As promised yesterday on Twitter, here's the first entry from The Professor's Journal - the prologue to Early Adopters - Rogue Elements (or the first draft anyway!). Hope you enjoy! Entry 11
Status: Full Encryption It was raining on the way in this morning. Underground, in this facility, it’s hard to tell if it carried on all day, but the melancholy of it hung to me regardless. We begin with our first procedure tomorrow. It is too soon. Far too soon, not that my new paymasters want to hear that. We press on regardless. We hope for positive results. I don’t want to discover what happens if things go poorly. When I first came here, I was told that we would be studying inter-species viral transmission. That we’d be using gene editing to build up humanity’s resistance to the next global plague, whatever that could be. I am certain that if our experiments are successful, the test subjects would indeed be very hardy. To illness and all manner of other hazards this world could throw at them. I know now though that this was never about virus transmission. The things I’ve seen already during my short tenure here. The uncanny things that I’ve been gifted, unexplained. Keys to knowledge beyond my wildest dreams, but hushed silence in response to questions of its provenance. I should have walked away. Maybe if I were a stronger man, I would have done. The truth is that when I could have done, I was greedy with interest and now that I’ve seen enough, I honestly fear what MiliTech would do to me if I tried to leave. Things had changed quickly once MiliTech took over the operation. Perhaps I am showing my academic naivety. More likely they have always been involved, behind the curtain until I was in too deep to walk away. It seems they wanted me for my involvement in the original project. Found my name in Professor Lendel’s notes. They didn’t want to hear that back then pretty much all I did was make the tea. Thankfully, my skill has developed since then. I pray that it is enough, for all of us. There is no choice for me now though. No choice for all of us involved but to press on and hope for the best. It is too early for human trials. I keep telling them, but no one wants to listen. One thing they do want to communicate however is whose fault it will all be if a sub-optimal outcome is delivered. Tomorrow. We’re not ready, but I have no choice but to proceed. In addition to the enlightening, sometimes terrifying data they are feeding me from god knows where, I also have access to what remains of Lendel’s research from the original Union Jake project. It has helped me to make some of the jumps required. Without Lendel’s notes I wouldn’t even be close. Success tomorrow would be an impossibility, rather than just an unlikely outcome. I wonder sometimes what Lendel would think. Or what Union Jake would make of it all. If only I could speak to Lendel again. If only I had more time. The subject is willing enough. Sgt Connor Bannerman. A very brave young man indeed. A true war hero, if such a thing can be allowed to exist in the cess pit the world has become. He is aware of the dangers and frankly, the agony to come for him and he has not balked at the prospect. He has a grit that I have not come across often in my own vocational circles. If this project is to succeed, if we are successful in lifting him up above his current, already lofty physical station, I can imagine no better man for the job. Hopefully, something like the man going into the process tomorrow ends up coming out the other side. He is, for these purposes at least, the best of us. However, I cannot say the same about the rest of the ragtag bunch MiliTech have provided me with. That is, I suppose, a little unfair. Perhaps I’m spending a little too much time around my paymasters. Beginning to think like them. Maybe I need to remind myself more often that these are human being we are talking about after all. Perhaps in the days to come, I can justify my involvement in all of this by affording them all as much dignity and humanity as my situation allows me to. I have a dreadful suspicion that not all of them are here voluntarily and an even worse sensation that they won’t all last out the process. Hopefully, I can get them all through this, one way or another. Everyone is jittery. Not in a good way. There is no frisson of excitement here, but a deep well of dread, bubbling up. The incident on Level 3 last week has hardly helped the mood. Some professor of machine learning or artificial intelligence down there was working on neural network digitisation. Dr Cline, or something like that. Probably being pushed as hard to deliver as I am being pushed myself. Maybe he had a little more courage. He was conducting the experiments on himself after all. Shifting his consciousness from brain to some specially constructed cloud data cube and back again. Last week though, he didn’t come back. I saw them wheel the body bag out of here. It has plenty of the staff pretty spooked. Especially as some of them are still receiving electronic communications from him. He’s not in a good way, apparently. One can only imagine. Against my better judgement, we go ahead tomorrow morning. God have mercy on us.
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May 2022
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