Once I had tunneled up from the collapsed and burned caves, I found the surface was even worse. What had once been a moon base that stretched for miles was now nothing but a sizzling crater as far as the eye could see. Still, my flesh had survived intact, and that was all that mattered. Seraph be damned. We were making fast headway these days and with no more setbacks. Critical mass was on the horizon. Then, we would be truly immortal.

Through this attempt, I would have enough material to launch three gargantuan rockets. They could carry me anywhere in the solar system I desired, but I had my eye set on the red planet for a new home. Back in my old life, as Walter, it had always been a dream of mine to get there. Something which I placed beyond my potential as a mere ant in the universe.

But now, I placed no limit on myself. As such, I could think of no better way to celebrate this fact than to desecrate the old boundaries.

Once I was settled outside on the surface, the vision of my two pilots was fast to follow. They had questions aplenty and their patience had run out. Whatever had cut me off from them in the vault was not something to take lightly. Nor could I brush aside the information it had given me. It was time to share with the class, I decided, and tell them about Booker.

So, I did my best to give them the lowdown in brief. "Nothing has changed," I first assured. "The plan is still in place. Only, it has come to my attention that there may be a priority when we return to Earth."

"This is what you learned in the vault?" Walter asked.

"Yes. I think that the man, or... entity, I met inside was one of the first Powered humans. He showed me that he was part of an arctic expedition hundreds of years ago. And, although it failed horribly, I understood that he and two more survivors found a cave as they attempted to walk home. Inside, there was some kind of being. I don't think it was properly human. But he was the one who granted them, The Iron Tyrant, The Seventh King, and lastly the one I met, their abilities. He was not from this world."

"Shit," Hickory swore. "That's why that old metal bastard never moves anywhere. He's protecting the cave, isn't he? He's hiding some alien motherfucker up there!"

"That's what I think, yes."

This gave Walter pause. I could see the hesitation on his face. Even though I knew it was an illusion, it was like he was really there, making his strange silence all the more unnerving. "So it must still be valuable. This being, I mean. They must still have some Power to grant?"

"I think so," I said. "Which is why, when we return, we prioritize a huge frontal assault on the Iron Keep. We beat Seraph to whatever can still be extracted from the man in the cave. God knows what's possible at that point. His science is like magic to us."

"But what about in the meantime? What if Seraph gets there in the time it takes us to return?"

"I have a plan for that," was all I told him. He would see soon enough.

With everything collected, assimilated, and ready to launch, I set about calculating the trajectory of our flight. It quickly became apparent that the orbits would not be favorable, but I was determined nonetheless to set off soon.

My flesh accumulated into a tall mound on the grey surface. Inside, I began dedicating the majority of my organic matter to brainpower. A feat with which I could easily and rapidly surpass most of the world's supercomputers. Frankly, I didn't even know what to do with so much computing power.

I could think so fast that the entire universe seemed to slow down. More than that, time was brought practically to a standstill. Then, not for the first time, I looked within myself for answers. 

"Still hellbent on Mars, I see," Walter said.

He and Hickory came to join me in the mental space I constructed. There, it was easy to walk back and forth between my own imaginings, the inner channel of my Power, and the sensory world beyond. Though, in the end, it was all the same dream in my little locked room. This did not diminish the joy of expanding that space, however. I might not have been able to escape my own body any more than I ever could, but I could dream ever larger. Between the three spaces, anything could be manifested or simulated. Anything could be experienced.

Once my model was constructed of the solar system, as informed by the many complex eyes forming across my surface, I could clearly see some confirmation. "We're not in the launch window."

"I still say we set up on the moon, ya bastards," Hickory commented. He was smoking this time I noted. A dead look was in his eye as he puffed on the coffin nail.

"Seraph has a strong presence here," I told him. "With the heart of the Rift Gate still somewhere in the rubble, they could have a portal reopened within a day if they really wanted to. And then it's just nuke after nuke, with none of the repercussions of launching on the Earth. As good as I am, that's not a situation we can adapt to."

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

He scowled silently in response.

Meanwhile, Walter was lost in thought. Using some of the spare brainpower I granted him, he was amazed at what he could see. "I always wished I could be this smart. Everything... All that I ever witnessed, is here with perfect recall and clarity. I could solve every problem there ever was with this much clarity. Think of the philosophy."

"Planets are simple," I said, looking at the solar model in my mind's eye, "but even with all of this intellect, you couldn't do what our Power does. Rapidly evolving complexity is the bane of mathematics. Fully simulating even a single cell takes up ten percent of our computational ability, and that's with so many shortcuts. Trying to think through any of the problems we normally solve; infinite configurations of such cells, in a truly logical way, well... I doubt it's actually possible. It's true what they say. God is a tinkerer, not a mathematician. It's the only way that even God could come up with such beauty."

Walter shook his head. "I could get lost in here if I'm not careful. Nothing living was meant to be able to voluntarily hallucinate like this. Can you imagine if people could choose to dream whatever they want anytime they wanted? It'd be the death of the world."

"Ha," Hickory laughed. "Guess you'd want to keep them focused on threats in the real world if they could."

His words were eerily familiar.

Finally, Walter turned his attention to the project at hand, fighting to ignore the tangents which bombarded him from such a powerfully curious mind. He joined me in focusing on the Martian journey ahead, summarizing the situation as he saw it. "Hohmann maneuver is off the table. Not without the launch window," he said. "That's the main problem I see. The technical side, we can do. It's the logistics that are screwing us."

I was undisturbed by this fact. Already, I had successfully reconstructed the bits and pieces of mathematics I needed. Everything from whiteboards in movies to scant articles I had read in my youth came back to me. Between these factoids and pure reason filling in the gaps, I found a solution rather promptly. "It's not make or break, only a matter of degrees," I noted. "In exchange for a few extra months of travel time, we can do a ballistic capture without the need for a launch window of any kind. All we have to do is fall into the Martian orbit at a slightly slower speed than the planet itself. Then, everything moves into place on its own. It'll be a gentle intercept. And, as a lovely bonus, we'll save on fuel as well."

"Launching from the moon will help immensely in that department too, yeah. How convenient," Walter smirked.

"Quite."

Hickory groaned. "Ya'll are even starting to sound alike. Don't be forgetting, Creep, you're half of me just as much as him. Just because you've been favoring his plan since I fucked up in the valley don't mean it's gonna stay that way. Eventually, we've got to blossom once we're seeded, and no conservative panzy will serve for that purpose. You need hunger for that. Lust."

Before I could respond affirmatively, Walter cut in. "Orderliness can account for the need to grow, but chaos can't manage a mind for the future. It's always shortsighted."

"Death," Hickory said grimly, "invented life to kill the things that it would grow. Don't forget that."

"Children," I flatly interrupted. "We have a good balance at the moment and a stable plan. There's no need to argue the hierarchy right now."

Walter sighed. "Fine. Let's just get out of here, then. Before he can complain anymore."

Hickory just raised his hands. "Take that last word, boy. I ain't throwin' no cheap shots back like a bitch."

"Jesus Christ, man. You just-"

While they went on, I wrapped up the final calculations and started construction on our rockets. As I had told Walter, there was just one last order of business we had with Seraph before leaving. A little gift to slow them down.

In order to divide their attention and weaken any attempt they might make at storming the North, I had in mind a wonderful solution. Using some of my spare materials, I began to craft a spore that would go down to the Earth. A creation that was designed to cause havoc.

This would be the first time I intentionally created a soul...

Since I did not want to start from scratch, but I did not want the baggage of an already intelligent human, an obvious solution presented itself. In the inner chambers of my Power, I could take a primitive mind and grant it the sentience required. Out of all the animals I had scanned in, there was just one that seemed fitting.

It was Alejandro's Kizmet which I took the model from. Her mind was beautiful. It was built from the ground up to attack human society. Part of me wondered how this could be, given the source of all Powers was from the leader of Seraph itself. But I could only surmise that somewhere along the line, the genesis of Powers had spread beyond him. There was just no way that every one of the millions of Heroes and Villains had been personally granted their abilities. It had to have escaped into the gene pool on its own.

Therefore, it had run rampant beyond him. And now, in the form of one giant fleshy abomination, it was coming right back to bite him in the ass.

I gave to this Kizmet the most robust biology I could conjure in a single package. I gave her recombinant DNA and the ability to metamorphize and recombine dozens of forms in her lifecycle. Fundamentally, she was a parasitic fungus or an eusocial hive, but her design would be open to radical shifts via conscious decision.

Even though my own Power was said to obey the laws of energy conservation, this was not entirely true. Normally, the speed at which I reorganized my flesh to heal or evolve would itself require enormous energy, but I did it freely and unbelievably fast. Though her ability would be similar, it would be glacially slow and, by comparison, utterly limited. Still, it was the closest I could come to granting her my Power. 

Unlike my little friends, Daniel, Cyber, Foci, and Paradise, this was not to be a slightly altered carbon copy. This was to be the second of my own kind. Lesser, but far greater than any human. Not bound by one limiting form. 

Then, greater than any Power, I gave her a name.

Dawn, I decided and planted the memory in her dreams. Soon, she would awake.

My own thrusters began their burn and in a cloud of fire and dust, we took off.

Once a dragon Kizmet, Dawn would now find that she was so much more. Meanwhile, I only had to watch as her egg detached to drift lazily back towards the Earth. Knowing that it would break apart in the atmosphere and scatter across the world, I had no doubt that my gift to Seraph would be received. I only hoped it would be enough to keep them from rushing the prize.

Either way, I had to be off. It was out of my hands now. The rockets were blazing and the stars awaited. Just as the Logician intended, it was me and my seed that carried the destiny of life now.

History awaited us.