“Bullshit,” Allison whispered. She wiped the tears from her cheeks.
Chuck shook his head. “Look, I won’t touch you. Let’s have a seat.” Chuck opened one of the few intact doors left in the abandoned school and motioned her to enter. Allison inched around him, warily, and found herself in what remained of Mr. Counter’s history classroom.
They sat facing each other for a long time before Allison asked, “What do you want?”
“I’m dead, what could I possibly want?” Chuck’s voice dripped sarcasm.
“What are you? A ghost, a sprit, part of my subconscious?”
Chuck sighed. “I ain’t quite sure, sweetcakes. No one gave me an instruction manual. All I can say is I’m what’s left of good ol’ Charlie Wilson.” Chuck shook his head. “All I know is that that knockout drug they gave you gives me a chance.”
“For what? Revenge?”
“Oh Jesus,” Chuck looked up at the sky. “A chance to talk. Before they hit you with their anti-mindwarp crap. I hardly need to go booga-booga at you, do I? You almost offed yourself—”
“How do you know—?”
“This is your head we’re in. You leave a lot of stuff just lying around here.” Chuck opened up a drawer in Mr. Counter’s desk and pulled out a yellowed test paper and tossed it to Allison. Allison recognized it as part of Restless Nights, as corrected by Mr. Counter.
Allison looked at it and back up at Chuck. “So, what do you want?”
“I told you, this ain’t easy—” Chuck paced up and down behind the desk and finally punched the blackboard, cracking it.
Allison jumped.
“Fuck it all, I’m here to apologize— there, I said it— I know how much an asshole I was— am— ok? I deserved everything.” Chuck started for the door.
“Wait.” Allison said.
“Damn,” Chuck said. “Ok, what now?”
“Why?”
“Why— fuck it all to hell, you want to know why? Can’t I just—”
Allison stared at him, dumbfounded. He must have taken it as a “no.”
“Look, sweetcakes, we’re stuck together.”
“Huh?”
Chuck sighed. “What happened, you know, blood flying and all that. You doing that mindwarp shit. It tied us together.”
Allison still stared and Chuck tapped his forehead and then, gently, tapped hers. She flinched.
“If we don’t call it quits and even the scorecard, we’re going to live through that shit over and over for all of whatever. Kind of screw what we all got to do.”
“I see.” Allison whispered.
“Ah, no you don’t. But I do.” Chuck pulled a chair over across from Allison and sat with his arms folded over the back. “We got to be on speaking terms, sweetcakes. See,” Chuck smiled, “you might need me someday.”
Allison shrank back. “Never.”
“Yeah, right.” Chuck stood up. For a moment he was silent. Then he looked around with a pained expression. “Fuck it, you have no idea how badly you’ve screwed things.”
“I can deal with it myself.”
“Shit you say. You’re about to get your chance.” Chuck became translucent. He looked at her through hands that were rapidly fading. “Say hi to Dad for me,” Chuck said before he disappeared completely.
He’d left her alone in Mr. Counter’s classroom. The scene didn’t change until she woke up.
What did he mean “anti-mindwarp crap?”
EIGHTEEN
OVER ARKANSAS: Saturday October 30, 1999
3:25 AM
Allison woke up with a seat belt restraining her, and for a moment she thought she was back in her Mom’s Taurus outside Columbus. As the fog receded from her mind, she began remembering fragments of last night.
Chuck was right, I screwed things up.
She tried to remember where she was, but she had no idea. Her cheek rested against a flat surface. It vibrated gently against her skin. She opened her eyes and found herself looking out a thick glass porthole. On the other side, blackness.
Where am I?
A small part of her mind tried to reach out with her teek— and her sense slammed against the side of her skull. The sudden pain made her gasp. The shock felt as if she’d sprained her ankle, but only discovered the fact when she’d put her weight on it.
Her head was stuffed with cotton, and for the first time since she’d discovered her teek, she was trapped in her own skull. The sudden sense of claustrophobia that caused was worse than waking up in a prison cell.
She hugged herself and turned her head away from the darkness outside the window. The rest of the cabin was darkened, but there was enough light to see she was in an airplane. Allison guessed that it was a small business jet, not that she would know.
“Macy?”
Allison felt panic grip at her.
A comforting hand rested on her arm and Allison nearly screamed. The panic caught in her throat when she saw who it was in the seat next to her.
“She’s asleep—”
“Dad?” Allison’s voice was strangled and small.
The man hesitated a second before he nodded, as if it had been an accusation he didn’t necessarily want to admit to.
“I’m sorry for—” he began.
“I trusted you!” Allison whispered. “I have no idea why. You were supposed to fix everything!” Tears began welling in Allison’s eyes. “Why, Dad? I ran across five states to find you, and you’re with these ASI nitwits who’ve ruined my life.”
“I didn’t have a choice—”
“So when do they start drilling into my head, Dad?” Allison couldn’t remember feeling so angry.
“It’s not like—”
“Don’t tell me what it’s like! I’ve seen a film of them lobotomizing some poor kid, they killed Mr. Luvov, and what… about… Mom?” She shook now, wracked with tears and anger. She felt as if she was about to tumble head first into an abyss of hysteria that had no bottom.
She squeezed her arms across her stomach and rocked.
Dad put his arm across her shoulder, “Allie, I know these are bad people. Stone threatened you if I didn’t help them—”
“Mom,” Allie said. “Where’s Mom?”
“I’m so sorry…”
The way he said it confirmed Allison’s greatest fear. The sobs began, choking off any words. She curled into a ball and shook.
◆◆◆
It seemed an eternity before she had the strength to ask, “How?”
She didn’t move, so all she could see were her own knees in front of her face.
“Some stupid accident,” she heard him say. She could hear a hollow anger in his voice. The hollowness echoed how she felt. “Carol panicked when she saw them, ran, fell.”
She can’t be dead. Allison tried to lie to herself, but she had suspected it ever since the Taurus had pulled into the driveway without Mom in it. Allison shook her head and closed her eyes, hugging her knees closer to herself. “What are they going to do to me?” Her whisper was so low that she barely heard it herself.
“Take you to the Institute with all the other kids. Study you—”
“Will they cut open my head?”
Dad patted her back, “No, Allie.”
“I saw this film—”
“Whatever it was, it must have been old. The kids are too valuable to Stone. It’s other people who’re…” Dad trailed off, his voice carrying enough pain for Allison to realize that he felt for her mother too.
“Who are these people?” Allison whispered.
“Mr. Stone?”
Allison shook her head. “All of them. ASI, Prometheus, this Mr. Stone guy, the Flintstones, you, Mom, me— everyone.”
Dad sighed. “Are you up to hearing this?”
I’ve been up for this ever since I heard you call Mom. Allison nodded.
With Allison curled into a ball next to him, he began the first story he’d told her since she was five years old.
◆◆◆
According to her dad, John Charvat, Prometheus had its origins at the end of the Second World War. Not the project itself, but the pathology that eventually led to the project, a pathology that germinated within an intelligence community that seamlessly slid from World War to Cold War and quietly went insane.
A knot of people within the government convinced themselves that the Soviets were capable of anything— and not simply in the moral sense. Any scientific intelligence from the Soviet Union was cloned in the US under a cloak of paranoia and secrecy.
Any scientific intelligence.
Any.
The Prometheus project had begun in the late forties in response to wartime Soviet experiments in ESP and Telekinesis. Evidence for such Soviet projects was spotty at best, and the results of the experiments were even spottier. And while the mainstream American intelligence community was paranoid of a Soviet lead in technical areas concerning bombs, tanks and missiles, in one small corner of the CIA the worries were psionics, mind over matter, astral projection, telepathy.
In the black secrecy of the Cold War, a small cadre of men with this agenda could divert huge amounts of resources without challenge. Their agenda became Prometheus.
The project was supposed to do the Russians one better. Through the early fifties the CIA funded the Prometheus Research Institute, which in turn funded several thousand experiments in universities across the United States. The experiments funded by PRI were fairly straightforward. Most of the tests were only slight refinements of tests developed by Dr. J. B. Rhine in the thirties. The major refinements were ones of scale. Every result, along with the identities of the test subjects, was sent back to PRI to be collated. The data pool eventually contained nearly a million college students.
None of this was terribly unusual.
What was unusual was what PRI did with those results.
Thousands of people, after the experiments, were contacted by PRI. High scorers on particular tests were encouraged to marry people who were high scorers on similar tests. The incentives sometimes amounted to thousands of dollars, cars, and even houses— often with the major part of the dowry withheld until a child was produced from the union.
The project was expensive, amoral, and— in terms of pairing off Rhine test high-scorers at least— very successful. The Prometheus institute was soon cataloging thousands of second-generation Rhine kids across the country.
It the mid-sixties, PRI began to see results.
The film Allison had seen had come from this era, when the PRI had begun “taking in” second-generation Rhine kids to examine the results of the project.
The PRI experiment had worked. Psi effects followed the Rhine kids like a plague of locusts; precognition, apparitions, spontaneous combustion… and poltergeists. At the very least, the new generation scored as high as their parents did on the Rhine tests. At best, the kids could erupt into activity that had never before been available to scientific scrutiny. Out of the thousands of second generation kids out there, PRI took nearly two thousand back to the institute for in-depth study.
Allison had seen a movie of that kind of “in-depth study.”
Unfortunately, most of the second generation, while finally giving them a base to build a physiological model of psi, were erratic talents. In fact, the more powerful, it seemed, the less reliable the ability was. The poltergeists were a classic example, universally they were the most powerful kids in terms of energy expenditure— but they were limited to a brief flash of uncontrolled power during puberty, and then the power would shortly burn itself out.
The pattern was typical. A brief— and sometimes fatal— eruption of uncontrolled paranormal activity during adolescence, followed by a descent into quiescence.
While this was happening, the CIA itself was having problems.
The sixties weren’t a great time for the Agency, especially its small covert subsidiary the ASI. The seventies were even worse. The public began to hear about things like LSD experiments on prisoners and military personnel. The CIA steadily tried to divorce itself from the “weird stuff.” The public exposure of something like Prometheus would be a disaster, not only for the experiments. There were thousands of families out there, created by PRI’s bribery, that were terribly unstable. Most of the unions fell apart after the second kid. Many did so violently.
The typical burn-out of the second generation kids did not encourage support from the more mainstream intelligence community. In fact, the surviving second generation Rhine kids were paranormally quiet for the most part by the time they reached adulthood. By the early seventies, PRI had run out of teenagers to study.
Gradually, the CIA weaned the Prometheus away from government funding, until the organization stood by itself. By the end of the seventies, PRI became, publicly, a legitimate pharmaceutical concern specializing in neurochemistry.
But…
PRI was run by old intelligence men, who in turn recruited intelligence people. There was a corporate psychology at PRI that was cut from the CIA out of whole cloth. In fact, the people who ran PRI had come from the most extreme portions of the intelligence community, and had shifted into the private sector because the CIA could no longer tolerate them.
Privatizing PRI did little except remove it from what little restraint CIA oversight had given it. In fact, Prometheus became more entrenched, more paranoid, and more secretive about the real work.
Prometheus, freed from the CIA, needed the funding to take the experiment the next logical step. They found their money in the pockets of Howard Stone.
Stone was a rich man. Texas rich. Oil, cattle, rail: name it and Stone owned a large piece of it. Stone was also a die-hard commie-hating patriot who had— among other things— attempted to fund a private invasion of Cuba at least three times during the late sixties. Stone was also slightly off his cork about the Bermuda Triangle, the Illuminati, UFOs, Atlantis, and— of course— the powers of the mind.
In other words, he was the perfect candidate to fund PRI.
Billions of Stone’s dollars flowed into PRI as the company tried a new tack to prevent the familial disintegration of the Rhine’s previous generation. They were more subtle this time, and as effective. Often they only talked to one of the pair. They convinced some second generation women to undergo artificial insemination. They recruited some of the second generation to come work for PRI. Quite a few of the Rhine kids, understandably, had evolved an interest in the paranormal. In a few cases PRI still bribed.
The major problem was reconstructing a list of the second generation kids. Locating all of them was a major effort. The funding decline during the sixties had allowed many of the second generation kids to slip through the cracks. One of Stone’s major contributions to PRI was reconstructing its private intelligence capability to find those kids.
◆◆◆
“The ASI?” Allison asked. She had unfolded a bit in her seat and watched her dad. It was an eerie sensation just to look at him, after so many years.
“Yes and no,” Dad said. “The ASI was an agency within the CIA during the sixties and the early seventies. It was responsible for overseeing Prometheus, the LSD experiments, a lot of covert ops in Vietnam. It was all but disbanded after the war.”
“But—”
“It’s a convenient cover for PRI’s operations arm. While the ASI technically exists in Washington, it’s so layered in secrecy and national security that any local inquiries by either police or private citizens are simply shunted away.”
“So the Flintstones aren’t the real ASI?”
Dad looked away for a moment and said, “Nothing is real in this business.”
The silence was filled with the vibrating thrum of the plane’s engines. Allison wiped the tears off of her face. She felt less on the edge of a hysterical breakdown. But her head still hurt, and her gut still ached.
And Mom was still dead.
She resisted the urge to start crying again. Instead, she looked at Dad and said, “What about us?”
Dad turned to look at her. “Us?”
“You, me, Mom— where do we fit in this?” Allison sucked in a breath, “Am I someone’s experiment?”
Dad smiled, “That’s the ironic thing, Allie. You aren’t. Carol and I loved each other, despite the strange home life PRI inflicted on us.” Dad reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t ever think you’re the result of some ‘experiment.’ You were born because Carol wanted a child, and she never stopped believing that you were the best thing that ever happened to her.”
Dad let go.
“Tell me about it,” Allison said.
◆◆◆
Dad had met mom at PRI. By the time Carol had joined the lab staff, Dad had been working as head of security for three years. Dad had come out of the ASI in Vietnam, Mom out of Duke University. Within a year Carol wanted marriage, and a family.
The problem was that PRI had strict rules against inter-employee relationships. Mom and Dad had to develop theirs in secret. Because of Dad’s control of the security apparatus, they could do so. Unlike most PRI employees, Mom and Dad could have a private life— even to the extent of secretly living together.
Dad said that Mom had never really known how much active intervention it took on his part to keep the relationship secret. And, even with his control of the records, marriage was out of the question. In the end, the two of them agreed on a dangerous compromise, Carol would have her family, but without marriage.
◆◆◆
“It was stupid, all the secrecy. One of us should have just quit.”
“Why didn’t you?” Allie asked. She couldn’t help picturing herself in that situation if Dad and Mom had never separated. Would she have to sneak to school out the back door?
“Too proud. Too stubborn. Both of us. Another irony, clinging like that, since we both ended up despising our jobs.”
No wonder, Allison thought. That kind of deception, for years, it had to take some sort of toll.
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