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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4981642" data-attributes="member: 143">Interlude: Mission Aftermath and Base Priorities (May 27, 2008)Project Lazarus. When Alpha Team finally emerged from the Australian facility, there were still two hours to kill before the containment team and refueling tanker were scheduled to arrive.  They spent most of that time in the decontamination unit erected by Stan White in the rear of the Skyranger.  Buzz spent the rest of the time, and most of the nine-hour flight back to base, jacked into the computer, working on the Australian base logs.  Most of them were damaged or encrypted, but by the time they returned to Nevada, he’d reconstructed a pretty good overview of what was going on at the base. Project Lazarus was a project being conducted by a team of scientists, headed by the brilliant cell geneticist Doctor Ernst Lieber.  The Australians captured a team of sectoid scouts during an early alien incursion, and brought them to an old World War II-era storage facility that had been converted into a nuclear research site in the waning days of the Cold War.  The Project Lazarus scientists, in their work on the captive sectoids, discovered the remarkable regenerative powers of the alien species, and the similarities between alien and human DNA.  Lieber believed that the alien biology could be used to give humans the ability to regrow damaged organs, and possibly even to reverse the progress of natural aging. The project began modestly, with several key discoveries about the alien physiology.  However, human applications proved elusive.  Some of the scientists recommended sharing their information with other researchers, including the newly-established X-COM.  However, a disturbing incident where a technician was caught trying to leave the base with a sample hidden in his boot led to a security crackdown.  Recognizing the deadly potential of the research, Lieber began to institute more and more draconian security measures.  The technician, held as a prisoner, was "volunteered" to serve as the first human test subject of the project.  Using some alien technology taken from the captured alien ship, the scientists started growing a hybrid clone based on a sheep embryo, injecting it with alien and human DNA.  The hybrid creature thus created was never intended to live, and in fact lacked any higher brain functions whatsoever.  The researchers intended to induce the clone to produce hormones that could stimulate latent regenerative properties in human cells. It was not clear from the records what went wrong.  There were reports of scientists growing ill, and hints that there might have been some sort of security breach in the latter days of the project.  Lieber's reports became less frequent, and some of the other scientists commented in e-mails that he was becoming more and more erratic in his behavior.  The technician test subject sickened and died, and there was a brief fragment of a report, the words on the screen dripping panic, about the "dead man" breaking out of the morgue and attacking two guards, strangling one with his own rifle strap before he was literally shot to pieces. The last days of the base existed only in fragments of damaged files.  Apparently some of the researchers tried to escape, only to be foiled by Lieber's lockdown protocols.  Eventually one of the last surviving scientists managed to hack into a minor system, using it to get a message out into the communications array.  The bypassing of the security protocols is what allowed X-COM to intercept the message. That’s where Alpha Team came into the picture. * * *</blockquote>

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