Empire Games Series, Book 1(113)

From its initial formation as the Family Trade Organization (FTO) during the first world-walker panic in mid-2002, the agency operated on a small scale. Operationally it was divided into three departments. Forward Intelligence controlled the deployment of agents and special forces in the Gruinmarkt; Interdiction provided the Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI with intelligence leads pointing to Clan smuggling operations on US soil; and Technology drew on the resources of the national laboratories to develop and manufacture world-walking machines (under the rubric ARMBAND). Prior to the nuclear attacks of 7/16, the FTO was one of the smallest organizations in the intel community. With fewer than four hundred staff it was even smaller than the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR).

The events of 7/16, the retalliatory bombing of the small nation of Gruinmarkt in the Clan’s home time line and the subsequent congressional hearings, changed everything. The FTO brief became the policy football of warring rival bureaucracies. And the Department of Energy, DHS, and Immigration all made bids to become the parent stakeholder in the embryonic agency—in the case of DOE, because of the access to oil in other time lines that it promised. DHS “won,” much as a caterpillar that wins the race to eat the spores of a particularly grotesque parasitic fungus might be said to win. It engulfed the FTO and in the process renamed it the Office of Special Programs.

But, in short order, the business of transportation security—the DHS’s prior focus, via the Transportation Safety Administration—took a backseat to the business of building and managing world-walking machinery. The new machines provided access to all the oil under all the uninhabited parallel-universe versions of Pennsylvania and California, and a similarly vast number of biospheres into which carbon waste emissions could be exported. Transportation security is not merely about terrorists and train crashes; energy security is a huge part of the picture.

Protecting airliners, trains, and Greyhound coaches is only a hundred-billion-dollar-a- year industry. Oil is everything, and the para-time frontier is potentially infinite. The iron law of bureaucracy dictates that most of the people in any large organization will, after a time, be more preoccupied with preserving their own jobs than with fulfilling the mission statement of the agency. And the best way to ensure continuing employment is to build out the organizational empire. Who could possibly argue with that?

After a decade and a half of integrating the OSP’s core mission into the DHS policy apparat, there were precious few people left over from the wild ride of the early years. Fewer still understood the fraught legacy of potential disaster left behind—the legacy created by the government’s initial reaction to the world-walkers’ attack on D.C. These remaining individuals were the few, the proud, and the cowboys: in this respect they were much like “Wild” Bill Donovan’s OSS operatives, who after 1945 went on to form the backbone of the Central Intelligence Agency but who were rapidly swamped by a rising tide of bureaucrats.

Building on this foundation, the FTO sucked in staff from the FBI, NSA, DIA, NCS, Air Force Intelligence, and other more obscure provinces of the sprawling national security empire. The embryonic OSP was largely sidelined and left to its own devices. It should be no surprise that this branch of the organization is now known (dismissively) within the DHS as “our para-time CIA”—the subagency responsible for identifying and addressing threats to the United States originating from other time lines.

OSP is small in comparison to the DHS as a whole (its budget in FY 2019 barely topped four billion dollars, making it responsible for less than 2 percent of the total Homeland Security budget), but its responsibilities are vast. In the decade and a half following the development of the ARMBAND technology—devices that used stem cells originally harvested from the brains of captured world-walkers to enable aircraft and vehicles to move between parallel universes—OSP drones mapped out paths to hundreds of new time lines.

Three quarters of the newly discovered were uninhabited, and of the remainder, all but two held only scattered tribes of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. However, the two exceptions were cause for serious soul-searching within (and without) the OSP.

The first inhabited nonpaleo time line to be identified was, of course, time line one, location of the Kingdom of the Gruinmarkt: the version of North America where the Clan originated. (Following the US retaliation on that time line, the East Coast is still unsafe to visit without protective gear and radiation detectors.) The other time line is Nova America four, an ice age version of our world that is dotted with the ruins of a long-extinct high-technology civilization. (This will be discussed at length in chapter 26, “A Bridge to Nowhere.”)

Finally, there are the unknown unknowns, as President Rumsfeld so memorably characterized them. We know today that the world-walkers’ ability isn’t natural, or even evolved. It relies on self-replicating intracellular quantum-dot enabled nanotechnology, controlled by engineered genes and activated by what one researcher described as an “epigenetic hack.”

Somewhere out there in the infinity of branching universes we call para-time, there is (or was) an advanced technological civilization—and almost certainly more than one of them. At least one of these civilizations understood the structure of the multiverse better than the best physicists in America today and built subtle machines to manipulate reality and bend it to their will. The world-walkers of the Gruinmarkt come from a primitive, preindustrial world. Exhaustive sequencing of the genome and epigenome of the few surviving prisoners has long since revealed interesting facts about their world-walking ability, which had been subtly damaged by a point mutation a couple of hundred years ago. Interrogated, they revealed a family history pointing back to a founder who had appeared in the 1760s. From where? Nobody knows. The obvious inference was that he was a fugitive, a runaway, a deserter. He kept a low profile, bedding in deep in the Gruinmarkt, willing to live a life of relative poverty in a quasi-medieval backwater in order to avoid the attention of … what?