“What I’m about to show you is not public knowledge,” Julia says, leading me down the hall. “I’m trusting you with this because I believe you’re intelligent enough to understand its significance and professional enough to represent it fairly.”
“Well, thank you. I appreciate your confidence.”
“Confidence has nothing to do with it.” She stops outside a door marked simplySuite 7and presses her palm against a scanner. “This is about making sure you understand what Vanguard is and what it takes to…maintain him.”
The door slides open, and I follow her inside.
The room is smaller than I expected, maybe twenty feet square, dominated by a single piece of equipment at its center. It takes me a moment to understand what I’m looking at.
It’s a chair. Not a simple one, but a reclining apparatus of chrome and leather, with padded restraints at the wrists and ankles and a curved headpiece studded with electrodes. Screens and monitors surround it, currently dark, and cables snake from the headpiece to a bank of computers against the wall.
It looks like something out of a nightmare, or maybe a horror film about mad scientists.FrankensteinmeetsMarathon Man.
“This is our enhancement maintenance suite,” Julia says, her voice perfectly casual, as if she’s showing me a conference room. “When you push the human body beyond its natural limits, it requires regular calibration. Tune-ups, if you will, like a high-performance vehicle.”
“You mean Vanguard…”
“Sits in this chair every month.” She runs her hand along the armrest, almost lovingly. “The process takes approximately four hours. It’s not painful. He doesn’t really feel pain in general, as you may know, but we sedate him regardless. Without regular calibration, the enhancements begin to degrade. Muscle control deteriorates. Cognitive function becomes erratic. The body, quite simply, starts to reject what we’ve done to it.”
I’m surprised at the part of him not really feeling pain, but I file that away in the back of my head. Instead, I stare at the chair, imagining Nate strapped to it. The idea of seeing him helpless and unconscious while Julia and her team do whatever they do to keep him functional is unsettling.
“That sounds…” I search for an innocuous word. “Invasive.”
“Progress often is.” She moves toward the door, apparently done with this room. “This way. There’s more to see.”
I follow her back into the corridor, my mind racing.Regular calibration. Sedated. Erratic cognitive function.Are they ableto, like, control him in any way? Is he aware of this? He seems to be of the mind that he has autonomy, but how much does he even know about what they do?
The next laboratory is larger, brighter, filled with equipment I don’t recognize and some I do—glass tanks filled with viscous fluid, robotic arms performing delicate operations, screens showing what look like cell structures dividing and multiplying.
“Our synthetic biology division,” Julia announces, a note of pride creeping into her voice. “This is where the real magic happens.”
She leads me past rows of tanks, each containing something organic and unsettling—a length of muscle fiber suspended in gel, what looks like a section of skin growing on a frame, a pulsing mass that might be cardiac tissue, all completely disgusting. I can’t help but feel a little nauseated.
“When Vanguard is injured—which happens more often than the press knows—we can repair him at the cellular level,” Julia explains. “He heals fast, no doubt, but injuries can take their toll over time. Here, we can grow replacement tissue matched perfectly to his genetic profile. Skin, bone, muscle. Anything the human body can produce, we can replicate and improve upon.”
“Um, where do you get the base genetic material?” I ask, keeping my voice neutral despite the chill running down my spine.
“Various sources. Volunteers, primarily.” She pauses by one of the tanks, watching something pink and glistening pulse with artificial life. “The enhanced program requires a significant pool of biological data. Tissue samples. Genetic profiles. The more diverse our database, the more effective our treatments will be.”
Volunteers.I think of Kozlov at the gala, shaking hands with Matthew Webb. I think of the Prometheus files and their horrifying failure rates. I think of refugees and migrants and people desperate enough to sign anything for a chance at a betterlife, because they were told things in the USwouldbe better now.
“That must require quite a recruitment effort,” I say carefully.
“It does.” Her eyes meet mine, narrowing just a little. “We have partnerships with various organizations around the world. Medical facilities. Research institutions. Immigration services.”
Immigration services.
“Shall we continue?” Julia gestures toward another door. “I’ve saved the most interesting part for last.”
The final room is the largest yet, a circular space lined with screens, dozens of them, all displaying streams of data I can barely parse. Numbers scrolling, graphs fluctuating, images cycling—and at the center of it all, a massive holographic display showing what appears to be a human body, rendered in blue light, rotating slowly.
It takes me a moment to recognize the figure.
Vanguard.
“Our biometric monitoring center,” Julia says, and there’s no mistaking the pride in her voice now. “From here, we can track our enhanced assets anywhere in the world. Every vital sign. Every movement. Every fluctuation in their physical and psychological state.”
“Assets?” I say. “Plural?”
