Ben McCoy is the sole child of Jack and Sarah McCoy, a couple who owns a neighborhood market dedicated to local organic produce in Seattle. The Barn, as they called the shop, is located on the corner of East Mercer Street and the 21st Avenue East, in Capitol Hill’s quiet neighborhood of Stevens.

The McCoy family’s two-story maroon brick house sits just across the street from The Barn, at 21st Avenue East. Some of Ben’s fondest memories are intrinsically associated to his parent’s home, where he was brought up with love and comfort.

Jack always took his son to the games of Seattle’s major professional teams, and it was in the stadiums that Ben developed a substantial patriotism that shaped his character decisively.

Ben had fun going to the stadiums with his father, but he always felt particularly excited to attend games on military appreciation days. He nourished a sincere admiration for the members of the uniformed services from a very tender age.

Hence, his decision to pursue a military career upon graduating from high school did not come as a surprise to Jack and Sarah, who did not try to dissuade him from his choice – rather, they respected Ben’s free will, as per one of the fundamental principles of the family’s way of life.

Nevertheless, they did not hide from Ben that they wanted him to take advantage of both his intellectual and athletic aptitudes in order to be admitted to a prestigious university and then become a professional athlete or succeed in a non-military and non-violent occupation.

Ben did not have to wait too long before the Army made use of his services in important campaigns in the Middle East and in South America, which propelled his battlefield promotion to the rank of captain when he was twenty three years old.

Two weeks after his commission, mustang Captain McCoy was getting ready to move on with his new routine at Joint Base Lewis–McChord, a few miles away from Seattle, sipping a cup of sugarless black coffee to the sound of the morning rain beating down on the window of his office, when an e-mail sent by the I Corps’ Lieutenant General caught his attention.

The message was an invitation from the Department of Defense to the commissioned officers of the armed forces to take part in the last stage of development of a program that aimed at the formation of an elite multitask unit dedicated to missions of strategic interest to the United States.

According to the e-mail’s text, only selected officers were being offered such opportunity at that time, which should not be discussed with anyone who was not his superior officer.

The brochure that was enclosed to the e-mail revived within Captain McCoy the desire to be a key element for the success of his country in protecting the American people and promoting world peace, which eradicated any possibility of hesitation in answering to what he saw as an extremely flattering call to duty.

***

The attentions of certain high level members of the American government were turned to a project that was conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Biological Technologies Office and was referred to by the acronym HETO.

Project HETO was conceived by Dr. Paul Volkov for the purpose of achieving Human Enhancement for Traversing of Objects by applying microtechnology at the service of bioengineering.

Dr. Volkov was able to convince all of the authorities that were involved in the approval of his project that traversing of objects is a mere question of comprehension and correct application of the principles of electromagnetism and quantum tunneling, and that the mastering of such specific knowledge would lead the United States to a higher degree of military superiority.

Project HETO promised to deliver intangible soldiers who are capable of entering any premises simply by phasing through their respective walls, regardless of the materials from which they are built.

The strategic advantage that the development of such technology would render transcended its use by the military and thus prompted the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology to allocate resources to the project.

The theoretical research that had been carried out by Dr. Volkov at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology already was in a very advanced stage by the time that the government’s high authorities took notice of his work, which helped him to persuade the DARPA’s Director to seek the construction of Project HETO’s facilities shortly upon its approval.

Due to the need of a location that enjoys low temperatures and is isolated from external interference for the execution of the test phase, Dr. Volkov was glad to accept the Department of Defense’s offer to build a research and development center in one of the most remote places in the Aleutian Islands, near the former site of a Naval Air Facility once called Adak Station, which was doomed to oblivion in spite of its relevant role for the success of the United States in World War II.

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The selection of the scientific personnel that would be necessary to carry through the project had already been finalized when Dr. Volkov was informed that another of his requests was granted, so that the initial tests would be performed with inmates from the Military Corrections Complex at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, who would be relocated to Adak voluntarily in exchange for remission of their sentences.

Once the Adak Research Complex was built and operational, it did not take too much time for Dr. Volkov’s team to develop the first prototype of the HETO Microdevice. The first batch of inmates arrived shortly thereafter.

It was clear from the beginning that the project’s success was contingent on the harmlessness of the device – which should feature an effective system to prevent the brain’s electric currents from reaching hazardous levels – and on the development of a program that could provide the subjects with the basic knowledge that they would need in order to make the implant work.

However, the tests that were performed with early versions of the device showed unsatisfactory results, since the implant did not control the increased electricity that was generated by the brains of the subjects. At that point, progress meant increasing the time that lapsed between the device being implanted and then frying a subject’s brain.

When that problem was solved, Dr. Volkov was confronted with an even greater challenge: how to stop the subjects’ particles from reorganizing randomly, which caused the displacement of organs and body parts.

Sometimes the subjects would be found with a misplaced nose, sometimes their bodies and the gurney on which they were lying were amalgamated in the most diversified ways. They all died somehow in the end – it was just a matter of how aberrational their condition would be.

The efforts that were consistently rendered by Dr. Volkov’s team eventually led to the development of an implant that did not kill the recipient subjects, who at that time were arriving from many other military correctional facilities.

Even though the subjects had a general theoretical understanding of what they should do once they had received the implant, there were not a lot of practical guidelines as to how they should proceed in order to put into use the ability that was supposed to be provided by the device.

The lack of a preexisting objective and detailed training program was due to the fact that Dr. Volkov wanted it to be the product of empirical knowledge, regardless of the resources that would have to be expended in the course of the experiments.

The first significant attempt that was made by a subject to walk through a wall failed as expected, but not without giving Dr. Volkov some exciting news. It did not concern him that the subject materialized his body a few inches into the test wall, which obviously killed him; the only thing that mattered to him was that the subject’s particles were not reorganized randomly as far as his body could be told apart from the wall, which suggested that conscious manipulation of electrons causes one’s particles to retain their original configuration.

Plenty of the subjects died or sustained severe damages throughout the tests – many of the latter had more than one limb severed – before one of them eventually succeeded. Upon successful replication of the latest improved practice guidelines, a final training method was deemed conceived.

Upon conclusion of the test phase, Dr. Volkov sent a thorough report to the Secretary of Defense stating that the moment for mass production of human weapons had finally arrived.

The report was accompanied with an operation plan comprising aptitude tests and the basic structure of a preparatory course that was intended for the best members of the armed forces.

Dr. Volkov’s report impressed the Secretary and the other authorities that were involved in the project, and the necessary arrangements for a preparatory academy to be established at Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson were authorized.

When the preparatory academy was ready for operation, the Secretary decided to call his brother-in-law, who happened to be the I Corps’ Lieutenant General:

“I’ve already told you about Project HETO, right?” – the Secretary sounded somewhat apprehensive.

“Yeah. What about it?” – the Lieutenant General seemed surprised that Project HETO would be the topic of their conversation.

“It’s ready to go operational. We need to start sending men.”

“Are you sure it will work? I wouldn’t risk losing good men over a mad scientist’s delusion.”

There was something in Dr. Volkov’s report and the whole situation that the Secretary did not dare to tell his brother-in-law and that made him feel rather uncomfortable with the decision of proceeding to the production phase. Regardless, the Secretary replied affirmatively:

“Trust me, it works. I'll tell you what: let's start small. Just send someone that can be tested and, if he succeeds as expected, we'll go full scale.”

“What kind of man do you need exactly?”

“We need to find someone that is good enough for the program and will be a useful resource if he succeeds, but it has to be a man we can control without the use of force.”

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

The Lieutenant General already had someone in mind before his call with the Secretary was over. There were a few arrangements to be made, but one specific person was going to receive his e-mail with the brochure that had been prepared by the Department of Defense in anticipation of the production phase.

***

Captain McCoy arrived punctually to the designated examination site after enjoying a good night’s sleep at the private sleeping room that was provided to him within the barracks of Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson, and soon realized with bafflement that he was the sole candidate to Project HETO’s preparatory academy.

He knew that the applications were restricted to selected officers, but it did not seem logical to him that nobody else was interested in such a unique opportunity to take a step toward the next level of human evolution.

McCoy was submitted to several physical, psychological and intellectual aptitude assessment exams throughout the day, which included electroencephalography monitoring during some of the tests. The results showed that he was a suitable candidate and thus could be admitted to the program.

By the end of the program’s seven weeks of intensive preparation, McCoy had attended classes ranging from meditation to electromagnetism and was deemed ready to join Project HETO.