The Program (in which there are no ninjas)

The walk took ten minutes; outside, across streets and intersecting paths. There weren't many people milling about in the Eastern end of Quantico on this Saturday afternoon. Those who were around chose to mind their own business and not wonder why a teenager in a concert-tee was leading around a decorated Lieutenant Colonel.

"I might have underestimated your ambition, but this should still wait until next month," he said once en-route.
"And why is that?" I asked in return.
"Because then it would be less illegal."
"You're going to explain that one, too," I said, shaking my head.

As the sound of the Potomac grew closer, we cut through a line of trees and found ourselves indeed in a small park. There were some running paths weaving through the trees and out, a few park benches lined the edge of the fencing against the river's edge. To my right in the distance I could see the airfield and the hangars where they kept Marine One, the President's helicopter equivalent of Air Force One. I considered the existence of Navy One; does the President have a personal aircraft carrier, perhaps? Maybe a submarine. Maybe one of those inflatable motorboats the SEALs use.

My mind wanders, for lack of caffeine today. Getting back to business, I walked the both of us over to a metal-framed, wooden-slat park bench that sat on the well-maintained lawn and overlooked the Potomac. The white noise from the river was loud and variable, going from shrill to low at random as the water level and surf changed. I imagined this made the use of listening devices rather difficult, and I wondered how many wars and top-secret operations had been planned from this very park bench. Wandering again.

Schumer sighed, loosing some tension as he sat down and leaned back against the bench. I sat beside him and for a moment just watched the river roll. This point of the river was over a mile across, Maryland's shore looked in the distance like a foreign country with an ocean between us.

"How well do you know your history, kid?" Schumer asked beside me, facing the waters too.
"I can tell you anything about the French Revolution you want to know," I said. The gun I'd slipped into my belt was poking into my back, so I shifted in the seat a bit to ease the pain. The other gun was in my right pocket. I hadn't taken the time to examine them, but I assumed they were Berettas.
"I mean recent history. Political," Schumer went on. "The 1970s, the Cold War long gone, the military and its ancient tactics were beginning to show their age. Things like Iran-Contra were cropping up all the time, terrorist groups posing more of a threat than entire armies."
"Iran-Contra was in the 1980s," I said.
"That's just the one event that you'd have heard of," Schumer said. "The point is from the mid-70s the military became aware that they would have to change their outlook on the world. This is when the 'black budget' was invented. Each branch of the military was finding new and creative ways to skim millions of dollars from the defense budget for their own off-the-books projects. This is when the Army put together Delta Force, the Navy refined SEAL Team Six and built Red Cell, and the Air Force used the money to built and commission aircraft like the stealth bomber, the F-117, whatever they wanted. It was a whole new age, daddy's pocketbook was open and all we had to do was be clever about the bookkeeping and we could do or try whatever we wanted."

"Slush funds, right, I've heard all this," I said.

"What you didn't hear is what the Corps was doing with their share of the money," Schumer went on, his voice just a bit lower. "Besides a few projects I don't know about or won't talk about, our primary concern wasn't with new counter-terrorism units or magic, invisible airplanes, our concern was recruitment numbers."
"Recruitment?" I asked, glancing at him for the first time since I'd sat down.

"Yes. All across the military, enlistment was down. The sense of 'join up and fight for your country' was diluted, we weren't fighting for God and country anymore, everything we've taken up arms in the past 25 years has been about politics or money. Even the idiots at home on their couches could see that. Dropping your shovel and going to fight Hitler, that's one thing. Sitting around a hole in the sand, polishing your gas mask and waiting for another bio-attack alarm, it's a whole different thing.

"The only people joining up were the wrong kind of people. People join the Army now because they flunked out of college and have nothing else to do. They join the Navy because their dad, or uncle, or neighbor, or barber was a Navy man and never shut up about it. They join the Air Force so they can stand on, in, or near a ten million dollar jet fighter. The Marine Corps was always lucky enough to have the distinction of being the best, the warriors, but it still wasn't cutting it. So, while the Army was building black-ops death squads and the Air Force was building black-ops planes, we were forming black-ops enlistment strategies."

"And what does this have to do with me?" I asked.

"This has everything to do with you," he said, "and I mean that in the most literal way possible."
"Enlistment strategies? Posters and commercials?"
"No, not that. I'm talking about research, lots and lots of research. How to make the Marine Corps look better, how to make people want to join, and a few... more elaborate programs. I was put in charge of one of these back in the late 1970s. You have to understand the timing of all of this in the civilian sector, as well. It was a new medical renaissance, the first successful in-vitro fertilization was done in 1978, modern psychology was being re-invented, the human genome was all but mapped, it was very exciting times for anybody paying attention."

"This isn't one very long lead-up for telling me I'm a clone, is it?" I asked.
Schumer turned his head slowly and looked me over. "No," he said after a moment.

"My project was to look into a way to make enlistment seem like less of a gigantic life decision and more of a matter of course. If your father was a Marine and he spends his whole life talking about it, it's much more likely that you'll enlist than if he was a farmer or anything else. This is because, in a way, you feel like you've inherited it. Your destiny, or what-have-you. Of all the projects tasked with dealing with that, mine was the most advanced."
"Will you stop telling me about your stupid project and just tell me what you did already?"
Schumer grunted, "This is a very complicated subject and there is no way to explain it without explaining every component."
"Fine," I said, "go on."

"In essence, I was to use all of the newest medical techniques to completely reduce the weight of one's decision to enlist. We looked at currently-available genetic and psychological possibilities and set ourselves the following hypothetical goal:

"A married couple has been unsuccessfully trying to conceive a child for years, and are candidates for in-vitro but cannot afford the several-thousand dollar procedure. They agree to let the government pay for the in-vitro fertilization, with the caveat that when the child turns 18 he will be given a presentation and offered the chance to join the Marines. Keep in mind that I said 'offered', not 'forced'."
"We'll give you a baby if you promise to give him to us when he grows up?" I said, actively choosing not to believe any of this.
"No. I said, we can't force anybody to enlist. In this hypothetical situation, we're footing the cost of a very expensive procedure to allow a couple to have a baby, and all we're asking is that the child be offered to serve his country. He would be free to decline, of course. This was the goal me and my project were given, my job was to make it seem realistic.

"The problem is that parents don't even like the idea of their kids joining the military, because they're afraid they'll be killed. We can run advertisements proclaiming the extensive training we conduct, but to them it's like sending their kids off to sleep-away camp where they'll probably die. To reduce that anxiety, the only thing we could think of was to convince the potential parents that not only would their children do fine in the Marines, they'd do better than anybody else. Since we were doing in-vitro fertilization, and we had the capability of slightly altering genetic profiles to allow for growth in a technically foreign host, it wasn't difficult to--"

"Wait," I interrupted. "Wait, wait, wait. You're saying your big idea was to screw around with fetal DNA or whatever to make it so their kid would be some kind of super-soldier, aren't you. Genetic super soldiers. I knew it, either you're crazy or lying your ass off."

"Stop getting ahead of yourself," Schumer said, "this isn't like the movies, we can't make people stronger or faster, all we could do was make sure that the right genes were there. When a person is conceived, many genetic traits are still left to chance. Things like metabolism, reflexes, cellular regeneration, these are all much more open to outside influences than inherited traits like hair and skin color. In the process of in-vitro fertilization, we had the ability to filter out any potential genetic defects for the highest possibility of a 'perfectly able' child. We weren't 'engineering' anything."
"It still sounds wrong," I said.
"Now," Schumer continued, "going back to our initial hypothetical, we can no say to a young couple who could get in-vitro but can't afford it, 'We'll pay for the procedure and do everything we can to make sure your child is perfectly healthy and has the best possible reflexes, metabolism, blood-clotting time, whatever, and when he turns 18 we'll just give them a talk and see if he'd or she'd like to be the best Marine he or she could be .' It's still a bit of a tough sell."
"Could you please drop the lead-in and just get down to it? What was the big stupid black-ops project of fantastic unethical baby-making that you came up with?"

Schumer sighed again, and said, "After looking at all our resources, the hardest possible version of that hypothetical to turn down would go something like this: Young couple, can't afford in-vitro. We tell them we'll pay for the procedure, we'll use genetic filtering to make sure he's healthy and has the best traits available to him from each side of the genetic tree, and after the child is born we will use discrete hypnosis to instill in him all the values and knowledge one would learn in boot camp but without him knowing. When he turns 18, we'll tell him that he has all of this training in the back of his brain, and if he'd like to join the Marines we can 'activate' that training and he would join at a Private First Class ranking, bypassing boot camp altogether. If he doesn't want to join, we can have all of the training removed."
"Hypnosis?" I said.
"Yes," Schumer said.
"...Hypnosis?"
"I just said--"
"HYPNOSIS!"
"It's possible," Schumer said, "we spent nearly ten years putting the program together. We brought in all kinds of psychologists ad hypnotherapists to help design the program. With hypnosis, a person can be told or taught something while hypnotized and instructed not to remember any of it when awake. According to the program we designed, for a few hours each day while the kid grew up we could have a hypnotist put him under, teach him problem-solving skills, teamwork, and so-on and told not to remember it or the hypnosis until later. At 18, a hypnotist could put the child under again, tell him to remember all of the hypnosis, and like magic he's a fully-trained soldier."
"And that's legal?"
"Amazingly, yes. While the child is a minor, the parents own him. They authorized all of this, and as long as there's no danger it's fully ethical. And like I said, if the child chooses not to enlist, we can have a hypnotist put him under and have him forget all of the training, and even forget the conversation of he chooses.

"This whole psychological component was developed in tandem with the genetic side. We brought in leading geneticists and put together the program to allow for the encouragement of healthy fetal growth without breaking any existing ethical boundaries. The two parts, building a solider, mind and body, was my project."

I didn't say anything.

"One of your questions, and I believe the loudest question, was what your father really did. Well, there you have it. He worked for me. He was my lead geneticist. He's the one who outlined the project on the genetic side, he's the one who made sure everything was on the up-and-up, that we wouldn't be creating a mutant and that we weren't doing anything unethical."

So that was it? My dad actually did work in a lab?

"And the Marine Corps University?" I asked.
"We used it for cover, for financial and logistical reasons. Genetic research being conducted by a University seems less suspicious than anything else."
"And this 'program' he helped you design, the whole not-quite-super soldier program. It was never, I don't know, 'activated', was it?"
Schumer laughed, a hearty chuckle. "Oh hell no, it never went beyond testing. The world is a different place now from when we first started. If such a program were in existence now, the second we went up to some couple and said, 'hey, let us make you a baby and we'll just hypnotize him every day', that couple would be on Fox News or blogging about it within hours. The project could never be put into use, not in this country at least."
"So, was it just an accident that killed my dad?" I asked, taking a few minutes to process everything and decide how much was a lie.
Schumer hesitated. "Well," he said, "as I just stated, it couldn't happen in this country. From what I can tell, either your father was approached by members of a foreign government, or he approached them himself. He was trying to sell the program to our enemies, Chris."
"What?"
"Yes. I can't say who to, but I can say it's exactly the people who don't need to be hearing about our dirty secrets, and not the type of people who would let ethics prevent them from doing what ethics prevented us."
"Thats why the FBI knew him? He was the one selling secrets?"
Schumer nodded, still watching the water. "The FBI became aware of his dealings a few weeks before his death. They informed the Marine Corps, and the news filtered down to me only after he was killed."
"Killed how?" I asked, a lump growing in the back of my throat.
"I don't know for sure, the word I've been getting is that the FBI moved in on a meeting between your dad and the foreign agents he was selling through. Things went bad, there was a shootout."

I was silent again, trying to process it all. It seemed like a lot, and none of it made sense.

"As you can see, this all involves many parties. Many agencies of many governments are all over this. Everybody on this side seems to want it covered up, people over there are upset about dead agents. People who are friends with 'over there' want to know what the big secret was, and everybody in between just smells blood in the water. We've all been trying to wrap this up, but it seems that it's all fallen into your lap just the same."
"And the money? The insurance money?"
"Oh, that. The FBI looked into it, as did we, to see if there was any foul play involved. It seems that your dad just knew that he was putting himself in a risky situation, and wanted to make sure you and your mother would be protected if he was killed. He took out a whole new policy as soon as first contact was made."

I thought of it, tried to feel some form of closure. I felt nothing, no satisfaction, no anger or sadness. Nothing. I thought of my list of questions, tried to shape everything I'd just heard so it would cover the whole list. Things still didn't make sense. Nothing has explained Comstock, or Austria, or Lorton, or the guys in my house.

"That doesn't explain everything," I said, my eyes on the water. "What about Comstock, and me, and everybody trying to kill me. What about the two guards you had on your office, and the video you had of me sitting at a---" I stopped talking, because I suddenly knew the answer. It had been staring me in the face since Schumer had started talking, since he chose his words so carefully, since everything he said had seemed unbelievable but all somehow very, very possible.

Schumer seemed to read it on my face. "I told you the program was never activated," he said, trying to dissuade me.
"You said it never went beyond testing," I said.

Schumer sighed, yet again. He folded his arms around his chest and stared out at the water.