Necrocide

Chapter 36 (Ambrosia Project Log #1)

Good evening, diary...I should probably think of a more masculine way to acknowledge these audio logs by.

Sorry. Not important right now. And I seriously hope Tabitha doesn't hear this. Let me try again.

Good evening, whoever's listening. I'm Troy Schaefer, known only as Zeus by the test subjects of the Ambrosia Project. I'm the leader of this facility and the mind behind our mission to design a makeshift immortality for usage by the British military.

However, even though we've barely started this project two months ago in January, I feel like we've hardly made any progress. Granted, we have been able to record the Ambrosia's successful healing qualities within some of our subjects' injuries, but last night proved the process is too sluggish to have a hundred percent success rate.

Robert Thaxton, codenamed Janus by the Ambrosia Project's Greek-themed alias assignment system, died after receiving multiple fractures in all four of his limbs along with a shattered spine due to a mishap involving a combat droid gone mad. He was bleeding out of his nose and mouth by the time we got the stupid machine to quit pummeling his carcass. And it didn't help that Hades was too busy enjoying the show to help the poor lad.

In a way, Thaxton was actually spared from the worst things that are going to happen at this facility. Too bad his corpse is gonna spend the rest of its days rotting at the bottom of the garbage chute with the other rubbish.

As if that wasn't bad enough, two test subjects, a veteran identified by the system as Ares and a sprog taken directly from one of the camps known as Atlas, were apprehended by security last night after trying to sneak out of their sleeping quarters. While I personally don't mind a little violence, even I will admit the gun wounds they received were unnecessary. I don't even know what they were doing in the facility's garage, but Artemis says they meant no harm.

I doubt it. I've seen many men break over the years. Men who could've only been described as heroes and pacifists. Men who fought only for their homes and their families, all of them broken down into mindless killers and puppets.

Believe me. If I find the one thing in this world that gives people like Ares hope and take control of it--maybe even destroy it--I'd be able to make him devolve into an animal like the rest of these so-called heroes. I corrupt his mind, then his heart, then his perception of the world around him.

And that, listener, is the true purpose of the Ambrosia Project. I'm raising an army, but like everything else, it's not the superhuman healing or the combat training that makes us more dangerous than any other group of humans on the planet.

The most dangerous weapons of the Ambrosia Project are the demoralized humans taking part in it. But after the things we're about to put them through, they probably shouldn't be referred to as humans.