Chapter 2: DEXO
Valentine doesn't remember his parents. As much as he tries, the farthest back he can remember is the orphanage. Those were the last days of Tellus and he was just one of many unwanted children, not entirely abandoned but with dwindling resources and a lack of people who were still willing to look out for others it was a miracle he had a home at all. The planet was dying, polluted and resources depleted from overpopulation which was sharply overcorrecting with an uptick in natural disasters. Its last defense was a desperate attempt to shrug them off and it was working.
He lived at the orphanage until he was selected by the planetwide agency responsible for training and providing paranormal support on the Ark Project. The Ark Project was humanity's last ditch effort to save the species, a plan for abandoning Tellus in search of planets that were within reach that could possibly sustain human life. All resources were being diverted to constructing and supplying the ships that would take them on this journey.
Paranormal support was the stuffy official term the government types used to avoid words like magic or ghosts or spirits or monsters or anything else that didn't fit neatly into a scientifically quantifiable box. In the earliest days of the Ark Project there were many challenges and failures to overcome but despite the original intent to keep things strictly scientific it had become harder and harder to deny one glaring oversight. Wherever there were people, there were spirits, ghosts and what some would even call gods. And so some of the best equipped ships, full of the best and brightest humanity had to offer were amongst some of the least successful at both selecting a decent planet and at establishing settlements. Meanwhile some of the most meagerly outfitted, the most unlikely to succeed had flourished, because they had brought with them their spiritualists, their witches, their fortune tellers, their ghost hunters, their diviners and their alchemists.
The Department of the Extra Ordinary, DEXO for short, had been formed and it was an odd sort of collaboration between top scientists and the few spiritualists willing to work with them. Spiritualists, the inadequately descriptive yet all too necessary blanket term applied to all who worked with magic, were an unorganized bunch to begin with. The idea of working hand in hand with a bunch of skeptics was grossly unpalatable to most but a bit of guilt tripping and strategically applied arm twisting had convinced a handful of them to cooperate. The result of this collaboration was the development of a program for enhancing average people to become a sort of super spiritualist. They would be preternaturally hardy and intelligent and long lived, well suited for their role as problem solving prognosticators, capable of anticipating and handling any and all problems that arose that your average human could not.
Unsurprisingly there was a chronic shortage of volunteers willing to undergo this process. In the fledgeling days of the program DEXO was just barely able to keep up with demand by offering monetary compensation to participate. As the continued deterioration of the planet caused currencies to gradually lose all purpose and anything else of value was being directly funneled into the Ark Program they were eventually forced to come up with alternate solutions. One such solution was the offer to commute sentences of nonviolent criminals in exchange for their participation. That worked quite well for a time but as the program ramped up the number of nonviolent criminals that hadn't already been conscripted to one aspect or another of the Ark Program dwindled.
In those later, more desperate days the vast and growing numbers of unwanted and abandoned children were brought up as a possible solution. Objectively speaking they were a drain on society and legally speaking they were already wards of their respective states. If humanity was to be saved then all who were capable should ideally participate. The question of commuting the sentences of violent criminals was raised as a counter proposal several times but in the end children won out, by simple virtue of being more malleable and more widely available.
And so Valentine had been scooped up by bland faced government drones and whisked away to DEXO where he would undergo a series of surgeries and therapies and experimental procedures designed to enhance his senses and harden his body for the rigors of being a Paranormal Investigator.
It is a confusing, uncertain time for him. The orphanage hadn't been great, it was overcrowded and understaffed and undersupplied but he'd mostly been left to his own devices as long as he had behaved himself. He'd got on well enough with the other children, playing at being space pirates most days, turning the play yard into a battlefield in which campaigns were waged, won, and lost.
The DEXO compound he is taken to is a military facility. Soldiers guard the gates, the walls are high and crowned with barbed wire. Intake is done in the medical wing, all cold steel surfaces and flimsy plastic curtain dividers and overworked, dead eyed staff in scrubs that poke and prod and measure and take samples. There's rounds of injections and inoculations and Valentine wants to make them stop but he's already seen what happens to the children that don't cooperate, strapped down to gurneys and if they continue to fuss, wheeled away to who knows where.
His first night he's handed a pillow and a thin blanket and there's no mattress only the concrete floor. He crams in with all the rest of the children, piled in like sardines. The bunks are on backorder, the adults say. They'll be here in a week.
It takes a month to get the bunks in and installed. There's more blankets scrounged up in the meantime, a motley assortment of handmade and store bought, some brand new and some worn through and frayed around the edges. The children make little nests and it's almost like the nights the air-conditioning had been on the fritz at the orphanage and they'd all slept out in the play yard, under the stars. They're not allowed to make noise past curfew but they whisper to each other softly anyway, clutching each other's hands for comfort.
He goes through rounds and rounds of testing. They want to know how well he hears, how well he can see. They ask him if he knows his name, if he's got more than just the one. Does he have parents, who were they. Where is he from. Does he know his numbers, his colors, his letters, does he know how to read. He does not. They frown and ask him how old he is again. He does not know.
The children are separated into groups. Those that are in markedly poor physical shape are sent on to other facilities. Those that remain are sorted according to physical condition and the amount of schooling they've received. Valentine very nearly washes out but he makes it into the last group by the skin of his teeth as he is uneducated and undersized for what is estimated to be his age.
There is much the public does not know about DEXO, and those who run the organization would say that this is done deliberately as a favor to them. DEXO provides something essential for the survival of humanity but knowledge of the specific processes involved is best left to those with strong constitutions and flexible morals.
The medical side of things has been refined considerably in the decade that the program has been running. The survival rate of participants was initially very low but that was only to be expected with something so experimental. The survival rate is now roughly 60% which while far from ideal falls within acceptable parameters for losses. There is hope that children will prove to be more resilient, as the process so far has only been performed upon adults.
Valentine's group is chosen as the first to begin the initial round of medical procedures that will enhance their bodies and minds. Since they are the weakest of the lot losses will most likely be higher amongst this group but it should have minimal impact on the program as a whole. It would be best to discover any potential issues with the least valuable assets.
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