“You have everything that Slash and the guys found in your email,” Gray said, pulling up the shared files on her tablet. “They sent them to all of us. It’s not much, but it’s a starting point.”
“We’ll start there and build the rest from scratch,” I said.
The laptop screen lit my face as I began probing Tango Bio Research Solutions—public records, private filings, subcontractor relationships, university affiliations, anyone doing business with them in the last decade. Their public-facing front was all biomedical development, safety protocols, ethical commitments. A glossy shield.
Too glossy.
“Purportedly,” Gwen said, sipping coffee and reading her notes, “Tango Bio is researching next-gen medicines and antibiotics, using mostly animal-to-human pathogen vectors. Normal stuff, on paper.”
“But not in practice,” I muttered.
Gwen nodded. “No, not in practice. And if a previously shut down CIA biological project was ever going to resurface…”
“It would be under something like this,” Gray finished, pacing the length of the table. “Maybe we should request a surprise inspection. Sic them on the lab.”
“Sic who on the lab?” Basia asked.
“The US government agency that’s responsible for implementing that Animal Welfare Act Lexi was talking about earlier,” Gray responded. “I don’t know exactly who that would be, though.”
Gwen sat back in her chair. “That would be the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS for short. If any facility is mistreating animals, that’s the agency that would shut it down in a heartbeat.”
“So, it’s easy. We request an immediate inspection from APHIS,” Basia said.
“Hate to be the realist here, but I doubt it would happen any time fast,” Gwen replied. “Especially since we have no proof of anything, just a suspicion.”
“I agree with Gwen,” I said, “Those inspections are likely to take days, even weeks, to schedule and execute, and that’s if they even believed us in the first place.”
“I don’t think we have weeks,” Gray said quietly. “They seemed especially eager to get Ginger back as soon as possible…for something.”
Since we all agreed with her assessment, that ended that discussion.
Energized by anger and concern, I drank a couple of mugs of coffee and dived deeper into Tango Bio’s server activity by hiding behind a series of chained VPNs while testing their security. Their infrastructure was unfortunately active, fortified, and well maintained. If I were to hack, it wouldn’t be an easy one.
At some point, Gwen slid her phone across the table. “Check this out, Lexi. I found several old articles about the Vision Zone Technology animal operation in Arizona that led to their closure and supposedly abandoning their research. The later articles report on the progress of the federal and state inquiries, but it is the initial investigative piece that is most interesting. Prepare yourself—it’s shocking. I am pretty sure this was article Slash cited that led to the place being shut down.”
I clicked the link and saw a twenty-year-old investigative piece written by Arizona journalist Barbie Shutt. The evocative title read, “Vision Zone Technology Revealed to Be Using Illegal Animal Testing.” Gray and Basia also pulled up a copy of the article on their devices and started reading.
Shutt’s reporting was crisp and damning. She detailed how Vision Zone had posed as a cutting-edge sensory-research subsidiary while secretly running cognitive-enhancement trials on felines, canines, and primates. Current and former employees described relentless neurological restructuring protocols, implanted behavior overrides, and intelligence-escalation trials so extreme that most animals failed to survive the experiments.
Vision Zone denied everything, but from leaked documents and whistleblower accounts, Shutt compiled a disturbing picture of a lab pushing animals beyond natural physical and psychological limits in the name of science. A second article reported that when state and local authorities inspected the site, investigators had to stop the raid twice to compose themselves.
It sickened me.
Of particular interest, however, was one of the experiments that Shutt uncovered, the Enhanced Canine Intelligence Unit. It purportedly involved cognitive and behavior modeling, neural enhancement mapping, and language-pattern comprehension testing on dogs. My heart skipped a beat as I read on. The lab-trained dogs appeared to have been designed for situational awareness predictions, advanced communication techniques, and emotional responsiveness conditioning. There was a brief mention of technology adaptation trials, but from all accounts, most dogs failed to demonstrate proper responses to the protocols or had been broken and discarded after the relentless, brutal experiments. I was surprised they hadn’t created any monsters. Maybe they had. Regardless, the lab’s training program failed miserably to meet the standards of the AWA—no surprise there. Unfortunately, when they shut down the lab, most of the animals had to be put down because they were too damaged.
“This is beyond vile,” Gray murmured.
“Disgusting,” Basia added.
I agreed with both of those opinions, so I scrolled on.
The photographs accompanying the article were even worse than the narrative, if that was possible. Rows of metal cages packed with animals showing surgical incisions and restraint harnesses. Lab schematics annotated with chilling technical precision and stainless-steel operating tables under stark fluorescent lights. Trays of scalpels and electrodes ready for procedures that no ethics board would ever approve.
The lab had denied everything, of course, but the paper trail, the investigation, and several former employees told a different story. The lab was immediately shut down for good—or so everyone thought.
All this started to make sense. If somehow this branch of research had continued unchecked, Ginger wasn’t naturally smart. The lab had built her to be smart. Who knows what she and others like her had to endure to reach that capacity?
“Unbelievable,” Gray finally said. “Is Ginger even a real dog?”
