Rite of Passage, posts 1-2
Immortality Project, posts 3-4


[align=center]--- Rite of Passage ---[/align]

Deep in the forests surrounding the walled city of only six thousand, a small group of eight travelers came to a halt at the mouth of a small cave that extended down into a bush and tree-covered hillside. The group looked inquisitively into the darkness long-hidden by thorny vines that formed a barrier between the outside world and the caverns beneath. The leader of the group turned towards the seven others, letting down the hood of her brown cloak to reveal the smooth face of a young woman, though her shoulder-length hair was silver with great age and her face possessed equally silver eyes that seamed to almost glow with reflecting light. She raised her hand to point at the entrance to the cavern for a moment and began to address the heavily supplied group of her followers in a young, yet strangely calm and experienced voice, “This is where the Rite begins. Normally you take the passages down into the depths without any living guidance, but there is need to bend those ancient rules for a short time. Especially considering you are the first of your people to undergo this in over two thousand years. Although, once we reach the Cavern of Lights, I can no longer guide you. Faith alone must be your guide from then on.”

She turned back towards the cavern, raising a hand towards the vines. Without so much as touching a single one of them, she slid the thorny vines to the sides, opening a way for the group to pass through unhindered. The rest of the group quickly stepped through the entrance; already used to the impossible things their leader could do having seen other demonstrations of it during the trek through the forests. Once inside, she let the vines fall back into place, leaving no trace of their passage into the ancient tunnels. The group of almost monk-like young men and women quickly removed their cloaks, stashing them away in their packs. The one that was in charge of carrying the torches took one out and quickly lit it, illuminating the small entrance to the immense labyrinth of caves below. They soon found the flat stone in the wall that told a story of how to reach the secret hidden deep within the caverns. As the group studied it, their leader carefully removed her cloak, reveling large brown eagle-like wings extending from her back that she stretched out after having been pressed against her back for so long. This too the group was used to seeing, so continued reading the tablet of engraved writing in the wall. Their Mier, or Hand of God, was expected to be amazing. Though after thousands of years of absence, such things were merely myths until she proved them true.

She started walking down into the cavern, still carrying nothing but her cloak and the loose brown linen clothes covering her body, and spoke back to the group, “Those writings are a lie. If you follow them to reach the Fount, you will become thoroughly lost in these passages and starve to death.” As the group followed her she continued briefly, “Loyal and devout followers of the true faith know of this, for it is in their ancient books and teachings. Though recent translations of those books are not to be trusted, it is safe to assume you have all read the original texts at least once?” Some members of the group murmured that they had. “Those texts can help one survive this Rite. Recall them well.” She hurried her pace, staying far enough ahead of the group that they could just barely see her back and wings in the light cast by their torch. Even if the group attempted to catch up with her, she increased her pace to stay just at the edge of the sphere of torchlight. So finally the group settled with an easy pace together, letting the Mier walk separated from the group not too far ahead of them.

It was not long before one of the group suddenly decided to say something, “I hear a river.” The rest of the group stopped for a moment to listen. Not hearing anything they continued walking, kidding the one that had spoken. Before long though, the others in the group heard it too. One of them called ahead to the Mier, “Agea, is there a river down here?”

Still walking, Agea turned her head to the side, “Yes. A great underground river that comes from the same one that passes through your town.”

The group continued walking as the thundering roar grew closer and closer until finally the edge of the river came into sight. The group decided it was a good time to stop. They all sat down, eating a small portion of the food in their packs, already resolved that they would find none down here in the caverns. They refilled their leather flasks at a small pool of relatively calm water that swirled alongside the great rushing river that their torchlight barely lit. Agea sat away from the group, in the direction that they were going to continue traveling once the group was a bit more rested. She was by all means an outsider to the group that had been growing closer and closer together since their forced isolation from their friends and families after starting the journey. It was what she wanted, for now. Once the group packed up their things, Agea stood and continued walking ahead of the group as she had the entire time. The roaring in the distance somehow continued to get louder and louder, eventually the Mier stopped the group before entering the next cavern. “Watch your step.” She cautioned them calmly, in a quiet voice that could somehow be heard over the deafening roar. She turned the corner into the next cavern, and the group quickly followed.

They walked along a wide ledge in an immense cave that slowly wound its way down along the edge of the cavern. They could just barely see a great waterfall dropping off into the depths. She cautioned them again, when one of them ventured closer to the drop into darkness, again in the same volume she had spoken to them before entering this deafening place, yet still they could hear her clearly, “If you fall, you will eventually die.” From then on they stayed away from the edge, their curiosity stifled by their fear of falling forever to their death. They reached the bottom of the cave a good hour later, where great clouds of steam were shot up from a great, strangely circular hole in the earth that the water dropped rapidly into. Some water managed to escape that gaping maw and trickled away into the darkness as a small bubbling river.

After a few hours of walking, the din of the underground waterfall faded to nothing, and the group made another stop to eat and rest. They figured that since they had reached the cave just after breakfast that morning, that this was dinner, getting close to nighttime. The group picked up the pace again after finishing eating, determined to find a nice good place to sleep. The Mier soon turned into a smaller cavern and came to a halt, waiting for the tired group to catch up. They quickly decided that this was a good place to stop for the night, finding random nooks in the walls that happened to be perfect to sleep in. Agea knew though that this was one of the resting places for the followers: a well-hidden and almost invisible place for them to sleep during the journey. Though she was not about to tell them anything that she did not absolutely have to say. They had to figure things out on their own.

The next morning, they decided to do a little exploring, having realized that the rocks they slept on were man-made beds. It wasn’t long before one of the exploration parties came back excited that they had found something. The group packed up and made their way to that place, finding a few fruit-bearing vines of plants growing down the wall in the darkness. They quickly picked the fruits and stashed them in their bags, immediately thanking God for the gift.

Over the next three ‘days’ in the darkness of the caverns, the group found only one other such cache of strange plants that grew without light. Agea, still walking ahead of the group, actively listened to their more and more open conversations. They actively exchanged ideas, even if those ideas were disagreeable to the group. Although, Agea would have preferred they had more often discussed some of the problems their town instead of talking about who they thought was in love with who. She figured that that was okay, since they were still growing together into a group of inseparable friends. Such kinship was just one thing the Rite created for those that underwent it. It was needed so that they could become the leaders of their secret order that were required to make it function correctly.

Agea suddenly stopped in front of a wall, turning around to face the group. They were so preoccupied with their conversation that they did not really notice for a good minute. When they finally noticed, they all turned to face the Mier. Agea pointed at the wall, “This is the entrance to the Cavern of Lights. You must figure out for yourselves how to continue from this point on.” She stepped away from it, taking up a seat not too far behind the group as they began to inspect the wall. All over it were thousands of words of writing, telling about the story of creation. Fantasized dramatically with flowing metaphors, but that was the way of things.

After about an hour of trying to figure out the wall, the group took seats near Agea and ate as they thought over it. Finally, one of the younger girls asked Agea, “Mier, there is a doorway in that wall?” More of a statement then a question, but Agea nodded anyways. After a few minutes of silence, the girl, Leun, stood and walked over to the wall, carefully searching it and reading the story. She finally came to a passage that was about at eye-level that spoke of a passage through time. She began to inspect the wall closer, quickly finding in its perfectly flat surface, aside from the engravings, a single, unnoticeable depression in it that dotted one of the i’s unlike any of the others. She read the passage it was a part of again, and gently pressed her finger against the slight depression. Suddenly to the side, part of the wall silently swung back inexplicably. The group quickly stood and stared, Leun smiling at her accomplishment. They quickly packed their things and passed through the open doorway. Before passing through, Leun quickly glanced at Agea and caught a slight smile that quickly vanished into the usual calm and blank expression that Agea had always worn. Leun couldn’t stop smiling after that.

--

Now that Agea was no longer guiding the group, she let herself walk just to the side of them. Still maintaining that she was an outsider, but not so distant as before. When they stopped to eat, one of them looked over at Agea and asked the obvious question, “So this is the Cavern of Lights correct?” Agea nodded. “Then why is it just as dark here as it was in all the previous caverns?”

Agea calmly replied with a phrase from their ancient book, “Your book says, ‘God only guides the souls of the willing. Those they allow Him to guide their path will see the Light.’”

“Well that doesn’t help...” The boy replied disappointedly, going back to eating. The group continued talking amongst themselves.

An hour later, they were exiting a small tunnel and walking through a tall cavern when Agea suddenly spoke up for the first time that wasn’t a response to something they said, “There is a thing I must do. Continue on without me, I will catch up.” Without another word or any further warning, she spread her wings and flew straight up into the darkness. A moment later, the sounds of her flapping wings vanished entirely, leaving the group completely alone for the first time. They looked at each other for a moment, not quite sure what to do. They continued walking, but in silence. They had gotten so used to the Mier walking with them that it was strange and disconcerting to walk without her.

--

Agea could see the group far below where she held onto metal bars that extruded unnaturally from the ceiling of the cavern. She placed her free hand against a flat spot of cold rock near the metal bars she clung to. Strange water-like liquid oozed out from the wall to enclose her hand in its artificially thick and cold embrace. The liquid dimly glowed blue for a moment before pulling back into the ceiling, leaving no trace of its passing. A moment later, part of the ceiling swung open, and metal rungs held together like a ladder slid down out of the small opening. Grabbing hold of the ladder, she folded her wings up against her body and let the ladder lift her up into the small tunnel, the door silently closing behind her as she and the ladder sped upwards.

Only moments later, the ladder came to a halt inside a square metal chamber lined with ancient metal boxes, each with two small hand-sized holes in them. Agea sat down in a chair specially designed for her comfort and slid her hands into two of the ports. Suddenly light burst across half a dozen screens in front of her. All around her machinery began to hum quietly as it reactivated. The images on the screens remained blank for a few minutes, until finally a fully three-dimensional image appeared that looked much like ball of yarn after a kitten had destroyed it. Up in the corner was a note that marked what this image was of: Cavern of Lights: Holographic Map. Agea quickly zoomed into the image until finally an almost completely realistic view of a group of seven people resolved on all the screens. The group was slowly walking unknowingly in the wrong direction through the tunnels in silence.

She moved the exceedingly detailed three-dimensional image down to the bottom corner screen, and loaded up several programs on the other screens: Thermal Generators, Facility Security, Life Fount, Storage, Genetic Material Lab, and Processing Center. She started each of the bootup programs that would over the years reactivate each sector of the hidden facility that existed deep underneath the Cavern of Lights. Silently, each sector glowed with a green ready light. She spun up the thermal generators and facility security systems, watching the progress bars of each show up on the screen. In a year, the Life Fount would start its low spin up process, taking another four years to come fully online. The moment she removed her hands, the screens shut off while the machinery around her still hummed away and the dim lights above continued to burn. She pressed one finger to her temple, activating an implant that let her see in her mind’s eye that same security footage that she had brought up on the screens. She zoomed out away from the group until a blurry image of the planet slowly resolved itself, becoming more and more detailed with every passing second as the security systems came online and started scanning and rescanning the planet. She zoomed out further until a blurry, barely recognizable image of the entire solar system began to take shape. The implant also did its own scanning up to a ten mile radius in case the facility’s constant planetary scans were not detailed enough. She zoomed back down to the group, mentally setting the program to follow them with whatever viewing angle was best.

She walked back over to where the short ladder waited for her, and grabbed hold of the rungs, folding in her wings again. The lights in the chamber faded to off rapidly just as she started the descent back down through the metal tunnel, finally coming to a stop hanging just inside the caverns. She grabbed hold of the metal rungs that extended from the ceiling and let the door shut before letting go, dropping down with only her wings to slow her fall.

--

A strange distant roar echoed through the caverns, stopping the group in their tracks. It passed quickly, though in its place instead of silence, was a strange hum that was almost like wind passing through rocks. The Mier had told them that there was nothing to be scared of down here, but this new thing worried them all. Especially since the Mier was not with them. A few minutes later after hearing what must have been yet another a cave-in of falling rocks from a new direction, they all decided to stop for a while and eat, loosely planning their next move as best they could.

Suddenly out of the darkness, Agea appeared in their torchlight, her silent footsteps hidden entirely by the quiet humming wind. In her hand she carried a black-sheathed broadsword with a glowing blue eagle emblem burned into both sides of the hilt of the blade and its scabbard. She sat down near the group, placing the broadsword to her side, draping her arm over a raised knee, passively watching the group as she always had. The group watched her for a moment before going back to talking and eating.

Once they established a plan, they packed up their things and continued walking. Now that their Mier was with them again, they felt safe enough to continue chattering and telling jokes every now and then - none of which Agea laughed at, or even showed any signs of acknowledging. Finally, one of them leaned over to the others and loudly whispered, “At this point, I don’t think she has any emotions.”

To which Leun quickly replied, “She’s probably done this thing with thousands of groups just like ours over her immortal lifetime. I bet this is just as boring to her as digging irrigation trenches back home is to you.” She waved her hand in dismissal, “Besides, she’s been away for thousands of years.” Although, in reality, Agea was fascinated by the group’s dynamics. After having caused or at least witnessed thousands of years of human history, it was thrilling to see that work unconsciously prevalent in their personalities, in the stories they told, and in what they discussed. She was just a master of hiding that excitement. A skill learned eons ago when deception was a requirement for her line of work.

Eventually the group came to a halt after finding another resting chamber, and decided to sleep there for the night. Sitting around the torchlight eating a small ration that came out of the small amount of food they had left, they continued talking, this time over more serious subjects.

They didn’t even notice Agea stand rapidly, her eyes glazed over as if she were someplace else entirely. She raised a hand, and suddenly a bright white light exploded out from it across the group, penetrating through the rock, immobilizing everyone and everything it touched. A few seconds later, a distant rumbling grew louder and louder until cracks sped across the ground outside where they rested like snakes slithering through grass, halting abruptly at the edge of the white field of light. The cracks quickly grew wider and wider until finally the floor out from where they were all motionless gave away, dropping down into the depths with a roar. Agea, clearly not affected by the immobilizing magic she used to stabilize where the group sat, lowered her hand and moved towards the entrance of the resting chamber to look down into the depths to the collapsed rock below. With the immobilizing light fading away, she held out her hand towards the darkness. The group watched as rocks flew up from below pressing themselves against the wall just under the doorway into the resting chamber. Layer after layer of rocks built up on each other, extending out into the darkness as a flowing liquid stone bridge. After a few minutes of this, Agea solidified the liquid rock into a solid pathway that lead across the chasm to the safety beyond.

She turned to them, “It is no longer safe here. I will show you to a safer place.” The group quickly got up, gathering their things, and cautiously stepped onto the great bridge that stretched out into the darkness. As they hurriedly walked, they heard rocks collapsing behind them, knowing without looking back that Agea was letting the fragile stone of the resting chamber collapse downwards along with the no longer needed parts of the bridge, as the earth had wanted in the first place. When they reached the next chamber, they were all very quiet, still in a sort of shock over what had happened so suddenly. Before Agea had just moved small tree trunks and vines with nothing. Now they had witnessed a far greater power at work in her magic. They now assumed that all of the impossible myths and legends about her were true. Somehow.

--

The next morning as the group ate breakfast, Leun spoke up, and “I think we’ve been doing this entire thing wrong. The collapse of the caves back there would not have happened, I think, if we were on the right path.” Agea listened closely, knowing that the collapse was actually the facility clumsily gathering new mineral samples after having been completely shut down for far too long. Leun paused, quoting the phrase Agea had said earlier, “It was written that ‘God only guides the souls of the willing. Those that allow Him to guide their path will see the Light.’ I think that light is really a light in these caverns. I think that we are letting the torch guide us instead of God, clinging to it instead of letting it go. So the light is invisible to us.”

“What do you suggest Leun?” asked one of the younger members of the group.

“Put out the torch. That should show God that we are willing to let Him guide us.”

“Maybe... Just maybe,” said the oldest boy, still basically the leader of the group. He looked around at the others, and then to Agea, who was just sitting there watching the group like always. “So, we’re all in agreement to put it out?” He looked back around at the group again, who all nodded. “Okay then... You crazy, crazy people.” He picked up the torch and broke off the part with the lit tar, dousing it as best he could with water from his flask. As its red embers smoldered and faded to nothing in the darkness, they all sat quietly looking around them into the deepening dark. They all quickly noticed the Mier’s silver eyes glowing dimly in the dark, still watching them with her eternal stare, but said nothing.

“So now what?” one of them said in the darkness. “Just wait for it,” responded Leun. As their eyes got used to the dark, snaky veins of glowing blue light began to resolve in their vision. “I think I see something.” “Me too.” “Hey, I think it’s the same blue glow of the eagle emblems on Agea’s sword.” As their eyes got used to the darkness, one of them ventured to stand up, and walked carefully over to the wall, and ran their hand along the wall, feeling normal rock, but seeing deep underneath the rock dimly glowing blue veins of light that seamed to pulse and flow. “Its some sort of glowing crystal. Deep enough in the rock that you cant see it when you’re blinded by torchlight.” Soon they were able to see relatively clearly in the darkness, though large shadows still remained. It was bright enough that they could see each other’s shadowy faces, all smiling at the revelation. Even Agea had a small smile on her face, a carefully calculated one. The first time most of them had see anything but the usual blank expression she always wore, giving them all new hope.

Quietly, Agea spoke up, “Now that you know, you might as well know this as well. These glowing crystals go out through all of the caves down here, all the way to the first fork in the tunnels just after entering the caverns from the surface.”

Leun realized something suddenly, “So that’s why you constantly walked just outside the torchlight. It was so you could see this light. I always thought you just had the ability to see in the dark, considering you never seamed to be hindered by the darkness before.”

“Yes,” Agea replied, “Your eyes, just like mine, adjust to the closest and brightest source of light, making dimmer lights harder to see even when you are standing right on top of them. The only difference between your eyes and mine is that mine can adjust to darkness far further then yours, letting me see in even the most light-less places. The ability lets me see in the dark, as you put it.” Not really understanding the genetics behind what Agea had said, the group sat back down as they got more and more comfortable with the dim pulsing blue light surrounding them. Very quietly, just barely audible, Agea whispered words that passed over their minds without truly registering, “Your eyes were not the only things blinded by the torch,” and went back to being her usual silent self.

The group packed up their things, not really knowing what to do with the torches now that they knew they were useless down here. Finally, they decided to go ahead and take the unburned torches with them, knowing that those things would be needed once the group got to the surface again. They changed course, silently listening to their footsteps as they walked, following the veins of glowing crystals towards what they knew now was the end of their journey. They did not truly know what to expect though. Ever since she had noticed the river before all the others, Leun had become more and more the leader of the group. They started looking to her for guidance especially now that she figured out the hidden guiding crystals of the Cave of Lights. Even the old ‘leader’ of the group did so.

Soon, Leun stopped the group, looking around, “I smell something.” The others sniffed around, clearly not smelling it, though now they were not about to dismiss what Leun said. Leun walked forwards a little ways, sniffing the air, “It smells like plants I think.” She continued a little further down the passage, the group slowly following behind her. “Hmm, no, not this way.” She backtracked a little ways, taking a different passage where the crystals did not flow with the tunnel. “This way.” Some of the group members looked around each other and shrugged, following Leun. Every now and then for the next thirty minutes, Leun paused to sniff the air, sometimes turning back or away from whatever path they were currently on. As the smell grew stronger, the rest of the group started to smell the feint odor of wet earth and sweet aroma of fruit-bearing plants. Finally, Leun stopped where the passageway dead-ended into a wall of rock crisscrossed with veins of glowing crystal, looking around. “It has to be coming from here,” she said, looking at the rest of the group. The group had found something important completely on their own, even though they didn’t know exactly what it was yet. It had something to do with food though; food that they desperately needed to re-supply on.

As Leun searched the walls, the rest of the group sat down, talking. This time they were discussing their ancient book. They were talking about different stories in it, trying to split the facts from fiction from the parts they could remember. Every now and then, Leun would quietly say one of her thoughts aloud. “These walls are too perfectly smooth to be just natural. Even though the veins make it look rough...” “Maybe this is like the doorway into the Cavern...” “Only, there’s no writing, just these veins...” After an hour of thoroughly searching the over the wall, she spotted a break in the smooth flow glowing crystal. A very tiny shift from one part of the vein to another that would go unnoticed unless someone spent a lot of time searching. She ran her hands along the wall, searching with both her hands for anything, any clue. Finally a finger slid across a depression in the wall that the crystal veins seamed to avoid as they flowed through the wall. “I found it!” she said suddenly, gently pressing her finger into the depression. A section of wall slid outwards and slid to the side, reveling a bright room inside. Thousands of crisscrossing veins of crystals lit up the room through the doorway far brighter then the veins in the outside caves. Damp soil greeted her leather shoes as she stepped inside. Along the edges of the room, pools of water rippled, small rivulets of water flowing into the soil while dozens of fountains poured water down into the pools. The chamber was almost entirely filled with fruit-bearing plants that ranged from small trees, to bushes, to vines. Small critters ran out of sight, burrowing into dirt or vanishing into the plants.

Behind Leun the group ducked through the doorway into the miniature underground jungle. It was probably a good five or ten-minute walk from one side to the other. Behind them, Agea quietly retold a quote, “‘Looking out across the lush lands and clear pools, he saw the work of God in the impossible oasis deep in the wasteland. It was unneeded proof that God had long ago provided all that was needed for the Followers to survive, even in the darkest places of the earth.’”

The group quickly collected what fruits they needed.

--

As they walked after lunch, they continued discussing what they remembered from their classes back home about the ancient book. Even without the book itself, they were still attempting to decipher what was literal and what wasn’t. They had decided that most of the book was probably a loose literal history, written down to guide their order. The only part they could not really agree on was the legend of the Dragon Emperor. Surely the Dragon Emperor could not burn entire towns out of existence in mere minutes. Finally, Leun stopped the group and turned to Agea. “It was written that you fought and defeated the Dragon Emperor.” Agea nodded. “Is it true that he could burn entire towns that rebelled against his rule in an instant?”

Agea remained silent for a moment before speaking, “Yes. And the Dragon Emperor is not a he or a she. Not even human. It was a great beautiful serpentine lizard covered in unbreakable crimson scales that ruthlessly ruled your people for thousands of years. An actual dragon.” The group looked at each other for a moment and continued walking; thinking over what Agea had said.

After a few minutes of silence, Agea continued, “I was a great friend of the dragons actually. They were the first sentient species to arise here. They assisted me loyally for long time. Your myths say that the dragons were evil, hell-bent on ruling mankind or obliterating it under their fiery wrath. In actuality, many of the dragons were very friendly. Kind blue dragons lived in the oceans, able to give water to the driest places. Secretive and distant Black dragons lived in the desert wastelands, keeping to themselves as to not spread their rot and decay unless needed. Hermit-like green dragons lived in the jungles and forests, helping breath life into the world. Brown dragons lived deep inside the earth, carving out caverns mostly for themselves. Red dragons lived near the volcanoes, breathing fire and destruction on the lands.”

“The Dragon Emperor was the most powerful dragon in existence, a hotheaded red that was quick to come to my aid when I asked for assistance in watching over the new humanity. As humans grew increasingly intelligent, they became harder to keep under control. Endv started repressing the humans more and more violently, until finally it started burning entire towns to the ground to prevent them from breaking free of the dragon’s iron grip. Endv got so violent that finally I had to intervene. It refused to relinquish its control over humanity, so I was forced to end Endv. Unfortunately, a few humans managed to see me battle and then defeat the Dragon Emperor. In the past, dragons had been great friends of the humans. But once Endv fell, everything changed. Humans banded together with what they had learned from those that had seen me defeat Endv and hunted down the dragons. Killing every one of them until suddenly all dragons were extinct. The only way humanity could live with what it had done was to record a lie as the history of those times. They recorded that they had only done what was necessary, as I had done in destroying Endv, to save humanity.” The group had stopped walking during the story, all eyes fixed on Agea. She looked around at them. “The dragons will return soon. The mistakes of the past will be corrected, must be corrected. It is the only way.” She walked past the group, continuing down the path they were already on. The group quickly caught up and took back the lead.

---

It wasn’t long before they came to the origin of the glowing crystal veins. They entered an immense round chamber that was completely encased in the glowing crystal, and in the center was a very noticeably man-made building with a path of dark stone leading to it. The perfectly smooth floor around the path was of such flawlessly formed solid crystal that one could see down into for a long distance. The building itself was made from bricks of the same glowing crystal.

As the group neared the building, they noticed the stone had been etched with hundreds of years of weathering. It was almost as if the building had been under open sky, even though they were deep underground. They looked questioningly at the Mier, who stared blankly back. Finally, they came to the front of the structure where stories were written out of the glowing crystal on slabs of dark rock. The stories spoke of a monumental explosion of blue flame that ripped upwards through the stone, and even seared the heavens with its fury. The blue light ripped across the skies of the world, tearing apart the delicate balance that existed. For years to come the pillar of deep blue light could be seen from all places of the world as it flew outwards into the universe. Here, at the center of that explosion, the Keeper had done his best to contain the monumental disaster and save as much of the world as he could. In the end he perished in the flames, leaving the Guardian to tend to the world alone for all of time. Above the doorway there was a smaller slab that simply said, “Here lays Cliak. Keeper of the Life Fount.”

After reading and discussing the stories, Leun carefully stepped away from the group across the slick crystal, leaving them to figure out how to open the door on their own, “You know what I just realized. You are not just the leader of the Mier... You are the Guardian of the Life Fount.”

Agea nodded, standing with her back to the building, clearly trying to not see the writings she had made long ago. “I will tell you the true version of the fantasized story that they will read inside the building.” She glanced back at the group, “Once they get inside... Here.” Agea easily laid down on her stomach across the smooth crystal facing the building, her chin and upturned face resting on folded arms, her wings resting down over her body like a blanket. Leun sat down cross-legged next to Agea, also facing the building. Both were watching the others figure out the door. Agea looked saddened and was trying to focus on anything that was not the building. It was a painful reminder of that great and disastrous accident that happened so very long ago on that exact spot thousands of feet down in the earth. Some time passed before Agea spoke again, “I need your help Keeping the Life Fount, as you’ve probably guessed by this point from the things you have read.”

Leun looked at Agea with shock, “Bu-but I am just a mere person! You are the Hand of God.”

Agea let out a quick breath, almost as if she found that funny, “No, no, no. I am the Guardian, not the Hand of God. The Hands of God, those you call the Mier, are individuals of your own people that were and are still tasked with secretly guiding the course of human history. The Mier were never immortal and only rarely had super-human abilities like my own. They have always been just normal people, great leaders, that have that one great task to strive for over the course of their lifetime.” She paused, watching the group continue their efforts with the door. “Well, two tasks. The greater of the tasks that requires more effort and devotion is guiding human history. The lesser, though equally important task is returning here every ten years of your life to ensure the Fount is still uncorrupted. I would do the task of maintaining the Fount myself, but I found out very quickly that I was unable to be both Guardian and Keeper at all times. Each job alone requires absolute devotion of an immortal creature like myself.

She leaned her head down, staring down through the manufactured crystal floor of the place at the main control center of the Life Fount, only seeing it because of the holographic map that was being projected into her mind. She silently stared down into the depths, patiently waiting for Leun to make up her mind. After more time passed, Agea calmly spoke into the humming silence, “This entire Rite is designed to guide those that undergo it to see the truth of their order. During the entire time, you also should come to realize truths about yourself, your people, and your world. Simultaneously, it brings the groups together so they may lead their order using the best of their combined abilities.”

After a good thirty minutes of more silence only broken by the distant humming and shortly after the group vanished through the open doorway to discover the insides of the building, Leun spoke up, “I think I am up for the task. I’ve noticed that my people have been slowly degrading over the three thousand years of your absence. I have been disgusted by the corruption and outright murder on our streets for a long time. I’ve always wanted to change things... I have just never known how.”

“Those crimes you have seen or even just heard about are so very mild compared to the crimes I’ve personally seen my own people commit on an hourly basis. Instead of one murder every few years, it was dozens every few hours in just one small neighborhood. The corruption ran so deep that even the most non-violent and good-willed of my kind were prone to murder, bribery, theft, and willful destruction. I freely confess that I took part in endless quantity of purely evil crimes during my early life and am still prone to committing those same crimes even today, despite so many eons of trying to ironically destroy the horrid self-destructive instinct within myself,” Agea trailed off, letting the humming silence take over for a few minutes.

Without moving from where she stared into the depths, Agea started telling her story in a very quiet voice that only Leun could hear clearly, “Just listen to the story, and don’t try to understand words I use to describe advanced sciences and technologies. You just need to learn from all the things we did wrong and did right from the very beginning.” Agea paused, glancing up briefly to see Leun nod. “A very, very long time ago - somewhere around the time span of thirty million years - Cliak and I came here in our vessel seeking to make a new start for our failed race. You see, my people had always been warlike, from our beginnings to our final days. Our home world, now a charred corpse of a planet so far from here that you cannot even see its star in your skies, was once a great thriving planet teeming with an endlessly complex ecosystem of life. Having no other species of creature more intelligent then ourselves, we ruled our planet like conquerors. Terrible wars broke out between us, mostly over control of resources. Water, land, metal, people... You name it, we brutally fought over it. One day, after years of research we developed a weapon of immense power that had the ability to obliterate hundreds of thousands of living souls in the blink of an eye. After their first use, the world was too scared to enter another open global conflict. So instead thousands of small-scale battles raged on over the years.”

“We grew so used to these powerful weapons sitting idle in their secret facilities that we lost our fear of them. Finally one day as a perfect symbol of the failures of our species, the largest city on the planet, about thirty million souls, was vaporized in an instant. Within a week, all of our cities were annihilated with similar weapons, leaving just small scraps of our once ‘great’ people left alive. After the Days of Fire, the survivors banded together, pledging to never repeat the same mistakes. Eventually their new semi-peaceful society regained a foothold on the planet, the remnants of the destruction fading slowly. It wasn’t long before we reached enlightenment and started colonizing other planets in our star system.”

“The pledge was quickly forgotten during this burst of expansion. Again war erupted, this time between different planets instead of continents, driving refugees of the conflicts out of our star system and across the galaxy. For millions of years we fought each other. Each time expanding outwards saying that we were escaping to find a lasting peace, but only breeding more war and destroying our new homes. Entire planets were obliterated, entire star systems even. Trillions dead was considered just minor casualties in just the smallest of the wars.”

“My empire was the first to discover the secrets of immortality. Because I was spearheading that research, I was the first to undergo the process. Our people would never again age again - we would be forever young. We would never truly die either, so long as the resurrection facilities remained intact. But even after those unlocked secrets spread long-lasting life across the universe, we still fought horrible wars that put hundreds of trillions to needless, permanent death.”

“Finally, one of the warring empires developed a disease, an evil and magnificently beautiful plague that always killed those it infected. That plague showed no signs of its manifestation until a good year after a person became infected. Once symptoms showed, the infected died within just one day’s time. The plague spread like wildfire through the empires, wiping out all human life with complete certainty. Escaping fleets of ships that were trying to stay ahead of the plague waged war on the empires that were not infected; sometimes even infecting those places themselves in order to obtain the resources they desperately needed. Eventually, the plague killed even those in the great fleets escaping it.”

“Cliak and I, both of us former leaders of the Immortality Project, managed to escape the annihilation of our people in a small vessel long before the plague reached our homeland. We carefully, yet ruthlessly pillaged empty and destroyed cities for supplies to help us survive. Before long, the only sounds we heard over our communication systems were the final dying screams of planets that had fallen long ago. After witnessing all of the technology of destruction and simultaneously the wondrous technology that could so easily create life, we finally resolved that we had to give our race a chance to fix the mistakes we had all collectively made over and over. We would start from the very beginning; raise the new humanity to learn to live peacefully with its own. Force it to learn to share what it could with others through any means necessary.”

“One dead empire we came across had once specialized in terraforming technology, all of which were inevitably turned into devastating de-terraforming weapons to destroy ‘enemy’ planets, as was the way of our race. We recovered thousands of these de-terraforming machines and stashed them away on our vessel, knowing that most planets were uninhabitable in the universe and that searching for a single habitable world would take far too long. We followed a random course through dead empires that we would gather all possible knowledge from, meandering towards the closest neighboring galaxy that our people had never been able to expand to. The sheer magnitude of energy required to make the inter-galactic leap had always been too great for any one empire to accomplish. But as the last two of our kind in the entire universe, we had suddenly gained all the resources necessary to make that leap. We gathered long-dead fleets that had been floating adrift in space for so long, purged them of their infected, sometimes still-living inhabitants; gathered supplies and resources from destroyed lifeless planets – eventually we gathered enough to make that single, one-way leap between galaxies.”

“With a few hundred thousand machine-piloted ships in our immense Fleet of the Damned, we began the journey across the darkness of the inter-galactic void, using up one ship at a time, leaving behind the spent ships to drift in the empty abyss as our fleet pressed on. During this long voyage, we reconstructed and redesigned the de-terraforming machines we had stashed away; finally constructing a machine that would encircle an entire planet’s core so that it could perfectly terraform just one single planet like no other machine in all of recorded history. In hindsight, we probably should have come up with a better name then just ‘Life Fount’ – some name more interesting that better described its amazing power and capabilities. Although, I guess calling it God is good enough. In any case, this early Life Fount went untested as we sailed through the empty void. We perfected it as best we could in such a limited environment before finally going into suspended animation for the duration of the trip.”

“Only ten of our mechanical ships reached this galaxy with us, the rest left like breadcrumbs in the void for future space civilizations to discover. Each is equipped with a tiny beacon that transmits our failed people’s history out into the universe, powered only by solar energy. Hopefully some starting civilization will come across those transmissions and realize where a warlike society will lead.”

“Once we got closer to the galactic core, we began searching for a suitable world somewhat similar to our own that we could install the Fount into. Eventually, we found this star system and were almost forced into settling here after scrapping the last of our mechanical ships for spare parts. In actuality, the first Life Fount was installed into one of the other planets in this star system. But it ultimately failed, as there was far too much local radiation for it to operate at any reasonably efficiency. So we installed a new one here, bringing in the raw materials it would need to operate. Over the years, the Fount breathed air into the planet’s thin atmosphere and slowly spread water across the planet. It generated millions of different varieties of microscopic creatures that it then flooded the oceans with. With these creatures, it sewed an unbreakably complex ecosystem into the planet. By the time plant life began growing on land, our ancient escape ship had become too aged to continue operating without a complete overhaul, so we retired it deep inside the earth where it still remains sealed off today for the distant future to find. We stored our own genetic material where at some point the Fount could use it to seed the planet with humanity. More and more complex animals developed on the lands and in the oceans, along with larger and more complex plants. We quickly found the need to be able to do our work without aid of machinery because of the astonishing inefficiency they provided for such little gain. So we genetically altered ourselves so that we could better watch over the planet. We gave ourselves the ability to see lands covered in nightfall as if the sun were staring down on them, the ability to walk in the hottest or coldest environments without being burned or frozen, and many others. At some point we developed implants that would directly link us with our computer systems so that we could spot dangerous changes to the ecosystem long before the Fount detected them as a danger. This also increased our mental capacity so that we could better process the sheer amount of data streaming in. Just because we felt like it, I gave us wings so we could fly unaided.”

“We soon discovered an interesting side effect of being exposed to the activities of the Fount for so long.” As if to prove the point, Agea began to mildly demonstrate each ability she listed as she said them, “We learned we could pick up objects from feet, even miles away without moving a finger, regardless of weight. We could create balls of energy and control them, creating flames of every color. By controlling substances down to their very atoms, we gained complete control over wind, water, and stone. We could rearrange the molecular structure of objects to suit our needs. This sword was made from the glowing crystal found throughout the caves, and is molecularly modified to be far stronger and sharper then any sword our machines could have ever made. Soon after we discovered our new abilities, we found out some of our creations on the planet were naturally demonstrating very weak versions of what we could do. Creatures such as the dragons with their very limited intelligence at the time quickly learned to use this ‘magic,’ even going to far as to unconsciously adapt it to their very genetic makeup over the years.”

Agea let out a deep sigh before continuing. “Somehow my race always manages to destroy, one way or another. One day, a catastrophic series of mechanical failures jetted energy out of the Life Fount into the main control facility where Cliak desperately attempted to contain as much of the destruction he could that was a certain reality at that point. He made sure the leaking energies would be channeled upwards into space, instead of outwards across and throughout the world. It would have destroyed the planet if allowed to explode un guided. I was on the other side of the planet tending to the oddly failing plant species that should have been thriving, completely oblivious to what was happening at the Fount. Knowing his death was imminent and wishing for me to survive to carry on the task, he fed my implants fake transmissions, covering up the emergency from me. Suddenly the earth trembled. In the distance I saw a great pillar of energy rip through the skies up into space. Long searing streams of the Fount’s leaking energy that could not escape the atmosphere flared outwards across the planet, incinerating all clouds and life it touched as well as scorching the soil into glass.”

“As the planet reeled from the aftermath of the sudden disaster, I quickly flew towards the dying pillar of blue fire that was escaping from the immense crater that had once been the Fount’s underground control facility. It took me a few hundred years to repair the large-scale damage of the explosion, during which I was so focused on the task I did not once stop to think about what happened. After rebuilding the facility and eventually reactivating the Life Fount, I recovered hidden files that recorded his last moments before the explosion. I filled in this part of the crater with pure crystal that had been formed from the release of energy. I built that building there as a reminder of what had happened and buried the recordings inside it as well. Eventually I buried the building itself, sealing it off inside this crystal dome from the world. I personally reconstructed the lands above to repair the damage that had occurred.”

“Not very much later the dragons came to full sentience, just as the first seeds of humanity were taking root. I had let the dragons develop in whatever way they happened to develop. Browns, curious about the legendary pillar of blue flame that had erupted from inside the earth, discovered this place after following a river that had eaten its way down here just to dropped into the Fount’s water reprocessing center. They immediately marked this chamber as holy, and quickly dug out confusing cavern systems that expands for hundreds of miles around to hide it. They fiercely protected this place down to the very last one of their kind.” Agea suddenly stopped as one of the group members stepped out of the building. “For thousands of years singular people, collectively known as the Mier, learned these secrets, and have worked tirelessly at guiding humanity along a path towards an instinctually peaceful society that should take them around the black abyss that my people so often fell into before eradicating them so long ago.”

Agea let everything sink in for a while, watching the rest of the group hover around the entrance of the building talking amongst themselves about what they had read inside. She turned to Leun, “Here, let me give you the knowledge you need to maintain the Fount.” Leun nodded, expecting to receive a book or to be told another story. Instead, Agea raised her hand and placed it on Leun’s forehead for a moment. Within seconds Leun’s mind was reeling from the massive intake of knowledge that passed into her mind through the short duration of the connection. “You will always remember.”

Agea remained where she lay as the group approached, the members of it glancing from her to where Leun laid almost asleep, her mind still spinning from the sudden intake of knowledge. Agea spoke in a normal voice - there was really no need to speak at all considering the words were projected into their minds in the first place but talking was something they were used to, “You have passed the Rite, and are now ready to lead your people down the long road to Enlightenment. You now know everything you need to pass this Rite on to only the most worthy of your descendants so that the tradition may be continued. Do you wish me to accompany you back to your homes so that you may start this holy task?”

One of them spoke up, “Don’t we need to do this thing for ourselves, by ourselves?” To which Agea responded with a simple yes. “Then would it be all right if we made the journey back alone?”

Agea smiled, “Of course it is okay. I cannot act as a guide for all your future generations anyways.” She looked to Leun, who was starting to recover. “You must guide yourselves, it is the only way it will work.” Agea stood, looking over this new generation of guides. “Remember, if you need me, all you must do is recite the prayer. I will always hear it. Sometimes I may not come, but those are times when you can deal with the need yourselves, even if you do not see any solution at the time. Currently there are things I have been putting off that I must attend to immediately.” As she stood there in front of them, a blue light seeped across her skin, her clothes, and even the feathers on her wings. The light from the glowing crystals seamed to pulse dimmer with each passing moment, clearly feeding whatever spell she had cast. That light suddenly burst from her body in the direction of the passages, creating a twisting and winding path through the caverns towards the exit. In the blink of an eye, she turned and vanished along that pathway of light.

All the crystals in the chamber faded to black in that instant, leaving the group in utter darkness except for the fading trail of light. Slowly the glow flowed back through the crystals, relighting the caverns in their now-eerie blue glow.

“I bet a hunter killed too many deer and she had to go stop him,” one member of the group joked halfheartedly. To which he received rolling eyes and groans.

“Come on, let’s go,” said Leun weakly in a sort of half-daze, trying to stand. “We’ve got lots of work to do.” One of the group helped her up and they started the long trip back, leaving the glowing artificial chamber behind.

Life Fount (cont.)

Days after the group had returned home and as more and more of Life Fount facility’s systems came online, the glowing chamber blurred, turning into the chaotic scene of the main control center just minutes before the devastating explosion. Cliak’s almost unrecognizable holographic form was standing in the center of the chamber, not far from the chaos. His body was completely burned; his wings were charred stumps along with one of his legs. Boiling bodily fluid bubbled out of his skin and dropped through the air, completely evaporating before reaching the bubbling metal floor. Despite all of this, mostly due to his genetic alterations, he stood straight with a calm, painless expression on what remained of his face. Dark blue energy was rocketing outwards from cracks in the massive mechanical tube that was the Life Fount behind him that curved off to the sides of the immense chamber of the main control center.

He pulled his burned and oozing hands from the ports on one of the slowly melting computers and turned towards the viewpoint of the holographic recording, speaking more with his mind then with his lips that were slowly burning off from his body. “I am sorry my love for deceiving you like this. I could not let you come here and die with me. One of us had to survive the explosion to carry on the task. It was a stupid decision to try and push the Fount beyond what we calculated were its maximum capabilities, something I have paid for with my life as well as many of the lives of creatures and plants across this world. As you know our genetic material is stored on the moon orbiting this planet in the resurrection facility, I have just finished sending a final copy of myself to there as well as in the decayed and abandoned resurrection sections of the Carrier we traveled here in for safekeeping. Once day my love, you can resurrect me using those dormant facilities. Oh and just in case both the moon facility and buried Carrier are destroyed by something in the future, I also constructed numerous backup complexes on each of the moons of this star system, as well as in other star systems we came across during our voyage here. I should have told you about them sooner, but the subject just never came up. This final transmission of myself will be bounced across those facilities of course.”

An explosion rocked the facility behind him. He turned around, calmly assessing it, before turning back to the camera. “Luckily, I was able to use transmissions of our race’s recorded history to create a canal for these energies to take straight away from this planet into the galaxy. Hopefully this civilization and others will find it in the future, and learn from our mistakes. One last hope for our people’s redemption I guess, in case we both die from this.” The cracks in the Life Fount burst, flaring up and searing through the ceiling of the facility in intense blue jets of flame. “Goodbye, Agea my love. For now.” He smiled as best he could just as the initial flares of searing energy flowed over him, instantly turning what remained of his body into pure ash.

Within a second the blue energy from the leaking Life Fount exploded across the chamber, instantly incinerating all it came in contact with. The holographic footage blurred, twisting as the transmitted signal from the main control facility to the backup facility was interrupted and warped by the explosion the melting computers were recording. The chaotic hologram instantly winked out of existence, leaving the glowing crystal chamber behind as well as the dimly lit figure of a winged woman.

White-hot anger flashed across her face so very unlike the deceptive display of sorrow she displayed earlier to the new humans. She practically yelled at the building that held the records that had just played for her. “I had gotten so far and then you just had to destroy yourself, half the planet, and narrowly me. After EVERYTHING I had been through and done, you almost single-handedly wiped out my last chance of redemption! If only you had done something like that before the temple, then I would have been rid of your stupidity long ago. I would have destroyed every single record of you, killing you permanently the day I pulled myself out of the resurrection tanks.” She threw a massive jet of blue flame at the building as if you show her willingness to destroy him without a second’s hesitation, even though the flames did not reach it. “You’re lucky I’m no longer completely the monster I was born to be. Unlike you, I have actually been trying to get absolution for the unspeakable crimes I’ve committed. For the good of the new humanity, you will remain in the mainframe forever. You will never get to see this ‘experiment’ of yours come to a conclusion,” Agea hissed, “Hopefully that will finally teach you the lessons you yourself have been broadcasting across the universe.” She laughed for a second, mocking it, “The only good thing that came out of the incredibly stupid thing you did is that watching this recording reminds me of why I am here in the first place... Idiot.” She angrily flung another jet of blue fire at the building, turned, and stalked out of the chamber.

Cliak had assumed that she didn’t know about the resurrection facilities he had constructed along the way. She had even secretly destroyed them before they moved on, not willing to risk having some other civilization come across the technology. He never even knew about Agea’s true involvement in the Project. Since she was simply a low-level assistant, he never realized the Project’s breakthroughs were only made because of her work. He had simply been a figurehead, a target should anyone have discovered the true identity of the Project before its completion.

Agea had created the framework of a pathway for the energies to escape the planet when they had first installed the machine, just in case something went wrong. Something else the idiot Cliak did not even realize, not even there at the end. She had known about his insane attempts at focusing the Fount’s energies in a vain attempt to boost his own abilities, and had let him. After all, you never really know where experiments will take you until you actually execute them. It was possible he would discover something, though unlikely. Which he had not, to her knowledge. There were many things Agea left out of the stories she told, instead of just outright lying. The day she installed the resurrection systems into the Carrier, she had also installed what was needed to automatically resurrect only herself should anything happen. Cliak thought that those systems were to resurrect both of them, and that they were deactivated when they decommissioned the ship. Having secretly reactivated them, those systems were still operational and luckily functioning perfectly the day of the explosion.

The radiation from the explosion was unsafely damaging her mind as the tendrils of energy flowed out across the skies of the planet after the initial blast, so the resurrection systems inside the Carrier immediately went to work, resurrecting a new copy of Agea while killing the old. For some unfathomable reason, only one copy of a person could exist at a time, some strange law of the universe. Less then a day after the explosion, her resurrected body pulled itself from the tanks dripping thick globs of fluid. Already knowing what had happened, she stalked up to the surface to repair the damage.

Then, three thousand years ago, she had discovered the Carrier’s systems had completely degraded to the point that it was impossible for them to resurrect even a mouse. The systems were just far too aged. Not willing to risk permanent death, she had gone into hiding deep underground where she completely rebuilt the entire ship from the ground up. To be able to use the amazing amount of energy stored for the Life Fount’s use, she was forced to shut it down during the reconstruction. No task was so needed so immediately that she had to risk setting off another devastating explosion. Besides, the Fount was not doing much those days anyways having already completed its goal of a complete ecosystem. She turned the massive carrier automated factory that would replace worn out parts of itself, a machine version of infinite longevity, and the parts of the new resurrection facility that was constructed there. The new facility would last forever, so long as there was a planet, recycling and rebuilding itself constantly over the millions of years. The security systems would instantly put any trespassers into stasis and store them inside the facility until a time she could deal with them.

She sat down in front of the main control console in front of the life fount, watching the energy within it flow like deep blue water. Alone with her thoughts, she couldn’t help but remember how it all had begun so very long ago.

[[Be forewarned, adult-ish themes and some pretty bad violence.]]

[align=center]--- Immortality Project ---[/align]

Noack glanced at the digital clock above the doorway in his private rooms aboard a train that sped across the planet along magnetic rails. He had been thoroughly trained from day one to follow orders without regard for his own well being. It was the only reason he even did this particular kind of messenger work. He absolutely hated hand-delivering orders from the Handlers to their pet monsters - those deadly and seductive Mier the Handlers had the audacity to call human. Each was created entirely in a lab using a conglomerate of genetically superior DNA to any normal human. Then they were raised and trained constantly to be perfect: completely untraceable spies, undetectable thieves, deadly assassins, and perfect deceivers. They had no inhibitions whatsoever, willing to do absolutely anything to achieve their goals without so much as a moment’s hesitation or pause. Every time he delivered orders to them, he couldn’t help but get the feeling that they had their own secret agendas, despite supposedly being under the complete control of their handlers. Such a thing is exactly what they would want if it were true. Everyone that he had told this to just laughed, after all the whole process was so thoroughly perfect that there was no way those Mier were capable of acting on their own, much less having a single independent thought outside their duties. Even knowing all of that, he still felt the same.

He stared out the windows at the thick haze of the planet-sized city, thinking to himself. Before long the train sped into the insides of a massive skyscraper, these upper levels almost completely devoted to government housing. He stood as the train smoothly slowed to a halt. He quickly exited the train, blending perfectly into the crowd around him. He stepped inside a lift, standing right at the door to prevent anyone else from going up it with him. Once the doors shut, he stepped over to the lift’s control panel, pulling it back and placing his hand on a hidden panel inside, letting it run the scan. Without so much as a beep, the lift started its long ascent up the structure to a floor that was inaccessible by any other means. The Mier living quarters were as hard to find as a single person was far below on the planet’s surface. He took a deep breath just before the lift doors opened. He stepped out into the ornate fake marble halls that really looked no different then any of the other floors. The only difference was that these were completely empty. The halls were completely devoid of all noise except for the seemingly magnified clicks of his uniform’s boots on the marble as he walked. It would have been nice to at least have the hum of some machinery at work to cover the ringing in his ears. Such silence sent shivers up and down his spine, and the icy air didn’t help. He came to a halt in front of an apartment door simply labeled ’13,’ his hand hovering over the button that would signal the Mier inside that there was a visitor. He stared at his hand a moment, before letting it fall back to his side, leaving the button un-pressed. It wasn’t like the all of the Mier on that entire floor didn’t know he was there.

It wasn’t until a good ten minutes later that a very young black-haired girl opened the door. She looked young enough to be attending one of the higher-level schools, though her eyes could easily show a sadistic malice that no mere teen could ever have. He stayed perfectly straight where he stood, not saying a word and keeping his eyes locked forwards, trying his best not to acknowledge that she did not have a scrap of clothing on. He remained unmoving even when she wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing him passionately. After what felt like hours, she let go of him, letting him see disappointment on her face. Considering her talent, she was probably fascinated by his reaction, or rather lack of. “Still nothing?” she asked, sounding as if she was pouting. Getting no reply, not even a blink out of him, she smiled suddenly, “I will get some emotion out of you. Come on in.” He had no doubt that she would. She turned, walking over to a wall cabinet, picking up a glass as she walked. “I found a very interesting thing last time I was at the Imperial Palace.” She pulled a bottle out of the cabinet, making sure he saw the personal seal of the Emperor. “Supposedly the strongest alcoholic drink in the universe and has a taste to die for,” she poured herself a glass, an act that normal people would actually be put to death for. Even seeing the crime happen was punishable by death. She so easily blackmailed him in that instant, leaving no escape route that he could take away from it. So he remained motionless just inside her apartment room, staring straight ahead. She offered him the glass, “You might as well drink some, considering.” She waited a moment, and seeing that he remained perfectly still, quietly replied, “No? Have it your way then.” She sat down and quickly downed the entire glass not effected by it in the least - a ‘gift’ of her genetics.

Setting down the glass, she remained silent, watching him stew for a good thirty minutes. Finally, she sighed, “What do you have for me?”

“This envelope,” he replied and quickly handed her a metal box. She took it from his hand in such a way that her thumb rested over an engraved rectangle on the side of it. She continued watching him even as a thick liquid flowed out of the box, enwrapping her finger. Once it verified her genetics and that she was alive and well, part of the box opened, reveling a long cord that she quickly attached to the tiny implant just behind her left ear. Her eyes glazed over for a second as the information was pumped directly into her mind. A moment later the cord detached itself, letting a flap of skin reseal itself over the implant’s port to perfectly hide it.

Her eyes back to normal, she stared at the wall, deep in her own thoughts, processing the information for a moment using her implant to assist her biological mind. Noack could swear she was changing her own secret plans to compensate for whatever mission she was given. Suddenly she looked straight into his eyes, a strange half-smile on her face. It was unlike anything she had ever showed him in the past. Startled, his eyes looked straight at her. She laughed quietly to herself...


--

A middle-aged woman dressed in the black and white of a security officer leaned back in her chair, staring at the ceiling. “God I hate this so much. They could have put me someplace where I’d get to at least take down a few criminals, but noooo they had to put me in this burning booth takin’ IDs. I hope one of these days I get to arrest some idiot that tries to get in without a proper card.”

Behind her, a man seated watching some sort of new sporting game turned angrily, “Just shut up already damn it. We have both been stuck in this hellhole for years, and are not going anywhere. So just shut your damn trap already.” He turned back to his game, still fuming.

“Whatever,” she dismissed it with a wave of her hand. Around noon, as they were eating lunch, a sleek black car sped toward them, coming to a hovering halt just seconds before slamming into the blast doors of the facility’s main entrance. She got up and moved over to the window, sliding it open, and waited for the blacked-out window of the car to roll down. After a few minutes of waiting, just as she was about to turn to go back to eating, the window rolled down, revealing a girl with hair and eyes just as dark as her car, music blasted from her car’s speakers. She was way too young to be working there. The girl extended her hand through the window, holding an ID card. The security woman snatched the card from the girl’s hand, sliding it into the computer to check if it was real, not really expecting it to be. Suddenly the girl’s files showed up, shocking the security woman. Some supposedly smart twat named Agea. That kid must have screwed somebody important to get in. Sure, she had a low level job with practically no access, but still. Still shocked, she handed the card back to the girl, opening the blast doors for her to pass. After closing the doors shut behind the girl’s vehicle, she collapsed into her chair, “There just is no justice in the world. None whatsoever.”

Speeding through the tunnels to her parking spot, Agea let herself grin slightly. Infiltrating this place was too easy. The idiot in charge of the project practically shoved a job at her after just one night sleeping with him. She didn’t even have to ask. Sure it was a low-level position with no real access, but still. It wasn’t like security checkpoints could stop her anyways.

She slammed to a halt in her parking spot, just one of thousands of private parking spots that would maintain its stored vehicles while they went unused. She got out, acting like she didn’t see the man standing motionless by the door into the little room as she got her things. The stolen car had been stripped of all identifying marks, and then new ones were put in place that belonged to the person she had created over the past month. Everything in the car perfectly fit into the fictitious character she was playing the part of. They could ‘secretly’ search it all they wanted.

Stepping up to the man, she quickly noticed that it was really only a shell. The man really was completely stripped of all humanity, only able to do tasks that were specifically listed out. It was exactly like a machine in a man’s body. Acting as if she still thought he was a normal person who was just assigned to escorting her to her quarters, she tried starting up conversations with him, eventually giving up in feigned frustration. The two walked down the corridors in silence. They soon passed by a thick window into a large lab that was half greenery, half laboratory. In a brief glance through the window, she noticed plants fading in and out of sight as researchers subjected them to different things. It was ironic that the government used a cloaking research facility to hide a far more important Project. She and her mindless guide continued down the halls.

--

Agea, wearing the white lab clothes of an assistant, glanced at the digital clock on the wall of her little isolated lab room. She was sitting around picking up different devices and looking at them in boredom. The researcher she was assisting was quick to berate her, “Don’t touch anything unless I tell you to. Just sit there quietly.”

“Oh fine,” Agea pouted, folding her arms across her chest, “When are we going to do something interesting?”

“This, here, is interesting,” the researcher said absently, doing something with an electronic microscope. She sat down on one of the lab stools, mildly spinning around, waiting for something to do. A good thirty minutes passed before the man finally looked at her, annoyed at her spinning. In almost annoyed frustration, he decided to give her something to do, “Get the box of slides over there, the one marked with a bright red slip, number 14.”

She got up and started rummaging through the shelves and shelves of little boxes, each box marked with a different color and number. Finding the unorganized group of red-slipped boxes, she pulled out the one that was fourteenth from the left, instead of the one marked with the number 14. “This one?” she asked, holding it out to the man.

Without looking away from his work, he said, “Yes, now arrange those slides in order of progression of the cells. Each is marked.”

She set the box down on the table next to her stool, and began sorting through them. This particular box was badly unorganized, with some slides even missing labels. She glanced back to the researcher and quietly stood. Being as quiet as she could, she carefully picked up another microscope from the other end of the table and brought it back to where the slides sat stacked up next to the box. She slowly flipped the switch on the device, sliding one of the slides into the base of the scope. She looked down through the lens at the cells. The slides acted as little stasis fields, and the moment the slide was placed inside the scope, the field deactivated. She watched as the cells rapidly decayed. Something was causing the cells to quickly die off. As she looked at more and more of the slides, some marked some unmarked, she noticed a general trend. These were all cells that had been exposed to various levels of something, each decaying at a different rate. Once she had the box organized, she quietly put the microscope back and sat back down. A good hour had passed, and since she was quiet for once, she honestly thought the researcher had forgotten she was there.

She suddenly spoke up, in a voice a little louder then normal, “So now what?” She smiled broadly when the man jumped, almost knocking over a rack of test tubes he was doing something with. When the man turned, all he saw was her smiling innocently, with the box of slides in hand. He swiped the box from her hands and carefully placed it back on the shelves, not even bothering to check what number she had done.

Agitated, the man quickly dismissed her, “Just go, leave me alone. If I need you I’ll call for you.”

Watching the researcher go back to his work, she got up and stalked out of the room.

--

She got to her room and walked inside, closing the door behind herself. One of the tiny security cameras followed her inside. She acted like it wasn’t even there as she undressed. Tossing her clothes onto her bed, she made her way to the computer in the corner of the room. She calmly grabbed a glass and filled it with water from the tap before sitting down in front of the computer to boot it up, raising a leg to rest it across the table as she sipped on the water. Without focusing on the robot, she watched it move around to get a better view, while she still sipped her water. The robot lowered itself until it was practically sitting on the desk, watching her closely. Calmly, she set down the glass right on top of the machine, with just enough force to crush it. Leaving the glass on top of the crushed bot, she brought her leg down and logged into the facility’s network. Within minutes she secretly broke through all the levels of security firewalls. It wasn’t long before she created a hidden administrator account in their mainframe, giving her complete access without needed to break through the firewalls and security measures. She brought up page after page of research that the facility had done, reading up on the processes that had decayed the cells she had looked at. Over the years it appeared they had gotten very good at decaying organic matter. They had recently figured out a relatively inexpensive way to turn this into a weapon. The research was actually starting to get somewhere, which would explain why she was given the assignment to look around for any possible leaks.

She got up, walked over to her lab clothes and pulled out a single slide. The one from the group of slides that had displayed the least decay, maybe even slower decay then normal. She ran her finger across its smooth metallic surface, thinking.

--

Over the next few months, Agea collected a list of individuals that she would be able to break the easiest. They had all gotten contacted at least once by a mysterious outside agency, each quickly hiding their tracks. She had listened to those brief conversations, buried deep in all the waste of everyone else’s supposedly private communications. Now that security was no longer keeping a very close eye on her, she sent a single transmission to the single person out of all of those that would be easiest to break. She masked the transmission as that of the mysterious outside agency that had contacted that man less then a year prior, a far more threatening message then before. Unsurprisingly, the researcher deleted the message immediately on receiving it.

Later in the day, as she passed through the line in the cafeteria to get something to eat, she quickly spotted the researcher. The man was sitting alone, glancing around every now and then as if expecting security to haul him off any minute. The message had touched a nerve. She walked up behind the man who had his back towards the line, and quietly asked, “May I sit here?”

The man almost jumped, quickly hiding it. Turning to face her, he seamed to calm down slightly, though his voice was still soaked in apprehension, “Uh… yes... sure.” He went back to eating, though he clearly did not have much of an appetite.

Noticing he had downed his serving of dessert, she offered her own, “Here.”

He looked at her for a minute, sort of surprised, “Thanks,” he set the little dish down on his tray.

“No problem, not like I should be eating that stuff anyways,” she said, going back to eating. She noticed the man seamed a little more relaxed now. She knew she really needed to not do that, but let it happen anyways. It was interesting watching the impact of what such a simple act could do.

For the next few weeks at lunchtime, Agea sat there at the table with him, watching him get kinder and friendlier with her. He started talking about his work, even people he left behind when he came to work for the Project. She found it all fascinating, listening the man’s brain at work. She listened to his stories and even shared some of her own. Some great works of fiction that she made up about the person she was playing the part of.

One night, Agea sent a second transmission to the man, again masked as it was before, this time much more threatening. The next day at lunch, the man was clearly shaken up. She handed her serving of dessert to the man, “Are you all right?”

He had been completely quiet up to that point, “Yeah. Its just...” He paused for a while, glancing around. “I’ve been getting these disturbing messages lately.” He went silent again, toying with his food. “I don’t know if I should take the threats seriously or not, though whoever’s sending them seams to think they can carry them out. I’m starting to believe they can.”

She put her hand on his, staring worriedly into his eyes, “Who could possibly be threatening you? And why?”

“I don’t know,” he stopped glancing to his sides, “I really shouldn’t talk about it here.” He continued messing with his food for the rest of lunch. He never brought it back up.

For the next year, he got more and more messages from the agency, all were really from Agea. One day at lunch, he was very worried, immediately speaking up after she sat down next to him, “Before they just sent me vague threats, but now they’ve sent me a list of names, threatening to kill off my coworkers one by one. I don’t know what to do. If I tell security about it, they are going to arrest me and I will never see the work again. I don’t know if they can actually get in here and carry out the threat.”

She calmed him down, trying to comfort him, “This place is the most secure facility on the planet, and nothing’s going to get in here. Just delete those messages and forget about them.”

--

Agea stared up at the ceiling from where she lay on her bed like so many nights before. It had been a week since the last message had been sent, and the man had not broken, though he was so very close. It was like water pressure behind a dam, just a little more and the dam would break. The list she had made and sent with the threat was actually from least important researcher to most. The facility would not miss the top of the list if they were to unfortunately die.

Over the months, she had gotten into a first-name basis with most of the security personnel at the checkpoints. They were all familiar with her, so it didn’t matter which one was on shift, they were all more likely to let her pass without taking another look at a manufactured clearance slip she created. Simultaneously, she had been watching the work being done by the research facility as a whole. Some departments found things that other departments would have benefited from, though the security measures insured that methods were not shared between departments. The entire project was divided up into individual units that had no real contact with each other in regards to how exactly they were doing their work, only sharing their breakthroughs with departments where it mattered. An unfortunate inefficiency, but the paranoid setup of the project let her create breakthroughs that she could then deliver to the higher up departments to process.

Something she intended to do now.

She rolled out of bed, quickly dressing in her lab coat. She reached down into the secret storage compartment she made in the ventilation shaft that fed air into her room and pulled out the slide she had stolen so long ago. Along with it she pulled out a disk carrying the recordings of her breakthrough, as well as a manufactured clearance slip that would get her into the higher-level security section of the facility. She quickly slid the items into her lab coat’s pockets. She had just one more thing to do before delivering the slide.

She left her quarters and made her way to where she had helped her boss with his work for the past few months. She quietly entered the man’s lab, signaling him that she was there as she walked in. She quietly asked, “Do you need anything Dr. Veban?”

Without turning from his work, he half-mindedly replied, “Here, put these recordings into the computer there, I think I have something.” he handed her a disk that she took, stepping over to his computer. Instead of inserting the disk like she was supposed to, she took out the disk containing records of her breakthrough and slid it into the machine, uploading those readings and storing them. After sliding the disk of her work back into her pocket, she stepped over to where Veban was studiously studying his own work, the disk of his recordings in her hand. “Just set that down here,” he said, pointing to a random place on the table.

“Anything else Doctor?” she asked, setting the disk down on the table.

He glanced at the time, “Oh my,” He looked at her, not even realizing she had left earlier, “Go on ahead to bed Agea. I’ll call you if anything comes up.” He went back to his work. Standing by the door, she pulled the clearance slip, disk of her work, and the slide out. Holding all three as she stepped out into the hallway, she unobtrusively made sure the security cameras saw the items in her hand. She quickly made her way down the corridors to the security gate she needed to pass through.

As she approached, the man in the booth glanced up, “Oh, hey Agea, need anything?”

“Yeah actually,” she said, holding up the slide and disk, the security slip in her other hand, “Dr. Veban wanted me to deliver this to Doctor...” She looked at the slip, reading it for a moment as if she couldn’t remember the name she had written onto the slip, “Doctor Sul-id... I think... I really can’t read Dr. Veban’s handwriting. He really should learn to print these slips off the computer.” She handed the slip to the man, “Anyways, he told me to show you that.”

He glanced over the slip, not really reading much of it before marking it that he had seen it. “Here you go,” he handed the slip back to Agea, “Dr. Sulid is currently in his lab. A word of caution, he doesn’t like being disturbed.” He gave Agea a friendly smile, “Best of luck.” The security door opened, letting Agea pass through. She walked down the halls in the direction of Sulid’s lab, acting as if she was remembering directions told to her by Veban.

Before long she was standing in front of Sulid’s lab. She pressed the comm. button next to the door signaling that Sulid was inside. After a few minutes, the door slid open. “What is it? Make it quick,” demanded the little man.

“Dr. Veban wanted me to deliver these things to you,” she said meekly, faking being intimidated by the man.

“What had that crazy old fool come up with now,” Sulid said, taking the slide and disk from Agea’s hand. He tossed the items onto the table next to his computer, obviously going to look at them later. Assuming that the task was done, Agea turned and left. She looked down the hall both directions, making it seam like she was forgetting which way to go. Finally, she started walking down the hall in the opposite direction she had come in. It was time, during a small window she made for herself that would open soon. As she walked towards the quarters where the first member on the list quietly slept, she kept an eye on the security cameras. She kept taking random passages, all in the direction of the man’s room, making it look like she was lost for the cameras. As she neared the man’s room, she noticed the camera in the hall seam to wilt. Because of the time of night, there was no one in the halls to notice them shut down. She quickly made her way directly to the man’s room. Using the ghost account she had created in the mainframe, she opened the password-locked door of the man’s room. She stepped into the darkness. She had plenty of time to do this.

Very careful to not wake the man, she bound hands and feet so that he would not be able to move an inch. After taking off all her clothing but her undergarments and tossing them in the bathroom, she lay down next to him, running her fingers through the man’s hair gently. A cruel smile came across her face as she locked her fingers onto a single hair, plucking it from the man’s head. The man woke suddenly with an ow, taking a few moments to realize he was not alone. “Who the hell are you?!” he tried to move his bound limbs, fear starting to cross his face.

She gently ran her hands through his hair, finally grabbing hold and turning his head to the side so she could whisper in his ear, “I am the bringer of pain.” Knowing full well the room was soundproof; she plucked another hair from his head that was close to the nerves that ran under his skin. He clenched his teeth, barely letting out a peep. “I know you can scream for me.” She plucked two hairs from his head at once, making him whimper quietly.

After a few more hairs, he quickly started babbling, “What do you want?! Why are you doing this to me!”

“I’ve always been fascinated by people’s reactions to different stimulants, I can tell you are going to be very interesting to watch,” she said quietly just before she ripped a larger clump of hair from his head. This time, he let out a stifled scream fighting against the binds, blood oozing out of the small hole left in his scalp. She rolled off the bed, starting to search the room for things she could use. Since the man was going to die in a few minutes, she went ahead and turned on a light to help her look for tools. As she picked up pens, razors, even some batteries and wiring, she noticed the man staring at her with terrified eyes, not making a sound. She sat down on the bed next to the man, tossing the things next to where she sat in plain sight for the man to see. She began getting the things ready, talking to him almost casually, “Have you ever heard of the Mier?” The man didn’t respond, though he clearly recognized the name. “Well, I am one of them.” The man’s eyes bulged. “All of the things you heard are diluted versions of the truth,” she leaned in closer, “Just so that those that told the stories can stomach the horrors that we do to our victims.”
--

A few minutes later, from right outside the room, the barely audible screams of the man died out as the man’s brain overloaded from the pain. Inside the room, Agea stood, leaving her bloody tools where they lay discarded. She tossed a blood-drenched razor on top of what remained of the man’s chest; having made sure the man was no longer alive. She wiped her hand across her face as she stepped into the bathroom. She stared into the mirror at the already-drying blood stained all over her body and face. She yawned, not really caring if the man’s blood dripped from her face into her mouth before turning and stepping into the shower. It only took her another few minutes to wash all the blood from her body and hair, the sweet-smelling shampoo quickly replacing the metallic stench of blood. She quickly dried off and dressed, and opened up the security panel for the door. She quickly erased the video of her entering the room, as well as all other records of her having been there. She quickly used the door’s security camera to make sure the hall was clear before stepping out, closing the door behind her. She quickly made her way to the security checkpoint she had entered the place from. Just as she reached it, she noticed the security cameras slowly raise up as they turned back on.

The man that had cleared her through was still there, “What took you so long?”

“I got lost trying to get back. I just couldn’t remember the directions after giving the things to Dr. Sulid,” she said innocently showing him the clearance slip again.

“Don’t worry, he does that to all of us. He’s got one hell of a superiority complex, and a massive ego to boot.” He took the slip, tossing it into a little box under his desk. He quickly opened the door, “Well, goodnight Agea. Hope you sleep well.”

“I’ll try. Goodnight.” She smiled at him, passing through the door, and headed back to her quarters to get some much needed sleep.

--

The next morning, hours before anyone woke up, the head of security knocked on her door. She let him in, fully alert yet feigning sleepiness. “So why is the head of security wanting to talk to a low level assistant like myself?”

“Mier, I need your help,” the man said. Her act completely vanished as he continued, not asking when he had been informed, “One of our Level Two researchers was tortured to death over the night.” She stood. “I was informed to give you this should I need your assistance,” he dropped a change of cloths on her bed, needlessly turning around for her to change. It was a security personnel uniform, and folded inside the clothing was with a small device that would change her facial features for a short time. She quickly dressed in the uniform and used the device, making her face appear older and very forgettable, nothing like her real face.

“Show me,” she said emotionlessly once she was ready.

As the two quickly made their way down the halls, they passed by a tired Dr. Veban that did not even notice her. The man that had been on duty when she had passed through the checkpoint only hours before was still there. She watched as he saluted his superior officer, opening the door. He didn’t even notice Agea was standing right there. The face-changing device was truly wonderful. Before long, the two came to the dead man’s room; one of the two guards posted outside the door opened it for them. She stepped in first, followed shortly by the head of security. Once the door shut, the man began to explain things, “We found him no more then twenty minutes ago when he failed to show up for his early-morning shift.”

Agea glanced at her work, not so much as acknowledging that she had seen it before, “This is professional,” she stated coolly as she inspected the body, not touching anything just yet.

The Chief continued, “Apparently the security cameras for this entire section of the facility were shut down for about twenty minutes over the night. Even the door’s hidden security camera was wiped clean. We also noticed you were here in this section last night.”

“Yes,” she answered, “There was an infiltrator I interrogated and put to death.” Not about to mention the name of the fake infiltrator she had entered into the computers months ago, she rolled the man onto his side to inspect his back, not hesitating to get blood on her hands. “Apparently there is second one. One that is very skilled in torture.”

The chief ventured a few words, “Should I get you all the data he was in contact with?”

“No need,” she said calmly, continuing to inspect the body. Fascinating how human biology worked.

The Chief, not quite really knowing what to do, ventured, “Should I increase your cover’s security clearance?”

Agea laughed lightly at the question, still inspecting the almost shredded body. Something that very clearly disturbed the Chief, “I will take care of everything myself.” She stood, leaving the body where it lay. “Who knows?”

“Just you, me, and the officer that reported it.”

She looked at him coldly, “Is that officer standing out in the hall guarding the door?” The chief nodded. “Good. He can not be allowed to speak with anyone.” She looked at the dead man before looking back at the Chief. “This man died of natural causes. He looks like he hasn’t been eating right for a long time,” she looked down at the body again, “Lets say he died from multiple organ failures as a result of prolonged mal-nutrition.” She turned to the chief; “I need a way to transport the body quietly to the morgue.”

“I’ll get Medical to send someone up with a gurney,” said the Chief, turning on his radio and calling Medical with the request.

A few minutes later, the door opened and a young woman rolled a gurney into the room, not seeing the body at first. After the door slid shut, she jumped slightly, her eyes now used to the dim light of the room. She looked at the Chief, who glanced at Agea. Agea immediately moved to pull a metal blanket out of a storage bin in the gurney. Once she had it draped across the gurney, she pointed to the body, “Get the feet, I’ll get the arms.” The woman was quick to respond. Soon the body was completely encased in the metal blanket and covered with a white sheet. Not a single drop of blood showed anywhere on the gurney or the sheets.

Both Agea and the medical woman washed all blood off their hands in the bathroom, “Turn on the automated cleaning system when you leave Chief, and tell the officers outside to accompany us to the morgue.”

The three of them stepped outside, the medical woman pushing the gurney exiting first. The Chief quickly relayed the orders to the two officers, who took up positions on each side of the gurney as they walked. It wasn’t long before they reached the morgue. As the other three entered, Agea held back a few moments to speak with the Chief one last time. “Find a good time in the next few days to discharge those three from service. Cite whatever reason you can find.” The man nodded, already knowing the fates of those inside the morgue.

Agea stepped through the door, sealing it shut behind her. She watched the medical woman start to move the body to one of the autopsy tables. “No. Incinerate everything,” Agea ordered. The woman looked surprised, but went ahead and followed the order, sliding the body along with the sheets into the incinerator. Just before the woman shut the door, Agea half-smiled, “You haven’t put everything in there yet.” The three looked at her, wonder crossing their faces, “Everything must go inside. Including you.” Their eyes widened, an evil grin now on Agea’s face. “Go on, climb into the incinerator and make your deaths painless for yourselves,” taunted Agea. One of the officers moved for his weapon, but was far too slow. Agea quickly closed the gap, breaking the man’s neck with a pop. The other man pulled his gun, firing a single shot with a miss before he collapsed to the ground, his ribs shattered by a blow to his chest. Ignoring the medical woman who was frantically trying to open the sealed door of the morgue, Agea sat down on the back of her legs next to the heads of the two still-conscious officers. She looked at each of them, listening to the woman’s hysterical screams.

“Why did you think you could possibly be faster then a Mier?” she paused, as if expecting the two to be able to answer. “If you had just climbed into the incinerator like I asked, I would have set it for a quick burn. But you just had to draw your guns.” Casually, she picked up one of the officer’s weapons, “She gets to die a quick death,” and fired at the medical woman without even looking. The woman dropped with a thud as the single bullet to the back of her neck shattered her spine. Agea tossed the gun to the ground. “You two get to roast alive for a very long time.” The two stared at her, terror in their eyes, already choking screams barely escaping their blood-filled throats. Before long, both officers, the dead woman, and the dead researcher were all locked inside the incinerator. She looked straight into the terrified eyes of one of the officers and grinned, starting the slow burn sequence. The screams grew louder and louder as the heat rose. Agea pulled up a chair and watched through the thick plas window at the faces of the two officers. Bored after just the first minute, she got up and started looking through the cold storage compartments of other dead bodies. Ten minutes after starting the incinerator, the screams faded completely, leaving only the hum of the incinerator. Agea quickly picked up the two officer’s weapons, sliding them into her pockets. Before unsealing the door and leaving, she quickly cleaned up the bloodstain on it, tossing the bloody rag into a laundry basket alongside other similarly bloody rags.

With no one in the halls around her quarters just yet, she stepped inside. She quickly undressed, folded up the security uniform, and stashed it away along with the guns and the face-altering device. She lay back down in bed, instantly falling asleep.

Over the next few weeks, Dr. Veban’s security clearance was raised to Level 2, along with Agea’s, because of his breakthrough. Simultaneously, an almost hermit-like lab assistant on the low end of Level 2 died when one of the machines she had been using inexplicably exploded. For some unknown reason, security never bothered to discover why. And finally, a terrified man leaked everything he knew to the unknown agency that had first contacted him so long ago. Along with that information, Agea hid an electronic tracking device that would allow her handlers to identify the agency involved. When reporting back to them about the leak, she altered the evidence so that it was actually the assassinated Level 2 lab assistant who had leaked the information. Agea never figured out why she did it.

--

Many months passed, not a single breach, not even a possible hint of a breach, showed itself that entire time. She devoted every night before sleeping and every morning right after waking to searching through all of the facility’s communication records, sometimes going back months. She could not find anything. Having nothing else to do, she devoted more time to the research her cover was conducting, quickly becoming invaluable to Dr. Veban. She actively assisted him and fed him ideas to help advance the research. The Immortality Project was nearing completion far faster then it had before her arrival. She had become the secret head of the project, right under everyone’s noses.

One evening, having been dismissed early, she sat in front of her computer terminal. On the screen were her designs for a fascinating direction the project had suddenly taken. She was unable to actively think about it though most of the time, resorting to only doing impulsively. She had become more and more aware of that mental block during her time working inside the Project. She had found ways around it though. She did her work to further her mission; it was how she got through security checkpoints with too low a clearance level and how she wove a network of contacts she could use to keep an eye on everything. It was an interesting, but never thought about way to bypass the implant in her mind. She just had to convince herself that thinking about those interesting things was so she could accomplish her mission.

These designs, once put in place, would free her of the implant. Only then could she achieve her full potential in preventing future security breaches within the facility. She closed the diagrams, bringing up a map of the facility. She soon found a wing of the facility that was completely unused. A radiation leak years ago had made it impossible to do any lab work there. The radiation levels were relatively low now, though no one bothered checking anymore. They had no use for that section of the facility. So she faked a leak of a different kind of radiation, one that decayed far slower then the actual. She meticulously changed all of the data and information regarding it to comply with the new kind of radiation. No matter how closely the new data was looked at, it would look completely valid. It had suddenly become thoroughly unsafe to even enter that section to take manual readings. She submitted and approved of a request to change quarters to one that shared a back wall with that closed-off section, effective the next day. She quickly packed her things, hiding away all the things she had collected over the months among it all. She then erased, and replaced all the computer’s logs with something more applicable to her cover. All of her data was safely stored away in a tiny locked portion of the mainframe that she could access from anywhere.

After a few weeks of careful work, she created a tiny doorway for her to pass into the sparsely irradiated sector of the facility. With two days off as a reward for months of hard work, she was ready to get to work cleaning out the subsection she now had access to. She gathered up some things she had come across; flashlight, oxygen mask and tiny tank that would produce that oxygen, and a scanner that read local radiation levels. She stepped into the bathroom, opening the cabinet over the bathroom sink. She slid on the oxygen mask, sliding the oxygen generator tank into her pocket, turning it on as she did so. Since none of the machinery had been at work for years in that section, its air pressure was far lower then that of the active sections. The only thing that was active now was a small amount of energy flowing through the systems, just enough to unlock doors. Once ready, her fingers searched the top of the cabinet just out of sight for a little button. She pressed it, watching as the back of the cabinet swung open with a hiss as air escaped into the other room. Light from her bathroom cast long shadows into the bathroom on the other side. She put the flashlight and scanner down in the sink, quickly squeezing through the tiny door to the other side. She reached back through, picking the things up again, quickly sealing the door shut. She flipped on the light, illuminating the bathroom. Towels and bath supplies lay where they had been abandoned years ago. She flipped on the scanner. Her genetics let her withstand the levels of radiation in the room, levels much greater then any normal human could take.

As her light passed over the bed, she caught a glimpse of a clump of hair on a pillow, the sheets of the bed covering the dead woman’s body. Agea wasn’t surprised. The section was closed off the moment the more important people were out, leaving everyone else there to die. None of those left behind even knew of a danger. She stepped over to the door, pressing the button to open it. After a few seconds, the door unlocked with a click. She pulled the door open and stepped out into the dark halls. As she walked in the darkness illuminated by her flashlight, she passed a dead security officer. She bent closer to the body, careful not to disturb it. Only very slight decay. The completely clean facility didn’t allow for anything that would decay these corpses further and the thin air helped to preserve them almost exactly as they had been the day they had died. She stepped over the body, forgetting about it entirely. She already had a target set of rooms in mind to build her machines.

She passed more bodies as she walked through the dead halls. None of those people knew what happened. The radiation had silently done its damage to their internal organs, showing no physical signs of its manifestation until finally the person fell asleep wherever they happened to be at the time. She pressed the button on the panel that controlled the door to a large lab she planned to use. Once the door’s locking mechanism clicked as a sign it was now unlocked, she pulled the door open and watched as a dead researcher slouched out, having fallen against the door when he had died years ago. She stepped over the body and examined the room, immediately finding that it suited her needs. She left the room with its door opened.

She looked around the dead rooms for a good thirty minutes before coming across something she could melt metal with. She took the device, putting an old yet well charged battery pack into it, and headed back to where she had first entered the section. She cut the bed free of the metal floor with the device, hauling the entire thing, body and all, out through the door to leave it abandoned in the hall. She quickly went to work, pulling unnecessary panels off the walls in the hallways and using them to wield all of the vents shut. Once finished, she cleared the room out of all loose items, tossing them into the empty room next door. She then dismantled the shower and sink, wielding shut all the pipes and tossing the scraps into the hall. A good two hours after starting, she stood, looking over at a completely barren room. It would work well as an airlock for the time being. She stepped back out into the hall, tracking down a replacement battery pack for the wielder. She quickly did the same thing she had just done to the room next to her temporary airlock.

Once finished, she shoved the bed and dead woman into that room, putting it close to the room’s own bed. She walked back down the hall, flashlight in hand, and was soon standing over the dead security guard. She clipped the flashlight to her collar and bent over, picking up the corpse by the arms and dragged it to the room where she had put the dead woman. She unceremoniously tossed the corpse into the corner of the room, turning to go get another body. She went through the entire subsection, dragging body after body to the room she had prepared for the corpses. Once she was done, over a hundred corpses filled the small room; every single person that had died in that subsection was tossed in there into a mangled heap of death.

She heaved the door shut, closing it with a click as the locks popped into place. She grabbed the wielder she had left in the hall and quickly wielded the door shut, sealing off the grave entirely. Just for extra measure, she destroyed the unlocking mechanism, not trying to hide anything at this point. She quickly collected up all the batteries she could for the device and went around to all the large doorways for the subsection, wielding all of them shut, destroying their circuitry so they could not be opened without brute force.

She collapsed against the wall after finishing permanently sealing the final door into the subsection. If she needed into the other parts of the sector, she would create airlocks out of the now-empty living quarters. She closed her eyes, leaning her head against the wall. She suddenly realized she was completely alone for the first time in her entire life. Not a single person, not even a dead one, was anywhere near her where she sat. She actually felt at home, at peace with the world, here in the dark halls of death. She liked the strange feeling and enjoyed it up to the point her implant suppressed it into oblivion. She stood, heading back to her quarters to shower and reactivate that subsection.

Every single night for an entire year she crawled into that hidden and sealed subsection, diligently constructing the machines she had designed. By the time she was finished, she had worn herself thin. Even her implant was experiencing difficulty keeping up with its original purpose. It was damaged, by both her exhaustion and the constant exposure to radiation during those first few months. By this point though, the radiation coating the entire sector had dwindled to almost nothing in this subsection, barely even a blip on her scanner. She had successfully sealed her ‘resurrection’ facilities off entirely from whatever had been continuously irradiating it. Exhausted, she requested and approved two weeks off. She slept most of that time away, only showing up in the cafeteria once or twice every day to eat a big meal. The final night of her mini-vacation, she secretly broke into the room of one of the lower-level lab assistants and made a perfect blueprint of the sleeping man’s body using resurrection scanners she had constructed. She fed these into her resurrection facility, letting it start working on reconstructing the assistant’s body.

As the reconstruction neared completion, she found herself hovering over the tank that the man’s reconstructed body lay in. An hour of waiting was quickly paid off when the body suddenly awoke with a gasp. She quickly made sure the resurrected man was a perfect duplicate, taking scan after scan and even talking to the disoriented man for a while. The moment she was satisfied that he was a perfect copy she snapped his neck, feeding the body back to the organic material reclamation tank. Unsurprisingly, the man’s original body has suddenly dropped dead right next to his boss in the middle of an experiment. The mortician that autopsied the body could not figure out why the man had dropped dead so suddenly.

A few months later, rather suddenly and unexpectedly, she received a communication from her handlers. They were satisfied with her work at keeping the project secret and were ready to pull her. She immediately made resurrection blueprints of herself and downloaded all her work onto disks. Once she had erased all traces of the data from the mainframes, she brought the disks into the resurrection facility and placed them in a pile right alongside the security uniform, the face-changing device, the guns, and everything else she had been stashing away for future use. She would need those things later. She quickly started up the machines. She stood over the makeshift tank she had resurrected that test subject in. It was already at work reconstructing her body. She had one month to insure she could never be followed. It only took her a few minutes to destroy the door she had built into the wall between her quarters and the resurrection facility, returning the wall to the way it had been more then a year ago.

She was soon back in the vehicle she had driven there in, driving away from three years of work.

--

Noack came to a halt in front of an apartment door simply labeled ’13,’ his hand hovering over the button that would signal the Mier inside that there was a visitor. He stared at his hand a moment, before letting it fall back to his side, leaving the button un-pressed. It wasn’t like the all of the Mier on that entire floor didn’t know he was there.

It wasn’t until a good ten minutes later that a very young black-haired girl opened the door. She looked young enough to be attending one of the higher-level schools, though her eyes could easily show a sadistic malice that no mere teen could ever have. He stayed perfectly straight where he stood, not saying a word and keeping his eyes locked forwards, trying his best not to acknowledge that she did not have a scrap of clothing on. He remained unmoving even when she wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing him passionately. After what felt like hours, she let go of him, letting him see disappointment on her face. Considering her talent, she was probably fascinated by his reaction, or rather lack of. “Still nothing?” she asked, sounding as if she was pouting. Getting no reply, not even a blink out of him, she smiled suddenly, “I will get some emotion out of you. Come on in.” He had no doubt that she would. She turned, walking over to a wall cabinet, picking up a glass as she walked. “I found a very interesting thing last time I was at the Imperial Palace.” She pulled a bottle out of the cabinet, making sure he saw the personal seal of the Emperor. “Supposedly the strongest alcoholic drink in the universe and has a taste to die for,” she poured herself a glass, an act that normal people would actually be put to death for. Even seeing the crime happen was punishable by death. She so easily blackmailed him in that instant, leaving no escape route that he could take away from it. So he remained motionless just inside her apartment room, staring straight ahead. She offered him the glass, “You might as well drink some, considering.” She waited a moment, and seeing that he remained perfectly still, quietly replied, “No? Have it your way then.” She sat down and quickly downed the entire glass not effected by it in the least - a ‘gift’ of her genetics.

Setting down the glass, she remained silent, watching him stew for a good thirty minutes. Finally, she sighed, “What do you have for me?”

“This envelope,” he replied and quickly handed her a metal box. She took it from his hand in such a way that her thumb rested over an engraved rectangle on the side of it. She continued watching him even as a thick liquid flowed out of the box, enwrapping her finger. Once it verified her genetics and that she was alive and well, part of the box opened, reveling a long cord that she quickly attached to the tiny implant just behind her left ear. Her eyes glazed over for a second as the information was pumped directly into her mind. A moment later the cord detached itself, letting a flap of skin reseal itself over the implant’s port to perfectly hide it.

Her eyes back to normal, she stared at the wall, deep in her own thoughts, processing the information for a moment using her implant to assist her biological mind. Noack could swear she was changing her own secret plans to compensate for whatever mission she was given. Suddenly she looked straight into his eyes, a strange half-smile on her face. It was unlike anything she had ever showed him in the past. Startled, his eyes looked straight at her. She laughed quietly to herself.

Her orders were very clear, kill Noack. Her handlers had no idea what they had done in giving her that order. For two weeks she had waited patiently for old blackmail on Noack to take effect. With just two days left until she would drop dead, they had opened exact window she had been looking for. She poured herself another glass of the emperor’s alcohol, “Sure you don’t want any?”

“Yes,” he replied, once again staring straight forward, his eyes locked in place.

“Suit yourself,” she replied, downing the entire glass in seconds. She set the glass down and reached inside one of the cabinets, pulling a device out of a hidden compartment. She showed it to him, “You know what this is?”

He glanced at it, puzzled, yet still answered, “A detonator.”

She nodded, “Let me tell you a secret.” She leaned close to his ear, whispering, “There are enough explosives stashed away in this room to completely vaporize this entire floor along with the two floors above and below us,” His head jerked to stare at her, actual fright in his eyes. She backed slightly away, speaking louder now, “Such a powerful explosion might even bring down this building.” She stared at the detonator in her hands, a finger gently caressing the button. “My orders are very clear. Kill you.” She looked at the terror in his eyes for a moment. “They don’t even realize the catastrophic mistake they made in giving me that order,” an evil little grin flashed across her face as she pressed her finger down on the button-

--

She suddenly jerked awake in a dimly lit room, coughing up thick fluid, her vision severely blurred. She sat up quickly, thick fluid sloshing around her as she continued coughing up more of the thick fluid. Once her coughing died down, still breathing quickly, she turned her head, very slowly taking in the fuzzy darkness. Her mind slowly pulled itself together in a flood of memories. The last thing she remembered was turning on the resurrection scanners that had made blueprints of her body. Eventually, her eyes cleared and focused enough that she could see a makeshift bed right next to the tank. She slowly and weakly rolled out of the tank onto the bed. She rolled over onto her stomach as best she could with numb limbs tingling with weak sensations. She passed out in seconds.

She woke slowly to the same dimly lit room, now seeing the only light was from a computer screen in the corner flashing brightly every few seconds. She rolled over, swinging her slowly strengthening limbs over the edge. She stumbled over to the computer, dropping down into the chair. The flashing was from a message on the screen: Resurrection Complete. Continue? She pressed continue, and watched as the room’s lights very slowly began to turn on. The system would automatically control the lighting for the next few days, fading the lights off for night, and on for day. She glanced at the computer’s clock. It was almost nightfall.

She opened a cabinet next to the computer, pulling out a sealed container that she had severe difficulty opening. She ate as much of the contents as she could, drinking a small amount of water to wash it down. She weakly went back to the bed next to the resurrection tank, passing out again the moment she laid down. It took her three days to be able to regain a normal sleeping pattern and start eating the normal three times a day. A week later she was back to normal.

As she sat in front of the computer terminal looking over the recorded progression of her resurrection, her fingers absently ran over the place behind her ear where the implant was supposed to be. It felt so strange now that it was gone. Apparently she had repaired all the missing tissues where the implant resided in the resurrection blueprints before starting up the machines. She had no memory past when she started making those prints, which was how it worked. It was just disconcerting that she had done things that she could never possibly remember. She was curious about how she had disposed of her old body, having not been able to so actively think about it before.

She shut off the computer screen. Everything had gone perfectly by the look of things.

That night she lay in her bed staring at the dark ceiling, feeling a strange mix of emotions flooding her mind that she had never been able to feel before. For the first time in her entire life she smiled completely her own, not as part of a show to someone else. She felt... It was hard for her to decide what the feeling was having never felt that way before. She settled on ‘happy’. She thought about how utterly alone she was, bringing back up the feelings that had been suppressed that time in the halls after she had finished sealing the subsection. She loved the feeling, immersing herself in it. She was truly alone now, even more so then that night now that the implant was gone. There was not a single person in the entire universe that could give her orders anymore; she was completely her own person now. Not constrained by a single thing, she was entirely free. She marveled at the thought. She had suddenly become far freer then anyone could ever be in the entire universe. Her Mier training had ripped inhibition, doubt, and all morals from her that all others were bound by. She knew she was evil, pure evil, considering she had no problems with outright and maybe even pointless murder. She was fine with that; those things would only serve to constrain her anyways.

She quickly realized there was only one final thing that she had to do before she could choose her own path. She had to exterminate every last one of those Handlers that would only seek to leash her again. Then annihilate the empire that had created them in the first place. Never again would she be caged like an animal. Never again.

Immortality Project (Cont.)

After over a month’s absence from the facility to take care of some family business, Agea came back to the facility to continue working. She quietly stepped into Dr. Veban’s lab, silently taking up a position next to the man. He looked at her with a smile, “Good to have you back Agea.”

She looked at him with a genuine smile, “Good to be back.”

Luckily, the very nature of her existence let her pick up the character she had left behind for herself. The handlers knew only small portions of the details of her cover, only that she had been sent there and pulled out later on. Agea. She had come to like the name and even had started honestly thinking of that as her real name.

As the days passed, she began hearing rumors about a government housing complex that had been partially destroyed. A massive explosion had instantly incinerated six floors of the building causing all the hundreds of floors above it to collapse down. From what she could gather, the explosion just happened to center around where she knew the Mier apartments resided. She quickly assumed that she had been the cause of that explosion, killing herself and all the Mier there in the process. The handlers would just send them after her anyways, if they found out about what she had managed to do. So it made sense that she would kill off as many of the possible hunters as she could while she had the perfect opportunity. She also noticed that there was a new head of security, the previous one had simply vanished a day after she herself had left. She also assumed she had played a role in that as well, even though the timing did not make sense.

While she was not helping advance the Immortality Project, she was quietly planning out how she would wipe out the handlers permanently. Considering her close proximity to where the decay weapon had been constructed, she decided that a modified version of that was her best bet. It was a simple weapon really, it just blasted an area with invisible particles that would rapidly accelerate the cells of everything those particles hit. These hyper-accelerated cells would break down extremely fast if the effected person were unable to keep up. As it was, it was useless to her needs. She needed something more thorough. Something that would tear down an empire. Something that they could not stop.

--

By the end of the year, one of the departments had a monumental breakthrough. They were able to stop the overall decay of a few cells entirely, so long as they were constantly subjected to the process the researchers used. If one cell died off a perfectly identical cell replaced it quickly. It was really just a focused version of the resurrection technology they had developed, but instead of rebuilding an entire body it rebuilt individual cells. It wasn’t long before they developed a way for the body itself to do the same thing.

Agea volunteered to be the first test subject, knowing full well that the procedure was safe. She had taken one of the researchers from the cloaking facility and tested the process on the man, watching the progression as it changed the man’s body. While the person had to eat and drink more then usual, it had worked. Of course, the first week of such a treatment was not a pleasant thing to watch.

She lay down on the medical bed, ready for the injection of cells that would slightly change how her body worked. A medical technician, standing over Agea with the almost archaic needle syringe, asked, “Agea, are you ready?”

“I am ready,” Agea said calmly. She had a very good idea of what she was about to go through, though the medical staff did not. She felt a slight prick in her arm followed by a strange sensation that was like a bubble of liquid in her veins under where the injection had taken only a second to complete. The medical staff should have bound Agea’s arms and legs, something they quickly realized as the injection went to work only seconds after pulling the needle out. Agea’s entire world vanished as searing heat burned around the injection site in Agea’s arm, in minutes spreading to her entire body. It felt like a red-hot wielder had been activated throughout her entire body. Her body convulsed, the medical staff were quick to hold her down while they quickly bound her body to the bed. It took thirty minutes for her to black out from the intense pain. Another ‘gift’ of her genetics-

Agea slowly woke drenched in sweat in a dimly lit room. She tried to move her arms, quickly finding them bound to the bed, along with her legs. A quiet voice somewhere out of sight spoke to her, “We almost thought we had lost you.” A woman wearing a lab coat stepped into view, “You’ve been unconscious for days.” The woman watched Agea tests the binds on her arms and legs, completely misinterpreting it, “You had gone through very violent seizures, so we were forced to bind your limbs so you would not hurt yourself.” Agea knew why the binds were there; they just made her very uneasy. It wasn’t until the next day that the binds were removed.

Over the course of the next few weeks, the medical staff as well as the researchers tested and retested Agea. It was much longer then they needed to, but that was the way of how they worked. They marveled at how well the test gone, soon declaring the project complete. A combination of the infinite longevity injection and the resurrection technology would make anyone willing to undergo the process immortal.

The upper levels of government were quick to undergo the process, considering the monumental benefits. Thinking they had suddenly become immune to death, they quickly unleashed their armies onto neighboring empires. They wiped out entire planets with weapons of decay, placing their Eagle banner on those conquered star systems. Before long, one of the other empires under threat of destruction, unleashed captured decay weapons down onto the capital world. Billions died in just hours during the bombardment. All that had undergone the immortality process were unaffected. The bombarding ships could not understand what was happening as the immortal soldiers annihilated them. Before long, other empires inexplicably became immune to the decay weapons as well, ending the war that had only taken place in months.

In just half a century, the wars between empires with immortality and empires without wiped out millions of planets, turning them into barren radioactive wastelands. An empire at the edge of the galaxy, just starting to face the threat of annihilation, was wiped out in the span of just days. When the battleships came to those planets, all they found were rapidly decaying corpses of humanity. It was almost as if the planets had been wiped out with decay weapons that somehow preserved the planet’s other forms of life. They quickly claimed the dead star systems as their own before returning to their homes, entirely unaware of the ticking time bomb they had become just by simply breathing the air near the decaying corpses. Almost silently, entire empires vanished at the edges of the galaxy. Like a shockwave, those that had managed to escape this new and unknown plague careened away from the death. These groups, survivors from many different empires that had fallen to the plague, destroyed each other without hesitation as they burned and pillaged worlds in their way. Before long, they all turned a plague none of them truly understood into a means to get resources. They infected planet after planet, helping the plague spread through humanity just so they could get enough resources to continue on.

Agea was the only person in the universe that was immune. So she watched, entirely alone on the sidelines, as the plague obliterated empire after empire. The plague, really the inverse of the infinite longevity injection in an airborne viral form, was perfectly fulfilling its sole purpose. Never again, she thought to herself, somehow horrified by the necessity she had unleashed.