Chapter 18: Enough is Enough

The newly-instituted procedure of sleep deprivation was annoying at worst because the nanites in his system could effectively turn off the pupils of Tim Murphy’s eyes and keep the lights from waking him. The same could be done for his hearing. The nanites would disable his hearing so any loud or annoying auditory stimuli would eventually be deemed ineffective.

At the moment, Tim was quietly reveling in this private joke. The guards were pumping loud and annoying sounds, usually called music, into his cell as well as turning the lights on and off throughout the night. Every few minutes, the lights would either turn on or off or sometimes pulsate rapidly.

With his hearing and sight artificially “dark” while he slept, the advanced interrogation techniques of sleep deprivation and sensory bombardment simply did not work – but the interrogations continued.

Tim was preparing to go to sleep in his cell after another day of enhanced interrogation techniques. Earlier in the week, his hosts had begun their sensory bombardment and, initially, the lights would turn on at different times in attempts to keep their prisoner awake. It was yet another one of their endeavors meant to break Tim’s spirit so, hopefully, he would divulge every dark secret from his past. More importantly, they wanted to know how he gained access into one of the most secret military installations in the world.

Now this evening they started on auditory manipulation. Mainly, bad music from the 1990s. Laced underneath the “music,” however, were subliminal messages designed to make the prisoner more likely to cooperate.

Tim slid his fingers down over his nose as if he was rubbing away sweat and filth from the pores of his nose. He then slowly wiped his hands over his mouth and chin to hide that he was talking to the nanites in his system. “Can you guys do anything about the music?”

In closed captioning across the bottom of his eyesight he read, “Unfortunately, we have no power over the choice of recording our hosts wish to play. We do not believe they would take requests.” A brief pause. “End of message.”

Tim quickly covered his whole face with his hands in a larger version of the previous attempt to hide that he was openly talking to someone or something else. He was quick about the move because he did not want his hosts to see him smile and almost laugh out loud. That would not exactly be what his hosts would consider to be an appropriate response to their new enhanced interrogation techniques. “No, that is not what I meant. Can you temporarily fix my ears, so I am not disturbed by their music or whatever they decide to use to try to keep me awake all night? After all, you told me I need some sleep so you can make your repairs as needed, correct?”

Tim was speaking softly into his hands. His words, though, were directed to the nanites previously injected into his body years earlier, after he accepted the position as a security guard for the top secret laboratory. The lab was built several hundred feet below the Texas Army National Guard Armory, on Interstate 35 and the north side of San Antonio, Texas. The armory was also originally located just outside the fence line of the newly-built Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston. The lab was built underneath both the armory and the new hospital. The lab was created as a sister site to several other secret labs, working in conjunction, at any time, on several different top secret projects for the military.

“Of course, Tim. We can temporarily turn off your auditory nerve, so you do not hear anything at all, and their attempts at sleep deprivation will not work. We will allow you to get much-needed rest. We will awaken you and reactivate both the auditory and optic nerves tomorrow.” A brief pause. “End of message.”

“Thank you very much.” At that moment, the music stopped, and the room got dark, so Tim went back to sleep. The nanites actually put him to sleep immediately to maximize his time in REM sleep.

The nanites worked throughout the night, attempting to fix as much of the damage as they could to ensure Tim would be in the best shape he could be in when the torture inevitably began again in the morning. Among themselves, the nanites could not understand why Tim had not, as of yet, attempted to escape from confinement. Since they were not programmed for strategy, however, they decided to concentrate on what they could do and keep the body in its best physical form.

Tim made his trip to visit himself in the past and deliver hope of changing his life. He used nanites, whose programming was not constricted so they had the ability to adapt and help beyond basic gene manipulation and cell reconstruction. The nanites Tim delivered to the past were next-generation nanites. That meant they had the ability to adapt and assist their host do whatever he wanted. They were not even forced to stay inside the body – if necessary, those nanites could leave the body. They couldn’t inhabit other living things, however, since the activation process also adjusted itself to the specific DNA sequences of their host.

The nanites currently in “older” Tim’s body were “restricted” nanites. Therefore, they were tightly programmed for use within Tim’s body, and they could only increase muscle mass and dexterity, repair abnormalities within the body and make repairs to injuries.

In theory, the nanites could make the perfect soldier for about ten years -- the life span of the new restricted nanites. They were newly installed a few months before Tim’s trip in time, but they had already done the work of nanites that have been in special forces soldiers, behind enemy lines for at least six years, inside him. The nanites were still working well but were wearing down quickly.

George Johnson was in his office, finishing the weekly security reports for the lab and also monitoring the prisoner via the closed-circuit camera in his cell. The lights coming on in the cell caught the corner of his eye, and then the music started. “Oh shit! They are starting that tonight. Now, that is goddamned torture,” he said to himself since there was no one else in his office. “I can only think of one more thing to make it worse than 90s pop music.”

As if on cue, the insipid Barbie Girl song ended, and a new mind-numbing song began...

“The Barney song. That is just fucking cruel.” After the song started playing for the third time in a row, even with the volume off but keeping the video windows open in the background, George could not take it anymore. “Damn. I’d be screaming my head off by now. It’s inhuman.”

The guard looked over the security feed and, even though the lights were currently off, the night vision filters were working just fine. He saw large paunches of fat from the rotund man’s midsection hanging off the edge of the bunk while he continued to appear to breathe normally, as if asleep. George watched for a few more minutes, with the music now muted, of course, but when the lights turned back on, he saw absolutely no change in breathing and not even a disruption in his rapid eye movement. He was deep asleep.

George turned the sound back on, and there was some guy yelling at the top of his lungs, in German, with extra loud guitars and drums blaring at ungodly decibels, but the prisoner did not move or even flinch. With the sound from the computer turned down, George, however, found himself still flinching when a particularly emphatic note was reached.

“Damn. I wish I could sleep like that.” He looked down at his watch, then confirmed it with the clock on the wall. He finished his security journal entries and other assorted paperwork for the day and, just before he turned off the computer monitor, said, “Well, it’s time for me to go get something to eat and let you not be my problem anymore today.”

A nice meal and a couple of drinks with friends is a good way for most people to wind down after a hard day of work, and the people who worked in the lab were no different. Three men in the restaurant weren’t really winding down, though. They seemed to still be tightly wound, and they had their reasons.

Next door to everyone’s favorite family-owned Mexican food restaurant was a friendly family-owned bar. Actually, the same small family. As cliché as it might sound, it was a place where everyone knew your name, for George and his friends. Margarita was the older sister and preferred the night life, so she became the sister in charge of the bar. Yolanda preferred cooking and so was placed in charge of the restaurant by their family.

Everyone in the bar either worked for the bar, the restaurant, or the secret lab about a half mile down the road. A classic NBA Finals game, featuring the hometown Spurs, was on TV. It was the time of year when the NBA season had just finished but the next NFL season had not kicked off yet.

George was happily enjoying another of Margarita’s margaritas in the bar, with some others from work, after having just finished their meals in the restaurant.

After a few minutes of shared rejoicing for the weekend, the number of patrons was quickly winding down. George and his two newest friends, Drs. Thompson and Jensen, were the last of the dinner crowd to leave. It was still a good hour before the nighttime party crowd would be coming through the doors of the bar, so the three had a chance to gather at a corner table away from any possible eavesdropping.

“George, level with us. What the hell has been going on with you-know-who?” Dr. Mike Thompson was the oldest of the three friends, and to steer the conversation to that subject was a little bit out of character for him. “I heard some rumors of the new Colonel being some kind of interrogation specialist the Army uses to question the terrorists captured in Afghanistan.”

“Oh, come on now, Thompson. You shouldn’t be listening to rumors, especially at your age.” George’s friendly rebuke earned him a quick salute by Thompson’s middle finger, garnering laughs from the others at the table.

“I know you can’t say anything officially, but,” Dr. Thompson then gestured toward Dr. Jensen, “we were both there when it happened and, even though we were told everything was taken care of, we still have not been able to work on the main project we were brought to the lab to work on. We have essentially been shut out but not told why.”

Mike scooted further forward in his chair to get closer to George. “We just want to be able to get back to work and make that project work. Because, from the looks of it, the freaking thing did work. Or does work. Or will work.” Dr. Thompson took a deep breath and then released it while sitting back in his chair, waiting for George’s answer.

George was concentrating on the men sitting across the table from him. Both doctors were scientists at the lab who did their work without any security problems. The night Tim appeared, they were working in the embarkation control room, going over hardware for the final round of system tests scheduled for sometime the next week. These tests were necessary to prep for their first attempts at time travel. When Tim materialized in the powered off embarkation room, the question of time travel as a possibility was suddenly answered – at least to the two scientists who were there and saw a four hundred pound man in a security uniform just appear out of thin air. George decided to trust these two and tell them some of what he had been seeing. “Okay guys, I can see you are having trouble with this. But tell me, what have they told you about what happened so far?”

The younger scientist, Dr. Mike Jensen scooted his chair closer to the table, took a sip from his beer, scanned the immediate area for anyone possibly listening in, and began his explanation. “Well, when you-know-who was initially held and being questioned, we were pretty popular because everyone thought we might know what was going on since we were the only other people here except you. Unfortunately, you have a bit of a reputation of a hard ass. So no one wanted to question you about what was going on.”

“Well, don’t worry about that. I was being interrogated by what seemed every security supervisor in the entire government. Everyone called and wanted me to give in-depth recounts of what happened. It was like everyone was trying to prove nothing actually happened, and I was crying wolf. Christ, I spent the whole day on the phone answering questions from higher-ups who had nothing to do with this lab but wanted to look good and find out what happened without getting off their asses. I’m just glad it had stopped before I started getting calls at home every day trying to catch me off-guard and doing something wrong.” George said without hiding his disgust. He took a drink from his third, or maybe it was his fourth, margarita. “Sorry, Jensen, go ahead.”

“We never saw it as you being a hard ass; we saw it as you being serious about your job. I know, for me, personally, that was very refreshing.” Jensen was looking for reassurance from his fellow doctor, seeing him nod his head positively.

“Well, WE approved from the start how you took your job as seriously as we did. That’s why we were always sticklers for the rules and procedures, and the other doctors and scientists were usually pissed at us since we never got reprimanded for lackadaisical security procedures. They were put there for a reason, and it didn’t take but a couple of extra minutes out of the day to do them properly. But anyways, the new security bosses they brought in the next day grilled us and demanded we not say a thing, and I know I haven’t talked to anyone else about it. Well except, to keep myself sane, I do occasionally talk to Mike, here, about whatever new rumors are circulating.”

Dr. Jensen turned directly to George and asked, “Is there actually a new tunnel dug out just for moving our friend from the lab to wherever they question him?”

George knew this was the moment that would change everything. He was not supposed to talk about whatever was being thought up and created in the country’s most secure and secret lab built underneath one of the world’s leading hospitals and into the sub-floors of one of the nation’s oldest and important U.S. Army bases in the world. He was not supposed to talk about what happened the night a four-hundred-pound man simply appeared in the middle of the most secure area of that secret lab. He was not supposed to let anyone know the names or jobs of the group of soldiers brought in from some other top secret places to interrogate said large man.

He was not supposed to talk about how the Army spent millions of dollars creating a new underground tunnel and lined it with advanced security apparatus all along its multi-mile length, just to shuttle the man from the lab to a specialized interrogation center built underneath what used to be the base’s library. For a while, the interrogation bordered on torture. Then, suddenly, the line was obliterated. George Johnson was at the center of what was possibly one of the most secret events in U.S. history, and he was not supposed to tell anyone.

George looked up from his now-emptied margarita. He took in a deep breath and quickly scanned the room for any eavesdroppers – just as all three were doing, periodically. “Did the government take the time and money to dig a tunnel underneath one of the city’s most heavily-traveled areas into the heart of one of the country’s most important military bases, just to secretly shuttle a four-hundred pound man to a secretly built black site, just so some secret Special Forces clean-up crew could interrogate him away from prying eyes? Yes. Yes they did. But that, my friends, is not the only thing that’s going on.”

The sunlight from the window reflected off of the three stars on the general’s shoulder, creating an almost halo effect around his entire upper body, which stood in stark contrast to the general’s yelling. “Nothing yet! But you’ve had over a month, with nearly all restrictions removed, for you to get results. What have you been doing this whole time?”

The other Generals and Admirals in the conference room also reminded Colonel Kevin Price that, in their eyes, he was failing in his assignment. He was tasked to discover how a man appeared, out of nowhere, in the middle of one of the most secret U.S. Military laboratories in the world.

The group of higher-echelon military leaders was gathered in a conference room in the headquarters building of the Criminal Investigations Division – Special Investigations (CID-SI) at Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. While the base is known as the home of Army Medicine and is the training post for all Army medical personnel, from Doctors and Nurses to Combat Medics, for every unit in the U.S. Army, it is also the command headquarters for the United States Army North, United States Army South, the Army Medical Command (MEDCOM) headquarters as well as the Army Medical Department(AMEDD) Center and School.

The CID-SI was created to give Col. Price and his men autonomy while they get answers to questions the government needed answered. Col. Price used the opening ceremony of a new rehabilitation center for soldiers as a cover to assemble the men in charge of the different laboratory projects. With the opening of the new center and the pomp and circumstance adjoining it, the CID-SI was able to bring every member of the Command Council to one location so they could personally see what Col. Price was dealing with and maybe even force some results via methods not yet tried.

After the opening ceremonies were completed, everyone had a chance to meet with the base commanders and local politicians, but every member of the Command Council was infinitely more interested in the guest locked in the basement of the secret lab under the new 425-bed Brooke Army Medical Center.

“Well Colonel, we are here and anxious to hear your excuses as to why you have so far failed to get us an answer to one simple question.” The three-star generals’ statement was dripping with contempt and sarcasm. “How the hell did that fat fuck get in our lab?”

The general’s yelling was wearing thin on some of the others in the room, including Colonel Price. It took everything in him to not jump over the table and choke the three-star blowhard until his eyes popped out of his head.

After reigning in his temper, Colonel Price began his presentation to the council. “Sirs,” he started, making the point of not looking at the yelling general but looking at all the other upper echelon Command Council present in the conference room. It was a simple political move from the young colonel to show his disdain for the general who tried to tarnish his image in the eyes of the other leaders in the room.