TCTS 3 Chapter 43 (Patreon)

Life goes on, but today it feels like there's lots of demons out here. Rest in peace, Oliver. Your music always got me in rhythm when writing.

IDK why every single time I say I will get a certain amount done, I never do. Anyways, I was researching a bunch of shit that I have no clue I'm even using correctly in this chapter. Why? You may wonder. Well, that's because I'm an architect, and this chapter is diving into the deep end of science, which I'm pretty sure I told to go fuck itself one too many times in this chapter alone, lol.

While everyone had been fighting tooth and nail to figure out just how to make humanity's first ever War-Frame, work that could be said to be parallel to it was taking place. Vita had begun the augmentation research Mark had assigned her when he presented the distributed-interface design, and she had approached it methodically. 

The challenge was as straightforward as could be, but in reality, it was quite the undertaking, even for the AI. A normal human body would have to either be rebuilt from the ground up or undergo forced evolution, just as the Strathari had done. Their nervous systems had to be made much stronger, their spinal cords had to be restructured, their brains had to be buffered against data overload, and their metabolic systems had to be uprated to sustain the energy demands. Each one of these, on its own, wasn't exactly the hardest thing for Vita to do, but creating an outcome in which the patient wouldn't be killed was the wall she had to face.

What they needed was evolution compressed into days rather than millennia, pushing specific biological systems in directions where they had the potential to grow.

"I want to be clear about something before we start," Vita said, communicating through a pair of overhead speakers in the room's ceiling. Seated around a briefing table were Dr. Corven, Severus, and six medical staff. "What we are attempting has never truly been done by humanity. Sure, there have been a rather large number of unethical experiments, the Elites and the Simulacra being one of them, but they were not conducted to the extent we intend to. No one in the history of mankind has really created a way to evolve human genes to interface seamlessly with a machine."

"You're talking about forced evolution," Dr. Corven said.

"Correct," Vita said. "The Strathari did something comparable to their own race, though it was done primarily to make themselves the best biological killing machines. We are starting from a worse position with less advanced tools and less knowledge. The Strathari sequences I've mapped can be said to be biological instructions, and due to the fact that humanity, at its core, came to existence through the use of Strathari biology, it too has the potential to be taken further. What we want to do is give it that push it just so needs."

"And the body will just accept that?" Severus asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Severus," Vita addressed the Elite, "You, along with the other Elites and father, are a walking example of human evolution, though father can be an exception to this. What I'm proposing is a compound that acts directly on the body at the cellular level and triggers an accelerated evolutionary response in every system we need to change. It is similar in nature to the procedure I have no doubt you surely underwent. The person who goes into the pod will come out fundamentally different. They'll have denser bones, they'll be stronger, their muscles more efficient, their nervous system capable of carrying more, a metabolism that would run harder and longer than anything baseline biology produces, and a cellular repair mechanism fast enough to keep the whole thing from tearing itself apart during the process... Now, if anyone in this room believes that there is a reason not to try, I would like to hear it now."

Almost a minute went by in absolute silence, but no one spoke.

"Good," Vita said. "Then let's begin."

Vita's earlier work with the Strathari genome had given her a functional map of the sequences that governed their enhanced physiology, neural conductivity, bone density, and metabolic efficiency. The idea, in concept, was to synthesize a compound from the functional Strathari sequences that, when introduced into a human body, would trigger a cascade of targeted evolutionary changes and push the body past its natural limits in the specific directions they wanted it to, bridging the gap between what the demand to operate a War-Frame and what a human could give.

In concept, it was simple. In practice, well, they say practice makes perfect for a reason. And practice is obviously accompanied by many failures.

---

"Trial forty-eight," Vita announced. "Neural conductivity catalyst, variant C-12, applied to sample tissue at standard concentration."

Dr. Corven leaned over the microscope display, watching the cellular response in real time in the neural tissue harvested from a volunteer's biopsy. The catalyst entered the medium, and for a few seconds, the cells did exactly what they were supposed to do. Conductivity pathways began forming, and the myelin began thickening, the tissue reaching toward what looked like the first stirrings of a Strathari nerve cluster coming to life within human cells.

Unfortunately, it did not take long for the cells to swell, blister, and die.

"Same story as last time," Dr. Corven said as she leaned back from the display. "The cells accept the catalyst, begin changing, and the immune system catches up and burns the whole thing to the ground. Forty-eight trials and we haven't even budged past four seconds."

"Because, from the immune system's perspective, it's just doing its job," Vita said. "It sees cells growing in a way it never has before, and treats the new tissue the same way it'd treat a tumor. It doesn't know the difference between evolution and cancer. All it knows is that something unfamiliar is happening, and its only response to the unfamiliar is to kill it."

 "So let's familiarize it," one of the junior staff said.

"Twelve variants have tried," Vita said. "Yet none of them have lasted."

"What about just knocking the immune system out?" another junior staff member asked. "Suppress it and let the changes take hold, bring it back up after."

"No." Dr. Corven said, leaving no room for negotiation. "If you suppress the immune system during a process that's rewriting the patient's cells from the ground up, you leave the body defenseless. And since every cell would be in flux, if there's nothing standing guard, then a single bacterium would waltz in and tada!  Now you've got sepsis in a body that can't fight it."

The room went quiet momentarily.

"I believe there may be another way," Vita said. "Instead of suppressing the immune system, we can teach it. Before the serum is introduced, we can prime the body with a compound that would inform the immune system about what the evolutionary changes will look like before they begin. By the time the serum arrives and the real changes begin, the immune system's already been told that what's happening is supposed to be happening."

"Hmm, I see," Dr. Corven said as she took her glasses off her forehead and put them on. "You are suggesting we introduce the guest before the guest walks through the door. The immune system kills the catalyst because the growth is a stranger. However, if the growth isn't a stranger, then the immune system would let it in. Like a vaccine.

"Correct, though it's not really that simple. It'll be as though we are giving the body a preview of its own future," Vita said.

Dr. Corven was quiet for a moment, then looked at her team while slowly nodding. "Let's get started on synthesizing a primer using the Strathari cellular signaling markers Vita has already identified as benign. Build a primer that lays those markers down in the cellular environment before the serum goes in. If the immune system sees markers it recognizes when the growth begins, it might hold its fire long enough for the changes to take root."

It had taken them less than a week to come up with a primer after the conversation. It used the Strathari cellular signaling markers that Vita had already cataloged as benign, and wove them into a delivery package that coated the interior walls of every cell it touched. The primer flooded the intercellular space with molecular patterns drawn from Strathari biology, and by the time the serum arrived and triggered cellular growth that produced those same patterns, the immune system would encounter tissue it had already been introduced to.

By the beginning of the following week, trial fifty-three had managed to last for eighteen seconds before rejection began. The last five trials had signaled that the primer was indeed having an effect. However, it simply wasn't long enough.

"The markers are degrading too quickly," Vita said. "The immune system holds off while the primer's fresh, but once the markers fade, it catches up. I need the markers to last until the new tissue anchors and start producing their own cellular signals."

"How long would it take to factor that?" Dr. Corven asked.

"Four minutes for neural tissue," Vita answered.

"Let's triple the dose," Severus said with a slow nod.

"Already on it," Vita said.

By the time they reached trial number fifty-eight, the markers were able to hold for three minutes, closing the gap even more with every new trial. By the sixty-fourth trial, the markers were holding indefinitely, and the neural tissue sat under the microscope with its conductivity tripled and its myelin thickened to a grade approaching the lower bound of the Strathari baseline. The tests had shown the cells growing into the change and stabilizing as the immune system accepted it.

Dr. Corven studied the sample as she made her observation, her voice bordering between wonder and weariness. "It's integrating it. The tissue thinks the change is natural."

"Quite the astute observation," Vita joked.

"I can't believe we were able to get that so quickly for this tissue type," Dr. Corven said with a bit of pride. "Now we just need every system evolving at once, in a living body, without the changes tearing each other apart."

"Now that we've got the groundwork set, we can move on to doing the bulk of the work in simulations," Vita said, and she was correct.

Over the course of five weeks, Vita had modeled a virtual human body at the cellular level using Severus' medical data as the baseline, and she ran the full serum administration from first injection to final stabilization in compressed time.

The first run killed the virtual patient in minutes as the neural evolution consumed more energy than the body could produce. The metabolism couldn't keep pace with the demand, toxins stacked up in the blood, and the kidneys failed.

The second run, with the metabolic evolution triggered first, cooked the patient from the inside as the accelerating metabolism generated more heat than the body could shed.

The third run applied both at once, and it produced two competing evolutionary cascades that interfered at the cellular level and killed the patient.

They ran ninety-seven more over two weeks. Each one failed differently, and each failure pointed somewhere new.

Run number one hundred had the patient die at the fourteen-hour mark. The bone density had begun increasing on schedule, and the mineral structures were forming exactly as Vita had designed them to, but the nerve clusters threaded through the vertebral column hadn't evolved far enough to withstand the compression. This led the denser bone to squeeze the nerves, which, in turn, misfired, causing the spinal cord to seize, and the virtual patient flatlined.

"The bones are eager," Vita said. "They want to evolve, and the cells respond to the structural catalyst aggressively, almost too aggressively. But the nerves are slower, and the bones aren't waiting for them."

"Can't you slow the bone growth?" Severus asked.

"If I slow it too much, the structural evolution falls behind the muscle evolution," Vita said. "And then the muscles would tear themselves off bones that haven't caught up yet. There's a narrow window, but I believe I'll be able to find it."

Run one-twenty-seven managed to survive to the final phase, which felt like progress until Vita pulled the results apart. The virtual patient's neural evolution had completed, but it had done so unevenly, leaving the left hemisphere's conductivity to run thirty percent higher than the right.

"What does asymmetric neural evolution mean for a pilot?" Dr. Corven asked.

Octavia, who'd been brought in to consult on the interface implications, answered from the doorway where she had been standing for almost half an hour. "It means the pilot's intent reaches one side of the frame before the other. Steps will pull, turns will drift, and under stress, the lag between hemispheres compounds until the pilot either compensates hard enough to give themselves a hemorrhage or loses control entirely."

"So it has to be symmetrical," Dr. Corven said.

"Perfectly symmetrical," Vita said. "The dosage and delivery have to be balanced to within five percent between hemispheres. Anything beyond that introduces asymmetry that I'm 98.37874% sure the pilot will feel."

By simulation number one hundred and thirty, the patient had made it all the way to stabilization with every system evolved to target parameters, and Dr. Corven was halfway to allowing herself relief when Vita delivered the postmortem. The patient's new baseline metabolism burned fuel at six times the normal human rate, meaning that the body would consume its fat reserves in hours, then cannibalize its own muscle tissue, then start on the organs.

"God damnit," Dr. Corven cursed.

"The metabolic catalyst pushed too far," Vita agreed. "I need to cap the growth. There's a window between 'enough to sustain the other changes' and 'consuming the body to fuel itself,' that I need to find."

"Every solution only serves to make a new problem," Dr. Corven said, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. "We fix the nerves, the metabolism breaks. We fix the metabolism, and the bones fall behind. We fix the bones, but the nerves can't take the pressure. What can we do?"

"Maybe we ought to stop treating them as separate systems," Vita said. "Because they're not. In Strathari biology, these systems evolved together over who knows how many millennia, each one shaping the others as they grew. We've been trying to change them one at a time, expecting the body to sort out the integration on its own. But it can't because the body doesn't understand that these changes are related and processes each one as an isolated event that results in conflict."

"Okay," Dr. Corven sighed.

"Let's do one compound done through a single injection with every evolutionary trigger in the same formula," Vita proposed. "But each one is wrapped in a molecular delivery shell that dissolves at a different rate. The dissolution rate controls when each trigger activates once the body receives the injection, and the serum orchestrates the rest from the inside."

"Walk us through it," Dr. Corven said.

"There would be four layers," Vita said as she brought a timeline up on the display, a horizontal bar divided into colored segments. "Layer one is neural, which will have the shells dissolve immediately on injection, allowing the nervous system to start evolving first because it's the most fragile, the most complex, and the most unforgiving of mistakes. Conductivity pathways begin forming, then myelin thickens, and the neural architecture starts reaching toward the bandwidth the ports will eventually carry.

"Layer would be metabolic. Those shells dissolve four hours after injection, once the neural evolution has enough of a foothold that it won't be knocked over by the metabolic shift. The body's energy production ramps up, and cellular output increases as waste processing accelerates. This is the layer that feeds the neural evolution and prepares the body to fuel what comes next. Without it, the neural growth starves, but with it, the body has the energy to keep growing."

"Layer three is structural and will begin to take place eight hours after the injection. By this point, the nervous system is stable, and the metabolism is running hot enough to sustain the heaviest work. The bone matrix begins to densify, and mineral structures form that human bones don't naturally produce, allowing the person undergoing the evolution to bear the load of a body working at sustained combat output. The muscle fibers begin to restructure, shifting from peak-force configurations to high-endurance ones. Oh, by the way, this is the most painful part of the whole process."

"And the fourth layer?" Severus asked.

"Layer four is the net," Vita replied. "Cellular repair catalysts are unencapsulated and active from the moment of injection. While the other three layers tear the body apart and rebuild it, layer four runs behind them, cleaning up and repairing any collateral damage. Stabilizing new structures as they form and preventing any sort of runaway cellular breakdown. In simpler terms, layers one through three are the architects, and layer four is the structural engineer."

"Just one injection?" Dr. Corven asked.

"Just one injection," Vita confirmed. "The body and the serum should be able to take care of the rest."

"Can we actually build this?" Dr. Corven asked.

"The components? Yes," Vita said. "However, the encapsulation is the hard part. The shells have to dissolve on a precise schedule inside a body whose chemistry is changing in real time around them. A shell calibrated for six-hour dissolution under normal conditions might dissolve in four once the metabolic evolution shifts the blood pH."

Simulation number one hundred and thirty-one was the first test of the integrated serum, and it had the muscle evolution's delivery shell dissolve forty minutes too early. The metabolic changes had shifted the blood's acidity just enough to eat through the casing ahead of schedule, and the muscles began to evolve before the bones could bear the load, leading to a fractured femur for the virtual patient.

"Point-three pH units," Vita said. "I'll reformulate the shell to resist the drift."

After three days, one hundred and thirty-five had been completed with every phase on schedule. It was their most successful simulation to date.

Vita ran it again and again, reaching an eighty-four percent survival rate by run one hundred and fifty. Eighty-nine by simulation two hundred. Ninety-one point three by two hundred and fourteen, after she added a secondary primer for the blood-brain barrier and an intravenous nutrient infusion to keep the body fueled during stabilization.

"Unfortunately, that's the ceiling in simulation," Vita said. "The rest is individual variation that the model can't capture. In other words, it's time to go back to testing flesh."

---

Fourteen Peacekeepers gave samples within a day of being asked, and Vita grew cultures from each one and ran the serum against living human cells for the first time, and the difference between simulation and reality showed itself immediately.

"Sample set four," Vita said during the first review. "Neural tissue tracked within two percent of projection. Metabolic within four. Bone within one. But the muscle evolution ran eleven percent faster than projected because the volunteer's baseline metabolism dissolved the structural shell early. Same failure as run one hundred and nineteen."

"So we're going to have to calibrate per patient," Dr. Corven said.

"The serum's core would stay universal," Vita said. "But the shells will have to get tuned to the individual. A blood panel taken 24 hours before the procedure should tell us everything we need to know about the patient's chemistry, and we need to adjust the shell resistance to match it. Faster metabolism, tougher shell. Slower metabolism, thinner shell."

Two volunteers were screened out, and their genetic panels showed neuroinflammatory markers that would let the brain's immune response punch through the primer during neural evolution.

"Those two don't go in the pod," Dr. Corven said. "Not with a modified primer. Not with extra preparation. Not at all. We would essentially be gambling with people's brains."

"Agreed," Vita said.

Severus looked at Dr. Corven. "What about mine?"

Vita answered. "Within one percent across every category. You have a clean immune profile, optimal metabolic range, and zero neural resistance. Biologically, you're an ideal candidate."

"Good," Severus said. "I'm going second."

"They haven't even finished the War-Frames yet, so what's the rush? Let's continue experimenting for the time being," Dr. Corven said.

After three more weeks of tissue trials, Vita had ended up adjusting the primer three times, reformulating two shells, and adding a real-time monitoring system to the pod that could track the patient's blood chemistry continuously and adjust the serum's pacing on the fly if the body drifted from the calibration during the procedure. They had severely modified a medical pod and turned it into an active partner in the process, managing temperature during structural evolution, feeding nutrients during stabilization, catching rejection before it cascaded, and keeping the serum's four layers locked to what the body was actually doing rather than what they'd predicted it would do.

Twelve of the fourteen volunteers cleared.

"This is as far as we go without a living patient," Vita said during the final review. "The serum is ready, the simulations are as good as they're going to get, and the pod is ready. The next data point is a human being."

Dr. Corven looked at her tablet for a long time before taking off her glasses, wiping them on her coat, and putting them back on. "Question is who."

Two days later, Mark had called for a meeting. He gathered the Elites and laid everything they had been working on for the past four months out. The distributed interface, the War-Frame, the evolutionary procedure, the mortality risk, and the fact that the process was irreversible, which they didn't really care about.

When he finished speaking, Severus raised his hand to speak. "My lord, who will go first?"

"I will," Mark said.

Octavia's head turned and Titus uncrossed his arms.

"My lord," Severus said. "You are the colony's unofficial leader. If something were to happen to you, who knows what would end up happening?"

"If something goes wrong, then you lot will take over," Mark said. "I'm not asking any of you to step into that pod if I haven't gone first and come out the other side."

"With all due respect, sir," Titus said, "that's exactly why you shouldn't go first. We need you alive more than we need you brave. Little Lyra needs you."

"This isn't about bravery," Mark said as he swallowed hard. "If I send one of you in first and it kills you, I carry the fact that I let someone else take a risk I wasn't willing to take. I won't be the kind of leader who would willingly sacrifice his subordinates' lives without having the balls to put his own on the line."

Severus held his gaze for a long moment, the kind of look that passed between men who'd bled together. Then he nodded once.

"The procedure will take place tomorrow," Mark said. "I'll brief Vita and Dr. Corven tonight. If any of you want to be there, you're welcome. If you'd rather not watch, I understand that too."

"We'll be there," Severus stated, and the rest of the Elites all nodded in unison.

The next morning, the pod stood upright in the center of the surgical wing, in a chamber Vita and Mason had designed for this purpose alone. It was an oval, pill-shaped object of white composite and glass, taller than Mark, connected to banks of monitoring systems along every wall. Inside was a contoured cradle that would hold the patient through the four-day process, fitted with IV ports for caloric supplementation, neural monitors, and temperature regulators to manage the thermal shifts the evolution would generate.

Mark stood in front of it in medical shorts, his chest bare and his pendant resting against his collarbone. Dr. Corven and her team moved through preparations quietly, and Vita ran final calibrations through the speakers.

"Primer calibrated to patient baseline," Vita announced. "Primary catalyst encapsulation adjusted for metabolic rate. Secondary neural primer loaded. Caloric supplementation staged. All systems are ready to go."

"Vitals?" Dr. Corven asked.

"Heart rate elevated twelve percent above resting baseline," Vita stated. "Blood pressure normal. Neural activity consistent with heightened alertness. He's nervous."

"I can hear you," Mark said.

"I know, Father," Vita said. "I'm noting it for the record."

Severus stood by the door with his jaw tight, and Marcos watched through every sensor in the room without comment.

And behind the observation window, Lyra pressed her little face against the glass. She held Mr. Bear in both arms, clutched against her chest, her eyes locked on Mark's. She hadn't cried when he told her about the whole thing planned for today. Instead, she had simply asked one question. "Will it hurt?" 

"Yes," he'd told her. "But I'll be okay."

Mark looked at the pod, then back at the window to see how Lyra's chin rested on Mr. Bear's head. He smiled at her genuinely. It wasn't a smile that hid his fear behind his bravado, but one that communicated that he, too, was scared.

She didn't smile back. But she raised one hand off Mr. Bear's back and pressed it flat against the glass, fingers spread, and held it there.

Mark turned to Dr. Corven. "Let's go."

Dr. Corven met his eyes and nodded. "Step in."

He stepped into the pod. The cradle received his weight, the contours shifting to fit his body. The IV ports connected, feeling cool against his skin. The neural monitors settled at his temples. The last thing he saw through the closing seal was Lyra leaning against the window with a tear falling from her left eye.

As soon as the seal closed, Mark felt himself grow drowsy, and the world blurred away. Almost immediately after, his eyes shot open. He glanced around, but all around him was an endless expanse of white.

"I believe this is the first time we've had the chance to properly chat, Mark Shepherd. Or should I say..."