Agent Diaz: The Last Hours of Purity
One hour. Sixty minutes, or three thousand, six hundred seconds. That's all the time it took for the UAC installation on Phobos to be completely overrun. Accounts would likely have differed about when the incident actually took place...if there were any humans left alive to give accounts.
From the RCPA's perspective, though, the incident began at least five years earlier. That's when the Union Aerospace Corporation made international headlines by becoming the first corporation to found a colony on another world. Prior to that day, colonies on Earth's moon and Mars were largely the domain of governments and non-profit space agencies. What they wouldn't give to have a multi-trillion-dollar conglomerate like the UAC funding their efforts. Thanks to the funding and resources provided by the UAC, the new installation was finished in only a few short years, having its own hermetically-sealed "bio-dome" ready to sustain the lives of a few thousand employees, from researchers to engineers...and, much as the UAC denied it, human test subjects.
That's about where the Research Crimes Prevention Agency came in. On paper, the RCPA is a UN-backed international entity that aims to ensure that the betterment of humanity is carried out ethically and peacefully. With branches all over the world, and acknowledgement by at least a hundred national governments, the RCPA were responsible for drafting the "Stanford Convention": a series of laws and guidelines meant to govern safe and responsible research.
But of course, the RCPA was so much more than just that. Should a research group breach the rules put down by the Stanford Convention, the RCPA were given authority to shut down any laboratories found to be operating against protocols, and failing that, shutting them down by force. RCPA might have officially been just a paper tiger, but when a company refused to comply, RCPA agents had full authority to liquidate everything. Within the first couple of years, RCPA authorities arrested several biomechanic scientists, a few psionics experts, and at least one rogue cosmetics designer.
So by that respect, it should not have surprised anybody that, when the UAC had released its testing schedule for what was then known as "Project Wells" - named for author H. G. Wells - the RCPA elected to send an agent to Mars as a "peacekeeper." Of course, not without backup, but said backup was not to be inserted - let alone landed - unless contact was lost with the first agent. Among many candidates from many RCPA branches, it was determined that two agents from the RCPA's offices in Madrid were to be chosen for the job: Olivia Diaz and "Agent" Hernandez. Diaz's insertion into Mars City was to occur at precisely one hour before Project Wells' prototype was to be activated. During such time, Diaz's "official" orders were simply to monitor the test. But her real orders, under the table, were not to be near the test site at all - her task was to search and obtain documents incriminating Union Aerospace for unethical practices relating to Project Wells. Though it leaves to be said, that this would have worked a lot better had the UAC not been lying in the schedule.
As Diaz touched down, there was no greeting party for the shuttle at port. Most personnel were missing, if not dead. And, from Diaz's report, there was no denying that the place reeked of...something. Not just death. Something worse.
