For years, human experimentation has been outlawed and condemned by people and governments across the world. It has been called one of the most vile, contemptuous acts a person could enact on another. Those words, however, are based in morality rather than the truth of the human condition. For so long as there are unanswered questions, there will be those who will obsess and seek to understand, to improve and change, the human body. Despite their words that damn the actions of scientists and seekers of understanding, the men and women in charge will still turn to them and ask that they challenge and overstep the boundaries they themselves created.

The year is unimportant- no longer written on tests or in catalogs- and the country has no name (If one were to go through the records of history, it would be found that it stood where once the country called England reigned). There is a war across what was once an ocean, and many people of the nameless, border-less country have been sent there to break the fighting and install peace. These efforts, kind though they may seem, are wasted on those who live there; the war is, after all, the fault of the very people who were there claiming to be peace brokers.

Both men and women are maimed and killed in the line of duty, serving as scapegoats for the anger directed at a government whose people would never step foot in the arid land now torn apart and painted in death.

As it is, the war itself is unimportant. The true result is in its treatment of the survivors. Prosthetic limbs are a common sight, just as they were years ago, but now there are whole bodies that have been reconstructed, men and women given second lives as androids after their own, natural bodies were hacked apart.

These are the circumstances surrounding the lives of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, two men who have been made more and less than human.