Tokyo: Proving one's position from behind the scenes

Yokosuka, the U.S. Naval Base, has three underground levels.

Commissioner Smith pushed open the laboratory door faster than usual. Today he was wearing a khaki short-sleeved shirt, the silver eagle emblem on the collar reflecting the white light of the fluorescent lamp. He walked in empty-handed, without a coffee cup in his right hand.

Dr. Ryan stood in front of the row of stainless steel lab benches, his back to the door. Hearing footsteps, he didn't turn around; his shoulders were taut, a stark contrast to his usual relaxed, scholarly nonchalance. Before him was a wall of monitors, their screens densely packed with data curves of various physiological indicators, red, green, and blue lines slowly dancing against a black background.

A few more things have appeared in the laboratory.

Six transparent isolation chambers stood side-by-side against the wall, their entrances resembling thickened telephone booths. The outer shells were made of bulletproof glass, reinforced with stainless steel frames at the four corners. Each chamber had a white absorbent pad at the bottom, glaringly white under the fluorescent lights from the ceiling. Five of the chambers contained people, or rather, things that had once been people.

In the leftmost isolation chamber lay a corpse. Its skin was an uneven grayish-white, like pulp that had been soaked in water for a long time and then dried. Its eye sockets were sunken, and its eyeballs were cloudy, like two overcooked fish eyes. Large patches of dark purple bruises covered its chest, spreading from its collarbone to its abdomen, as if something had ruptured its blood vessels one by one from the inside. The corpse was curled up, knees pressed against its chest, and the fingers of both hands bent into claws, leaving five long scratch marks on the inside of the bulletproof glass. The scratch marks were dark brown, dried blood.

The second isolation chamber also contained a corpse. The changes to this corpse were more obvious—his spine protruded outward from the center of his back, his skin was stretched to the point of translucency, and the deformed bone outline could be vaguely seen underneath. His jawbone was dislocated, and his mouth was open to an angle that a human should not be able to open, as if he was desperately shouting something before he died but could not make a sound.

The third corpse's arms had grown longer. They reached past the knees, and the fingers had at least two more joints than normal. Each finger was over twenty centimeters long, resembling a bone fan stretched to its limit and wrapped in skin.

The fourth one.

The fifth one is empty.

The experimental subject was still alive in the sixth isolation chamber.

He sat in the corner of the isolation pod, his back against the bulletproof glass, his legs bent, and his hands resting on his knees. He appeared to be a white male around forty years old, with short, dark brown hair and a receding hairline. His stubble, which hadn't been shaved for three or four days, stretched from his chin down to below his cheekbones. He wore a gray sleeveless blouse made of thin cotton, the kind used for hospital gowns, with a low neckline that revealed his collarbone and chest.

His physique was a size larger than average, a raw, primal strength. His shoulders were nearly half again as wide as normal, and his trapezius muscles bulged high from the sides of his neck, like two stones piled above his collarbone. His arms were as circumference as an average person's thighs, the cuffs of his blouse stretched taut, revealing his bulging forearms with their prominent veins. His palms rested on his knees, each finger twice the thickness of a normal person's, with prominent knuckles and thick, wide, dark yellow nails.

The color of his irises had changed from their original blue to a murky gray-green, and his pupils were dilated, almost filling the center of his irises. His gaze was fixed on the stainless steel lab table directly in front of him, motionless, as if he were looking at something, or perhaps not at all. His breathing was steady and deep, each rise and fall of his chest large, the fabric of his blouse stretched taut at the chest, and the low, bellows-like whooshing sound of air entering and exiting his lungs could be heard.

Dr. Ryan turned around, and to Commissioner Smith, his voice sounded much hoarseer than it had been a week ago, with a quality that came from the depths of his throat, the kind that comes from prolonged sleep deprivation.

"I extracted something from tissue samples of Yoshida Sho's body that could be called an 'active factor' that can trigger targeted cellular remodeling in living tissue."

He paused, then pointed with his stylus to the pulsating curves on the screen behind him.

"The direction of remodeling depends on the individual differences of the host. In most experimental subjects, cellular remodeling is out of control, with excessive bone growth, muscle fiber rupture, internal bleeding, and nervous system collapse, ultimately leading to death within minutes to hours. However, a small number of experimental subjects have successful remodeling, or at least partially successful remodeling, with muscle density increasing three to five times, bone hardness more than doubling, and nerve conduction speed significantly improved."

He pulled up a set of data comparison charts on the screen. The left side showed the various physiological indicators of a normal adult male, while the right side showed the current data of test subject number six. Almost every curve on the right was above the curve on the left, as if the physiological maps of two completely different species were being compared on the same coordinate system.

Commissioner Smith walked to the sixth isolation pod and looked at the man sitting in the corner through the bulletproof glass. The man's gaze remained unchanged, staring straight ahead, as if he were completely unaware that someone was standing in front of him.

Commissioner Smith asked, "Does he have any intelligence? Not too high, just enough to understand who to hit."

"After the injection, the activity of the cerebral cortex of all the test subjects dropped sharply, the prefrontal cortex almost completely stopped, language function was lost, and only the most basic stress response remained. They could breathe, move, and follow simple instructions, but they could not speak, think, feel fear, or get angry. This may be because the test subjects came from the streets of Sanvern City and used too many amine substances. If they were healthy people, there should not be much loss in their intelligence."

This is a euphemism—the test subjects were homeless people on the streets of America.

"What about production volume?"

Dr. Ryan paused, startled. The stylus fell from his hand onto the lab table with a crisp clinking sound. He opened his mouth, momentarily speechless.

Commissioner Smith didn't repeat himself a second time. He walked back from the front of the isolation chamber, went to the lab bench, picked up the stylus that Dr. Ryan had dropped on the table, and placed it back beside him. The movement was natural, as if he were helping a colleague pick up a dropped pen.

"Dear Dr. Ryan, you have done a great job. Extracting the active factor from that corpse and developing a drug that can give ordinary people superhuman physical abilities has exceeded my initial expectations. The White House and Capitol Hill will be very pleased."

He pushed the stylus closer to Dr. Ryan's hand.

"Expand production. From now on, your laboratory will no longer be a research institution, but a production workshop. I will increase your manpower, provide you with the equipment and raw materials you need, and give you all the resources you can use at the Yokosuka base. Within a month, I want to see the first batch of products that can be put into actual combat, and ideally, the test subjects should retain their intelligence."

Dr. Ryan's lips moved slightly.

Commissioner Smith didn't let him continue.

"I know what you're trying to say. The extraction efficiency of active ingredients, the success rate of experimental subjects, and the stability and controllability of the product—these are all issues. But these problems can't be solved by you sitting in the lab repeatedly conducting control experiments. You need more experimental subjects, more data, and more failures before you can find patterns from those failures."

He paused.

"Don't worry about the test subjects. They'll be sent from the mainland. They won't go through customs, and there won't be any records. Just focus on your work. Of course, this product probably won't completely satisfy the local officials. It would be best to research its life-extending and healing aspects."

Dr. Ryan remained silent for a long time. The white light of the fluorescent lamp shone on his gray hair and on the small stain on the edge of his glasses. His fingers unconsciously rubbed the stylus, his thumb sliding back and forth on the button at the end of the pen, but he didn't press it.

He nodded.

Commissioner Smith glanced at him again.

"Give your product a name. It should sound high-end and professional, so that when you're writing reports to ask for funding, people will immediately recognize its value. Don't call it 'Active Factor' or 'Cell Remodeling Agent'; those names sound too much like lab numbers. You should know more about this than I do."

He turned around and walked towards the lab door. He paused at the door and turned his head to the side.

"How about calling it 'Project Prometheus'? And the potion 'Prometheus Potion - Type 3'?"