ACT I, SCENE 3
2006 CE - Home Office Building, Marsham Street, Westminster, London, England, United Kingdom
"The creature's autopsy proves beyond any doubt that it was definitely a male," states Connor Temple, shortly after receiving his call from the coroner.
Stephen Hart shakes his head in disbelief. "It's got to be a female, it was nurturing its young."
"Maybe in that species that's a job for the boys."
"It better be."
Abby Maitland stands frozen, shocked, wide-eyed. She knew what Stephen is about to say next.
"If not, it means the mother's still out there."
Connor's eyes turn to the DS40 sitting on a metal foldable table. The oscilloscopic pings keep coming, intensifying in both frequency and amplitude.
The mother is here. But where?
Then, without warning, a rustling in the bracken ferns. A kick, a spring, a ting. She has gone through the anomaly so suddenly, Connor, Abby, or Stephen only take notice at the last second, with puzzled looks on their faces.
"What happened?" demands Claudia Brown, as she leads the SAS forces to the scene of the happening.
"Not sure," says Connor.
"Did you see something?"
"Nothing," says Stephen.
"Is it getting weaker?"
"No, no chance," Connor observes, using his watch as a magneto-barometer for the anomaly. Claudia doesn't find much comfort in his readings. Nick, Helen, and Ryan are on the other side, and the mother predator was sure to catch up to them.
And something is changing.
The shining pupil-like "eye" of the anomaly starts to dilate, its shards expanding. Connor feels an ever increasing tug, a magnetic pull on the watch.
"Connor, watch out!"
Claudia pushes Connor out of the way, onto the pine-needle laden forest floor. Stephen ducks, shielding Abby with his arms. The anomaly misses its target.
The SAS troopers start firing shell after shell at the anomaly, but their efforts are futile; the rounds simply go through the time warp into the Permian abyss. It keeps rambunctiously convulsing. It attacks again, a stream of sharp-tipped shards reaching out at a soldier, impaling him and dragging him into its mouth, like an octopus tentacle holding a strolling crab or fish. Another shot, another victim.
"What the hell is happening!" screams Connor, absolutely mortified.
Claudia took a quick glance up. "It's shrinking again! The anomaly's getting weaker!"
And then it was gone, in a literal flash. The carnage is over.
Claudia and Connor get back up on their feet. Abby and Stephen have taken shelter behind a stack of SAS quarantine containers.
She runs back towards the vans to find Lester. She finds him curled up in a tight ball amidst the ferns, behind a decaying pine snag struck by the anomaly's lightning bolt, pissing himself. It is the first time she had ever seen him cry like a little toddler.
And it was the last time she would ever see Nick Cutter.
"You're in charge."
"What?"
"You're in charge, Ms. Brown," explains Sir James Lester. "Provisionally, until the Minister can confirm your appointment is permanent."
"Are you sure you want me take over?" asks Claudia.
"If I wasn't, I wouldn't ask."
"Let me guess, you're not…man enough for the job."
Lester isn't impressed with Claudia's attempt at snark. Then again, he is never impressed with other people's jokes, only his only. And Claudia never really found Lester's 'biting satire' impressive anyway. In that regard, they're even.
Lester exhales a long sigh, his fists clenched on the the metal rails of the balcony on the third floor lobby.
"If what we saw in the Forest in Dean is an indication," he continues, "it's that we are up against a threat unparalleled in the history of mankind. Remember what I told you. Once day, an anomaly's going to open up, and millions of those goddamn savages are going to pour throw. Not mention the anomalies are a top predator in their own right, and I have killed two of best men. And we haven't got the slightest bloody clue of what they are, where they're from, and why they appear. And on top of that, the two people who could have figured it out are stuck god knows how many millions of years in the past."
"Two hundred and fifty."
Lester turns his head. Claudia mutters, "Its…two hundred and fifty million…years…"
"Doesn't matter," he snaps. "They're trapped, we can't get to them, and there's nothing we can do but contain the threat."
The atmosphere within Mission Chronus is beyond hectic. Three and a half months since its inception in response to the first Forest of Dean incident, and it already reached a devastating setback. It was as if Helen Cutter had brought bad luck onto everyone her lives touched. They shouldn't have trusted here, they should have her up in solitude at the supermax in the basement, interrogating her until she gave her more straightforward information than "saber-toothed killers in central London".
In the cubicles of the HO, the air is rife with the buzzing, rigging cacophony of speed dials and voice mails. Everyone is put on high alert. Wanted posters of Helen Cutter are already being sent to police stations all across the south of England, in case she will emerge from another anomaly somewhere, in case she was the mastermind behind all of this.
Claudia thoughts turn to Nick. She hasn't spoken much since the attack happened five days ago, her fragile mind tormented by random, unexplained visions of rampaging gorgonopids, pareiasaurs, and therocephalians.
And anomalies. Anomalies that mol to the curves of her body, obscuring her completion, almost as if they are about to swallow her up.
Those visions weren't as random as they first seemed. Perhaps they were warnings.
If only she could talk to Nick, to find comfort in him. All she disclosed was some "bad dreams", and a few instances of fatigue and dizziness. She should have told him more, among all the other things she forgot to tell him..
She didn't even say she loved him when they kissed.
Lester keeps yapping in the background, but only now does Claudia return to terra firma. "You job's to to come up with cover stories. If anything else gets out about these creatures, these phenomena, it will cause mass panic across the nation, perhaps across the world. And worse still, if it goes public in any way, shape, and form, it could be utilized by any and all enemies to Her Majesty's government. Al-Quaeda, the IRA, the cartels. People who want to cause harm for their benefit. Your job is to predict and contain the threat. In essence, that means convincing people they didn't see what they actually did…"
"We need to tell them," Claudia counters. A shot of adrenaline, of confidence rushes through her veins, her concern more firmly expressed. "People need to know. Maybe there are menacing people out there who would take advantage of the creatures and the anomalies, but there's also a lot of good people. Decent people, ordinary people. People we've dealt with, people who've already lost their loved ones. And your solution is to shut them in dark with wool over their eyes?"
"Keeping this secret is the government's top priority."
"Cutter wouldn't approve."
"He's gone. He's doesn't need to approve."
Claudia struggles to maintain composure. Now she was just infuriated with Lester. And unfortunately for her, he can tell.
"Look, I get it, you have a lot on your shoulder," he said, putting his hand on her shoulder. "You need to stay calm. Keep things calm, controlled, and you can manage it, slightly dull. And don't expect a pay raise."
He then strolls Bond-like and professional back towards his office, leaving Claudia to ponder the seemingly unbearable weight of her new responsibility. The entire fate of the world on her shoulders.
She has always loved the big picture, she loved science and nature as child and still does, but in secondary school she wasn't as good with numbers and equations as she had hoped. Christine got her an entry-level job in government PR, from which she worked up the ranks. She still a little minnow in a big pond, though, and she doesn't like the bass that threaten to swallow her whole. Her job revolves around the very thing she hates most in this world: attempting to appeal to corrupt aristocrats and bureaucrats. If it wasn't for her importance to Mission Chronus, she could quit her job and sail freely around the world, retracing the routes of Magellan and Darwin.
"Highly unprofessional."
"Stuff professionalism."
She feels a swift, fluttering tippity-tap on her shoulder. It's Connor.
"Feeling okay?"
She doesn't respond immediately. She's still thinking about Nick.
"I miss him," she admits, and starts to tear up. "I'm not ready for this."
Connor gives her a big hug, as big a hug as Nick did when Duncan passed away right in front of him, prompting him to nearly quit the project.
"It's okay, we all miss him. But we're going to get back. Maybe not now, but someday. We'll get him back."
She feels reassured. At least someone is following in Nick's footsteps, and of all people it's the goofy Star Wars nerd with a fedora.
2007 CE - Barikju, near Kajaki, Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
They are without a father. They are without a home.
Armala doesn't trust the newcomers, the British and the Americans. Thugs with guns, they are no better than the Taliban. Pulling, dragging innocent, unsuspecting men, women, and children out of bed and out of their houses, clearing the rooms with noxious gas, all in the name of "checkups" and "neutralizing". It was all in the name of "freedom", "liberty", "justice.". A gift from God, from "the land of the free".
Whatever God the Yankees and the Tories have, it isn't Armala's Allah. It is a trickster, a liar. It's angels are really demons, and they are not here to removed the Taliban. They are here to create hell on Earth.
The last month had witnessed a barrage of fire, "Operation Volcano", the Westerners called it. Armala had never seen an active volcano in person, only in pictures and maybe once on the village television, but she knew when they went boom, they went boom. And this was quite an eruption. A immense flow, torrent of troops dropped from helicopters, consisting of hundreds of well-armed white solders, 8,000 of them to be precise. They claimed to be planning a removal of the local Taliban forces, like an exterminator plotting the removal of pests.
So why did they, the innocent people of Afghanistan, have to suffer?
On a dark and stormy night, the Tories received fire from Taliban in the nearby village of Chinah. Armala's husband, Takhtaf, was in Chinas that same night, visiting a dear old friend. He never came back.
Why did he leave without saying goodbye? Or was he taken away from her against his will?
The next morning, Barikju was bombarded by drones and mortars. Armala's brick qalla was obliterated. It took her all day to excavate her twin daughters Qazahia and Tumula out of the rubble and shapnel, and to get them to the nearest hospital in Kajaki.
At least the Yankees and Tories didn't try bombing the dam like they did several years back. Without that damn on the Helmand, a relict of a bygone era of Zahir Shah and Morrison-Knudsen, they would have no food, no electricity, no life. It's only a matter of time before it gets bombed, too. After all, everything is crumbling, tumbling down all along the Helmand, the statues, the monuments, the buildings, the governments.
And now her family. Her daughters are without a father and a home.
They are taking up temporary residence in a makeshift ten, in the backyard of their next door neighbor Jayid. There is not much for all of them to go on, though, save for stale naan-e and yogurt, well past its expiration. Enough for them to cling on for the next two weeks, but not much longer.
She is afraid of going underground, of using the tunnels beneath Barikju to lead her daughters to safety, to their grandparents in Kajaki, all while avoiding the bombastic artillery and the resulting nocturnal carnage.
Nowhere is safe. She has heard too many rumors since the "Volcano" began erupting. People taking refuge in the tunnels, and never to be seen or heard from again. Full grown men, strong enough and grave enough to take on even well armed militants, found dead in the gutters and the drains, beaten, bruised, buttered, sometimes even gnawed all the way down to the bones. Things Taliban do not normally do; even in their state of barbarity, cannibalism is against their religion, their moral code, as with any follower of Islam.
Then there are witnesses who have survived their endeavors in the tunnels. Their reports are mention a common motif: a bright flashing red light, making a pinging sound, flashing and pinging more and more as it approaches its target. Another light glowing behind it, snow white and blinding, sometimes reaching out. A complicated drone of some sort, probably on the side of the Yankees and Tories, who could be piloting them through the gloom.
If only they would go simple leave, vanish, let the people of Barikju and all of Afghanistan be. Let them take on the Taliban on their own.
It is dusk. Armala tucks Qazahia and Tumula to sleep in crocheted wool blankets, as she gazes upon an old photograph of her late mother Alamal, one of the few belongings remaining from her destroyed qalla. She still remembers the bond they shared when she was a little girl, when she born into the reign of the DRA. The good times, the promising time, when Afghans were truly free, when they had Moscow on their side. Two decades later, all has changed. The Soviets are no more. The Yankees and Tories, and all their contras, have won out, and are spilling innocent blood all across this land, and the lands to west.
She is disgusted by these pugnacious, rapacious foreigners. They took away her husband. They took away her home.
2009 CE - High Street, Southam, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, West Midlands, England, United Kingdom
YOU'VE GOT TO MAKE IT HAPPEN
YOU'VE GOT TO MAKE IT HAPPEN
YOU'VE GOT TO MAKE IT HAPPEN
RIGHT NOW
Abby and Connor are drunk. And not just drunk, but drunk. Ridiculously drunk, giggling and giggling, sweating profusely, latched on to one another as they threaten to trip off the stage. Such is the motto at the Carthusian-themed karaoke bar: "Le Gobelet de Chartreuse, drunk as a monk getting dunked".
Drink had lead to the angel as well as the devil, Claudia surmises, and for the better. Abby and Connor had not been getting along recently, ever since they moved into a new flat for what seemed like the millionth time in the last two years since Cutter's disappearance. (Greater London landlords have little tolerance for herptophilic tenants, it seems.). They had been dating on and off throughout that interval, but never really solidified a working partnership. Friends with benefits, but without many benefits to speak of. And for a long while, there was no chance of Cupid's arrow hitting both targets, not after Abby kicked out Connor's other sort-of-girlfriend, Caroline Steel, for nearly poisoning Rex with the wrong brand of lizard chow. Caroline had issues.
More recently, another fight happened. Claudia doesn't know exactly what happened, nor does she want to know the whole story, but she's allowing Connor to crash on her sofa for the time being, until he can pull off a Lloyd Dobler move or something. He hasn't been speaking to Abby at the ARC (Anomaly Research Center), keeping to himself while fixing a broken electromagnotometer in the anomaly detector over the past week.
Yet now, a few glasses of Maury later, they're friendlier than they'v been to each other. Drunk, intoxicated, but nonetheless friendly. Maybe they can make it happen.
If only Claudia could make something happen too.
They're stationed not far from a potential anomaly hotspot, the abandoned Brooks Mansion on the outskirts of South en route to Wellesbourne. No direct evidence for an incursion, not even the confirmed signature of an anomaly fault line, just a bizarre missing persons report filed by the Warwickshire Constabulary in 1995 regarding two teenagers who disappeared: Patrick Quinn and John Mortimer. Ryan Mason, the only surviving witness, said they may have been murdered, and even described the prime suspect. It was humanoid, but not human. Large ears, large eyes, large teeth. Able to change shape, color, texture, even voice instantaneously, like some elf or fairy of Celtic myth, or a alien UFO pilot of science fiction. Patrick's older brother Danny denied the allegations, even going as far as framing Ryan as the true culprit. Yet the story of the Brooks killer lingered on in the collective memory of the Southam townsfolk. Some even believed it was what drove out the original owners of the mansion in the early 1970s.
Connor thought the had connected the dots. After the British Museum incident with the panzer-croc and the Sun Cage, he realized that the anomalies were the key to demystifying cryptozoology, to making it a legit science. Sure, Bigfoot, Chupacabra, and Nessie were fabrications, hoaxes, psyops maybe, but other creatures deemed mythical or imaginary - the Babylonian sirush, the Chinese fenghuang and qilin, Herodotus' winged snakes - creatures with immense cultural significance and immensely detailed natural histories recorded over millennia, may have been real flesh-and-blood animals lost in time. Perhaps prehistoric species that haven't turned up in the fossil record yet, or perhaps species that haven't evolved yet (like the future predators, which have become ever more elsuive since the last excursion in the Forest of Dean). In any case, wherever there was a sighting, a myth, something inexplicable and unexplained, there was an anomaly. The Quinn-Mortimer case was recent enough, and Mason's description detailed enough, that it was overdue for serious scientific scrutiny by the ARC.
They are way outside the Greater London hotspot for anomaly activity, but then again that very first Forest of Dean anomaly was also outside those bounds, almost to Bristol really. Claudia is thankful the forest is over a two hour drive away. She does not want to go back there. Here nightmares have largely subsided, and there have been no observed cases of predatory anomalies since then. But there is still an omnipresent fear of the place, of the possibility.
If anything else gets out about these creatures, these phenomena, it will cause mass panic across the nation, perhaps across the world.
She still misses Cutter. Abby and Connor miss Cutter too. Stephen hasn't handled the professor's absence well either; he's no longer works for the Home Office, having resigned over a year ago after he broke up with Valerie, allegedly to do "fieldwork" in the Kurdish regions of Armenia. Mission Chronus' operations have expanded with the establishment of the ARC in Bromley, but the original team is a vestige of its former shelf, a tiny island surrounded by a genomic ocean of bureaucrats and technocrats.
Perhaps it's the prospect of Cutter returning that keeps Claudia staying put, not abandoning her post, but at this point her nostalgia is based solely on the memory of the noble Scotsman, divorced from his true form.
There he is, at the bar. This could be her chance.
She is becoming exceedingly annoyed with Lyle. He just keeps blabbing on and on, in a vain attempt to keep her interested. His words mean nothing to her
"I must admit though, I've never seen you around here myself. And hey, why don't we have a drink afterwards? I would love to…"
Her eyes are fixated on Professor Cutter…
"Excuse me."
Claudia, startled, abruptly turned around in her booth at the back of the bar, nearly spilling her glass of yellow chartreuse. A satin black figure, seemingly out of nowhere, sits opposite her, cloaked in a velvety trench coat, topped with a wool 1920s safari Stetson reminiscent of something Indian Jones would wear. No face is visible, nor is any naked skin on the arms, for the figure has stretched turtleskin sleeves seething unusually womanly hands for a bearer of a croaky masculine rasp. A small figure, less than a meter and quarter in height, but incredibly intimidating.
"Don't panic," he says, reaching to his aluminum can of spicy pear shandy. "I just told off some sleazy Hooters type that you were my wife, and that we out out to dinner. Drink certainly leads to the devil in these parts, doesn't it?"
Claudia is stunned. This is just like here first conversation with Cutter. This can't be real, this is too good to be true.
This is one of those setups, isn't it.
"Well, um, glad I could help," she awkwardly bumbled, hesitantly sticking out her open hand. "My, um…my name is Claudia Brown, I…"
"You were at the mansion earlier today, were you?"
Now she is paralyzed. He knows way too much.
"And…how do you know that? Oh dear god, did that asshole Mick Harper send you after us?" Her hand slowly slides toward the Webley Stinger hidden in her back jean pocket.
"No, it was Emily, the little Merchant girl next door. Watching over my place, as usual, saw three Londoner murder tourist break past the boards. Tried to warn the bearded nerd, but he didn't listen, he kept snooping around the place with his blondie." He paused to take a sip from his can. "The Merchants are a wonderful bunch of chaps. Still won't listen when I tell them to stop giving me Kosher, though. For the millionth, billionth time, I want cracovia or ogórek. The Polish know how to make good pickles."
Certainly an educated fellow, especially for one squatting in a dilapidated house deemed too deteriorated for sale.
"The name's Gremm, Gremm Striker." Claudia shakes his hand out of respect, but reluctantly. Something literally doesn't feel right. The feeling of long sharp fingernails underneath the arm sleeves, much more grotesque than any human nails.
"Alright," she exhales, "since you…know an awful lot about that place, let me ask you something. Do you a certain Patrick Quinn and John Morti-"
"If you're looking for the killer, don't bother. He's dead. He shot himself a long time ago."
He tries to compose himself underneath the curtain of attire, to keep from breaking down.
"My brother, Skarn, he didn't last long. I thought extracting the chip would solve everything like it did for me, but he kept spiraling downward. I found face on the floor, blood splattered everywhere, a old ČZ vz. 27 in his hand."
Claudia is ever more confused. This being, so weird and unnatural, yet so human.
"The Merchants understood what really happened, what we were subjected to. That those two boys…It was an accident, Skarn wasn't supposed to do anything like that, even with the chip. They promised to keep it a secret, to not tell the police. But it hurts. It hurts not be a part of the rest of the world. I have nowhere to go. The Merchants tell me the gateway might not open for another century."
"You…mention this…'chip'," Claudia inquires. "What do you mean by that, that you and your brother had it?"
In a fit of nervousness, Gremm gulps. He is just as scared as Claudia. His hands are shaking.
"Before we came here, to this world…we had masters, men. 'Cleaners', the Yantarists called them. We were treated as nothing more than animals, slaves even. The chip was how they maintained dominion over us, managed our obedience. It overrides any and all natural instincts. Whoever they said to kill, we killed, but only who they said. They weren't supposed to glitch, but -"
"Where was this chip?"
"In the neck, about the base of the skull. It still hurts there. I often feel searing pain."
"Show me."
Upon Claudia's request, Gremm removes his hat and his sleeves, revealing…nothing at first. The head and hands are invisible, like a headless horseman, a ghost in the shell of the trench coat But slowly, the crinkles of skin come into view, and a being of the flesh emerges.
Claudia realization is horrifying: Gremm matches Ryan Mason's account:
Not like an animal, not like a person, but like a demon. Long wide ears. Bright golden eyes, light as the sun, yet with pupils black as night. A grimacing smile full of needle sharp teeth, like a mouth full of knives. Long spindly arms, long fingers, long claws.
It's a creature. It came through the anomaly.
But some aspects of Gremm don't match the account. His right ear is clipped at the anthelia, like a long crop on a Doberman, but unfashionably, as if it was done as a punishment, to do harm. Only one eye remains; in the place of the other is a round empty socket lined with scabby skin, as if it had been gouged out. His wrists had numerous parallel scars as if someone had attempted to butchered him, to skin him alive.
Claudia was heartbroken, her palms shielding her gasp. This poor soul has had a hard life, in his anguish, in his depression.
"What happened?"
"Skarn and I got into a fight. It was a few days before his suicide, a year after the boys disappeared, I think He got mad that we would never find a way out, now that the gateway had closed, so he turned on me. He thought I was to blame for all of this. So he tore my ears, took away my eye. Then in remorse, in regret, he took his own life. I though of taking mine today, there was no reason for me to keep living. But Emily's mother found me half-dead in the living room of the mansion. They saved my life. They're the reason I've chosen to stay here."
Claudia goes around to Gremm's side of the booth, putting her arms around him. She wipes the tears from his remaining eye, as he reaches into a pocket on his trench coat.
"This is all I have of him," he explains, putting the device on the table next to his can. "This is his chip. I extracted it myself. It was difficult, I only had a screwdriver I found in the basement, and without the Cleaner's proper tools I could have killed him on the spot."
"Who are these Cleaners?" asks Claudia.
"Mercenaries, soldiers, in the world I come from. Lackies and servants of the British exiles in America. Bloodthirsty thugs. They're plotting to take back Britain from the Yantarists, and all the communist nations springing up in the Levant, and the Caucaus region too. Working from bunkers owned by the ARC."
"The ARC?"
"Anomaly Reclamation Clinic. One of their many anti-communist militias under the command of Supreme General Johnson. They created my ilk to hunt down people in 'degenerate' regions that had 'stolen' imperial land. We were the chosen ones after the predators switched sides, became their guardians, their pack animals. They made us out of lemurs and bush babies acquired from the East Indian pet trade, a frequent avenue for bourgeoise black marketing. Then merged us with the genes of squid, and of the Cleaners."
ARC. Johnson. Predators.
This can't be real, thought Claudia. But what if it is?
"But we will resist, we will rebel. I have faith. We will be recognized. We will not be silenced."
2011 CE - Counterintelligence Optioning Project (COP) laboratory, classified location near Englefield Green, Runnymede, Surrey, England, United Kingdom
Prospero: We are the future.
In the name of the future, don't fuck anything up, thinks Christine Johnson, as the last of the neurosurgeons enters the corridor leading to the main glass-encased operation room.
Philip Burton is a very clever, powerful, and ambitious businessman, one that does not like mistakes, particularly mistakes that lose him employees or money. He's not coming down to the actual laboratories in the concrete reinforced basement today, and it is Johnson's duty to keep that way. He needs to remain at that gala, at that presentation, courted by the COP's best and brightest, until she can attend it herself, once done with all the dirty work. If anything were to make to the surface at disrupt anything, she's done for. And especially since this very building, not far from Burton's childhood home, is in fact the site of the first Prospero offices, before he sold it to the military and moved to its new locations in London and Salford.
Times are desperate, and so are actions. They need to control the soldiers and harness their power, their potential, right now. Johnson has already seen the worst case scenario, the Isla Nublar situation where one single minute malfunction leads to the whole system collapsing. A year and a half ago, in the Wiltshire facility, when the security apparatus went down due to a cyberhack, the soldiers-in-training went berserk without the and attacked an inspecting Home Office official, Oliver Leek, as well as three of his security guards, gnawing all the way to the bone. All of the animals had to be put down, and the entire bunker downgraded to decoy site before finally being decommissioned, to contain any leaks. Not Johnson's best day. It was the most devastating incident of its kind since the Long Lagoon happening fifteen years earlier; there were no known survivors, human or animal, in that tragedy, just isolated unconfirmed reports of an "Australian chupacabra" shot in the vicinity of Minerva Hills National Park.
At least she has Captain Wilder to back her up. He has always seen her strength, her cunning, her endurance. Eleven years ago, he handpicked her out of the Oxford biology program to become part of MI6's initial research into biotechnological defense, the predecessor of the COP project. Despite the setbacks, he has remained her guardian and mentor, something of a father figure. Yet he is also willing to let her take charge when necessary.
"Ma'am, it's about the Wiltshire incident," he says, handing her a file as they walked down toward the operation room.
Johnson doesn't even start reading the whole report. Only three letters catch her attention.
I.R.A.
I don't know what to do, Dolly. Papa's not coming home.
"You sure about this?!" barks Johnson, her temper flaring, her face turning red.
"Don't know," admits Wilder. "When the Belfast authorities tried to intercept the alleged source of the attack in Lisburn, they found a burned down shack. No computers recovered, just this bizarre artifact." He pointed to a photo of a bronze-plated hexagonal prism, slitted at both ends, with an engraving "65359". "Said to have high traces of radioactive cesium, for some reason. But when Scotland Yard came to retrieve it, it was gone from the police station. It might have been stolen, sold on the black market."
"It might not," sneers Johnson. "My whole future could depend on this. If anyone finds it, I want it. Understand."
"Yes, ma'am."
Breathing heavily, Johnson struggles to regain control. The pair now gazes upon the operation room, the so-called Sweatbox, separated from their subordinates by a plane of bulletproof glass.
"All set?" shouts Wilder through the intercom.
One of the surgeons, Yusef, gives Johnson and Wilder a big thumbs up, before he and his colleagues proceed work.
The patient on the table is a cadet, No. YK-653, a subadult male about six years old, just finishing his conditioning. His naked head is globular and heavily booed, particularly about the frontal and ventral portions toward the skullcap. His eyes are minute, obscured by cerebral folds; he usually sees only black and grey, illuminated by vibratory pulses of sound from the large melon organ above its nasal hole or from its surroundings. His front paws have two sickle-clawed fingers, curved at about the pip joint (in his containment cell, he walks and runs on his knuckles to protect his natural weapons). His back paws have three toes and also contain sickle-shaped claws. On his back, especially about his shoulder, is a muscular hump, lined with five rows backward-curving spines made of matted rhino-like keratin, including a major spinal row trailing all the way to his short, spur-tailed tai. In Johnson and Wilder's eyes, he is a perfect specimen.
YK-653 is not the first of his kind, or the largest or the fastest or the strongest or the most intelligent, but he is of the only surviving type, the most practical one. The process of his creation can be traced back to the early 1980s on the American West Coast, during the modernization of Silicon Valley and the countercultural movement into a more refined weapon of governmental defense, a more efficient and subversive successor the CIA and FBI's MKUltra and COINTELPRO. A prime focus of this movement was the merger of organic and mechanical life into profitable tools, experimented through genetically modified, selectively bred animal test subjects. Yet these early prototypes of cyborgic synergy, the gliding bugbats hunting rogue lab rats in the server rooms, couldn't reproduce naturally, a precaution taken by the engineers were they to escape into the wild; they had to be synthesized from scratch in the embryonic stage one at a time. Eventually, the bugbats came under the possession of the British Armed Forces and its associated organizations, who saw their potential as efficient bioweaponry, more useful in remote outposts than drones or tanks. The goal was to get them to reproduce, to inherit their bestowed genotypes, so that the only artificial aspect of manufacturing would be neural clamp installation upon sexual maturity. This was accomplished a decade ago, when the first naturally conceived and gestated pups were born at the Sandhurst bunker, and ever since the new predators, Blanops predatorius technologicus, have had an evolutionary advantage over their sterile bugbat "ancestors" in Silicon Valley and Long Lagoon. They are already stationed for military use in small numbers throughout battlezones in the Middle East, executing neutralization surveys in sparsely populated areas suspected of harboring extremist holdouts.
On one of the metal rolling utility tables is a new and improved neural clamped, intended to prevent future incidents like the Wiltshire massacre that killed Oliver Leek and his men. Seven centimeters wide and four centimeters tall, its base contains four metal-capped spiked electrodes, its back side two tubular black nodes; all connect to the central nervous system via the animal's parietal and occipital lobe, which control the sensory organs. The orange LED light, shining through four slit-like bands on the central dorsal disk, only works as a bright flashlight when necessarily, instead of flashing when the wearer closes in on a target like earlier models; more often, it is on low power, signifying only that its functioning. Energy is derived from the soldier's food intake, so the only way it will lose power is if the wearer starves to death, insuring that it is always under direct control of encrypted digital signals from the handler.
In all, this is the future of military weaponry. That is, if the surgeon's can successfully install it.
"It's amazing," comments Johnson, as Yusef began to incisive his scalpel across YK-653's skullcap. "Now we understand them, we know how to control them."
Or maybe not.
YK-653's arms twitch, then spasm. Mysteriously, the domitor analgesic hasn't quite worked to full effect this time. Usually, it puts him in a peaceful, torpor-like state.
Not today.
"Get out there now!" screams Wilder.
Yusef and the other surgeons know the drill. They evacuate the operation room immediately, dropping their scalpels. The creature stirs. He is not quite awake yet, but as he flails his arms around his in his untimely sleepwalk, he knocks over his bed and all of the utility tables.
The new neural clamp model is smashed in the process. It will take a long time to manufacture another testable prototype to replace it.
As he regains consciousness, YK-653 presses against the glass, facing Johnson and Wilder. At first, he threatens to smash through, but as his actions becomes less spastic and erratic. He recognizes a familiar sound.
The firm, persistent, yet strangely gentle thumping of Johnson and Wilder's hearts.
Mother. Father.
Of course, he has a real biological mother, but he hasn't heard her, smelled her since he was weaned, and taken from the Wiltshire bunker by Johnson for training at this laboratory. These human masters have been his parental guardians since then.
Obey my voice, he remembers. Obey the pact. My voice, my pact, is the only one you recognize.
He cowers on all fours, his head dipped down, his stubby tail curved between his hind legs, like a wolf expressing regret for challenging the alpha female of the pack.
His has disobeyed his mother, and in the worst manner possible.
Johnson looks on, utterly surprised. This has never happened before. Maybe she will tell this to Burton when she heads upstairs to the gala.
Perhaps they won't need the clamps. Maybe these soldiers have been engineered, conditioned, domesticated enough to require intensive training, and nothing else. The Pact maybe enough.
Or maybe this is a fluke.
"Tell development to build another model," she orders Wilder. They'll still need a way to fully control their soldiers' actions.
2014 CE - The Clock Tower Apartments, Westminster, West End, London, England, United Kingdom
"We don't know if its the same anomaly, but we can't be too sure!"
Even through the HT, Claudia can tell Captain Hilary Becker was distressed. They have reason to be wary. If he is right, they already encountered this anomaly five years ago, when it claimed the life of Sir Richard Bentley.
The spores of an infectious fungus, like a Cordyceps on steroids, were transferred to Bentley by his assistant Lloyd, while he was purveying the art collection is his flat. Claudia, Abby, and Connor tried to save the two of them at the ARC, but it was too late. Gremm knew the only humane thing to do was to freeze them, and let them pass on in peace. Through his intel, the ARC gathered that the fungus was engineered in the future by the Cleaners' masters, as a weapon of war, to applied against warring armies of predators on tropical battlefields. A sample of spores would be delivered on an suspecting predator, who spread it to the rest of the troop. The resulting "zombies" would carry on the disease to every other animal in the environment until the fungus could no longer derive energy from the host's flesh, and died of starvation.
If anything like this were to reach epidemic proportions in the twenty-first century, it would destroy half of London.
Claudia, Abby, Connor, and Jessica Parker leap out of the steel grey ARC-branded Toyota Hilux as they pulled into the apartment parking garage, grabbing the large tranquilizer pistols and ice throwers from the truckbed. As is the routine, Gremm is the last to leave, locking up the vehicle manually before becoming invisible, running outside and stealthily taking a shortcut along the side of the building, while the rest of the gang met up with Captain Becker at the elevators.
But something isn't right. The handheld ADD on Gremm's field belt (cloaked, as is the rest of his attire) isn't pinging anymore. Perhaps the anomaly has already closed. In which case, if a killer fungus or any other organism came through, there is no way of sending it back to its natural habitat.
Meanwhile, in the elevator, Connor comes to the same conclusion. The others star at his ADD morbidly.
As the elevator doors open to the lobby on the eleventh level, Becker leads the way "We have to hurry! Go!" All five of them rush toward the apartment in question, No. 359, Richard Bentley's former luxury condo.
Becker, weapon in hand, knocks on the door. "This is the SAS. There is an emergency in the area, and we need to conduct a search."
A long pause. No one at the door. Becker is about to bust down by brute force.
Then a screech. And the unexpected sight of Gremm being flung onto Becker's iron-hard chest by a rather distraught, unpleasant-looking American with a blackish-brown mustache-goatee duo, smothered in salmon-flavored cream cheese and Russian caviar while a nearly finished Cuban cigar just out of his mouth, and unwashed technicolor Che Guevara pajama slacks.
"I found it," creaks Gremm, as he got back on his own two feet against Becker's body. "I found the creature that came through the anomaly…"
"Do you want me to bust your other eye, Mr. Batboy?" yells the disgruntled hipster, unimpressed with Gremm's sarcasm, his red hot middle poker pointed at all of them. "And what the fuck y'all doing breaking into my place, assholes I don't even fucking know!"
"That's enough!" screams Claudia, putting her foot forward and literally confronting the man head on. "Now, as officers of Her Majesty's government -"
"Hey, do I look like I give a shit for you peppy Tory solider boy types?" counters the man, tugging on his slacks.
"I take offense to that," says Becker.
Jess squeezes past Becker and Claudia. "I'm sorry so the commotion and the misunderstanding," she says passionately, soothingly, hoping to resolve the tension. "I apologize for my boss…and my boyfriend. Um, I'm Jess, Jessica Parker. Nice to meet you."
The man removes the cigar from his lips, throwing it into his apartment. His eyebrows jumped. "Jessy, eh? Now I like you, you know how to act like a normal person, not like this creeps." He enthusiastically shakes her with both of his hands. Jess is confused, but tries to maintain a wide glowing smile.
"The name's Bryce Dallas Belkin, son of Howard Belkin. Former vice manager of Haystacker's Bookstore of the Insane, Chula Vista, California. Now unemployed in beautiful downtown London and fucking loving it."
"That's interesting, Bryce…Nice to meet you." Jess giggled.
"You're a tea party type, aren't you Jess? You look like the tea party type. Why don't I get dressed, and you tell your little friends here the calm the fuck down, and maybe I'll get ya' a couple of drinks, okay?" He closed the door behind him.
The others are less than pleased, even Becker. "Honey, what the fuck?" he asked.
"Do you realize what you've done?" opinioned Abby. "We're supposed to find out what happened the anomaly, not playing Mad Hatter and March Hare with this damn bozo."
"Dunno," says Connor. "Maybe he's a nice guy, once he doesn't look like he just got out of bed."
"Doubt it," grunts Abby. "He's are gnarly, messy. Like my first boyfriend in high school. Always in his bed, never out of bed. Disgusting."
"Indeed," agreed Gremm, his hand against his aching, bruised forehead. "And I'm going into that scumbag's den again."
Claudia reaches for the aspirin in her coat pocket. She seems to be needing it more and more these day. "Okay, let's make the best of it."
Bryce reopens the door. Connor, Abby, Becker, and Jess enter his condo. Claudia turns to Gremm, pressing her hands on his shoulders.
"You alright?"
"Well, I've just been thrown halfway across a room by a Zizekian sack of shit with serious temper issues," Gremm elaborates, "and I feel incredibly dizzy."
"Go to the truck, drive to our home. Get some rest on the sofa. I call our men to get the truck back here when we need to return to the ARC."
"Thank you, sweetheart."
Claudia plants a soft, posh kiss on Gremm's forehead, before entering Bryce's mancave. As the door closes, Gremm disappears, making his way down the hall to the elevators, a much less precarious route back to the parking garage.
"Alright, I guess its time for a more formal introduction," Jess states to Bryce. "This is my boss, Claudia Brown. And this my boyfriend, good ol' sweet Hilary Becker." She tugs at Becker's cheeks. "And this is Connor and Abby Temple…"
Claudia looks around the living room. Bryce makes much more use of the condo's space than Bentley. There are books everywhere, on the shelves, on the floor, strewn all over the place alongside clothes and bottles of gin. Bordiga, Bukharin, Chomsky, Dauvé, Pyatakov, Turner grace the covers of his library items. So many books. Did he have enough time to read them all?
There is no anomaly. No fungus, no even a single solitary spore on the hardwood floor. The coast is clear, for now at least.
She sits down along with the others on the cloth Felicerossi couches. Bryce barely covers his hangover-like appearance with a neon pink bathrobe. He starts pouring out Earl Grey in his visitor's coffee mugs.
"So, if you're unemployed, how do your afford all this?" Claudia asks.
"Inheritance money, duh?" Bryce answers. "I'm a single child, got all the money. Dad was the last of my immediate family to die. Got all his booty, his moola. Close to spending it all though, after all that traveling abroad. Who knows, maybe I'll get back into working soon."
"Traveling? Where?"
"Oh, in the northern Middle Eastern countries, south and east of Turkey. Backpacking and bike riding in Kurdish Syria mostly, also bits of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Incredibly scenery, incredible people. Especially now that the revolution seems to be winning out."
"Revolution?"
"The Kurdistan People's Army, KPA. They want a united Kurdistan separate from Turkey and Syria. It will be one of the first pure communes in the region, doing what the Ba'athists failed to achieve. While in the canyons of Rawandiz, I got caught in the crossfire of one of their battles. It was incredible, I was lucky to make it out alive. Bullets, misses flying, right of of nowhere. They're awesome fighters, bro. Taking on Al-Quaeda, ISIS, Assad, even the US. No one stands in their way. They give zero fucks."
"Sounds incredible," says Claudia, as she sips her tea.
"They got these…drones, they think that's what they are, stolen from the Americans and British. Planted, clamped on the skulls of soldiers. Like mind control, controlled by radio. But they've learned how to override it, to jam the signal. Now they use the technology against the Americans."
Claudia dropped the coffee mug out of her hand, spilling the Earl Grey all over the floor.
Drones. Plants. Clamps. Mind controls. Jamming the signals. This sounds like terminology concerning predators.
She remembers Gremm's words.
The predators switched sides, became their guardians, their pack animals.
2016 CE - Anomaly Research Center (ARC), classified location in Bromley, London, England, United Kingdom
"What you mean they're cutting funding to the ARC?" hollers Lester, bellowing so loudly everyone in the ARC facility stops dead in their tracks.
"I'm sorry, Sir, but the government is reconsidering its priorities regarding the anomaly initiative," MoD Calvin Steering calmly explains through the speaker phone. "We're not scrapping the ARC completely, but we've reassessed our budget, our goals for the next decade or so, and we desperately need to restructure Mission Chronus. No one will be fired, they'll just be stationed at smaller facilities throughout the nation. We don't have the economic or social justification for maintaining your bulky, outdated Bromley facility."
Everyone in the ARC was listening to Steering's provocations. They saw the red writing on the wall.
"We're done for," Claudia huffed on the lower ground floor "I can't believe it. We're fucking done for."
"Guess we're going back to being zookeepers, huh Abby?" teased Connor.
Abby wryly smiled, but didn't seem to impressed with her husband's snark. They had enough money saved from HO paychecks to pay for little Nick Temple, but they would still have to find new jobs. And Abby definitely didn't want to go back to studying parasites in elephant job, an occupation that at any moment could also be on the chopping block post-Brexit.
Ghemm had no words. Sitting in Connor's moving chair in front of the ADD monitors, now screening the BBC News 24 broadcast, he saw the domino effect right before his eyes.
This was the beginning of the chaos. It all starts here. And it's worse than he ever imagined.
Bruce Patton had won the elections in America, with Howard Belkin as his Vice President. Both high-profile technocrats, trained in the military, made rich in Silicon Valley. Both self-proclaimed contrarians, populists, men who wanted to "make a new frontier for a America".
Gremm knows what these people are like. They are fascists. They're acting straight out of the playbook of Hitler and Mussolini. They have already brought death to countries abroad.
"Are you okay, sweetie," consults Claudia. She has noticed Gremm hasn't uttered a single word since the breaking news came on. She wraps her arms around him, nestling him against her kashmir sweatshirt.
"I failed," he whispered. "We failed. This is it, this is what happened."
They remember how that self-professed "anarchist" in Westminster, the young American Bryce Belkin, lied about his father's death.
2020 CE - off Huwaysat Island, United Arab Emirates, near Al Batha, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia
Saya Membebaskan was born eighteen years ago on Pulau Bawean, a tiny sunlit island in a far off place called Indonesia. Her parents were fisherman and merchants who voyaged from place to place, never staying on one island for too long, so she never had a concept of a permanent home besides her mobile boat. But she's always wondered what that sort of home would be like. A home where she could be comfortable, with her family.
She was taken away from them when she was seven. She lagged behind them in the streets of downtown Jakarta, when she was strangled, muffled, cuffed, and taken into the alley. Next thing she knew, she was on a plane, pig-tied reverse prayer style on the flower with a machine gun to her head, headed to a land far beyond anything she can recollect. A land of sand, oil, and blood, where she would be sold in the underground, as a slave, a lowly title she retains to this day.
Most of the 'civilized' Muslim has long abandoned the practices of involuntary servitude, if not outright banned it, but it remains a fact of life for the sheikhs of the Saudi monarchy, the neo-Wahhabists and their contemporaries, who maintain the most political power in the Middle East. The influx of money from the west , primarily American and Britain, cements their power. They are unstoppable in their economic and political progress, both here in Saudi Arabia and in the United Arab Emirates across the disputed border to the east, which now boast manmade wonders rivaling in scale those of the West, many of which were built on the backs of abused cheap labor, including slaves.
Saya has only heard rumors of the Emirates from eavesdropping. It is a magical place. Islands of sand shaped like palms, or of all the lands of the world. A great pointed spiraling mass of glass and steel, the Burj Khalifa, a Ziggurat of Babylon dwarfing everything else in the surrounding dunes. A tower possibly reaching to the realm of Allah and Muhammad.
But is only for the rich. Only the rich are able to reach to the stars, the heavens, where everything is clean and virgin, and approved by the Americans and all the other Western pigs. The rest of society, the workers, the slaves, struggle for scraps.
Saya doesn't get to have fun here either. While Al'Ahmak Ghan and his socialites party to the sound of defeating electronic screeching until the sun goes down on their yacht, she has to scrub the poop deck spotless of spilled alcohol.
Any disobedience, however civil, will have dire consequences. She has heard the stories. Particularly that one about the slave rebellion along the Saudi border of Qatar, in which there were only a few survivors. Most were killed by the slaveowner's missile-carrying shepherd-drones, gifts from the Americans, and had to be replaced.
Those that survived and refused to confess their guilt were taken to special interrogation chambers deep underground, often below the sheikh's palaces and mansions. Here they were other drones, gifts from the British. Animals, almost ape-like or human-like in appearance, but only just, their thoughts and actions controlled by drones atop their heads, obeying the commands of the slaveowners, to beat slaves into submissions, sometimes to the death. Those that survived had the pencil-shaped puncture marks around the neck to tell the tale. Getting out of the lion's den, some called it. Those that didn't were thrown into what could only be described as a great pit of white fire, with no possible means of returning.
Saya doesn't know if these stories are entirely true, but she doesn't want to find out. She doesn't want to be killed in the lion's den. But then again, she doesn't want to waste her life in this mundane existence either, as a slave with no future of her own. Like many in her worn-dorm sandals, she wants to be free.
Dusk sets on the crystal clear water of the Dohat Sumaryah. A monuments rumbling shakes the boat. Past Ghagha Island and over the eastern peninsula, a white stream of smoke and fire erupts, brightening the night sky. Al'Ahmak Ghan and his friends, sunglasses on, watch in awe. At last, the Arab world has joined the great Space Race. Inside the speeding rocket are the first people from the Emirates to visit the grand cosmos, and make their constellation among the stars.
Saya could care less. There may be monsters on this earth, monsters under the earth, and vile corrupt plastic weaklings being sent to dethrone Allah himself, but it is here, in the gutters, on the wayside, hidden from the view of the upper classes, that true hardworking human beings lived, and these meek souls will one day be the inheritors of this world.