Posted by Lieutenant Alexis Bonner (Scientist, Medical Researcher) in Side Sim- R&D Lab- Bait Is Important When Fishing (Tag Bonner)

Posted by Lieutenant Dr. Solomon Kane (Medical Research & Development) in Side Sim- R&D Lab- Bait Is Important When Fishing (Tag Bonner)

Posted by Lieutenant Alexis Bonner (Scientist, Medical Researcher) in Side Sim- R&D Lab- Bait Is Important When Fishing (Tag Bonner)
Posted by… suppressed (1) by the Post Ghost! 👻

The R&D Lab was dark at that time of the morning. Kane walked in and made sure no one was slated to come in for a while and then locked the door. He went to the office he had yet to move into and activated the comms. As the system came online, he keyed in a numerical sequence and the screen went dark for a long few moments before coming alive again with a green screen and a large group of random icons. He watched as they moved around the screen in seemingly random patterns and then touched six of them in order. A text interface activated and he typed in yet another series of words and numbers.

Another pause and then a man’s face filled the screen and it was obvious he had just been asleep. =/\= Yeah, this is - aw, dammit. No. Whatever it is you want, the answer is no. How the hell did you get this channel anyway, Kane? Know what, never mind. Just… No. =/\= The man reached for the screen and Kane said =/\= I need your help. =/\= That was all he said. No inflection, no look, just those four words… and the man froze and his eyes opened wide in shock and surprise. =/\= Did… di- … did you say you needed my help? Seriously? ‘Cause if you are fu@^!^g with me I’ll kick your a$$. =/\= Kane cocked his head to the side and said =/\= Nope. Serious. Do it, and I won’t bug you again. =/\= The man leaned way back and stared at Kane for a long time.

=/\= Ok. What do you need? =/\= Kane nodded and said =/\= I’m gonna send you a file, very vague. I need you to make sure that a specific person in Intel comes across it while they are looking into me. Because they are definitely looking into me. =/\= The man nodded and said =/\= Yeah, I heard you whooped some guy and put him in the hospital. =/\= and fell silent. Kane nodded and said =/\= Right. So I need him to find the file. It’s not classified or anything… in fact it’s fake. But I need him to believe it’s real… and no one knows anything about it except it’s really important. Like career-making important. Maybe attach your name and wait for him to call; play it up as ‘you cant talk about this’, ‘how dare you speak about this on a comm ‘ blah blah blah… you know the drill. But make certain he believes this is a high priority, highly classified, high clearance eyes-only kind of thing. I need him to buy it so hard he wants it for himself. =/\=

The man stared at Kane for a long time and then said =/\= Who are you baiting? You tell me, and then I’ll tell you if I’ll do it. =/\= Kane took a breath and said =/\= Commander Soulis, don’t know the rest of his name. =/\= The man’s eyes narrowed. =/\= Soulis… yeah. I know the guy. He the one you kicked the crap out of? =/\= Kane just nodded once. The man took a deep breath…

=/\= You shoulda killed the bastard. I’m in. =/\=

Kane, R&D

Alexis woke up, early as always, but she was alone in the room this morning, the lights on at 75%, he always made sure the lights stayed on. It was no different than her quarters, but it was a change to his life that he made to make her feel better. It left her…confused. “Solomon?” but there was no answer. She wasn’t particularly bothered by him being gone, she wasn’t particularly thrilled that she was alone though. It had been over a week now, Soulis would be out of medical by now. He hated medical, he hated not being indestructible…and with that thought what had been bouncing around in her brain for the last week finally solidified. She stuck her head into the living room seeing Frigga’s nose. “Come on Frigga.” She put food and water down for her and then she grabbed a uniform out of the bag she had packed. She was in and out of the shower. She grabbed Frigga’s harness, a ration bar, bottle of water and headed for the door calling Frigga with her.

Alexis practically jogged down the corridor, up a deck to the arboretum and a short job around the smallest loop. Frigga grabbed her ball and Alexis took it. “Not now.” She dropped it in the box on their way out. She stopped by the door slipped Frigga’s harness on her and then down the corridor to the lift and up to sickbay. Alexis hadn’t thought about those early years on Hathaway in a very long time, but her mind was a steal trap. She just had to be willing to remember, to recall the data. She dropped Frigga in sickbay with barely a word to the receptionist, totally lost in the idea that was forming in her head. The receptionist didn’t notice being a hologram.

Down the lift, onto the deck and down to the lab she nearly slammed into the lab doors when they didn’t open. She pressed the controls and they didn’t open. Checking the controls again it was locked not a malfunction. =^=Bonner to Kane. I need access to my lab space. Is R&D available or do I need to go somewhere else?=^= It wasn’t rude, but her question was obviously an after thought, her mind on something else. She paced down the corridor and back, a stylus in her hand tapping out a rhythm against her leg, her fingers twitching almost like playing a piano, but that wasn’t what she was seeing in her minds eye.
Bonner, med research

The doors opened after a moment and Kane was standing in the room. He looked at her through the mane of wild hair and said “Come in. Lock the door.” and he looked at her again, over, and said “You’ve thought of something. What is it?”

Kane, R&D

Alexis walked in, keyed in the lock code for the door and went straight to her work station, knelt down unlocking the bottom cabinet. Filled with PaDDs. These had been in her quarters but when she couldn’t go back she’d taken them with her, and locked them up here. She was looking for one particular one. She tossed and discarded PaDDs back into the drawer, tossed one onto the top of the work station, dumped the rest into the drawer and relocked it. She stood up and finally turned her attention to Solomon. “This is what he’s after.” She tapped the PaDD. “This is every idea, project, discussion he showed interest in or stole from me.” She slid the PaDD across to him and turned to her console searching for something. The PaDD was filled with ideas that seemed to be innocent, until you realized the were all focused on a common theme. Alexis glanced at him, “He was obsessed with the Eugenics wars. He used to ask me how it could be done without ‘the risks’ but I refused to discuss it. It’s illegal.” That theme being improving, artificially, some aspect of the human condition. She tried to slow down to explain what she was thinking, “He’s out of the hospital by now. He hates going to the doctor, for anything. Not because he hates being worked on or sick people, he sees it as a mortal flaw that he’s not indestructible. He used to talk about what he would do if he was a super soldier. It may not be one of those projects specifically but that’s what he’s after. He wants to be unbeatable.” She flipped through the list and picked one. “This one fascinated him. The idea is to make a fruit that can grow anywhere, but has high levels of vitamins, electrolytes, minerals, that help heal malnutritioned populations. I used to take notes on the questions he asked me.” She double taps on the screen and scribbled on the side is ‘What would this do to a healthy person? Would it make them stronger, better, faster?’ She looked at Solomon, “Can we use this? He’s almost as obsessed over it as he is me.”
Bonner

Kane took the PaDD and looked at it for several moments… and then he nodded. “Yeah… this’ll do nicely, I think. But it needs a hook, something to get his attention.” and he stared at the PaDD and then he looked at Alexis.

“Tell me about him… specifically, is he religious?”

Kane

Alexis tipped her head to the side her gaze turned inward - puzzled. Was he religious? The man she had known before wasn’t real, he was a persona. So what was honest and what was for effect. “I think so. He always seemed to pray before he ate, but he never actually said anything. When I was at Intel I saw him come out of a building that had several chapels. I was told they used it to train agents about different religious groups. He was there every week. I avoided going that way so I wouldn’t have to see him.” Her fingers tapped rapidly on the table. Religion…mythology…myths…”He read or maybe studied hero myths. Particularly ones with Hamartia or a fatal flaw. Told them all the time. He always repeated the one about Samson.”
Bonner, med research

Kane nodded and tapped a few commands into the PaDD and handed it to her. A new file had been created: Project Eden’s Apple. “That. That’s the bait. Now what you need to do is make this look legit… but not real. He won’t have time to delve deep. Cursory glance. Enough to convince him that he needs to take this. For himself and for his career. Use words like ‘promising results’, ‘we are encouraged by’, ‘pleasantly unexpected’ and so on. We’ll need to backdate experiments and supply requests. I’ll handle getting comm logs modified to show a steady line of communication between us and ‘someone’ at Intel headquarters. And some personal logs talking about how we are so close, we just need time to verify results and it’s ready. Can you think of anything else?”

Kane, R&D

Alexis listened carefully to what he wanted. She went back into the drawer with all the dreaded PaDDs, rifled through them and came back with another after locked the cabinet again. “This one won’t connect to the ship’s systems. You’ll have to plug it in or use an iso chip.” She stares at it for a minute. “Some times I pick up on things and don’t even know I have or what it means. But at some point after…after everything I realized he was copying my work, and I stopped saving it on the ship’s computer. I didn’t want him to get more of it. I…” she shook her head, that wasn’t the point. She scrolls through the PaDD and stops on a file, opens it and looks through it. “We just need to change the dates. It was all personal work, nothing official, the only records are on this PaDD. I never got to actually grow one of the plants, but I do have the seeds I modified.” She passed the second PaDD over. On it is a record of where she’d worked to modify the seeds of a C. reticulata Rutaceae bush, or a mandarin orange bush. It would grow in just about any environment with a minimum of a cup of water a week and oxygenated air. The genetic and nutritional simulations were promising. Almost everything he asked for was there, except for supply requests and correspondence with Intel. “Does that help?” Alexis was so far out of her depth. She knew she could probably make a fake file, but she’d never done it and wasn’t sure how convincing she could be without making it real: simply because that was how her mind worked. She also wasn’t sure what they were baiting him for. Okay so she knew the end result was to make him leave her alone, stop him from hurting people, but once they got him to come after her work, what were they going to do with him? How were they actually going to stop him? She honestly didn’t know if there was anything else....She looked around the lab, he’d had the door locked and still did, she supposed he’d stopped the computer from recording. “What are we going to do once he takes the bait? I’m not sure if I’m thinking the same as you, and honestly, Solomon, I’m not sure I know what I should be doing. But you asked if I could make him stupid.”
Bonner, med research

Kane said “Grow the fruit, but really just an orange. Regular, none modified. And then let’s figure out what we can use to make him worthless. I’m thinking Pneumolysin or a derivative. Irreversible damage to hippocampus neurons. Memory and learning deficiency will take him out of the loop for sure. And it’ll keep him away from you permanently. We trap the containment system we keep the fruit in. He goes for it, he gets whats coming to him. What do you think?”

Kane, R&D

She was drawing invisible patterns on the table top as she listened and thought. “Pneumolysin is a good option, it occurs naturally in so many environments and scenarios. The problem is the R&D lab isn’t made to handle biological contaminates, as you so precisely reminded me.” The day Borchek mixed those chemicals and she’d put him in containment seemed so far away now. “We’d have to use one of the biological labs or make modifications to this one, and that would raise a lot of questions. And if it’s out of our supervision we run the risk of someone, not involved, getting exposed.” That bothered her. Serve them right messing with experiments that aren’t theirs, but that kind of damage she wasn’t sure she was comfortable with on someone not involved. “It’s a much simpler solution than what I was thinking though. If I had his DNA I could modify the orange to only affect him. It would take longer to set up, but there would be no risk to anyone else and I could make it look like a massive allergic reaction.” Alexis shrugged, “You tell me what you need and I can make it happen. You know what needs to be done, I’ll just make it work.” If Kane was expecting her to be bothered by the idea she wasn’t. It was a puzzle that needed and answer and she’d already worked out the moral implications and was okay with it.

Bonner, med research

“You just work on the compound and fabricating the data. I’ll handle the other stuff. Including the containment system. This is Research and Development, after all. Would make sense we have a bio-storage and containment unit in here.”

Kane, R&D