Mr. Smiley took long strides as he paced in front of Jack. “Dr. Savage,” he began. “When you began work on the Locust project, did you have any ethical concerns regarding the use of live human test subjects?”
“Mr. Euphoria, we are not here to discuss Dr. Savage’s previous crimes. Now, if you would kindly...”
“No Judge, it’s ok.” Jack looked directly into Mr. Smiley’s eyes as he answered. “No. I had no ethical concerns regarding the use of live human test subjects.”
Jack sat in the large gray chair in front of the desk. It was comfortable, facing the large full panel window that took up the rear wall of the office. “Live humans? Where on earth are you going to get live humans willing to let us do this?” Jack leaned back in comfortable chair, disbelief across his face. “Max, I know we’ve used live subjects before, but only one or two at a time. Not..” Jack searched through the files in front of him. “Not forty-three at a time! Why the bloody hell do we need this many at once?”
Behind the desk a large, red velvet chair span around. In the chair sat a tall, well muscled, handsome man. The light reflected off his pitch black hair. He wore a slimming red suit, and a long thin black tie. Although he had a well defined bone structure, his rugged chin was cleanly shaven. As he turned Jack remembered why he was the boss. As well as being a true genius, he also had enough charisma to sink a ship. He spoke in a deep voice, a smile across his face the entire time. “Jack, we aren’t simply engineering a single soldier. We are designing an assembly line, a way to turn the average Joe-shmo into a perfect military asset. To do that we need to create a procedure that works with any person, and to do that we need a lot of test subjects.”
Jack looked at the papers on the desk. “But Max we...” Jack looked up from the papers into Max’s smiling face. He hated how Max could convince him to do almost anything with just a smile, and could make him do anything else with a few simple words. “Fine Max. I’ll do it. But how on earth do you plan on telling the board about this?”
With the flash of a smile Max replied. “I don’t. It is none of their business. Well, not until those idiot stock holders pry this company from my cold, dead hands. Now come on Jack, what has gotten into you? We’ve done plenty of these projects before.”
“Before,” Jack was lying in his ill lit room, on his stiff bed, staring at his cool gray concrete ceiling. As the springs dug into his back he remembered his response to Max. “Before we didn’t have the board on our asses about questionable ethics.” His thoughts were drawn away from the past be a gunshot. Somewhere down the hall, another prisoner must have tried to fit his hand through the food deposit slot. Jack had often thought that by doing so, one could grab the guard dropping off the food and take his gun, unless, of course, the guard got to his gun first. As Jack heard the commotion of multiple locusts running around to secure the area, Jack remembered what he had wanted to say to Max. “Before, we weren’t kidnapping and butchering hundreds of men to turn them into our own personal army.”
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