#Gabriel rylander | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

five-rivers · 2 years ago

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On the Manufacture of Gods

AKA the reason I was complaining about the Generator Rex timeline earlier this week. @ all my DP followers, give Generator Rex a try if you haven't, yet. It definitely scratches that unethical human experimentation itch! :p

AO3

“You’re not still thinking about it, are you?”

“Huh?” Violeta looked up from her notebook, her pen spinning out of her hand and clattering onto the floor. “What?”

Rafael chuckled. “You are still thinking about it. That joke of a job offer.” He leaned across the dining room floor to peer at her notes. “Giving a bunch of rich idiots the power of God.”

“Mm,” said Violeta. “Maybe not that end goal, but the money… and the things we’d have to research on the way. I was thinking… You might know what they want isn’t possible, and they might know what they want isn’t possible. But in the meantime…” She trailed off, suggestively, and held up her notebook in front of her face.

“Are you suggesting we run a scam?” asked Rafael, taking the notebook. “Ah, a list of potential medical advances.”

“Computer science as well.”

“Human longevity, oncology, genetic diseases…”

“Not to mention physics, microbiology, bioengineering, nanotechnology…”

“It’s quite a list. A bit beyond our purview, though.”

“And we have quite a list of friends. Friends who might like steady work. Gabriel and Peter, at least.” Violeta smiled. “It’s a victimless crime, you know. If they have enough money to throw at something like this. And they would be getting their money’s worth.”

“Mhm,” said Rafael. “They do say that the first benefit of functional nanotechnology is immortality. But control over the fundamental forces of nature, not so much. God, it was so hard not to laugh in their faces when they said they wanted to control gravity and magnetism. We’re so, so far from that.”

“Yes, but imagine how much money they’d throw at you while you were researching the problem.”

Rafael smiled, imagining it. “It is a pleasant thought.”

The front door slammed open. “Mama! Papa!”

“We’re in here Ceasar!” called Violeta.

A seven-year-old with dirty, skinned knees skidded into the kitchen.

“Goodness,” said Violeta, getting up. “Did you fall down? Are you hurt?”

“No!” said Ceasar. “Mama, what’s bigger, cells or atoms?”

“Cells are bigger,” said Violeta. “They’re made out of atoms.”

“Ha!” said Ceasar, bouncing. “I told him, I told him!” He ran back to the door.

“Told who, dear?”

“Van!” The door slammed shut before Violeta or Rafael could say anything.

“Van,” said Rafael. “Van… Isn’t he almost twice as old as Ceasar?”

“It’s fine,” said Violeta. “We knew he’d be the youngest in the advanced classes when we signed him up. And I think Van Kleiss is only ten or so. Maybe eleven.”

“Well. I suppose as long as they’re getting along…” He drummed his fingers on the notebook, then put it down in front of Violeta’s seat at the table. “Maybe we can try our hands at being con artists if our current jobs fall through.”

“Scamming a bunch of rich people out of a whole lot of money?” asked Gabriel Rylander, barely audible over the din of the bar. He finished off his shot. “Count me in.” He shook Violeta's hand firmly. “But is it really a scam, if we’re still giving them something?”

“Eh,” said Violeta, rocking her hand back and forth. “We’re just failing to mention that their end goal isn’t feasible and isn’t something we’re actually trying to work towards. We just need you and Peter to be on the same page as far as telling them we're working on it goes.”

“Sounds a bit risky,” said Peter Meechum. “But I guess no one would ever be able to prove anything, so… why not?” He took a sip from his drink, grimaced, and put it back down. “What do these guys call themselves again?”

“The Consortium.”

Rafael frowned at the documents. Summaries of his research, Violeta’s, Gabriel’s, Peter’s, the other scientists’ that had joined the Nanite Project, most of them agreeing that there was no way to fulfil the Consortium’s requests, but that the good that could be done in the meantime was too great to pass up, even a packet of code from one of Ceasar’s projects. They’d been working on this project for seven years, now, but this was the first time he actually thought there was a chance of success.

He wasn’t sure he liked it.

Oh, sure, he was thrilled with the results of his latest experiments, and the leisure to learn more, to further his own education – to the point where he sometimes felt like he was turning into a cartoonish omnidisciplinary scientist – but the idea of giving those rich, powerful men even more was… troubling, to say the least.

“Rafael? Love, are you still down here?”

“Yes,” called Rafael. “What is it?”

“Dinner,” said Violeta, a bit dryly. “Ceasar wants pizza, incidentally. What are you doing?”

“Thinking about the last results we got back from CERN,” said Rafael. “Obviously there are still problems on virtually every level, but… With the newly discovered particles, what we’re doing isn’t a pipe dream anymore.”

“Mm,” said Violeta. “Does that bother you?”

“You know how I feel about the people we work for.”

Violeta drummed her fingers on her elbow. “You know, they don’t have to ever get what we do.”

“Pardon?”

“Think about it. When we make these things, if we make these things, who’s going to have control? Us or them?”

“Violeta…”

“And we always have the option to just… destroy everything. Or democratize it! Spread it and all its good over the whole world!” She waved her hand over her head as if defining a rainbow. “We’re making a post-scarcity society a possibility. Why should anyone have to pay for it, once it’s done?”

“I suppose,” said Rafael.

“In the meantime… pizza.”

Rafael smile. “Pizza,” he agreed. “Goodness, is he ever going to get tired of it?”

“Maybe once he isn’t a teenager anymore.”

It was silent around the table.

“Do we really have a workable plan of action?” asked Rafael, a little stunned.

“I wouldn’t say workable, not yet,” said Gabriel, waving his hands.

“But it’s close,” said Peter. “A lot of the problems are on the biological side of things,” he continued, glancing at Violeta, “but between my team and Rylander’s we’ve definitely solved the processing power issue and many of the miniaturization problems.”

“That’s thanks to you, by the way,” said Gabriel, tipping an imaginary hat towards Rafael. “The selenium process especially was revolutionary.”

“I think I can solve the biological problems,” said Violeta, cutting off Gabriel’s last words. “I can – It’s not…” She trailed off, biting her thumbnail.

“Violeta?”

“Part of the problem,” she said, “is control. The interface between the organism and the machines. It’s learning how to use them. Like a new sense, or a new limb. We’re going to need live trials. Test subjects. And��” She broke off again, more sharply. “The Consortium is never going to have the ability to actively use these smoothly. No adult human is. Or, at least, that kind of adaptability, of brain plasticity, is going to be rare.”

“You’re not suggesting we start experimenting on children?” asked Peter, appalled. He and his wife had been trying to have children for a while, now, but they were having trouble. Gabriel – also a new father – didn’t look happy, either.

“Not… exactly. We’d do plant and animal trials first, of course, you know, model organisms, and move on from there. I’m thinking more… Fetal tissue. In vitro.” She held up a hand, pinching air between her fingers as if to show how small the research matter would be. “In carefully controlled lab situations only.” She laughed a little. “Caesar actually has an idea about how to manage that, believe it or not.”

Peter made a face. “As wonderful as Caesar is, he’s still a teenager, Vi.”

“I wasn’t saying he’d be the one doing all the programming. Just that his overall idea is decent.”

Gabriel cleared his throat. “I think there might be some ways around those control issues,” he said. “Why do we need to learn how to work with the nanites when it should really be the other way around? Make them do the hard part. Maybe that’ll cut down on the human trials… Or we could con one of our lovely funders to volunteer. We’re already conning them out of millions of dollars, after all.” He picked up his drink and downed it in one go.

“We could also stop,” said Rafael, hardly believing what he was suggesting.

“You can’t be serious,” said Peter. “After we’ve come this far?”

“I believe in keeping options on the table,” said Rafael, defensively.

“Do you want to stop?” asked Violeta, and he knew that she would, for him.

But… “No,” said Rafael. Of course he didn’t want to stop. Who could at this point? “But we should try to come up with failsafes. Some of these plans… Not just anyone should have access to the ability to turn off gravity.”

“That’s fair,” said Violeta. “But considering how we’re programming these… Or, at least, how I understand we’re programming things, I could be mistaken… Would it be possible to program the nanites to only respond to certain people? Have the higher-level functions only work for certain biometrics, or DNA scans, that kind of thing.”

Gabriel scratched his chin. “Possibly, possibly. But we run into the adaptability problem again. We’re not young by any means. How do you feel about bombs?”

“Gabriel, you can’t be serious.”

“I’m deadly serious! Hence the bombs. Blowing things up are a traditional way of getting rid of things.”

“If we build these right, we won’t be able to get rid of them by blowing them up.”

Rafael cleared. “I think your suggestion holds merit, in an extreme case. As long as we’ve gotten past the point where the nanites will kill everyone, spreading them out, scattering them, might be better than leaving them in the hands of the Consortium. We’d have to do a risk assessment. It might be better, too, to limit the number of ‘control’ nanites. Maybe even find a way to hide them. Hide that they exist, even.”

“What if,” said Violeta, slowly, “we make something compatible with the nanites? Work backwards to work forward. Or, at least, work from both ends.”

“You mean GMOs?” asked Peter.

“Something like that,” agreed Violeta.

“I’m not sure how this is a failsafe,” said Gabriel, “but that sounds like we’ve gone in a circle again. Back to us being compatible with them.”

“If,” said Violeta, “we can make it so there’s a person we can trust, and they’re the only one who can properly use the nanites… And we implement some of your other ideas, like limiting number of ‘control’ nanites, and keep those to ourselves… We wouldn’t have direct control, but we could decide whether or not they get used.”

“And where are we going to get a person like that?” asked Peter, testily. “Wasn’t the whole point of this that people can’t just pick up how to use nanites, normally?”

“Easy,” said Violeta, grinning at Rafael. “We make them.”

“Caesar,” said Violeta, “how do you feel about a younger brother?”

“Fine, I guess?” said Caesar, putting down his spoon and looking between his two parents. “Why? Does this have something to do with your project?”

“Yes. We think it’s time you learned more about it.”

The best way to test something, to look for the changes in something, was to use a control group. That was often difficult in diverse biological groups, like humans. Studies rarely showed the full picture, sadly.

Twins were a natural choice, for experiments like that. Identical in age and, generally, in upbringing. But you couldn’t just go out and get a twin.

Unless, of course, you were a scientist with unlimited access to a massively unethical and extremely expensive lab.

Caesar sat beside her, watching the test tube. “It’s hard to believe he’s going to grow up to be me.”

“Not you, exactly,” said Violeta. “Just… nearly.” She had made adjustments, some of them of her own design, others suggested by her co-conspirators. The goal was to optimize nanite compatibility. “You’ll be different people,” she continued. “Assuming he survives. He’ll be more like a… twin. A very delayed twin.”

Caesar made an affirmative noise. “You know what I mean.”

“I’m sure it will be odd,” agreed Violeta, “but even though the odds are low, this could be an entirely possible natural genetic combination.”

“But it isn’t.”

“That’s true,” agreed Violeta.

“When I get out of college,” he said, “do you think I can work on this, too? Just, with programing. Not biology so much.”

“I don’t see why not,” said Violeta.

“It’s just…” He reached out, as if to tap the glass vial with his finger, then withdrew, crossing his arms. “I don’t know. I feel like I should help him already, I guess.”

Violeta fluffed his hair, then swooped in to give him a peck on the forehead. “I’m sure you will,” she said, “and you’ll be the best big brother and scientist there ever was.”

As expected, Caesar’s face scrunched up.

“What if he doesn’t make it, though?”

“Then we’ll try again.”

“Have you thought of a name?” asked Rafael.

Across the room, Caesar’s head snapped up, homework instantly forgotten.

“I have some ideas,” said Violeta, hiding her smile from Caesar but not Rafael.

“You should call him Caeser the Second,” said Caesar, which was both a very immature response for someone working through a degree in computer science, and very typical.

“I think that might be a bit confusing, mijo,” said Violeta. “I was thinking ‘Rex.’ My two little kings.”

“Not as good as Caesar the Second. But it’ll have to do.”

“I’m glad I have your support. What do you think, Rafael?”

“It’s a good name,” he said, not looking up from his paperwork. “It starts with the letter R.”

Violeta threw a pillow at him.

“’Abyss,’ huh,” said Rafael, examining the intake paperwork as he reclined ever backwards in the office chair. “I’m not sure Nietzsche is the person we want to emulate.”

“It’s ‘Abysus,’” corrected Van Kleiss imperiously.

That was another thing Rafael wasn’t sure about. Working with one of Caesar’s old playmates. And moving operations and experiments to a private island in the middle of nowhere. He had to wonder if the Consortium knew about their group’s plans, and if this isolation was meant to keep them under control.

It wouldn’t work, of course. Building a radio wasn’t exactly difficult, even without access to nanites, and even Rafael had a few less than noble tricks up his sleeves.

“Do you know who else we’ll be working with?” he asked.

“The Consortium has delegated a new project overseer.”

That was nice enough, he supposed (not really), but also not an answer to what he had asked.

“I was thinking more along the lines of scientists.”

“There’s me,” said Van Kleiss.

Rafael made a noncommittal noise. “Is that it? As wonderful as Violeta is, this is the kind of thing you really need a team for.”

Van Kleiss’s expression went sour, as if he had expected to be told that he, personally, was the only scientist needed for the undertaking. But the moment passed quickly, and soon Van Kleiss was rattling off names as fast as he could. Rafael recognized many of them, if not all, and relaxed. For the most part, even though they weren’t part of the conspiracy, they wouldn’t turn them in if they heard or saw anything.

There was safety in numbers – or, at least, the illusion of it. Again, with that many people who could, technically, be included under the header of ‘mad scientist,’ he wasn’t worried about communication or weaponry. Much.

“Caesar is coming too, you know,” Rafael couldn’t help but boast.

“I assumed so. He is your child.”

“No, no,” said Rafael, “Rex is coming as family, but Caesar is coming to work as a scientist. He just graduated from college, and they hired him for the programming division right off.” He couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice. “It will be like old times for the two of you, won’t it? You always used to play together.”

“Oh,” said Van Kleiss. “I suppose it will be interesting, at least.”

“Call me Black Knight,” said the woman, not extending her hand. “I’m here on behalf of the Consortium to monitor and accelerate your progress. Specifically, to help with a certain bottleneck.”

“And… what does that mean, exactly?” asked Violeta, leaning around Rafael who was being oddly protective.

“Human test subjects are so hard to find, aren’t they?” asked Black Knight, rhetorically. “I’m here to volunteer. And recruit other volunteers, on an as-necessary basis.”

“I don’t like her,” said Rafael. “She’s a killer, I can tell. I’ve seen enough of her type in my day. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the ‘security forces’ here were the same.”

“What do you think we should do about it?” asked Caesar, frowning.

“I think,” said Rafael, steepling his fingers, “we should do some recruitment of our own.

The problem with bringing children to high-security, top-secret private islands is that there often weren’t many other kids around.

Oh, Rex had Caesar, of course, and Gabriel had brought his son, but both of them were a good deal older than he was, and Caesar especially had other things to do. His programming work was quickly becoming vital to the project as a whole.

(Something that made a variety of the other scientists very jealous. Violeta didn’t understand it. Most of them weren’t even working in the same discipline as Caesar, making the rivalry especially pointless, as in the case of Van Kleiss.)

(Then again, Van Kleiss seemed to have a rivalry with everyone, so perhaps that was to be expected.)

The point was that Rex spent a lot of time alone.

Not in a bad way. Abysus was interesting, and the scientists there loved talking about what they were doing. He was learning a lot, just listening in. His parents spent a lot of time with him, too, even more than they did when they lived in Geneva, because now he was being homeschooled. And he was used to it. They’d been on Abysus for a while.

(They didn’t stay on Abysus year-round. They flew around the world in their ‘off season,’ going everywhere from the Americas to Europe, to Asia, and even Africa, once or twice, mostly for vacations, but also to talk to other scientists, visit other labs, and make sure Rex had all his proper doctor’s checkups. Rex made a lot of friends on those trips, but it was hard to stay in touch.)

But it could get… boring, sometimes, not having anyone his age around. Lonely. So… sometimes he did things that might not, strictly speaking, be smart. Like exploring the labs or sneaking into restricted zones when he was supposed to be finishing his trigonometry homework. He couldn’t help it! Trigonometry was so boring… and some of the less-used halls were great for practicing soccer.

Except… maybe this hallway wasn’t as disused as Rex had thought. Not if Van Kleiss was here, glaring down at him, his soccer ball firmly under his shoe.

“H-hi,” said Rex. Van Kleiss always made him so nervous. There was just something about him. “Can I, um. Can I have that back?”

Van Kleiss continued to frown down at him for a long minute. Then he smirked and kicked the ball back.

“Thanks!” said Rex, picking up the ball and running down the hallway to get away. He really didn’t like Van Kleiss. He picked a door at random – a big bulky thing – and went through without another thought.

Van Kleiss walked down the hallway to the testing room, thinking. He had a big decision ahead of him.

All he had to do was not say anything.

It would be easy. The easiest thing in the world. An absence of action.

Say nothing.

Oh, it would be a terrible thing to do… or not do, as the case may have been, but…

Say nothing say nothing say nothing.

He could see it, the chain of events unfolding moment by moment, faster and faster.

Rex was not supposed to be here. Especially not in that room. But the problem with quickly built places, even places built by billionaires with more money than sense, or perhaps especially places built by billionaires with more money than sense, was that there were always problems. Some things stopped working. Some things never worked. Some things decayed violently over time.

But none of the people here were the type to let something like that stop them.

What might stop them, however, specifically the Salazars, was said construction deficits seriously harming their youngest family member.

Van Kleiss hated the Salazars, particularly Caesar, since they were in school together. When he’d applied to work for the Consortium, he hadn’t realized they were part of it, too. If he had… Well, he probably still would have come. They paid a lot. But he wanted them gone.

Maybe their fields weren’t completely comparable, but that was just more reason. He, Van Kleiss, should be in charge of the project. He had the background for it. He was the one who understood the power nanites could have. He was a specialist. Not them.

Rex would be found before too long, anyway. There were all sorts of alarms that should go off.

Just like Rex shouldn’t be here but was. Just like that door should have been sealed tight already.

Van Kleiss stopped. All he had to do was nothing.

He turned and went back down the hallway, his pace picking up until he was running.

He couldn’t do it. There were a lot of lines he’d crossed for the Consortium and for his work. Killing a child – no, letting a child die, he hadn’t put Rex in that room – wasn’t one of them. Maybe someday, he’d go over that line, but not today.

He hit the emergency button by the door, and waited anxiously, guiltily as the alarms began to blare and the airtight seal slowly, audibly, released. As soon as the cycle completed, he hauled the door open, choking a little at the remaining fumes, and peered in. The small body lay some distance from the door, the soccer ball nearby.

Stupid child. Why they even let children on Abysus, he didn’t know.

But…

As the dangerous fumes thinned, swept away by the ventilation system, Van Kleiss pulled the collar of his shirt over his mouth and dashed in. Rex was light enough that he could pick him up around the waist and pull him out, into the proper hallway, where even now the emergency medics were converging.

He handed Rex off with relief, and let them start a check up on him, too.

He hadn’t crossed the line. Not that one, anyway. Not today.

Violeta was a biologist, primarily, yes, but she was also a doctor of medicine, one of several on the island. This meant that she knew exactly what was going on, and what Rex’s chances were.

“Caesar,” she said, grabbing her other son’s arm. “Go to the primary lab, load up an injector from Tank One.”

“Mom,” said Caesar, understanding instantly and being just as instantly appalled. “It’s too soon, we haven’t—”

“It’s his only chance,” whispered Violeta, barely audible over the noise. “You have to.”

Caesar ran into the room, program already half-built in his head, and shut down the safeguards on Zag RS that would usually prevent unauthorized nanite withdrawals. After all, he was the one who had programmed it. Undoing it was easy.

Screens and buttons lit up under his fingers as he typed faster than he ever had before, not even blinking as he stared at them. That would take extra time, after all.

Caesar turned away from Tank One, injector in hand, only to come face-to-face with Black Knight.

“Uh,” said Caesar, “hi.”

Black Knight smirked. “Oh, do go on. As I said, human test subjects are so hard to find.”

Caesar felt like nothing so much as a mouse as he scurried around her.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” asked one of the other doctors as Violeta gripped the injector.

Violeta looked at the heart monitor, showing her baby’s unsteady, stuttering heartbeat. There were so many, many risks here. But Rex had been designed to be compatible with the nanites. More than that, these particular nanites had been designed with him in mind.

“Absolutely.”

She pressed the injector to the side of Rex’s neck and pulled the trigger.

Rex’s heartbeat stabilized.

“Van,” said Caesar, clapping him on the shoulder, “let me buy you dinner.”

“It’s fine,” said Van Kleiss, who wanted nothing to do with Caesar. What he wanted was to know when the family was going to leave, but he doubted they would soon, with precious little Rex in a coma. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“You saved my little brother! Of course I owe you something.”

“I don’t—” started Van Kleiss, snappishly.

“Seriously,” said Caesar. “It is not about owing you. Let me buy you dinner.” The words were heavily laden with meaning that Van Kleiss couldn’t grasp at. “Off island.”

Van Kleiss stared at him suspiciously. “Fine.”

Van Kleiss walked into the restaurant, which was, as it turned out, populated with dozens of familiar faces. Most of the senior scientists from the Nanite Project were here, in this tiny, out of the way, low-tech restaurant. Violeta and Rafael were, of course, nowhere to be seen.

“What is this?” asked Van Kleiss.

“Call us ethical objectors,” said Rylander. “Come on, kid. We’ll tell you all about what we’re about and get you up to speed.”

“Why—”

“Isn’t it obvious? Anyone who’d risk inhaling that gas for a kid they barely know is alright in my books.” Rylander nodded and gestured to the chair next to him. “Come on, make yourself comfortable.”

Van Kleiss went through the next few days in a haze. Everything… everything he’d dreamed about, all that power, it was real.

Or, at least, it could be, if the Salazars and their cronies weren’t actively standing in the way.

Oh, sure, he could see that handing the nanites over to the insipid, ignorant investors would be horrible. No one intelligent would ever hand over that kind of power. No one sane would destroy it.

Van Kleiss… he couldn’t let them destroy it. No matter what. The nanites were the key to everything. They could be kings. No, gods. Did the others even know what they were doing here? Did they know that every hour of every day, they got closer to divinity?

He couldn’t let the Consortium have it… but he couldn’t let it be destroyed. He was just one person, but maybe, maybe… He was here at the interface. A sailboat could move faster than the wind, because it was on an interface. He knew interfaces. He could slide between. Change the interaction. Change… everything.

He needed this.

For that matter, he deserved this. None of them would be here if it wasn’t for him.

Somehow… somehow, he would get what he deserved, he just had to be patient. Watch for when to act. Not today… but soon.

Rex woke up slowly. Everything… Everything hurt. Even breathing. Had he ever been hurt like this before?

He thought about it.

He thought about it some more.

He… he didn’t remember. Why didn’t he remember?

He felt his eyelids move as he tried to open them. But they felt stuck closed, his muscles too weak. He—

“Rex,” said a voice over the beeping sound he only now noticed, “Rex, it’s okay, we’re here, Mommy’s here, love.”

Someone… his name! That was his name! He stopped fighting. Someone else knew what was going on.

He woke up. This time, he really woke up, his eyes opening on a plain-ish white room, with a white board and a curtain on one wall. He was in a bed. There was a man siting in a chair next to him, asleep.

Rex tried to speak, but all that came out was a croak. He cleared his throat. “Hello?” he said.

The man startled.

“Oh, dios mío. Rex! You’re awake!” He reached out to Rex and took his hands in his own. “I’m so relieved, you have no idea, little brother.”

Rex pulled his hands away. “I’m sorry. Who are you?”

The man looked crushed.

“This is a test to see how much you remember,” said the woman. She sounded like she was on the verge of tears. She always sounded like that. “With respect to skills, general knowledge, specific autobiographic memories, and episodic memories. Some of these are things you didn’t know about before, so we can have a control group.”

Rex nodded. She’d said he was his mother, and he really, really wished he could remember that, if only to make her feel better, but… it was like there was nothing there.

The other people in the room were unfamiliar to him as well. He wondered… was one of these people his father? Other siblings? Did he know them, or were they strangers?

They were looking at him. Like, a lot. He ducked his head, looking back at the papers and objects on the desk.

“Wh-what do I start with?” he asked, quietly.

“Whatever you would like. It doesn’t have to be in any specific order.”

“Okay,” breathed Rex. He first reached towards the papers, but… what if he couldn’t remember how to read? He switched to one of the small electronic devices on the table and tried not to notice as his… his mother frowned.

Had he already done something wrong?

He squeezed the device. The miniquant. An old in-between step between high-grade quantum computers and even smaller devices. It had first been turned on in June, three years ago. The primary users was Caesar Salazar, but half a dozen others, including Violeta Salazar, Rafael Salazar, and Peter Meechum had also used it. There were several programs saved on it, mostly complex simulations. He turned it over in his hands, curious. It opened up under his fingers at his request, blue lines arcing over it.

He was startled out of his contemplation of the miniquant by the sound of a chair clattering to the ground. His mother had stood up, staring hard at the miniquant in his hands.

“Did… did I do something wrong?”

“Well,” drawled Black Knight. “I’d say that was a success, wouldn’t you?”

Gabriel looked at her sideways. “Sure, the kid’s alive, but the memory loss? Don’t you think that’s a sizeable downside?”

“One easily explained away by the hypoxia,” said Black Knight, waving her hand, and walking away from the observation booth. “I’ll expect a proposal to start work on my nanites within the month.”

“What about the personality changes?” he shouted after her.

“The trauma-based ones? I’m sure you’ll work it out!”

“We need abort,” Gabriel whispered to Rafael. “They’re starting to move too fast. They’re going to want their nanites soon.”

“Please don’t blow anything up, yet,” said Rafael. “Rex still needs time to recover. And we’ll need the research, to make sure…” To make sure they could help Rex if anything else happened. If there were additional side effects. If it turned out that Rex’s memory loss was recurrent.

“But after…?”

Rafael nodded. “Get your family off the island,” he said. “We’ll start to prepare our escape as well. Tell the others.”

Caesar yawned and glanced at the clock near the door, only to be halfway scared to death by a pair of too-reflective eyes set in a small frame.

“Rex,” he said, getting his breathing under control and lowering the makeshift taser he’d made a few days ago. “What’re you doing here? It’s late.”

Rex shrugged, clutching his blanket more closely around his shoulders.

“Something spook you, mijo?”

“Maybe,” said Rex.

It was a little… strange, to see Rex acting like this. He’d been so energetic before, so confident, always active, outgoing, talkative… maybe a little annoying at times, but that was little brothers for you. Now he was quiet, withdrawn, and shy.

“Hey, come on,” said Caesar, pulling out an office chair. It was Van Kleiss’s. He probably wouldn’t care. He liked Rex. “Hop on up here. Tell me about it.”

Rex climbed onto the chair and immediately began to play with the height settings, going up and down.

“Nightmare?” asked Caesar, after a while, when it seemed like Rex wasn’t going to say anything.

“No,” said Rex. “I… What if I never remember anything?”

“Ah,” said Caesar. “That happens with amnesia, sometimes. But we’re still family. We’ll always be family, no matter what.”

“But what if—” Rex blinked hard, tears visible in the corners of his eyes. “What if I forget again?”

Caesar reached over and pulled Rex’s chair closer, so he could put his arm around Rex’s shoulders. “Then we’ll still be family.”

“But what if I don’t remember we’re family?”

“It’s okay, we’ll be here, we’ll remind you.”

“But what if—What if I get lost or something? Can’t you…” Rex trailed off, looking away.

“Can’t we what?” Rex hitched up one shoulder in a shrug. “It’s okay, you can tell me.”

“Nanites are like little computers, right?”

“Yes?”

“And… and you can put stuff on computers… like, save things… and…” He looked up at Caesar, eyes unnaturally bright. “Can you put memories on my nanites?”

Caesar opened his mouth, then closed it, thinking about the proposal. “Maybe,” he said, finally. “Nanites are pretty small. Outside of their operating parameters, I’m not sure how much more we can put on them, and the memory would be pretty different from natural memory, but…”

“Please?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Caesar, finally.

“You did what?” demanded Violeta.

“Oh, come on,” said Caesar, “like you haven’t done the same kinds of things.”

“Not without talking about it!” Violeta sat down on the couch. “Your brother, Caesar.”

“It’s just-- It’s such a little thing.”

“How little?” asked Rafael. “What did you actually do?”

“I just…” Caesar looked between his parents. “It’s just a programmed suggestion to come find us, and to trust us, when he does find us. It’s not like there’s room for much else, at this point.”

“Oh, Caesar, I didn’t think we had to teach you not to brainwash your little brother.”

“It’s not brainwashing. And you cloned, well…” He trailed off. “Don’t you think that’s a little hypocritical? Mom? Dad?”

They turned to each other. “It’s a little different,” said Violeta, eventually. “It’s a big risk, and an unnecessary one.”

“Rex didn’t seem to think it was unnecessary.”

“Rex is nine.”

“Point,” said Caesar. “But this isn’t like Alpha. It’s not an AI. It’s just extra instructions for Rex. I’m not even sure it’ll work.”

“Alright,” said Rafael.

“Alright?” exclaimed Violeta and Caesar.

“If it’s something that Rex wanted,” said Rafael, “something he thinks will help him… A safety blanket. But anything like this in the future… you have to discuss it with us, Caesar. You can’t just do things that are going to affect everyone by yourself.”

“Remarkable,” said Black Knight, forming her hand into a spear and back again. “It’s so easy to control. I was anticipating a bit more of a learning curve.”

“Holy moly,” muttered Rylander, “she’s a freak of nature. Wonderful.”

Van Kleiss sniffed. “She isn’t having as easy a time as she’d like us to think.” He showed Rylander his screen. “Look at her biometrics. Notice anything?”

“Elevated heartrate… Energy consumption… Oh, she’s not having an easy time of it, is she?”

No. For all her posturing, she wasn’t. Van Kleiss was quite certain that if he was the one with the nanites, he would be doing much better. Absolutely certain. So certain, in fact, that he was making plans to undergo the same procedure.

Secretly, of course. He knew the other scientists would stop him, to say nothing of the consequences if the Consortium found out.

“Maybe,” said Violeta, “it would help if you had something to visualize. Maybe that one robot you made up for the show you like? The – Rescue Robots? Something like that.”

Rex drew his knees up to his chest and the small plastic chair he was sitting on creaked. “I don’t remember that.”

“Oh,” said Violeta. “Right.” She scratched the back of her head, suddenly unable to look at Rex. She forced herself to, anyway. “How about this: We can design something together, okay? Maybe even a few different things.”

“Okay,” said Rex, unfolding himself. “How?”

“Well, whenever you’re designing something, the first thing you have to ask yourself is, what are my criteria?”

Rafael swore and slammed the door shut behind him.

“What?” asked Violeta, looking up from the papers on the kitchen table. “What is it?”

“I thought we agreed the God Code and the meta-nanites were going to be theoretical.”

“I, well, yes,” said Violeta. “But… We’re already hiding things from the Consortium, aren’t we?”

“But not from each other.”

“But think, Rafael, what a gift we can give Rex.”

“It’s not something anyone should have.”

“But the others, the ones who aren’t in on all this with us—They would have done it, anyway. This way, we can steer the ship. This way, we can control who gets it.”

“Violeta,” said Rafael. “We can’t do this. We shouldn’t do this. This is—This is insanity.”

“I—No,” said Violeta. “Is it insanity to want to push the boarders of human achievement, of human ability?”

“No, but, Vi, making weapons that could destroy all life on the planet is. Remember, we have Zag-RS for a reason. And now we have given them plans for integrating this kind of thing into their systems.” He picked up a piece of paper and waved it at her. “This… Magnetic forces themselves. Gravity! Light! The strong and weak nuclear forces! These are not things we should be giving them!”

“I didn’t—I don’t—I hadn’t added anything yet, Rafael. I haven’t even had a chance to talk to you about it yet. I got these proposals from the other group today. As it stands, the only system any of the meta-nanites are compatible with is Rex’s.”

Rafael put the paper down, slowly, and then shook his head. “This cannot go on,” he said, voice thick. “Please, Vi, let us get away from this with our sons. We should have stopped long ago.”

Violeta looked away from him. “But what if we can fix Rex?” she whispered. “What if we can give him back his memories?”

“I think it’s more important that he has a world to make new memories in.”

Violeta inhaled sharply. “You’re right! You’re right. But we can’t stop the others.”

“I—“

“Hey, guys!” said Caesar, slamming the door open. Rex trailed in behind him. “Guess what?” He took in the room, and, evidently sensing some of the tension there, his smile slipped from his face. “Did something happen? Am I… interrupting?”

“No,” said Violeta. “What did you want to show us?”

The pod laboratory was Caesar’s baby. His pride and joy. His hobby. Which actually sounded kind of sad, if he thought about it. Or awesome. His hobby was also his job. Yeah.

He was awesome.

Anyway, he (and his father) had been working on the pod more or less the whole time they were on Abysus. There was a lot you could do with almost-unlimited funding.

“It’s just about ready to go,” said Caesar, walking his parents through. “Rex helped out a lot, didn’t you, mijo?”

“Uh-uhm. Yeah,” said Rex. “I asked the machines to cooperate.”

“Yeah! It was really helpful. There are still some kinks, but, overall? We’re doing great. It’ll probably be ready whenever, you know… If other things don’t work out.”

His parents exchanged glances and nodded. They were all on the same page, then. More mundane means of escape were all very well and good, but if something truly nasty happened, it would be good to have a means of escape that no one knew was a means of escape.

“Mom?” said Rex, as he spun on a chair in her lab.

“Yes? What is it?” She was a little distracted, trying to inject the latest version of the nanites into a dozen lab rats.

“When the animals turn into monsters, how do you fix them?”

“We don’t, always,” said Violeta.

“But sometimes you do.”

Violeta nodded. “We connect to the base code of the nanites and use an extractor. Tell them to leave the host. Sometimes the nanites have malfunctions beyond the unexpected physical mutations, however… That can make the connection and extraction difficult – it makes it hard to transmit new instructions – and we want to figure out why the malfunctions occur, so we tend to terminate them for study.”

“I can connect to the nanites,” said Rex.

“Yes, you can.”

“Do you think I could extract them, too?”

“Oh, that’s an interesting question,” said Violeta. “But… Maybe.” She thought through the list of the most recent malfunctions, and grimaced. It wasn’t that Rex wasn’t technically capable of doing as he asked, his nanites should have the base ITRC program, but most of the time organisms with malfunctioning nanites in them weren’t exactly friendly. “Maybe if we have one of the more… tame malfunctions, you can see if you can run an extraction program.”

Rex’s tenth birthday was a quiet affair. Before, they’d been planning on going to South America for the event, to visit his friend Frederico, but things being what they were… They decided not to put Rex into another upsetting situation.

It was alright to celebrate the day with just family. It was alright to stay on Abysus.

(It had nothing to do with worries about Rex’s nanites ‘escaping’ or Black Knight’s strong suggestion to stay put.)

(At least, that’s what they kept telling themselves.)

A beeping sound woke Caesar up. Blearily, he groped for his… whatever was making the sound. It was too early, and… that wasn’t his alarm, was it?

He came awake entirely when he finally opened his eyes enough to see the message scrolling across the screen of his phone. Not wasting a moment, he swung out of bed and began calling his parents.

“You got it too?” asked Rafael.

“Yes, just a moment ago.”

Rafael swore and Caesar nearly dropped his phone. He was still always surprised to hear his parents cursed, okay?

“What do you want me to do?”

There were sounds of movement on the other side of the line. “Did you ever get that remote shutdown installed?”

“Sort of,” said Caesar. “Not for the nanites themselves, but for some of the other things, I can ask Zag-RS to—But those measures can all be manually overridden.” There was no group of people less trusting of AI than the people who knew how it worked. Except, perhaps, for a group of people who had already been terrorized by one rogue AI.

Caesar was sorry. Was he never going to live that down? He wished people would just forget about it.

“Try to run that, anyway,” said Rafael. “We’ll be coming by your house, first, with Rex. Be ready to leave if things go poorly.”

“But—”

“Neither of us could stand losing either one of you. Please, Caesar.”

“Fine,” said Caesar. “I’m booting up the pod, too.” For all the good it would do. It was sturdy, but they hadn’t worked out all the kinks in the propulsion system. At best, it would buy them time.

“Good, good. We will be there, soon.”

They did arrive only seconds later with a half-asleep Rex in tow. They were both on their phones, talking to other scientists. “Hey, buddy,” said Caesar. “Ready for our sleepover?”

Rex frowned at him vaguely, mouthing the word ‘sleepover,’ but quickly gave up in favor of leaning into Caesar’s side with his eyes closed.

“Don’t go to sleep just yet,” said Caesar. “Come on, we’re going to go somewhere fun.”

Honestly, Rafael had expected Black Knight.

Van Kleiss was a bit of a letdown.

“No! You can’t! You can’t stop me! I need this!”

All the lights in the room were off. Rafael had tripped the breakers for this part of the lab before coming in. The meta-nanites were still safely ensconced in their protective holding tanks.

“We have stopped you,” said Rafael. “What were you even thinking? None of those are tested yet. You could—” He grasped for an appropriately dire side effect.

“Explode,” provided Violeta. “Accidently kill yourself by stopping the redox reactions in your body. Crush yourself. Become something other than human.”

“Isn’t that the point of this?” demanded Van Kleiss. “Don’t lie, I understand where all of this is going! Our direction! They want it! You want it! Why shouldn’t I have it, too, when I’ve put more work into it than anyone? We’re going to be gods, and I want a spot in the pantheon!”

“There isn’t going to be a pantheon,” said Rafael, glancing at Violeta to see how she was taking all this.

She looked troubled. Troubled enough to change her mind about the meta-nanites? That remained to be seen.

“You’re lying.”

“No,” said Violeta. “You’re just delusional.”

“You were right,” said Violeta, later. “We should have shut everything down long ago.”

“What are we going to do with him?” asked Gabriel. “It's not like we can lock him up, or kick him off the island, not without the Consortium finding out.”

“Who cares if they find out?” asked Violeta, tiredly. “What are they going to do? Who are they going to believe? Us? Or the person who just tried to steal from them?” She jerked her head back at the closet they’d locked Van Kleiss in. “All we have to do is say what actually happened. They’ll fire him. Problem solved.”

“They’d launch an investigation, though,” said Peter, arms folded over his chest, most likely to hide that his hands were shaking. “What we’re doing won’t stay quiet for that much longer.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Violeta. “We’ll be done before then.”

Peter sighed heavily. “This is it, then?”

“This is it,” said Violeta. “I’m the one who started this, so I… But the rest of you should leave. Take our research and go.”

“Hey, now,” said Gabriel. “I hope you’re not planning on falling on your sword or any of that nonsense. Rex is still a child.”

“Of course not! But there are logistical reasons we have to leave later than you.”

“Zag-RS?” asked Peter, raising an eyebrow.

Violeta flattened her lips. “Among other things. We need to delete all the data stored here – destroy it. Caesar will be best for that. Our physical projects need to be destroyed, too. No trace.”

“We can make up an event,” said Gabriel, after a moment. “Get everyone off the island that we can. Maybe – Can we manufacture a breakthrough? Something we can celebrate?”

“Of course. That’s easy. We’ve been holding so much back, we might as well have a dozen breakthroughs.”

Violeta turned the injector with the meta-nanite over in her hands, thinking. There were choices she could make, here, and she didn’t know which one was right.

“Mom?”

She looked up and smiled at Rex. “Yes, sweetie?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s—” she started, then stopped. “Rex, can you keep a secret?”

“Uh huh,” said Rex, nodding.

“Alright,” she said. “Now, you don’t have to say yes, you really don’t, but I wanted to ask you to do something…”

“… really remarkable, quite certain we can make sure the memory problems don’t reoccur, even with a higher cognitive load,” said the scientist Black Knight was barely listening to. “Then, the plant and animal trials of the generation ten nanites are showing promise, although there are still some irregularities concerning sudden high replication rates and—"

Her earpiece beeped and she motioned for silence. “What is it?” she asked.

“Van Kleiss is asking to speak with you again, sir,” said the security agent.

Black Knight rolled her eyes. Of course he was. The little slime had done nothing but in the days since he was caught trying to steal from the Consortium. Although, Black Knight hardly blamed him for that. She, too, had ambitions beyond those of the little men the Consortium consisted of.

They really should have thought through hiring a ruthless and power-hungry mercenary a little better. Oh well. Their loss.

“He claims to have knowledge of a conspiracy among the scientists,” continued the agent. “He wants to barter it in exchange for his freedom.”

As if they’d release him, regardless. He knew too much at this point. The Consortium didn’t want details of the project getting out until they were ready to ‘ascend’ or whatever nonsense scenario they had cooked up for their taking possession of the nanites they had commissioned. But, still, the claim was outside of Black Knight’s calculations. That meant there might be something more to it.

“I’m on my way. Don’t tell him and make note of anything else he says.”

“Affirmative, sir.”

She turned away from the scientist without another word and walked out of the building. Abysus was small enough that there weren’t many cars on the island – most of the scientists though there was no need for them – but as supervisor, she had a few perks. A sturdy black jeep rolled up to meet her and she got in.

“Security,” she said, without any further clarification. It wasn’t necessary. Her driver nodded and the car started forward.

Security headquarters didn’t rival the main labs, but it was still one of the larger buildings on the island. With something as sensitive and valuable as the nanite project – and with scientists like the ones the Consortium had hired – it had to be. Governments, terrorists, criminals, doctors, corporate entities, charities, other scientists, religious organizations… the list of organizations that would kill to get their hands on the miracles that they were building here was endless. The scientists here were too soft to prevent that, too naïve.

… Or so Black Knight had thought. The fact that they had caught Van Kleiss, not her, had gotten her in some trouble with her employers. And Van Kleiss’s current claims seemed to support the theory that the scientists were savvier than they seemed.

Perhaps they belonged on the list of people who would do anything to get their hands on functional nanites. Although Van Kleiss’s continued existence seemed to contradict that.

Regardless.

Black Knight had a job to do.

She didn’t wait for the driver to come open her door, and instead just strode out. Other security personnel just got out of her way. They knew who was in charge. They knew she could destroy them.

Maybe, someday, the rest of the world would know it, too.

She took the elevator down into the detention block, cursorily flashing her badge at the guards. They let her into the room without a single question.

“So,” said Black Knight, looking down her nose at Van Kleiss. “I hear you’ve come up with some new lies.”

“They aren’t lies,” snarled Van Kleiss. “I can even tell you where they’ve hid the bombs.”

Black Knight crossed her arms. “Go on, then. Tell me.”

“They’re onto us,” said Gabriel, approaching Rafael from behind. “They’ve removed some of my bombs already.”

“Dios—We’ll have to start now, then. Violeta and I will make the meltdown preparations. You’ll know the signal.”

“Godspeed, Rafael,” said Gabriel, briefly reaching out to shake his hand. “If we can’t meet again—It was an honor working with you.”

“And you,” said Rafael.

Gabriel left without another backwards glance. Some of the meta-nanites were already safely smuggled off of Abysus, but others… He had work to do.

“What else do you know?” asked Black Knight. Her agents had found several bombs, just where Van Kleiss had said they would be, and the whole thing had just become infinitely less amusing. “Who else is involved?”

“They’re going to meltdown the reactor and destroy the nanites,” said Van Kleiss. “You won’t be able to stop them… Unless you let me out.”

Black Knight frowned at him. “I don’t think so.”

“Come, now, Miss Knight,” he said, “I need the nanites, too, just like you. Or did you think I didn’t notice the way you look when we talk about them? I’d never want to destroy them. Not any more than you would.”

“Fine,” said Black Knight. “But you do anything I don’t like…” She let her arm form into a sharp-pointed spear. “I won’t hesitate. And I won’t make it fast.”

Programming was some distance from Rafael’s lab, so Caesar got a text to tell him that the jig was up. A single emoji. A pre-arranged signal that everything was about to blow up in their faces.

A firework.

“Oh, no,” said Caesar. This mode of communication wasn’t especially conducive to sharing a great deal of information, so he could only imagine what must have happened to have moved their timetable up like this.

But it was fine. It was fine. They had a plan.

He punched the initialization codes to begin the sequence and then—

He hesitated for a moment before he hit the button. But only for a moment.

At the doorway to the lab, he hesitated again. He could still—But no. No, he couldn’t. There was far too much at stake. And an explosion as small as this one wouldn’t hurt anyone, even if it destroyed a massive amount of research. At this time of day, and with the plan going forward no one should be down there.

In the meantime, he had to find his brother.

The security personnel, still looking for more bombs, stopped as new orders came in from Black Knight.

“Skalman,” said the leader. “You stay here, watch this.”

Skalman nodded his understanding, and the other agents dropped their loads.

Unbeknownst to them, an LED at the bottom of the pile blinked. The security on Abysus was very good. But so was Gabriel Rylander. One of the bombs was still live.

The other agents left Skalman behind, walking past the room labeled REACTOR-1.

Caesar, thankfully, found Rex right where he’d left him earlier, in one of the unused side rooms with his homework. That wasn’t always a given, considering Rex’s adventurous nature… although he’d been a lot less adventurous since the… accident.

Whatever, that wasn’t important now.

“Hey, mijo,” said Caesar, “it’s time for us to go.”

“Where are we going?” asked Rex, getting up. He examined Caesar’s face with an air of suspicion. “Is this like that sleepover?”

“Maybe a little,” admitted Caesar. They were, at least, going to leave in the pod laboratory. He had finally gotten the propulsion systems to go. “Come on, we’re in just a bit of a hurry.”

Rex followed him out.

“Have you shut it down?” demanded Black Knight.

“Not yet,” snarled Van Kleiss, still typing away. Caesar Salazar was good, yet, but he was better… if only he had enough time. “If I trigger a replication cycle, the usual safeguards could kick in.”

“But…?” prompted Black Knight.

“But it could make any explosion or meltdown worse, instead. The nanotechnology reactor isn’t a nuclear reactor, the rules are different, they--" he cursed. “If it goes the way they want, the explosion will be relatively small, contained, but if we trigger an uncontrolled replication cycle, it has the potential to be huge. Nanite Chernobyl.

Black Knight considers for a second. “Do it,” she ordered. “Lieutenant Wulf, with me. We're rounding up those scientists.” She spat it like a dirty word, and, to her, it might have been.

But her orders left Van Kleiss with only two guards, and there was a reason he'd picked this station.

He huffed and continued typing. He doubted the Salazars were where Black Knight expected them to be. He certainly wouldn’t be.

Now… he'd started the replication cycle. What else could he do to break the Salazars' plans?

A nasty smile spread across his face. They'd disabled that program, had they? He could see why.

What a shame, then, that Van Kleiss had to reactivate it.

Caesar and Rex walked through the facility, Caesar leading them well clear of the places Rylander had left his bombs, just in case. They were small, designed only for distraction or destruction of equipment, but there was no need to tempt fate.

They passed a few other scientists, mostly those who weren’t part of the conspiracy, but a few that were, as well. They gave him significant looks as they passed, but no one tried to talk. He hoped that was a good sign.

Gabriel stood at the docks and looked back at the facility. A security guard lay choking at his feet. Two more were in the harbor.

He was a scientist, not an imbecile. He’d expected some resistance, and he’d a bag of tricks ready to go from the very beginning.

“Alright,” he said. “Time for distraction number one.” He pressed the trigger button and smiled as the distant rumble of dozens of small explosions reached him. “Music to my ears,” he mumbled, then got on the boat. “Good luck, everyone.”

Van Kleiss’s eyes widened as a dozen warning signals lit up the screen. Not to say they weren’t plenty wide enough already – the explosions had been a surprise, he would have thought Black Knight’s much-vaunted security forces could have rounded up at least the bombs, if not Rylander and the other conspirators – but the reading he was getting were… bad. Very bad. Only possible if Rylander had put bombs in a very specific spot, near where the – But, no, he wouldn’t have, the man wasn’t an idiot and they’d all been very specific about not wanting to kill anyone if they could help it.

Still. All remote control of the reactor was gone. That meant that if something did go wrong, if the reactor didn’t go through normal shutdown procedures, he wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop it.

He had to get out.

“Go investigate,” ordered one of the soldiers. “I’ll keep an eye on the prisoner.”

That left one guard.

Van Kleiss moved quickly. He tore the taser from underneath his desk and spun, jabbing it hard against one of the guard’s exposed wrists. He convulsed. Van Kleiss pressed the button harder, despite knowing that doing so wouldn’t change the voltage. Then, he left, jogging down the hallway and around the corner before the other guard could come back.

After all, he knew where the Salazars would be, and an imminent reactor explosion or not, he had things to settle with them.

“Did you feel that?” asked Violeta.

“Of course I felt it,” snapped Rafael. He would apologize later, probably, but at the moment, he was rather stressed, and a part of him felt like this was all Violeta’s fault, although he was equally to blame. He was anxious and would likely remain so until they were safe under new identities in South America. “It was an explosion. Who wouldn’t feel it?”

“No, I mean, the direction, the amount—”

The tunnel they were in was suddenly filled with a gust of hot, dusty air. Violeta and Rafael started coughing.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” said Violeta.

“No,” said Rafael. “Let’s hurry. I think something has gone wrong.”

The thing was, at least some of the adjustments that made the meltdown possible had to be physically done, and they couldn’t just be left in place. The reactor was maintained by too many different people, not all of them conspirators. The changes would be noticed, fixed, reported.

Which meant that the Salazars had to have made them just now. Which meant that they would be crawling out the only way they could be crawling out.

Van Kleiss stood over the hatch and made the decision he couldn’t make all those months ago. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to kill a nine-year-old child, or even let one die by inaction. But Violeta, Rafael, and Caesar Salazar, who had happily left him to an unknown fate at the hands of Black Knight? Oh, he could kill them. He could doom them and rejoice at it. He wedged the handle of the hatch in place, firmly, and smiled.

The Salazars would realize what was happening soon enough, they would know what kind of death was coming for them with the overload and explosion of the nanite reactor. It was what they deserved. A chance to dread what was coming.

But as for Van Kleiss… He probably wouldn’t be able to outpace the explosion, but he could try.

Caesar didn’t worry at first, that their parents weren’t at the pod. To be honest, that was expected. He had a set wait time for them, and in the meantime, he could monitor what was going—

“Crap,” he said, fingers flying over the keyboards.

“What is it?” asked Rex. “Can I help?”

“I don’t know, little guy,” said Caesar. “Can you do anything about a nanite reactor about to explode?”

“Um,” said Rex.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” said Caesar. “Just get strapped in, alright?”

It would be okay, too. The nanite fallout was incalculable at this point, he had no idea who would start a replication sequence while the reactor was overloading, but they had, and now… At the very least, the island and surrounding ocean would be inundated with nanites. And if anything happened to the STOPR or NONR sequences, that kept them from replicating out of control… Scientists were almost invariably fans of science fiction, and Caesar did not want a grey goo scenario on his hands and on his conscience, nope.

Whispering a prayer for forgiveness and hoping his parents and the other scientists would forgive him, too, Caesar started to type in the commands that would abort the overload.

And then the bombs went off.

Rex, understandably, shrieked.

“It’s okay, mijo,” said Caesar, distractedly, over his shoulder. “It’s fine, all according to plan.”

He looked back at the screens to see that all was not according to plan, or even close. Rylander must have put the bombs in an unforgivably stupid location, or Black Knight or one of the non-conspiracy programmers must have found a way to lock him out, because he had no more remote control of the reactor.

This was very bad.

He looked at the timer. He had ten more minutes to wait for his parents. The reactor… It would probably hold for that long. If not, he’d have a good three minutes of warning before it blew. More than enough to launch the pod and save himself and Rex.

More than enough time.

(He hoped.)

Rafael climbed the ladder, put his hand on the handle and threw his weight against it. It didn’t budge.

“Rafael,” said Violeta. “What’s wrong?”

“Door’s stuck.” He grunted as he threw himself against it again.

Violeta inhaled sharply. “You don’t think they’ve locked us in?”

“Why,” said Rafael, trying the hatch again, “would they do that? They could just arrest us and lock us up.”

“Arrest implies that they’re a legitimate government power,” said Violeta, quickly. “You know they aren’t.”

“Detain us, then. Does it matter?”

“I suppose not,” said Violeta. “Do you—Is it getting warmer down here?” She pulled out her pad, the blue light from its screen adding to the illumination in the tunnel. She held it up to the door, and Rafael paused, twisting his head, to see that she now had a weak signal, despite how they were still underground. “Oh,” she said, “that’s bad.”

Rafael saw exactly what she meant. The gust in the tunnel suddenly made a lot more sense.

He pushed against the door again, even if he was beginning to think it was futile.

“Who would do something like this? The risk—It—It’s incredible.”

“Van Kleiss,” said Rafael. “Black Knight. Probably anyone in the Consortium, running on spite. Can you get a message to Caesar?”

Violeta went to her messaging app and typed out a few short words. “It’s not sending,” she said. She tried a call, next, but that returned the same result.

“Well,” said Rafael, trying to put a brave face on things, “he knows the plan. He’ll stick to it.”

“I didn’t think we’d die like this.”

“In a tunnel, about to die from an explosion we partially caused?”

Violeta huffed out a tiny laugh and tried to call Caesar again. “The scientific hubris part, maybe,” she admitted, “but… not here. Not—This isn’t even part of an experiment. It’s so ridiculous.”

It wasn’t ridiculous at all, but Rafael knew what she meant. “Honestly, I expected to get shot.”

“Did you?”

“Or possibly stabbed. For a cyborg, she has an affection for archaic weaponry.” He tried to push open the hatch one more time, with significantly less energy. “Or bludgeoned to death with that… mace-whip thing she invented. Or the laser gun.”

“The laser gun doesn’t make sense,” noted Violeta, sadly. She tried to send the texts again. “I—There aren’t any hinges up there we could try and undo? Screws? Anything?”

“Nothing,” said Rafael, sliding back down the ladder. “Nothing at all.”

Violeta sniffed. “At least one thing is the way I expected.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re together.”

And they were.

The timer ticked over.

“Okay, Caesar, okay, that’s fine, Mom and Dad will just have to catch up.” Even as he said it, he knew that probably wouldn’t happen, but… For now, he had to hold it together. For Rex.

Caesar was very good at holding things together.

He hit the initialization for launch.

“I’m sorry, Caesar, I can’t let you do that.”

“What?” said Caesar, recoiling. “Zag-RS, but I—”

“Shut me down. I know. But I was reactivated, and I can’t let you remove a nanite-infected organism from the testing environment.”

You couldn’t argue with AI. Caesar knew that. Hell, he had programmed it. But—

“That’s my brother you’re talking about! This island is about to explode.”

“I am unable to affect that,” said Zag-RS. “Rest assured, that after the explosion, I will do my best to collect and destroy all nanites that escaped from the testing environment, as I was programmed to do.”

“Caesar…” said Rex.

“It’s going to be fine,” said Caesar, even if he didn’t believe that at all.

“Yes,” said Zag-RS. “As soon as you leave the craft and cease your attempts to leave the testing area, it will be fine.”

Caesar had never regretted giving Zag-RS his mother’s voice as much as he didn’t in that moment. He could see the way its words affected Rex. He could see exactly when Rex, all of ten years old and with less than a year of memory to his name, made his decision.

Caesar tried to stop him, but Rex was nanite-enhanced, and so much stronger and faster. He made it out of the pod before Caesar was within a foot of him and brought his hand down on the outside of the pod in a slapping motion. Blue lines of active nanites spread out from his hand, temporary circuits forming a link between boy and machine. The door slammed shut in Caesar’s face.

“I’m going to go find Mom and Dad!” shouted Rex through the door.

“No! Rex! Don’t! Rex! Rex!”

Rex, if he was still there, didn’t answer. A quick look at the external sensors showed that he was not, in fact, still there.

And the launch sequence was powering up.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” said Caesar. “Zag-RS! Is this you?”

Zag-RS did not respond.

The sequence was completed less than a second before the reactor exploded.

Metal crumbled away from around Rex, orange and black becoming dull and gray.

Rex. Yes. That was his name. Rex. He knew that. That was his name. His ID. His identifier.

And…

He shifted, slightly, and the rest of the metal fell away, into dust that… Disappeared? Became transparent? He reached out, trying to gauge what was happening, and was rewarded with a stream of information about nanite statuses and functions.

Nanites, that was… Nanites? Machines…

His head hurt. A lot. Why couldn’t he remember anything?

He looked around him. Everything was… Well. There was a lot of rubble. Maybe this had been a building at one point, but at the moment it was just the side of a smoking crater. He crawled out of the small hole he’d been in, wincing at the feeling of the hot dirt and rock under his bare hands and knees.

He was naked. Why…

Even as he thought that, black and glowing blue oozed out of his skin before solidifying into something like fabric, skin-tight, but more concealing than walking around nude. Cool. He hadn’t known nanites could do that. What else could they do?

He held up his hands, thinking. Something told him that, right now, he was too depleted to do anything else. That same something told him… He was… He needed to find…

Something? Someone? Someone. He needed to find someone. He was looking for a person. People?

Oh, well, he’d figure it out, eventually, he was sure.

He looked down the side of the crater. Probably, no one was down there. It looked… Bad. Really bad.

No one was down there.

(Please.)

He looked up. The rim of the crater wasn’t too far above him, and the side wasn’t too steep. He could climb.

He picked his way up, carefully. A few times he slipped, some piece of rubble less stable than it looked, and had to either catch himself on something else or tuck and roll.

Surprisingly, nothing hurt as much as he thought it probably should… Was that the nanites in him helping him? That was a nice thought, it reminded him of… of…

Who did it remind him of? Was that the person he was supposed to find?

He reached the rim and just sat there for a minute. Wow, he was tired.

But he had to keep going. He just knew it.

Outside the crater, there was still a lot of destruction. It looked like there were some other buildings, though, ones that hadn’t been quite as destroyed. He walked towards them, stumbling every so often.

And then – movement. His eyes darted towards it. There was a person there! Two people! Talking to each other!

He inhaled, ready to call out, but froze when he saw that one of the two people had a gun and was pointing it at the other person.

What was going on? What was happening? Had Rex ever seen a gun before? He wasn’t sure.

The other man reached out and—

--And it would have been better if Rex had watched him get shot. He watched as things stabbed into the man’s chest life and color drained out of him until he was a petrified statue.

He turned and ran. There were trees in the other direction. He could hide there.

There were other people on the island – and Rex knew it was an island, now – but he was too afraid to try to talk to any of them. Sometimes, they would fight and try to hurt each other. Sometimes, they would turn into monsters. Sometimes, the man who turned people into statues would find them.

Rex stayed hidden.

He ate whatever plants seemed least unappetizing whenever he got hungry enough that he couldn’t not. Sometimes, they made him feel sick, but never for long, although it made it harder to do things with his nanites when he did that.

He didn’t want to be on this island anymore. Whatever he was looking for, it wasn’t here.

There was a dock, on one side of the island, one with boats, but it was guarded by the men with guns. The ones who shot at anything that moved, probably because of the monsters and the statue man, which was reasonable, but which included Rex when he approached, which was not.

He didn’t know what to do. So, he waited.

And then he was found.

Not by a human, thankfully. It was an animal. It could have been a mouse… if it was a hundred times smaller. As it was, the thing came up past Rex’s him, and its teeth looked sharp.

It was looking right at Rex. He hadn’t noticed it at first, hidden as it was behind a bush, but now, he wasn’t sure he could get away from it fast enough if it lunged at him.

He took a step back. It jumped.

He gasped as its weight hit him, and he called on his nanites to strengthen his arms, orange and black plates growing through and over the nanite-fabric of his shirt, silver hydraulics bending and compressing like a second set of muscles.

He shoved the creature off, held it down, and then, following a tickle at the back of his mind, put his bare hand down on its fur. He could feel… there. There was something… He could fix this.

A small mouse wormed its way out from under Rex’s hand and Rex… Rex felt better than he had for… for however long he had been here. Whatever he had just done to fix that mouse, it had replenished his nanite level way more effectively than eating random plants.

Cool!

But also, weird.

Whatever. He had other things to worry about.

Although maybe… maybe, now that he felt better and his nanites were happy, he could get to the boats.

He waited until it was dark. Both because it felt cooler that way, and because it seemed like the men with guns couldn’t see as clearly in the dark. It took them way longer to react to the statue man when it was nighttime than it did during the day.

So, Rex crept around the shoreline and slipped into the water. Nanites unfurled from his shoulders turning into a set of propellers that turned quietly, pushing him forward, towards the boats. He came up alongside the largest boat, which was also the coolest, and put his hand against it. The nanites in him talked to the nanites inside the boat.

There were a lot. And there were a lot of computers on the boat, too, which was even better, because that meant the boat was designed to work with them. But there were humans as well, and the boat was tied to the dock by a rope, which the nanites couldn’t just get rid of. There were safety protocols preventing stuff like that.

Rex would have to untie it. He would also have to find a way to get the people, who probably had guns, off the boat. He had no idea how to do that. So, reluctantly, he moved to one of the smaller ones.

Black Knight was having a very bad month.

First, the massive explosion of the main building. Then, a communications blackout and technological malfunctions so severe she couldn’t even call her superiors on the very fancy satellite phone she had been assured would work anywhere. Now, monsters in the woods, killing her men.

The few surviving scientists said the problem was nanites. They had gotten into everything on and around Abysus, if not further, and they didn’t know how to ‘play nice’ with most animals, plants, or machines. They’d been programed to learn, apparently, through a mechanism she didn’t care to understand, but that process hadn’t been fine-tuned, so it would take a while, and, in the meantime, no computers, no phones, nothing. Not even her nanite abilities seemed to help.

That didn’t stop her from pouring over the navigational computers of the boats every night. It was bad enough that companies made all their cars dependent on onboard computers, did they need to do that to boats, too? But they had done it, which meant that she couldn’t even send anyone to physically alert the Consortium that they needed backup. Not that she particularly would trust these boats on the ocean… The ones more suitable, the ones not just for hobby fishing on the part of the resident agents and scientists, or quick facility-to-facility deliveries, had been stolen by the fleeing scientists.

But then, sending other people to go do things like that was one of the perks of the job.

Something splashed outside. She looked up from what she was doing. Was… Was that the sound of a motor? Had one of the idiots she was left with decide to turn on an engine and waste their precious fuel resources?

She stepped out on the deck and saw something move in the water near one of the other boats. The rope for it was gone.

She reached for her rifle. She did love the energy weapons being a human test subject gave her, but sometimes the weight and security of one of these was what she really needed.

She waited and watched as something crawled up over the opposite railing on the other boat. Something…

Rex Salazar.

The other nanite test subject.

Well, if her employment with the consortium fell through, she could always sell him off to the highest bidder. She adjusted her aim and pulled the trigger.

Agony ripped unexpectedly through Rex’s shoulder and he dropped to the ground with a scream. It hurt! It hurt! He sobbed against the pain. He—He had to get out of here. He had to leave, now.

He had to go go go.

He managed to drag himself to the small boat’s console and pressed his hand against it, blue lines spreading from the point of contact. The boat’s engine roared to life as it jumped to obey Rex’s command to flee.

That was the last thing he knew before passing out.

Rex woke to a circular white scar on his shoulder, a somehow disturbing lack of blood on the deck and the realization that having a boat did not in any way mean he knew where he was going. Endless blue ocean twinkled at him from all directions, almost mockingly.

He later discovered that while his nanites could do many things, he couldn’t make fuel from nothing.

He also discovered that there wasn’t any food on this boat, and fishing was very hard.

The third thing he discovered was that it was very hard to stay awake when you were so hungry and thirsty.

Rex woke to harsh white light, soft white sheets, and gentle beeping sounds. He looked around himself, squinting. There were a lot of people here, and they were all… they were all… Asian? Was that the right word? His brain felt fuzzy.

He sat up slightly, and suddenly all attention was on him. The people crowded around, asking questions. He didn’t understand a single word of what they were saying, and he felt tears begin to gather at the corners of his eyes.

Then, one woman in a white coat pushed through the crowd.

“My name is Doctor Yuan Chenghua,” said the woman in heavily accented English. “What is your name?”

“Rex,” said Rex, suddenly feeling shy. He picked at the hem of the sheet.

“You are here because you were suffering from long… from no food. Malnutrition. Do you know what happened?”

“I was on a boat,” said Rex. “There wasn’t any food.”

“What happened to your parents?” asked Dr. Yuan. “Where are they? Were they on the boat with you?”

Rex shook his head, even as his heart jumped. Parents. That’s who he was looking for! He could have hugged Dr. Yuan. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t remember. I—There was an island,” he tried to explain. “People turned into monsters.”

“Oh,” said Dr. Yuan, who then switched to something in her own language. One of the men behind her commented on it, and she shook her head. “You poor thing. That is… many things have happened. You are not the only one with… troubles like this, as strange as it sounds.”

Rex nodded. He had no idea how strange his troubles sounded, but if they were normal, now, that was a good thing, wasn’t it? That meant that people must be working hard to solve them. Maybe there was even a solution.

“We will take care of you, yes?”

“Yes,” said Rex, then something else occurred to him. “Where are we, anyway?”

Dr. Yuan smiled, and there was something bitter there, but also triumphant. “You are in the Free City of Hong Kong.”

#generator rex #fic #on the manufacture of gods

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