She was trying hard to isolate the intruders into the computer system, but she wasn’t having any luck. She knew someone else was in the facility from the motion sensors that she monitored in the Labs section occasionally. The resolution wasn’t good enough to show her how many there were, just that they were present. She knew they had hacked into the system—which was built on the remains of the extant computers temporarily until they could gut the whole thing. She was going to insist the upgrade process happened immediately, now that they had been hacked. They had shut all the security doors and locked her out of the security portion of the computer system. It hadn’t taken her long to learn that much.
It also hadn’t taken her long to figure out who. It had to be Manifold agents—probably their blasted Gen Y soldiers—because they hadn’t actually crashed into the system. They had used an old extant override code that had originally been implanted in the Manifold computers. After the Hydra incident, Deep Blue and Lewis Aleman had crashed the entire base’s computer systems. Later, once Eli Jacobs and his cleanup team had been sent in, they had resurrected some of the system, to get certain parts of the base functional, and they had begun the slow and painstaking task of deconstructing (and in some cases unlocking) Manifold’s old data architecture. Sifting through thousands of computer logs, science reports, blueprints, diagrams and descriptions, files and video footage of genetic experiments had taken months. Deep Blue still hadn’t sorted through the whole mess, but they had made enough headway that Jacobs and his cleanup team had been dismissed. Deep Blue was content to slowly discover what else he could over time with the systems. The base would now be repurposed for Chess Team’s usage and people were due to start setting things up right away.
Lori had pretty quickly seen that she wasn’t getting past the override code, so she had thought outside the box—and outside the room. She had gone into the nearby server closet and rewired some of the powerful Juniper Networks routers and gateways. Where she had been locked out without access before, now she could at least get to some parts of the system with a direct connection. She knew a few things now. The intruders had gotten in using the terminal outside the door to Post 2 at the helipad attached to the Labs section. They had further controlled the system wirelessly with a laptop. She had shut that shit down, killing all the wireless access points throughout the base. She didn’t know why they were here or what they were after, but she could see some of the old data architecture they had examined from the laptop before she had killed the wireless. They hadn’t done much in the system. After locking the doors, they took computer control of the trains between the three sections of the base, and they had looked at one researcher’s notes in particular. A genetic researcher named Todd Maddox. Lori knew the name from the files Deep Blue had given her to read on Manifold. She shuddered.
The man had been instrumental in the experiments on regenerative creatures and with the Hydra, but it seemed to Lori that his true interests and talent was with his experiments with the regenerative abilities in smaller creatures. nAG proteins, pig bladder extract, blastema cells. Lori didn’t understand half of it, but what she gleaned was that Maddox had been working on a different project from the Hydra experiment on his own time. He was speeding up the regenerative abilities of ambystoma maculatum—some kind of salamander from what she could tell. He seemed first interested in applying the regenerative abilities of the creatures to humans, but was unhappy with the speed of regenerating cells in humans. A lot of his work had focused on ways to speed the process up. Maddox had started out in the Manifold Beta facility in Peru but his work had ultimately been moved to New Hampshire for access to…
Lori began to sweat as she read further in the files. The air conditioning vent directly over her head in the ceiling was doing nothing to regulate her body temperature.
Apparently, there was a massive quantity of natural Uranium in the granite of New Hampshire’s White Mountains and it off-gassed Radon. They were exposing the salamanders to Uranium radiation, just as Deep Blue’s medical staff had done to King’s friend, George Pierce, when they were trying to cure him of the affliction with which Ridley had saddled him. Deep Blue’s team had eventually been successful in healing Pierce. Unlike with George though, Maddox’s work had discovered that the uranium radiation wasn’t having the same effect on the salamanders. It was making them aggressive and Maddox saw a few inches in growth overall with all the samples, but it wasn’t speeding up their regenerative capabilities.