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| Man of the People; Closed, but Please Read! | |
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| Topic Started: Jul 7 2015, 02:11 PM (496 Views) | |
| John Sublime | Jul 7 2015, 02:11 PM Post #1 |
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Money (The Best Superpower of All)
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Timeframe: June 20th, 2015 - approximately 1 pm Pacific Time Location: Publicity stadium onsite at Sublime Solutions headquarters, in Seattle, Washington He took to the stage like he was born for it, basking in the spotlights, waving to the audience with a bright, charming smile, a strong, confident gait to his walk as he went to center stage amid applause and cheers. It had only been a few years since he started giving these talks, but in that short time, John Sublime had gone from a man with strange ideas to a man who people eagerly came to see, devoutly listened to, and spent their hard-earned money to read his written work. "Good afternoon!" He called out once his intro music had died down and he had made it to his mark on the stage. "Really glad you could join me here. I've got some basic things I'd like to talk to you about, some of the framework behind what makes us... us, and what makes us ready to be more than us." He gestured with a wide sweep of his right hand to a screen that lowered itself from the top of the room. "If I could direct your attention to the screen, please," he said, and as he did, a detailed image of a DNA molecule materialized on it nucleotide by nucleotide, a graphic trick meant to entertain and hold attention. "This, as you know, is what makes an organism what it is. DNA, the building block of life, the hard drive upon which every single defining factor of life is written. Your hair color, the sound of your voice, the shape of your face, everything. Everything that makes you you is right there in this funny little spiral sitting inside the nuclei of every cell in your body." The image swirled as it zoomed in and straightened, focusing now on a particular strand of the DNA, a long and varied strand of it. "And this section right here - you know what this section codes for? Take some guesses. Eyes? No. Opposable thumbs? Guess again. The shape of your nose - sorry, no. The actual answer is - nothing. Crazy, right? DNA - the coding information that makes everything - has entire regions that do nothing? That can't be right. You know what's crazier? Upwards of ninety eight percent - ninety eight percent - of your DNA is like this. Non-coding regions, junk, buffer zones. All there to protect us in the replication phase of mitosis so the stuff that matters gets it right. Now imagine if just one, just one of that ninety eight percent could... Switch on. What might it give us?" The image on the screen changed from the DNA to a generic human male form - mostly featureless, designed in a way to be as vague and non-specific as possible. "Could it give us wings?" Instantly, the wings mentioned sprouted from that generic man's back and he flew off of the screen. A generic female replaced him. "How about laser eyes?" Again, the demonstration he mentioned came through in that figure in the screen. The screen flashed red when the beam swept forward, and the figure was gone. "The ability to transmute our very form, or control electromagnetic waves, or read minds?" the examples came hard and fast on the screen now, including several that weren't mentioned. "That's the core principle behind TranSpecies. Is that we are, as human beings, meant to be more. Meant to be... greater. And now it is closer to being in our grasp than ever before. We are making advances in genetic manipulation, therapy and reprogramming, and I feel confident that sooner rather than later, we can be what we were always meant to be." He paused, allowing the audience to wear out their applause. He had enough practice with this that he knew how to tell an audience what it wanted to hear. And it helped that he attracted a very specific type of audience, not unlike a televangelist or a software mogul, who were prone to being in-line with what he said. Broadcast a video of a speech given to a sympathetic audience, an audience who already likes your ideas, and people watching online will be more willing to take those ideas in and mull them over, because if these people are so enthusiastic about it, then surely there must be some merit, right? "Thank you, thank you," he said after the furor had died down a bit. "And now I'd like to welcome to the stage a good friend of mine. She was one of the first people to contact me after my book hit the shelves, and we had a good long chat about it on the very day of publication. She was one of the first people to publicly identify herself as transpecies, and she's here now to tell you all about her experiences - to share her story with you. Please welcome to the stage Angela Goldstein!" He gestured back as a woman walked onto the stage - not too terribly tall, approximately middle-aged but dressed in a nice ladies' pantsuit, her light blonde hair cropped close and cut short. The two met in a quick embrace, and then John Sublime left the stage to let her speak. |
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| John Sublime | Jul 8 2015, 02:27 PM Post #2 |
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Money (The Best Superpower of All)
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As John Sublime left the public eye, his physical demeanor morphed and changed. The casual, easygoing manner with which he carried himself onstage was gone, replaced with a fast, determined, almost predatory and aggressive way of moving as he stalked his way down the hallway of his own company headquarters. He passed by employees, workers with but the barest of acknowledgements, a curt nod here, a brief wave there, and made his way to a particular door. Behind this door was a room nobody but he had ever seen. It had a double-door entry system that meant that anybody who happened to see him open the door would only see the other door inside, not the room itself. Each door was opened by biometric security measures, randomly alternating ones so that it would be highly difficult to replicate or steal the ways in which to access this room. What was in this room, what went on in here, while not grotesque, was still something Sublime did not want anyone to know about. By all accounts, it was simply an office, with a utilitarian desk and communications arrays aplenty. It was not ornate, as it didn't need to be. But it did keep him abreast of everything with his side project, or arguably his main project, that he would need. "Excellent introduction, sir. We were watching the stream from our end," a voice came over the telecom line, faceless and masked enough to sound unnatural. "Of course you were," Sublime said as he took a seat at the desk, using his index finger to begin quickly scrolling through a data display on an integrated screen on the desktop. "Some of us were wondering though... If you were going to get around to mentioning our part in this. What we do for the mission." "You do realize that these talks are designed to endear me to the public, right?" Sublime asked with a sigh. "Well, yes, sir, I..." "And you do realize that if I say to this public 'hey, by the way, you might be interested in euthanizing mutants and taking their body parts in an attempt to get their powers,' they might, just maybe, turn against us?" "But mutants are just raw materials, they're not actually..." "That - doesn't - matter. You've wasted enough of my time on this. U-Man operations are to remain strictly top-secret until I decide otherwise, do you understand me?" "But the potential for increased recruitment-" "You're boring me. You're boring. The first one who puts a bullet through his helmet gets his position." "Wait, don't-" he was cut off, however, by a sharp crack of a gunshot, and then the sound of his body hitting the floor. "Who's my new pointman over there?" Sublime asked, idly cleaning his glasses with a fold in his shirt. "That would be me, sir," a voice answered. "Oh, a point woman, I like it! Okay, let's get down to business, then. How's acquisition been in your sector?" "We're up fifteen percent from last quarter." "Good, good. Any successful grafts from these new acquisitions?" "We attempted thermal vision, left eye only, but the eye was rejected." "Shame," Sublime said with a sigh. "Let's try something different, then. What if we prime the recipient with blood transfusions, say two a week, every week for a month before surgery?" "We'll give it a try." "That's what I like to hear. We need that kind of can-do attitude," Sublime said. "And how about the girls?" "They made an attempt at acquisition, but the target was apparently wise to them and evaded capture." "That's... disappointing," Sublime frowned. "Evaded meaning the target is still alive?" "Affirmative." "Not good," Sublime said with a frown. "Activate emergency protocol seven, and tell the staff at the beta site to begin preparations to become the alpha site." "Understood, sir." "Shame that we might lose your facility, but do not lose the work. Begin transferring subjects immediately." "And the girls?" "The girls can stay. If what I think is going to happen will happen, they may prove valuable." |
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| John Sublime | Aug 12 2015, 04:24 PM Post #3 |
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Money (The Best Superpower of All)
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Timeframe - August 2nd, @ 11 pm Pacific Time John Sublime was rarely directly involved in this part of the work. He usually kept a rather large margin of separation between himself and the U-Man operations. Plausible deniability just in case, of course. If he wasn't actually there, if he did t actually spend time in the facilities, overseeing procedures, giving direct input, then he could claim ignorance if they were found, and who would prove otherwise? With companies large and sprawling like this one, particularly sneaky employees could get away with a lot. And he had no qualms about throwing his U-Men under the bus if it came to that. He could always get more. But this was different. New techniques were being tested. New theories of his being put to work. He had to oversee this personally. He had to make sure that this was viable, or else it was back to the drawing board. This was another one of his "dark" facilities. Off the map, off the grid, out of the books. Officially, it didn't exist. He had to sacrifice one of them to the X-Men some time ago, all the way across the country, far from here. Far from this small island well off the coast of Washington State, which, for all intents and purposes, was uninhabited. Perks of having a subterranean laboratory, nobody sees a building above ground where there shouldn't be one. He walked into the core surgical laboratory, and looked around. His men cleaned up well, he was glad to observe. What was likely a grisly scene not too long ago was pristine, spotless. Strapped to a surgical table was a young man with long dark hair, with bandages across his chest and IV fluid pumping into his arm. He was very obviously uncomfortable and in no small degree of pain. Sublime walked over to the young man and looked at the screen that monitored his vitals. "Pulse looks good, heart rate returning to normal... good," he mused, nodding his head. "They... they took my wings..." The young man rasped through a dry mouth. "Hmm?" Sublime brought his attention to the young man, having not been paying attention. "Ah, yes, well. That was the point. You didn't need them anymore, I can promise you that." "Hurts..." The young man whispered, gritting his teeth hard. He wasn't doing so great, and wasn't entirely lucid, but Sublime didn't need either wellness or lucidity from him. Survival would do for now. "I'm sure it's horrible of me to say, but I really don't care," Sublime shrugged his shoulders. "The viability of your cells is far more important than your pain and suffering." The U-Man project so far hadn't been working too well. Something about the grafting process didn't take with enough consistency, and it made him wonder if perhaps it was time to move on from grafting altogether. Eye implants were rejected, skin grafts went necrotic, new hands didn't work right, and on several occasions, the new organs ended up killing the recipient. But this time would be different. This time, the recipient had been primed with blood transfusions from the donor - a perfect blood type match. Low-level radiation treatments to infuse the new cells with energy designed to mimic mutational power. Gene therapy to make the DNA of the host more willing to mutate into the guided form. He really hoped this worked. In a separate and conjoined room, the recipient lay in a recovery bed, on her back to allow her new organs room to acclimate, and so she would not be laying on them. He entered the room, a stark contrast from the cold and clinical holding station the mutant was kept in. This had warm, soft lighting, wood panels, a vase filled with flowers, a television set to some old game show with Dick Clark. "How are we feeling tonight, Mrs. Dalton? Like a new woman, I hope?" There was no response. After he had met with her husband at a publishing party some few months ago, John Sublime had invited her to his compound, where she pledged her life and her bank account to the U-Men, in exchange for being made... whole. He cautiously stepped up to the bedside where she lay motionless, and pulled the sheet that covered her back away. The once-beautiful, transparent dragonfly-like wings that had been grafted to her back were withered and dead, with dark black spots on the shoulder blades where they had been attached. Her skin otherwise was pale and non-responsive, her lifeless eyes staring blankly at the wall. "Damn it!" Sublime snarled, reaching for the vase by her bedside and flinging it against the wall, the glass and flowers and water shattering and spraying and splattering against it as it hit. Another failure. Another dead end. Another dead test subject. All the while, Dick Clark carried on with his game show on the television. Taking a moment to regain his composure, unclenching his fists and relaxing his jaw, he tapped the intercom next to her bed. "I need a crew down in Mrs. Dalton's suite, cleanup and sterilization. Immediately. Full protocol seven nine alpha. I want her cremated and disposed of. And I want full chemical dissolution of the mutant. We need as much DNA as we can take from him. Be down here in twenty minutes, begin after I've left." He hung up he line, and headed back to the hallway. Another failure. What was going wrong? What was he missing? What did he need to make this work? |
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8:51 AM Jul 11