The Red Series were supersoldiers from South Africa who were enhanced by neural implants in their necks. This gave them extraordinary strength and durability, greater than even Manticore Transgenics.
Description[edit | edit source]
All Red soldiers were convicts, who were recruited from Death Row with the promise of several more months of life and relative freedom serving their country.
When a soldier was chosen, an implant was inserted (painfully) into the back of his neck, where it attached itself to the brain stem and began to rewire neural pathways. When the process was complete, the pain centers of the brain were deactivated, ensuring that the soldier would feel no pain and therefore would be essentially fearless. They also became hyper-adrenalized, granting them vastly superior physical strength and ruggedness. In this condition, a Red Series could withstand a tremendous amount of physical abuse, and could survive multiple gunshots to the torso. In the end, however, the strain on their nervous system was too great, and they burned out after about six months, a year at best.
Activities[edit | edit source]
In the year 2019, a team of several Red Series soldiers was sent to Seattle, Washington. Their mission was to capture an X5 series from Manticore. They were told that the scientists behind the Red Series project believed that by using the genetic code of a transgenic as a basis, they could engineer the Red soldiers' DNA and adapt them so that they could tolerate their implants for much longer.
The team indeed located an X5, Max Guevara/X5-452, who was one of the X5's who had escaped from Manticore years earlier and was living in Seattle. They attempted to capture her, but although she was no match for three Red soldiers, she managed to escape. The group of Reds spent several more weeks searching for her, and, during that time, had to replace one of their number, Red Six, who had died from his implant.
Eventually, they found Max once more and went after her, but during the pursuit, another Red, Red Eight, was killed. The remaining soldiers then took one of Max's friends hostage, and, with nothing else to do, Max used the implant from the dead soldier to supercharge herself beyond even the normal limits of an X5. In a fierce fight, she killed the remaining Reds, but immediately collapsed from the strain; the Red Series could tolerate the implant for months, but it was not designed for a transgenic, and Max could only last a few hours with it active. Fortunately, two friends of Max, Original Cindy and Logan Cale, managed to disable the implant by short-circuiting it with a defibrillator.
Just before his death, one of the Red soldiers, Red Five, overheard his handler mentioning to Max that there had never been any hope for his men, and that they were simply told what they wanted to hear. In truth, South Africa wanted to capture Max for her egg cells and produce transgenic supersoldiers of their own. Summoning the last of his strength, the Red soldier killed his leader, and with his last breath stated, "No regrets."
Known People Involved[edit | edit source]
- Johanssen
- Red Five
- Red Six
- Red Seven
- Red Eight