Chapter 61 - Living Prototype (Patreon)

The Operator sat on the floor with the tiny version of herself in her palm.

She raised her right hand slowly, and in her palm, the mini did the same thing at the exact same speed. She lowered her hand; the mini lowered hers. She said something, and the mini said it with her, in the same voice and at the same beat. Two mouths, one sound.

Her fingers went to her forehead, and so did the mini’s, the same hand on the same forehead, mirrored at the same speed.

Okay, stop copying me.

The mini froze with her hand still up there. The Operator brought her own hand back down slowly. The mini stayed where she was, arm raised, palm flat against her tiny brow.

Christ, that is one hell of an upgrade. Step one cleared, even if I have no idea yet what else she’s good for.

A muffled boom came through the ceiling, then another. Distant, slow, like something heavy hitting the floor above. They had been going for minutes now, and they were not stopping.

Those fucking explosions are still going up there. Far, but I know what they mean.

“Tera, explain this to me. Why does hitting level seven mean I get a mini version of myself? What’s she for? Levels one through six were all engineering stuff. A clone doesn’t connect to engineering anywhere.”

Okay. I wasn’t expecting this either. But the nanos have a message for you, and they want to explain the level seven abilities themselves.

“What? The nanos want to talk to me and explain things?”

Not directly, they communicate with me, and I translate for you.

“Yeah, I know, but I clawed my way from one to six on my own for days, no instructions, no warnings, and some of those upgrades hurt like hell when help would’ve spared me. So why now? What’s different? They suddenly like me or something?”

I’ll tell you what they’re saying, their words not mine. And remember, the nanos still don’t have personality, no feelings, no emotions, nothing close to whatever you’ve got going on in there. They speak from a functional place, which is a polite way of saying they’re informing you, not asking.

The Operator let that sit. The small copy in her palm stayed exactly as she was, frozen along with her.

Tera continued.

Apparently your evolution’s been a learning experience for them, the double one especially. And there’s respect in there too, for how you handled the system, how you went toe to toe with their old boss and didn’t break. That’s me translating, by the way. Respect’s an emotion, and they don’t have those, but it’s the closest thing to whatever it is they’re feeling after watching that.

A level with actual instructions for once. That’s a relief.

Tera went on.

This is the part they really wanted you to hear; they feel they’re part of your body now. They understood it before, mechanically, but now they feel it. They’re part of you, you’re one, and they hope one day you’ll feel the same, that you and they are one thing, and neither can live without the other.

"Okay, wow, that was not what I was expecting. A lot of emotions, a lot of information; we’ll process this later.

“Right now I need help, level seven, the ability, all of it. I made it from one to six on my own, but this one’s bigger than me, so I’m asking.”

Okay, this needs to be fast. Something’s about to happen up there and we don’t know what. I’m giving you the short version of level seven. The nanos already sent me everything, and you’re going to love this.

“Alright, hit me.”

Level seven splits in two. The first half is Bio Reading. Try it, your left hand’s busy with the clone so use your right, pull the threads out like when you were leveling up.

The Operator focused on her right hand. Threads slid out from her fingertips, but they were not blue.

Fine filaments, red, with tiny stingers running along the length of each one. They moved in the air the way she remembered the blue ones moving, though the look was different, less elegant.

“Why the stingers?”

The blue ones connect to machinery, but the red ones don’t have that option, so the stingers are how they get inside when they need to, and you’re going to want to hear what they can pick up.

The Operator turned her hand slowly, watching the red threads sway.

“What do they read?”

Bioactive compounds. Living tissue, body fluids, venoms, enzymes, hormones, plant resins, Kanryx components, biological acids.

“Why now? Why give me this at level seven specifically.”

The nanos did the math, and the math was depressing. Your formulas came from the system; the system isn’t around anymore, the Guardian’s calling the shots and he hasn’t promised you so much as a hello. And even in the best case, the next dungeon won’t have Kanryx; that resource is gone the moment you walk out. Your evolution was on a timer nobody told you about; they built this so it isn’t.

“So I have a path outside the dungeon too. Good.

“Okay. Second ability.”

The second one’s in your other hand. The nanos call it Clone Generation, their literal label, but the proper name for it is Living Prototype.

“Prototype of what.”

Of you. She’s your test subject, a working copy for running tests on. You analyze a compound with Bio Reading; we save the data, and the simulation runs on her.

“She’s a fraction of my size, though. How does that scale?”

She’s built from nanos and your tissue. Genetically and structurally, she’s a working scale model; the simulation accounts for the size difference and projects the result onto your full body. What happens to her tells us what would happen to you.

The Operator looked down at the tiny figure in her left hand.

A copy of me. For testing.

“What happens to her if something goes wrong in the simulation?”

Let’s say the compound’s lethal for you. Then when we run the simulation on her, she dies, the run shuts down and you’ve got your answer, bad formula. She resets clean afterward, no harm to you.

“And the evolution part?”

That’s where she earns her keep. Any formula that passes the test on her is one you can actually use, and your mutation evolution keeps progressing. The clone is the gate; the formula is the upgrade.

The Operator let her right hand fall to her side. The threads pulled back into her fingertips.

They want to turn me into a walking lab? I love it.

“Tell the nanos I love them.”

They heard.

She sat there for a moment, looking at nothing.

Okay, process all of this. The clone takes the risks; the threads read the chemistry. This is, this is huge.

“Give me a second, Tera. I’m processing.”

A brief silence.

“Okay. How long does the mini stay active?”

Two hours. After that, she dissolves.

“And to make another?”

Twelve-hour cooldown, so if you decide to dismiss her, you wait twelve hours before you can call up the next one. The reason is biological; every time we build her, we pull organic material from you, and your body takes about twelve hours to replenish that.

“Shit, okay, so I need to do something first. I’m going to leave her here on the floor for a minute and...”

No, don’t. She’s made of nanos and your tissue, so she has to stay close to you. If she gets too far away, she falls apart, and the nanos return to your body.

“Range?”

About ten feet.

“Okay, got it.”

She closed her left hand carefully, not enough to crush the mini, just enough to support her weight, and stood up. The little one balanced on her palm without complaint. Like she knew the move was coming, because of course she did. They were the same person.

Okay. First things first.

She crossed the lab to the control panel by the Kanryx tanks. Her copy in her hand rode along in silence.

She typed into the panel with her free hand. The mini could have gone right there on the panel beside her, two hands free in seconds, but the excitement had pushed the obvious out of reach.

[EXTRACT AND SECURE COMPOUNDS]

The control panel asked how many ounces and which compounds.

She typed her answer. All of them. Whatever fits in the pack, no extra weight. Twenty ounces per compound.

The control panel pushed back.

[For mobile transport, only 15 oz per compound is available, subject to container availability.]

She adjusted. Fifteen ounces, all seven.

She tapped accept.

A machine on the right side of the wall came alive with a low hum, liquid moving through a network of glass tubes, draining from each Kanryx tank and feeding into the unit. The monitor in front of her cycled through messages.

[Loading compounds.]

[Compounds completed. Available.]

A small hatch opened at the base of the unit, releasing a cold puff of air. Seven flasks sat inside, identical except for the labels. KX-1, KX-3, KX-7, KX-12, KX-19, KX-22, KX-31. Everything she’d come for, packed and ready to leave with her.

She ran her free hand into the hatch, pulled out the flasks one by one, and set them on the floor in front of her. Seven small metal cylinders, lined up cold against the tile.

She typed one more question into the panel.

[Time outside cold storage?]

The screen answered.

[12 months stable.]

She closed the hatch and lowered herself to the ground next to the flasks. Her copy was still in her left palm.

She picked up the first one, KX-1, and twisted off the lid with her free hand, bringing it close to her face.

The smell hit her, iron with something sweet underneath it, not pleasant exactly but not foul either.

Okay, I am not touching this with bare skin, no idea what it does on contact.

She rested the flask on the floor between her knees and focused on her right hand.

Threads.

The red filaments came out of her fingertips and twisted together above the flask. Her hand stayed still while they moved.

She lowered the threads into the flask, and they touched the liquid, and for a moment nothing happened.

Tera, nothing’s happening, it’s not like Machine Reading. My head should be on fire by now.

All the information is going to the HUD, and none of it loads into your brain. That’s the difference. Your cognition stays on the engineer side. Bio Reading writes everything into the HUD database, where I store your other data. I have it all.

“Okay,” she said aloud.

A few more seconds passed, then Tera said it.

KX-1 finished. Move to the next one.

The Operator pulled the threads out of the flask, capped it, and reached for KX-3. While her free hand worked, she kept thinking about something Tera had said.

“Okay, stupid question, Tera. If this works through the HUD, why didn’t machine reading work through the HUD too with the machines? Every time I used it, my head felt like it was about to split open, and the information was incomplete so I had to write it down on a piece of paper.”

Tera came back with a flat tone, edged with something close to amusement.

Operator, these are components for building mutation formulas, and the engineer role runs on one thing, you learning.

“And if Machine Reading just gave me the data, and you stored everything in the HUD?”

Then what part of you would actually be growing. Your brain wouldn’t, your body wouldn’t, the role wouldn’t.

The Operator looked down at the flask, the red threads still hovering above the liquid.

Right. The work is the point.

“So me figuring it out alone, that’s on purpose.”

Every ability you’ve climbed to came from you working it out the hard way, Disassembly Field, Living Forge, all of it. No struggle, no growth.

“And evolution stops.”

She paused with her hand on the cap of KX-7.

These are formulas, and you have a mini-clone in your hand for testing them. That’s it, much simpler. There’s no growth process to climb on this side; the role already gave you the tool at level seven, the goal now is upgrading your body through the formulas. Engineering keeps its own research path; that’s where the building and learning happens. Bioengineering moves through mutation and evolution, a different track, different rules.

The Operator sat with that. She did not respond out loud, and she kept working.

KX-7. KX-12. KX-19. KX-22.

Each one the same routine, twisting off the cap and setting the flask down, then lowering the threads and waiting, capping it and moving to the next.

When she got to the last one, KX-31, she finally spoke again.

“Thanks for all of that. It was a lot, I won’t lie. But look, if the nanos really feel like they’re part of me, then I want all of you working with me on this, you, them, and Napoleon, the whole team. Tell me everything you can about what’s happening to my body, because you’re the only family I’ve got right now and so far everything you’ve told me adds up.”

They heard and they will.

“Tera, the seven Kanryx compounds, you have them all?”

All seven are stored.

What did you feel when you touched them?

The Operator thought about it.

“Nothing solid, just the sensation of touching the liquid and something flowing into me, but very faint, almost not there.”

Right. The data went straight to the HUD, so you didn’t have to feel any of it; that’s the whole point. Now listen, take care of these flasks because we’re leaving and we may not come back; they’re irreplaceable for now. But the bigger picture is this, if something interesting shows up out there, we now have the means to actually study it. That’s where the prototype really pays off.

The booms above stopped.

She froze and tilted her head toward the ceiling.

“Tera, they stopped. I think they’re getting through. Do we have time for one more thing?”

We’re deep down, and they have to clear several levels before they reach the security zone we were in earlier. So yes, we have time.

“Okay, I need to be sure of every ability I have. And I have Napoleon, so he can defend me.”

Napoleon turned his head toward her from his patrol and extended one of his front legs in her direction, a small gesture, the kind that meant he had her covered.

“Okay. Tera. Can you guess what I want to test?”

I can guess.

“We need to figure out is how we experiment with the compounds on the mini, so you have all the data.”

I have all the data on the seven compounds, so I can run simulations. You just tell me what you want to try, and we can run any combination, any quantities, to see how the prototype reacts.

“Perfect, but fast. We only have one mini, and you said twelve-hour cooldown, so once she’s gone, she’s gone for a while. Listen, I can’t look at the HUD right now, no time. Pick a random formula and run a simulation.”

Starting simulation.

A small panel opened in her field of view, the formula appearing on the HUD.

KX-3, 30 ml.KX-12, 15 ml.KX-22, 20 ml.KX-1, 5 ml.

Random quantities. Selected from compounds with a strong mutation impact.

Starting simulation on the clone.

She was still on her left palm, sitting above the three red rings on her fingers.

Initiating formula insertion.

The three red rings on her left hand glowed, and the mini levitated a fraction of an inch off her palm. Tiny red threads started rising from the rings, fine as needles, and pierced into her body from below, four of them.

Injecting test formula.

The Operator looked at her hand. She felt something deep and strange, like she could sense the liquid moving into the mini, even though no liquid actually existed.

Tera.

She said it out loud, voice changing.

“Tera. Something is wrong.”

A weight pressed down inside her, nothing physical, something else.

“Something is definitely wrong.”

Her eyes filled. Tears slid down both cheeks before she understood she was crying.

“Shit Tera. What is this sadness? Why am I feeling this?”

She looked down. The mini was crying too, with tiny tears rolling down a face identical to her own.

And then the mutation started.

The mini’s head burst. Not exploded outward, just split apart from the inside, and four pale tentacles pushed up from where the head had been, growing where her neck had ended. Her skin turned chalk-white, top to bottom, the color leeching out of her in seconds.

The Operator stared. She could not stop crying. Because she could feel it.

Whatever the formula was doing, the mini was feeling all of it, and because they shared everything, so did she, the panic in her head.

The creature’s arms lengthened, the bones inside stretching past what bones should do, the fingers growing into long blade-like points. Its stomach split open, no blood, just opened, and a wide mouth full of jagged teeth formed where the stomach had been.

Its legs stretched too, white, growing past what a leg should be; nothing about the shape was human anymore. A roar tore out of the mouth in the stomach, low and ragged, and the Operator screamed with it, the same length, the same pitch.

“AAAAAAH!”

Hold it together, Operator. Hold it together.

She gasped for air and forced herself to breathe until the roar in her chest stopped.

But the tears did not.

“Tera, that creature is suffering; it's conscious. The sadness is, I can’t even describe it. I can’t take this, please, I need to stop this, I can’t anymore.”

Just think dismiss. Think about it.

The creature on her palm jumped before she could move. It hit the floor and started running away from her, fast and unsteady on those new legs but still fast, and it made it about ten feet before it exploded.

The body burst apart on the spot, flesh and tissue scattering around it, the elongated arms and bladed fingers landing close by.

The nanos separated from the flesh of the clone and crawled across the floor toward her, climbing up the side of her boot, along the leg, across the torso and up the arm, until they reached the rings on her left hand and slipped back inside.

The Operator looked at the floor, at the pieces of pale tissue in front of her, all that was left of the mini.

“Tera. Why did she fall apart?”

I did mention this earlier; she’s made of nanos. The nanos belong to your body, so she can’t be more than ten feet from you. Beyond that, she falls apart, which is exactly what just happened.

“And the flesh?”

That part is yours, tissue you grew. The nanos control everything, run the simulation, run the structure, and the flesh is the body of it. The body falls apart when the nanos leave, so we need to study this in depth.

“Yes,” the Operator said. “We need to.”

She wiped her face with the back of her hand, and the tears stopped. She breathed in slowly, then out.

“Okay. Okay.”

She took another breath.

Move.

She got to her feet, walked back to her pack, and started loading. The seven flasks went in tight, pressed against the padding so that they would not roll. She grabbed the leather notebook with the formulas and slid it into the side pocket, then tested the weight on her shoulder. Full.

There’s more I’d grab, but the pack’s full.

“Tera. If we get a chance to come back here, we come back here.”

Agreed.

“Okay, Napoleon, we’re leaving. No time to check the other doors, no time to look at anything else, we need out.”

Napoleon stopped his patrol and turned to face her.

“As you say, Operator. Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. I think we go down.”

She tightened the pack across her shoulders and adjusted the revolver on her hip, then took one last look at the lab, the dried acid patches and the small pile of pale tissue on the floor that used to be her mini.

She turned to leave.

A head rose through the floor in front of her, not the whole body, just the head, and she recognized it immediately. A Guardian.

One of his clones, a huge human eye on his head, iris, pupil, all of it there, only the color was different, green instead of black.

“No, not now. I don’t have time for this. I need to run.”

The Guardian raised a hand toward her, the gesture calm rather than threatening, asking her to stop, and then he spoke.

“Operator. I have your next mission.”