badly as the old manors were torn down, the farms uprooted then subdivided into smaller plots and asphalt roads were set to bring in denser motorized traffic. Nowadays, the Old Glory is surrounded by noisy, messy industries fed by the canal, railways and roads besides many low density apartment buildings and cheap motels. This means that it's a very quiet, secluded homestead as there are few direct neighbors to be nosy and all area traffic occurs several hundred feet away from the property line except for the actual river which is the northern boundary of the property."

"To my childish eyes, back when I was 9 years old, this land and manor house represented both freedom and security. The house was built mostly out of heavy steel structure and red bricks with clay tile roofing. The builders back in the 1870's had used railroad tracks & oak rail ties to create the basic framing and timber stays. The bricks, cement and ornamental wrought iron was all welded or molded around this metal structure, making it one of the thickest and strongest residential constructions in the entire city. Each room had either an open fireplace or a cast iron stove to burn wood & coal that were retrofitted to also use gas or oil in the 1930's as they wired in electricity throughout. There was a central live-flame boiler to feed both the potable hot water in the taps and the cast iron heaters spread in the corridors and less active zones of the house."

"The workshop and the barn were built at the same time as the manor, initially as tradesmen's shop and material storage shed respectively during the construction, then they were completed as the proprietor wished for his own uses. Because the landowner had planned to keep and use them for industrial purposes from the get go, they were built with the same techniques and materials as the main house, with updates to add electricity, convert the wood-burners to hybrids, add telephone cables then networking cables, etc... All were done along the passing years. This house was ancient but solid and reliable, without any pests or contaminations that could be found. It was MY dream home come true."

"Making Cynthia contact the Wise Manor Heritage & Trust in charge of maintenance and security for the house was a backbreaking chore that I helped along with liberal applications of threats and surreptitiously adding minute doses of diverse hand-crafted poisons to her food when she least expected it. Just enough to make her sick enough to be physically non-threatening against me but never that much that she couldn't work from home and stay useful to me."

The three lawyers were studiously quiet as they typed notes and organized files for the visual graph of the timeline of events that they would need to bring up in court. Right now though, they were all wondering how it was that their client was still allowed to walk the streets unfettered. His mind just didn't seem to be that nice a place to live in, truth be told. But then again, his life would have broken many experienced adults long before he reached 7 years old.

Secrets buried in the Mists of Time's Shadows

(Fredric Chopin – Funeral March)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 10:40am

Daleminton Hotel, room #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

(These are thoughts inside Lucas' mind; he will NOT tell the lawyers these.)

The Wise Manor & farmstead, seated at 3, Erie Canal Promenade.

Snort! - The place was so old that the only remaining stretch of that street is less than 50 feet long and the only legally active address on it was the Wise Estate. The 'Promenade' was just a miserable little bit of asphalt that linked the manor grounds with Mineral Spring road out of the domain's south wall, which was useless as the edifices were all built along the north boundary near the river's shoreline for easy access to the canal as it was the family's principal method of travel and commercial delivery back in 1870. In fact, the Erie Canal Promenade had never been more than a packed-dirt street until the early 1920's during the Great Depression when the city's mayor tried to create public works projects to employ the hordes of miserable unemployed men starving in the streets. Then the city's urban planning changed radically in the 1940's with WW II demanding a lot of new manufactures, railyards and the streets were getting moved and paved almost every month.

That forlorn plot of untended land with its decrepit unused structures had offered Lucas many advantages, including a physical link to his long lost ancestry on all sides of his forsaken bloodline, as it had been forgotten and abandoned by his immediate parents. But it was his discoveries of what was hidden inside the walls, basements and buried deep in the land besides the official buildings that made the entire place worth all the efforts he gave it since finding out about its existence.

The huge manor had been built in 1870 using a solid-stack floor-plan resembling the Old French Houses of the 1400's and 1500's with some clear 1800's Steam-Age touches like the all-brick construction topped by gray tiled roofing, multiple long thick chimneys wrapped in covered spiral staircases, wrought iron bannisters on all balconies and steel-plate storm shutters at all windows and doors. However, the defining element was that like the houses of Old Europe in those Late-Feudal epochs, the enclosed rooms were not laid against the outer walls with windows looking outside; instead, all bedrooms, offices, studies and bathrooms were in the middle of the floor back-to-back in a straight line with a coursive-type corridor between the exterior wall and the internal wall with the doors to the rooms. This was an ancient manner of building an edifice defensively so that people could sleep at peace without fear of spies, explosives or poison devices being thrown into the rooms at night. It also served to move people safely around each level as there were always two paths around each floor to move defenders or escaping family. The manor's windows were bowed outwards to form bays with boxseats thus creating firing alcoves to lodge defensive gunners in case of a siege by enemies of the family.

And yes, THAT architectural detail was voluntary, for just that particular usage, too.

Just like the secret 'maintenance' passages that riddled each level in that central structural block between all the enclosed rooms. Officially it was to access the plumbing and electrical wires instead of demolishing the walls but the 10 foot width and full height of the passages along with their separate enclosed stairs, secret elevators, built-in hot-water heating, lighting with both gas and electricity, as well as two full bathrooms hidden on each floor, accessible only from the tunnels themselves, showed a very careful, very deliberate planning. Someone had wanted these corridors to be used more frequently than by just the occasional maintenance worker.

The same could be thought for the fact all three main buildings had 3 basement levels; 2 that were publicly known and the deepest 3rd sub-floor could be accessed only through secret staircases hidden in the floor of the second basement's secret passages. All three main structures had been built with a 10 foot wide tunnel linking them at each level of the basements so that operations could me maintained despite the harshest Lake Erie winter squalls sweeping across the the townships. Other households and industries would be crippled but this domain would not stop working or supporting its owners for any thing at any time.

On a more personal, emotional level, Lucas thought that the secret, heavily reinforced underground bunker was a treasure trove in itself. It had been built in 1940 by Doctor Franklin Henry Wise, at the very beginning of the Second World War, when it was rumored that Germany had biological weapons and the capacity to smuggle them into the USA. This austere, learned man was one of his family's ancestors as he was the grand-son of the man who built the manor. The builder of the House had two sisters; each sister married into what would later become the bloodlines of Holtzenstein and Wolenczak in the early 1900's whilst his son continued carrying the paternal moniker which he transferred to his only son and grand-children thereafter. Several years passed and in the mid 1970's, the two daughters of F.H. Wise marry with Harkady Holtzenstein and Londberg Wolenczak thus partially reuniting the bloodlines. This was later further completed in 1997 when the only living children of each line married, bringing back all of the Wise bloodline under one single roof and inside a single person.

Lucas was that reincarnation of the family's original genetics and history.

Cosanguine, inbred little bastard that he was, no matter that his parents had been married legally.

The original builders of the house had been well-to-do apothecaries, chemists and surgeons, jewish people whose grand-parents had fled the larvated racism and silent discrimination that was rampant in Europe throughout the centuries. They came to America in 1807 but witnessed by newspapers, then cinematic newsreels, and then radio broadcasts, the horrendous wars and atrocities in Europe that wiped out the few last living relatives they had in the Old Countries. So, in 1940, it was the fifth generation of the family to own the land, led by Franklin H. Wise, that saw the developments in Europe as sign the german & russian pogroms could come to their doorstep in their lifetime. Hence, they contracted the best architects and engineers they could find, which happened to be military men; handicapped survivors of WWI or WWII's first throes that were peddling what they knew best: fortified concrete and shielded decentralized infrastructures.

Therefore they built this massive, superb bunker of 600 x 600 feet on a height of 3 storeys with 10 feet thick armored cement outer walls. They built using battleship-grade steel girders and plates for the base structure, leftovers from the many damaged vessels of WW I that were brought back to the USA for scrapping and recycling as a way to finance the country's war costs. The process was actually to dig a giant 100 feet deep hole then lay a concrete foundation pad of 10 feet thick then build on top; the hole would be filled up when all had been constructed to specs. The owners had asked for tunnels that joined the bunker with two secret entries in the 3rd basement of each surface building plus a seperate boat-dock tunnel that reached the Erie canal / Buffalo River for a small 20' motorboat to leave in secret and four distinct escape connections with Buffalo city's brick sewage tunnels that had been built in the early 1900's. The escape tunnels started in the bunker's lowest level as they had to pass under both the property's wet moat and the public waterway itself to reach the new sewage tunnels built in the new urban developments on the opposing shores of the river.

The teenager would NEVER SAY to anybody alive WHAT he found in that house's secret passages and especially not what was buried in the bunker. It was his escape plan, his bolthole, if everything went pear-shaped as it usually did in his life. Not even his other lawyers in Buffalo or San Francisco had ever been made aware and these three certainly wouldn't know about it.

Controlling information and perspectives

(Two Steps From Hell – Fearless)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 10:40am

Daleminton Hotel, room #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

Blinking his eyes slowly as he brought himself out of his thoughts, Lucas spoke aloud again: "I was in love with that old, dingy, decrepit manor house the moment I saw it." the boy spoke with rare emotion, the one genuine display the lawyers had seen this morning. "I had known about the place since infancy as my grand-parents had taken me to see the land and visit the house. What Cynthia didn't know, and wouldn't have cared about, was that it actually was the ancestral domain of both her's and Lawrence's families. The reason neither of us were in line to inherit anything was that my great-grand-father Franklin Wise created the Trust to manage things until one of his descendants had enough education and business success like him and his parents before him to purchase the property back from the Trust. The angry, austere, spartan old man didn't want anybody to have any sort of easy go at life; if you wanted his old home, you'd have to strain, force and bleed for it, like he had to."

It's because I had visited the house several times before I was 3 years old and I now owned it that I had decided which studies I wanted to do for that year: a bachelor's degree in 'Laboratory Techniques, Equipments and IT management for Health Sciences'. Since the property had some acreage of well maintained medicinal herbs and the barn was full of transformation machinery, it was child's play to set the production line back to rights and have it churning out the traditional recipes again. By the middle of the year in July, I had a massive clean home with household staff and an actually functional business generating revenue to pay for it all, with almost no efforts besides the damned flow of paperwork."

"So, by December 2015 at my 10th birthday, I had hung another bachelor's degree to my list of accomplishments and was enjoying the winter holidays in my Master Study, in my large, plush urban manor when Untold Evil came knocking to my door on the 29th. Lawrence was in town and had just spent three days secretly negotiating a sweet deal with Cynthia to take my legal custody off her hands. The miserable fucking bastard busted down my door, storming in escorted by a pair of his favorite low-born cock-shakers as mercenaries to scare me into immediate submissiveness to his will."

The teen made a nasty smile that showed all teeth when he glared at the lawyers as if they were enemies as well. "The first criminal rushed at me, hoping to get to me faster than I could launch my acid spray at his head to maim him out of the fight. Idiot redneck mick! I was young but I knew that if you don't change your patterns, you get scoped and somebody will eventually bypass that pattern and reach you to hurt you bad. I didn't attack with acid; I threw a small metallic cylinder the size of a small pen that spread a four feet wide cloud of gaseous contact poison. My very own, private recipe of a paralytic chemical that I had manufactured with the antique medical equipments in the House as well as extra chemistry tools in the workshop and medicine processing barn. Lawrence's minion #1 dropped to the floor, soon followed by minion #2 who was rushing in behind his partner and got a faceful of gas just the same."

"Seeing Lawrence stand there flabbergasted, eyes wide in fear and shaking in suppressed rage all the same was a real rush for me. I let the gas disperse than grabbed the cast iron fireplace poker and charged the damned bastard before he recovered his mental means. I even got in a couple of good whacks at his chest and left arm before he got in the game for real and started fighting back. We hurt each other pretty bad, that time, but the counter-fucked retard didn't get anywhere near as lucky and dominative over me as he had hoped to be. He came to my land dreaming of glorious conquest and injuring me bad enough that I would be handicapped for life; bound to a life-support wheelchair and as useless as he always accused me of being since birth."

A nasty, enraged snort of contempt emitted from the child as his face adopted a rictus of such soul-deep visceral anger that two of the lawyers began to worry about his mindset whilst the criminologist could only marvel at the fact the young male was still more-than-marginally functional to this date.

"That was my New Years' Gift from daddy dearest; he had obtained final legal custody AND DISPOSITION of my person from Cynthia who had gone so far as to disown and renege me for all times. After my household staff - loyal only to me - separated us and gave basic care to my wounds until I could reach a hospital, NOT Lawrence's or his minions, we sat down in the Master Study and came to an understanding. Since I got basic care while he was still bleeding, holding a broken arm and busted ribs as much as me but without the pain pills and bandages, Lawwy-dearie was quite in a hurry to speak up, negotiate and then leave to reach medical care ASAP. He knew damn well I wouldn't give him any help nor let my employees waste resources on him. As he tried to shake his great and mighty manhood in my face, I got fed up with his bullshit and took up the fireplace poker again. Right in front of him, with my staff watching almost eagerly I could say, I clobbered to death the two paralyzed mercenaries he had brought to do me harm. I sat back in my large plush wingback chair and laid down the laws for our relationship for the rest of the time until I turned 18 or became emancipated."

"Being very much afraid at that time and in a hurry to get medical treatment, Lawrence accepted everything and even signed on it right then and there as all the documents had been prepared in advance by my own lawyers from the Wise Manor Heritage & Trust. As for 'how' I knew about Lawrence and his visit in time to have the lawyers draw up the papers and prepare my inscription at Stanford in the Young Prodigies Program at the same time? Well, I had used all I had learned in my telephony & networking studies to hack then overwatch the offices and multiple homes of Cynthia along several of her favorite contacts in the criminal underbelly of Buffalo and New York. The moment she began speaking with her ex-husband about taking my custody in October, I was aware and began to prepare accordingly."

The blond-haired boy turned merciless hard eyes on the three lawyers seated at his table. The three adults tried to hide the shiver of fright that slithered down their backs as he contemplated their uses in his life and whether they knew too much already. Making a moue of distaste at the fact he was so exposed to so many strangers, the adolescent turned back to sipping some of his sugary coffee before continuing with his story.

"That little confrontation had put me through the ringer and I walked away with several broken bones, contused internal organs and two different concussions but I had won the fight for the time being. I went to the same clinic of that doctor that had initially fixed my hands and got some world-class treatment and pain management for everything Lawrence had done. Ever since I had met him, that doctor had been a very good friend and my multiple, periodic injuries kept him interested in me just enough that he always opened the door and afforded me the best of care. Defective bastard. Anyways, as per MY planned schedule, I waited until passed the turn of the year to get a private plane chartered by daddy dearest to take me to Stanford. He really didn't want anybody asking out loud WHY I was in such a state of injury so he very nicely paid for a Lear Jet to take me, my equipment and personnel from Buffalo to San Francisco where we got stashed in a 5 star hotel for 3 days until the Young Prodigies' rep came to fetch me."

Nourishing interlude

(SeaQuest – season 1 theme)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 11:00am - Brunch

Daleminton Hotel, room #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

Lucas looked at the hour on his portable workstation that was still wired to the center of the table. Seeing the time, he stood to go open the door for the service cart bringing their food. Just as he was reaching the entry to the suite, the soft tone and Alexa's voice indicating a person asking to enter sounded across the apartment. Giving a brief gaze at the monitor besides the door, the boy opened and guided the server to push the cart on the side of the kitchen where the ovens were as they would not be needed for the day. The young employee smiled pleasantly at his younger client, but stayed silent as he unspooled and connected the cart's electrical cord to the wall outlet to keep the cart's tempered compartments at proper settings. With this done, the server pushed a few buttons to activate some small LED's around the cart to make seeing inside the food platters or the internal boxes easier.

Lucas handed the server a 10$ tip as he left then closed tightly the door after him. Gesturing to the lawyers, he invited them to set their notes and electronics aside for the break. The young man set his cane against the side of the cart to pick up a plate to serve himself a warm meal to have some fuel to work on; the telling of his later years of life would not be any easier than his childhood had been.

The teenager took something easy to digest for his first course; some toasted bread slices, hash brown potatoes, a pair of sunny-side up eggs, bacon slices, a small bowl of baked beans and some thin slices of watermelon.

The lawyers were not foreign to high class hotels as Vancouver had it's share of them but the idea of a buffet cart served directly in the room was a new bit of luxury for even them. All three adults took similar plates of toast, eggs, potatoes, meats, waffles, muffins, fruits or beans to their tastes.

All four persons were concentrated on their plates and drinks for the following half-hour until they went for a second course to fill the last little cravings with either a bit more meat or something sweet with maybe some cheese and fruits to nibble on as the conversation would slowly start up again.

Lucas was now sitting with a plate holding a small rolled crepe filled with apple and pear slices drizzled in caramel, with more potatoes, a sausage and some cheese, with his third mugfull of coffee of the day. Leaning back into the backrest of his chair, the adolescent watched the slow, careful movements of the adults who were finishing their meals in utter silence as if any stray sounds they made might trigger an episode of murderous rage from their 'special' client. Huffing in amusement at the fact his meagre self could induce such fear in grown adults, Lucas decided to direct his attention to his food and wait until his guests had finished their plates before suggesting they could start up again.

After sufficient time to finish their food and let everyone use the washroom, the lawyers got their writing kits back in proper working order to continue debriefing their client on his life and what he needed from them.

Back in the saddle

(Two Steps From Hell – Ironheart)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 12:15pm - noon

Daleminton Hotel, room #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

With the table cleaned back to working configuration, everybody resumed their chairs, primed their recording devices and were ready to give it another go.

The rich, self sufficient adolescent who had so many deleterious secrets hidden in his closet seemed perfectly at ease waiting for the older folk to be set. From the outside, he seemed indolent, restive and unworried about all events around the room. It couldn't be further from the truth. Internally, he was running simulations and computing what the chances were that these so called 'lawmen' would turn against him and sell out his secrets or even give public testimony about his being completely, irreparably bonkers beyond all capacity of society to tolerate.

The fact they were more right than wrong about THAT was unimportant in the Order of Things.

"Okay, now we get to Stanford and it's much falsely vaunted 'Young Prodigies Program' that everybody loves to hear about. Creating the little geniuses that are the bright shining hopeful future of America, the Great and Exceptional. - Behrk! - There's nothing bright, shining or hopeful about that bunch of smarmy egotistical bastards, I can tell you that! Most are juvenile delinquents looking for a quick fix or else are so cowed by the impossible demands of angry, psychologically abusive parents that they often fall to depression and the cheap vices that are sooo easy to get amongst the university crowds. Other kids just give up and follow mindlessly until they reach age 18 then leave, never be found again."

"For my part, I experienced most of the very worst sides and activities associated with these so-called 'prodigies in-the-making' and it's nothing like the brochures and recruiters tell you. A lot of these little miscreants live off their parent's money and indulgences like leeches, sucking out the juices and liveliness of others no matter the consequences to those persons. A lot tend to plagiarize ideas shamelessly or even steal objects under the pretense 'it's due to them' or that they will 'have a better, more scientific usage for the item' than you. All self-serving, childish, immature crap to justify thievery and mental laziness; nothing more than that."

"Anyways, I came to Silicon Valley badly injured and couldn't start up with the average kids in the program right away. I had to heal, then have some physiotherapy for my broken arm and leg and some medications to fight off infections from the operations needed to reset the bones and take out the free-moving shards lest they nick veins. The solution was both brilliant and basal at the same time. Stanford University is a massive campus, big enough to be recognized as a small town if it wanted to; as such they have their own private hospital to handle the problems that occur with the staff, their families and the students. It also serves as the teaching facility for the medical faculty so I was able to meet and work with a lot of my future teachers and student-colleagues. I rented a private single-bed room in that hospital and tutors from the Prodigies' Program came to visit me to establish the paperwork, create my customized study plan, set the class schedules for the year, etc... Given my precarious situation, I decided on a path that surprised many at the time."

"I spent about four months in that hospital before moving into the actual Prodigies' dormitory setup and used that time to get into medicine related classes to better understand the human body in general and how to heal myself when injured. I pursued a Paramedic license (grade 1), a traumatology nurse licence (grade 1) and received a certificate for hospital orderly training. These three combined together allowed me to ask for and obtain in December 2015 an 'attestation of pre-med studies' instead of wasting a whole year going through what is essentially a high school seventh year focussing on biology, chemistry and human health."

The lawyers were sifting through the paper files to find and annex the hard copies of the licenses and certificates mentioned so they had those in proper order for the court presentation. Ms Delray knew that from an immigration standpoint, all money aside, any trained medical practitioner with his diplomas in hand would get fast-tracked through processing as the country lacked enough qualified personnel to care for all the elderly and indigents they had. Not to mention the sorts of fundamental research the boy was going into; neurology, neurochemistry, neurosurgery and others with the aim to find cures to dementia, senility, Alzheimer's, traumatic comas... Yes, she could see how the Canadian Government would want to rapidly decide this case and gamble on his becoming a quiet, helpful citizen once he was removed from the deleterious influences of his birth parents and their mercenaries.

After five minutes of paper pushing, Lucas spoke up again. "For the year 2016, I studied my way through my first Mastery degree 'Mechanical & Cybernetics engineering for public utilities services' that I accomplished inside of the year. I again out-performed adult students who normally need at least two years to power through the studies and class work. That was my first post-graduate diploma and I was rightly proud of it. The other 'prodigies' were put off by my capacities and that caused the emergence of childish snobbery on their part against me. They had also started hearing about my electronics company that built small IT systems and devices custom-built for dedicated uses. That in itself started up the trend of the more bullish boys trying to mooch cash or items off me on the pretense that 'I could afford it' or that 'I owed passage & protection fees' to them for being in their house. I NEVER mentioned the Wise Manor Heritage & Trust and its associated companies in public, except the Stanford recruiter and he was bound by a Non-Disclosure clause in the contract. The only corporate activity of mine the kids and tutors ever heard of was the Wolenbahn Electronics Inc, especially once I rented the first office spaces in Stanford Campus to set up my local division to start serving customers in the university labs and companies around the university's township."

In 2017, I studied through the Mastery degree 'chemical/biochemical engineering & molecular design' that was the real prelude to my life's work; the neural interface and its afferent neuroplexic programming. After giving so much time to mechanics, electronics and technology at large, I needed to start focusing on my long term goal: improving the minds and living conditions of those patients suffering from dementia, senility, Alzheimer's or fallen into traumatic coma. A set of classes focused on the design, creation and analysis of new medical chemicals and bio-agents was exactly what I needed at that point of my studies. Not to mention that the 'pure mathematics' implicated throughout the entire class-load was mentally stimulating and a nice challenge compared to running cables or welding circuitboards for Internex consoles. The fun part of that diploma was how we learned to create diverse types of chemicals then put them in 3D and 4D printers to create bio-absorptive implants to both cure an infection & keep the body parts aligned whilst the healing process occurs. This idea was incredibly useful for dealing with shattered or fragmented bones like I had suffered a few times during my life."

In the year 2018, I studied through the only doctoral degree that I ever worked for. I chose to honor my ancestors, Franklin H. Wise and forebears, by going for the Medical Doctorate degree 'Theoretical & Developmental Pharmacology & Chemotherapy'. This allowed me to study basal chemistry up close, get better laboratory techniques, and learn how to diagnose patients through biological samples to see if the medications prescribed were effective or had adverse effects. I learned how to create from scratch or re-compound several medications into one while altering the taste, texture and odor to make it more user friendly."

"I wrote my doctoral thesis on the subject of '4D-printed cortical implants as pharmacological vehicles for palliating disease-induced cerebral dysfunctions' in which I made a very clear demonstration that implants of certain shapes could deliver medications directly into the affected areas to help alleviate not only the symptoms but the very causes of certain mental illnesses. Furthermore, my newly created type of implant utilizes '4D-printing' which means that you print it out as a straight filament but the moment it touches a substance it is programmed for, like the grey matter in the brain, it reacts and starts to change shape until all the molecules are rearranged into the desired final form. This means that the surgical application of the implant could now be done via needle & catheter instead of craniotomy. Also, since the implant is built from the medication itself, it is slowly consumed by the body as the diseased area is cured thusly closing the surgical tunnel created by the needle during the insertion. This means total physiological repair and no solid metal or plastic device left in the patient after the treatment has run its course. The possible applications foreseen are limitless."

The three lawyers were giving the boy the gimlet eye; just HOW the hells did a kid at THAT age come up with those sorts of research subjects, let alone have the brains to accomplish it successfully?

"Now, that diploma is LEGALLY VALID across the USA, Canada and most of Europe" Lucas continued with visible pride, "BUT I would need to take the Pharmacist Board's examinations in order to have the legal right to practice pharmacy with the open public like, let's say, Walgreen's. As it stands, my diploma allows me the right to be called 'doctor', 'pharmacologist' or even append the letters 'DP' to my name and work in a clinical context like a research lab; just not in direct contact with patients like your local pharmacist."

The teenager snorted in sarcastic amusement at the idiocy of adults the world over. "This ain't another episode of 'Doogie Howser MD', folks. I can't legally pass the pharmacist's exams anywhere on the planet as the countries where I would want to practice with patient-contact all mandate a minimal age of 21 to allow you into the testing program because practically all the public pharmacies operate under territorial laws specifying their workers must be 21 years old. They ask for that age to manipulate the chemicals and legally prescribe drugs because alcohol, tobacco and firearm laws are usually all based on that age too. Therefore, just because of my age, a large sub-class of medics and health sciences professionals refuse to call me 'doctor' since I don't have the actual licenses in hand yet, despite the fact that I can legally own the company, the chemicals, do the tests and then sell the compounds anyways, so long as all the laboratory permits are paid. All the hoopla is just transparent ageist bigotry aimed at forcing a very young person that doesn't have the experiences and stubbornness that I have to go and make a bad deal with an older, licensed pharmacist if they really want to work in direct-to-patient service. I dont; I want to be in my lab, creating chemicals and devices that will then be sold to hospitals who are the ones in charge of usage. As such, the standard 'pharmacology' diploma and its usual laws, licenses and permits suits me just fine."

Mister Tah raised a finger and stipulated "You can ask to be addressed as 'doctor' as long as you work in a closed clinical or research setting BUT never have contact with patients or anybody other than the health professionals who pass orders for specific chemical preparations? Is that the lay of the situation? That seems more than a bit hypocritical to me. I gather this is the influence of the syndicates and professional orders coming to play."

Mister Aylmer countered that blithely "It's more like a driver's license: you can pass the classes and get the diploma but the 'privilege' of driving on public roads must be earned through a process of government mandated testing and licenses per vehicle classes. The same government can punitively remove your license but can't take the diploma away nor erase the knowledge from your head. It's the same with medicine in many cases. There are plenty of migrants who come to Canada with diplomas from their home countries but are unable to practice here because they don't pass the exams to get the legal licenses required. And I wouldn't be surprised to see we have a minimal mandated age for medical licenses too, just like Europe and the USA probably have."

Have a rotten New Year 2018

(Fredric Chopin – Funeral March)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 13:45pm

Daleminton Hotel, room #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

The teenager snorted in anger and told the adults "It's that year, on 27th December 2018 just days after my birthday, that I was ambushed and almost raped in my bedroom at the brownstone in Stanford. You have the exhaustive collection of police reports, medical reports, affidavits and court hearings' files. I don't want to be rehashing the judicial minutiae of the investigation today but we need to go through at least the basics so you can understand what Lawrence is all about. Then we are going to power throught the rest of this damnable life of mine and eventually talk about the real threats coming at me as we speak."

Seeing no signs of contestation on the adults' faces, the boy continued immediately. "As you were told in the court files and DCFS reports, after my attack I escaped with little superficial injuries until Lawrence got his hands on me. Normally, the sick bastard wouldn't have been able to get near me, but this time he got sneaky to achieve his goal. He told the police officers at the Stanford station where I was called in to give my formal deposition that I had an 'anxiety disorder' making me panic easily so they should put a 'mild' sedative in whatever drink or food they would offer me to make me calm down and cooperate civilly. Most of the cops refused to drug me without telling me in advance, but one accepted a discrete bribe and passed me a poisoned coffee. That spiked drink made me groggy enough to answer questions intelligently but with little emotion and almost no self-preservation instincts. It was this period of reduced mental capacities and awareness that Lawrence exploited to get me out of police custody and into a hotel just on the border of Stanford campus. Once in the 5-star room, he began to beat me with abandon, breaking many ribs, dislocating an arm and severely damaging both legs, especially in the thighs and knees."

The teenager waited for a few minutes while the adults flipped sheets of paper in the official reports to confirm the timeline and explanations given by the young man. After getting the signal from all three lawyers, the boy continued his story. "Now, during the car trip from the police station to the hotel, I had been groggy but aware of events. Lawrence was in the front alone, driving the rental, and I was alone in the backseat. I faked being more out of sorts than I really was, so I managed to take out and dry swallow a general antidote pill against date-rape drugs to try and counteract the extra sedative that I had realized I had been poisoned with. Taking that broad-spectrum anti-poison helped clear my senses but my physical reflexes were still sluggish, slowed down and a lot weaker, less strength even in fine hand movements."

Eyes vacant, looking ahead of himself but seeing only the painful, miserable events of his past, the teenager spoke in a low, monotone voice that carried little of what he actually felt inside. The lawyers wondered if he was too disconnected from those passed events, too self-controlled as a matter of course or too emotionally damaged (as in 'rendered insane') by all the suffering and degradation in his young life to fully feel normal human emotions anymore. After several breaths of silent contemplation, the youth spoke again.

"Once in the hotel room, Lawrence started by ranting at me all his blames and accusations; all the weaknesses and failings of his personality and life, he tried to place them on me. Then, like a switch flipped in his head, he literally jumped at me over the low coffee table and dumped all his dead weight on me, knee leading right into my gut. We fell and tumbled around on the floor, knocking about furniture, punching, kicking, screaming and all at each other. My abdomen was ablaze with pain but my survival instincts finally kicked in. I grabbed a small decorative item that fell to the floor and whacked him in the face repeatedly, near an eye, until it was him that pulled away in panic at the fear of getting blinded. He jerked away, scrambling back on all fours then got to his feet. That was when he got a good stride and kicked me right in the face, then the stomach, then the neck, then the gut again, and he started kicking me all over the torso and legs until I ended up screaming in pain and shame louder than him. That was the moment he grabbed a fallen, broken lamp to rip off the electric cord to wield it as a whip against me. He came to my prone, agonizing form and ripped off my flannel shirt and T-shirt, then beat me with that wire-whip until my torso and arms were ripped and shredded, and the furnishings and us both were all covered in blood spatter."

"At that point I achieved finally a higher level of wakefulness and physical reactivity because of the adrenaline and endorphin released during the fight. I managed to pull an acid-burst capsule out of a hidden slot in the waistband of my jeans and throw somewhere towards Lawrence. It blew out in a four feet wide cloud that immediately began to eat through his clothes and skin, disfiguring him so badly in just a few seconds that he panicked beyond control or reason. He ripped off most of his clothes then grabbed the shreds of my shirts to try and rub the acid mist off his skin in attempt to save his face, especially his eyes and mouth. As soon as he was done in his vain attempt to wash off the acid, he grabbed at my hair to pull me off the floor but backed away immediately when he saw I had another capsule in hand ready to throw. Instead he raged at his impotence against my defenses, against my will to survive and be free of his depraved violence. He took a run at the entry door of the suite which he yanked open and yelled at me like a madman to get out and never come back to him. He was casting me out of the family, reneging me as his son and cursing me to live alone and unwanted as I deserved. I had to find a way to get off the floor by levering myself against the furniture, then lean on said furnishings to make my way to the door on two badly injured legs that had multiple breaks and shatters in them and somehow, on raw adrenaline alone, make it out to that corridor alive. As soon as I raised my hand with the capsule of acid, he screamed in fury and ran the other way, to hide inside the bedroom with the door locked to keep me from following."

"The moment the gormless bastard was out of sight, I crumbled to the floor in unspeakable pain but I couldn't just stay there, vulnerable to another attack. I had to leave the suite by crawling on my belly like a damned worm, the dead-weight of my destroyed legs trailing agonizingly behind me, into the corridor to try knocking on the doors of the other suites until somebody answered my pleas for help. Finally, as a kind couple of parents in town to visit their kids for the holidays answered their door, Lawrence ran out of his suite in full flight mode, suitcase and briefcase in hand. The counter-fucked spawn of a gutter-stain even had the inhumanity to give me one last kick in the hip on his way to the elevators and the rental car in the parking lot. The two adults I had been talking to were appalled but too slow to react so the criminal escaped back to his besancted WPP, out of US jurisdiction again."

"The adults called 911 on a cellphone and the hotel security on the internal lines at the same time, all the while trying to dispense what little help they knew how. It took mere minutes for the security to arrive, the cops on their heels and paramedics last. The worse of it all was that I was completely conscious and aware, responding to the medics and cops for the entire ambulance ride all the way until they put me on a dialysis machine to cleanse my bloodstream of contaminants. If they didn't do a system-wide purge, they couldn't properly sedate me to operate on my legs to take out the free-moving bone shards or repair the two knee joints which meant that I could either lose the legs entirely from internal damages, infection or even get a blood clot. So, they put me on dialysis while taking X-rays with a portable machine, and doing the basics with me awake and no sedation. What fun times those were!"

The boy stood up slowly and gazed angrily at the people supposed to be on his side of things. He didn't trust them yet, and certainly didn't like them after just a few short hours, but he had little choice if he wanted them convinced to help fully. Reaching behind his back, the teen flicked a few buttons on the recorder in the hidden pocket to set it on WiFi before undoing the wires and pulling off the turtleneck shirt to show them his torso and arms.

The three adults couldn't believe their eyes at the sight of so many interlaced scars weaving across and through each other. The child's skin was scored liked the multi-level reliefs on a church vault or the gold filigree on a High Lady's wedding necklace. They could see the base layer of skin with raised scarring and deep furrows dug through the epidermis that never healed properly so they formed vales and canyons across his chest, back, flanks and all over the arms. There was at least 45% of his upper body marred permanently by whipping scars and injuries that would never heal on their own. The boy would need extensive plastic surgeries between ages 20 and 25 to attenuate the worse damages but the chances of complete removal were nil. There would be scars and traces of this traumatic assault on his health and dignity for the rest of his existence. Unless he spent a few million dollars on total epidermal grafts like those horribly burned by fire and acid sometimes could afford. This boy certainly had the money and medical resources at hand. Maybe, if he lived long enough, he could exercise that option.

"I won't lower my jeans unless you specifically need to see for yourselves." Lucas warned them. "I have a lot of injury scars and surgical scars on both thighs and knees. They had to pull out bone shards and fill-in the holes with a bio-ceramic aggregate of my own invention to rebuild my bones. Even then, it wasn't solid enough to allow for standing or moving upright so they had to implant thermoplastic slats and rods chemically glued into grooves they routered along the outsides of the long bones to inlay the plastic and cover it with aggregate to cement everything in place permanently."

The young man waited for the lawyers to finish looking at his chest then at the medical photos and scans of his legs, knees and pelvic bone arches before continuing the gory details.

"At least, the implants that my workshops custom-crafted for me are non-metallic and therefore non-magnetic. They won't make sensors scream or get charged electrically in the wrong conditions. They have less expansion and contraction in temperature changes as well. But the best thing about them is that they were crafted using the 4D chemistry that I devised so they will slowly be decomposed and absorbed by my body as the bones are repaired by the cells. That means that in about 6 years, the implants and the voids created to house them will have vanished, leaving me whole again."

Since the lawyers had no rational way to answer the situation, they silently went back to notating the files, ordered them, then took a short break to refill coffee and get some dry cookies to help settle the sudden flux of acid and bile they experienced. The teenager pulled his shirt back on and reconnected the wires of his devices. Once ready, he sat in quiet observation of the adults' movements in dreary, moribund silence until they were all seated and ready to pursue hearing his miserable lifestory again.

"It is rather obvious that I had to again spend a lot of time in the Stanford University Hospital and I even got lucky enough to rent the exact same room as four years before. I was well known and well liked by the Faculty of Medicine as well as those in Pharmacology, Biology, Health sciences and several technical domains. Getting them, for a reasonable surcharge that I billed to Lawrence after adding my medical bills, admin fees and even a 50% profit margin, to again work with selected tutors on a customized January to December schedule as I had done forall my life. That was my key to success, you see. I always studied at home or office and only attended laboratories to hand projects or publically present my results like the other students did, plus the exams, although even those were a bit specially-made too. Because I didn't need to move around so much and could work at my own speed, I was free to indulge my workaholic nature and do 12 to 16 hour days all week and not be bothered for it by anyone."

"During that hospitalization that lasted from December 2018 to March 2019, I moved around in a motorized wheelchair that I customized along the way. I did my studying, coursework and company business out of my private hospital room and the staff were very helpful with it, just like the first time in 2014. Also, just like at age 10, I used my time in hospital and the 11 months of physiotherapy afterwards to get my paramedic license up to grade-2 by December 2019 since I was living inside the teaching clinic anyways. It made for a nice little side-project to my main studies for the year. Then in April of 2019, the imbeciles at Stanford Administration decided to make a grand token gesture to thank me for not suing them into debt by giving me the much lauded Doctorate (PhD) Honoris Causae; 'History of the laws and culture of medicine in North America'. Yeeeppp folks! I got me a second doctorate degree just because I'm such a nice guy! - SNORT!"

Mr Tah mentioned rather blithely "That does sound like a useless bone they threw you to make you happy and 'silent' about any problems their 'Young Prodigies' students might be experiencing. It's not like that particular diploma gave you a license or permit into a restricted field. It could get you a teaching job in history, law or medical history at collegiate level, though, which is a nice fall-back to have in case you did develop permanent handicaps. And I'm sure they would have made several efforts to accommodate your mobility and necessities to not lose you as a student or R&D partner. Just your very superficial expose of your doctoral thesis has proven this to me. I do not see the Stanford admins making efforts to kick you out, much to the contrary. The are most certainly quite cross to have lost you so unprovokedly."

The other two lawyers were quiet as they finished typing their notes and appended them to the already impressive collections they each had gathered this morning. Lucas focussed on the asian man, answering "That is why I haven't terminated my contracts with them for R&D or using their students and teachers in Wolenbahn's production workshops. The relationship with Stanford will continue as long as it's profitable and can run on automatic through the lawyers and my company's admins."

"Speaking of which, it was during the initial phase of the medical treatments in January 2019 that I decided to find different offices, big enough to serve as a permanent apartment to live in, do my corporate affairs, studies, class projects and receive my tutors civilly as well. It so happened that during negotiations with The World Bank in early February, for a Web Tier-2 cyber-security contract worth barely 11 millions, that they told me about their secured HQ in San Francisco and further investigations revealed it to be exactly the ideal solution to my needs. So, in March 2019, I signed the rent for 10 years, ordered renovations and upgrades, ordered some new custom furniture designed to help my recovery and autonomy post-care, and kept up with my ongoing classes, projects and businesses."

"So now," Lucas grumped, "We come to the year 2019's main work whence I studied for the Mastery degree 'applied technologies of biomedical engineering' which I managed to cram into a single year like every other study program that I undertook. Home tutoring is suuuch a damned fine thing, especially with mail-in tests and courier-delivered projects! Now that I lived isolated in the World Bank's well secured office building in San Francisco, away from the juvenile criminals, I could work all day and all night without any fears of having trouble knock down my door, catching me alone and unaware while injured and practically immobile to boot. As such, I could maintain my intense studies on one hand while working the complex programs needed by my high-paying clients on the other."

"We now come to the close of Stanford and my moving here. In 2020, I studied for the Mastery degree 'Applied Sciences of Neurology, Neurochemistry and Neurosurgery' and deposited my end of studies project and thesis in front of a packed auditorium. The neural interface, the psychotronic computer and the neuroplexic programming needed to run all the connections between machines and living patient. When I demonstrated publicly my capacity to interact with the mind of a comatose patient that his family had volunteered, the Stanford Board of Promotions put me up for a Doctorate (PhD) Honoris Causae in 'Psychiatric Cybernetology, Psychotronics & Neuroplexic Programming' with the actual medical practice licenses attached & legally active de facto. Needless to say that this decision caused several waves in the medical communities across North America and Europe due to several contesting my age, my lack of patient-care experience and the fact I was basically unknown, amongst other things."

Mister Tah commented: "This copy of the DHC; it's notarized by the Stanford Promotions Board, therefore it has validity anywhere that the University's diplomas have credence. Given it is Stanford, that means almost everywhere on Earth and its orbit. The opinions of a few malcontents will not deter from this in front of the courts or professional orders. Especially since what I hear are arguments based on ageist bigotry and protecting their own limited standing inside their professional orders. There should not be any problems in getting your educational and professional standings recognized by Immigration Canada nor the Ministries of Education or Medicine. The licenses and permits though, might still be subjected to age limitations, but maybe the provincial and federal governments could be open to negotiations to certify at least the basic rights for research not involving patient contact."

"I concur" Ms Delray added tersely. "Often enough in the sciences, there is controversy that the government ignores systematically because it is artificially manufactured by cults and preachers that seek powers to which they have no legal or moral rights. As such, the diverse committees in charge of validating diplomas from other nations have become quite adept at ferreting out such petty religious or political manipulations that are attempted against a fully educated doctor or scientist. Do not fret; we will present this in open court and have the pros line up to support you, no matter what some misguided individuals might try to stir up by themselves."

"It is now 15:00pm, or High Tea" said Mister Tah, with a glance at the clock. "Why don't we break for a few minutes to relax and use the washroom, sip some warm beverages and then reconvene towards 15:30pm? It would give all of us time to destress and be fresher for the next phase of discussions."

Elucubrations and plans

(Phil Lober – Alive)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 15:30pm – High Tea

Daleminton Hotel, room #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

Mister Tah frowned as he looked over the assembled people; each was sitting ramrod straight with both hands around their cup or mug, occasionally sipping from the hot drink of their choice. Small plates of solid food were at hand, taken from the still present buffet cart that, since electrified, had kept everything warm or cold at need. Having chosen the option of getting served in the suite was well thought, but opting for the cart had proven, despite the cost, a practical and economical solution given just how much time was saved by not having to go to and from the restaurant. This was also faster than ordering room service at each occasion one of them was a mite peckish.

Sighing in long suffering patience, the contract expert asked out loud a question that had been niggling at the back of his mind "Tell me, Doctor Wolenczak, what would you be doing if you weren't trying to obtain citizenship in Canada right now? What had been your plans, if you had stayed in Stanford?"

The adolescent was startled out of his serious contemplation on the usefulness of keeping both parents alive and healthy. It had occurred to him just now that he only need keep Cynthia alive enough to testify in court that she could handle her high-functioning very autonomous son without external assistance then they could make an arrangement to live separately. As long as her mind worked at 50 to 60% capacity and her right hand was dextrous enough to sign papers, she would make the lesser evil of two solutions he was faced with and DCFS would be bound by law to accept. The alternative being to eliminate both threats and try his luck with foster care, preferably a group home at his age. Given his massive personal fortune and multiple companies, he would certainly NOT accept any 'nominal legal guardian' since such a person could try to usurp his money, investments and sell off the companies for a quick cash-out that they would steal as well. Not to mention that a 'NLG' could be paid to pimp him off to the UEO Navy or imprison him in a Jesus-camp just like Lawrence was trying to do.

The solution was relatively obvious. And its not like he hadn't done it before, either. The problem was the same as always; Lucas had a better, more evolved sense of family loyalty and belonging than his parents. And, crazy as it sounded, the adolescent really did not want to massacre his own relatives like some cult guru going down the spiral of paranoid self-delusion and familial anihilation. The thought of becoming, devolving his soul and personality, the same way that worshipers of false gods and sects did made his stomach flood with acid enough to sicken him.

The question asked of him startled him out of his ruminations, but it was welcome, indeed.

Taking a sip of coffee and pushing away his empty plate and tableware, the boy gave the three lawyers a calm, probing look-over before answering softly. "I had essentially finished my studies. Those that were critical to my life's work, at any rate. My immediate plans were to pass the quietest winter holidays possible before registering for classes to complete a slow year that I would take as easy as I could to complete my recovery from the ongoing health problems. I was planning on getting a MBA – Mastery of Business Administration – which is basically a lot of book reading and exams, no projects, scaled models or laboratories, so... Easy workload to do at home with an occasional tutor just to check up on my progress. I would have taken a few days after my surgeries in January to visit my home in Buffalo, at Wise Manor, and maybe a layover in New York at the Ramshackle Manor later on, before coming back to San Francisco. I do have to check up on things in person every now and then, you know."

Mister Aylmer said in bland tones "Now that you have been forcibly displaced and changed countries, what are you planning?"

"I just want to be free and safe. If that can happen without hurting anybody, especially me, then so much the better. There are no long term plans at the moment, not until the surgeries in January are done and I have the results in hand. I have a short term plan to rent office space to install a division of Wolenbahn in Canada and prove I am a serious investor to the refugee commission to help along my candidacy evaluation, but not much else in sight."

Ms Delray gave a tight smile and contributed "Well, we will have to help you get some plans. The more long term strategies you have, the more seriously the immigration committee will take you and that can only help in the long run. Not to mention that having elaborate strategies for augmenting your business will neatly counteract any claims your father has made that your are incapable of handling yourself alone."

Enter the Phoenix Foundation

(MacGyver – main theme 2016)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 15:30pm

Stanford University Hospital; neurology department

Silicon Valley, California, USA

The nurse a the lobby's reception desk looked up from her console as she heard the light footsteps of a new arrival in front of her desk. The young man looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties, fair but lightly tanned skin, short blond hair, the most scintillating green eyes and cute dimples on his cheeks that reminded her of her nephew on his wedding day four years ago. Dressed nicely in khakis, brown checkered flannel shirt and solid brown leather shoes, the man smiled at her in a manner that seemed genuinely friendly.

"Hello ma'am. My name is Angus MacGyver, I work for 'The Phoenix Foundation for scientific development and understanding' in Los Angeles. My employers want to establish a professional meeting with one of your student-doctors in residence, a Doctor Lucas Wolenczak, who works in the psychiatric neurosurgery ward. Would he be available to meet me today or tomorrow?"

The nurse knew full well who the 'Doctor Wolenczak' in question was. Everybody on campus that worked in health sciences, chemistry and electronics knew about him and several of his companies that were hiring straight out of the classrooms based on the individuals' potential rather than diplomas and graduation. The young man's family problems were well known too around the hospital and administration offices, especially the last episode of violence from two years ago. Any questions about him from a newcomer to town was probably not good.

Smiling the universal bland expression of receptionists everywhere, the older woman answered "I am afraid that Doctor Wolenczak is unavailable at the moment. He had to leave town quite suddenly just a few days ago. He is supposed to contact us after the holidays. In January 2021. Can I take a message on your part to hold for him if he calls us? It is the only way to reach him at the moment."

The man blinked his eyes twice slowly as he absorbed the information he was given before asking in a gentle tone "Do you know where, to which city he went? Maybe our Foundation has a divisional office in the area to send the message directly."

Matching the male's gentle but vapid expression, the nurse replied "I am afraid that Doctor Wolenczak has left instructions not to hand out a forwarding address. He is attending to personal necessities therefore he asked Stanford to understand that he needs time to replenish himself before continuing with his most important research projects. We do expect to hear from him in early January at the latest. Can I do anything else for you, sir?"

Tapping the countertop lightly with his hands as he thought for a few seconds, MacGyver shook his head in the negative. "Nope. Thanks a lot, ma'am, I'll report to my employers and let the head office handle the contact protocols from there on. Have a nice day."

The mature woman watched curiously as the younger man walked from the lobby, going outside the building towards the parking lot. "Contact protocols?" she whispered to herself. That did not sound like the normal speech patterns of a company or medical representative. A soldier or government black-suit trying to be discrete maybe, but not just a tech company wanting to try a quick meet & greet to see how easy to con into a cheap contract the young medical researcher was. Those types of conmen she saw twice a month since she had started working here twenty-four years ago. She worked in a hospital in the best university of the entire north-american West Coast, in the department that dealt with mental illnesses, thus listening to people to discern their problems through garbled communications and crossed signals was her job. And right now, she smelled a rat. Taking the telephone on her desk, she conference-called her supervisor and the director of the Wolenbahn workshops located near campus. They needed to know about this and her doubts.

{ SQ } - { Sniffing around } - { SQ }

Walking slowly out to the sunlit parking lot, Angus watched his surroundings discretely to make sure he wasn't being followed or observed by a supposed bystander. Old US Army EOD squad training and memories from time serving in the Arabic territories with Jack had taught him to be weary of public places, especially with the list of enemies he had accrued over the years with Phoenix. And now, the bad memories, the souvenirs of things he had seen and done when he still carried a rifle were trying real hard to come out today. He paused by the water fountain to drink a sip and get his bearings.

Leaning against the fountain's cement pedestal with his hip, arms crossed over his chest, Mac thought about the receptionist's demeanor during the short five minutes of conversation. It didn't go well. She had been as unhelpful as a bank clerk repeating confidentiality laws,which was par for the course in hospitals as they had even more stringent laws about patient files. It seemed that the establishment took the privacy of its faculty and students even more seriously than he had been told. A beep sounded from his pants pocket, accompanied by the vibration of his smartphone. He took it out and swiped the screen to accept the incoming call.

"Hello, Mac?" Came the voice of one Jack Dalton, ex Delta Forces infiltration and neutralization specialist. "I'm with Riley here and we got zilch. How 'bout you?"

Angus blinked in surprise at the words. "What do you mean, 'got zilch'? You did go to the operating theater that we were told about following the coma-revival demonstration back three weeks ago, didn't you?"

Jack's deadpan tone came back clearly as the daylight "I mean bro, the entire room is empty, like emptier than a beer fridge after a college football game! And it wan'nt sacked, either. The whole place was disassembled by techs and packed up in a 50 foot ISO cargo module then put on a semi-rig heading for Wolenbahn Electronics Inc on the outskirts of Stanford campus. In case you missed it, that's the place we were at yesterday and their guys told us to come look over here to find our mystery geekazoid extraordinaire. Looks like they were giving us the ole runaround the drain pipe."

Riley's voice came through the phone as she stood next to Jack and he was on speaker-mode. "Yeah, the WEI guys stripped everything out, Mac. I mean, they even took out the rolling tables, the surgery bed, the transparent rolling partition screens, the mobile power regulation modules, the psychotronic CPU core and the neural interface chair... Absolutely everything is gone. I'm surprised they left the paint on the walls or the linoleum on the floors. Whoever gave the orders to pull out, he wanted this as squeaky-clean as the day the hospital was opened, before the gear was installed for service."

Jack added "One of the janitors we spoke to said it happed at night, Wednesday, and the truck left Thursday morning, meaning yesterday, at around 08:00am. Direction is supposed to be WEI but I have a feeling it wasn't headed there. We haven't called in to Matty yet, we wanted to hack the trafic cams to see if we can spot where the truck went and how far it got before we get her in the loop."

MacGyver looked over the skyline of the buildings, thinking silently as he contemplated the elements of the puzzle. He answered to his teammates "Meet at the van in 10. We're getting back to the hotel and then we call Matty. Riley can hack while you drive, but I'm already sure we won't find anything. Plus, I have a feeling that the staff here will not be any help at all. The secretary in the lobby almost had me in a straight jacket heading for a pickaxe lobotomy in the basement when I asked about the little guy's location. She said they would be contacted in January, no forwarding address."

Riley's voice answered him "Wow! I never thought i'd see the day that Mac got sent packing by a secretary! Din't you 'dimple' that shiny pearly-white smile at her?" she joked at him.

Shaking his head at his friends' ability to take his mind off his failure, the young man replied easily "She was old enough to be my mother. Or my aunt. So no, I smiled but she didn't buy it. She did however give me the feeling that we would not enjoy the consequences if we poke too harshly at the sleeping bear of Stanford U & partners. They got friends and connections all the way to the top of government in several countries; they can fight back dirty if we push too crudely."

Riley snarked gamely "So, we don't send them Jack or Matty, we use me or you, or Bozer in a crunch. That should be easy enough to handle..."

Jack's expletives of protestations were amusing enough but the budding migraine Mac had in the back of his head wasn't letting him any peace. Shutting off the phone, he jogged to the van where he got into a rear seat, belted in and closed his eyes, hoping for at least three minutes of silence until the others arrived. They would meet with Bozer at the motel and take it from there. Hopefully, the boss would order them to pack up and get back to LA so he could get some rest. The last troubles with Murdoch had really done a worse number on him than he had realized. Maybe he should tell Matty. Maybe that young doctor they wanted to contact could have a look at his brain as the test patient to see just how competent he was.

An unwelcome interruption

(Two Steps From Hell – Merchant Prince)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 16:20pm

Daleminton Hotel, room #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

Lucas was in the middle of discussing the nitty-gritty of the 'refugee claim process' in Canada and the diverse bureaucrats and elected officials involved with his three lawyers. The level of paperwork and interviews, both private and before public committees, reminded him of Trump's famous 'swamp' and 'deep state' comments during his diverse campaigns. Then, a specific tonality emanated from his smartphone accompanied shortly by another different sound from his laptop on the table. The teenager's face changed to a stony countenance as he turned his portable workstation at an angle so everyone could see the monitor, then tapped the comms suite active in vid-phone mode with all sounds through the speakers so the people around him would hear as well.

"Director Langlois. To what calamity do I owe the call?" the adolescent asked tartly at the man whose face had barely appeared on the screen. He was the head of Wolenbahn's security division and worked out of the Buffalo facilities not far from the Wise Manor. In fact, Lucas had bought the land, torn down the decrepit old factory and rebuilt brand new because the emplacement was accessible by the river, through the underground canals or be walked to in less than a half hour, even in the rain. The HQ was where all the human resources issues, accounting and security for WEI were handled along with housing the permanent offices of the Wise Manor – Heritage & Trust lawyers that handled WM and WAC's general business and litigations. The only reason Michel Langlois would call him directly was to report an imminent threat to his person or a mess in progress big enough to require HAZMAT containment or rebuilding a workshop.

"I regret to inform you sir, that another attempt to locate your current locale by external parties has just occurred in Stanford. The personnel at the Psychiatric Neurosurgery ward were very loosely queried whilst a pair of infiltrators were snooping around the operation blocks. A janitor was spotted talking to them before they left. It was the operating theater where you performed the coma-revival procedure three weeks ago, sir. The man at the front desk claimed to be an 'Angus MacGyver' from something called 'Phoenix Foundation' based in LA. They seem to be the same people that visited the San Francisco office on Thursday morning before going to the Stanford campus production lines Thursday late afternoon. Our analysts will soon have confirmation by comparing the camera recordings from the security setups in all locales. As per the procedures you have instituted at the onset of WEI, their faces, bodies and voice prints will be entered in the Cyberghast Hub and distributed to our affiliates ASAP."

Lucas worked his jaw, grinding his teeth a bit as he thought of the situation. He had heard of this 'Phoenix Foundation' and its mysteriously vague works in the last two years. Of late, the Dark Web had been abuzz with rumors around some of their workers. It was just something on the outermost periphery of his awareness, so he never gave it any attention or efforts. Turning his eyes to the lawyers, he asked "Mister Tah, does contact with such R&D foundations not fall under your remit?"

The lawyer nodded once before answering in monotone words "I will of course initiate contacts with them if you wish it. Any information your own security division could provide would greatly cut down on my preliminary digging so I could know what kind of people we are dealing with."

"It's governmental; DARPA or 'black-suit' but we haven't figured out yet which" commented Langlois from the monitor. "The receptionist at SU-H's lobby called in a conference with her boss and our man in the Stanford campus facilities to warn us. She was specific about this detail in the linguistics their doorknocker used when he spoke with her. He said that his employers would handle 'contact protocols' from now on since 'Doctor Wolenczak was out of the area'. That sounds like a soldier reporting or a spook passing the intel along to his handler. No geek, gearhead or squint that I know speaks like that, unless they worked for the 'men-in-black' for 5 years and more."

The teenager took a deep stabilizing breath then ordered "Langlois, have our people dig this like maggots through a carcass until it's picked clean. Then, send it to the CH and I will distribute to the lawyers and a few others. Also, I compiled the basic dossier on the Khunestade Cathedral and their Nazified Viking themed mercenaries. We will have to deal with this, but after the lawyers here have been informed. I need the police forces in both countries to have first dibs on this to build my credibility as a law-abiding citizen and peaceful immigrant before we get involved in the clearing & mopping operations. Also, have you got the dossier on the meaningless little error-of-Nature that I counter-hacked yesterday? Any activity?"

"Very well sir, it will give me time to gather and equip a better team than I thought to be limited to for this kind of work. And, no, Houston is still silent on all fronts."

Gazing at his lawyers interrogatively, the boy got no signals for further questions so he ended the call with his employee and got back to talking about paperwork and bureaucrats. Oh, joy of Joys!

Riley's bad evening starts

(Giuseppe Verdi – Il Trovatore; The Anvil Chorus)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 17:46pm

Stanford township, cheap 2-star motel

Silicon Valley, California, USA

Wilt Bozer walked into the room he and Mac shared to put some take-out food in the mini-fridge for his friend to eat when he woke up from his emergency nap to deal with his migraine. The black male knew full well that it was really bad when the other man took out the pills and icepack to lay down for two or three hours of immediate sleep. Ever since he got drugged out of his brains by Murdoch a few months back, his best friend had been having flashbacks from old missions, varied nightmares and occasional migraines. It was the last symptom that had the team and Matty Webber worried as Mac had never suffered from migraines in his life to date unless it was a result from a concussion but then the peripheral symptoms of that would be present too. No such luck here and it had been quite some time since he'd encountered a head injury or area-effect explosive blast.

Quietly opening then closing the sliding wall partition, Bozer traversed into the other room. This suite was interstingly built as it had two long rooms connected together so that the parents could take one side and the kids be in the other. Each side had a full bathroom and a kitchenette counter with twin-sink, a mini-fridge, an 8 seat table with 8 dingy unpadded chairs, two large double beds and a small sitting area composed of two Lazy Boy sofas, a coffee table and medium-sized flatscreen TV at the front near the entry door and bay window. Add threadbare industrial carpeting and cheap brown drapes in the windows, and that was it. Not in the least a luxury resort, not even what they shared back home him and Mac, but he'd seen worse while traveling on Phoenix missions over the last year.

Jack and Riley shared this room since they were practically family and the young woman saw the older man as a foster father. The fact he had dated her mother 13 years ago and almost married her too meant that after months of working together they had finally finished patching up their problems. As it was, they were actually enjoying a walk down memory lane while each did their basecamp duties until the food arrived. Now that Bozer was here, they would set aside the weapons, maps, paper dossiers and the laptop & antenna setup Riley had been preparing to keep contact with their HQ through the night, just in case Mac's health got worse or they had a break in the trail they were following.

"So Ri, how's tricks? Any leads on that cargo pod with the medical gear?" Bozer asked as he spread out the food containers on the shaky rectangular table. 'The thing must be older than Jack! And a lot less sturdy, too!' he thought amusedly about the oldest member of the team. Sitting himself with his own styrofoam bowl and boxes at the table, he gave Jack a side-look just to see that the older male was coming over to sit as well, with Riley in tow.

Blowing a breath through her mouth, exhaling her annoyance at the situation, the young woman replied tiredly. "Nada, Bose. Ever since yesterday, all I get is either static or false leads to nowhere."

Jack opened the styrofoam bowl to smell the soup inside before grinding some soda crakers into it to thicken the broth a bit. After a few spoons of hot beef & barley had warmed his stomach, he asked the young woman some details. The tech stuff, often enough, just went over his head but she had a way to explain in simple terms that MacGyver rarely managed. "What do you mean static? Your signal seems fine..."

Smirking at her pseudo-dad's lack of tech-savvy, Riley answered back gamely "I don't mean the connection or strength of the signal, those are fine. No, it's like there's a fog bank between my machine and the rest of the Internex. Even when we stopped at Stanford campus, I tried to link up to their free Wi-Fi hot spots and the linkup was sluggish, about 10% slower than what they advertise it should be and it isn't the only place I had the problem. Even here in the motel, I have a wired link that I hacked into the wall sockets to bypass the pay-meters so I could get the best speed their routers make possible and my machine still seems slow compared to what it was three days ago."

"Did you catch something? A virus or spyware maybe?" Jack asked thoughtfully between spoons of soup as his partner didn't seem to have a clue. If the team's cyber-geek was stumped, they'd have big problems finding the guy they were hunting after, especially if she couldn't find her own answers. It wasn't like Jack himself could do better than hold parts or give pep-talks as she worked her keyboard. Even MacGyver routinely got lost in the virtual wake behind her when she went full-tilt on a hack, so Bozer and him had absolutely no chances of helping.

Riley was stirring her hot soup with a thoughtful look on her face, trying to visualize what she could have missed in the last three days. "I scanned my gear, both laptops and all 3 cellphones, twice already since the first slow-down occurred but I can't seem to put my finger on it. The devices are working fine inside themselves, parts & softwares, and I tested the network signal with completely separate tools, both airwaves and wired versions. The Internex comes in strong and clear. For some reason, when I connect one of my devices to the web, there is a slow-down in the comms linkup management app and only in that specific function. Everything else stays at the same performances."

Bozer shook his head sadly, not able to help. He could understand more of the concepts than Jack and follow her reasoning for a bit longer but couldn't really give any better advice than the eldest member of the team. Plugging stuff without mixing the wires in the wrong devices was pretty much the best he could do when she asked for his help setting up the camp comms.

The sliding wall opened slowly and very quietly as Angus walked through, unsteady on his feet and holding a reusable icepack to the nape of his neck. His face was pallid, his green eyes dull and lightless, and he seemed to have to take one or two seconds at each step to walk without faceplanting in the carpet. This would not be a good night, the other three could tell.

Sitting himself very slowly and very carefully at the table on the nearest empty chair, Angus turned tired eyes towards Riley. "Why'd you bug my phone? Are you afraid I'm gonna disappear? Or was it Matty that told you to do it?" the young man asked tartly.

Narrowing her brown eyes, the surprised woman shook her head in denial, affirming verbally "I haven't bugged you, Mac. I could, and I have when you go missing, like the time Murdoch heisted you off to drug you. I find, scan and activate your phone remotely to locate you and bring help. I don't do this to peep on people and I don't spy on my friends. What made you think that I bugged you, anyways?"

Angus held out his phone to the woman so she could see for herself. "Cuz it's been set to synchronize with my laptop, which I keep home and never bring on missions, and also, like, NEVER put Phoenix stuff on it. Especially after all the break-ins we had, like Murdoch among others. I have always kept all mission briefs and research on the phone or at HQ in my office. I never bring those things home even when I'm sick. Operational security and all that rot they trained us for at boot camp. So who other than you could have hacked in and programmed the synch function to link with a CPU that isn't even here to connect with?"

Taking about two minutes to fiddle with the device, the team's hacker began to swear in quite imaginative words that had Jack wince through his wide smile at a few whilst Bozer and Mac had amused expressions. After another five minutes, the girl handed back the phone with a pained set to her face. "Let's eat, then I have some work ahead of me for the entire evening. I know how we got hacked. And it was a hack, I just didn't see it pass through. Bloody first time that I see THIS done, too!"

Bozer clicked on the TV to CNN; even if it served just as a background noise, it would make a distraction while they ate. At least that was the idea until he saw the headline titles being announced before the first batch of ads ran. "Eh, guys, I think I found us our medical genius. He's in Canada somewhere."

Jack turned to him, curiosity written on his face, to comment "Bose, man, you just got here! How in tarnation do you find a missing teenage kid in under 10 minutes like that?"

Seeing the faces of the other two teammates expressing the same question, the cinematics and makeup specialist pointed at the wall-mounted TV. "That could be cuz he's on international news feeds, right about now. Turn around and look, the story's coming up!"

{ SQ } - { Live story } - { SQ }

The announcer on the CNN Washington DC newsroom floor was starting up the report with two large pictures behind him on the massive projection monitor: the juvenile prodigy of medicinal and cybernetic sciences DR. Lucas Wolenczak DP, MD, PhD, and the UEO flagship SeaQuest – DSV 6000. Inside of 5 minutes, the gist of the story was out in the open, streaming to billions of households, restaurants, companies and law enforcement agencies across the planet.

The UEO Navy had made a secret deal to enslave a child aboard their ship to avoid paying him for his work, this at the request of a violent, murderous father who wanted his adolescent son to be destroyed by the sailors and killed off during an armed conflict with 'something nasty' as he had commanded.

Then the film of when Lawrence attacked Lucas at the hotel 2 years ago, as filmed by the safety recorders the boy had hidden in his clothing, was played out, at full length, including the segments in the corridor.

After that, clips from the recording of the conversation between Lucas, Lawrence and lieutenant Denalt was played, using those excerpts to further prove the immorality and depravity of Lawrence as well as demonstrate the exact 'why' that was behind placing Lucas on a warship.

After the eye-searing presentation of familial violence came the panel of commentators from diverse branches of law enforcement and two judges from America and Canada, a spokesperson from the ACLU and a representative from the secretariat of Justice for the UEO. It didn't take more than 5 minutes to prove there was consensus that, under established and settled law in all member states of the UEO Treaty, the maneuver attempted by Lawrence Wolenczak against his child was illegal. There were no known exceptions, nor any manner in which the UEO, USA and other nations would tolerate or let pass such a depravity.

Then the discussion moved on to the young medical expert's active flight to Canada, his request for 'refugee status' and his added long-plan request for 'investor immigrant' status as well as a brief overview of the eye-popping personal and corporate wealth he had amassed since age 9 when he founded the Wolenbahn Electronics International company.

Again, the consensus was quickly confirmed that the boy had every right to remove his person from the place of danger and seek rescue and support where he would be cared for safely. As far as the experts could determine, Lawrence had already been declared an unfit parent by court decree 12 years ago. He should never have had custody of the child transferred back to him anyways, therefore he should not have a claim on the youth from then on to begin with.

Then the panel of pundits turned to the toxic thorny issue of the White House Cabinet being involved in the deal that was to see the injured, damaged teen enslaved aboard SeaQuest. They established a rapid agreement that the POTUS seal-of-office came with signature serial numbers unique to each dossier they were stamped on to back-trace each use of the seal. As such, it was proven that the seal on the printed versions of the orders that were sent to the ship's officers, civilian hirelings and external contractors were genuine. That could only mean that President Donald J. Trump had authorized the illegal, immoral kidnapping, enslavement and torture of a child for no discernable reason other than 'he made a good deal with Lawrence'.

Switching channels to give other news programs a quick peek, the team saw that it had exploded across the TV-scape and every station was running a segment about it. This mess was planetary and not going anywhere. Even Fox News was having patently obvious problems coming up with a justification or excuse as to HOW or even WHY such a situation could be morally acceptable, especially given the father's destructive violent attitude against his son.

Curious about this development to their mission but hungry, the team concentrated on their food while it was still warm except for MacGyver who decided to go take a shower and lie down for a healing nap again. He would eat later when the migraine's worst effect were passed and the pills were no longer stewing in his stomach. Grabbing the soda crackers that the others wouldn't eat, he munched those with some water as the shower ran itself to the proper warmth.

A slow, healing bout of hydrotherapy had him in a much better mood, especially after letting the warm water spray on his aching head and nape for about 20 minutes. Feeling properly sleepy, he slid his fleece lounge pants back on then lied down in bed under the sheets with the lights closed. The others would wake him around 23:00pm, in time for the call-in to HQ before the final checkups and their own bedtime. At that point, he would be able to browse the web to do some quiet research on their query with minimal pain in his head or eyes by keeping most of the lights closed. Bozer was used to his nightly work habits so he would not be bothered, as long as there was no music or strong noise.

Finally alone

(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)

Friday 18th of December, 2020; 18:45pm

Daleminton Hotel, room #204

Park Royal, West Vancouver, BC, Canada

Lucas sat on the large sectional couch in the living room of the suite, on the right lounging wing near the hearth, with both legs elongated before him so that the heat waves could gently massage his aching knee joints. Eyes closed with all lights shut off, the boy was trying to regulate his breathing to achieve a state of calm so he could stabilize his stomach enough to keep down his evening meal.

The events of the day were finally catching up to him emotionally, after the physical tiredness.

The preliminary meeting with the attorneys had gone better than he expected on the technical side of things but also much worse on the emotional side. He had exposed himself publicly to people he didn't know anything about and that risk was very nearly unacceptable. Now, they knew things about his character, temperament and methodologies that nobody ever had before. They would have to disappear quickly if they ever decided to put that knowledge to work against his health and plans.

Keeping his eyes closed, the adolescent took a deep breath, exhaling it slowly as he tried to let himself mentally flow along the events of the day's end.

At around 17:30pm the lawyers had needed to leave to reach their office to deposit all the accumulated evidence and manuscript notes taken during the day. They also had to call in some researchers and junior lawyers to help with multiple 'detail' analysis and research that would need to be done during an emergency night shift to prepare the next meeting scheduled to occur on Sunday afternoon. Finding workers still available for emergency shifts at this time of the year, especially at night, would be nigh on impossible but the overtime and rush-job fees the adolescent had offered for the one-time event could make them decide in his favor.

After the three adults had left, Lucas had gone to the bathroom to splash some warm water on his face to help relax himself from all the accrued stresses of the day. Then he had used the still present buffet cart to plate up an early dinner composed of a fully dressed Friday-club sandwich, spicy potatoes, caesar salad and a fruit juice to change the taste from so much sugary coffee all day long. The meal had been easy to assemble from the already cooked parts. Fortunately for the culinarily challenged teen, he just needed to toast his bread then apply butter, mustard, eggs, bacon, cheese slices, tomatoes and lettuce, then put his sides in bowls, and he was ready for a relaxing snack in front of the TV to watch the news.

Snort! - He had completely forgotten the biggest piece he had put on the gameboard.

So much for being a multi-genial super-prodigy with a 94.7% recall eidetic memory!

Sighing in deep annoyance at yet another mistake he made, the teen just ended up laughing at the memory of how he had almost choked on his grape juice when he turned on the 18:00pm news on CNN only to see his own sickly thin, pallid face as the lead story of the show. They even got his many titles right, for once in his life. Then the announcer gave the basic outline of the case with enlarged snapshots of the written orders from the White House Cabinet as proof the story was absolute truth. Those documents had been recovered by NCIS from the offices of the senior officers, civilian workers and even the company or university reps in charge of research projects. The FBI had gone to the White House with a federal warrant to obtain the originals from the Presidential Archive where they were stored until the seated president left office to be replaced by the next. The documents were there, sealed and signed manually by D.J. Trump who had even admitted to it plainly as if the entire situation was being overblown. To the geriatric crud's eyes, it was 'just a little side-deal between friends'.

Defective bastard!

The documents showed clearly that Lawrence had intended to dump 'custodial legal guardianship' of his son on everybody & anybody above age 21 who was to serve aboard. These documents were analyzed by DCFS and the US Department of Justice experts who all concurred that even a cursory examination showed them to be completely illegal, thoroughly immoral and not binding since Lawrence never had them emitted by a seated judge or DCFS officials. The Presidential Seal on them did not in any way make them legal or binding either. The established law did not grant the president ANY authority over child custody and placement in the USA, nor could he force the military to take a child for 'redressment'. Furthermore, there was no law in the USA that allowed a father to spread guardianship of a child to an entire community, like a cult, even less when the members of the group were not identified, had not been vetted by DCFS and the group was 'fluctuating' with the passage of transitory, temporary persons. Handing 'custodial care' to a boarding school was legal because the school had a permit and inspections, the teachers were licensed and inspected, and the personnel could not in any way forcibly convert a child nor take over his finances and life out of the school's territory.

Then, CNN's announcer played the fight films from the hotel on TV; both his safety recorder and the security cameras from the building showed in gory, unvarnished details just WHAT and WHO the man called Lawrence Wolenczak was. The fact it showed Lucas throwing an acid capsule in his own defense was presently glossed over, but he knew that event would come back to haunt him, especially in court.

Then some chosen bits of the three-way fight between Denalt, Lawrence and him had been played, giving the world a deeper, more revealing, glimpse of his family dynamics.

The fact that all the pundits on the CNN discussion panel, governmental and social activists alike, had agreed immediately about the depravity and unfitness of his parent was a boon, yes, but not binding in court nor did it affect the refugee claims committee and the rest of the immigration process. It simply gave him some thin cloak of legitimacy in the court of Popular Opinion, but not much else. At the very least, the splash-around effect of this would cover Lawrence, his workers, his contractors, all his personal friends and eventually the political supporters he had acquired along the years. The public pressure would make certain the investigation stayed open and public instead of being handled behind closed doors in the basement of a church somewhere like the defunct parent had hoped to do. It might even be enough to insure that nobody in any of the US military services would ever want Lucas inside their ship, base or building, regardless of reasons and orders.

Finding that he had nothing in his mind that was pressing, he swallowed passed the lump of accumulated stress in his throat and tried to wriggle himself more comfortably in the couch cushions.

"Alexa! Activate living room TV."

The adolescent opened his weary eyes to watch the screen, hoping to find – anything – to take his mind off the week he had to endure. Given it was a Friday evening, it could still happen.

{ SQ } - { Second present of Christmas unwrapped } - { SQ }

(18:59pm)

Lucas closed the TV with a – Snort! – of disgust. Everything was either christmassy or useless reruns he had seen several times over the years already. Finding that there was nothing of any interest to watch all night, even the Friday night special offered on diverse channels between 19:00pm and 23:00pm, the boy decided to do something both useful and relaxing for him.

It was time to unlimber and activate the second portion of the Cyberghast Hub.

Gathering his portable workstation, smartphone and meta-glasses from the dining table, the teen hobbled on his cane and stiff legs over to the office doors to access the heart of his cybernetic web of control and espionage. He would use the opportunity to survey his bot-net and the watchtowers he had set on sentry duty over critical threats. After that, he might have some time to do a survey of his companies and the deployment of investments in Europe that he had ordered to offset the risks presently dogging him in North America presently.

Passing through the complex lock on the double doors, he went to the active console to set in place his portable devices in their connection slots to synchronize securely with the CH & bot-net. After waking up the Cyberghast's admin & sys-op module, he carefully positioned the secondary transport caisson on the left side, near the entry of the room, with the handlebar towards the sys-op module and three feet of space between the two machines. Then, Lucas passed through the same complex opening of pannels and automated hydraulic pistons as he had done with the first CH module. Now that the transport crate was stabilized and unveiled, he pulled some multi-layered anti-electricity/magnetism gloves from the CH admin module and a set of complex keys from another cubby. He had almost 20 minutes of manipulations to unspool power cables and network wires that connected Module #2 to the CH admin module. Then he unspooled a secondary kit of cables and wires that would connect Module #2 to the wall sockets to bring in the electricity, telephony and Internex to the dedicated work-horse.

The goal was to create a localized network to spread both electricity and data throughout the room by multiple sockets and ports to allow the machinery to automatically select the least occupied connection when doing complex, heavy jobs that had priority over the maintenance tasks that ran in the background. Also, with multiply redundant wires and cables, it made disconnecting the modules quickly nigh on impossible and since each linkup was armored and shielded with sensor wire twisted around the main conductor element, any removal or damage to the cabling would trigger alarms and the defenses built into the mobile hub caissons.

NOBODY would steal or hack Lucas' primary work tools and go away unpunished.

Now though, the boy was opening his second box of malice to play with it.

The Cyberghast ECB – Echo-Cloaking Broadcaster; the data mining, number crunching, electronic warfare wellspring of virulation, malwares and dispersion of misinformation, lies, propaganda and social-media-vectorized character assassination. The dolly-portable equivalent to the Aegis-destroyer for the Virtual World. And it wasn't the only one he owned. Many were installed in permanent locations in his homes, offices and manufactures. Others were mobile in vehicles like the flying boat, the private train, the four service boats he bought this year and several semi-trucks rolling in seemingly random patterns around North America.

The ECB was a custom-built system of CPU's that no one else on the Earth had. It was composed of several motherboards & chipsets of crystalline psychotronic technology all tied together by the neuroplexic programming Operating System created with Base 3-13-39 mathematics that Lucas had invented back at age 8. The entire system was completely proprietary and optimized to be configured and controlled by the Neural Interface that he had purpose-built for just this warfare management task.

It was incredibly hard to evaluate the system's capacity in terms of today's technology since it worked along the same principals as a human brain and could actually reach a significant percentage of the organ's raw speed and processing potential. There was also the fact that the smaller, portable versions were much more limited by how little electricity and network signal they could process given that the locales were not designed and built with their specific necessities in mind. The bigger permanent versions installed in Buffalo, New York, Cambridge and the partially completed computational hubs in Sault-Sainte-Marie (Ontario), Copper Harbor (Michigan), Clough Island near Duluth (Wisconsin) and Mission Island in Thunder Bay (Ontario) were all purpose-built and had exponentially larger capacities.

Making a face of annoyance, Lucas thought a few seconds about just how big his nascent industrial and cybernetic empire was getting. He'd have to sleep in the damned neural interface to get it all done on time and proper order.

Now that the system was deployed, he could pull out from one of the cubbies in the sys-op module the portable NI headset, which was a bigger version of the meta-glasses he usually wore but capable of connecting with his neural pathways on his head through crystalline induction plates implanted at his temples and nape of the neck. Additional less annoying connectors had been installed at the lowest point of the upper arms just above the elbows to allow wired-links without having his head encased in heavy systems all day. The vocal command application in the CH-ECB was also far superior to the glorified 'Alexa' on steroids that was lodged in the CG-adm module.

Once fully wired and seated in his plush chair, the teenager began to take care of his bot-net, multiple businesses and move pieces on the gameboard to ensure his safety in the coming weeks so that he could go to the hospital in January in peace.

{ SQ } - { What a web I weave } - { SQ }

The old prototype oil-fired steam-engine floatplane was in Buffalo (New York) finishing its resupply before it would head out to a secret hiding place that Lucas had selected last year. A rental boat hangar in Highlands (New Jersey) directly on the Atlantic Ocean's shoreline that was paid for out of an anonymous account to diffuse the money trails. The moment the plane was located in its hangar, the building would be winterized, locked down and sealed with only Lucas having all the keys to undo the protection scheme that would deter theft and curiosity away from his escape route.

Well, one of them, anyways.

The private train convoy, the venerable antiquated 'The Briary', had left Bramble Manor in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and made good time up north to Canada and Quebec city from where it would take a set of seldom used private cargo railways along the back country forests of the St-Laurent Valley's northern shore. These tracks would lead all the way up to the north-eastern village of Rivière St-Paul, in the Province of Quebec where an old train equipment maintenance workshop was located. As it so happened, it had been built and furnished to repair steam engines for trains, boats, mining shovels and similar systems of the early 1900's. It was abandoned in the early 1960's when diesel engines became less expensive and more reliable than the old steamers being replaced all over the continent. Since 'The Briary' was a unique prototype of so-called 'modern steam' train engineering, it had made sense for the teenager to buy this discrete locale that was cheap despite still being well furnished with industrial gear he needed to repair the vehicle in case he had to go to ground for a long term. A discrete private contract under an anonymous company had seen the workshop opened, cleaned, restocked and all utilities reconnected with extra gear installed as per the teen's needs inside of six months. The bolt-hole for his precious train had been ready for a little over three years now and it would be put to good use until he could take out the convoy in public again.

Lucas was becoming quite attached to his ancestors' old things and didn't want to risk either parents trying to steal or destroy them if it could be avoided. Therefore, the adolescent had been slowly but methodically preparing caches for his most important assets since he reached Stanford. That program of preventive acquisitions and renovations was now paying off.

There were the four new boats, all of them 200 feet long ocean faring ships of the 'rescue & technical assistance' kind that had been acquired just last February of this year. They were kept separately in Sidney Mines (Nova Scotia), Copper Harbor (Michigan), Monterey (California) and Cameron Parish (Louisiana). They had all been reconditioned to the specs that Lucas needed to live aboard despite his leg injuries and limited wheelchair access by the same shipyard where he had bought the matched set during the liquidation of a bankrupt oil platform repair company following the 2019 tornadoes.

The boats were kept in their flaky paint, rusted hull appearance to deter thieves and snoopers from paying attention to the high tech comms equipments, new living quarters, new full med-bay and a pair of new crane arms usually found on large tow-trucks capable of moving wrecked semi-rigs and buses. The hulls had been cut and hinged to create a reliable sea-gate with moon pool, ceiling winches, diving cage, hyperbaric chamber and a rack with eight underwater drones to scan the hull and subsurface conditions in shallow waters. A rack with eight aerial drones would establish a mid-range defensive perimeter whether in dock or on the waves. Each boat had received a custom-designed mobile version of the Cyberghast Hub in its complete permanent four-module form.

Finally, Lucas gave a superficial look at his closest bolt-hole he could reach in case of emergency evacuation. It was near Edmonds, 12 miles north of Seattle in Washington State; the unnamed? Manor that had been built there, right on top of Shell Creek, accessible by Melody Road. His great-grandfather had constructed the plot of land on the same layout of 3,000 x 3,000 feet with a huge manor, two great workshops with a boat & floatplane hangar near it and a private railway spur leading to all the shops and docks whilst ¾ of the land was farmed or decorative gardening. This was the last such great estate he had built, in the late 1960's before he pulled away from the public eye to become recluse in Buffalo and his subsequent disappearance in1970.

Supposedly, the austere, arogant man had built three more such 'Old Glories' in more remote areas that were now being reached by civilization, if barely. Even prolonged observation films and research through the channels Lucas could hack in corporate or military satellites did not give anything probant on those sites. Built in the 1940's during the World War II frenzy of industrialization, their weird construction and heavily bunkerized nature would have passed under all radars, especially since nobody had reliable cameras or the Web to do multiples searches and correlations of disparities and patterns as were now available even to newbies.

Th first terrain was in Florida's southern most regions, in the Keys. Most specifically in Key Largo's central mass, on Jewfish creek. The large plot of land allowed to pass boats either by the creek going south then the Blackwater Sound or going north through Barness Sound, then Card Sound then the open Atlantic Ocean. The domain had a private railway spur still in place and seemingly well maintained, while regular road access was done through Overseas Highway and a private road through the swampy land. The land had the usual, large, multi-wing manor with two great workshops and a vehicle hangar fot boats, floatplanes and the train convoy. As normal, ¾ of the land was reserved for farming and gardening but presently just overgrown wild greenery that climbed up the buldings so bad that it hid them from sight.

The second phantom estate was located at the northern tip of the Bahia Grande lake, near Port Isabelle in Cameron County, Texas, near East Ocean Boulevard. It was accessible through the Atlantic Ocean and subsequent rivers until the Bahia, the Boulevard and float-plane. This one's railway line seemed to have been swallowed by the swampy forests along the years but it still showed on the scans and films as if it were complete and solid, just covered in green crud. It bore investigation.

The third terrain was located in San Diego, California, at the junction between the Oneonta Slough and the Tijuana River. It was straddling the meeting point of the two streams and had the Pacific Ocean as its western border while accessible by Tower Road or Boundary Road, the ocean docks, the rivers and float-plane. The private rail tracks that were visible on the satellite films seemed slightly overgrown but still usable as-is.

Lucas would have to do a search to see if any maintenance contracts had been paid for somehow to keep the railways, roads and canals operable during the estates' hibernation period. That seemed exactly like the sort of thing F. would have done. The man had written several times that he absolutely HATED not having a house, vehicle or workshop in proper functioning order when he needed it for an experiment or project. Getting a 'right-of-way' railway construction company to clear out, inspect and renovate the private tracks should not be complicated nor too costly given that there wasn't that much mileage to repair and redo all the electronic signals & cameras up to the teen's specifications.

A nice little side-project to add on the list.

Supposedly, if the manuscript notes of his ancestor were to be trusted, all 'Manorial' properties were designed and set to have a standard gauge private railway spur coming unto the plots of land, just like the Wise, Bramble and Ramshackle manors had been built. The other private residences in other towns were large and opulent but had never had the terrain needed to support workshops and rail service, so the train systems were set to be used out of the nearest Wise Apothecary production or distribution facility if any was nearby.

This meant that Lucas had several usable safe-houses in his hands that nobody knew about, including his lawyers or employees back at WEI and WAC. That meant he could go to ground in any of these massive old piles of steel and bricks with some food reserves, medicines, clothes and a few burn phones to stay up to date on the outside world and he would be off-grid and untraceable for the very long run.

After perusing his other less glorious - meaning cheaper and smaller – properties and vehicles, the adolescent dove into the minutiae of a recent Web Tier-2 security protocol upgrade that the US Central Mint wanted reviewed and corrected since their initial contractor had done a quick & dirty job of it that simply wasn't satisfying. It would be his first piece of work for them and he didn't know their habits or reliability but The World Bank had accepted to act as guarantor of the transaction as a known friend of both sides. It was just a paltry 3 million dollars and should take all of 17 hours to complete. If he did it on the hand-brakes, without pushing himself. Or he could push, do it in about 8 hours and move on to something else more – titillating – for his mind. Oh, well... Being workaholic had its benefits sometimes and he did 'need' the legally traceable cashflow to prove he really was a decent, reliable investor to justify his welcome into the host country.

As he planned his evening workload, Lucas told himself with a playful smirk that he didn't need to get Hanukah or Christmas presents from anybody. He was rich enough to just buy the gifts, and the stores that sold them, by himself if he really wanted those items. It wasn't a very cheery holiday-like thought, but it was amusing to his gallows' humor anyways.

And wasn't that a declaration on the health of his mindset.

{ SQ } - { PREVIEW ch.5 } - { SQ }

In the next chapter we have the whole bloody mess exploding in public, several Agencies in the Washingtonian Alphabet Soup gearing up and the old biddies come out of retirement to save the country and Free World they sacrificed so much to build and protect. Admiral Noyce, the SeaQuest and its crew make their grand appearance on the gameboard while the White House tries to play the wounded party despite being fully exposed as criminals and bereft of credible allies.

Lawrence Wolenczak and Cynthia Holtzenstein will be put in the Eye of Public Opinion and the beginning stages of their Fall are seen.

This chapter will actually have little about Lucas himself except in mentions and references as it concentrates on the plethora of other actors involved in the cataclysmic events caused by the unveiling of the criminal situation.