Chapter 3

Eighteen-year-old Aya was Earth’s greatest criminal, and nobody even knew.

Not her parents, who tried to pretend she didn’t exist, while lavishing affection on her sister.

Not the Sentinels which mistook her for one of them inside the EtherCloud.

After all, they never saw her real body, the one which had the dubious distinction of belonging to the only Xhuman who ever hacked up phlegm.

Turned out, she was quite good at a very different kind of hacking, as well. So much that she was the only civilian who’d seen three dozen videos of Ishihara Ryusuke defeating two Shocktroopers.

The raw footage.

Not the edited story which the Government released. Witnesses knew to stick to that fiction. To do otherwise would mean their social score would sink so low, they couldn’t even get a Purebred’s job.

While even the simplest AI could use one camera angle and extrapolate details into a 92.7% accurate 3D rendering, Aya had taken all available views and merged them into a 99.99997% accurate replay of the fight. Now, she rewound it back to Ishihara’s confrontation with the Shocktroopers, and walked among them in the simulation.

Her EtherCloud Avatar flickered, tethered as it was to her real body. “Freeze,” she commanded.

Gasping for air, she jacked out of the EtherCloud and returned to reality. Mucous was flooding her lungs. Coughs racked her body as phlegm scoured through her throat and filled her mouth. She spat it out into a glass, leaving a salty aftertaste on her tongue.

Aya heaved a few breaths as she looked around her lavishly furnished bedroom. She snorted. The decorations were a waste; but her parents figured that making her living space as luxurious as possible would keep her from leaving the house.

Because in a world where all humans but the Purebreds had reached genetic perfection, Aya was a one-in-three-billion accident.

She was supposed to have been just a bundle of engineered stem cells, a base from which to create designer hair color for the one who’d become her elder sister. When her parents were ready to have a second child, an AI mistake in the embryo lab management system had led to her being implanted in her mother’s uterus instead of a younger sister. By the time anyone realized what had happened, she’d been born with an incurable disease that had been eradicated six centuries before.

Back then, people still used pharmaceuticals; now, nanobots did the work, and the sole sufferer of an ancient disease wouldn’t live long enough for a nanotech company to recoup its investment costs to program a treatment.

At last, fresh air filled her lungs. The ten minutes of open airways in real time translated to what felt like a day in the EtherCloud. She jacked back in, leaving behind the limitations of her flawed body.

Her Avatar, a black-haired beauty with honey-toned skin from her homeland’s brutal past, reappeared in her firewalled EtherSpace, back in the simulation she’d paused. Ishihara’s stunningly handsome figure stood to one side, the two Shocktroopers on the other. At full speed, he’d moved like a blur, faster than the Peacekeepers in their reflex-enhancing armor, and just as fast as the Shocktroopers in their power armor.

“Ai,” she said, fusing the letters for her Aritificial Intelligence assistant to sound like ancient Japanese word for love. “Play at one-quarter speed.”

As the scene repeated itself, she froze it in certain places. Ishihara didn’t appear to be wearing any technology to enhance his speed or strength, but perhaps he was one of the Ministry of Defense assassins with internal wiring and a tenuous grip on sanity.

His fingers had been injured in the minigun; and yet with the wave of his other hand, the Shocktroopers’ blade emitters had just broken off. She leaned in to examine the sheer cut in the tube.

“Reverse to timestamp 11:04:03:91.”

The scene jumped back in time to where the first emitter failed. The cut was just appearing in the conduit.

“Magnify.”

The image zoomed in, closer and closer with still no sign of what had disabled the Shocktrooper weapons. The resolution surpassed the several civilian videos that she’d knitted into the replay, and was limited to the feeds from the Shocktroopers and Peacekeepers.

“Stop.”

The image, caught by that bitch Keiko’s camera, froze at the atomic level, where water molecules interlocked into a line, slicing through the emitter.

No, that couldn’t be.

Because if what she was seeing was true, Ishihara could control water at the molecular level.

It was supposed to be only theoretical, the technology in the experimental stage. And it didn’t explain how Ishihara could move so fast.

“Ai, Zoom back to standard size and resume play.” She watched another second of fight, to where he jammed his fingers into the revolving minigun barrels. “Pause. Zoom in.”

Unlike the revelation of the water molecules, nothing on the surface showed just how he’d been able to stop durastrium alloy rotating at 8000rpm. Thankfully, Government cameras included wide spectrum electromagnetic scans as well.

“Shift to X-ray CT and magnify.”

Filaments of some kind webbed through the layers of his skin and muscle fascia. The protein structure of his ligaments and muscles looked strengthened by coiled proteins. Foreign minerals reinforced his bones, and his blood vessels…

“Cross-Reference.”

Organic polypeptides in the subject’s connective tissue, Ai’s voice spoke in her mind. Images of the long-extinct orb spider flashed, along with the chemical structure of its silk. Several different iron alloys made up the network in the subject’s skin.

How was this even possible? If Aya’s Avatar could gasp, she would’ve. After spending so much time snooping around the Government’s classified regions of the EtherCloud, she, of all people should’ve already known if these theoretical technologies were already being integrated into prototypes.

She would’ve gasped again. There were no signs of artificial wiring to explain Ishihara’s speed. Nothing non-organic in him.

This was all genetically engineered. There was no other explanation for Ishihara’s abilities. Maybe the next iteration of the Shocktrooper? After the Onslaught, they’d been instrumental in repelling platoons of Tivarae landing forces. Perhaps Mankind was preparing for the next hostile alien species.

But who? The Elestrae? With a lifespan over thrice that of humans, and the ability to channel Istrium radiation, they’d become a formidable enemy if their alliance ever fell apart.

Though that didn’t make sense, either. Ishihara had to be at least thirty, meaning which they’d begun working on him a long time ago. Unless they’d sped up his maturation, like the early Shocktrooper models. That would explain his apparent age.

For now, this would be her working theory: he’d escaped from wherever they were developing him, and the Ministry of Defense had sent Shocktroopers to capture him before the Peacekeepers got ahold of him.

Well, now that she knew this shadow program could possibly exist, she’d uncover it. On a command, she shed the virtual kimono and donned the Carapace of a Government Sentinel. Unlike a Cloak, which could make her invisible to anything on private corporate serverspaces, but not to Government Sentinels, the Carapace would allow her to hide in plain sight. With a wave of her hand, she opened a portal in her firewall to the Peacekeeper server network, and stepped through.

Besides several lumbering, mantis-like Sentinels, and tentacled Filers, the only other beings buzzing along the serverspace were the pixelated Avatars of real people, operating in Real Time. Aya almost felt sorry for them. In the real world, they’d be swiping their hands left and right, viewing output thousands of times slower than her. Only a handful of hackers had figured out how to program an interface that allowed them to experience the data like her.

Ignoring them, she tracked Ishihara from the point of his capture, an hour ago in real time. They’d taken him to the closest Peacekeeper facility. Coincidentally, that was just a block away from home at the Kyoto Central Peacekeeping Headquarters.

The Ministry of Science had put in a request to transfer him to New San Francisco Bioengineering Laboratories. Unlike the hour-long shuttle civilians might take, the Government’s a high-altitude, sub-light transport would get him there in about three minutes. Of course, without the need for inertial dampeners to combat the laws of physics in the real world, her Avatar could cross the space between the servers in a thousandth of a second.

Now, though, instead of going to San Francisco, all she had to do was hop over to Kyoto Central Peacekeeping Headquarter’s server.

There, Ishihara’s file glowed like the sun as a thousand authorized Avatars accessed it. The vast majority were Peacekeepers, but some were marked as the Ministry of Science and Technology. As of yet, none of the Avatars appeared to come from the Ministry of Defense; but if they’d sent Shocktroopers to fight Ishihara, they surely knew about him.

Since a Sentinel wouldn’t access a file, and real Sentinels would investigate if she removed her Carapace, she created a copy of her Sentinel shell and programmed it to patrol around the file. Then, she Cloaked herself from the Filers and human Avatars. Though her hacking skills weren’t good enough to stay invisible to the Sentinels, they’d see her copy patrolling and head off to other partitions of the ServerSpace. Using this virtual sleight-of-hand, she slipped by and swiped a copy of the file. Then, she returned to her own firewalled ServerSpace and opened the package.

Riffling through it, she discovered yet one more surprise: the Peacekeepers knew only a little more than she did. They had yet to discover the structure of his muscles and bones, and his ability to manipulate water molecules.

Double checking to make sure the package was indeed the original classified files, and not a false trail, she proceeded to the DNA tests. Several had been run, from spectral analysis of skin to saliva testing.

“Analyze subject’s DNA.”

In a billionth of a second, her Ai flashed the results in her vision.

No, this couldn’t be.

Ishihara’s DNA lined up with that of other people.

The only thing special about his DNA, when compared to a billion other samples, was that he was totally ordinary. Not even XHuman.

He was Purebred.

Aya flipped to the earliest files on him, which were dated from an hour ago in real time.

The information appeared as brushed ink on rice paper. Which meant the Peacekeepers had dug deep to determine his identity. These were ancient files from three centuries before the Onslaught.

An image of a birth certificate appeared, identifying him as Ishihara Ryusuke, born in 2015.

He was nearly eight hundred years old!

How was that even possible? Even with genetic engineering and nanotechnology, homo sapiens’ maximum theoretical age was half that.

Unless this was some elaborate hoax. No, fingerprints—to think the ancients used such unreliable biometrics!— and retinal scans all confirmed that this was indeed, a man from Age of Greed.

Primary school reports showed he enjoyed something called Physical Education, though his poor health limited him; while Junior High School records noted he hated English—now the common language of Earth.

And then, at age fifteen, all record of him disappeared.

She froze. Poor health? She swiped over to his medical records. “Vaccinations,” whatever those were, were “up to date,” whatever that meant, and he’d suffered a greenstick fracture of his tibia as a three-year-old.

Then, the words burned on her virtual eyes.

He had cystic fibrosis.

Same as her.

Could it be? She pulled over an image of her own DNA and had Ai compare it. The gene regulating CFTR in both their samples overlapped.

He shouldn’t have lived to reach eighty, let alone eight-hundred. Everything she’d read about the disease suggested that there had been no cure until CRISPR advances had allowed mankind to edit it out of the genome.

In the real world, tears welled in her eyes, and it took all her concentration for her consciousness to remain in the EtherCloud. If he knew the cure…

Not like she’d want to live in the real world.

What could it offer, beyond actual people with their unfathomable mores? Whereas the EtherCloud made sense. AI constructs followed logical patterns, and whatever she didn’t like, she could program in her own firewalled space.

Still, with healthy lungs, she’d be able to stay in the EtherCloud indefinitely, tethered, but no longer chained to a frail body.

Again donning a Sentinel Carapace, she opened a portal back to Kyoto Central Peacekeeping Headquarters and stepped through. Ishihara’s file still glowed bright as yet even more authorized Avatars from Peacekeeper Facilities all over the world accessed it. Several Sentinels prevented Ministry of Defense Avatars from entering the server at all.

No doubt, once someone near the top of the Peacekeeper hierarchy realized what they had, they’d place the highest level encryption on it. That was a few levels beyond her level to crack. With no Sentinels monitoring the crowd, at this split second, she changed her Cloak to level five staff. Just high enough to access his files without drawing undo attention.

A quick scan revealed Kyoto Central was keeping Ishihara in a low security medical unit. He was still unconscious, and staff continued to monitor and run tests. Yet once they’d cleared him, they’d likely transfer him to the top level holding area, which was the most heavily guarded, and also close to the sub-light transport.

Swapping her Cloak for a Sentinel’s Carapace again, Aya hacked into the medical unit’s cameras.

Ishihara lay on a bed, eyes closed, wearing nothing more than organic-fiber underpants and the Ballistrax restraints that secured him. Deliciously lean, toned, and hairless, he looked frail compared to the chiseled bulk of Shocktroopers. He might’ve been mistaken for XHuman if he weren’t so tall.

His chest rose and fell. Curiously, his hands laid palms up, index fingers touching his thumbs. Even more curious, his injured hand looked like it hadn’t just been mangled in the rotating barrels of a power armor minigun. Transdermal pads connected various points on his body sent data to several monitors on the otherwise sterile walls. What exactly they were monitoring, Aya didn’t know, but she copied the data stream.

“Another one!” A nurse dressed in a high-collared white uniform threw up his hands and tossed a bent hypodermic needle onto a table with several others. He stomped off.

For the moment, Ishihara was all alone. Well, save for the people connected to the EtherCloud, running tests on him.

So far, they hadn’t looked at his lungs, and this camera couldn’t scan that deep. She switched to another angle, where the camera could do a chest CT.

A young man in the high-collared grey suit of cleaning staff crept in, blocking the path. Mop in hand, he was undoubtedly Purebred, like all people in this line of work. He was quite good-looking for his kind.

Still, he wasn’t doing any mopping, and had no business approaching a patient, let alone a high-profile prisoner like Ishihara. Strange that they would allow him in there, instead of having a cleaning droid do the work. And he clearly knew where he was going.

What if this was a disguise, and the man intended to harm Ishihara?

Well, after what he had done to three Peacekeepers and two Shocktroopers, he probably had a lot of enemies.

Taking active control of the camera, Aya zoomed in on the boy’s nametag.

Tanaka Kenataro.

“Confirm identity,” she commanded Ai.

In a trillionth of a second, a copy of the tag, biometric data, and other forms of identification popped up. This was indeed Tanaka Kentaro, or else someone as good as her had hacked the Government’s databases to falsify his information and steal his identity.

And who would want to steal a Purebred’s identity?

And what would a Purebred custodian want with Ishihara? Was it just pure curiosity?

Ken’s expression showed no sign of ill-intent. No, it was of pure wonder. He placed a hand on Ishihara’s forehead.

Lights flashed in the EtherCloud representation of the server. A remote viewer based in New London’s Peacekeeper Headquarters had seen Kentaro and was now double-checking. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be there at all, and he certainly should be touching Ishihara.

Still, he showed no sign of doing harm.

Aya’s curiosity got the better of her. Hands moving furiously, she made a virtual copy of Kentaro turning back to the door, while masking the real Kentaro. The alarm from the remote viewer shut off.

Back in the room, Kentaro’s hand still rested on Ishihara’s forehead.

Ishihara’s eyes opened.

The tether to her real body tugged. In order to follow Ishihara on the camera, she’d slowed her perception to Real Time, and now her lungs were filled with mucous.

Just when it looked like Ishihara was going to speak.

To Purebred, no less.

And outside of the EtherCloud she wouldn’t be able to shield their conversation from other prying eyes.