“Now, we reach my own personal experience. I must compress thirty years of my professional life, in order to make it coherent. My first introduction to the Archon Directive, though I didn’t realize it at the time, came in early 1972. As part of my government employment, I was assigned to Dulce, a sleepy little town in northern New Mexico, then populated by only nine hundred people, many of them Jicarilla Apaches.
“Just outside of town is Archuleta Mesa, and buried below that a six-level research complex, connected to Los Alamos by a tube shuttle. The entire installation was devoted to a pair of the Totality Concept’s overprojects, Whisper and Excalibur. The Overproject Whisper subdivisions were Operation Chronos and Project Cerberus. My work was conducted primarily on Level Four, and Chronos occupied Level Five. I knew Overproject Excalibur and its subdivisions occupied biogenetics laboratories on Level Six, and perhaps even a secret Level Seven, but inasmuch as I was a cyberneticist and physicist, my interest in genetics was limited.
“At any rate, my work focused on Cerberus, the mat-trans units, on how to reconcile quantum theory with relativistic Einsteinian physics. The technology in Dulce was not theoretical. The hardware worked, though no one really knew how it worked, and no one wanted to admit where the principles to build the first experimental gateway unit originated. After a couple of years, after a few promotions, after a few security-clearance upgrades, I finally did learn.
“The Totality Concept researches dated back to World War II, when German scientists were laboring to build what turned out to be purely theoretical secret weapons for the Third Reich. The Allied powers adopted the researches, as well as many of the scientists, and constructed underground bases, primarily in the western U.S., to further the experiments. Dulce, of course, was a main nexus point.
“I was enthralled and delighted with the place, at least for the first few years. The center was filled with meticulously chosen technicians, and it was a source of great pride to be one of them. Dulce, for all its secrets, its stringent security procedures, was devoted to pure research. We had limitless support and funds. Since I was young and naive, and my one passion was science, I was obsessed with my work, especially since the Totality Concept was classified ‘Above Top Secret.’ It was known only to a few very high ranking military officers and politicians. I doubt even the Presidents who held office during my tenure there were aware of the full ramifications. Obviously I felt very special.
“As the years wore on, I became Project Cerberus overseer. During my rise, I heard a number of whispers, rumors about Dulce and about the other research on different levels. When my security classification was upgraded to MAJIC status, I asked to visit the other divisions, which hitherto had been off limits to me. Instead, an Air Force general handed me a briefing paper and waited for me to read it, hovering nearby with his hand on his side arm and never leaving the room.
“The document was issued from an ultrasecret think tank known as MJ-12. This was the name of a governmental control group, more or less the people who oversaw and approved our work. Rather than answering my request, the document essentially outlined where the source of our technology originated. I learned it was not built on German research at all, but was the result of an alliance between the U.S. government and the Archons.
“Although I spent most of my time in the Dulce installation, I didn’t live in a complete vacuum. Urban legends and conspiracy theories had filtered into the public consciousness to such a point that even I, in my vanadium-alloy tower, had heard the tales of aliens, of grays, of mysterious animal mutilations and of Area 51, where captured extraterrestrial spacecraft were allegedly undergoing back-engineering. As a scientist, I discounted just about everything I had heard or read or seen on television. You can imagine my shock when the briefing document confirmed nearly all I had been sneering at for years.
“That revelation was stunning enough, but when the general asked me for my opinion of the paper, my reaction was much the same as yours, Kane. I said, ‘Prove it.’