Probe

by Douglas E Roff

  “Nothing until I get there. I’m leaving now and will be there in about five hours. Are they complaining about the lights?”

  “Just started with that.”

  “Good job Vicente. Now what I want you to do is dim the lights. Check the guide, and log I sent. Then get everyone out of the secure area and control room except you. My orders. I want everyone all the way out, and the outside monitors turned off. I don’t want any interference, and nobody goes in there. Understand? Nobody watches, and nobody takes a peak. If anyone shows up on the surveillance tape other than those three Gens, I will personally put you in a room with cousin Octavio, cousin Adam and cousin Misti. Are we clear?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Good Vicente, I’ll see you tonight.” Edward stopped, then asked, “How’re your folks doing?”

  “Good Uncle Edward. To tell you the truth, I kinda wish I was with them right now.”

  “Me too, Vicente. Me too.”

  ***

  Edward arrived hours later than he intended but, was in South Dakota before the show started. His helicopter had met him at the small private airfield of an old friend and whisked him away to the decommissioned air base where the two Gens soldiers were being held.

  He was greeted on the tarmac by Vicente. The helicopter was wheeled inside the hangar.

  “Vicente Marquez? You’re the youngest of the Paz brothers, correct?”

  “Yes sir. After my parents died, Rogelio and Corazon Paz took me in. Raised me. The twins are my older brothers.”

  “You’ve grown into quite a talented young man by all reports. Good to see you again.”

  “Thank you, sir. How do you know that, if I may ask?”

  “Well, Vicente, I knew both your parents. Back in the good old days in Oaxaca. Your father was a good friend; a good man. And your mother? Well, what can I say? She was beautiful, kind and wickedly funny. We were young, and stupid in those days, and we never gave a thought to the future. Little did we know how brief our lives together would be; they died young. But to answer your question, I keep track of everyone in the Eight Families, and make sure everyone can get a good start in life. Might be a little creepy, but then it’s not the worst I’ve been called.”

  “It was you who paid for my school? The trips? The summer jobs?”

  “Yeah. But it was Rogelio and Corazon who you should thank.”

  “I do. That doesn’t mean I can’t thank you too.”

  “You have.”

  “How?”

  “Look at the man you’ve become. Says everything I need to know. Now you’re here with me.”

  “Can you tell me about my parents, maybe later.”

  “Absolutely. You look like your dad, you know. Handsome and a natural born heartbreaker.”

  “I wish.”

  ***

  Vicente led Edward to a bank of elevators taking them deep down under the tarmac to the bottom six flights below. There was a series of a dozen large bunker rooms, with no apparent function. One had been converted into a secure facility, with cameras and imagers angled to every corner of the space. The combination of devices was designed to capture the transformation of the Gens in human form back to natural state. Then, they would be given blood, so Edward could see the transformation back to human form. In between, Edward would study the Gens in their natural state.

  Moments later, they arrived at the bottom, then headed for the observation platform.

  They entered the high-tech observation room, with video monitors everywhere and a clear unobstructed view of the space below. Two men, both in obvious distress, were briskly pacing the floor. The lights were dimmed somewhat, but the entire room was still visible from Edwards vantage point.

  Vicente said, “I programmed the sequence of light diminution over time, starting from the time I called you. The various imagers, and cameras have all been coordinated and each has a time stamp. All devices are high resolution, high speed, and state-of-the-art. They will capture anything that’s visually possible to capture. What now?”

  “We wait.”

  ***

  Around two in the morning, the transformations began. How or why the transformations occurred simultaneously seemed odd to Edward but, nonetheless, each transformation began within ten minutes of the others, one at a time.

  Edward turned to Vicente the only other witness to the event, “You’re making history tonight watching this. Just remember that nothing you see here tonight can ever be revealed until you are given the OK to do so. Are we clear?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Vicente and Edward spent the next few hours watching the Gens undergo a transformation that could only be described as right out of a Hollywood movie.

  Two hours after the first transformation began, the process was complete. The entire process had been captured on video and on imagers. Edward was fascinated and furiously making notes from his own visual observation. Vicente was dumbfounded, having had no previous warning of what he was about to witness. His brain was still trying to process what it failed to grasp; an apparent human being had transformed, right before his very eyes, into a creature, an animal, the likes of which he had never seen before.

  Vicente, many years later, described the event in his own autobiography, There at Ground Zero.

  I had called Edward St. James, Uncle Edward, several days before the event. I had noted that the captives, ordinary looking men I had been told were a part of a cult, had begun becoming agitated for no apparent reason. When they first arrived, and I was placed in charge of them, their resistance to captivity was largely confined to not eating meals and throwing their trays through the bars of their jail cell. Over time, hunger most likely convinced them to stop, but in fact all they did was eat and drink a small amount and then throw the rest through the bars as before.

  I spoke to each individually, as instructed, and asked a fixed set of questions regarding their transformation. My uncle was interested in their reactions to our knowledge of their ability to transform, but all the captives ever did was curse or say nothing. Eventually, I informed them that the guards would not be cleaning up the mess made, and they would be sorry for the stench that was soon to ensue. Each laughed at the notion.

  Approximately three days before Uncle Edward arrived, as the agitation increased, I was ordered to move them from their jail cells to the large holding area. I had been asked to outfit the bare concrete room with an array of electronics that included sophisticated state-of-the-art high speed, high resolution video surveillance cameras, thermal imagers, night vision and low light cameras and infrared and ultra violet imagers. I never ask the reason for this kind of array and did not learn of its purpose until many years later.

  I was also asked to make the lighting adjustable. In the twenty-four-hour period before transformation began, I informed Uncle Edward of the ever-increasing level of agitation and chatter. Eight hours after the call, he was at the base and we were together and alone in the observation room.

  As we waited for the transformation to begin, Uncle Edward prepared me, as best he could, for what I was about to witness. Then for several hours he told me stories of his youth and his life in Oaxaca as a young man. He had funny vignettes about my family in Seattle and all the trouble he and my Uncles used to get into.

  But the main focus of his storytelling that I can remember as clearly today as if it were just a few minutes ago, were the tales about my birth mom and dad. Uncle Edward was a fantastic storyteller, and I could swear that at times, I felt like I was right there with my birth parents, drinking beer, laughing and running away from the cops.

  He told me that my dad had been quite the ladies’ man until the day he met my mom. His attraction to her was immediate but hers to him not as quick. Uncle Edward described a long hot summer in which my dad did everything he could to catch her eye. When the summer was over, and Uncle Edward had to go back home to the States, the relationship had still not flowered. By the following
summer, it had.

  According to Uncle Edward, when he returned to Oaxaca, my dad was a changed man. Working diligently, no running around and deeply in love with my mom. While the events that I witnessed that night made history, the thing I remember best are the stories my uncle told of the parents I never had the opportunity to know.

  Chapter 28

  The transformation began in the early morning hours on the day after Edward arrived and ended a couple of hours later that early morning. From Vicente’s book.

  The agitation had steadily increased from frantic pacing and obvious sweating, to loud cursing and demand for blood and finally to death threats. They would pace, then confer, then one would rush the plexiglass partition, trying desperately to break out. They tried the door and looked at the ceiling, as if there was some way to escape upwards. There wasn’t.

  In the end, they seemed to accept their fate, and simply snarled at us that we would be sorry, and they would kill us all, drink our blood and feast on our hearts. As I remember the two of them lining up along the wall facing us high up in the observation room as their physical transformation began, I suddenly felt a chill wondering if their threat was a portent or merely rage induced bluster.

  But for the four-inch-thick military grade bulletproof glass walls, I believe the former would have been my fate. As it turned out, Uncle Edward, calm with nerves of steel, simply smiled. His redundant systems included gas to render them unconscious and a separate line of gas to kill them if things really got out of control. He had every right to be calm; he had prepared and anticipated the reaction of the prisoners. He had been prepared by the Team in London, Team Hannah, who had given him the scoop on what was about to happen.

  The Gens soldiers were going nowhere.

  It began in the early morning just after midnight as one of the captives began to convulse, as if experiencing an epileptic fit. The process would take a little over two hours for the Gens to transform. When the two had completely transformed, their hostility and vicious natures were evident almost immediately.

  Once the process began, the convulsions lasted only a few minutes. Uncle Edward later discovered the reason for that, which made what we saw that night easier to understand. At the point that the convulsions ended, the Gens seemed to go into a trance-like state, eyes rolled back in their sockets and looking very calm and peaceful except for the occasional involuntary lurch. Somehow each had managed to roll over onto their backs and lay dormant and peaceful, as if two cadavers resting on slabs in the morgue. Their breathing had become quite shallow; almost imperceptible. Indeed, Uncle Edward told me later he would have liked to have gone in and taken pulses and other bio readings, but no way was he going inside their accommodation to gather the data. As their transformation began, even before full cycle, their aggression and demeanors had changed to a state of almost unfathomable madness.

  Uncle Edward wanted no part of that two on one. Neither did I.

  Had both been fully conscious during transformation, the experience would have been unimaginably painful. Uncle Edward surmised at the time, and confirmed later, that every organ, every tissue and all the biochemistry of the thing that had appeared to be human was undergoing transformation. A comatose state was the most efficient way to transform quickly, minimize the state of vulnerability, and survive the process without going into shock.

  They both remained fully clothed, wearing light blue cotton garb, the kind patients in hospitals often wore. Each had been given hoodies against the night chill and both had drawn the strings, leaving only their faces and feet open to view. As the calm set it, they both began to murmur something as if they were having a conversation between themselves.

  Slowly, the features of the visible portions of their bodies began to change, first to an indeterminate color of skin, or leather, followed by the appearance of what looked like fine downy milky white hair. They remained visible until full transformation, then began to fade out into the color and texture of the clothing they wore. They appeared to blend in and become a part of their very own clothing.

  In the hours that followed, the guests, now fully transformed and smelling the scent of human everywhere, were a curious mixture of calm, and seething frenzy. They would circle separately, then join. One after the other would test the strength of the walls that confined them, and they didn’t act in a way that harmed them in the test. They assaulted the walls individually and in concert, one after the other in rapid succession, then both localized on one spot at the same time.

  There was clear communication as evidenced by acting together and a clear methodology as to how they went about their business. Yet, from the control room, neither Edward nor Vicente could hear any sounds nor witnessed any other form of communication. Later, after careful review of the audio recordings there was clear evidence of speech just outside of the human audio range.

  At first it remained easy to visually track the two Gens who continued to wear the garb they had been provided in human form. Shortly after transformation, within hours, they shed their clothing one by one. At that point they became virtually invisible to the unaided naked eye. Vicente and Edward switched to thermal cameras watching activity through video monitors.

  After several hours of quiet observation within the mirrored control room, Edward made a small discovery.

  “Vicente are you able to see any movement without watching the monitors?”

  “No sir. I can see things move when they disturb a plant or some other object. But that’s after the fact. I can’t see them at all right now. You?”

  “Yes, I think I can. I don’t exactly see them as much as I seem to detect a vague outline of a shape or form. As if someone had lightly penciled in their shape. But it’s more like I detect a density in the light being reflected back from the outlines of their bodies. In the dark I’d see nothing. But in the light, I detect something.”

  Edward thought for a moment, then said to Vicente, “Go out and get six or eight guys and bring them here. I want to do a test.”

  Vicente left immediately and returned about fifteen minutes later.

  “Men, I want you to watch that room, and tell me if you detect any movement whatsoever, and if you do, no matter how faint, tell me exactly what it looks like.

  One of the men asked, “May I ask what we’re looking for sir? Might be easier if you gave us a hint.”

  “Nope. I just want you to look and tell me what you see. I’m going to watch and see if we spot the same activity in the same way. I suspect some of you may not detect anything, while some of you will. Remember, look for anything that appears to be movement. As soon as you see something, as you see it, just say ‘hit’. Start right now.

  The men stared at the room and nobody saw any movement for an hour or so. Then one of the men said “hit”.

  Edward said, “Where?”

  “Left side of the room moving back and forth in front of the window, circling back to the starting point at the rear of the room.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “Looks like a slightly more concentrated light, as if light was going through a magnifying glass. But it’s more indistinct than that. If you hadn’t asked me to look, I never would’ve noticed. I was concentrating on the room, and then looking at the thermal monitors. But I wouldn’t exactly say I’m seeing them.”

  Edward said, “I want everyone to do just as Davis just described, but in reverse order. Find one of them using the thermal imagers, then when it moves, see if you can detect what Davis saw visually. Don’t say you see it if you don’t. I expect some of us will see, and some of us won’t. But I need what you see to be described accurately.”

  This process went on for several hours, with the men getting bored staring at the room, and the monitors to see something, or not. In the end, about half the men saw the faint outlines, but as Davis had first observed, if they hadn’t been looking, they wouldn’t have noticed anything at all. Edward dismissed the men, except for Vicen
te.

  “Sir, what was the purpose of that exercise? Does it matter whether we can see them or not? I mean out in the world, it wouldn’t matter. Without thermal, we wouldn’t see them at all.”

  “Right you are Vicente. But it’s an important discovery, and we’re lucky we caught it on the first day we have them in natural state. It’s truly a remarkable discovery.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it may mean that in the distant past, we were related to them biologically. Probably from a common ancestor from which we each diverged on separate evolutionary journeys. A long time ago, but in geologic terms, not that distant. Maybe on the scale of less than five hundred thousand years.”

  “Is it important?”

  “I don’t know, Vicente. Maybe. But if my hunch is right, it’s a critical piece of information that we can now study. If I’m right, the implications are staggering.”

  I remember thinking at the time that Uncle Edward was either the smartest man alive or the smartest con man alive. I had no idea what he was talking about, but that was due to the fact that I did not see what Uncle Edward saw. I witnessed something, just like he did, but I failed to “see” it. To understand it in its full implications and comprehend its meaning. As it turned out, the importance of that single observation was the turning point in our understanding of the Gens, what they meant to humanity and what the future would hold for both our species. But the significance of that observation would not be understood for a great long while and not without great personal and reputational pain for one man.

  And the man to whom it mattered most was Cousin Adam.

  His assessment was both biological and mystical; it’s full importance could not be understood in any other way. Only he understood its vast significance and he would pay a very heavy price for an understanding that no one else shared. It would go hardest on him and come close to costing him his life. In the end, his analysis of its importance and significance would prevail; sadly, his explanation of source would not be accepted by anyone for a very long while.