Scott woke up in a dim room with metal walls on a small folding cot. A creaking sound seemed to indicate the structure he was in was under some kind of stress. He had a splitting headache, and there were tubes going in his nose and a ventilator in his mouth. This should have been a reason to panic, but instead he calmly looked around and inspected his condition.
He had extensive bandages on his torso and more tubes going into his arm. There was some medical equipment monitoring his heartbeat and breathing. Feeling around, he found there were also bandages on his head. Melinda had performed some kind of brain surgery. Again, Scott noted that this should have caused him to panic, but instead he calmly started some of Nadia’s mental exercises. His memory and observation skills seemed to be intact.
Wondering if she had removed his emotions, Scott thought briefly about Adriana. He felt a slight thrill thinking about how amazing she had been at their last meeting when she made that suggestion to steal a rocket. At least some of his emotions were working. He noted a lack of his usual anxiety about whether he should have complimented her about the idea, or if he had sounded like an idiot with his own dumb comments. Melinda’s surgery had dulled his social anxiety. He was a bit angry at her for yet another involuntary surgery, but he was able to switch it off quickly as he realized that this would help him perform better on this mission.
Scott’s anger returned, and he now felt a new stabbing pain in his head to go with the existing headache.
A woman in scrubs quickly entered the room, she ran over and injected something into the IV near his arm, then removed the ventilator from his mouth. Scott's headache eased up, and his perception grew fuzzy, but he tried to hold onto consciousness.
“Can you tell me what’s going on with my medical condition?” Scott asked, slurring the words slightly. His mouth felt really dry.
“Oh, that should have knocked you out.” The woman said, looking in surprise at the syringe.
“Please don’t give me more.” Scott grabbed at her arm quickly, noting that his coordination seemed to still be good.
“Interesting,” the woman started typing some notes on her tablet. She squirted some water into Scott’s mouth, which he really appreciated. She then started asking some simple questions that were part of a cognitive assessment. “We’ll wait on the neurological assessment until after the drugs wear off, but your mental function is excellent.”
“I seem to have more control over my emotions.” Scott said.
“Yes, you now have some extra connections between your somatic and sympathetic nervous systems. In theory, this should allow you to dampen or enhance various emotions after you have a few seconds to process the response you want. Melinda also reduced some of your anxiety sensitivity.” The woman, who Scott remembered was named Beth, seemed to find the procedure fascinating, but he detected a hint of concern.
“I felt a stabbing pain at the base of my head earlier when I was trying to decide how angry I should be at Melinda.” Scott thought this might be important.
The woman typed more on her tablet and seemed to be skimming through some notes.
“Right, that’s a pretty common complaint from other test subjects who had this procedure. It should reduce over time. There are two paths you can take. If you suppress or enhance emotions frequently, your brain will reinforce the paths, and it will get easier over time. If you don’t use it much, the paths will atrophy and the amount of control you have will reduce. Either way, the pain should ease up as your brain adjusts to how you use the process. The other subjects said it was no longer painful after a couple of months.” Beth said while her eyes skimmed over her tablet. She had dark hair and olive skin and seemed to be in her early thirties. Scott spotted signs that the woman had lost a large amount of weight recently. This was not uncommon for employees at Elsa’s company. Getting to an ideal weight and fixing skin problems seemed to be a benefit that most of her employees took advantage of. He assumed this was an employment perk, since the services usually cost several hundred thousand dollars. Scott pulled from his memory that the woman had joined them from one of the refugee camps in Texas.
“What else did she do?” Scott asked. He started to feel a bit of panic thinking about what must have been a major surgery, but it went away almost immediately. The ensuing headache was mild thanks to the drugs.
“Standard heart and lung upgrades. We’ve been testing those for a while and hardly ever get bad reactions, so she thought it was worth the risk.” Beth explained.
“What happens when it goes wrong?” Scott asked.
“Oh, the usual is a rapid and aggressive cancer. We then have to regrow the organs from scratch, which can take months.” Beth replied.
“Right, I guess I’m glad that didn’t happen. Has this happened much?” Scott felt his anxiety growing, and this time he made an effort not to suppress it. His anxiety was in part because he worried, he could no longer feel anxiety. It was a weird realization, but he felt the familiar dizziness as he thought about cancer in his heart, lungs or brain. What if they missed it?
“I see your heart rate has gone up. That’s healthy for you to feel anxiety sometimes.” Beth took some more notes. “We had a couple bad reactions early on, but we learned a lot about how to avoid some of the triggers. You might be surprised how many ways you can trigger cancer when you start modifying DNA in humans. Our whole genetic code is riddled with viral DNA and evolutionary dead ends that have been suppressed. It’s amazing we can keep functioning with all the deadly junk in there.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Scott decided not to let himself panic about that. “So what kind of benefits will I see?”
“Your resting heart rate is now about 30 beats per minute, so it’s up there with world-class endurance athletes. Your lung capacity is now similar to an Olympic swimmer, but your muscles are also now producing myoglobin, which can store extra oxygen. It’s something Melinda stole from dolphins, but it should let you hold your breath with a fair level of activity for about five minutes.” Beth explained.
“Did she change anything else?” Scott asked.
“Melinda considered adding a computer to your brain like Carl has, but the risks of memory loss and a long recovery were too high. She said she wants to test it on some more people before she tries it on you.”
“I’m glad she occasionally decides not to take risks with my health, but it is troubling that she’s planning more brain surgery that I never agreed to.” Scott rolled his eyes. Not for the first time, he wondered if he should move somewhere away from Melinda and only deal with her on video calls. “How long am I supposed to stay hooked up to these machines?”
“Your levels look good. I’d say you can probably start some light exercise tomorrow and ramp up over the next few days. I’ll need to keep monitoring you, but it looks like you are going to make a quick recovery. We are supposed to arrive near Morocco in five days.” Beth smiled and left the room.
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Adriana rubbed her eyes after scanning through the maps and camera feeds for their tunnel building operation. The tunnel took a winding path from Proteus to a large farm plot they had purchased just south of the Reserva Ecológica Estatal El Palmar near highway 281. They had started calling this the Xibalba tunnel, named after the Mayan underworld. Another branch headed East roughly six miles towards the property along the Sierra Papacal road where they had built Trinidad’s and Hisashi’s factories. Despite not having permission, they had dozens of robots on all three ends pulling out rough limestone blocks. On the Proteus side, they were significantly adding to the large mounds of tailing from the mines. These underwater mounds now peaked at about 200 meters above the surrounding sea floor and extended in a line about half a kilometer.
The inland portions of the tunnel had similar, but smaller mounds starting to form. At the factories, they were cutting the and smoothing the rocks to build a wall around the four-acre property. At the Xibalba tunnel entrance, they had started building a large Mayan style pyramid, although it had a corrosion resistant plassteel structure which supported a large open space inside. Also, it had windows and walkways going around the inside of each level. The tunnel itself would pass by four little known cenotes and a number of previously unmapped cave systems. The route was designed to go around these natural features, but they would build viewing windows so a good portion of the route you could enjoy a view of stalactites, columns, curtains and other flowstone features.
Over the past year they had made several improvements in the mining robots, and they were able to tunnel at about six meters per hour. The primary improvements involved more robust directional drilling designs that would drill multiple holes at once, then go around a corner to drill channels in the back face. This was followed by the injection of water, which was explosively boiled to crack the faces and extract the blocks. Each layer had three robots working along the face and were followed by additional robots that would deepen and widen the tunnel. They had only been digging for about a week, but unbelievably had cleared out almost a quarter of the planned excavation. Melinda had reallocated some robots from the mine, claiming that they had huge piles of ore already waiting to be smelted and huge piles of iron and other metals they couldn’t sell because of weak demand and shipping constraints. The repurposed robots needed to be modified to work out of water, but the conversion mostly involved adding some hoses, a large water tank, and some a software patch. They used a lot of this steel to reinforce the tunnel as they went. Adriana thought the project would probably cost over a billion dollars' worth of metals and robot labor, but she would leave the accounting to Melinda.
Aside from the impressive looking pyramid at the entrance, they were adding space for multiple rest stops or businesses. Anywhere there was a good cave or cenote view they would hollow out areas for restaurants, stores or gas stations on the opposite side which would allow businesses to enjoy the view. They were running power, water and sewage to these spots even though the property did not belong to their company. Since most of it was under the ecological reserve, they would have to wait and see what the government decided about underground land use before they could determine how it might be developed.
For the pyramid, they had a security station, gas station, restaurant and a hotel planned. Various companies Angela had supported had already grabbed the rights to rent these areas, and they were busy planning construction. After the first pyramid was finished, Adriana expected they would have enough limestone blocks for several more. One would be a parking garage and a third would have apartments. The apartment pyramid was fun to design, with apartments around each step with large windows and gardens around the outside. The middle area was mostly open, with a huge swimming pool and some retail space facing inwards. These areas would be finished after the tunnel was complete, and they were not critical to the timeline so would be developed at a slower pace, probably opening late the following year.
“How is the project going?” Melinda had called her to check up.
“Really well. Those robots are making fast progress. We had a bit of an issue on tunnel C when they hit a small natural gas pocket. We shut it down quickly and avoided an explosion, but it will delay us a couple of days as we map it out and add a more permanent seal.” Adriana explained.
“Anything else you need?” Melinda asked.
“Well, I’m hoping the cement facility in Proteus is up and running soon. We’d like to start making concrete to level out the roadways on some sections we have finished. We’re running utilities as we go. Barry has taken over designing the section we are building under Xibalba, and Zaliha has hired people to design the facilities we need for the spaceport.” Adriana touched on the various projects that overlapped her current area of interest. Barry was building a power plant and energy weapon lab underneath their property, near where they had planned the three pyramids. Naturally, it would have a secret entrance. Adriana suspected Barry had spent more time designing the secret entrance than he spent working on the layout for the lab.
“Sounds like everything important is moving along. We don’t have an update from Scott yet, but he should be getting close to the Moroccan coast by now.”
Adriana wondered what Melinda had been thinking when she decided to send Scott on a mission like that. He was a resourceful guy, but not someone who could keep his cool when bullets were flying. Carl was just an idiot. Who was supposed to be the adult on that mission?