Red Series

The Red Series were supersoldiers from South Africa who were enhanced by neural implants in their necks. This gave them extraordinary strength and durability, greater than even Manticore Transgenics.

Description
All Red soldiers were convicts, who were recruited from Death Row with the promise of life and freedom. In truth, they gained practically nothing, as the implants used to enhance them also killed eventually.

When a soldier was chosen, an implant was inserted (painfully) into the back of his neck, where it attached itself to the brain stem and began to rewire neural pathways. When the process was complete, the pain centers of the brain were deactivated, ensuring that the soldier would feel no pain and therefore would be essentially fearless. They also became hyper-adrenalized, granting them vastly superior physical strength and ruggedness. In this condition, a Red Series could withstand a tremendous amount of physical abuse, and could survive multiple gunshots to the torso. In the end, however, the strain on their nervous system was too great, and they burned out after about six months, a year at best.

Activities
In the year 2019, a team of several Red Series soldiers was sent to Seattle, Washington. Their mission was to capture an X5 from Manticore. The scientists behind the Red Series project believed that by using the genetic code of a transgenic as a basis, they could engineer the Red soldiers' DNA and adapt them so that they could tolerate their implants for much longer. The soldiers were told that their DNA could be retrofitted while they were alive, but in truth, the procedure would not work on someone already using the implant.

The team indeed located an X5, Max Guevara, who was one of the X5's who had escaped from Manticore years earlier and was living in Seattle. They attempted to capture her, but although she was no match for three Red soldiers, she managed to escape. The group of Reds spent several more weeks searching for her, and, during that time, had to replace one of their number who had died from his implant.

Eventually, they found Max once more and went after her, but during the pursuit, another Red was killed. The remaining soldiers then took one of Max's friends hostage, and, with nothing else to do, Max used the implant from the dead soldier to supercharge herself beyond even the normal limits of an X5. In a fierce fight, she killed the remaining Reds, but immediately collapsed from the strain; the Red Series could tolerate the implant for months, but it was not designed for a transgenic, and Max could only last a few hours with it active. Fortunately, two friends of Max, Original Cindy and Logan Cale managed to disable the implant by short-circuiting it with a defibrillator. Just before his death, one of the Red soldiers overheard his handler mentioning to Max that there had never been any hope for his men, and that they were simply told what they wanted to hear. Summoning the last of his strength, the Red soldier killed his leader, and with his last breath stated, "No regrets."