Chapter 1: A Quiet Spread

Greyslake, The Free Cities

Jose Rodriguez is a slender man, well past middle aged at this point, and his apartment is small and well kept. He greets me as a fellow journalist, though few actually regard him as such. To most of the world, he's a crack, conspiracist, absolute nutter. Once though, he was all the way right. He welcomes me inside, and begins his part of the story.

You know how it was in those days, all the noise, none of the information. 24 hours of news a day, and maybe one real fact in that entire time. Half the comments on every website were bots, astroturfing everywhere, and nothing but lies in the media. Of course, it's not like things have changed much. The things I could tell you about the Megacorps and their throttling of the net...

But that's not why you're here, is it? Sorry, I know I ramble sometimes. Bad habit. You wanted to know how it started, how I first heard?

I was poking around the Crispr scene, I knew with all the black budget funding, some kind of spooky shit was going down in there. All these start ups, all that money, regulations nowhere near keeping up with the pace of discovery. You really think lawmakers could really regulate what they didn't understand? You think they would anyway with the kind of kickbacks they were getting?

The biggest and quietest was Biotechnics, just like today. Sure it wasn't a megacorp then, but they were working on shit nobody else could dream of. I had a source though, a lab tech who grew disillusioned with their investor fellating bullshit. He let me know htey had a breakthrough, something really big, then he went dark.

I heard nothing, not a peep, for two weeks; we'd been talking almost daily before. Then I started noticing other things. Social media pages for Biotechnics employees stopped updating. Staff photos removed from the site. No whispers in the investosphere yet, but this was something big. I had to go check it out.

It was a six hour drive from where I was living, though some of that was my shitheap of a car. I get to my sources apartment, get buzzed up, and knock on the door. This absolute knockout of a woman answers. Now my source was a nice dude, skinny little genius, but there was no way he could land a beauty like this. 5'6, huge tits, asian chick, wearing nothing but a losely tied bathrobe, panting a bit, her cleavage clearly on display.

She knew my name, said my source had mentioned me; she was his girlfriend, and I could wait for him to return with her. I went in, and then, well...

What happened?

What do you think happened? She spent two days **** the shit out of me. My source was fully converted, and I was the first person she'd seen since the transformation took hold. I couldn't walk straight for a week after that; I couldn't get away until she just got bored with me one day, went back into work.

So what did you do?

I was an idiot, I had to know. What the fuck were they doing that could cause...this? I surveilled the lab for two days before driving home and publishing my report.

The Futa-Future One?

That's it, exposing their whole super soldier program. I got laughed at then of course, but whose laughing now? I was right, wasn't I?