File name: j-defalco_cel_journal_01
Date created: November 17, 2007
Time created: 5:49 PM (US EASTERN)
Application: celsimpletype v3.0.3
Phone handset model: UNKNOWN [ encryp.code.7EFGJ9 ]

After nearly five years of silence -- four of which I suspected that whatever I typed was logged by a keystroke security program of Hill's creation -- I have been released from the facility, on indefinite sabbatical. I can now leave a record of my triumphs and sins, for a sliver of the world to see.

I do this because I know I will not return to the facility. None of us who were released yesterday ever will. Kleinman has deluded himself into thinking that our creations will remain secret forever, and that he will soon summon us back to Virginia to resume our observation and experimentation.

I dare not share the old man's saccharine optimism, and haven't for years. Things are far too gone for our project to remain in the shadows. We created a psychopath and let him loose upon the world. He is wreaking his vengeance now. We are all accountable. We are all expendable.

It is that second realization -- that my colleagues and I are now at risk, here in the topside world -- that fueled my life's second great betrayal. Like the first all those years ago, I feel no remorse for it. I am not a villain. I am an opportunist.

Diaries are preposterous things. People pour their angst and anger into little books (or in my case, a ridiculously small cell phone), insisting to their souls that their words are for them alone, a means of documenting their lives, or venting their frustrations, or sharing their secrets. They are telling great lies to themselves.

I liken people who journal to people who undress with their bedroom lights ablaze, and their curtains parted. It provides a dark, subterranean thrill to do so; somewhere in their minds, they pray their performance will be seen by a stranger. How delicious. How taboo. People dump their lives into diaries because they hope, some day long after they are gone, that their words will be discovered and read by others. It is consensual voyeurism. It is the desperate hope that an anonymous life can actually mean something.

And here I am in my Florida "home," tugging out my own emotional pecker, pecking on this painfully undersized smartphone keyboard, indulging in this consensual voyeurism, sharing my life with myself ... and whomever I later deem worthy of reading it.

This is an explanation of my acts. This is me being as honest as I can be with myself. This is not Truth. Truth does not hail from human beings. Our brains are far too complex -- and our base needs far too selfish -- to provide Truth. We are the heroes of our own stories. I am the hero of this one.

My name is James DeFalco. I spent the first quarter of my 40 years on this world being beaten by stupid boys -- and an illiterate father -- in New York's Little Italy, the neighborhood of my youth. There are a great many people who lament the encroachment of Chinatown into that neighborhood, and the so-called decimation of Little Italy's culture because of it. I am not one of them.

I learned to be fleet of foot during those years. I learned to survive. I discovered the best way to evade my oppressors was to run from them. I hid in libraries, burying myself in grand tales of science fiction and books of science fact. Run, hide, learn. Run, hide, learn. I became quite good at this, and it was noticed by people in positions of power: teachers, principals, perhaps the government ... though I could never confirm this.

I spent the second quarter of my life in a boarding school far from Little Italy (and my bastardly father, for which I was grateful), mooching off a grant bestowed by a very private endowment designed to give "inner city youth" a chance for academic success. I taught myself to quash my mush-mouth WOP accent. I became an exceptional long-distance runner. I still have those chops, thanks to at least two dozen government-provided treadmills over the past fifteen years.

I didn't know who my boarding school benefactors were at the time, and officially still don't. But I have excellent deductive reasoning.

My twenties and much of my thirties were a blur. More schooling, then employment. A stint at the Centers for Disease Control, lending my biology and genetics expertise to classify new viral strains -- and then, off to the Department of Defense's DARPA. I don't remember much of this time. The hours were punishing, the work ultra-secret and time-sensitive, and the stakes were as high as I thought they could get.

Put another way: Our government anticipated another inevitable ground war, and wanted its soldiers to fight harder, stronger and longer than God intended. I did my part, whatever it was, working on compartmentalized projects, boosting mouse -- and eventually, chimpanzee -- genetic material endurance well past its limit.

These experiments were failures. The center, as Yeats once wrote, cannot hold.

I had a wife during this time, a delightfully charming, bookish brunette named Serena. I barely remember her, or our two-year marriage. My profession demanded that I do what I did best -- run to a new "Eclipse Command" project, hide in a laboratory, learn secrets -- and she grew weary of it. The divorce papers came in the mail. I didn't blame her.

Five years ago, I received transfer orders to what I would later learn was Project 7th Son. On the day before I departed to that great hole in the world, a courier arrived at my McLean condominium with a package. Inside was a black laptop. When opened, its screen blinked to life, and a voice -- clearly modulated to obscure the identity (and even sex) of the speaker -- growled from its speakers.

This brings me to my first great sin.

The voice told me that I owed my life, as I knew it, to the U.S. government. For the past decade, I had been bred for this promotion to "Code Phantom" security clearance (whatever that was), and that I owed my keepers something grand indeed, should I want to continue my career and life. The voice did not threaten me. It did not need to. I am a survivor, and I know the snarl of greed and need all too well.

I spoke into the laptop's internal microphone, and asked what my keepers wanted. The voice told me. An organization within my government code-named Operation Trident -- employed by thirteen people whom I apparently considered colleagues and friends, now code-named "retiarii" -- required information that I could soon provide. I would be a transporter, a courier, nothing more ... and after delivery, never again. I agreed.

I left the laptop on my living room table that evening, and went to bed. The next morning, it was gone.

And so I came to the 7th Son facility, greeted by Kenneth Kleinman, Orlando Hill and others, to assume my role as assistant director of the project, second only to Kleinman himself.

The security mainframe was as aged as my keepers had told me it would be. On my thrice-annual vacations that first year, I did what I had been asked, smuggling sensitive data out of the facility -- specifications on our cloning procedures, research on the MemR/I recording process ... even the genetic blueprint of the experiment's test subject, John Michael Smith Alpha.

Upon my third topside delivery to a woman -- one such anonymous "retiarii" -- I was released from my debt.

It was a good thing. John Alpha escaped and faked his death the year after that, and Hill reinforced his Ops security grid. Despite my betrayal, I contributed to the 7th Son project with a clear conscience. I am not a villain. I am an opportunist. I wanted to live.

When Hill finally brought the Beta Clones to the facility yesterday, I knew the game was over. We creators had assembled our creations. These were children who, perhaps aside from Michael the U.S. Marine, had no useful experience in tracking a psychopathic presidential assassin. When it became clear some of them would be marching to their deaths in West Hollywood, I realized that our "super secret" experiment wouldn't stay that way for long. We would be exposed for the megalomaniacal, God-playing, human rights-violating mad scientists that we were.

We would be held accountable. We would be expendable.

I was grateful when Kleinman sent all "nonessential" personnel on indefinite sabbatical. It meant I could do what I did best. And here is my second great sin.

I was all but certain that Hill or one of his monitor-watching stooges would discover me, but they did not. I assume this is due partly to the mass exodus from the facility -- there was so much simultaneous security activity that it would be humanly difficult to track it all -- but mostly, I suspect it was a failing of Hill's patchwork Ops system.

I spoofed a terminal login, used my Code Phantom access, and stuffed my highly modified facility-issued laptop with secrets. What were those secrets? I do not know; I have not examined them yet. Perhaps I'll find mention of "retiarii" in these files. Perhaps not.

But in the world in which I now live, where the television here in my dusty Jupiter home flickers with barely day-old news reports of a downed military helicopter on West Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard, I know that I was right. Some of the Beta Clones are most certainly dead now. Alpha's rampage will continue. I'll never return to the 7th Son facility. Filling up this ridiculously powerful laptop with secrets was the smartest -- if most dangerous -- choice I could have made.

I'll need these secrets, if my retribution-hungry government quests to find me. I'll have leverage, something with which to bargain for my life.

Not that I'm waiting for them to find me. I am making preparations to leave. The government friends I've made during the past fifteen years -- and the stupefying wealth I've amassed working for these shadow projects -- will ensure several identities under which I can travel. Off the grid I shall go, mere days from now.

I shall head south. Nothing can stop me. I will run, hide and learn. It's what I do best.