The Beginning of The End

Project exchange

Scarlett

How much has to happen before you start to see the obvious? I never thought I was clueless until the answer came straight to my door and I thought nothing of it. At the time I didn't know who I was looking at or what they could potentially do but fate can work in your favour sometimes. I would not have any faith now if I didn't know what I now do. People are the ones that give you faith but I have found that you never really know a person until you have heard all their secrets. There are some things that even your closest friends don't know. When you know one secret the rest will follow in a chain reaction until you feel you know too much. And it is this that helps uncovered secrets that have been buried for a long time.

***

After the strange first meeting, we didn't see Ella and Adrian until we were invited round their house in order to get to know them better the following day. Their house was as large as ours, if not larger and they had fewer people staying there. The front of the house looked the same as ours even down to the tiny touches in the garden.

We rang the doorbell but the face that answered the door was not familiar. It was a tall woman with long blonde hair and friendly brown eyes that answered the door. She introduced herself as the twins' mother and ushered us up the stairs to a study room on the left.

The door to the study had been left ajar and through the gap, we could see the twins in amongst the computers and laptops and surrounded by walls filled with paperwork. The room was only something that I could imagine my dad using for his accountant work. There were filing cabinets along one side and a bookshelf with official-looking documents on the other. The desk stood against the window on the far side from the door and two chairs like the ones you would see in a school computer room were huddled around it. Ella's eyes were fixed on the screen of a pink Dell laptop while Adrian worked from a more high-tech version of the school computers. The screens showed websites with black writing on white backgrounds and no pictures. There were no hyperlinks just information. I imagined it was a school science project they had been given to do over the summer.

Or at least that was what I had believed it was until I got closer. As Alex and I went through the door Ella and Adrian minimised the screens they had been examining at the same time and spun to face us. They mirrored each other's movements perfectly. It was almost eerie.

"Hi." I looked at them trying to read something from their expression. If it was a science project why close the window in such a hurry. I had seen some of the words on Ella's screen before she had a chance to close it. Project exchange, experiments and APIS had jumped out at me but I was not entirely sure what they meant. The latter I had no clue about. "What are you doing?"

"Oh, it's nothing." Ella's body language was evasive. She was glad when her brother cut in.

"Just school work. Too many projects going on and not really enough time to do them all." Adrian did meet my gaze but I knew he was still hiding something.

"Maybe, it's something we could help with. My grades in school are quite high and it would give us the perfect opportunity to catch up with where your school is at in terms of the syllabus." Alex sensed the same thing that I did.

"Oh, so you decided that you are going to come to our school now." The change of subject was failing and really obvious.

Alex and I had reached the computers at the same time. Without giving them time to react I clicked on the tab at the bottom of the screen which Ella had been looking at only seconds ago. The similar words flashed up.

"What's project exchange? And why are you looking at scientific websites anyway?" My questioning personality wanted answers.

"We told you it's a school project but it's not important." There was defensiveness guarding Adrian's voice now.

"If it's a school project surely it's important we know about it," Alex spoke the question I had been thinking just moments before.

"You might as well tell them. They will find out later anyway we might as well give them the information now so that they can help us with it." Ella's voice was calm she was making direct eye contact with Adrian.

He nodded and brought up the webpage that had been on his screen.

"What is this about?" I hoped by asking questions I would get the answers I wanted - direct answers, not riddles, hushed whispers and worried glances.

"Is that a government website?" Alex was staring at Adrian's computer screen.

"You two might want to take a seat this is all a bit complicated to explain." Adrian's tone was normal again - strong, confident and we did as he had suggested.

Moments later we were sat behind them in the large office. Getting the answers we wanted to hear.

"After we met you we have been searching for answers to the question 'What is happening in Stanville'. We have watched all the news reports, read newspaper articles but there is still something missing." Adrian took the lead.

Ella followed. "We have been searching the internet for anything that could give us more information something obvious that we had all been missing."

"But there was nothing new to be found other than one government website."

"All the information had been scrambled and it didn't appear to be of any use to the eye of anyone else."

"We hacked into the main body of the site. Found the administrators account and brought the website back to life."

"You guys hacked a government website and accessed the administrator's account." I was lost in all the technical jargon but at least Alex understood.

"It wasn't that difficult when you know what you're doing." Ella was smiling to herself although her eyes were deadly serious.

"And we have had a lot of practice." I didn't know exactly what that meant but Adrian met Ella's eye as he said it.

"From the website which Adrian is studying, we found a link to this scientific document." Ella indicated the information on her screen as she spoke. "It talks about a series of scientific experiments called Project Exchange which started in the January of 1992."

"When the scheme was just beginning to take full shape there was an incident. A young girl of 10 years died near the research centre. At that time it was not known that it was there and it was believed that she died of a heart attack."

"No newspaper reports can be found on it from the time but the government site explains the work they did to cover up the incident."

"What I don't understand is how you actually managed to access this information. Surely the sites were password protected?" I thought my confused face said it all.

"Yes, but the password was easy to guess when you had a bit more information. We're professionals in the trade and this is our place of worship." Adrian was cocky, confident.

"What was the password?" Alex was interested in all that computer rubbish. I'm sure he would have tried to learn the trade if science hadn't claimed him first.

"Apis92." Ella kept her voice level as she spoke as if it was obvious but she didn't look down on us for not understanding and she expanded on her point before we had to ask. "Apis is Latin for bee. 92 is the year when the project started." It was so simple when it was explained like that yet I would have missed the obvious.

"You know Latin?" I thought Latin was a dead, unused language. Obviously, I had been mistaken.

"I know enough." I was sure there was more to it but I accepted her answer as I had more pressing questions.

"So what's happening in Stanville? Does it have anything do with Project Exchange?" Once they had started revealing stuff I wanted to know everything.

"The bees themselves are the subject of the experiments but we don't believe they were planning on them spiralling out of control as they have." Ella knew a lot about the scientific side of the project from what she had read and I believed she was telling me everything she knew.

"We are looking for a log of the experiments and their results. We think that could give us an idea how things went wrong if they went wrong." Adrian was calm, confident. Once again I thought he was reciting a script.

"So have you found anything that could help? Any weaknesses? Any patterns?" Alex was plotting something but at the moment he didn't have all the information he needed.

"We haven't found any specific science research; just the basic information about the project itself. We know the location of the base which is about 2 minutes away from where the girl was found." Adrian seemed slightly annoyed that we were asking so many questions as if we had strayed from his script again.

Ella took over. She seemed to know more about what was happening. I guessed that was the knowledge she had glistened from the science site. "So far I have found no information that could help us. There are no links I have found so far and I am struggling to get further into the core of the site. I am sure there's something obvious I'm missing but I was never very good at reading into things."

"Can we help?" It was the only way I could think that we would be able to find an answer in a reasonable amount of time.

"I thought you'd never ask." Adrian's voice registered amusement that came with his attempted humour.