In yesterday's episode Adam watched as Marcus was gunned down in cold blood at XenTek headquarters. The kill order was issued by Seth Busby himself. This was Seth's first attempt to show Johann he was indeed tough enough to take the helm at XenTek. This one decision will be something that has the potential to cast a shadow over the rest of his days.
Episode 30 is monumental in that it marks the halfway point but there is much more yet to come.
Did Evelyn survive the night with the black widow spider? Will Johann decide to make more jumps into the future to steal technology from his own company? Who is this Ikeda person that’s being mentioned (Disclaimer: he’s my favorite character.)? You’ll find out all this and more in the days to come.
Welcome to today's episode of Alarm Clock Dawn!
CHAPTER 10
“Mr. Busby, this is Captain Ellis. The mission is complete. The target has been apprehended and terminated. Over.”
“Very good, Captain. Now it is imperative we find Adam Harkin. He's a valuable asset to us. Send out a locator on his Consumer Identification Card immediately. If he has his C.ID badge or Holo on his person, it will also reveal to us his precise location.” Busby made his way to the director’s office for an emergency briefing he had just been summoned to attend. Only two people were on the invite: he and Evelyn Poltier, the head of Research and Development.
To say that Johann Pfizer's second in command was relieved that Marcus had been caught was an understatement, but Busby realized he hadn’t escaped unscathed yet.
“Tell me what the hell is going on!” the director barked from behind his desk as Busby entered his office. The door clicked as it closed behind him.
Busby's hands shook as he stopped directly in front of Johann Pfizer’s desk. “Sir, the guard tried to escape. I understand that a kill order wasn't the ideal method, but given the circumstances it was our only choice.”
“And Harkin?” The director asked, his jaw clenched in anger.
Busby felt the anxiety level in the room escalating, and his voice cracked as a result. “Sir, he hasn't been found yet, but Captain Ellis has assured me that he is making it his top priority.”
The director sprung up like a tiger, grabbing Seth’s necktie just under the knot, pulling him off his feet and across the desk. Seth's eyes bulged, his chest pinned flat against the desktop. Johann leaned down and in a quiet, snakelike whisper just inches from his ear said, “Listen to me very carefully, Busby, more carefully than you ever have in your life. We are now in the midst of a situation more crucial than you can even imagine. Because of your incompetence we now must race to clean up this mess. Ms. Poltier has disappeared. We tried to locate her Consumer I.D. signal and she's not even showing up on the grid. I explicitly told you to watch her closely. She’s extremely smart and knows far too many of our secrets, secrets that could easily destroy us. Now use all the resources at your disposal. We must find them both. Do not fail me this time.”
Johann relaxed his grip on the wrinkled necktie, and Seth's eyes watered as he struggled to catch his breath. He straightened his crooked tortoise shell glasses and nodded.
“Yes, sir,” as his chest heaved with each inhalation.
Johann walked slowly around the front of his desk, staring Seth in the eyes. “Since I will soon be transitioning control to you, I'll have to brief you on everything eventually, and I suppose there is no time like the present to begin. Please sit down.” Johann’s voice had suddenly taken on a quieter, gentler tone.
He sat down on the corner of his desk and rested his hands on his knees, pausing for a long moment. Seth knew this was the precise point where his reality finally caught up with his dreams and his destiny became forever intertwined with XenTek. The silence of this moment seemed deafening as he took what would be his last breath of innocence.
“Seth, what I'm about to tell you will surely change you. It will alter what you believed was your reality and it will come as a shock. A lot of things have happened in the last few decades that a very small and a very select group of people in the world have official knowledge about. What I told the board members last night about the UFO wreckage and the exclusive contracts that XenTek secured from our government was true, but it was only the beginning.”
Busby shifted forward in anticipation and pushed up his glasses onto the bridge of his nose with his finger as the director continued.
“XenTek had released most of the products reverse engineered from the wreckage in fifteen short years. We are talking about lasers, the semiconductor, and fiber optics. We were desperate for more, as were our shareholders. Our programmers uncovered things we were never meant to learn in the craft’s computers about several different alien civilizations. This knowledge was even more valuable than any of the technology we harvested. We eventually deciphered their written languages, and we began reaching out to communicate with a certain group of them that were known to openly trade with civilizations less advanced than their own.”
“Twenty years ago, just a few years after I took over XenTek, we held open, face-to-face meetings between our company, the government, and the Agemo. The Agemo are composed of two different neighboring civilizations that have joined forces. The Agemo group sent a team of diplomats that landed in their craft at night right in the Terra Valley on the very site where the Phoenix collider is today.”
“All of this has been kept secret from the Consumers of this world. The government was very concerned about losing control of the population and causing mass hysteria, so when any news related to this did leak, it was always counterbalanced in the media with false news stories, and it worked wonderfully. Seth, these civilizations are millions of years more advanced than our own, but we quickly learned that just like us, some were good and some were bad. Oh, what a glorious night that was! It was our finest hour. We struck two major agreements from that particular round of negotiations.”
Johann smiled as he paused for a moment to reminisce. He got up from his desk and looked out the window, putting his hands in his pants pockets as he continued. “The faction of the Agemo just needed one thing—gold and lots of it. Their home planet was becoming too warm and their plan was to suspend fine gold dust in their atmosphere to help reflect the sun's heat away from their planet. Do you remember when our government moved away from the gold standard that backed our currency?”
Seth’s brain was on complete overload and he could only manage to nod his head in shock.
Alarm Clock Dawn is the first novel of a trilogy. The sequel entitled, Truth Is Stranger, will be published in the Spring of 2017.
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