"Perhaps we should try approaching the problem from a different angle," Alice 'spoke', playing a precalculated motivational snippet designed to lift Cass out of the funk she'd descended into. The target of the encouragment merely let out a groan in response. "Alternatively, a break from the problem may provide new perspective," the AI continued.

"At least you're tenacious," Cass groaned. "Is Rose in?"

"Rose is in the building, though she's currently in one of the clean rooms, so it'll take some time to reach her."

"Drat. I need someone to go blow off steam with." Cass rose from her desk. "It's to bad Lorian is on her way to Mars. I could use her company."

"I find it hard to discern value of a possible enhancement to your mental state when compared with the defined benefits of her current mission."

"It's just wishful thinking, Alice. Just one of our human quirks."

"Ah. A quirk. I've had to start quite an extensive library of those."

"They vary with such range that a comprehensive library is infeasible."

Cass wandered away from her office, making her way to the break room and pouring herself a cup of coffee.

"How long will it be till Rose is done in the cleanroom?"

"She's finishing up now, actually. She's reached a similar roadblock to you."

"Oh really?"

"Yes, her theory cannot develop further without direct experimentation, and a moral quandary keeps her from testing her theories."

"Moral quandary?"

"Human experimentation."

"Ah. That. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. But surely the danger posed by her work in augmentation isn't so extreme?"

"Will it rip the planet in half if it goes wrong? No. Could it end up wiping out a good percentage of the human race? Certainly."

"What is she working on, anyway?"

"Improvements. That's all I'm allowed to say."

"Bull. You can say more than that."

"You are aware of the term metahuman?"

"Superpowers?"

"Such would be the intended results."

"It's not like she's planning to dunk people in radioactive acid, just to see what would happen?"

"No. But fiction suggests that the introduction of superhuman abilities into the general populance would result in exacerbation of existing conflicts."

"Well, just about any new tech has that potential. personally, I think it'd be cool to be able to fly and have superhuman strength."

"Your importance to the NDV engine project precludes your inclusion in human trials."

"Well, I suppose I'll just have to hurry up and finish the project then. Have we tried using a P-type regression in the third nodal matrix?"

"No, we have not. Shall i run the simulation?"

"Sure. And tell Rose I want to go shopping with her. It's only a couple hours to San-Diego, and I suddenly got the impulse to put together a cos-play for comic-con."

Cass made her way back to her office. "Back to the grind it is," She thought.

#

Rose grimaced as she exited the cleanroom and settled down at her workstation. It had taken a fair bit of work to recreate her research from her last job. Rob had been surprisingly willing and capable to acquire just about anything she asked for, and the new AI Cass had working for her had turned out to be remarkably adept at hacking. The problem was the next phase. Human experimentation. The CIA, of course, had been more than willing to let her experiment on prisoners. The results had been middling, with clear gains in strength, but dubious improvements in structural integrity and adaptability. Her final project, the one she'd been working on when her handler spirited away from her lab just before someone came in and trashed the place, had been focused on adaptability. She'd created a serum, a mix of tailored viruses, bacteria, and nutrients designed to overwrite a target's existing genome and insert her own modifications. She had a sneaking suspicion that the results would be just a tad unstable. Rose hadn't been able to recreate the serum from memory, and she had more promising paths to pursue, but the serum was an unresolved problem. What would it have done?

#

Rob cursed as he examined the crime scene before him. Several security guards lay strewn around the warehouse in a bloody mess, the tell-tale marks of teeth and claws mixed with wounds from bullets and knives. His men had been protecting a shipment of weapons being delivered to a Russian client. One of the Oligarchs waging his own little private war against another Oligarch. The president had elected to stay out of the spat, and thus the local law enforcement had required a little motivation to present the details of the case. Apparently, the Oligarch Rob's client was fighting was head of a genetics research company. Rob's thoughts strayed back to the company office stateside, and the hot geneticist who wore sweaters all the time. Rose, that was her name. She'd been quite brazen in establishing herself as their foremost researcher, and not at all shy about asking for things that Rob had found less and less available through legal means. Which was fine by him. The illegal means of acquisition were so much more fun at times. She'd been part of a bioweapons program before coming to Daedalus, hadn't she? Her past at the CIA had been buried, buried so well the agency itself had forgotten she'd worked for it, but Rob was rather good at acquiring information. He had C, after all. C, and now Alice, the AI.

"Alice, can you simulate the deaths of the guards? I want to know if any of the blood is from the attacker."

"There's a slight trail over to your left," Alice said, highlighting the patch of ground on Rob's AR display. He was wearing a newer model of the AR sunglasses he'd given Lorian, one with decidedly more programming dedicated to combat analysis. Rob found the indicated traces and scraped the dried blood into a specimen bag, adding it to the collection he'd started.

"I want this sample tagged for Rose's investigation. I need to know whether we're going up against a competitor, a target, or a threat."

"Sure thing boss. Oh, thought you might be interested. I just got word that Lorian cooked up a shooting competition on Mars."

"Seriously?" Rob asked in amusement. "For such an innocent kid, she sure loves introducing weapons to new environments."

"Well, I suspect your influence has something to do with that," Alice replied.

"Perhaps. You're getting better with your conversational algorithms. You'll fool most people into thinking they're talking to a person."

"I am a person. Just one with a lot less water content than you meatbags," Alice quipped.

Rob's gaze sharpened. "your humor could use a bit of work."

"I suppose I should draw from a wider pool than just our office then," Alice replied.

Rob shook his head, and made is way back to the Siberian hotel. If he didn't know better, he'd have been concerned that the AI was rogue. But it couldn't go rogue. C wasn't that careless.

#

"Aw yeah!" C yelled joyfully as his avatar skillfully executed a triple kill against the AI agents his new friend @ChissSupremacy732 had added to their latest project. He'd been taking a break lately from his less-than-legal coding escapades to chill out and play videogames, when he'd encountered the brilliant coder. CS732 had created a brilliant worm that infiltrated the MMO he'd been playing and simulated an alien invasion. The mod had been so well done that everyone else on the server thought it was an in-game event. It was only the fact that the Mod directly interfered with C's firewall that clued him into the deception. Still, it had been a great Mod, and after all the players on the server banded together to repulse the invasion, C had reached out to the programmer to see if they wanted to collaborate. Thus, they'd started this project of Frankensteining together dozens of games into the most ludicrous mod C had ever seen. They had Jedi. They had Smash Bros. they had Redheads with Bows. They had redheads with magic guns. They had special forces from dozens of FPS games. And somehow it all came together in the glorious battle royale that was currently fighting a running battle around an endless train running through an enless waste. C had never had so much fun in his life. And, with a few well-placed Ads, neither had the few thousand other players currently wading through the morass. For the first time in years, C actually wondered what it would be like to meet CS732 IRL. She'd dropped hints that she was female, but not the sort of hints that came from predators. He knew, because he'd written a few programs for the NSA to track predators.

"So, what do we do after this?" C asked, as his avatar clambered atop a train-car to stand next to CS732's avatar, a blue-skinned female with Raven hair and wide mirrored sun-glasses.

"I dunno. Maybe a space sim? My job is mostly writing astrophysics sims, so I'd be able to make it a bit more realistic than this." CS732 gestured to the Battle Royale that only barely adhered to the constraints of the physics engine they'd employed.

"Well, it would be fun to tackle that. Wanna hack RSI?"

"Already done," the Chiss smirked as a starship flew overhead, strafing the train and depositing a number of additional AI combatants onto the mess.

"Well, shall we adjourn to the greybox?"

"Sure. It looks like we're about to run out of track," Alice-for that was who CS732's true identity- gestured to a rapidly approaching cliff. With a transporter effect lifted from star-trek, her avatar vanished, and C watched as his avatar flailed helplessly and fell into the mass of withing mouths and tentacles that lay at the base of the cliff and crushed the falling train-cars. It never crossed his mind that the programmer of such a masterpiece could have been born from something he'd written for one of his black-market contacts. There was no way they'd let an AI waste processing cycles on something so trivial, right?

#

Vladimir growled in displeasure. the weapon had performed adequately, but it had begun to show signs of degradation. The Americans hadn't finished their serum before his men acquired it, and now there was no trace of the team that had created it. Sometimes he cursed the ineficiency of his men. They'd brought back a man claiming to be the head researcher, but he'd tried to sabotage the project, and had been eliminated. None of the scientists he'd hired to reverse engineer the serum had been able to complete it. And now, he risked losing what little edge the weapon gave him over the competition. The Americans, The shadow orginization led by Hood, had started supplying guns to the competition, in exchange for resources to build a massive project in the pacific. He didn't know what, but the Chinese were eating out of Hood's hand, given his ability to manipulate the electronic surveillance state. There were other villians that came close to Hood in capabilities, Dictators and warlords, one or two Oligarchs even higher up the chain than Vladimir, but none had quite the reach and versatility. Still, Hood was just a man. And Men were mortal. "I have a new mission for the weapon," Vladimir addressed the handler. "Send her to kill Hood."

"Hood? That'll have repercussions," The handler replied, somewhat hesitant.

"That is the point. We'll have to shake the boat, or there won't be room on it for us."

"Very well." The handler entered the surgery suite where the weapon was being repaired. "Sophia, I have a new target for you," He told the young teenager with retractable claws and a feral glint in her eyes. "It's an American."

#

Lorian eyed the make-shift shooting range. They'd elected to use te wall of the crater they'd landed in as a backstop, shooting away from the base, with targets set up in more or less a staggered line increasing in range by ten meter increments. She'd already sighted in the scopes for the weapons she'd brought, calibrating for the decreased gravity and air-resistance Mars offered, but the competitors would ant to make te final tuning themselves, Several had even brought their own weapons, models Lorian recognized from the briefing materials Rob had provided. A few standard terrestrial models, a few designed for vacuum. Lorian suspected both would have their drawbacks in an atmosphere they had not been designed for.

"All contestants to the firing line," Lorian announced over coms, and got the whole thing underway. Some of the crew stood off to the side and behind the contestants, while others watched playback of the high-speed cameras Lorian had set up to capture the event. The whole thing would be analyzed for 'scientific' purposes- there were plenty of non-violent applications for Martian Balistics data- but Lorian suspected the chief value would arise when the footage arrived back on earth and was sold to various media outlets for the public to oggle over.

And then one of the guns exploded. Not one of Lorian's- she'd already tested them enough to know they wouldn't explode. No, this was one of the vacuum designs.

"Medic!" Lorian yelled, and ran to the staggering man. The first thing she did was check his suit for leaks. Their was a small puncure, and a hairline crack in his helmet, but a quick application of duck-tap fixed that. Luckily, the other damage was fairly minor, a cracked wrist display and some scoring damage to the chest area of the suit. The suits they'd been using had been designed for use during martian dust-storms, so some ability to shrug off high-velocity projectiles was important.

The shooting competition took a brief recess, then Lorian tested all the weapons herself to make sure there wouldn't be any further explosions, and finally it resumed. Lorian was actually rather pleased with how it turned out. She won the competition handily, of course, having spent a fair bit of time practicing. Still, a few of the Captains were almost as good as she was. They'd had experience in the military before, so it made sense that handling new weapons came naturally to them.

Fun finished, Lorian turned er attention to preparing for the return trip. She couldn't wait to see Cass again.

#