Two outrageously broad-shouldered men in army camouflage were doing exercises, lifting giant tractor tires over their heads, while a tracksuited trio looked on.

‘Where’s this from?’ Harry asked, as he squinted and saw that the men exercising had boyish faces and small heads.

‘Remember that giant Chinese intelligence leak a few months back? When sixty million Chinese military files got dumped on a public server? Most were encrypted, but hackers have been crunching away and they’ve decoded videos and paperwork from an enhanced warrior programme.’

Genetically enhanced soldiers had been in the news a lot. The US government claimed to have only done theoretical research into the possibilities, but Russia had openly announced an enhanced soldier programme, and other nations were suspected of doing so in secret.

The subject was controversial, because a lot of voters and religious groups said altering human DNA was against God’s will and should be banned. But pragmatists pointed out that the US Army would be in trouble if they went to war against a nation whose soldiers were seven-foot-tall hulks who could flip a car and run fifteen miles without breaking a sweat.

‘Here comes the juicy part,’ Matt warned, pointing to the bottom right corner of the image.

A small tracksuited woman holding a computer tablet was giving the two muscle men instructions. But something upset one of them. He set the five-hundred-pound tractor tire rolling violently towards a wall and approached the instructor. The clip had no audio, but it didn’t take a genius to see that she was ordering the giant to return to exercising.

‘If she’s five feet tall, that monster must be close to eight,’ Harry calculated.

‘You certainly wouldn’t want to shoot hoops with him,’ Matt observed.

After a brief face-off, the pin-headed hulk grabbed the woman by the shoulders and yanked the arm holding the tablet.

‘Oh!’ Harry winced, as he watched the monster tear the woman’s arm off.

‘He rips it off like a chicken wing!’ Matt said, smirking. ‘They’re calling him Chinese Chewbacca.’

‘Matilda, go back fifteen seconds,’ Harry said, so that he could watch and gasp all over again. ‘Play at one third speed.’

The clip ended as the monster chased several other officials out of the sports hall, while the one-armed woman lay spasming in a pool of blood.

‘Best of all, the Chinese government are saying the video is a fake created by Taiwanese agents,’ Matt explained. ‘So there’s no copyright. We get to keep all the ad revenue.’

‘Could it be a hoax?’ Harry asked.

‘Nobody seems to think so,’ Matt said. ‘The hackers have decrypted hundreds of other files relating to this warrior programme. You can’t see what the warriors look like on that video, but they’ve released photographs that show how young those hulks are. Kids make the best subjects, because their bodies regenerate faster and soft bones adapt more easily to large scale genetic changes.’