The line of police cars seemed to stretch into the horizon. The sirens created a raucous cacophony loud enough to almost shatter the eardrums of those who came close enough to observe the proceedings. The cars themselves came from a variety of departments: the Santa Barbara Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the California Highway Patrol, and even the Los Angeles Police Department. The entirety of the LAPD's SWAT unit had even been activated for this, and their black armored vehicles drove alongside the regular police cars. To anyone watching, it would almost appear as if the police were preparing to head into an actual honest-to-goodness battle.
But in truth, all of these cars and SWAT units were there to protect a single prisoner transport van right in the middle of the convoy. It looked like any other delivery van out there except for the words DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE and UNITED STATES MARSHALS SERVICE printed on the sides of the van along with the seal of the aforementioned federal department and service. Inside the van itself were four Deputy US Marshals armed and kitted out in full battle gear and assault rifles. They surrounded a lone man wearing the classic orange jumpsuit of a prisoner, and he was restrained to his seat in the van by a combination of handcuffs and leather straps on his arms and calves.
At first glance, the prisoner looked just like any other maximum security inmate being transported from one jail to another, although the security surrounding him might seem quite a bit excessive. But the truth was that the man in the orange jumpsuit was not really a man, or at least he hadn't been born one.
His name was Eldril One-Nine-Two of the Kes Shaan Pool, at least before the United States government had forced him to change his name to Eldril Kesshaan. He was a Yeerk, or rather he had been a Yeerk, and he had once held the rank of Visser Eight during his species' attempted invasion of Earth. Like his fellow Vissers and Sub-vissers, Eldril had been forced to surrender to the humans after the Animorphs had vented the Yeerks' Pool ship in orbit around the planet, killing seventeen thousand Yeerks by exposing them to the vacuum of space. But Eldril hadn't surrendered without a fight. Eldril and his cohorts had made a last stand in a Yeerk Pool somewhere in the state of Pennsylvania (although the exact location of which still remains classified), and his last stand had resulted in the deaths of twelve humans (two of them from either the Pennsylvania Army National Guard or the United States Marine Corps; existing unclassified reports of the events vary in the description), seven Hork-Bajir, fifteen Taxxons, and at least fifteen Yeerks. The end result of his last stand though was that Eldril and the Yeerks under his command were still forced to surrender, and Eldril and his cohorts were removed from their hosts and detained in new, specially constructed Yeerk Pools buried deep in the Rocky Mountains. His rank and prior history meant that Eldril was placed, or actually confined into a small Pool barely big enough for him to swim around in his slug form, and the Kandrona ray supply to his Pool was limited to only the bare minimum, enough to keep him alive but not enough to put him in a constant state of starvation.
But what many people didn't know about Eldril was that he had a way with words. Eldril should never have gotten out of his Pool prison in the first place owing to his track record as a Visser, a Sub-visser, and his own admitted loyalty and dedication to the Yeerk Empire. But during the classification of Yeerks that had occurred in the post-war aftermath which had eventually resulted in thousands of Yeerks becoming nothlits, Eldril had managed to avoid being classified as a Class One Yeerk (a Yeerk, usually a high-ranking one, who was fanatically and deeply loyal to the Empire). Instead, he managed to talk his classifiers into making him a Class Three Yeerk (a Yeerk whose views of the Empire and their methods of expansion were ambivalent to say the least). Eldril did that by using the classic Nuremberg defense, attributing all of his actions as a Sub-visser and later on Visser to orders coming down from the Council of Thirteen, even adding in a few sob stories of how he almost came close to dying because he didn't sign off on the execution of a subordinate quickly enough.
Eldril also managed to talk his way out of the seemingly irrefutable evidence showing that he was completely loyal to the Empire by claiming that his loyalty lay not with the Yeerk Empire itself but in the concept of a free and sovereign Yeerk nation not under the influence of another species like the Andalites. Of course, the humans doing the classification had their misgivings about Eldril and his version of events, but as there was little if any time for them to poke holes at his story, the committee had no choice but to classify Eldril as a Class Three Yeerk.
Three years after the end of the Yeerk invasion, and two years after his classification as a Class Three Yeerk, Eldril qualified for parole from his Pool prison on account of his good behavior. Eldril was allowed to become a nothlit, and he was given the choice of being either a human or an animal nothlit. Unsurprisingly, he chose to become a human nothlit, and after two hours and fifteen minutes of waiting around in his new human form, Eldril One-Nine-Two of the Kes Shaan Pool became simply Eldril Kesshaan. He became the highest ranking Visser in human captivity to be allowed to become a human-form nothlit (and survive; Visser Seven was also allowed to become a human nothlit but he tried to demorph back to his Yeerk form at only one hour and fifty-eight minutes, resulting in his immediate execution).
Now it was time to transport Eldril to his new home. Eldril was originally supposed to have been sent to an actual maximum security prison as a continuation of his original sentence, but his defense successfully argued that Eldril had technically already served his time during his solitary confinement in his tiny little Pool in the Rockies, and that throwing him into a federal penitentiary would be equivalent to double jeopardy. Of course it wasn't stated so bluntly and openly; it was all couched in bureaucratese and legalese, but it did have the intended effect of setting Eldril free. Free of the American justice system, at the very least.
Of course, Eldril wouldn't be too free though. Eldril would be free from the human prisons, but he would be confined in one of the designated nothlit housing districts, his every movement tracked by the ankle monitor clipped to his right leg. The anklet was specially designed to tell the authorities if Eldril had gone beyond the walls of the designated nothlit housing district where he was due to be transported. It was for this reason that the Applegate Towers district in Santa Barbara had been chosen for Eldril's new home, because of its proximity to three law enforcement agencies that could response to a breach in the district's security within minutes.
Ivan Sanchez had been a sergeant with the Santa Barbara Police Department at the time of Eldril's transfer from the Rockies to the Applegate Towers. He had not been infested by the Yeerks during the invasion, but he knew many others in the department who had been made into Controllers in that time. It is estimated that between 75 to 90 percent of the personnel of the Santa Barbara Police Department had been infested by the Yeerks, according to survivor testimonies and recovered records from captured Yeerk computers. "I had just arrived at Santa Barbara after a stint in the Bay Area," Sanchez recounted. "And before that I had been a Navy MP down at San Diego. I guess you could say that I was quite the nomad. Which, I'm guessing, is the reason why the Yeerks probably didn't try to infest me. There was always a possibility that I could get reassigned yet again, to a place where they probably hadn't established a base of operations yet. They couldn't take the risk, I guess, so that meant that I got to walk free.
"But I knew guys who were infested," Sanchez continued. "Heck, I got to know quite a few guys in the department while they were infested. After the war, when I got to meet some of these guys again and they no longer had Yeerks in their heads, it was like I was meeting them all again for the very first time. And they were all really affected in some way or another by what the Yeerks had done to them. Some of them had fought with all they had against the slugs, but many of them didn't really fight that hard because they had been told by the worms that the consequences would be that their families would be taken and infested as well. Not that it helped out some of them, because some members of their families still fell into the trap of the Sharing even though their Yeerks hadn't forced them to do any recruiting."
Sanchez had gone to the Applegate Towers to see Eldril transferred into the housing district, along with quite a number of his fellow Santa Barbara cops and detectives who had been infested by the Yeerks during the invasion. "Me, I was just curious about the whole thing," Sanchez recalled. "But some of the other guys wanted to see the slugs being put in their rightful place. Chief Rosa was there as well. Man, she really hated them Yeerks. The worms took her daughter and used her to get their slimy tentacles on the Chief and infest her. And now that the Yeerks had been defeated, the Chief wanted to see them and gloat over them, at least some of them, at their lowest, just as they had done with her."
The prisoner transport van peeled away from the convoy surrounding it and stopped in front of the gates leading to the Applegate Towers, where it waited for the guards to lift the barrier and let it through. The van proceeded down the path that had been carved out of the throng of nothlits curious about the new arrival by policemen on foot. The van finally stopped in front of an apartment building almost right in the geographic center of the district, but apart from that it was indistinguishable from every other apartment building in the district. But it was also about to become the first residence of the future leader of the Nothlit State.
The doors at the back of the van opened, and two US Marshals clad in black and packing full combat gear hopped out. They stayed close to the van as they waited for the other Marshals inside to release Eldril from his seat and carry him out of the van. The seat faced the back of the van, making for a very unpleasant and uncomfortable ride for the person made to sit in it. The Marshals removed the straps around Eldril's arms and legs, and then they made him stand up inside the van. But because Eldril's human form was tall even by American standards at the time, the Marshals had to make Eldril bend over at the waist until he was finally out of the van. He blinked and squinted as his eyes adjusted from the darkness of the van's interior to the early morning sun, and then he took in a deep lungful of the cold ocean air. "Ah, to be finally free again," he muttered.
"Don't get used to it, Eldril," one of the black-clad US Marshals told him. "Now get a move on, slug!" The same Marshal that had spoken to Eldril pushed him forward, and the former Visser began walking towards the apartment, flanked by the fully armed Marshals.
Rosa Stein, chief of police for Santa Barbara, was standing at the top of the stairs leading to the apartment building. She was flanked by her fellow police officers, Ivan Sanchez among them. Rosa Stein was one of the more notable casualties of the Yeerk invasion in Santa Barbara, having been infested by the invaders with the help of her very own daughter Taylor. Three years after the end of the war, Chief Stein was still undergoing treatment, therapy and counseling for her time as a Controller as well as the mysterious disappearance of Taylor Stein. Speculation abounds as to the fate of Taylor, and while the answer to that particular question may have been given to us in one of the later Animorphs books (specifically, number 43, The Test), the doubts about the veracity of the events depicted in the book series means that there are a lot of people out there who believe that Taylor Stein did not die in a natural gas explosion meant to eliminate the Yeerk Peace Movement in Santa Barbara.
"Yeah, the Chief really had been through some shit," Sanchez recalled. "I mean, imagine it from her point of view: first your daughter almost dies in a fire, and she loses an arm and a leg, literally. Then these weirdos, these mysterious people who look like they're in a cult, they tell your daughter that they can give her her arm and leg back, but in exchange they will put an alien slug in her head that will make her do the same to you. And your daughter accepts, and so now you've both got slugs in your head and you are now subordinate to your daughter, and now you're going to spend the next three, four, five years as a prisoner and a slave inside your own mind and body. You tell me that that isn't enough to mess you up. It's enough to mess anybody up!"
Chief Stein and the other Santa Barbara officers waited until Eldril had finally arrived at the top of the stairs. "Man looked so smug as he got up the stairs," Sanchez recounted. "It didn't help that the bastard had the kind of face that you just wanted to punch so bad, and repeatedly at that. Blue eyes, skinhead, thick beard; Eldril really looked like your average white supremacist trailer trash. Or maybe a serial killer or even a mass shooter. If you didn't know who Eldril was, that was what you would think he was if you met him for the first time."
"Chief Stein," Eldril said in a surprised but friendly tone when he saw the chief and the other officers waiting for him, as if he had come across them during a morning jog. "Fancy meeting you here, of all places."
"You know that this is much, much more than you really deserve, Yeerk filth," Stein hissed as she made to confront Eldril face to face. "If I had my way, you would never have been allowed to leave your tiny little Pool cell."
"It's nice to see you too, Rosa," Eldril said with a nod, acting like he hadn't heard a single word that Stein had said. "Do tell your daughter I said hi, if you ever see her."
"All right, Eldril, time to get moving again," one of the Marshals behind him said, and the nothlit was pushed forward with the flat side of an assault rifle, forcing him to get moving again. Eldril and the Marshals walked into the lobby of the apartment building, followed by the Santa Barbara officers, but today there was no concierge to greet them. And instead of the elevator, the Marshals shepherded Eldril into the emergency staircase where SWAT troopers in their combat gear and black balaclavas covering their faces stood guard. Each man had a clear field of vision to the man both above and below him, meaning that it would be near impossible for someone to move up and down the stairs without them noticing. Eldril and his Marshal escorts took the stairs up to the eleventh floor, where they all got out and walked towards an apartment in the middle of the hallway they had appeared in. And even though the police had already swept the apartments numerous times before Eldril's transfer, protocol demanded that the Marshals still open the door to Eldril's new apartment as if they were entering a hostile area, as if a pack of Hork-Bajir-Controllers would suddenly jump out of the apartment to free Eldril.
But there was no hidden army of Hork-Bajir inside the apartment waiting to free the Visser. Once the Marshals had confirmed that the apartment was clear, they dragged Eldril inside. The place was small, about as big as the living room of a cheap suburban house. The couch at the front of the apartment also doubled as a folding bed, although currently it was still in its couch configuration. Beyond the living room-cum-bedroom was a kitchen small enough to fit inside a restaurant's walk-in refrigerator and a door leading to a bathroom that was basically a glorified shower stall with a toilet included.
The Marshals practically dumped Eldril onto the couch, and they waited until Rosa Stein was inside the apartment with them. "Welcome to what should be your last home for the rest of your miserable life, Eldril," Stein said. "God knows that you should be in solitary confinement in a place like Fox River. But if you can keep up your little show of good behavior, you could end up staying in this dingy little place until you die. Now there are some rules that you will have to follow if you don't want to end up in a place like Lompoc, but I'm sure that you're going to break them anyway, so I'm just letting you know what they are. For the next thirty days, you cannot leave your apartment. You cannot leave this tiny little room. All your food and your other bodily needs will be provided to you by the concierge or the floor mother, kind of like back when you were still a Visser. After those first thirty days, you can now step out of your apartment, but you cannot step out of the Applegate Towers. Step out of your apartment in the next thirty days or outside the Applegate Towers after that and you will find your ass being thrown into a maximum security prison, and I will enjoy every minute of it, although not as much as if you had just remained as the slug that you truly are.
"And don't even think about tampering or tinkering with your new bling," Stein continued, referring to the ankle monitor on Eldril's leg. "We will know if you're trying to remove or tamper with your tracker, and that will also get your ass in jail for breaking the terms of your parole." Stein then bent down to look Eldril eye to eye. "One word of advice from me to you, Eldril, just so you can't say that I've been too hard on you," she told him. "Don't drop the soap." This got a few laughs from the otherwise hardened and emotionless Marshals and police officers.
"Prisoner transport complete," a Marshal reported on his radio, and the Marshals and the officers left Eldril's apartment. The nothlit and former Visser of the Yeerk Empire looked around his new lodgings, and then he leaned back on his couch-bed and crossed his hands behind his head. "I could get used to this," he said.
No one can really know (well, no one except Eldril himself) whether this was the moment that it happened or not, but the moment that Eldril Kesshaan had been transferred to the Applegate Towers is one of the leading candidates for the moment that Eldril decided that he would create the Nothlit State.