#spec bio

So… catching and sedating an animal that runs at roughly 113 kph for hours on end was maybe not a great idea. I’ve had no luck even getting within a couple meters of one, much less getting a syringe into it.

Instead I’ve thrown myself back into the archives. I found this old, rundown research facility in some town- and it looks much older than any other structures around here… it’s labeled as the ‘Chascomús Archival Center’. I’m guessing some kind of cultural preservation? It has a good connection to the signals I need access to, so I’ll be doing my archival searches from here now. I just wish any of that meant anything other than me being stuck in an old stupid building staring at a computer for eight hours a day. I’m sick of combing the same articles for information day after day! All of the information on the internet got screwed up during the sphere collapse anyway, and all that’s left is things from at least a decade or two earlier, before they even started gene-editing. I don’t even know why I’m doing this. I’m driving back to the site.

I found something. It’s not very detailed, but it’s a plan for a way to limit the spread of any escaped edited organisms. There are a lot of arguments on here… it looks like a conversation log. Something called a ‘forum’. The main points seem to be somebody asking how they should add a fail-safe to any mutant organisms. I see a lot of responses mentioning a “lysine dependency”... and then a lot more rebukes to that idea. There’s another point here though, if I open this folder… yes! The fail-safe I’ve noticed is here. The splicers actively avoid intermixing with native fauna.

This isn’t much to go on, but at least now I can attempt to trace the original asker to see any other comments they’ve made.

In the meantime, I can run a study on the populations here to see how many of them are clearly splicers, native, or mixed. That should give me a better idea of if the failsafe is working and whether it was necessary for the creators of the splicers. I mean, those things are aggressive so some measure of control would have been important no matter what, but there should’ve been a better way to contain them than preventing them from passing on the traits and hoping they die. Their edited genes are recessive anyway!

I don’t even understand how the populations would intermix. The old-world wolves I’ve seen and paddleclaws are so fundamentally different, I can’t imagine them living together. But then I come here and see them roaming through shallow waters, working together to hunt!

Maybe control of the organisms wasn’t the goal of the aversion to native life (which seems to not be working now regardless). It could be that splicers are more susceptible to hereditary diseases? They’ve inbred so much now in small groups that it’s a wonder they haven’t all- wait. Oh no. 

They can scramble their own genomes! It would explain so much- how female quickstrikes appeared from nowhere, how the inbreeding hasn’t killed them off, and how they’ve bypassed the aversion fault! And how the traits disappear so quickly in native populations! Their genetics can somehow adjust to the environmental pressures around them. But how would that even happen? It’s not like the genetics programs at the time were advanced enough to somehow add an auto-edit feature.

Maybe… maybe it wasn’t on purpose. If they were splicing so many different genes into one organism, some kind of ‘flexibility’ gene could have been implanted to keep the creature viable. And it mutated…? I need to do more research about the facility they were created in. And I need that blood sample more than ever now.

NOTE FROM VIEWER: hell, osah, if this theory turns out to be true, we’re in a lot more trouble than i thought. i’ll see you in a few days. stay safe.

See you next time, little carbon brick.

 I found it! A concentrated population! I explored old Buenos Aires this morning, and on the way back my mapping system went on break and I learned a valuable lesson- don’t try to drive through a jungle with no road. I crashed through a wall of foliage and went straight over in a lake. I checked the ATRV’s diagnostics and it seemed like everything was fine, so I activated the floatation loops to get to the surface (the vehicle’s airtight). As I started floating upward, a paddleclaw pack appeared out of nowhere and tore straight through the loops! Thankfully the ATRVs are made from bulletproof material (still not sure what a bullet is, maybe an acronym?) or they might have breached the hull. 

After they swam away, I exited through the airlock and pushed the vehicle upwards to the surface, and found sheer cliff walls in all directions. I discovered a cenote! Eventually I found a gradual enough slope to winch the ATRV out of the hole, but not before sending some automatic pingers down into the caves. I need to know if anything can come and attack through them. Those results should come in about three hours. The cenotes are large sinkholes that fill with water and are connected to underwater cave systems. Since paddleclaws normally nest in dark areas, I need to check for evidence of them or they could get to me while I’m sleeping (or awake, for that matter).

I’m planning to anchor the ATRV on the northern edge of the cenote, on a small cliff bordering the river that feeds into the lake. Then I can just hit the button, and voila! Instant campsite. In the four hours I’ve been here I’ve already seen more splicers than my entire life down in Adelaide. That probably means their original containment was in this area, rather than up closer to the old United States (which are really like the united dust bunnies now- I’ve heard of deserts that stretch between oceans that far north). 

I’m doing some research into who, exactly, designed the splicers. I know that before they built the sphere, genetics research was becoming a bigger deal all over the world. I wonder what that many people would even be like, all communicating at once. It sounds efficient but not at the same time. Back to the point- I know from my archive searching that the splicers were genetically engineered for a variety of purposes. 

NOTE FROM VIEWER: osah, please investigate which ‘archives’ they could have been looking through. i’m getting very tired of them knowing so many things that they shouldn’t.

Quickstrikes were supposed to be showy, flashy symbols of status. Apparently, they were all engineered to be male so they couldn’t breed- but there’s females now, and they’re the dangerous ones. Paddleclaws were supposed to be, according to the archive I found, “the new dolphins”. I’ve never seen a dolphin, but it’s apparently a sort of fish mammal that breathes air. It doesn’t seem like a great strategy to be an ocean mammal that can’t breathe water, but every organism has a purpose I guess.

NOTE FROM VIEWER: what the hell is a dolphin? please investigate.

Speaking of old-world life, they seem rarer than splicers in this forest. I rarely see old macaws and parrots anymore, it’s always quickstrikes and other splicer birds. I think the splicers are slowly driving all native life to extinction through competition. The splicers are better equipped to handle all facets of this world in a way that native life can’t. Although the splicers do seem to have some pretty coincidental adaptations…

Out here I’ll see two splicers fight one day and nearly kill each other, but be back at it again the next day with barely a scratch! And each splicer individual seems to be wildly different, with only a few shared characteristics. It’s easy enough to tell what species they are, but their colors, sizes, and even behaviors are never uniform like they were closer to Adelaide. It’s like their genetic codes change from day to day, but that can’t be right.

I’ve found all I can from the archives. They’re broken down and I don’t even have some sort of signal from where I am to access them anymore. If I want to learn more about these creatures, I’m going to have to get a blood sample. I’m going to target a leapgrazer- they seem more tame than the other splicers so far (although for the aforementioned reasons it’s hard to tell).

Goodbye, carbon fiber square!