Sound came in a combination of garbled words and phrases with the rare sentences that made little or no sense thrown in to keep him on his toes.

After what seemed like centuries the sentences lengthened to admit full conversations.

"There is little cause for concern general the process first devised by Doctor Essex is keeping his healing factor under control while the process is completed." One voice was saying as Xander regulated his breathing so as not to give his consciousness away.

"Essex was a maniac and a traitor to the cause, now tell me why this project is going to work where Striker's Weapon X failed." A gruff voice said in the same manner it probably used to describe a dog pile the voice had just stepped in.

"Weapon X was destined to failure from the start. The Adamantium, while nearly indestructible increased the subject's weight to nearly nine hundred pounds while setting off every metal detector he ever walked through and still leaving him vulnerable to curtain… attacks." The first voice responded as Xander ran the voice through his memory to place where he had heard the female voice before.

"You're talking about how Magnus tossed him around like a rag doll or the fact it seems to be more then a little susceptible to electricity." The Gruff voice said with more then a hint of sarcasm.

With a smirk Xander could actually hear the first voice counter the gruff ones challenge. "Both actually. Leaving a weapon vulnerable to things like that is exactly the kind of insanity that Striker would allow just to see the 'Aberrations' put up a fight before they died while still keeping the weapon weak enough to control through the constant beating it went through."

"And this one's different… How?"

"This one is different because we used a special latticework of metal instead of coating the bones entirely, and the metal we used is a very special type called Trinium. As strong as Adamantium, as light as Aluminum and is completely immune to the effects of magnetism."

"And what about mind control? What exactly are we supposed to do if one of those… things takes our weapon over?"

"Telepaths and psychics hold no threat to the weapon due to the Arium latticework we lined the inside of the weapons skull, you may remember we found out about Arium while studying the Aberration Magneto's helmet, Arium has been found to be impervious to telepathic and psychic signals, making the weapon immune to mind control." The first voice said with a measure of pride in it's voice.

"It sounds almost perfect… what's the catch."

After a lengthy pause the first voice finally responded. "We can't control it either..." it said in an almost whisper that Xander had to strain to hear.

"WHAT!" the second voice shouted with a volume that would have assured Xander would have heard it even if had still been unconscious.

"Yet general, we can't control it yet, every control chip we insert into its neural pathways burns up within an hour." The first voice said in a slightly embarrassed tone.

After a heavy pause that Xander gathered was the General thinking the matter through he finally responded.

"Could this be some type of secondary mutation?"

"No, it fails to spike any of the X-gene sensors. We don't know how to explain it yet but we are constantly updating the design and we feel confident we should have a permanent model available for it in six month's time."

"We don't HAVE Six month's time Doctor, the mutant threat is rising and we need a response NOW."

Xander heard the doctor sigh before she continued. "General please try to understand, this is not some simple 'Plug & Play' device where you just slap it in wherever it fits and hope for the best, if we mess this up the BEST we can hope for is the subjects neural pathways frying, leaving it in a permanent vegetative state for the rest of it's life. Failing that we would be lucky for it to just scramble the long term memory paths leaving it with a type of amnesia, much like Weapon X and those are the BEST scenarios." The doctor said with a note of finality that stopped the conversation for a time as the other speaker ran through what could possibly happen if this where to go wrong.

Xander was just getting ready to make a break for it when a new voice broke into the room. "Doctor the Cardio monitor."

And snapped his eyes open in time to see a woman in a lab coat stick a long needle into his arm. As the world swam away Xander caught the last bits of the conversation.

"Keep working on your weapon Doctor Rosenberg, but I'm going to approve the Sentinel Project… just in case…"

The rest swam away as Xander's mind locked on the betrayal by Willow's mom.

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