| abstract | - CW ASPECT was the secure ONI cryptonym for Operation Forecast (FORECAST)—a HUMANCONFIG special access program funded, overseen, and operated by the UNSC Office of Naval Intelligence, Directorate for Special Intelligence/Section Three, UNSC Department of Biological Warfare, Program in Human Synthesis. CW ASPECT fell under the overarching auspices of the HUMANCONFIG paradigm—to perpetuate the augmented cadre of the UNSC Special Forces, why let evolution do the work and then step in and recruit the most fit members of the species as children (e.g., the SPARTAN-II Program)? Instead, given a 26th understanding of biology — specifically, developmental biology — and also a nuanced knowledge of how to alter that process (utilizing chemical biology techniques) — why not fashion one's ideal adult from a fetus? Draw together disparate components — for example, manipulation of limbic development and that of the nervous system — and re-engineer human development with the tools that one at hand? It is difficult to alter a person after they're borne, because one is constrained by the pre-determined anatomical geometry of the body (and thus one is restricted to relatively limited augmentations à la the SPARTAN-II augmentation procedures). Why not when one is plastic as an embryo, to shape and mold that nascent, emergent human according to one's design while one can still have a hand in its formation? CW ASPECT was undoubtedly ambitious, recklessly so—it drew from the PATRIOT, SCARLET, and HUMANCONFIG initiatives already ongoing at the Office of Naval Intelligence. The former, SCARLET, was less science than madness—it was the umbrella for all UNSC Office of Naval Intelligence/Acumen Science Laboratories investigations into Flood biology. The aim here, as insane as it was, was to apply limited isolated components of Flood molecular circuitry — namely, several cardinal transcription factors (the B3 transcription factors of the BRANDY genetic space) — to human development in utero to see if they would favorably perturb human development. An initially unqualified disastrous failure, CW ASPECT had little scientific rationale in its execution, though there was some extent of rigorous theoretical thinking involved in the deconvolution of the mechanism of action of B3 in human cells under the PATRIOT project's initial phases of development. Its only result was at first a dubious and ambivalent one, then a significant one. The sole product of the ethically-dubious and the ruinously costly program would be AURORA—the codename for Chief Petty Officer Kimberly Ivy Blackburn.
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