In 1943, as World War II raged, the U.S. military launched a classified program called Project Sentinel. The goal sounded like something out of a comic book: build a soldier who never tired, never disobeyed, and never died. Their first volunteer was Elias Turner, a perfectly healthy young recruit willing to serve his country forever. At first, the serum looked like a miracle. His strength soared. Bullet wounds sealed, burns vanished, broken bones snapped back into place. Scientists celebrated—they thought they had created a real-life Captain America.

Then everything went wrong. Within two weeks, Elias stopped sleeping. He stood for hours staring at blank walls, whispering the names of people no one knew. He answered questions before anyone asked them. Weapons disappeared from locked storage. Guards vanished from their posts. Security footage showed Elias wandering the halls at night, saluting empty rooms as if receiving orders from someone only he could hear. One morning, they found him kneeling in the corner of his cell, smiling at a bare wall. “The voices won’t stop,” he said. “They keep giving orders, even when no one’s here.”

That was the day Project Sentinel died. Elias was sedated, shackled, and sent to a sealed underground facility built to hold “irregular soldiers”—failed prototypes the public would never know existed.