Prose:Project Alderon/Chapter 1
The CORE Nanotech facility sat on the edge of Lexington, Kentucky. A small, nondescript industrial complex that contrasted sharply against its surroundings - run-down business parks, shuttered warehouses, and heavy overgrowth. In the distance, the city’s towers shone through the morning fog, neon banners decorating their sides. UAVs darted between the towers like swarms of insects. The harsh wind on the balcony whipped across the two researchers’ coats.
“Man, why’d they gotta put us all the way out here?”
The scientist lit a cigarette.
“We’re the moonshot lab. We only get funding when management wants to use us for something.”
“Could’ve used some infrastructure. Like a train. We’re the best-paid nanotech engineers in the country and all we get’s a measly bus.”
“Hey, can I bum one of those?”
“Didn’t know you smoked.”
The scientist slid a shiny gold durry from the pack. A Fujikawa Filtronica Brass. His colleague blocked the icy wind with his hand as he lit up the tip with his electron-beam lighter.
He took a long, slow drag before exhaling.
“This fuckin’ project, man. It’s stressing me out. We’ve recommended a dozen safeguards. The carb wants us to push ahead anyway. I dunno, I- I feel like we’re on the road to disaster here.”
The other cleared his throat, coughing. “Why worry about it now? They signed off on it. All we can do’s what they ask of us. You think about it any more than that, it really starts to eat away at you.”
“And… if it goes south, it’s not on us. That’s what the paper trail’s for. Once our contract’s up, we’ll both have more than enough to pay off our debts and get out of this godforsaken industrial backwater. Cali, the Thames, hell, maybe even Mars…”
He trailed off, then stubbed out his cigarette and tossed it over the railing.
Another gust sent dust blowing across the balcony. The dosimeter clipped to his belt emitted a rapid series of beeps in response.
“The wind’s picking up. We’d better head inside.”
"Taylor wants you down in the SCIF. Says it's urgent."
"What? Why?"
"Didn't say."
After badging through the blast door into the meeting room, he sat down in front of a massive, dark screen. It was unnaturally quiet, the sound-dampening properties of the walls insulating him from all outside noise. Once a few seconds had passed, the screen flickered to life.
Establishing video stream via DECINET...
A tall, severe-looking British woman, wearing a sharp grey suit, appeared on-screen.
"Elliot. What a pleasure it is to speak with you again," she scowled.
"Dr. Nadez said the call was urgent. What do you-"
"Let's get this over with. I'm here to say you're done."
"E-excuse me?"
"You and your project are uncontrollable. You scheduled animal trials without informing us? We saw the results of your recent tests. I cannot overstate how dangerous this has become."
"That's rich coming from you, Taylor. You told us to remove those limiters."
"We asked for the capability to remove them. As and when required."
"You can't do that in a truly polymorphic system. Even if we did implement them, they'd be as useless as suggestions! We built a system that does exactly what you wanted."
"This is not a debate, Elliot. Legal's preparing the paperwork as we speak. Personnel will be on-site in a matter of weeks to arrange the removal and destruction of all project assets."
"What?! Do you even realise how much funding's gone into this program?"
"Since the vast majority of it was ours, yes, yes I do. And it pains me so to throw it all away, especially for what could've delivered such a game-changing new capability for our mission. But this, if it were to be further developed, manifests a direct threat to humanity. And that existential threat outweighs any net benefit it grants."
"The board won't just go quietly. They'll fight."
"No, they won't. You know they won't. Goodbye, Elliot."
The screen cut to black.
Elliot dug his fingernails into his knees until he bled. Then he picked up the chair and, with all his might, launched it at the monitor.
"GAAHHHHHHHH, FUCKING BITCH!"
Glass shards rained down upon the polished metal floor. But the insulated walls of the SCIF absorbed his rage.
As I stood over the control panel in the hazmat testing chamber, I heard the door slide open. My heart dropped like a stone as I noticed the CorpSec soldiers in the reflection of the chamber window.
“Don’t turn around, Samuel. Stay right where you are.”
“Uh, w-what’s this about…” I stammered.
“The Anti-Proliferation Front? Did you really think this day would never come?”
“P-please, don’t do this…” I sobbed, begging for him to change his mind.
“Close your eyes. We'll make this quick.”
I watched as he raised his weapon and aimed it at the back of my head. In one last, desperate attempt at survival, I twisted the one control dial I’d instinctively put my hand on hard to the right.
A canister of liquid nitrogen exploded, immediately misting the room in a dense fog. The commander fired as I made a run for the corridor.
As I sprinted through the door, I recoiled, feeling like I’d just been punched from behind. Then I looked down and noticed the new hole in my chest, leaking bright red blood. I cried out in pain, but the adrenaline gave me just enough to keep going.
Having just barely lost them in the mist, I headed for my only remaining chance of survival. There was something in one of the secure laboratories. It was probably a death sentence, but I had nothing to lose.
I tapped my badge against the blast door reader and keyed in my PIN frantically as I heard the security team right behind me in the corridor. Praying they hadn’t had the foresight to revoke my badge permissions. And thankfully, for once today luck happened to be on my side.
The door swung open. I dashed through and slammed it closed, hitting the emergency interior lockdown. That’d at least buy me some time, I thought, as I heard the sirens sound and the thermite charges ignite, fusing the boltwork into the door frame.
Reaching for a medkit off the wall, I pulled out a roll of medical gauze and pushed it tightly into the gunshot wound in my chest, gritting my teeth in pain.
I turned my attention to the table in the centre of the lab. A thick black metal case sat squarely on top of it, marked with a copious amount of danger signage. Using the tiny keypad, I entered in a code sequence that I was absolutely not meant to know.
An explosion shook the room, causing the blast door to buckle inwards slightly. Breaching charges. It wasn’t going to hold for long…
The magnetic latches of the secure transport case disengaged sequentially. Forcefield disarmed, the display read. I felt the walls and floor violently shake again as the blast door gained another massive dent.
With shaking hands, I withdrew the autoinjector from within its neat black foam enclosure. An iridescent, metallic liquid sloshed around in the attached vial.
The words of my research lead two weeks prior echoed in my head.
"What'd happen? Well, we've never tested this new iteration on humans. But a single rat... almost managed to tear through the blast door of the test chamber before we swept the room with GRID."
Collapsing against the table, I coughed, splattering more of my blood onto the table, the gauze haphazardly packed into the hole in my chest already soaked through. With the last of my remaining strength, I pressed the tip of the injector to my thigh and spoke the activation phrase.
A-atem… Hayom… Tsarim… Marak… Sigma… F-five…
The trigger gave way under my finger and, with a hiss, the plunger shot forwards. A searing, white-hot pain began to spread throughout my thigh as I tossed the injector aside, screaming in agony as that very same pain began to migrate up towards my chest.
I was out of time. A blindingly bright purple plasma channel ejected what remained of the blast door, sending it careening across the lab. Green targeting lasers swept across the room, finding me instantly as their sources emerged from the dust cloud.
The soldier stomped to a halt in his exosuit, taking the safety off his railgun. It was too late; it hadn’t worked. This was it. This was the day I’d die.
He squeezed the trigger. The kinetic penetrator ripped through my damaged chest, shredding my flesh and bone effortlessly. And as unimaginable pain shot through me, I expected my vision to start fading at any second, my consciousness slip into oblivion.
But, somehow, it didn’t.
Instead, I felt a warmth coalescing in my chest. The searing pain started to fade, and I glanced down to watch as my flesh literally reassembled in front of me. The soldier lowered his weapon, confused, as two more rallied alongside him.
“Shit, is that nanotech?”
“Zero him! Now!”
All three opened fire. Some tearing through my neck, my shoulder, my pelvis, my legs. But for every hole they made, another one fixed itself.
“Aim for the head!”
I felt myself coursing with energy now. Ducking behind the table, I grabbed the empty metal case and hurled it with all my might at the soldier.
With a sickening crack, the case made contact with his skull, splitting it open like a watermelon. He fell backwards, shooting uncontrollably. The two others quickly moved in from behind him.
“Suppressing fire!”
“Command, need heavy support immediately! Target... i-is a high-class nanocybernetic threat!”
As the rounds whizzed above my head, I sensed a new feeling. Intense pangs of hunger. But unlike anything I'd felt before. Without thinking, I sank my teeth into the metal table. Every instinct I'd known told me they'd shatter, but instead, I effortlessly cleaved a chunk of metal from the table, chewing. Then another, and another, gulping them down like pieces of a sandwich. Within mere seconds, I felt sated, and noticed protective metal armour forming across my torso and down my arms, thickest in the places I'd been struck.
I stood back up, now practically a walking tank, smiling as penetrators pinged off my armour as pathetically as ping-pong balls.
The two soldiers glanced at each other with expressions of panic, then dropped their weapons and ran.
I walked back out of the entrance, stepping over the commander’s crumpled exosuit. Alarms blared in the hallway. I sensed heavy boots on the ground, rapidly on their way to my position and just a few corridors away. Without looking back, I sprinted for the exit. My surroundings became a blur as I ran with more power than I’d ever felt before in my life.
Raven: "The date is March 17, 2353. The time is 1423 hours, as confirmed now by the KVSC on-log. Present council members are High Adjudicator Kleist, High Adjudicator Stone, High Adjudicator Gardner, High Adjudicator Schmidt, High Adjudicator Ermakov, and High Adjudicator Raven, speaking. This deliberation session will be conducted at the Gamma level."
Raven: "On today's agenda is the action to be taken regarding the Project Alderon in relation to the Conway situation. For the benefit of uninformed parties, CONWAY-1 is an active MD-3 nanosecurity threat in Lexington with additional risk to progress to a higher class if not immediately contained. We will now discuss Project Alderon."
Raven: "Project Alderon is a Gamma-classified BRL-15 program developed in collaboration with CORE Nanotech to develop adaptive nanocybernetics with the intention of augmenting CMI operatives. The program was halted after a standard risk assessment by BRL-15 determined project risk to be far beyond our appetite. It is only recent knowledge that CORE intentionally withheld project assets during the shutdown and destruction process in order to covertly continue the program for their own benefit."
Raven: "Because of CORE's recklessness, an individual possessing extremely hazardous and unpredictable adaptive nanotech is loose in Lexington, and the technology he carries in his body poses a threat to this very planet and possibly even the whole system. I believe that it is the utmost importance we immediately isolate the source of the technology in order to prevent any further proliferation."
Ermakov: "Terminus-17 is already in position in facility airspace, running interference. All we need to do is give the signal."
Kleist: "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a sec. You want to send an entire CMI fireteam to assault a private research facility in broad daylight?"
Ermakov: "That's exactly what I'm saying."
Gardner: "Rules of engagement?"
Ermakov: "We-"
Raven: "No quarter."
Kleist: "Melanie? Are you insane?"
Gardner: "Let's hear your justification."
Raven: "It's the stakes. If anyone - I mean anyone - outside CORE figures out how to build this tech, we won't just have one MD-3 calamity to deal with. We'll have a hundred."
Raven: "We don't have time for careful amnesticisation or detention. We can't risk those scientists talking to anyone. Even if they're loyal. Even if their intentions are good."
Gardner: "Why don't we just sweep the place with GRID? Or hit it with Phantom Hammer?"
Raven: "GRID doesn't guarantee destruction of nanobot clusters. And we can't use antimatter weaponry this close to a metropolitan area. Not without significant collateral."
Stone: "What's the legal implications of this?"
Raven: "Reality Law permits it, as long as we can justify it. Of course, there'll be a PR hit; but I trust the public will understand why we did what we had to do if we make the true gravity of the situation clear."
Schmidt: "We're not doing this again. We're still recovering from the Harkland fiasco, for fuck's sake. The Coalition's watching us very closely. We don't need more negative press."
Ermakov: "Just... hear her out. There aren't many other options."
Raven: "There's an additional benefit."
Gardner: "Oh?"
Raven: "Not even the SIO anticipated CORE's disloyalty. We can't have the corporation stepping out of line again, but we also can't afford to lose them. We're too reliant on their technology."
Raven: "So... we send a strong message. This is, in my mind, a proportionate response."
Raven: "Shall we put this to a vote?"
Kleist: "Gah, let's get on with it."
The meeting room was crowded, packed with corporate executives and high-ranking members of CORE’s private military division. CorpSec soldiers carrying massive rifles stood guard outside. The tension in the air was almost palpable.
“Gahhhh, fuck. Simon, sitrep. Just how much did we lose?”
“The facility’s still smouldering. E…every member of the research team’s dead. W-well, those we've accounted for, anyway. We’re still combing through the wreckage, b-but…”
An older woman sitting at the end of the table interjected in a distinctive Southern drawl.
“It’s a message.”
“What? The whole building’s gone. The program can’t recover from this.”
“We put the world at risk. That’s the hard truth of the matter. You think this is violence? This is Raven being nice.”
“So, you think we should just, what… sit down and take it? After we poured so much funding into R&D? Are you out of your mind?”
“There is no other choice. You can’t fight the wind; you can't hold back the ocean. I guarantee if we show even an inkling of a desire to restart this project, it won’t just be a satellite facility they come for next. It’ll be the head office.”
The executive sighed and waved his hands in exasperation.
“Any news on Conway?”
“From what I’ve heard? Still on the run. Raven’s shut down the city, and Calamity Mitigation’s busy tearing it to shreds. And anyway, why the fuck do you care?”
“Well, I- I just thought…”
“Hurry up. Spit it out.”
“Uh… well, you see... I-if... we could recover the asset, then…”
Her expression changed in an instant, the room going so silent you could hear a pin drop. The soldiers standing around the room grimaced, as if they were bracing for something.
The woman slowly stood up, silently walking over to the meek-looking exec, bringing her face so close to his he could practically smell her breath.
“I’m in a good mood today. We lost one lab when we could’ve easily lost your whole department. So, on this occasion, I’ve decided not to have you killed.”
“However… you are fired.”
“Security, eject this man from the building.”