Chapter 104 – Hypothesis – Phase 2
The data obtained from Bloodtech is vast.
After the infection war, various biological experiments were conducted, and countless photos and videos were attached.
Artemis classified these in an instant, stamping a significant amount of material as ‘useless’ or ‘low grade’.
[You are an engineer, not a bioengineer. Going through all the little experiment records is like perusing a trash can full of spam emails. Waste of time. A waste of stamina.]
She buried the low-level material deep in the city database and didn’t want me to access it.
[Your primitive brain only has a handful of capacities, and it can’t initialize or isolate memory like mine. You can’t turn off associations when accessing certain visual materials.]
Even if you secretly sell it, you mix it with a spoonful.
[Let’s take a look after I finish sorting.]
The reason I silently followed the somewhat rude request, which seemed to limit my viewing rights, was because I read the anxiety in her voice.
The research data is sure to be full of terrible content. It would be no different from a human sausage factory.
As a veteran who has experienced all kinds of hardships, it seemed like unnecessary consideration, but I didn’t want to make Artemis worry unnecessarily.
The materials that were selected contained useful information. Just like you are seeing right now.
[Now there is no point in making vaccines.]
The man in the video said. He is taking pictures in selfie mode while walking down the hallway.
Looking at the background, I saw the Bloodtech clinical trial lab that I visited recently.
At the time this was filmed, everything seemed to be running smoothly, and people were seen busily walking around all over the place.
Please note that when I say it runs fine, I am referring to physical standards. Morally, it is never sane.
Over the man’s shoulder, a heavily armed soldier stood guard, researchers in blood-stained surgical gowns, and cleaners cleaning orthopedic tools or carrying black bags with expressions as if they were about to vomit passed by.
[It is nonsense to pour national power into vaccine development at this stage.]
He appeared to be in his late 30s, was wearing a white research coat, his hair was frizzy, and he looked exhausted.
The condition of his face is so bad that I want to check the level of caffeine in his blood. The jagged beard that he couldn’t maintain made him look even more like a bad person.
His appearance resembles Lee Wan Ryan. It is a natural psychopathy.
The name tag he wears around his neck says ‘Chief Researcher.’
[The ‘phase’ I just mentioned is a personal hypothesis, but what it is…]
His words were cut off by a voice suddenly calling.
[Chief!]
In a lab in the hallway, a woman with her upper body exposed called him out.
[Um… Hey, injection! Please give me an injection.]
Her voice was extremely frightened.
The chief’s face, who was trying to pour out a story with an excited face, suddenly sank.
[No, how much free time do you have to take care of every single thing? Take care of yourself!]
The chief shouted. The veins on his neck and forehead are clearly visible.
[Black…]
The woman who asked for help couldn’t answer and started crying.
[You’re really bothering me.]
The chief cursed but headed toward where the woman was.
She was a woman, and even though she shed tears because she really didn’t want to do it, her colors came back.
[How many people?]
[7 people.]
The woman answered and held out a tray with seven syringes on it. Given the circumstances, it appears to be a euthanasia drug.
[Damn it, you kept piling it up while I was sleeping?]
The woman lowered her face without answering.
[Hey, at least hold on to your arm. Let’s finish it quickly.]
After handing the tray over, I grabbed the back of the woman who was about to disappear. She wanted to leave, but she followed with a tearful expression, perhaps because she saw the foreman’s grim face.
[I’ll have to take another picture later.]
You can see two soldiers guarding the entrance to the laboratory, and beyond that, you can see an operating table with people lying as if they have fainted.
[Hey, you son of a bitch! Don’t you put away your cell phone?]
An old doctor holding a blood-soaked surgical instrument screamed when he saw the doctor. There is an amount of blood flowing on the floor that can only be considered fatal.
[Oh, I’m going to turn it off now. Don’t be too mean to the person who came to clean up your assistant’s poop.]
With those words, the video ended.
“…”
She looked at the monitor with her hands folded in a triangle shape on the desk for a while.
At this point, Bloodtech was conscripted and conducted experiments under government orders.
Communication records show that progress reports were made on a daily basis, most of which were related to vaccine research. In some ways, it’s natural.
The director in the video wrote reports every day to be submitted to the government.
The investment of enormous resources and manpower raised the potential of research, and the experimental process that ignored ethics dramatically accelerated the speed of results.
Apart from reporting to the government, the chief also left unofficial records tailored to his own tastes. What I just played is one of those things.
The following video was played. It’s only 30 seconds long.
[I was interrupted and tried to film again, but somehow my excitement waned. So, after taking a break, I’m going to try to make something proper.]
Behind the foreman, a janitor was seen being dragged away by the soldiers, one by one.
[I am not an undercover reporter! I was just calling because I was worried about my mother! If you check your phone, you’ll know! Please!!!]
In the clinical laboratory, people other than researchers were prohibited from possessing cell phones.
The chief, who only tilted his head to glance at the scene, shrugged his shoulders.
[I’ll see you on the operating table soon.]
The video ends here.
The third video was a full-fledged presentation video. Like a documentary.
[As I said before, the development of a vaccine no longer has much meaning. Now the probability of infection is lower! No, should I say exactly that the mechanism has changed? No, no, this is not the right expression either.]
As the screen changed, scenes of various games, movies, cartoons, etc. Were stitched together one second at a time. Most of them were works about zombies.
[When the infection situation first began, our military and police responded quite competently. Even though it was our first time experiencing it, everyone was trained. It’s like image training through mass media. There is no one who doesn’t know zombies these days.]
Soldiers being loaded onto trucks and armed police officers were seen controlling the streets.
[The number of infected people during this period was quite high. Because they were literally zombies. No, it was worse than that. Even if it’s not a headshot, you’ll be defeated if you hit a few vital points.]
The chief said, ‘Wow~’ and rolled his eyes, stretched out his arms and struggled.
Then suddenly he grabbed his chest and pretended to fall.
Cheolpudeok! He sank into the back of the chair, and after a few seconds, he narrowed his eyes and grinned.
[I once heard a military officer tell me not to waste bullets aiming for a headshot, but to just shoot the chest.]
A video emerged of the military firing indiscriminately at walkers in the city, accompanied by loud gunshots.
Certainly, being hit in the stomach or limbs did not incapacitate him, but if he was hit in the heart or lungs, he collapsed and could not get up.
[Even at this stage, some mutated individuals were discovered, but the proportion was small, and they were enough for the military to suppress.]
There was footage of mutants killed in a laboratory being dissected. It was an entity that spit out acidic liquid.
One of the researchers suddenly made a V shape with his fingers and looked back at the camera. When I looked closely, I saw that it was the lead researcher.
[The problem was the transmission power. It was incredibly contagious. Curse of Dawn? 28 days later? The Last of Us? Everyone tell me to shut up.]
One difference from past epidemics, including the coronavirus outbreak, is that medical personnel were wiped out in just a few months.
The screen changed to reveal a joint military-police operation team surrounding the hospital.
The hospital is on fire, and survivors can be seen on the rooftop waving their arms for help.
Ta-ta-tang!
Bullets rained down on walkers running in patient and nurse uniforms. There are more than one such video.
[There has never been a case where all troops deployed in a suppression operation were unharmed. In any case, at least one person is infected. By the time that one person was weeded out, several members of the unit had become carriers.]
The video that came out afterward was not much different from the newspaper material I had clipped. These were scenes that showed control rapidly collapsing.
[Because of the high-ranking people urging me to create a vaccine as quickly as possible, I had to experiment while sleeping less than 3 hours a day. And finally I came to a conclusion.]
He took a shot at a paper cup filled with coffee and then stared at the screen.
[The direction of infection has changed. If up to now it was Phase 1 focusing on mass expansion, should we say it is Phase 2 from now on?]
In the video, a giant mutant monster, the Juggernaut, appears, grabbing the main gun of a tank and tearing it apart.
He even tore off the hatch and stuck his muscular arm into the hole and stirred it around. The arm was so thick that it caught on, and I couldn’t fit it in properly.
[Aaaaah!]
A soldier was pulled out and torn alive. When I threw it away, the infected organisms rushed in and ate it ravenously.
As Juggernaut put his hand into the hole again, the screams of the tank crew were heard.
There was also a multi-pod bug monster that snaked up the building diagonally. The body was as thick as a decent truck, and every time it went up, pieces of the tempered glass exterior wall broke like crazy.
Two bamboo-sized antennae moved disgustingly and collided with the glass wall of the building.
Wow!
A scream was heard from inside, and the head, drawn by the sound, plunged inside.
[Aaaaah!]
A woman jumped next to the monster’s body and fell straight down.
It seemed like he panicked and decided to escape, but the problem was that he jumped from too high a place.
Whoa!
She fell from a height of at least 10 stories and was shattered upon hitting the ground.
A red high heel fell a beat later next to her writhing corpse, her head crushed.
The cameraman must have thought that the falling death scene would get better viewer ratings than the insect monster, so he slowly lowered the angle and filmed the falling scene.
[Phase 2!]
The screen changed to the chief researcher’s laboratory. He was holding up two of his fingers with each hand.
[Monsters have begun to evolve. Bigger, stronger, faster and more vicious! Perhaps in return, the contagiousness has decreased.]
Photos of various varieties were displayed, and among them was the vampire sea anemone monster seen in the basement of Bloodtech.
He was attacking the ranch, and wow, it was a truly terrible sight.
[My colleagues made a fuss about immune antibodies and all, but I think it was just the infectious agent that changed its strategy. Should I say that I ended up investing my energy elsewhere?]
The chief extended the index fingers of both hands to the left and then moved them to the right.
[Across animals, plants, bugs, bacteria, and viruses, there is no being that has all the strengths. If you have one, you have to give up the other. Just as any organization has a limited budget. Infections also began to choose other things instead of contagiousness.]
An aerial photo of the sea from a helicopter appeared. A huge black object is moving at high speed under the sea.
It was the size of a football field and was pointed at a patrol ship a few hundred meters away.
Bang! Bang!
The patrol ship attacked like crazy with all its firepower, but was unable to slow down at all.
There was a sunken oil tanker next to the patrol ship, and the sea in that area was turning black.
A huge object under the sea has reached the patrol ship.
Wow!!!
A moment later, there was a tremendous explosion and the sea was covered in flames. So much so that the expression ‘sea of fire’ fits perfectly.
[If we compare it to a human war, we have launched a nuclear bombing all over the world, and now we are trying to carry out a precision strike on the surviving remnants.]
A vial containing a blue liquid appeared on the screen.
[A prototype vaccine has been created, and it is clearly showing some effect. But I wonder what meaning it will have by the time it is completed. Contagion would not be a problem then. Wouldn’t it be better to use the resources that go into it when it is more valuable?]
He buried his body behind his desk.
[No matter how you look at it, this infection was created for a specific purpose… So it’s like a tool of war. Otherwise, it would be too stiff, wouldn’t it?]
Roll!
He dragged his wheelchair and pressed his face to the screen.
[In the first stage, the focus was on the spread and social collapse due to its enormous contagious power, but then the government and military collapsed, so it became a mutant?]
He shook his head and raised the middle fingers of both hands to the sky.
[I don’t know who made it, but it was really damn good!]
The third video has also ended.
“Hmm…”
This chief researcher’s records contained a lot of information that could not be ignored.
There are some similarities with the hypothesis made by Artemis.
“Phase 2…”
If his hypothesis is correct, what is the situation now?
Does the phase he mentioned end at stage 2?
More questions arose than were answered.
1 hour later.
[Ready to dispatch.]
Artemis reported.
The exploration team aboard APCs (Armored Personnel Carriers) is ready to go outside.
Their mission is to secure the body tissues of infectious agents.
After watching the video, I wanted to check for myself the infectiousness of those currently roaming outside.
[Open.]
The exterior front door of the shelter opened and light poured in.
“Chief researcher. “Let’s test your hypothesis.”
Heavy vehicles lined up and headed towards the light of the outside world.
