TCTS 3 Chapter 39 (Patreon)

It had been three days since Mark's new helping hands, well, algorithms had first come online, and they were already proving their worth. Reginald had just sent his first major recommendation to Mark, who was in his library reviewing Mason's revised city plans.

The plans he had arrived earlier that morning in a file that was very thoroughly organized, to the point that it made every previous infrastructure document look like it had been drawn on a napkin. Mason had redesigned the entire drainage system, made a plan to reroute the power conduits, and proposed a modular residential expansion that could grow with the population without requiring a full infrastructure overhaul each time a new block was added.

It was good work, and Mark was halfway through approving it when Reginald's voice came through the room's speakers.

"Sir, if I may," he said. "I've identified a significant underutilized resource within the colony."

"Go ahead," Mark said without pausing his work.

"There are people," Reginald began. "Let me rephrase that. There are approximately one hundred and forty colonists who possess non-technical skills and currently lack a structured occupation beyond basic communal duties. They are willing to do more, but they are idle, and idle populations, however well-intentioned, tend to develop a sort of restlessness that leads to social friction that could've been entirely avoidable."

Mark stopped what he was doing and began to pay attention to Reignald's words.

"I've been monitoring the colony's social dynamics since my activation," Reginald continued. "The technical population, your engineers, medics, soldiers, and specialists, are fully engaged. However, the non-technical population has been operating on a loose volunteer basis since the colony's founding, and participation rates have declined by fourteen percent over the past two months. I must emphasise the fact that this is something brought about due to willingness fading, but because the work available to them has become routine to the point of tedium. People will tolerate monotony when survival demands it, but when it doesn't, they need something more to keep on going."

"Alright. I believe I see the point you are making," Mark said. "Tell me, what do you have in mind?"

"A public task system," Reginald said. "I propose installing a board in the central square, by the City Hall, both physical and digital, listing active tasks across all departments, each of which would display its description, estimated difficulty, time commitment, current completion status, and reward. Any colonist may select a task, complete it, and receive compensation in the form of currency, and since Sterling is in the process of establishing one, I suggest we may even offer educational credits that grant access to specialized training programs in place of monetary rewards."

"In other words, you want a quest board," Mark said.

"If you insist on the fantasy nomenclature, then yes," Reginald said. "By all means, a quest board. After all, the psychological principle behind such an act is sound. Humans respond to visible progress, tangible rewards, and especially to the sense of contributing to a collective effort. I've coordinated with Sterling on the economic incentives and with Ceres and Mason on the task backlog. Between them, I have over three hundred actionable tasks ranging from agricultural labor to construction assistance to survey work that require no specialized training beyond a willingness to show up."

Mark thought about it for a few seconds before nodding to himself. "I see no fault in that logic. If it helps keep people sane and feeling worthy, then go ahead and do it."

"Already done, sir," Reignald replied. "I took the liberty of drafting the framework before this conversation, on the assumption that you would agree, which was highly likely. The board will be operational by tomorrow morning."

Mark smirked and let out a dry chuckle. "You know, you're quite confident for someone who's barely been alive a couple of days."

"Confidence is simply competence with good posture, sir," Reignald stated matter-of-factly.

Mark allowed himself a small exhale that was a mixture between a laugh and a sigh. He had built Reginald to be this way, and the fact that the AI was already exceeding the parameters he'd set served to either speak to the quality of the code or give out a warning about the limits of his control.

He decided not to think about it too much and chalked it up to it being the former and went back to Mason's plans.

---

Over the course of time, the colony changed. Of course, the changes didn't just magically come about instantly or without any struggle. There were supply arguments between Ferrum and Mason over printer time, Knox flagging Ceres' proposed wildlife corridors as "security vulnerabilities," and Sterling and Reginald disagreeing on the economic weighting of educational credits versus direct currency. But with seven dedicated minds managing the details and Marcos overseeing the whole, the pace of development accelerated.

The quest board in the central square saw an uptake in the number of visitors within its first week. People gathered around the large display every morning, scrolling through the available tasks, which ranged from simple orders, like clearing debris from the new park sites or assisting the agricultural team with planting rotations, to more complex orders, such as assisting Octavia's engineering team with War-Frame component sorting, or assisting Aurelia's team with surveying potential expansion zones.

People were volunteering, and though there were some who still held a grudge against Mark over the things he had hidden from them, they still did their part. There were also more people than Mark had expected.

There was a young woman who had no work experience in anything whatsoever who had spent three weeks helping Ceres map the root structures of the native flora near the eastern wall, and by the end of it, she had earned enough educational credits to enroll in Dr. Corven's field medicine program.

There was also a former cargo handler who'd been idle since the colony's supply runs stabilized. He signed up for a construction task under Mason's direction, and within a month, he was leading a crew of twelve.

The city grew outward and upward as Mason's revised plans were implemented. Parks took shape in the gaps between residential blocks, green spaces with planted groves and walking paths gave the colony the feeling of a place people actually lived in. Along the southern wall, Ceres had designed an enclosed habitat for the domesticated livestock, where the cattle and goats that had been bred from the colony's stock would be situated. They had separated zones for grazing, dairy production, and managed breeding. The animals inhabiting the location were healthy, and within two months, the dairy supply tripled.

Further out, beyond the residential perimeter and within Knox's defense grid, wildlife corridors opened through the brush and grassland. The wolves moved through them freely, with Atlas and Ivory's pack having shrunk for a while as some wolves left to find their mates with other packs, and at the same time grew as new wolves joined them, and the colonists who walked the perimeter paths in the evening had gotten used to the sight of them passing through the tree line in a loose formation, Ivory now managing to keep pace with the rest without visible effort.

Knox hated every second of it, and he made it known during almost every morning briefing.

"For the record," Knox said, "I consider open wildlife corridors within the defense perimeter to be an operational liability."

"Right, like always," Ceres said cheerfully. "Overruled."

"You don't have the authority to overrule me," Knox said.

"No, but Mark does, and he likes the wolves," Ceres retorted.

"That is irrelevant," Knox countered. "The threat assessment doesn't care about aesthetics."

"Knox, they're wolves," Ceres said in a tone of voice that was equivalent to an eyeroll. "It's not like they are going to stage a coordinated assault on the power grid or something."

"The chances of that happening may very well be very low," Knox said. "But it will never be zero. In addition, you do not know that."

"I absolutely do know that," Ceres stated.

Marcos, who had been listening to the exchange without comment, finally decided that it was time he intervened. "Children, please."

Both AIs went silent for approximately half a second, which was, for artificial intelligences, the equivalent of a long and chastened pause.

"She started it," Knox said.

---

By the third month since their creation, things had smoothed out a bit. Vita requested a private meeting with Mark on a morning, which was unusual because Vita was not really the type to request meetings. She scheduled them, attended them, and delivered her findings with clinical efficiency, understanding that her colleagues' time was not hers to waste. A request meant she had something she wasn't ready to put into a standard briefing.

Mark found Dr. Corven already in Vita's dedicated office space, a converted examination room in the hospital wing that Vita had organized with a level of OCD-ish precision that made even Reginald look disorderly. Dr. Corven was seated in front of a wall-mounted display, her glasses pushed up onto her forehead and her arms crossed as she stared at a genetic sequence diagram that occupied the entire screen.

"Father, if you would be so kind as to close the door, please," Vita said through the room's speakers, and Mark obliged.

"Five months ago, Marcos transferred full access to the Strathari facility's genetic archive to my systems," Vita began. "The archive contains four hundred and twelve preserved DNA samples from sixty-one distinct Strathari bloodlines, along with a comprehensive index of their genetic markers, phenotypic expressions, and baseline biological parameters. Since then, I have been running a dedicated extraction and analysis protocol on the samples, and cross-referencing them against the most complete Strathari genome available to us."

"I'll take a wild shot in the dark and say it is Talos," Mark said jokingly.

"Yes, Talos," Vita confirmed. "With his consent, I have been taking regular tissue samples to construct a living reference genome. Between his genome and the four hundred and twelve preserved samples from the facility's archive, I have a comprehensive picture of the Strathari genetic structure."

Dr. Corven didn't move from her position in front of the display as she spoke. "Tell him the rest, Vita."

Vita remained quiet momentarily before speaking. "I believe we may be able to replicate it."

Mark frowned as he looked at the display, then at Dr. Corven. "Replicate what, exactly?"

"The Strathari genome," Vita said. "Structurally, the Strathari genome is a sequence just like any other. Theirs is considerably longer than humanity's, approximately forty percent more base pairs than a standard human genome, and it includes several nucleotide compounds that human DNA does not use, but those compounds are produced by Strathari biology, which means they follow the same chemical rules as everything else. I can synthesize them since the sequence itself is fully mapped, and I can replicate it in its entirety. DNA is, at its core, just information, and information can be copied."

"Then what's the problem?" Mark asked.

"The problem is not replication, per se," Vita said. "But comprehension. I can copy the entire sequence, yes. I could, given the resources and time, produce a cloned Strathari from the preserved samples and let biology sort itself out through natural cellular processes. The genome would express as it was designed to express, and the result would be, in theory, a complete Strathari."

She paused. "But cloning from a sample and understanding what you've built are two very different things. I have the full sequence. What I do not have is a complete functional map. I can identify approximately ninety-one percent of the genome's expressed functions with confidence, the sections governing enhanced physiology, accelerated healing, musculature, skeletal density, and a significant portion of the neural architecture. The remaining nine percent, I cannot map because our technology is not capable of identifying what those sections do. The analytical tools we have were built to decode human genetics. The Strathari genome operates on a level of complexity that our instruments can see but cannot interpret, like reading a language where you recognize the alphabet but can't parse the grammar. I've exhausted every approach available to me, and the result is the same, with those sections remaining opaque."

"So you can build the whole thing," Mark said, "but you only understand most of it."

"Correct," Vita said. "And that nine percent is not trivial either. We're talking about genomics, small percentages that carry enormous weight. Humans and chimpanzees share approximately ninety-eight percent of their DNA, and the difference between the two is, as I'm sure you can appreciate, rather significant. The nine percent I haven't mapped governs the systems that made the Strathari what they were at their peak."

"Walk me through our options," Mark said.

"Option one," Vita said. "Full cloning from preserved samples. I let the Strathari genome express naturally and allow their biology to handle the complexity through its own cellular machinery. This would produce a complete Strathari, resonance cortices and all. The trade-off is time. I would need a dedicated fabrication setup and between one to three years of development to establish the growth protocols, refine the synthetic nucleotide production, and build the gestation infrastructure. It is the most complete path, but also the longest.

"Option two is what I'd call a synthetic integration," she continued. "Rather than cloning a full Strathari, I take the ninety-one percent I understand and build a genome that integrates those functions into a human-compatible framework. This produces something that is not a Strathari and not a baseline human, but a hybrid expression that carries the core biological advantages of enhanced physiology, accelerated healing, denser musculature and skeletal structure, and expanded neural capacity. The sections I can't fully map, the lifespan regulators, the resonance cortices, those get left out, because I won't include sequences in a living being's genome that I can't predict the outcome of."

"And what's the projected lifespan on option two?" Mark asked.

"Approximately three hundred years," Vita said. "Based on the metabolic and cellular repair systems I can map with confidence. The original Strathari from Talos' era had lifespans of up to two thousand years, and the later evolution that your mentor came from reached nearly fifteen thousand. The difference between those figures and three hundred is almost entirely housed in the regulatory systems I haven't decoded. Given time, I could decode them. But that is a longer road."

Mark was quiet for a moment.

"Three hundred years," he said. "That's still a hell of a number."

"Give or take a decade, depending on environmental and epigenetic factors," Vita said. "It is a fraction of what the Strathari were. But it is also several times beyond what any normal human has ever lived."

Dr. Corven finally turned from the display. "The lifespan is not the only impressive thing, Mark. There is also the healing factor, which alone would change medicine as we know it. The neural capacity opens doors that I can't even fully enumerate yet. And the skeletal and muscular density would produce individuals who are, to put it plainly, built the way you are."

"Built the way I was built," Mark said.

"Yes," Dr. Corven said. "Except this wouldn't require a singular alien mentor performing experimental gene therapy on a single subject. This would be something more reproducible and standardized. It would be much more available."

Mark leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. "And the limitations on option two specifically?"

"The resonance cortices are part of that unmappable nine percent," Vita said. "An individual born from the synthetic genome would have expanded neural capacity, but not the dedicated structures that the War-Frame lattice requires for full integration. Full cloning, option one, would produce individuals with those structures intact, since the genome would express them naturally regardless of whether we understand the mechanism. But we would be creating beings whose biology we cannot fully predict or monitor, because we cannot see what that nine percent is doing even when it's active in Talos."

"And third," Dr. Corven added, "there is the question of what we do with either option. Neither is a treatment or a modification you can apply to an existing person. Both require a genome to be carried to term and born... We are talking about creating a new kind of human being, or in the case of option one, bringing back a species that has been extinct for a very, very long time. These are not small decisions."

The room was quiet for a long moment.

"Have you lot told Talos yet?" Mark asked.

"Not yet," Vita replied. "I wanted your authorization before expanding the circle."

Mark thought about Talos on the observation platform, learning to walk on prosthetics built from technology his people had never imagined would be needed for one of their own. He thought about Anahrin, who carried the genetic legacy of a species he had single-handedly caused the extinction of, and chose to pass it on to a single human because there was no one else left to give it to.

"Tell him," Mark said. "I think he deserves to know."

"And what about the broader colony?" Vita asked.

"Not yet," Mark said. "I don't want them to know anything about this until we understand what we're holding. This is the kind of thing that changes everything, and I'd rather we know what 'everything' looks like before we put it on the table."

"That is quite a prudent approach, father," Vita said. "I'll prepare a detailed briefing for Talos and schedule it with Dr. Corven."

Mark pushed off the wall and moved toward the door, pausing with his hand on the frame. "Oh, and Vita?"

"Yes?" Vita spoke.

"Good work," Mark said. "Try to see if you can come up with something that can be applied to human beings as well, in a way that would allow them to be... evolved."

"Yes. Thank you, father," Vita said. "I should note that the work is Talos' as much as mine. He sat through forty-seven tissue extractions without complaint, and on three occasions, corrected my understanding of Strathari cellular biology in ways that saved me weeks of analysis. His English may still be rough, but his knowledge of his own genome is priceless."

Mark nodded and left the room.

Dr. Corven stayed, staring at the genetic sequence on the display, her glasses still on her forehead. After a moment, she reached out and touched the screen where the double-helix model rotated slowly.

"Three hundred years," she said to the empty room.

---

Over the course of the months that had passed, the seventh War-Frame stood in its cradle in the mech bay, its cockpit sealed and its systems on standby. Octavia had managed to extend the stable handshake window from eleven seconds to thirty-eight, using a hybrid approach that combined her attenuation design with Talos' field-modification principle and elements from her own universe's interface technology. It wasn't a solution. If anything, it was barely even a foundation, though every test pushed the window wider.

In the hospital on the opposite end of the colony, the Strathari who had once piloted the machines she was trying to crack was still learning to walk again.

Dr. Corven and Marcos had designed a prosthetic arm for him together, adapting the same neural link technology they had used on Ivory for a nervous system that was older and more complex than anything it had been built for. The arm was engineered from a composite of printed alloys and synthetic polymers, mounted to the shoulder stump through a socket joint that interfaced with Talos' severed nerve endings via a web of micro-contacts embedded in the socket's inner lining. The neural link read the motor-cortex signals from Talos' brain, bypassed the missing nerve pathways, and translated his intent into a mechanical response.

It was crude by Strathari standards, and Talos made that known when Dr. Corven first activated it.

His fingers had twitched, curled, and then opened, and he had stared at them for a long time before speaking.

"It is slower than what I had," Talos said.

"It's way faster than nothing," Dr. Corven had replied.

Talos was then fitted with a prosthetic foot, socket-mounted at the ankle where his original limb had been severed. The foot assembly provided balance and basic locomotion. The neural link drove both limbs through the same interface, and within three weeks, Talos was walking the length of the hospital corridor under his own power, his steps uneven but controlled, and his remaining hand braced against the wall for balance while the prosthetic arm hung at his side, its fingers flexing in unconscious rhythm with each step.

After a month, Talos had gained the ability to walk without the help of the wall.

He stood on the observation platform at the western edge of the colony on an evening when the suns were an hour from setting, and the light they cast across the valley was the color of bronze. The prosthetic arm rested on the railing, its fingers wrapped around the metal with a grip that was precise but not natural, and each contact point was a fraction of a second behind the intent that drove it.

The prosthetic foot bore his weight pretty well, the joint at the ankle flexing as he shifted his stance, and his foot registered the texture of the platform's surface as a dull, generalized pressure that was nothing like what his real foot had once felt. But for now, it was more than enough. Maybe in time, humanity would make further advancements in this sector of biotechnology.

He could see the city from here. There were parks now, with trees that had been transplanted from the surrounding wilderness and paths that wound between them. There were livestock enclosures along the southern wall where animals grazed in the fading light. There were residential blocks, and commercial spaces, and a central square where humans gathered each morning around a board to choose their tasks for the day, like warriors accepting contracts from their house lord.

He had spent the months watching them, listening, and reading the histories that Marcos fed to his terminal, and what he had learned about humanity had not surprised him so much as clarified something he had felt since the first time Mark had sat beside his chair and spoken to him through the barrier of a language that neither of them fully shared.

These people were self-destructive.

That was Talos' major observation. Humanity's history was a record of civilizations built and burned. Knowledge was gained and lost. Wars were fought over principles that shifted with each generation. They reached for greatness with one hand and tore it down with the other, and they did both with an energy and a recklessness that the Strathari, for all their millennia of existence, had never quite matched.

And yet they built. They built constantly, compulsively, with a speed that bordered on the irrational. In six months, he had watched this colony transform from a cluster of functional structures into something that resembled a city, and the people who had done it were not all engineers or warriors or scholars. They were survivors who had been given a task list and a reason to show up in the morning, and that, apparently, was enough to somehow build all of this.

The Strathari had done the same. They built, expanded, reached, and fought. But where his people's self-destruction had been slow and deliberate, a civil war fought over philosophical differences that spanned generations, humanity's was fast, chaotic, and one that repeated quite constantly. They did not wait for a philosophical crisis to tear themselves apart. They did it over resources, over territory, over ideas that had the lifespan of a single generation, and then they rebuilt from the rubble and did it again.

It was something he was beginning to recognize as the same fundamental drive that had powered his own people, only compressed into shorter lives and therefore expressed with greater urgency. The Strathari had believed that death gave life weight, which was something humans didn't need to believe in since they lived it. Every generation carried the knowledge that their time was brief, and that knowledge drove them forward with a ferocity that longer-lived species could study for millennia, yet never manage to replicate it to the same degree.

Talos flexed the fingers of his prosthetic hand, watching the synthetic tendons pull beneath the polymer skin, and thought about his father.

Talesh had seen something. In those final days before everything went down, his father had looked at the civil war and the bodies it was producing and had concluded that perhaps death had given enough meaning already. That perhaps it was time to reach for something else, something that required the kind of thinking the scholars offered, even if the price was everything the warriors held sacred.

Talos had been the loudest voice in a house full of voices, and his father had put him in the ground for it, and for four hundred thousand years, the last thought in his mind before the cold took him had been that his father was wrong.

He was no longer certain of that.

Vita had told him about the genome three days ago. She had laid it out with a clinical precision he had come to respect from her. The fact that she had managed to come withing a margin of ninety-one percent reconstruction, what the missing nine percent was, the expected aging projection, and Dr. Corven had sat beside him while the words settled.

Three hundred years was nothing more than a fraction of what his people had been. Hell, he was older than that by over half a century. But then again, that was also a beginning.

His father had wanted the Strathari to become something greater, and the cost of that ambition had been everything. Now, four hundred thousand years later, a species that had never known the Strathari existed was standing at the edge of the same question, holding a blueprint for a life that was longer than theirs and shorter than his, and asking themselves whether they should reach for it.

The scholars had asked that question. His father had answered it. And Talos, who had spent his entire life believing that the answer was wrong, was standing on a platform built by humans who lived eighty years and accomplished in six months what some Strathari houses had debated for decades, and he was starting to think that perhaps the question itself was not the problem.

Perhaps the problem had been the inability to see that both answers could be right.

"I am starting to understand you, Father," Talos said in Strathari, speaking to the soft wind that was passing through.

He stood on the platform and watched the suns descend toward the horizon, and the light changed by degrees from bronze to copper to a deep amber that caught the surface of the prosthetic arm and made it glow. Below him, the city moved in an easy rhythm as evening settled in.

Children walked home from the schoolhouse. A pack of wolves threaded through the wildlife corridor to the south. A woman laughed somewhere near the central square, and the sound carried up to the platform on a breeze that smelled of cooking food and fresh soil.

The suns touched the horizon, and the valley filled with long shadows, and Talos stood there until the light was completely gone.