“I wasn’t a part of engineering those augmentations. Also, any excuse to not be in the same room as Decker is good enough for me.”

Wurzburg snorted. He had always appreciated my sense of humor. I knew him well enough, however, to tell this wasn’t just water cooler talk. He was checking in on me. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t losing it after 6 months of watching the same kid I had shoved into a van screaming turn into a fucking cyborg.

“Fair enough. But you can’t just discredit yourself because you’re not the brains of the operation. Hell, if anything, your place in this was infinitely more important. And you did it alone.”

                I exhaled before setting down my coffee. There was no point in trying to evade Wurzburg’s real motive. He was the director of social sciences for a reason, after all.

“She doesn’t deserve this. No one does, but especially not her. Baranoski may have chosen me under the assumption that my past has turned me into an emotionless machine, but he doesn’t know shit. Do you know what she kept saying, over and over, while I was pulling her into the car?”

                There’s a very rare and special connection between a mentor and his former pupil. When you’ve plucked someone from obscurity and still remember all the stumbling and falling on their face that happened in those first few years, even when they stand before you entirely transformed, you truly know who they are. You know the deepest depths of them, you know their worst fears and highest aspirations. You know just how low they can sink, and just how quickly they can rise.

                Wurzburg understood me, and when I locked eyes with him in that dimly-lit cafeteria, he felt as well as heard every word that came out of my mouth.

“Why. She kept asking me why, why was I doing this? Why was this mean lady taking her from her parents, from her friends, from her life- why?”

                I swallowed, hard. I knew everything that happened in this facility was written down, and even casual conversation was recorded. In that moment, I was glad nothing was private. I wanted Baranoski to hear this.

                A week had passed since the initial briefing, and it was nearly 5am when I was still hunched over my desk going through the files. I was down to the final 20 in a competition no one even knew they were in, and if they did they certainly wouldn’t have wanted to win.  There were 12 girls and 8 boys, the ratio offset by the likelihood that a male subject would be more prone to insubordination come puberty.  They were all American children, between the ages of 4 and 8, with no history of aggression or mental illness. They were healthy, came from stable families, and did well in school. 19 had bright futures ahead of them, but only one had the gaping maw of an unspeakable hell looming just out of sight.

                I considered taping all the photos to the wall and throwing a dart at them, but Baranoski had been clear- none of this could be left up to chance. Every last detail had to be scrutinized- every ear infection and common cold examined with excruciating precision, every tantrum and hissy fit analyzed and explained. There was no margin for error, or mercy. It still puzzles me why the first and most important step was left in the hands of an agent, a glorified mercenary with a long track record of unspeakable acts. Maybe they thought I was heartless enough to feel no guilt over the matter. If they did, they were wrong.

                Eventually, one of the photos began to stick out amongst the others, one of a little blonde girl with shiny blue eyes and missing front teeth.  Her name was Cassandra Bethany Dorsey, age 6, born to average parents in an average town. Everyone called her “Cassie” and her favorite things in the world were the color purple and her dog, Pepper. But none of that was what separated her from the other candidates.

 The difference between Cassie Dorsey and the other children up for consideration was one tiny thing, something seemingly insignificant but profoundly remarkable. She had Postaxial Polydactyly, the presence of a sixth digit next to the pinky on both hands and feet.  All of her supernumerary digits had normal sensation, and shockingly- joints. They were all valid, usable fingers and toes. In modern medicine, any form of Polydactyl was considered a deformity, but the trait itself was actually dominant in humans and had simply become rarer and rarer over time for unknown reasons. This “mutation” did not exempt her because technically, it wasn’t a malformation at all.

       There was a brief moment where I wondered if Pepper would miss his best friend, if Mom and Dad would ever recover from the horrible tragedy that took their precious little girl. The thing was- it didn’t matter. A good agent never ignores their intuition, and my intuition had spoken. She was the one.

                  4 days after my decision was approved, little Cassie Dorsey was reportedly abducted and killed on her way home from school. Her remains were found several months later, weighed down and wrapped in a black tarp at the bottom of a lake not far from her home. Her alleged murderer was a local sex offender, who was tried and sentenced to life.

But Cassie Dorsey was not the body buried by her grieving family. She was alive, strapped to a gurney in an empty, sterilized room with a viewing window.  Her head was shaved, and her veins were filled with Pentobarbital. She was in an induced coma, with a feeding tube, catheterized, and being prepped for the surgery that would merge her with Megumi Ukiyo’s greatest abomination. After her memory was wiped clean, she had been kept under observation until the collaborative efforts of 4 people birthed a series of neural implantations that promised to make her faster, stronger, and completely obedient.

                The first to speak was Decker, who was so appalled by the very concept of her latest assignment all she could do was shout angrily and pound her fists on the table.

“This is absolutely- absolutely fucking ridiculous! Is this a joke? Do you have any idea what a waste of time and resources it would be to even attempt something so-“

                A soft, yet stern voice silenced the outburst.

“Corinne. I am aware that you are accustomed to dolling out orders rather than receiving them, but I have to remind you that you are not in any position to refuse this assignment. This is a briefing, not a proposal.”

                Ukiyo had shut her down with ease, and you could practically hear the older woman’s blood boiling under her thin, veiny flesh.

“You know just as well as I do, Megumi, that this is beyond insane. You know there’s no fucking way in hell-“

                Again, Dr. Ukiyo was unmoved by Decker’s words, scathing as they were.

“As I said- this is a briefing, not a proposal. You can either calm yourself, Dr. Decker, or I will call security to escort you out.”

                She didn’t even have to raise her voice, that one. If I wasn’t still reeling from what I had just heard, I would’ve felt an envious respect for Ukiyo’s unmarred composure. It was clear who would be in charge of putting everyone in their place, should they lose sight of the fact we had no choice in what we were about to do.  Whether this was a good thing or not, I’m still not sure.

                Regardless of how any of us felt about it, there was a job to do. The necessary documents were handed out, the oaths of secrecy were conducted, and 5 people left that boardroom knowing nothing would ever be the same for any of them. Baranoski had laid out the plan, and there was to be absolutely no coloring outside of the lines. Phase one had already started, and unfortunately for me, this was where I came in.

I still remember the meeting where the initial briefing for the project was given. There were 5 of us, all the highest ranking in our respective fields, except for myself. Among all those that had excelled and advanced to become the very best of the best, I felt more than slightly out of place. Little did I know, regardless of our worth to our superiors, every one of us at that table would be remembered only as the ones chosen for what would be the biggest fuck up in the entire history of our organization.

                  First was Dr. Thompson, the director of psychology. He was a plain man, but well liked for his good attitude and humor, something that was rare in our line of work. Despite his informal outlook, he took his work very seriously and it had landed him the top spot amongst all the EIS shrinks. He knew when to lighten up and when to drop the comic relief, and it had served him well.

                Next to Thompson was Dr. Decker, the director of physiology.  Her reputation painted her as a cold, mechanical woman with little to no time for anything but analytics and autopsies. I had never met her prior to the first meeting, but one look into those steely grey eyes was enough to confirm she did not fuck around. She was the oldest out of everyone involved at the age of 56, and her experience and expertise would be invaluable.

                With basic human emotion and anatomy covered, Dr. Ukiyo would be the one to set the foundation of the project into motion. Little was known about the inner workings of the esteemed director of robotics and artificial intelligence, but without her none of this would’ve been possible. She was fluent in more languages than I could name off the top of my head, and if the rumors were true she had never once lost her shit in the 19 years she’d worked for EIS. That in itself was an impressive enough feat to earn her a seat at the table before us.

                The last of the directors was Dr. Wurzburg, the grizzly old man at the head of our extensive social sciences department, and my personal mentor. It was him who had approached me at the shitty coffee shop I worked at to keep myself afloat through college, simply stating “you have the look of someone who needs a purpose”. He left nothing but a phone number scrawled on a napkin, but it was enough to change my life forever. His presence made me nostalgic for the days of learning things like how to load a gun, and when to aim for the chest instead of the legs.

                  Once we had all assembled and the shuffling of paperwork and half-hearted greetings had ceased, a voice came over the loud speaker. It was an unfamiliar voice, but it was obvious it belonged to an older man, someone who was very, very important. Important enough that measures were taken to make sure everyone involved never had a face to put with the name we were about to hear.