Eveline and I had been journeying for almost three days, and we were closing in on our first target since leaving New Salem, Massachusetts, where Eveline and I last saw our friends Amélie and Philippe, Caitlynne, and our contact, Scott Cameron. Our mission to deal with the Harvester breeding facility in New Salem had resulted in the rescue of over fifty hybrid cubs and the capture and arrest of a small handful of their captors and lab technicians who were creating them in the first place. The world I now lived in was very different to the world I grew up in, and that applied as much to the people who lived in it as to the environment itself.

When I initially volunteered for the Synergy Nanotechnology Solutions company experiment, I was a fifty-eight year old man with some glaring health problems and maybe a few months left to live. Nanotechnology fixed all of that. As part of the experiments, I was induced into cryogenic sleep for what was supposed to be a few weeks or months at most, and found myself waking up over forty years later, with an incredibly dense nanite cluster maintaining my body, what I have since referred to as a Nanocloud. My body was no longer fifty-eight years old with the physical condition of someone at death’s door. Now my body was over a hundred years old with the physical conditioning of a very healthy twenty-five year old athlete.

This was as well, because it took all of my strength, speed, endurance and reflexes to survive the initial weeks I found myself in this terrifying new world, until I was able to find sanctuary with like-minded people in The Netherlands. I met my travelling companion at that time, Eveline, a feline-human hybrid with the musculature of a dedicated gymnast-bodybuilder and the temperament of a house-cat.

That wasn’t a joke, either.

She literally was like a cat in many respects, including having a rather fussy temperament and an aloof disdain for people she neither trusted nor respected. Said trust and respect were very difficult to earn. I had personal experience of this.

She also was hardly alone in being a hybrid. Many people I had encountered in my journey since leaving England were hybrids. The cubs we rescued were all hybrids, and it was also likely that all hybrids, Eveline included, were bred in captivity for specific uses. It was one of the reasons she disdained the company of strangers unless absolutely essential. None of this changed the fact that she was an utterly-dependable companion for travelling across hostile terrain, and I was getting to know her well.

There existed an insidious and powerful organisation that few people really know about, which operated in the background, and were for some reason I had yet to learn, trying to simultaneously influence what few remnants of civilisation remained while breeding as many hybrids as possible, experimenting with them all the while.

The knowledge that these Harvesters were doing this business was what had ultimately made me go all-in with the Cuisset Foundation, a worldwide network of volunteers who sought out and assaulted breeding facilities like the one we raided a few days ago, and made it their life’s mission to rescue, and ultimately free cubs from said captivity.

My original mission was so much less important than this. After all, how could digging up the past and how we got to where we were headed as a species, compare to thwarting whatever plans these Harvesters were trying to see to fruition?

Then again, maybe it’s a comment on our suitability as a species that such places existed to begin with, and our continued right to exist, if ever there was one, was entirely dependent on whether or not we could eradicate the kind of diseased thinking that made others think that such facilities were even remotely acceptable to begin with.

Even though I had made my decision to pursue the lead I had with the IBM Thomas J Watson Research Facility in New York State, I was far more interested in getting back to our base of operations in Quebec, so we could start planning our breeding facility raids throughout North America.

In the distance, I could see the largely-intact structure of IBM Watson as we made our way toward it. With my enhanced eyesight, I was able to make out the weather-worn concrete and metallic sections of the building, as well as zones of glass that had been smashed in places and cracked in others. As we approached, other signs of the passage of time became obvious, including the disruption of the tarmac that once comprised a car parking zone, but which now had grass sprouting through the gaps, and in some cases, some young tree sprouts were pushing through.

As we stepped toward the building and over the remnants of the car parking spaces, my nanocloud took an inventory of the exterior, and a three-dimensional map was built in my mind. I’m pretty sure that if we needed to, we could find a way to climb this structure to get inside.

Eveline glanced in my direction briefly, before staring at the building again. “So, this is the Watson building you told me about back in Berlin?” She asked, almost absently, as her eyes roved all over the structure.

“It is,” I told her in a quiet tone. “There has to be a way inside from here, but the nature of these places means it’s likely to be locked down pretty well.”

Eveline nodded, her gaze continuing to rove over the exterior. I knew her well enough at this point to know she was laser-focused on the task of finding a way past the locked entrance alcove. I, on the other hand, began to feel like this entire journey had been a waste of time. With the condition of the exterior the way it was, the chances of me finding anything intact inside seems less and less likely.

“I’ve an idea,” she suddenly announced, gazing at the top of the building where a ladder rung seemed to jut up from. “Wait here, I’ll be quick as I can.”

And with that, she made one almighty leap from the ground, and was grabbing a pipe at the side of the building before I could even think to protest. With amazing upper-body strength and a grace I had come to admire about her, Eveline scaled the pipeline to its junction, before hoisting herself up to another connecting pipe, using a combination of her powerful grip and all of her claws to scale the side of the building in a fluid combination of free-climbing and Parkour that made me feel both aroused and impressed at her ability.

Not that this was really the time for such musings.

Within moments, she disappeared over the side of the building, and I was left waiting. While she was busy trying to do whatever it was she had decided to go and do, I decided to consult my nanocloud and determine what I could do next.

Has the Level 3 Nanocloud upgrade completed yet?

Yes. Do you wish to proceed with subdermal reinforcement upgrade?

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A few weeks ago, I might have been concerned at my nanocloud volunteering information or anticipating task requests like this, but I had learned that the cloud had been developing self-awareness over this time, and had begun anticipating my requirements as a result. Rather than query why it was anticipating my requests like this, I simply went along with it.

So far, my nanocloud had done nothing to cause me harm. In fact, everything it had carried out by itself without my instructions had benefited me, directly or otherwise.

Go ahead, I instructed it.

The subdermal reinforcement upgrade the nanocloud referred to in this case was one that functioned in two ways. The first was that it provided a thin layer of protection against external threats, such as sharp blades, and in extreme cases, could stop a standard pistol round. It was intended to protect internal organs against injury while in combat, but because of its properties, it could also be used to channel heat and cold, which would allow me to properly implement the heat transfer functions I had come across in the past safely.

This would be an advantage. Last time I used the heat transfer, I forced my hand to freeze an interrogator I came across in New Salem, but the action had weakened my left hand pretty drastically, reduced my combat effectiveness, and had I continued for even just a few more minutes, I might have frozen my whole hand to the point it might have shattered. Implementing the subdermal armour would protect my bones and muscles from the effects of the cold through processes I currently didn’t understand, though I was sure my nanocloud would be able to explain it to me in great detail if I needed to know. Additional upgrades to other parts of my body would allow me to make more effective use of the functions I had come across, but I wasn’t ready to replace every part of my body with synthetics just yet, in spite of the conversation Eveline and I had shared with Rosalie and Dani back in Quebec.

Eventually, I caught sight of Eveline again, as she appeared from a door that had opened near the side of the building.

“That took longer than I expected,” she told me by way of explanation for the delay. “This place is like a maze. Why did everyone design buildings to be so convoluted in the old world?”

I smiled in amusement at the outraged tone she used. “It’s a long story,” I told her, not wanting to get into a lengthy explanation of building layouts and corporate office structures while we were trying to get inside this place.

Funny thing about being in a world that had so changed from the old one I used to live in before the outbreak. When you walk back into an example of what the old world used to look like, it can surprise you a little bit. When I woke up from the cryogenic chamber back in Yate, England, I was stunned to find that everything I ever knew had been effectively destroyed. Before going to sleep for forty-three years, I had climbed haphazardly into a coffin-shaped device, surrounded by working instruments, a clean room lab environment that was pristine, surrounded by technicians all working on calibrating the pod for my tenure within it, and Doctor Rochelle Foster giving me some last minute words of encouragement. The next moment I was conscious, the pristine environment was dirtied, worn, falling apart in places, and there was nobody around whatsoever. I was frankly amazed that the cryogenic systems in the pod had lasted as long as they did.

Walking into this building now, was like walking back into the clean room facilities of the Synergy labs underground, once again. It was a jarring experience to find this building in this state of repair, given that everything not less than a mile from this very location was falling apart worse than even England was, that chaos was essentially the order of the day in the United States, and that most buildings in both England and the USA were in varying states of disrepair that seemed incongruous with the world I grew up in. It was a glaring mystery I did not like.

Why was this the way it was? Who was maintaining this facility? And for what purpose? I came here, expecting to have to dig around and uncover fragments of data on possibly corrupted systems and servers, and yet this place looked like I had just come for a visit in 2025?

“Rick, what is it?” Eveline asked, her tone mirroring my anxiety.

Shit. This could be a problem. If I tried to brush it off as nothing, she would know I was lying, and we didn’t really have the time for me to explain too much.

“I feel like I just walked into the past,” I decided to tell her. “I promise I’ll explain later, but now probably isn’t the time.”

Eveline’s frown might have come across as annoyed at any other time, but I knew better. She was shelving her concerns for now, and likely agreed that this was not the best time, after all.

We made our way further into the facility, checking doors as we went. I was looking for a server cluster that I could gain physical access to, that still had power. Getting access to its data was a whole other issue, but I’d deal with that once I had an opportunity to do so.

Working our way from the ground floor up and from the outer sections inwards was a pain, given how much real-estate the building covered. Most of the rooms were conference rooms, labs and cubicle banks, mainly geared toward admin and corporate meetings despite the research nature of the facility. It was only once we got to the third floor of the facility that this had started to change. Most of the outer sections continued to have offices and meeting rooms, although they began to take on a more executive-style feel.

As I opened the door to the central cluster of rooms on the third floor, I finally saw what I was looking for. This room was one of many which had server equipment. Unlike others that I had seen on my way here, this server room not only remained intact, but the server equipment in it was active. Multiple activity lights blinked on and off as data traversed the systems in this room and possibly elsewhere, and I began to note the pattern. One of these servers was still exchanging large amounts of data with something else on the network.

There was only one way to find out what that data was, of course.

I stepped over to the server itself, a towering rack-mounted array of consoles and computing units that worked together to provide the computational power needed for large-scale research projects and data processing. I guessed that this was the same as the others, even though they were somewhat dormant.

But would this contain any data that might be useful to me?

Extending my right hand, I touched my index finger to the rear-mounted USB port on one of the racks, waiting the 1.2 seconds I needed for my nanocloud to reconstitute the filaments needed to form an electrical connection to the port.

Connection established. Querying resources…

This might take a few minutes, I realised. The nanocloud was now trying to catalogue the contents of the server, and there was a good chance it would need to break some pretty strong hardware encryption to do it. If that was the case, I wouldn’t be getting any data today, or possibly for the next few decades, but I had to know.

While I was tethered to the server rack, Eveline paced around the room, bored and a little frustrated while also taking inventory of her surroundings. I could feel her impatience to get out of this enclosed space as quickly as possible, but she was trying to master the impulse.

“There’s been something bothering me for a while,” I called across to Eveline, partly in an attempt to distract her, and partly because I needed to satisfy my own questions.

Eveline looked back at me, questioningly. “What’s that?”

“Why any hybrid would think of betraying their own for humans who are just using them,” I told her. “That’s been bothering me for a while.”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” she told me in an acid tone, but I knew that she was at least considering the question. “I always dismissed them as traitors, sell-outs, hired thugs who are only out for themselves-”

Abruptly, she stopped talking and pacing, leapt out of sight behind a server rack in the room, and made not even a little sound. I could tell she was anticipating something, but had no idea what that would be.

To my surprise, especially as my nanocloud didn’t alert me at all to this possibility, someone appeared in the doorway, and her appearance immediately triggered an alert in my nanocloud.

Subject identified as Taylor Kilpatrick.

This was a person heavily involved in the Synergy nanotechnology company that had provided me with my nanocloud, and my own had immediately identified that Taylor’s own nanocloud was as dense as anyone else I had ever seen. Unlike every other subject I had identified from the data I had picked up from the Milton Keynes office, Taylor wasn’t a test subject.

She was a research investigator on the project, and was based here in the state of New York.

“Hello Rick,” she announced, nodding back to me. “I know you’ve been looking for us.”