Special 5: Project Alice
By Nova
“Play the clip again,” the tall man said.
The man in the chair nodded, then clicked a few keys on his keyboard.
From where it hung above the table, a projector cast an image of a prehistoric wilderness—characterized by gingkos, cycads, and ferns—onto the large canvas screen in front of them.
The video opened with a shout. “Guys!” a black-haired boy yelled, to the concern of the boy and girl beside him. As they waded through an undergrowth of ferns, they were being recorded from above; the tall man was unable to make out more than their general features. “Daniel! Guess what!” the boy continued.
The camera angle shifted, now showing who he was yelling at: an obvious football player type who had no interest in what the boy had to say. He walked a few paces ahead of them, alongside four others.
The camera flickered back to the black-haired boy. “I’m Stagehand!” he shouted. No one, but the two beside him, looked his way. It was like none of the other teenagers had heard him at all.
“Okay, okay,” the golden-haired boy next to him said. “I get it. Can we use inside voices now?”
“But we’re outside,” Black-hair countered. “Nothing but outside for miles.”
“You know what I mean,” Golden-hair replied.
“Well…” Black-hair sighed, his shoulders slumped slightly. “Yeah. But we really should talk.”
“Well?” the girl, who had flaming red hair, interjected.
“You can stop it here,” the tall man said.
The man in the chair hit a key, and the video promptly froze on the three teenagers.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. The tall man stood behind the man in the chair—having ignored the open seat in the office, which was only lit by the electric glow of scores of computer monitors. He remained silent as he studied the image, his finger tapping his cheek to an unheard beat. “Has anyone else seen this?” he finally asked.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“Just you, sir,” the man in the chair said.
The tall man sighed. “Good,” he said. “How’d you get this footage, anyways? I thought that our systems were wiped in the attack?”
“The First Way’s virus wiped out our security files, yes, and locked us out completely.”
“So how’d you get this footage?”
The man in the chair smiled. “This isn’t security footage. It’s scientific research. Survey cams. Stuff designed to watch the animals for the zoologists in Specimen Behavior. Normally, this doesn’t show anything important, just the animals doing animal things. But…” He glanced toward the screen, where the trio of teenagers remained frozen—their expression hidden from the camera’s position on the branch of a monkey puzzle. “It’s not a part of our security system, so the virus didn’t touch it—other than locking out remote access, of course. They’re even on battery power, so they weren’t affected by the outage. I only found that these cameras were operational yesterday when I was trying to defrag the mess Cuckoo made of our system…”
“Good luck for us, finally,” the tall man muttered.
“I don’t see how this is going to salvage Project Hammond,” the man in the chair said. “We lost most of our Pleistocene-and-later assets in the gas attack, and now the Hell Creek Experience has gone completely wild. Not to mention the PR problems from having half the guests eaten by the wildlife… This doesn’t change anything.”
The tall man waved his hand dismissively. “Oh, I’m not talking about Hammond, though I heard some murmurs from the board that they’re planning on rebranding to focus on the prehistoric ‘safari’ aspect… No, Hammond was a failure.”
“An expensive failure,” the man in the chair said. “How much of your department’s budget was going to this mess?”
“I’d… rather not talk about it…” the tall man admitted. “But, what matters is that this footage is the break we’ve been looking for.”
The man in the chair raised an eyebrow. “I don’t see how three superpowered children-”
The tall man shook his head. “You’re still reacting to Hammond, not thinking about the future. Think about Alice,” he smiled. “Project Alice has been underfunded for months now.”
“That’s because the anomaly sits underneath a school in a major urban area. The operating costs alone would be immen-”
The tall man silenced the man in the chair with a raise of his finger. “We don’t have a choice. Hammond was a failure. Half our biotech contracts have canceled. We need to go all in on Project Alice.”
“Alice will only pay off if your theories are correct…”
“I’m staking my career on this,” the tall man said. “Plus,” he jerked a thumb at the screen, “those three kids are our ticket in.”
The man in the chair raised an eyebrow. “Only if they cooperate.”
“Oh, we have enough carrot we’re not gonna need the stick,” the tall man said, waving a hand dismissively. “But if they don’t… Well, they’re just kids. We’ll deal with them easily enough.”