Wolverine: Weapon X

by Marc Cerasini

  Landing in a HAWK harness was roughly the same as jumping out of an airplane with a parachute, then Unbuckling that chute about ten or fifteen meters above the ground and falling the rest of the way. The landing tended to be hard, and you didn’t always end up on your feet. Most guys curled into a ball and rolled until they came to a stop.

  Not Logan.

  As his visor ticked off the altitude in meters … 50… 40 … 30 … 20 … his airspeed was reduced to less than forty kilometers per hour.

  Logan threw his legs forward and punched out of the harness. The wings disengaged, folding like a crushed butterfly in his wake. He hit the ground running, rolled three times, and hopped to his feet. But the momentum he’d built up in the descent was still pushing him. Ahead, Logan spied a fallen tree in his path. Just as he leaped over the obstacle, a silhouette—human—rose from behind the log.

  It was too late for Logan to stop. He slammed into the stranger and heard a muffled cry. Hurling out of control, they both tumbled down a steep slope in a cloud of dust.

  * * * * *

  The alarms had been silenced. Calm had been restored. Subject X now drifted motionless, the spasm subsided. Technicians and doctors moved about the room, recalibrating instruments and rebooting key computer systems.

  “We’ll lose a little time, Professor. It’s unavoidable,” Dr. Hendry said, face grave. “The technicians will have to get the computers back online. Restore function in some of the probes. But for now, Subject X has been stabilized.”

  The Professor barely nodded before facing Dr. Cornelius. “The nanotechnology. Is it functioning?”

  “The process is complete, the silicon valves are working like the real things,” said Cornelius. “You can see them on this full-body ultrasound… the tiny black specks on the skeleton…”

  The Professor glanced at the image, then raised an eyebrow. “And you are absolutely convinced that your nanochips did not cause the subject’s seizure?”

  “Not a chance,” Cornelius replied with more confidence than he had ever felt.

  “Then we must turn to you, Ms. Hines,” the Professor hissed. “What is your theory? What do you think went wrong?”

  Carol Hines swallowed nervously. “I… I still believe we’re dealing with random electrical impulses in the hypothalamus. It’s man’s basest instincts—the ‘lizard brain’—fighting for survival in the very face of extinction.”

  “Poetic rubbish,” Dr. MacKenzie scoffed. “There was obviously brain activity going on somewhere in the cerebral hemisphere. The subject was experiencing random memories, a total recall of some past event, the pangs of birth—whatever.”

  “Nothing like that showed up on the monitors,” Hines insisted.

  “We both saw the spike,” MacKenzie replied, “only you dismissed it as an anomaly.”

  The Professor lifted his hand to silence the argument. “What does it mean, Doctor?”

  MacKenzie faced the Professor. “The REM failed to completely interface with the subject’s mind. There was a hole in the system, a flaw in the program. Some of Logan’s—I mean, the subject’s previous personality was exerting itself.”

  MacKenzie turned his back on the Professor to face the man in the tank. He tapped the glass as if it were a fishbowl.

  “Something was going on inside that head of his. Subject X is not ready to surrender his identity… not yet,” MacKenzie stated. “I’d stake my reputation on it.”

  The Professor placed his hands behind his back and paced around the laboratory “This presents us with a small dilemma. Two of my associates disagree about a critical phase in the Weapon X program. We are at an impasse. How are we to proceed?”

  MacKenzie stepped forward. “I’ve done everything in my power to keep Subject X under control. We experienced no difficulties until the brain dampeners were deactivated. I suggest we go the chemical route—Pheno-B. Three-point first dose, more if needed.”

  MacKenzie stared a challenge at Carol Hines. She met his gaze, then faced the Professor. He was staring at her, too.

  “I’ll reboot the REM mainframe,” she said. “And start the interface from scratch. It’s possible … maybe it’s possible … that a step was overlooked.”

  MacKenzie, smug in victory, turned his back on the woman.

  “The reboot should take about an hour,” Carol Hines continued. “And we can try again.”

  “One hour, then,” the Professor replied. A moment later, he was riding the elevator to an upper level.

  With the Professor’s departure, Dr. Cornelius approached Hines’s workstation and touched her arm.

  “Don’t feel too bad,” he said. “Stuff happens … delays… mistakes… errors in calculation. Nobody’s perfect. Bet this kind of thing went on at NASA all the time.”

  Carol Hines tapped her keyboard without looking up.

  “Anyway, the Professor was in a quandary and he went with Dr. MacKenzie… you can’t blame him for—”

  “For what?” she interrupted, looking up at him. Her thin face was flushed under her severe haircut. “For listening to the person with the most letters after his name?”

  Cornelius shook his head. “You’ve got it all wrong, Ms. Hines. The Professor went with the technology he trusts, not the man. His decision had nothing to do with advanced degrees, or the fact that MacKenzie’s a doctor. It’s just that he’s used Pheno-B before, but never the REM.”

  He could see he’d reached her and that she was paying attention to his words.

  “If you’ll recall,” he continued, “the Professor was looking to blame my nanochips for Subject X’s strange reaction.”

  Cornelius was relieved to see the lines on her face soften.

  “And in case you haven’t noticed before,” he whispered conspiratorially, “there’s a certain Dr. Hendry who’s got it in for me. So don’t feel too persecuted just because the project’s headshrinker doesn’t like you. I’m beginning to think everybody involved in this project is up the proverbial creek without a paddle.”

  6

  The Experiment

  From his chair, the Professor lifted a pale hand. “Let’s make history.”

  The clatter of keys and the echo of voice commands came next. Inside the massive space, scientists and technicians had set to work.

  “Feed.”

  The command came from Dr. Chang, a metallurgist known for his work with special alloys. Chang was hunched over a full-body monitor beside a two-tiered portable pumping station set against the bubbling tank.

  “Conductive feed,” said the tech assistant seated right below the metallurgist, at a second workstation.

  Behind leaded glass at the base of the pump, steam hissed as liquefied adamantium flowed from the holding tank into the feeder tubes that snaked into the subject’s containment unit.

  “Steady … adamantium breakdown twenty-nine in one, sir,” Dr. Chang warned. “I’ll compensate.”

  The Professor shook his head without an ounce of concern. “It’ll reduce. No problem.”

  Chang nodded. “Feed.”

  “Steady…”

  “Feed.”

  “Cardiotach?” asked the Professor.

  Carol Hines was about to glance at the heart monitor when Dr. Hendry barked, “High. Higher than we expected.”

  The tank looked like a simmering glass kettle; the figure inside bobbed as a cork would in boiling liquid. Subject X would either make scientific history or die a burning death.

  Dr. Cornelius watched the procedure with tense anticipation. The room smelled more like a steel smelter than a medical lab or a makeshift operating room. An odor of burnt metal hung in the air, and in the last few minutes the temperature on the floor had increased several degrees. The reason for both: the holding container at one end of the room, glowing crimson-hot behind a thick wall of leaded glass. Inside, hundreds of pounds of molten adamantium steel were pressurized and primed to pump into the subject’s body.

  Cornelius knew that adamantium was the hardest sub
stance in the universe. Developed in the 1940s by Dr. Myron MacLain, a United States government metallurgist, the alloy was created using a mixture of several top—secret resins including an infusion of the mysterious substance vibranium. In its liquefied form, adamantium was only malleable for approximately eight minutes, and only if maintained at a constant temperature of fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. After four hundred and eighty seconds, the alloy would not bond to any other substance. This meant that any interruption during the critical pumping stage would be catastrophic.

  Around Subject X’s tank, the team supervised all facets of the process at computer terminals and medical monitors. One sound rose above the white noise of whirring machinery: the beep of the machine that measured heart rate, breathing, body temperature, and other body functions.

  Dr. Chang’s hands continued to play on his keyboard. Inside the leaded glass, the cloud of steam dissipated. “Steady…”

  “Feed …”

  “Suffusion enacting… now!”

  The activity in the tank increased exponentially. As molten metal filled the feeder tubes, they superheated, then quickly transferred that thermal energy to the fluid inside the tank. In seconds, Subject X was totally obscured by a boiling chemical stew.

  “Steady…”

  “Feed.”

  At the monitor, Dr. Chang watched the molten adamantium seep into the subject’s skeleton. On the ultrasonic image, it appeared as if the ghostly gray-white bones were being coated with black paint.

  On his own display panel, the Professor magnified that same image several hundred times to observe the surface of the right femur. It was clear from the ultrasound that the nanochips were protecting the delicate fissures in the bones as well as the veins and capillaries that ran through them.

  Cornelius watched the same data on his monitor and felt a mixture of triumph and relief. A few years ago, he believed that the process he just witnessed would be impossible. But the sheer vision of the Professor, the immense scientific progress of the program, and its vast resources made anything seem possible.

  “Steady…”

  “Things are going well, Doctor. I’m pleased.” It took a moment for Cornelius to realize the Professor had addressed him.

  “Feed?”

  “Suffusion?”

  “Steady. Both steady,” Dr. Chang replied, pushing a shiny black strand of hair away from his face.

  As Cornelius watched, living tissue was being bonded to a metal alloy to create the world’s first truly bionic organism. It was indeed history in the making, and Cornelius was moved to speak.

  “This is an extraordinary experiment, Professor. I’m honored to be a part of it.”

  The Professor’s thin lips curled into an expression more like a sneer than a smile. “Of course you are, Cornelius.”

  “Cardiotach?” This time it was the metallurgist who called for an immediate update.

  Hendry shook his head. “Not good … I guess it’s ANS.”

  “Feed.”

  Dr. MacKenzie spoke for the first time since the bonding procedure began. “Let’s up the Pheno-B. Two points … no, one. Any more and he’ll have beans for brains.”

  “Is there any reason for concern?” The Professor directed this question to the psychiatrist, but it was Hendry who answered.

  “I don’t believe so, Professor. You chose Subject X for his rather remarkable stamina. What we’re getting here is his autonomic nervous system kicking in. He’s a hard fellow—even unconscious.”

  “Chelation beginning,” said Dr. Chang.

  The mass of roiling bubbles around Subject X expanded outward as he began to thrash violently, bumping up against the glass walls.

  “What was that?” the Professor demanded.

  “Resistance, sir,” MacKenzie replied.

  “He’s pulled a feeder tube!” the metallurgist cried. “Cut the flow to tube Nineteen B, use backup tubes A and C to compensate.”

  “Compensating.”

  “Maintain.”

  “Damn … resistance. More resistance,” said Hendry, anxiously.

  “Equalize.”

  “Feed.”

  “Impeded.”

  “Feed backup channel.”

  “Balance imminent,” spoke the metallurgist. “Steady… steady… balance achieved.”

  The thrashing subsided. Molten steel continued to be pumped into the subject’s twitching flesh.

  “How’s the REM interface holding up?” asked the Professor.

  “It’s at one hundred percent,” Carol Hines replied. “I upped the amps to short out the subject’s autonomic nerve functions. I believe that has corrected Dr. Hendry’s ANS problem.”

  “Hendry … ANS?”

  Hendry looked up from his monitors. “Subsiding, Professor. Nearly normal.”

  “Cardiotach, Miss Hines?”

  She hesitated before answering, surprised that the Professor had called on her again. “Rising rapidly, sir. As of now, the heart rate is 198 per minute and increasing.”

  The Professor gritted his teeth. He found the subject’s accelerated heart rate troubling.

  “Diagnosis, Dr. Hendry?”

  “Sir, I believe the nanotechnology is at fault—”

  “Now, wait a minute—” Cornelius protested.

  The Professor lifted his hand. “Clarify Dr. Hendry…”

  “On the ultrasound monitor, you can see gray flecks covering the skeleton which Cornelius tells us are his nanochips. Well, look at this—”

  A magnification of the subject’s heart muscle revealed the same gray-black specks lining the interior of all four chambers.

  “I believe Dr. Cornelius’s programming was incorrect. The nanochips treated the dense heart muscle like bone, with predictable results.”

  Cornelius was speechless. Could I have been so wrong?

  The Professor frowned and spoke tersely. “Ms. Hines, would you please access the subject’s medical profile and history? I studied it long enough, but I could have missed something.”

  “On-screen, sir,” Hines said.

  “Detail any cardio-abnormality.”

  “None, sir.”

  The Professor gazed in silence at the figure adrift in the tank. When he finally spoke, his tone was rueful. “You’re really letting me down here, Cornelius. Why didn’t you prepare for this in advance?”

  Cornelius stared at the image. His nanochips still clustered around the valves—doing who knows how much damage to the subject’s heart—when they should have been long gone.

  Hell, they were long gone a few minutes ago. Why did some of them end up back inside his heart muscles?

  “I thought I’d prepared for everything, Professor. But who could have foreseen this?”

  The metallurgist interrupted them. “Sir, the rate of adamantium absorption should be twenty-four in one—”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s fifty-three in one, sir … and increasing.”

  For the first time since Cornelius met him, the Professor appeared baffled. He immediately called for an explanation from Carol Hines.

  “It seems that Subject X’s highly accelerated heart rate is draining the adamantium reservoir at three times the estimated speed of absorption,” she explained.

  An alarm sounded, interrupting them. Dr. Hendry analyzed the problem without looking up from his monitor.

  “The subject’s thrashing again. And there is some leakage in the tank. I detect trace amounts of adamantium.”

  “The damaged tube?” Hines offered.

  “No,” Hendry said at once. “The leak is coming from the subject’s pores. He’s passing adamantium through his sweat glands.”

  The Professor was suddenly alarmed. “Rejection?”

  “More likely … elimination,” Hendry replied. “His liver, his lymph nodes—they’re dealing with the metal as they would a bacterial infection or a toxin. Some of the alloy is being filtered out, passing through his skin. Not enough to worry about, but…”
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  “This guy’s liver functions must be phenomenal,” said Dr. MacKenzie. “So efficient I doubt our boy can get drunk even if he wants to. That could also explain his resistance to drugs.”

  “My God! It might also explain the nanochips lodged in his heart,” Cornelius declared.

  “Explain, Doctor,” said the Professor.

  “The subject has phenomenal stamina, right? And we can see that his immune system is amazing, too—”

  “Your point?”

  “Those chips didn’t travel to his heart on their own, and their programming wasn’t flawed. They were forced back into the bloodstream by the subject’s immune system!”

  Cornelius whirled to face Hendry. “What’s the white blood cell count inside the subject’s heart?”

  Hendry tapped his keyboard. “Elevated… Abnormally high, it’s as if—”

  “As if he’s battling an infection.” Cornelius faced the Professor. “That means his immune system was strong enough to kill a percentage of my chips, which are now being passed out of his body like waste matter, through the sweat glands.”

  The Professor digested the information. As his mind turned, his glasses seemed to dance with reflected light.

  Dr. Cornelius glanced at the cardiotach, noting that the heart rate had stabilized.

  “I can assure you that there’ll be no further problems, Professor,” he said. “Subject X’s heart rate can’t possibly go any higher or he’d be … well, a superman or something.”

  The Professor’s head jerked as if stricken by Cornelius’s observation. His pale flesh turned bone-white, and though he didn’t speak, the Professor’s jaws moved behind thin lips.

  “We’re going to pass the equalization point, sir. We’ll have to compensate on every channel,” Chang’s assistant warned.

  Dr. Hendry was also perplexed. “So soon?”

  “Astonishing,” said Cornelius.

  The technician paused, looking to the Professor for a decision. But Cornelius could see that the scientific genius was paralyzed, unable to take action, unable even to speak.

  Cornelius stepped forward. “Refeed, then,” he commanded. “On every channel.”