Chapter 14: Genetic Modifications

Online discussion between anonymous Genefreaks on Abyssnet Forum site: VortexEYE

Bangbunny: Yo, bought some of that shit from you the other day, why the fuck am I so hairy now?

Megamutant: You asked for ‘Lapine Morphology’ Mutagen, the shit were you expecting?

Bangbunny: Bunny ears.

Megamutant: Okay, yeah. You might get that, as soon as the rest of your changes settle in.

Bangbunny: I wanted bunny ears, now I got shit stuck on my ass from the fur growing there!

Megamutant: Just wipe better. Or wait until your digestive system makes it all round and tiny.

Bangbunny: I will kick your door down.

Megamutant: Yeah, you might get the legs for that xD, look man, next time ask for something coded as Alteration Mutagen. You took an Integrity Mutation and you pay the price.

Bangbunny: Fuck, will you at least help me remove it?

Megamutant: Ah, while I’m at it I’ll take your SIM out of your corpse. Ain’t no removing genes once you get them on you.

Bangbunny: Jackass, the hell am I supposed to do with this hair?

Megamutant: Shave. xD

Bangbunny: You don’t know who you’re fucking messing with.

Megamutant: Yeah, neither do you. You don’t want to know who my supplier is.

Bangbunny: Tough shit. I’ll kill both you and that mofo.

Megamutant: Oh, there’s no killing that guy. Ever heard of Soul Killer?

Bangbunny: Real scary name for a tryhard.

Megamutant: I’m serious, I realized their identity a while ago. They use some bitch named Kaisel to organize their deals with me, but I saw those eyes. Ha, oh… you ever heard of people with strange eyes?

Bangbunny: What eyes? Every mofo specs out their eyes now.

Megamutant: Bloodshot. Completely red with white pupils, Crimson Souls calls them The Soulless.

Bangbunny: The fuck are you telling me this for?

Megamutant: It’s a warning, bud. xD

Bangbunny: I’ll have Los Diablos skin you alive.

Megamutant: That’s if you’ll even have control over your own body by then.

Bangbunny: The fuck does that mean?

Megamutant: That you haven’t even scratched the surface of what Mutations can do.

9:30 PM

June 4th

Diana

I washed my face, the crystalline liquid sloshing some clarity into the day’s confusion as my thoughts ordered one after the other. The police station was being targeted by Dogwhistler, whoever that was. Potentially someone who either worked for or was tied to a Megacorp. I was now probably an Esper. Ripley was being forced to work for Metal Heavens, and I had agreed to help him…

Okay Diana, focus, you’ve got the next three days off until you officially become an Investigator. That means there’s time to come up with a game plan. I showered, I changed, then I sat down at my desk to scheme. There were three holographic monitors wrapped around my vision, each displaying several cases I had been interested in and wanted to take on once I got promoted to Investigator.

I closed them all. A quick navigation through the police net-portal highlighted several resources I now had access to on my Warpstation computer due to my promotion, even more complex cases and conspiracies now visible.

A tap from my finger sent me to reports of that day at the club, over several hours I searched through to find nothing. Unknown buyers from Yuzhou’s Shandian branch attempted to buy a MAL-Seed off Snake Fangs and during a police confrontation, it was released then killed by NeoCore. Yuzhou released a statement that they would investigate this internally, but I doubted any real justice would come about.

Nothing on the Implants, nothing on me, nothing on Ripley. That was strange. I had certainly received credit for my role, and there were numerous witnesses to my involvement, but someone had cleared any data about him being the Shard Operator present there. That made things easier for me, all I could assume was that Missy had connections to keep his name off our system. Something that made me wary of just how deep she might be involved in this District’s history of crime.

Most of the names of the involved Police Staff were red, either with a KIA or MIA written besides them. Of the ones alive, I only knew Investigator Tomas, the guy who had kicked me.

Even though I knew it was a distraction, I clicked his name to send me to his personal page. He was listed as a 2nd Rank Investigator in the STRIKE department and designated as Bronze Grade; early 1st Tier Adapter. Other than that, he graduated two years before me and only became an Investigator last year. So much for being a senior.

I pried deeper. Thirty-Seven kills in just the last six months?

And when I dug into his missions? A daycare, an elderly retirement Centre, a hostel on the edges of the city… Each of the assignments came with claims of some illegal activity, and each was proven true in the end.

Stolen story; please report.

But I couldn’t ignore a minor note left at the end of each mission.

Minor civilian deaths had occurred…

Just one line hidden amongst the rabble; I would normally have passed it off. That stuff happens in this city, the Founders knew how high our homicide rate was. But I remembered the man with the fractured skull, and I- I knew something had to be off.

I was getting side-tracked. A quick sip of chamomile tea eased my nerves, the warmth slipping into my fingers which clicked and tapped pointlessly as they looked for clues that weren’t allowed to be there. No mention of a Dogwhistler despite hundreds of pages. Any previous acts of MAL-Terrorism like the one that had formed Little Requiem held no connection or were dismissed as psychotic one-off events.

Even with better access, I was left with nothing to find. Each click spiraled me deeper into an abyss of entangled lies and misdirection.

The abyss? The AbyssNet layer of the police archives compiled their most well-hidden secrets — that fact was an open-secret. If there was any place I could find reports condemning even the Megacorps, it was there.

But getting access would mean hiring a Data Delver, and no way in hell was I going to work with a morally gray mercenary. No matter how much white was in that gray, my feet weren’t dipping into the shadows. Ripley was where I drew that line.

Which meant I needed someone who could legally access those files. Like the new Lieutenant Grazhe. I could tell her directly what I knew, or I could open up the case and take charge of it — providing results that would get me access to the files I request.

A significantly harder option, but the better one. Revealing my Gold to her now was liable to have that information leak to my father, if he knew I was getting into something like this then I knew that somehow my job was liable to transferring away from this case.

And probably somewhere where I would be closer to him where I’d be paraded around as a poster-girl for his campaign once again. Except now I would have the fame of a Gold. Looking through our database, Gold Adapters were beyond rare in the criminal world. Two each within Muramasa Dynasty and Crimson Souls, and one in the leaders of Los Diablos and Metal Heavens.

As for the Police, I knew all three of our Captains were Gold but they were off-city setting up defences for the Swarm, in the end Westbrook’s law enforcement had to be led by the ten precincts and their Lieutenant’s for now… all Silver Adapters.

Fuck? Was I the only Gold within Westbrook’s law enforcement right now? Would I be turned into a weapon or an advertisement if I was found out? Either way, I’d be a tool for them — staying secretive was my best bet.

I rushed my thoughts aside, taking one final glance at the Toxin Club case. This time, I scanned through the post-operation photos, something that churned my stomach just from the tiny thumbnails in the corner.

There were so many unrecognizable bodies, my heart throbbing as though fearful it would join those bodies. There was a reason the club was devastated, a reason the-

I froze, my lips quivering at a particularly gruesome image of fallen chunks of stone flattened bodies. But aside all that carnage was a girl, one I’d seen before and recognized now.

Her head wasn’t attached to her body. Selene… was dead.

Did Ripley not know?

I slammed my hand to turn the screen off, palm stinging and my whole body as cold as steel in snow. Ripley didn’t know, he still thought she was alive. He- he deserved to know, even if it hurt. My hand tingled against the edge of my laptop’s metal… guilt and frustration boiling into my fingertips.

The laptop sparked. An injection of its electrical current digging through my skin like a worm. Sharp, deep and invading but so empowering. The pain was brief, but the sense of tingling potential drifted higher up my arm until it slowly dispersed like heated air.

Delving into the haze of warmth within my body, I felt it. Thin crackles of electricity looking for a way out. I tried to command it out of me, like lifting a candle upon which smoke and heat drifted through the flow of my Warp Energy.

Those embers slid higher up, through my chest and shoulder and down my elbow until it reached my hands. The tingling was more prominent, like a hundred fireflies were buzzing in my palm. I did the same to my other hand, but no fireflies followed the Golden candle now… just warmth danced in my other index finger.

I brought them together, and a fine thread jolted between them in the blink of an eye — startling me. The pain was less prominent, the tingling too. Again, I drifted that current down using my imaginary candle back into my other finger like a circuit of sorts. They jolted again. This had to be me altering my body’s conductive properties in some way, or was I actually controlling electricity with my mind? I had no idea.

So I tried again, watching as each time the jolt grew weaker, slowly falling into a trance as the revolving current circled through my skin like a dancing fairy.

It calmed me.

Mutagen: Electrical Conduction [5%] has been classified as an Energy Mutation.

It was as I’d thought, my conduction wasn’t just passive but could be manipulated by the Warp Energy inside of me — making it an Energy Mutation. Three more times, I revolved the spark around myself in an ever-quickening circuit. Sometimes I used different fingers, just toying with the possibilities, other times I tried to gauge the distance until eventually, a few inches apart, no electrical zap occured between them.

Maybe if I had more electricity, I’d be able to properly gauge what my other Mutations could do. Electrical Sensitivity had so far been most prominent within my own body, the ‘tingles’ easy to feel for but I was sure I’d soon be able to expand it outwards once my… cells changed. As far as I’d read, Mutations like mine consumed Energy both from your Implant and your body‘s general metabolism.

Nutrition. Founders, I was going to have to eat a lot to generate the calories necessary to manipulate electricity. There were other Mutations to fuel your body’s needs, I’d heard plenty of people took in Mutagen specifically to alter their metabolism — some could even eat raw materials and effectively burned it like coal. Others just had refined lungs or could carry more oxygen in their blood, this was the kind of thing you’d discuss with your geneticist.

As for Pacemaker, I didn’t have any scientific expertise to understand how it worked. My basic understanding was that every cell in your body had some sort of voltage on it’s membrane, and dependant on how that changed there would be a cascade of various outcomes. Your entire body was regulated by your nervous system, whether concious or not, and that relied on changes in your neuron’s voltage. Electricity could stimulate muscles to tense, I supposed I would learn how to properly harness that natural response into a more… powerful outcome.

Then came Unstable Biology, which I did not want to touch at all just by namesake. I knew that it’s effects would mostly be positive, but what on earth could it cause as time goes on? At least my Compatibility was significantly higher than the norm, which would mitigate any negative effects for now.

Once these Mutations were settled and developed past a certain threshold, it would be feasible for me to use the other Mutagen I’d bought. Even if Iron, once they began to merge they’d improve in Grade according to the clerk I bought them from. What would happen if they merged with my electrical genes? Hopefully, I’d get something to produce electricity within my body like an eel. That way I wouldn’t be dependent on alternate sources of power…

Then again, I always typically carried a Braceshocker on me. But I’d been hit by one once before during training with Yvette… it sent me to the hospital.

Non-lethal didn’t mean not painful.

And so, I settled in for a night of experimentation and training. I would be expected to return as a Mutant, but they wouldn’t be expecting me to have a firm grasp over my Esper powers. And I loved proving people wrong.