4. Dmytryk loses his s**t.

A. Dmytryk follows up on the unexpected appearance of a girl in a paper gown in his lab.

4

 

As the days went by the girl’s face was never far from Dmytryk’s mind. Ada, her name was Ada, and she used to be somebody before biomorph took her. He didn’t buy their story in the slightest. She still looked human, but if she’d managed to excape from biomorph and get several floors down and one tower over, she couldn’t be just human. The thing was, Dmytryk had no idea what exactly that made her.

 

Figuring that nobody from biomorph was likely to tell him if he asked, he consulted google. Of course, living inside the compound, it wasn’t exactly as though he could just pop on the net and search whatever he liked without worrying someone was looking over his shoulder. In fact, he knew they monitored the net and googling what they were doing there was an astoundingly stupid and easy way to put himself in a very bad position.

 

So he was meticulously careful about it, of course. Dmytryk swiped id badges from various off-duty colleagues, returning them where he’d found them as serruptitiously as he could, and used their cards to swipe into the highly-monitored net to scan countless local news articles through safe searches and proxies, not really sure what he was looking for but certain he didn’t want anyone wondering. He really had no idea where to start, but somehow eventually found a scattered few articles about strange mutated things, dead things, showing up periodically around the harbor. They sounded warped enough to fit the few whispered horror stories he’d heard about biomorph, certainly. Everyone at HIRA had heard ghost stories about the mutant dogs, and if the articles said what he thought they did, the earlier models hadn’t made out so well. And they’d been dumped around town, where a pair of private investigators had been tracking them.

 

He mentally noted their contact information, listed with a request that any similar incidents be reported to a number he committed to memory. Dmytryk didn’t let himself wonder why HIRA chose to dump their mistakes rather than destroy them, or how and when he’d ever even have a chance to call O’Callahan Bros Private Investigating at the number he’d memorized.

 

That didn’t completely explain what a girl was doing there though. She clearly wasn’t a dog they were mutating to be more deadly, or humanoid clever. He turned the situation over and over in his mind, and couldn’t fathom how the girl could possibly have consented to anything they might be doing in biomorph. Between the few admittedly vague articles and the near-legendary horror stories the other departments whispered about biomorph, he was certain that whatever the truth was, it could’t possibly be anything that anyone would want to agree to. Which led him to believe that she hadn’t agreed at all.

 

And she seemed to have no idea of what was happening at all. The more he thought about it, the more it sickened him. Likely as not they’d just pulled some random girl off the street to test on. They kept her sedated, “to keep her safe”, while they experimented on her.

 

It took him three weeks to hack into the internal computer system and find the correct division. Animal hybrid supersoldiers. The latest test group, J776, was going well, with four of six surviving the second primer phase. Of course, if anyone knew that he knew that, his body would show up in the harbor six months on and no explanation would ever surface. A few days later he managed to get into the system files again. Two of six subjects in test group J776 survived the third and final primer phase. He felt sick. He scrolled down, clicked things, tried to find any record of the subjects. Looked for any record of a girl named Ada.

 

Group J776 surviving subjects to undergo full phase mutation at 0800 hours, tomorrow. Patients R53 and R54. Aged 23 and 22, respectively. There were no names, of course, because biomorph didn’t see them as people, they were test subjects. There were no names, but there were pictures. R53 was a young man with a thin sharp nose, full lips, and a mess of black wavy hair.  R54… she was alive. That was Ada. He checked his watch. It was noon. He logged out and stealthily returned the badge he’d used to log in to the pocket of the labcoat hanging in the break room. Not his breakroom. Not his department, or division. He was strictly not allowed on this floor, even. Under fear of death, actually. Dmytryk made a hasty retreat back to his division, returning to the test room just as his lunch break was ending.

 

Three and a half hours later his stomach refused to settle. His latest bit of sleuthing had left him growing increasingly frantic. If there was one thing about the tests they were running that his snooping in the biomorph files had revealed, it was that every single test subject that had survived to phase morph had failed to survive the actual mutations. There were pictures, more than he’d been able to look at. He’d only seen a few, but that was enough. That girl wouldn’t survive. The odds were not in her favor.

 

By 2300 hours he had reached the absolutely frantic decision that he must help her escape before they killed her. In his mind, that is what the phase morph was. It wasn’t another phase of testing, it was an execution. Those that survived it didn’t survive long, and died so horribly disfigured he wasn’t sure how the tests had continued after that. No, he knew. Doctor Suleiman didn’t get squeamish and didn’t care who got churned up in the cogs, so long as the HIRA machine kept churning out results. If the end goal was a supersoldier, a few mangled mutations was nothing. If Dmytrky could help it, Ada wouldn’t be one of them.

 

The only real trouble was how a junior plastics engineer was going to stop that. He had nine hours. Of course, he also had access to a large number of prototypes just down the hall. As he suited up in a white polymer prototype bodyarmor suit, complete with robocop-esque helmet, and equipped himself with a few prototype weapons which he knew intimately well from having participated in their development, he downloaded all of his research projects and data to a pocket harddrive. Dmytryk did a full system delete of all of his research then slipped the hard drive into a plastic bag, sealed it, and tucked it into his breast pocked under the armor. They wouldn’t be able to replicate his polymers from the prototypes. At least he had that.

 

Clearly, he was never coming back. God, he was insane. Clearly insane. He’d be a body in the harbor by the end of the day. F**k it, he was the son of Russian imigrants and basically worked in weapons research and development in an obviously unethical underground lab. He’d just have to go out in a blaze of fire.