Paul Wu put on a smile as yet another person clapped him on the shoulder in fake familiarity. “Marvelous work, Doctor Wu,” the man said, grabbing Paul’s hand and shaking it vigorously. “Your name is going to be in the history books for this!”Not likely, Paul thought to himself, as he kept his hand limp as the other man shook. If I know ONI, they’ll scrub my name as soon as this is over, just to make sure nobody ever looks too closely at where these surgeries came from.
The unknown man wandered off without introducing himself. Paul didn’t know who he was, but at this point, he didn’t give the smallest ounce of care about that. Far too many people had done the exact same thing in the past hour, and he knew that it still hadn’t ended.The event hall was packed with people, and Paul felt more claustrophobic than he had in years, seeing all of them intermingling and mixing in the largest gathering room the University of Circumstance had. It was strange to be back here after so long; like a half-lucid dream, Paul kept expecting to see younger versions of Catherine, David, or Steve wandering through the crowd, despite knowing they were back on Reach.
“Would everyone please begin taking their seats?” the master of ceremonies asked, standing up at the podium near the front in his tuxedo. “We’ll begin the presentation in a few minutes.”Paul squeezed his way past two men who were arguing over what looked like a floral bouquet, and made his way towards his table. He’d been seated at the very front of the event hall, and almost all of the people seated around him were much, much older than him. Venerable doctors in their sixties and seventies, the kind of people who ran entire hospitals and had navigated the treacherous waters of internal politics to exile their enemies.As far as everyone in the room knew, Paul didn’t belong in the front row. He was too young, didn’t belong to a large and important hospital, and he had no apparent skill in those kinds of political games. So they smiled at him and clapped him on the back in congratulations, while whispering behind his back about how he didn’t deserve the award, how he had no pedigree, no backers, no experience.Which, really, was the perfect sign of how unimaginative all of these morons were. In the old days, it would have made him angry to see doctors acting like politicians, fighting and bickering over the tiniest amount of prestige like it was the last drop of water in the desert. He knew that they weren’t all like that, thanks to David, but it still pissed him off so much. Medicine was supposed to be sacred, and that made it all the more disappointing that it was just another place where people bickered over the tiniest differences.These days, Paul couldn’t bring himself to care. He had bigger issues to worry about. The only reason he was here was as a direct favor to Michael Stanforth. The Rear Admiral had asked, very politely, if Paul would help him give a favor to Section Two. The War wasn’t going too well, and since they refused to make up false victories (more because it would risked backfiring than because of any principles), that meant they needed some kind of good news. So after more than a year of the work being complete and just sitting on his desk, Paul dusted off the instructions for the commercial surgeries, ran them past Ysionris Jeromi for one last idiot check, and sent them off to the UNSC Medical Association. He hadn’t really thought about them in that time. Paul, David, Ysionris, and all their science teams had been far too busy focusing on the Spartans and their surgeries.
It took a month or so for the documentation to reach Circumstance and a reply to come back, asking Paul to please attend the upcoming award ceremonies held at his alma mater.
That was almost certainly why all these doctors were so annoyed with Paul, even if they insisted on not showing it. He had come out of nowhere and completely eclipsed their drug trials, treatment procedures, and new surgery ideas. Some of them had done good work, and frankly, it was entirely possible that one of them deserved this award more than he did… but the UNSC needed a win for the government right now, and they were playing a card to achieve it. Frankly, the fact that almost all of the other attendees at the award ceremony didn’t realize that ONI had rigged the competition was almost offensive to Paul, much to his own surprise. He’d never been the type to obsessively worry about the government or conspiracies, and he did have the advantage of already knowing what was happening… but honestly, what did these people think had happened?
Some unknown biochemist had come out of nowhere with miraculous treatments for brittle bones and Ehlers-Danlos, despite having no network, no hospital, no anything… except for the support of ONI. Clearly, an impossibility. They should have made the natural assumption: that Paul absolutely had all three of those things. It was so obvious. A child could have realized it. Any one of the Spartans would have figured this out at just eight years old.
But none of the civilian doctors had, and now Paul had to rub shoulders with men who seemed to think their best option was to question him by implication. Their combined peer pressure would have worked, if Paul hadn’t just spent most of a decade working for Catherine Halsey and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Frankly, Paul was a little disappointed by the doctors around him. There was a goddamn war on, and they were annoyed because he stole their thunder? He didn’t even care about the award. He was only here because it might help the war effort, and therefore humanity.None of these people could see that. None of them cared.
And that pissed Paul off more than anything else, because it reminded him of how he used to be, back at the beginning of the Spartan-II Program.
Xxxx
Paul’s smile was firmly on his face as he shook yet another hand. The medal around his neck caught the light as he stood in front of the podium.“Thank you,” he said into the microphone, as cameras flashed around him. “I am honored, on behalf of my team, to accept this award for innovation in the realm of life sciences. As we all know, brittle bones are becoming more common with space travel. That’s why for the past several years, my team and I have worked to develop a procedure to help the most vulnerable to this affliction: the children.”He kept going. The words flowed out, and he wasn’t really paying attention to anything he was saying. He hadn’t written the speech, after all. It was the work of some Section Two employee, and it hit exactly what he needed to.Luckily for him, the speech was short. Only one page. The teleprompter kept him on track, and he rattled the words off with as much emotion as he could muster, despite the fact that he didn’t really care about any of these people. It would help thousands of innocent children, and it would help the war effort, and that was all that mattered.
It didn’t matter that his soul was damned. What mattered was the children. Just like Catherine had said, all those years ago: he could do his job and live with the stain on his conscience, or he could hold tight to his sense of moral superiority and let the children die. He understood it now, in a way that none of the other doctors here seemed to understand.
Finally, Paul finished up, and accepted one more round of applause before taking his leave of the podium. He smiled, waved, and walked off, barely keeping himself from biting his own cheek to keep his anger down.
An award. God, but he wanted to take this award and cram it down the throats of these people.
Didn’t they know what this meant? Not the surgery, but the award itself. Paul hadn’t been shy in his documentation – even with the true origin of the surgeries concealed, the proof of the procedure still contained plenty of experimental surgeries on children. The amount of incisions and injections required. The level of scarring that was inevitable. Diagrams of what it would look like, almost as horrifying as the real image.
Best Medical Innovation, read the inscription on the medal. Bullshit. It should have said Best at Vivisecting Children.
His mood improved a little as he returned to his seat by all the Chief of Surgeries and hospital General Managers. Not because of their company, of course, but because that meant he was finally getting some food.
Paul ate quietly as the next award recipient came up, and the next, and the next. He knew it was rude, and that almost nobody else was eating, but he wouldn’t see any of these people again in his life, and he needed his strength for the next trial to come.After the show was all done, and the final round of applause had finished, he stood up, and started walking towards the next room over. Event staff were already moving quickly through the crowd, finding all of the award recipients and gently shepherding them towards the room.
It was time to talk to the press.A dozen, two dozen, three dozen journalists were waiting for Paul and the others as they filed into the room. Some of the doctors looked surprised at the sheer number of reporters present, and again, Paul wanted to shake his head at how stupid they were. Honestly, couldn’t they put it together? How much more obvious did it need to be?
“Doctor Wu, how does it feel to be awarded the Centrella Medal of Life Sciences?” one of the reporters asked, as Paul sat down for the first of the questions.
“Humbling,” Paul lied.
It was exactly what he had been instructed to say. It wasn’t true, but ONI wanted a humble, polite, amazingly kind doctor to present to the colonies, as a counterpoint to the arrogant, aggressive, and unthinkably cruel aliens that were currently burning some of those colonies to the bedrock.
The next question came in, and Paul answered that one with another prepared answer. It would have been easier if he knew the exact order that the questions would come in, but that would have required ONI to convince all those reporters to follow their script, and that was a waste of vital resources at a time when they couldn’t afford it. Instead, the Section Two handler that had accompanied Paul from Reach had spent the entire journey – no cryosleep – training him on the most likely questions, and how to answer each of them.
More questions came in, and Paul continued to answer them from memories so thick that it felt like he was carving off pieces of ham for sandwiches in the campus deli. The size of the lie was unthinkable, but reduce it to one little slice at a time, and it became palatable and ordinary.
He was not the perfect scientist with the perfect surgery and the perfect story. He was merely a very good scientist that they might consider perfect, with a surgery that was beyond imagination but less than his own hopes. Add those two together, and they enhanced each other, building that perfect story up out of nowhere.
Paul was almost tempted to think of this as the worst thing that he’d ever done, but then it was rather hard to surpass the whole ‘vivisecting children’ thing. This was just another step on the road towards fixing it.
Catherine had shown him that there was a way out, if he worked hard enough. She had shown all of them over the last several years. Her refusal to give up, even in the face of damnation, was more than inspiring. It was aspirational. It made Paul wonder if they could survive the Covenant’s obliteration, if they worked hard enough.
And so he would work. No matter what the task was.
Not all of the questions were for Paul, but many, so many, were. He watched the faces of the other award recipients as they realized, one by one, that for every question the reporters asked them, they asked another one of Paul. A fifty-fifty split, half going to one man, and half going to a dozen.
This, too, was a message. The Section Two man had explained it to Paul one ‘night’ of their voyage.
Humanity needed to be unified. Not just because of UNSC policy and disdain for the Insurrection, but because Section One’s estimates of the Covenant’s capabilities were always increasing. They had too many ships, too much technology, and there was a terrifying implication that they had too many planets and too much population. Any one of those things was a very, very bad sign, but all of them together painted a picture of inevitable loss.
But ONI couldn’t say that, now could they? Not only was it an assumption at this point – because no UNSC ship had ever seen a Covenant planet, and so they couldn’t know for sure – but it was also a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they said that supposition out loud, then the war effort would shatter instead of harden.
So everyone needed to get with the program. For the honest, they’d be told up front that the war effort was the most important thing of all. For the others, the ambitious, they’d be shown that the path towards success went through the war effort. It was a… neat display of economic principles, as Catherine would have called it. Their greed would be their motivation towards helping out with the common good. All ONI had to do was promise them rewards like fame and fortune: the same reward that Paul Wu was getting, right here and now.
Finally, towards the end of the Q&A session, one of the reporters asked a question that Paul hadn’t been prepared for.
“Doctor Wu, you’ve talked quite a bit about how your surgeries will improve tens of thousands of lives,” the man said, an old-fashioned paper notepad in his hand. “But will these surgeries will help the war effort?”
Paul hesitated. The obvious answer was yes, because they were already helping the war effort, through the Spartans. The super-soldiers, super-scientists, super-officers that Catherine Halsey had molded like clay into the best personnel the UNSC had.
He couldn’t say that, obviously. If he did, ONI would shoot him in the parking lot and pretend it was a mugging gone wrong, and then they’d quietly arrange a ‘minor’ electrical accident that would wipe the memory of every single recording device present at this event. It would be a little harder to destroy this reporter’s physical notebook, but Paul had no doubt that the Office of Navfal Intelligence would have a simple solution for that too. Maybe some kind of paper-dissolving acid that could be shot through a paintball gun. That would have seemed crazy when he was last at the University of Circumstance, but these days, ‘crazy’ had an entirely new scale of him.
At the same time, however, he didn’t want to say no. The whole point of this plan, the reason that Paul had agreed to go along with it, was because it would help the average soldier in the long run. They needed more political support behind the UNSC, both from the common man who believed in the promises of the future, and from the arrogant elitists who understood the subtle message to get on board or get left out. If he said that it wouldn’t help, he wouldn’t just be disappointing ONI, he’d be undermining his own efforts.
Damn, how does Catherine do this so easily? Paul thought to himself, almost biting his lips at the thought.
“I think,” he said slowly, drawing the words out in an effort to buy himself time. “A better, wider applicant pool for our military is an inherently good thing to consider.”
There. That was safe enough. Imply the possibility of people with these surgeries joining the UNSC, when they would have been unable to before now. People with brittle bones couldn’t carry rifles, or go through high-G burns, now could they? It wouldn’t end well for them.
“Thank you, Doctor,” the reporter said, scrawling the answer down with a pen.
“You’re welcome,” Paul said, smiling faintly.
It didn’t occur to him until later that night, as he was up in the privacy of his hotel room, that there was a double-meaning to his words.
He was brushing his teeth when it hit him. A better, wider applicant pool. Paul had been talking about expanding the range of potential soldiers, making it wider… but why had he said ‘better?’
A better applicant pool had nothing to do with the raw amounts, it was about the average quality of the recruits, and Paul’s surgeries had nothing to do with that. Just because someone got toughened bones or fixed their nervous system’s dysfunctions didn’t make them smarter, or more psychologically suited for combat.
Damn. I gotta warn Jimmy about this, Paul thought, wincing internally as he spat out the toothpaste and filled a glass of water to rinse with. Someone might look at that, and think about the possibilities. They might wonder about taking those surgeries and giving them to a perfectly healthy kid, instead of a sick one.
Paul should have thought of that before Section Two had sent him out here. Yes, this would probably raise morale in the colonies, to learn that scientists had devised treatments for their poor unfortunate kids… but at the same time, someone would be thinking about the fact that you could make bones harder, that you could modify the nervous system.
After all, none of the Party House had known about this kind of thing when they’d drunkenly written their evil paper. They’d simply theorized about it with little more than idle minds. Now it was worse – now people had a suggestion, a hint. The door had been cracked open.
It was terrifying. Jimmy, the Section Two man, would certainly start worrying about the possibility of someone figuring out that the Spartan-II Program existed.
Paul had a bigger worry, personally. Figuring out that the Spartan-II Program existed was the advanced stage, the second step in the assumptions. To get to that point, someone had to accept the earlier stage, the first step: that human augmentation was possible.
If they realized that… they might try it. They might come up with their own projects, their own ideas on how to achieve the same lofty goals that had fascinated ONI in the first place. And the more widespread that idea became, the more accepted and common, the less cultural stigma or taboo was held against it.
That was the real problem. A lessened taboo against human augmentation meant that people wouldn’t be instinctively shying away from the topic. They’d be debating it with rational minds, thinking about it from the cold, machine-like logic of governments or nations trying to survive a genocidal war…
…and the cold logic said that if Catherine Halsey and the Spartan Program could make seventy-five Spartans, then they could do it again.
It was the same fear that the military leaders of the Program had, when they made the assumption that Catherine was the result of an Insurrectionist super-soldier project. They weren’t just afraid of Innie Spartans popping up, but of what it meant beyond that: the possibility that Spartans would become the next evolution of warfare, popularized by what they had created, and mass-produced at scale.
Because if Stanforth, Mendez, and Johnson were right, then the genie had escaped its bottle. It didn’t matter how hard it was to make Spartans, because technology always improved. The failure rates, the time requirements, even the material costs, they would all drop, until one day, there would be thousands or millions of Spartans.
Would that be enough? Enough of those soldiers to enforce a government’s will, and ensure that no Insurrectionists ever took power? Sure, maybe. If you had a big enough hammer, you absolutely could crush every single piece of opposition. For a time, anyway. Eventually, there would be more, as people inevitably split apart and went their own ways. People were biological, just like the biochemistry that Paul knew so well. Mutation and growth were unstoppable.
Paul remembered fearing this, years ago, when he still believed that Catherine wanted this future. But now, now he wasn’t so sure that this was the biggest problem.
Hypotheticals were fun. God only knew how many weekends had been spent in the Party House, throwing around audacious and arrogant and downright stupid ideas. Enough that when they’d all gotten drunk to celebrate Catherine’s PhD, they’d naturally fallen into that same habit, and wound up making that damn paper.
But the plain and simple reality was a bigger issue right now.
Augmentations, albeit in lesser form, were now an understood fact. Somebody would soon figure out the idea of strengthening those augmentations, and using them for warfare. They’d take that idea to ONI, and ONI would smile and pat them on the back, and then quietly roll their eyes, because the Spartan Program already existed.
The fact was, though, that seventy-five Spartans were not going to be enough. If they’d only been dealing with the Insurrection, then sure. But handling the Covenant? Not a chance in hell. And that was the issue.
Before Paul had left for Circumstance, they’d had one of their monthly meetings up in that conference room, and Catherine had expressed some mild approval for this mission. Not because the PR would help the war effort, but because the PR would help the Spartans.
“The training exercises with other special forces were necessary to ensure cross-branch cooperation,” she had reminded him. “We had to ease them into the idea, and not just surprise them all at once. Well, eventually, this war is going to be over. When that happens, we can’t just declassify the Spartans all at once. It’s too horrifying! So we have to do the same thing to the public that we did to the ODSTs and the Army Rangers and the others.”
“We slowly introduce the ideas, and give people enough time to absorb them,” David had said, frowning as he considered it.
“I don’t believe that declassification is ever going to happen,” Sergeant Johnson had muttered, kicking his feet up on the table once more and ignoring Catherine’s usual glare to remove them. “But hell, if it does, then maybe we should build up people’s tolerance for bullshit before we drop the motherload on ‘em.”
“Let me get this straight,” Michael had said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You think it’s inevitable that we’ll have to declassify the Spartans, so you want to get the average citizen comfortable with the idea of minor augmentations… so that they’ll accept the bigger ones? What’s the argument, here? That there is a moral equivalency between augmenting children to fight terrorists, and giving sick kids their legs back? Walk me through it, Catherine.”
“Ah, you are thinking too much like one of us,” Catherine had said, waving off his concern. “We all know how this program started, and what it truly is. But the public doesn’t, and I’m not suggesting we tell them. Instead, what I’m saying is much simpler. Rather than the Spartans being the origin of our augmentation focus… they are the culmination, years from now. And hell, when we do that, their time at the naval academies will come in handy, because all their classmates will have become officers, and they still remember when John, Kurt, Fhajad, Edgar, and all the others were still short and normal looking. We imply that they were augmented later on, as adults, once the theory was more popular.”
Yes, sure, it was an elegant idea, and one that Paul had liked. Hide the Spartans under secrecy, as originally planned, until later on, when people might believe that they were augmented adult volunteers, rather than conscripted child-soldiers.
The problem was that once again, like so many of Catherine’s plans, she had miscalculated. The plan hinged on a slow timeline, as if they had easily a decade to slowly introduce larger and larger human augmentations (which hadn’t even been invented yet, thank you very much!).
But they didn’t have a decade to spend on it. The Covenant were coming, and sooner or later, ONI would start reaching for life-line. And now, thanks to that one reporter having a bright idea, the same cultural acceptance that Catherine wanted to use for gentle acceptance of the Spartans was potentially too much, too quickly – and it would turn into an outright demand for more Spartans.
Which meant that sooner or later, ONI would think about a Spartan-III program.
And who better to run it than them?