Weeds had overtaken the ship like an abandoned garden.
As Ryan’s group advanced into the metal bowels of the Alchemist’s base, they ran into more and more alien plant life. Greenish slime leaked from the walls, while snakelike red roots and fanged purple flowers dug holes into the floor. Eventually, the corridors became so overwhelmed by vegetation that Sunshine moved at the front to torch a path ahead.
Often, they would find the broken remains of armored aliens, their helmets melted by lasers, their shielding pierced by powerful rounded projectiles. Yet they never found any trace of what killed them.
Their slayers didn’t leave corpses behind when they died.
“So if I follow correctly,” Shroud said, after Ryan had finished briefing his team. “This is an alien spaceship from a long-lost imperialistic civilization, and the creature we fought was one of its soldiers. The Alchemist pillaged their technology, but accidentally woke up the remaining troops left in stasis and now they’re fighting her for control of the facility. And an alien deity gave you a divine mandate to destroy this place before the prisoners can escape.”
“Pretty much, yeah,” Ryan replied, while Len checked out the data the had harvested from the Alchemist’s computers. The manbear himself advanced on all fours, an ear against the walls.
Mr. See-Through snickered, unconvinced. “Should I call you Joan of Arc? You did hear voices.”
“God loves the reptilians too,” Ryan preached, “so long as they stay in reptiland.”
“Why?” Unlike Shroudy Matty, who remained in denial, Sarin had listened to the explanations with solemn silence. “Why?”
Why did Eva Fabre make Genomes and Psychos possible? “I guess… I guess she wanted to protect us?” the suggested, trying to be charitable. “To give us powers, so we could defend ourselves?”
“What good could have come from empowering people like Mechron and Augustus?” Leo Hargraves asked at the front, skeptical. “The former alone killed more people than both world wars combined.”
“Though Mr. Wave is thankful that she graced the universe with the brilliance of… Mr. Wave.” The boastful Genome paused briefly. “Mr. Wave didn’t find a way to avoid the repetition. Still, he agrees with the rising sun. The walk doesn’t match the talk.”
“The aliens aren’t coming either.” Ryan shrugged, as his armor picked up vibrations. “Well, except those inside this place.”
“And how do you figure we destroy this ship in the first place?” Shroud kept nagging him.
“I thought we might have a last minute desperate escape, with a digital countdown. Maybe a round number.”
“I would rather avoid that,” Shroud replied dryly, arms crossed. “Besides our own lives, if Elixirs are truly sapient, helpful beings, then blowing up the ship would kill them too.”
“Human life isn’t the only kind with value,” Sunshine agreed, having now destroyed the plant growth with his shining light. “I agree we cannot let the horrors of this ship escape into the wider world, Quicksave, but blowing it up should be a last resort.”
Truth be told, Ryan kinda hoped that reaching the ship’s control center would provide an alternative solution too. Nice Guy might have been grating, but Shroud was correct that it deserved to live.
However, the courier suspected his mere presence might cause the ship to collapse anyway.
Ryan’s Black power was a paradox, destabilizing reality with its very existence. The courier guessed that Earth’s dimension was ‘solid’ enough to absorb the damage, but the spaceship’s thin place was a small, artificial construct. Ryan degraded it a little further with each time-stop. Eventually, it might even collapse on itself.
Had the Violet Ultimate One foreseen this possibility? That Illuminati creature could control all of space and time, if Darkling was to be believed. It might very well be omniscient.
The raised a paw. “Sifu, I’m hearing something through the metal!”
“My armor is picking up vibrations too,” Ryan said, analyzing the readings. “Where do they come from, my young pandawan?”
“The left,” his sidekick replied, using his sensitive bear ears to pick up sound. “Explosions.”
“They must be pretty powerful for their noise to go through the ship’s shielding,” Leo Hargraves said. “Considering the increasing number of corpses, we must be approaching the site of a battle. Can you offer more details?”
“I-I, I will try!” The took a deep breath, intimidated by Sunshine. “I hear… I hear something big and heavy moving, and impacts.”
“From the form of the ship, and the way we moved inside so far, the left should lead us to the front,” Shroud pointed out. “If the architecture is anything like Earth’s aircrafts—”
“Then it should be where the command center is located,” Leo Hargraves guessed with a nod. “Timmy, can you bring us as close to the sound’s source as possible?”
“Yes, sir!” the raised a paw to his forehead in a military salute. “Of course, sir!”
“The rest of you, stay on guard,” Sunshine said. “Neither side of this war is an ally.”
And so the took the lead, an ear against the ground. As they took twists and turns, Ryan’s armor picked up more and more vibrations and other Flux energy activities. The very fabric of reality seemed to weaken the further they progressed.
“Riri, I finished analyzing the data,” Len said, as the group left the cramped corridor for the remains of a large hangar the size of an airport. The metal walls had been melted away, and Ryan could see the scrapped remains of robots and vehicles everywhere he looked. Clearly, a battle had taken place here. “It’s… it’s all we need.”
Sarin’s head snapped in her direction. “For me? You could make a cure?”
“Yes,” Len replied, before hesitating and avoiding Miss Chernobyl’s gaze.
She wouldn’t like what came next.
The Psycho in the group clenched her fists. “Go on, Nemo. Don’t sugarcoat it.”
“The Alchemist…” Len took a long deep breath. “The Alchemist already has a cure. Had it from the start.”
Sarin abruptly froze in place, causing Shroud to bump into her back.
“Repeat that,” the Psycho said. But now her armored gauntlets had clenched so tightly, that Ryan worried she might break them.
“It’s, uh…” Sarin’s heavy gaze troubled Len. “I should start at the beginning. If I understand the data collected… Elixirs come from the White World, but can naturally move from one colored dimension to another and immediately adapt to their new home’s Flux energy.”
“And they use this ‘Flux’ to communicate?” Shroud asked, trying to understand.
“Yes,” Shortie confirmed with a nod. “The Alchemist decoded the Elixirs’ language with the aliens’ technology, and with it, she can... how to say that… ‘educate’ them? Tell them how to recognize DNA, which species to bond with… If we associate gene therapy with the right Flux message—”
“We teach the Elixirs to patch out the bugs,” Ryan finished.
“It could… it could even work for you,” Len explained to Sarin. “Or Frank. It’s all about the right signal.”
Ryan had expected Miss Gasshole to be overjoyed. After all, she had spent a decade and a half as a cloud trapped in a suit. The possibility of becoming human again was a dream come true, and her previous self had been willing to consider murdering Ryan when she thought he wouldn’t deliver.
However, Sarin had picked up on a worrying detail and wouldn’t let it go.
“She had a cure,” she said, her voice low and furious. “That bitch had a cure-all along, but didn’t release it?”
Psychos weren’t a bug, but a feature.
Even Mr. Wave had turned serious. “Why would she do that? Why would anyone do that?”
“I… I cannot say,” Len replied. “All Psychos are sterile due to their unstable genetic code, so… so they can’t replace mankind the way Genomes will.”
“But what about the children of two Genomes?” Leo Hargraves asked at the front. “I only know a few who were born after one or both parents consumed an Elixir, Narcinia included.”
If a Genome was above fifteen years of age, they could only have earned their power from an Elixir. Even Fortuna and Felix had taken Elixirs, unlike their adoptive sister.
“If the creation of Psychos was intentional, do children of Genomes risk mutating too?” Sunshine asked, clearly worried for innocent lives.
“I’ve seen a few Genome children in my life, and all of them turned out fine,” Ryan said. “Also, in cases of one parent having powers and the other not, the child inherited a variant of the parent’s abilities. I couldn’t really figure out why exactly though.”
“It’s because Elixirs use asexual reproduction, Riri,” Len said. “Like jellyfish. But they can also alter their double’s make up during the duplication.”
Ryan blinked behind his helmet, as the truth dawned on him. “Wait, so if I had a child with a normie, my Elixir would duplicate and pass on to the kid?”
To his horror, Len confirmed the theory with a nod. “If one parent is a Genome and the other is not... the Elixir duplicates, fuses with the fetus, and slightly adapts the power to the new host.”
The thought of Ryan’s children inheriting his power chilled him to the bone, and made him thankful that he had taken precautions against having a descendance. His power in itself was both a blessing and a curse, but in the hands of a child…
It would make for nightmarish teenage years.
“If the parents are both Genomes…” Len cleared her throat. “If both parents are Genomes, the Elixirs communicate during conception to avoid the pitfalls of the Psycho condition. Instead of competing for a host, only one of the Elixirs duplicates, but takes some information from the other. Since the child doesn't yet have dreams and desires yet, the child’s Elixir creates a power based on the two ‘parents.’”
“So, to take Narcinia’s example,” Leo Hargraves asked, “she was born a Green Genome, but with her power also being influenced by her father’s Yellow ability?”
“Her mother could alter life, and her father could cut through anything,” Shroud said. “She can create life by cutting herself. Definitively Green, but with some Yellow inspiration.”
And since the children of Genomes were always stable Genomes, no matter the parents’ nature, their numbers would only increase with time.
Homo Novus would phase out Homo Sapiens, the way they did with the Neanderthals.
“Then what if…” Shroud crossed his arms. “And this is terrible to say it, but what if Psychos were meant to kill as many normal people as possible? If the Alchemist’s plan is to make Genomes supplant normal humans—”
“Psychos by nature target other Genomes first, Matty,” Ryan reminded him. And the random nature of powers meant creatures with world-ending powers like Bloodstream could arise. “It can’t be the only goal.”
While they had been arguing, the had reached the northwestern corner of the hangar. “Sifu, we’re close!” He raised a paw at the wall. “I can hear the source in this direction!”
“Mmm, we might have to take a detour,” Leo Hargraves said, not finding any door. “Mr. Wave, could you quickly tour the room and—”
Sarin furiously raised a fist at the wall, and unleashed a fearsome shockwave at it.
The black steel, brittle and weakened, cracked and collapsed before Miss Chernobyl’s onslaught. A terrible noise echoed through the hangar, followed by a cloud of green and dark dust as the attack revealed a path into a new, gigantic corridor. The courier heard the sound of lasers, explosions, and most importantly, voices coming from it.
“I forgot to explain rule number four.” Ryan glared at Sarin, hands on his waist. “Avoid making too much noise!”
“Too late, nerd,” the furious Psycho replied before stepping through the hole, her hands shaking in anger. Now she didn’t want answers, but revenge. “When I find her there will be blood, and it won’t be my own.”
Ryan didn’t have the heart to deny her wish, the rest of the group cautiously following her. The courier closed the march with Len. “Shortie, would that cure work on You-Know-Who?”
Shortie looked down at the metal floor. “Past a certain point, if a Psycho couldn’t stabilize their genetic code… the damage becomes so extensive that not even Elixirs can correct it. She…” She breathed long and deep. “The Alchemist has… she has others in storage.”
Other Bloodstreams. Psychos who had degraded to the point they had become an entirely different form of life. The more he learned about this place, the more Ryan was convinced it had to go by whatever means necessary.
The group followed the noise of battles all the way to a spotless, well-lit chamber deeper into the complex. All blast doors on the way had been torn apart, and Ryan had to leap over the wreckage.
The next room was a fortified security checkpoint, with more than two dozen troopers in futuristic, sleek blue bodysuits firing at a giant monster over improvised barricades of scrapped metal. Behind them stood a damaged blue gate nine meters in height, which unlike the rest of the facility looked relatively intact.
Some of the defenders wore helmets, others did not, but they all shared the same facial features. Short black hair, blue eyes, plain features, and a determined expression. Their weapons included rifles unleashing familiar red lasers, organic cannons identical to the ones used by E.T, and stranger devices looking like purple rods.
On the other side of the chamber, closer to Ryan’s team, an orange portal had opened in the very fabric of space, letting a colossal creature step halfway through. The entity reminded Ryan of a concrete cube more than eight meters in diameter, except with six tiny golden legs to carry it.
Lasers inflicted no damage to the creature, and it smashed one of the barricades with a leg. The blow sent scraps and troopers flying, the soldiers collapsing into blue particles when they hit the gate behind them. The survivors with rods used them to unleash violet projectiles tearing space apart. Ryan identified these weapons as focused Violet Flux, and unlike his Black particles, reality absorbed the damage they caused after a while.
When they hit the concrete creature though, the projectiles tore through its body as if it were made of clay. The barrage pushed the creature through the portal and it vanished into the Orange Flux rift, at least for now.
With the threat dealt with for now, the troops peeked over the improvised fortifications to observe the newcomers. Ryan’s group moved between the barricade and the portal, careful not to be close to any of them.
“Eva Fabre, I suppose?” the courier asked. “You have a lot of twins.”
“You are clones,” Len whispered.
“Quantum duplicates,” a trooper said. Since the doubles collapsed into Blue Flux, Ryan guessed that the Alchemist’s power followed the same rules as Livia’s. She created simulations indistinguishable from the real thing.
“Quicksave,” another Eva Fabre said, recognizing Ryan. “Living Sun.”
The time-traveler bristled, as his team took a fighting formation. Len and Ryan stayed at the back, the Sunshine, and Shroud in the middle, and a furious Sarin at the front with Mr. Wave.
“You know us?” Leo Hargraves asked, while keeping an eye on the portal as if expecting the creature to crawl out of it again.
“We have been watching you for a while, ever since you defeated Case-BiH-006 in Sarajevo,” a trooper replied.
BiH. Bosnia-Herzegovina.
They were talking about Mechron.
“Your power is of the highest interest to us,” another said, looking at Ryan. “Your time anomaly’s ability to affect our entire reality was deemed a milestone in our chronotech research.”
“We made plans to safeguard your genetic data for future storekeeping, but other projects demanded our full attention.”
“We saw you on security cameras, but the situation here is critical.”
“We would be happy to discuss that, after reasserting direct control,” a clone finished. “Will you help us?”
“Hell no!” Sarin took a heavy step forward. “Why?”
The Eva clones all raised an eyebrow at the same time, some exchanging glances. “Why should you help us?” one of them asked. “This facility is under attack by hostile extraterrestrial entities, that must be eradicated for the sake of the human ra—”
“Why the fuck?!” Sarin snarled, hands raised at the doubles. “Why the fuck did you turn me into this?”
“Who is she again?” one Eva Fabre asked her doubles.
“One of the mutants working with Case-USA-3682,” another trooper answered. “Codename ‘Adam the Ogre.’”
“Oh yes, I remember. But I don’t think we gave that one a case file.”
“Don’t think so either.”
Sarin could clearly barely restrain herself from murdering them all where they stood. “You don’t even know my name.”
“We didn’t need to,” an Eva shrugged, uncaring.
“We didn’t force you to take two Elixirs, if that is your question,” another had the gall to say. “If you experience discomfort, blame your greed.”
Sarin raised her gauntlets to blast them, but Mr. Wave quickly moved in the way to stop her. Leo Hargraves still had questions, though his radiance had turned into a more scarlet shade of crimson than usual. His body language radiated restrained anger.
“Why make it possible to create Psychos in the first place?” the Carnival leader asked, while Ryan observed the troopers. Something bothered him about them, but he couldn’t explain why. “Why all this sorrow?”
“For mankind to take their rightful place as masters of the universe,” one of the Evas answered calmly.
“As for Psychos, if by that term you refer to bicolored mutants, we wished to understand how Flux abilities from different colored dimensions would interact together,” another clone added. “We thought the potential synergies would greatly surpass monocolored powers, perhaps even lead to a Genome capable of overwriting reality itself.”
“But we couldn’t test the theory on a small sample of people. We needed something larger.”
“We… we were were lab rats to you?” the asked, his cute bearlike face morphing into a horrified expression. “But you… you could have destroyed the world!”
“She did,” Mr. Wave replied, clearly not amused. “And she left it for Mr. Wave to piece it back together.”
“Do you think we are so careless?” One Eva asked, completely oblivious to her own hypocrisy. “The ecosystem damage was taken into account.”
“We had enough genetic samples to clone a human sustainable population if the worst came to pass, and projects for Martian colonies.”
“The chances of Earth’s destruction were considered slim.”
“Almost negligible.”
“An acceptable loss, if the worst came to pass.”
“Less drastic alternatives might have failed to establish a suitable Homo Novus population.”
“Mass release guaranteed Homo Sapiens’ decline within two hundred years, according to our projections.”
“You ruined this planet, you insane sociopath!” Shroud snapped. “You killed billions!”
The outburst didn’t even phase them. “Yes, a patient often experiences significant pain when a shock treatment is used, but in the end, what matters is that the cure works. Mankind’s temporary discomfort will be quickly forgotten in the next age, when we establish colonies in the solar system and expand—”
“You don’t care about mankind,” Sarin snapped. “You pay lip service to it, but deep down you don’t give a shit.” Energy built up in her gauntlets. “You’re just like Adam.”
“We don’t eat people,” a clone replied, completely missing the point. “Now, if you are done with your childish tantrum, we would be happy to teach you why this was necessary after we retake the facility.”
“Do you…” Though he couldn’t see her face beneath the armor, Ryan recognized the anger in Len’s voice. She hadn’t sounded this angry since she learned of how Dynamis turned Bloodstream into a product. “You killed billions… ruined my father’s life… all this despair and destruction… Do you feel any regret?“
The response was swift and chilling.
“No,” all the Evas answered at once.
“No, of course not,” one said, as if it had been a stupid question. “Imagine a time when humans will reshape the very fabric of reality, like painters with a canvas?”
“The universe is a dangerous place,” continued another. “A stress test was necessary to prepare mankind for the dangers ahead.”
And then came the coup de grace.
“We did what was necessary.” One shrugged. “It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it. One day, you will understand.”
Ryan had met many monsters and megalomaniacs in his life. Bombastic Psychos, fanatical Genome warlords, god-wannabes. He thought he had heard it all.
But that woman’s voice… that complete, clinical disregard for human life… even Big Fat Adam and Augustus showed more emotion, even if it was cruelty. But the Alchemist didn’t feel even that.
Eva Fabre had destroyed the world for the sake of a pipe dream, and gave absolutely zero fucks.
“You’ve seen what those lizards were up to,” Ryan said, reaching a terrifying realization. “I wondered why you never even considered that following in their footsteps was a terrible idea, but now I understand. Elixirs grant people their dearest wishes, and yours was to have an army of copies telling you how great you are. You turned this spaceship into an echo chamber!”
“We considered that possibility and dismissed it,” the Evas all answered at once. “We all are simulations from different universes.”
“But you’re still somehow all Eva Fabre,” Ryan pointed out. “Don’t you get it? You may have different experiences, but there are enough similarities that you still count as the same person! Enough that you can complete each other’s sentences!”
If she truly created different simulations, then some would have protested against this horrifying course of action. But none of them did. Of course her power wouldn't summon copies that could oppose her, and whatever good intentions she might have had, years with only slavish clones for company had slowly erroded Eva Fabre's critical thinking.
She was even more narcissistic than Augustus!
“I have heard enough.”
Sunshine floated above the ground, no longer a warm morning sun, but a vengeful fireball.
“Carnival, arrest this woman,” he ordered. Shroud turned invisible, Mr. Wave cracked his knuckles and stepped out of Sarin’s way, while even the looked furious. Len herself prepared her water cannons, thoroughly done with words. “Eva Fabre, you are under arrest for genocide, human experimentations, and crimes against humanity. If you surrender, you will be granted a fair trial before a citizen jury. Resistance will be met with lethal force.”
“You want to arrest us?” an Eva asked. The worst part, she sounded genuinely surprised. Years spent with only her clones for company had eroded all potential for self-reflection, to the point that she had expected the other Genomes to fall in line on principle. “We made you into gods!”
“Then you shall be smote!” Mr. Wave replied while turning into a laser, and charging straight at the barricades.
The Evas answered with a volley of lasers, and Ryan froze time while his team prepared to charge. The courier looked up at the orange portal still fluctuating in the frozen time, and then at the giant gate behind the Alchemists, as blue as the sea.
Beyond this door was the starship’s command center. He could feel it in his gut.
Now?
Now, he just had to fight his way inside.