Mary Swift was an adventurous girl—a trait which brought her brother endless grief and now reared its head once again.
She also loved orange juice. Shayara and Erika discovered this as Mary downed her fifth cup, shivering with pure delight.
The two Omics exchanged uncertain glances. At least the girl preferred cold beverages over traditional hot drinks; Erika's only experience with hot luxury imports involved knowing smugglers who snuck overpriced beans past Rift Line checkpoints. They all said the same thing: expensive.
"This is incredible," Mary declared, eyes sparkling with entrepreneurial fire. "Who made this? Is he open to carbonating it?"
"It's Baldwin," Erika replied. "And I don't know his stance on fizzy drinks."
"Oh, he'll warm to the idea," Shayara—an acquaintance of Baldwin—confirmed. She redirected the conversation with a tone heavy enough to create a singularity. "But are you certain about volunteering first?"
Mary drew a deep breath, ran her calculations one final time, and nodded with conviction.
The two Omics exchanged glances. They had different backgrounds, but recognized the same desperation. Mary's military discharge clearly drove this decision, but convincing someone motivated by powerlessness to reconsider seemed impossible.
Her recklessness served their needs perfectly. One volunteer might cause the cascade effect they hoped for. Still, sending a sixteen-year-old girl to the Rebirth Waterfall first left Erika nauseated.
"Are you certain?" Shayara asked, masking her hope that Mary would reconsider.
"Shouldn't you be enthusiastic about me volunteering?" Mary asked. She couldn't believe how difficult it was to become a test subject. "You want me as a lab rat, right?"
"First, you're not—"
"I know what I am," Mary stated flatly.
"No." Erika interrupted this time. "Lab rat implies this procedure is experimental. It's not. Wonderweiss already ran simulations, and—" She paused, struggling to explain how the planet beneath their feet had given its approval. "Well, we have guarantees it works."
Mary blinked and reached for another cup of orange juice. "I'll trust your word. When do we begin?"
"The lab is free, right?" Shayara asked, hoping for a 'no'.
"It is," Erika answered with much consternation. "How old are you again? Should we ask your brother? He's your guardian, isn't he?"
Mary blinked. "No one asked these questions when I enlisted in the Militia."
Erika set aside the numb existential horror: she'd grown up under a regime so corrupt that a nascent organization—one answering to a living planet and its Favored Child—showed more ethical concern in its first hundred days than High Terraria had in a hundred years.
With excuses exhausted, both Omics escorted Mary to the Rebirth Waterfall. The automatic doors opened to reveal the sight they should have expected.
Lemuel Swift—Mary's protective brother—glowering at his little sister. Helena Christy hung behind him, hunched over a monitor, scanning files with a deepening frown.
Mary held her breath—a childhood habit whenever Lemuel gave her 'the look'—and ducked behind Erika. She'd learned about full Omic physiological advantages. Lemuel might be strong, but not strong enough to fight a woman whose muscles could withstand deep-sea pressure.
"Mary," Lemuel spoke, unamused.
"Quiet down," Helena scolded, completely ignoring them. Any shame, or care, of being caught in espionage had long since died at the beginning of her career. "I'm trying to decipher the code in this report."
"I don't think anything on that computer is encrypted," Shayara offered helpfully. The two Omics shared a glance and came to the agreement it would be better for everyone to leave the girl with the dead-man switch alone with her obsession.
"Doesn't matter," Erika almost pitied the furious legendary outlaw. "You can't convince a five-year-old who doesn't understand light refraction that there's no pot of gold at rainbow's end."
Lemuel sighed, accepting that being ignored had become his defining trait. Instead, he directed his attention toward Mary's improvised shield. "Did she volunteer?"
Shayara felt relief—a rare luxury in these trying times—and answered in the calmest, most collected voice she could manage. "Yes, she did." She ignored Mary's silent pleading and continued. "I take it you expected this."
"She's been down ever since the—" Lemuel avoided his sister's downcast expression. "—the incident." He made up his mind. "Forget Mary. I'm going first."
"You're not stopping her?" Erika asked.
"Mary. Will you stop because I say so?"
"I totally would!" Mary shrieked in a high-pitched lie no one believed.
"There you go. I can't stop her when she sets her mind to something," Lemuel sighed. "Best I can do is clear the minefield."
Erika noticed Mary avoiding her brother's eyes in guilt. Part of her felt touched. Another part couldn't help but admire the man's stupidity and brilliance. If the procedure failed and he died, Mary would never face danger. If it succeeded, Lemuel lived another day. People often confronted no-win scenarios—Erika herself barely escaped hers, thanks to Helena's self-sabotaging paranoia—but few would sacrifice themselves to escape the impossible choice.
"Don't try to sound so noble," Helena mumbled, somehow loud enough for everyone to hear. "You're just afraid the procedure will make Mary stronger than you, and you'll never live it down."
The silence echoed through the room.
"Ignore her and show me the tank," Lemuel said.
Erika and Shayara followed suit. As far as anyone was concerned, Helena had never spoken those words aloud. Mary committed her brother's stricken expression to memory—something she felt confident would cheer her up on rainy days—while trying to ignore his wounded, pleading glare.
As for Helena, she banged her head against the table, still unable to crack the mysterious (nonexistent) cipher hidden within the report about some orphan and his childhood friend defeating a sea monster.
This damn cipher was, without a doubt, the greatest challenge of her life.
This nonsensical story stood between Helena and everything she needed to know. She'd unearthed clues about Wonderweiss's secret project, leveraged every piece of blackmail to get aboard. The truth about Millennium Entropy lay within reach—if she could cross this final barrier. Whatever they were hiding behind this cipher had to be catastrophic.
She wasn't disappointed by the resistance. Many would dismiss Erika as some bureaucratic clerk, but Helena recognized calculated misdirection in every word. The woman had even managed to recruit Mary to their cause through careful manipulation. Helena wasn't intimidated. Her insurance files were distributed across multiple caches—they couldn't silence her even after she'd effortlessly penetrated their pathetic computer defenses.
But Helena had to credit her opponent's skill. Erika concealed her true nature behind a perfect administrative facade. The woman felt nothing—absolutely nothing—when cornered. Most telling was how Erika had casually allowed her to copy additional files onto the datapad: an obvious psychological ploy. The message was clear: they were confident she couldn't break their encryption. They even egged her on to keep trying.
Helena smirked. They were underestimating her, just like everyone always had.
She would show them all.
After all, that bedrock was who Helena Christy was.
In happier times—better times—she would have been hailed as a prodigy. She mastered cartography and algebra by age seven. Numbers were her playground. Her family—the closest thing to lower middle-class in a world some malevolent force had decided to make cruel—enlisted her in the Militia at fifteen. She aced every assessment, a cohort first.
Many friends believed they'd be calling her General Christy before her thirtieth birthday.
Everything changed during her first deployment against Millennium Entropy.
She didn't balk or turn coward. The looming demonic titans and sorcerous imps casting impossible Wizardry chilled her spine, but she held her ground. Through superior logistics, grim determination, and luck, she emerged victorious as the contested planet bled and burned around them.
Her curiosity had changed, though. She wanted to understand her enemies: their origins, motivations, ultimate goals. Innocent Helena shared these questions with her superior.
The teacher's pet received no glowing praise—only reprimands and stern warnings. That particular superior, whose name she'd deliberately forgotten, reported her concerns upward. Soon her career stagnated in thankless desk positions, burdened with pressure to marry some High Terraria noble whose bulk exceeded his brain.
Smart enough to recognize her military time was finished, she quit in fitting rebel fashion: by setting her office ablaze.
Legendary outlaw Helena Christy was born that day, but the itch remained. Her competency grew with her infamy, as did her need to know.
And that conviction, combined with her stubborn ego and misdirected genius, had kept her glued to the cipher for days on end. The truth behind everything must lie beneath this secret encryption, the greatest ever produced.
When she broke it, she would have the key to all of Wonderweiss's secrets.
Or so she believed it should go.
"Still haven't cracked it?" Mary asked. They were waiting outside Lemuel's room in the medical wing.
Helena groaned. "I tried binomial, several old High Terraria ciphers, I even whipped up decryption software," she muttered to herself. "Is this entire story about Edgar Shin written in anagrams?"
Mary watched the smartest woman she knew fruitlessly bang her magnificent brain against a wall. The outlaw had already exhausted most methods she could recall.
At this point, the young girl suspected the code might be nonexistent. The notion flickered through her mind before she dismissed it. The story in the record was too unbelievable to be real.
"If traditional cryptography won't work, I need social infiltration," Helena muttered. An idea—something so utterly ludicrous she would never entertain under normal circumstances—crept into her mind. "Should I undergo this Omic procedure and infiltrate their organization?"
"I thought you didn't trust the process."
"I might not have—"
Then something clanged on the floor from Lemuel's room, accompanied by frantic noise.
"No! Mirror! Someone give me a mirror!"
The two women looked at each other and burst into Lemuel's room.
Two days ago, Lemuel had volunteered for the Rebirth Waterfall. They'd observed the process—it resembled a normal medical checkup with blood tests and injections administered by Shayara and the facility's AI, Artemis—right until Lemuel was sealed inside a medical capsule and submerged in the glowing blue pool at the chamber's center.
Twenty-four hours later—during which the two women waited, practically camping at the facility—the capsule was lifted out. Cracking it open revealed Lemuel, largely unchanged save for certain improvements. His muscles appeared more pronounced; something Helena decided to study appreciatively before redirecting her gaze to his face. Mary, meanwhile, was more fascinated by the gills flanking his sides.
Lemuel had slept another day before waking up screaming for a mirror. Thankfully, he found one in the room as the two women charged inside.
"What's wrong?"
Lemuel rubbed his face in relief, confirming nothing was missing.
"I had the most terrifying dream," he explained. "Lightning cracked. I became some kind of shell-covered chitinous monster."
The two women exchanged glances.
"That's new. And I thought I'd already seen everything," Helena muttered.
Another person chose that moment to walk through the open door: Erika.
"Glad to see you're awake," she said, pulling out a clipboard. "Are you fit for walking?"
"Yes," Lemuel paused. "As a matter of fact, I think I'm fit enough to do anything."
"Hmm, let's put that statement to the test, shall we?"
And she did test him. After downing several energy bars and nutrient supplements—a stopgap measure to compensate for what the genome alteration and new organ growth had drained—Lemuel went to the gym. He moved from weights to treadmills, revealing he was several times stronger than before.
"That weight is about 150 kilograms," Erika whistled as she checked the monitor. The other two watched speechlessly as Lemuel barely breathed hard handling superhuman weight. Helena in particular couldn't take her eyes off how his Prismatic Fiber coverall hugged tight against those moving muscles.
"Is that normal?" Mary asked, fearing her older brother had become a muscle-bound freak.
"Well, my limit is around 95 kilos and I know someone who can push 200," Erika replied airily, completely oblivious to Mary's gaping mouth.
Things went smoothly until the basic intelligence tests. Lemuel aced the pattern recognition assessment. Helena believed even she could have done better—after all, she'd been hailed as a genius. This minor consolation lasted until he beat her at chess and war game simulations.
It was a new experience. Helena had never lost like this before.
"How do you keep winning?" she screeched, struggling to keep up. Something in the pit of her stomach felt like fear. The problem wasn't their knowledge of the game—she might even edge him in that department. It was that Lemuel's brain worked much faster than hers.
Originally, this wouldn't be a problem. A child could work out the same moves as a grandmaster with unlimited time. But when the countdown timer created pressure tighter than a vise, and a half-second advantage opened gaps wider than oceans, Helena found herself losing.
"You take too long to make decisions," Lemuel made his moves instantly and pressed his timer.
Helena studied the board, analyzed it, and made her countermoves. It took ten seconds longer than Lemuel, and fifteen moves later the delay snowballed into defeat.
And to her horror, Mary watched the entire thing.
"Awesome," Mary turned toward Shayara, who entered with a compact. "Wait, you have makeup? And is this super intelligence normal for every Omic?"
"Baldwin's newest cosmetic product," Erika—who recorded the score, Helena: 5 to Lemuel: 17—answered. "It's designed to stick underwater and work on Omic skin." She turned toward the girls with eyes shining with possibility. "And yes, we get enhanced memory on top of thinking speed." She felt a jabbing pain in her spine. "Trust me, it's not always pleasant."
"Cool." If Mary had any remaining reservations about the procedure, they vanished into the wind. "When can I get my own dip?"
Helena heard every word. Mary's innocent enthusiasm felt like salt on an open wound. A series of devastating prophecies played in her mind.
Why are you so slow, Helena?
Look, I beat you again!
Isn't it normal to draw this schematic during a morning run? What do you mean you can't do that, Helena?
It was the final straw.
The incomprehensible cipher was bad. Getting demolished at strategy games by Lemuel felt like someone massaging her stomach with an axe. But it would be nothing compared to the humiliation she'd feel if Mary said those words to her. Enough was enough. Helena made up her mind.
Screw Homo sapiens. Time for organizational infiltration. She wiped her sweat with renewed determination. Humanity was a broad concept anyway. If growing gills brought her closer to success, the gamble couldn't be better. She'd risked at least that much when she poured fuel in her office.
Days later, the group discovered three of their own had undergone the procedure. The cascade effect promptly set in.
Their reasons differed. Most men were sold when Lemuel lifted 200-kilo reps. The fact that Omic women were substantially more beautiful than baseline humans might have played a part in convincing them the grass was greener on the transhuman side of the debate.
But every woman present only needed to hear one thing from Helena to be convinced.
"I think my metabolism processes nutrients much more efficiently," the outlaw said post-transformation, checking her hair, which had turned several shades whiter. She looked into the mirror and admired her new glorious gold eyes. "Well, I don't think diet is going to be a problem anymore."
The women of the group took one envious look at Erika's body—particularly where they believed fat normally went—and rushed to sign up faster than Erika could register.
The first phase had been a success.