Lletres: Soundtrack Artists. Ten Thirteen.

The method, as they call it, though it was more so a germ-line procedure of singular meta-scientific complexity, had been
given to them by the alien colonists as a quid pro quo. The Syndicate would help them to create a population of alien hybrids
who would hide in plain sight, cloned from human ova and alien bio-material, so there would be a clone race immune to the
effects of the black oil when the return to the planet began. For this, the Syndicate would be sequestered, granted a sort of
immunity or asylum, given a place in the grander scheme.

They were the Vichy government to the German "Final Solution": collaborationists whose motivation was simple, self-directed
survival. These cloning operations were spread across the country, the cataloging and record-keeping done through a complex
intra-institutional system that connected to every branch of government, from the Social Security Administration to the
Department of Defense.

The operation, under the working title "Purity Control," had been launched in 1948, its original conception the brainchild
of German scientists given immunity themselves for war crimes, and allowed to continue the eugenic experiments that were
Hitler's dark legacy.

The Syndicate had begun as a subset of a shadow intelligence agency whose original orders were to create plausible denial
and an effective cover-up of Purity Control. But through 50 years, numerous U.S. and U.N. administrations, the principals
began to wrest control, accumulating power and influence across international borders, such that - by 1990 - the operation
ceased to have a member accountable to any one government and whose only orders would be taken from a man named Strughold, a
German industrialist who had fled his homeland to northern Africa.

These men, whose knowledge and access provided control of a foreseeable future, had, in spite of this, everything to lose.
Their secret work, the cloning preparations and the cataloging constituted their greatest vulnerability: exposure. Their
detection would ensure not just their own demise, but a far-reaching dissolution of social and religious order around the
globe.

To protect against this, the Syndicate employed methods of disinformation, using covert government programs that had been

regrettably discovered, as a kind of smokescreen - a dodge or blind where the transgressions of Congress-accountable agencies
served to hide their own more odious undertaking.

They had even at times used the UFO phenomenon to create a hysteria that science and the intelligentsia denounced so
completely as to make belief in believers seem ridiculous and completely discreditable.

They had also, in a crisis, used a tool of the colonists themselves - alien bounty hunters who policed the cloning
operations and enforced rule on the countdown to colonization. A double-edged sword whose cold-blooded tactics had helped to
stem a leak or threat, but who also kept a watch on the Syndicate. A threat in itself, as the Syndicate had something to hide
that not even the colonists knew of: a vaccine against the black oil, an inoculant against the substance in which the alien
life force was held - in fact, the very medium of the life force itself.

To guard this secret was perhaps even more critical than the truth of the existence of alien life, and of colonization. If
the Syndicate's own secret vaccine were discovered, the vaccine that would make themselves immune from the effects of the
black oil, they would certainly be destroyed and the timetable for colonization stepped up. They would protect this secret
with their lives. They would kill to protect it, as it symbolized the only hope they had of avoiding enslavement when the
planet was overtaken.

That they had been able to, over decades, conduct their work on the vaccine undetected was the result of a code among the
Syndicate members that put honor and the future above personal politics. But now this code was beginning to break down, an
incipient scramble for power beginning to develop. A threat from within that doubled the threat from without: from agents
Mulder and Scully, and the X-files.