Page 72 of The Syphon King

She nodded a little and again moved out of his embrace, regarding all of them. “I need to return to them. We’re having a prayer circle. But...please hurry.”

NIDEV COULDN’T ENJOYthe astonishment on the good doctor’s face more when he provided him with a number to Dr. Harlow. Back in his office, the testing was all that was left, and he closely watched David’s face as he tried texting first.

“Terrifying tabernacles,” he gasped in awe with a laugh. “He replied!I think it’s him!”

“Think?”

He showed him his phone.

Harlow. It’s Dr. Ubaldo. Are you there?

Prove it,JACKOFF.

Nidev wasn’t sure what to say other than, “I can surely understand why he might wonder how you found him, but the hostility is...intriguing,” for lack of a better word.

It made David chuckle. “Harlow is one of a kind. This hostility feels related to our Handy anomaly, hence theJACKOFFterm.”

“Handy anomaly?”

He put his phone down, aiming a mix of curious expressions at him that sparked Nidev’s interest. “I suppose there’s no more need for classified secrets now,” he muttered. “As you know, my line of work delves in the realms of advanced biotechnology. Ten years ago, I was invited to work with DARPA on some top-secret projects. The military was one of their prized divisions, and so I focused my talents there and intended to create the ultimate human soldier unlike anything ever imagined. I searched the database for subjects to work with and found five individuals with phenomenal cognitive gifts. Four of them were death row criminals, including our good Dr. Harlow whileAugustine I later learned came to me from an orphanage.

“Augustine had a partitioning gift that allowed him to fracture his mind into pieces at will. The termfile it awaywas one of many profound abilities he possessed, only his filing cabinets were entirely impenetrable. I was able to develop a program that allowed me to access this part of his brain for testing my cognitive enhancement theories. Once I managed to partially neuro-link him with the four other gifted individuals, it was balls to the wall as they say in testing, tweaking and even creating programs tosyncthem into a single acting unit.

“But to be accurate and fair, I was more like the assistant to Dr. Harlow,” he chuckled with pride. “I surely didn’t mind. He and Kult were the engineers. Kult had the ability to see secret things hiding in plain sight and Harlow was able make those things he saw happen. But Sync was the critical component. No matter what sort of extreme stimuli I introduced to Sync’s brain, he was able to level it out nearly instantly, reducing it to harmless waves that mimicked a baby’s sleep.

“Now, Pain, he was something spectacular. Able to turn all forms of algia or pain into physical strength. You’re seeingthe possibilities,” David saw with wide eyes when Nidev couldn’t hide his marvel over such a thing. “We all did, each of us. And within a year, we’d done it, we’dmeshedtheir gifts so that they worked together. KAPHAS was officially a formidable soldier where all forms of pain were converted into unstoppable power. Along with his ability to think rapidly and forget nothing, they rivaledsuperman.”

“Kaphas?” Nidev wondered.

“An acronym I used to refer to them collectively. K-ult, A-tlas, P-ain, H-arlow, A-ugustine and S-ync.”

“What did Atlas do?”

His eyes brightened. “He was our human computer. He gave them the ability to forget nothing with his photographic memory. Together, they were truly a thing to be feared.” Nidev watched darkness ebb into his excitement. “Or misused.”

“The reason you went into hiding,” Nidev said, getting his nods.

“I think I was the last to figure it out, really. The boys already had a plan to prevent it and I merely unwittingly accommodated them. By removing Sync’s ability from the soldier, the program could not function, as it was his synchronization gifts that tailored it, like a signature.Without the signature, they became a ghost, virtually non-existent.”

“So, you helped them escape.”

“I had little to do with the technical aspects of the escape, they plotted all of it, I merely did as instructed. They secretly raised the funds, built a facility, even relocated their real bodies and preserved them in cryonics. Once they reached the phase in their escape that allowed them to reunite with their bodies, they did so.

“But we were discussing Handy, and this is where he comes in. Two things had to happen for this escape plan to work. Only a very small part of Sync was to be left in them, and all their memories had to be removed to ensure traces of what they were became entirely lost. Augustine was dropped off where his only biological brother would find him, which he indeed did. And only through near-death experiences would they be able to access the part in Augustine’s brain that held the fullness of their escape plan. This is where I realized there was more to this plan than I ever knew. There was this...Butterfly in their convoluted web that remained in their conscience. She was to be used in the part of their plan that involved revenge.”

“Revenge.”

“Against those who had hurt Augustine. I did not know that when I put them in Augustine’s head, they’d becomeonewith him, knowing all he’d experienced.”

“What happened to him?”

He shook his head. “I still don’t know that. They never breathed a word of it to me and it was inside a part of him that the program didn’t reach. Buttheyreached it. And for these men to devise an escape plan for the sole purpose of revenge says a lot about the horror of his past.”

“So... they found this Butterfly?”

“They did. And she provided them with details but without remembering the fullness of their revenge scheme, it was a puzzle they had to piece together, and Kult did, being the puzzle genius that he is. But there was one thing none of them foresaw. And that was falling in love with the Butterfly.”

“Oh damn,” he muttered, getting David’s nods.

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