“We also haven’t discussed the Serum Project. That discussion follows after we finish up with the discussion of the immediate viral/bacterial threat.”
***
“As I mentioned, the Black Shirts have been running a parallel program to the one run by the Gens Collective for several years. For the most part, this was done at their own Labs, which as I said before, we identified and located except for the one we think is in Northern California somewhere. They were somehow able to recruit rogue scientist already in place the Collective’s Labs who were sympathetic to the Movement or insinuate new scientists into key positions of authority in those Labs. No matter how they did it, it is clear from the employee records of those who survived Adam’s retribution that they were certainly Black Shirt recruits or sympathizers.
“Many of the top Collective researchers survived and have disappeared, including Dr. Calista Gold. She not only ran the E-5 project research in Chicago but appears to be largely responsible for the delay and obstruction tactics employed by the Black Shirts in all Labs in the US. She appeared to be running parallel research within the Chicago Lab right under the noses of the Collective’s leadership. Accountability within the Gens hierarchy seems have been poor and internal security extremely lax. This seems to suggest that they were unaware of the internal threat, or only considered humans a threat only in a general sense. Most probably, however, they thought nobody was watching and, if they were, nobody cared about what they saw.
Cindy asked, “What have you determined about the progress of the Black Shirt E-5 program? Have they made more progress?”
“They have. In fact, they have almost perfected a strain of the E-5 virus that accomplishes most everything that the Gens program sought to accomplish. The strain is deadly, but we’ll come back to that momentarily. It mutates quickly, making treatment difficult. The incubation period is long, and symptoms manifest slowly. The pathogen can be introduced into the water systems and is resistant to chlorine and chloramine. It can be aerosolized and introduced into ventilation systems. In other words, it can and will spread quickly and humanity won’t even know it is infected for perhaps as long as a month. By the time people begin to show fatal symptoms of the illness, it will already be too late. The spread of the disease is even worse in that contact with infected individuals can spread the disease though fluid exchange, sneezing or even touch or breath. This thing is very deadly and is easily communicated, human to human.”
“What about communication of the disease human to Gens. Either in natural state or transformed human?”
“The Gens in natural state appear to be immune. Not sure how or why. They have also developed an immunization for Gens in transformed state. Without this therapy, the transformed Gens would be as susceptible to the disease as humans. Kill rate around 95%. We are not sure if the disease affects humans and transformed Gens in identical ways, but we know some humans have natural immunity and we have begun working on replicating and testing the Gens immunization as we speak. Based on what we have of their research, and we have a lot, we are confident that with a little time we will be able to synthesize an immunization for humans too if the Black Shirt immunization is inadequate.”
“Why haven’t they used the E-5 already? Sounds like they’re ready to go.”
“They have several problems, some large and practical, some small, but seemingly insoluble.”
“Such as?”
“On the large and practical side, they are having great difficulty with quality control, packaging and distribution; as well as dissemination. This is a huge task to do this on a global scale, without detection and in mass quantities. And that requires large volumes of cash which they now don’t have and will not have from their previous source: embezzlement of Gens Collective bank accounts. Their money tree has been chopped down, and they have nothing growing. The process for making the disease water born and resistant to chlorine and chloramine is complex and expensive. Ditto aerosolization.
“These problems won’t last forever, but the severity of the problem of lack of access to cash is presently unknown. We have cut off their funding and for that matter, the Gens Collective too. All the Black Shirt funding now belongs to us. Of course, they could always collaborate with the Gens Collective and reserve killing each other for later. That part is unknown, except that we don’t believe that the two sides are talking. Not yet, anyway.”
“There’s more?”
“Yes. One more major thing. Though the Gens in natural state seem to have an immunity to the disease that isn’t 100% the case. Approximately 7-10 % of natural state Gens will perish no matter what. Something genetic, but no one is sure what at this point. In addition, the Black Shirts are unsure, if the E-5 virus mutates, how will it affect natural state Gens or immunized human state Gens?”
“Is that it?”
“One more thing; and this is only known among a few of the elite in the Black Shirt Movement. Their leader, Saldana Ri, as well as a fair number of their top scientists, leadership and military types, have the genetic coding for susceptibility to the virus.”
“Why not take the immunization and stay in human form?”
“Can’t. The disease will kill 7-10% of the Gens population no matter what form they are in. At present, if the E-5 virus gets out, she and a lot of Black Shirt elites will be toast.”
“You think that’s what’s holding up the war?”
“I know it is. Saldana Ri is delaying as hard as she can, using the lack of funding as the reason and the insecurity around mutation as her backup.”
“What will she do?”
“For the moment, nothing. She has a backup plan to kill her leadership if they find out this drawback and elect to proceed against her wishes. She won’t allow it. We have time. How much, I don’t know.”
“Do we know where she is?”
“We think she is in the Bay area somewhere. But there’s more.”
“What else?”
“Well we have now definitely confirmed that Saldana Ri, leader of the Black Shirt Movement, virulently anti-human and chief architect of the demise of the Gens Collective, and the genocide of humanity, is married and has three kids.”
“So?”
Alana casually dropped the bombshell, “Yeah, but she’s married to a human. And the kids are human too.”
“Ohhhh bang. That changes the world just a tad.”
“Ya think?
Chapter 32
There was silence for a few moments as the family gathered in the meeting room soaked in the news and the staggering implications of what Alana had just dropped on them. Neither Adam, Edward nor Pops, each of whom had worked closely with Alana on various aspects of the data she had acquired, analyzed and summarized, were aware of this last little tidbit.
While the work that Alana had done was widely acknowledged within the project Teams as amazing, and exceedingly germane and valuable, this one piece of data was beyond priceless, and potentially an immense game changer. The Black Shirts had made Paulo and the leadership of the Gens Collective look incompetent and like fools, taking control of the Collective’s modes of communication, replacing leadership messaging with their own, crafting the facts to their best advantage and completely displacing the previously unchallenged Gens propaganda machine. The recruitment of senior disaffected Gens scientists as well as the infiltration into the ranks of various leadership councils, largely the regional, and local councils as well as the ranks of the Tracker, Captain and Military classes, had been clandestine, efficient and eminently successful.
Senior leadership at the Great Council and Council of Elders was almost totally unaware that the Black Shirts even had a cohesive organization and message. Likewise, the senior Councils of the Tracker and Captains classes as well as the senior leadership of the Gens military would be equally taken by surprise.
It was clear that the Black Shirts were ascendant, their message making major inroads in the minds of ordinary Gens; th
e Movement was growing – and growing quickly. Their message was primarily the Gens equivalent of Gens racism; hatred for humanity, the inferiority of the species homo sapiens and the need for the Great Cull to proceed quickly.
The lesson taught by the insurgents was that world would be better off with the Gens as the dominant species. The corollary to that message was that the fundamentalist Black Shirts should be in control and guiding the populace back to first principles.
The lessons and the messaging were getting through. The world of the Gens Collective was in turmoil and the strategy of Saldana Ri and the Black Shirt Movement was beginning to work.
But this factoid, this tidbit that Saldana Ri was a fraud and a hypocrite was explosive. It could sink the Black Shirt Movement before it could take firm root and spread like wildfire in the tinder dry environment that was the Gens Collective in the aftermath of the Incident. The massive loss of life that followed in America and elsewhere around the world, together with the aggressive and highly opportunistic Black Shirt propaganda machine, had shaken the confidence of the ordinary Gens in their traditional leadership. The rank and file had not abandoned leadership, at least not yet; but whereas the Black Shirts had been considered harmless rabble rousers and trouble makers, their message was now being taken seriously. Their fundamentalist message was far from having universal acceptance, but it was now a political philosophy that was gaining traction.
Edward was the first to speak, his mind racing with the implications of this intelligence dancing across the horizon of his thoughts.
“Can you verify any of this. No, strike that. How did you come to this information Alana? Begin in the beginning and walk us through your process and your sources.”
“Of course,” Alana said unremarkably.
Alana looked around the room, somewhat surprised by the sudden serious tone her presentation had taken. She thought the news about Saldana Ri was interesting, but not very important. A side show without significant consequence.
She was incorrect, as both Edward and Misti realized immediately. Adam was with Alana and the rest of the family in not thinking much of the news. They were far more focused on the immediacy of the threat posed by the advanced state of development of the E-5 virus. Further, thought Alana, they had not gotten the news on the state of the Serum Project. That would complicate this presentation even more. The news there was even worse.
Way worse.
Alana began, “When we first got the news of the Black Shirt Movement, and their leader Saldana Ri, Adam asked me to sift through all the data collected about the Gens Collective we had amassed and then do a backup secondary search.”
Misti asked, “What’s that?”
“Very simply, scrub all external databases we have around the world and search for any information anywhere on the name Saldana Ri, her surname Ri, the term ‘Black Shirts’ and anything else that might relate. This was done using the DL Main. Adam also asked me to use whatever proprietary search engines I had, or that the NSA, FBI and CIA had, to do the same on the Dark Web. He provided me a list of search terms and key words, including some symbols that meant nothing to me, and let him know if anything turned up.”
Edward and Misti, virtually in unison, asked Adam why he commissioned this work.
“No specific reason. Just wanted to see what might turn up. She’s the leader of the Black Shirt Movement and I didn’t think the Gens Collective knew any more about her than we did. Possibly less. I thought since she probably knew all about us, we should return the favor. Alana and I had concluded she was probably our greatest threat.”
“Good call.”
Adam said, “You mean lucky call. I was expecting to maybe find her bra size, but nothing like what actually turned up. And before Alana continues, she has a lot more that she hasn’t told you. Since you obviously think this stuff matters, Alana should show you the rest of what she found a little later.”
Edward asked, “Do you have it.”
“Yes. And so, do you and Misti ... now. Just sent it to. I have background too. You can have that too if you want.”
Misti said, “Send it all. But continue, please.”
“This didn’t seem as important as other things I was working on, so I had Adam write a kind of ‘autopilot’ algorithm that I could use to search the DL Main, the web and the dark web in sequence. I ran his program on one of my smaller computers and went to work on other more pressing matters. And, I kind of forgot I even had the darn thing running until Adam asked me a couple of days later if I had found anything. Truthfully, I hadn’t even looked.”
Adam said, “We sat down and spent a couple of hours one day looking at the search results and we found a whole bunch of stuff from a lot of sources, but what stuck out right away were some medical, and financial records from Utah, then a marriage license in San Francisco, a certificate of marriage from California, followed by three birth certificates for three children born to Saldana Ri and a man named Eaton Gray. We checked him out and, bingo, we found out a whole bunch of stuff about him and his family. Clearly, they were not, are not, Gens and had no other connection to the Collective at all. We concluded he must be a human. Obviously, we haven’t done any DNA workups but the likelihood that he is Gens is next to zero. If he is, it’s a random association. He appears in no other records of the Collective. Unlike all other Gens, there is a mountain of public and consumer information on him going back to his birth in Oakland.”
“Fuc-king A”, said Edward. “You said there was more?”
“Yes. Adam wrote another algorithm, this time to sort the data in chronological order, and by source. This turned up some additional correspondence, this time a series of emails sent from a private server over the Dark Web to, and from some guys in Boston. There was a file of sorts on what Adam calls the ‘Dark Cloud’; cloud based but originating in the Dark Web. It’s like a deep subset of the Dark web, even more difficult to access and find, heavily encrypted and with what you could call a very narrow passageway in.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning really difficult to find, and real difficult to access.”
“But you did.”
“No, Adam did. He popped the cork on those sites quickly, don’t know how, and we sat down, and read all the correspondence between Saldana Ri and her psychotic band of hired hit men. The files had docs, memos, pics and video. Not cool. Some bad, very, very bad stuff.”
“Like?”
“You look. I’d like to forget what I saw, if you don’t mind.”
Adam said, “Saldana has a series of memos in which she outlines her goals, strategies and tactics. An extremely comprehensive battle plan, very detailed and with specific timing, tasks and assignments. The tasks and assignments are staffed, with backups. She also has complete lists of Black Shirt personnel, locations, work history, skills and qualifications. Also, family ties and relationships.”
“Incredible,” said Edward. “This is priceless. What else did you find?”
“One of the most senior and well-respected Gens scientists, Dr. Calista Gold, is Saldana’s sister.”
“Her sister?”
“Yes indeed. Unknown to the Gens Collective presently, but she was head of genetic research in the Chicago Lab. Now ashes. She got out.”
“Something we can use?”
“I think we can turn her.”
“How?”
“Alana will send you a video; in fact, several videos. You have a look. They aren’t pleasant, but then you can decide for yourself.”
***
There was silence in the room.
Then Misti turned to Alana and said, “Will you marry me. Please!”
“And me.”
“And me.”
“And me.”
Cindy said, “Geez, Alana. You’re not just a pretty face. You’re hot, sexy, beautiful and smart as fuck. What else don’t we know?”
Adam quickly said, “She cooks like a French chef, is e
xtremely polite, and has excellent table manners.”
“Damn. Those too?”
Adam laughed and turned to Alana, “The women are wet, and the men are horny. Run, girl, run!”
Chapter 33
After a thorough discussion of the situation surrounding Saldana Ri and her progress with the E-5 virus, Alana turned to the last topic she would discuss before Edward updated the group on the events in South Dakota.
“I have gone back and forth trying to figure out whether the virus presents the most pressing danger to us, or whether it’s the Gens Collective Serum project. The Serum project was originally denominated the A+/A- project. Basically, the project is designed to correct a perceived imbalance in the transformation process from natural state to human state, and vice versa.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the Gens believe that they are superior fighting creatures in natural state. Born predators with excellent hunting and camouflage skills. In human state, they think they’re at least on par with humans, at least with most male humans but, even then, they think themselves superior, just not by as much. But if they’re in natural state, where they have an advantage, and they attack, and kill a human, the consumption of human blood eventually takes away that natural advantage through transformation. Further, in natural state, the Gens cannot communicate effectively when in transformed human state Gens. The only exception is during the transformation phase when they are neither natural state nor proto human. In this in-between state, they are able to communicate with each other state of being. But the tweener state is very short in duration, varies by individual, and is almost no use militarily. What the Gens Collective wanted was a way to resolve these perceived drawbacks.”
“What was their goal then? What were they developing?”
“The goal was to develop a serum that would prevent transformation after ingesting blood. Develop some sort of inhibitor that would allow the Gens in natural state to keep fighting after ingesting blood where they had an advantage.”
Probe Page 86
