Eidolon. There was a full set of details.
More information? Nothing. Data not found.
Powers? Nothing. Data not found.
Legend was the same.
Maybe someone less prominent. He selected Chevalier and got the standard information. More details.
Powers? He selected the option, and received pages upon pages of testing data. Rey’s eyes pored over the results, soaking them in. It was like reading Shakespeare. One could listen to a line, and be momentarily baffled, but skimming it or assuming a general foundation of knowledge, it was possible to pick up the gist of the message; The underlying meanings, if not the exact definitions of the individual elements.
The work of a tinker wasn’t typical science. Refining it was science, but the blunt, raw use of the power? It was almost the opposite.
Good science meant starting with the conditions, forming a hypothesis, making a prediction, and then testing it. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until there was a solid base of knowledge. That knowledge let one establish further conditions, refine hypotheses.
But tinkers started with the end result. A moment of inspiration, glimpses of the major steps one would need to take to get there. It involved working backwards, up until that moment the means came into view. Rey could see it at work, could see Chevalier’s power as raw data, something he could replicate by traveling an entirely different path. He would need a sturdier frame. Something big. This wouldn’t be a hybrid of a stray dog and a plant. This would need to be something closer to a bear.
Or, he realized, a human.
He backed out of Chevalier’s data until he was at the original screen. He checked the samples Accord had provided him with.
Select sub-database:
A) PRT (Protectorate, Wards) samples
B) Non-PRT (evidence database) samples
C) Misc samples
Further investigation revealed the full truth. Accord had gotten his hands on a database of DNA from countless members of the Protectorate and the Wards, as well as scraps of material from certain powers, where traces remained behind.
He selected C, expecting little. His eyes widened.
Many were samples from lifeforms that various tinkers and masters had created. His own were in there. That wasn’t the surprising fact.
He selected the last option on the list. To the right of the computer, in a hermetically sealed case, a robotic arm extended and deposited a microscopic sample on a slide.
A fragment, so small as to be nearly impossible to see, of one of the Simurgh’s feathers.
“You keep making these little oohs and ahhs,” Citrine commented. ”It sounds like you’re pleasuring yourself.”
“I am, believe me,” Rey replied, not looking her way. ”Where did he get this stuff? Does he even comprehend what he gave me?”
“I’m sure he does.”
He’d considered replicating Chevalier’s power, with a solid enough frame. Maybe a bear, maybe a human. Small potatoes.
He went through the contents he’d unloaded from his pockets until he found a piece of paper he’d folded into an envelope. He tore it open and tapped out the contents.
Each seed was about the size of a pea, tapered at each end, a mottled white-brown. He hurried over to one of the large glass tubes and fiddled with the controls until it started flooding with water.
“Are you one of the talkative ones?” Citrine asked.
“What?”
“I mean, maybe it’s a dumb question, because you’ve stuck pretty much to monosyllabic grunts since this whole thing started, but I’m wondering if you’re one of the capes that likes to rant or one of the quiet ones.”
“Quiet. Why?”
“Honestly? I’m bored. Not like I can go on Facebook with my smartphone or anything. That sort of thing gets you killed, when you work for Accord.”
“You want me to entertain you?”
“I doubt you’re capable. But you could distract me, help while away the minutes.”
He eyed the woman. Rey wasn’t one of the quiet ones by choice. He’d just fallen into the habit of being alone because it was easier to stay in the lab than it was to be out in the larger world. People in the larger world sucked. Up until the Nazis from Brockton Bay had turned up and claimed the building at the other end of the street from his lab, it had been a place he could retreat. A place where his work and his art could occupy his thoughts and distract him from reality.
Art. It was a good starting point for an explanation, and she was probably the most attractive person he’d spent more than one minute around in the last few months…
He forced a smile. He was a little rusty on that front. ”What we do, what tinkers do, it’s more art than science. Every step we take is made with an end goal in mind. Just now, looking over these samples, I think I decided on an end goal.”
“What’s that?”
“My usual methods, well, you know them. You’ve fought my creations before.”
“Yes.”
“These seeds,” he raised one hand, a seed pinched between index finger and thumb, “Are like stem cells. They harbor the potential to become virtually anything. Wherever information is missing, they fill in the gaps.”
“Like using frog DNA for dinosaurs.”
“Like using frog DNA for dinosaurs, right. The way I worked it, they’ll decode the information in a very brute force way. The seed starts by forming two bodies, attached by a central hub. I kill the least viable one, it buds and splits again, with copies that are derivatives of the survivor. Usually two to four. Kill all but one, repeat.”
“Until you have something viable.”
“Exactly! Takes anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Then I have what’s essentially a plant-animal hybrid, and I nudge it in the direction of my enemies. Or give it simple programming that I can use. Training half-plant rodents to fetch shiny objects, for example.”
“How?”
“Trade secret,” Rey said. ”I’m not dumb. I won’t give away the essentials.”
“Okay. So what’s today’s project?”
“Oh, I’ll have a dozen projects in the work before I let myself go to sleep. But the big one is that I want to replicate an Endbringer.”
He glanced at Citrine, saw that she’d gone still.
“I may need to go talk to Accord,” she said.
“No need,” Rey said. ”I suspect he already knows. He gave me these samples, no doubt with the idea that I’d use it.”
“And you can’t even control it? Or he can’t control it? It doesn’t sound like him,” Citrine said.
Rey paused. It didn’t sound like Accord. Was there another explanation?
Accord might be planning on killing him after the project was done. Rey kept his creations in line with pheromones, spraying them liberally around his lab and the surrounding neighborhood. They would move to the nearest unaffected location as soon as they were free. Once he did that to Accord’s home, the place would be rendered immune to his own attacks, at least for a little while.
But it still seemed too reckless for the perfectionist. Was Accord that eager to kill the white supremacists? Or was there another plan in the works?
“You’ve gone quiet,” Citrine said.
“Thinking,” he said. ”No, I need things quiet for a minute. There’s a TV in the corner. Watch that.”
“I can’t. Accord would be upset,” the woman in yellow replied.
Rey sighed. He crossed the room to the television, turned it on, set it to mute and turned on the closed captions. ”He won’t be upset if I turn it on, will he?”
“No.”
“There.”
He returned to the computer and started working with the Simurgh’s tissue. It was hard to cut, and harder still to slice to the point that he could look at it under a microscope.
“Crystalline,” he murmured, as he focused on it. The feathers were like snowflakes when viewed at 40x magnification. He scaled all the way up to 800x magnification befo
re realizing that there were no individual cells.
Was it just the feather? Was it dead tissue, on par with the keratin of fingernails or hair? He used the computer to access a sample of Leviathan’s ‘blood’, and let the hands handle the arrangement of preparing the slide. Being liquid, the blood was easier than the feather.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to use Leviathan’s tissue. Growing a miniature Leviathan in a vat would be a bad idea if that vat was filled with fluid.
Using Behemoth’s tissues would be just as problematic. The Herokiller could ignore the Manton effect at a range of up to thirty-two feet. Even semi-conscious inside a glass case, it was too risky.
Had to be smart about this.
Leviathan’s blood was the same as the feather. Crystals, dense and so opaque that light wouldn’t pass through them.
There were more tissues. Flesh. More blood. Hair. Damaged tissues and intact ones. He went through each.
All of it, the same. Crystals. No individual cells. Even the crystals barely differentiated from one another. Truth was, there was more difference in crystals collected from deeper inside the Endbringer than there was in crystals that had come from different parts of the Endbringer’s body; hair as opposed to blood.
He scraped off a bit of his seed, then added water and the catalysts to splice it with some of the Simurgh’s feather. Sure enough, it started to grow. Each end of the scraping formed into buds, and the buds started to form into basic, foetal shapes, one quadruped, one vaguely humanoid.
But neither lived.
The weaker tissue was easier to work with. Assuming it was deriving patterns from the crystals, insofar as the crystals could create or support life, he could use that to work out the peculiarities of how the Endbringers were able to sustain themselves.
No vascular system, no sign of emergent organs.
Of course the emerging lifeform wasn’t viable. It wasn’t capable of life in the first place.
He’d have to take another route. He withdrew a sample of Myrddin’s tissue, then started splicing it with one seed and the ruined fragments of the Simurgh’s feather.
It was lunacy, tampering with Endbringer-related materials, but he couldn’t shake the idea that he was on to something. He’d sustain the Endbringer tissues with other living tissue that could feed it energy or nutrients. His seeds would bridge the gap. It would take ten or fifteen minutes before he saw any real results. There was other work to do in the meantime.
A sedated monkey plus a sample of his own tissue and one seed, and he had a homunculus in the works. It would be roughly as intelligent as a very stupid person in most respects, but it would share his own understanding of chemistry, biology, science and botany. It would serve as a lab assistant, and he would need one for a lab this big.
The rest of the seeds went into another vat to replicate. He’d need more.
He walked over to the glass tube where the Simurgh-Myrddin-plant hybrid was in the works. One had wings rather than legs. He directed a laser to kill it. The other had four arms, but two resembled wings. It would work. He conducted a charge through the fluid to reset the life cycle. It would split in two or three, and he’d kill the remainder.
Accord must have based this equipment off of the stuff he’d had in his last lab, the one Accord had forcibly ejected him from. The lasers being built into the glass tube were a nice touch, kept everything hermetically sealed.
In a fit of whimsy, he directed the lasers to a pure light form, then had them fire into the glass case itself. Letters lit up, labeling the projects. Regrowth for the plant that was growing and budding with more seeds. Homunculus for the monkey that was gestating in the second tube.
And for his real project? It would have to be something fitting.
Morrígan.
Beautiful. He studied the three foetal forms that were developing inside, killed two, narrowing down the results he wanted. Like pruning branches.
The TV started making noise. Rey wheeled around to see Citrine and one of her fellow ‘ambassadors’ standing in front of the TV. The man in the suit with a green dress shirt and a copper lizard mask was the one turning up the volume.
“I’m trying to work here,” Rey said.
“Something’s going on. Look,” the man spoke.
Rey impatiently left his work behind. If he waited too long, a bad growth could be carried on to the young. Wouldn’t do.
The TV showed a reporter talking. Why was he supposed to care?
Then it changed to a camera view of an ongoing conflict. Three gigantic armored suits were in open conflict with a small group of people.
The Slaughterhouse Nine. Here, in Boston.
One of the suits was deploying swarms of drones, but they were getting cut out of the air as fast as they appeared. Another member of the Nine had a loose-fitting coat of human flesh draped over him. He stretched it out to grab surrounding buildings and anchor himself in place as a mechanical lizard with a giant wheel on its back tried to haul him in with what looked to be an immense suction.
The Siberian had made contact with and was tearing apart a third suit.
A suit high in the air fired off a laser beam, and the Siberian jumped to put herself in the line of fire.
Whatever happened next, the camera didn’t catch it. The concussive force of the laser hitting was enough to knock the cameraman over, and the image shorted out.
Rey sniffed. He’d like to see more of Dragon’s work, not because it had anything in common with his own, but because it was good work. But for now, his focus was on his projects.
With a quick glance, he assessed and executed two homunculus-offshoots and one derivative of the Morrígan. Electrical charges restarted the gestation process.
The thing was starting to resemble the Simurgh, though both feathers and hair were brown-black in color, it was hermaphroditic and the flesh was more translucent than white. Veins stood out.
Rey studied it while the thing cracked in the middle, the individual halves separating with a thread of flesh between them. Each of the halves began dissolving and forming anew.
If it was even half as powerful as the real Simurgh… well, this would be a game-changer.
And Accord had to know that. Had to be aware that Rey would be working with the Endbringer tissues on this level.
It wasn’t as though the method of control was that difficult to master. One set of pheromones would make the creation feel fond of something, the other would have an negative effect, drive them away from a person or area. Still another would provoke feelings of anger or hatred, useful if he wanted to bid them to attack.
If Accord found the pheromones, he could be rid of Rey, and he’d have whatever creations Rey had put together in the meantime.
It would be at least a day before the Morrígan was fully grown. He had that long to think of an answer.
The door slammed shut. Citrine had gone upstairs. The lizard-masked man watched the television.
Time passed, and he watched the results with interest. The Morrígan was now forming with two arms, two legs, and vestigal wings. He let it develop to the point that it was roughly two months old, then killed the offshoots. He started running x-ray scans and doing biopsies, picking through the results to fine tune the internal changes and monitor how much of the lifeform was Simurgh, versus being Myrddin or plant-based. He was judicious and merciless in executing the offshoots, keeping them from growing to a point where there was even a chance of them being sentient.
The lifeform did, he noted with some pleasure, have a Corona Pollentia; a lobe in the brain that would allow for powers if it developed fully.
While the man watched the unfolding news, Rey took the opportunity to brew and spray himself with a set of pheromones. His creations would be more favorably inclined towards him now.
The door at the top of the stairs closed. He turned to see that the lizard-man was being relieved. Had that much time passed already?
“You being good?” the woman asked. She wore a b
lack evening gown with a slit all the way up to her hip. It would have been alluring, but her mask was black, with black lenses and spikes radiating from the edges. Her brooch was of a black star.
“Making headway,” Rey responded.
“One of your fucked up creations broke my leg last year. Please give me an excuse to hurt you. Please.”
“I’ll pass,” Rey said, turning his attention to the homunculus. He calibrated the signal, pressing two electrodes to his own forehead, then sent the readings out to his creation.
When it was done, he drained the fluid and vented the chamber. The glass sank into the floor, and the homunculus crawled out, using its knuckles to walk. Its skin was peeling, more like loose bark crossed with scar tissue than flesh.
“You retain any English?” He asked.
The homunculus nodded.
“Spanish?”
Another nod.
“Go dispose of the slides. Consider everything a top priority biohazard.”
The homunculus found a pair of rubber gloves and began cleaning up the mess from the early experiments.
Rey studied the Morrígan. Alarms were set to go off if it approached one month of age. With Myrddin’s brain tissues and the current state of growth in Simurgh-derived parts, there was little to no chance that it would achieve any degree of self awareness.
A glance out the window that overlooked the street showed that it was getting dark. He’d been here all day.
The door slammed at the top of the stairs. He sighed in irritation. Time was passing too quickly. Would this one threaten his life too?
There was a crash, and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He wheeled around.
The woman with the black dress had slammed into the television set. She had holes in her as though she were a piece of Swiss cheese, and more of her had been torn to shreds.
A body fell down the stairs. The man with the lizard mask. Dead, though not so mutilated.
The woman who came down the stairs had an unusual body type accented by her style of dress. She was almost like a boy, she was so thin, and her strapless dress hugged her upper body, but the lower half billowed around her. Her hair was long and white, her eyes wide with irises and pupils small. Her lips had been painted black.
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