I know that I've got other stuff to work on, but I have this one in my head and I love it!

Prolog—Termination

"What?!" Vlad Masters yelled incredulously at the GIW general. "We can't just do that! Do you know how long this took us? Almost twenty years of planning, researching, developing—and you want to end it all on a whim!?"

The black man looked down on the fuming scientist with little sympathy for what Masters was saying. His sunglasses hid his eyes, but the way his mouth frowned, the general could care less about what Vlad wanted.

"It is not whim sir, it is fact," the general spoke with authority in a scathing monotone.

The general turned his gaze back onto the object that was being discussed. The body that was in a half-frozen, half-sleeping state was still pale looking behind the yellow-tinted glass of the tube. It had been pulled out of the wall just like it would at the city morgue; only, the subject wasn't dead.

"It is unstable," the general said clipped. "You cannot find a solution to this problem."

"Not yet," Vlad said, stressing each word to try and get through the general's thick head. "We may be close to one."

"May is not a word I am fond of Masters," the general turned from the subject and walked purposely towards the door. "If you can't get anywhere with this one, then melt it down and start over. Our money will not be wasted on fruitless acts. We've been waiting to see results Masters, and so far, we haven't seen any."

"Then how about you do my job and I can just blow people up?" Vlad shot back. "This isn't easy you know. Messing with genetics is like handling the most fragile glass on the planet. One wrong move and it can destroy everything."

The general waved it off as he brushed some invisible dirt off of his pristine suit.

"And one wrong move on your part, and your funding will be cut," the general threatened. "Start over if you have to Masters, but I will not fund this any longer. Terminate that worthless piece of flesh, or you will be terminated—permanently."

Vlad ground his teeth harshly as the general left the holding-lab. His anger was lost however when he turned back to look at the 'worthless piece of flesh' the general had been referring too. To Vlad, he was much more than a science project, he was almost like a son in some odd way. It was true that Vlad had spent more of the lab's money into helping out this one subject than anything else. In actuality, it should have been terminated long ago, but Vlad never had the heart. This was his first success to get the Phantom Project into an actual form, there had been fifty failed experiments and this one had been the only one to make it, but not for much longer.

"I won't let them hurt you," he vowed to the silent form. "I promise, but what am I going to do?"