The Project

"As for you..." Wei Xiuming turned to Gideon Malick. "I have something for you to handle. Since you have influence at NASA, you're the perfect person to be in charge of it. If necessary, you can bring in the World Security Council—or let the American military foot the bill."

"What do you need me to do?" After discovering that the god his branch had worshipped for thousands of years was actually a slave, Gideon Malick suddenly seemed as though his backbone had been ripped out. His whole bearing turned dejected. Losing one's purpose in life was a terrible blow, after all; going gray overnight wasn't just a figure of speech.

At the same time, however, a new hope flared within him. In the thousands of years since Hydra's founding, no matter how hard they had tried, they had never achieved anything worthwhile. They had made a fortune investing in aerospace and other high-tech projects, but life had still been plain and tedious. Now that he knew all his efforts would be pointless even if they succeeded, Malick felt oddly relieved.

"An outer-space defense system, a line of defense made up of twenty-four satellites. Even with it, we'd still be in trouble if the three great empires or other forces invaded. But it would at least make it harder for the Ravagers or other wanderers to come and go from Earth as freely as if it were their own home," Wei Xiuming said.

If his face hadn't been hidden behind a gas mask, his expression would have revealed just how disappointed he was in them.

At this point, it wasn't just Gideon Malick who was interested. Pierce perked up, too. "What about equipment like space warships? To deal with outside threats, we can't just be forced to defend ourselves. We need to take the fight to them!"

"Space warships?" Wei Xiuming scoffed. "You're getting ahead of yourselves. With Earth's current industrial base, do you really think you can build a ship that can take off and land freely, break through the atmosphere without rocket assistance, and travel between planets? The materials needed for a main battle ship to withstand extreme forces can't even be synthesized in the most advanced laboratories on Earth today."

"Even if you could build a ship capable of long-distance travel, not a single weapons system on Earth was designed for combat in outer space. If you ran into an alien ship, it'd be like a warship from the age of sail facing a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. If you started a new development project, the aliens would probably have turned Earth into a colony by the time it was finished. Even if I put a set of blueprints in front of you, it'd be like handing plans for a nuclear weapon to people in the steam age. Without the foundational knowledge, you might not even understand what you were looking at. Even if the entire world's industrial might were brought to bear back then, you might not have been able to build so much as a graphite pile."

"Given Earth's current level of technology, an outer-space defense system is the best value for money. Other things, like vacuum implosion bombs and gravity interference devices... even the most basic neutron inhibitor for shutting down nuclear reactors is beyond what you should even think about right now."

Wei Xiuming was pleased with how the two Hydra leaders had reacted. He could hardly believe that a few words had convinced two old foxes. He'd spent years earning Nick Fury's trust; there was no way he hadn't stacked the deck here, too.

He had genuinely studied human thought and the way hormones affected emotions, and even conducted experiments. By using his magnetic-field ability to interfere with the body's bioelectric currents, he could stimulate feedback from the nerve endings and indirectly influence the way people thought. The first time he used it in earnest was on Pierce and Malick.

This level of ability went far beyond what the original Magneto could do. It was practically a kind of psychic power in its own right.

But the human body was an extremely precise instrument, and the more precise something was, the more likely it was to malfunction. After Wei Xiuming forcibly disrupted their endocrine systems with his ability, the two men would undoubtedly suffer physical side effects—perhaps even fall seriously ill.

His electromagnetic abilities also interfered strongly with electronic devices, so a little attention would reveal something was wrong. This meeting was a secret among secrets. To keep the information from leaking, everyone had left their electronic devices outside the conference room. And neither old man had a pacemaker despite their heart problems. That had given Wei Xiuming a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

"Next on the agenda: creating a Super Soldier for Hydra." Wei Xiuming continued, "Given the current state of technology, a genetic adjustment program involving gene editing during the embryonic stage to produce a next generation with high intelligence and enhanced physical abilities isn't very practical, either in terms of feasibility or cost. So I recommend mechanizing the human body."

At those last words, Rumlow, who had been standing off to the side like a background extra and looking stunned the entire time, suddenly darkened. He remembered the human augmentation plan he'd heard about in Nick Fury's office. So I can't escape it after all?

"Rumlow, this is your destiny," Wei Xiuming said. "As a Hydra hero, you'll lose most of your body during the execution of Project Insight and be forced to undergo biomechanical augmentation. That history changed because I came along, but have you really not considered getting the procedure anyway? After you retire at ninety, surgery could restore you to a normal human form—with the body of a young man."

Wei Xiuming was only saying this to provoke Rumlow. Hydra had a firm grip on its members. Brainwashing was a common tactic, and its operatives were like ancient death warriors: if captured, they immediately took poison and killed themselves.

But Rumlow's loyalty to Hydra clearly wasn't that strong. After Project Insight was thwarted in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, he saw that all was lost and left the organization. He gathered a group of men and became a mercenary, using the alias Big Daddy—no, strike that, his codename was Crossbones. He was killed by his own bomb vest.

If Rumlow couldn't get past his psychological resistance and became half man, half machine, but Hydra's leaders forced him to undergo the procedure anyway, that would make for quite a show. It would be even better if Wei Xiuming could use the opportunity to recruit Brock Rumlow. He was short on talent. Though he was dealing with two large organizations, his own situation wasn't much better than being completely alone.

Doctor Death's alternate body was a cyborg, and whenever he activated it, he had to wear a special neural interface to control it remotely. The strength it could bring to bear was pitifully weak.

As for the Shocker combatants, they had started out as drifters used in human enhancement experiments. After the experiments succeeded, they were supposedly "disposed of in secret," but Wei Xiuming had secretly kept them and performed brain surgery on them, turning them into simple-minded fighters. He'd then equipped them with combat suits and basic Mechanical Exoskeletons. Their combined strength was only about two and a half times that of an average adult man. They were terribly weak.

"I do have a good candidate in mind for the human augmentation," Pierce said. "The Winter Soldier from Hydra's Siberian branch. His real name is James Barnes."