His parents had named him John Locke, after an ancestor, but when Flint saw the documentary on his namesake on the Enlightenment Channel, he recoiled at the sensational notion of the tabula rasa, and changed his name. Flint was solid. Flint was used for arrowheads, for starting fires. Flint was a good name for the leader of the South Carolina Aryan Troopers. Hard, sharp, fiery. Flint Locke formed SCAT with a few of his drinking buddies after studying frame-by-frame, pixel-by-pixel, all the video he could find of the airliners crashing into the World Trade Center. His study required patience. It required time. His eyes burned and blurred from the hours spent at the computer monitor. He called in sick several days to continue the scrutiny when he sensed a breakthrough. His boss at the textile factory was ready to fire his ass, but Flint had come in handy in the past when the union organizers had come to town. As Flint slowed, stilled, enlarged, and parsed the images from that terrible day, he knew he was not looking at an “airliner” “crashing” into a building and then “exploding.” No, the “airliner” clearly melted, for lack of a better descriptor, into the side of the building. It dissolved without leaving a trace, and then something else happened inside, not an explosion but rather something almost subatomic. There could be no doubt. The “airliners” were holograms, or something similar, a great deception, while someone (he had a pretty good idea who) triggered some sort of black ops technology to create an international incident. He had read about dark energy and the scientists on Long Island creating trillion-degree subatomic fireballs by crashing beams of gold nuclei into each other. He was sickened. He organized the Aryan Troopers the next day, right after work, at the Hole.
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