The secret organisation known as the Prism had been born from the dying embers of the Second World War.
As the Nazi war machine had tried its best to create, and then ultimately destroy, technology far in advance of anything previously known, the Allies, in response and with the end of the war looming, had orchestrated Operation PAPERCLIP. PAPERCLIP consisted of several strategic intelligence teams whose mission was to hunt and track down both the weapons and the brains behind them. Jet propulsion and nuclear scale weapons were just the tip of the iceberg.
Instead, the Nazis had been experimenting with super-cannons, drone technology (the infamous Foo-Fighters), proximity explosives, stealth vehicles, as well as the more bizarre, but no less dangerous, anti-gravity, outer atmosphere travel, time/space distortion and parallel reality manipulation. Not all of these projects were successful, in fact a great many failed, but an awful lot of them didn’t and it was estimated that if the war had continued for another year or so, then the technology may well reached the advanced prototype stages.
From this, a US Counter Intelligence Corps officer, a Colonel, had discovered all manner of ‘doomsday’ devices and technology that the German High Command had been intent on developing with the ultimate outcome of world domination, or world destruction if defeat seemed inevitable. To his chagrin, he had blindly handed them over to his own politicians, unaware of the global power struggle that he had become embroiled in. He was quickly learning that he who controlled the technology of the future controlled the present.
The choices that his government, his country, had made had disturbed him and left his moral compass in disarray. He began to dig deep, researching the limits of the information and devices that he and his team had discovered. What he had found had terrified him. It was the stuff of the devil and macabre science fiction novels.
After the war, the Colonel, now an advisor to the United States Senate Select Committee on Weapons Proliferation, had assembled a private faculty of like-minded humanists who were committed to preventing the world falling back into chaos by the abuse of Extinction Level Event Technology (ELET).
His reasoning was clear. A Level 0 Type Civilisation was not equipped, either morally or philosophically, to exist peacefully with advanced technology, especially technology that could be manufactured for war. Nation states and private corporations had only power and greed in mind in the use of this technology and were therefore vulnerable to the machinations and weakness of man’s ambitions. The opportunistic and short-sighted mindset that he had witnessed from world leaders – both East and West – had done nothing to dissuade him of that.
So he had formed the Prism as a safety valve, a breaker, to stop the madmen and the reckless from gaining ‘his dark materials’, as Milton had termed it in Paradise Lost. The Prism was there to keep the world in balance and in check for a more enlightened time. The Prism bought humanity time to catch up with the science and the next level events.
The analogy that was often used was that of a five-year-old pulling on the trigger of a machine gun in a confined space, say something similar to a classroom. The five-year-old likes the noise, the feel of the weapon and the visual exhilaration of watching the bullets destroy the target, but has no idea of the decimation, the lives that are lost, the destruction and despair that his pulling of that little piece of metal has caused. Flesh torn, bones shattered, lives ended. The Prism was the safety catch that stopped the weapon from being fired – or, more accurately, the grown-up that took the child’s lethal toy away.
The Prism’s rules were simple; it was all about containment.
The Prism was there to stop the procurement and proliferation of dangerous future science and life extinction event technology. Firstly, they would try to steal the secret away, either through deception or espionage, and then hide it away until it was deemed that mankind had the maturity to handle it properly.
Secondly, they would sabotage the technology, slowing down the chain of events, hampering it, stalling it, disabling it.
Thirdly, and as a last resort and if the scientists involved would not see reason, they would ruthlessly eliminate the brains behind the technology, to stop it advancing further before it had chance to wreak havoc. Better to delay the process for a decade or more than to have it brutalised and abused in the here and now.
Like most secret societies throughout history – the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, Opus Dei – the Prism kept its hierarchy small, close-knit and tightly contained. The Prism and its operatives fought a secret and brutal underground war that stretched from the skyscrapers of Manhattan to the killing fields of Asia, from the elite money districts of the West to the underworld backwaters of Europe. It had taken its fair share of heads to carry out its operations, but it had also lost a good number of its people in return.
And did the Prism share with other governments? Of course it did. It guided, it manipulated, it nudged and it influenced – but always from the shadows, its face never known. It steered humanity towards a path of least destruction. Its carefully selected and recruited operatives were embedded in all aspects of humanity; there to oversee but not to involve themselves except in the most extreme of circumstances. As a salve, and to balance out its ethos of containment, the Prism allowed, in certain circumstances, the advanced technology it held under its control to be released into the mainstream – a vaccine that could stop an epidemic, a piece of safety technology that could save lives, or a perhaps even a scientific theory that could help move the human race onto the next level of understanding.
The first Architect, the US intelligence Colonel, had seen what a madman with unlimited power and resources could do and he had been determined never to let it happen again. Thirty years later, the second Architect had been credited with being a major player in the end of the Cold War, one that had eliminated the need for the nuclear conflict and had negotiated down to a more manageable scale.
His successor, the current Architect, had been a victim of the Jihad. He had been witness to the burning of the Twin Towers, had seen at first hand the death and destruction that the minds of madmen could cause. He had both lost his life and been reborn on that same fateful day in September. The Architect had made an oath that he would never again allow the psychopaths, terrorists or politicians to get their hands on the weapons of mass destruction that could bring a civilisation down for good. The Architect was the lifeblood of the Prism, its guiding hand and the one that would lead the organisation forward. He would create the haven from which the Prism could operate. But if the Architect was the leader of the Prism, then that was only because he was the first amongst equals.
At the heart of The Prism was the six member Council; the wise elders, experts all in their chosen fields – science, geo-politics, medicine, ecology, finance and religion – and all committed to the Prism and its ethos of protecting humanity. They were its guardians. The Council and its operatives were not hampered by political expediency, greed or power. They had chosen to dedicate their lives, covertly, to a cause that transcended the narrow-mindedness of tribal nation states. The Council saw the bigger picture, not just for now, but for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years from now.
They operated in secret, meeting perhaps only a handful of times a year as and when required. To their families, friends and colleagues in their everyday lives, they were respected and lived a blameless life. Nothing would be written down, no files kept recorded and no witnesses outside of the Council would be alerted.
But when the call from the Prism came, they would convene, discuss and analyse the threat that the world currently faced. Then they would become very different. They would stand in judgement and decide how to deal with it. Many times intervention would be needed; a piece of technology stolen, a suspect arrested via an anonymous tip off to the police… and then there were the times when the ultimate sanction would be needed, when no other option was available, and the threat would be eliminated permanently.
And below the Council stood the operational arm of the Prism; the sentinels that were at the front line fighting a covert war.
There was the Warmaster, a seasoned military veteran who ran a specialist unit in the event that the Prism would have to conduct a small-scale, but robust, strike operation against a target, say to destroy a production facility or eliminate a terrorist training camp. Then the Warmaster and his unit would be alerted to carry it out with ruthless efficiency.
The most recent member to the sentinels was the Codex. The Codex had been in her youth one of the most talented cyber-hackers and black ops communication specialists on the planet. She had become notorious for a wide range of cyber crimes including terrorism, fraud and extortion, until she had finally been recruited into the Prism and set upon a more enlightened path to help her fellow man. She now ran a team of expert hackers from a small base in Luxembourg and it was from here that they hacked into emails, websites, supposedly secure communications and a hundred other means of transferring information digitally, passing whatever information was needed to the Prism and conducting cyber-assassination operations.
Finally, there was the Seer, the Prism’s Spymaster. A former British Secret Intelligence Service Executive Director, she had seen at first hand the dangerous power that could be wielded by terrorist groups that had gained access to lethal technology. The Seer, like her namesake, saw into the future, countering the atrocities before they happened and deciphering where and when the next threats would come from. She used her international espionage networks mercilessly and was always ahead of the intelligence threat curve.
And below the sentinels of the Warmaster, Seer and Codex were a vast range of resources, agents, couriers, mercenaries, hackers, safe houses, and financiers. Some were conscious about whom they worked for, some were semi-conscious and some were completely in the dark about what they were doing and why they were doing it.
The Prism had remained mostly hidden for decades, nearly seventy years in fact, and had managed to gather together the next level of technology to be protected. It had also saved the lives of thousands of innocent people and had averted numerous hostile conflicts around the planet. As the leader of the Prism, the Architect had stated many times, “We are the Prism. A Prism reflects the light of its environment so that it can be studied. We see the truth and what the future holds for our planet and for the time when we will travel beyond our planet. It is our job to study, contain and protect ‘his dark materials’. Because if we don’t, nobody else will. If the zealots and extremists gain access to what we have and what we know… well, ladies and gentlemen, history has taught us quite clearly what that could mean.”
The Prism Council knew very well what that could mean; Armageddon.