Project Darwin

Project Darwin is a pre-War research facility controlled by Irwin John Finster.

Background
The first (and only) director of Project Darwin was Irwin John Finster. A man with interests in mathematics, baseball, psychology and cybernetics, he led a dedicated team of scientists with the mission of creating life that would adapt to a post-nuclear war. The covert nature of the research would prevent the research team from gaining a Nobel prize in genetics, which was won by Andrea Mills from Sleeper One. This led to an escalating rivalry between the two research centers, which went even further as Irwin John Finster attempted to enhance his performance with aid from Base Cochise AI, turning into a cyborg. With that, he lost his humanity.

After the war broke out, Darwin became isolated. The town was self-sufficient and over time grew extremely xenophobic and withdrawn, but at the same time a haven for wasteland outcasts and those who couldn't fit elsewhere. One of them was Dr. Jekyll, who opened a Body Shop in the city limits. The base's police also became increasingly wary of any outsiders, sometimes shooting them on sight.

Darwin changed it's mission only slightly - now, it aimed to produce life capable of surviving in the harsh wasteland, useful life. As Irwin John Finster became a cyborg through the influence of Cochise's AI, he created a cybernetic interface called the Mindlink, to oversee the research and control the labs directly. Other research team members were disturbed at the results of his research and eventually, Finster begun releasing some of the creatures into the town to terrorize the populace, locked up most of the staff in the lower levels of Project Darwin and infected lower ranking security and maintenance staff members with a disease to prevent them from reveling the truth.

Finster was cooperating with the Base Cochise AI, to fulfill it's goal of creating the perfect form of life that would inherit the Earth. The vision was madness to the common human - Earth would be transformed into a red planet, populated by mutants unlike anything any man could dream before. The labs of Darwin and the biodomes served as cultivators for the plague that would consume the Earth as we knew it.

Before the plan could come to fruition, however, Finster was assassinated by a group of Desert Rangers, who also shutdown the project permanently, to prevent the plague from being released.