Chapter Forty-eight: Jarvis - Boy Scouts

Corporal -- no, Sergeant -- Mizuguchi was waiting for Jarvis and Aspen as they reentered the Messina. He exchanged salutes with her and then watched, impressed and amused, as she turned and offered the appropriate greeting for a civilian consultant to Dr. Aspen. Mizuguchi was going to go very far, he reflected.

He just hoped she wouldn't get pulled down into the Charybdis whirlpool the way he had. It seemed like he'd spent his whole life, lately, just trying not to drown.

She led them directly to the conference room and the three sat down together.

"General Baldwin has sent word that he wants us to proceed to Earth in two days' time," she informed them. "The intent is that we should arrive after the local forces have taken Riddick into custody, and he will be turned over to us at that time. Given what you two have learned on Troubadour, the General wants both of you, especially Dr. Aspen, available to begin studying and treating him as quickly as possible."

Jarvis nodded, looking at Aspen bleakly. They'd already discussed their prognosis for Riddick at great length. If he really had begun experiencing dissociative episodes, there wasn't going to be much that they could do.

He hoped that they were wrong. The idea that little Bryan might still be alive somewhere within that monster, trapped and unable to prevent the horrors he committed, was unbearable to contemplate. He didn't want to come face to face with proof that it was true.

Aspen had circles under her eyes andd her pale face was beginning to look haggard. The last four days had been hell on everyone as they scrambled to learn as much as they could before all the evidence could vanish. Mizuguchi, he noted, looked equally exhausted, although her youth and darker complexion were more generous to her about it.

The Sergeant opened a file. "We still haven't been able to determine any kind of connection between 'Angelica Porter' and Peter Malcolm, if there is one. Nor do any of Malcolm's victims seem to have had any kind of contact or connection with Riddick. So far, that line inquiry is a dead end. Do you still believe that Riddick killed Malcolm as an act of revenge?"

Jarvis shrugged. "It seemed consistent with the M.O. But we've been coming up with a lot of inconsistencies in our investigation. Riddick appears to be losing touch with reality to a greater degree than we'd expected, despite the fact that he seems to continue to have a great deal of precision to his actions. None of it makes sense. We can't even get his travel itinerary to work unless he managed to find a way to flagrantly violate the laws of physics."

Once again, a small voice in his head began to chant: If anyone could do it...

Dr. Aspen looked up. "Did you get our data on the real Angelica Porter?"

Mizuguchi responded with an exhausted chuckle. "Yes, we did. She died when she was four, right? Along with her brother Roger, the supposed Captain of the Singing Swan. We're running searches to see when their identities became active again. Maybe that will give us a lead on who she really is."

"I doubt it," Jarvis muttered sourly. "Riddick's much too thorough, even when he is in meltdown. If he created those identities, they'll be virtually perfect. He probably established them months -- or years -- before he intended to use them."

That was, after all, what he'd done on Nereid. Even now, what they'd discovered in the wake of Riddick's abrupt, bloody escape had him in awe. If only the boy hadn't panicked...

If only he hadn't found the press release. In retrospect, it was easy to see why Riddick had jumped to the conclusion that he was about to be quietly terminated. He had no idea, after all, of the Tribunal's real plans for him.

Even ten years after the Tech School killings, nobody on Earth had been willing to consider clemency. Riddick's only way out, his only avenue to freedom, was to officially "die." "Die," and awaken in the Project's training facilities, ready to begin a new life as a Phase II Operative...

Of course, the fact that the most notorious prisoner in a maximum security prison had successfully hacked into the most classified files on-site had left everyone else in a bit of a panic. The Charybdis Trap had been created soon after, on the off-chance that Riddick should ever come looking for some answers. Now he'd sprung it five times, and they'd never caught him. The closest they'd ever come was when a drug-addled mercenary found and overpowered him in the wake of his battle with the platoon of Special Forces soldiers dispatched to arrest him. Of course, the merc in question had an extremely old grudge against Riddick, thanks to the debacle with Ruth Baker...

Another way that the Charybdis Project is like a Greek tragedy, he thought to himself with wry amusement. Everything is so damned incestuous.

"Sir," Mizuguchi said after a moment, interrupting his thoughts. "That would imply that Ms. 'Porter' has been with him for quite some time."

"Not necessarily," Aspen replied on his behalf as he shook himself out of his reverie. "He may have created those IDs for Jack Kowalczyk."

Jarvis felt a cold wind pass through his body. By Mizuguchi's reaction, she felt it too.

"Explain?" he asked.

"He was waiting for her at Seti Station. Somehow he was able to intercept her when she was on her way to her new employer. That says he'd been tracking her moves. Maybe, initially, he thought that they would become a team again. Until he decided she'd jumped the fence and was working for us." Aspen sighed, shaking her head. "If I'd had any idea their connection was so tenuous, I'd never have agreed to the tracer."

Jarvis swallowed, his eyes and nose abruptly stinging a little. Inside him, Jack was still alive, along with Bryan Riddick. Outside, in the real world, both had been annihilated by a monster who still roamed free.

"So then the question is, who is using those identities now? And why?" Mizuguchi continued. "Because if he has found someone to act as his 'Charybdis Mate,' he might even now be stabilizing again."

Jarvis winced. That was the role he'd hoped Jack would take. He'd thought she was better-suited for it than anyone, after all. She and Riddick had been through so much together, and had seemed to bond so closely. He and Aspen had both been in agreement that the girl was in love with Riddick, as well. Who better for that role in his life?

"It's possible, but unlikely," Aspen sighed. "You read the transcripts of our interview with Marnie and Karen, the women at the Moulin Rouge Brothel, didn't you?"

Mizuguchi nodded.

"He wouldn't have needed them if he'd found a 'Charybdis Mate.' He probably wouldn't have been interested in them at all."

"I'm still not at all clear on what that is, anyway. The data I've been studying doesn't make much sense to me." Mizuguchi glanced at both of them. "Could I get a little clarification on it?"

Jarvis nodded. "Four of our Phase II Operatives have taken 'Charybdis Mates.' These are essentially life-partners. They're ordinary human beings, although they all tested highly in terms of IQ. They play a number of roles in the Operative's life. They're sexual partners, they assist in the Operative's missions, everything."

He stood up and moved to the water cooler, still talking. "People who can do that are hard to find. Extreme intelligence is a requirement, as is a great deal of bravery. They have to be able to forge an emotional bond with the Operative, and they have to be able to keep up with him -- or, in Ruth Baker's case, her -- sexually.

"They tend to have a strong balanciing effect on the Operative's emotional states. Nathan Sorenson, for instance, used to be very volatile until he took up with Corporal Logres. She's now on permanent assignment to the Charybdis Project as his partner. Two of the other Operatives bonded similarly with women; Garth Torrance surprised us all by bonding with a man."

"And nine years ago, before she died, Ruth Baker took up with a man named Anthony Johns," Aspen said quietly. "Now that ended in disaster for everyone."

"How?" Mizuguchi looked puzzled. Of course, he thought. Ruth Baker had been dead for eight years; even though she was on the list of Riddick's "classified" victims, Mizuguchi probably hadn't had time to review the information about her.

"Tony Johns tried to poison Riddick," Jarvis explained, amused by Mizuguchi's look of shock. "He slipped Adrenosynth 17 into one of Riddick's drinks. It was jealousy. Ruth was trying to get behind Riddick's defenses by seducing him. Tony couldn't handle it. Adrenosynth 17 is seriously dangerous stuff. Most of the coma victims they used in Phase I had taken it; it was extremely popular fifty years ago. An ordinary person would have gone into severe shock at the kind of dosage he put into Riddick's drink. Might have even gone brain-dead on the spot. Riddick, however... he exploded into violence."

Poisons never worked on Riddick for long. They'd found that out when he was eleven and they'd tried to keep him out of the math contest. They'd had to reinfect him with the stomach flu virus every four hours because his body kept successfully shaking it off...

"When the smoke cleared, Ruth and Tony were both dead, torn to pieces. Tony's brother, William, was critically injured and only just managed to survive," Aspen finished.

"That's not the same William Johns who captured Riddick five years ago, is it?" Mizuguchi asked. She swore quietly when both Jarvis and Aspen nodded.

"And that was how we lost the last surviving female Charybdis Subject, you see. She was the only one of the Phase II females who didn't commit suicide." Jarvis needed more water. No, what he really needed was a stiff drink. Or maybe just a vacation.

What he really needed, he realized, was the knowledge that Riddick was dead. That his personal nightmare was over. He'd never get his family back, of course. It had been a decade since Mel had accepted one of his calls. He'd only heard from her through lawyers, once she decided to divorce him. His daughters, at least, would accept his calls, but they were distant, reserved. They'd all become that way after he'd taken Bryan Riddick to Velma Skinner's foster home. It had killed him to do it at the time. He'd had no choice, but his family had refused to forgive him nonetheless.

Bryan had refused to forgive him, too.

Four months had passed for him when he saw the boy again. For Bry it had been three years. And there was no Bry anymore, he'd found to his shock.

He'd arrived at Mrs. Skinner's house, eager to see Bryan, only to find himself confronted by a stranger. The boy had grown, of course. That much he'd expected. But the aloofness in his eyes struck him like a blow.

"Lieutenant Jarvis," he'd said, inclining his head with precise politeness... if he'd been talking to a stranger.

"Bryan," Jarvis had answered. He'd been hoping the boy would greet him as "Uncle Reg." He'd tried, on the car ride to Mrs. Skinner's house, to explain to Bryan why he couldn't stay with Mel and the girls, why he couldn't go into cryo-sleep with them. Now he realized that the boy had tuned him out completely, refusing to hear a word he'd said at the time.

At the mention of his name, Bryan Riddick cocked his head quizzically. "Who? My name is Rich."

Jarvis had glanced at Mrs. Skinner. The look she'd given him had been both sad and stern.

"Bryan, I--"

"Bryan is dead." The boy took the chair farthest from Jarvis and sat down. "You should know." He glanced at Mrs. Skinner himself, and something in his expression made it clear that he wanted her to leave the room. She did.

His dark brown eyes turned back to Jarvis once she was gone, filled with irony. "You're the one who killed him, after all."

"Bryan, that's not fair."

"There is NO FUCKING BRYAN!" the boy hissed, his whisper thousands of times worse than a shout ever could be. After a moment, his body relaxed again and he sat back in his chair. "Life ain't fair, anyway, Lieutenant. Don't you know that yet? Hell, you should. You taught me all about that, didn't you?"

The eyes dared him to deny it. What had happened to the sweet, carefree boy he remembered, Jarvis found himself wondering. Maybe if he got him back to Mel and the girls, he'd recover...

"I'm here to take you back home, Br-- Rich."

Sarcasm sparked in the boy's eyes again. "Home? Where's that? Jamestown? Not likely. Only real home I ever had was a dumpster behind a liquor store. Shoulda stayed in it."

Jarvis winced. "The girls miss you. Mel misses you."

Bryan -- Rich -- shook his head. "They've been sleeping. Anyway, they'd still miss me even if I went, because I'm not the person they're expecting to see, am I? You given any thought to how hard it'll be on Val? We were the same age. Now I'm three years older. I'm Patty's age now... until the next time you stick them in the freezers again. Go away, Lieutenant. I don't want to be part of your family again."

And just like that, the conversation had ended. Rich Riddick, no longer a boy called Bryan, got out of the chair and left the room. It was the last time they came face to face until Jarvis got word that "Rick" Riddick had murdered the nine other members of his chess club one night, four years later.

He'd killed them, gone home, taken a shower, done his homework... and when the police arrived to ask if he'd seen anyone or anything suspicious at the school, he'd calmly told them that he'd been the one who stabbed all nine of his friends. Jarvis had wondered if his killing rage had ever seemed to reach above a whisper for them. He'd wondered if there had been any rage at all. Possibly there's just been that glacial calm, that odd, ironic gaze...

Mizuguchi jarred him back out of his thoughts. "I've been wondering about that. Why is it that the female subjects turned their violent tendencies inward, and not outward like the male subjects?"

Jarvis blinked and shook his head, pushing away his thoughts of the boy he'd once known. "That would be a better question for Dr. Aspen, I think. And it only applies to the Phase II subjects, anyway. None of the Phase I subjects committed suicide, aside from Evelyn, and she doesn't actually count."

"Evelyn was the first?" Mizuguchi flipped through her notes and nodded. "Oh, yeah. I see that. But she was female as well. Maybe a more important question is why none of the female Phase I subjects did, and why Ruth Baker didn't."

"My theory," Dr. Aspen said after a moment, "Is that the Phase I subjects formed a collective bond. None of the Phase II subjects had contact with each other until after the Crisis Year. We didn't want a repeat of the Phase I debacle, after all."

We, Jarvis thought sadly to himself. You hadn't been dragged into this yet, Martina. I'd only just been dragged into it.

"So you think that the female Phase I subjects were part of a... collective mind or something?" Mizuguchi frowned.

"No, although they'd developed something of their own culture. They knew they were different from ordinary humans. They felt isolated from humanity, but not from each other. It probably seemed perfectly natural to theem to turn on us the way they did." Aspen leaned back and rubbed at the spot between her eyebrows for a moment. "I think that the Phase II subjects felt that same sense of isolation from humanity. They just didn't have any contact with people like themselves, to fill the gap. The girls, for the most part, seemed to become listless, experiencing flashes of temper but nothing violent, until they suddenly took their own lives."

"So what made Ruth Baker different? She was just as cut off as they were." Mizuguchi glanced between them.

"She had a much more aggressive personality," Jarvis answered. "Her anger turned outward instead of inward. We almost didn't get to her in time. She was the first to display instability. She killed her foster parents... practically cut her foster mother's head off. We managed to hush the whole thing up before the story could break. As a result, when the other Phase II boys began to display aggressive patterns, we were ready and we got them locked down before they could act on their new volatility."

"And Riddick?"

"We'd been watching him, too, of course. And we were bored silly. Up until he killed those kids, he was perfectly calm. Icy calm. Well-liked at his school, never gave anyone any trouble... we just weren't ready for what he did. It happened, and the story broke, before we could prevent it." Jarvis shook his head. "Up until then, he'd been a goddamned Boy Scout. We just weren't ready."

Once more, Jarvis's memories devoured him. The day Patty had shown up at the house, repeating "everything's okay" over and over again... Valerie, it had turned out, had drowned. She'd gotten caught out farther than she should go, and had panicked when some idiot kid on a motorboat came too close to the shore. Bryan Riddick had pulled her out of the lake and administered CPR before any adult could respond intelligently. A seven-year-old boy had saved a girl's life using CPR... it had taken all of the Project's resources to shut up that little Human Interest story.

While Jarvis had been in Cryo-sleep, on his way back to Earth, nine-year-old Rich (no longer Bryan) Riddick had been playing in a municipal parking lot when one of his friends had tried to jump down from a nearby wall, landing wrong and snapping his leg. By the time paramedics could be coaxed into that rough neighborhood, Rich Riddick had already set the bone and splinted the leg. Fortunately, nobody would believe he'd done it; nobody ever believed anything the kids from that neighborhood had to say.

He'd disarmed fellow students at school on numerous occasions. He'd tutored his classmates, at Miss Spenson's request. He'd been everything they'd ever hoped the Phase II subjects might become... until the day he became a rabid killer.

"A Boy Scout," Jarvis muttered sadly to himself.

He felt Dr. Aspen's hand cover his, gently. After a moment, Mizuguchi tactfully got up and left.

You don't understand yet what it's like, Sergeant, he thought. You haven't watched enough people you care about die or get turned into something awful. You don't understand yet. But you will.

God help us all, you will.

The Charybdis Project, after all, waas a soul-killer. Anyone who needed proof of that only had to look in the soulless eyes of Richard Bryan Riddick, who'd murdered the one person who might have been able to save him, who might have been able to help him -- "Jack" Kowalczyk.