“Do you have any ideas about how our research could be applied?”

“Yeah, I have always wondered if…”

Dr. Michael Oblitmonnomen sat there dumbfounded as the intern answered his question.

What had flowed from this lazy freshman who possessed no security clearances, and good god, had not even signed a non-compete agreement or non-disclosure agreement, was terrifying, to say the least.

The kid knew the whole thing. What they were doing. He didn’t know the minor details, how to iron out the technicalities to make the big picture work but, that’s what they were doing here. They were spending years, decades really, ironing out minor technicalities using cheap labor, and the cheapest laborers capable were college interns. The other advantage to college interns was they weren’t supposed to be smart enough to know what was going on. Just hardworking, eager, and oblivious. The exact opposite of Andrew.

This one, he saw five pieces and then painted the puzzle, and again, he had no security clearance. No non-disclosure agreement. There was nothing stopping him from walking out that door and writing a novel that told the entire goddamn planet that hydrogen bombs really work using by explosive flux compression to drive an eddy current heating device that causes the fission implosion to occur uniformly. There was no legal device on earth that could stop him from disclosing that, one of the most tightly guarded secrets of the five or so countries that knew how to make a hydrogen bomb.

And guarded for good reason. Anyone with access to depleted uranium, which was easily acquired on the internet in those days, and some wires and fertilizer could make a fission bomb. And worse, any nation state could, therefore, with the leak of that one tightly guarded secret, make a thermonuclear bomb.

Michael sighed and hit the panic button on his car keys. He liked the kid, kind of. Sure, he was lazy. His computer was found to have had played twelve hundred games of free-cell that summer, although none of them were losses. They’d initially assumed that was a glitch. Now he no longer questioned the validity. The intern had gotten all his work done quickly, even if he had spent half his time dicking around. Anyway, procedure was clear on this kind of thing.

They couldn’t allow someone walking the streets to have that kind of knowledge and no consequence for disclosing it. They knew he wouldn’t sign a non-disclosure agreement now. It was his last day. He was on his way out the door. They would have to forge it.

When corporate security entered, they already knew what to do. The MK-Ultra program had discovered that if a memory is traumatic enough, the individual will be incapable of coherently remembering it. Thinking on it enough invariably results in a state of psychiatric distress, and law enforcement generally ignores accusations given by someone in psychiatric distress. If the memory is disturbing and traumatic enough, psychiatrists will treat it as a delusion and teach the individual to ignore and purge it. That was that fate that awaits, young, nubile, Andrew.

The security officers used sodium-pentothal, a trick they learned from serial killer biopics. It produces the same effects as extreme drunkenness, but as it can be injected, does not require the consent of the individual for it to enter the bloodstream. It had the added benefit that, thanks to being mis-characterized by Hollywood as a truth serum, the mere mention of it during testimony generally marks the person insane. The crazier the thing that happens to you, the less likely anyone is to believe it. That much should be obvious, and as such, the experience Andrew would soon be subjected to was designed to be just that: highly traumatic, and generally crazy sounding.  

The Director of Manufacturing Engineering couldn’t watch. He didn’t want to know what they did while solving these issues. He was disgusted by the policy, but he knew execution for treason could await him if he failed to report the possibility of a security breach, and this was a clear and blatant one. What he did know was that years earlier federal agents had come through investigating child porn use by individuals in his office, and that no one had been arrested for it, for reasons unknown to the Doctor.

What happened in the other room was, Andrew, nearly blacked out drunk from their sodium pentothal injection, was forced handcuffed and at gunpoint to watch videos pulled from the DHS’s snuff film evidence database. Horrible, horrific, disgusting, perverse, disturbing, unimaginable things, being done to children, and adults, and animals, but mostly children. The security officers, none of which Andrew had seen before nor would ever see again after, had not even given him their names. They did, however, tell him that they were CIA agents, and that he now had to choose either to join them, by sacrificing a woman to their sex trafficking network, or be killed. They opened his public Facebook page and went through his friends list, and made suggestions about who. They told Andrew this, in late August or early September 2010, while doing things to him that even literature shies away from describing.

Then they let him go, figuring that one of three things would happen. he might get a DUI on the way home and go to jail, or over the next year he would attempt to join them by coercing someone into prostitution, and then they could blackmail him into keeping the company’s work a secret or land himself in jail, or in the most likely scenario he would totally repress all thoughts of his time at the company at least until it drove him stark raving mad.

And the last option is the one that happened.

But there was one thing they were not counting on.

            The federal investigation into their little trafficking ring was not actually over yet.

You see, the people involved in the ring were not scientists. They were not essential to modernizing and advancing our nuclear technology. They were security personnel who merely knew of classified material, knowledge which they were holding as leverage against their arrest, and the politicians and courts ruled in their favor, against the agents who desperately wished to dismantle their little circle of hell.

A few years earlier, one of their analysts had a brilliant idea. Make the guarded knowledge which protected them public domain. The only way to do that would be for someone to leak it publicly on a first amendment protected form of mass media, with sufficient reach.