Chapter 10

À vaillant coeur rien d’impossible. - Jacques Cœur. “For a valiant heart nothing is impossible.”

“Do you realize who that is?” Monica asked us all.

“No, but evidently you do, so share it with us Monica.” Eric laughed.

“Okay, okay that’s Janis Ross Whitney!” Monica told us.

“And who is a Janis Ross Whitney???” Eric asked the million dollar question for all of us.

“Only the owner and head of Extreme Solutions LLC.” Monica laughed.

“And that’s supposed to tell me ... us something?” Eric complained, looking around at the rest of us.

“Ok ... Ok. She is the person you go to when your team of extremely expensive, wildly intelligent, geniuses burn out on that cutting edge project you assigned them. When they run into that proverbial brick wall and go to pieces. If you have the money she can put your project back on track. She’s been on the cover of News Week, Forbes, Money Magazine, and all the other top money magazines recently. There was talk a while back that she was working on a top secret project for the government and would be out of touch for awhile. After that she sorta disappeared.” Monica explained.

“Was she a genius or just a good projects manager Monica?” Eric asked as he finally became interested.

“Oh, she’s definitely a certified genius all right. Member of MENSA, you know, the high IQ society, top 2% of the general population on an approved intelligence test and all the other stuff that goes along with it.” Monica laughed.

Janis Ross Whitney, 34 years old, smooth olive colored tanned and toned skin, short curly dirty blond hair surrounding a cute elfin face with pale blue eyes, 5 foot 7 inches tall, one hundred and fifteen pounds. Youngest of the 6 children of Jeff and Jane Whitney of Platt City, Arkansas, the proud home town of the Platt City Red Raiders, a sleepy little town twenty miles outside Little Rock, Arkansas. Jeff, the loving father, a part time voluntary fireman and licensed plumber that had never graduated high school, but made better than good money as a licensed union plumber and owned his own plumbing business and truck. Jane, the full time mother/housewife, was a full time housewife that was the first in her family to graduate high school. Little Janis Ross was named for a great great grandmother on her father’s side of the family that had married a Yankee Carpetbagger and risen to prominence in the city in the Reconstruction Era. She had died a long time ago and the clans fortunes had suffered from her demise.

Janis was the 6th child of the brood of 6 children. Number 1 was a brother, number 2 was another brother, three was a sister, four was another brother, 5 was another sister, and 6th was Janis herself. There was a year and a half’s difference between all of the sibling’s births. Their mother was as regular as a good pocket watch their father liked to brag every time he knocked her up and passed out cigars. She would have continued to be regular if the surgeon at the last delivery hadn’t done a D&C after the last child was delivered.

By the time she was six Janis was running the family like a well oiled machine. At that age and time she was first exposed to the state’s education system. Placement tests lead to other tests and then more and more tests. Finally the school called the family in and it was explained to them that Janis was an exceptional student meant for great things.

By no means was Janis considered to be a nerd by her family. All her brothers were well in the neighborhood of 6 foot tall and rock solid football players, hefty but not over weight. They were not super smart, but by no means were they stupid either. Her older sister was well liked and considered pretty like her mother. Jane, the mother, was still flirted with when she went grocery shopping to the great irritation of her husband Jeff whom she was always accusing of taking her for granite.

As time went on the school system devoted more and more time to Janis, and the other students around Janis began to resent her, but with three older brothers that adored her around all the time there was really little they could do. Finally the family was approached by persons representing the government. They told the family that they were holding little Janis back. Didn’t they want Janis to be the best she could be? With the CCTV at the new school it would be like she was home the family was told. In the end little Janis was packed off to “The Institute” in Southern California. There she was introduced to another world of other bright children like herself. At home, back in Arkansas, it had all been easy fun, no pressure. Something she did for pleasure. Here it was cut throat competition.

She learned fast that there was no trick too low or dirty for her fellow students to pull on her. She learned that the first day when somebody stole her pencils. Without the proper tools she couldn’t take notes or follow the instructors directions, and nobody would lend her one. At that point her life reached an inevitable crossroad and her life could have gone in one of two ways. Janis chose to organize her fellow students rather than fight with them. In no time they were a team, her team. That was her major talent it turned out.

It was soon recognized that she was an exceptional organizer and leader, it was almost intuitive on her part. The groups she was with, any company she was with for that matter, could put out more than the normal team could put out. The team ran smother because she seemed to anticipate the needs of her teams. Everything in her life became a breeze after that. The only downside was her teams literally exploded and burned after she left them to their own devices.

Until this latest project everything had been fine. Project Mani had changed all that. Well for her it changed everything anyway. There were plenty of things that Mistress Red had either not known or failed to tell Eric and company. Cutting off the mind enhancing drugs was the least of it.

Project Mani

Five billion years ago something metalic ... something very very big, something very very metalic, something truly colossal impacted our moon’s dark side. Something we had only guessed at until now, but we hadn’t been able to actually see it till now. All the scientist would call it, even now after years of actual study, was it was a “large excess metalic mass?”. On the far side of our moon is a large 1,550 mile wide crater named on our maps of Luna as the South Pole-Airken Basin. One mile beneath the surface of that crater is a great metallic mass, 2.4 quadrillion US tons of mass to be exact.

Something metallic still exists deep in that crater, something that extends all the way down to Luna’s very core. It, whatever it is ... was ... will be???, is now trying to communicate with us. At first the Chinese, who discovered it, sought to hide the discovery from everyone, but soon it became apparent that alone they didn’t have the resources to either stop or develop it. After much internal discussion, even whole regime changes within their own science-political system, they approached the UN Security Counsel with what they had learned. The Counsel after much discussion allowed the Americans to set up Project Mani.

Mani was the male Germanic Norse god of the moon. In Norse mythology the moon was a male deity and the sun, Sol, was female and his sister. This is a complete reversal of most of the human cultural archetypes where the sun is male and the moon is female. The moon is most commonly associated with the normal female fertility cycle or menstrual cycle of women. Project Mani was to be unusual to say the least.

The UN, with the approval of China, put together a team of internationally known scientists to study the signals their probe detected coming from the “large excess mass” buried deep under the crater. The UN, Chinese, and Americans put together an international team to study the signal. After several weeks of listening and arguing about what the signal was the first team fell inexplicably into a deep coma. It was not all at once, but within a week they were all out of action and in deep comas. Nobody could figure out what had happened to them or why.

A second team was set up when it was determined it wasn’t something contagious. After the second team of approved scientist was put together with the mutual consent of the UN, US, and China, the original discoverer of the “large excess mass”, a new study was started. They studied it for weeks then they too started to collapsed like the first team. Once again no cause for the deep comas was found.

This time the project was immediately put on hold. At that point Janis was finally called in to fix the problem. Janis was not interested in the discovery itself, she was interested in what happened to the teams studying the signals themselves. She was interested in why their study of the thing lead to their comas. What caused the coma.

The original Chinese probe was on the dark side of the moon which made communications with it difficult. With the American’s help they were able to supplement the probes equipment on the ground, and add orbiting satellites to set up relays to communicate with it. Now they could monitor it in real time at their home bases in California and China. Something about the signal seemed to eventually put anyone that actually listened to it for any length of time into a deep coma. The first signs of problems was they started to hallucinate, seeing and talking to things that didn’t really exist. Finally lapsing into the coma. Both teams had followed the same pattern in two weeks.

So far they had been unable to find a reason for the comas. After analyzing the signals nothing was found that should have been harmful to a human being, and it was determined that it didn’t effect the lab rats, or other test animals at all. No hidden sub harmonics deadly to the human mind were found. No ultra high frequencies to disrupt cell walls were present. No hidden messages too low or too high for the human ear to hear, or too slow or too fast for the human mind to fully grasp on a conscious level. There was not even something that would only effect the subconscious human mind.

Nothing was found that explained what was apparent by the results they had. Two mixed sex teams of twelve adults a total of twenty four people were now vegetables because of something in that apparently innocent signal, but they still didn’t know what. Janis declared she was going to find out what it was or die trying, ha, ha.

In the end she came to the conclusion that the members of the teams were undergoing some process of change that we were at present unable to understand. The old argument again about advanced science looking like magic to a less advanced culture appeared to be true. Maybe she reasoned the coma was not the end of the process that was going on. What she needed to do was to expose the teams to the siginal ... maybe message was a better description ... for a little while longer to allow the process to be completed she reasoned.

When she approached the people in charge of the project with her suggestion they at first absolutely refused to allow her to even consider exposing more people to the signal. They were still less than thrilled after they understood that she wanted to continue to expose, well re-expose, the teams already in comas to the signal. The Doctors and medical personnel absolutely refused to endanger their patient’s lives any further. Finally she was able to persuade one French doctor to allow her to expose one of his comatose patients to the signal under carefully controlled conditions.

For her experiment Janis chose one 27 year old female linguistics professor from the French Sorbon and isolated her with the signal. One way, though not the only way, we use language is to reason things out, well make sense of the world around us anyway. It is the use of language with which logic is primarily concerned and applied. The purpose of logic is to improve our critical thinking she reasoned. To think critically is to recognize, construct, analyze, and evaluate arguments.

Doing these things requires us to be able to separate the argumentative uses of language from the other uses. Arguments, as applied to logicians, are not physical disputes or angry confrontations between people, though the logician’s analysis of arguments may well have a bearing on such disputes, ha, ha. An argument in logic is a linguistic entity, an object having properties that can be discovered, analyzed, described, and eventually solved. These properties were what Janis was hoping her Guinea Pig would work through in the end. Janis reasoned that a linguistics’ mind would be most adaptive to the new information it was receiving.

Two days later Jill, her Guinea Pig, was showing brain activity for the first time in months. Six hours after that she woke up. When questioned she apparently could neither speak French or English, nor could she understand them either. What she was speaking nobody had a clue about. At the same time it was discovered that she, well Jill herself anyway, could still read and write English and communicate with them that way. Twenty four hours later it was apparent that Jill was now a split personality. The new alien personality was the dominate personality controlling when and if Jill could communicate with them. Jill knew nothing about the alien personality, but as far as Janis could tell Jill’s original personality and identity were locked away, but still intact inside her skull.

A week later the alien inside Jill could communicate with Janis verbally, and Jill herself was a borderline psychotic from being cut off from all human contact. Jill was virtually blind and isolated inside her own skull only able to communicate through writing when a pencil was put in her hand. The alien entity at first asked that all the original team members receive the same treatment as Jill. When that didn’t happen it resorted to demanding that they all be re-exposed.

Meanwhile, when the alien allowed Jill to communicate, they found out that Jill herself had learned nothing about the alien inside her. Jill by this time had come to hate the alien and begged Janis and the medical staff for some relief. Janis was still the only one that came into actual physical contact with the alien, and those contacts were only when the signal was cut off.

Finally the alien somehow convinced Janis to expose herself to the signal in a filtered form that the alien swore to Janis was perfectly safe. Needless to say it wasn’t, but Janis did have time to contact Evil Mind Controller’s R Us, or EMCRU and the woman she had come to call her aunt, better known as Mistress Red to us. By agreement they would try to deprogram her if worst came to worst and she felt herself slipping into a coma like the others.

‘“So we have one team member Jill somewhere in a maximum security lockup now. Twenty three others still in comas somewhere else and Janis here in a coma too. The Million-Dollar-Question is, “If we can wake her up right now what will she be.” Did I miss anything there Monica.”’ Eric stated angrily.

“That’s what the paperwork says.” Monica responded just as angrily.

“They think that the alien process is not complete with Janis. They think that if you can wake up Janis herself with this electrical boost and fortify her with hypnosis she can break out of the coma and we can learn what the alien is up to, and what it wants. What it really wants without giving it another body to work with.” Monica finished rather lamely.

‘“She’s not telling you everything Eric. They’ve already tried electrical stimulation and drugs on the others and nothing worked on them. Janis herself set this up. She must have figured the alien was lying. She knew what she was walking into and prepared herself as best as she could for the exposure. She thought that it is, and these are her words, “Imperative that we understand and control whatever that mysterious colossal “large excess mass” on the dark side of the moon is.”’ Larry told Eric.

And so in the end Janis became Emily May’s and Larry’s first experimental super woman. Originally they only intended to stick in electrodes and only stimulate certain areas of the brain to see what it would do to a conscious mind. Obviously Janis was in a deeper coma so that wouldn’t work. So in the end they dropped her body temperature down to ice cube temperature, and took off the top of her skull cap with bone saws and then installed the thin-film-printed-circuits they had made-up, well really grown in the lab, deep into the creases and folds of her wrinkled exposed brain’s gray matter. Then the wiring harness that connected it all was run down her neck to the CPU that would control it all. That CPU was located in a cavity they created in her right breast.

The skull cap was then put back on and stitched back together with surgical staples and glue. Her body temperature was brought back up and she was placed in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber that was pressurized with pure oxygen to speed up the healing. Waiting for her recovery Emily May, Larry, and Eric started down their check list of the CPU using it’s GO-NO GO functions. When her vital signs stabilized they were ready to start their real tests.