Black Jack

by Rani Manicka

  Dakota was pulled out of her chemical slumber by her chaperone, a tall, statuesque, mysterious woman in her mid twenties. Miss Monroe lived in, was on call 24/7 and seemed to have no discernible family or friends. She wore at all times an emergency alarm device that if activated would summon down an armed Marine killer team. In the two years that Dakota had known her she had never seen Miss Monroe smile or make eye contact with anyone.

  Miss Monroe broke the top of a glass vial and pulled the clear liquid in it into a syringe. Her other hand reached below to pull the waistband of the girl’s pajama bottoms down a few inches. With practiced efficiency she swiped a cold disinfectant swab on the girl’s exposed skin and eased the needle into her flesh. The drug was a stimulant to counteract the sedative she had injected into the girl the night before Dakota shielded her eyes with one hand and turned groggily to her side.

  A few minutes after Miss Monroe left Dakota sat up and stretched. Her bedside clock said 8.10 a.m. but it could have been midnight for all she knew. In the maze day began whenever your chaperone woke you. She padded into her spotless bathroom, where she used the toilet, brushed her teeth, and showered, all under the gaze of a surveillance camera. Wrapped in a towel she stood in front of the mirror. A ghost looked back. She undid her long, golden braid, combed it and re-plaited it. Then she dressed in a pink tracksuit that had been left neatly folded on a chair for her. It had a butterfly monogram on the left breast. Next she went into the kitchenette and helped herself to a glass of orange juice.

  Wandering into her living area she switched on the TV. Without it she would have been intolerably bored, but, in fact, it was not there for her entertainment. All visual media in the maze was access controlled and functioned primarily as a conditioning/reinforcing tool. Each psychic had his or her programs expressly selected for their specialty. Hers was designed to keep her mentally infantile, compliant, and locked in a fantasy world of all things extra-dimensional and other-worldly, especially alien life forms. She was never allowed any movies or programs that portrayed rebels, world affairs, or dealt with any subject matter that could cause her to think or begin to question her strange and lonely existence.

  That day she had been a given a Disney animated movie, a cartoon, The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland, an episode of Star Trek, and a specifically adapted documentary about angels. She immediately selected The Wizard of Oz. Like those of all trauma-trained slaves her brain stem had been scarred to develop a photographic memory, so she knew every frame of the film by heart, but for reasons incomprehensible to her she was unable to resist its lure even after hundreds of viewings.

  She began to watch the movie and almost immediately her programming triggers kicked in and she lapsed into flat state - a non-thinking trance. It was only when the thick metal door opened and Miss Monroe walked in with her breakfast that she was brought around. Miss Monroe put the tray on the low table in front of Dakota and held out the morning’s medication, vitamins, minerals, and the cocktail of drugs necessary to counteract the long-term liver and kidney damage caused by the strong and often lethal doses of psychoactive drugs she was forced to consume daily.

  Miss Monroe left when she had downed her pills. Dakota unwrapped the plastic utensils and ate. The food was hot, very good, and highly nutritional. Afterwards, she leaned back into her armchair and was soon lost in another trigger-induced stupor.

  Again, it was the arrival of Miss Monroe, this time with lunch, that roused her from her hypnotized state. There were more pills to be taken. These were metabolic buffers designed to alleviate some of the debilitating physical side effects of the drugs that would be injected into her body during her afternoon mission. Dakota finished her entire meal knowing that it would be her last for the day - after her afternoon drugs she would be unable to hold down anything solid for six to twelve hours.

  When the time arrived, Miss Monroe came for her.

  PROJECT ABADDON

  [The demons and workers from hell have] a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon.

  - Revelations 9:11

  They walked quickly down a long, central hallway, always silent, always deserted. It had many branch corridors that led off to more dorms, all secured with thick doors requiring magnetic strip cards and access codes to operate.

  Outside one of the briefing rooms, Miss Monroe passed her into the care of another purposely expressionless man. He was ‘a suit’. Suits, called so because of the way they dressed, were mission coordinators and the leaders of their respective teams. They were always male, psychic, and lived on-site. One of their specialties was to feel intrusions into their mind. They had been through a very rigorous mind control process that had left in its wake a dangerous bloodlust in them. All were hard-wired to kill on command. Each concealed a gun with a silencer on his person, and had the clearance to kill both the psychic and himself in the event that either was compromised.

  As a means of bonding their relationship, Dakota’s suit had given her permission to call him by his first name, Teddy. She considered it an odd privilege. Not only did he refer to her as ‘the subject’ when speaking with the other team members, but she had specific and rigid instructions never to look him in the eye.

  Teddy smiled politely and held open the door of the briefing room. It was bare, but for a rectangular table and some chairs around it. There was a glass bowl of candy bars on the table.

  They sat opposite each other. ‘Take one,’ Teddy invited.

  ‘Thank you.’ She put a sweet in her mouth. It was laced with memory-enhancing drugs.

  Teddy opened the laptop into which he would log information throughout the session. It contained a detailed and complete profile of her as well as the list of command codes and keying gestures that would elicit different responses from her.

  ‘How are you today?’

  Her breathing had become slower and deeper, but her eyes remained open and alert. ‘Fine. Thank you.’

  ‘Good. Any questions?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shall we begin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Teddy moved so fast he was holding open the door for her before she was out of her chair. In silence they proceeded to a nearby ops room where the actual mission would be carried out.

  The ops room was built like a vault. There were computer banks to the front and rear. A back room led off from it, where two men could sit and view the proceedings. In the middle was the ‘trip’ seat, a reclining, padded seat that looked very much like a dentist chair, only much bigger. It faced a large screen. Dakota climbed into it. It was very snug and curved around her like a cradle. She put on the pair of headphones that lay by the side of it and leaned back. A device around the back of her neck held her rigid while the biotech activated the four metal clamps on her arms and wrists that pinned her to the machine. When Teddy had loaded the targeting coordinates into the psychotronics console, he turned toward her and applied the keying gestures and said the code words that would call forth Dakota’s most powerful alter, Shekina, to come to the front of her mind and hold her body.

  Shekina’s arrival was heralded only by a change of expression in the girl’s eyes - superior confidence and unconcealed disdain for Teddy. She despised him.

  Like a robot he uttered the exact same words he had every day for the past year and a half. ‘Today your instructions are to remote view this time next week on the vector coordinates you are given. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her job was to drag data out of her trip into the future.

  With Shekina in full command, Teddy called the other team members into the room. The comm tech, an ex-computer hacker with a criminal record, tasked with monitoring her heartbeat and, whenever targets were involved, theirs too; and the biotech, who proceeded to attach the EEG headband and the heart monitor wires. Then he inserted an IV needle into the permanent internal IV catheter in her arm and started the drip. With a syringe he pushed the first dose of psychoactive drugs into t
he IV line.

  Almost immediately her body became anesthetized and heavy, in direct contrast to her mental state, which was greatly heightened. Only her judgmental machinery remained untouched. She would break through into her mission exactly as she had been before the drugs.

  In her drug-induced hypnosis, Shekina heard Teddy say, ‘Abandon amazement. Pay attention. Look at everything.’

  The lights went down and brainwave tones were played through her headphones. Vector coordinates appeared on the screen and she was told to focus her mind on that location.

  Long.: 66°33’6, 60”S

  Lat.:99°50’24, 84”E

  The image of the cabalistic tree of life was projected onto the screen and she began interfacing with the computer, putting her entire concentration on the sephirot or circle at the top of the tree until it morphed into a Tibetan mandala-like geometric shape that she had been told to think of as ‘the flower with the thousand petals’. The flower began to spin, faster and faster until all the different colors raced into each other. Thousands of details per second, but her photographic memory missed nothing. She kept her eyes on the spinning object until she felt absorbed by the vortex.

  By monitoring her EEG Teddy knew with near-mathematical precision when to depress the button that sent an electric shock coursing from the trip seat into her body. The shock had the effect of propelling her awareness at tremendous speed through the vortex. She heard the sound of ripping Velcro and a whoosh, and she was through the flower membrane. The transition did not feel like a mental impression to her, but an actual physical sensation. Once past the membrane she was able to go anywhere. At incredible speed she flew over land mass and sea toward her vector intention.

  In seconds, she was in the freezing, bleak landscape of the South Pole. To get her bearings she let herself float for a moment in the deep blackness. The moon was very bright and there were lots of stars in the sky. She had been looking at them every day for a year and a half with no result, but that day a blinding white light, like a falling star, suddenly lit the night sky. It was traveling at fantastic speed. It was not in her sight by accident and it was intelligent. Without any fear she began chasing it. Incredibly, it appeared to slow down to let her catch up with it.

  She entered the white light and found herself in a bright, white room with no walls and no visible source of light. There was a strange, low hum, like that a machine or computer might make. When she looked down she saw that the floor was littered with objects, which at first she thought were Fabergé eggs. Jeweled, intricate, complex, and incomprehensibly marvelous… Then she realized they were, in fact, alive and waiting to hatch. But they could not do so without the help of human endeavor. They needed to be ‘sung’ into existence. She reached down and touched one of them, and heard a whisper in her head. ‘When the time comes you must give her to him.’

  ‘Give who to him? And who is he?’ she asked, but before the egg could answer, she heard the sound of men’s voices shouting urgently, ‘Wake her up. Quickly, or it will be too late.’ Then she was violently flung out of the white room, back into her trip seat and gasping for breath.

  “Who’ll dig his grave?”

  “I,” said the Owl,

  “With my pick and shovel,

  I’ll dig his grave.”

  - ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’,

  Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book (1744)

  Teddy was looking down anxiously at her. ‘What the hell happened?’

  ‘You stopped breathing,’ accused the panic-stricken bio med. He was holding a syringe of emptied adrenalin.

  Her body felt leaden and her head throbbed. Shekina turned her eyes away from their enquiring faces.

  ‘It’s here,’ she said.

  ‘What’s here?’

  ‘The being you are looking for.’

  ‘Did you make contact?’

  ‘It knows I am looking for it, but it will not let me look at it.’

  ‘How do you know it’s not a Gray or just another alien life form?’

  She closed her eyes. ‘It is stronger, bigger, and far more powerful than anything I have encountered before.’

  ‘Which star system is the entity from?’

  ’I don’t know.’

  ‘What happened in minute twelve? I lost you.’

  ‘I was inside some construct it had created for me.’

  ‘A construct?’

  ‘A white room with eggs in it.’

  ‘Eggs? What kind of eggs?’

  ‘They are waiting to hatch. But the environment is not right.’

  ‘Hatch into what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Even a shrug was too much for her. She turned the corners of her mouth downward. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘That’s it? Can you try to elaborate a little more?’

  ‘It needs us. Events and things have to be put into place before the eggs can hatch.’

  ‘What events and things?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did it or the eggs communicate an intent?’

  She paused. ‘The eggs seemed neutral, but, like I said before, the one that is carrying the eggs is too powerful for me to even look at.’

  ‘Quick recap: you were taken into a white room, shown some eggs, and then shut out… Nothing else?’

  For the first time since she had been created, Shekina decided she did not want to comply. She would not tell him about the mysterious instruction to ‘give her to him’. She did not yet understand it, but knew intuitively that it’s meaning would be revealed to her in time. She shook her head slowly.

  The suit walked away, frowning. There was something different about her. He crossed off the idea that she might be lying. Power alters were hard-wired to tell the truth at all times. He could see from his console that the other data collectors were still remote viewing, as if nothing of import had happened. She must have picked it up briefly as it came into the Earth’s atmosphere, a supernova bolt of pure energy. Obviously, they were not under attack or anything like that, but…

  ‘Release her,’ he said and the bio med quickly set about unhooking her. When both the bio med and the comm tech had left the room, Teddy walked back to Shekina and through gesture and code brought Dakota back into dominance.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He pressed the button to summon her chaperone and Dakota lay back with her eyes closed, too weak to move. The drugs would wear off in a while, but for the moment even her head was too heavy to lift off the leather. She longed for the soft dim of her dormitory where Miss Monroe would gently put her to bed, and she could sleep undisturbed. When Miss Monroe arrived, Teddy lifted Dakota and put her into the chair that Miss Monroe had wheeled in.

  The door closed quietly behind them. Teddy got in front of his computer and sent out an encrypted code.

  “Who will dig his grave?”

  The reply was so instantaneous that Teddy let out a low whistle.

  “I,” said the Owl.

  For some moments Teddy’s finger hovered over the send button as he reviewed the events of the last hour. Clearly much depended on the outcome of this file. Had he done anything wrong? No. Could he have done better? Not that he could see. He hit the button and leaned back into the chair. Come what may.

  Schooner Klaus studied the computer transcript with meticulous care and watched the video of Dakota’s session twice, pausing and rewinding many times. Finally he stopped his video player and stared at her frozen face, his eyes hard. Something was not right. He stroked the smooth stone on his ring and contemplated his next move. He must inform the network. He rifled through some papers in his safe and extracted a mobile phone. He connected it to a power source and waited for it to start up. Then he punched in a set of numbers and holding it to his ear stood looking out of the window. He counted the rings. One, two, three…

  A voice gruff and thickly Semitic rasped, ‘Yes.’

  ‘The girl says he is here.’

  There was a long pause. A
German aria was playing in the background. Schooner Klaus did not recognize it. The pause stretched. Schooner Klaus imagined the fragrance of Vermont Brie and eggplant fondue, though he had no idea what Kite drank or ate or even looked like. Kite’s power was real, yet he moved in the highest circles simply as a faceless, nameless, crestless codename - abode unknown.

  Kite had waited for and anticipated Schooner Klaus’s words for years, and now that Venus was spinning as an upside down pentagram, his lord had come. When finally he spoke, his horrible voice throbbed with urgency and excitement.

  ‘I want to see her. Tomorrow night, in Virginia.’

  ‘Yes, Sublime Master,’ Schooner Klaus crooned obsequiously.

  Poor Pearl, she had no time to play,

  The merry game of childhood;

  From dawn to dark she went all day,

  A-wooding in the wild-wood.

  - Gerald Massey,

  ‘The Legend of Little Pearl’ (1981)

  Dakota fought her way out of the clinging web of synthetic sleep the next morning to find Miss Monroe standing a few feet away from her bed. Her chaperone was wearing a long evening gown and high heels. Not only was her dark hair decorated with jeweled clasps, but she was also wearing make-up. Without her deliberately imposed dowdiness she was quite the beauty. She gestured toward the low table where three glossy cardboard boxes had been set.

  ‘They’re for you. Come and open them,’ she invited softly.

  Dakota hesitated. Both surprises and gifts caused her intense anxiety. Invariably: the fear - someone’s going to get hurt. Real bad.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Miss Monroe assured. ‘They are not gifts. You cannot keep them.’

  Dakota left her bed and went to lift the lids off the boxes. Inside layers of tissue was a stunning blue party dress; in another box a pair of sparkly shoes and skin-colored tights; and in the largest box a soft, deep blue, woolen coat.

  ‘You are going to a very special ball today.’