Project Kumeran

Project Kumeran was an extremely secretive BioCorp project to reverse-engineer the biology of the alien Ir'vaki species. It involved the torture and dissection of three Ir’vaki diplomats shot down by Paradigm in a secret agreement with the organisation, and the artificial growth of several Ir’vaki specimens under controlled conditions in an attempt to create a subservient entity with extremely powerful psionic abilities. It is known widely as one of the greatest corporate atrocities of the 22nd Century.

Background

Human Observation

The Ir'vaki race has a long-standing history of observing humans, and is thought to be the origin of many of the unexplained UFO events in Earth history. One such example was the 2055 UFO sighting over Manchester, Great Britain; which was later known to be an Ir'vaki scout team whose particle cloaking field had malfunctioned on exposure to the Southern Exclusion Zone, where a Entropic Flashover Bomb (EFB) had detonated during the London Revolution.

Transport Crash

In the 2170s, the Ir'vaki made the decision to end their period of observation and reveal themselves to humanity after they realised their technological development was accelerating at unprecedented rates, with humans both understanding and exploiting dangerous reality control technology. A diplomatic craft was dispatched to the Solar System with its shields and cloaking generators intentionally turned off. However, as the ship passed a Paradigm surveillance base located on Europa, it was inadvertently shot down by automated anti-ship batteries.

This sent personnel at the base into a state of panic when the craft crashed, realising what they had done as they found the Ir'vaki crew alive, but severely injured. Despite sentiment on the part of the base's personnel to admit what they had done, Paradigm leadership quickly forced a coverup on the basis of preventing their race from finding out what had happened.

BioCorp Abuse

Later that year, BioCorp, which had a close relationship with Paradigm, expressed interest in disposing of the Ir'vaki bodies in exchange for the rights to construct research laboratories at Paradigm-controlled space colonies, as well as a large financial contribution. Their true intentions, though, were to analyse the unique Ir'vaki biology in order to give the corporation huge advantages in the fields of genetics and wetware computing, as well as unlocking the secrets of psionics. This effort became known as Project Kumeran.

After BioCorp acquired the barely-surviving Ir'vaki diplomats, the corporation used spatial cell control to repair their damaged bodies, before imprisoning them in the Site 18 Research Facility. Throughout the mid and late 2180s, BioCorp conducted experiments on the Ir'vaki prisoners, including copying their genomes in an effort to produce clones that would be integrated into hybrid-biological power generation systems and wetware computers while still conscious. The project also paved the way for Project Jericho, which aimed to use Ir’vaki neural tissue as the substrate for the wetware computers that were currently being developed.

Legacy

The project’s existence later became known to Raven, but it was not known to the public before it incited the Ir'vaki Conflict. As part of the race’s demands during humanity's surrender, thousands of BioCorp personnel involved in the project were forcibly extradited to the Ir’vaki homeworlds for trial. BioCorp was also heavily sanctioned by the Coalition and raided by Raven for its violations of Dimensional Security Accords, which caused severe damage to the corporation and caused its share prices to significantly drop. As a result of the origin of wetware computers in Ir’vaki biology, the technology remains extremely controversial and is banned today in some countries.