Stolen Gifts

[Nox]

He waited. It was a sterile room but it wasn't locked. They tried to entertain him but there was nothing on the screens that would hold his attention. Nox hated TV, and sitting still. He paced most of the time when he fed Lily or rocked in the chair. He hated sitting still. His knee bounced until the door opened and the Ascendancy came in. The fear less, he was his normal regal self as he sat down and demanded an explanation.

It always amazed him that the Ascendancy demanded when all he had to do was ask. Nox had never given him any reason to think he'd keep things from him. He was loyal if not deferential enough. Never disrespectful. But he never made an issue of it. The man was the leader of the known world, he expected things, demanded things. Though Nox had said he would tell him everything when he told him of the problem.

There was a wry smile as he started. He didn't feel the humor, and his voice didn't reflect it either, but it was the dry humor he was fond of. "I don't suppose you want my life story, so you know I was bitten by a genetically engineered creature. Best I can guess is it was Chupacabra and rougarou from the research data that we've analyzed." Nox pulled out another data stick and handed it to Nik. "Project CxR was in development for a super soldier but the only they they made was the horde that you helped me wipe out of the tunnels. One bit me, we severed the arm. You gave me a new one. The new one got busted. Sage Parker had connections with his parents cybernetics company and he got me a new one with a few new modifications. In order to help with the healing process and my general tendency to get hurt, he set some of the nanobots he injected into my system to a generalized healing procedure, to prepare my arm at the nerve level to connect to the interface to wires of the new cybernetic arm. Over a short period of time I started to notice the power going on the fritz. Unable to reach it, slipping through my fingers until it was just gone. No longer in the empty places, no longer a light. The world is dead, lacking color without it. Life only worth living because I made myself a promise long before this. And I've got a lot of people counting on me. We believe that the nanobots removed the mass that was the horde, and with it clipped whatever connection to the power I had."

[Ascendancy]

Nikolai took the data stick from Nox’s hand, examining it like it was a shard of glass.  He didn’t speak immediately. What was there to say, when a thing like this was laid before you? The seat of their power, unmade by accident. A side effect. Not punishment, not retribution. Just flesh and code and metal. Just biology and machines.

His fingers closed around the data stick. He turned and crossed the room, pacing slowly. Controlled. Like something coiling inward. His mind raced ahead, faster than even his voice could follow, leaping from one conclusion to the next.

Genetically engineered creatures. Nanotechnology. Neural interfaces. This wasn’t unmaking. This was surgery. He turned back.

“These nanobots,” Nikolai said, voice even. “If they removed the horde... perhaps they also removed something else.” His eyes narrowed. “You said they were designed to heal. To repair nerve tissue. To reconnect interface points. Their sensors believed there was an injury in your mind that needed fixed…”

He paused to think, then slowly locked his gaze upon Nox like he was a machine in need of repair. “They excised it. Removed what they mistook for damage.” He spoke as if he was still grappling with comprehension.

The option seemed obvious. “Just remove the nanobots. In their absence, perhaps your mind will reconnect with the power.”

[Nox]

The Ascendancy was grasping at straws trying to make heads or tails of the situation. Nox might even say he sounded frantic in his solutions.

But he listened and he didn't say anything until the suggestion to remove them was made and he thought about it. "I don't think it will help. They have subsequently been reprogrammed to avoid any other interactions with the brain and to only heal assigned injuries."

Nox wasn't sure what to say to alleviate the fears or anxieties or whatever was making this man search for answers they had thought about too. "I have doctors looking at things. But the channeler brain is unyet studied except by your people. You've run tests on me. Let my people see the scans. I'd offer for them to work together but that could spell bad things so I only need the raw data and they can do the rest. I will share whatever we find."

[Ascendancy]

Nikolai said nothing at first.

He studied Nox in silence, the man’s words echoing in the vacuum of his mind. They have been reprogrammed. The phrase coiled inside him like a serpent unspooling. A single concept, quiet in tone, deafening in consequence.

Reprogrammed.

That meant they were functional. That meant they were modular. That meant...

He glanced to the glowing scans again.

In another era, centuries ago, power was believed to be granted by divine right, sealed in blood and coronation. Then came knowledge: industry, bombs, currency. But this? This was something older and newer all at once. Something elemental. Biological. The god-born, extracted from Nox. The thread of divinity, clipped like a nail.

And if it could be removed, it could be prevented.

In anyone.

His breath came slowly, controlled, but his pulse ticked upward, sharp as glass behind the stillness of his eyes. His mind was running now, too fast to contain. The potential of such a thing was horrifying in theory. 

He turned back to Nox only once more, but this time the weight behind his stare had shifted. No longer angry. No longer threatened. Cold. Measured. Proprietary. “You’ll have your data. I'll make sure Dr. Weston gives you what you need” Nikolai said softly. “And we will await yours in return.”

He was by the door then, and as the rush of thoughts slowed, he remembered something. He turned, back and studied the boy whose face had shifted from enemy to tool to ally. "I am sorry this happened to you. It must be-- well, I'm sorry." It was as close to comforting that Nikolai ever breeched.

[Nox]

Nox shrugged and stood, hoping that he could leave. "Thank you. There are no more fear filled nightmares. No guilt. But there is no love and no joy. It's a hell I don't wish on anyone. Death is the only escape from the endless life of gray." He gave the Ascendancy a wry smile. "I am at your disposal should you need anything I can provide and I'll send any data we learn over to the good doctor."

It could have gone worse.

[Ascendancy]

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.