The Fog of Dreams
Page 67
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William Strickland had hoped that his trip to the cabin would imbue some great and wonderful knowledge upon him, but it had mostly served to generate more intense nightmares. Where his previous nights of restless sleep were punctuated by vague concepts of his surroundings, he could now make out the walls, floor, and ceiling of the cabin clearly, which disturbingly brought these painful dreams into a much more realistic clarity.
However, the sparse time spent in the cabin was not all for waste. Strickland had liberated the mysterious "Operation: Harvest" report and he had spent several hours on a daily basis consuming this amazing document, which had suddenly opened his eyes wide to the situation surrounding him. The document was a mixture of scientific proof-of-concept and an elaborate rundown of the phases, stages, and expectations for Operation: Harvest. As it turns out, this was a project, decades in the making, where genetic engineering had made leaps and bounds in recent years, completely transforming the project from mere hypothesis to brutal reality. Much of the report was out of Strickland's comfort zone, talking about DNA mapping, stem cell infusion, and genetic structural re-engineering, but he felt like he was getting the overall gist of the concept. A team of National Security Agency engineers and scientists worked to isolate certain elements of animal and human DNA then interweave them into a single functional being. Hypothetically, the result would be human on the surface, but with many of the skills, traits, and talents of an animal, including heightened senses, increased strength and agility, as well as dexterity, endurance, and a natural killer's instinct. On the surface, it sounded exciting and revolutionary, but as Strickland dug into the meat of the document, things looked like they might go off the rails.
Several test subjects had been attempted, with zero successes to date. In most cases, the animal DNA simply chewed up and spit out the human DNA, creating mindless mutations. The former NSA contractor had no idea how the government agency had gotten away with this for nearly fifteen years without so much as a rumor or WikiLeaks-style expose however they had done it. They'd done it under the cover of darkness.
Strickland couldn't help but notice some similarities to what he had experienced compared to what the document in front of him outlined as encouraging results. Part of him thought that just maybe he was the first successful trial of this insidious sounding experiment? but then his dreams came back to his head, and he realized that if he was the first one, he certainly wasn't the only one.
Was that what had been in his dreams since day one? That horrid hunched over gray and brown matted? thing? It had a pronounced snout, a mane of jagged, dead hair, and teeth like yellowed stalagmites. Could that have been one of the failed Harvest experiments? Could his wife have been a victim-
He shut his eyes tightly and pressed his palms down against the wooden desk. It was a dream. That's all. He flipped the page of the report, now marking the sixth time he'd read it cover-to-cover in the past two days, and ran his finger along the page line by line, seeing if there was something, anything that he had missed in prior readings. There wasn't, but even the information gleaned from the first review had been valuable. For instance, he now knew that there was an NSA field office very near his current place of residence.