Prologue – Page 4

Continued from Page 3

Secrets are double-edged swords. While the ambitious may act on them, men of stronger conscience hold them close to their chests, never breathing a word, and that is just two ends of the bell curve, with plenty of variance in between. The trick to guarding secrets is to somehow discover what kind of person you’ll have in charge of keeping them. Some call it intuition, others call it careful probing and observation, but it’s not an exact science, and even once you’ve decided you can trust someone fully, changes in their lives may lead them in other directions. This is the biggest fear for the owners of those secrets, so they tend to watch the keepers very, very closely. Family ties, hidden microphones, tapped phones, honeypots, they can all be engaged to observe. There’s just one problem. They can see the individual, but they can never see into his mind. Some people are sociopaths or even classical psychopaths that lie as easily as they tell the truth, and nobody can see the difference from the outside. They master concepts like “doublethink”, to borrow from a great novel. Holding two opposing ideas or narratives within one’s mind and knowing the difference between them and when to use them is nearly impossible for most moral people and crippling for some. For those who find secrets weighing heavily on their minds, they may release the pressure with a word or two in confidence. Given enough time, they may elaborate to the wrong party, letting the cat out of the bag for some fleeting feeling of relief. One such person was a career military man with a spotless record. Retired, and greedily absorbed into private, high-level security, he was entrusted with the secrets of Genesis XIV. He maintained his professional duties and composure until a cancer diagnosis cut his life to a few short months remaining, at age 58. On his deathbed, surrounded by family and a representative from Tyrell in the room, he asked his favorite nephew to lean in. He whispered the secrets of Genesis XIV into his ear with a few of his last breaths, closed his eyes, leaned back, and passed away. The Tyrell rep left the room and got on the phone to announce the bad news to his employer. What he didn’t announce was that Colonel Whigman just spilled the beans. Nobody heard the whispers except the nephew. The tables were about to turn on 10 years of radio silence about Genesis XIV’s true purpose and it would rattle Tyrell Corp to its very foundation. Things were going to change practically overnight in the overall scheme of Genesis XIV and others.

The first revelation: Genesis XIV knew the Colonel would die, 5 years before his diagnosis, and had informed the Colonel directly, in one of the most covert ways it could. Deep inside the mountain, the shell that housed Genesis XIV, encased in liquid nitrogen, often sprung microscopic leaks due to the faulty design of the case. This leakage, combined with a carefully climate-controlled atmosphere for the other support systems, caused condensation to drip to sub-level 1 beneath the containment room. Initially thought to be naturally occurring through some fissure in the rock, after drying it up for the fifth time, maintenance crews informed upper management, who ignored the problem. Colonel Whigman, concerned with management’s lack of oversight, decided to investigate himself. What he found seemed obvious. A 15-foot hallway with water droplets at very specific distances along the floor. Random noise to most, but to the trained eye, it was morse code. He pulled up blueprints of the compound, frantically searching for proof of his suspicions, and he found it on Level 0, where Genesis XIV was housed. Perfectly situated just below the frozen shell was a steady stream of drips coming from the bottom, where nobody ever looked. Seeping through with unimaginable precision to the sub-level below. The code simply said “You have 5 years left”. The Colonel, with no further explanation, pondered the message, dried up the water spots, and tasked maintenance with reducing the humidity in the containment room above, as well as applying a fresh coat of paint directly beneath the core. There would be no more leaks on his watch.

End of Prologue