In The Shadow of 115

The Story of Doctor Edward Smithberg

November 16th, 2076

I've returned to keeping journals of our progress here at West Tek after nearly a year of silence. Why?

Today, November 16th, I've received a very interesting offer. The autumn wave of Limit 115 apparently hit Beijing even harder than our slanted news networks say... and that's saying something. As it turns out, the completely unpronounceable biological warfare division of the People's Democratic Volunteer Liberation Army of Happiness and Candy or whatever is utterly flummoxed by the virus and hasn't gotten nearly as much headway on a potential vaccine as we have with the PVP.

Though I have no idea how they managed to do this, my private terminal contained a quintuple-encoded message from said division requesting my knowledge of said project. For quite a handsome price, I must say. I immediately accepted - I'm injecting rhesus monkeys with twenty different strains of Panimmunity Viron a day because it pays well, not because I give a damn about some moron dying a painful death from brain hemorrhaging.

This would be so much easier if we still had a union! As it is, those idiot military grunts search our quarters twice a day, apparently in-between pointlessly repeating random portions of the phonetic alphabet for no reason in particular. I've had to keep the holotapes directly on my person, which is much easier said than done.

With that rather illustrious prologue complete, I can return to documenting our results with the Viron. Nothing particularly noteworthy occured today, other than another regular seizure from the chimps. Her record cerebral activity was a 0.93% increase over the last seizure victim, but aggressiveness actually increased by 24.4 on the Vehrz scale. If this project is ever deployed to cure L115, we're going to have a very spastic and angry nation, but marginally smarter. Not that's saying much.

January 7th, 2077
What fun! The powers-that-be have decided, in all their bureaucratic glory, that West Tek, where all of our equipment is stored, is not good enough for us, the heroic scientists of America - who are never once mentioned in a single press release, mind you!

We're apparently moving to some horrible military base called "Mariposa" - and, better yet, Spindel's security team is coming with us the breath down our necks while we try to make man immortal and I proceed tell the chinese how we did it.

How inconsiderate.

I've got hundreds of supplies to collect - we're probably going to break a year's worth of grant money in lab equipment with the moving process. Not that it matters: the Senate committee on... whatever the government considers us to be ordered essentially unlimited funding for this project. Privately, of course. Still, Johnson actually named some of the reusable syringes. He's going to be even more unpleasant to be around should those goons break any of them.

January 10th, 2077
Well, the moving is complete. We received some interesting information on arrival: we'll be getting no new specimens for testing. How, I ask, are we to test the FEV, as it is now called?

Mariposa contains a military prison.

I can only imagine how many human rights lobbyists would go into cardiac arrest if they so much as conceived that the government might actually do something like this. Oh well, I'm not here to question. Still, some of the new testers we're dealing with are downright sadists. I couldn't care less one way or the other, but these people seem to enjoy when the patients go into violent seizures.

In any case, the human genome has reacted wonderfully to the quadruple helix structure. I, personally, believed along with much of the team that euploid humans would die after hours, but so far the same aggressiveness characterized in other test subjects, but muscle mass has increased. Like everything from strains 11-523 onward, they all exhibit immunity to radiological, biological, and chemical agents. Mitosis has increased by 12 Kilohertz, but brain activity seems to remain normal or drop.

Unfortunately, this being a military prison, many of the prisoners are loaded up on quite a bit more than their fair share of control-breaking diseases. We considered ourselves lucky when we finally got a purely political prisoner from Canada. First one with a clean bill of health so far.

Nice fan fic.

Keep up. Lets see another entry

March 9th, 2077
It's been coming for awhile now. We couldn't honestly hope for much better - the PVP cures L115. Our objective is no longer panimmunity. Instead, we're making genetically enhanced soldiers, or so say the orders we've just received.

Lovely.

Thankfully, my chinese counterpart has not asked me to partake in any form of sabotage, and will be extracting me on October 27th. I'll be looking forward to seeing a different lab after working in this godforsaken base for over half a year. I wonder if I'll need to learn chinese.

In any case, we've unofficially been working on improving combat prowess in subjects for several weeks now anyway. Cognitive decay and aggressiveness usually demand euthanasia after at most a fortnight, but in that time we've seen all kinds of adaptations develop: triple corneal reflection, reduced neuron pruning (which seems to be the only way they can retain enough motor skills to breath), and obviously muscle growth. The skin jaundice is somewhat cause for concern, but doesn't seem to have any serious effects.

An odd effect we've noticed in subjects exposed to gaseous FEV is, well, a complete opposite of those with direct contact. Muscle mass decreases, skin flakes off... the damn things look like the living dead. However, they benefit from even higher cellular regeneration rates than the direct contacted, and radiological agents actually prompt tissue regeneration in some subjects. Best of all, we see almost no mental degradation in most cases. In approximately 39.2% of tests, however, these subjects loose nearly all higher mental function and gain the same aggressiveness as in the main tests. Sadly, in both cases, the body becomes even less durable than a standard human. So much for supersoldiers.