The Prometheus Agenda

    Justin woke up early on Saturday morning, and Amber was ready for her walk outside. He told her to wait until he had a cup of coffee, and then escorted her out of the cabin for a nice long walk in the forest.  He headed for the trail leading to it, but Amber began following a haphazard path through the trees and the brush, sniffing the ground as she walked with deliberate steps. “What are you smelling, Amber?” He asked her as he followed her deeper into the forest.  Some two hundred yards farther, she stopped by a pile of branches between two pine trees and began looking ahead with much interest. Justin was intrigued with her gestures and was curious to see what it was that made her act so strange. He then saw her step slowly ahead, then suddenly stop a few feet away from another tree and begin to dig the ground in front of her. A dead animal, perhaps? He thought as he approached the spot where she was digging. By then, she had made considerable progress, and when he looked into the sizable hole she had dug, he noticed that there was something buried there, something shiny. No dead animal, that, he thought as he knelt on the ground and began digging too. He then reached in and pulled out a silver cylinder covered in mud. He looked at it with much interest, stood up, and began twisting its top. It took him several tries, but he finally got it open. Inside, there was a rolled wad of papers. When he pulled them loose and unrolled them, what he saw on the top of the innermost page made him gasp:
                    The Prometheus Project
    He was so surprised and confused, his hands trembled as he nervously looked over the first few pages. They were full of notes, calculations and several designs of the project his dad had worked on. And they were in his dad’s handwriting, he recognized that immediately. He tried to read some of the contents, but his hands were still trembling and his eyes could not focus properly. So he stopped, looked away from those papers, and ordered himself to calm down and think. He would find a spot where he could sit, relax for a minute, and then go over the entire file. But no, the middle of the forest was no place to be doing that. He would hurry back to the cabin and, hopefully, by the time he got there, his shock would subside. A little more composed now, he rolled the papers, stuck them back into the cylinder, and turned to Amber who looked puzzled by his behavior. He patted her on the head, and told her, “Amber, I don’t know how you found this, but you did good. Let’s go back to the cabin now, okay?”

   He spent the rest of that morning going over his father’s papers for at least five times, and each time he got a much clearer understanding of that incredible project his dad had been working on. The Prometheus Project was more complex than he had thought at first; the calculations, formulas and designs on those files were phenomenal. If the prototype described there were developed, it would come very close to being a powerful weapon. It was designed, after all, to penetrate the earth’s crust for more than five miles, and to do so in a most amazingly surgical way. The one Unit 3 was about to produce would not have anywhere close the capabilities of the one in the papers in front of him.
    But several times during his pouring over all that material, a few nagging questions were running through his head.  Why did his father do all that research and then stopped short of initiating production?  Why did he hide this complete set of files there, where no one could ever find them? By now, he had no doubt that it was his dad who had buried that cylinder in the forest. But again, why? Furthermore, why did he keep another set of incomplete files at their house in Danville, files that Roger had lifted during the break-in, the contents of which were now confounding the directors in Unit 3? He had no answer to any of his troubling questions, and that made him angry, confused and a little frightened. His logic was telling him that his dad must have had a very good reason to have done what he did. He would have to think more, much more, about the material Amber had unearthed for him.