White gets a page. She sighs with relief.
"Good news guys. You been promoted. The controversy over your actions necessitates knowing what You'll be the first full team with full access to Mr. Gray. Mr. Gray, take it away...
Mr. Grey appears on the screens in the infirmary. "Greetings. You have done your jobs well, and earned increased security clearance. You have come under scrutiny by the media, and with this attack, which Barrington is blaming your actions in the Negev for, this scrutiny will increase. Thus, I owe you an explanation of what we are, and where we came from.
As you know, the Trust was founded during and after the fall of the Soviet Union, cobbled together from superheroes, jettisoned DoD Cold War projects, and our most valuable of acquisitions, a Geldaran mothership. A number of supers felt that it was necessary to create the group to ensure that major superthreats were efficiently dealt with, and feared that without the Cold War, the necessary security apparatus would not be maintained. Some also preferred that this kind of power was out of government hands, anyway. Since we were offloading cancelled or soon-to-be-cancelled government programs -- both technological and operational -- into our group, it was necessary that certain government officials at the time know of our existence to facilitate the transition. In the end, the government officials who felt these programs had to survive, and the supers who founded the Trust and provided the ship, came to an agreement.
The Trust is literally a trust, a blind trust really, into which covert technologies and programs were placed. The intent of the group is to protect the country and the world outside the confines of government, but with the resources of government. We were built as the perfect blend between superhero groups and governmental security agencies.
Both sides agreed on a trustee, a man who was trusted by all -- Jack Simmons, the superhero known as The Patriot. He also founded AEGIS, among other things. He was terminally ill, however, but in the end, that actually worked to our advantage. The Geldaran mothership included the most powerful and sophisticated supercomputer any of us had ever seen, including a highly-configurable artificial intelligence unit...with Daedalus' help, Simmons' consciousness was merged with the AI...creating me.
I am Mr. Grey. I am also the Trust AI. Most of all, I am Jack Simmons, reborn. My mission is to act as I did in life. The interests of the country are important to me but both sides knew I won't do anything that violates my morals...this is by design. I was programmed to be the ideal combination between superheroes and national security. My programming prohibits me from directly coordinating with any high-ranking government official, but I can take their actions into account, and am incapable of actual treason.
The Trust was set up in part by the Department of Defense, but we are not a government agency. No president has ever known about it. After the initial group, no well-known high ranking government official has been informed. In fact, while they have no agents within the Trust, the Trust has agents in the government to provide us access. Our early allies in the DoD arranged to create X-Directorate, which is ostensibly an oversight group, but is in fact a front we use to access the intelligence community. We also have agents within AEGIS, easily arranged since I founded AEGIS.
Thus, you see our dilemma. We are not a government agency, but we cannot reveal ourselves either. Our critics are dead-wrong, but there is enough of a grain of truth that we must remain secret.
