Alternatives

Chapter 1: Ascension

Twenty million a kilo, unrefined. It turns out, that is just how much a thousand human lives are worth.

When they discovered the unobtanium on Pandora, and made first contact with the natives, a huge bidding war was started over the rights to travel to the far off moon and both study and negotiate with these strange, sentient aliens. And, if not for Grace Augustine's Avatar Program, my life might not have been so uselessly squandered.

Sorry, it kinda sounds stupid to say that, after all that has happened…

Let me start at the beginning.

My name is Mia. And I was made by the lowest bidder.

With the race to create the quickest, easiest and most effective way to operate on Pandora in full swing, hundreds of companies were exploring thousands of different technologies. Some were trying to downsize AMP suits into something more akin to powered football padding, while others were attempting to perfect active camouflage.

The company responsible for me was one of the frontrunners in the race. They were a genetics company, one that had, previously, dealt in the growth and repair of organs, limbs, and other such necessary gibblets. And they decided to reach for something that many would consider far beyond their grasp.

The Avatar Program did something incredible, building remote controlled bodies by splicing human and Na'vi DNA. The Ascension Program, however, did almost exactly the opposite.

You have to understand, with the globalization of humanity finally coming to a close, certain ethical boundaries have become extremely flexible, particularly in the area of human experimentation.

I guess you see where this is all going.

Don't feel bad. It gets better. Not for a while, but it does get better.

The Ascension Project forcibly infused live humans with Na'vi DNA. Effectively, they tried to mutate their subjects into Avatars.

Permanently.

It took them ten suites of experiments to get it right. Ten sets of a hundred subjects.

Seven subjects survived.

I woke up on a lab table, blinded by bright white lights and surrounded by monitors and people talking excitedly. They were wearing exopacks, which meant they couldn't breathe the atmosphere in the room. Part of my brain identified that fact, and though I had been breathing just fine up to that point of realization, I panicked.

The monitors spiked, and a loud beeping started to blare. The voices started shouting, and I felt my hearts start pounding even faster in my chest.

Wait… Hearts?

Startled out of my panic by the incredibly alien double thumping in my chest, my eyes managed to finally adjust to the light and I was able to focus on a face above me. She was rather plain looking, but the expression of joy on her face was strangely calming. Her lips were moving slowly, and the sounds I was hearing started to make sense suddenly.

"-eed you to sit up for me, Mia. Can you do that?"

And suddenly, I could feel my body.

And I realized just how wrong I felt.

It's difficult to describe the sensation of waking up in a body that was not the one you fell asleep in. especially one with a tail, that's almost twice as large as it had been.

I guess I'll give you the rundown here, though I didn't really have time to go over my new body for a number of hours and one more life-changing decision.

I was almost eight feet tall, a huge change from my previous four-ten. I clearly wasn't entirely Na'vi, but there was no way you could call me human any more. My hair had gone stark black, and the characteristic nerve bundle hung down from the base of my enlarged skull. My eyes had taken on a sharp yellow-green hue, a stark contrast to the deep blue-violet of my new skin. Something in the process had clearly not gone to plan, but evidently much more of it had. The feline-esque nose and ears. The full foot of neck. The long, wiry limbs.

I would be a freak in both groups. But again, that is a later issue.

I'm not entirely sure exactly what went on in those first few hours after the procedure. It was all kind of a blur. I'm sure they were giving me drugs of some kind, but, as I said, I was disoriented enough at the time that it was destabilizing enough being awake, let alone flying high on chems.

The next thing I was definitely aware of was the next time I woke up. The monitors were still there, but the people had left. There was a folder on the side table that gave me a better idea of what had been done to me, and a pouch filled with some kind of paste they obviously expected me to eat. It was left behind as I leafed through the files, devouring the information inside.

They had used a redundancy system in my suite. I was one of the very few who survived. To see on the page what had been done… Redundant heart. Enhanced lungs. Extra kidneys and liver. Increased muscle density. Artificially reinforced bone structure.

A walking medical miracle.

A freak of nature.

There are… A large number of boring details and cold, depressed nights that I'd rather skip here. They started teaching me a bit of the Na'vi language, but there were no major occurrences for a month or so.

The RDA went with the Avatar Program.

That was all I heard before the liquidation teams entered my room. And I did what I needed to do. I regret killing those four men, but they were going to kill me. I was a loose end in a project that was not going to be continued.

You know how these things go.

Interesting side note, it turns out that Na'vi physiology includes a natural air filter. So while it wasn't entirely good for me, I was able to breathe, though somewhat laboriously, Earth's atmosphere.

Which was good, as I had to run through it to stay alive.

The second half of the project was a faster form of transport to get us to Pandora. A way to get the first batch of us to our target. I was saved by an idiot who put that information in thee folder they'd given me that first day. Little did they know that I would not be liquidated like the others.

And luckily for me, it had been completed and stocked for a whole month before the contract was cancelled.

Guess where this is going yet?

You don't dream in cryo. You aren't even aware of the passage of time, really. So I woke up scared and alone, just as I had gone down just over six years before. But when I woke in the tube and the autopilot opened up for me, it registered in moments that I was safe, and that I was definitely not in the Sol system anymore.

I didn't need to hear the computer's automated landing warning to let me know where I was.

Pandora.

a/n: another day, another story. Pandora is too cool a place to pass up. The idea for this story, in case it wasn't clear, was to explore some of the other possible solutions to the Na'vi problem that were considered alongside the Avatar Program, or at least one in particular. I feel like this intro is a bit of a cop-out, but I think it gets what I want across. Besides, have you seen the extended beginning to the movie? It *SPOILER* ruins a big part of the reveal that Jake's crippled. I don't want give away too much here… R&R, like usual. Stay frosty. –E. Red