She chugged the rest of her beer. “Before we sit here a minute longer, I want facts: what are your ultimate goals?”
He waited a moment and studied her. “What I am about to share is so sensitive, I normally do not speak of it on American soil. Doctor Archer's work relates to traveling through time. He is under the impression that the expedition will gather medicine and cures from the future to bring back and solve all of our greatest ills. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Without his knowledge, we have performed several reconnaissance missions using his technology. We have isolated a weapon designed as the ultimate deterrent to nuclear war, which not surprisingly, is still a threat in the future. When activated from the atmosphere, it finds the genetic markers common to all humans and eliminates those life forms. So as not to be mistaken, within seconds, seven billion lives will come to an abrupt – but necessary – end.”
Val nodded. “What do you need me for?”
“I don’t wish to sugar-coat this,” Roger said. “The civilian participants have a very specific role to play. Put simply: it’s to repopulate the earth.”
“Ah,” she said, “so you need me to function as some sort of brood mare, huh?”
“Not quite,” Roger went one. “Many of the participants are long-time associates of my organization, but a few of them are suddenly having second thoughts. The search is underway to fill our group, but we need someone committed to ensure our plan succeeds. I believe that someone to be you.”
“But I’ll still be needed for breeding purposes, right?”
“Not exactly. Archer is a brilliant man, and I would like him to be a part of the new society…”
“I see,” she interrupted. “So you need me to seduce him? Tell me, is there any part of this plan where my vagina does not play a prominent role?”
“There is more,” he interrupted back. “The agreed participants have been carefully selected and are willing to play their part in the repopulation. Since you are so concerned with the use of your reproductive organs, however, I am willing to give you an exclusive position that includes the option to remain celibate should you choose.”
“And how is that a reward?”
“The program is structured to allow only the celibates a role in governance. The celibates are not compromised easily and are more focused in my experience. Do you see what I am offering you? You will have the power to promote great change in the future society.”
"But why me?" she asked.
Roger sat back and unbuttoned his top shirt button. "Ms. Ferguson, my organization is always on the lookout for people who are disgruntled with the current system. While this may sound predatory, most of those people, in my experience, have been spouses of the armed forces. We live in a time of great war, so there are not a few such disgruntled ones. Given your personal history and emotional stake in world affairs, I believe you possess the necessary trait I need."
"What's that?"
"Indifference. Indifference toward the current political system. Did you know that you were the only student in your college that did not side with a political faction? The current world order has failed you, Valerie. It has failed me - really, all of us. I need people desperate for change."
“Then I assume you won't be offering me promises of wealth?”
He shook his head. “There will be no money in the new order.”
“Good,” she replied.
“Then we have a deal?”
She nodded. Roger and Val left the pub without acknowledging the check on their table and, within moments, she was on a plane to the organization’s secret base. She would become its most loyal agent.
Chapter 3
A week after their wedding at city hall, James and Genesis found an apartment they could afford and moved out of the hotel where they spent their honeymoon. The joy the newlyweds shared together was heightened by the knowledge that the love they shared on their wedding night and countless occasions since then was known only to them.
Life in their new home was one of routine, but both of them relished the comfort that the order in their new lives brought. For Genesis, finding a comfortably paced schedule helped her ease into her new life. James’s life prior to Genesis was turbulent and chaotic; his life now was one of great peace and tranquility.
True to his mother’s warning on the way to city courthouse, James’s father and sister reacted with much shock and distress over the sudden news. Melissa sided with her father and rarely called or visited during those early months of their marriage. She eventually came around, but true to his own word, James never saw his father again.
As Genesis suspected and later warned James, their getting married might alter the stream of time in unforeseeable ways. Indeed, his parents remained together but his father was killed in an automobile accident a few months after their wedding. James and Genesis attended the funeral naturally, although he spent the following weeks pondering the wisdom of what turned out to be his final moments with his father. But as Genesis had taught him earlier, it was futile to live in the past.
The ease of their new life made the grief more bearable than he had anticipated. The stocks and certificates James had stored in his family’s hope chest were worth far more than expected. In addition, unknown to James and the rest of his family, his father made a sudden adjustment to his will that allocated the vast majority of his estate to James, with very little left over for Becky and Melissa. All told, he and Genesis had enough to live comfortably without the immediate need to determine the direction of their lives. Genesis was content to adore her husband and care for their home, a job she yearned for most of her life and only got to enjoy in small doses in her life with Jadzia. James had a new sense of purpose and direction and decided to use the bulk of his newfound wealth to set up a charity to care for lost children, a cause important to him given Genesis’s absent past.
Indeed, their new life was one of peace and calm. But it was not to last. Just a year after they married, James came home from work to find Genesis collapsed on the floor in the kitchen. Her pulse was slow but steady, and her breathing shallow. He grabbed the phone and dialed 911 and from that moment, he never left her side.
As Genesis lied in a coma, he sat beside her and stroked her hair. Doctors and nurses came and went, none of them with immediate answers as to the cause of her illness. After several longs hours, she finally awoke.
“Where am I?” she said.
“You’re in the hospital,” he said standing over her. “You were in a coma.”
“How long was I asleep?” she asked.
“About six hours.”
“I had the funniest dream,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” he said. “Tell me.”
She gushed. “I was replaying in my mind that time you were trapped in the body of your mother’s step-father.”
“Don't remind me!” he answered as his face turned red. She laughed.
“I never told you this, did I?” she said. “But that was when I would be with you forever.”
“What?” he exclaimed. “Why?”
“I don't know,” she said, feeling ashamed she never admitted it sooner. “I guess it was because you were doing a better job than me. You were totally selfless.” She blushed. “I found that very attractive.” She smiled, then leaned in and kissed him.
James and the woman he loved sat together holding hands a few moments more before she fell asleep again. A doctor entered a minute later and James told him what happened.
The doctor then explained the results of her blood tests.
“We found a chemical substance in her bloodstream that we were unable to identify, but the resulting disease is something we see all too often: cancer.”
“Will she be okay?”
“Honestly, Mr. Grant, I don’t see how she is alive now. The toxicity levels are well beyond anything a human should be able to endure.” He rolled up the sleeve on her gown and examined her right shoulder. “Here!” he said. “That’s the n
eedle wound.”
“What are you saying, Doctor? That someone poisoned my wife?”
“It looks that way.”
“What can you do?”
The doctor reexamined the chart and shook his head. “Nothing, I’m afraid. “
James turned away and touched his wife’s cheek.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the doctor said. He turned and left James to grieve.
The head of the New World Organization was born Roger Cooke. He was born in a tiny village in Brazil to a pair of German refugees. His father worked as a scientist under Adolf Hitler and after the war and found innocent of any crimes against humanity, he exiled himself to South America and changed his family name, desperate to start his life over. There, Wolfgang Cooke spent the rest of his life engaged in philanthropic efforts and promoting world peace.
Under a number of aliases, Wolfgang lobbied the nations to create equality among the world’s peoples. As the Cold War heated up, he realized that his message of unity had fallen on deaf ears in the West while the Communists agreed with the tenets of his cause in principle, but they were unwilling to apply the ideal to all people, including the leaders. In Wolfgang’s mind, the only way true unity could be achieved was if the leaders played by the same rule as the people.
As Wolfgang grew older, his resolve weakened. He still saw use in the political system, while his son wanted nothing to do with it. Educated in America and Europe, Roger Cooke realized the basic teachings of his father were correct. He saw first-hand the hypocrisy of the elite, who held up the few hard-workers who achieved tremendous wealth as a means to convince all people that they too could do the same - provided they show up to work and invest heavily in the stock market. How no one saw through this ploy was unbelievable to Roger! But his father’s methods of uniting all people were outdated, Roger thought. Wolfgang continually funneled money into the current system and donated to causes he believed in, having convinced himself that this could bring about real change. He even set up a not-for-profit corporation in America (under an alias, of course). But as long as he did this, Roger believed his father to be part of the problem. Nothing solidified his resolve more than when his parents were murdered by the very people they were trying to help. Despite all his parents’ hard work donating millions of dollars to protect the rights of the working class, four mineworkers from South Korea tracked the Cookes to Brazil and brutally killed them. Local union leaders that the Cookes were working to undermine convinced the workers to carry out the crime, this despite their acceptance of a large donation from the Cookes.
The charity organization, which Wolfgang left to Roger upon his demise, was subsequently dissolved and later the funds absconded by Roger. His parents lived long enough to see Roger marry Jennifer, an American entrepreneur and the only woman he knew that shared his desire to live quietly and at peace - only without the bankrupting morals they attributed to the present world system.
It was a dream they would share together until he shared it alone - on her deathbed.
A few months after Archer was recruited, Roger stood silently in his office looking out across a vast ocean. Storm clouds gathered to the east, but Roger wasn’t worried about anything the weather might bring to the Agency’s command center. The engineers assured him the organization’s flagship vessel was durable and unsinkable. Just like the Titanic, he thought with a smile.
Behind Roger sat a large group of people representing every major occupation on Earth. While their work history was diverse, they were all equally attractive: the men handsome and fit, the women all buxom and pretty. After all, if these people were to be the foundations of the new society of humankind, they needed to be attracted to each another - at least to the extent that babies would result. He turned to face them and allowed a smile to escape, to which the group responded in kind.
“Before we begin,” he said, “I know that I’ve personally vetted each of you and I’m sure you are all persons of significant character or else you wouldn’t be here. Nevertheless, the import of this mission will affect every man, woman, and child on this planet, so please: Listen up!”
The group sat up straight in their chairs and almost as one, folded their hands on their individual desks like schoolchildren. A young man toward the back of the room raised his hand.
“Go ahead, Professor Williams?”
The man nodded. “Will we be paid for this?”
Archer’s smirk disappeared as he nodded to a guard by the door. The guard walked straight back to where the man was sitting. “I’ll need you to come with me, Professor,” the guard said sternly. The man stood up and walked out of the room with the guard in tow. The rest of the room grew silent.
“I can assure the rest of you,” Roger went on, “that if money is all you seek, then please, excuse yourself. You can await our return in a prison cell with Professor Williams.” No one moved an inch. “Good. You see, we took great care to make sure that all of you were chosen for a certain selflessness you possess. Apparently, Professor Williams managed to see beyond our little ruse and slip through the cracks. It was bound to happen. He is a psychologist so we should have seen that coming.”
The group laughed.
“I understand that all of this has been a bit hard to swallow. You've all been vetted, interviewed, dragged out of bed, forced to say goodbye to your family, flown out to a remote location, and given no information. Oh yes,” he added, “for no money either.” They laughed cautiously. “What I can tell you now is that all our lives are about to get better. Soon, class distinction, racism, and poverty will be a thing of the past - because we will create a world without it.
“As you enjoy your time aboard and our mission gets underway, please keep our true intentions from Doctor Archer. He is an idealist like the rest of us but he lacks the commitment we need. As far as he knows, we are going to bring medicine and knowledge from the future.
"You will all be going into the future with our security team so you can see that our plan is a necessary step toward achieving world peace. You will see firsthand the chaos that will result if the current civilization matures. While you wait, feel free to begin the work for which you’ve been hired for.” He smiled broadly as he watch the exchange of glances between the male and female participants.
A young college student in New Jersey raised Valerie Ferguson in a filthy, rat-infested trailer park. At the time of her birth, Valerie's mother, Jane, worked as an exotic dancer at a nightclub next-door to a prison where her clients were just a few gropes away from becoming inmates themselves. Valerie was brought up by, not just her birth mother, but by several of the dancers. When Valerie was three years old, enough of the women at the club had babies that one of them quit dancing and opened a day care for the children.
Valerie entered preschool with two of the other girls she played with at day care. Jane and the other mothers resented the way their children came to know each other and vowed to make sure that none of them followed their paths. All three of the mothers were recovering drug addicts and did not graduate high school. While none of them believed there was any correlation between those two facts, all of them pushed their daughters hard to excel in school. Word got out of what their mothers did for work, and the ensuing persecution came much sooner than their mothers expected.
Still, despite all the pressure they received from home, Val was the only one of the few children who managed to forge a different path than their mothers. She graduated high school valedictorian and at every college she applied, she was accepted. Her mother eventually took night classes, got her diploma, and quit the nightclub. As a result, she made far less money than she and Val were accustomed to and college was largely paid for by scholarships and grants, including several from the Cooke Family College Fund.
Val relished life on campus away from home. She loved her mother, but her friends had fallen into their mothers' familiar habits. One of them got pregnant shortly after graduating high school and Val feared if she hung around, she might feel fo
rced to stay out of obligation to her friends.
In college, Val got involved in politics for the first time. Her friends at school all belonged to different political groups, but there was so much infighting between them that Val came to see them as gangs.
“Gangs are for stupid people!” her girlfriends would often cry.
Even if they were right, Val hated the mentality of the factions and deplored them for keeping people so divided. Her mother, so long described by her schoolmates as a welfare mom, had become so calloused toward politics over time that she wanted her daughter to stay out of it altogether.
Val just wanted to see people united in a common cause. She got her wish during spring break her junior year when a nuclear weapon set off by an international - militia destroyed the nation's capital. The government acted in a predictable way and declared war on every nation it suspected of promoting, not the actions of the militia, but the ideals of it. Suddenly, everyone at school solved their differences and united for the war effort. This isn't what I had in mind, she thought.
The Great Altruist Page 22
