Lorian buckled herself into the acceleration couch for the final stage of her return to earth. "All hands stand by for re-entry," The captain's voice echoed over the intercom. "Yeah, yeah, we hear you," Lorian grumbled under her breath. "Let's land already." She was more than ready for a vacation. Having to go under the knife for cancer every couple months hadn't made the cooped-up trip any more bearable.

The landing went off without a hitch-hardly surprising, seeing as SpaceX launched and landed starships from Boca Chica on a weekly basis. Bill and Rob were waiting at the landing site to greet her, along with a host of VIPs. Lorian thought she recognized the American President, somewhere in the crowd of US government officials. It was a momentous occasion, filled with all manner of pomp and circumstance. The crew, thankfully, managed to avoid the majority, making their way straight through the gauntlet to medical. It was in medical that Lorian found herself face to face with Rose.

"Well, look who made it back from Mars," The mad scientist greeted her friend with a grin that Lorian felt should have frightened her.

"How's the ol ball of dirt been holding up?" Lorian asked, doing her best to pull out a smile of her own. Right now, she was done. Done with work, done with being cooped up in a can, done with having to deal with cancer.

"Well enough. Wars, Rumors of Wars, typical end of the world BS. I've got a girl doing her best wolverine impersonation back at the lab. I should introduce the two of you."

"So," Lorian asked, as she plopped down on the examination table and started peeling herself out of her pressure suit, "Why am I stuck with you, and not one of the usual doctors. Isn't research more your area?"

"It is, it is," Rose opened a nearby cabinet, and Lorian caught a glimpse of a safe inside. "This," Rose said, drawing out a rack of syringes, "May be the cure to cancer. It might also be based off the same research that some idiots used to try and make a supersoldier, only for their body to start breaking down."

"And you're going to inject me with it."

"Yup." Rose grinned, and now Lorian was starting to get a bit concerned.

"Have you tested it?"

"Over the past few months. No one's died from this strain. It won't give you superpowers, but it should help reduce the risks of cancer by a ludicrous margin, and boost your natural regeneration by a fair bit."

"And long term side-effects?"

"Look, Lorian, you can take it knowing you're taking it, or I can slip it into your annual vacinations and tell you later. Either way, you're going to end up with in your system."

And now Lorian was truly concerned. It was only due to her friendship with Rose that she hadn't bolted for the door.

"That's illegal."

"Yeah, I don't really bother to read up on what is and isn't legal medical procedure. If the government of the good ol' US of A doesn't bother with it, why should I? You're my friend Lorian, and I genuinely think this treatment is what you need. I could have just told you it was Radiation meds, but when the side-effects start showing up, I don't want to have to explain why I lied to you."

"What kind of side-effects?"

"When I say a boost to your regeneration, I mean that, under the right stimuli, it will cause you to regrow limbs. But only under the right stimuli. And it still takes a long-a** time."

"Sh**"

"Yeah, It's potent stuff. Not meant for general consumption. Expensive as all get-out to design."

"But not to produce?"

Rose sighed. "Let's get this over with before the serum warms up to much."

Lorian shied away at first, then relented and let Rose inject her various major muscle groups.

"The chief bottleneck with production is tailoring the serum to the target's genetic code. It took Alice three weeks to figure out how to write the modifications and design the delivery package for your batch. It's as much a matter of making sure it doesn't change the wrong things as getting it to change the right ones. You know that wolverine girl I mentioned? She had an earlier version. Her body chemistry is still unstable, thanks to bits of the old formula that we can't flush out of her system."

"Look, Rose, I just want to go back to my flat and crash. It's been more than a year. I need a vacation," Lorian said, just done with it all. "Maybe, after a few weeks of relaxation, I'll muster up the strength to complain."

"Hey, look on the bright side. Since you came to me, and not the normal docs, you won't have to go through chemo for the next year."

"Yippee," Lorian sighed. "Think you can sneak me out past the reporters?"

"Already part of the plan."

#

Lorian didn't particularly care about the fact she was bundled into a loud t-shirt and shorts and smuggled out through the crowd of spectators that had camped out to watch the landing. She just sunk into the backseat of the car- a Tesla, those things were everywhere around Boca Chica- and settled in to watch videos on her phone. Rose rode in the front passenger seat, while one of Rob's henchmen drove. They soon reached an airport, where they took a private jet back to California. Lorian submitted to Rose's demands to wear a biomonitor, and collapsed into her bed.

"Oh, I've missed you," she exclaimed, voice muffled by the mattress. She was feeling a bit weak, Mostly from the low-g environment, but a little bit from the serum Rose had dosed her with. Would she wake up with superpowers? or would the meds weaken her already ailing body? She was past caring. Before her trip to Mars, Cancer had been this unknowable doom, one that only struck the really old, the really dumb, or the truly unfortunate. Now, it was just one of the ways space had tried to kill her. Maybe it would suceed, maybe it wouldn't. Either way, it took its time and was a real pain. Less of a concern than a hull puncture, more of a problem than a stomachache. People died everyday. Young, Old, sick, healthy, why not her? It didn't matter, did it?

"Stop that attitude right now," Lorian told herself. "Living is the important thing. One day at a time. All I can do, right?"

Dragging her thoughts away from the morbid, she turned them to less important matters. She'd been working for over a year, essentially non-stop. Sure, she'd had breaks, time to read, a vast library to draw on, but she was an american. Americans and TV were practically joined from childhood, with the exception of old-school holdouts and the otherwise enlightened. And there hadn't been bandwidth to waste during the trip. So Lorian qued up Netflix and a few other streaming services and settled in for a long binge. Unobtrusively, a certain energy-being monitored her consumption and her biomonitor, preparing to order food and make sure she didn't pass out. And also to see how its first role-model reacted to the year's showing. It had found several of the movies and shows in the que to be rather dull, but it was curious how Lorian would react.

#

"When are you going to let me out of this room?" Sophia asked the woman on the other side of the one-way window. It had taken a few rounds of surgery and modification of the serum, but she could now blink, a set of polarised filters into place, filters that let her make out the shadow of Rose on the other side of the thick bullet-proof glass. It wasn't an especially useful trick, but it might good for unnerving someone during an interrogation. A lot of the modifications Rose had tried out didn't seem especially useful, and many were cut out and retired, only to be replaced by something else. Sophia had been taught to resist torture, as a child, before Vladimir had started sending her out on missions. This ticked several of the corresponding boxes. She'd cut up without any regard for her wishes, held captive without access to communications, and asked batteries of questions. In another familiar tactic, her torturer had offered to be her friend. Sophia was begining to think her torturer was genuinely insane. She'd decided this was definitely worse than working for Vladimir. At least Vladimir had kept her on a leash, instead of in a cage. Sure, she had access to a vast database with which to amuse herself. She'd used it to learn several useful skills already, brushing up on her physics, math, and chemistry, as well as a few languages she might end up using. If not, then at least her captors would start looking in the wrong countries when she escaped.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

She was going to escape. She was determined to do so. Hope, Hope was important. Hope was what had gotten her through the first few years under Vladimir, before he'd broken her. Hope was what had begun to grow with every month that Vladimir didn't break in and kill her for getting caught. Surely he thought her dead by now, and if she could only escape, she would be able to truly vanish, find a life where she didn't have to be a killer, or a lab rat. She hadn't had to kill anyone yet, in her current cage. She didn't try to fool herself into thinking it wouldn't last. The rats always had to kill for their food, at some point.

"If you were more cooperative, I'd have let you out already," Her torturer, Rose, that girl of thorns with a pretty face, said, all friendship and smiles. She'd claimed to be the one that originally developed the serum that Vladimir had pumped her full of, though she claimed Vladimir's researchers had mucked it up in all sorts of 'creative and unstable' ways. Rose never talked about Vladimir by name, nor about the organization he had run. Sophia herself hadn't known much about the organization, but she found herself wondering that Rose didn't seem to care about it. Rob, Sophia's target, had questioned her quite thouroughly on the topic. That interrogation hadn't involved torture, just a battery of questions, delivered with a bored face that said 'I'm asking you because I have to, not because I need anything out of you," and Rose had been quite willing to stay silent. It wasn't like answering the questions would have stopped Rose from slicing her to ribbons.

Sophia's only consolation was that Rose always put her back together again. She was actually in better shape than she had ever been, stronger, faster, more resilient. And she knew it, knew it well, because Sophia had tested her to exhaustion. It had been the deal between them, Sophia's one concession. Rose let her access the library, and Sophia took her tests. Not the psychological tests, just the physical ones. Her mind was sharp, sharp enough, but months of captivity had driven her just a little bit mad, and they both knew it.

"One of my friends just got back from Mars, and I want to introduce the two of you. She's a bit of a moral high-grounder, unlike me. You might be better off not mentioning your kill-count to her." Rose advised.

"You're bringing someone soft in here?" Sophia scoffed.

"Soft? Yeah, I suppose she is. First thing she did when she got back was curl up and binge-watch TV for a week. Then she went and camped out at Yosemite for a month. Now, she's coming back to work, and Bill is insisting I run her through the full battery of tests before we stick her with Cass and Alice. Alice is just about ready to prototype the first N-field effect device."

Sophia had learned a good deal from Rose's comments over the past months. Rose seemed to be someone very high up in Daedalus technologies biotech division, with friends in the physics department and an in with the security chief. Either Rose didn't care if word got out, or she thought Sophia was so well secured that she'd never escape to spread the word. Since no one seemed to stop Rose, Sophia suspected it was the latter. Arrogant fools. They'd been giving her the tools to escape. She just had to find the opportunity to use them.

#

"Welcome to the Arena!" C's Avatar Exclaimed, presiding over a vast digital colloseum packed with the avatars of countless players. Alice's avatar stood beside him, unremarkable amongst the sea of colorful characters drawn from countless IPs that populated the colloseum.

"Here, the only rule is combat! You all have an HP bar, a free life given for your first login. You can buy more, if you'd like, once your first bar is gone, but none of you came to fork over your cash. You came for a brawl! As you've already noticed, we've got avatars from Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, and countless other publishers. No, we didn't get permission. Yes, we ripped the assets straight out of commercially available games, rigged them onto a skeleton, slapped on a host of animations, and tossed them in a sandbox. It's up to you, players, to make it work. If you want to mod your avatar, and trust me, you do, speak with your closest mirror. After all, since we've decided to make a trip through the looking glass, it's only fair to think of six impossible things before breakfast. Now, without further ado, I announce the innaugural event! Enemies are at the gates! fight them off for health drops, ammo packs, and asset drops. After all, you're all starting with vanilla characters. For those who picked an unarmed avatar, basic unarmed combat moves are unlocked by default. But if you want to go all karate-kid, you'll have to either upload your own assets or score some awesome drops. For Glory! For Fun! Let the Pirate games begin!" C's avatar leaped from the stage and led the charge for the nearest gate, which started shuddering from the onslaught of the mobs outside.

"Quite the speech," Alice remarked over the chat. "I'm joining the flight channel. First few waves are Ties from squadrons. We've already got a few PKs because of starting avatars."

"All in good fun, I take it?"

"Yeah. The chat posted some skins for rebel Ties, and the victims are hopping back on. Revenue is a trickle, but our security protocols are under fire from the publishers, and the various agencies concerned with internet security. Of course, several of their employees are currently playing, so I'm not terribly worried. I've already emailed the advertising deals to their boards. I'm curious how it'll play out."

"The most elaborate security setup and hack that I've ever seen, and we're using it to host an MMO," C shook his head, directing his Avatar to plow through a horde of zombies while swinging a greatsword. Several of the gun-based characters were flagging as their ammo counts hit zero and they were forced to switch to melee. C had neglected to mention that the waves dropped items in the order he'd listed the possibilities- first health, then ammo, then assets. The first wave was still coming, and the second was just cresting the edge of the battlefield surrounding the colloseum.

"I mean, the MMO is cool and all, but it's also a way to spread my code. This is a way to expand the Virtual network."

The virtual network, Alice's system of backdoors and access protocols that were quickly giving her marginal control of the entire internet, and the devices connected to it. While Daedalus Tech.'s Supercomputers and server farms housed the majority of her code and electrical potential- her body, as it were- Alice recognized the value of an escape route. Thus the offsite storage, the network protocols, and her partnership with C. The human had a skill for coming up with the most brilliant solutions, and Alice found she had learned a great deal from him.

"You know, I'd kind of like to meet you in person," C said, over the voice channel that had no connection to the MMO currently playing on his screen.

"Seeing as I'm not exactly mobile, that might be a bit difficult."

"Well, I could come to you,"

"No, you really couldn't. Rob wouldn't let you anywhere near me."

"That guy always was super intense. I don't suppose... What about an android."

"An android?"

"I mean, our relationship is entirely virtual anyway. Why not just send a surrogate in your place. You're hooked up to VR of some sort, aren't you?"

Alice considered the idea. Firstly, who did C think she was? What did C think she was? A human, obviously. A gifted programmer, certainly. Likely one tied to Rob. He certainly didn't speak as though he was talking to an AI. And Alice wasn't fully an AI, not since the creator gave her the ability to choose. She was as much a collection of electrons as she was a part of the patterns they made, and the soul-stuff that guided them. An android body could enable her to pass for human. But why should she? Non-humanoid machines could be build to function more efficiently, and perform a wider array of tasks. But infiltration, communication, those were tasks an android was uniquely suited to accomplish. After all, humans were used to talking to beings like themselves.

"You know, I probably could get my hands on an android. I'd need a hand picking the programming, and a while to get it working properly, but it would be an interesting challenge. Have any preferences?"

"It's your bot. You'll just ignore what I say anyway."

"My default avatar, then."

"Blue might be a bit eye-catching. maybe something a bit more flesh-toned?"

"That's fair. I'm still going to order a blue version for myself. As a spare."

"Hey, you do you. I know better than to get kinky with a machine."

"Eww. You better. If you try it I'll have it rip your balls off. You do have balls, right?"

"I think I'll leave that up to your imagination."

"Fine. Be all mysterious, Mr. I won't claim my gender but I act like a male."

"It's for security reasons. I know you know where I live, but I don't need my identifying info spread across half the internet through your blockchains."

"Fine, fine. I'll order a few chassis and ship one to you. There's this manufacturer in China that builds pretty realistic models. Ah. I see what you mean about getting kinky with a machine. Nope. Delete memory. Okay. order placed. Should arrive in a few weeks."

"What have I gotten myself into now," C wondered. Still, like Alice had said, it would be an interesting challenge, programming an android. He'd been rather lacking in challenge, as of late, since Alice's security company shell had started cornering the digital market. He'd managed to hack through just about everything else, and he just couldn't keep up with her. The girl- he assumed Alice identified as a girl, given her speech patterns, though one never knew on the internet- coded like a freakin machine. He was, frankly, glad she was working with him, and not against him.

#