FILE NO. 182

PERSONAL JOURNAL ENTRY—DR. ROSE FRANKLIN, PH.D.

Location: Underground Complex, Denver, CO

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

Those are not my words. In fact, I had to look up the exact quote. Like everyone else, I only knew “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” We tend to romanticize good quotes, and I always imagined Oppenheimer uttering those words while staring at the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. In reality, he spoke those words during an interview for an NBC documentary in 1965. He had had twenty years to think about it.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project these past few days. I haven’t been building a bomb, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore a very simple truth.

I am building a weapon, and a formidable one at that. But that’s not the truth I’m hiding from. There’s no hiding from that. I spend most of my time understanding just how devastating it can be. I realize it may have been an instrument of peace, but not the kind of peace achieved through righteousness and understanding. This is meant to be a killing machine, one of such might and power that no one would stand against it.

It works. I’m afraid of it. I’m reminded of it every night in my dreams. All of us are. I keep showing up earlier and earlier in the morning, either because I can’t sleep or because I don’t want to go back to whatever dream I was having. Inevitably, someone’s already there, or they show up a few minutes later. No one wants to talk about it, but we can all tell we’re going through the same thing.

My dream is usually the same: she’s standing over me, then she bends on one knee and brings her face a few feet above my head. She’s staring at me with bright, blinding turquoise eyes; she looks like she’s about to speak. That’s when I wake up in a sweat.

After yesterday, I know I won’t have the same dream ever again. We finally looked at the head.

Everyone was dying to see it. It had just been sitting there wrapped in a black tarp. I’d catch Kara trying to take a peek about once a day. I could have just unwrapped it, but it was too much fun torturing her. She would pace around it for twenty minutes, hoping the tarp would magically fall off. And then she’d walk off angrily.

Yesterday morning, I brought Vincent in his wheelchair and I told Kara it was time. We unstrapped the head and removed the cloth. She is stunning, but not at all what I expected.

She has thin lips and a very small nose. All her features are small, delicate. She almost looks like a child, innocent but controlled. Chaste is the word that comes to mind.

I can’t decide if it’s her hair or a very elaborate helmet, but her head is covered in wavy spines with intricate carvings. Turquoise light seeps between them. Some extend forward onto her cheeks and brow, others are sleeked backward toward her back armor. From her forehead, several spines join to form an axe-shaped appendage at the back of her head.

When we unwrapped her, I was expecting to cross the same intense gaze I see in my dreams, quailing at the idea to be honest, but it wasn’t there. No blinding light, no gaze, no eyes.

She doesn’t have eyes, only small recesses where they ought to be. It’s very unsettling. You can’t help but wonder just how aware of your presence she really is. I know she’s not aware of anything, because I’m the one who put her together. But there’s something about her…a presence. I think there’s more there than a glorified toaster. Besides, I can’t really be blamed for anthropomorphizing something that’s anthropomorphic. Anyway, I doubt she’ll leave me alone at night, but she’ll have to find another way to scare me.

We had to use two cranes to raise the head. As soon as we attached it, the whole room started to shake. Her entire body stiffened for a second, then everything went back to normal. I asked Kara to grab a walkie-talkie, get up the elevator, and into the sphere.

She went in and braced herself at her station. I asked her to raise her right arm slowly. It was fantastic to watch. She moves! After all this, we finally got her working. We made her move her arms, rotate her head. She even bent down to pick up a storage crate. She’s really gracious, delicate in her movements. I didn’t expect such fluency. Of course, she crushed the crate with her fingers, but we can work on that. Kara’s not that delicate herself.

We found weapons today. I haven’t told our nameless friend yet. He’ll find out soon enough. I just don’t want to give him the pleasure of pretending he hasn’t been waiting for this all along. We came upon them by accident. I was expecting we’d find weaponry at some point, but not so soon, and I always thought it would be lasers, a death ray, something futuristic. Maybe I just watch too many movies. I was wrong, it turns out our girl is old school. She has a sword and a shield.

Apparently, she was built for close combat. I don’t know what she was supposed to fight, but it must have been big. The sword is a focused-energy weapon. Like a lightsaber, only wider, double-edged, more like a medieval sword. Star Wars meets Lord of the Rings. It’s not turquoise like everything else. It’s a very, very bright white. It’s almost impossible to stare at.

What’s really—I seem to use the word cool a lot these days—is that we can dial its length on the console. Vincent figured out that it works on a sixty-four-step scale—1 being the shortest, 64 the longest. At the lowest settings, it’s almost like a dagger. At its longest, it’s…We made a large hole on the floor when we tried it at 64. We stopped playing with it after that.

Fortunately, the shield is somewhat safer to experiment with. It’s also based on controlled energy and we can adjust the size in the very same way. At the lowest setting, it barely covers her wrist. At the highest, it can cover her entire body. It’s also not nearly as bright as the sword. It’s almost transparent, in fact. You can tell something’s there because it distorts light a little bit, like the exhaust of a car on a really hot day.

We discovered it can also be used as a weapon. It took another hole—in the wall, this time—to figure that one out, but the edge of the shield is very sharp…if you can say that about light.

The light in both the sword and shield appears to be self-contained. There’s no sign of an electromagnetic field around either of them. Needless to say, I have no idea how they’re able to manipulate photons as if it were regular matter. Yet, they seem to do with light as they please, like a sculptor would mold clay.

We haven’t found any long-range weapons so far, but I’m certain we will. She’s full of surprises. There needs to be a way for her to focus the energy release away from her. If she does, I’m sure that weapon will have a pretty long reach. She really needs to be able to control it or she’d be more of a danger to her own army than to the enemy’s. All one would need to do is throw enough power at her and she’d obliterate everyone around. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near her when she gets into a fight.

On the other hand, if she can focus all that energy in one direction, she’d be a nightmare to deal with. Everything one would hit her with, she would throw right back. The more powerful the enemy, the mightier she would be. That, I have told already. But I hope we don’t find out for a long, long time.

It’s important for “the powers that be” to know that we have yet to uncover her more destructive powers. I fear they’ll take her away from us the minute they believe there’s no more weaponry to be found. We must use the time we have to discover as much as we can about how she works and what she can do besides leveling a city or vaporizing an army. I haven’t told Vincent anything, but I think he understands.

All we need now is to make her walk.

We’ll have to wait before we take her for a spin. Vincent’s not ready. He can barely walk himself.

I hate to say it. We’ve already lost several months because of his injury, and I know Kara’s more than eager to resume training, but it’s a miracle Vincent’s lasted this far. To push him any farther would jeopardize everything.

I would never tell him, because it would only make things worse, but I can’t stomach what they’ve done to him. I understand the appeal, there’s even a reasonably sound logic behind it, but we must draw the line somewhere if we’re to remain human.

He hasn’t tried reversing his knees yet. He wants to, but I don’t. If I understand correctly, it’s going to rip apart whatever muscle he has left on the back of his legs. They’re just too short. It’ll take months for him to build muscles that fit his new anatomy.

I realize that won’t happen if he doesn’t try his knees, but he’s already in pain twenty-four hours a day. I’m not going to put him through even more. And it’s not in anyone’s interest to push Vincent to do something he’s not ready for. It’ll break him physically, and mentally. It will bring resentment, mistrust, and will put every member of my team at unnecessary risk.

I know he’ll have to try them at some point. I don’t think it’ll be easier, or any less painful, if he does it a month from now. In fact, it’ll probably be more painful because he’ll have gained some muscle mass. But I’m hoping he’ll have gained some strength as well, physically and mentally.

All that said, I can’t wait to see her walk.

So, what’s that simple truth I’ve been hiding from? It’s not that I’m building a weapon. It’s not even that it’ll kill people. That’s just a matter of time. What I’ve been trying so hard to deny is that I’m loving every minute of it. As much as I’d like to be principled enough to walk away from this, I’m having the time of my life. I’m a scientist, and this is what I breathe for. If I can learn to live with that, I might be able to sleep again.

I tried to find out what Oppenheimer’s thoughts were while it was all happening. He had this to say in 1945:

“But when you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.”