Mortal Protection Services Chapter 15: V.OS: Origin of Scourge

Read chapter 15 of Mortal Protection Services by B.T.Skull on NovelPedia.

V.OS: Origin of Scourge We knew the Rule. It had been the only rule in place that anyone respected with relation to scientific progress. No cloning, no cloning research. Last time we started trying to clone ourselves something horrible happened. It was so bad that there's not even a record of us existing on this planet before a thousand years ago. There's evolutionary evidence for all the other creatures, and all of the plants we don't farm. Our crop plants are like nothing else on the planet, though. I always found that odd. It's never made any damn sense to me, but that is what they say. The cataclysm was caused by cloning. No one ever explained how. I actually started studying history to figure it out myself, because I felt every explanation was so very lacking. But all the ancient records are straight up blank on the how. It's always, a cloning experiment got out of control, then the cataclysm happened. It's like our whole species woke up on a new planet one day and everyone asked around to see who was up to the stupidest thing, and then they chose to blame a cloning experiment gone wrong. Well, as I said, I studied history, and not just the stuff other people had already dug up, but new stuff. Stuff no one had found before in what was probably a thousand years. I dug shit up myself. I found a cloning lab. I swear by my mothers leftmost trunk, I didn't just... immediately spin up some test tubes and start a cloning shit. I was cautious, mostly reading the logs and the old research. I'd become basically fluent at reading the old script years ago, so getting caught up on their research didn't take all that long. I spent a year, then I hired a very small team. The five of us spent another three years learning what the ancients knew. In the process, I must admit, we started to believe it was possible to clone things without causing problems. We started with just an organ. A lower heart was all we tried to make at first. And it worked! My own lower heart had been damaged for years... We had a secret surgery, and it work great. Better than expected. We replaced a few more organs, a kidney, a splerchnoot, an eye! We cloned an eye, and Ignurt still had it in place of his old bum sixth eye when he got...well I'll get to that in a second. Then, we got bold. We tried to clone a whole person. The sample was mine. We tried to clone me. I... I admit my guilt. It grew... entirely too fast. I don't mean like it should have taken 90 cycles but it took 81. I mean, I put the sample in the tube, and went to lunch, and when I came back the embryo was already almost overgrowing the test tube, veins of extraneous flesh reaching out, pulsing, searching, squirming for sustenance. It had nearly push the lid off its test tube. It was photosynthesizing far too efficiently, so I turned off the lights and put it in the containment facility the ancients had built. Days later I opened it to see if it was still alive in its pitch dark prison, and it surged toward me as soon as the light hit it. I slammed the containment door shut and sealed it in there again. Tensions on my team grew, we knew what we were doing had been wrong all along. Now, some horrible unkillable flesh mass made of my own cells had come about because of our hubris. I tried talking them into helping me kill it, but when we approached with flamethrowers it snatched Ignurt before we could even pull the triggers. He'd been our door man. It was all we could do to seal the door again before it escaped. We tried using some of the ancients scanners on it. According to our research they used high energy electromagnetic scanners of some sort to look through things, like the walls to the containment room to scan what was inside. It worked, sort of, and we were able to get a scan of the thing's mass. The reading had to be wrong, too low. When we ran the scanners, it continued to grow. When we stopped, I believe it stopped. Growing only when when it was being bombarded with energy. Of course, at th