The first human trials were the messy, inevitable beginning of something vast—something that would reshape the Foundation's military doctrine forever. But even knowing that, nothing truly prepares you for the sight of a man detonating like a balloon filled with red paint and bone shards.
The experiments were conducted deep beneath Site 999, in a sealed laboratory complex only the O5 Council and my hand-selected personnel even knew existed. Not a single Ethics Committee member, not a single Director—not even other O5s outside the project—had any record of these sublevels. And that was deliberate. The work being done here was too important, too dangerous, and far too morally corrosive for the oversight of bureaucrats.
The first activation of the gene-seed prototype had been a disaster. The D-Class selected convulsed, screamed, and then ruptured. Not a slow rupture—an instantaneous red mist that painted the reinforced glass observation barrier. Dr. Everett King calmly wiped his glasses off and said, "Well, that confirms our suspicion—the stabilization matrices are still reading inconsistent."
Orochimaru only grinned. "Fascinating. I would like the remains for study."
I gave him a look. "There are no remains."
He seemed even happier.
But we continued. We had to. The resources of three O5s—myself, Julius, and Darius—were funneled into this project like a bottomless river: money, equipment, test subjects, anomalous stabilizers, temporal dampeners, dimensional power converters, vats of retrofitted Primaris-grade Larraman cells, gene-editing arrays fueled by telekill-insulated microreactors… everything.
Progress was inevitable. Catastrophe was also inevitable.
Trial after trial failed. Muscles tore themselves apart. Bones liquefied. Nervous systems overloaded and burned out like faulty wiring. One D-Class grew three hearts before all three burst simultaneously. Another developed skin so dense their body suffocated itself from the inside. One screamed for twenty-one minutes straight without lungs before collapsing.
Senku Ishigami documented everything with scientific enthusiasm that was almost unsettling.
Lex Luthor, however, was irritated. "Your genetic templates are fundamentally incompatible without a scaffold. If we had Kryptonian biomatrix stabilizers—"
"We don't," I cut in. "So we work with what we can build."
Dr. Bright just shrugged as another corpse was wheeled out. "At least it isn't me this time."
The number of D-Class used rose rapidly. Fifty. Sixty. Eighty. Nearly a hundred bodies. Nearly a hundred failures.
But none of us stopped.
The Imperium of Man had perfected the art of creating demi-gods from human stock. We would do the same—but with Foundation knowledge, multiversal science, and anomalous support behind it.
The first success came on day forty-three.
A D-Class designated #D-9831 stepped into the retro-engineered Primarch-type conversion chamber. Implantation of the multi-organ suite began. His vitals spiked. His heart rate skyrocketed. Blood pressure fluctuated wildly. His skeleton began to reforge under the pressure of the osteo-augmentation.
He screamed, but he didn't explode.
Minutes passed. Hours. He remained alive.
I leaned forward, tightening my gloves. "Stabilization levels?"
Senku flicked through his tablets. "Ninety-eight percent. Unbelievably stable. Somehow."
Orochimaru licked his lips. "His body is accepting the gene-seed."
This was the moment we'd been pushing toward.
By the twelfth hour, #D-9831 had doubled in muscle density. His skeletal structure had rewritten itself into reinforced layers. His blood had shifted into something darker, oxygen-rich, and hyper-nutritive. His organs had expanded, rearranged, adapted. His mind… was changing too.
The transformation took two days.
When the chamber unlocked, steam poured out like the breath of a dragon. The man who stepped forward was no longer a man. Two and a half meters tall. Muscles like sculpted armor. Eyes glowing faintly with metabolic fire. A living engine of war.
He looked down at his own hands and whispered, "What… am I?"
I stepped into the chamber, unafraid. He towered over me, but he didn't move aggressively.
"You," I told him, "are humanity's first perfected Astartes. A Space Marine. And you will be the first of millions."
His expression tightened into instinctual obedience—which the hypno-indoctrination would soon reinforce.
Behind me, Julius appeared through a shimmering golden portal from his Gate of Babylon, his arms folded.
"Well done," he said quietly. "This… will reshape the balance of power on this planet."
Darius only nodded. "And every other planet we claim."
The first Space Marine prototype bowed to me—deeply, reverently.
"Awaiting… orders."
It wasn't pride I felt then.
It was triumph.
The nightmare months of blood, failure, and death had paid off. Humanity had gained a new soldier. A new spear. A new shield. A new terror the enemies of the SCP Foundation would learn to fear.
I allowed myself a breath.
This was only the beginning.