A Sinner's Eden

***Tirnanog, Mount Aerie***

***Magnus***

"I am so sorry! Aaah!" Astra howled in agony as four people, one among them Thalia's father, gave it their all to set the bones of her broken arm and a dislocated shoulder. In theory, it sounded easier than it was in reality, considering the patient had reinforced bones and steel muscles that didn't play along. So, two people were holding onto Astra's torso while two more were pulling at her hand while manipulating the angle to set the bone and to realign her shoulder.

Meanwhile, I gave my best to stay still while Thalia tried to operate one of the many wooden splinters out of my cheek which barely missed my left second eye. When Astra's improvised saw-grinder disintegrated spectacularly, I barely managed to raise my arm and protect my eyes. It was a reflexive reaction and I hadn't considered the second set. Two centimetres lower and I would have been mostly fine.

“Don't pull a face!” Thalia reprimanded me. “It's already hard enough to pry this thing out without doing even more damage to your eye.”

“I am trying, but it feels like you are jamming your tweezers into my eye! Just pull the splinter out and be done with it. It hurts even more if you dig around trying to be gentle,” I complained.

Thalia gave a disgruntled huff and suddenly stabbed her tweezers into my skin, grabbing the splinter and jerking it out – and with it, the Second Sight on my left went all blurry.

“Fuck!” I cursed.

Thalia bent over me and frowned with a slightly intrigued expression. “Yeah, that's what I wanted to avoid. It's bleeding over into the sensory area of your second eye. Guess next time you might just give it more time?” She shrugged. “But whether it heals in a day or a week isn't my problem, is it?”

“You are an evil woman!”

She grinned.

An audible 'pop' and another scream signalled that the team of doctors finally managed to straighten Astra's arm and shoulder.

“I am so sorry, I wanted it to be a surprise,” Astra whimpered for the umpteenth time.

“Well, we are still here, so I guess it was a surprise.” I tried to console her but then thought better of it. We were playing with powers which could kill us if applied wrongly. The least we could do was to think before performing an experiment which involved the warping of space. “But next time you should at least speak to someone about it! What did you think would happen? Except for turning our quarters to smithereens.”

The security personnel thought someone tried to assassinate us till we explained everything.

“I imagined it would be like a saw grinder,” Astra admitted. “Something to cut through heavily armoured opponents.”

I snorted. “Yeah, as long as you don't lose control of the magnetic fields keeping the effect in place.”

“It shouldn't have been a problem!” She countered. “I went through it in my head several times and the Math panned out perfectly.”

“Except for when you spin something magnetic, like magnetized iron dust, inside a magnetic field, which then induces a second magnetic field! Like a dynamo! And when you stop the particles violently by ramming them into a resisting surface it destabilizes the whole system. Conservation of energy, Astra. As soon as the field collapsed, all that energy you pumped into it had to go somewhere. Either as heat, radiation, or kinetic energy. I am baffled. You invent an almost perfect energy storage system and your first inclination was to use it as a grinding tool.”

“Energy storage?” Astra sounded as if she hadn’t thought of the true potential of her idea at all.

“Yes, it's brilliant. Remove friction resistance by creating a localized area of warped space and wrap it in a flash step field. Now put a magnet inside it and you can spin it up as much as you want. It's a flywheel dynamo with almost limitless potential as long as you can keep paying the relatively minor upkeep cost,” I ranted. “It’s the holy grail of any society. Forget about energy generation. It’s energy storage that’s the real problem.”

“So, I am a genius!” She sounded like she just had an epiphany and was in awe of herself.

I pushed Thalia's tweezers out of my face and sat up to glare at Astra before I realized she was pulling my leg. She was grinning, so I raised a warning finger. “For that, you are the one who deals with the kids while we recover. Isaac will be over the hills once he learns that Mom is sick and has to stay at home.”

Astra winced. “You know, we are instilling the wrong message in them. Isaac is already of the opinion that his parents being sick is a good thing because then we have to stay at home.”

Thalia pushed me back down on the bed. “There is still a big one left. And over all that drama of you coming injured to the hospital, I didn't get the chance to tell you that Mark and I will get a little one too!”

“Congratulations!” Astra squealed but hissed when she tried to move her arm.

“Just one?” I asked.

“It's too early to judge. And now lean back, I have one more to get out.” Thalia pushed me back on the bed and a second later I had the tweezers once more in my line of sight.

While Thalia dug for the last splinter and Astra was patched up with a splint, I heard an angry scream which sounded like it came from the floor above us.

“Did you hear that?” I asked, wondering whether something nefarious was afoot.

“The scream?” Thalia shrugged. “That was Gurney. He moved into the floor above because they put all your organisation’s medical equipment there. The last few days he has been up in arms because his nanites are not behaving as they should. He is very upset because of it. I don’t think it’s as big of a problem as he makes it out to be. Just shows he isn’t perfect.”

“Moved in?” Astra asked, exhausted.

“Yeah, normally nobody lives in the hospital. Gurney got his quarters, but he never left his new workplace since they set it up for him. He is sleeping in the nurse’s ready room, so it’s not wrong to say he moved in,” Thalia explained. She bit her lower lip and finally pulled something large out of my cheek, holding the eight-millimetre splinter triumphantly for me to see. “And I managed it without scratching your eye further.”

“Thanks.”

“You are welcome.”

I got to my feet. “I think I will pay him a visit while they finish with you, Astra.”

“Aw…” Astra complained, but it couldn’t be helped. The doctors were in the process of fixating her arm with some sort of plaster cast.

Thalia gave me a sterile pad so I wouldn’t bleed all over the place and I was on my way while holding it against my cheek to stop the bleeding. There was no problem finding the stairs and getting cleared by two guards who were watching out for unauthorized personnel.

I found Gurney working with a few more people from the ninth strata. There were also people who I recognized from my days in the organisation, giving me the distinct impression at least a few were solely there to watch Gurney.

He was handling a machine connected to a touchscreen while a computer next to him displayed a sequence of numbers. The small size of the computer made it obvious that the thing was just an interface connected to the colony’s supercomputer.

“Hey, Gurney! What are you using our limited resources for? I hope you know we won’t get more of these if you break something?”

“Of course, I know! Do you think I am a fool?” Gurney barked back while he turned to me, only to grimace once he got a good look. “By all that’s holy! What happened to your face, Magnus? Did you think it was a bright idea to inspect a sandblaster from up close while it was turned on?”

“Ah, just a little accident while trying to get a grip on our abilities.” I waved it off. “I was just in for treatment a floor below when I heard your plight about your new accommodations.”

Gurney harrumphed. “If it just would be that easy. No. What has me so frustrated is that my nanites are going haywire!”

“They are?” I asked. “I hope you are not talking about the ones messing with our DNA.”

“What other nanites are there which could hold my interest?” Gurney shook his head.

“So?”

He gestured at his equipment. “I designed those things for a very specific purpose. Namely, to regulate the recombination virus which is responsible for our mutations. They are to act as a part of our immune system and weed out any unwanted irregularities. Autoimmune reactions, cancerous cells, deviating DNA. It’s far from a perfect system, but they are not, and I repeat, not supposed to do anything else!”

“But they do,” I stated the obvious conclusion. “What exactly is the problem? Isn’t it possible that Earth made some alterations while you weren’t ‘practising’?”

Gurney shot me a disapproving glare. “Those fools can try all the alterations they want, but none have any meaning. I would have never unleashed a horde of self-replicating nanomachines if I believed there was the slightest chance of them being altered by my enemies or jumping host species. They do a regular majority check of their functions, not only within the host but also by utilizing the UI network with other hosts. It’s a hard-coded core function. Even if some smartass from Earth introduced a new version, it would be subsumed by the non-corrupted originals as soon as the host enters a settlement and his nanites link up with the rest. The older version would always be recognized as the not corrupted one.”

Or till Gaia takes control and starts messing with their programming on a planetary scale. Shouldn’t be a problem for an entity spanning all of humanity.

“Huh…” I raised an eyebrow, nonetheless surprised by this information. And there my people had always worried about getting the right nanites when there was never a true threat. “I honestly didn’t know that. So all the experiments done by Earth?”

Gurney waved a hand. “Small alterations in function and prioritization of mutations at most. Maybe some managed to affect the very first mutation an exile got. In the long run, it doesn’t matter because they are functional for a limited amount of time at most. As I said, I was very careful not to create something with the potential to wipe out humanity. If I had allowed any idiot to change my nanites I bet we wouldn’t be talking to each other right now.”

“So what has you in such a tizzy?” I asked.

“The nanites, they do things they aren’t supposed to do!” He balled his hands to fists and shook them. “It’s like they evolved on their own while I couldn’t monitor them! Widened their functionality on their own.”

I blinked. “Like what? You are repeating yourself.”

“A myriad of small things, but all together it adds up!” He pointed at his tablet. “Hormonal control, lowering the inhibition threshold for unpartnered people. Taking charge of the immune system in case something threatens them. Since your people’s arrival, I had the chance to monitor the partnering of forty-seven couples. The nanites are using hormones to actively influence people whose mutations are compatible. They induce a second puberty!”

“Like mind control?” I asked.

He snorted. “Please, it's hormones. Nothing as nefarious as a psychic.”

I let out a sigh of relief. “Oh, that’s good.”

“No! It’s not good. Why am I the only one who sees the problem? Evolving nanites are bad, especially if they follow an unknown agenda! And I am not completely certain yet, but I think we observed at least one case in which they aborted a malformed fetus!”

I massaged my chin, wondering how to handle this. “It sounds like they perfectly integrated themselves with their hosts and are working towards their benefit. And while someone with a higher moral agency than I would have to judge your last point, you haven’t told me anything inherently bad from my point of view.”

Gurney shook his head, seemingly lost at my lack of a reaction. “I am surrounded by idiots.”

“Have you considered whether there is a commonality to all the new functions?” I asked. “An overarching goal they achieve? A guiding will, so to say?”

Gurney looked at his data and then at me. “I already explained why changing my nanites is impossible!”

“Nonono, Gurney. That’s not correct. You just told me you can alter their function if you can reprogram the majority of nanites in one fell swoop,” I pointed out. “At least that’s how I understood your explanation.”

Gurney gaped at me like a fish before he began working his mouth, but not a single sound came out.

It was then that I got a UI message marked as urgent.

I didn’t have to read all of it to get excited. “I am very sorry, Gurney. I just got a very exciting message and I have to run. I will drop in on you at the next opportunity to check whether you solved your little problem.”

Turning abruptly, I ended my visit as spontaneously as I started it.

Walking at a speed between forced marching and jogging, I rushed to the wormgate, barely remembering to inform Astra of my departure.

From there I returned to the flagship and gathered a few things before I made my way to the cells, elated at the new development.

Meanwhile, my sub-personalities were running hot with theories and possibilities.

Somehow, a patrol had caught Zacharias – or at least one of them. He was already imprisoned and being interrogated by Vanya.

Not more than twenty minutes later, I burst into the prison cell where Vanya stood with the ancients Mary and Felix, facing the prisoner. Gunnar was also present and taking notes. Zacharias was strung up upside down with his hands and feet pinned to the wall. His bindings were oversized steel shackles, leaving no doubt that even someone with above-average strength would have trouble freeing himself.

“I hope I didn’t miss anything?” I smiled and set up the folding deck chair I brought. Taking a seat and leaning back, I pulled the box with my refreshments closer and chose a cooled drink flavoured with some fruit mix. The caboose staff hadn't been happy when I requisitioned the items on the fly.

“No, he hasn’t talked too much since we got him,” Gunnar replied slowly. “Excuse me, but what are you doing?”

“I am watching,” I replied cheerfully.

“Ah, if it isn’t Magnus,” Zacharias spoke, drawing everyone’s attention. “I wondered when you would show up. I assume you have many questions.”

“No, not really.” I popped off my drink’s cork cap and took a sip. It was the preferred way of bottling liquids on Tirnanog. “Asking you questions is just as dangerous as allowing you to run around the ship. You would inevitably learn what we want to know since I assume you are still connected with your clones. And knowing what your enemy wants to know is sometimes just as important as knowing things about him.”

Zacharias frowned. “Don’t you want to know what happened to your sister?”

“Of course I do.” I shrugged. “But I suppose you will tell me what you want to tell me and that’s it. You are an ancient with multiple bodies, so nothing I can do to you would truly affect you. There is no way of knowing whether you are telling the truth. If Vanya could do anything, you wouldn’t have allowed this clone of yours to be caught alive so easily. I have fought you, and I don’t believe for a moment some random group of scouts could apprehend you if you had resisted. So you are here because you hope you can learn something, or because you want to tell us something. Either way, I will get what I want out of this.”

“Which is?” Zacharias looked intrigued.

I slowly relaxed in my chair. “I strongly believe you are somehow involved in my sisters’ abduction. Why else would you know us by name? I don’t think of myself as a murdery person. Watching others suffer doesn’t give me anything, except for when they did something to me or mine. And you are too dangerous to imprison. So, even if it is just a foretaste of what is to come, I will just sit here and enjoy the sights till you croak.”

Zach laughed. “You are one sick motherfucker. So, should we start the meeting?”