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This Substack is a combo story bible and first draft of a novel I’m writing — about two immortal lineages of the human race walking among us, hidden in plain sight. Delivered by Spanish caravels in the fifteenth century, the Masters work their way from the shores of Haiti to the jungles of Puerto Rico to the classified briefing rooms of the US Army's most elite special operations unit (more below).
What’s it about?
In August 1950, tissue samples managed by the Los Alamos research group, are stolen from a lab in San Juan. To everyone's amazement, the theft was orchestrated by Jesus Santiago, an old Taino farmer who stashed the samples, along with a small brass heirloom from 1518 inside an old wooden crate on his property. When the samples are recovered and Santiago is arrested, FBI station chief John Spillers gets involved. He has Santiago transferred to a high security military compound known only as the Grass Cutting Area, then activates a special missions unit based out of Fort Benning, with orders to parachute in, take possession of Santiago, and if necessary, kill everyone who gets in the way. Everyone. Complicating things is Captain Sepulveda, who runs the detention facility where Santiago is being held. He’s an officer from Puerto Rico's storied 65th infantry regiment, and is haunted by an incident earlier in the year when several of his men died under mysterious conditions at New York Presbyterian's research lab in San Juan—the same lab that housed the stolen tissue samples. Observing all of this through giant obsidian monitors called apertures, is a cadre of extra-dimensional technocrats known as Area J operators. They observe and document human beings as they move through the event stream, and grow increasingly alarmed by the strange events that appear to follow John Spillers—events which seem to stretch all the way back to December 1492.
The Masters is a story about slavery, evolutionary biology, revenge, and grief—a violent romp through history, full of true, but-stranger-than-fiction nuggets. There are blood harvesting renditions, government conspiracies, werewolf battles with mercenaries, and the mad scramble to understand, reproduce, and militarize an incredible human capability encoded right in our DNA.
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Here’s what you get
