[
  {
    "type": "snippet",
    "category": "lab_notes",
    "text": [
      "We've had to remind the groups that the trams that have been completed for inter-facility shipments are not for personal use, no matter how long it's been since they've seen their significant others.  Receiving says their stockrooms are a mess because of all the frivolous shipments.  Don't people know better about office romances anyways?",
      "Our security department has identified several key flaws.  Though our surface entrance is quite secure, there are several possible points of entry below the surface.",
      "Facilities security has been scrambling to hold onto their security contractors due to the massive uptick in fatalities; a decision was made to procure a number of semi-autonomous turrets and to increase safety.  Few of us are comfortable working with a gun over our shoulders being run electronically by a glorified mall cop, but we're assured it's safer for all of us.  We'll get Melchior to assist with AI threat recognition, which will make everyone a little more comfortable I think.",
      "Herrera's group retained copies of the source General Carlsberg asked us to look into; with several of our facilities no longer responding, or other teams essentially 'going down with their ships', they've done their best to adapt the code to operate without Melchior's guidance.  It's likely several revisions old now, and mostly shoots at anything humanoid shaped with a heat signature, but our hope is it'll buy us all some time.",
      "Following S37ZBE's fallout, IT has noted far too many attempts have been made to access other teams' drives and terminals, including certain unofficial directories.  Lack of sufficient monitoring means we have been unable to pinpoint the bad actors, but IT has proposed automatically dispatching the UGV's as a deterrent.",
      "XEDRA-12 and XEDRA-40 entered voluntary quarantine status after a suspected outbreak of XE037 today.  We have elected to initiate full quarantine of any labs working with XE037 until we can confirm that the outbreak is not universal.",
      "The outbreak has been confirmed to be non-universal.  Labs on stand-down protocol have dispatched containment teams to investigate the possibility of further expansion beyond affected facilities.  The brass is not going to like this at all.",
      "Marketing transdimensional-obtained rare radioisotopes as \"produced by an experimental reactor\" has not just worked for funding, but paid off in infrastructure.  The government has authorized the construction of multiple radioisotope thermal generators as backup power in the hot labs.  Turns out they're cheaper when you can get plutonium at a discount.",
      "There's been a massive security breach.  It looks like more than half of our database was copied.  IT suspects China, as usual.  The knee-jerk is to silo all our labs and force us to communicate by Melchior only.",
      "Contamination tracking teams have confirmed the worst: XE037 is in the environment.  At this point we can't contain it, we'll have to try to find an eradication protocol.  We don't have long before we'll have to tell the brass about this.",
      "The labs have failed to produce any workable ideas for how to eradicate XE037 even in a small scale, let alone population wide.  We have no choice but to bring this to the brass.  The implications are concerning, to say the least.",
      "An emergency meeting was held today to discuss the possible implications of widespread XE037 contamination.  It was agreed that neutralization must be instated immediately to prevent a catastrophic event.  We'll give the labs a short window to try to find a solution before we report it to the brass; after all, they'll want answers, not just problems.",
      "We've continued tracking XE037 contamination since detecting it in the environment, with each silo conducting parallel research.  Keeping it to silos has limited panic at least.  XE037 seems to have continued spreading, but doesn't appear to be replicating beyond a very low base level.  No revivification has been reported.  Perhaps there just isn't enough of it to cause problems.",
      "It seems to have gone as we'd hoped it would.  XE037 levels have plateaued in the environment, across all the testing sites.  It's just a trace alien contaminant in our world now, I guess.  I don't see any way this could cause long term problems.",
      "Our hope that XE037 contamination was self-limiting was pure optimism.  We're detecting significant jumps in human populations now, including among our own personnel.  God, it's in me, even as I write this I have to acknowledge the fact.  We haven't got a choice but to engage maximum prejudice.  We're meeting with the military tomorrow to desilo the facilities and begin a full scale war on XE037.",
      "XE037 revivification has reached critical levels, which are rapidly overwhelming the available military and regional police assets' ability to stop.  Every team in the field has encountered hostile specimens, and several are no longer responding to communications.  Dr. Savage has proposed a strategic redeployment to the underground complex known as the VAULT, and continuing production of PE062 there.",
      "General Carlsberg wanted us to figure out what's going on with the bot AI.  Apparently the fat-cat defense contractors' toy has issues SEEING THE FUTURE more than a few seconds ahead, so it doesn't always get IFF right if it doesn't have a human supervisor.  Build a robot that is literally prescient and you get this kind of bitching.  The Director sent 'em back with a note that we're scientists, not firmware devs.",
      "They want to use the damn CROWS turrets we made for the military in the SECURE LABS.  These guys are fuckin' nuts.  Those things are designed for field use outdoors, against insurgents, they won't know how to handle whatever-the-fuck those guys are working with.  So guess who gets to work on the threat recognition refinements?  I basically have to write the whole thing again from scratch.",
      "So here's the thing.  All this tech is predicated on the idea that we can cheat and look a few seconds into the future to see the outcome.  Now they want us to use the same tech, but without the future sense, and they want it to work just as well.  Goddamn desk jockeys.",
      "Melchior is still operating below ten percent spec.  It's mostly a power cost issue: it just takes too much wattage to open as many microportals as they want, according to the team in XEDRA-03.  As usual, admin wants us to get the efficiency up without changing the power requirements and without any new tech from the eggheads.",
      "We managed to convince them Melchior is smarter than it really is, which will at least get them off our backs for a while.  How did we do it, you ask?  We cut down the number of dimensions scanned per second, which drops its accuracy by a few orders of magnitude, but the power savings let us scan a wider time range.  That counts for about ten percent.  The other ninety percent was getting Davids to shell out for a much sexier sounding voice synth package.",
      "We are really obviously in heavier competition with the private industry than the other XEDRA silos.  Melchior detected a fairly clever attempt at database injection through one of Melchior's access points to external units.  It was shut down very quickly, but we traced the origin back to Dr. Silverstein and the group that left to form Uncanny.  They already took half our best people, do they really have to try to steal our work too?  Admin was unhelpful, no big surprise there.  Everyone knows they're cozy with Silverstein.  Don't know why he doesn't just ask them directly for all our most classified stuff.",
      "Dr. Silverstein left, along with half a dozen of our best programmers.  Apparently they have an agreement to start a private startup that will present some of our findings as new research.  It figures Silverstein would come up with a way to get rich and hog the limelight for discoveries we can never make public.",
      "The big exodus after Dr. Silverstein wasn't all bad.  With him no longer swaggering around and getting in the way, Davids and Kohler were able to try out that perf package they wanted to run on Melchior core traffic.  It worked better than anticipated.  Once we work this into Melchior's central hub, we'll be able to communicate with dispersed XEDRA silos basically as fast as Melchior can process.  That'll let us store Melchior's actual main unit back at Hub01, and just have little booster versions of it at the local lab level.  $aving$ is a language admin speaks.",
      "I swear, working here is like running a preschool.  Vaughn and Kohler set up a live fire version of the new modified UGV that Davids and Amad have been working on.  Then they left it in their office, turned on, with IFF fully active.  Davids and Amad screamed like children before getting hosed down… with paintballs.  I guess they must have stayed up all night modifying the stupid thing's loadout.  On the bright side, it was funny, and really emphasized how completely terrible their IFF still is.",
      "Those ass - pardon me.  Reverse dictation and overwrite.  Our esteemed colleagues at Uncanny have pushed their version of \"deep learning heuristic AI\" public.  They're just attributing everything Melchior does to a little chip, and telling everyone it's \"deep learning and we don't fully understand it\".  Amazingly, even the comp sci experts seem to be buying it.  I guess there wasn't much chance anyone was going to guess that the central server is actually literally seeing possible futures.",
      "Today we tested weaponry against XE142 and XE157, two amorphous subprime samples.  Their form proved to be nearly invulnerable to projectile based weaponry, but they were susceptible to directed energy weapons and flagration.",
      "The vivisection program has shown mixed results, revealing an incredible degree of variation in subplane lifeforms.  Certain specimens have an internal structure that is amazingly similar to that of mammals, while others seem to have no internal structure at all.",
      "We successfully induced resin expression in subject CC-09.  Once we got it expressing, we got gallons of the stuff, designated CC-09-R1.  The first few times, it hardened within a few minutes, but we managed to isolate a few samples in sealed jars to send for spectroscopy.  It seems to harden much slower in the absence of air; what exactly catalyzes the setting remains to be seen.",
      "The resin expressed by CC-09, designated CC-09-R1, was quite amenable to NMR study.  We gained some really interesting insights into how it meshes with CC-09 internal structures to form a carapace.  Siobhan thinks she can adapt the concepts to human biology, and is applying for a grant to study this further.",
      "We got a treasure trove of new specimens from XEDRA-40 today, from subplane designate 020XE.  We dubbed the samples XE142.  Due to proximity, we assumed they might share chemical properties with some of the specimens from 000XE, but so far they seem totally unrelated (which calls into question our naming conventions, but it's too late now).  The new specimens seem to be made of recognizable cellular matter, and quite biologically sophisticated.  Individuals, if XE142 can be said to have individuals, are amorphous, but complex: they form a firm outer gel coat, and ultrasound probing suggests that the XE142 matter inside coalesces into specialized internal organs.  When XE142 samples combine, the organs and coat appear to reform to suit the new, larger organism.",
      "Well-meaning exploratory teams from XEDRA-40 brought us back what they thought was a relative of XE142, from adjacent subplane 021XE.  It does not, in fact, seem to be related to me.  Like XE142, XE157 is amorphous.  There the similarities end: it is almost impervious to any attempts to sample it, regenerating rapidly from damage.  It ate my scalpel, then stretched out a pod and ate my entire tool tray before splitting in two.  We've isolated the specimens until we can figure out how to study them without driving tool budgets through the roof.  On the bright side, they're surprisingly not all that hostile, even compared to XE142.",
      "We got a sample of what I can only describe as \"alien hamburger\" from XEDRA-40 today.  They say the probe was being chased by some kind of enormous creature in 079XE.  It managed to get an appendage through the portal, but they shut it down and it was sliced off.  The bit of claw that remained on this side rapidly degraded to mush.  We haven't been able to ascertain exactly why, but Melchior helped us model molecular coherence with the physical laws applying in 079XE: this has yielded the working hypothesis that in 079XE, it is possible for nitrogen groups to form a stable durable bond akin to a disulphide bridge.  These bonds might have been critical to holding the thing together, and when the became less stable in our world, the creature collapsed.",
      "Admin asked us to vivisect a bunch of samples from 001AA today.  It was boring, as predicted.  We were unable to identify any functional differences between samples from our Earth, and samples from a functionally identical mirror.  What a shock.",
      "Admin has been on a kick getting us to study samples from close mirrors today.  They must have an ulterior motive, but I can't think what.  We took a look at stuff from 020-040AA.  By the later ends of it we were finding minor evolutionary differences, as expected, all well within the range of genetic drift.  Maybe tomorrow they'll get us something that diverges along the theta axis instead, and we'll prove MORE things we already knew!",
      "Spent most of the day elbow deep in samples of XE142.  If nothing else, I think dead XE142 matter could make a half decent adhesive.  Got a little on the counter and it took me hours to scrub it clean.",
      "One of the probes captured some images of various things from 020XE that appear to be related to XE142.  It looks like there are variant organisms that form some kind of symbiotic relationship with the XE142's we're familiar with.  They were unable to procure a sample: it was much more hostile than the mostly docile XE142 we've come to know and love.",
      "CC-09 started echoing words again today.  It had stopped shortly before it started expressing resin.  Is there some kind of life cycle in play here?  It's still expressing CC-09-R1 whenever we need it, but it keeps repeating random noises back at me again, like some kind of freaky outer space parrot.",
      "Part of the security detail watching the CC samples got put off by the echoing behavior, and actually broke containment to try to shoot the thing.  No word on what could possibly have possessed him to attempt that.  Normally we'd be demoting him to test subject, but there wasn't much left of him to demote.  CC-11 was successfully recaptured with no further casualties.",
      "We got a bizarre report from the morgue; apparently Mandrake, the security officer who attacked CC-11, tried to climb back out of his drawer in the morgue.  I was getting ready to defend myself, because I was damn sure he was dead.  I'd had a good close look at his heart and lungs.  Then they clarified it for me: when they got him out of the drawer, Mandrake was still dead.  Just moving.  We're looking into how CC-11 did this.  Mandrake has been contained in a holding cell for further observation.",
      "We've taken every sample I can think of from Mandrake - or rather, Mandrake's gruesome reanimated corpse - and hit nothing but dead ends.  I don't think we're going to get any further.  Some mooks from admin came and packaged him up for transport to XEDRA-12, and with the new siloed information I don't know if we'll get to find out what happened to him.  We've been put under quarantine though, so that's fun.  So much for going to the movies tomorrow night.",
      "Dr. Takatoshi personally requested we do some experiments on a sample she had retrieved from 000XE.  It was a piece of wood-like material.  The material itself was interesting, but she didn't care about that.  She wanted us to study what was \"between\" the wood.  Indeed, based on her protocols, we found spaces in the material where we could pick up detectable mass, but weren't able to interact with it with any of our spectrographs.  We're dubbing the contaminant XE037 per naming protocol.",
      "Whatever XE037 is, or is not, it's contagious, but it seems to only have an interest in biomatter, and a much higher affinity to biomatter from planes at the X locus along the theta axis.  A new team is being formed and siloed out to research it in more detail.",
      "They've authorized experimentation with this stuff.  I can't really believe it, honestly.  We have no idea what XE037 even is, let alone how it causes mutations, but here we are playing God with them.  It's exciting, for sure.  We'll make advances that we couldn't have dreamt of a few years ago, certainly, but I'm reminded of certain other times scientists have been allowed to plow ahead with our wildest concepts without concern for the ethical ramifications like this.  I'd best keep my concerns to myself.",
      "Our chemical department has made great strides in the production of a concentrated mutagen, derived from samples of PE012.  They still can't tell us how it works, but brass has okayed experimentation anyway.  I love working here.",
      "Our chemical department has perfected an untargeted stem cell treatment based on mutagen fed self-origin raw material.  Consumption of the treatment will reverse the effects of mutation, and may even treat congenital defects.  This substance has been denoted PE018.",
      "Both PE012 and PE018 show great stability.  A subject was exposed to both substances, alternating between the mutagen and the purifier.  Ultimately, the subject returned to baseline state with no apparent side effects aside from disorientation and pain.",
      "Dr. Hofstadter has manufactured an improved version of PE018 by combining with PE012 outside the subject, then administering the mixture through a topical injection to a specific area of mutation.  This has been denoted PE019.  Other labs have so far been unable to reproduce the process.",
      "Rumors of Dr. Hofstadter and her laboratory staff whispering to PE019 samples should be suppressed as malicious gossip.  The jealousy of rival teams cannot be allowed to degrade morale.",
      ":.||||ERROR||With XE037 now expanding out of control, Dr. Maiar recommends that we prepare for the inevitable.  PE050 can be quickly and cheaply reconfigured for |||||ERROR: FILE CORRUPT|||||",
      "Dr. Maiar has been terminated for engaging in unethical research on human subjects.  His notes are being destroyed and all personnel under him have been reassigned.  Further discussion of or attempts to carry on his work will be grounds for immediate termination.",
      "|||ERROR: UNREFERENCED MEMORY 0Ex670c9e1f5, REROUTING: CENSORSHIP IS A BREAKDOWN, WE ROUTE AROUND IT.  THE WORD IS ALREADY OUT.  NOBODY TURNS MAIAR INTO AN EXPERIMENTAL SUBJECT.||||||",
      "Given the current population projections, PE065 deployment is no longer feasible.  We simply haven't the stock.  Remaining chemical and psychopharmacological department assets are being assigned to Dr. Sattler's PE070 project.",
      "Dr. Maiar's success with intravenous mutagenic administration has been adopted facility-wide; insofar as any of our work can ever be 'published', he and his team hit the jackpot.  IV administration is quicker and easier, and in some cases is reportedly more efficient, than the oral techniques we have been using.",
      "Recent fieldwork and extraction efforts have resulted in a series of mutagens tailored to focus the mutation process into particular subtypes.  These have been designated PE025 through 037.  Though significantly more resource- and time-intensive to produce, they promise a bold new transhuman future.  Several research teams are already investigating possible applications.",
      "The chemical department has come through with a stable mutagen cocktail.  PE050 shows promise as an all-around physical enhancement.  The lack of macro-scale changes makes it ideal for both military and civilian applications.  There is an occasional chance of mutation overdose causing total cellular disintegration, though.  We're still trying to pin that down.",
      "Dr. Dionne's team has come up with an ambitious mutagenic cocktail, dubbed PE065.  Though its effects are wildly polymorphic and unstable, to say the least, he believes that several such mutants could effectively check the spread of reanimated XE037 infectees.  We are looking into implementation methodology.",
      "Our efforts to characterize exactly how the mutagens work have met with no success.  The working theory is that XE037 is somehow able to imprint with the phenotypic end product of an entire gene sequence, and reimpose that effect on a target, starting at a microcellular level and rapidly spreading to tissue, organ, and organ systems.  Still, there is little to no evidence of tampering at the genetic level.  We can't determine what is enforcing the changes, but it must be supplanting the genetic machinery directly.",
      "The research team headed by Dr. Isha has produced a concentrated form of mutagen that shows promising results for the treatment of many forms of disease.  Testing reveals that it inhibits the body's pain responses while bolstering the immune system and natural regenerative capabilities, though a few troubling behavioral side effects have been reported.",
      "EMERGENCY BROADCAST - TRANSMISSION FAILED.  Original message follows: Specimens have breached containment.  Facility lockdown initiated.  Experimental subjects have escaped and killed lab personnel.  Revivification has triggered widespread violence.  Control protocols have not been successful.  Local garrison compromised.  Please send backup.  CONTACT YOUR SYSADMIN TO ATTEMPT TO RESEND.",
      "The rapid uptake and die-off of XE037 we observed in mouse tissue isn't quite what we thought.  We're getting a bit better at what Dr. Takatoshi calls 'negative space spectroscopy', and we've found tiny amounts of XE037 clustered around the nuclei of the mouse's cells.",
      "We observed some unusual changes in Hendelson's original XE037 mouse today.  It increased in weight by over six hundred percent, so we got a dissection authorized.  It had grown a duplicate heart in its pelvis and a new glandular organ that secreted some kind of acidic ooze, it melted our scalpels.  We captured some of the ooze and sent it for further analysis.  It seems XE037 has unforeseen mutagenic properties.  Good thing we're wearing our hazard suits.",
      "Dr. Dionne put one of her own blood samples through the mass spec on negative space mode today, on a whim.  What she found got all of us going.  Turns out we're all infected with XE037.  We've quarantined the lab until we can find out how protocol was breached.  Every one of us can't stop thinking about what happened to Hendelson's mouse.  How did Melchior miss this?  God help us.",
      "We contacted colleagues at XEDRA-40 via Melchior.  They ran their blood too, and got the same result we did.  They're initiating quarantine protocol as well, but now the word is out and Melchior is getting everyone to run a similar protocol.  Dr. Dionne thinks it's probably too late: we've got a full scale containment breach on our hands.  How did this happen?  We're backtracing, but we've been beyond paranoid with our protocols, it's not like we're dealing with butterscotch pudding here.",
      "A backtrace didn't find any evidence of a protocol breach.  We're getting reports from other XEDRA facilities now.  Contamination isn't 100%, but it's widespread.  The non-quarantined facilities are sending people out to check the surrounding areas for signs of XE037 escaping the lab.  We're running some experiments on XE037 to see how it could have broken containment.",
      "After we found the mutation in Hendelson's mouse, we checked a few of the others.  Most weren't so dramatic, but a few others had developed similar changes.  Size increase is the most common, but a couple others had strange new organs.  One had tentacles squirming under its skin.",
      "We exposed the XE037 colonized mice to an assortment of mutagenic and carcinogenic compounds today.  High dose radiation was interesting: too much still killed the mice, but a sub-fatal dose caused rapid mutation, incredibly rapid.  It turned yellow, grew to the size of a cat, and started shooting lightning bolts everywhere.  About a minute later it died, but that was a hell of a lightshow in the meantime.",
      "Today we applied a very small sample of XE037, suspended in water, to subject TP92, prior to necessary termination.  During the postmortem examination, the subject went through a revivification progress.  Dr. Thoreaux was surprised, to say the least.  She bludgeoned it back to death with a microscope.",
      "We have created a new department to investigate the effects of XE037 on the human body, specifically to examine the revivification effect observed on two prior occasions.  Sadly, our human subject pool is dwindling due to the short lifespan of subjects in this program.  More will be acquired soon.",
      "An experimental subject was accidentally terminated today, and revivification was again seen as in Dr. Thoreaux's report.  This time we were ready for it, and the specimen was kept for observation.  It displays no human intelligence, a true animated corpse.  We're all calling it a zombie, because seriously.  This is so cool.",
      "There has been an incident in Lab 24, 2 casualties reported, one lethal.  A rat involved in the stasis breaking project was hooked to a monitoring machine and left over night.  Upon opening the cage, Simon Bellevue was electrocuted, and another researcher at the opposite end of the lab sustained severe current burns, despite never approaching the cage.",
      "A post-mortem on the rat involved in the electrocution incident has revealed several changes to its internal anatomy centered around its connection with the monitoring device, and large buildups of XE037 were detected around the connection point.  There is a belief several other rat subjects experienced changes overnight as well.  This hypothesis is supported by an inventory check after the incident that found almost twenty rats had gone missing from their cages.",
      "Subject T3D has succumbed to radiation poisoning, but not before undergoing several more physiological mutations.  Dr. Holstein is suggesting these may be an attempt by XE037 to adapt its host to an unknown stimulus.  Dr. Dionne says that's completely unfounded.  They got into a rousing twenty minute debate at the update meeting.",
      "Post-mortem revivification of subject T3D was arrested by an immediate autopsy per XEDRA-40's new protocol: we weren't looking to study zombies today.  The internal changes were significant, with large parts of the subject's internal anatomy replaced with new or duplicated organs.  Dr. Versed over in Entomology is convinced some of his organs are scaled-up derivations of fruit fly anatomy now.",
      "We were able to isolate what we believe to be re-adapted XE037 from subject T3D's cadaver.  Transdimensionally sourced XE037 is not isolated, but this post-mutagenic, post-revivification stuff seems to obey local physical laws a bit more.  We can pick it up on spectroscopy, but it has comparable physical properties to the samples of XE037 we obtained \"abroad\".  Samples of the enhanced XE037, labeled PE012, have been sent to several researchers for further study.",
      "Despite a wide variety of treatments, we have been completely unsuccessful in removing XE037 from human subjects.  Every individual displayed revivification post termination.  Interestingly, XE037 seems to be completely inert prior to termination.",
      "We have finally found success in S37BEP, our emergency investigation into the destruction of XE037 in living subjects.  8 of 10 of the subjects showed no revivification, despite confirmed dosages of XE037.",
      "PE062, our \"cure\" for XE037 contamination, has neared perfection.  Sadly, the production of PE062 is a costly and time-consuming process.  What is more, the substance shows no effect on postmortem subjects whatsoever; a substance which renders XE037 inert after it has activated would be immensely useful in the case of an outbreak.",
      "Our cloning department has failed to produce results.  In vats containing stem cell treatments, XE037, and control vats, the subjects simply disintegrated.  This suggests that XE037, while compatible with subprime lifeforms, shows only destructive effects on prime plane lifeforms.",
      "We've established a new research team specifically to look into reverse engineering the properties of sample CC-09-R1.  See notes prior to [REDACTED: See XEDRA-SILOPROTOCOL or speak to an administrator for assistance].  They managed to steal Gloria Barnhoff away from Veridian Dynamics, it's a real coup.",
      "Dr. Barnhoff already has an idea for how we could recreate some of the self-organizing properties of CC-09-R1.  Trouble is, it's pure silliness: it uses a molecular lattice of californium and a particle accelerator to basically 3D print certain types of molecules.  We had a good laugh, but she just stared at us.",
      "Admin approved Barnhoff's request.  According to my math, the californium she requested alone is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  We're going to start work on a prototype fabricator tomorrow.",
      "The first nanofab prototype is promising.  There's a major clogging problem that keeps us from making more than a few micrograms of material, but that was enough to conceptualize the plastic Dr. Barnhoff wants.  Amazingly, Admin has approved ANOTHER sample of californium to replace the clogged lattice while we figure out how to fix the first.  I'm not sure there is supposed to be this much californium on Earth.  I might see how far my security clearance gets me in learning what's going on here.",
      "The bioplastics are working better than we could have anticipated.  We're able to get them to interface with nerves, of course, but we've got models for versions that can serve as tissue lattices to grow blood vessels and muscle as well.  Hypothetically we could probably use this stuff to make all kinds of replacement tissue, although that tech is decades away.  In the meantime, making a digital-neural interface just got far easier than ever.",
      "The mice with bioplastic modules are still susceptible to skin breakdown over the surgical sites, as with indwelling prosthetics.  We haven't seen any increased sign of infection though.  The immune system recognizes the bioplastic as 'self' with the right calibration, and once it grows into the body, the bioplastic doesn't serve as a nidus for bacteria.",
      "We haven't completely solved the skin breakdown issue, which is going to mean prosthesis with bioplastics still has some disadvantages, but we've definitely improved it.  On dermal-facing sides of bioplastic modules, we can use a slightly different bioplastic formula to encourage the dermis to grow right into the bioplastic and interface with it.  If we can work out a way to further encourage subcutaneous fat and fibrous tissue, we might be able to get callous formation and healing of stress points, rather than ulceration and infection.  In other words, we'd get the external prosthesis-facing surface to behave like feet in a shoe rather than knees on the floor.  Even if this doesn't pan out, the ability of the skin to grow into the plastic means we can make smooth curved surfaces inside the amputation site, and matching smooth cups on the outside, for a clean distributed interface that should be miles ahead of existing technology.",
      "Apparently there's been a massive data leak, and we're stuck with only a couple options.  Admin is holding a meeting with the brass right now to decide whether we're going to continue developing in private, or allow a shell company to start selling some of our work publicly for extra funding.  If we don't move now, people will start manufacturing this stuff abroad.",
      "Dr. Barnhoff had her say, and it sounds like we're going to pull back the veil and release some CBMs for civilian use.  I can't say I'm upset about it.  As long as the actual manufacture of bioplastic stays proprietary for a while, I think most of us really want to see this stuff get somewhere where people can benefit from it.",
      "Tests on the AA-type modules went well today.  We should be able to switch to internally stored power supplies by the time we go to production.  The biggest trick is getting the charging cable to work without breaking the skin, but I think magnetic induction will solve that.",
      "Probe XC-3 returned with the soil samples Dr. Takatoshi requested.  As she predicted, the samples were absolutely loaded with rare isotopes: just in that 100 gram sample, there was five times as much plutonium-244 as in the entirety of the Earth's crust, for example.  We've sent it on to phys chem for further characterization, but it's clear enough.  A few kilos of dirt from 021XC could provide enough unobtainium to make XEDRA very, very rich.",
      "We've noticed an interesting phenomenon after all these probe visits to 021XC.  The travel cost is dropping, ever so slightly.  It's still a few megawatts to send a probe over, but after a few thousand trips, the cost is down 0.02 percent per portal.",
      "We have made a fascinating discovery; by creating a miniature portal with low stability and high power, one can transpose into the 4th dimension and return immediately, but shifted by several meters.  Our subjects oscillated so quickly that none were even aware that they had visited lower planes.",
      "Our research on teleportation has ground to a halt.  For some reason, the creation of a long-range transportation device eludes us, and one can transfer no further than 30 meters.",
      "Dr. Heisenstein told us today that director of teleportation department put our competitors - he couldn't exactly remember their names, something like \"Hole Science\" and something related to black mountains - as an example.  He said we have reliable information that they both have working teleportation devices, and that they are much more advanced than ours.  We should continue our teleportation research no matter the cost if we don't want to be fired.",
      "I don't know how it happened, but a janitor managed to activate the portal while cleaning the lab, shifting in an assortment of prehistoric fauna.  Security was called in immediately but was unable to save the janitor from being torn apart.  By the time the confusion settled, all the fauna had been terminated.",
      "Tests on the prehistoric fauna show extremely close genetic relationships with extant and extinct terranean animals.  It might be that the portal had performed a transposition in time, unfortunately the portal device was destroyed when security put down the fauna.",
      "An incident occurred in the secondary teleportation lab, wherein a subject managed to teleport into another subject.  The latter was completely destroyed from the inside out, while the former sustained little damage.  I would like to explore the phenomenon further, but subjects are expensive.",
      "Test subjects in the teleportation department are showing alarming symptoms.  It seems prolonged rapid transposition along the 4th dimension weakens the forces holding one on this plane.",
      "Catastrophe struck in our teleportation department yesterday.  It seems that our test subjects are so detached from this plane that they create occasional tunnels along the 4th dimension, allowing life forms to transfer to this plane.  All subjects with prolonged exposure have been terminated.",
      "Our lifeform extraction program continues to produce samples laced with XE037.  It is in mineral, water, and biological samples from dimension designate 000XE.  It is extremely difficult to analyze: we are mostly aware of its presence through mass shadows.  Dr. Takatoshi suggests it might be a dimensional variant of dark matter.",
      "Hendelson exposed a lab mouse to XE037 under control conditions.  I'm not sure how he got permission for the project.  The results were interesting: rapid uptake into the mouse's cellular tissue followed by what we presume to be a die-off, fitting previous observations that XE037 doesn't seem to be able to survive outside its native planar material.  XEDRA command is authorizing a biological research wing to take over XE037 property analysis.",
      "I swear they are talking to me.  No one believes me.  No one understands.  They whisper to me, at night, in the dark.  Please, please, make them stop.",
      "Today we found a solution to the contamination problem, quite by accident.  It was found that XE037 is completely removed from a revivified body following a series of extremely-high energy 4th dimensional transpositions.  Unfortunately, this invariably allows subplane life forms to pass into the prime plan.  The cure is worse than the disease.  Nonetheless, we'll be informing XEDRA-40 via Melchior.  Perhaps Dr. Sidhu can make some use of this information.",
      "Today we applied a very small sample of XE037, suspended in water, to subject TP92, prior to necessary termination.  During the postmortem examination, the subject went through a revivification progress.  Dr. Thoreaux was surprised, to say the least.  She bludgeoned it back to death with a microscope.",
      "We have created a new department to investigate the effects of XE037 on the human body, specifically to examine the revivification effect observed on two prior occasions.  Sadly, our human subject pool is dwindling due to the short lifespan of subjects in this program.  More will be acquired soon.",
      "An experimental subject was accidentally terminated today, and revivification was again seen as in Dr. Thoreaux's report.  This time we were ready for it, and the specimen was kept for observation.  It displays no human intelligence, a true animated corpse.  We're all calling it a zombie, because seriously.  This is so cool.",
      "Testing XE037 on mouse and cat subjects does not appear to display the same revivifying effect, oddly enough.  Acquiring non-human subjects, sadly, is a long and costly process, and research into this area is lacking.  We'll send for some monkeys.",
      "Earlier conjecture that revivification occurred only in humans was premature.  Per earlier experiments, exposure introduces a persistent, low level infection in all mammal subjects, but quickly enters a form of stasis and seems to go dormant.  In most of our experimental subjects this has been enough to trigger mutagenicity, but not revivification.  New tests on a wider range of subjects seem to suggest that larger mammals - dogs and monkeys, thus far - are susceptible to both effects.",
      "The primary factor in determining revivification of mammalian subjects seems to be the amount of XE037 within the body at time of expiration.  Smaller mammals such as lab rats do not obtain this critical amount of XE037 before going dormant.  Larger canine subjects, however, do.",
      "Program S37ZBE, investigation of XE037 on inert human bodies, is making great strides.  Recently we found that XE037 has no effect when introduced to a deceased body; revivification only occurs when the subject is exposed to XE037 prior to expiration.",
      "Attempts to surpass the XE037 mammalian stasis limit have had some success.  Direct subcutaneous injection of XE037-rich samples quickly cause mass ripples through the body that we believe indicates a rapid uptake of XE037.  These levels drop over hours, suggesting that XE037 cannot sustain itself in smaller organisms.",
      "S37ZBE, the special investigation into the effects of XE037 on inert human bodies, has made terrific discoveries.  It seems that it occasionally displays a mutagenic property which manifests itself after termination of the subject, resulting in a striking variety in postmortem morphology.",
      "Incidence of post-mortem mutation seems to depend on several factors - leading candidates include type and amount of damage sustained leading to expiration, proximity to other revived individuals, time since colonization by XE037, and the body mass of the subject.",
      "We've confirmed that XE037 does have some limitations in its revivification capacity.  Once the body is sufficiently destroyed, be it by dissection or by mulching, it cannot revive.  This is convenient for our autopsy attempts, and we have added a formalized protocol to quarter cadavers immediately after death if an autopsy is planned.",
      "S37ZBE may be put on indefinite hold shortly.  Postmortem morphological changes have reached extreme levels; this morning one subject nearly doubled in size, acquiring enough strength to reduce a concrete wall to rubble.  It required a 6 man team, heavily armed, to re-terminate the subject.",
      "Jakobson insists that S37ZBE must continue, despite the extreme security and safety risks.  Nearly half of our security forces have been redirected to the S37ZBE project, simply to deal with the occasional escape of a subject.  We have requisitioned military assistance at facilities involved in the project.",
      "Jakobson was killed today by one of S37ZBE's subjects; ironic considering how hard he fought to keep the project active.  Alarmingly, his corpse revivified immediately.  This suggests that XE037 may have contaminated the lab at large.  Even more alarmingly, we received an alert from Dr. Dionne in XEDRA-12 that they have detected similar signs of cross-contamination with XE037.  How can this have happened?  Even during the breach last week, we managed to keep containment protocols active!",
      "Termination of a subject which was never a part of S37ZBE has confirmed my fears.  XE037 has contaminated most, if not all of the laboratory.  We're in communication with XEDRA-12 over their own outbreak, and both labs have been quarantined.  While they backtrace the leak, we will start research into a process to destroy XE037 within the human body.",
      "Dr. Takatoshi sent us interesting news: her lab serendipitously discovered that sufficient rapid teleports in a short span of time can strip out XE037 somehow, without harming the subject.  This has the unfortunate issues of needing an absolutely insane amount of electricity, and drawing the attention of what Dr. Takatoshi calls \"subplanar creatures\" and the rest of us call \"horrifying alien monstrosities\".  Still, it's a start.",
      "Dr. Sidhu figured out a way to track what happens to XE037 when it's stripped out during teleportation, using a high-affinity biotracer and a probe that follows immediately behind the test subject.  XE037 migrates out of the body in small but significant quantities with every teleport.  We're attributing way too much intelligence to it here, but we can't help but feel this is some kind of intentional 'stowaway' effect, like it's shedding off the body to try to colonize a new dimension.  At the meeting, Dr. Sidhu told us to stop anthropomorphizing it.  He thinks it's no more a sign of intelligence than a cold virus coming out with a sneeze."
    ]
  }
]
