GETTING A LITTLE CARRIED AWAY WITH
IT ALL, PERHAPS
APPENDIX:
On the League of Gentlemen.
From the hidden wars for global domination and
ultimate knowledge that raged over the long
centuries, fought by secret societies of Illuminati
of whom the best known--the Freemasons, the Knights
Templar, the Rose + Cross, the Trilateral
Commission--are but pale remnants and facades, there
emerged a victor: the League of Gentlemen. Its
origins are obscure, its methods shadowy, its wealth
immense, its power absolute. You work for them; so
does a taxi driver in Samarkand. Some say the League
rose from the ashes of World War I, in the
proliferation of new technologies and systems of
control; others that it has been in existence, in
one form or another, since Babylon, since Tyre. What
is not in dispute is that thanks to the influence of
one of its greatest members, Sir Alexander
Mackenzie, it has its chief base of operations,
known as the Old School, in Western Canada, which
owes its entire existence as an independent nation
to the League.
For an age the League ruled supreme, without
enemies, without opposition, without fear of any
threat to its control. Then, in the years that
followed the Second World War, there emerged a new,
unlooked-for threat, not in the form of a rival
cartel or conspiracy, but in that form most
threatening to any system of control: pure
randomness; in this case, the random, spontaneous
mutation of human DNA. Members of what some believed
to be a new species of homo had begun to appear:
mutants. Sometimes these were merely freakish
accidents of genetics, sometimes completely unviable
dead ends, and sometimes--this was what worried the
League--they were gifted with amazing and wondrous
powers. Such randomness and such strength,
potentially beyond the reach of law and armies,
troubled the sleep of the Gentlemen.
Almost from the moment of the first mutations,
League scientists--the vast majority of whom had no
idea they were working for the League--became aware
of the problem. Their research was quickly focused
in two directions, not necessarily compatible:
control, and eradication. In the meantime the League
continued to operate against the mutants, with
remarkable effectiveness, through largely
non-scientific means: using its great media organs
and command of the world's lawmakers to demonize and
persecute mutants.
In the mid-1970s, on the verge of breakthroughs
in certain aspects of antimutant studies, a secret
facility was built, in the wilds of northern
Alberta. Officially known as the Institute for
Modern Animal Husbandry Studies, Department H or the
White Farm, as it became known, was the birthplace
of the two deadliest products of League research:
the Legacy virus, which attacks the chromosomes of
mutants, while leaving ordinary humans unaffected;
and the "metaformed" mutant known as
Wolverine.
Intended to be the first of many anti-mutant
mutant agents, Wolverine was to be also the
fulfillment of the dream of the shadowy Gentleman
known as Mr. Montclair, "manager" of the
White Farm. Mistrusting the potentially catastrophic
effects of the Legacy virus, he preferred to pursue
a course of eradication through control. A team of
anti-mutant agents, to be code-named the Sports of
Nature, would carry out covert operations around the
world, tracking and killing mutants until none
remained. These agents must, of course, be mutants
themselves, powerful mutants with abilities more
than equal to those of their prey; where such could
not be found, they must be created. Thus Wolverine.
The man hitherto known only as Logan was an
effective operative for the Canadian government who
served a number of dangerous missions during which
he was severely injured many times. His unusual
recuperative abilities and heightened sensory
apparatus, clearly the results of mutation, drew him
to the attention of Department H just as a test
candidate was being sought for Project Weapon-X, the
program that would "build" the Sports of
Nature. Discharged from the service, captured, and
taken to the White Farm, he was subjected to a
series of horrifying surgical procedures during
which he was provided with a set of retractable
adamantium claws, while more adamantium, the hardest
metal known, was bonded directly to his skeleton. At
the same time, the Control experts went to work on
his mind, breaking down his personality constructs
and biochemically manipulating his memories, to
bring him under the full direction of the League: a
super-soldier, incapable of disobedience, codenamed
Wolverine.
Meanwhile, in the eradication division, the
brilliant biogenetic engineer Dr. Harry Lee, chief
researcher and developer of the Legacy virus, was in
the grip of a different horror. Hitherto unconcerned
with moral or ethical questions that he considered
extraneous to his work, he now had to face the fact
that, in inventing Legacy, he had placed a weapon in
the hands of murdererers, and that one of the
potential victims was his own daughter. Jubilation
Lee, then eleven and entering puberty, had started
to manifest mutant powers. One day Dr. Lee
discovered, by chance, that his daughter's
abilities, limited for the moment to the production
of a faint luminosity from her fingertips, had not
escaped the notice of the Weapon X directorate. She
had been marked for monitoring, with an eventual eye
toward subjecting her to metaforming and
mind-control.
Conferring secretly with his wife, Dr. Flossie
Lee, a psychoinformatician assigned to the Control
team responsible for Wolverine's memory implants, he
made plans to help his daughter escape. While there
was no time to effectively synthesize and test it,
Harry Lee developed a formula for a Legacy antigen
and then hid this message in a very clever bottle:
encoded in a strand of junk DNA on his daughter's
chromosomes. Once she had escaped, she was to make
her way, if she could, to an old student of his who
would be able to help: Henry McCoy, a brilliant
researcher whom he had always suspected of being a
mutant.
The plan was discovered; Jubilation was captured,
and her parents killed. Before she died, however,
Flossie Lee managed to sabotage the Wolverine's
programming, blocking key neurotransmitter paths,
and implanting him as well with a deep suggestion
that Jubilation held the key to the Legacy virus.
The girl, too valuable to kill, was subjected to
intensive memory reprogramming, using techniques her
own mother had developed, and then
"adopted" by League operatives living in
Fullerton, California. During the "involuntary
debriefing" of Jubilation, details of the
escape plan, including the existence of one Henry
McCoy, Ph.D and mutant, were uncovered.
Investigations were made, leading the League to
learn of the existence--though no more--of the
secretive X-Men, purported to be a group of
super-powered mutants, of whom McCoy was believed to
be a member.
A little over a year after the failure of the
Lees' plan, during final testing of the Wolverine
agent, the removal of certain psycho-controls deemed
to be necessary if he were able to operate
independently enabled Wolverine, thanks to Flossie
Lee's tampering, for the first time to access a
remnant of his Logan-self. Sudden consciousness of
his current state, of all that had been done to him,
induced his first completely free beserker-rage.
Amid unbelievable carnage he escaped, and headed off
into the snow.
Meanwhile, back at the White Farm, chaos and
recriminations. Only one head remained cool--that of
Mr. Montclair. Uniquely gifted at making a virtue of
necessity (perhaps a mutant power?), he forbid
recapture of the Wolverine unit, allowing him to
make his way into the woods, ordering only that he
be infected by means of a hypodermic dart, with the
Legacy virus. He then sent a counterfeit e-mail, via
anonymous remailer, to Henry McCoy, Harry Lee's
greatest pupil, alerting him that an escaped mutant
was in danger and need of help.
Mr. Chabon's wonderful book, The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay, may be ordered by clicking here.
