Dragan gulped as he looked up at the monolithic building, his eyes scanning the exterior for potential points of entry. Sure enough, the only way in seemed to be the massive sealed doors right in front of him. He crossed his arms as he tapped his foot, tossing the possibilities over in his mind.

"Why not go in, dead boy?" Pan asked, floating a few meters up as if she was standing on thin air. It seemed now that the cat was out of the bag, there wasn't much point in pretending to obey the laws of physics.

Dragan bit his lip. "The doors locked," he said. "I can't go in."

Pan raised a finger in the air as if she was educating him. "When door is locked, you knock on it, dead boy. Then it opens. Easy peasy."

"I'm a dead person walking around in the middle of what's basically a zombie apocalypse," Dragan rolled his eyes. "I'll be lucky if they don't just blow my head off again."

Pan cocked her own head. "Again, dead boy?"

Dragan looked up at her -- and he gulped again, as if speaking the words would make them real. "That's what happened, right? I get shot in the skull, then I wake up with you in my head. Doesn't take a genius to work out I didn't just tank that hit."

Pan nodded eagerly. "Saved you, dead boy. So you live boy now. So no problem. Go knock, okay?"

"What?" Dragan snorted. "Sorry for the scare, everyone, I actually ended up getting resurrected by the mind of the Panacea on the planet, so we're all good now? You really think they'll buy it?"

Pan frowned. "That's what happened, dead boy."

"Yeah, but they won't believe that. They'll think I'm lying."

"So you sleep out here, then?"

Dragan looked around. With the darkness of the night, and the shadow of the building, his surroundings were nearly imperceptible. If he tried to climb down under these circumstances, there was a good chance he'd just fall off again. Not to mention the Repurposed that would no doubt be lurking about if he wandered off.

"No," he sighed. "That's not really an option, either."

"Then why not knock, fucko? No other option!"

Dragan sighed again, heavier. He'd never really thought about what it would be like to talk to a mushroom, but he hadn't imagined it would be so very frustrating. Still, she wasn't exactly wrong.

He took in a deep breath, raised his fist up, and -- pouring his Aether through it -- knocked.

----------------------------------------

Hessiah's growl was dark and deep enough that the air around him vibrated in sympathy. Even Marie, standing before him in the lab, couldn't help but shudder.

"To think they'd go so far," he snarled, turning the holographic display. "To think they'd plunge to such depths. Unforgivable. Unforgivable!"

At Hessiah's insistence, Marie had allowed him to take a scan of her body -- more specifically, of the restraining devices the Supremacy had placed inside her. The Needles, they were called. The cross-section of one of her arms, and of the Needle that rested within it, was what had inspired such anger in Hessiah.

"Small," he muttered, eyes on stalks growing to inspect the hologram from every angle. "Only large enough to contain the mechanisms and the necessary payload, and yet dangerously fragile. Clever, clever, even I must admit. I assume they've made you aware of the activation conditions?"

Marie nodded, stepping off the scanning module. "If I try to destroy or interfere with the Needles, they automatically activate. If I try and remove one of them, they activate. If I try and split off a separate organism without one of them in it, they activate. They're pretty foolproof." Her words were well-rehearsed -- they encompassed the rules her life had been preserved by for so long, after all.

Hessiah snorted, his attention firmly on the hologram. "Of course. A cell is only effective if you know where the bars are. And I'm sure they told you what exactly would be the method of your execution?"

Marie's body stiffened. That, too, was only too easy to recall. "They said it was the… the venom of a Gene Tyrant."

He nodded, each eye closing in anguish. "Harvested from an esteemed carcass, no doubt."

"I know it's deadly, but…" Marie gulped. "I don't really know that much about it. It could even… kill one of us?"

Hessiah created an eyebrow, and raised it. "You didn't understand the magnitude, yet didn't dare rebellion?"

"Didn't want to take my chances."

"Hm." Hessiah flicked the display away with a hand and stood up straight, his extended spine making him unnaturally tall, his head brushing against the ceiling. "Your trepidation bothers me, but I can't deny it was well-founded."

He extended one finger, delicately turned it over, and watched as slow drop after slow drop of pape green liquid dripped from it. Where it struck the ground, it steamed, persisting for but a moment before dissipating away.

"A long time ago," he whispered morosely. "It was thought this was the only thing capable of killing us. The uprisings taught us otherwise, of course… they were so very creative with their work. Still, still… very effective."

"Why?"

Hessiah sighed, two hands clasped behind his back as two others planted themselves against the ceiling, pushing him down into a hunch. "Poisons are almost invariably useless again us. Our bodies can adapt against any malady, change to accommodate any foreign substance. That's something I've been reminded of fairly recently. However, the venom of a Gene Tyrant…"

He gingerly took a step back as a cleaning automatic zoomed through, thoroughly scrubbing up the spot where the venom had dripped.

"...the venom of a Gene Tyrant," he sniffed. "Is capable of adapting just as a Gene Tyrant is. No matter what you are, no matter how long you manage to delay it, the venom will kill you. It was considered a very great crime to use it against one of your own, back in the day."

Marie took a deep breath. "So, basically -- I set off one of the Needles, I'm fucked, right?"

Hessiah nodded. "Yes, quite fucked."

"So… what do we do?"

With a sigh, Hessiah tapped some buttons on his wrist bound script, and the floor tile below him raised up to become a seat. He sat down, chin in his myriad hands.

"It's a long term problem, to be sure," he murmured. "Once the great rectification begins, if the Supremacy discovers you are working with me, they'll no doubt activate the devices immediately."

Never said I was working with you, but okay.

"I'll put some thought into it," he said. "Perhaps if we managed to remove or destroy all of the devices in the very same instant? Then again, if we were off by even a second, it would mean your death… a problem for another day. We can't be hasty."

Silence settled over the room, and Marie found for a moment that her hands were shaking -- before she adjusted her nervous system to stop that, of course. Again, it didn't take a genius to figure out why.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

All they'd discussed to this point were practical matters -- names, Hessiah's plan, her own circumstances -- but she found her heart yearning for an emotional connection with this being, the only other one of her kind in the universe.

"If you don't mind me asking," she began quietly. "How did you survive?"

He glanced up at her. "Survive…?"

"The Thousand Revolutions. I mean, I never really got how anyone would have -- you know, made it through all that. The stories, the history… it all seems pretty total, you know?" She was stumbling over her words -- that was pretty unusual for her, but this was a pretty unusual situation.

When she'd first came into existence, she'd been kneeling in a puddle of blood in some alleyway. Whether that blood belonged to her or someone else, she never found out. All she knew was the basics of how to operate as a human -- how to breathe, how to talk, how to walk. She had all the intellect of a normal human, just without any memory to speak of. Everything she'd gotten since then, she'd taken with her own two hands.

All her predecessor had truly left her, if anything, was the cold tears on her cheeks when she'd first come to awareness.

"The Thousand Revolutions," Hessiah growled darkly, adjusting his position on his seat. "That's their name for it, isn't it? As if it were something so noble and proud. Was it glorious when the Umbrants steered Olga's yacht into a star? Was it such a great victory when they turned the surface of Progress' March to glass? Atrocities each and every."

He really seemed to like ranting about that -- spittle was nearly flying out of his mouth by the end, but he hadn't actually gotten close to answering her question. Was he deliberately avoiding the question, or was it just that much of a sore spot? Usually she'd read human body language to sense deceit, but that didn't seem to be possible with another Gene Tyrant -- the shape of their body changed from instant to instant, after all.

Hessiah slumped over in his seat, hands clasped together and fused at the fingertips.

"My survival?" he murmured, finally getting to the point. "A matter of circumstance. During the waning age of our society, I found myself interested in the notion of extraterrestrial life -- despite how far humanity had expanded its borders, we had never found any neighbors. At the time of the uprising, I was far beyond our territory. As such, I went unnoticed by the rebels."

Marie raised her eyebrows in interest. "Extraterrestrials? What, like aliens? Did you end up finding any?"

If Hessiah found her segue insensitive, he didn't show it. If anything, he seemed to relax, crossing two of his legs.

"Disappointingly, no," he gestured vaguely. "Once, I thought I had found a tribal society of intelligent reptiles, but it turned out to be an experiment of one of my fellows that they failed to report. I had the lot incinerated in the end."

Before he could elaborate any further, however, there was an audible beeping from Hessiah's script. He frowned, glancing down at it -- and as he did, his form seamlessly shifted back to its humanoid default. He read the screen of the script while slicking his hair back with his other hand.

"Interesting," he said quietly, scanning the text before him. His eyes flicked back up to Marie. "You may want to look at this -- a disturbance at the exterior doors."

Marie went to step forward for a better look, but Hessiah cast a hologram display instead, the screen floating in front of her face. Her eyes widened.

There, knocking on the huge doors of the ExoCorp building with all his strength, was Dragan Hadrien. The young man who was supposedly dead.

"You know him?" Hessiah asked, noting her reaction.

She nodded. "Me and my partner came here looking for that person -- he's a defector from the Supremacy. But… he's dead. He was with that last batch of people who arrived, but he was killed before he could get in here. Had his head blown off, from what I understand."

Had del Sed lied to her? No, she could read the expressions of a normal human like him easily enough. Had he been mistaken, then?

Hessiah turned his gaze back to the script. "Interesting, then, very interesting… could this be another manifestation of the Panacea, then? First the Repurposed, then the Dead Hand, now this… well, how can my scientific spirit resist?"

He raised the script to his mouth.

"Bring it into containment," he commanded. "Quietly."

----------------------------------------

To be honest, Dragan was fairly surprised when the front doors actually opened. He'd already been looking around the exterior of the building again in the hopes of finding a vent or something he could squeeze in through. It was only when Pan whooped in celebration that Dragan realized the doors were smoothly sliding open.

The light within was blinding, but Dragan stepped forward without fear, only holding one hand up to shield his face with the glow. He realized this would take some talking, of course -- but unlike nearly everything else he'd experienced since landing on this planet, that was well within his wheelhouse.

"Okay," he said preemptively, squinting to see. "I realize this might seem like a suspicious situation, but --"

His vision adjusted. Six plasma rifles were pointing right at his face, wielded by six grim-looking security officers, clad in biohazard suits.

"Hands in the air," their leader said, his gruff voice modulated by his rebreather. "Or we kill you and bring you in cold."

Dragan sighed. "Okay, now listen --"

There was a chorus of clicks as six safeties were flicked off.

Dragan put his hands up.

----------------------------------------

Fascinating, Ansem del Day Away thought, inspecting the scene before him through his left eye. Most fascinating.

His three personal automatics were monstrously expensive to maintain, but in situations like this he couldn't be more grateful for them. They were as small as houseflies, capable of flying great distances -- and wherever they were, they could stream video and audio directly to the optical implant in Ansem's left eye.

So, even as he sat here in his tent, he could watch what was going on right outside the building.

The silver-haired young man behind led inside at gunpoint was without a doubt the same one who'd been shot dead earlier that same day. Ansem had seen some strange things during his venerable lifetime, but not yet the resurrection of the dead. With a twitch of his eyebrow, he commanded the attending automatic to track that young man and keep him informed.

The second of his three automatics was patrolling the main floor of the warehouse, carefully watching from above. Not so long ago, the man called Skipper and his compatriots had been released back into the crowd. There'd been someone else with them, too -- the young man from the Supremacy, Atoy Muzazi, but they'd quickly gone their separate ways. He'd be worth keeping an eye on. Skipper had rejected his initial offer, but he hadn't yet approached Atoy Muzazi.

The third of his automatics was still waiting to reacquire Titan Hessiah, hovering through his personal quarters. That lab in which Hessiah spent most of his time had countermeasures in place to interfere with such espionage automatics, so Ansem could do little more than speculate as to what the CEO was doing in there…

…and fear.

Ansem del Day Away had come to this place to ensure the freedom of the workers being ground down -- that was the principle that the Coalition of Three had been founded upon. For that purpose, he had negotiated and bargained, seeking to come to an understanding with Titan Hessiah. It had been fruitless: every request had been denied without compromise, and the Dead Hand had been brought in to terrorise the workers into capitulation.

Well, he had thought. That's just fine too. The Coalition understood better than anyone that chains often couldn't be broken with words.

Three times his automatics had injected Hessiah with deadly poison -- the sap of the Weeping Rose Tree, a most effective method of honourable execution. Each time, there had been no effect. Hessiah hadn't even blinked.

Watching the building like a spider in a turtle's form, Ansem sighed heavily. Whatever was happening here, it was beginning to overwhelm his understanding.

----------------------------------------

"Well," Dragan sighed, Neverwire-bound hands on his knees. "At least it's not too drab in here."

The guards had brought him to some kind of quarantine cell -- a sealed glass cube, surrounded by bright lights, furnished only with a bench, a threadbare bed, and a pathetic-looking toilet. They'd left him in here and abandoned the room, but Dragan had no doubt he was being watched from half-a-dozen angles.

"This is cozy, dead boy," Pan commented, sitting on the bench next to him, legs swinging through empty air. "This is your house now?"

"No," Dragan replied, resting his chin on his hands. "This is more like jail, I guess…"

"What's jail, dead boy?" Pan asked. Her curiosity truly was insatiable.

"Well… jail is where criminals go, I guess. You remember criminals?"

Pan grinned widely. "Yes! Yes! I remember criminals, dead boy!"

"If only you'd never existed," his mother hissed, her hands wrapped tight around his neck. He remembered criminals too.

Dragan went to open his mouth, to question Pan more as to what exactly was going on with this planet, but before he could speak a new voice echoed throughout the room.

"Having fun talking to yourself, pal?" North asked. "You're supposed to be dead, ain'tcha?"

Dragan nearly jumped out of his skin, swinging his head this way and that to see where the voice was coming from. He looked left, he looked right… but it was only when he looked forward again that he saw North. The tanned Umbrant was leaning casually against the glass, one grey eyebrow raised.

"Been a while, huh?" he smirked. "You got a minute to talk?"