“On paper, Overproject Excalibur’s function was to map human genomes to the specific chromosomal locations. It was an ambitious project, and should have taken many years. It was obvious that it was either completed or near completion.
“In a stunning revelation, I understood that Overproject Excalibur was creating life-forms to survive in a world devastated by atomic war. It is a field called Pantropic science. Designer mutants, courtesy of the Archon Directive.
“I finally realized why the elite power group and their allies did not fear a coming nuclear holocaust. It was all part of the drive toward a one-world government, brought about by the culling of society’s ‘useless eaters,’ and aided by a technology turned over to a humanity not prepared to handle the consequences.
“When the first warhead detonated on the twentieth of January, 2001, the Anthill facility had been in operation for some two months, inhabited only by a group of scientists, myself among them, and a few paranoid politicians and their families.
“Despite all of the precautions, the effects of the conflagration caused extensive damage to the Anthill. The consequences were far greater than any of the MJ-12 or military tacticians had foreseen. Rather than emerging in ten or so years into a world mercifully free of its parasitical humans, the timetable looked to be closer to a hundred.
“However, even if they managed to outlast the nuclear winter, they couldn’t cure radiation sickness, nor could the provisions be stretched to support all the people for a century. Cryogenic facilities existed in the Anthill, and many people either volunteered or were forced into suspended animation. Others were the subjects of radical surgery, and over a period of decades, they received organ transplants, artificial hearts, prosthetic limbs, and some became true cyborgs, a hybridization of human and machine.
“I volunteered for the freezing process. I desperately hoped that I would revive in a brave new world, different but much better than the one which had been destroyed. It was a foolishly vain hope.
“I was resurrected fifty years ago. Much had changed over the course of a century and a half, but much was still the same. The Archons were now in charge, their Directive now a Directorate. Oh, they still operate behind the scenes, but now they enjoy hands-on control of their willing human marionettes, so they no longer have to deal through several layers of intermediaries. For some reason, though, they don’t seem to be here on a permanent basis and come and go, but their power apparatus is fully in place.
“The barons are the most obvious example of puppet and puppet master. They are hybrids of Archons and humans, bred to survive, even thrive in the postholocaust world. The baronial hierarchy is composed of these hybrids, the mixture of genetic material. The last two generations of barons are of hybrid stock. It is a return to the ancient god-king system, where the subjects believed their rulers to be semidivine.
“Through them, the Archons implemented the so-called Program of Unification, which keeps a boot forevermore pressed on the necks of what is left of humankind. The world they tried to build using the Nazis as pawns has finally come to pass. The mass of humanity is guided, controlled, channeledand they don’t even know it.
“This is not our world any longer, and I pity those of you who were born into it.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Dead silence reigned in the room. What they heard was too much to grasp and absorb in one sitting. They all stared at Lakesh in stunned silence, eyes wide with a pain hovering near disbelief. But by now they knew better.
Lakesh smiled sadly and leaned back in his chair. “Any questions?”
“Only a thousand or two,” Grant said in a gruff, clipped tone, “I’ll work from the end to the beginning.”
Kane repressed a smile. Grant was in interrogation mode. He almost expected to hear “slagger” tacked on at the end of every query.
“Why were you thawed out?”
“The Program of Unification had reached a certain level of progression,” Lakesh responded smoothly. “I and a number of others were resurrected to aid in the final shaping of ville governments. We were consultants, more or less. At the moment, there is one freezie, as we are called today, serving in at least one division of every ville.”