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The hardest part of running an illegal lab where you experimented on human clones was applying for funding. There weren’t really any nonprofit organizations who encouraged human experimentation or anything that really looked at it, and there were only so many times you could lie about a project without having to show your results before word got around and people stopped giving you grants.
This was how Chiba Shizuo, Osaka Soushi, and Yaotome Sousuke were brought in. The lab needed funding; all three men had money, and truly stunning family issues.
Chiba Shizuo’s wife was infertile, and his mistress had a complicated pregnancy, and so he and the mistress had allowed the labs to experiment on the embryo. It had been born alive, and loved by its parents, but it had gone into organ failure after less than a decade and so the lab had taken it back, removed its hippocampus so it wouldn’t know to fight them, and then dropped it, the first of the failures, into a back room for observation. This was the experiment labeled 1D0L15H-7-Y, and Chiba Shizuo paid the lab well for its care, in the hopes that it would be returned to him someday. This would, of course, not have ever happened even if the lab wasn’t just using the man for his money—1D0L15H-7-Y had physically assaulted its sperm donor and fled his house soon before the organ failure set in, and if it had been human it likely would never have returned anyway.
Osaka Soushi, a business tycoon, needed a son for image purposes. The lab had provided this, at a high price, and the resulting clone had been perfect, for a while, until it became a little too perfect and took control of the stock market, and then it started to get curious about how Soushi’s brother financed his music career, and then… Well, the lab needed to protect itself, and so 1D0L15H-7-S’s hippocampus was removed as well, and it was placed with the rest of the failures.
Unlike the Osaka and Chiba failures, Yaotome Sousuke was both a good cash cow and good at actually raising a human clone. There were no organ failures, assaults, stock market issues, or inconvenient calls to the federal department of labor from his genetic offspring. However, divorce came for him as it did for everyone else the scientists in the lab were close to, and in the custody battle they got the clone back. This one’s memories they merely muted rather than destroying, just in case they needed to go to court for child support, and it was counted as the first success of the second generation and labeled TR1GG3R-G.
This scheme, accomplished three times, kept the lights on, if nothing else. It also provided more clones from whom the scientists could harvest blood and organs to sell on the black market, which was another good source of funding. It was also a dangerous one, though, and it was through this, and through the paper trail left by Yaotome’s child support payments that caught attention—first, from Yaotome’s personal assistant, a young woman named Anesagi Kaoru with an axe to grind over custody arrangements, and then from her to a young man named Okazaki Rinto, who was getting a Master’s in business and had a little too much time on his hands, and from him to a teenage girl named Takanashi Tsumugi, who had a nose for trouble and an infectious—and dangerous—curiosity.
Rinto followed the paper trail. Anesagi provided access to any and all of Yaotome’s records that might prove helpful in their research. And Tsumugi—
Tsumugi, freshly graduated from high school, young and reckless with her entire life ahead of her, snuck directly into the lab to see what she could find there.