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Damn this project, damn this man, damn this day.
The man standing in front of Alexander was the very definition of "military officer". He wore a perfectly-groomed military uniform, complete with several medals attesting to past acts of bravery and efficient leadership. His gray hair was trimmed, his face closely shaved, and his definition suggested muscles that had been acquired and retained not by chemicals, but by a dutiful exercise regimen that he would have had to maintain even after taking an office post.
Gazing at the man, Alexander felt all the weight of his own inadequacy. The officer was frowning as he read the brochure April had printed three hours ago that described, with a charity bordering on outright dishonesty, the specifications and strengths of their graduation project.
Their booth was one of many stands arrayed in the large, warehouse-like exposition building of the Asbury Academy. Today was graduation showcase day, a commercial event like many Academies had, where students would show the projects they'd spent a year working on to anybody interested and hopefully find buyers, as well as investors for their future endeavors. For potential buyers, this was an occasion to acquire the latest, most innovative products the Academy had to offer. For a student, selling one's project at a good price was as good as a guarantee that they would get their white coat after the summer break.
The officer was one of many businessmen and officials going from booth to booth, looking at the caged creatures and asking questions about their abilities.
"This here says that your warbeast has enhanced senses?"
"Yes sir. Tests have shown that the Leviathan project has well-above average night vision." This was technically true. "Its hearing has also been designed with the detection of stealthy enemies in mind." This was also, strictly speaking, true. It was the same meaningless, technically-correct drivel they'd dutifully recited to the last four potential buyers to visit their stand.
The officer grunted, and turned his attention back to April's brochure. Alexander was starting to feel sick. If this kept up, he might need to excuse himself and take another anxiety pill before long.
The truth was, the Leviathan project had been designed with many objectives in mind.
When presenting the design to the preliminary grading committee, Alexander had thought it incredibly elegant. Though no Crown official would ever admit it, it was an open secret that warbeasts were extremely vulnerable to traps and hand-crafted bombs. Their heavy weight meant that they could trigger mechanisms that would ignore men and smaller experiments, their tendency to be designed to charge enemies made them easy to bait, and their low intelligence meant they blindly stepped on traps that even stitched could be taught to avoid.
Rebels had shown no compunction against exploiting those vulnerabilities: bombs were cheap, after all, and warbeasts were expensive. And so rumors had started to circulate that the Crown was pulling funding from warbeast projects, and towards smaller, more agile, smarter weapons.
As soon as he'd heard the rumors, Alexander had seen a problem to be solved, and after a few nights of sketches and checking textbooks, come up with a simple solution: a warbeast that would combine the strengths of its bovine-like brethren, with the wit and sharp instincts of a trained soldier.
The Leviathan would be thirteen feet tall, man-shaped, with an internal cavity that could fit a grown man or woman. Its brain would be linked to that cavity with a neural interface, allowing the soldier to control it, not by giving it orders, but by using its muscles as if were their own. It would have enhanced senses, to detect traps and ambushes, and agile hands that could use tools and large weapons, instead of relying on claws and horns.
Of course, the grading committees had been skeptical. They'd pointed out that his design would butt against Wollstone's second and forth ratio. As a creature's size's doubled, for instance, its weight was multiplied by eight, while the cross-section of its bone was only multiplied by four. The entire field of warbeast design was essentially centered around bypassing these problems, by making more efficient organs, denser muscles, smoother blood distribution, and many other optimizations. The problem was, almost all these optimizations were designed for quadruped warbeasts, while his project called for a giant biped.
To compensate, he had to come up with his own optimizations. The Leviathan would have multiple hearts, each sustaining different body parts, lessening the strain on any individual heart. Its bones would have a Moiré honeycomb pattern, a recent innovation, making them more vulnerable to intense shocks, but also considerably lighter. Its muscles would be built for rapid movements, for dodging attacks instead of enduring them.
After two years, the project having survived through two validation passes, Alexander managed to get two students, Ewan Spencer and Matthew Bates, to join his team. Ewan was assigned the "enhanced senses" part of the project; Matthew took the neural interface; Alexander took the physical optimizations, in addition to the team management role.
The zero quarter committee estimated the project might sell at around twenty thousand dollars. Now was time to implement it.
This was the point when things started to go wrong.
For one thing, the physical optimizations turned out to be much harder to implement than he'd thought. What seemed like a clever solution on paper often became an unending stream of unforeseen complications in reality. Synchronizing multiple hearts to beat at the same time was fiendishly difficult when these hearts were yards apart from each other. Alexander's first prototype worked well enough until he tried to get it to walk at a brisk pace, at which point its hearts started to desynchronize and work at cross purpose, increasing each other's strain until they gave out.
While Ewan and Matthew were making steady progress on their own sub-projects, Alexander was spending sleepless night after sleepness night throwing away diagrams and writing new designs from scratch, only to restart the process all over a few weeks later. After two months, it occurred to him that he'd chosen a design that forced him to throw away a century of innovations by dozens of immensely talented doctors, and provide his own alternatives in less than a year.
Still, he managed to come up with a decent bone structure that filled most of the initial requirements, and grow a decently-sized warbeast demonstrating its advantages, which he thought would be enough to maintain a decent ranking in quarter one. At which point, he had his second awful realization: Ewan and Matthew had not made nearly as much progress as they'd led him to believe. Ewan had spent three months designing eyes that were only slightly superior to the industry average, and produced sensory inputs that the Leviathan brain was unable to process. Matthew had grown a mass of tissue that could connect the warbeast's brain to a subject's... provided the subject had their cranium removed; even then, the only thing that link could transmit was meaningless hallucinations, though Matthew swore he was weeks away from getting it to transmit accurate sensory data.
The quarter one committee revised the project's value estimation to four thousand dollars.
After that, Alexander got wise. He went from monthly to weekly progress reports with his team, and insisted that his teammates show him physical demonstration of their work at every one of them. He quickly got into the habit of assuming that any progress he didn't see for himself was fictional, and that any innovation that wasn't tested in a real, up-to-scale warbeast was a mirage.
Ewan took well to the new constraints, and his work started to improve.
Matthew did everything he could to thwart them. He showed up late to reunions, or missed them outright, and gave half-hearted excused when confronted about it. He chafed at the restrictions, insisted that quality work took a lot of time, while always promising that it would be finished any day now. He was quick to get angry if anyone implied that his contribution was lacking, and evasive when asked to show proof of that contribution.
Two months into the quarter, Alexander and Ewan decided they had enough, and needed to get rid of him. Fortunately, Matthew was known to fraternize with a certain experiment; it was easy enough to arrange for him to get caught in the act, resulting in his summary expulsion, and in a sharp rise in productivity for his former teammates.
The quarter two committee estimated the project's value at six thousand dollars.
To weeks later, Alexander successfully lobbied for a teammate to be added to his team to compensate for Matthew's departure; April Burke was added to the project shortly afterwards.
What followed was the third major piece of bad news for the project: the neural interface was completely unfeasible.
April explained it all with ruthless clarity: how it was too broad, how existing brain interfaces were nowhere near versatile enough to allow a man to move another's muscles as his own, how brain-to-brain communication on the level required by the project was unheard of even in academies with military funding like Radham or Kingswick, how even if they managed to somehow design a working brain interface it would only expose hundreds of completely new problems that would require way more than seven months to even begin to understand.
Meanwhile, they had entered the phase where the Academy gradually stopped allotting resources to student projects, which meant they needed to find investors fast, or stop being able to build prototypes, which would be the death knell of the project.
The following weeks were filled with sleepless night after sleepless night, as Alexander, Ewan and April struggled to come up with a design that would be plausibly workable while still technically fitting the specifications promised back in zero quarter. They replaced the brain interface with an iteration on the standard voltaic-triggered implanted commands; the warbeast would still have augmented senses, but it would need to be trained to transmit the information it perceived to its driver through grunts and smells; instead of carrying its driver inside a cavity, the driver would instead ride on the beast's back, which would both allow them to perceive their surrounding without a neural link, and make the Leviathan's internal structure much simpler.
It would be a downgrade from the initial design, but one that Alexander could sell as minor, an inevitable iteration based on practical experience.
The quarter three committee estimated the project's value at seven hundred dollars.
Time was running out.
The organ optimizations were proving unworkable. The muscles just couldn't support the warbeast's weight for an extended length of time, and that was without going into more complex organs like the lungs or digestive system.
The project's only saving grace was April. Though decently skilled in technical matters, her true asset was her ability to game Academy tests and success metrics. The only reason Alexander had managed to get an investor for the project was that April and Ewan had managed to get third place in environment perception rankings, mostly by correctly predicting which metrics the beasts would be evaluated on.
And these small victories were proving direly necessary. It was becoming increasingly obvious, week after week, that progress on the organ optimizations was never going to be finished in time. There were just too many problems, and not enough time to find solutions.
At first, Alexander floated around the idea of asking for a time extension, until April took him aside and explained him in polite but very firm terms that she was not going to work on this project for another year. This left only one option: the Leviathan had to become a quadruped, which came with a slew of features that had to be scrubbed away.
During the project's last two months, the group spent more time filling paperwork to justify these downgrades to their professors than actually working on their project.
The quarter four committee didn't even bother making a value estimate.
"How much do you want for it?" The officer asked, pulling Alexander back to reality.
"Beg your pardon?"
The officer pointed at the warbeast. It looked like an oversized cross between a horse and a gorilla. A metal seat was fused into its back, with a handful of voltaic wires running from the left arm to the beast's brain, triggers for basic commands. It looked, bluntly speaking, completely hideous. It had absolutely nothing in common with the elegant design Alexander had submitted a year ago.
"Your project. Your brochure didn't mention an exclusive sponsor. I assume it's up for sale?"
"Twenty thousand dollars." Alexander blurted out.
The officer frowned. It took all of Alexander's social skills, honed by years of surviving sabotage attempts and irascible professors, not to widen his eyes in horror. This man was likely to be the only person who would express any interest in his project for the entire day, and now he was going to think he was being insulted.
The officer looked Alexander in the eyes, and nodded.
"Very well. I can think of a few uses for a warbeast with good night vision. I think I'll buy five of them. How fast can you make them?"
Alexander was at a loss for words. Fortunately, April quickly took over, and went into a description of the warbeast's maturation process; five minutes later, the preliminary contract was signed, and the sale was decided.
"Good job", April said, deadpan. If she realized they'd just been paid one hundred thousand dollars for a bunch of animals that weren't even worth the cost to feed them, she didn't show it.
One hundred thousand dollars. It made Alexander's head spin. Even with the Academy and the investor's cut, even split between three students, it was more money than he'd ever owned. It would be enough to live without working for the rest of his life, if he so chose.
After a year spent struggling, after going against impossible odds of his own making, after failure and sabotage and disappointment after disappointment, in the end, he'd won not through his medical skills or political acumen or his management abilities, but through institutional inertia and pure, unadulterated luck.
Well, guess I'm paying for drinks tonight.
~
Editor's note: The Leviathan project was decommissioned six months later due to excessive vulnerability to improvised explosive devices. The surviving specimens were repurposed for civilian use. Alexander Griffiths, Ewan Spencer and April Burke were eventually reassigned as assistants on the Nephilim One project.
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