The wires you’d cut off were still connected to a small, black, polished stone, set on a desk a few feet behind the tub, small circles along it blinking in red. A Soul-Mind-Router Stone. The tubes still in your nostrils were connected to an auto-ventilator resting a few feet from the desk. The instant you started to remove the breathing tubes, the ventilator started beeping incessantly.

“Turn it off, Please.”

You threw the tubes into the tub full of used temporal fluid. “Youuuu got it,” your God-System said, and the sound ceased, but the ringing in your head persisted. “Shall I—”

“Is Zeta here? Did the uplyft go smoothly once he died?”

An holo-image formed in front of you. Zeta’s body, half-formed as Organ Generators needled at it, working too fast to perceive in your exhausted state. “Zenda’Ataru’s body is still in production, though it already houses his soul, but—”

“Good.” You started walking towards the door.

“I wasn’t finished.”

The door slid open and you walked through it, into the gray, empty hallway. “Say your peace, by all means.”

Fabric began to form around your body. Please’s doing. You kept going, catching a sight of the Planet’s artificial equation clouds through one of the projection windows. Daytime. By the time you began walking up a spiral staircase from the fifteenth floor, a blue flower robe had fully materialized around your body.

“I don’t think it will take, Natha,” Plea said.

Because of you. “What won’t take?”

The live holo-graphic feed appeared in front of you. Your friend’s body, half of it at least. “Look closely,” Plea said.

You did. A fully formed skull, flesh covering a third of it, minimal skin on the ear. A pink throat below two oval tonsils, and within it, between the trachea and a jugular vein, tumors.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Those are just the recent ones. The ones that haven’t been removed yet. They’re coming faster and faster. Zenda’Ataru is going mutant, in two hours or less.”

“What’s the speed of the OrganGens?”

“Near Maximum. Any more power and we risk discovery.”

You started running up the steps. “The Healing God-Skill.”

“Doesn’t work on mutants,” Please said.

Sixteenth floor. “He’s not a mutant yet,”

“He’s near enough for the Techno-Mana. It won’t work on him.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Yes. We don’t. Untold Millennia and no rumors of Mutants or Near-ones coming back from the brink by any skill! None! If it could be done, we would know already.”

It can be done. Seventeenth. Eighteenth. “We won’t know if we don’t try.”

“Trying means quitting. Not paying the price for what we did to the Prime. Letting a mutant form will put a spotlight on us. Graystone Corp will know what we’re trying to do, and they’ll build barricades against it. The world won’t survive.”

Nineteenth. Leaving the spiral staircase, you ran across the curving hallway, speeding past one room. Two. Three. Till you reached the fourth. The room you’d allocated for him.

“Can’t you smell the air. The world’s already going down the drain, whether we pay the price or not. I won’t let my father go down with it,” hand pressed on the module next to the door, you prepared to walk inside, but the door didn’t slide open. You closed your eyes and breathed out a sigh. “Let me through.”

“They’ll come.”

“Let them come.”

“You could go back down. Monitor your crew, who would be caught in the crossfire if you tried to help him. Go, and I’ll do the hard part for you, like I’ve always done.”

“I can save him.”

“Maybe. At the cost of everything; absolutely. I’ll let you through, but know this, if I do, I’ll vacate this rotting plane. Leave you and yours to suffer the consequence of this act of hubris. For I will not suffer with you.”

“What about your promise to her.”

“I already avenged your daughter. Fulfilled my promise. All this, paying the price so the universe doesn’t go extinct for the vengeance we enacted. Why should I care if you don’t?” Plea asked. “Now, do I let you in or do I kill him for you?”

She wasn’t bluffing. Would end millennia of a partnership if the risk was too great. This is what it cost. Guardian or Grand-daughter. One, none, but not both. You made your decision. “He’s the only good father I’ve ever had, Plea.”

There was silence, for a moment. A burdened silence, filled with everything you two had ever done together; as well as the potential of everything you would have ever done. Before one word tied a bow to all of it. Gave it all a necessary end there was no coming back from. A farewell in its simplest form.

“Understood,” Plea said, before a once-burdened silence stood empty.

The module beeped, the door slid opened, and you entered the room knowing the crew, the planet, and most likely the universe at large was one God-System short.