Let Sleeping Dogs Lie (2343)
Lansaya felt her left eye twitch - the tell-tale sign of an incoming migraine.
With a grumble, she begrudgingly peeled herself away from her desk, swiping a bottle of God-knows-what pills along the way. She faintly recalled that the Agency’s Pharmaceuticals Division had, at some point, given her the rundown on their precise chemical makeup, but the memory was buried under a fog of time and stress. Not that it mattered much anyway. All that mattered was that these miracle pills would keep her functioning for at least another few hours - well past her baseline biological limit.
Some distant part of her psyche was well aware of the potential side effects - a shortened lifespan, cytoplasmic atrophy, lifelong immunocompromisation, and persistent audiovisual hallucinations. Still, it was a small price to pay if it meant inching the Agency closer toward winning the war. At least, that’s what she told herself as she unscrewed the lid and shook a pill loose into her waiting palm.
The stakes had been drilled into Lansaya ever since she’d enlisted with the Agency forty years ago. She was fighting an enemy that was simultaneously everywhere at once, and yet nowhere to be found. Her enemy was simultaneously all-powerful, embedded in the upper echelons of the world’s governments, and yet always on the run. This enemy had vowed to save the world, and to do so they would stop at nothing to bring about its destruction.
It was a war the Agency had been waging for decades, if not centuries. Unbeknownst to the wider world, they’d been fighting in the shadows to strike at a hydra that only seemed to grow back stronger from each defeat. Every day, she and her colleagues put their lives on the line for the fate of the world, and every day fewer came back from the frontlines to fight another day.
Something needed to change or else their enemy, coasting on the waves of the universe’s entropy, would bleed them dry. That’s precisely how Lansaya found herself here, stashed away in a floating vault - in a location unknown even to her - to pore over every record the Agency had scrounged up from its time in Colombia.
The War of Severance had provided the Agency with a valuable opportunity to feast on the technological whalefall that was the rapidly decaying corpse of the Scientific Wild West. Her higher-ups had wasted no time mobilizing the Agency to scavenge the battlefields of Colombia. They were convinced that somewhere in the wreckage, buried alongside the ghosts of those lost to the gruelling march of unbridled scientific ‘progress’, was a silver bullet they could fire into the heart of their enemy.
Lansaya grimaced as a sharp pain flared behind her left brow. She popped the pill into her mouth, swallowing it dry, before returning to her desk.
Her desk was buried under stacks upon stacks of bulky black binders, each stuffed to the brim with reams of paper documents. The Agency insisted that none of this data was to be digitized - their cybersecurity systems were beyond state-of-the-art, but it would only take the slightest slip in their technological defence for them to lose everything to their enemy. Anything that could be used against their enemy could just as easily be used against them. The Agency spared no expense in ensuring that would never happen - in the event of a physical breach, the vault was designed to lock down and incinerate its contents. She did her best to push that thought to the back of her mind as she returned to work.
The hours began to blur as she combed through document after document. She worked with all the meticulousness of a data vulture, turning over the bones of each file - every research log, field report, and schematic - until she had picked it clean. She dissected each wildly unethical experiment that found its way onto her desk, drafting several dozen ways the research could be repurposed by them, and several dozen more ways it could be repurposed against them. Each experiment, no matter how absurd or depraved, would be used to stock their arsenals on the frontlines.
One file that stuck with her was the field report from a team sent to Canisia - a planned city built for what was intended to be the world’s first ‘dogpunk’ society. Canisia had been the brainchild of Brazilian trillionaire André Diniz Segura, whose love for dogs far exceeded his sense of moral duty or fiscal responsibility. Rather than setting aside his wealth for the betterment of his fellow people, Segura imagined a world in which each cornerstone of modern technology had been replaced with a selectively bred variant of man’s best friend. Dogs, he reasoned, had already been bred to do everything from pulling sleds to herding sheep - how much further could their potential be unlocked with the marvels of genetic engineering?
The field report painted a harrowing picture.
Her colleagues had found Canisia deserted, but not abandoned - Segura and his scientists had fled the country at the first sign of trouble, sealing the gates behind them on their way out. The rest of Canisia’s inhabitants, the several thousand dogs who comprised the city’s burgeoning ‘infrastructure’, had been left to fend for themselves.
As her colleagues fanned out through the city, making their way to the central spire housing Canisia’s research facilities, they waded through the consequences of science untethered from ethical restraint. They passed the emancipated remains of giant Saint Bernards - or, at least, what might have once passed for Saint Bernards before genetic engineering morphed them into beasts of burden with stouter, denser skeletal architecture - strewn along the roads, hinting at their original designs as modes of transportation. They came across an abandoned clinic where several dozen Dachshunds - whose olfactory senses had been bioengineered to detect a whole suite of medical conditions - had starved to death in their display cases. Their field report even detailed an encounter with a peculiar Corgi crossbreed - the only specimen still alive by the time of their arrival - which had been diligently working a mechanism to turn a stack of lamb slices on a shawarma spit.
Lansaya had forced herself to look past the stomach-churning descriptions of Canisia as what amounted to a communal grave for mutilated dogs - all while suppressing thoughts of her own Bolonka back home.
She loathed to admit it, but what the scientists at Canisia had accomplished was nothing short of ingenious. What Segura’s scientists couldn’t achieve with genetic engineering alone, they supplemented with insights from beyond their field. The Saint Bernards had seen their skeletons strengthened with a scaffold of electrospun microfibers. The Dachshunds had seen their sense of smell enhanced through the xenotransplantation of ant olfactory receptors. Even the curious shawarma-tending Corgi had been outfitted with a neural interface that allowed simple commands to be directly programmed into their brain.
Still, as ingenious as it was, the thought of using the fruits of this unethical experimentation filled her with a deep disquiet.
She sank back into her chair, grimacing as her left eye twitched.