Undisclosed Location: Directions
Chapter 1 Teaser
The elevator dings as the second level passes; the slight tingle of the excitement and freshness that morning brings clings in the air. Yuki took a deep breath and let it out slowly, savouring it. This wasn’t any ordinary day either. No, this day was special; it was about achievement and a career path that could only get brighter.
The elevator doors opened and the woman in her late twenties got off, the door closing behind her with a small thunk. Greeting her was a sign, “DARPA: Floor 3.” the air of this floor, like seemly all large offices in the mornings, was drenched in the rich smell of coffee. Yuki walked over to the coffee machine, grabbed a clean mug from the cupboard and poured in the hot liquid that would kick-start her morning.
It was her first day with this job; and amazing job that just dropped out of heaven and fell into her lap, so it felt. She’d been working with DARPA starting as an intern in college; quacking climbing the ladder in the more secretive areas of the largely unknown agency. She got a reputation as a keen problem solver, and this unit was one vary large problem.
Yuki nodded with a smile to one of the analysts working on her floor as she made her way down the hall of cubicles.
Her unit was in charge of most of the classified top secret research projects DARPA was involved in, they think. See, most of the projects dealt with here were so secretive that few to no documents were even kept. The projects were considered too risky to have direct ties with; and were funded and shrouded in secrecy. It was this extreme secrecy and covertness that both attracted Yuki to this job and made her the ideal choice to track down the rogue projects left by her predecessors.
She continued down the hall, past her old cubical, and into her new, comfortable corner office; sighing slightly as she opened the white door. It was all hers; and she was still having trouble soaking it all in and accepting that she had really made it.
As she made her way across the office and sat in her large executive chair, her eye glanced an envelope on her desk. “A gift” was written on the front of the envelope, and a sticky note attached; “Your first skeleton from the DARPA closet.” The envelope was signed simply “A Friend”. She proceeded to open the envelope gingerly, expecting this to be some sort of “first day” practical joke; instead she found a file folder with her section's stamp from a 6 year old project named Novous.
The first few pages documented the project's funding and setup. A front had been created with the name “Novous Group” that both DARPA and the CIA then funnelled money into for the groups’ activities. The entire group was then under the control of Special Projects even though most of those working there had no idea they were actually working for the government. This wasn’t uncommon… compartmentalization made deniability and project termination easier, Yuki kept reading…
Her eyes widened as she began reading into the project goals: "to temporarily alter the genetic structure of a human being so as to blend into the environment", "infiltrate an enemy position", “gather intelligence”, and finally "return back". It all seemed like something out of science fiction.
She continued flipping through the file, becoming more and more startled and suspicious at what she was seeing. Eventually she came across photos of what looked to be a half-man/half-wolf created with “early attempt” written at the bottom. Photos documented the supposed genetic change from fully human, to something that looked completely to a wolf, and then back again.
She found it impossible that something like this not only did exist, but that it had somehow been kept completely quiet. Further reading though the file showed the project hadn’t been a complete success, and that sometime after the initial experiments took place the genetic virus that had been used to perform the temporary transformations partly reactivated and the test participants slowly began to once again morph back into the animal genome they had been injected with.
Since these side effects weren’t apparent until much later in the project, over twenty subjects eventually went through this experience. DARPA and the CIA then decided to stop the program, but not just stop it, but burry it and destroy all records of its existence.
According to the file; all of the “mutated”, as they were called, were moved to a self-sufficient and well-hidden military base built at the very end of the cold car called “island twelve”. The last pages of the file read, “All participants, military personnel involved, and civilian workers moved to island twelve as of August 9th, 2003.” Included was a single page of personal information of each person; each with a status of “declared dead”.
Yuki chuckled to herself and leaned back in her chair. What a weird file, who would ever think to make up such things, it couldn’t be true...could it? She wrinkled her nose as she always did when in deep though and turned to her computer to enter each person’s name into the records search.
Her eyes widened as she seen each person was not only real; but really had been declared dead in various ways on the same day, each also contained a memo that the records had been modified by the Special Projects office on the same date.
Each file matched the printouts she had exactly. Except for one person, a civilian scientist “Randy Greene” which had a footnote attached, “File requested by Erhik Greene (deceased son) July 7th, 2008 –JWC/SP”. She changed her search and typed “Erhik Greene” into the search field. She knitted her eyebrows as she seen that in a recent tax filing he had been working for a genetic research firm.
She placed all the files back into the folder, slid it back into the envelope and placed it all into a lockable drawer in her desk. The whole thing had left her a bit shaken; if it were true it went beyond anything she had ever worked on before; or that she even thought her department would have done. She took another sip of her coffee and pondered exactly what she had gotten herself into.
Yuki entered “Island Twelve” into the internal records search engine and a few results instantly appeared. The first result also looked the most promising, “Island Twelve, archives D-3-44.” She picked up her phone and dialled the number for internal archives and requested delivery of that box from the archives. Sadly, the archives were located at a secured building at the DARPA main office, and nothing would arrive from them until the next day.
She went back to her normal routine, sipping her coffee; all the rest of the day her mind continued to drift back curiously, wondering if Island Twelve was a reality.
