Review: It is not what happens to you, but what you do with it that matters.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 2, 2013
I believe there are no coincidences.Yesterday I met a veteran who served three tours in the American War in Viet Nam serving on a chopper which dropped 'young, barely shaving' soldiers into combat zones, only to come back hours later for pickups on stretchers, in body bags. This veteran raised the question of where do people learn to do such horrid, mutilating, evil, things to others. The questions were raised in the afternoon; I finished the Orphan Uprising last evening.`Working with veterans every day, many  have told me evil is real: they have seen it. All of us can see it if we only face it instead of sweeping it under rugs when it does not  seem to concern us directly. Nevertheless, any living evil does in some way impact on all of us.This trilogy by Lance and James Morcan speaks to the evil of the Omega group; a world wide consortium whose only interest is money.  While there is nothing unusual about that kind of power bid and avarice on a scale  that nothing can adequately measure in today's world, Omega is a group that has less than zero moral fiber; a group that does experiments on children worthy of Dr. Mengele in his most demented moments. Their objective is to program, via any means, via any horrid physical and mental experiments, children into adults who will by their programming become assassins; operatives programed to do whatever bidding comes to them. Operatives to kill.Each orphan was trained to well beyond normal limits of physical, mental abilities; told that no situation was impossible for them to overcome.Each orphan  is implanted with a tracker so their whereabouts are always known should one go renegade and need to be dispatched, permanently.Nine, by name Sebastian, is one of those orphans. He had broken free of this horror world several years before; married, disappeared, fathered a son, awaited the birth of a daughter.Then Omega took his son.Wrong move.Very wrong move.Nine calls on Thirteen, his blood sister who had been violated repeatedly by Naylor, the reigning head of Omega, to help him. He has her deprogrammed and blood proves thick as she answers her brother's call for help and becomes aware gradually of what has been done to all of them as they were raised in the Orphan Factory, as "brothers  and sisters", sent out on assignments, to kill.If opening Pandora's box unleashed the evils of the world, Sebastian is trying to rid us of some of it by raining terror down on the heart of evil of Omega for his son, for all of the children who had been, and were still being brutalized, and  tortured.His harrowing, chilling, hell hath no fury as a father whose child has been stolen by hell's minions, journey as he globally leaps through Omegas spiderweb of child experimental stations calls up all he was, all he ever could muster of who has become.  His journey a is heart tearing, mind splitting, gut churning crusade all of us share in empathy.Time is ticking.His son's little  virus bug will not much longer keep him from becoming yet another experimental victim.Sebastian's heart is a ticking time bomb set with a trigger mechanism of a failing heart.Sebastian's journey is our journey, reminding us of the possibilities of love confronting evil.The Morcan's trilogy is more than just a thriller, an adventure tale. It is an 'open your eyes' invitation to acknowledge the world around you as it is. It is a clarion call to recognize that those monsters, for surely they cannot be called human, who spread, who  perpetuate evil are a weak, spineless bunch who live in the shadows; who are incapable of facing their comeuppance when faced with retribution. A slithering gaggle of creatures who cannot face the havoc they have wrought, who swallow poison, leap out of windows rather than face even a fragment of the pain they have caused others.This trilogy is a revelry call to recognize power bids, human trafficking, and yes, evil itself with the power of love, with the commitment, that  nothing will stop me from exposing its dark, pustulant face. And they give us something else to think about in all of this bid for vast wealth, for power, selling out humanity. Nine and his sister, Seventeen, have to come to grips with ridding themselves of the programming that made them killers. Veterans have said to me, 'They made me a killer and now I cry at everything. I like myself better this way.'Nine and Seventeen cried.Did their hearts and minds, and, indeed, very souls, hang on long enough to fetch back the child; to bring down Omega?Would yours?Don't miss the courage of this book by father and son writers, Lance and James Morcan. They take you places we all need to go.