This is a teaser of my story “War of Rebirth” that I will be posting here for all of you to read. At least the first chapters. This is just a teaser of it so let me know if you like it 😉
Sha.
Chapter I. The War
May 29th 2090.
This is the transcript of the relevant information we could obtain from the prisoners during their time in the camp before the incident last monday. I leave these as well as the recordings in the hands of a courier as well as the last four vials we found in hopes that it will reach to you safely. I have to apologize because some of the files might be unordered as our storage unit was damaged during one of the raids and we had to salvage as much as we could.
I want to add that we began having more frecuent encounters with the enemy so I think it’s better to send these your way, General, while we try to get the rest from what’s left of the lab. Also, I’m afraid more human casualties is unavoidable, they are ingenious and have damaged four transports so far, like the one on monday where we lost the doctor.
Dr. Rob Tusk
Assistant to Professor Hope
When we started Project HAGFISH we were researching on organ farming and harvesting for medical applications, it wasn’t a new concept, there was already a lab in China that did that with pigs, but it wasn’t until the military invested in HAGFISH that the project really kicked off, but quickly we realized they weren’t interested in organs anymore.
When subject CO-1 didn’t… fail the tests they shut down the entire compound and started building all these fences and towers around, they had to buy and demolish a few surrounding buildings to expand the grounds.
We thought they were going to take over the project and bring in their own people, I mean, they did, but they did not replace us, on the contrary, we quickly climbed up the food chain, they sacked Director Hudd and the entire board of directors, in a way it was kind of fun watching all your bosses who stopped our research every step on the way because of equipment cost and the ethical council stepping in, it was… liberating, we were having so much done in the first three weeks after they were all gone than what we did in the year before.
Dr. Amanda Silvers
Director of HAGFISH Project
We were like kids in Disneyland and we had they keys to everything, we were so excited that none of us wanted to go home, then our dream came true and the army set up quarters for us in the compound, it was nice at first of course, and we did not miss the light of day one bit as we could work on this project we believed on for a long time. We thought we were finally going to eradicate disease from earth, just imagine the potential of replacing a damaged limb, or a heart, even parts of the brain with all-new improved tissue that wouldn’t decay as fast, cancer, parkinson’s, we could get blind people to see again with just an operation!, we were at the very top of genetic research!.
It was a shame what happened to CO-1… I mean, Coral, as I called her. We only experimented with females so that if one of the subjects was stable we were able to produce successful replicas quickly with their egg, plus they seemed like the right choice back then, oh man, I feel shivers just thinking about how cold-hearted we were.
John Stevens
Son of General Stevens
My dad was always a smart man; he was able to see way ahead of things and was a meticulous planner—sometimes unpredictable, but he had a way to see how things would unfold. It was scary how he was able to see through people and events and stay calm. He knew he had to secure the serum, but he had to make sure none of the scientists knew why. He just needed it ready and available as soon as possible.
It was as if he knew the test subjects were going to be able to get away, as if he had planned it. Later we knew he didn’t plan any of this at all, but he knew he had to be ready to have some kind of leverage on the rebels.
As much as Professor Hope was loyal to my father, I knew he hated his guts. Hope knew the way he did things, but he was not going to allow his creation to turn against him, you know, like Frankenstein’s monster turning against him, so he made sure to to create the S-Serum as a safeguard in case it happened, he was a very paranoid man, but for my father, what he did was the key to stop the rebellion, and they both knew it, as smart as the rebels were, sooner or later they would need to negotiate with him for the Serum.
Dr. Rob Tusk
Assistant to Professor Hope
When we started Project HAGFISH we were researching on organ farming and harvesting for medical applications, it wasn’t a new concept, there was already a lab in China that did that with pigs, but it wasn’t until the military invested in HAGFISH that the project really kicked off, but quickly we realized they weren’t interested in organs anymore.
When subject CO-1 didn’t… fail the tests they shut down the entire compound and started building all these fences and towers around, they had to buy and demolish a few surrounding buildings to expand the grounds.
We thought they were going to take over the project and bring in their own people, I mean, they did, but they did not replace us, on the contrary, we quickly climbed up the food chain, they sacked Director Hudd with the entire board of directors, in a way it was kind of fun watching all your bosses who stopped our research every step on the way because of equipment cost and the ethical council stepping in, it was… liberating, we were having so much done in the first three weeks after they were all gone than what we did in the year before.
Dr. Amanda Silvers
We were like kids in Disneyland and we had they keys to everything, we were so excited that none of us wanted to go home, then our dream came true and the army set up quarters for us in the compound, it was nice at first of course, and we did not miss the light of day one bit as we could work on this project we believed on for a long time. We thought we were finally going to eradicate disease from earth, just imagine the potential of replacing a damaged limb, or a heart, even parts of the brain with all-new improved tissue that wouldn’t decay as fast, cancer, parkinson’s, we could get blind people to see again with just an operation!, we were at the very top of genetic research!.
It was a shame what happened to CO-1… I mean, Coral, as I called her. We only experimented with females so that if one of the subjects was stable we were able to produce successful replicas quickly with their egg, plus they seemed like the right choice back then, oh man, I feel shivers just thinking about how cold-hearted we were.
Dr. Rob Tusk
I think that if it wasn’t for the serum this whole war could have finished very quickly, and not for the right side to win, but yet we thought that it was how we were going to stop the war in the other direction, how naive we were.
So, the serum, basically the idea was to control the genetic fusion stability, when we first made it to stabilize the fusion, as the first attempts went really bad, the rejection was very quick and the subjects didn’t last long, but when CO-1 made it, the whole thing was rendered useless! There was no instability, no rejection, or so we thought, but Professor got orders from Gral. Stevens to keep perfecting the serum, so Dr. Wilkins was assigned to the task.
Dr. Charles Wilkins
I was ordered to continue some parts of the research even when they were dead ends. There was a time I thought I was doing forensics for all the stuff that went wrong, I mean it is part of the research, but to keep developing a serum that was no longer necessary? CO-1 was getting through her first year I was still stuck trying to remove impurities in the serum, it was not being used on live subjects anymore, other than CO-1 that is, or so I thought, just once each three months or so they’d order a batch of the improved serum and that was it.
Dr. Amanda Silvers
She had it rough, poor girl, the nausea, the headaches, they were really bad, sometimes she was trying to keep her good spirit alive making jokes on her changes, and sometimes she wouldn’t leave her chambers asking to keep the lights off at all times, she described the effects as almost the same chemotherapy patients did, she felt her blood burn sometimes, but there was no chemicals applied to her, it’s as if her own blood was fighting against itself, but every result came clean.
And then Professor Hope visited her in private and a couple of hours later she was joyful as ever, as if nothing happened.
John Stevens
I didn’t know why it was the tiger genetics that sticked at first, I don’t know how the gears of that kind of science works but I’m sure that even the scientists were as surprised as us that it was feline genes that sticked on subject CO-1, I used to think that it was because tigers are strong and stuff, but I’m sure Dr. Silvers would give you a better explanation of that.
Still CO-1 didn’t show any kind of aggressive behavior, well, at least she didn’t when I got to see her. I was starting my career as private following my father’s footsteps and sometimes I’d get to see CO-1, she was… confusing, of course in that step of the research the looks of her weren’t really great, she was kind of scary to me, she didn’t look like the later subjects at all, in fact I don’t think I could tell you how she looked like, she was just a lab creature, deformed, and still through all that deformation she seemed happy, making this… weird-looking expression that I learned was a smile later on.
Dr. Rob Tusk
Despite her look, by day 30 her T-Cell count was great, in fact it was even better, and by day 60 there was no trace of the virus at all, it’s as if it was vanished from her body, yeah, she had a lot of deformities on the outside, but inside she was stronger, her organs were regenerating really fast and even growing back! I did shout Eureka! when I saw the results, but with all those soldiers around it wasn’t as funny as I pictured in my mind.
However there were times when the growth stopped and the organs even begun to degenerate again, that’s when we understood that even when the genetic recoding was not working, the natural immune system kept rejecting the fusion, so that’s when we started to modify the eggs so that the splicing happened from the conception itself. So we came to a difficult choice, the gene therapy worked, but as long as the serum was supplied, which was insanely expensive and impractical for mass production, but if we could introduce just the needed genetic code to the eggs we could have healthier people by carefully picking what worked to prevent the major “defects” in the human code.
Dr. Amanda Silvers
We thought they would want to hold the maturing of male eggs until we had more successful subjects after Coral, it was just a matter of time, we knew that, what we didn’t know is how fast they would begin doing it, but one day the general and Dr. Tusk arrived with a cryo-box with a successful embryo labeled CO-X and I realized something was wrong.
Dr. Charles Wilkins
I knew it was wrong, god, I wish I’ve listened to my gut, but having all that equipment and all those new results Dr. Tusk showed us, it seemed like the right way to go, after all the serum was pretty much done and it felt like the natural step to take in the research, how wrong we were.
CO-X was perfect in every single way, it grew up very quickly but it had more fur and cat-like physical look even when his body structure was perfectly human. However we noticed something was not right: by the first year he had excellent cognitive skills and could have a conversation and by the third year he looked like a 14 year old. We had to make adjustments to the second batch of spliced eggs to correct the accelerated aging.
CURRUPTED FILE
It was when CO-X turned 4 when he became a bit… hostile, he begun demanding to leave the lab and it was not unexpected he started to ask where “the rest of them” were, as much as we avoided having mirrors in the place, just a simple reflection on the glass was enough for him to realize he was not like the rest of us. My father was concerned with the attachment Dr. Silvers and Dr. Wilkins developed with CO-X to the point that their interactions with him were reduced at the minimum necessary.
Dr. Amanda Silvers
At first I must confess I felt no attachments with CO-X, but after Coral passed away I felt like I had a responsibility with him, this new creature, alone in a lab, wondering why he was confined to the facility. He did have some new rooms added to the lab with a playroom, a gym and some entertainment but I guess he knew there was more out there, what we didn’t calculate was the factor of a living being’s curiosity.
Dr. Charles Wilkins
It was a matter of time before we realized or mistake but this might be just what we needed for the s
Dr. Amanda Silvers
When he heard the first blast, we were all already taking shelter in one of the cryolabs—it was cold, not because of the cryo-chambers, but because only the emergency power was on and we were a couple of floors beneath the surface. At first I thought one of the main power generators went kaboom, but we overheard the guards receiving orders from their comms to seal the lab, something about a bomb on sector two and some rebels getting through their lines. That’s all we heard, then it was all quiet for a while. First I feared that they blew up all of sector two to stop them from getting out, and it only made it worse because we were just there, watching the hours pass by.
Once in a while a guard would get in, check on us and go back outside. Professor Hope was very impatient and kept demanding more power for additional computers—he told us he was in a rush trying to backup as much information as he could, but now that I think about it I’m sure he was trying to make sure the serum was safe. I couldn’t understand then why he cared so much about the S-Serum while we were trapped in there; I was more worried about the subjects records and their fusion results, if we were to get out of there that’s what the military would care the most, but it was like he was obsessed with it.
John Stevens
Son of General Stevens
My dad was always a smart man; he was able to see way ahead of things and was a meticulous planner—sometimes unpredictable, but he had a way to see how things would unfold. It was scary how he was able to see through people and events and stay calm. He knew he had to secure the serum, but he had to make sure none of the scientists knew why. He just needed it ready and available as soon as possible.
It was as if he knew the test subjects were going to be able to get away, as if he had planned it. Later we knew he didn’t plan any of this at all, but he knew he had to be ready to have some kind of leverage on the rebels.
As much as Professor Hope was loyal to my father, I knew he hated his guts. Hope knew the way he did things, but he was not going to allow his creation to turn against him, you know, like Frankenstein’s monster turning against him, so he made sure to to create the S-Serum as a safeguard in case it happened, he was a very paranoid man, but for my father, what he did was the key to stop the rebellion, and they both knew it, as smart as the rebels were, sooner or later they would need to negotiate with him for the Serum.
— END OF FILE —
