فصل 9

chapter-9 Manipulation

Everything Hatch predicted, with the exception of his own murder, came true. Carl Vey and, presumably, Coonradt, were terminated. Vey’s assistant, Anna Ferguson, went into hiding.

It was only a few years after that that the existence of the electric children was revealed. It was Hatch who learned about them. He was looking into the children who had survived, to see if any of them had subsequently died of MEI complications, when he discovered, from confidential state and medical records, that the survivors had been affected in peculiar ways.

The first electric child discovered was Nichelle. She’d been in foster care from the time she was very young, and state records showed that she had been in and out of an unusually high number of homes—sometimes only lasting a day or two before being transferred to a new one. Foster families she’d stayed with reported that she was an unusually challenging little girl, and several of the homes she’d lived in had burned down, typically due to damage to the electrical systems.

It was the note about damaged electrical systems that piqued Hatch’s interest. The next afternoon he arranged to have Nichelle kidnapped from the backyard of her latest foster home, where she was found uprooting a bed of flowers.

It took the Elgen a few days, but after running her through a series of tests, they determined that she was essentially an electrical ground wire. From that point on, Hatch was motivated to find the other electrical children, and one by one they were brought into the Elgen, where their powers were discovered and developed.

As Elgen director, Hatch continued to work as if he ran the company. He also began steering the Elgen on a new course. Shortly before his “death,” Coonradt had demonstrated to the Elgen board how the MEI could electrify rats. While initially Schema considered the discovery nothing more than a curiosity, Hatch recognized the potential for a new source of electrical energy and, with board approval, launched the Starxource Plant Initiative (SPI), turning the Elgen into a massively profitable corporation and setting them on a trajectory to someday become the richest company in the world.

Internally, Hatch took draconian measures to guarantee that his mandates were followed and his power protected—measures that included spying, wiretapping, murder, and extortion.

The first person Welch killed was a man named Paul Wang, a former Elgen scientist who was caught trying to sell Elgen secrets. Hatch convinced Welch to kill the man the same way he’d gotten Welch to take that first drink of alcohol—a simple, quiet request. After Welch had blood on his hands, he was much easier to manipulate. And no one was better at manipulation than Hatch.

Once the Elgen, under Schema’s guidance, moved their operations from the United States to international waters, it became relatively easy for Hatch to launch his takeover of the Elgen by force. The coup was organized and carried out on the command ship Ampere by Welch and his two senior Elgen commanders. By that time, Hatch had turned the Elgen security into an active personal army solely under his control.

Hatch and Welch together created the complex hierarchy of the Elgen guard. Hatch was named supreme commander, general, then admiral-general, while Welch became his chief EGG and right-hand man. That is, until Hatch sentenced his most loyal and enduring friend to death.