James Cameron and Charles Eglee own Dark Angel. My use is in no way meant to challenge their copyrights. This piece is not intended for any profit on the part of the writer, nor is it meant to detract from the commercial viability of the aforementioned (or any other) copyright. Any similarity to any events or persons (either real or fictional) is unintended.

Meditations Upon the Abyss

By

Nevermore

Chapter 1 – Max

Manticore has been around for far longer than I, or anyone, ever thought. It's still hard to wrap my brain around this one. It's bad enough that I got my ass handed to me by a couple of guys that lacked a distinguishing barcode. But this…

Lydecker trained my sibs and me to handle anything that ever came our way, but I don't think he ever expected us to be threatened one-on-one by a normal. It's not supposed to work like that, and it's something that's really concerning me in a way I'm still trying to understand. What can this mean?

Logan's been wracking his brain, trying to figure out some way to figure this all out for me. It's to be expected, I guess. He can't come anywhere near me without endangering his life, so to show his affection he's resolved to find an answer to my latest, and greatest, riddle – who were those guys that were working with White, and what's their connection to Manticore? It's an important question, but the more I dwell on it, the more I think it's actually the wrong question to ask.

We have evidence that these guys, whoever they are, are connected in some way to ancient civilizations. From the way they took my best and threw theirs at me, I can only guess that they're the product of some pretty special selective breeding. It sorta blew my mind at first, like some kind of lame-ass plot thread on that old pre-Pulse show, the X-Files, but then I started to think about it all more seriously.

I mean, let's face it, once you eliminate all that which is possible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth, right? So they had no bar codes… Well, Joshua claims to have been the first of the Manticore products, and apparently he's the only one that never got branded. So odds are that these guys were indeed not one of the X-series. Next, they could, perhaps, be part of some other government's genetic engineering program, or maybe they were hyped up on some new performance enhancing drug treatment. Those both sound good, but neither takes into account the anthropological evidence we found linking the Manticore symbol to something that was obviously much older.

As much as I don't like it, I have to admit that the proper question here is this – what is Manticore's connection to these guys? They were around first, so it's only logical to conclude that my sibs and I were created for some reason that has to do with them. The fact that our program's Manticore symbol is exactly like theirs pretty much proves that fact.

Sandaman, who Joshua says was his father… the creator… the man that pretty much created the Manticore project… he carried a cane with a Manticore on it. The bronze figure was exactly like the one in the old symbols from ancient cultures. I don't believe in coincidences… there has to be a connection. So, what is it? Even better, why is it?

From the facts that I've seen, there are only two reasons the man would have gone to the trouble of creating the U.S. government's Manticore project. After all, he had to have known that there was already a group of super-humans walking around, so why make more? From what I can tell, these guys were able to use millennia of breeding to achieve the same end that Manticore's transgenic engineering did, and all that without suffering the same side effects as the X-series has.

So theory number one goes that Sandaman, for some reason, felt that the super-human products of the breeding program were becoming a threat. So how do you destroy an army of super-humans? You create another one, of course. Seems logical, right? I thought so at first, too. But it just doesn't feel right.

First off, why would they have gone to the trouble of engineering amphibious transgenics? Unless some of the breeding program's individuals are amphibious, this seems like a waste of resources. Besides, if we were intended to stop the breeding program's soldiers, why were we never told of them? That seems like a bit of an oversight.

Theory number two is what I'm starting to feel more confident about. I think they might have gotten as far as they can by only using human DNA. Think about it – you can breed the fastest woman with the fastest man every generation, but eventually you'll reach a point where human muscle and bone can only achieve so much. Or even more likely, after maybe twenty generations of breeding the two fastest people, you'd end up having a subject that was so superior that breeding him with anyone else would only decrease those traits in his progeny. You'd eventually start diluting the perfection, unless they started inbreeding the best, generation after generation, and inbreeding is usually going to detract from more traits than it will enhance. In the long term, it would doom the project.

And why the third baby each generation? That makes no sense, either. I remember reading once that birth defects come in threes, and are most likely to be present in every third child that's born. Are they actually trying to produce a baby with defects… or mutations? Maybe that does make sense, though. If the third child is more likely to be radically different from the others, then it's there that the greatest potential exists for adding something unique to the gene pool.

And what better way to add something unique to the gene pool than to start splicing in animal DNA? If you want the perfect being, you obviously can't begin and end with a human. We might be the most intelligent species on the planet, but we can't out-bite a shark, outrun a cheetah, outmuscle an ape, or regenerate limbs like some reptiles.

So why am I the one they're looking for? Why is it important that I have no junk DNA? Am I just supposed to be some kind of brood mare to the Manticore breeding program? If that was my destiny, then Sandaman likely knew it from the beginning. I can also be pretty sure that Renfro knew it, too. But for some reason, Lydecker didn't. They must have brought him in out of necessity, because the money they needed to do their research came with the stipulation that it was undertaken in the interest of creating the prefect soldier. That was Lydecker's role. He must have found out, somehow.

If he's alive, he's probably looking into this right now, maybe following the same thought process I am. I can't believe I'm actually about to think this, but I need to see Lydecker. I need to find out what he knows, or at least suspects. I need help. Months ago I went to Gillette to destroy Manticore. That was the operation, plain and simple. It seems that I unwittingly did the powers that be a favor, though. All these potential mates are now all over North America, without any U.S. government bean counters to keep an eye on things.

Manticore just got far more dangerous than it ever was when they made me. I need to know more…

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To be continued…………………………………