CHAPTER 7

Year: 04/8/2525

Planet: Sargasso

Location: Leades Wilds Forest, Life Foundation Research facility, underground research facility, level: 5, Lab: A, Sub-Lab: 5A

The Level 5 labs, or as some of the more knowledgeable scientists and employees called it, ‘The skeleton closest.’, was the Life Foundation Sargasso branch Research facility’s most guarded area. The research and experimentations done on Levels 1- 4, including their respective sub-levels, were overall legal if somewhat questionable in certain regards. Level 4, before the project was moved to a more isolated location, once contained Project: HAZE, (an experiment into creating an effective performance-enhancing drug with minimal side effects). Level 3’s research was discovering ways to treat debilitating genetic conditions through bio-engineering.

Level 5 was where they sent projects that skirt the line so much that only the army of lawyers that the Life Foundation Corporation had at their disposal could convince the courts that it was legal, if only barely. Here was where the corporation’s most ‘controversial’ research and experimentations were performed. Most notable among them is the concerning discovery that was made so many years ago.

The symbiotic race known as the Klyntar.

Sub-lab 5A contained various computer terminals and high-end science equipment ranging from sterile field generators to advanced medical scanners. They encircled a woman seated behind a desk scrolling through the countless files on her terminal and a few on a datapad.

She looked up into the mini mirror she kept on her desk. A woman close to her mid-thirties with beige, almost almond-colored skin and brown eyes with bags underneath stared back at her. Her hair was tied into a messy bun, and bangs touched her eyebrows. Her button-up shirt was extremely wrinkled, and her unbuttoned lab coat had a couple of splotches of light brown on the left side under her ID tag. They were the result of drinking her tea before checking if it was cool or diluted with milk.

Staring back at her was Dr. Dora Skirth, key scientific advisor to the Life Foundations R&D division and responsible for the rapid progression of Project Symbiosis.

And the evil acts committed that brought about such rapid progression.

Dora stopped scrolling and rubbed her eyes, trying to massage away the bags from under them. She reached to her side and grabbed the mug off her desk taking a sip of her tea. When the warm liquid touched her tongue, she savored the sweet, nutty, and floral flavor. Since moving to Sargasso its local specialty, Sargassoan Tea, became her favorite pick-me-up drink. A divine mixture of tea leaves, the typhoon hibiscus flower, and honey crystals. The smell caressing around her nose masked the odor of the sterilizing agents that filled the room. Unfortunately, it didn’t wake her up like it usually did.

‘You’ve been working non-stop. You need to rest.’ said a gentle, feminine, and distorted voice.

“I will, once I finish going through these reports. As long as our son is in danger I have to keep working until we formulate an escape plan to rescue our child,” said Dora as she set the mug down. She resumed her scrolling through the postmortem medical reports on the victims and the medical reports for future victims of this damn project. Most of them were homeless individuals lured with promises of food and a warm bed, while others were terminally ill and desperate for a way out of an early grave. A few were either paraplegics or quadriplegics and a good chunk of the homeless were veterans abandoned or neglected by a system that promised to take care of them after years of service. All of them were signing waivers filled with so much lawyer-speak that they couldn’t possibly hope to comprehend them. Though they probably didn’t care for the contents, only the promises made.

No matter how many times she saw the same reports over and over, it always made her stomach clench knowing that she was one of the main contributors to all of this. She knew she couldn’t do a damn thing about it without risking her child. She would’ve attempted another escape, but ever since her first attempt more precautions were taken and measures added.

“Just-” Dora let out a yawn. “Just shoot me up with more adrenaline, and I’ll be fine, Agony.”

‘No,’ refused Agony. ‘I’ve been pumping you full of adrenaline for days. You haven't had a full eight hours of rest for a week! And I don’t mean the two-hour naps! Even with me, you need to rest a full eight hours at least once every seven days! I understand you’re worried about our son and I’m worried too, but please, get some rest,’ she begged.

Dora sputtered, then let out an irritated sigh and smiled. During the first year of her employment for the Life Foundation, an accident resulted in Agony escaping from her storage unit and bonding with Dora; they had been together since. Without Agony’s insight filling in many gaps, it would’ve taken longer to make even half the progress. But even she didn’t know everything. By Klyantar's standards, she was at most close to middle age, if not a little younger.

As a race, the Klyantar were primarily logical. Their emotional capacities were very… limited and alien, but Agony was an oddity. She was unusually empathetic compared to the rest of her kind. She cared for her host on a deeper level than the usual Klyntar. On top of that, thanks to having Dora as a host during her pregnancy, Agony inadvertently assimilated Dora’s maternal instincts. This was in line with the observation that Klyntar assimilated, to various degrees, the personality traits of their hosts. The fascinating result was Agony’s parental feelings towards Dora’s son and the general love of ‘younglings.’ Unfortunately, it also caused Agony to treat Dora like a child.

‘Don’t be like that. You're too important to Carlton, so Director Reece wouldn’t dare admonish you for getting a full night's rest,’

“Fine,” growled Dora, jumping up from her chair and standing to her full height of almost 6 '2 feet tall. She used to be 5’7, and a height increase was one of the benefits of being a host, though how tall depended on the host’s genetics. “There’s also something else,”

‘The news of one of my kind escaping,’

Dora paced around the lab with a hand under her chin in thought. “Yes, fortunately, it has found a compatible host-” Dora walked back to her desk and picked up her datapad. She closed the reports and opened the Sargasso News Network(SNN) App. The first thing that popped up was an article about the hero known as Nightstalker accompanied by a substandard picture of the hero in question. Based on how it operated, and the fact none of the criminals were missing their heads or other body parts, it was likely held back by its host. Otherwise, based on previous reports of this particular symbiote, there would’ve been a lot more deaths.

That was a good thing; it meant that the host was of moral integrity and restraint. It also meant that the host and Klyntar achieved a level of symbiosis. But Dora's main concern was what Carlton would order that overweight coward to do.

‘The fact this one found a compatible host so soon is surprising.’

“I know, which in turn would catch his interest. Knowing him, I would bet he would observe for a while before capture. Especially when there are more important things to worry about,” Dora placed the datapad under her arm. She dug into her coat’s pocket and pulled out a circular device the size of the palm of her hand. She pressed a button on the side of the holo-still, and the round glass in the middle lit up and projected a picture, but it was not the one she intended.

“It had to be this still,” muttered Dora.

In the picture was Carlton Drake, back when he looked his age, shorter and smaller, wearing a neatly pressed black suit. He was shaking the hand of a naive and wide-eyed young woman, barely over 18 years old. She wore a black business suit with brown penny loafers and her hair cut short into a bob cut. Both of them smiled with hope for the future and wanted to make the world a better place. Dora stopped pacing and frowned as she remembered better times.

Working on her third doctoral thesis on the use of genetic engineering to improve the human condition attracted Carlton Drake, who offered a paid internship at his company assisting with a project he believed would help mankind. The thought of working for the Life Foundation Corporation, known for its philanthropy and medical advancements, to improve lives filled her with anticipation. After much consideration, she took the internship.

Dora smiled, remembering how proud her parents were of their daughter and how her three friends, Michelle, Patrick, and Hannah, threw her a party. She also remembered waking the next day with a massive hangover in a bathtub filled with ice and stitches on her stomach; she nearly had a heart attack. Fortunately, it turned out it was a prank her friends pulled and the stitches were fake. She got them back of course. She wondered what they were doing right now. She hadn’t sent a message to them in a while.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

On her first day in the year 2508, Carlton himself showed her the reason for Project: Symbiosis. The Klyntar, or as they were known to everyone on the project at the time: Symbiotes were recently discovered. That hopeful young woman marveled at the organic yet at the same time, inorganic substance. Its ability, based on animal testing, to enhance its host and cure it of all ailments amazed her. With such a creature, so many lives could be improved! There were so many possibilities!

Carlton explained that, almost a decade prior, a mining company under the Life Foundation umbrella found several of these creatures in a piece of meteorite that landed in an isolated piece of property they were scouting for a mining operation. The creatures bonded to a couple of dogs they brought along, and they knew they had found something special. After the crew contained the creatures using the site’s COMM systems to generate a loud enough noise to weaken them and noted their ability-enhancing properties, they were sent to the labs for study.

Due to Carlaton’s distrust of the government’s competence, he decided not to report it and study the creatures on his credits.

At first, the experiments were moral, only testing on animals. They planned for human testing several years down the line if no problems occurred. With her guidance, Project: Symbiosis produced significant results within the first few months. When the accident happened, those results accelerated even further! The discovery of the symbiote’s true name and that they were called Klyntar and were sapient accelerated the results even further. In turn, the experiments were performed with more of their comfort in mind.

Dora closed her eyes and clenched her free hand into a fist.

Then, a couple of years later, in 2510, everything changed. Carlton came back from a trip to a planet where something was discovered, bringing with him another symbiote and a strange container. Carlton said he would personally study the symbiote rather than send it to a secure facility off-planet. The strange empty metal container went to a different facility. Dora suspected that he became a host to this symbiote, but outside his youthfulness, the sudden increase in strength, muscle development, height, and fitness outside the norm for his age made him suspect, but she couldn’t be 100% sure. For all she knew, he could be on HRT and had some limb extension surgery.

Another worrying habit was that Carlton never seemed to come out of his office anymore. When he did, it was mostly to inspect facilities personally across the different colonies. But what she did know for sure was that technological advancements had something to do with the ruins he visited and the contents of the container he brought back. She suspected he found more than just the Klyntar and a few artifacts.

Since then, he rambled on about ‘securing humanity’s future’ and greenlit projects that were questionable. He forced Project: Symbiosis into human trials early, ignoring her and her colleagues' protest. At first, it was strictly volunteers, but it didn’t take long to go from volunteers to experimenting on the desperate who didn’t fully grasp what they were volunteering for. Then the Klyntar experimentation became more…. extreme. Dora and a few others attempted to leave and blow the whistle, but Carlton had leverage over them and forced them to stay.

Many of them were transferred to other projects.

In 2511, he also tasked her and a team under her with making safer versions of augmentations and creating improved versions based on data files he claimed were from a canceled project of one of his company’s subsidiaries. However, it was rumored he hired corporate spies, including the infamous Ghost, to get said files.

At the start of this endeavor, Carlton provided her with data files detailing the flawed enhancements and detailed medical files and samples from two patients who received said enhancements, codenamed Taskmaster and Crossbone.

Once the improvements were made, another team member was tasked with taking most of the load in continuing research on augmentations, freeing Dora to do more research on the Klyntar application and trying to replicate their unique biology through cloning while at the same time helping with choosing candidates for the sub-project of Project: Symbiosis, known as the Sym-Soldier program.

Over the years, news of the Life Foundation buying, through a shell/puppet company called Alchemax Medical, struggling companies that caught Carlton’s interest, and rumors of weaponization programs such as the whispered Projects Firepower, Aegis, Dynamo, Carnage and Titanium ran rampant. To curb the spread, the gossipers were ‘gently’ encouraged to not speak of it too much by the human resource department. Then there was the rumor that one of the Life Foundation’s shell companies also owned more than a few PMCs and in the process of buying out more, essentially forming a private army. A good chunk of the Sym-Soldier program’s candidates came from these PMCs and candidates for Project: Symbiosis are slowly being drawn from that pool..

For a moment, Dora’s mind turned towards some of the candidates she met. Some were of the unscrupulous sort, but others were simply dealt a bad hand or simply in it for the pay. There were a few in particular that came to mind.

Dora smirked. ‘I wonder how Charlie and the others are doing. Hopefully, they’re keeping Johnny in line. His womanizing would get him in trouble one day and no amount of his ‘Devil’s luck’ will save him.’

They were good people who didn’t deserve this.

Dora deactivated the holo-still and placed her face into the palm of her hand.

“Where did everything go so wrong,” she asked herself rhetorically. She knew the answer, it all started when he came back from that damn planet, and the disturbing thing was that he truly believed what he said about humanity’s future. What most frightened Dora was that he sounded-no, he was terrified.

What did he find in those ruins that frightened him so much? What would justify all the scrofulous acts he committed? Dora pressed the button again, switching to another image. It was of her, Agony, and the center of their life, Jonathon. Dora smiled, remembering how excited the then eight-year-old was when she was given some time off to visit. They spent the whole day marathoning through his favorite shows. She could recite the theme to Quantum Fire. Dora scowled; she had to give Carlton credit, he wasn’t unnecessarily cruel.

“Dora,” called Agony gently.

Dora blinked and looked to her right. Agony manifested herself out of her back, her dark purple and dark pink skin pulsating and moving like a group of snakes. Her eyes slanted slightly outward, mimicking a human expression of concern.

“Go get some sleep,” she said. “You’ll be able to do more once you're fully rested.”

“Right,” she yawned, and her mind went slightly hazy as the mixture of tea and adrenaline that had kept her going for the past week started to wear off. The aftereffects hit harder than usual; maybe she had pushed herself too hard. Dora turned around and headed towards the automatic door. Once at the door, she called out.

“Sentry, I would like to go to my quarters.”

“Very well, alerting your escorts.”

And with that, the distant sound of metal hitting metal was heard followed by the familiar soft whirring of servos. After a minute, the sound stopped and the steel door opened revealing the two looming black and silver skeletal figures on the other side. The two mechanical giants stared down at her with two circular red eyes that glowed softly. They were either experimental or prototype units. This was evident by the fact that pieces of the older model of ODST battle armor were welded and bolted on to protect the exposed power cables as best they could. On their backs was what Dora could surmise a battery pack, possibly graphene-based, with a wireless power receiver. The black armor clashed with the gunmetal gray mechanical skeleton and white artificial muscles giving another hint to their retrofitted nature. Both were armed with the MA5B assault rifles, likely loaded with incendiary rounds, and lining the utility belt were sonic grenades.

image [https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/c8c5c09a-c12a-440f-a3ae-9badb3d467d3/dedgnr9-16a2152a-52ee-4bc7-8da0-ef0ae0898b16.jpg/v1/fill/w_1280,h_1813,q_75,strp/phase_1_experimental_combat_android_by_mechafan1224_dedgnr9-fullview.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9MTgxMyIsInBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcL2M4YzVjMDlhLWMxMmEtNDQwZi1hM2FlLTliYWRiM2Q0NjdkM1wvZGVkZ25yOS0xNmEyMTUyYS01MmVlLTRiYzctOGRhMC1lZjBhZTA4OThiMTYuanBnIiwid2lkdGgiOiI8PTEyODAifV1dLCJhdWQiOlsidXJuOnNlcnZpY2U6aW1hZ2Uub3BlcmF0aW9ucyJdfQ.nsK6BaOvaok9M_xObbEPOEbHq7QaAALDXz9nss2_DrM]

One of the longest-circulating rumors was of projects researching combat androids and a new AI for said android. Many, particularly Dr. Nagai, doubted the rumors until last year.

Almost a couple of years ago, the facility was sent retro-fitted combat androids as part of the increased security and in response to her first escape attempt. They were rumored to be leftovers from a phase of another project: Terracotta. Dora read articles and scientific papers on the development and use of combat androids to supplement, even replace, frontline infantry. She noted how many companies tried to attain a military contract and funding for such a program. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on who you ask, politics, distrust of AI in such an independent role since the Cyberdyne incident, and worry that it would put servicemen out of the job slowed this line of research.

But this was one of the issues.

The other half was finding a small, dependable power source to sustain the machine for long periods. Another issue was creating an AI that was adaptable enough for the ever-changing conditions of the battlefield but could also be installed on a small platform. Smart AI would be the only logical choice. Dumb AI would lack the adaptability and creativity found only in smart AI. That leads to a two-fold problem. Smart AI requires data to function on large platforms such as starships or crystalline computing clusters of a data center.

The second problem was that smart AI only lasted seven years before going through rampancy. Based on observation, it was clear that these robotic platforms used an AI that lacked the sheer intelligence of a smart AI and the immense computing power and specialist capabilities of traditional dumb AIs. There was technically another problem with brains being a requirement for making smart AI, but for those who didn’t mind breaking the Moral Dictata, flash cloning could solve that problem.

Yet, the AI used by these machines had embers of creativity and was still far smarter than a normal computer and a normal Dumb AI. So the question was, what kind of AI did these automatons use?

A deep, synthesized voice came out of the helmet of one of the drones, breaking Dora out of her thoughts. “Dr. Skirth, we’re assigned as your escorts. Follow us.”

‘Rude as ever,’ commented Agony.

Ignoring her partner, Dora followed the two automatons down the hall, with one taking the lead and the other following behind her. Dora kept quiet, wondering about the mystery that was Nightstalker’s host, what they were doing now, and worrying for their safety.