#19 Dolores Hardcourt – Mother

The project’s been complete for three months now, and I don’t know how much longer I have. The Director stops by every day, asking when they’ll be ready to show to the Brass. The 5-Star Crowd really likes to see what it spends two billion dollars making.

He’s beginning to get a little fed up with my constant cries of “more testing, more testing.” I know that Dr Lorenz is slipping him the results, and he’s just as impressed as I am. The subjects meet or surpass every goal that was set for the project. Even Los Alamos didn’t have this much success.

Every one of the subjects is a marvel of modern science. Through gene therapy, cybernetic enhancement and good old fashion pharmaceuticals, we have taken soldiers and created something better. They have reflexes and agility that make a cheetah look like a stone statue. They’re strong enough to drag a tank a mile and have the endurance to run a marathon afterwards. They learn and assimilate information so fast, that when they read Shakespeare in the morning, they’re putting on Hamlet before lights out. They are the best of the best made better.

I should be happy.  My work has revolutionized combat and could save thousand if not millions of lives by ending wars all over the globe quickly and with minimum casualties. But all I can do is look at these fresh young men and women, barely more than children.

They came to me and put their lives in my hands, to turn them into something more than they were. Now that I’ve succeeded, I can only sit here and imagine all the battlefields they’ll see, all the corpses that they’ll leave behind them, the world of death and violence that will be their life until they’re too broken down to fight anymore. And I just want to keep them here, if only to let them have one more day of peace.

Category: 2011, Scifi