On my way back, my mind was awash with memories of the last few months. After I had burned the bridges with my family, things had changed in a major way. Gone were the obligations, gone was the suffocating control, gone was the security. Money had not been a problem, thanks to contacts to the Shadowbroker and Galatea’s ability to make money by speculating on currency and, as a last resort, stealing it from slush-funds as we had done to establish our original capital.

But without the need to escape my father, a new problem had emerged, or rather, I had noticed that I was lacking something. I was lacking a goal to strive for and that was something I needed. The idea to just sit back, to build life in a house, with a spouse, a cat and two-point-four children, fenced in by white picket fence was abhorrent to me.

No, I had a need to do something meaningful, something that mattered to me, I wanted to look back and say, ‘I have achieved this.’, with this being something meaningful or heroic, saving the world or changing the world with a scientific advance. My fusion reactor might be something in that regard, but I was uncertain if releasing it to the public would be a good idea, it had the potential to cause major economic and political upheaval.

One of the ideas I had worked on was in a similar vein, the genetic work I had used to greatly increase the physical prowess of my body might be a stepping stone towards a medicine that increased the life-expectancy of a normal human, something with even bigger potential to disturb the world.

So, I had mostly focused on what I thought was a simple, uncomplicated and positive undertaking, investigating the Omegas and taking the gang down, making sure that they could no longer hurt people. It had mostly worked, I had laid the groundwork and pushed the police in the right direction, from time to time helping them, which caused the gang to quickly collapse, like a house of cards.

At the same time, I had tried to take care of Sophia, helping her with the upheaval in her personal life, as her father turned away from the family, trying to deal with his own sadness by turning towards religion and what I believed to be a cult. thus breaking up the family. I think the loss of her husband had unhinged her mother in turn and when her mother had needed money, she took the only path she knew, trying to sell a female body. Only that the body was Sophia’s and she was having none of that, running away.

That resulted in the deal her mother had made falling through and her procurer did not take it well. It is unknown what exactly happened that night, but the police report states that her mother was beaten, raped and killed. I never told Sophia about her mother’s death, maybe I should have. Not that it mattered in the end.

After Sophia had run away from her mother, she had joined me in my bunker, but over the months she had more and more slipped into depression, no matter what I tried.

Finally, last night, I found a hint while going after the roots of the Omegas, a hint that gave me an idea where Sophia’s brother had vanished to. As a result, we had raided the compound he was held in during the morning. The raid went very well, considering the circumstances, but I was forced to kill a woman, someone trying to use a Power to get into my head, to control me. Sophia had reacted badly.

Maybe it was for the best. Maybe it was for the best that Sophia was now with her brother, no longer in New Brunsburg but in a new city, where she could start healing.

Maybe, it was truly for the best.

I’m not quite sure how I managed to get back into my bunker, I think Galatea had taken over my armour as I knew she could and walked me in. When the cold air hit my face, I partially woke and managed to get myself into bed, instantly falling asleep due to my exhaustion, something I was grateful about.

I woke in the evening at first a little disoriented before the events of the previous day came crashing in. What I had done. The scared expression on Sophia’s face. Part of me wanted to contact Sophia, but I was scared. In a way, it was similar to the gedankenexperiment of Schrödinger’s cat, as long as we had no contact, she had not told me to go to hell and our relationship was in a state of flux.

I felt my mind recede in self-defense, avoiding the pain and slipping into a strange fudge-state. I was aware what I was doing, similar to the normal, shallow trance-state I was using sometimes, a dispassionate state in which I was able to examine things without preconceived notions, cutting to the heart of the matter and finding facts. And one of the facts was that I could not be certain of Sophia’s loyalty, that she was outside of my control. Previously, Galatea had kept an eye on her but I had asked her to stop, so I would not know if she gave out information about me. It was strange, to be aware of the fact that I was deceiving myself but not wanting to change the self-deception as it helped to numb the pain. But numbing would not protect me.

No, protection would mean that I had to leave for now, making sure that I was out of the way, just in case the worst case came to pass. The next step was a quick inventory and I realised that I would have to leave a lot behind, a lot of sensitive items that I would not want in anyone’s hands but mine. So, I mixed up as much explosive as I had resources for and made sure that nobody would get anything out of my bunker. Sophia would get a way to contact me, if she used her pass-codes, everyone else would create a new crater-lake.

I was especially sad that I had no way to take my armour with me, but it was simply too large. The gauntlets for my stealth-suit I could pack into a small suitcase together with the mask, the fabric of the suit looked similar enough to normal cloth so I could take it with me, but the armour, no way.

Still in my strange trance-state, I checked if I had received messages and found one from Voltic and one from the Shadowbroker. Voltic warned me that something was afoot and I should get my head down, an information that scared me more than I cared to admit. But I felt I owed Voltic to make sure that nobody would know that she had helped me, so I asked Galatea to scrub every trace of her message from the system. The message from the Shadowbroker was just as ominous, he warned me that I had apparently gone too far and the police was seriously after me.

But both warnings did not change my plans, I had no intention to let anyone get my stuff and running in the middle of the night would not help me, so I planned to work through the night, while Galatea prepared as much data from the two information-raids we had committed, compiling a complete dossier on the Greene families involvement with the Omegas and their training-compounds, hopefully with enough evidence for the media to go after them.

In the morning, I would get myself a train-ticket and vanish into the province, licking my wounds and taking further steps.

The late-night news shed some more light on the warnings I had been given, talking about the brutal torture I had inflicted on three young man, describing their injuries in almost graphic detail, making sure that I came off as a brutal monster, taking pleasure in the pain of my victims. There was no mention made about the fact that those innocent victims, as they were portrayed, were kidnapping rapists, with a basement out of either a horror or a bad porn-movie No, never disturb the media’s narrative with uncomfortable facts, they only distract.

Before leaving in the morning, I made sure that my base was locked up tight, Galatea left a hook within the system, allowing her to quickly retreat into the base’s mainframe if my laptop was destroyed, or if I wanted to return to the base. The reactor was down to the lowest possible energy output, making sure that the base would remain in working order for the next decade or so, even if I never returned.

I made my way to the train station, looking for a train into the countryside, somewhere I was able to remain close by but far enough away to make a get-away if something went seriously wrong. Just in case. There were a few small towns that were a good fit, I would go with my gut-feeling, looking for a good area to go to ground.