Genetic Upgrades

After taking three bullets and an ungodly amount of shrapnel serving in the Middle East and coming back to finish her biochemistry doctorate, Captain Samantha Ortiz was determined to do something to improve the lives of her comrades still out in the field. Most people would just make donations to military charities, or buy aid packages, or do some other simple thing that help boost morale for at least a few soldiers--but Sam wasn't going to settle for something that basic. Not when she'd been gifted with a genius-level intellect and a position with one of the top genetic research labs in the country.

Most geniuses are insane. In Sam's case, it was less 'insanity' and more 'strange creativity', combined with some unusual fascinations. Her pet snake, Faraday, struck her with inspiration not long after joining the research team: snakeskin was tough, difficult to pierce, protective. If she could find a way to (pardon the pun) scale up the strength and durability, and get rid of that whole business of needing to be shed, a human-proportioned snakeskin could make for a rather fantastic underarmor.

It took her years of long, sleepless nights to work through the details, and in that time she burned through more coffee a week than most small diners did in a year. Sheer determination kept her going as the results of her research and testing finally led to a breakthrough, and the vat-growth of the first organic underarmor set in modern times. The prototype was an instant success with every official she demonstrated it to, able to significantly mitigate the damage from small arms fire, and even entirely block shrapnel and stab wounds. Everything Sam had dreamed of was achieved by her historic invention.

Just when her pride was at its highest and a lucrative contract was almost certain, disaster chose to strike. Extended testing showed that the armor began to quickly degrade after a few weeks, and within a month and a half, it was all but useless. Furiously Sam worked to find a way to correct the problem, but it soon became clear that the organic armor's degradation was, in fact, a form of necrosis. The armor would literally die over time, and the only solution was to integrate it with something to quite literally keep it alive. As for that goal, there was only one obvious way to achieve it, one that none of her colleagues were willing to consider.

Samantha, however, had poured far too much of her life into this project to let it go so easily. Without a moment's hesitation, she began reworking the armor's genetic code and implanted it into a retrovirus being tested by another team in the lab. The retrovirus was intended to induce mutations into an organism by gradually rewriting its DNA, a purpose that perfectly suited her requirements for integrating the armor directly into the body of her test subject--the captain herself.

Less than a week after the first injection, her entire skin had been converted into a scaly, armored hide as the synthesized reptillian DNA fused with her own. Extreme though her methods were, the army was still impressed after she was able to conclusively prove that genetically integrating the armor into her body eliminated all problems with degradation. Soon, Sam found herself honored with the first contract in American history to develop a mass-producible genetic modification for all US servicemen and women, after working out a few side effects that had cropped up in her own mutation. Simple things, such as mutated eyes, increased hormones, and the strangest fascination with strawberries.  

Her final product of course was without these issues, but for herself.... well, the changes had their own rather pleasurable charm, especially when she was off work.





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