Project RIB

Project RIB was the name given to an -funded genetic program performed under the direction and funding of Redmond Venter. During his time fighting the on  following the end of the, Venter had encountered an urchin named "Stray" amongst the child soldiers in his unit. Stray had revealed himself to Venter as Simon-G294, a renegade who had turned on the UNSC after being stranded on the secessionist-minded planet. Although Venter mentored the traitor Spartan and hoped to groom him into a lethal rebel agent, Stray became disillusioned with the Insurrection's methods and turned on Venter near the end of the Mamore conflict. Though the Spartan and his untapped potential were lost to Venter, the rebel commander had taken numerous genetic samples from Stray in an effort to learn the secrets behind the UNSC's. Believing he could salvage his efforts to harness Stray's lethal abilities for the Insurrection's cause, Venter initiated Project RIB. In flagrant violation of long-standing laws outlawing the replication of full human entities, a team of Insurrectionist scientists created seven clones of Stray. These were designed to grow at an intensely abnormal rate, reaching a late adolescent stage over the course of a single month. The maturity rate was then stabilized so that the clones would grow and develop at a regular rate. Despite major advances in genetic research, such specific genetic tampering was still incredibly dangerous; three of the seven clones did not survive incubation and a fourth died due to developmental problems shortly thereafter. The three clones that did survive proved both well-developed and receptive to the prototype augmentations the Insurrection had developed as a result of the studies conducted on Stray's chemical and physical makeup.

The cost of Project RIB was immense, and Venter did not create more clones. It was his hope that the Insurrection's understanding of supersoldier augmentations would reach a point that ordinary rebels could be augmented; the augments derived from Stray were specifically tailored for his genetic makeup. Some time after the initial RIB batch, Venter came into contact with his old commander, Arthur Onegin. It is unknown as to what transpired between them, but following the encounter Venter revived the program, this time as a means by which to experiment with splicing large portions of Stray's DNA into other genetic samples. The result of this dabbling was a single female fetus that Venter code-named "Eve." Venter eventually gave Eve to the mercenary David Kahn, who renamed her Nimue when he set out to raise and train her.

Following Nimue's incubation, Venter shut down the project for good. Though he kept a few samples of Stray's DNA for himself, he sold the rest of the genetic samples and his staff's project data to the Syndicate agent Iris Sabio. The remnants of RIB would thus become the template for Sabio's Knight project.