Location: Chanreid Research Base, Lepidus

Date: 35 Post Exodus

Morgan Reid woke early. Since catching that first glimpse of the glittering metal in the wreckage of Jannisary’s core, he always had. A slug of ferrous metal fired from a railgun millennia ago had found its way through the heaviest defences of the colony fleet and lodged itself into the containment core. The only logical conclusion was that it had been produced by an alien civilisation whose technological capabilities were broadly comparable to the fleet’s. Fifty-thousand years ago.

The late Gudmunder Singh had simply been relieved, Reid reflected as he stumbled through the small kitchenette for coffee, that no one had shown up to visit the ships when they made landfall on Deyga. For Singh, that had been the end of the matter as the more mundane task of running the new colony had overtaken all other considerations.

Reid, by contrast, had never forgotten that humanity sat atop a landgrab bigger than any other in their varied history. His scientist’s mind puzzled over the astronomical odds of the system’s configuration.

Ionad sat at the centre with three habitable planets and two large gas giants separated by a ragged belt of dwarf planets and other asteroids. Beyond Beacon lay the Teine system – another class M star with her own complement of two habitable planets and a heavily-mooned gas giant. Even further beyond lay the Solasta System, infamous as the destination to where Mollinero fled with the Akiva, again with two habitable planets.

Nothing, not even the abundant Kepler system could have contained such wealth. Reid gave no thanks to God for their deliverance, as some did, but rather wondered whether such a super-system could ever form naturally. If there were gods, he thought, he could believe that they had made all this, but the idea that they could return to reclaim it kept him awake at night.

The plan had three prongs and Reid reviewed them as he walked past the wall-length windows throwing pink light across the white-metallic hallways of the compound. On Earth, the first stage might have been the most difficult, but in this brand-new world it had so far proven to be the easiest. He had needed to make himself exceedingly wealthy.

The medium of exchange was a hard-coded number of bits. For the moment, the value was centrally controlled and tied to an average price of several commodities but the management of the early economy had been chaotic and Reid had been able to magic up several trillion bits prior to the currency’s launch and store them on an un-networked device. The Chan-Reid Construction company had been born, and Reid could funnel his unregistered bits through it to finance his research.

The lab space was large, as befitting the main research campus of Chan-Reid R&I. The walls were white-washed alloys and the workbenches laden with pristine machines. A bank of cell-hoods lined the far wall, while a window in the corner looked out over the collection of pre-fab buildings that made up the base. Beyond that was the tall, red-leaved forest of Lepidus, Ionad’s third planet.

Taking a moment, Reid stared across the deforested patch of land and beyond the concrete walls of the base into the forest. Many of the maroon leaf-like structures had operated under the same evolutionary pressures as on Earth, being broad to catch the light and the stifle competition below. As the sun rose, Reid saw that the luminescent symbiotic vines that coated many of the trees were beginning to fade and he turned his gaze towards the blue and green orb in the sky, Lepidus’s little sister, Gaius.

She was almost the size the moon had been in Earth’s sky, though Reid knew this was a trick his Terran brain played on him, for Gaius was about twice the distance from Lepidus as Luna from Terra. She was the smallest body in any of the three systems capable of sustaining an oxygen rich atmosphere and a complex eco system. All the models said Gaius should be a lifeless rock and whatever magnetosphere she possessed should have long ago been rendered too weak to protect her atmosphere.

What Reid wouldn’t give to drill into that core and spill the secrets of that strange world. Or any of the strange worlds they had found, from the mineral rich deserts of Deyga to the lush jungles of Valya outside the habitable zone. If the reports were true, the planets around the outer systems were even more bizarre. Reid turned away from the living moon. His destiny had not lain in serving science, but in safeguarding humanity.

To that end, the second stage of his plan was progressing nicely, albeit under a different atmosphere in the military bases under the Porto hills outside of Nupolis on Deyga. When Reid had approached Director Gyrzik with the idea, to create perfect soldiers loyal to the Council, he had jumped at the chance. The Council military was missing a special forces branch, so why not have the best? That is how Reid had marketed the offer, legality be damned, and no need to tell the rest of the council. The Creche, set up to grow the population rapidly, proved a fertile field from which to harvest material for that project.

Gryzik himself was proving to be a particularly woeful Director, if Reid was honest. Ruthlessly efficient and loyal to the military that had given him purpose, the man was possessed by an obsession to see any task through. But while his narrowmindedness had been an advantage as the head of the Director’s bodyguards, it was most certainly a deficit in holding together the polity that humanity had become.

Watching the news each day had become a gut-wrenching ordeal, and Reid was worried Gryzik might throw away everything before the original inhabitants could even come and reclaim their planets. They had to be united, yet Gryzik’s demands of unwavering loyalty and simpleminded authoritarianism had stoked protests across Deyga and even to the nascent colony on Valya.

The Director had his troops on the streets of Nupolis and his fleets patrolling the void but in the long scope of history, Reid thought, Gryzik’s power was the incredibly potent and often very temporary kind. Even worse, it was temporary because of its potency. Terror was not true power.

Returning to his work, Reid carefully removed the flask of cells from the incubator and walked, evenly, over to the microscope. Only one. The lab was equipped with anything he might need, but only one of each item. Reid pushed a strand of hair from his brow and looked deep into the microscopic world.

In the pale, yellow light, a black box dominated his field of view. Ghost-like tendrils seemed to grow from its outer edges and Reid followed them towards a curved mass of cells. On the surface they looked like a tangled mess, but Reid saw the inherent order of the biological structure. They were developing nicely in response to the electrical and chemical signals from the box, he noted.

Cells have taken on a hippocampal-like organisation, he noted on his hand terminal. Swiping across the field he made an additional observation; small constellations of cells grew from the dense layers, again with ghostly wiring. Possible appearance of engram structures??

Blinking away from the soft-light, Reid let a smile flicker across his face. The results were incredibly promising and had replicated the structures exceedingly well. It was time for more complex experiments.

An alert from Reid’s handterminal intruded on his plan and he read the headline with mounting horror at the implications. The man had been ignorant, stupid and smallminded, but he had been instrumental to phase two.

Reid shook his head double-checked to make sure there was no mistake. There was none.

Director Gryzik, aged 70, had been assassinated.

Location: Chanreid Research Base, Lepidus

Date: 38PE

Reid took the voluminous freight elevator down to his behaviour lab. Each time he gave a gentle thanks to the cautious nature of the Deygan political class. Gryzik’s killer had been caught and turned out to be just one of the many malcontents he himself had created. Vincent LePham, head of the judiciary had discovered some spine, denouncing many of Gryzik’s reforms as unlawful and had swept to power at the subsequent election.

He was a much worthier custodian, Reid mused as the giant room made its ponderous way into the earth. Lawyerly, and a respecter of the system’s laws. He was certainly a contrast to Gryzik’s who saw laws as an obstacle to be overcome. And yet, Director LePham had given Reid his own share of sleepless nights, he reflected as he stepped from the elevator into the lab.

The behaviour laboratory had been built to Reid’s exact specifications. The walls were soundproof, of course, and covered from floor, to wall, to ceiling in yellow plastic. Banks of clear plastic boxes lined the walls in chromatic steel racks, each one four meters by four meters.

One of the boxes was placed on a steel trolley at the centre of the room. Its occupant, a macaque monkey. For all the world, the thing seemed content, grooming its self and sniffinf around the cage. Reid took out his hand terminal and, with a few quick motions, set speakers embedded in the walls to begin playing a high-pitched tone.

The monkey screeched in pain and froze in the corner of its cage shaking in fear. Reid looked down at the creature with a thin smile creeping onto his features as he stopped the flatline tone that filled the behavioural lab.

It was the same tone he had played while introducing a mock snake to the cage and administering a painful electrical charge to the animal’s left arm; the left arm that the macaque now cradled. Except this macaque baby had yet to be born, its mother safely in another room, while these stimuli had been carried out.

The baby in front of Reid was responding to an event that it had never experienced, a lived experience of a macaque that had been dead for three years. Reid recorded his data, and then set the lights in the room to run on a flicker pattern.

The animal responded, again throwing its arms to cover its face, but with satisfaction Reid noted that the animal did not succumb to its genetically preordained seizure response. The device inside the macaque’s developing brain had encoded old memories and kept its epilepsy at bay.

Suddenly, the flickering of the lights stopped. Reid cursed and looked at his hand terminal. The lights were still set on their flicker-mode. He switched the setting off and on again as the lights returned to their programmed task. The macaque in the cage continued to scream, and after a few seconds the lights returned to normal.

Reid found the electrical problems annoying but not concerning. Afterall, he had designed the lab himself and it was difficult to get reliable work done on an off-the-books science project. He resolved to review the programming, or the lights, himself but he was not too concerned. The experiment had finally yielded the results he needed.

Date: 43PE

An uneasiness gripped Reid’s stomach, accompanying the pain that was his now-constant companion. He might have gone too far, but he had to know. Grimly, and with a sense of unfamiliar squeamishness, he toggled the room to a setting he had designated Critical Systems Failure and watched as the behaviour room was plunged into red flashing light. A droning cacophony of alarm accompanied the sound, which was interspersed with a calm voice. Warning, critical systems failure.

The macaque, which had been contently sitting in the middle of the cage playing with its fur stood on hind legs and began to inspect the limits of the cage. It was displaying none of the fear response that Reid had expected. He knew the event replicated had been traumatic, but the Macaque seemed more inquisitive rather than frightened.

It looked like it was, calmly, searching for a way to escape.

Reid shook such thoughts from his foggy mind. He had been with the macaques too long and was simply anthropomorphising. He concluded the pain medication was simply messing with his mind and that the animal was displaying no recordable behaviour.

Through the pain and analgesic mist, Reid ran his brain in circles. His days were getting shorter, and the results of this latest experiment had lodged in there like a splinter. If only he was younger, if only he was healthy, if only he was free from the pain eating his guts! Then he would be able to solve the gnawing in his brain.

Was the look on the macaque’s pink face one of puzzled recognition? He longed for it to be and felt sick that it could be.

“Sorry, my old friend.” Reid whispered with a sob as he flipped the settings on his hand terminal. There was a hiss of gas and the macaque slowed, flopped around, and fell to the floor of the cage. “I’m so sorry.”

Date: 45PE

The long Lepidan day had been one of the difficult ones and Reid found himself with less and less energy to do anything. The work had trickled down into a crawl right at the time he needed his useless body to be fuelled by the burning fires in his mind. Each day, he thought, would be a day of busy work and yet after only a few hours he would need to sleep.

The other project was running well and the soldiers who had survived were impressive specimens. When Gryzik had died ten years ago, Reid had feared inquiries and judges and all the mess of a restored judiciary. Much to Reid’s pleasant surprise, there had been no blowback from the election, even as the new Director Le Pham had promised to undo Gryzik’s worst excesses.

Plausible deniability, wrote Le Pham’s chief of staff. That gave Reid a smile whenever he watched the cleaner than clean Director Le Pham on the relay. Still, Reid had handed the special forces project on to the military proper and the training now took place at the Ostia shipyards in orbit between Lepidus and Gaius, not half a million kilometres from where Reid stood.

There were other arrangements to make now, Reid thought while he set up the final experiment. This lab was a secret, and he could not be allowed to die here and risk the work being discovered. Nonetheless, time was running short, and he knew he would not be able to perform the proper evaluations.

The army were making the sword, he thought, but a sword needed someone to wield it.

The macaque sat in the plastic box a conditioned implant lodged deep into the hippocampus. This animal feared the tone, but Reid was interested in the next animal. The macaques in the plastic cages against the far wall were quiet and still. They were watching him. Was it accusation in their eyes?

Reid played the tone. The animals around the room gave no response, apart from with puzzlement, while the animal in the middle of the room screeched, cradled its arm and whimpered away in the corner. Satisfied, Reid switched the program. There was a faint hiss and the macaque flopped around drowsily before it was finally, and permanently, still.

The other macaques screamed and yelled while Reid cursed his drugs and his condition that he had not thought of carrying out the sacrifice in another room. Out of the corner of his eyes, and through the all-consuming ruckus in the room, Reid saw that one animal was not screaming but rather examining its own cage as if it were a novel environment.

Loath as he was to add to the noise, Reid switched the conditioned tone back on, keeping his eyes fixed on the exploring macaque. As soon as the flatline tone started it became startled, frozen, and screeched in fear, cradling its arm to soothe an injury it had never received.

Reid smiled at the pitiful creature. His plan was finally realised. The implant was safe, he knew. His company already sold it as a treatment. A few changes to the specifications, and no one would know the difference. The device would seamlessly enter mass production and at the heart of it would be the code that would determine to whom humanity’s salvation would be bequeathed.

A sword had been forged, and now, Reid had ensured, there would be an undying King to wield it.