The Effie Enigma The Motherless Mothers ISBN 978 099 32107 9 2

 Taken from The Effie Enigma The Motherless Mothers

With sketches by Jacqui Malkin

Agent ZX (Zedex) had mixed feelings about being called to the Connect HQ. On the one hand, it meant endless hours scanning through news reports, watching old news films and scratching away at connections. On the more positive side, an opportunity to meet his latest crush, Agent QT, whom he called Cutie, from the Far East Sector of Connect. They had communicated virtually several times, but the thought of meeting Cutie in the flesh gave him goose pimples.

In the old days they used to call this day Saint Valentine’s Day.

But, thought Zedex, what chance do I have? Cutie is an attractive young man, just about 22 years of age, with olive skin, visible muscles and long blond hair.

Zedex himself was probably, he thought, more of a father figure than a potential flesh-on-flesh lover. Now 98-years-old, rotund, balding, he still wore the old-fashion spectacles. He had never been comfortable with instant vision surgery that most partook of. All they had in common was that they were both investigating Crisis Connections and had both previously been with the military. Anyway, current events that were bringing them together were serious and they would have to focus.

 

But, remembered Zedex, Cutie will only have seen perfected image projection of him and vice versa. To Cutie, Zedex would have appeared forty years younger, several kilos lighter and with a full head of hair. And Zedex knew nothing about how Cutie actually looked in the flesh. This first meeting could well be a make-or-break.

Earlier that day, Zedex had been called to the HQ after four more deaths, this time all scientists all connected with Project Outreach. At the same time, there had been a failed attempt on the life of Professor John Sullivan, the creator of the portable wormhole in time. Certainly this leaned towards the conspiracy theory.

So Zedex had taken an auto-hover car which enabled him to quickly catch up with the paperwork. Nowadays, few people moved about the city other than in auto-hovers which were remarkably safe. Fewer people actually travelled about the city than previously. What with food parcels delivered to your door, virtual teaching through the PLATO programme, the Planetary Tuition Optimisation scheme that brought almost identical tuition schedules into almost every home and put an end to the “school run” traffic chaos that Zedex had grown up with.

Zedex had received his instructions and a minimum amount of information via his retinal-link. Despite the safety record of auto-hovers, all four scientists, two men and two women, had died as a result of hover-car accidents. The chances of that being simple coincidence was indeed slim.

Connect was officially established way back in 2021, two years even before Zedex had been born (of course he was not called ZX back then) to investigate apparent connections between various historical events seriously retarding progress on Project Outreach, the building of the A.I.-controlled Mother-ships that would eventually enable distant planets to become human colonies, literally billions of years and even light-years from Earth. A.I. and robotics, cryogenics and space exploration itself were progressing comfortably but these events, whether connected or not, were slowing the project down to the point where earth’s own problems could bring a halt to the project completely.

Zedex had entered Connect in 2098 and had been working virtually with Cutie for several years now and had listed incidents that had caused the delays in or seemed to have tried to delay project Outreach.

Until now it had appeared that it was merely a conspiracy theory that there existed a well-hidden long-term project to delay or stop Outreach. It had not officially been taken very seriously and Zedex’s work was hardly a workload It was only now, with the sudden death of four essential scientists, that the newly appointed World President had prioritised the Connect project. The recent discovery of how humans and possibly others could use portable wormholes and the possibility of travelling through time introduced an entirely new line of investigation. It may become possible for people to travel to the past and make dangerous changes, cause all sorts of paradoxes; or even to the future. The possible assassination of the man at the leading edge in that technology, Professor John Sullivan, increased the likelihood that there was a connection between assassins over the decades and now there was news that Sullivan’s suspected assassin had been “examined” and apparently the assassin thought he was indeed from the future and on a mission.

 

Cutie turned up with FE, pronounced Effy, his assistant, a gorgeous, shapely, young, woman with long flowing red hair and a big smile. She was a fit and bouncy girl of about 21 years of age and Zedex felt an immediate attraction to her. She was one of the elite super-IQ people that had been selected for this task. From the start Zedex saw her as the flirty type and thought she probably had a broad sense of humour. She smiled when she spoke or whenever Zedex looked at her directly. He saw that QT carried a case of electro-files.

 Zedex did not feel ready. He had meant to don a wig and clean himself up a bit. Nowadays, people seldom met in the flesh. QT walked in, full of confidence and frowning, looking spectacular in Zedex’s eyes.

QT was quite slender and tall but clearly muscular. His long blond hair was tied back in a pony tail. He had the start of a beard growth. He looked very serious. The sort of young man that seemed to find it hard to smile.

Zedex knew that, like himself, FE and QT were selected from amongst the most intelligent and successful people on the planet, suitable for Pure Information cloning to send out to colonise the galaxy through Project Outreach.

Zedez thought that QT and FE were like an ill-suited couple.

They clasped and shook hands as in the old days. Zedex wanted to hug him but that definitely wasn’t on.

Zedex wanted to spend some time chatting, flirting, with either Cutie or Effy, or both, he didn’t care. Just being with them and chatting with them would be such a unique and deeply personal memorable experience. Sex was desirable to Zedex although he thought it would be out of the question. Briefly he imagined himself in bed with both of them.

Zedex had prepared his introductory speech to explain to them what was the purpose of this meeting-in-the flesh.

Instead though, Effy stood up and began talking, reviewing the short history of the Connect project. She wanted them to study the links that the conspiracy theorists had pointed to.

The first event, said Effy, that they had known of was the assassination attempts on Albert Hofmann, who had discovered and synthesised LSD, Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, way back in 1928. At that time, the military was looking for drug weapons and in fact it was the US military that first conducted large scale tests using LSD on its’ personnel in the 1960’s. 

 

Hofmann was born in 1906 in Baden, Old Switzerland, as it was known now, and had taken up his career in chemistry at the University of Zurich, finishing it in 1929. Hofmann provided insight during a speech he delivered to the 1996 Worlds of Consciousness Conference in Heidelberg, Old Germany: “One often asks oneself what roles planning and chance play in the realization of the most important events in our lives.” Hofmann, had lived for over 100 years, not so common in those days, so it was quite possible that he became involved with the secret works of Outreach.

Many people thought that it was the consumption of LSD that had opened the minds of so many others also either involved in Outreach or involved in some of the steps and thought processes that had led to it.

Timothy Leary, the ‘Acid-Guru’ of the 1960’s, was another. There had been assassination attempts against him too.

Other failed attempts were made against Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, the early computer entrepreneurs, who had also been reported as Acid users. The assassins had more success killing John F Kennedy in 1963, after his enthusiastic approach to space travel and putting man on the Moon.

Other major incidents that delayed Outreach considerably, were the Apollo 1 fire in 1968, the Challenger Space Shuttle that killed seven people in 1986 and the destruction of Connect Offices in the Twin Towers attacks in 2001.

Zedex was convinced that this series of events was down to a very secret organisation dedicated to stopping Outreach ever happening. So was Cutie. Effy said that she was unsure as often events that appeared to be connected were not.

Yet there was no hard evidence. The few culprits that had survived and been arrested and questioned, had several things in common. None of them had any sort of record, criminal or governmental; they had no fingerprints and there were no dental records, even though they all had, mysteriously, very bad teeth. They wore no masks but there were no photographs on file, anywhere: no health records, no records on birth or education or employment and the only words any of them had uttered were “outreach outrage”.

Zedex and Cutie now had the job of crystallising probabilities into certainties, of making connections and making them real. They looked at screens, ran analytical and predictive routines, and spent several hours in isolation tanks after consuming micro-doses of Acid to expand their thought processes. They had to consider alternative realities, parallel universes and even time travel itself, and that would indeed be hard if sitting in a room looking at screens, and, Zedex thought, impossible for him to concentrate whilst sharing space with Cutie.

Cutie suggested that they “Get down to business right quick.”

Dismissing the possible double-meaning, Zedex switched on the virtual screen which showed recent photographs of the four dead scientists. By pointing at a pic, they could read, or have read to them, short or longer biographies: it was amazing just how much data was held on almost everyone on the planet, and some off it!

After they finished reading each short bio, without planting too many preconceptions about Connections, the first step would be to use the A.I. to suggest them.

There were a great many of them, far more than either Agent would have imagined. A.I suggested Hofmann, Einstein, Tesla, Leary, Kennedy, Jobs, Musk and Sullivan as well as about twenty others in a secondary list. They would have to go through them one at a time, which would take days. Information came from official records, popular and alternative press reports, diaries and notebooks and even conspiracy theorists. Most of it was indeed public knowledge, unlike the conspiracy itself, which was hidden in the open. Instead of officially investigating the claims of the conspiracy theorists, successive governments had officially dismissed it all. They hadn’t though. They had set up Connect instead.

Effy stood up saying that she had with her and would read througha series of reports on characters, events and information that was deemed connected to Operation Outreach and attempts at sabotaging it.

She read the reports aloud from her display pad.