Per the terms of her extraction, PoI-7701 has been provided a small cottage near Site-74, where she resides under house arrest.

PoI-7701: Hello, Dr. Carlson. Good to see you again. I hope you remembered the tape recorder this time?

Dr. Carlson: You as well, Dr. Craggs. And it's already recording.

PoI-7701: I suppose I should start explaining then, right?

Dr. Carlson nods.

PoI-7701: Well, you probably know how this goes. Work as wholesome US employee. Defected to Soviets. Soviet Union collapses. Where else is a bioweapons researcher supposed to find meaningful work?

PoI-7701 chuckles.

PoI-7701: Anyway, they brought me in and I was able to swipe a bunch of old GRU equipment - some of it self-developed, some of it 'borrowed' from other groups. In particular there were a couple old UK Ministry of Defense prototypes on something they called 'Blue Falcon' in their old rainbow-code project naming scheme. I had a bit of a laugh at that one. I didn't think the Brits would use American military slang, but they did.

Dr. Carlson: I don't understand.

PoI-7701: 'Blue Falcon' is a euphemism for 'buddy fucker'. It's the soldier in your platoon or company or whatever that would screw you over in a heartbeat just to get ahead. And what this 'Blue Falcon' project did was allow you to seize control of a person remotely at range. It seemed like the Limeys were trying to use this to start friendly fire incidents.

PoI-7701 gestures with her hands as if she has a gun, and points it at Dr. Carlson.

PoI-7701: It was pretty limited - not a long range, not a long time. But all you needed was maybe fifteen seconds - pop, pop, pop - and three of your buddies are down, and you're about to get turned into swiss cheese, and everyone else is going to be really confused and scared.

Dr. Carlson: That's horrifying.

PoI-7701: There were more issues than that, though. It was bulky, hard to use, caused psychological damage to operators, didn't always work… a real laundry list of issues. Eventually we scrapped that whole idea. Turns out brains are complicated and hard to manipulate at range.

PoI-7701: But it did provide a good starting point for the "Mike" program, which is what I presume you're actually interested in.

Dr. Carlson nods.

PoI-7701: We decided to abandon the whole friendly fire thing. The range bit was the hardest part. There aren't many good ways to manipulate brains, and most them require you to be in the meat - er, brains, I suppose.

PoI-7701: Instead, we decided we could use this as a rudimentary form of mind control. I mean, we already knew the principles and processes - and having a bunch of hardware crammed inside someone's head gave us a lot more control and finesse over what we could make happen in there, rather than taking figurative pot shots at range.

PoI-7701: So I send this proposal to the Delta Command, and they send me a couple million bucks, a lab, and maybe a hundred or so live subjects.

PoI-7701: While that sounds like a lot, it was actually a shoestring budget - I only got maybe a third of what I requested, and they told me to make it happen or I would be a test subject for the next guy.

PoI-7701: First order of business was to design the hardware. We were really breaking new ground - I know GRU 'P' wasn't doing anything like this, you guys certainly weren't doing anything like this, and I now know that Prometheus Labs didn't get very far. Given that this was something totally new and foreign… there was a lot of trial and error.

PoI-7701: Fun fact: a lot of brain surgeries often occur while the patient is awake. Brain surgery still isn't super well understood, and you need the keep the patient aware of what's going on to make sure that what you're cutting isn't too important. First fifteen or so died on the table, and the next fifteen ranged from comatose to retarded to paralyzed.

PoI-7701: After the first thirty or so practice surgeries - to figure out what modules worked and where, and where we could stick hardware without impairing stuff like motor skills - we started making real progress. Other than a few oopsies here and there, the other fifty we got implanted - we were even able to save most of prefrontal cortex, in most cases.

PoI-7701: Not that they'd need it or anything. Once that chip is in, any control they used to have is overridden.

PoI-7701: Next step was controller. That was pretty straightforward. Just had to find a cooperative test subject, which wasn't too hard. A fairly standard surgery and some implants later, and he's now got a serial port in the back of his head. Plug him into the machine, and BOOM! All the test subjects can be 'controlled' by our controller.

PoI-7701 airquotes the word 'controlled'.

PoI-7701: I say 'controlled' because - as I understand it - it wasn't really direct control. He could give them objectives, and designate certain things, but he couldn't make them to do anything directly. But hey, not bad for a first try.

Dr. Carlson: Can you recall the mechanism of control? Did controllers have to exert willpower, thought?

PoI-7701: Hm… I can't really remember right now. I think some nice scotch and an internet connection might jog my memory though.

Dr. Carlson: We'll take that into consideration. Please continue.

PoI-7701: So I send my findings back to Delta Command, and they give me a target. First, I'm disappointed. There's so much potential for these guys! Clearing minefields, bioweapons dispersal, forced dangerous labor. Even plain old distraction.

PoI-7701: But I read further. It's an old GRU site, run by someone I used to know. Piece of shit named Dmitri Kalasov, GRU 'P' interrogations guy. He kept count of how many bones he broke. I think it was somewhere in the thousands. Pretty sure he keyed my car. Anyway, he was old and decrepit at that point, in a nice sunset position. Apparently a CI guy defected to his site, and they wanted him offed. I saw an opportunity for payback, and I told them I would make an example out of them.

PoI-7701 whistles.

PoI-7701: By God, did we make an example. We put a bunch of extra bells and whistles in these poor sod's heads - they're virtually immortal as long as the implant's intact and the muscles still function. We armed our subjects with some old Soviet equipment - knives, AK-47s, what have you - and sent them on their merry way. That GRU site had maybe seventy-five security personnel, and a hundred others. Every one of them died a grisly death. Can you believe they ran old Dmitri through with his own fuckin' cane? Brutal.

PoI-7701 walks up to a cabinet and begins digging through files.

PoI-7701: I think I still have the AAR photos from that one, you want to see?

Dr. Carlson: Are they in the official files you gave us? If yes, don't bother.

PoI-7701: Spoilsport. Anyway…

PoI-7701 checks her watch.

PoI-7701: Oh, lunchtime. I guess I'll see you next week?

Dr. Carlson: Probably. Not sure if they'll send someone else.

PoI-7701 shrugs.

PoI-7701: Try to? That Dr. Foster squirms too much.