The first three XES units are given their orders.
Project Nexus was a secret project of the Earth Federation prior to the Third Civil War. Designed to create the ultimate soldier, it was a successor to Project Vitek as a scheme to clone dead soldiers and create multiple copies, each with the abilities and strengths of the donor corpse, but with greater reliance on cyborgization and other wetware enhancements to overcome the earlier operation's problems with recovered memories interfering with later programming. Due to the likely public outrcy and technical illegality of these experiments, for greater secrecy, the project was carried out by Internal Security at their top-secret Elysian Fields Research Facility in Bloemfontein, an outer-ring suburb of Avalon City. To the public, the facility was a Department of Agriculture research facility focusing on more efficient ways to use animal manure as crop fertillizer, but of course this cover story was just so much bull excrement.
In its final form, Version 5.2, it produced the XES unit, or eXperimental Engineered Soldier. Only a handful were ready prior to Rashid King being forced to prematurely launch his coup attempt, and the first fully operational unit, XES-3, code-named Damien Richter, was assigned as King's personal bodyguard for final field testing. In this role, he participated in King's failed coup attempt and the resulting bloodbath in the Grand Council Chambers, before being disabled by Xavier Pollos and forced to flee along with Herbert Gergenstein after Pollos went on to kill King. With the entire Internal Security organization now suspect following the treasonous acts of its commandant, Gergenstein ordered the surviving XES units to carry out a campaign of sabotage, kidnapping, assassination, and general mayhem, both to get revenge on InSec's enemies in the government, and to provide a distraction to enable his own escape into hiding.
The XES units performed above expectations, successfully carrying out multiple acts of mayhem and greatly adding to the confusion of the larger Battle of Avalon. Large segments of the capital city were laid waste by atomic explosions following the sabotage of several fusion reactors, Raptor HQ was bombed, and hundreds of soldiers and scientists kidnapped or killed. Many of those kidnapped were used as raw material for cloning a new wave of XES units, until there were hundreds of them active, operating from a secret HQ in the sewers under the city.
But even before King's coup, Project Nexus was being supplanted by the even more sophisticated cyborg soldier program of Project Nimrod.
Behind the Scenes[]
Of course, Project Nexus is named for the Nexus Six series of android replicants in Blade Runner.