The A.R.EX. Origin

by Angelo Facchin

  “What is your name?”

  “Alex Rivers.”

  “Your age?”

  “33 years old.”

  “Your date of birth?”

  “October 29th, 1998.”

  The technician raised his eyebrows at the last answer, checking his machine.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alright. Now, I am going to have to ask you to lie on the next two questions. Just say whatever untruth pops in your head. What is your favourite food?”

  “Raw Onions.”

  “Alright. Now, what is your favourite sport?”

  “Baseball.”

  With that done, the test shifted gears.

  “Have you ever committed any offence punishable by law?”

  “No.”

  “Ever at any point were you tempted to commit an offence?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you on the night of June 19th?”

  “I was at home.”

  “Can anyone vouch for you?”

  “No.”

  “The same question, this time pertaining to the night of the 25th.”

  “I was helping to clean the gym where I work. I went to bed at around 10:30.”

  “Again, is there anyone there who could vouch for that fact?”

  “No.”

  “And what about last night?”

  “I had hosted an Independence Day party. The last of the guests left at around 11:30.”

  “At any point did you leave the party to do anything?”

  “No.”

  The technician looked at him intently.

  “We need to be clear right now. Is there something you’re now telling me?”

  “I’m not hiding anything.”

  “You might be.”

  “Then your machine should be telling you as much.”

  “You could be trying to cheat the test. I can tell you’re very calm and collected for someone taking a polygraph exam.”

  “Uhhh…thanks. I guess.”

  “My point is that you might be throwing off the test.”

  Arex looked at him. He couldn’t understand why he was being asked these questions, and they didn’t make any sense. Everyone was surprised when he stood up and started to take off the equipment connecting him to the polygraph.

  “Mr. Rivers, please sit down.”

  “I don’t have to if I don’t want to. I agreed to do the test and now, I’m stopping it. Whatever your intents were, I don’t understand them. You’re assuming that I committed a crime or crimes. Your assumptions mean one of two things to me: either you’re so amazingly stupid as to not being able to figure out whether I’m lying or not despite having a lie detector machine, or so you’re so desperate for some kind of confession to something, you’re willing to hide the truth from me, thinking I will get antsy. Either way, this test has become pointless because you should how my answers have panned out.”

  “Arex,” Mika intervened, “you don’t understand.”

  “That’s right, I don’t understand. I don’t understand how I’m expected to take a polygraph test without being told why. I don’t get it. It’s like you don’t even know what the results of the test were, so what was the point of me coming here? I have no idea what’s going because you’ve asked me my whereabouts for three random nights. The test is even stupider because you and Mike were at my party last night. You already knew when it ended. So, unless you’re going to tell me what’s going on, what you want to accuse me of doing, we don’t have anything more to say to each other.”

  “Wait, said Rodgers. I want to talk to you in private.”

  Mika and the technician left the room. Rodgers took a tape and showed it to Arex. It was a tape one would use in a video camera. It wasn’t something he could put in a VCR.

  “I think you were right when you said we treated you unfairly. You had every right to know what this whole charade was about. What I’m about to show you isn’t going to leave this room, at least not for now. This has the entire police department and the mayor very nervous about you.”

  Rodgers put in the tape and started playing it. Arex braced himself for whatever was on there.

  He thought he was ready for anything. The video showed someone who looked just like him beating up a homeless person and then robbing the poor man while he was unconscious.

  “This was taped last night by a patrol officer near Central Park. Thankfully, Mika was still at your apartment at the time and is willing to testify to that. It didn’t hurt that you passed the polygraph exam without any doubt. So the question is: who is that, and why does he look like you? More importantly, what does he hope to accomplish by trying to frame you for these crimes? Do you have any enemies we should know about?”

  “No. I’m still hoping to some day put all of that BIOGENCORP stuff behind me, but that doesn’t seem likely. I thought Patrick Sandlak was the only one who knew how to transform a human being into something that looks like me.”

  “There’s still the possibility that this could be a realistic costume. It certainly looks like our unknown subject is really wagging his tail like it’s his. If this continues, I will have the pressure of the entire country to find whoever’s responsible. Barring that, I would have to arrest you for these crimes, which would mean that the perpetrator would have succeeded in ruining your reputation. We have to keep this investigation under wraps until we have something concrete to work with.”

  * * *

  Mika usually hid her personal feelings when it came to her work, but she found it difficult to concentrate on her cases after leaving Rodger’s office. She had lied to Arex, and he had made her feel incompetent and stupid, something no other person had managed to do before. Not only did his presence not help the investigation run its course, but she put their friendship in jeopardy.

  That other reptile was going to ruin everything Arex had worked so hard to build in the last five years. Everyone knew who Arex was and being attacked by this other reptile could lead people to mistake him for it. It would prompt public outrage and could potentially put Arex’s life in danger.

  With that in mind, she reached for the file she had on A.R.EX. and BIOGENCORP. She figured it was best to start there, since it would be the only way she might find a clue as to who would hate Arex enough to frame him. She also felt it important to check up on make-up effects and costume shops to see if they would have been commissioned to make a costume that would make someone look like Arex.

  Chapter 4

  Sunday, July 6, 9:02 a.m.

  Mark Reeves’ House, Troy, New York

  It wasn’t hard for Mika to find Mark Reeves’ house. The ex-C.E.O. of BIOGENCORP had moved to a new house just a couple of blocks from where she lived. She was actually a little disgusted with the fact that she could just walk there. She didn’t want to imagine what the man might do if he ever discovered where she lived.

  She had called him the day before to arrange a meeting. She felt it was better than having him meet her at the FBI building, especially since he was well known by her colleagues.

  Reeves’ trial had made her resent him, not only because of what his company was responsible for, but she also hated him for the fact that he had effectively gotten away with conspiracy to commit murder. It was true, he wasn’t involved in the A.R.EX. project, and he wasn’t even working when Patrick Sandlak effectively destroyed Erikson Meyers and replaced him with Arex, but she had always felt that he should have been held accountable for those facts, seeing as he was the head of the company and should have done something to stop the whole mess from happening. Instead, he was on vacation at the time, which didn’t sit right with her.

  She had to wait a while after ringing the door bell before he answered. He smiled, shook her hand, and led her to the dining room table. The house had a quaint feel to it with almost everything dated, but with a comfortable feel to it. Like his office five years earlier, it lacked a personal touch. This house must’ve been his mother
or grandmother’s. Does this guy have any personality?

  As they walked, Mika also noticed that Reeves was limping, putting a lot of weight on his left leg while his right was very stiff. As he sat down, he winced in pain, not allowing his right leg to bend.

  “Are you okay? What’s wrong with your leg?”

  “I was involved in a serious car accident. It left me with some difficulty in my right leg. Don’t worry, it should heal with time.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was driving to Rome in January when I hit a patch of ice on the highway. I lost control of the car and hit the railing that was there. My right leg got caught in a very awkward position.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I was actually already unconscious, so by the time I woke up in the hospital, they had put me on a pain killer regiment. I had to stop taking them, though. They made me feel a little too good for a guy whose tibia had an “L” shape for a couple of hours.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Everyone says that, but you know it’s not true. You probably hate me even more, since Arex dropped the charges against me. It more than likely made you feel like you had wasted your time with your investigation. It didn’t help that Patrick took the easy way out.”

  It was true. Mika did resent Reeves because he was allowed to walk away and rejoin society as if nothing happened. She had to admit to herself that there was some satisfaction in seeing Reeves suffer. Still, the man had been in an accident, and she couldn’t ignore that.

  “You’re right, I do feel a little happy about that. That’s what I’m the most sorry for.”

  “It’s alright, I’m just lucky to have survived that intact. I was surprised to hear you wanted to see me for something. I am also thankful I didn’t have to drive to New York. So, what did want to talk to me about?”

  “There a few questions I would like to ask you. They involve the events of five years ago.”

  “Really? Strange, I thought the case was closed.”

  “Well, I have to reopen the case, if only because I need to find information for a new case I’m working on. Someone is trying to frame Arex for petty theft and assault on three separate occasions on homeless people. We are looking extensively into who might hate him enough to want to do that.”

  “And I’m probably the first person you’ve seen so far, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do remember that if it weren’t for Arex, I wouldn’t be talking to you here now? I would be in jail if he hadn’t dropped the charges against me. I have no right to hate him for that, so I have no motive to want to see him in legal trouble.”

  “Well, someone is hurting these homeless people and I know for a fact that it wasn’t Arex. It might be a disguise, but I can’t discount for the fact that someone else might have figured out how to create the A.R.EX. formula and transformed himself in some elaborate revenge plan.”

  Okay, that felt silly, saying it like that, she thought.

  “Anyway, let’s begin: who else might have known about the A.R.EX. serum?”

  “Nobody. Patrick kept that secret to himself. He claimed it was because he didn’t want the secret to get out, but I felt it was because he didn’t anybody else to know about it. Nobody outside the company was to know what the project was about until it was revealed to the public. In fact, you know firsthand that the project was kept a secret from the employees who had less than two years of experience with us. That’s why Daisy Carter wasn’t in the loop. As for physical access to the serum, I can’t really say. I suppose that anyone who knew about the project and/or had worked on it would have had access to the serum if they got into Patrick’s office somehow or got into the chamber. If someone had stolen the serum and had ingested it, it might be the dumbest decision that person’s ever made.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I suppose I need to start at the beginning. What do you really know about the project, besides what you’ve released to the public?”

  “We don’t know anything else. All of your computers’ hard drives were wiped out the minute we tried to hack into them. It didn’t help that your lawyers had kept you silent about the project. Your entire trial was centered only on the idea that Erikson Meyers was murdered while in BIOGENCORP’s custody. We never had enough information on the project for charges to stick. We still don’t even know the real identity of your sponsor or sponsors.”

  “Actually, on that point, you know as much as we do. Since Samuel Berry turned out to be a fake, I can’t help you there. I can however tell you that he contacted us at least two years before Arex’s creation.”

  “What exactly did he tell you?”

  “He told me and Patrick that we were to begin a classified project for the Pentagon. BIOGENCORP was to create a new biological weapon. Immediately, there was something odd about his request.”

  “Go on.”

  “He wanted the weapon to be directly linked to the human genome. He wanted us to invent a new kind of steroid that would enhance a normal soldier from within, essentially making the effects of the steroid permanent. An added issue was that these soldiers were to be used, not for open combat, but for covert operations and guerrilla warfare. On top of which, the whole thing had to be safe for the environment and be done on a somewhat restricted budget, though the money we had was unlike anything we’d ever gotten. Not only that, he also threatened to buy out the company if we didn’t comply to these demands. BIOGENCORP was my entire life at this point, I didn’t want to leave the company and I knew my job was on the line. Besides, I was also looking at it from a business perspective. If BIOGENCORP were to strike a long-term deal with the Pentagon, it would mean more opportunities for the future. We were, after all, a pretty small company until the project started.”

  “That’s a strange way of seeing things, especially since you were, in fact, threatened by a man you had only met once.”

  “I had a very different mentality back then. I went into another mode of thinking whenever I got to the office. I had to look at things from all angles and in this case, the pros seemed to outweigh the cons. We had no legitimacy as a company before the A.R.EX. project. Whenever we would get a contract, we always had someone breathing down our necks as if we didn’t know how to do our jobs. We were constantly scrutinized at every turn. We even had one idiot on visit complaining of the kind of food we served at the cafeteria because it wasn’t to his taste. I had lost count of how many of my employees had their work double-checked because those whom we were working for didn’t trust us.”

  “Did the company have a bad reputation?”

  “This isn’t well-known, but the founder, a Danish entrepreneur, didn’t know the first thing about hiring scientists. He had hired a lot of recent college graduates, and their inexperience and lack of proper training led them to make a lot of mistakes. He was eventually sued for that and lost most of his money. I bought out the company with Patrick in June of 1995, and we managed to clean up the company’s image as much as we could, but it wasn’t until “Sam Berry” came along that we really hit our stride. With the knowledge that funding might not a problem for a very long time, I was able to hire much better staff and the better reputation soon followed. You know the old saying “Go big or go home”?”

  “Then I suppose creating talking humanoid reptiles must have been a huge undertaking.”

  Mika couldn’t hide the sarcasm from her voice. The man sounded like he was still very much in love with his old company.

  “Actually, I laughed when Patrick first came to me with this idea. He came into my office, looked at me straight in the eye, and said “I can do this”. So, naturally after hearing him out I still laughed in his face and called him crazy.”

  “And yet the A.R.EX. project still came to be.”

  “Of course it did. We had exhausted every single other options and were ready to give up on the Pentagon’s sponsorship. The project actually came to be when Patrick decided to contact “General Berry” directly witho
ut my consent. It’s hard to keep a straight face when you think a three-star general is chastising you for not doing the job you were really being paid to do.”

  “Why didn’t you just leave after that? Your friend and colleague had just basically betrayed you.”

  “I could have left.”

  Reeves suddenly smiled. It was a somewhat chuckling smile that made Mika feel uncomfortable. It told her that Reeves knew something that she didn’t.

  “What? Why are you smiling?”

  “I didn’t leave for two reasons. The first reason was that I figured I couldn’t find employment elsewhere. There isn’t much call for someone who’s main workforce experience is administrating a genetics research facility. Leaving the company meant turning my back on what my father helped me pay to build. The second was that if I ever left the company, there would be nobody out there who would believe me if I told them about the A.R.EX. Project, not until it was too late. It turns out that I had ample time to figure out a way to expose the project in one way or another. I think the method I chose worked out both better and worse than I expected.”

  The spark came to Mika right away. She had finally realized something she missed five years ago. The only reason the FBI was put on the trail of BIOGENCORP and the A.R.EX. project, was the anonymous phone call that was made to the field office.

  “You were our tipster, weren’t you? You were the one who put us on the trail of your own company.”

  “By the time I made that phone call, I was completely disillusioned about what was going on. When I found out that Patrick had conducted a first test behind my back in July, I was both furious and frightened at the same time. It was clear to me right then and there that I had lost control over Patrick, who was my friend, but was supposed to be my subordinate. When I saw that he didn’t respect me, my concerns, or even my orders, than I knew there would come a point where no one else in the company would. They were going answer to his authority from then on because he had the charisma I lacked.”

  “So you decided to tip us off three months later.”