Some days I hate waking up, I thought as I groaned my way out of bed, head throbbing while I slammed down several bottles of water, then cleaned out my rather concerning head-wound and the temporary covering I'd been using to deal with it. Trying to snap myself into full awake-ness was a mostly-failed strategy, but it at least got me to remember what I was doing the previous day, and with half-closed eyes I set about dispatching the rest of the Empire into the Birdcage.
Seriously, Doormaker is ridiculously overpowered, I thought to myself as several more Nazis crashed into the human-rights violation that was the prison under Canada with even less effort than last time, though the fighting I saw while doing so was concerning in the extreme. It was a stark reminder that actions had consequences, but my general opinion was that a simmering infection that killed people slowly was in the long term far more dangerous. The Nazis had to be dealt with, or I couldn't live with myself, not really.
I'd also considered going after Lung, but there was a significant problem - I lacked much lead on where they lived and what they looked like, other than Lung being extremely large and having dragon tattoos. That was about it, and I intended to make tech that would deal with this problem soon anyhow, but it didn't make leaving his victims any easier. There was another problem too - I knew that sex-slaves (one of the ABB's major enterprises) in general were of legally vulnerable populations like illegal migrants, and as such even if freed they'd either be shipped out the country or forced into slavery somewhere else, and this one was a massive socioeconomic issue I simply did not currently have the resources to deal with. Suffice to say, the man was on my
list, but I couldn't deal with him right now and thinking about it too much would lead to even more stress than I was already under to the point of near breaking.
The thing I needed to do today - after dealing with the Nazi fucks - was finalise my biotinkering setup. I had all the chips I needed after leaving my fabricator running overnight, and all that was left were the vials/vats to produce biochemical stuff in. So I did a little searching on the Internet, located some random genetically-modified-yeast lab company, and obtained myself vats and left them a little money, before nearly dropping into a tinker fugue to realise the beautiful biosynthesis tech I'd just created.
But I was interrupted by a
ping from PHO, a private message from totally-not-Vista, which made me let out an involuntary
fuuuuuuuck. The goddamn faerie queen wanted to "claim" me, a terrifying thought indeed as my heartrate rose and I tried not to panic.
She must be able to sense through portals then, I considered, and immediately retracted the connectors I had to electrical, internet and water lines, desperately hoping it'd go a little quicker, even as they finally exited out of the portal after a tense 10 seconds and I slammed it closed mentally as fast as I possibly could. Little did I know at the time, but I'd scraped by with only a few seconds to spare and I spent a few minutes with my portal (using free coffeeshop wifi along the way, hah!) to find some Military-Industrial Complex corporate factory and hijack their resources, somewhere far away in Canada where the Faerie Queen was notably
not, just how I preferred it.
I'd want to change my location with some amount of frequency, however, just in case she had a power for long-distance observation that worked through my portals and clairvoyant/precog-blocker. Unfortunately, precognition blocking could be a potential means to locate me, in a similar manner to Cauldron's attempt to do presumably awful things to myself. Dwelling on that and having my brain shut down from anxiety again was a bad idea, so I spent a few more minutes in bed and pacing, agonising over the varying things i needed to do before jolting myself back into a tinker fugue, completing a single vat and the bioslurry generator within about 20 minutes - I already had all appropriate chips after all, and it was a simple matter of plugging the pieces together, which the shaker side-effect of my tinker power made trivial with only very primitive tools.
This was just the start of the things I really wanted to do. The little sleek bioslurry generation and biochemical assembly device was the true start of a technoorganic revolution that I fully intended to induce on this shitty planet, and thrill rushed through me as I began shoving some of my biomass (as I euphemistically called the disgusting piece of Eidolon's arm that made me feel like vomiting just looking at, that I'd tried to seal off while I completed this piece of tech), as well as various bits of plant I yanked out of places around the planet. It would take several hours to break down, of course, but there were other tasks I could do in the meantime. Like set up some automated systems so I don't get attacked by the Faerie Queen in my sleep or just because I got distracted and forgot to move stuff around as I was prone to do. The real issue was - theoretically - the fact that my portals were generated from an implant. In practice? I was nearly at the point where I could
still automate that.
For now, I created a 6-hourly alarm (which would play merry hell on my ability to function, but I needed to live) on my laptop to go to a new place with acceptable targets for nicking their utilities, and got to work on one of the most complex pieces of biochemical machinery ever conceptualized. The most important things I intended to do, before anything else, was make self-genetic-modification easier and more secure. It was a highly complex task, one which would require a genetic payload that could rework the entire infrastructure of a cell without harming it, and I'd contemplated the core concepts that would be needed for this sort of thing over the past few days and come up with a system.
It was a, in my view, beautiful series of ideas that my amazing tinker power would let me turn into a true, documented invention. A collection of technological blueprints glued together in a process only describable as total bullshit, that let me skip decades of complex research of specifics and just
create. The most important cellular architectural shift was to add an indirection layer to the process of protein production, converting the main series of genetic information into an index for an innumerable number of smaller, self-contained, virus-like lipid shells that independently existed in the cell nucleus, which would be single-protein-coding areas of DNA with their genetic expression controlled by a number of external molecules rather than the multi-component system of existing eukaryotes, which transcribed amino acids based on the storage proteins (histones) of cell-nucleus DNA and methylation to manage the expression of genes.
The system itself would then allow the modification, replacement, and insertion of genetic information just via using an index rather than requiring knowledge of the exact genetics you already had as was the case with Earth-Prime systems like CRISPR, instead allowing the simple replacement of the contents of one or more of the virus-like capsids of genetic material.
A major innovation - the one that took a significant amount of time - was constructing the secondary system for enabling easy genetic modification that also did not allow just anyone with your genetic index to replace DNA in your cells, which was an absurdly complex problem, for which I had to do several things. The first was pick a quantum-resistant public/private key encryption scheme and create a protein that could verify attached private keys to a genetic change instruction molecule - something that would tell the cell to, for instance, replace the genetic sequence at an index, or delete the contents at the index. This essentially required me to construct an entire protein-based computational system, but with the help of a maxed out biocomputation specialisation, the specifics were easy for me to write down and document. Then there was the components of a ratcheting signature replacement system on the outsides of the genetic information capsules, but at this point it got into complicated cryptographic details.
Suffice to say, by the time I finished writing down the reorganisation of various components like gene suppression, protein manufacturing, cellular replication, genetic error checking, cryptographic verification of modification, a highly adapted process for reproductive cells involving reconstitution of original chromosomes, systems for the generation of propagating agents containing modifications, and a series of CRISPR-like initial modifications that would encode the creation and maintenance of several nerve clusters calibrated for construction of artificial modification sequences of numerous types and the reading of arbitrary existing gene sequences, I had a paper almost 200 pages long containing the documentation of a multitude of proteins and genetic sequences and the ways they interacted with the existing system to convert cells in place and replace the functionality, as the Faerie Queen alarm set itself off and I quickly shut down the utilities before moving to a region in Europe and hijacking a mafia building.
The initial conversion protocol would provide a default pair of cryptographic keys that needed to be changed, which I put in bold on the front page of the documentation site. After all, leaving your genetics wide-open to unverified modification was a capital-B Bad Idea in a world where Bonesaw existed. But there were several benefits as well, even ignoring the capacity for freeform genetic self-modification - the new structure provided ridiculously rigorous genetic verification on cellular replication (as a side-effect of the constant process and necessary checks by which signatures on the microscopic genetic modules of each cell would have the ratcheting "allowed to modify" codes continuously changed on a daily basis) and immunity to all existing retroviruses like HIV because the central genome acted merely as an index and in fact would no longer produce any proteins directly (the previous encodings for start and ending of protein production were explicitly skipped over).
Involuntarily shaking myself out of my tinker fugue, I realized I had been in a hyperfixated-hypomanic state for nearly 30 hours straight somehow with only minimal interruptions for moving where my infrastructure was hooked into, and promptly collapsed on the bed from exhaustion, hunger, and thirst after pushing my genetic modification tech (including the final DNA sequence to be put in a virus to initiate the conversion process) onto the internet with Earth Bet's equivalent of a GPL license while shutting off external links.
Yes, I thought to myself just before passing out,
I am so looking forward to this shit.
Panacea Perspective - 11th March, 20:00
Panacea paced through Brockton Bay General, head buried in the darkness of her cloak as she waited for the next call. The hospital had been overflowing with Nazis and their victims in the past day, though far more Nazis than victims as the minorities they had been subjugating finally had an opportunity to strike back. The chaos caused just by the
presence of the Faerie Queen (even if just for a few hours before she ran off on a pan-American goose chase) meant even more injured people, for Panacea to heal.
For the ten-thousandth time, people called her a miracle worker, a blessing, a hero. Thank yous and adoration were given.
All that Amy Dallon heard was the constant sense of unworthiness, of the abstract idea of duty and the shame of never being good enough to not be on the verge of villainy. And so, with a defeated sigh, she moved onto the next hospital ward, and the next, and the next, trailed by the boisterous, enthusiastic blonde known as Victoria Dallon who was mostly oblivious to her plight and kept almost crashing into the corners of the corridor while babbling about some double date or another that Amy wasn't interested in - other than as a way to listen to Victoria talk of course.
"- and he's so nice, you'll have a great time if I can just get you together in that coffee shop you like!"
Glancing at her sister with weary eyes and letting out a sigh the healer replied "Sure, I mean it couldn't possibly go worse than the other 27 attempts."
Victoria frowned a little before perking up, "aw, don't be like that sis, it'll be -"
The young superheroine was interrupted by her phone making a ping, much to her chagrin, and Amy saw her face twist into a generally concerned frown as Vicky read her notification before she turned to her and whispered "Hey, Ames, do you think trans_morphic would actually release a bioweapon? This headline seems really sketchy to me, it doesn't seem like something they'd do at all."
Amy shuffled anxiously, "Oh? They're a biotinker after all then?", to which Glory Girl let out a "hm, I guess so" while unconsciously lifting herself off the floor and continuing, "but actually reading this the headline is ridiculous! trans_morphic released a document and some files for something they called 'Cell AGM Restructuring Virus' which the PRT said could maybe be a bioweapon but they don't know."
"Well that's worrying", was the healer's response, "though I'm not sure anyone would release documentation if they made a bioweapon."
I wonder if I could ask them about it or get my hands on it?, she thought to herself before realising in horror that she'd just considered talking with a villain about biotinkering!
God, Carol's right about me.
Fuck!
"- Ames, Aaaaaaames!", Glory Girl interrupted her thoughts before asking, "Are you alright? You kinda froze up there."
A muttered "I'm fine, just tired" later and a concerned looking Vicky was flying her home at speeds that would make racing car drivers cry, while continuing to talk excitedly about the oddities of a tinker with actually understandable work and the way scientists had already started looking over the contents of the documentation. Her sister was interested in parahuman theory, and Amy listened along to her even as her own internal turmoil continued, all the way until they got home.
Somewhere in the south of the USA
The Slaughterhouse Nine were, as per their name, engaging in mass murder. Bodies with their faces pasted over each other, still alive but horribly mutated, twisted expressions of happiness forced on their faces even as they tried to scream, littered the streets. Smashed glass shredded the feet of any civilians who still dared walk, and fires were scattered across the buildings.
2 kilometres away, PRT Agent Jackson tried not to wretch as his high-caliber tinkertech sniper gun aimed at the head of his target, Jack Slash of the Slaughterhouse 9. No doubt once the man was killed they'd rally at least temporarily, but right now he had free reign and this was a job that no parahuman could do. A crackle in his walkie-talkie and one authorisation-to-kill command later, and Jack Slash's head exploded in a pile of disgusting gore that not even Bonesaw could recover someone from.
Bonesaw herself let out tears and cries of "Uncle Jack! Uncle Jack!" as she discovered his dead body. A few seconds later the Siberian grabbed Bonesaw (interrupting the projection's consumption of the fingers of a particularly large man trapped by a paralysing agent) and carried her off to the van as fast as possible. Jack Slash's influence was gone, and it took a scant few minutes before the rest of the Slaughterhouse collapsed in organisation, most members running off on their own or in pairs. Jack's power meant that over time he grew to manage capes with increasingly conflicting goals and ideas, and once he was gone, the whole house of cards collapsed.
It just so happened that the murderous biotinker and the Siberian got hold of the S9's van first, and drove off as fast as possible away from the rest of the 9, while the Siberian also covered both Bonesaw and the vehicle in her power, preventing any further attacks on them both. As they drove further north, Bonesaw explored the internet - specifically PHO. She lacked the guidance from her Uncle Jack now as for what to do, but a mention of a bioweapon caught the tinker's attention. Before she knew it she was reading about an impressive feat of genetic engineering and gained a gleam in her eyes that hadn't been there for months.
Underground Base, Brockton Bay
A skinny, costumed man known as Thomas Calvert was deeply frustrated with the past week of chaos.
First, his future Pet had gotten away, this time seemingly permanently. None of his timelines got even close to her when he was still trying.
Second, his moles in the PRT were vanishing, one by one, and his timelines kept terminating randomly.
Then, after a couple days of that, his long-term plans for the Empire 88 were categorically shredded within 24 hours, while his timelines were giving him a raging headache within about 2 seconds of attempting to split, forcing him to close one, ever since just before the Triumvirate came to Brockton.
Nevermind the risk he could get disposed of as a potential source for trans_morphic's insinuations about the power-brokers to whom he still owed several favours.
His current pet Tattletale was also becoming more defiant, and he couldn't even take out his frustrations in another timeline! He was strongly considering the same treatment program be applied to her as he had intended for his other Pet, the one he had yet to capture.
All of this, of course, traced back to trans_morphic. That
damn tinker - he had tried to go after them in alternate timelines before that became nonviable, but living in a pocket dimension made attacking hard - was no doubt the source of his problems. There just wasn't anything he could do about it. Hell, the power brokers had actually used one of their favours to
order him to capture trans_morphic, and despite all his attempts, he had so far failed.
Failure was not something you wanted to engage in when dealing with those people. And now... now that tinker was setting off his Nilbog alarm-bells with their recent biotinker-like behaviour. He'd already put the base on filtered air, and he had ordered his mercenaries to take various preventative measures, but he felt it was simply not enough. There was only so much Coil could do, after all, regardless of his boasts of being the master of fate.
[end of chapter - nya~]
So, I spent the last two weeks being a complete dysfunctional wreck from anxiety but! I still wrote a chapter
nya
