MJ-12: Inception

8

The roar of propellers made conversation pointless, even though Maggie really felt like talking to someone. So, she was left looking out the tiny window in the second-rate cargo aircraft she’d been herded onto that morning. She’d gotten notice of her departure only a moment before she actually had to leave, and her few personal effects had been unceremoniously shoved into an olive-drab duffel bag. She’d never really had a chance to unpack them, anyway.

As she looked out over the desert mountains and parched valleys, she wondered — not for the first time — whether she would’ve been better off back at Agnews. At least in the looney bin she’d been left alone most of the time, and hadn’t been transferred around the country every other month. Plus, the plants there smelled nice. The plane, by contrast, smelled of sweat and grease — as did most of the places they took her to.

Since leaving the hospital with Danny, she’d been poked and prodded, tested and retested. She’d undergone countless physical and psychological evaluations and been subjected to mental exercises concocted by military psych guys completely out of their depth. She asked to do something physical to help pass the time, and ended up getting into pretty fit shape. She even completed the basic training course given to Army draftees — solo, of course, because there was no way they were going to let her train with the boys.

Not that they’d bother her once she was done with them.

In fact, she’d dealt with a whole lot of men over the past year and a half. She’d made them cry. She’d made them scared — so scared, several of them pissed their pants and shit themselves. She’d enraged others to the point of animalistic frenzy, and had made more men fall in love with her in a month than all the boys there ever were in her neighborhood growing up. There was one guy she could’ve sworn she’d even made… well, he left the room in a hurry after she let the lust slough off him. At the time, she’d thought it was hilarious. Looking back, it just made her a little sad, and a little scared, too.

Then there was the guy who had a heart attack during an experiment intentionally designed to provoke fear. Thank God he lived, because it had taken all her newfound discipline not to blast anger and sadness and rage on everybody in that goddamn room for putting her through that.

The person in charge of her evaluation turned out not to be Danny but someone named Detlev Bronk — what a name that guy had. Middle-aged, graying scarecrow of a man — not what she’d expected from a government spy. He was the one who had come up with the whole plan to help get her curse under control. She was skeptical at first — how can you control a curse, really? If God or the devil decides to mess with you, what can a bureaucrat in a bad suit do to make it all better, even if he was some kind of pioneer in biophysics?

It turned out that Detlev’s big plan was practice. Over and over and over; several times a week, in fact. Sometimes, the people they brought in were volunteers, and sometimes they didn’t even know they were part of an experiment — not exactly a surprise she’d wish on anyone, but it was the Army, and she learned pretty quickly that they could do to their soldiers whatever they wanted. So, they would travel from base to base around the country, never staying for more than a few weeks or a month of testing before packing up their things again and heading on to the next one. She’d been to eight different bases since leaving California, enough that eventually they began returning to some of the places they’d first visited to experiment on the same test subjects a second time — she guessed they wanted to see the effect of repeat mind-fucks.

But they were all the same, first-timers or not. She let herself loose, and they folded like a bad hand. There were a few who managed to keep it together, like Danny. Maggie liked the little bookworm, and he came to visit and check on her regularly. There was a sense of compassion about him that her other handlers didn’t have. She’d thought about using her Enhancement — that’s what he kept calling it, but no matter what silly name the government wanted to give it, she would always think of it as her curse — to get Danny to tell her more about what was going on. But she liked him too much for that. Besides, she’d begun to develop her own rules about how she chose to use her ability, because the US government sure as hell wasn’t going to cry foul about ethics. She was a tool for them, and she knew it. She just didn’t know exactly how they were planning to use her — which was another scary, lonesome thought that would sometimes plague her in the middle of the night.

And even if she felt inclined to get Danny to talk, she knew there would be consequences. When she met with Bronk — or any other people for training or therapy — she was under “remote observation.” Most rooms had microphones, and one even had a massive camera that Bronk said was for television (it was the first time she’d ever seen a television camera before). Either way, Maggie was always monitored, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If she tried to use her Enhancement on the guards, or on Bronk, they’d know about it fast — and she had no idea what would happen to her, other than it’d probably be bad. Everything she did, every place she went… secrecy and paranoia were right there with her. Sometimes she felt like a prized pupil, but other times she felt like a guinea pig or, worse, some kind of threat.

It made sense, of course, since she guessed she was pretty unique, but… it was tiring. All of it. Constantly observed and monitored, keeping her ability reined in when she got depressed or angry or lonely or just hot for company. It was like she couldn’t have any emotions of her own, because of how dangerous it could be for the people around her.

She did get a nice present for Christmas, though. Over the holidays, they flew her all the way out to an island — probably in the Caribbean, but they never gave her specifics — and set her up in the best little cabana by the beach, stocked with great food, a radio, plenty of books. And they left her there for four days, completely by herself. It was so freeing to just have a good cry, to laugh, to let her guard down and take a walk without being monitored or feeling like she might hurt someone.

Yet at the same time, being completely free on the island only made her “normal” routine — if you could call it that — feel like some kind of captivity by comparison. She was a guest and a prisoner at the same time, and while she was never mistreated, she wasn’t free to deviate from the schedules set before her. When she was on the island, she thought about swimming for it, but she figured she’d drown before she reached another island. So, after vacation was up, it was back to work — back to therapy and testing and practice and lots of discipline training. All the while, in the back of her mind, she hoped they’d let her go back there again for a little taste of freedom.

But that wouldn’t be anytime soon. Maggie had been at some base in New Mexico for a few weeks. Now she was on a ratty cargo plane heading west — and she wasn’t alone. For one, there were two armed guards, both sitting as far away as possible, just out of the demonstrated range of her ability. Of course, she could get up, take two strides, and make them go fetal before they could reach for their guns, but… best to let them have their sense of security.

They were still close enough for Maggie to “feel” their emotions, though — a surprising but not unwelcome development as she honed control over her Enhancement. And what was more, when she focused on it, her range was even greater. She could feel the boredom of the pilot, for example, if she concentrated on it, the nervousness of the copilot — probably aiming to please his senior officer — and the weary vigilance of the guards.

And there were others on the plane, much closer to her — her fellow passengers. One was an old black man, dressed in simple clothes, who had kind eyes and two lifetimes’ worth of struggle written on his face. He’d been helped aboard by a couple of military policemen who were surprisingly gentle with him, and he sat now with his back against the bulkhead, eyes closed, resting. He seemed content, surprisingly. That was the last thing she expected.

Across from the black man was someone Maggie took to be his polar opposite: a smartly dressed blond young man who fidgeted with his seatbelt straps and paused to glare disdainfully at the black man from time to time. He was all nerves, masked poorly by an insouciant grin and given away by a clenched jaw and bouncing leg. Then again, maybe he just had to go to the bathroom. But his green eyes held none of the serenity of the old man; they shifted and darted, suspiciously taking in everyone on the plane. When they fell on Maggie, she could practically feel him give her the once-over, and the grin that followed sent a shiver up her spine. She was sorely tempted to give him a dose of fear or sadness, but she knew she’d get in serious trouble for that. Too bad.

Finally, there was the man who sat near the back and gazed out the window, a hollow look on his face. He was maybe around thirty, and pretty strong by the look of him. He moved gracefully but purposefully, the kind of movement she’d seen in farmhands and laborers who did their jobs well. His brown hair was cut short, his jaw had a couple days of stubble, and he wore a ratty woolen sweater, dungarees, and work boots. He was smart, though; Maggie could tell. Like the younger, shifty guy, he checked out everyone on the plane when he boarded, but in a dispassionate, analytical way, as if he were calmly gauging each person’s strengths and weaknesses to determine if they were a threat. She recognized the look well, because she’d done the same when she boarded. This one was guarded, pure and simple. There were no other emotions with him at the moment — merely alert and ready.

The plane began its descent with little warning, just a dip and a turn that Maggie barely noticed. She looked out her window and saw a massive dried lake bed the color of chalk nestled in one of the gray-brown valleys below. She stuck her face as close as she could get to the glass, looking for any indication of a nearby town or city, but the guards were up now, moving toward them cautiously.

“We need to ask you folks to put these on,” the one wearing sergeant’s stripes said. He held out pieces of black cloth. Blindfolds. “Security reasons.”

Gingerly, the young well-dressed man took one, followed by the old man; the former, Maggie could tell, got a whole lot more nervous, while the old man almost seemed amused. Finally, the big, competent guy took one with a grimace, and while he didn’t show it, she could tell he got a case of the nerves too. If Maggie was being honest with herself, the whole thing made her uneasy. Of all the places she’d visited around the country, all the flights she’d taken, blindfolds were an unwelcome first. What could possibly be such a secret?

But nonetheless, she took it and tied it over her eyes. They were shaped like sleep masks, like the kind Maggie’s mother used to have, padded and dark. They made it impossible to see, and without her sight, the pitching and bobbing were amplified as the plane made its approach. Maggie took a deep breath and focused her energy on figuring out how close they were to landing. She reached out with her ability, tracing the threads of emotion toward the cockpit, where she felt the pilot perking up and the copilot calming down. Maybe training was overcoming nerves? Or maybe he was just better at landing than taking off. Hard to say.

Then the nose of the plane started to rise, and the gears rumbled as the landing gear was lowered. A dip, a screech, and a pitch forward… and they were on the ground. That was all Maggie knew, though she was pretty certain they were near the dried lake bed they saw, because they hadn’t gone far enough to land anywhere else amid those mountains.

After a few minutes of rolling down the runway, the door on the side of the plane opened, and she heard boots on metal flooring. “Lady and gentlemen, each of you will be getting a hand. Please keep the blindfolds on until you’re told otherwise,” said a new voice, a young man who sounded very accustomed to being in charge. “This is for your own safety. Now everybody up! Sooner we move, sooner you get to see again.”

Maggie would’ve bet a dollar he was a Marine officer — but then, she realized, that was purely because of his emotional attitude and nothing concrete. But then, perhaps this ability of hers was concrete enough? Or was she jumping to conclusions? Some days, it was just really hard to tell what was popping into her head from her ability, and what was just an overactive imagination, fueled by equal parts anxiety and boredom.

Maggie stood and waited with her head down. She tried to pinpoint where everyone was on the plane. She could feel the young, shifty man’s tension, the old black man’s resignation, the big guy’s hair-trigger alertness. The cockpit crew and the guards escorting her fellow passengers were mostly bored or otherwise neutral, though there seemed to be a bit of idle curiosity among one or two of them. Made sense, given that none of the passengers would ever be mistaken for regular military. The man she pegged as a Marine, though — he was the one who grabbed her bag and took her arm gently to lead her forward, and he suddenly swung from confident to nervous, almost unreasonably so. He must have known what she was doing there, what she was — it was the only possible explanation. He’s scared of me.

Jumping to conclusions again, she thought. Not smart.

They made their way slowly through the plane and down the steps to the ground. There was tarmac underneath her boots — standard Army issue, far more practical than the shoes they originally tried to foist on her — and she was soon guided to a waiting jeep and gently placed in a seat by the still-nervous soldier. The emotional threads belonging to the old man — fatigue, curiosity, bemusement, worry — snaked toward her in gentle, pastel hues from the seat next to her. Her guide took the wheel, and she also felt another person in the jeep as they pulled away — probably a grunt, his emotions steady and generally nonplussed.

Soon, there was warm wind in her hair as the jeep sped off in what felt like a straight line — they had to be doing at least forty miles an hour, and it seemed their final destination was some ways off, as it took about three minutes by her reckoning before the vehicle came to a halt. They were well away from the runway — probably well away from the usual assortment of hangars and outbuildings she’d seen at other air bases.

“You can take those off now,” the officer in charge said. She did so and recognized him as the man she’d first met along with Danny at the mental hospital so very long ago. Anderson, his name was, dredged up from memories she wanted to forget from her time there. No wonder he was put out — he probably remembered her very well. On the bright side, her hunch was right, and she quietly enjoyed the little victory.

They were at a small cluster of buildings at the end of a very long road — far enough from the landing strip that she could barely make out anything from where they’d come from. The buildings here, though, were pure government prefab, corrugated metal and wood framing and canvas, and they looked pretty new, given the general lack of dirt and dust on them. There was a wood-framed watchtower in the middle of it all, with a couple of soldiers looking at them closely — weapons at the ready, though not aimed.

The layers of barbed wire fence surrounding the little encampment were, she had to admit, less than promising.

Maggie jumped out of the jeep and moved around to the other side to help the old-timer, who already had tried to get out of the car without his escort. He seemed strong enough but still had that uncertainty of movement that came with old age. But he soon stood and took in his surroundings before looking at her with a smile. “Thank you, miss.”

“Welcome, Pops.” She had to wonder: if this guy was a Variant of some kind, it had better be a pretty impressive ability, because otherwise he wasn’t going to be very useful to the government people. Then it struck her, as she took his arm, that maybe she should be more nervous than she was. But she wasn’t. Definitely too much time cooped up, she considered.

The two other passengers from the plane, having arrived in another jeep, were already walking toward one of the smaller buildings, surrounded by a couple of suits and a half-dozen soldiers. Maggie and the old man followed, only to find Danny Wallace waiting for them.

“Good to see you, Maggie,” the young officer said with a smile, offering his hand. “Good flight?”

“Depends on where I’ve landed,” she said quietly, keeping her hands to herself and eying him warily. “Where are we?”

Danny turned his extended arm toward the old-timer instead. “Middle of nowhere, Nevada,” he replied. “You’ll learn more inside. Now, Mr. Hooks, let’s take it easy here. How’re you feeling?”

The old man smiled and shook hands. “I’m all right, Mr. Wallace. Can’t complain. Been building up my strength since our last little test. Feeling better today. But I’ll let you nice folks wait on me just the same.”

Danny nodded toward the door. “Right inside, then. We’ll get started when you’re all comfortable.”

Maggie held the door for the old man as he shuffled in, then followed as they were ushered into a large room full of chairs and tables — she’d been to enough army bases now to recognize a mess hall when she saw one — that had been turned into an impromptu conference room. The two others from the plane were already sitting there, folders in front of them; the rugged fellow was already leafing through the pages, while the young, shifty one was smiling and shaking hands with the four others inside.

“OK, if we can take our seats here, we’ll get going,” Danny said, walking toward the front of the room. “General? You want to start us off, sir?”

A man with two stars on his army uniform stood up and nodded at Danny. “Thank you, Commander. Welcome, everyone. My name’s General Bob Montague. I hope your trip went well. I know you’ve all been poked and prodded and tested for quite a while — a year or more in some cases — and your country appreciates your time and cooperation.

“We’re moving on to the next phase of our study,” the general continued. “You may recognize a couple of the gentlemen at this table. This is Dr. Detlev Bronk,” he said, motioning to a silver-haired man in a sharp suit and glasses, who gave them all a smile, “and of course you all know Commander Wallace here.”

Maggie looked over at Bronk and gave him a thin smile that he returned in kind, though she could practically see the strands of tension and discipline emanating from him. Such a serious guy. The idea of making him giddy enough to skip and dance briefly crossed her mind, and she had the feeling that it would’ve been the very first time he’d done either.

Bronk rose from the table with a folder in hand. “You may have already gathered by now that those around you are fellow Variants. Starting more than two years ago, you’ve each somehow acquired an unusual ability of some kind, an Enhancement — and yes, each one of you has a different ability. For the past year, we’ve been measuring the extent of your abilities and the control you have over them. That was phase one of our study. Phase two is much more experimental. We’re putting the four of you together to see how your abilities interact with one another’s. Through this, we’re hoping that we’ll learn more about what you can do and more about the source of these Enhancements.”

“You mean you don’t know?” the rugged man said. “All this time, you still haven’t figured it out?”

Bronk frowned. “Never said that, Mr. Lodge. At the moment, any information about the source of Variants and Enhancement has to remain classified, though, yes, studying you in action will certainly add to our understanding. We’re also hoping to step up the training you’ve received so that you can better use your abilities on behalf of your country.”

At this, the younger man smirked and laughed. “All well and good,” he said with a genteel Southern accent. “But what if, after all this time, we decide we have our abilities well in hand and don’t want to play anymore? I got a wife and kids, Dr. Bronk. I sure would like to go see ’em.”

“And we will make arrangements for that, Mr. Longstreet,” Bronk replied tersely. “As for your voluntary participation, I need not remind you of the expense and effort the United States government has already invested in each of you. The men who graduate from West Point or Annapolis are required to spend four years in the military, at minimum, as recompense for their education. The agreement you all signed stipulated a similar length of service, commensurate with the time and study you’ve received. In your case, you would be free to leave in approximately sixteen months — and, I should add, you would be given no further training in the application of your Enhancement. Plus, you would have to compensate the United States government for the assistance we’ve rendered you thus far. Are we clear, sir?”

The man named Longstreet frowned and slumped back in his chair, silent.

Bronk smiled slightly at this, then addressed all of them once more. “You are all, of course, United States citizens, with all of the rights and responsibilities that come with that privilege. You have abilities, yes, but we’ve seen how dangerous they can be. We must approve each of you, individually, before you are allowed to leave this facility, and will only do so once the training regimen we’ve given you has satisfied us that you have enough control so as to not harm the people around you. And yes, you’ve all signed agreements to serve your country after your training and evaluation is complete, and we are paying you generously in the interim. Your country is trying to help you, and we expect you to do the same for your country. Any other questions before we get started on the briefing?”

The old black man raised his hand, earning him a scowl from the Southerner. “Yes, sir, if I may. First, I want to thank you again for allowing me regular calls with my wife and son, and for the salary you’ve given me. My boy’s been accepted to Grambling, and I’m mighty grateful to you that we can afford to send him.”

“Congratulations, Mr. Hooks!” Bronk said, favoring him with a genuine smile. “That’s fine news indeed. Now, what’s your question?”

To Maggie’s surprise, she could feel waves of disgust and anger peeling off of that Longstreet man, despite his placid demeanor. She’d read about attitudes in the South, but feeling it so… viscerally… was a horrible thing and would only be worse if it had been directed at her.

The black man, however, continued. “Can you tell us exactly where we are?”

The question hung in the room for several moments before Montague answered. “Your exact location is highly classified. In fact, only about two hundred people know this installation exists, and only thirty-five know the extent of what we’re doing here, including everyone in this room. All you need to know is that we’re at a former US Army Air Force Auxiliary facility. The Atomic Energy Commission mapped this area out last year, and we’re using their designation for it in our official communications.

“You’re at a place called Area 51, the operational base for a project called MAJESTIC-12. And if you ever say either of those things out loud to anybody not in this room,” Montague said simply, “you’ll be arrested for treason and shot.

“Now let’s get started.”

Maggie looked around as everyone else opened up the folders on the tables in front of them. Lodge, Longstreet, Hooks… they were just like her. Variants. Different, but still very much everyday people in their concerns and desires. Love of family, worry about money, wanting to know what the heck had happened to them. All perfectly normal.

Except that it wasn’t. And despite what Bronk had said, there wasn’t going to be a normal, she felt. Ever again.

With a sigh, she opened the folder in front of her and began reading a letter from Harry S. Truman.