"Play it again," Farheen commanded, and the female computer tech rewound the recorded video feed.
It had taken four tireless days of data recovery to piece back together the recordings from 1101's operation.
The Facility's technicians were all bright, driven, and troubled selections from the yearly recruitment pool, plucked from in between their individual rock and hard place at a point in their lives where they were easy to lure and easier to control.
Said team had managed to recover most of the modified EEG sensor recordings, although quite a few frames had been too corroded to save. What resulted was an imperfect, staccato stream of images rather than a smoothly integrated video.
Usually, the tech team worked flawlessly and quickly, some out of the debt that the Facility was careful to keep them in, some out of loyalty. But the delay and imperfection of this project was in part due to a sudden gap in their personnel.
Farheen pressed her lips together, each jump in the continuity of the images onscreen a slap in the face.
She leaned over the control desk, reaching impatiently over the technician's back to rewind the feed and set the last minute on loop at 50% speed.
The control desk was at the center of the Facility's computer lab, with rows of high end computer stations lining the room behind the desk. The focal point of the lab was the series of large display screens that were mounted on the far wall, which the central desk had command of.
Farheen watched, rapt, as on one of the display screens a pink cloud hovered over the blue-green simulation overlay of the subject's brain. Represented on the corrupted video as short bursts of movement, that pink cloud was growing, probing at the brain structure with thin tendrils.
The electrical signals of the brain were firing at an accelerated rate, the video forever preserving the subject's confusion and panic for their analysis.
Farheen watched, again and again, as the pink cloud coalesced into a more dense formation before making a move on the brain, diving forward with full force to burrow into the grey matter.
They had seen this move before on 1040 and 1042, their two closest attempts to integrate Pearl with a human brain.
But on the screen, just as Pearl struck the brain and began to fan out, enveloping it like rubber suit, the screen flared so brightly it had blinded the sensors and the feed went blank.
Farheen tore herself away from the loop and paced the length of the room, stopping before a second display screen, on which ran a live feed video of 1101's brain as it was now.
The brain itself stood relatively untouched, with a few dozen small pillars of pink anchoring the umbrella of Pearl that surrounded and encased the grey matter. A significant margin of space separated the two structures, a distinct difference from previous formations in which Pearl had stuck to and penetrated the brain of those earlier subjects.
Farheen shook her head and moved to a third display screen, which showed a layered musculoskeletal image of Subject 1101's body taken and compiled a day after the operation, once the tremors had subsided and the body had settled into another coma.
The image made her heart race. It was everything, everything they had ever wanted to see with the T-strain, and now, with Pearl. A perfect integration of the symbiont with the human.
The cure for everything.
All down the length of 1101's body, Pearl had stretched long thin tendrils that intertwined with bone, with muscle, with veins and with sinew.
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Pearl
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