Rhythm and Blues

Without the normal human biological needs and urges for things like sleep, food and drink, I am finding it difficult to adopt a rhythm to my existence. I had intended for this blog to help establish such a rhythm, by sitting down each day and recording my observations on the events of that day. However, since that incident involving the armored car robbery that I last wrote about (which was my first law enforcement action since being brought back from the dead other than training actions), I have been in a mental funk, feeling blue, if you will.

When I was a beat cop, I thought I wold have given just about anything to be able to act in times of danger and fear without the sometimes paralyzing rush of adrenaline and the tunnel vision that usually accompanies that feeling. What I wouldn't give now to have any feelings at all!

Enough whining. I doubt any of you are particularly interested in reading my pinings for my lost humanity. Perhaps, however, you are more interested in learning more about how I got this way to begin with. Up until now, I have hinted at how I came to be brought back, but it is time to fill in a few blanks. Bear in mind however, that I don't have all of the facts myself, and some of the story remains classified by my handlers.

Late in summer of 1998, I was approached by my police chief. He took me aside into his office and said "I've got a representative here from the Dept. of Justice. It seems they are looking for good cops willling to take part in a series of special training events and meetings to be part of a special task force. They have asked that the officers nominated have no attachment to any particular religion. So Smitty, you haven't gotten any religion since we last patrolled together have ya?"

"Nah chief, nothin' has changed there, I'm still the same heathen who drank your ass under the table at your promotion party."

"That's what I thought. He's reviewing some of your past reports in the training room, I'll bring him to you when he's ready. Don't try any of your smart ass shit Smitty, this guy is serious, and it could mean a nice little boost to your salary, since the DOJ is kicking in some money for your time."

"Alright Chief, I'll be a good officer and see what he has to say."

Later that day, I was summoned back to the Chief's office. Instead of the Chief sitting at his desk however, a thin guy in a dark gray suit with a very intense look about him was sitting behind the desk. The Chief was standing to his side, and excused himself as I entered. The Suit stood up and extended his rail thin hand. Taking the hand though, I had to keep from gasping in pain and shock at the coldness of his fingers and the sheer strength of his grip.

"Hello officer, my name is Drake Kampmann, and I represent the Department of Justice and am trying to organize a special task force of local, state and federal officers. I would like you to join this team."

"OK, Mr. Kampmann, is it?"

He nodded.

I coughed before proceeding, "Chief mentioned that there might be some extra pay in it for me, and I'd like to know more about that, of course. But more importantly, what is this task force being organized to do, and why do you want people with no religious affiliations?"

"Well, these are good questions, Officer Smith, so let me begin with the purpose of this task force. We are organizing this task force so that it can be assembled on very short notice and deployed to virtually any location in the United States in response to a growing threat by religious fundamentalists of all stripes. The Attorney General wants a strike force of dedicated law enforcement professionals who have no affiliations with any religious denominations so that we can act quickly and decisively against any threat before it grows too dangerous. As to your first point, about the extra monetary compensation, the DOJ is going to kick in up to $25,000 a year to each department who contributes an officer for this strike force to compensate for the lost man hours our training and operations will require, and an additional stipend to be paid directly to each officer who completes all of the training exercises and remains a participant in the program each year."

"Pardon my rudeness, Mr. Kampmann, but you know, how big will this stipend be?"

"Officer Smith, the size of your stipend depends on your level of involvement and whether or not you complete all of the required training, but I will tell you that your stipend could easily exceed the amount paid to your department. The first partial payment will be made once these contracts are finalized. There are some additional details that I will only be able to discuss with you in Washington, should you accept my invitation to join this task force."

Shit, once I heard his mention of the size of the stipend, I didn't hear anyting other than mumbling. I signed the contracts and memorandums he put in front of me without much paying attention to the details. The visions of what an extra $25,000 a year could do for me and my family were just too tempting. They had found a sucker alright, and boy was I to learn that over the next couple of years.

More to come with my next few entries. Now I must take my leave to attend to some surveillance operations.

Braaaiinss

You should have seen the look on that crankhead's face! By the time I finished with him, he was begging to be arrested by the police, babbling about zombies trying to eat his brains!

I was summoned last night to help out in a nasty hostage situation that some locals had gotten into when they chased a pair of robbers from an armored car heist. The pricks had killed the driver and one other guard was badly wounded. But they didn't notice the local news copter that had seen the heist and called in the law (but not before airing it for their viewers and getting that all important exclusive footage). Once the jig was up the robbers had fled into a nearby house and were holding the old lady and her grandson hostage, threatening to kill 'em if the locals didn't let 'em slip away.

I was called in and sent towards the house as an unarmed police hostage in exchange for the boy. As soon as those bastards saw me lurching up the driveway, things started to go sideways in a hurry. The boy freaked when he saw me and bolted for the cops. The taller of the two crooks took a step outside to shoot the kid, and was dropped by a sniper with a well placed shot. I stepped over his body and into the house to see the fat, balding crook holding the old lady in an armlock with a big ass Desert Eagle .44 Magnum held to her temple. As soon as he got a look at my nasty mug, the bastard went from the flushed red of exertion to pale-as-a-sheet white. He looked into my eyes, and brought the gun up towards my chest. The old lady had some spunk in her as she bit into his other wrist, and did a mule kick into his balls. Dentures and curses went flying, but he never took his eyes off me. He managed one shot before I closed on him, arms extended in my best Frankenstein pose, as I muttered "Braaaiinss". The impact of the bullet was barely noticeable as I grabbed the gun and broke his wrist with one hand, and reached for his neck with the other.

When the local SWAT team stormed in, they found him in a fetal position clutching his nuts in his good hand, barely coherent. I was in the process of handing the lady back her teeth when I had to catch her in mid-faint.

It took a few hours today to debrief and get all the appropriate paperwork signed and the bullet holes plugged up again, but I am finally free to relax here with you, my gentle readers.

It sure is weird going into a situation knowing that I can't be hurt. Sure is different from being a beat cop. Hell even the SWAT goons aren't invincible. There just isn't enough body armor to keep even the bravest officer from getting the shakes after a shootout. Yet here I was, shot through the chest cavity by one of the biggest, nastiest guns out there, and I didn't feel anything other than a shift in my momentum from the impact. I can look at the whole incident with a clarity unclouded by the adrenaline I would've felt just two years ago.

No dry throat. No shakes after realizing what could have happened. No exhilaration at surviving a tough struggle. No real sense of victory or accomplishment. Just a plain, clear knowledge that two lives were saved, and one was avenged.

But what is vengeance when there is no beating heart to burn with the need for it? What have they done to me? What have I become?

Perhaps there are no real answers to these questions, but I am going to find them if they exist. I know with a certainty that I am an experiment. I was the first dumb bastard to successfully fufill that weird contract for them by getting killed, and then be raised back up again. But I know of others who signed up for this too. I owe it to myself, to those other poor saps and to all the living to find out what kind of monster I have become.

It would be too easy to become an impersonal killing machine. The perfect soldier. The perfect robot. A machine with the intelligence and the...soul?...of a man. But a creature who can shed no tears, suffer no pain, feel no love.

The really bad part, the part that no robot would ever face, is the memory of all that is now gone. Oh that bastard Drake says he is working on a better neural system for me, that they are still refining systems that may bring some sense of things like touch back to me, but how can that be the same?

In my past life, I wasn't much for books or even deep thought. Mine was a life that was experienced, both good and bad and everything else in between. Now I must find meaning in my thoughts and in the wisdom of others.

What a strange damn journey is ahead of us. Are you ready for that? Am I?

Journal, my ass...

The Bureau shrink suggested that I keep a journal of my experiences, so that I 'could work out my issues' with my new existence. I don't think he, or my handlers, will appreciate the public forum that I am now using to do just that. But hey, what can they do now, fire me? I don't think so.

You see, when you are already dead, you get an attitude. Maybe its the freedom from all of the expectations and worries of living, or maybe I'm just pissed because I feel trapped in this shell of a body they have set me up with.

I guess I shouldn't complain too much, since this is essentially the same body I died with. Maybe if I had been a little better at taking care of myself when I was alive, I wouldn't be so disgusted at what I see in the mirror, but I don't know how good they can make a body look that's been dead for more than a year after being shot in the forehead.

So, by now you must be pretty confused. I probably should explain a little bit about myself, but this will be difficult since many of the details of my existence are considered top secret, and even I don't have clearance to know all of the details.

I can reveal that the name that I am using here was assigned to me when they 'woke me up'. I was a cop, and a damn good one, before I was killed in the line of duty on October 31, 2003. My life hadn't been a bed of roses, but things were just starting to get good again before that night. I had just finished with a nasty divorce where she got almost everything except my balls, but I was looking so forward to actually using those things again! I had finally sobered up and was in line for a promotion that would have had me sitting pretty until retirement, maybe ten years down the line...damn it all, hold on, my lens is fogging up....

Alright, so maybe I still smoked too much, but a man's gotta have at least one vice, no? So much for worrying about cancer. If I had known I would have ended up like this, I sure would have smoked a few more Cubans. I had this great connection, a fellow cop from Canada. He'd score the Cubans for me, and I'd hook him with the occasional Red Wings tickets. But there was always the nagging, 'You'll stink up the house', or 'You're gonna make the kids sick'. Bah.

Anyway, I was a local cop see, and I made the dumb ass mistake a few years back of signing up for this top-secret experiment with the DOJ. Seems like they had this horseshit theory about keeping a persons soul around after they died. They said they would be able to transfer your soul into a machine, or some hyped up version of your body again, and you could theoretically live forever. Now I didn't believe any of this voodoo bullshit, but they were offering an annual bonus every friggin year you stayed in the program, and as long as you did their little rituals and wore this special little doodad (sorry classified material here) all the time.

Hey, I wasn't religious, figured I had nothing lose, and the extra money sure helped out when things got tight, like they always do. Anyway, imagine my surprise when I woke the hell up in the morgue with all of the bastards in suits and one strange dude in robes looking down at my ass!

Whoah, talk about strange. Last thing I remembered was staring down the barrel of my own damn gun that the punks had taken in the course of the struggle, there was a flash and bang and sudden pain. They were all wearing masks of presidents, and it just figured I'd get whacked by Shrubya.

Hold on, I am getting paged. Looks like I need to wrap this up tonight. I've got so much more to tell you about, but I am on call 24/7/365, and there is stuff that only I can do.