Ancestor [3]

What Liam saw inside shocked him greatly. The entire mechanism of the turret was a 120 barreled auto cannon which fired organic particle beams in a pulse.

Each beam would cause the cells of a living organism to immediately undergo apoptosis before degrading into the fundamental atoms of the periodic table of elements. It was a painless, but unstoppable death.

'a configuration like this could have been used to hold a beach front against one hundred thousand soldiers during the War, they put 22 of these to protect me?' Liam felt conflicted. They shackled him here, but it seems they definitely didn't want him to suffer considering the mental distortion of the perception of time and the security.

He found the console for the machine and used his finger to turn into a port plug for Noona to check.

<Liam… third panel from the center, rip it off…something is weird.>

Liam did as Noona instructed and saw a neat circuit board with tens of thousands of tiny almost microscopic lines running everywhere. In the center of the circuit board was a glowing silver crystal the size of a golf ball.

"Uhh, I know I have expanded vision Noona, but I shouldn't be able to see dark matter right?"

<That's because that isn't dark matter. It's a core Liam. A core. Just…like the ones growing in the bodies of these Fera…Liam…give me 10 seconds to think.>

Noona was an incredibly advanced AI with processing power and speeds to make the greatest chess AI Stockfish seem like an Abacus when it came to calculation speeds. 10 seconds meant she was going through more permutations of data queries than there were grains of sand on the beach. When Liam considered this, he found himself thinking 'so why does she seem like an idiot?'

Before Liam could get into his own thoughts deeply, Noona spoke again <Liam, I don't think that radiation alone made the world uninhabitable. I think…I think someone found a way to make Dark Matter manifest without the superconductor or supercooling constraints in a stable state. >

<The issue is, this has a direct impact on the life around it, changing the world forever. Normal humans and most animals would not have survived the exposure. Even you were luckily isolated away from it with NANO reconstructing your body continually until you came to a point you could tolerate and utilize it.>

< Otherwise you would be a corpse right now. What I can't figure out, no matter how I factor in every detail we have at hand, no matter what hypothesis I come up with, is how the Fera came to be.>

Liam scrunched his brows, deep in thought. The super soldiers had been wiped out during the war. The front lines and all major cities were glassed. At first, Liam suspected that the reason the Fera existed is they were the progeny of the 'failure' super soldiers that hadn't been sent to the front line.

"Noona, do you know what the sterilization rate for the failed super-soldiers was?"

<…It was 100%. Their gametes were completely incompatible with even gametes of other subjects in the same trials. They were too unstable.>

"So where the hell did these guys come from Noona? It's not like they were originally animals and became humanoids right?"

<Your guess has a low chance of being correct. Only 1.8% based on the cultural observations I have made thus far. The etymology of their languages can be traced back directly to human language, and their ability to read English directly correlates that at some point in time…their ancestors either were or met humans.>

<Also, the crystal in front of you seems to have grown from a source of dark matter into the tangible object you see on its own. I suspect that once it did so the Turret could no longer utilize it as an energy source. The only way this could happen is if there was a change to the fundamental laws of the universe.>

'Change to the fundamental laws of the universe.' Liam froze when he heard those words. A sharp glint appeared in his eye and hatred could be felt rolling off him.

Noona noticed the drop in Liam's Neural stability and quickly asked <Liam? What's wrong? Talk to me!>

Liam shuddered as he exhaled a deep breath and said with a hint of hope in his voice, "Noona, activate Starlink archive search. Search the following term 'Blackwater H4T sub red code name Icarus."

<Blackwater H4T sub red code name Icarus. Man, there's a lot of red tape to get to this…and done. OK, wet works mission in Beijing. Declared successful assassination of particle physicist Shouxian Haoyu code name Icarus by code name…Sage…1 casualty reported…agen->

Before Noona could continue to read the report Liam interrupted her. "Stop, now this is important. Do you have a manifest of the personnel that worked on the Daedalus?"

Noona paused for a moment and said <Yes, his name does not appear.> "Run a background check on every name on the list. Tell me when you find one that puts the age at the time of the work at 43 years old, and I want to know if that person was Chinese."

<Done, Liam there's nothing…I think you're chasing a ghost here…>

Liam frowned. That phrase was way too familiar to him. It was one of the maniacal lines that Icarus had shouted when he detonated his lab to try and kill Sage with him.

'How can you possibly be prepared to stop me? ME? I AM THE ONE WHO HAS FOUND A WAY TO CHANGE THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE! I WILL BE THE NEW GOD AND YOU WILL BE FORGOTTEN, FOR THE WORLD WILL BE INCAPABLE OF KNOWING YOU EVER EXISTED!'

That monologue still sent a chill down his spine. He should have died that day. But instead…she…

<Liam your Neural stability is plummeting! Get it together you are at 44% talk to me! Hey! Listen!>

"Calm down Navi. Now tell me. If you were able to change your appearance and forge a completely new persona so that you could work on the Daedalus project; and are having delusions of being a God, you could only be one person on the team right? Do a full investigation into the head of the project."

<Head of R&D was Half Japanese Half Greek billionaire and genius inventor Crete Minosu. Age 36 with a long list of accolades…>

"Show me his picture."

Noona projected an image into Liam's occipital lobe for him to view. It was a handsome, rugged man with a strong jaw and the proud Grecian nose with the arch in it that the Greek were known for. However, his eyes were unmistakable. Deep soulless black eyes that seemed to radiate ambition and ruthless arrogance.

Liam knew those eyes. He knew them well.

'What the fuck did you do to the world?'

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Liam controlled his breathing. He had to focus, now wasn't the time to go down this rabbit hole any deeper. He needed to get his bearing and see what was going on in this world. He glanced back at the silver crystal and asked Noona,

"Noona, are you able to use this?" Noona responded by stretching a tendril of nano bots from the end of Liam's hand and gently plucking the crystal before it started to glow brightly. She withdrew it back to her and inside Liam's body.

<Hrm… it seems to have quantum entanglement with the other crystals that have formed inside the turrets. If I go slowly enough, I'll be able to absorb all of the energy in these. But Liam, it's a great deal of energy and it seems that it will take me close to a month to absorb all of that.>

< My processing power will be stable during that time, but I won't be able to activate or deactivate protocols much less create any new protocols for you. I can still maintain your current form though.>

"Can I still absorb the organic crystals myself? And can I use my weapons?"

<Yes. And your regeneration has been partially unlocked since consuming those Ipili cores, it seems you were able to harness part of their genetics to regenerate your own damaged genes. You'll need a lot more of them to regenerate without me dedicating a lot of processing power, so don't go being reckless.>

"Yes mom, anything else?"

<Actually yes, go back out there and talk to your new girlfriend. She's got to be getting lonely since Batman turned into spiderman and awkwardly nerd crawled away from her earli- OW!>

"Yeah, I'm definitely going to take away your comic books."