Journey back to an unexpected time and delve deep into what you think you know…
Phase I – The Children of A-space
Sun Child
– Issue 3 –
From what I can surmise, the Institute for Brain Function is a secret government research facility. If it is true that Alia spent any time there, it lends credence to the theory that she is a mind reader or fortune teller. I spoke with several doctors in the area who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and they told me that the Institute is where strange things go to disappear.
“I remember one Halloween night, maybe a couple years ago,” one of the doctors I spoke with explained, “this big guy came into the ER. He had what I thought was a pretty cool costume, like Abomination from the Hulk comics. He was scaly and greenish brown and I thought it was a joke at first, but he ripped the waiting room apart. There was a SWAT team here to subdue him. I heard people talking about transferring him to the IBF, and even though it was so much commotion and chaos, the story wasn’t even on the news the next day. I asked someone about it and they told me we were pretending it never happened. And that was that.”
I spoke with a doctor in Charlotte, North Carolina who told me about a patient he saw about five years ago who was one of the first to be afflicted by a drug that was believed to be of alien origin and caused seemingly irreversible psychological effects.
“It was difficult to watch the progression of that patient,” the doctor recalled. “He was a young man and at first he seemed to be locked in seizure, and then he seemed to recover, only to devolve into intense delusions. Eventually he seemed to lose all sense of himself and he honestly looked like a grazing bull; he was always on all fours with his head low to the ground. There was nothing we could do for him so we did what the director of the hospital thought best, we sent him to the Institute for Brain Function. If they haven’t been able to help him there, then he is beyond help. There is no way for me to know if he was ever cured, I wouldn’t know unless the Institute wanted me to and I have no great expertise that would warrant my furher involvement with that patient.”
I was able to track down a former worker of the IBF and we spoke very briefly. She did laundry for the patients and doctors who sometimes lived at the Institute and she saw the facility from the inside.
“It’s just like a hospital. There are doctors and patients, lots of fancy equipment. It’s a secretive place, lots of doors and elevators with keypads and secret codes. I didn’t have a lot of access, but from what I saw, it was a standard medical facility.”
She had never seen anyone matching Alia’s description in her time at the Institute.
The security of the Institute suggest that they have intriguing secrets to hide. The militaristic nature of the building with the high, wrought iron fence all the way around and armed security guards at the entrance, suggests that those secrets are worth killing for.
Drug Wave
– Issue 1 –
There are more criminal organization in this world than there are organized governments. They are pervasive, to say the least.
Drug organizations factor into this larger tale because they proliferate illicit drugs that are said to be of alien origin. TIp: Earth has many stories about user encounters with drugs that produced effects unlike anything they had experienced before. One such drug, a sparkling pill that glitters like a diamond in the light, seems to be the most legendary and is credited with the decimation of many of the gangs and criminal organizations along the Eastern Seaboard in recent history. The drug is not widely available, I still have not been able to confirm its existence, but it is said to make the user susceptible to mind control, which is how it was used to kill so many dangerous people. The drug is said to have been used by the most dominant drug organization in the United States to stake its claim and gain its reputation. This organization does not have a cool name or acronym and this speaks to the goals of the organization; they are only concerned with profit, not notoriety and members of the organization have been killed because they attracted too much attention to the greater organization. It is believed to be managed by one man with the help of a scientist who is said to be able to manufacture any drug, including the sparkling one.
The street level politics of the drug trade can muddy the hierarchy quite a bit, to the boon of the higher ups who become obscured by smaller cells of gangs organized by leaders thirsty for power who feud with one another, but are all ultimately sourced by the same alpha organization that funnels drugs from their own manufacturing operation and from around the world to a neighborhood street corner near you.
There are many great (relative term) men who have given their lives to make the alpha organization what it is today, but they would be nothing without the hustlers on the corners.
I traveled to Baltimore, Maryland recently to speak with some of the drug dealers who stand out on street corners. I didn’t want to pretend to be a customer, but they were eager to treat me as one and when I identified myself as a reporter, most of them walked away disinterested in an interaction that would not yield a monetary exchange.
When I finally found someone willing to speak, it was a young man, still a teenager, and he was alone in an alleyway between two abandoned commercial buildings. He was reading a dogeared copy of Native Son, and he spoke to me without looking up.
“I got the usual, I ain’t taking credit,” he said robotically.
“You got a minute for a reporter?” I asked him and he looked up over the top of his book and I saw his eyes for the first time. He was taller than me, but he had a boyish face with intricate designs cut into the fade above his ears. He seemed to be very bored and he reminded me of young workers in grocery stores who were always watching the clock as they scanned my groceries.
“What you want from me?” he asked without a change in the tone of his voice.
I told him that I was just looking to get a sense of what the life of a drug dealer was like these days, and he answered my questions without shooing me away.
“I go to school and stuff,” he explained, “I know if I work hard I won’t have to be out here like this, but ain’t nobody taking care of me in the meantime.”
He was alone in the world. He had lost both of his parents to the drug life of the city and he had learned that there was no one he could look to for help.
“I can make it out, I just gotta be smart,” he said. “Don’t get lost in it.”
I asked him if he knew anything about how drugs made their way to the city and he chuckled.
“You trying to get me killed. Everybody got the man they answer to, you know, and that chain start somewhere. You hear stories, bad men, like the baddest dudes you can imagine, disappear off the streets and they supposed to be running things. But it’s hard to know what’s real and what just stories. It probably all come from China, it’s how they stay ahead of Americans, they keep us drugged up.”
I asked him if he knew anything about alien drugs.
“I heard things. It’s funny you ask, some of these fiends out here be acting weird sometimes, but it’s like I say, it’s hard to know what’s real.”
I told him that I hoped he got to where he wanted to be and he thanked me. I took his number and he agreed to speak again in the future.
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