Ghostfinders 02 - Ghost of a Smile

and look down at the Earth, like the most precious and most fragile toy of all.”
    “You see?” said JC. “I can’t do that.”

    Back in Room Three, Melody had finally found something useful. Happy moved forward so he could peer over her shoulder and watched very secret files appear and disappear on the screen in response to Melody’s fingers flitting over the keyboard. It was all very scientific.
    “All right,” said Happy, after a while. “You’ve got that smug and triumphant look on your face, so what am I missing? What have you found?”
    “LD50,” said Melody, sitting back in her chair so suddenly she almost head-butted Happy in the face. She folded her arms and scowled at the screen. “And I don’t feel smug, or triumphant. This is not a good thing to have found. LD50 is the dosage at which the new drug is expected to kill half of the test group. Lethal Dose, Fifty per cent. Not something you should be finding in a drug being tested on volunteers. But this LD50 file is quite definitely attached to the Zarathustra project. It seems to be posing the question of what happens if the affected subjects can’t or won’t die? If they insisted on surviving, what should be a Lethal Dose?”
    “Are you saying . . . the scientists deliberately gave these people a drug so strong they expected it to kill half the volunteers?” said Happy. “How the hell did they think they would get away with that?”
    “You’re not listening,” said Melody. “Yes, under normal circumstances, half the recipients should have died. But what the scientists really expected was that this new drug would keep them alive. By changing them so much they could survive something that would quite definitely kill normal people. LD50 was the final test, the proof that they’d achieved what they thought they’d achieved. I think . . . whoever was in charge of this project wasn’t too tightly wrapped. They were playing with people’s lives!”
    “Okay, I’m thinking illegal , and unethical and Mad Doctors on the loose ,” said Happy. “Did the company, did MSI, know they were doing this?”
    “Looks like it,” said Melody. “The orders and authority for this last test came straight from the top. But I would have to say, given the results these people were getting, and the scientists’ reactions to what they were seeing . . . I would have to say they were all most definitely scared shitless. The changes went a lot further, and at a much faster pace, than anyone anticipated.”
    “Did it kill them all, in the end?” said Happy. “Is that what happened to the test volunteers? The scientists panicked, and had to dispose of the bodies?”
    “Unfortunately, no,” said Melody. “The test subjects survived. And changed. There’s nothing here on what they became, but it couldn’t have been anything good.”
    “Is there anything there on which patients had the placebos?” said Happy. “I mean, they wouldn’t have gone through any changes. Could they still be here, somewhere?”
    “There were no placebos,” said Melody. “They didn’t care about rigorous scientific procedures, they wanted as many affected test subjects as possible.”
    “But that’s . . .”
    “Unethical? Illegal? No-one here gave a damn about any of that, Happy. They thought the company was big enough, and powerful enough, that they didn’t have to care about things like that. Which meant this was never a legal test of a legal drug, for legal purposes. MSI was after bigger fish.”
    “Superhumans,” said Happy. “For the Military, or Intelligence, or maybe for themselves.”
    “Might help to explain why there was such a fight over jurisdiction once it all went wrong,” said Melody. “But it doesn’t explain why MSI asked for us, specifically, to come in and clean up their mess. They must have known we’d find out the truth . . .”
    “Maybe they thought only people with our unique experience would be able to cope with whatever these test subjects have become,” said Happy. He looked quickly about him. “And I wish I had their confidence.”
    They all met up again, half-way down the corridor, to share what they’d discovered. There followed a certain amount of raised voices as they tried to figure out what to do next.
    “We are not equipped to deal with genetically modified madmen!” said Happy.
    “Who is?” said JC. “But we are uniquely suited to dealing with things and situations that fall outside normal parameters.”
    “MSI