All sentient life is connected. The appendages may be different, we may eat different things, and live in different solar systems, but at the end of the day, we’re all one big family.
It’s time to explore the branches of the universal family tree, and today, we present:
Made in America (Series 2)
– Issue 17 – To Infinity, and Beyond
There are protocols at the CZS, redundancies to ensure that everything runs smoothly. If one department lags behind, the others take on the load to ensure that all necessary work is completed. The CZS has unbreakable deadlines and the man in charge, Dr. Roy Worthington, has been excited to have his entire organization working toward the biggest goals of the Consortium of Human History. The CZS is like a factory that produces whatever the doctor dreams up.
One half of the first floor is dedicated to artificial animation of the human body. Most of the test subjects on the west half of the first floor are cadavers, or partial cadavers, even severed limbs and isolated organs. Doctors and scientists work to animate organs without the use of a centralized nervous system and they have created extensive maps of the neurology of human bodies with the effect of creating remote control cadavers, limbs and organs.
The east half of the first floor specializes in the creation of artificial neurotransmitters. Because Dr. Worthington is an expert in epidemiology, he has dedicated the majority of first floor east to the manufacture of biological neurotransmitters capable of blocking signals from a neurocenter, like the brain, and producing new commands that essentially highjack the body. The artificial, biological neurotransmitters are helpful for disrupting normal function, and first floor east scientists have been perfecting a method for remote controlling the neurotransmitters so that the entire system can be controlled remotely using the neurotransmitter as the source of control.
Second floor west does work in cellular regeneration, though this is misleading. The scientists of second floor west also work with cadavers, but rather than simply animating using electrical stimuli, they develop a biological means to jumpstart cellular growth with the hope that newly generated tissue can supplement what is deficient in the cadaver to create a new being altogether. The second floor west doctors do not regenerate human bodies, but they create what amounts to living molds or fungi that are capable of using the remains of a human to form a sort of hybrid with limited brain function.
Second floor east specializes in human transformation using technologies that Worthington created largely by accident. Second floor east scientists use bacteria to introduce metamorphic agents, but they also use genetic tampering. These scientists have been very busy of late, and they have been slowly creating the army that Worthington had hoped to create himself when he went to Tennessee. If things had gone according to the doctor’s plans, he would have made a very powerful friend in Yuri James and there would have been plenty of addicts to use as his soldiers. It was supposed to be simple, slip something into a batch of drugs and then collect the afflicted, but Worthington hasn’t communicated with the CZS in a while. Tin, a member of the COHH board who arrived to Durham months ago, has been working with the second floor west scientists to animate their mold men with souls that Tin could speak to. Tin was aware of Worthington’s mission and he was impressed at the Director of the CZS who had contingencies in the event of his own failure. The CZS sponsored homeless shelters in the area that allowed them to easily find forgettable subjects for their experiments. They could supply double the amount of soldiers that Dr. Lynnette Jones, sometimes called Rhodium as the head of the board, had requested.
Tin is standing in the middle of the campus as the monstrous soldiers are amassed on the lawn in neat rows. They are hard to look at, perversions of humanity and Tin forces himself to think of the bigger picture. He’s lived a long life to this point, he has seen many things and traveled to many places, and nothing has given him more enlightenment than the knowledge he’s accessed since he joined the COHH. It was sad that all of these people, with their exaggerated limbs and bulging muscles, pale colored skin that was ghostly white or ashy brown, it was sad that their lives had been hijacked and they were being sent off to fight a war that they would never be able to comprehend. Tin didn’t really understand it, but Dr. Jones had asked for soldiers and she would have them.
The security guards of the CZS wander around clutching their automatic weapons tensely. The soldiers average about seven feet in height, though some are much taller with fists bigger than a pumpkin. The security guards don’t need to worry, the head of CZS security has a control switch to activate them, or wake them up to perform complex, independent action, and he could just as easily put them into this highly suggestible state, literal sleep, or kill them.
The lawn of the CZS campus is massive and normally, it looks like a well maintained park that stretches for acres. It is well lit with ornate light posts scattered around. Tonight, it is filled with neat lines of monsters and small aircrafts. The head of security is overseeing the boarding of the monsters onto the small aircrafts, and when they are all inside, a large section of the lawn in the middle of the campus opens up to reveal a launch pad and a large spaceship. It looks like a standard rocket ship, an elongated cone with fins at the bottom like a fish, but it is large and a platform materializes that allows the small aircrafts to drive inside. The last ship to board looks more sophisticated than the others and it carries four men with extraordinary abilities to lead the armies of monsters. Eventually the expansive lawn is clear and the ship prepares for takeoff.
Tin stands inside the safe shelter on the lawn with the head of security as he speaks into a radio, presumably with the person navigating the ship.
He would hear the story eventually, about where the ship packed full of mutated men and women landed and what they did. But now, Tin wants to go to his room and read a book about First People mediums.
PRL Serials 