Warriors of Poseidon 05 - Atlantis Redeemed

Chicago. Brutalizing innocents and terrifying even the police force.”
    He stopped and grasped the lapels of his lab coat, looked around the room, and smiled his smug, self-satisfied smile. “We made them productive members of society in just three days.”
    “I thought you said one month?” Brennan said.
    Litton was clearly prepared for the question. “Well, it took them three-and-a-half weeks to learn construction.”
    Everyone in the room, but for Brennan and Tiernan, laughed, but it had the tired sound of being well rehearsed. Brennan looked down at the papers in front of him and scanned the people in the room out of the corner of his eye. Most of them had telltale signs of exhaustion and anxiety. Pale and deeply drawn faces, nervous quirks such as tapping the arms of their chairs or the table, fidgeting, lip-biting. It didn’t take a shifter to read this body language. A select few, however, were leaning forward, all eagerness. They were the zealots, then.
    Something was very, very wrong here.
    “I made a fascinating discovery about the brain,” Litton continued, clearly in his element being the center of attention. “The activity in the caudate nucleus can not only predict people’s preferences, but it can and does reinforce decisions already made.”
    “The caudate nucleus is part of the striatum, isn’t it?” Tiernan asked, clearly surprising Litton.
    “So lovely to see you’re not just a pretty face,” he said, beaming.
    Brennan noticed the female scientists in the room—and some of the men—wince at the comment. Potential allies? But they all looked too defeated to strike out against Litton, and certainly they wouldn’t be able to stand up to vampires.
    Tiernan, however, ignored the remark entirely, focusing intently on Litton.
    “Yes, the caudate nucleus is part of the striatum, which is involved in generating movement.”
    Litton made a motion, and the image on the screen changed to a diagram of the brain. The caudate nucleus looked rather like an Atlantean sugar bean and was situated on the right side of the image.
    Atlantis Redeemed – Warriors of Poseidon 05
    Page 140 of 232
    Tiernan whistled. “That’s a pretty major discovery. Can you activate the caudate nucleus?”
    Litton smiled. It was a singularly unpleasant smile. “Not only can we activate it, Ms. Baum, but we can control it and, by so doing, control the desires and resultant actions of the person whose brain has been activated.”
    Tiernan slumped back in her seat, shaking her head. She turned to Brennan. “That’s not only major, that’s control-the-world major,” she said in an undertone. “And if he’s telling us this, he has no intention of letting us out of here, ever. He would not only be shut down so fast by the scientific community that your head would spin, but this is criminal prosecution time.”
    “Anything you’d like to share with the group?” Litton said, sneering at them.
    “Very impressive,” Brennan said, clenching his hands into fists on his thighs but presenting a calm face to the room. “Looks like you’re putting my money to very good use, Doctor. How long does this control last?”
    Litton’s smug smile faltered, and he broke eye contact. “As long as we want it to last, of course.”
    Brennan didn’t need to see Tiernan’s tiny head shake to know that Litton had just lied, but the confirmation convinced him that he needed to get Tiernan out of there, and fast.
    “Is your head still aching?” he asked Tiernan, who glanced up, surprised.
    He took her hand in his. “We should get you some medicine and have you lie down for a while before we continue this.”
    “Oh, no, I’m fine,” she said firmly, pulling her hand from his, the light of battle in her eyes. “This is fascinating, Dr. Litton, please continue.”
    “We have a bit of video you’ll be very interested in, Mr. Brennan. This will show you what we’ve done so far, what we’re planning to do next, and where we hope to ultimately arrive with our research and practical trials.”
    From the first image of video footage, Brennan knew it was going to be bad, but even he, hardened by millennia of battle, had not anticipated the sheer depth of evil—all committed in the name of scientific research.
    Litton’s voice, sounding somewhat tinny, narrated the footage, describing the testing and failures that led to eventual success in the human trials. The video focused on two subjects, one male and one female, and the