On the night that marked the start of the final week of Project ETHEREAL, gears were set into systematic motion. It was midnight and slight brisk in the air; the streetlights hovered a few meters above the streets like stars in the cosmos and swamped cars that went passed by in a sheath of orange glow. The night would only retreat with the arrival of Cheren and his seven o' clock rounds on the impressively grown subjects of Project ETHEREAL. But the mantle of darkness would not move for Colress. He moved briskly though the free air, his mind swamped with details, facts, and figures of the better plan in his mind. He was under the professional pretense of wrapping up some last minute maintenance and reports of the vital signs of the glowing and sleeping angels. The experiments performed just the afternoon before held the risk of mutation—he could not let himself sleep without the full knowledge that these beings were in perfect stable condition. But there was another pressing matter on his hands. The back of his mind rumbled with such violent intensity towards the moral standpoint of Cytla—how could that girl reject the pursuit of greater knowledge for the moral good of humans who were simply ungrateful?
Despite the storm raging inside his head, his face was calm and focused on the task at hand. He maneuvered around the iron gates and greeted the security guards docked right before the front doors. As expected, he thought then played them with subtle words of sincerity and tablets of proof, and they bought every bit of it. He was granted access to the facility under the strict time limit of thirty minutes for he was with neither supervision nor colleagues. But it was more than enough time he needed to complete the mission. He infiltrated the lab floor and within seconds he entered the silent and dim lab, the chamber of his marvelous work.
Still, he was rather determined as he gazed upon the two tanks. The subjects were now full grown women curled into the fetus position, their hair flowing behind them like the strands of light of an angel, their bodies still and soft with sleep, their minds elsewhere in the abstractness. The Master had placed oxygen masks that covered their noses and masks when they had first formed recognizable heads and possessed the capacity to breathe. They were humans, yet, they were angels. He could hardly look away from their fleshy beauty.
Remembering the time limit of thirty minutes, and calculating that he had only eighteen at his disposal, he moved towards The Master and ran the insertion program with a few pokes of his skinny index finger. Within an instant, the gene sequence of subject A opened and spilled out its contents in an overwhelming fashion, but he narrowed the results to target the sequences of the inner ear complexes then opened another window to display the codes of speech. He tapped three buttons to destroy the sequences.
Feeling confident in the final eight minutes he had, he closed the windows of subject A and targeted the sequence of subject B's eyes. He executed his malicious designs and disrupted the eye genes, but time slipped out from under him. He ordered The Master to resume autopilot and took one last look at the females as they twitched slightly but fell back into a frozen sleep. They can feel it, he mused, but the memory cells have not matured yet so they won't remember anything else but a bad dream. His face was unreadable, his glasses glinting in the dim light, his eyes filled with a sense of triumph and smile. He had witnessed just what the Gene Sequence Database was capable of, and he was proud of every moment of it.
His thoughts were cut short as the loudspeaker erupted and beckoned his leave, which he complied to with not the slightest bit of fuss or argument. His work was done.