Mindspace was the frontier of human capability but it was not new, nor was it a specifically human skill. Various cultures and religions had tapped into it throughout the ages to varying degrees and for different reasons, although few humans had refined their methods of skill development, or managed to integrate it with daily life to the same extent as the program.
The practise of meditation led into mindspace, but it took years via that pathway to build basic abilities and even longer to master on an individual basis. The achievement of transcendental states focused on connecting into a wider sense of being, existence and some variously described sense of universal consciousness. The benefits of a quiet mind and a state of pure “being” were long known, but the journey by which one achieved it was strung out, obfuscated and rendered somewhat mystical. Cultural and religious conflict diminished its significance and kept teaching and practise confined by association to identity and belief systems.
There was an inescapable irony in the involvement of intelligence services and the military with altered consciousness, whose pursuit of power and the ability to dominate inadvertently ended up making mindspace far more accessible and powerful. It was a true demonstration of the trickle down effect of technology investment by the military industrial complex. Government investigations inadvertently applied left brain analytical thinking to the right brain intuitive nature of transcendental experiences of reality and consciousness.
Western discoveries in the mindspace field were not really the preserve of the military, whose motivations stemmed from investigation into UFO, paranormal, psychological, ‘psychotronic’ and other exotic phenomena, all of which was largely born out of a paranoid, war-based state of mind. What these various organs of the state did not realise was that their military grade investment and intensive, structured and scientific research was actually closing the loop on mindspace and accelerating human understanding of it in the context of wider existence. Civilians across the world had been pursuing personal and social development of higher and altered states of consciousness for millennia. In this context, MK ULTRA itself was nothing new; its purpose was perversely introverted. Tribal peoples had long used natural “medicines”, rituals, incantations and so on to achieve altered states of mind with an emphasis on the reconnection to some kind of one-ness, be that with nature, the Earth or something larger. In the 20th century these pursuits took an aggressive turn when the rational and intuitive approaches combined. In the civilian world, western pioneers including Robert Monroe and Tom Campbell pushed the boundaries of human consciousness throughout the 1960s and 70s and commercialised their processes and understanding of how to entrain the brain through the use of various sounds across a spectrum of frequencies. It was their work, in large part, that the government appropriated and combined with its own and other research.
As MK ULTRA drew to a close in the early 70s, Harriett’s encouragement to “do MK ULTRA by other means” started Thomas on a deep dive into fields that could drive NoVeL Comms forwards. Questions around NoVeL Comms and consciousness seemed to overlap with Eastern practises and philosophies, particularly meditation. He revisited previous Agency connections to Robert Monroe, and began to appropriate aspects of The Monroe Institute’s patented Hemi-Sync Tapes, which used audio signals to synchronise the right and left brain hemispheres. The CIA actively incorporated these civilian tools into military processes.
Allard’s Agency work in the field of NoVeL Comms seeded the funding and focus for military projects that were fundamental to what he later understood as mindspace. The work formally spanned the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s and was quickly farmed out. It involved the Defence Intelligence Agency, Stanford Research Institute, and the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), amongst others. A top secret INSCOM unit operating out of Fort Meade was tasked with developing skills in extra-sensory perception in soldiers, whose agenda encompassed the investigation of remote viewing, out-of-body travel or astral projection, telepathics, telekinesis and, latterly, even time travel.
Mindspace became one of the fundamental platforms of the program. It had different forms and levels, which could be applied in different ways. At a basic level, it enabled remote, direct communication between proficient mindspace practitioners, either one-to-one or one-to-many. At its lowest level, this took the form of mental, wordless telepathic speech, apeing COATHANGER’s NoVeL Comms. A higher level enabled a faster, non-linear form of communication - emoting - that was a combination of meaning, knowledge and emotion. Emoting was harder to achieve but ultimately much more effective and efficient as it bypassed human language and multiplied communications bandwidth between the parties, and so sped up communications and understanding by orders of magnitude compared to linear speech. One potential downside of emoting was its inherent transparency. Without deliberate care and control, an emoter would lay bare their entire communicative sentiment, motives, understanding and feelings, which was a double-edged sword. Greater proficiency enabled finer and tighter control over one’s emoting as well as the ability to discern in others their degree of transparency. Between program members, transparency was the default because openness was a safeguard against corruption and meant that the program advanced as a collective, rather than on an individual or compartmentalised basis.
A skilled practitioner was able to communicate in both ways to unskilled humans but with mixed reliability and unacceptable risks. To the uninitiated, telepathic speech or emoted communications could be misinterpreted, ignored, or lead to shock. It could be mistaken as the listener’s own internal voice or could be mixed into their internal monologue or thoughts, or seem like the imagined voice of a third party. For it to be the unmistakeable telepathic voice of the mindspace practitioner required the listener’s initial receptivity and a degree of ready focus, or an initial level of brute force that grabbed the listener’s attention. It was this kind of invasion that drove shock in the untrained and unaware. The program had no general need or desire for such skills to become known and equally little desire for program members to be identified through their skills. Mindspace comms with people outside the program was generally forbidden, although aspects of it could be used in operational environments to achieve program objectives.
An evolved application of mindspace communication was described as “Framing”. A Frame could include many people in what could be thought of as a real-time consciousness workspace. The Frame was formed by an initiator and joined by those whom the initiator invited. This was done by invoking senses of the specific people’s identities when establishing the frame - name, images, smells, sentiments, words and phrases, whatever the initiator held in their mind’s eye. The resulting “emote invite” effectively pinged the relevant individual in mindspace. This meant that it wasn’t generally possible or easy to just ping anyone or everyone in the human race. Connections of some meaning had to exist to embed a good identifier in the mindspace initiator and the invitee had to be mindspace proficient and receptive. A lack of receptivity would diminish or even stop the mindspace invitations to join a Frame from penetrating the invitee’s consciousness.
Within a Frame, program members were able to form a kind of hivemind and share developed mindspace skills. To do this, bond strength amongst the participants in the Frame needed to be established and increased via a kind of ritualistic process involving Tonalisation and Wave Harmony. These rituals required the conscious involvement of everyone in the Frame because they were individual, self-focused actions that then served to contribute to their bond with others in the Frame.
Other individual skills and capabilities were accessible with higher levels of skill. Remote viewing or astral projection had been developed by civilians and the military as a function of deep meditation and focused research and development, respectively. In simple terms, a skilled individual could travel in mindspace to another location and view it, be it an adjacent room or somewhere else on the globe. There were deeper and more bizarre applications and destinations available, and the skill could be amplified via team work and focused by a kind of triangulation.
Empathic pre-disposition or deliberate work to cultivate empathy increased mindspace capability and led to a higher level ability to sense or Detect the presence and degrees of emotional state of beings within very localised range, typically tens to a few hundred meters. Detection manifested as an internalised sense of knowing, rather than some visual presentation. It was a little bit like a 3D emotional awareness of the presence of others, like having an personal, abstract radar of feeling. Detecting a being’s presence was the base state; feeling spikes of strong, dominant emotion was the higher level ability. Fear, hate, anger and aggression lay at one end of the spectrum; love, joy and great positivity were at the other end. Strangely, program research had revealed that orgasms registered at both ends of the spectrum simultaneously, although the question of why had not been definitively answered. It had been posited that procreation - an act to which orgasms were directly linked - embodied the joy of creation while simultaneously acknowledging mortality and inevitable death, hence why orgasms spiked both ends of the mindspace emotional spectrum. This was not a hard and fast rule, as later program investigations revealed. Human emotions were easy to corrupt, confuse and intermingle.
Degrees of personal knowledge could be quickly emoted between Frame participants, almost like opening a door to one’s personal mental library. One’s judgement and comprehension could not be freely accessed by others in the same way - this had to come from the individual via active cognition and sharing. It wasn’t directly possible to connect to a subject matter expert and just acquire their expertise arbitrarily. Nor was it possible to mentally take over individuals via the Frame so that they became a drone. A Frame was more like a shared harmony of individuals that ultimately aggregated into amplified levels of conscious capability.
When a Frame became focused for deliberate purpose into a closed, bonded team, they called it an OpFrame. Within an OpFrame, participants had a diffuse sense of the whole team’s positions, actions and cognition as they shared their perception with each other. One could focus down one’s sense to an individual in the OpFrame or widen out to many or all participants. Constant practise and training led to being able to quickly move through the individual and collective sense that the team combined in their OpFrame. It wasn’t like looking through the eyes of another; it was a wordless, instant mirror of their open state, which communicated more than visual, audible or speech channels could individually. It was as though another participant’s point of cognition, in which all their senses combined into their instantaneous sense of “I know…”, could be perceived and aggregated. This conferred a sense of “knowing” innately what the individuals and ultimately the team were doing and where, in relative space time. This was the result of sharing a bonded OpFrame. Inside it, direct and specific, emoted communications could occur without telepathic speech, which was supplemental to this sense of knowing.
Mindspace and Frames in general were not an entirely linear or sequential environment. It was like being party to multiple simultaneous conversations and emotional outpourings where the volume level was a function of each speaker and each listener. Self control was key to handling the information and maintaining a balance, but, done right, the information bandwidth was huge. When the purpose of a Frame was concerned with physical action in the world, it related to the physical perception of time, which tended to remain linear, thus it retained a conventional sense of forwards, linear temporal flow. When a Frame was established for more abstract, metaphysical work, the concept of time became more fluid. In some states and for some purposes, time perception could become extremely warped.
The aggregation of multiple mindspace operators’ skills into a bonded OpFrame and the amplification or enhancement of those skills created problematic phenomena that individuals and teams had to manage. The individual ability to Detect, when amplified by or aggregated with other team members could lead to an OpFrame becoming flooded or dominated by the Detections. Imagine being stood in a room where multiple people are being tortured. You would be witnessing the most brutal outpouring of cruelty and violence for possibly extremely nasty ends, and you would simultaneously be witnessing the torture victims’ reactions and responses. Visually, audibly, emotionally and ultimately cognitively, you would be saturated with both sides of the torture. Close your eyes. At least the visual path is shut off and that channel’s contribution is diminished. Clamp your hands over your ears. The audible channel is reduced - the volume of the torture gets turned down. You may still know, from the start or some other point, that the torture is occurring all around you, regardless of having seen or heard it, and so within yourself are your thoughts and emotions around the idea of being in a mass torture chamber. What visual and auditory filtering could not affect was the empathic or emotional channel, which is what mindspace operators became sensitive towards. In the room each torturer and victim naturally, unconsciously emanate emotions in the moment. To an empathic mindspace operator, this was Detected as the presence of each person and the extremes or spikes of the emotions that they emanated. Left unchecked, these Detections could Overwhelm the mindspace or Frame. Excessive Overwhelm could result in Overload, which was a debilitating, crippling state in which the mindspace operator became saturated in negative external emotion. The same could occur via unchecked exposure to excessive positive emotions. It was a trained skill to be able to Detect while filtering, suppressing and even ignoring or detaching from extremes or build ups of surrounding emotion. Add to that the effect of normal physical experience via the five senses. Operators and teams were most effective in intense environments when strength of Detections could be kept within useful parameters.
When the program used mindspace and OpFrames in intense situations, like a raid, two key roles were defined - Sensor and Assaulter. The difference between a Sensor and an Assaulter was that the Sensor prioritised the management of the shared OpFrame, whereas the Assaulter tended towards using the OpFrame to achieve tasks. Sensors fed the OpFrame with their sense of the environment via their Detections and relayed it across the team. They were information feeds and processors, feeling the environment, Detecting presence and associated emotional states. The Sensor would manage the OpFrame environment by controlling the amplification of Detections and actively filtering or suppressing them. In this way, they actively managed the Overwhelm and Overload problems. Sensors therefore tended to be the most adept mindspace operators within a team. The Assaulter was biased towards acting externally in the assault, communicating in the OpFrame and pulling sensory and awareness augmentation from the OpFrame, but inherently they would feed information back into it. The reality was that all operators were both Sensors and Assaulters, but a conscious demarcation of roles resulted in greater coherence of the OpFrame for all.
The intensity of mindspace training built up the ability to handle the complexity of the OpFrame in a combat or assault environment while still retaining full conscious control over one’s actions and awareness in physical space. The schism between the two planes was initially hard to balance, like splitting one’s brain in two while holding several conversations and looking at a different picture with each eye. At its heart mindspace and wielding it while remaining engaged in the physical world required the merging and syncing of the capabilities of the left and right brain hemispheres. Once this was mastered, senses of separation between the five normal senses and mindspace began to dissipate, to be replaced by a much broader sense of immediate consciousness. It was not an inherently intellectual thing. Being conventionally clever in a right brain, rational and intellectual sense had little to do with mastering mindspace, but proficiency in complex team-based OpFrames in intense, stressful situations required the syncing of intelligence with intuition in oneself and with others.
“Phillipe, this is your briefing. Establish mindspace then commence.”
Kneeling together in the circle, Phillipe tonalised the initiation sequence, like a mantra. He held his breath, focussing on his heartbeat. Then he began to breathe in and out in direct time with the beats. Then he slowed breathing to one breath in for two hearbeats, one breath out for two heartbeats. Then three, then four. This set up his aortic Wave Harmony. He dropped his gaze away from his team mates across the circle, defocused then began to cycle through their identities in his mind’s eye. He would construct the mindspace, they would find it and the focus would bond them.
He waited until each of his team mates’ identities echoed in the OpFrame, indicating their presence, then exchanged identifying codewords directly with each. After this operational briefing they would execute.
Mission overview.
Mission purpose is R3NJ.
Profile is Covert Program Unrestricted.
Primary objective is victim recovery.
Secondary objective is trafficker and intel recovery.
Tertiary objective is NJ test, off site.
Operational time frame is 0330 local for minimal activity.
He imaged a top down view of the buildings, then cut off the rooves and imaged each internal layout that had been burned in to their memories through repetitive study of the target site. Top down from the upper floors, then ground floor, then basements.
Target site is periphery slum. Four two-storey buildings in a block are connected below ground with an interjoining basement complex. Structures are badly built and likely weak.
Buildings contain trafficking and slave operations serving high user throughflow, which is minimal at Op time. Above ground are the business and guard set-up - typical waiting and entry room, a ground business room and toilet, and business rooms upstairs. Below ground is imprisonment/holding, staging and possible specific abuse facilities.
Constant guard presence is confirmed at 22. Four per building, 6 underground.
Hervé, confirm dynamic numbers on site now?
Hervé was in an overwatch position at the target site, 25 minutes drive away.
“3 underground, 2 male, one female. 4 overground, 2 male, 2 female. Two in Alpha, one in Bravo, one in Charlie. Delta has zero dynamics. Total of 7 dynamics. Expect positions to change.”
All, sync repeat the overview. Mission purpose is R3NJ.
The mindspace reverberated Mission purpose is R3NJ.
Profile is Covert Program Unrestricted.
The mindspace reverberated Covert Program Unrestricted.
Phillipe repeated sequentially each line of his overview. The team echoed every line in sync. Each repetitive chant drove up their bond strength, merging the echoes into a tighter emote, as their consciousness began to conjoin.
Phillipe moved on.
Nearby vehicle insertion, 4 operators per house of one Sensor, 3 Assaulters. Stealth approach to entry points 1 and 2 at the perimeter wall. Local power grid reliability is medium, power cuts are common. Hervé will cut power and landlines at the substation and exchange. Overhead drone will jam cellular, with an open channel for backup radios. Preferred building entry is half roof, via line launchers, half syncro ground entry. Maintain maximum stealth per building. An alert or disturbance in one doesn’t necessarily trigger all of them. That call is dynamic.
Maximum time is twenty minutes from first detection or alert.
If circumstances allow, evacuate buildings before basement entry, then review whether to assault basements.
Surface assault is hard stun primary, disable kill secondary.
Basement assault is disable kill primary due to the layout, space and risks to team and victims. Only hard stun if it can be done at low risk.
The team cycled through the remaining stages of the operational plan, syncing stronger and stronger through their repetition cycles. They had practised the operation and this briefing constantly over the last six weeks to develop Phillipe’s skills specific to this last phase of his operational training. He had to demonstrate the ability to command mindspace and, through it, the whole team. The environment was brutal - a literal house of horrors - which presented serious emotional and mindspace challenges on top of the physical role of being involved in a Rescue, Rehabilitation and Recruitment mission profile. The “New Jersey” test would take place after the raid. He had already shown that he could command from a remote overwatch position. This next stage was to simultaneously assault the complex while being fully engaged in the OpFrame. In the field, he would be the Leader Under Training. If he fell short, he would switch from Leader and Assaulter to a Sensor.
Phillipe boosted his last man, Emile, onto the top of the compound wall, who reached back down to haul him up. They quietly lowered themselves to the other side.
He could feel that they were all now inside.
Cut power and comms. Commence assault.
They were all detecting and establishing positions of people in the compound, triangulating with Hervé’s overwatch. Each Sensor was focused on their individual building to improve accuracy then relayed to the whole team to boost overall resolution. Hervé was augmenting them from an overwatch while operating the drone, remote EMPs in the substation and telephone exchange, and communicating with the vehicles held off at short distance.
Emile stepped back from the building wall, aiming the line launcher that was set for 11 meters, one more than the height of the building.
All rooves clear, Hervé confirmed.
Phillipe and Anders separated to sweep around the ground entries to building Alpha.
Emile fired the composite, rubberised grappling hook above the top edge of the building. It snapped open on leaving the bungee-powered gun and landed on the flat roof behind its low perimeter wall, trailing four double-density spectra lines through a small ratchet pully behind the hook. He pulled all the trailing lines to drag the hook to bite the roof wall, then he pulled just the two haul lines hand-over-hand. As he drew that pair of spectra lines through the ratchet pulley, the line ladder payed out from his backpack. In fifteen seconds, a narrow, metal runged ladder led from the ground to the roof. Anna immediately began the climb.
Phillipe’s side of the building was clear but not for long. He could hear movement inside and a muttered curse as the lights and TV in the front lobby had gone off. He felt the presences in the OpFrame. The darkness made the mindspace sensations and emotions more dominant as his visual input diminished. There were four people on the ground floor of Alpha building, one of them was just starting to move in the back room, one still in the ground floor bedroom. Upstairs were another five, mostly still, possibly sleeping.
Anders was in a position by the front door to assault or ambush, as was Phillipe at the back. Anticipating the moving person, Philipe drew his assault baton and crouched against the wall, just at the edge of the door’s arc.
The back door opened, creaking on its hinges. The air filled with cigarette smoke. “This fucking shit hole. Even Guadalajara is better than this fucking dump,” said the cruel goon. From his crouch, Phillipe held the door from swinging back closed with his heel then, in one smooth move, rose and swung the baton. Tightening his grip on the handle charged its striking surface. It impacted on the side of the goon’s head, just back from the temple, dumping a soft flash of volts and the hard strike into the goon’s brain. In the same motion, Phillipe swept the goon into a tight hold to stabilise him and control his quiet collapse to the ground.
There was no rush. He folded the goon’s arms behind his back and secured them with four zip ties then one around the ankles and one just under the knee.
“Turn the lights back on, morons. I can't shit in the dark!" came a holler from the ground floor toilet.
“Fuck you, bitch. I’m not an electrician. How’d ya think I feel? There’s no fucking TV! Now I’ve gotta listen to you shit," came the reply from the front lobby.
The conversation was brought to an unnatural end. The quick, dull blueish flash was the visible trace of Ander’s baton strike on the guard in the front room. Phillipe felt a pulsed expression of the strike in the OpFrame. Anders headed to cover the basement stairs. Anna was at the roof door, picking the lock. Emile was hauling up the ladder. Bravo team hadn’t entered at the ground yet, upstairs they were creeping down the roof steps to the bedrooms. The Bravo guards were animated and moving aggressively, with pistols on the upper floor. Charlie team was descending from the roof to the upper floor and had already secured the ground floor. All the Charlie goons were upstairs sleeping or fucking. There were signs of cruelty or violence upstairs in Delta while downstairs two guards had been disabled.
Phillipe waited for the guard in the toilet to leave so he could take him down on exit. Forcing his way in would be noisy and startling. "Hurry up! I have to go too," he said from outside, just enough to be heard, not too loud to giveaway that he was someone else.
"Okay, okay, you son of a bitch." Sounds of small movement. A few more seconds till a flush, then he’d exit.
Anna and Emile were moving down the stairs from the roof, monocle night sights engaged with pistols and batons. Anders was trying to sense into and relay the basement. From the back door, the toilet door was two big steps inside. The flush was fading and a presence was emerging from the toilet doorway. Although Phillipe could barely see him in the darkness, he could sense him strongly and the cruel brutality that he emanated, overlaid with a cold tell of psychopathy. His one-step swing to strike the goon’s jawline would have knocked him out without the baton’s huge charge, but the tool was thorough for good reason. He caught, laid and restrained him with fluid speed, then moved to ascend the stairs, ready to meet Anna. The person in the ground floor bedroom was still.
Low dread started to cycle across the back of Phillipe’s shoulders and in his pelvis, vague in its directionality. The Sensors were syncing throughout the compound and the victims’ emotional states as they together swept the buildings and the basement, then emoted that information into the OpFrame. Overload was the threat. Phillipe had to control himself first and throttle what he emoted into the OpFrame and what he took out of it. The Sensors had to throttle and filter what they encountered, which is why they were typically the most proficient mindspace operators, able to deal with extremes of emotion from the external environment. If fear, hate, pain, trauma, shock and negativity penetrated the OpFrame, Overwhelm would build. In this environment, these feelings were guaranteed. As violence increased, associated Overwhelms could spike into the OpFrame from team members’ physical and emotional stress. Phillipe held his breath then re-synced with his heartbeat to maintain his own wave. The dread held stable, like the beginning of a speed come-up in a club playing grinding dark house music amongst weeping faces.
Bravo were still holding on the roof stairs and outside the building, observing the movements inside to preserve their stealth advantage and delay open combat. Charlie had jumped the distracted guards upstairs. Sensations of panic fizzled at the edges of the OpFrame from Charlie’s Sensor. It was the victims reacting to the quiet assault. Charlie would contain them as best they could and prep them for extraction. Delta team had interrupted the guards’ upstairs assault of the victims by storming the rooms. The darkness and their co-ordinated speed made the batons effective. The Delta Sensor was suppressing the Delta victims’ emotional waves. A distinct but muted sense of panic, despair and trauma corresponded, but the Sensor’s expert suppression prevented Overwhelm. No shots fired. So far so good.
Emile snapped the upstairs door open for Anna to step in and club the last Bravo goon unconscious. She immediately began restraint as Emile controlled the victim inside with reassurance.
Alpha, Charlie, Delta, secure. Commence victim control. Anders, come with me to Bravo.
Phillipe emoted those clear commands into the OpFrame, which punched through and dominated everyone’s biploar consciousness. Affirmations instantly came back. This was a way of clearly communicating his command position in a hostile environment, amongst myriad physical and OpFrame distractions and forms of noise.
Anders and Phillipe tracked across the compound to Bravo building to reinforce its front and back entrances. Every quick step sent the dread up and up, bit by bit. Gutteral shouts poked out through the building’s downstairs window. A sense of anger, rage, vengeance and a thirst for pain began to spike as they crossed the moonlit compound. They dropped their night vision monocles into place.
Bravo assessment, Phillipe demanded.
“They’ve been gangbanging, very high, very cruel. Victim is at the end, they’re finishing him. Blackout’s stopped it but they are now tooling for a fight. I think one of them is the boss up here. High psychopathy.”
Bravo low: lethal assault through ground windows when targets in view. Bravo high: lethal assault to close.
Difficulty getting close enough for stuns risked a team injury and could alert the basement. His sense of Bravo building and team grew, filling the darkness of his left eye. His right was filled with the green night vision as he looked into the back window for targets. One bare-chested, ugly, shorn man, maybe 25, crossed into view from the stairwell.
“¡Enciendan algunas malditas luces, idiotas! Quiero ver lo que estoy jodiendo!”
A cold, cackling laugh trailed him. Another man appeared behind, a glow of a spliff puncturing the darkness. Three nearly simultaneous cracks of suppressed rifles were the end of them and someone at the bottom of the stairs. Then a fourth crack from upstairs.
Bravo secure, extract all, commanded Phillipe.
“Recovery vehicle 1 & 2 rolling inbound” confirmed Hervé.
Speed was essential now as they raced to evacuate the above ground victims. Panic and noise would alert the basement. The Sensors in each building dropped to the edge of the OpFrame and began to tonalise calm and pain control frequencies in an attempt to limit any victim’s shock at the rescue. In Alpha, Anna and Emile had already contained the 4 victims - three females of varying ages and a young boy - and had them ready near the front door. They were all traumatised, partially awake and partially drugged by their captors into semi stupors. Emile had tranquilized the Alpha guards and the other teams were doing the same. The stun baton duration was unreliable and no purpose was served by any guard regaining consciousness until the team had extracted.
A spike of condensed sadness, mortal pain, shame and an echo of latent cruelty spiked the OpFrame, driving a sensation of sickness and despair in Phillipe. The dread tingled down his spine. The Bravo team upstairs were trying to stabilise the abuse victim, a teenage boy. He was burned, lacerated, beaten, soiled and had been multiply raped that night. He was close to death. The Bravo Sensor suppressed the spike.
Anders went to open the front compound gate as the unlit, nearly silent electric evac van drew up. Phillipe swept over the OpFrame, assessing everyone’s progress. Victims first. One in Delta and three in Charlie had to be tranquilized when their reactions began to peak. Better to fully control them in the extraction than risk the whole operation. The team’s operational body armour, helmets, and weapons made them look like special police. That plus their calm and pain control tones helped to keep the victims manageable and quiet. Over the next few minutes the teams led and lifted the victims out of the houses and into the vans. Half the victims were run to the first van and the other half to the second, which would take them to the processing site.
Phase 1 complete. Assess basement assault.
No objections to the underground assault. Speed and surprise were still on their side. Terminal force was the default for Phase 2, but the situation they detected caused Phillipe to think otherwise. The Sensors Detected 20 victims plus 6 guards and 7 dynamic targets. The layout was tight: two parallel, narrow straight corridors with holding rooms off one side, in a mirrored formation. The team was sixteen strong, meaning 8 per corridor. Four would enter at one end, four at the other of each corridor. The crossfire risk could be overridden by the advantages of the OpFrame. Two Assaulters would aggressively sweep room by room, going for rooms with Detected guards and punters. Behind, two Sensors would provide cover while suppressing the emotion. They had been on site for 7 minutes with no alerts.
Retaining command, Phillipe went Alpha Sensor with Anders. Anna and Emile became the Assault pair. Bravo team worked the opposite end of Phillipe’s corridor. Charlie and Delta teams took the other corridor. At the bottom of the makeshift stairs that led down from Alpha building, Phillipe sank into a sudden despair. It was Overwhelm. Inside the despair there was a cruelty that made him feel like he was being held underwater by someone full of endless hate. He had to fight that despair and use the team.
Suppress maximum on me, he ordered. Anders and Bravo Sensors flooded the OpFrame with a 528Hz tone to suppress the Overwhelm and provide Phillipe with room to re-orient.
Alert, one Tango in the corridor, heading to Alpha, Anders emoted. A guard with a flashlight or lamp was coming straight for them. Anna, at the front of their stack, pulled out her combi-blade and dropped into a low strike stance. Behind her, Emile’s pistol aimed over her. In the other corridor, Charlie and Delta Assaulters were taking up breach positions at two nearest doors.
Phillipe had to quickly dominate his own state of consciousness and the despair. The natural temptation was to counter the Overwhelm with aggression. The trained response was to avoid aggression and switch to conscious neutrality, which he found akin to rapidly disassociating from everyone for a brief period. He focused on the Sensors’ tone and the incoming goon to abandon his despair. As soon as he felt it drop, he issued a conscious command.
Blade him at the bend.
As the flashlight and foot appeared in Anna’s view, she snapped up and around, plunging the charged blade upwards into the unsuspecting goon’s heart. The blade’s lethality was amplified by its charge, which paralyzed and silenced the goon as the blade sank in. As soon as she had swept him quietly to the floor, Anna and Emile entered the corridor, heading for the fourth room. Dull light leaked from some of the doors, indicating lamps or battery lights which betrayed the target rooms. Phillipe and Anders followed behind, stopping by the first and second doors, which felt full of victims. From the other end, Bravo headed for their second door. The motions and sequencing were silent and orchestrated. In the OpFrame, Phillipe had an overview of all actions. Through it, each operator was co-ordinating and communicating. There was no need for vocal speech.
Within a few seconds of entering the unlocked door, Anna and Emile were back out, each dragging a stunned, naked man into the corridor via a one-armed choke hold. Light spilled into the corridor. The presence inside the room remained still, emanating pain and dulled, deep trauma. They moved up to their next target room, also unlocked, to breach it and disable the pair of adults inside. Bravo Assaulters dragged out two female abusers from a room then immediately moved to the door with the remaining target. The team’s speed and silence meant the abusers and guards were nothing but vulnerable, especially given the time and their preoccupations. Anna, Emile and the Bravo assaulters simultaneously entered the two unlocked rooms. Phillipe felt the intention to fire fractionally before the cracks echoed from the Bravo Assault pair. Anna and Emile used the batons.
Instantly Phillipe felt a conflict. He had lost feel and focus on the other corridor. He had over-concentrated on his immediate surroundings because of the strength of emotions in the corridor. He was sweating and sensations of anxiety were creeping into his belly and arms. This was a glimpse of the brutality and the damage that had welled up in this pit of despair. He had to control his reaction and exposure to the black emotions that filled the hellhole. He held his breath to give his aortic wave a chance to harmonise and focused on the overview of both corridors. The moment he sensed that all offensive targets had been neutralised by Alpha and Bravo, he issued a conscious command.
Alpha, Bravo. Restrain, secure then commence recovery.
In the other corridor, Charlie and Delta were breaching their last two rooms. Four adults were executed, spiking the OpFrame with committed violence.
Charlie, Delta. Restrain, secure, then commence recovery. Hervé, send the vans.
It had taken them only four minutes to secure the basements. Now they had to evacuate the victims, sweep up obvious intel and drag out some of the goons and punters. He split the teams - half on victim evac, half on intel and perp sweep. Anders had recovered the keys from the knifed goon and began unlocking the doors.
All, suppress and deaden.
They were in a pitch black house of barely imaginable horrors. It was a mistake to dwell or focus too closely on the detail of the environment or trace a path to signals or echoes of the pain contained within. Not only was it extremely distracting in the assault phase, but it opened a pathway to Overwhelm and Overload that could jeopardise the whole team. This was a problem any person performing a human trafficking and abuse rescue raid faced, mindspace or no mindspace. Simply opening a door to find a dungeon, a cage, disassociated victims - be they children, teenagers or adults - the perpetrators, captors and any acts in progress, was deeply traumatic. The first priority was using speed and all the advantages of the OpFrame to neutralise the threats quickly with minimum violence, then evacuate at high speed. The longer the team had to spend in the environment, the higher every single cost to them became. The Sensors had the hardest job as they filtered the environment and protected the wider team while remaining operationally engaged in physical space. Phillipe’s command to “suppress and deaden” actively blocked as much of the negative emotion and pain as possible from the OpFrame via each team member. When amplified outwards by the Sensors, this helped keep the victims calmer. In this mindset and in the dark, the team could somewhat dissociate from the horrors of their surroundings. Phillipe knew he needed all the support he could get before walking into that room.
Inside was a chicken wire cage. The bare concrete floor was covered in filth. The reek of shit and piss hit him like a wall. Inside the cage there were three small shapes. He undid the cage’s shitty padlock with a bump key in a few seconds.
“I am here to help you. You are safe now. Estoy aqui para ayudarte. Estás a salvo ahora. Police. We are here to take you to safety. Please come with us. Policía. Estamos aquí para llevarte a un lugar seguro. Por favor, ven con nosotros. The bad people are gone. You are safe. La gente mala se ha ido. Estás seguro,” he said as he swung open the cage and flicked on his flashlight. He kept saying it as he backed away in the hope that the victims would come out. The rest of the team were in calm but rapid action. Phillipe felt no alert spikes, so focused on his immediate, personal situation. One girl, maybe ten years old, stepped towards him. He backed away into the light of the dead' goon’s flashlight, snapped the white cyalume stick on his chest and held up his flashlight so she could see his full form.
“Do not be afraid. I am going to take you to safety. The pain is over. No tengas miedo. Voy a llevarte a un lugar seguro. Se acabó el dolor.” The brave child came closer. She was filthy, fashioned by cruelty into a pitiable wretch with matted hair and sunken, dark-ringed eyes. Phillipe knelt down, took off his glove and reached out. “My name is Phillipe. Let us take you home. Mi nombre es Felipe. Déjanos llevarte a casa.” The girl stepped into the doorway but did not speak or take his hand. She looked up and down the corridor, to see shadows of Alpha and Bravo teams working the rooms, their positions betrayed by the bob of their activated cyalume sticks.. Some other victims were being lined up in the corridor. At the bottom, she saw the dead goon.
“It's OK, he can't hurt you anymore. Está bien, ya no puede lastimarte.” The girl stood still, staring at the body. Phillipe gently moved past her, into the cage. The two other victims were smaller and more docile. He swept them up in his arms and out into the corridor, before they could start to stir strongly.
“Ya!” His head snapped right. The girl was by the dead goon, kicking his face, then stamping on it and punching him while shouting in noise but not language. The “New Jersey” test was meant to commence off site, but in her it had started early.
It took 10 minutes to stabilise and prep the victims for extraction. Again, some had to be tranquilized. The team indiscriminately bagged any obvious equipment or evidence they could rapidly identify - cameras, devices, a security camera system hard drive storage. At the surface, half the team led the victims through moonlight to two more waiting vans while the other half dragged the tranquilized adults up from the basement.
Use discretion to extract half the surface adults, two thirds guards, one third perps. Execute the remainder.
The adults were beyond hope or rehabilitation. Those they extracted served only an intel purpose and would be dumped with the evidence for possible prosecution and tracing. The likelihood of prosecution at the hands of the Mexican authorities was low. Any who were recycled back in to the exploitation network would be actively tracked by the program to feed more targeted raids.
25 minutes after the operation had commenced, the team were in transit to the processing site. Hervé shut down the cellular jamming when they were a kilometer from the compound. It was anyone’s guess when the police would turn up. More likely that the dead and gone would be discovered by scum well before the law got a look in.
The Rescue was complete. Rehabilitation was the next phase. Recruitment lay way down the line. The girl had willingly engaged with the “New Jersey” or Natural Justice test in the corridor, as she wilfully beat the body of her abuser and captor. Where that could lead her was uncertain, and was what the program worked to find out.