Black Jack

  The other programmers and handlers owned the obligatory three-ringed notebooks and laptops with all the access codes and triggers for their slaves, but he had been trained in the oral method. He had it all memorized, especially the secret back door codes that he never revealed to anyone.

  He was not a squeamish man and he stepped easily into the growing puddles of blood, to lean over her. Her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling. He removed her earphones. His nostrils flared. The smell of her. Blood, sweat, a sour note - vomit, fear and something else… A child thing… His thing.

  The first alter to be programmed utilizing the thirteen by thirteen grid was always the protector persona.

  ‘She looks like you,’ he whispered. ‘But she is not you. We will always strap you down and hurt you. But she will come forth and hold all your pain. Her name is Merica.’ He paused for a moment to let the formal, unique name he had given the protector persona sink in. ‘I am now speaking with Merica, the one who holds all the pain. You are Dakota’s protector. From now on your only task is to keep her safe. If she disobeys us, you must do whatever necessary to stop her. ‘Or…’ He touched her face with an electrically charged ball wrapped in salt water. Dakota’s body convulsed violently. ‘We will hurt you. Don’t ever forget. Do your job well.’

  He lightly pressed his fingertips behind both her ears, and administered another low dose of electroshock to lock in the command. This ‘feel the pain’ sequence would be repeated again and again until Merica could be ‘trusted’ to take over the function of Dakota’s prison guard, the insistent voice inside her head that her twisted logic would call ‘her protector’. For the rest of her life Merica would keep not only the girl and later the woman isolated and pliable, but, more importantly, also her programmer and owner from capture or retribution. Merica would resist any recollection even in the hands of the most qualified therapist.

  The next persona he sectioned off was a weak thing, hardly human. It had no courage. Its heart, he told the girl, had been ripped out and sealed in an Earthen jar. ‘Now give all your feelings of wanting to hurt us to it,’ he commanded. In this way any desire for retaliation or revenge against her tormentors would no longer be accessible to the dominant personality, but held by that sorry, stunted creature. It too was given a formal, unique name - Eylon.

  In this manner anger was channeled into another alter and told it that it was not human, but a chained, wild creature. Only he had the keys. Only he could access that frothing beast. Over time that creature would be stoked, nourished, given legs, hands, wings, heart, mind, soul, and be set against any that would try to help her.

  Week by week with faultless precision he created many other alters. Almost all, permanently crippled, or taught to view themselves as hateful and hated. Some were frozen as little children; others blind, mute or deaf.

  Hope, he told her, led to wanting, and wanting was very bad, the cause of great suffering. ‘Friends will always hurt you. Boys will hurt you. You must remain alone. Don’t ever let anyone touch you. Or…’ He held open both her eyelids and squeezed a few drops of chemical irritant into her eyes. While she writhed with pain the lights were switched off to simulate blindness.

  ‘See what wanting does? Now you are forever blind.’

  Wanting was christened Cromag.

  ‘Your job,’ he told Cromag, ‘is to keep her from wanting. If she wants, take it away instantly. Replace it with doubt and discomfort.’ Cromag would spend the rest of her existence, isolated, blind and in terrible pain; nevertheless ferocious in the performance of her job.

  Another personality was created to house curiosity. ‘Never,’ he spoke firmly, ‘let her have questions. Questions belong to us. Do not look for answers. Answers do not belong to you. They belong to us.’ Holding her by the throat he injected an irritant into her larynx. The pain was so severe that the girl temporarily lost her voice. ‘You will never again be able to speak,’ he lied, and instantly that alter became mute. Another poor mute was given the task of remembering Dakota’s past. ‘If she remembers she will die. Do your job well.’

  When all the traits that were thought to be detrimental to his control of ‘the real Dakota’ had been locked away into a truly impressive myriad of alters, it was time to invoke the personas that would control access to her psychic abilities. It was vital that she have no access to her own powers in her daily life. He referred to the first such alter he created as ‘the powerful one’ or ‘the one who holds your powers’.

  ‘I am talking to Shekina,’ he said, using the imprinting gesture of rubbing her forehead just above the bridge of the nose. ‘ You hold all her psychic powers. She must never be allowed to use these powers. These powers belong to you. Only you. If she tries to use them you must stop her. If you fail to stop her, we will hurt you.’

  He hurt her.

  Then, he created a secondary alter called a key, so it would be impossible for her to either intentionally or accidentally access her own gift without this trigger alter. This gatekeeper he named Timu.

  ‘When you hear Timu you will know it is we who want you to use your powers. You will use your powers only as we tell you to. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Death to the weakling,

  wealth to the strong!

  - Book of Satan 1:1

  One day the door of Dakota’s dank prison opened and a huge man enveloped in a cloud of lavender perfume approached her cage. Even though she had been programmed not to remember his face, for a bewildering moment, she was unaccountably terrified by the juxtaposition of his imposing military figure and the familiar smell. But then he smiled and it was an indescribably wonderful smile. It lit up his entire face and he seemed beautiful to her beyond anything she could imagine. There was no doubt in her child’s mind: her troubles were over. He was some sort of policeman who had come to save her.

  Schooner Klaus unlocked the cage and told her that he had come to take her away from that horrible place. After the abominable cruelty she had experienced she felt insanely grateful to him. When he gathered her nearly skeletal body into his clean, sweet-smelling arms she clung pitifully to his strong neck and emitted a low, frightened howl.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he soothed gently. ‘But everything is going to be all right now. You have been a good girl and you deserve good things from now on.’ With infinite tenderness he carried her down the bare corridors and into a rather odd room.

  The walls were purple, and from the black and white tiled floor sprouted three pillars of different heights, none of which quite reached the ceiling. Although she had the impression that there were no windows, yellow drapes drawn shut made it seem that there were.

  On a black stone platform in the middle of the room stood a marble bath with clawed feet. He carried her to it and she saw that it was half filled with fragrant water. Gently, and with kind words, he lowered her into it. The water was deliciously warm. He took off his jacket with all its gleaming medals and rolled up his shirtsleeves. With a washcloth he proceeded to wash her. He unclenched her fists and examined her fingers, blue with needle marks underneath the nails that ran from tip to root. She heard him sigh sorrowfully. For some time she remained with her eyes lowered, but as his soft, reassuring voice kept on repeating just how incredible it was all going to be henceforth, she turned an adoring gaze up to him.

  He lifted her out of the bath and enveloped her in a thick towel. She put her cheek against the soft material, and unconsciously made the contented sound of a dog when its master bends to scratch its ears. There were polka dot panties and fine clothes laid out on a black velvet chair. He dressed her in them. In a daze she ran her palms down the front of the dress and smoothed it over her legs. This was her first time in clothes since she had woken up caged.

  She was taken to a playroom. There were many toys in a big, lidless wooden box, and another child was sitting on the floor playing with a train set.

  ‘Tom is the same age as you, Dakota. Would you like to play with him??
??

  The little boy was fair-haired like her and seemed unsurprised by Dakota’s appearance in the playroom. Dakota wanted to join him, but, feeling shy and tongue-tied, she hung back behind Schooner Klaus.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Schooner Klaus encouraged kindly. ‘I’ll be right here if you need me.’ He moved to a table nearby and sat down. Paying no more attention to the children he began to shuffle some papers on the table.

  Tom had neither smiled nor spoken, but he was silently holding out a green and black train compartment toward her. With timid steps she went to sit in front of her new friend. But no sooner had she settled down, when the door burst open and a large man barged in. Dakota was instantly immobilized with fear. Everything about him reminded her of the coldly remote six that stood around the metal table. Worse, he appeared to be in an uncontrollable rage.

  She scrambled up and tried to run to Schooner Klaus, but the man was lightning fast. His iron fist closed around her forearm tightly. He would have dragged her out of the room, too, if Schooner Klaus had not looked up from his papers and said in a calm, firm voice, ‘There must be some misunderstanding here. You must want some other child.’

  But the man was adamant. She was a runaway and must return to the metal room with him. Dakota began to cower with abject terror.

  ‘Let’s discuss this outside,’ Schooner Klaus suggested reasonably.

  They left the room. Dakota lay frozen on the floor, where the man had tossed her, for what seemed an interminable time. Finally, the door opened and Schooner Klaus walked through it. He seemed concerned. The man loomed at the door with crossed arms. Schooner Klaus knelt on one knee beside her so he could whisper into her ear. He told her that the man had orders to take her away and kill her, but that he had managed to convince him it was not important which child died, only that one did. And Dakota, well, Dakota could decide whether it was she or another child that did.

  ‘Perhaps Tom could take your place?’

  Dakota went white.

  Schooner Klaus shook his head regretfully. ‘I know,’ he soothed, ‘but it was the best I could do.’

  Dakota looked at Tom. Unaffected and uncurious about what was going on he had quietly gone back to playing with his train set. In a daze it occurred to her that she had not yet heard him speak. Perhaps he could not. He seemed strangely solemn and unappreciative of his own good fortune, living in that brightly lit, colorful room full of toys. She had done nothing wrong, and yet she had to die. It seemed terribly unfair. She thought of the metal table and began to shake her head. She couldn’t, she simply couldn’t go back. Her heart was pounding in her chest.

  ‘Well?’ Schooner Klaus prompted.

  She uttered her first word since being out of the cage.

  ‘Tom,’ she whispered.

  Barely had the word left her lips when the man strode into the room, grabbed Tom by his head, and, with a knife that he pulled out of his pocket, slit the poor boy’s throat. From ear to ear. Blood gushed out of the gaping wound as he kicked and writhed. Dakota stared in shocked horror. When eventually Tom stopped jerking, the man calmly wiped his knife, put it away, and left. In the dead silence, Dakota thought she heard the sound of wet gurgling coming from the boy’s throat. She felt numb and cold and very frightened.

  ‘There, there… You did very well, my pretty, little butterfly,’ Schooner Klaus praised, gently patting her on her back. She turned her stunned gaze toward him, and found him smiling and approving. She had done well? She felt confused. Perhaps, the boy had not been ‘good’ in some way. He must have deserved it. And yet… Schooner Klaus held out his hand in front of her face and she bent forward and put her wretched lips to the big, black stone clawed within his ring.

  He took her hand, and hand in hand they went out of the door, down a long corridor, up in a lift, and through a metal door into bright sunlight. She turned her face up to its warmth. She thought, it’s all right now. All is well.

  A long, black car with tinted windows pulled up alongside them and they got into the back seat. The car pulled out of the front gates of what looked like an ordinary office building. Dakota realized tears were flowing down her cheeks. She felt horrible. Her small fist closed around Schooner Klaus’s index finger. Looking down at her he understood precisely her reaction. Symbolically she had lost her innocence. The distinction that one was the victim and the other the perpetrator had been erased. This was, in fact, the beginning of self-loathing. He allowed her to hold his finger.

  ‘I’ve spoken to your parents,’ he said, as he fished in his trouser pocket and brought out a grape-flavored sweet. He unwrapped it and put it directly into her mouth. ‘They love you very much, but they said that I should keep you for a bit.’

  ‘Don’t they want me back?’ she asked, but the sedative was quick-working and she laid her head back sleepily. He patted her on the top of her head and whispered, ‘Of course they do, but go to the safe place now, my little butterfly, over the rainbow. It’s time to forget everything.’

  To induce retrograde amnesia before she actually fell asleep he extracted from his jacket pocket a stun gun that could have passed for a fountain pen, and electro-shocked her in the muscled area below the shoulder blades. Since human memories do not become coherent for about twenty-four hours after they are imprinted, shock-scrambling them while they are still stored in the short-term memory section of the brain destroys them. When she awakened she would remember nothing.

  As she slid into his lap he stroked her hair and smiled. By the time he was finished with her she would be transformed into a biological robot, unschooled to read, write or execute simple math, but capable of performing any act, no matter how depraved or barbaric. Devoid of any moral or ethical standard, and stripped of all human compassion, she would be the force behind Project ABADDON.

  January, 2012

  National Security Agency (NSA)

  If it moves, enslave it. If it doesn’t, steal it. If it resists, kill it.

  If it is no longer useful, destroy it.

  - Steven J. Smith

  Dakota lay sedated in her underground dorm, deep beneath the sprawling one hundred square mile confines of the NSA’s Marine Base Quantico. The complex had its official name, naturally, but she and the others like her knew it simply as ‘the Black Hole’. The name derived not only from its main multi-story, black glass building, but was also an allusion to the many who went in and never came out.

  Although she recalled being taken to the ops room almost daily, she had no conscious memory of what she did there or how to access her own psychic powers, except the once, when she had dreamed that she had been to the roof of the black glass building and seen large satellite dishes, oversized cooling units, and, as far as the eye could see, in every direction - pitch black forests. Traveling through the building, she learned that the above-ground floors were mostly office space.

  All above board; all legitimate.

  In fact, there was absolutely nothing above ground to even remotely suggest the secret world underneath that only the initiate had access to. A complicated maze of underground hallways connecting hundreds of secure dormitories, all stacked one on top of another, and tied together with elevators that required a magnetic strip and an access code to operate and never traversed more than one level. Of ops rooms with state-of-the-art psychotronic computers and well-scrubbed, freight-sized elevators, down which came marine security teams with ‘shoot to kill’ instruction in the event of ‘incidents’ involving the psychics.

  Aware of the risk she was taking, for it was lethal to be caught where one shouldn’t be, she had let her mind drift into walk-in freezers, large, well-stacked dry goods storage rooms, and the large central kitchen where all their food was prepared. But below the kitchens she instinctively understood she must not go. Her floor and above housed mostly other benign data collectors like her, but farther below lived the Delta teams - assassins. Some were considered so dangerous they lived in self-contained units and interacted with no one but their special
ly trained chaperones and handlers. They were killing machines.

  She had lived in that place with its blast-proof doors, on-site crematorium, and uncarpeted floors (tiles were very forgiving of ‘wet work’) for two years now. Her transfer there had been accomplished under cover of night from a secret military/NASA installation at Offit Air Force Base, Nebraska. It had occurred to her that she could remember almost nothing of her many years in Nebraska, other than brief flashbacks of sitting with one eye taped shut while watching a reel of film run so fast it was almost a blur; working with puzzles and pulsing lights under the supervision of men in lab coats; a single, slide-like memory of floating in a sensory deprivation tank; and a disturbing one of a ‘blood trial’ - earning stripes - where she was in an octagonal cage in a forest. There were spectators outside the cage and she was facing a crouched, snarling wolf. She recognized the wolf. It recognized her. She must have killed it. Any attempt to remember more fetched only blinding headaches.

  At fifteen, she was the youngest inhabitant of the maze. The rest she’d heard were between the ages of seventeen and thirty. She knew only a few by sight and a handful - those that had been involved in missions with her - she knew by name. Even then, no meaningful friendships had emerged from any of them. They were as aloof and disconnected toward her as she was toward them. At any rate, mingling and lingering were not encouraged. There was not even a communal dining room. All meals arrived on trolleys to their quarters, and everybody ate alone.