The Zenith - Protectorate HQ (Ifrit's Lab)
21st January, 2011
It was a common misconception that Tinkers were scientists. A scientist would solve a problem by experimenting, building a model of the world,
understanding something so thoroughly that they could predict exactly how that thing would work, and then they could predict how, if they intervened in the model, if they made something that used the rules of that model, they could make interesting things happen. Just like it sounds, this process takes a
long time. The best scientists in the world would spend their entire lifetime to make a small contribution to all of humanities knowledge so they could make tools that were slightly better.
Tinkers, on the other hand, did not use this process. They didn’t really experiment, they didn’t truly learn from the universe. Instead, they
remembered. Ever since his trigger event, a tinker would somehow already know most everything in their field of knowledge, but not in the conventional sense of
know. It was more like when you haven’t attended school/university in a decade, but at one point you did thoroughly understand calculus. You don’t have to learn calculus in its entirety, you spend a little time doing some trial and error, remembering what you once knew, figuring out how things worked, and then you can do it again! That is how tinkers work. In some cases, they have to consistently relearn their knowledge because there is so much information that goes into what they do, they can only remember a portion of the necessary knowledge at a time.
That is why we are called tinkers, we have to "tinker" with things in order to re-figure-out, so to speak, how things work. Oftentimes the process takes a long time, since the knowledge comes to our heads in
abstracts, not always familiar terms. Personally, I had an advantage, as before becoming a tinker I had wanted to be an engineer and had some familiarity with chemistry, and a lot of familiarity with abstract thinking. Still, even then we often didn’t understand what we built; sometimes the ideas for our constructs just
arrived, like how you once figured out that something works, you can’t remember all the reasoning but you are sure that if you follow certain steps or everything is positioned/shaped in a certain way, it will work. That is how some tinkers can be utterly clueless as to how they actually did what they did.
For most tinkers, sometimes the ideas arrive in our brains at the worst of times, just building up in our heads. We would hold onto the ones we thought were useful, and try to forget the rest. That was why when a tinker like myself finally entered the lab, it felt like
release. We could finally put all our ideas on paper, build them, or otherwise let go of the buildup of knowledge. For me, traveling could often be the worst as when you enter a new place it filled your head with ideas, and you had the fewest opportunities to express them. Let me tell ya, visiting a place like
The Zenith… Ya, it didn’t exactly make things easier. I suppose that was another reason Boston had so many tinkers, it made good tinkers great just by its very history and educational environment.
I had managed to prioritize; the first thing I did was check my gear, which was all in working shape. I had to resupply Griffin, my large drone, and replace some of the power cells but everything looked ship shape. With all the boring chores out of the way, I excitedly headed to the “drawing board.” Which was holographic, it would have made Tony Stark jealous and I could finally tell all the old wards how “rubber-man,” my private nickname in our group, had surpassed the wimpy man of iron.
Unfortunately, the first project I set in order was… less exciting. I had written down, a long time ago, the formula to a polymer I had never actually planned to create. Normal proteins were based primarily on Carbon, and there were an awful lot of things that could be done with protein, amino acids grouped via peptide bonds were probably the most flexible tool at my disposal, when it came to creating chemical agents. However I had long ago had the idea for
silicon based “amino acids” although they would need a different name then that. The capabilities such a type of protein would provide would be astonishing, but I quickly found during testing that the resulting omega-proteins, as I called them, were
completely incompatible with earth biology, it could just start tearing up proteins, skewing pH levels, it was a mess. I scrapped the project as it was essentially useless since anyone who came in contact with it would die, (sooner or later, it was heavily carcinogenic) but given the situation in Boston it may, unfortunately, be of use.
Many people have heard of the
botulinum toxin, it is the deadliest substance, by mass, known to man. The toxin is a protein that targets a mechanism in mammalian muscles, the tiniest bit would prevent all of somethings muscles from working, and after not too long, it would reach organs like the heart, diaphragm, esophagus, more. Resulting in rapid death. In high potentiates, it could kill, with an excessive dosage in a typical male body, in about 55 seconds, and it would stop muscle functions across the body much faster. It was the closest thing that real drugs came to the movies in being able to stop someone wholesale. I had no desire to use botulinum toxin, even if I intended to kill someone, as in the dosages necessary to kill someone quickly it would become an extreme hazard to any bystanders, since it would take a minute exposure to kill them. For better or worse, the Omega-Protein offered a solution to this problem. The Omega-protein could be designed to only maintain its- they wouldn’t be called peptide bonds? I will go with Silitide bonds…. Ya, I know, but I really needed to bring some levity to my life at that moment. -only maintain its “Silitide” bonds in conditions, a specific pH, a narrow temperature range, and it would only survive within warm, human blood.
Which could only be found in the human body, obviously. As soon as it left, it would be denatured and thus harmless, no effected bystanders nothing.
To bring it all together, I would use the same mechanism Botulinum toxin used to stop muscle function, with the already dangerous Omega-proteins, to make for a non-spreadable, incredibly lethal, toxin. I had no way of knowing, and I refused to test it in any way, but I suspected this toxin could stop muscle function far more quickly, although it would probably take the same amount of time to stop a heart, even including the excessive dosages my new lethal darts would deliver.
The lab already had a molecular processor, likely intended to be used to make nanobots. I was eager to move on to projects I could be
proud of, and I had a lot of ideas I wanted to use all this space for. It began the process after I input the all-too simple chemical formula. I
hoped it wouldn’t be this ease to use, because….
It shouldn’t be this easy to create a weapon so lethal.
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