Five years ago, when she became aware of the E-5 virus Project, and the Serum Project, she understood the need for two key elements that would lead to greater success for the Black Shirt movement.
First, she needed to obtain access to all the research and all the researchers involved in those Projects. She would recruit within the ranks of the Collective’s scientific community, using past Fortizi abuses of family and Clan, to stoke their disaffection and cooperation. These scientists, researchers, and technicians, aided by unknowing human researchers, would pursue the most promising avenues of the two Projects using Collective Labs, but also transitioning to their own.
Five year later, her recruitment efforts had gone exceedingly well, and the Black Shirt secret Labs were up and running. The Fortizi Clan and the Collective’s leadership had played right into her hands through its ham handed and ignorant policies and abuses. Disaffection among a large part of the Collective was already a fact; that there needed to be sufficiently dry tinder and kindling was the reaction she alone needed to ignite the flames.
Saldana estimated that about a third of the Collective watched political events closely and felt no love for the present leadership in the Great Council or in the Council of Elders.
The second key element was a campaign from inside the Collective’s Labs to slow down the formal disclosed progress of the E-5 virus Project, and the Serum Project. The Black Shirts would obtain all data and research that was promising while at the same time slowing down the Collective’s access to that data. False progress reports, misinformation on progress and active disinformation about promising avenues of scientific pursuit were to be employed. The Black Shirts needed top scientists in their camp to accomplish this task; they found those individuals in many Labs, and in greater abundance than they had originally thought available. The failures of the existing leadership structures within the Collective’s traditional social and political order was a coincidence that even Saldana hadn’t expected.
She couldn’t have asked for a better environment for rebellion. Her coup d’état might just succeed after all, and the constituent elements giving rise to revolution provided by current leadership.
For Saldana Ri, it was a great time to be alive, young, and insane.
***
Saldana Ri was nothing if not an organizational genius. Her advanced planning wasn’t always spot on from the perspective of the events necessary to catalyze other events she wished to happen, but her success rate was nonetheless excellent. Her abilities led to small victories, leading patiently to larger successes and finally to goals accomplished. Some successes were more important than others.
The conversion, and seduction of Charles Hanley, and his brother Frank was both fortuitous and immensely important. Frank handled a lot of the misinformation/disinformation tasks due to his facility with technology. He was a talented hacker, in the commonplace sense of the word, and was extremely creative in his genius. His was a family that hadn’t returned to natural state in generations. Some within leadership even questioned whether they even could transform any longer. It was of no consequence to either the Collective, which employed them, or to the Black Shirts who turned them to their rebellion.
Charles, however, was the real “get”. He was charged with managing the Gens Collective financial and operational resources worldwide. Saldana had plans, very vigorous plans for expansion of her many projects. Unfortunately, even traveling around the world was difficult; the Black Shirts had no access to the necessary funds. They were a cause without financial backing, so something had to be done.
They could start human enterprises, but that too took money too. Plus, they might fail, or be a major waste of time and resources. Saldana was on a tight schedule and this option had only a slim chance of success.
They could commit crimes; rob or burglarize, perhaps run schemes of financial fraud. This seemed possible but, in the long run, might not give them the access to the large amounts of capital they needed. And, it was risky. Humans had become adept at ferreting out these white-collar crimes, and the United States, the most fertile ground for this type of fraud, was closely watched by the FBI, the SEC, and other financial regulators. And they were mighty good at their jobs and had taken down a fair number of white collar criminals.
That left very little opportunity until one day five years ago, Saldana received a phone call from one of her lieutenants planted in the Princeton Lab. Did she know Charles Hanley? Or Frank Hanley? They were important Gens connected to the Fortizi Clan, but not one “of” them.
Her insider, senior researcher Gianna Paloma, had recently heard stories circulating around the Lab that the brothers were quite the Romeos; they had taken turns finding and seducing Gens women for carnal pleasure and were active in the local human bar scene. Gianna, herself no stranger to the pleasures of the flesh, asked Saldana if she wanted her to seduce them. It might give the Movement some leverage sometime in the future.
Saldana said no, that she would handle this herself, but told Gianna to stand by. She would’ve need of her skills later and that it might be both fun and productive for them both. In the meantime, Gianna should get to know the men better, and suss out their proclivities and tastes. She would be permitted to tease but only that. Then Gianna needed to introduce Saldana to the men in a private setting, probably in New York City, where the men often roamed in search of company and sport.
Then Saldana, Gianna and other of Saldana’s female Black Shirt contingent would find the ways to seduce the men and bend them to her will. To her great surprise, it was much easier than expected. The men were weak and easily given to their passions. By the time Saldana arrived on the scene, the men could no longer do without the services she readily provided them. Sealing the deal was all that remained, and Saldana personally handled the closing.
***
Charles had fallen deeply in “human” love with Saldana, so when she laid out the terms of her “association” with him, it included her role as “a top leader” of the Black Shirts who would show her gratitude to him in the ways he most enjoyed, time permitting. What the Black Shirts needed, and what Saldana required, was for Charles to cook the books, and divert funds for her use. These weren’t billions of dollars, but it was going to be in the tens, then hundreds of millions of dollars over time. This was largely play money to Charles; he was besotted and yearned for her when she wasn’t around. And she wasn’t around much. So, she supplied him with a steady stream of companions, often paid for with the same money he diverted to her or Gens women willing to “take one” for the cause. Charles had few talents that were not financial; sex was no different.
Her reinvestment was quite successful. Charles mortgaged commercial properties, even the Preserves, to secure the funding Saldana wanted. With those funds, she acquired properties for her scientific research project, outfitted them and was able to staff up. She acquired wilderness areas in Northern California, Washington and Oregon for training sites, built out barracks, and outfitted and provisioned her army. Like a Ponzi scheme, it would come crashing down one day; just not on her. By then she hoped that the utility of Charles and Frank Hanley would be long past due.
Chapter 18
The Black Shirt research teams from six Labs in the US met at the designated staging areas near the cities in which they worked and resided. GPS coordinates were given to them by secure encrypted email the night before the Incident was carried out in London. The secrecy and precaution were unnecessary; nobody had any idea what they were up to anyway.
And, for that matter, for days following the retaliation for the Incident, most Gens in leadership would be struggling to explain these events to the local authorities and trying to identify the dead in the burned-out rubble. Even once the dead were identified and the numbers didn’t tally, it was more likely that Paulo would think that the researchers had been kidnapped. That they were Black Shirts would probably not even cross his mind until much later.
By then
they would be gone, have new identities, and be safely out of reach of the Gens leadership and the human authorities. Some will have been sent to other locations offshore in India and sub Saharan Africa; most would be sent to safe compounds in the US in remote wilderness locations on the west coast. These compounds were all new, wherever located, state of the art and completely off the grid and self-sufficient.
Security was now provided by a combination of natural state Gens, coupled with transformed Gens. Newly developed drug compounds, unknown to the leadership of the Collective, allowed direct communication in either state. Transformed Gens could now command armies of natural state Gens, making the chaos of war ever more frightening.
They had also isolated the gene therapies necessary to retard transformation of natural state Gens into human form after consumption of blood. The onset of transformation could be delayed for months at a time, if the therapies were administered in the correct dosages at the correct intervals.
They had also isolated an effective retardant for the urge of natural state Gens to kill humans and consume them.
All in all, Saldana Ri had accomplished more and more quickly than the leadership of the Collective had in thirty years of careful planning and dithering. And, the worst bit, the Black Shirts had used the vast resources of the Collective to do so. Stealth and finesse had been more effective than brute force and idle threats. The Collective, to Saldana’s way of thinking, had sown the seeds of its own destruction. She would prevail over the Collective, and cull the humans resulting in the Gens taking their rightful place as the new stewards of the planet.
There was still more work to be done with the drug therapies; there were side effects, severe side effects, and not all were well-studied or well-understood. But they were close. The new epigenetic approach to the problems of genetic inconsistencies had been largely successful. Still, they had experimented on their own kind and to do that they had gone to the wilds to capture the recruits they needed. Many had died; some agonizing deaths. The deaths from early field testing had been difficult for the scientists to tolerate; they were Gens after all and didn’t like experimenting on their own kind.
And the human experiments? The humans were expendable but watching the effects of drugs tested on them had been no easier to watch.
But they found something; something that was far from intended or contemplated. The administration of an early drug therapy had accidentally been tested on captured humans. The drug was marked incorrectly, and instead of using it for analysis with the Gens, it was administered to a set of humans. The therapy contained Gens blood and a combination of Gens antibodies.
To the great surprise of the researchers, the humans transformed into Gens. And, they retained all their human knowledge while obtaining Gens senses, innate language and physical prowess. Transformed humans were far more lethal than the Gens in human form; they also had the ability to transform back to human form simply by consuming human blood. In many cases, vials of their own.
The science behind these experiments, and others subsequently conducted by the researchers, were eventually sequestered and stored digitally and in a hard copy format. Saldana had the only hard copies, and the digital records were stored in the Cloud in files only she and a few others could access.
One such scientist with access was Calista Gold.
***
Until Boston and Patrick Murphy O’Brien, Calista Gold had always suspected her sister was a clinically insane monster, in the human sense of the word, and as psychotics they would’ve been among the worst humans ever to walk the earth. But, she was a Gens of the old school from the Roman era. Saldana did not fuss over killing indiscriminately, something not characteristic of the Gens Collective generally. Most Gens considered the thrill of sport killing to be one of the most thoroughly evil characteristics of humanity and not a trait to ever be emulated. But during the Greek and Roman eras, the Gens had been caught up in, and participated in, the numerous genocides visited on remote and uncooperative tribes subjected to conquest by the Roman Emperors of the Imperial period. Their blood lust had been insatiable, and many human kings, rulers and emperors were simply sadists and cruel despots in the guise of “great leaders” or heroic figures. Killing indiscriminately for sport or pleasure had never been the Gens way. Until, at some point, it became so.
The great campaigns of conquest by Julius Caesar are often celebrated for the military tactics and amazing feats of engineering he brought to bear in subjugating the locals. One such conquest, at the Battle of Alesia, in what is now France, a fortified town on the top of a hill was under siege by the great Caesar. As food dwindled inside the fortified city, the elderly, women, and children were sent out of the town to the Roman siege fortifications expecting them to be taken captive and fed. The Romans trapped the tens of thousands in a “no man’s land” between the city walls and the Roman fortifications surrounding the city. Caesar let them all starve to death.
The instances of genocide and mass slaughter dot the history of mankind from ancient times right up to and including modern times. For the Gens of ancient Rome, battles, sieges, and retaliatory actions taken against civilian human populations were commonplace and the Gens in the service of Rome were only happy to be an instrument of Roman conquest. After the fall of Rome, the fun seemingly gone from conquest, the Gens receded into the forests and wildernesses of the world, remaining in natural state. Several hundred years later, the Gens Collective eventually, gradually re-emerged, living among humanity, and adopting modern ways.
A few of the modern transformed Gens seemed to have retained a blood lust from ancient times; mostly these were from smaller localized Gens tribes cut off from human civilization until the modern era. From these ancient tribes came many of the new Black Shirt leaders. Saldana Ri was one. Her sister was another, but none had the capacity for cruelty and calculation as did Saldana, and the will to carry out her vicious plans. Her pathology seemed to be more akin to a Gens with multiple personality disorder; insanely cruel in one iteration, an average, normal and socially adjusted Gens in another. Whatever trauma was responsible for her dual behavior would probably never be known. The Gens didn’t have anything akin to psychologists or psychiatrists. They weren’t known to be either willing or able to “talk things out.”
Calista Gold had just recently met the Gens equivalent of Mr. Edward Hyde; she would’ve preferred Dr. Henry Jekyll. Her sister and that psycho Patrick Murphy O’Brien had recently practiced strange cruelties on her and Tory Bright. Tory was still recovering and would likely be traumatized for a good long while into the future.
Calista Gold decided that this atrocity, practiced on her and Tory Bright, could not go unpunished. The leadership of the Gens Collective might be out of date, but it was not cruel; not like this. If her sister represented the promise of the future, she wanted no part of it.
As soon as she was ambulatory, she would decide what to do next. And then she would kill her sister.
Chapter 19
As is true with all despots, it’s only raw naked power which motivates them in their narcissistic pursuit of absolute domination over whatever they perceive is rightfully theirs. That domination might be territorial; it can also be related to a people, a culture to which they belong, a religious affiliation or perhaps even something as simple as a family or business. Irrespective of the scope of despotism, the symptoms and cures of the disease are almost always the same.
One must either accede to the demands of the despot or fight back with the intention of overcoming and prevailing at almost any cost. The alternative is often too frightening to imagine.
The tools by which the despot seeks to assume authority over territory, again, is quite similar. There is usually initially some form of propaganda to attract attention, then bluster, threats, and coercion, scapegoating and often a modicum or more of violence, followed by intimidation, physical, psychological, or emotional. The oppressed rarely see the big picture and what begins as the acce
ptance of small distortions often transforms into large lies.
The relationship between truth and utter nonsense, lies and fiction, is always strained. Truth is rarely the object nor are lies an impediment to the despot, since obtaining, and maintaining power is the object, not the empowerment of those sought to be controlled.
One sees this burgeoning behavior in young bullies and may often be expressed in one fashion or another by those who are moneyed or whose official position allows them a certain level of personal or professional authority. Cowing the weak, the young and the less fortunate is almost always a sport in which they engage. The use, or more accurately, the misuse of the superior position isn’t a sign of strength, moral or physical; it’s a sign of profound weakness and flawed character.
Nonetheless, despots seek specific sets of circumstances opportunistically and are quick to take advantage when those circumstances are present. Despots almost always seek to offer simple solutions to complex problems, or solutions to problems they themselves have a hand in creating. The ability to solve a small problem with an overlarge solution has long been the favorite of both the modern despot and unprincipled politicians.
Lies, dissembling and utter hypocrisy are completely engaged in the fullness of time; the ends justify the means because those perpetrating these solutions are “correct”, “God loves only them” or the “others” are “not blessed” or are somehow “unworthy”.
What this really means is that someone, a victim, is of the wrong religion, the wrong politics, or the wrong ethnicity. Wrong skin color us usually right up there too.
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