06-01-2025, 05:40 PM
Nikolai stood alone in the sterile hush of laboratory after Nox had gone. The silence pressed in like a weight. Beneath the stillness of his posture, his pulse ticked upward, sharp, clean, surgical. Controlled breaths masked the noise of his thoughts, but his mind was already racing, leaping over the chasm between fear and something far more useful.
What if Nox wasn’t a fluke?
What if every child in the world received a simple injection in infancy? A silent inoculation that rewrote their biology before the divine spark could ever ignite? No Manifestation. No dangerous awakenings. No gods walking among men.
Just human beings.
A correction. A vaccine. A failsafe. A switch.
And the hand on that switch? His hand. His alone.
The military could never be trusted with that power. Nor the Dominance governors with no experience in what it meant to be a god. The crumbling remnants of the American states were barely holding on to relevance, and the Atharim were nothing but dying zealots lighting fires in the dark.
No. The future didn’t belong to the battlefield. It belonged in a laboratory. In a blood sample. In a byte of code. The world was a petri dish.
His gaze lingered on the scans Nox had left behind, but the anger that had clouded his judgment had evaporated, replaced by something colder. Sharper. He saw Nox now not as representing a threat, but as a keystone. A flaw in the pattern that exposed the framework behind it. A living specimen of something utterly new.
Now, he moved with purpose. His footsteps echoed like verdicts in the corridor as he made his way to the diagnostics wing. There was no hesitation now. No room for doubt.
He found Dr. Weston precisely where he expected: shoulders hunched over a holodisplay, her fingers flicking through biological schematics with an ease earned by repetition and expectation. She looked up the moment he entered, standing a little too quickly and smoothing the front of her laboratory coat.
“Ascendancy—”
“Do we have one of them?” he said without preamble, his voice flat and quiet.
She blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“The nanobots,” he said. “From today’s samples. Are any still viable?”
Her expression considered the question as she glanced toward a secure console at the back of the lab. “I’d have to check. They’re microscopic, and we’ve only just begun processing the bloodwork. It could take some hours.”
“Check,” he ordered, already turning toward the screen. “I want confirmation as soon as possible. If they’re present, isolate them. Catalog them.”
Her spine straightened. “With all due respect, Ascendancy, I’m not a cyberneticist. These nanobot systems are outside my field. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
He nodded, as if she had merely confirmed what he already knew. “Then find someone who does.”nWhen she didn’t move fast enough, his tone shifted to deliberate. Razor-sharp. “I want to know what they did. How they did it. And whether they can do it again.”
Dr. Weston stared at him, the flicker of realization dawning across her features like sunrise creeping through a war zone.
“You mean?” she started.
“I mean replicated,” he cut her off. “Programmed. Controlled.” The word landed like a gavel.
She swallowed once, visibly recalibrating. Then nodded. “Understood.”
Nikolai said nothing more. He turned and left her standing amid the hum of machinery and slowly scrolling data, her mind now working for him in the same way her equipment did.
He stepped into the hallway, each footfall echoing beneath the tunnelled ceilings, and for the first time in hours, he let himself exhale fully. He no longer feared what had been lost. He saw what could be built.
What if Nox wasn’t a fluke?
What if every child in the world received a simple injection in infancy? A silent inoculation that rewrote their biology before the divine spark could ever ignite? No Manifestation. No dangerous awakenings. No gods walking among men.
Just human beings.
A correction. A vaccine. A failsafe. A switch.
And the hand on that switch? His hand. His alone.
The military could never be trusted with that power. Nor the Dominance governors with no experience in what it meant to be a god. The crumbling remnants of the American states were barely holding on to relevance, and the Atharim were nothing but dying zealots lighting fires in the dark.
No. The future didn’t belong to the battlefield. It belonged in a laboratory. In a blood sample. In a byte of code. The world was a petri dish.
His gaze lingered on the scans Nox had left behind, but the anger that had clouded his judgment had evaporated, replaced by something colder. Sharper. He saw Nox now not as representing a threat, but as a keystone. A flaw in the pattern that exposed the framework behind it. A living specimen of something utterly new.
Now, he moved with purpose. His footsteps echoed like verdicts in the corridor as he made his way to the diagnostics wing. There was no hesitation now. No room for doubt.
He found Dr. Weston precisely where he expected: shoulders hunched over a holodisplay, her fingers flicking through biological schematics with an ease earned by repetition and expectation. She looked up the moment he entered, standing a little too quickly and smoothing the front of her laboratory coat.
“Ascendancy—”
“Do we have one of them?” he said without preamble, his voice flat and quiet.
She blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“The nanobots,” he said. “From today’s samples. Are any still viable?”
Her expression considered the question as she glanced toward a secure console at the back of the lab. “I’d have to check. They’re microscopic, and we’ve only just begun processing the bloodwork. It could take some hours.”
“Check,” he ordered, already turning toward the screen. “I want confirmation as soon as possible. If they’re present, isolate them. Catalog them.”
Her spine straightened. “With all due respect, Ascendancy, I’m not a cyberneticist. These nanobot systems are outside my field. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
He nodded, as if she had merely confirmed what he already knew. “Then find someone who does.”nWhen she didn’t move fast enough, his tone shifted to deliberate. Razor-sharp. “I want to know what they did. How they did it. And whether they can do it again.”
Dr. Weston stared at him, the flicker of realization dawning across her features like sunrise creeping through a war zone.
“You mean?” she started.
“I mean replicated,” he cut her off. “Programmed. Controlled.” The word landed like a gavel.
She swallowed once, visibly recalibrating. Then nodded. “Understood.”
Nikolai said nothing more. He turned and left her standing amid the hum of machinery and slowly scrolling data, her mind now working for him in the same way her equipment did.
He stepped into the hallway, each footfall echoing beneath the tunnelled ceilings, and for the first time in hours, he let himself exhale fully. He no longer feared what had been lost. He saw what could be built.