RESTORATION (a science fiction novel) (RESTORATION (the science fiction trilogy)) (78 page)

Two weeks after the big take down every member of the team received a package via UPS delivery.  The boxes contained black jackets with “Operation Black Ice” on the back, and then the date, September 19
th
2056, followed by the complete list of all the team members names, 156 total, listed in alphabetical order and they added a
special “thanks to” at the bottom to list Toby, Cheyenne, Todd, and Alice, who even though they were not official team members, they were extremely crucial to the success of the operation.  Their last names were embroidered on the left breast pocket. 

John retained both Jason and Caitlin at the farm as their personal lab assistants with ongoing plans for more testing and
research in human and animal cloning.  The Farm remained top secret, none of the authorities were ever told of it or made discovery of it.  John’s girlfriend returned from out of town and things were getting more serious between them, it seemed John had finally found the one. 

Three months after the completion of Black Ice, Dodge got a call that surprised him, it was agent Hillgrave.  Brian invited Dodge and John to come to the pentagon and of course they both agreed.

It was a cold blustery December day when they arrived in DC on a private jet.  Agent Hillgrave met them on the tarmac.

“Good to see you fellas
again, and I’m glad it’s in a less stressful pretense.” 

They all agreed and got in out of the blowing snow and into the warm Crown Vic that was waiting.

At the Pentagon they sat in on a meeting with several heads of Home Land Security, White House Administration officials and few other that seemed to lack any ID.  There was some briefing on Operation Black Ice and then several video clips of Cyrus’s body on the floor in the room behind his office and some forensic terms and various points being made about the scene and what happened. 

Then they moved on to Glitch’s office and his body hanging there, his head nailed to the door frame with a huge knife.  They presented what they believed happened based on their notes and the taped statements taken from Dodge, John, DC, and Alan.  Statements made by JC had been stricken due to his condition at the time. 

With that complete, they broke for a nice lunch in one of the dining rooms where they were allowed to talk casually and off the record with agents and some of the President’s staff for over an hour.  It was very nice and everyone was quite interested to see them and ask a few questions including personal stuff, off the subject, like sports and even their favorite restaurants and bars in Indy. 

After lunch they returned to the briefing and watched detailed video and audio of the autopsies for both Cyrus and Glitch.  Cyrus’s body was a real mess even before they shot him up.  Only about half of his organs worked properly, his plumbing was all messed up and so he had to wear bags to collect his waste, and use power cells to keep his heart and brain functioning. 

He had several diseases that were eating away at him, and he was basically an experiment gone wrong from the beginning that should have been euthanized right away.  But the good doctor let him live because he believed it to be in the name of science to continue experimenting with this badly disfigured and mentally deranged human being.  It ended up costing the doctor and his wife their very lives and even the life of their other son that turned out for the most part normal, that being the Ron Simpson that worked with Dodge at ESS. 

Cyrus was simply a deformed disaster with a demented soul and a very maniacal mind.  Glitch was another story entirely.  He had originally been a spy in the Queen’s service in Great Britain, a real 007 type.  His real name was Gerald Litch, no middle name.  He was a master mind with computers as a young soldier in the British Army.  His uniforms always displayed G. Litch on the breast pocket and so the nickname Glitch stuck.  He was a disciplined soldier and upon his completion of his duty in the armed services he was offered a job in the British Secret Service which he gladly accepted.

Several years later there was a clash that ensued between the CIA and some rogue British secret service over an assassination attempt on the Prime Minister.  Glitch was a highly trained computer expert, and though well trained in combat as well, he wasn’t really cut out for front line action.  He got caught in the middle of a fire fight and was shot up very badly on the Prime Ministers yacht.  He went overboard and was presumed dead. 

Slade was in the area working for
both sides” as an informant, a crooked double agent.  No one knew too much about him other than he was a disfigured freak that they assumed had been blown up in some previous assignment and barely survived.  He was in the process of escaping the mess when something got caught in the propeller of the small boat that he was using to flee the area, when he tried to free the prop he discovered it was Glitch that he had hit. 

Cyrus dragged him up on board the little boat and took him back to his lab.  He realized who he was and figured if he could save him he would become a very valuable asset that owed him his life.  He managed to save Glitch but a good portion of his organs were destroyed and his heart was badly damaged.  Cyrus kept him in a coma working on him off and on for three years.  It was for selfish purposes, not human kindness, that Cyrus did this. 

Cyrus knew Glitch had incredible computer and technical skills that would change his game plan entirely.  Glitches’ modified body was a marvel really, and he was more machine than man.  He had multiple nuclium cells that fueled his body through some sort of a function similar to photosynthesis.  He had to plug in weekly to keep the cells in good working order.  Eating was not necessary but he still could eat if he wanted to.  The autopsy revealed only a light diet mostly consisting of liquids.  His body also contained what they were now calling a biodrive.  They were still studying it but had not yet gained a full understanding of how it worked.  They believed Cyrus had figured out how to clone brain matter in such a way as to  make it for pure data storage only, no emotion or any glandular control, just pure memory.    The tissue was where one of his kidneys should have been and there was something similar to wires connecting it to the base of his brain, only the wires were more biological than mechanical, more like a nerve trunk, grown from something that they had not identified yet.

They were completely baffled by the extreme advanced tissue structures in Glitch’s body that Cyrus had no doubt developed.  Cyrus as sick as he was had become a master physician and was a high level genius.  The pentagon would continue to study and learn from their bodies for years to come.  The hard drives and
PC’s recovered from the compound were all at the Pentagon now where they were being studied and scrutinized, one file at a time.  There was one part of the puzzle though that the pentagon still didn’t have and John was not about to tell them.  It was the drive that Cyrus attempted to make off with that day, the one he had tethered to his wrist.  It was in a nicely secured box so John gave it to one of men that chose to leave down on the foundry floor before the authorities arrived.  John had studied his background and knew in advance that this man would not stick around to be questioned by the authorities.  He was a Russian secret agent that was want by nearly every government in existence not to mention several private contract assassins.  He was actually hiding out in the compound under the guise of working for Slade.  He was using the situation to create a safe haven for himself.  John slipped him a note when he emerged from the oven with the others.  It included instructions that he gladly followed. 

He instructed him to take the case to one particular bank and go to a particular teller that he described in detail.
Walk up to the counter and say “John Calhoun would like to make a deposit, your fee will be wired.”  Give him the case and walk out.  He will know what to do and you will be paid two million dollars for your trouble.”  He received a standard advertisement skyphone message a few days later that read, “New collectibles at the pawn shop.  Come see what we have on sale.”  He knew this meant that his cousin received the case safely.  Dodge and John both wanted to go see what was in it but they knew they were still being watched by authorities so it would have to wait.  No doubt it contained some great dirt on Cyrus and probably others and lord only knew what else. 

The other hanging detail was the funds that Cyrus had.  No one had time to tally it before it was transferred to offshore bank accounts that John had set up but he knew it was in the trillions, it was still out there, undetected by the government, bouncing from one account to another.  John covered his tracks very well and was excited about the idea of an anonymous donation that would soon wipe out the national debt. 

It was a long day.  Agent Hillgrave took them to their hotel and dropped them off for the night along with their security detail.  The next morning he returned with a car and took them back to the Airport where a small jet was waiting for them on the Tarmac.  Agent Hillgrave walked them to their plane and thanked them again for their outstanding service to their country and the world. 

As they boarded, he said, “By the way gentlemen, don’t leave the country without contacting us first, okay?” 

Dodge and John looked at each other, then Dodge turned to Hillgrave, “You got it chief, thanks for the lift.” 

They boarded the plane and settled in for the flight home to Indianapolis.  It was football season now and they both had season tickets for a game tomorrow with their families.  The Indianapolis Colts were playing at home against their greatest rivals, the New England Patriots.  Peyton Manning was back on the team and it was going to be epic for sure.  It was expected to be a very good game and they couldn’t wait to see it.  On the flight home they watched the nightly world news.  The featured story was about a group of rich play boys.  It seemed the new fad
was death games.  The idea was to find the most exhilarating way to die and go out and do it. 

John sold the patent for his compact mobile Lifecorder to the company that bought the remnants of Xbox, the outdated gaming system company from the turn of the century, and now it had found a new lease on life by offering to monitor and log Lifefiles in real time via the tiny wearable Lifecorder device. 

The top story was covering a group of extreme skiers.  They were being dropped off out of a chopper onto an impassable area of Mount Kilimanjaro.  They would ski just as long as they could and then plummet to their deaths if they had the guts.  For those that couldn’t go through with it they could tap out by pulling the cord for a compact parachute that they were wearing.  These wealthy thrill seekers had clones already waiting for them at exclusive private life centers paid for in advance.  Their onboard personal mobile LifeCorders would record every memory to the very end. 

The camera crew followed one young man to his death and then traveled to the life center for the wakening of his new clone.  When his clone awoke, he sat straight up and said . . .

“Wow, what a rush!  That was incredible!”  Then he looked right into the camera and yelled, “Hello extreme sports fans!  Let’s go do it again!” 

John turned off the TV and looked at Dodge.     
         “If I had known a bunch of spoiled rich Brats were going to use my invention like that I would have just thrown it in the junk drawer out in the garage!”        
         “No kidding, it’s not like you needed the extra money!”        
         “Man what a crazy world we’re living in.”

On another plane thousands of feet above Dodge and John traveling in the opposite direction was a wealthy oil man.  He was watching the news out of Dallas Texas, his hometown.  They just aired a short story about John’s invention of the miniature lifecorder device and the same daredevils using it for extreme sports. 

“Good evening everyone, I’m Jack Stevens filling in for Bob Grover this evening, in an unrelated story we go now to Alisha Hughes just outside of Houston, Alisha?”        
         “Yes good evening Jack, and Good evening everyone, we’re on the scene at what local authorities are calling a baffling discovery here in this dessert area outside Houston this evening.” 

“What you see behind me is a large trailer like the big rigs pull down the highway everyday full of goods going across the country to various stores and factories.  This one is a little different because what authorities say they found inside this seemingly abandoned trailer earlier today were not your normal goods.” 

“Some children were playing outside this recently closed café earlier today when they decided they would break into what appeared to be an abandoned eighteen wheeler trailer, but when they got inside what they discovered surprised them.  It seemed to be the remains of a man lying in what looked like a very old barber’s chair or perhaps a dental office chair.  The children said that the corpse appeared to be connected to some kind of life support machine with many tubes and bags attached to his now shriveled and decaying body.  Directly in front of the corpse were a large computer console and monitor which were still functioning when the children entered the trailer.  Let’s go now to a recorded interview of thirteen-year-old Chris Bevins, one of the youths that entered the trailer. 

“Well we got inside and we saw the man and we thought he was still alive but then we thought he was dead.”

“What else did you see inside?
         “Um, well there were lots of batteries and wires and tubes and stuff and there was something running like a generator or a motor.  Oh, and there were lots of computer things in racks with blinking lights and cables, and lots of electronics like in a lab or something.”