Chapter Five

James Marshall Institute

It was another of those long featureless corridors that seemed to go on forever.  Mulder had had his fill of them today.  In fact, he’d had his fill of pretty much everything today. 

He trooped after his father simply because there was nothing else to do.  He’d had all the revelation he could stomach and he just wanted some time to digest it all and separate possible truths from probable lies.  He watched balefully as his father hurried ahead of him, obviously anxious to add the icing to the cake of secrets he had presented his son with today.  The man seemed so different from the father he had known as a child that Mulder was starting to question if he was actually his father and not a clone or a shapeshifter in a devilish masquerade.  It was only in the tell tale gestures and intonations of voice that he recognized him.  If his father had behaved this openly when he was young Mulder may not have felt so isolated and might not have hightailed it off to England, but that was a stupid train of thought.  If he had not gone to Oxford he would never have found his interest and supreme ability in life. 

Behavioural science, or criminal psychology as the English called it, was the perfect choice for an introspective mind such as his.  It had turned his introspection from maudlin self pity into a useful analytical tool that had been his saviour on too many an occasion for him to doubt it’s worth.  If he had not gone to England he would never have let his mind roam to greater things beyond his own tortured thoughts over Samantha.  He would never have begun looking for her and despite his hate/love relationship with the chase towards the truth he knew that his purpose in life was to be the thorn in side of those who would conceal that truth.   

If he’d never gone to England then he would have missed out on his relationship with Phoebe which, although he often disparaged and seldom thought about out of choice, had made him into the determined man that he had been when he discovered the X files.  She was responsible for him developing his unfailing wit and whilst some would consider that wit to be a shield he used to keep people away, and Mulder was a enough of a psychologist to see that he did use it for that purpose sometimes, but he also considered it a strength.  He genuinely did not care what other people thought of him and he could laugh at aspects of himself that other people thought were ‘spooky’.  The wit kept people away only because they wanted to stay away, because they were afraid of his strength of character and his determination in his beliefs.  It had never kept Scully away because she had never been afraid of him and had never doubted his strength, only the beliefs themselves.  Lately their roles had seemed so much reversed.  He had finally allowed doubt about himself and about his beliefs to enter his mind.  The wanting to believe had turned into needing to believe and finally into not believing.  Odd then, that these revelations from his father were coming now, in the hour when Mulder had made his choice not to believe.  These events were overtaking him too fast.  Too much information had been given to him in the last five hours and he could no longer function as an analytical creature.  Truth, lies, he didn’t, no he couldn’t, care about them anymore right now.  One thought pervaded his mind as he continued to blindly follow his father.   He just wanted to find Scully.  He would set his mind to introspection as soon as they were out of here.  Scully had to be in this place somewhere.

Mulder was so engrossed in his thoughts that he nearly walked into his father as he outside one of the doors leading off from the long corridor.  Bill Mulder held his hand against the door plate and the red lights traced a path across it, scanning for the implant.  Mulder was reminded of the tracking device attached to his arm.  Whatever plan he came up with to find Scully and get out of the institute would need a way to remove it.

Mulder followed his father into the room and looked dispassionately around himself.  He reacted not at all to the presence of high-spec audio-visual equipment set into banks of switches, dials and faders.  

“This,”  His father began.  “Is your worst nightmare.”

Mulder glanced around at the innocuous contents of the room one more time.  There were TV monitors, speakers, sound desks and the various other gizmos and gadgets which could be employed by an experienced person to edit videotape.  It looked like a very expensive edit suite which would not look out of place in a TV studio control room. Despite it’s technical nature it was ordinary in it’s possible uses and looked not in the least bit like any nightmare Mulder had ever had.

Bill Mulder began pressing buttons, flipping on switches and turning on dials.  An electronic hum rose from the equipment.  Lights began to flash steadily and in blinking sequences, but it was still just an edit suite.  Mulder’s expression must have told how much the room did not move him.

“Have you learnt nothing from the X files?”  His father demanded and Mulder shrugged nonchalantly.

“Well I’ve found out where in this country you can get a mean barbecued chicken.”  He deadpanned.  Bill Mulder grunted in annoyance.

“Often the more innocent something at first appears the more dangerous it is.”  He said firmly.  “This room is the hub of an advanced surveillance system so secret that most people on this facility don’t know about it.”

“Surveillance system?”  Mulder parroted, intrigued at lat.  “To keep track of…?”  He let the question hang.

“You know about the lighthouse places because of your partners experiences,”  Bill Mulder stated and Mulder nodded absently.  He wasn’t at all sure about that, but his father seemed to believe it and Scully certainly did.  He would concur to her judgement long enough to hear his father out.  “Well, some people could be described as lighthouses too.  In the final reckoning they will lead the chosen from the lighthouses and into their new lives.  These people are all repeat abductees who have been made special by alteration of their DNA and implantation of a device which stimulates the re-generation of the pineal gland into a useful organ as it once was.  It also has the added advantage that by changing the pineal gland it allows the interception of neurotransmitters as they pass though the brain, including the information from the optic nerve.  By duplicating these transmissions and interpreting them using the equipment in this room and the highly advanced satellite network into which it links we can conduct the ultimate surveillance of these people.  We can see through their own eyes.”

“But..”  Mulder tried to cut in, his mind whirling.  He wanted to ask if they could do the same with the persons thoughts.  Could they read minds…?

“Watch the screen.”  His father ordered and Mulder obeyed out of habit.  Bill Mulder keyed a number into a pad next to him.  “I know this by heart.”  He said softly, sadly.

The image on the screen flickered and rolled, then came into abrupt focus.  It was a picture of a TV monitor, mirrored in which was a TV monitor, and in that a TV monitor, and so on into infinity.  Mulder didn’t understand until he turned to look at his father and from the corner of his eye saw the image change on the monitor.  In that instant he knew but he didn’t look back at the screen.  Mulder fixed his attention instead on his fathers face, seeing there the mournful countenance of a repentant man.

“I didn’t let them take Samantha.”  His father told him softly.  “I did let them take you.  I wanted you to live when the end of the age of humans came.  I’m sorry.”

Mulder didn’t say anything, he just let his gaze wander slowly back to the little black monitor.  Curiously dead emotionally he toyed with the effect like a child exploring a mirror for the first time.  He viewed it from the corner of his eye, seeing his own viewpoint mirrored an infinite number of times in the endlessly regenerating lines of colour.  Then he looked full on and gazed deep into his own field of vision.

“Fox.”  He father said but Mulder ignored him and instead tilted his head different ways, searching his own sight.  It was his worst nightmare.  All this time he had known he was being bugged, had even displayed paranoia about it, and yet he’d had no idea of the depth of his involvement and of the extent of their knowledge. 

Every time he’d seen anything, they would have seen.  Each time he had read a report, a book or an article, they had known about it.  Oh shit, every porn film he’d ever watched, they’d known.  The packets of speed, the lines on the mirror, the pills, all witnessed.  If Mulder had been able to summon up enough emotion he would have sighed.  No wonder they had known how much he cared about Scully.  They would have noted every time his gaze had lingered on her just a little too long, observed each time his eyes had surreptiously feasted on her.

“Fox.”  His father tried again, but Mulder still wasn’t listening.

A telephone started ringing in the room but Mulder barely registered it.  Bill Mulder answered the phone but all the while kept a watchful, troubled, eye on his son as he stared into the monitor.  He had expected anger with this revelation, not catatonia.

“Mulder.”  He said into the receiver, a note of anger creeping into his own tone.

“Bill, bring your son to the control room now.”  He was ordered by a voice he knew well.

“What’s happened?”  He demanded back, a sliver of fear unaccountably slid through him.

“We know where the pyramid is.”  The Voice stated and the line went dead.

XXxxXXxxXXxxXXxxXXx

The intense blue light built up gradually around his ankles and spread along his legs.  As it went all the small hair follicles rose to gooseflesh and the hairs themselves tingled with static electricity.  Skinner tried to move away but the tube was barely big enough for him to move his arms and there was nothing he could do to stop the progress of the light.  He started to hyperventilate.  Sweat  was already pouring off of him.  The fear was general at first.  Confusion at awaking to find himself in the odd confinement of the clear tube which consisted of some kind of highly durable polymer.  Kicking and clawing at the material had produced no effect and claustrophobia had descended.  With it came the paranoia of a deeper kind, an almost genetic fear of the possibilities.  Skinner was infused with essentially the same fear that makes a person walking down an street on a dark night check behind them to make sure that the sound of their own footsteps echoing are not really the last sound they will hear before ‘something’ catches up with them. 

As the creeping light reached his chest the memories which Scully had hoped he would never need to know about crashed into his mind with a the force of a tsunami.  In a single instant he saw all that had happened that night.  He saw himself running through corridors, he saw the gunfire which had followed them, he saw Mulder and Scully snatch a kiss the moment before they disappeared in a shimmer of light and he saw the explosion from the inside even as he too disappeared in yellow light.  Then the deeper memories returned, the tube with the blue light covering him and the pain.  He screamed before the light fully covered him.  The memory itself was enough to hurt him.  Then the visions came.  The faces of the dead.  Old comrades fallen in battle.  The pain as a million deaths impacted on him.  Bullets pounding him and knives cutting him.  A hundred thousand tortured people and their pain engulfed his being.  Their pain was his.  Electric shocks charged through him from cattle prods.  A million broken fingers and knee caps.  Broken bones as multiple blows struck him.  All the agonies of the damned registered as his own.  Then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun.  He screamed continuously but without the visions before him he could finally hear himself.  The pain in his raw throat and lungs were insignificant compared to the pain he had just endured.

“Where is the pyramid Mr Skinner?”  A voice demanded.  Skinner’s only response was the continued scream.  “Does Mulder have it?  Was Agent Scully telling the truth?”

Skinner screamed and screamed.  Tears fell freely down his face.  His hands clenched and unclenched into fists so tight that his knuckles turned white.

The images and the pain resumed suddenly and Skinner could scream no longer as his head was forced under water by a blurry figure.  The sounds he made turned into a desperate gasping for air as he felt the bitter salty water flood into his mouth and nose, burning his raw throat and lungs anew.

 XXxxXXxxXXxxXXxxXXxxXXx

Mulder walked down yet another featureless corridor with his hand in front of his face.  He was fascinated by the idea of his hand before his own eyes being visible on that monitor.  Absently he glanced around the corridor and the random thought was thrown up that even some pot plants might make an improvement to its austere blandness.  He drifted off in contemplation of his hand once more in a quasi-catatonic state of detachment that might at another time had disturbed him.

Mulder barely noticed as they entered the brightly lit control room. The room was split into various levels by mezzanine floors and resembled nothing so much the lair of an evil villain in a Bond film.  A large screen dominated the main area and displayed a high-resolution satellite image of a section of land.  The image was continuously moving as if searching.  Numbers flashed across the edges of the screen giving, amongst other things, latitude and longitude information.

The Well Manicured Man stood watching the screen.  He didn’t immediately notice when the two Mulders walked into the room.  He placed his hand onto the shoulder of a young man seated in front of him.  The man turned to look up at him.

“We’ve searched all of the East Coast, we can’t find a trace of her implant.”

“Expand the search.”  He stated in his polished English tones.  “If you have to, expand it until you’ve searched the entire planet.  When we find her we find Them.”

The young man turned back to his work and the Well Manicured Man glanced around and saw the Mulders.  He walked towards them. 

“Bill.”  He acknowledged.  “Agent Mulder.”  He acknowledged his son and Mulder turned to look at the elderly man.  He snapped out of his trance abruptly as he saw him and then the room.  One question came to front of his mind.

“Where’s Scully?”  He demanded almost instinctively.  The Well Manicured Man smiled thinly.

“If you could tell us it would save an awful lot of our time, but I dare say that you can’t.”  He replied cryptically.  “Come with me.”  He instructed and turned, leading them towards a corridor leading off of the control room.

After a few minutes of walking in silence they heard a scream.  The room ahead of them was filled with blue light and Mulder tensed at the sight.  It triggered something in his memory, a fleeting impression which brought with it intense fear.  They walked into the room and saw the glowing tube with a nearly naked figure inside.  The identity of the tortured soul was masked by the light but his evident pain was not.

“I thought you knew where the pyramid was?”  Bill Mulder stated angrily when he saw the tube and the light.  The Well Manicured Man’s face held a look of mild disgust as he regarded the tube, evidently he did not like the method.  He made no move to stop the process. 

“We needed a element of persuasion, we have the pertinent information but not the main fact.”  He replied, cryptic to the last.

Mulders attention focused firmly on the tube and no one tried to stop him as he moved towards it.  As he drew close, the Well Manicured Man gave a signal to an operator at a desk and the intensity of the light faded.  The figure collapsed visibly, gasping for breath, and his identity was revealed.  Skinner. 

“Where is the pyramid?”  The operator asked via a microphone.  Skinner fought to speak.

“Scully said Mulder had it.”  He gasped.

“And does he?”  The operated prompted.

“I don’t know.”`  Skinner replied grimly

Mulder turned to face the Well Manicured Man.

“I don’t have it.”  He told him with an edge of panic  He pointed up at the tube.  “Let him out!”  He looked up at the tube and then frantically back at the men in the room.  “Let him out of there now.”

“We can’t until we have the pyramid.”  His father told him flatly.  Mulder strode over to face him down.

“It was all lies, wasn’t it?”  He yelled angrily.

“Not all of it.”  Bill Mulder answered seriously.

Mulder didn’t believe him and spun away in disgust, his path took him in the direction of the Well Manicured Man.

“I don’t have the pyramid.”  He told him.

“We have information that you do.”  Came the reply.  He nodded at the operator.  The light grew intense again and Skinner groaned, too weak to scream.

Mulder looked up at the blue glowing tube in horror.  He felt so helpless.  As far as he knew, he didn’t have the pyramid.

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