Agent Brown is walking through a warehouse with a shorter man carrying a clipboard. Both men wear glasses. The warehouse looks normal enough, with various sized crates stacked neatly and plenty of room to move. However, there is more space than crates and the presence of several soldiers and cameras prove that this is no obvious warehouse.


Brown: So all of the equipment and experiments too dangerous to simply dispose of are now safely ensconced here?

McCauley: Yes, all safely secured in this location now. 128 separate crates but I know of several containing a minimum of 35 biological hazards each.

Brown: Do you know what is in each of them?

McCauley: I don't have the security clearance to look into even half of these boxes. That's why I'm glad you came for an inspection. You have clearance to look into all but three of these and....

Brown: Surely you don't think I'm going to let you go on a hunting expedition here?? Your job is to oversee the safeguarding of the various devices and experiments left here after Department H was shut down. You don't need to know anything about what you're safeguarding, just know that it's important.

McCauley: But what if something goes wrong, something happens to a crate and we don't know what was inside? How do we deal with the consequences if anything biohazardous gets damaged, or leaks, or if something is stored improperly? We can't run away, we can't enact the proper measures to deal with any issue! I don't like being left out to dry like this.

Brown: There is nothing to fear. When SHIELD forced the government to close Department H nothing was half-done, all storage was done doubly and correctly. You know as well as I do that this facility has fail-safes linked to specific crates in case of a change in their state. If something truly bad does 'get out', the whole place will be incinerated instantly.

McCauley: Comforting thought.

Brown: What was brought here from Department H had to be saved. Too dangerous to dispose if safely maybe, but most are just too valuable.

McCauley: And yet if one get out the whole lot gets destroyed. It makes no sense. Should all the bacteria, viruses, fungi and chemicals be stored in various Hazmat facilities, or give to someone who can dispose of them properly?

Brown: You should have more faith that nothing can go wrong.

McCauley: Never say never. Bombs, HYDRA, AIM, even mutants would work very hard to get in here and take what they could, if they knew it was here. I'm sure some of them have an inkling that Department H just didn't disappear, and they know what H was working on right up to the power being shut off. It's no wonder that the downing of the Prometheus Pit didn't cause a catastrophe.

Brown: In a perfect world H would still exist, the building would still stand, and this would not be happening.

McCauley: This from a CSIS man!

Brown: I know what H stood for and what it meant for Canada. I did not support closing it and moving its assets to CSIS. We don't have the expertise to move forward like H did, we're too limited in scope. How we handled Pointer is proof of that. No, this isn't a perfect situation but it's a whole lot better than any alternative that was proposed.

McCauley: Such as?

Brown: Taking our chances destroying all the equipment and hoping nothing went wrong, giving it all to SHIELD, creating an agency tied to the NRC to handle the assets...

McCauley: So why not destroy everything, why take thses risks and waste all ths money storing the stuff?

Brown: Because a lot of money went into these, most if not all, could still prove very useful, and assets should never be given away without a fight.

McCauley: You gave away Pointer and Walker easily enough.

Brown: I said don't lose assets easily. Pay attention. Protecting these resources is part of protecting our sovereignty.

McCauley: We have the best tech available but CSIS only gave me ten people to watch the place. 24 hours a day for 10 people to keep an eye on everything is asking a lot. If this is so important we should have proper guards and even weapons installed outside...

Brown: Finesse, my dear sir, finesse is all we need. No need to call attention to ourselves. If we put out a sign, expect your worst fears to be realized. If we stay subtle, they'll have to be smart to get at us if they know we exist.

McCauley: So what do you recommend?

Brown: Stay the course. Loose lips and all. CSIS has no indication that anyone knows this facility exists. With all that's going on in the world we can stay out of the way, that'll be good enough for now.


Brown leaves the facility. Hours later we see him meeting with an older man but that's all we know. Later that week a clearly disheveled Brown goes to the apartment of Walter Langkowski.


Brown: I"m apologize for the lateness of my visit, Doctor Langkowski. I have little choice. I, I,... I,.... We need to talk. It's about Department H, history,....

Langkowski: Then let's get to it. Sit wherever you like.

Brown sits on the big chair in Langkowski's living room. Langkowski himself sits on the couch across from him.

Brown: I"ll get right to it. Director X is dead and what's left of Department H is about to disappear.

Langkowski: OK, you've only made two statements and you've lost me on both.

Brown: Fair enough, what choice do I have? Honesty and all that. [Brown is clearly becoming more agitated]. I've been keeping secrets for so long that telling the truth is an anathema.

Langkowski: Do tell.

Brown: I did my best to play it straight when we worked together at CSIS, honestly. But secrets are part of my soul now. OK. [he takes a deep breath]. My name is not Jeff Brown. It isn't Oculus, though that was my tag at Department H. Yes, I came from there, I was head of security there for 5 years, not that you'd know that. I know all its secrets too.

Langkowski: OK, you worked for CSIS, you're in the business of telling lies but now lying is the worst thing you could do, and?

Brown: When Department H was started it was by Hudson but not your Hudson. Two months before James Hudson jumped to Canada his grandfather started H. He knew what James had planned and he wanted in on the ground floor. He had a lot of people in the government and military under his thumb. When he talked to his grandson about leaving Can-Am Warren Hudson went to the PM and convinced him to give him the secret Directorship, the total final say, and let James think that H was his baby. Director X wanted his grandson to succeed badly but he felt someone with a cloak and dagger military background needed to be in charge.

Langkowski: I never met the man but James did think his grandfather was a bit of a control freak.

Brown: He certainly was. Up until SHIELD forced it to dissolve he micromanaged it; trust me, everything H was Director Hudson was. Nothing happened without his say so. Even when it's 'charter' was taken away H was under his control, it never was shut down, just hidden deeper.

Langkowski: I'll take it on that on faith, keep going.

Brown: Director X, way back in the beginning, wasn't all that involved in the Flight project but he wanted to use its assets. The ones that matter now are Gardiner Monroe and Alec Thorne.

Director X wanted to know if Flashback's duplicates could be made to tell him the future. Monroe couldn't get them to talk but he let H try, which meant Director X. He learned his favorite grandson was going to die within the year. He never learned how or when, the duplicate was as frustrating as Monroe after all. So he had scientists working on a way of integrating Flashback's temporal power into the Guardian suit, to give James an out. They went to James to try and make it work, he had his doubts. It worked, sort of.

When James' was distracted by Heather an is suit exploded the temporal program kicked in, but there were no tests, it was just a program. James was killed but three copies were split off, three duplicates. You've met all three, and all three are dead. One was the 19 year old version, passed off as some sort of synthoid. He lacked a lot of James' skills and memories. Another version was the cyborg, killed by Galactus. The one you knew the best kept being bounced into orbit, the emotionless one that died at Pointer's hands. All of Director X's plans to keep James alive failed. But he didn't put all his eggs in one basket.

Langkowski: So he used Thorne.

Brown: If he wasn't the smartest man around, you were. Do you remember RE-STH-5?

Langkowski: Of course. Reverse engineering synthetic template human, 5th iteration. It was a plan Alec and I were working on to create a human not simply by cloning, but matching a superior genetic template with genetic material from anywhere. But the odds of it succeeding were astronomical. It was a pure waste of time, energy and money. We saw no need to pursue it to an experimental stage................ The Beta Project. That's what the Beta Project did!

Brown: I'm impressed! You gave up on RE-STH-5, THorne gave up on RE-STH-5...

Langkowski: But Smart Alec didn't.

Brown: With the encephalohelmet Thorne thought he saw a way to actualize the process and make it work. The Beta Project started under his eye a month before the New York incident. Director X saw to it that it was never stopped.

Langkowski: Surely even both of you can see that it couldn't recreate James, it wasn't a strict cloning project.

Brown: But it could create something like James, someone who could carry on being James, or a very good facsimile.

Langkowski: I can't see any way for it to succeed.

Brown: Maybe it can't. But that's why I'm here. We need to find out....

Langkowski: You want me to try my hand at RE-STH? It still won't work even if I babysit it. Besides, even if a sample gets actualized and goes onto stage one it would take over a decade to get to the result and see if it worked.

Brown: Sir, if you know anything about the Beta Project trust me, it was all smoke and mirrors. It was RE-STH-5 through and through all these years.

Langkowski: But it can't work! Yet you are here defending it....

Brown: Department H, under Director X's explicit orders, made the Beta Project the one experiment that never ended, even with all that went south, all the failures and pain, all the money. One sample started well and gave him hope that RE-STH-5 could work, somehow.

Langkowski: One sample worked? It had a success?

Brown: We have one, one in progress. Listen, when H was truly closed down Director X worked hard to save and store its assets, including the one Beta Project that was still working. Only General Chassen was kept informed, Director X only trusted him to follow through. But Chassen died last year...

Langkowski: I know, three days before Pointer....

Brown... so the Director made me his confidant. The Director died last night and I need you to, to finish the job, the one job that matters now.

Brass tacks. You can't run a Beta Project without a lot of failure, and the secret wasn't kept well. Everyone found out about RE-STH-5 and tried their hand at it. We learned everyone failed. HYDRA tried over 200,000 iterations and only got 113 actualizations before they gave up. AIM had over 150,000 and only 512 actualizations before they gave up. SHIELD went 505 and 2, Weapon X gave up after 5 iterations, Weapon Plus only tried 15 samples and gave up. Only HYDRA and AIM were willing to go for the long haul and they had no success, never got a stage one.

Langkowski: But H did.

Brown: Sample #3. The Beta Project tried over 10,000 times , got 237 to actualize, three even reached day one of stage one. But #3 lasted, for some unknown reason. They tried DNA from over 5000 people, maybe even you or me, and a lot of the time they used a Hudson sample as their starting point, even young Marie, but only one sample worked. Nobody had a clue why, nobody even knows now what the initial conditions were that could've created this result. But we have one.

Langkowski: And it's ready to be released, isn't it? That's why you need me, someone to finish the job. Assuming I believe even one word.

Brown: CSIS has stored all of what we could save from H. There are three large crates side-by-side housing the Beta Project. One has the subject. One has the control and growth system. One has the security system. I need to get you in there to finish this job. We have a life to save.

Langkowski stares long and hard at the sweating Brown. He has Brown go over the pertinent details again, and again, before agreeing to go with him to the Department H warehouse.

Coming up: Alpha Flight is back online!