“With the advent of the Cerberus success, the new installationsthe redoubtswere built, linked to each other by gateway units. Though the COG facilities and the redoubt scientific enclaves were not part of the same program, there was a suspicious trade-off of design specifications, technology and personnel. Many of the Totality Concept’s subdivisions and spin-off researches were relocated to these redoubts. Cerberus, obviously, was moved here, to Montana.
“The most ambitious COG facility was code-named ‘the Anthill’ because of its resemblance in layout to an ant colony. It was a vast complex, with underground sewage plants, stores, theaters and even a sports arena. Supplies of foodstuffs, weapons and anything of value were stockpiled, oftentimes in triplicate.
“Because of its size, the Anthill was built inside of Mount Rushmore, using tunneling and digging machines. The entire mountain was honeycombed with interconnected levels, passageways and chambers. I was told that once construction on the Anthill was completed, the entire Totality Concept program would be moved into it. I was expected to move there, too.
“I was very confused, very disoriented by all of these abrupt, almost overnight changes. A severe case of bunker mentality possessed everyone. It was as if they knew something truly terrible was in the offing, and they were grimly determined to weather it by any means necessary. It was a crazed time, a blizzard of sound and fury and near panic that signified very little to meexcept a deep dissatisfaction.
“Morale was exceptionally low among the staff of the projects, and though we were forbidden to ever fraternize, because of all the confusion, we took advantage of the holes in security.
“One day, I met with a colleague from Operation Chronos, a man named Burr. Like myself, he was dispirited, demoralized. He told me that after many, many failures, his division had successfully retrievedtrawleda living human subject from a past time line. Rather than acting exuberant, he was terrified. He dismissed his success, saying that the trawled subject proved so very troublesome he had been removed from Dulce. What he wanted to talk about was a practice he referred to as ‘temporal peeping.’
“He said that his staff had peeped through a gap in the chronon structure into a future date, January of 2001. They discovered that a nuclear holocaust had, for all intents and purposes, obliterated the world. That news was horrifying enough, but he had more. The discovery had been reported to MJ-12, and rather than take the measures necessary to prevent the destruction, they opted to survive it instead. He assumed that the construction of the redoubts and the frenzied activity of the last few months were due to that report.
“Burr said that further peeping experiments had set up a horrified suspicion in his mind that not only was the holocaust preventable, but it was not supposed to happen. Operation Chronos had disrupted the chronon structure and triggered a probability wave dysfunction. In layman’s terms, we had created an alternate future scenario for ourselves.
“Assuming Burr could be believed, I realized if the alliance had not been initiated with the Archons, if the Totality Concept researches had been left to molder in old military-intelligence files at the end of the war, the apocalypse would not then, and would never happen.
“I know how insane it sounds now, especially with all these years of hindsight. Imagine living through it, being informed that doomsday was only a few years away, and that the very people who could prevent it actually welcomed it.
“Why? It took me a while to come up with an answer, at the risk of my position and my life. But I found it below Level Six of the complex, the staging area of Overproject Excalibur.
“It held the genetic labs, where experiments were performed on fish, seals, birds and mice, all altered from their original forms. The Archons had taught the human scientists a lot about genetics, things both useful and dangerous.
“It was when I encountered the humans in cages I realized I had entered a place privately referred to as ‘Nightmare Alley.’ I saw row after row of altered humans, human-Archon gene-blends and embryos kept in cold storage.
That’s where I first saw mutants, the ghastly prototypes of the creatures later known as stickies and scalies. They were drugged, dazed, some of them cried and begged for help. I was at a complete loss. I couldn’t understand the purpose of such horrific experiments.
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