Chapter Text
“Well. I suppose that's that, then.”
“Wha…?” At the sound of a voice nearby, soft, blurry bluish-green light flooded his eyes while he tried to force them open.
His mind was just beginning the ever-so-slow grind to lucidity, barely functional, when his surroundings began swimming into focus. He spent a few seconds hovering just outside of consciousness, until his first truly coherent thought formed through his head: he felt nearly weightless.
Not like he was falling.
That would have woken him much more violently than this calm drift into the world.
No, it felt more like he was hanging off of something buoyant, gently drifting along through not-quite still water.
But he, himself, was dry as a desert bone.
It was such a starkly jarring contrast to his expectations that he jolted upward, before, with a sudden jerk, he was forced back down. What lingering drowsiness he’d been feeling burning away in a wave of shock and adrenaline.
It took him only that single, forcefully aborted attempt at movement to realize he was restrained – fairly loosely though. It didn’t restrict him much, shifting around was easy even, but he couldn’t quite force himself out of whatever he’d been put in.
Not without seriously straining himself, and probably breaking whatever was holding him. Something he was hesitant to do without understanding what was happening.
Whoever had put him here had left him reclined back, and held firmly in place inside a housing nearly perfectly fit to the size of his body. His legs were pushed outward, and extended; his arms were stretched wide, and out to his sides in a T-shape with his palms outwards.
Calming slightly, he started when he noticed the helmet that sat, sealed firmly over his head. Eyes narrowed, confusion spreading across his concealed face.
The crystal-clear visor that lay just above his eyes had, somehow, managed to be so utterly unobtrusive that – though it really should have been the first thing he’d noticed – he found he had trouble perceiving it at all. The helmet’s viewport sat just on the extreme edges of his peripheral vision. If not for that, he may have taken much longer to realize his eyes were covered.
Now aware he had neglected to do so, he took a moment and tried to assess himself. Very quickly – and frankly, unsurprisingly – he noted there was a fully sealed respirator set over his nose and mouth. Counter to his expectations, the mask was surprisingly comfortable. Like the helmet itself, barely even noticeable, even. Nothing at all like he'd have expected from a sealed system.
There were only two real indications there was more to the equipment he'd been equipped with than just the helmet. His fingers, which gave off a muffled tapping as he clicked them together. And an air filtration system, pushing and pulling oxygen in time with his breathing, creating a small breeze. Small tells, but ones that were undeniable. He was in some sort of sealed, airtight suit.
Head tilted his head, and replayed that thought.
He, ah…
…didn't know how he knew that.
It did mean whoever had put him here had at least cared the bare minimum about his safety, thankfully.
Wherever the hell ‘here’ was, anyway.
At that thought, the fairly serious concern he'd been feeling started growing. Spiraling, faster and faster into an outright panic. Desperately searching for anything to focus on and redirect his thoughts, he turned his attention to the rest of his surroundings.
A quiet, numb part of his mind whispered that he should have been doing that sooner; not just analyzing how comfortable his odd bed and new suit were. If only to make sure he wasn’t in immediate danger.
‘Little late on the draw, there.’ He thought, attempting to use dry humor to mask real fear.
Unfortunately, he very quickly saw everything there was to see. There was only a single, large window set uncomfortably close to him. Somewhat counterintuitively, he couldn't even really see through it. Instead, the far side was covered in interlocking segments of metal – armor, at a guess.
His eyes traced the blank plane across from him, “Why…?”
‘Why’ was certainly the question. Why would they – whoever the hell this mysterious they were – put a window here in the first place? A window was a weak point. If you were going to put armor over it, why not just replace it with a camera and screen?
Or, well… He supposed the possibility couldn't be discarded that the armor wasn't there for him to stare out of, but for someone to look in on him.
Huh.
Not a fan of that thought. Not at all.
Slowly shaking his head, he finally began coming to terms with a fact he'd been trying to avoid – primarily by grasping desperately at any oddity or errant thought.
It was becoming distressingly clear that he had no memory of how he ended up here. More than that, however, he had no distinct memories he could call on at all.
And it wasn't limited to the short term. He couldn't recall things he knew any normal person should. Names of parents, childhood friends. It felt more and more like his mind was a filing cabinet; every drawer had a label on the folders inside, but none of the actual content that should fill it out.
“Shi~it.” He said, drawing the word out as it became more and more clear that his mind simply had nothing in it to recall.
Not even his own damn name.
“Fuck.” His voice cracked, the trickle of fear he'd been masking started to roll in like a proper tide, “What the actual -”
“I'm sorry that this will be the first thing you hear on–” He jumped at the sound, The Voice's short wake up call long forgotten in his scramble to learn anything at all about his situation. He looked around for a screen, a speaker, anything he might have initially. “– your grand and tragic epic into the great unknown, but, well, you know what they say: 'Needs must,' and all that.”
But… no. It only took a split second to realize that it was coming from his helmet. Probably from a built-in radio.
They'd built in a SCBA - a Self-contained Breathing Apparatus, though again he had no idea how he knew that – so a radio would hardly be unbelievable.
Brisk and firm, the voice coming through the communication was undeniably a man's. It carried an undertone of resignation, but despite that managed to keep an air of authority. It was grounding. If nothing else, it was grounding; staving the budding panic attack off just a while longer.
“I realize you don’t know what's going on at the moment. I apologize for that. I also realize that you don’t remember anything from before you woke up. I apologize for that, too, son. The situation is complicated, and I never meant to, ah… Throw you in at the deep end, as it were. Even if I did give you the best, ah, ‘diving suit’ in the world. Or perhaps… ‘Pressure suit’ would be more apt…?”
He was grateful for the distraction The Voice offered, it pulled his fraying focus together and helped direct him. And with such an obvious prompt, had no reason to put off looking at himself, or his odd suit, any longer.
At first glance, it looked like a near-pitch black mass of living tissues had been layered over top of his own body like some sort of parasite. But observing for even a moment longer made it clear that the artificial tissue was very much synthetic rather than biological. Dense, dark chords wove tightly around his body in a distortion of an overly refined human's muscular system. At sensitive, or particularly vulnerable, parts of his body the false myofiber anchored itself in place on a metallic exoskeleton.
‘Which would explain the metal tapping sound, huh? I am truly the greatest mind in generations.” Turning his head to look at his hands he confirmed that his fingertips were covered in the metal armoring. But then… when he rubbed his fingers together, or against his palm… ‘Why can I feel this like I'm bare handed?
Now acutely aware he could feel all across his body perfectly, as if he were naked, he was also aware that in some ways, he could feel more. In point of fact… something that felt both entirely normal and extremely unnatural was laying along his spine. Undoubtedly made of the same metal as the rest of the armor's exoskeletal structure, given its nature as a support, he could feel it cradled gently in a custom made groove in his chair. Almost as if it were made of his own flesh.
Oh.
Oh.
He did not like that one bit.
Focusing on the feeling of his ‘protruding spine’ was giving him intense feelings of dysmorphia. Aside from the overwhelming feeling of, fuckingnope shivering its way up his real spine, he couldn't help but cringe as fought the urge to rub up against the chair in a futile bid to try and scrape off the false spinal column.
He needed to focus on something else right now if he didn't want to be sick!
For all the actual panic had been pushed back several times now, the world was starting to feel distant. Like he was watching a recording, not living in the moment. The effect was interesting. The result of the swirling emotions inside him coupled with the mental distance resulted in a curious mix of muted concern, and anticipation. Almost like watching a particularly suspenseful moment in a movie.
“I’d intended to speak with you in person, of course. Or as close as I could get. But events have transpired to prevent that. I’d believed we had several more weeks before the situation on the home front became… untenable. I was unfortunately proven incorrect. Something I am beginning to find has become distressingly common in the past few days.
New York’s E.M.A.T. has rapidly begun to lose control of their quarantine, with death spreading unbidden right under the city's nose; and those fools in the government have repeatedly proven that they are unwilling to listen to me. Or Rasch, for that matter.
It's only a matter of time now, oh yes. Mark my words, we’re running down the clock to our proverbial midnight and all those political fools and Warhawks will squander what little chance we have to salvage the situation.”
None of that meant anything to him. Obviously a city-wide quarantine of any type was bad. But everything else was useless to him.
Except the name. Rasch.
He didn’t know who that was. Yet. But it sounded like whoever had put him in lockdown here held him – and his opinion – in some esteem. More than whoever was in charge of the quarantine, anyway.
The worst part was the lack of memories. He was just being talked at. Like he should inherently understand the context behind all these statements. The implications.
He didn’t.
It was frustrating in the extreme. And that frustration was bleeding into impotent anger.
The only good news he had – ‘And I am generously stretching the definition, there!' – was that the detached numbness? It was suppressing the panic and rage.
So instead, he was just feeling claustrophobic inside his one body, and as tense as a mooring line in a storm.
Basically running on a mental auto-pilot at this point, he’d given up on trying to piece together any information he wasn’t just given at this point.
“As such, we won’t be having our little face-to-face. In your position, I imagine I’d want to skip straight to the point, so forgive me if I seem a bit blunt.
At the moment, you are currently hurtling through a sort of derivative of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, if you’ve survived long enough to hear this. A wormhole, if you prefer. You’re projected to exit the white hole’s side quickly.”
Fucking what!?
“You’ll be free to look through the archives I’ve installed in the Cradle at your leisure, but as it stands, the main thrust of the situation is this: Humanity as a whole is very likely doomed. At best, it's going to be a coin flip if we survive more than six more months.”
Again, what!?!
“The hope for our race has, at this time, fallen into the hands of some poor Marine grunt. One who has clinically died no less than three times in the last twenty four hours, according to his transmitted medical readout.”
“Wha-...,” he trailed off for a moment, “You-.” No. He really couldn’t think of anything that was appropriate to say to that. Whispering in shock, “Three times? How the fuck…?”
“Oh, Alcatraz is doing his best, of that there can be no doubt, and doing a frankly miraculous job of it! But he’s fumbling blindly in the dark. If I can not reclaim the Nanosuit he is currently wearing within the next twelve hours or so – or failing that, convince him that he must undertake a suicide mission to sabotage a bioweapon powerful enough to purge humanity from our world, then all mankind is lost. Of this, I am utterly certain."
Everything in him went cold. That statement was something he’d have expected out of an over the top action movie. A novel. Not real life.
If that Marine – Alcatraz? – wasn’t successful, then…
… he was listening to a recording about the start of the apocalypse. In a sealed pod.
He was listening to a recording about the start of the apocalypse. In a sealed pod!
The horrifying connotations forced their way through the mental fog with all the subtlety of a mushroom cloud. “Fuck.” If his voice cracked a little on the quiet word, he didn’t think anyone would judge him.
He needed to find a new way to express himself. ‘Fuck’ was starting to feel like it was losing its impact. There really was no other way he could even begin to vocalize a fraction of what he was feeling, at the moment.
A sudden, delayed surge of adrenaline spiked through him. Ignoring the resistance, his left arm wrenched itself free of the Cradle he was set in and whipped out into the wall.
Other than sending a stinging sensation through his hand and up his arm, failed to accomplish anything with the reflexive strike.
And now, even though he was at least partially free, he had nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Even the space between him and the window he’d lashed out at was maybe eight inches at best.
Slowly, suddenly feeling like his body was the heaviest thing in the world despite the persistent feeling of weightlessness clinging to him, he leaned back into the Cradle.
It simply accepted him back, quickly maneuvering his body right back into its previous position with an unseen force.
‘Magnets, probably.’ His rational mind supplied, thoughts even sounding distant and uninterested, while he stared into the middle distance.
He was honest enough with himself that it was a slight comfort to know he could escape at least one layer of this with some work.
The message resumed not long after he locked back down.
“Plan A has already fallen through. Prophet’s reaction was understandable, I suppose… but with his defection – and more importantly, his theft of the only functioning Nanosuit Two-point-Oh with the Lingshan Iteration – I have no other way to intervene in what's coming. The Ceph have already begun their cleanup plans. Laurence was one of the best soldiers humanity has ever produced, to be sure, but he just… didn't know what was happening. He didn't understand.
Couldn’t.
Only me. Maybe Karl.”
A deep, long sigh filtered through the audio. For a moment, it almost seemed like that infuriatingly vague statement was what the message would end on. When the voice returned with a sigh, he was thankful he wouldn’t have to try and organize his own thoughts quite yet.
“Well. No use crying over spilled milk, as it were. The Ceph have come out in droves to tend their garden, and Plan A has fallen through. Karl and I both have our own Plan B’s. But we can’t leave anything to chance. Not with our arrogant, young, and so beautifully promising little species on the line.
You are my plan C, son.
Project Phoenix. Humanity reborn from our ashes, even if we burn ourselves and our world in one last grand conflagration, to spite the tender mercies of Charybdis.”
He figured he might have been more receptive of this if he knew what was actually happening.
Also?
‘The hell is a Ceph?’
So far? All he’d actually gotten was a flowery declaration of the apocalypse. He’d appreciate it if The Voice actually followed through and cut to the chase like he’d promised.
“I hope you don’t mind if I call you that?”
Called him what? Son?
Well, if nothing else it sounded like The Voice had actually been interested in what his answer may have been, there. It felt like the first time he’d actually been talked to rather than at for this entire recording.
“Forgive an old man his presumptive indulgence, if you would. It's really all I have left at the moment for vices. Perils of putting yourself into amniotic suspension, you see.”
The unexpected derailment of the conversation caused him to blink twice, before squinting. Dropping his head back with a light thump, he said, “No. No, I really don’t think I do."
He’d woken up knowing nothing about his situation. He felt like he knew less now…
That was kind of impressive, in a twisted, ‘God hates him’ kind of way.
But it was starting to feel less and less like he’d been set up as a simple disposable tool. But he was a tool, no doubt about that. The Voice had made it abundantly clear that he had an agenda.
Being told piecemeal about what sounded like the end of the world was agonising.
“Now, where was I?
Hargreave & Rasch Biotechnical has always been on the cutting edge, and we put everything we had into you.” The Voice had stressed the end of that sentence oddly, almost as if…
‘They put everything they had. Into me.’ His head quirked at the statement, trying to piece out the deliberate nature of the statement, ‘Was he implying…?’
“Honeycombed osteosis reinforcement. Denser musculature. Enhanced oxygen absorption. Clot and toxin scrubbing.”
‘Shit, he is. Then,’ he let out a sigh, ‘Was it just genetic modification and memory suppression? Or does it run deeper than that?’
“Even some of the Ceph’s tricks were integrated into your genome. When you get injured, cellular regeneration and application should greatly enhance the rate at which you heal. More flexible and redundant neural network pathways, to help mitigate the risk of potentially traumatic brain injuries. That type of thing, you know? Even ageing shouldn’t be an issue for you. Not for a very long time anyway.
That one makes me somewhat envious, I am forced to admit. How cruel it seems to see a better answer to my own mortality dangled before me, having so long been resigned to entombment!
When Karl started playing around with their genetics, I looked into it myself, some. I’m still not sure how he was going about it exactly, but until recently, the methods were too risky for my tastes. I had no intention of risking my meager plans of contention to the hivemind, so of cour–. …Excuse me, I’m drifting off topic.
But seeing as you are likely my – and more importantly, humanity's – last chance, a true Hail Mary of a plan if ever there was one, I felt that it was only prudent to stack the deck, so to speak.”
God, The Voice just loved ominous soliloquies didn’t it?
In a dissonant sort of way, he could almost find it amusing. A few breathless chuckles slipping out. The small part of him still desperately clinging to reality, however, was worrying over the point of doing this. To him. To anyone. The sheer amount of resources pumped into any single person would be…
Well, he wasn’t sure how much it would take; but it couldn’t justify itself when it sounded like Earth desperately needed all hands on deck.
So why the fuck was he thrown into a wormhole’s event horizon?
He almost wanted to say he'd never felt so helpless in his life, but… he was starting to suspect that he’d felt exactly this helpless his entire life.
“Now, I know it seems pretentious, but I mean it when I call you my son. It isn’t the most traditional method, but I built you from the ground up, you know. Designed every aspect of you for your success. I took the best genetics from thousands of candidates and painstakingly wrote out your DNA. The best soldiers in the world, the top minds, the best of the best of the best. Picked clean of their virtues and scrubbed of their faults.
I spared no expense.
I’ll never let it be said that Jack Hargreave does things by halves.”
A name! Jack Hargreave. This Son of a Bitch had really gone through the trouble of making him from the ground up. Though it did raise the question about how he had any sort of personality. Or at least, it felt like he did.
“Of course, it goes without saying that I built you from the best baseline genetic template we had: Me.”
Wonderful. And apparently decided that if he was going to play around with genetics, he may as well toss his own in as well.
Looking at it as charitably as possible? The bright side: it seemed like he hadn’t lost a lifetime of memories, after all.
On the other hand: Holy shit, what an absolutely wild way to learn that he was a chimera!
It sent chills down his spine to hear how casually Hargreave hadn’t even bothered to mention the ethical implications of creating a whole person.
“From here, there really isn’t terribly much you can d-”
There was no warning, when everything went wrong. The world around him just slammed; violently pressing him into his Cradle with a burst of pain and shock, cutting off the message and scattering his thoughts. Warning lights pulsed red, replacing the previously cool colors while vibrations absolutely racked his body. The turbulence shook his teeth to the roots, and ripped him out of his full-body lockdown. He only recognized he was still keeping himself nominally upright because his head kept bouncing in and out of the cranial housing built in the Cradle as he fought against the turbulence. Bracing himself as best he could between the Cradle and the glass window, he tried to stop rattling around like a marble in a can.
When it finally ended, it was as sudden as it started. The world went wonderfully, blissfully still in an instant.
“Oh, thank fuck!” He snapped the curse out, his eyes refusing to focus on anything.
Everything in him felt like it had been squeezed into jelly and squeezed into a vaguely person shaped tube. Maybe his bones were even floating around in there somewhere?[ It felt like he was a freshly tenderized cut of meat, and then rolled into a vaguely person shaped lump.
‘Maybe,’ he swallowed down some bile threatening to rise out of his throat, ‘some bone fragments are in there too.’
He had exactly zero doubt that if there had been anything at all in his stomach, it wouldn’t have been something he could keep down.
Movement in his peripheral vision caught his attention, while he was still awkwardly wedged between the Cradle and the window. The armor segments were retracting. Everything that had been running through his mind; thoughts and feelings. They froze in an instant, as he got his first view beyond his tiny room.
It was enthralling. And so deeply, utterly terrifying.
Stars upon stars, upon stars. Shining into the infinity beyond him, glowing gently against the void of space.
“Now then. The nature of space being what it is, you'll be drifting toward your destination for a while. Quite a while, I should think.” Hargreave's words were spoken with all the gravitas one would give to the weather. “Longer than any other man-made object has, at time of recording, if I did the math right.”
Electronics were starting to come on across his pod. Above a status readout of The Phoenix itself, the recording’s projected length kept ticking along through the silence. A small, static portrait of one Jacob Hargreave accompanied it.
Power…
Online.
User Status…
Operational.
He flinched at the voice. The unexpected, powerful sound was bassy and electronic. It caught him incredibly off-guard.
The sound had been unnatural, utterly unlike Hargreave’s smooth voice over the radio. It almost felt like hearing his own inner monologue, with a heavy electronic filter.
Almost.
A slight vibration at the base of his skull, just under his ears, told him it was very real.
SECOND initialization complete, interfacing with User neural network. Integrating new DNA profile.
“Well,” His attention flicked back to the recording, thoughts on neural interfacing and DNA integration set aside for now. There was nothing he could do about it at the moment, anyway. “For a given definition of man-made. We assembled this craft, The Phoenix, with nominally similar specifications to an old NASA space shuttle. Its capacity and superstructure are many times larger, however, and its shell and bones constructed entirely of Ceph material my CELL Operators have managed to… ah, shall we say, ‘liberate’ from various smaller sites worldwide.
I needed to be sure it would survive the ejection through the White Hole, you see… and entrance through the Black Hole’s event horizon, frankly.
That science is still beyond us, I'm afraid, despite the best efforts of myself and my team’s diligent work.”
So then he wasn't just in a pod flying through space. Hargreave had seen fit to nest him inside of something larger. Hopefully with some kind of supplies, given the sheer scale of the task being put to him. It would be difficult to rebuild civilization with a few sticks and a rock, after all – though technically not impossible. If nothing else, it was a comfort to know he had more than the bare minimum between himself and the infinite vacuum of space.
A cold comfort, definitely. But a very real one.
Cradle interface…
Complete.
Accessing data archives…
Simulations detected. Large-scale data archives registered on external storage mediums. Please select preferred access – or exit when ready.
A list of options scrolled through his visor’s newly activated HUD, continuing to grow as he scrolled through it. The options available ranged wildly.
In one section there were programs designed to teach survival and combat skills: Simulations recreating US Army and Marine Corps basic training. British Army Basic Training. Advanced Job Training. Force Recon, Rangers, SEALS, SAS, GIGN.
Something called the ‘CryNet Enforcement and Local Logistics Elite Operator Initiative’?
Another list showed more homesteading oriented training. Similarly to the martial programs, it had its own simulations, but these ranged much more broadly: from basic agriculture to electrical engineering.
But more than just the simulations, there were troves of books and videos archived within its depths, connected to those subjects and so many more.
‘Oh, thank God.' He thought, eyeing the archives.
Sprawling lists of books, games, and movies from across time periods stretching back into history. All of it had been meticulously organized to ensure its origin was documented; with hypotheses on those with unclear origins.
This was as much an archive to ensure human cultures and history survived as it was a resource for learning and teaching.
And it would mean he didn't go insane if there was no one else onboard with him.
He supposed it made sense, though. If Hargreave really had launched him into space under the assumption that humanity was doomed, the old man had wanted to preserve everything he could get his hands on. It was a truly staggering amount of data. That something like this could even exist outside of a server farm the size of a warehouse was shocking. Although… He hadn’t exactly had a chance to look at his ride. Maybe he did have a warehouse sized server farm?
Still. Even knowing Hargreave must have missed God only knows how much, this was probably as close to a complete archive on humanity as you could reasonably get.
And here it was. In his metaphorical hands.
Shaking his head slowly, he pried his thoughts away from the sheer amount of knowledge he was sitting on, and instead tried to consider the massive database of skills.
Each one would be necessary, undoubtedly, to build a new world from the ground up.
But which would be necessary first?
And which would he need to work on the longest to actually understand?
He already knew the first and second most important things in any survival situation – somehow. Water. Then food. Shelter, although that was presumably taken care of with living out of The Phoenix itself, in the short term if nothing else.
Hargreave’s recording continued, uncaring of his ‘Son’s’ first attempts at planning, “I could only activate the Ceph generators that we managed to, how shall I say… ‘acquire’, just long enough to send you to the outermost reaches of a system with what is, by all observations, a habitable exoplanet. I believe that proposals to give it the proper name of Trident were under review by the International Astronomical Union.”
A few beats passed, before he spoke again.
The words were quiet now, delivered in the somber tone of someone conveying what they knew was bad news, “I’m sorry to say, Son, that you were launched well before we planned. Out of necessity, perhaps, but even so, your shuttle will be moving quite slowly. We'd only managed to finish the maneuvering thrusters, the main rockets having been left uninstalled until just before we had planned to launch you. And now they lay forgotten, to rust away in some warehouse that will undoubtedly be sold off or forgotten once I’ve gone.”
Hargreave sighed, quiet and breathless.
“My best guess is that you’ll be drifting towards the planet for near on a century, Son.”
That had his eyes flicking toward the top left of the screen, where a small widget sat. Its previously unassuming information on display.
August 27, 2023
What little confidence he’d dredged up gave way, and fell out from beneath his feet. The numbness roared up in full force, overtaking all of the distant, shifting emotions he’d been working to process, and choking them out with a vengeance.
Hargreave’s last words hammered home reality. The cold, dead fact was that he was going to be alone for a very long time.
Whatever the recording spoke on afterward didn’t register. The dull drone of his ‘Father’s’ voice was in the background, as the old man went on about whatever he had planned. But none of that actually managed to make its way to his mind.
His slow, thumping heartbeat, and the hitching of his breath were all he could focus on. The only thing that anchored him to reality.
Long after the message had ended, he kept staring out into the star-spotted void.
Eventually though, shock started to wear off and time started to regain meaning.
When he finally – finally – managed to form something that vaguely resembled a coherent thought, he latched onto it with a vengeance. At this point, anything that would reorient him was a God-send.
Just being able to follow a coherent train of logic felt like it was a near-Olympian achievement.
The fit of disassociation beginning to settle, he turned his thoughts toward the first real decision he’d ever get to make in his life.
He needed a name.