The most pressing issue for the four heads, had been the transportation of so many employees into Proactive Square. If the location was to remain a secret, there could be no commonly known way in or out of the city.
While the City stood empty and secret, waiting in all its grandeur, the four heads had mused long and hard on how to get people in.
At this point the full scale of the recruitment drive was only just being imagined but would be pointless without the transportation issue resolved.
One of the four heads came up with the idea of teleportation. The other three laughed, initially, then thought about it and remembered who they were and the countless unlimited resources they had access to.
The suggestion of teleportation was not so unrealistic, particularly as the four heads had quietly and emphatically stretched their control, influence and resources over many years. They had been hard at work buying up major names and initiatives in wide varying fields of expertise all over the globe. Politicians, entertainers, media, architects, engineers, construction experts, mechanics, planners, you name it they had it all at their fingertips.
Science had also become of great interest as they started similar background checks and research to that of the recruitment drive that would follow, scouring the world’s best in as many scientific fields as imaginable. No stone was left unturned, for the four heads had designs on not just the economy and leading the world using that platform, but also gateway’s to absolutely anything that could consolidate their superior standing, whatever those gateways may be.
Power was everything but to attain ultimate power they needed supreme knowledge, or at least the tools and resources to provide it.
They found someone soon enough who could offer the extraordinary and a vital ingredient to the plan around Proactive Square.
His name was Franz Lahm.
Born in Berlin, Franz from his adolescent years had shown phenomenal potential in numerous scientific disciplines.
The reported problem with Franz was his lack of limits or at times, reality. His imagination and drive to go way beyond the limits of experiments or studies quickly made him unpopular. As a scientist and researcher, his work though breath taking was largely unpublishable due to its manic tangents and lack of critical evaluation.
Franz Lahm often stood on the precipice of startling discovery, but detail was not his friend, while passion drove him beyond piffling peer reviews and approval.
One such instance was a project he was a part of in Switzerland. Working with a team on teleportation, Franz quickly found the limitations of the experiments infuriating when up against his impulses to go so much further. He wanted to teleport actual ‘living matter,’ while his team found the concept at this stage deeply dangerous and unrealistic.
Teleportation, he was frequently told, is not about moving matter but one of transporting information. We’ll need to likely save matter of real substantial mass for the next generation.
Physicists on the project in Switzerland had been able to exchange information between light particles or photons or atoms, so long as they were situated closely alongside one another. Their current experiment marked the first in which information had travelled a significant distance, a whole 20 miles, between two isolated atoms. It was also the first time the powers of a photon, which can travel over long distances, and an atom, which is prized for its ability to retain information, had been jointly exploited.
It was all small potatoes to Franz Lahm. He had so much more in mind.
Franz stayed on the project and presented the picture of a focused scientist, putting in the hours and effort, along with offering up relentless practical if not boring, limited solutions. His peers were finally suitably impressed and left him to get on with his independent research on the project.
They didn’t appreciate or know that he was in fact performing his own experiments and was deadly serious, obsessed in fact, with the idea of teleporting not just matter but people.
His private experiments went unnoticed as Franz first took to attempts of the teleportation of animals. He toiled long and hard and his results were mixed and distressingly colourful.
His teleportation distances were short to start with. Often rats or dogs, stray cats, whatever he could get his increasingly edgy impulsive hands on, were disappearing and reappearing inside out, partially or mostly missing or not reappearing at all.
Franz’ principle thinking was that in order to teleport matter he essentially needed to destroy the body and then re-build it at as a perfect replica at the receiving end. He persevered and was starting to make headway, one in three of his specimens were making it through whole though were stone cold dead.
His secret experiment however did not remain secret from the four heads. The collective eye saw everything, and it was intrigued.
One night, as Franz was dragging an exceptionally drunk homeless person onto his teleportation pad, he was disturbed by a figure standing behind him, quietly observing. Franz, for fear of losing his work and being certified as insane, started to hopelessly plead his innocence and claimed the drunk, foul smelling individual in his clutches had willingly volunteered for this experiment.
The figure smiled and told Franz to ‘settle down, not to worry, please continue with the experiment, let’s see what you’ve got here.’
Franz, though disturbed by his new visitor, wanted desperately to complete his experiment on a human subject and see it through. His obsession therefore ensured he did just that.
He dragged his first human onto the pad and fired the teleportation device into action.
His specimen arrived in moments on the other pad right as rain, apart from the fact he was now a mass of crawling bubbling flesh with a brain balancing neatly on top like a mouldy putrefied cherry. The whole mess was neatly wrapped in what could only be the man’s intestines and remnants of a spinal cord.
The figure informed Franz that ‘technically, legally and morally, Franz had committed an appalling act of murder but on the bright side he could claim insanity.’ The figure also told Franz that he’d ‘been watching him for some considerable time and his love of ‘children’ was most definitely illegal and just as damning as his newly found career in murder when all pieced together.’
Franz crumpled onto the floor and shaped himself into the perfect foetal position before issuing a hearty dramatic wail of ‘kill me now.’ The figure had no such wishes. Rather, he was here to save him and his work, “You’ll have your own facilities and relentless funding to make this work. But you must make it work. We need teleportation of matter, ergo people, made real. We need it to be completed within eight years, ready and operational. Can you do that Mr Franz Lahm?”
Mr Franz Lahm found that he could.
He became unbearably rich, protected, and best of all allowed to work in total independence and unsupervised, at least on the surface of things.
Due to the significant funding, relentless resources and specimens provided, along with the unquestioning support of his new employers, Franz completed his work within three and a half years.
The remaining time was then used to oversee and develop the secret construction of teleportation pads across the globe. One teleportation pad in specific was developed into a sizeable teleportation room in order to transport people on mass. The risks of course were significant not to mention hideous, but Franz managed it and was even secretly a little excited about the risks to flesh and bone.
It was and remains arguably one of the greatest breakthroughs in mankind’s history, albeit entirely unofficial and unknown to most.
Thus, upon completion of the vast recruitment drive of Proactive Square, transportation of employees began in earnest across the globe. Poeple were understandably terrified and most reluctant to step into teleportation rooms and simply disappear with no knowledge of where they would reappear or if indeed, they would reappear whole, or at all.
After plenty of practical demonstrations however from Proactive Square officials, happily and excitedly teleporting back and forth with no signs of side effects or tell signs of death, the new recruits soon went along.
Within weeks, Proactive Square was full.
Proactive Square stood no longer as a great empty empire, but rather a rich and full kingdom.
Grand gleaming buildings were full to the brim of thousands upon thousands of workers. Trade quickly gathered pace, shops and café’s bristled with staff and inside customers, monorails and battery powered cars whizzed through and around the city and life took shape in the most secret location on earth.
Central to it all stood the tallest building of them all, vast and imperious.
Its gleaming black exterior beamed power and stature across the city. It was the beacon of supremacy for Proactive Square where the best of the best walked endless corridors of power and played money games.
The building was simply named ‘HQ’, its two letters stood atop of the building high and proud.
In the basement of this magnificent building, a small room containing nothing but an impressive but seemingly standard software server, a desk and an empty space, waited for a small portly balding chap named Geoff Smith, to take his place.