Kimberly Ivy Blackburn



"I have looked at [the] proposed experimental regimen. It is completely unacceptable. If you execute the protocol, I will immediately report you to the UNSC Medical Corps."

- Beah Schore to Admiral Gibson

"The most ethically questionable action ever conducted in the history of medicine."

- Rear Admiral Montgomery

Talon, born as Kimberly Ivy Blackburn, also known by her pseudonyms, Aurora and Nike, was an operative of the UNSC Office of Naval Intelligence. She was the first human born from "human synthesis" theory, and was involved with FORECAST, HUMANCONFIG, and PATRIOT.

Birth
"I will kill you."

- Beah Schore to Gibson upon finding out about FORECAST's ethical implications

She was born in 2554 in Asphodel Meadows Naval Special Warfare Center, Asphodel Meadows as the daughter of Alexandria Clarissa Blackburn under the auspicies of Projects PATRIOT and FORECAST. Under FORECAST, her mother, as well as the rest of the thousands of women enrolled in the FORECAST program, would be hormone-primed and artificially impregnated, and during the entire nine month span of pregnancy, would be continually perfused to the potent teratogen and mutagen SCARLET.

FORECAST would end up being a significant disaster for the UNSC Office of Naval Intelligence. While estrogen priming and impregnation was a technique well-perfected in model animals such as mice, and was a common clinical procedure to perform on humans, SCARLET, previously never tested in vivo with humans, much less developing fetuses, would turn the project into a sinister failure. Within days of exposure to the compounds, thousands of women died, beginning to grow second heads, extra arms and legs, sprouting extra fingers from the chest. By the end of one week, over four thousand women died, or were put into such excruciating, inhumane pain from the mutations that they were euthanized.

Only one of the human models — Alexandria Clarissa Blackburn would survive past a week. Commodore Cooke became principally responsible for this gigantic miscarriage — killing over four thousand women in a week by inducing the growth of extra limbs and body parts, for inhumanely slaughtering the women by usage of SCARLET, which had never before been tested in women. Admirals Gibson and Montgomery would severely chastise Cooke, and when Beah Schore found out, Cooke was at the risk of losing his command.

In November 2554, it was to everyone's consummate surprise when Alexandria would successfully reach to term and would give birth to a perfectly normal child, a female, Kimberly Ivy Blackburn. Although Alex was in paroxysms of agony and also metabolic failure from SCARLET, she would survive to give birth to Kimberly, and Alex was immediately put on BLUEBERRY, rescuing the mother from death from the combined mutagenic potential of SCARLET and the exertions of labor. After birth, Kimberly was immediately taken from Alex by the UNSC Department of Biological Warfare, who would claim Kim as their own, and rename her "Talon" in an attempt to destroy the daughter's knowledge of any of her heritage, forcing Kimberly to believe that she was born into the UNSC Office of Naval Intelligence.

Childhood
"The forecast predicts sunny skies and no rain."

- Cooke

Although the Department of Biological Warfare and Section Three extensively hypothesized about how Talon's physical body would be ravaged, horribly mangled beyond any normal human being because of her exposure to ultrahigh concentrations of SCARLET in the womb, surprisingly, after several months, it became readily obvious that Talon was physically perfect, and far from being a defective child or some gruesome mutant, would be the exemplar of human health. This was corroborated when her mother, Alexandria Clarissa Blackburn, made a full and complete recovery from her exposure to the SCARLET agent, and certain Section Three members had detailed thoughts on Alexandria after her exposure. However, Kimberly's health and fitness were remarkable — in the highest percentiles of the SPARTAN-II children, or even exceeding them in many aspects, even outstripping certain SPARTANs such as John, Kelly, Sam, and Fred in particular characteristics.

Immediately, Cooke began to act on Talon — many Section Three officers would begin to construct legendary myths of Kimberly as the only child that survived after her fetus was exposed to saturating concentrations of SCARLET, a Flood-like mutagen. Many would hold her in even higher regard than the SPARTAN-IIs and the SPARTAN-IIIs, who had been exposed only to limited numbers of far less potent chemical and biological mutagens, and at much lower doses and for a far shorter timespan — and when they were twelve or thirteen, at the peak of their physical health, compared to Kimberly, who had to resist the teratogen as a developing fetus. Kimberly immediately began her education prematurely by hypno-imprinting, and several months after birth, during sleep, she would be hypnotically imprinted with key knowledge — how to read, how to speak — a technically biologically-accomplishable feat because of the extensive plasticity of the postnatal brain. Because of this hyperplasticity, Talon would learn this exceptionally well and quickly, her recently-born amorphous mind capable of absorbing and integrating knowledge with far more tenacity than any older child, who had less plastic neural hippocampal circuitry.

Genetic Heritage: A Legacy of SPARTANs
Kimberly would also become a legendary mythology in Section Three because of her perfectness; something that had been deliberately designed through ethically- and morally-dubious "human synthesis".

After Alexandria would be captured on Nazareth, Beryl, Cooke would conduct genetic screening of all the women involved in the FORECAST program and would find that Alexandria had a peculiar genetic profile; she had the genetic flags associated with creativity and fitness, and a lack of the genetic markers that predisposed to illness, and upon further investigation, found that Alex well-fit Dr. Halsey's exacting criterion for the SPARTAN-IIs — that if Alex had been born thirty years earlier, she would have been a fine SPARTAN-II. Kimberly's mother was thus in supreme physical and mental health because of her genetics; something that would allow Alex to survive the exposure to SCARLET. Furthermore, Kimberly's father was renowned as well. While Section Three had always wanted to mate together SPARTANs to see whether or not SPARTAN traits were genetically inherited, this proved impossible because the SPARTAN augumentation protocol included virilization that diminished sexual drive. However, ONI was able to artificially derive sperm from the male SPARTAN-IIs through iPS reprogramming and germline differentiation — and they artificially impregnated the women of the FORECAST project with SPARTAN-117's sperm.

Thus, in an ethically-condemnable genetic breeding, Kimberly was the daughter of a father who was the most famous SPARTAN-II and also a mother who could potentially have been chosen as a SPARTAN-II.

ONI said that this was a significant proportion of the explanation of how Kimberly was physically superior and exceptional — while the SPARTAN-IIs had been inimitable physically, a breeding between SPARTANs would, in theory, the paramount cream of the crop.

Physical Augumentations
Understanding that Kimberly had managed to survive intense exposure to SCARLET in utero, Cooke authorized that Kimberly undergo the SPARTAN surgical and biochemical at a young age, with a high chance of survival, and also the added benefit that at a younger age, the body would still be able to develop around and more fully integrate and incorporate these augumentations. Talon was subjected to some of the previous SPARTAN augumentations, as well several new experimental protocols.


 * Superconductance of myelinated fibers: Talon was infused with a solubilized form of conjugated anti-myelin silver salt that selectively perfused myelinated nerve fibers in the central and peripheral nervous systems, an improved version of the nervous augumentation done to the SPARTAN-IIs to increase reflex times by superconducting nervous fibers, although this silver salt had the added benefit of being able to infuse into CNS myelinated tracks, and the phenotype effects of the non-specific targeting of higher cognitive functions was unexamined.
 * Transplant of pancreatic islets: Purified human pancreatic islets were isolated and transplanted into Talon's pancreas, allowing for increased glucose tolerance and enhanced metabolism to allow for increased growth and basal energy.
 * Encapsulation and cellular augumentation of skeletal muscle: Certain major skeletal muscles were encapsulated in an electrically-sensitive distensive membrane that contracted upon electrical stimulation; that is, nervous activation of muscles, effectively increasing contractive strength upon stimulation by bioengineering enhancement of contraction power. Skeletal muscle peripherals were also infused with FACS-purified skeletal muscle precursors (SMP), that were formerly shown by Harvard Stem Cell Institute in the 21st century to mediate muscle growth in mice, thus effectively increasing gross muscular growth in Talon. Muscles were also latently infused with (±)-Bay K 8644, a small molecule L-type Ca+2 channel agonist, inducing latent involuntary muscular contraction and subsequent growth.
 * Cardiac expansion and perfusion: Kimberly's heart was surgically dilated and expanded, allowing for increased space for cardiac musculature growth. The heart was also infused with a small-molecule analog of FGF8, a cytokine shown to be necessary for cardiac muscle expansion and regeneration in zebrafish. This led to increased cardiac capacity (end-diastolic volume) and contractile force, more efficiently perfusing the body with oxygen.
 * Pulmonary biological and mechanical expansion: Talon's lungs were locally infused with soluble Wnt5a and Wnt7b small-molecule analogs, cytokines shown to regulate lung size and epithelial / mesenchymal proliferation and branching in the developing lung. Wnt analog application led to hyperplastic lungs, increasing net lung size by distal expansion and also aveolar branching, increasing total lung capacity and forced vital capacity and also increasing the O2 / CO2 diffusion coefficient by increasing aveolar branching and mean blood interface surface area. The possible expansion size was increased by dilation of the pleural cavity.
 * Hematopoietic expansion: Kimberly's long bone marrow were infused with small-molecule analogs of erythropoietin and interleukin-3, inducing hematopoetic stem cell and myeloid stem cell self-renewal and resevoir increase, and also targeted expansion of megakaryoctes, erthryoblasts, and granulocyte colony-forming units (CFU), leading to vastly increased erythryocyte (red blood cell), platelet, and granulocyte production, increasing oxygen-carrying blood capacity, wound coagulation, and also non-specific immunity.
 * Pain tolerance: Talon's nociceptors were chemically ablated with titrated concentrations of diphtheria toxin A (DTA) conjugated to purified recombinant nociceptin, inducing irreversible apoptosis and of many peripheral nociceptors (pain receptors) and greatly increased pain tolerance.
 * Synaptic plasticity and spatial memory: Activity-dependent long-term potentiation (LTP) in the CA1-CA3 Schaeffer collateral circuit in the hypothalamus has been shown to be integral in spatial memory, plausibly through a Ca+2-dependent mediated by the NMDA receptor (NMDAR) and possibly voltage-depnedent calcium channels (VDCC). The NMDAR agonist (1S,2S)-1-(4-hydroxyphenyl)-2-(4-hydroxy-4-phenylpiperidin-1-yl)-1-propanol and Mg+2 celator EGTA were locally applied to the hippocampus, potentiating E-LTP and spatial memory.

Flood-like phenotypes
"I doubt we'll ever completely understand the partial Flood characteristics exhibited by Talon. SCARLET had always been a blind shot, and our understanding of human synthesis and human embryonic development currently can't even come close to understanding the effects of nonspecific mutations, especially in regards with xenobiology such as the Flood's."

- Rear Admiral Montgomery

During embryonic development in utero, Kim would be exposed to saturating concentrations of SCARLET in the womb; a small-molecule chemical cocktail that accurately in vitro replicated the phenotype of co-transduction of B3 transcription factors and the GAMBLE genetic sequences. The continual nine-month-long exposure of Kim to SCARLET, a potent teratogen, in the womb would lead to irreversible growth defects with an underlying Flood undertone due to the biological activity mimicked by SCARLET. SCARLET, which induced partial putative Flood-associated reprogramming in vitro in cultured cells, had never been tested in humans in vivo priorly, although the effects on the other four thousand women of the FORECAST project — horrible sprouting of extra limbs and body parts — made it obvious that the mutagen had disasterous effects for most humans exposed to the agent. Kimberly Blackburn, and her mother, Alexandria Blackburn, represent the two living human beings who have ever survived over a week of in vivo exposure to saturating concentrations of SCARLET. Thus, the Flood partial phenotype induced by SCARLET in utero exposure remains not well documented, with Kimberly acting as the first human to be fully characterized.
 * Abberant neurobiology: One of Kimberly's most peculiar birth defects compared to normally-born humans is a highly abberant and eccentric central and peripheral nervous system, and this is manifested on the neuroanatomy, cytoarchitectonics, and neurophysiology and molecular levels.
 * Aggression: Even upon gross examination, Talon's brain was abnormal, with a greatly engrossed prefrontal cortex, hypothalamus, and amygdala. The hypothalamus and the amygdala are well-known for controlling emotion and the expression of emotion, particularly rage and fear. The prefrontal cortex has been associated with higher-level cognitive functions; "executive functions" that control highly sophisticated social behaviors such as morality, troubleshooting, and decision-making. Furthermore, despite Kimberly's female sex, she has exceedingly high concentrations of the masculine steroid testerosterone, as well as androgynous steroids corticosterone, epinephrine, and dehydroepiandrosterone — all compounds that induce short-term and long-term rapidly-acting aggression. Serotonin, a modulatory neurotransmitter that represses rage, also has markedly decreased levels in Talon's brain.
 * Epileptic hyperexcitability: In the cortex, Talon's cytoarchitectonics are highly deviant, with hyper-innervation of almost all investigated neural circuits, with excessive numbers of axons and dendrites, with such abundance that even a small number do not synapse because of insufficient targets. Talon shows reinforcement of activating and inhibitory neural circuits because of excessive innervation, but the phenotypic consequence of this phenomenon is unknown, electrophysiological studies have shown that many of Talon's neurons are hyperexcitable, with a greatly increased basal electrical state and a decreased threshold to activation, leading to highly complex and never before observed normal electrophysiological brain activities, with proliferous spiking signals typically only seen in patients in an epileptic seizure.
 * Pain tolerance and sensation: Talon, even without her biosurgical augumentations, shows endogenous excessively high pain tolerance, with markedly decreased endogenous concentrations of nociceptin (pain-activating neurotransmitter) and extraordinarily high levels of enkephalin and anandamide (natural biologically-occuring pain relievers), which combinatorially serve to decrease pain reception. Furthermore, Talon's thalamus shows suprathreshold afferent and efferent innervation, especially to the eye, ear, nose, and somatosensors, thus increasing the ability of her central nervous system to recieve and integrate external sensory stimuli.
 * Nonspecific telomeric addition: A significant proportion of Kimberly's bodily cells, whether or not terminally-differentiated functional somatic cells or renewing stem cells, strongly express hTERT, the human telomerase gene. Telomerase protects against DNA degradation, thus greatly increasing cell lifespan; cellular in vitro experiments in the 20th century have shown that constituitively active telomerase "immortalizes" cells, making them capable of infinite divisions. While in the typical human, telomerase is only expressed in a very small number of stem cells to allow for limited regenerative capacity, in aging, eventually widespread cellular damage leads to the defeat of the protective telomerase expression by a small number of stem cells, leading to death. However, the fact that almost all of Talon's cells express telomerase means that any cells - not just a rare stem cells - are capable of dividing and regenerating in tissue damage, theoretically augumenting her regemneration and potentially greatly extending lifespan - two key traits of the Flood species.
 * Muscular hyperplasia: Talon's muscles upon a gross and cellular examination are also markedly different; Kimberly exhibits unprecedented natural muscular growth regardless of age, nutritional, or metabolic status, and her mean muscular mass as well as muscular cross-section are superior even to the most fit of the SPARTAN-IIs, suggesting that a Flood mechanism in part or in whole underlies this peculiar phenotype. Kimberly also expresses extensive and continual neovascularization or her muscultaure and also increased mitochondrial proliferation, accelerating both short-duration and long-duration muscular contraction by capillary perfusion and readily avilable creatine phosphate. Kimberly also exhibits bizarre muscular cellular structure with highly irregular cell shape and size, almost tumorigenic in the poorness of differentiation, likely indicative of extensive muscular proliferation and perhaps a higher-order organizing Flood cellular biology.
 * Cartilaginous symbiotes: Upon certain parts of her body, it appears that certain stem cell populations have migrated from their resident niches and aggregated into highly plastic cartilaginous networks that are highly fortified with hydroxyapatite, forming an increased structural network underneath Kimberly's skin, potentially for protective purposes, and also secrete significant concentrations of growth factors and cytokines that target a wide variety of tissues for hypertrophy and hyperplasia. This cartilaginous webbing has not been well defined, nor has its trophic support.

Training and Operational History
Talon's training remains highly classified, although it is known that she had a number of various instructors, including SPARTAN-091, and that at least part of her training would take place at Asphodel Meadows Naval Special Warfare Center. Later, she would partake in classified covert special operations, including Operation: ICEBREAKER, and at some undetermined point she would attain the rank of Chief Petty Officer (E-5) with the UNSC Office of Naval Intelligence.

Behind the Scenes

 * Kimberly Ivy Blackburn was partially named in homage to a particular Halo Fan Fiction Wikia administrator.
 * RelentlessRecusant would like to thank several notable individuals for mentoring and advising him in the stem cell biology and mammalian physiology over the years used to write significant sections of this article, including D.L. Woodbury, PhD (UMDNJ-RWJ Medical School), Douglas A. Melton (Harvard Stem Cell Institute / Howard Hughes Medical Institute), Mathew William Lensch, PhD (Harvard Stem Cell Institute / Childrens' Hospital Boston), Anthony Uzwiak, MD, PhD (Rutgers University), Justin K. Ichida, PhD (Harvard Stem Cell Institute / Stowers Medical Institute), Justin P. Annes, MD, PhD (Harvard Stem Cell Institute / Harvard University), Robin L. Davis, PhD (Rutgers University), Mark R. Plummer, PhD (Rutgers University), Esther Y. Son (Harvard Stem Cell Institute / Harvard Graduate School), and N. Lee (UCLA).