Tunnel Rat Chapter 364 (Patreon)

Warning: This is a little Dark.
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In the middle of watching The Three Musketeers, Rusty paused the film, raised his hands high, and shouted, "YES!" Then immediately frowned, saying, "The deceitful cur! My honor must be satisfied!" and disappeared. Belinda looked at Yumi, who shrugged, mystified. Butch laughed, "Any bets on what Milo just did?"

Min was confused, "Why do you think Milo did something?"

Butch waved at the people watching. "We're all here, so that leaves Mamma, Dad, or some unknown person, and Rusty doesn't know anyone else."

Confirmation came immediately as Rusty returned. "My honor has been restored! We're making a musical of Dirty Pair for Broadway. Milo promised to find someone to produce it once we write it. Who has a collection of show tunes rattling around in their head?" In the background, behind him, a montage of the anime started playing with multiple Kei and Yuri blowing up cities, starships, and national monuments. Accidentally, of course.

With more enthusiastic explanation from Rusty, the project started to take shape. They spent the next hour brainstorming with Rusty and giving him plot ideas before he would finally calm down and let them watch the rest of the movie. The scope of what Rusty wanted to do was totally beyond their experience, which actually helped in the beginning. Rusty had ten different stories written the next day, all of them unworkable with the restrictions of using human beings on a stage. Mama listened to them talk at dinner and then suggested they should watch Broadway plays to figure out just what it was Rusty wanted to do. The novel idea was accepted and the group began watching the strange world of non-animated stories using real live humans.

Belinda took part but mostly sat quietly, her mind elsewhere and pondering other problems. She needed to talk to her father, and to Eric in a controlled environment where John couldn't do something stupid like try to send her to her room. His messages to her were desperate now, and pleading. She needed to go home. If nothing else, to gather some of her belongings from her old life.

But a trip home meant a confrontation over what she and Rusty had found in the trove of data storage discs. There were old secrets there, and John knew about some of them. She wanted explanations.

The day after her birthday had started well with a good breakfast and a small breakthrough in finishing a section of Jeremy's mind benders. She was quicker now when going through the discs and she wasn't as tired as she had been. Her mind was settling into the idea of being split in two or three ways, all doing the same task, but simultaneously. Rusty claimed she was doing far better than anyone else other than Milo. She took a small lunch and dinner but kept working, feeling fine.

That ended when they hit an entire disc devoted to 'Batch One'. It started with the shocking revelation that her paternal grandfather had begun the research that her father continued. Everything she'd ever been told, and every bit of public knowledge was that her grandfather, Felix Johansson was a baker who had died young, leaving a wife and infant son. Vigo had put himself through school, aided by scholarships, and then started a small investment firm that specialized in biotech and medicine. He was described as a true, self-made man. The information in the discs painted a vastly different picture of Felix Johansson as an independent scientist doing work for a dozen different corporations and completely out of the public eye.

The Batch One experiment was started by Vigo's father, Felix, before Vigo was born. Felix had access to the genetics of hundreds of thousands of people taking part in corporate studies and experiments. From those he chose people with the traits he wanted to isolate. One hundred children were created from the sperm and ova of highly intelligent subjects with certain genetic markers, and implanted into host mothers in the hopes of creating intelligent children. The children were placed into ten groups and became part of ten different experiments. Three involved methods of teaching and indoctrination from day one. Five involved intelligence-enhancing drugs released continuously into their bodies and two had a series of ports placed into their skulls to experiment with direct connections between humans and machines.

The teaching method experiments were deemed disappointing, in that the results were still within normal parameters. They were all highly intelligent and well-trained humans, but nothing special beyond that. At the age of sixteen, they all signed corporate contracts and were sent to medical school, owing twenty years of work to their benefactors.

The twenty children directly connected to machines gave better results and a large amount of data on the limits of such connections. They developed far faster, mentally, and were in the top .1 % of humanity as far as IQ was concerned. In other ways, they were sub-normal. All of the subjects had major neurological or psychological problems rendering them unfit for society. Their physical development was stunted even when compared to humans who spent 18+ hours a day playing online games. Interesting genes were harvested and they were sent to other laboratories for further testing with no record of what eventually happened to them.

The fifty who matured in normal environments but were exposed to intelligence-enhancing drugs at an early age showed a huge variation in physical maturing, brain deformities, and life expectancy. Vigo's notes on his father's experiments were extensive and he was most excited about this batch. The wide variation between them was correlated with their genetics. But by the time they were 20 years old, 39 of them were insane by normal standards and seven were catatonic. Six were still functioning, but only as long as they were kept busy. By age 22, the experiment was wound down, and Felix moved on to other things.

Belinda was shaken more by this disc than the one showing the experiments done by Nazi Germany in world war two. As horrible as what she had seen in that disc, this was more personnel. It was like finding out your Grandfather was Victor Frankenstein. Her father's fascination with the experiments was shocking to her. After a small break, she said to Rusty, "I need to know, let's keep going."

Batch Two had been started ten years after Batch One. Again, 100 children were produced. The teaching methods were abandoned and the genes used came from the most promising test subjects in Batch One. Twenty-five of Batch Two were experimented on with drugs, twenty-five were given neuro implants, and fifty were given both. The two smaller batches were observed until they were ten and then disposed of or sent away. While things had been learned, it was the combination of cybernetics and mental enhancement that had the best results. Certain genetic traits were identified as having positive results such as an increased ability to link with machines, psychological stability, and the ability to hyper-concentrate on problems.

Problems arose as they matured and entered puberty. The fastest-developing children became emotionally distant and prone to violence. Staff began to disappear on a regular basis, only to be found dead, hidden in ceilings or cupboards. Two subjects broke out of the lab and left a trail of seventeen victims before they were hunted down. Nine children lagged far behind the others in both size and aggression. They were separated from their larger cousins. The larger psychopaths with their highly aggressive nature were found to also be very receptive to cybernetic enhancements. They were fitted with devices to control them and sold to another lab that wanted to develop military-grade cyborgs. The remaining children of Batch Two were studied until all of them had achieved puberty around age twenty-two. Their genetics were harvested to begin Batch Three, and three children were naturally born to them. The parents of the naturally born children were separated and placed in their own living quarters with their children. All of them became neurotic if bored. A combination of online tasks and video games worked initially to keep them occupied.

Batch Three was where more breakthroughs occurred, and more mistakes were made. The twenty-five members of Batch 3A all matured slower and showed signs of hyper-intelligence and hyper-focus. All of them could stay linked to computers for long periods of the day. In the end, this was shown to cause nerve cell deterioration and their bodies rejected the implants before they died. A correlation was shown between nerve cell deterioration and maturation. Experimental techniques used in the manufacture of cyborgs proved to be useful in staving off nerve cell deterioration and would be used in Batch Four.

The three naturally-born children in Batch 3B ended up yielding no usable data. At the age of six, one or more of their parents deliberately created a poisonous substance and used it to kill all the children before killing themselves by ingesting a larger dose and then setting their living quarters on fire. This was the last batch that Felix oversaw himself.

Batch Four was overseen by Vigo. Extensive genetic testing and gene splicing were used to select for the traits of slow maturation, hyper-intelligence, hyper-focus, and a fixation on tasks. Another mutation was added, coming from the lab that was experimenting with the descendants of batch two. It increased the density of nerve and brain cells which allowed for better links to machinery. In the cyborgs being created by a lab in Germany, it allowed for more cybernetic augmentation. In Milo's brothers and sisters, it let them link to computers for days on end with no discomfort. Another benefit was that during gestation, sites along their spines could be stimulated to create ideal placements for the plugs that were added before birth with microscopic surgery.

When Belinda realized she was reading about the creation of Milo, she again had to pause and sit for a long time. Finally, she continued but feared that worse was to come. Parts of this disc were Vigo's personal journals where in addition to his notes he talked about his passion to create smarter and better humans who could compete with the emerging AI. Belinda had trouble understanding how her father could be so passionate about humanity, but not care about the humans he experimented on. To him, they were only test subjects. He emphasized that to the staff. They had letters, not names, and would be referred to that way.

Sometimes he ranted about the need for more money and complained about the shortsightedness of the corporations whose funding he needed. That led him to discussions with Victor and Andrei Seimovich. Both men were ambitious, manipulative, and wealthy. One man was the head of a large organized crime family poorly disguised as a businessman. The other was an emerging tycoon with deep links to the organized crime he said he'd broken away from. Both were interested in Vigo's experiments, but he knew he could only work with one of them.

Vigo began working with her Uncle Victor two years before the death of her Grandfather, Andrei, and Uncle Nikki. Shortly after that, he met her mother. She read back and forth in his journals for hours and came to the conclusion that the deaths and her parent's marriage were connected and most likely planned by her Uncle Victor and her father. From the wording, it seemed that her mother was unaware of these things. At least at first...

The little she read after that sent her running from the room, followed by Max and her empty wheelchair. She was calmer when she arrived in Downtown and could strip off he helmet. She needed to talk with Milo, and then John.