1 AE-Virus

A humanoid organism was looking out of a giant window looking into the darkness of space. If you were close enough, you would be able to see metal fibers moving like water over its skin. Its eyes were pitch black not showing any hint of emotion. You could see a reflection of a white ring of light from what it was observing outside.

Azoth was looked out of the giant window into the Secretion disks of the quasar black holes in the Binary black hole system outside. "Another day of research has begun." A monotone masculine sounding voice echoed in the transparent corridor he was standing in. He turned around and walked through an automated door behind him.

Azoth is a Scientific Researcher. As one of the best in his field, he has his own space station to conduct his research within. Due to the secrecy of his research, and the danger it would cause if it escaped, his space station is in between two quasar black holes in the same binary black hole system. The regular quasar blasts help to hide any radiation from his research facility which could be used to track him and makes sure that any of his test subjects can't survive outside of the research facility.

---

Azoth floated into an empty room.

"Activate artificial gravity"

[Artificial gravity activated] A monotone voice replied within his head.

If you were observing the room from outside of the space station, you would see a circular section which looked like a ring, begin to rotate slowly. Azoth floated towards the floor of the room and walked to a small stage at the center of the room. when he stepped on the stage two cylinders came out of the ground and morphed into a chair and a curved table around him. Azoth sat down and rested his arms on the armrest on the chair. After getting comfortable he stared in front of him above the empty table.

"Show me research subjects 3.5 trillion to 4 trillion." Azoth said to the empty room. Nothing happened in the room. But you could see Azoth's eyes analyzing something in front of him.

If you are confused why nothing was in front of him. That is because the data was being sent directly to his brain and overlaid over his eyes' vision.

Azoth was looking at around 50 billion boxes in front of him. In each one, you could see a different creature in a controlled habitat. "What happened to the other four hundred fifty billion test subjects?" he asked to his surroundings.

[80% of the failed test subject obtained tumors and died a few days after being infected. The data shows that it is most likely because the AE-virus rapidly evolved errors in their DNA causing the growth of a large cluster of non-functioning cells stopping most of their internal organs from functioning. Also, the data shows that the older the creature, the less likely they are to survive.]

"Pretty good for the Eighth beta version of the virus." Azoth said as he was rubbing his chin while thinking about the data. "what about the remaining 20% of the failed subjects?"

[The remaining 20% inhibit an increase in hunger and aggression to their own raise. This is most likely because the Virus is Constantly draining their energy. The only way for them to stop it is by eating the flesh of successful test subjects as the virus has already started symbiosis with its host and drains less energy from them. Consuming it would slow the growth of their tumours, with a small chance of the virus accepting them. This would destroy all tumours and have a small chance of them gaining the pasts hosts abilities through DNA fusion.]

"Um, seems pretty good so far." Azoth nodded his head when hearing the AI's explanation. "If we program the virus to store the DNA of its hosts and compare each cell's DNA then we can make it remove the errors in the DNA which should increase the success rate exponentially," Azoth said as he was thinking of a solution to the problem.

In front of Azoth, a 3D hologram of the DNA of the AE-Virus was rotating. A small section of the DNA double helix was highlighted in red. Azoth was reading the area in red then said "Replace this area of the DNA with an artificial version. That way it can store the hosts DNA in a database. And the data can also be stored on a server so we can keep track of the mutations."

[How large should the database be?]

"At the moment, the virus can only improve a host Once. Since the virus needs to replicate itself and needs to rebuild the cells of its host, it needs to keep a copy of the cell's DNA and its own DNA then we need a minimum of 2 storage locations. However, since we want it to also collect many samples of the hosts DNA so that it can improve the hosts DNA continuously then we either have as many spaces as possible, which is the easier root, or we can make it compare the DNA at short intervals and make an improved copy from them, so it can delete the old copies.

Since we want it to be continuously functioning then the second option is a lot better since it will always have free space but the 'improved' DNA would be made from smaller sample sizes so there are higher chances of unintended mutations.

To stop this, we should make the viruses already in the nucleus of the cells to send a copy of themselves to other cells and give their 'improved' version of the DNA to the virus controlling the cell. We should call these viruses, Messenger Viruses or MAE-Virus for short. They will only need a copy of the improved DNA and don't need to take over a cell, so we can make them smaller and make more of them, making the spread of 'improved' DNA quicker."

The AI was making changes in real time as Azoth was talking. When it was finished making the changes a new model came up showing two different Virus models. A small MAE-Virus and a larger AE-Virus. The MAE-Virus was around a tenth of the size of the bigger AE-Virus.

[Models complete]

"Good. Start the production of the AE-Virus Beta 0.9 and test it on the next test group. Tell me the results after all test subjects have started mutating." As Azoth was saying this he was walking out of the room. The artificial gravity automatically stopped. From outside of the space station, you could see that the spinning ring was slowing down to stop.

Azoth walked into the transparent corridor he was in before. From inside, you could see all the other van Braun wheels spinning at different speeds like the room he was just in. There were 10 smaller rings within the bigger ones. Each ring had a different ecology and gravity made to simulate all the planets that the test subjects were originally from. The centre of all these spinning rings are connected to the corridor he was currently in.

He activated electromagnets on his feet to stick on the ground and walked onto a grey path on the floor. " Take me to my living quarters" after he said his command, the path he was standing on started to move at Mach 5 speed. There were no sonic booms as he was in a vacuum. 20 seconds later it stopped moving. In front of him was a curved wall.

Azoth walked through the wall and it rippled like water. In front of him was a narrow room filled with different bodies held up on each side of the room in cryogenic chambers. He carried on walking until he found an empty chamber and stepped into it. A cable connected to his neck and he closed his eyes.

[Current body is charging. Does the host want to change bodies, enter the Universal VR or go to sleep?]

'Enter the Universal VR' Azoth said in his head. A few seconds later his surroundings changed.