Discovery

by Douglas E Roff

  The research was undertaken to be able to query the DL Main using proprietary software and identify commercial opportunities which could then be sold to oil companies for development. The hope was that any techniques discovered would not only be commercially viable in Alberta, but around the world. Techniques for Canada may only need to be modified to use, say, in similar oilfields in the US, Venezuela or Mexico.

  If the results obtained conformed to known existing and proven parameters in Alberta, then the results might significantly reduce the time and effort to modify the technology for use elsewhere. The software would then be used to derive and project new techniques for use in other drilling locations and conditions.

  But the young and very talented Canadian programmer hit some snags in developing the appropriate algorithms and came to an impasse. He asked a Senior Programmer for assistance but still they got no closer to a solution. They went up the seniority chain but, again, to no avail. He was about ready to shut the project down when he got an email from the firm’s owner providing him with a name and a phone number at an institute he had never heard of.

  The email read, in part, “We’ve had a working relationship with the Victoria Institute for many years. Feel free to tell them anything and everything. Legal documents are in place, so contact them right away and begin work on the solution. Good luck.”

  The programmer contacted the Institute, forwarded his programming and analysis, described what the object of the program was then carefully described what he had done that had failed. Questions and answers went back and forth for several months.

  After about five months of interchange, an encrypted email arrived at the desk of the young programmer. It read, “Solution attached. You may run your simulations immediately.”

  This he did. Immediately.

  At first the programmer, a recent University of Saskatchewan Computer Sciences doctoral graduate, thought he had wasted valuable computing time with DL Main and his own company’s extensive and costly computer resources on a project he now believed was infeasible. He had worked so hard to land this job and was convinced that the three hundred plus solutions the computer had cranked out were likely to be massive dead ends. Worse, the computer was still spitting out solutions for parts of the world he had never heard of.

  He fessed up to his boss, expecting the head geek to be really, really pissed off. He was not. Instead his boss said, “Let’s have a look.”

  Three months later, the programmer and his geek boss were able to confirm the solution to drilling and related extraction problems existing in over eight hundred sixty-seven new major oilfields around the world. The computer was still identifying new potential oilfields but had been stopped in mid program as more than many billions of dollars in potential new oil and gas revenue had been newly identified. The ability to commercialize just what they had would take a lot of time, and a fair amount of money. Then industry would need to be convinced to buy what they were selling.

  But once they had more money, more time and more staff, they would restart the program. Then they would turn their attention to resource mining, diamond fields and a whole host of additional trade sectors.

  This program and DataLab Project had become virtual, digital and metaphorical gold mines. Pun intended.

  Chapter 13

  In early 2009, a meeting took place in Washington, DC which included representatives of the DataLab Project operating committee, US and Canadian defense establishments, the CIA, NSA and CSIS. On the agenda for the working group was the future of the DataLab Project, the defense and security implications of the growth in the Project and an infotech primer for the politicians and their senior staffs. This included just about every department head not on the committee’s governing body, hence just about everyone in the room.

  A working group was jointly established between the US and Canada to describe the altruistic purposes of the DL Main. The true purpose of the working group was to highlight potential access by unfriendly nations, renegade scientists, rogue nations and terrorist organizations. The converse was also important: how could the DataLab Project be used to combat the foregoing? What protocols could be put into practice, if any, that could circumscribe the potential for abuse? And if there were none, what further steps should the United States and Canada take to protect the peace and security of their nations.

  Seemed reasonable and the goals attainable.

  What only the President and the Prime Minister were aware of, along with select members of the governing parties in each country, was a report that had been jointly commissioned by CSIS, Canada’s national intelligence agency, and the NSA in response to concerns raised by Board Members of the DataLab Project.

  In summary, the report concluded that with the advances in artificial intelligence, new breakthroughs in algorithm development, massive increases in data storage capacity and speed of light data retrieval, the DataLab Project could now, and perhaps later in the future, be used to do a broad variety of tasks that were virtually inconceivable only a few years ago. Some were good, others not so much.

  Quoting: “Advances in technology, as applied to this database, could conceivably result in inherent abuses of privacy rights to such an extent that ordinary democratic principles would be unable to restrain. As such, the DataLab Project should be reconfigured in such a way that potential abuses are minimized. The only way to restrain and manage the growth of features that could become problematic in the future is to qualify and limit access to the DL Main through rigorous background checks and a system of sequentially limiting tiered access protocols.

  “Our recommendation is that steps be taken immediately to examine current access protocols and, within the next twelve months, develop a system of needs-based qualification for a multi-tier program that matches data access to stated research goals. Attached as Exhibit 23 is our recommendation for a Master Protocol that will accomplish this revision, as agreed to by the Constituent Parties, the US and Canadian governments.”

  The DataLab Project, the DL Main, was thereafter to be divided into to parts. DataLab A was a public program. DataLab B was not. Idle questions posed by third parties about DataLab B and its key personnel were routinely investigated by the FBI and the RCMP. Press reports didn’t exist, as there was no information available, other than that there was no public information about the that part of the DataLab Project. Hardly noteworthy.

  Because of this new legislation, DataLab B was to be headed by a newly appointed Joint Director of Combined Operations and a single Assistant Joint Director of Combined Operations, together with newly appointed Department Heads and a series of Regional Directors in both the United States and Canada. Department Heads and the Regional Directors would be chosen from a pool of applicants with extensive experience in in both DataLab Operations and pristine academic qualifications.

  The first Joint Director of Operations was Edward St. James. The first Assistant Joint Director of Operations was Adam St. James. The only real discussion around the two choices had to do with which St. James was more qualified to be Director than the other. The obvious choice for Director was Adam. But to most of the committee it was unseemly to have a father reporting to his son.

  Both were consensus choices; both were Canadian and US nationals, and worked well with both nations and their security and military services.

  Besides, rumor had it that Adam St. James was significantly more difficult to work with and had once told a joint committee of Congress to get its collective head out of its collective ass and appropriate the funding necessary for expansion of the Project into new key areas. Some on the American side described Adam as a ticking time bomb. The Canadians just laughed. After all, he resided in the remote and rural burgh of Barrows Bay, British Columbia.

  The place didn’t even have a hockey team. How civilized could it be?

  Chapter 14

  The young woman in her late twenties sat at her desk quietly contemplating the most recent news from Pri
nceton. Her spies on the inside of the BioGen facility in New Jersey had kept her apprised of all recent developments, but she was especially interested in one of the projects. Although the old Project A+/A-, now renamed the Serum Project, was coming along nicely, she still believed that, as conceived by the Great Council, it would only be of limited utility in the coming war.

  Flitting back and forth between natural and transformed state was an interesting parlor trick but how effective would it be killing large numbers of humans when confronted with the overwhelming mass of humanity? No, she thought, her band of rogue Gens warriors needed something that gave them more than a one-on-one advantage once the conflict began. With more than seven billion humans running around, and more each day, they needed an advantage. A colossal advantage.

  Over the past eight years, ever since being taken captive while on vacation by a small pack of shunned Gens warriors in the Amazon region of Brazil, she had come to know and understand who these outcasts really were: they were the future of their kind. These small packs had been left alone to their own devices and survived well in the wilderness; this they had done successfully in isolation and they had increased their numbers. Nobody paid attention, not the humans who were blissfully unaware of their existence nor the Gens Collective, who assumed that with ostracism came eventual death.

  The biology of that assumption had never been fully tested until some thirty years ago when a Gens research scientist who had been shunned found a way to survive the ordeal of expulsion. To his great surprise he determined that there was no biological imperative behind death or survival; rather it was more of a deep psychological response to untold years of propaganda and psychological reinforcement in the daily lives of his kind. He didn’t wish to be the experiment that disproved his hypothesis; but, in the end, it was his refusal to cease his research into the phenomena that led to his expulsion from the Collective. It also led to the eventual proof of his hypothesis that ostracism, by itself, meant nothing.

  Having survived in the wild for more than five years without transforming, he concluded that any Gens adult could do the same. Freed from the hold of the Collective, he also found that he could retain some vague, but tiny vestiges of memory of his time as a Gens transformed to human state. These residual memories, less conscious than unconscious, were immensely useful in survival. Whether this was biological or psychological, or both, he could not say. He only knew that it was.

  Two years later, he found his mate, a Gens originally from the deep forests of Thailand who had similarly and simultaneously undertaken the same kind of research in Asia and had been likewise ostracised upon discovery. She had elected to remain in human form, work among the prey and had immigrated to the United States to avoid the unwanted attention of the Thai Gens Collective. Within a few years she had been completely forgotten by her former Clan and they had simply marked her shunning as a death. She no longer existed to them and that was how she wanted it.

  She met her mate while vacationing in natural state in the deep forests of Northern California and she soon discovered that he had rare skills and arcane knowledge that had been long suppressed by the Great Council. In this new knowledge, she determined, was great strength and she was convinced that it presented new possibilities for all Gens if they only could be made aware of this untapped source of potential. The two decided then and there to dedicate the remainder of their lives to blazing new trails for all Gens folk, freed from the cloying rules of proscribed Gens conduct outlined in the Code of Strictures as well as other cultural and Clan prohibitions.

  They decided that they did not have to live the traditional way; another more primal path of ancient origin was possible.

  But the two could do little alone to effect change. They began searching out converts to their new way of life among both the dispossessed and disaffected Gens. Their message was simple, and recruitment was not all that difficult even though their numbers remained low. Lack of access to the mass of Gens populace, the need to remain “dead” in the eyes of the Collective and the heretical nature of their message all contributed to the tiny level of persuaded Gens converts. It would be a deadly game to align with insurgent and rebellious Gens, so even though the whispers of insurrection wafted through the Collective, resistance to their message was both natural and expected. Few mainstream Gens were willing speak of treason out loud, even among close friends and family.

  The mainstream thought of the Gens Collective, embodied in the two principal Leadership Councils, held greater sway with the masses of Gens; leadership had, in fact, been very successful in maintaining secrecy and avoiding discovery. In addition, the path followed by leadership had been the only path for so long that raising questions or challenging longstanding traditional conduct was rarely tolerated by Councillors in either of the two great Councils nor any in the lower Councils either. Dissention was identified quickly and rooted out ruthlessly. There would be no moderate opposition; there would be no opposition permitted at all.

  The new young leader of the Black Shirts reminded herself just how far the opposition had come and the incredible number of sympathetic Gens who supported at least having a dialogue with them. She alone had succeeded in recruitment where the two founders of the movement had failed. They had given up and eventually reverted to natural state where they now resided in the deep wilds of Indonesia. There they had found other of the dispossessed and founded a primal community. They sought no contact with the outside world, human or Gens, and elected never to transform.

  The enigmatic and charismatic young woman no longer believed in a single, silver bullet solution. In her mind, the biggest problem with the Gens leadership was that the Gens had allowed themselves to slowly be corrupted from natural state Gens principles and instincts and had become “humanized”; the Gens leadership and indeed the Gens themselves had become seduced by a flood of human constructs of behavior and order. She determined, and made the case convincingly, that this seduction was simply too great a price to pay to live among humans.

  So, if the Black Shirts themselves could not make war on humanity, they could shadow the Collective until they could engineer a conflict. They would find and light the fuse; but the big bang explosion would have to come from humanity discovering the Gens and starting the predicted holocaust that would surely ensue. They would bide their time until the various projects undertaken by the Gens leadership worldwide could become operational. Thirty years ago, this was but a pipe dream. Thirty years later it could soon become a reality.

  The V-1409-B Program, the E-5 virus, had been in research and development by BioGen for the past fifteen years. Only the rapid advances in genetic research, including unlocking the human and Gens genomes, had accelerated the pace and course of the research. Now the program was about to be tested under strictly controlled conditions to assess the viability of the E-5 virus.

  The sole obstacle to almost immediate infection and destruction of mankind was that BioGen Labs in Chicago had encountered a glitch in its research; the E-5 organisms were virulent and extremely deadly to humans but so too was it equally as fatal to Gens in both natural and transformed state. What was needed to begin the war was a vaccine, virus blocker or inhibitor of sorts; a substance that would prevent the deadly effects on Gens in either state. A pre-infection prevention through inoculation would be acceptable. Or some sort of genetic therapy, if indeed one was possible.

  Better yet what the Gens really needed was a new formulation that only affected humans.

  While BioGen had not yet made any new advances in the development of a solution to this fatal flaw, the rogue Black Shirt scientists believed they had or at least they thought they had. They also had made some interesting advances in the Serum Project. These scientists told their young aggressive leader that they were no more than a year or two away from a solution but were shy on specific scientific details. She had no way to verify their assessment.

  Saldana Ri, the fiery and charismatic young leader of the Black Shir
ts, was eager to begin experimenting on humans at the earliest opportunity. Her scientific colleagues would not accede to her incessant demands for “clinical human trials”; the Gens scientists understood that without stringent controls, this new virus could destroy the entire world of humans and Gens, transformed or not, if it wasn’t properly contained. Even the most committed of the rogue scientists themselves wanted to retain the ability to transform, so premature testing without appropriate safeguards was, to them, simply out of the question. It was just not safe.

  The Black Shirt scientists couldn’t abide this potentially disastrous result. Saldana Ri, however, could. If plague meant the destruction of mankind, she was willing to pay the price measured in equally high percentages of dead Gens in any state.

  Saldana Ri had her own agenda and putting it up for a vote was not a part of it. She would act alone if she had to. But she also had support among certain of the Gens leadership elite.

  There was one Gens leader who could supply her with all the scientific data she needed to proceed. He could be managed and led; her sexual skills had completely disarmed him and being with her in transformed state was all he ever thought about.

  What a fool, she thought. He’d be one of the first casualties. She would see to that personally.

  Chapter 15

  Dr. Calista Gold had been quite forthright in her assessment of the core progress being made in the development of the A+ and A- serums, which her staff called the Serum Project. Like many of the other professionals working on the Serum Project, as well as the E-5 virus, not everything that had been researched or developed had made its way into the official reports seen by Enzo Fortizi, and therefore eventually by Paulo, the Great Council or the Council of Elders.