Chapter XVIII: Evolutionary Response

GDI Blacksite, Blue Zone 1
[6/6/2056]

"I can't see a bloody thing," Will griped, as another drop of moisture ran down the inside of his visor and fell onto his nose.

He instinctively wiped a gloved hand against the visor of his hazmat suit, but the condensation was on the inside. Will groaned. The rubber suit was bulky, and thick around the arms. It made handling the slides and petri dishes a cumbersome task.

"Lab safety, pah!" Lazic remarked jovially. "In the Brotherhood, we are not so strict about these things." He shuffled past in his own suit, gloved hands raised like a surgeon.

"I'll bet that works out great for you," Will retorted.

"Well, yes, the scientists do go crazy from the fumes!" Lazic affected an impression of a B-Movie monster, staggering about the lab briefly.

Will shook his head, sighing. He had his doubts about the man's ethics, but Lazic sure had a way of charming a room. Even the armed guard posted behind the glass door cracked a brief smile.

Will returned his attention to the microscope. A little amoeba-like cluster of biomass was squirming on the slide, extending and retracting pseudopods of transparent flesh. Its movements were sluggish, as it struggled futilely to extricate itself from the glass prison. He watched with growing frustration as the little entity's motions grew slower, before finally coming to a halt. The flotsam of particles within its membranes kept swirling, a final flurry of motion before total cell death.

Will sighed, and stabbed clumsily at the buttons of a voice recorder that sat on the bench.

"After injection of tissue from first-generation mutation, Sample… 0512 showed an initial increase in metabolising of Tiberium gases. This burst of activity slowed after eighty-two seconds, followed by onset of Tiberium Toxaemia at one hundred and twenty seconds."

He ended the recording, and slipped the contaminated glass slide into a box for disposal. Will shuffled across the lab, and placed the box on the lip of the incinerator. His hands were clumsy in the thick rubber gloves, and as he fumbled with the container, it slipped from his grip. Will cursed as the slide shattered on the tiled floor. The rippling mass of tissue seized its chance, and slid off the remnants of the slide, across a carpet of broken glass.

Lazic calmly stepped over and incinerated the nascent visceroid with three squirts from a handheld incinerator. A napalm-like liquid issued from the nozzle. It stuck to the bundle of nerves and tumours, and burned. The tiny creature squirmed, smoke rising from its writhing limbs. Will fancied he could hear faint screaming, but it was most likely just gases escaping as the visceroid burned.

"That is a cute pet you've made," Lazic remarked once the creature had ceased its struggles. "I've seen a few of them this week."

Will grunted in response. The Nod scientist had the truth of it; their experiments had yielded nothing, nothing but confirmation that yes, Tiberium exposure created horrible monstrosities, and yes, those monstrosities lived short, painful lives before expiring of their many mutations. It was far from the kind of breakthrough they'd been tasked to find.

"What is our goal here, hm?" Lazic continued. "Making sure the human race survives beyond the next ten years? My people, we have a saying. Uh… the woodchips fly where the saw is cutting. It means things that are worth doing may not be pretty. You need-"

"You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs?" Will ventured. Lazic grinned in acknowledgment. "Exactly."

"We've broken more than a few eggs here," Will said, gesturing to the rows of empty sample containers on the laboratory wall.

"We do not need to learn how to make more flakipotwór - more visceroids. I think it would be beneficial to our work here, to have a live subject. A mutant."

"You can't be serious!" Will balked at the suggestion. "I'm a doctor, not a butcher," he protested.

"Think how many people you might help this way! I told you before, Tiberium mutation is not just a matter of cells dividing; the mind of the creature is just as important."

Lazic's eyes had a strange, manic gleam to them as he spoke, and for the first time Will was reminded uncomfortably of the kind of experimentation his new colleague must have been involved in as Science Minister to Kane.

"And how will they react when Kane's pet biologist asks for more Guinea pigs?"

"They won't listen to me; I'm a prisoner. But you, you are one of them, and they will listen to you."

Will looked askance at the guards, permanently posted outside the airlock of the lab. "I'm not sure my situation is any better, but that's not what I meant-"

"Do you think our new handlers will have much use for us if all we keep producing is failures?" Lazic muttered, eyeing the sidearms strapped to the guards' belts.

"I'll do what I can," Will lied. He turned his back on the fanatic, ending the conversation.

Professor Renald was surprisingly forthcoming, when MacDonell broached the topic over video call. He'd been escorted back to the small, grey-walled cell that served as his quarters. He had a bed, a chair, a desk and a toilet, as well as a computer screen recessed into the wall. He had the freedom to call anyone he liked, so long as they were part of the science program, and within the laboratory complex. Lazic was considered too much of a liability to be allowed similar freedoms, which essentially left Renald as Will's only contact.

"It's a serious suggestion, one I know you wouldn't make without fully considering the ramifications." Renald pushed his glasses up his nose. "Ordinarily… well… it would be unthinkable, but the Director has granted us extraordinary latitude in accomplishing our goals here."

"I understand if you're unable to find any viable subjects on such short notice," Will deflected, hoping to provide them both with an out.

Renald's eyes flickered behind his glasses as he browsed another window on his screen.

"There is one, currently in custody here in Zone 1," he announced eventually. "A young female, mid-20s, brought in from the Red Zone just a few days ago. I will arrange to have her brought to this facility."

Will sighed as Renald terminated the video call. Damn the man, Will thought. He'd been relying on Renald to dismiss the suggestion out of hand. War makes even reasonable men consider the unreasonable, and Renald has been on the frontlines of this conflict for a very long time.

He left his cell, drawing a calculating glance from the guard posted outside. He climbed to the roof of the building via the stairwell, but found the door on the upper landing locked. Will leaned his head against the cool glass, wishing more than anything for a smoke.

A flash of light on the dark horizon caught his attention. At first he thought it was a storm, rolling in from the Red Zones, but the flares glowed a fiery orange, not the electric blue of an Ion Storm. Streaks of fire leaped from the horizon, crisscrossing the dark sky, and detonated among the clouds. An alarm began blaring somewhere in the facility.

[7/6/2056]

When he entered the lab the next morning, he tried to wheedle some information out of the guards, but if they knew what the explosions on the horizon had been they were in no rush to divulge the information.

"Just focus on your work," one advised him in heavily accented English.

Will tried to keep his mind on the project, but errant thoughts were flitting around his brain. Were they under attack? Blue Zone 1 was on the continent, sure, but they were miles from the border, and all the local Nod warlords had been mollified and brought to heel… hadn't they?

Around noon, the guards walked a young woman into the lab, cuffed hand and foot. She was clad in a dingy grey jumpsuit. Lank, black hair hung down in front of her face, but her eyes shone an unnatural green colour through the strands. Lazic's face lit up with the same hungry expression Will had seen the other day. He seemed at once youthfully handsome, and impossibly inhuman.

Will tried to reassure the girl, speaking calmly to her as he and Lazic took measurements and blood samples, describing the process so she would have no concerns. She stared through him, her green eyes hazy and unfocused. They photographed the crystalline scars on her back and hands, and scraped slivers off into test tubes. She gave no more of a reaction than if they'd been trimming her nails.

When it came time to lay her on the slab for a full-body X-ray, Will found the handcuffs posed an obstacle. The guards posted near the door reluctantly shuffled over when Will beckoned them, and fixed him with blank stares.

"Can you take those off?" he asked, gesturing to the handcuffs.

"Cannot do, sir," the guard replied.

"Why not?" Will asked, fighting to tamp down his frustration.

"Orders," the guard replied bluntly.

"For christ's sake, have some humanity!""

The guard shrugged. "She's not human. Focus on your job."

Will pinched the bridge of his nose. "The cuffs are getting in the way of the scanner. I need them out of the way to do my job."

After much badgering, the guards relented, and handcuffed the mutant's wrists to the edge of the slab instead.

"Sorry about that," Will muttered to the mutant. She stared past him.

"Will, come take a look at this."

MacDonnell replaced the stopper in a flask, and crossed the lab. Lazic handed him a tablet, and indicated the display with a gloved finger. A tangle of ghostly white loops on a hazy grey background was visible; an X-ray readout.

"Look at this; the mutant's gastrointestinal tract is shortened by about a foot from what you'd expect of someone her size. What do you make of that?"

Will shrugged. "Chronic malnutrition, leading to developmental flaws?"

"Not so. Look at the musculature, the subcutaneous fat; do you see signs of malnutrition?"

Will frowned. He had to admit, the young woman was well built. She was skinny, but had a lithe strength to her. In fact, she seemed to have grown up better fed than many of the people living on Income Support in the Blue Zones.

"Random mutation, then," he posited. Lazic shook his finger in a very school-masterly way.

"Perhaps. But I have a different theory. If you look inside the cells on this slide-" he brought up a microscope image of one of the tissue samples they'd taken "-the mitochondria is atrophied, nearly nonexistent."

"I'm not sure what line you're drawing here…" Will said. Or rather, I am, but think it's bollocks.

Lazic ploughed on undeterred. "Atrophied gut, reduced mitochondria; the organism has found some other way of obtaining sustenance."

Will rolled his eyes. "Now, come on, that's just nonsense. 'The organism has found-' I mean really, that's a huge evolutionary leap to make in a single generation."

The other scientist stabbed at the slide with his finger. "Have you ever seen anything like this in a person?"

"No," Will was quick to retort. "But I've never experimented on humans."

Lazic's nostrils flared. "Well, I have, and I can tell you, I've never seen something like this. This is beyond normal mutation. This is divination."

Will nearly hurled the tablet at the man. He stood gripping the glass rectangle until the display distorted into a haze of pixels. Jaw clenched, he thrust the tablet back into Lazic's hands.

"One data point isn't a trend," he growled.

Lazic looked oddly smug as he replied; "then we will need to draw more samples."

That night, Will dreamed he was tied to a cold slab. Gloved hands plucked him apart dispassionately, labelling each organ and placing them in jars, before moving on to the next piece of him.