Manageable.As if Vanguard were a dog to be leashed.
“Heismanageable,” Julia says evenly. “What you’re seeing is a minor deviation. He’s forming an attachment. It happens occasionally. The psychological template we built on had strong bonding instincts, protective impulses. It’s part of what made him an effective soldier and the perfect candidate for the program.” She pauses. “Those instincts don’t disappear simply because he graduated. They adapt, find new targets.”
“And this journalist is his new target?”
“It appears so, though I suspect it’s novelty more than anything genuine. He hasn’t had much opportunity for meaningful connection. We’ve kept him isolated by design.” Julia allows herself a thin smile. “He’s simply responding to the first person who’s treated him as something other than a product.”
“What are our options?” Marsh asks.
“I’ll speak with him. Remind him of his priorities. His responsibilities.” Julia keeps her voice light, unconcerned. “He responds well to direct guidance.”
“And if that doesn’t work?”
Julia meets his eyes. “Then we have contingencies. The neural implant we installed during his last enhancement isn’t just for monitoring his vitals. If he ever truly went off the rails—became a liability—we could activate the failsafe, trigger a shutdown.”
“We’ve never done that before. You don’t even know if it works.”
“Then we’ll tweak it some more.” She waves a hand dismissively. “But we’re nowhere near that point. This is a distraction, not a defection.”
Marsh’s shoulders relax slightly. He likes having a kill switch. It makes him feel powerful, as if he doesn’t have enough power already.
“Handle it,” he says. “I want him back on script.”
“Of course.” Julia rises, smoothing her jacket. “I’ll have a report on your desk by morning.”
She’s almost to the door when Marsh speaks again. “This journalist. Should I be concerned about her?”
Julia considers the question. There is something about Mia, something that trips her alarm bells quietly, but she just can’t put her finger on it.
“I’m looking into it,” she says, “but for now, let’s focus on what we can control.”
The sublevel laboratories are quiet at this hour. Julia walks the sterile corridors alone, her heels echoing off concrete walls, until she reaches the room she thinks of as her chapel.
The monitoring station fills one wall—screens displaying Vanguard’s location, his vitals, neural activity in real time. She can see him now, a blinking dot on the Manhattan grid, currently at his penthouse. Heart rate elevated. Dopamine levels higher than baseline.
He’s thinking about her. She just knows he is.
The pesky journalist.
Julia pulls up his emotional mapping, watching the neural patterns pulse and shift. The tech is still quite new and not always reliable, but there’s a new cluster of activity, bright and insistent, centered around memory centers she knows intimately. Attachment. Attraction. The beginning of something that could become problematic if left unchecked.
She doesn’t want to take the chance and doesn’t want to dismiss it. She could, of course, intervene directly, call him in for a routine calibration, adjust his neurochemistry until Mia Baxter becomes nothing but a mild curiosity. She’s done it before—there was a handler, early on, who got too close. That problem was corrected swiftly without him ever knowing.
But heavy-handed intervention leaves traces, makes him suspicious. And a suspicious Vanguard is a dangerous one.
Better to be patient. Let this play out a little longer. See what the journalist is really after, and whether Vanguard’s fascination burns itself out naturally.
And if it doesn’t…well, she has options.
Julia touches the screen, tracing the outline of his neural signature with one finger. Her creation. Her masterpiece. The man Nate Whitaker used to be is gone—buried beneath layers of genetic modification and conditioning. What remains is Vanguard.
And Vanguard belongs to her.
“He is mine, in the end,” she murmurs to the empty room. “I made him.”
She pulls up Mia’s file again, studying the photograph. So pretty and young.
But so very temporary.
