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This Substack is a combo story bible and first draft of The Masters — a story about slavery, evolutionary biology, and revenge. From the jungles of Puerto Rico to the classified briefing rooms of the US Army’s most elite special operations unit, it chronicles the mad scramble to understand and militarize an extraordinary human capability encoded in our DNA.
What’s it about?
It’s August 1950. Tissue samples managed by the Los Alamos research group are stolen from a cold storage lab in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The FBI is dispatched, but turn up nothing. Two days later in an unrelated confession, agents learn the break-in was orchestrated by Jesús Santiago — a sugarcane farmer with no next of kin, no birth certificate, and no record of military service. They arrest him without incident the next morning and drop him off at the old colonial prison overlooking San Juan Harbor.
A week later, station chief John Spillers calls the warden, telling him he wants Santiago transferred to a military installation. The phone goes quiet because the warden knows of that place — the Grass Cutting Area is what the gringos in dark suits call it. “No problem,” he says. Spillers thanks him for his attention to the matter, hangs up, and places a second call. This one to Fort Benning.
Observing it all from Area J is Dr. Vandyck. She peers into a polished obsidian rectangle — watching, listening, recording. It’s not customary for a department chair to pilot an aperture to view the goings on of a single human, but this was different. For some time, she’s observed Spillers’ movements, documenting the violent events that follow him. She’s now convinced she has enough data to present her findings to the others. The lab theft in Puerto Rico was no coincidence. It was a chess move centuries in the making. Two immortal variants of the human race who first came into contact in 1518 are about to meet again.
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