Val Silver walked towards a set destination while he pondered on the subject they'd found recently.

For him, it wouldn't be wrong to say that the subject was akin to a miracle. A gem amongst trash he was, truly, nothing below a miracle.

An impossibility made possible; the boy carried such genes.

Val did not know how sometime that precious could be lying down 'there' . . . Just the thought made him scowl.

The subject was nothing less than the path to peace, the path to creating a medicine so strong that it could heal anything and everything.

They just needed one thing: enough time to crack the DNA, and the corresponding information regarding such a high healing factor.

It could save millions, no, billions of lives.

The subject was a sacrifice they were willing to make. In his eyes, it was nothing but a necessary evil, an evil they needed to dirty their hands with for the greater good.

The medicine was nothing but one of the many benefits.

A kid capable of endless growth—or so what they'd observed so far. The cells of the subject adapted and evolved. It was nothing short of a miracle.

A greater step in the realms of God, if you would. It was a waste in the hands of a kid, truly.

Unbiased it was: the universe. They had been searching for something like that for a long time, and when they finally found it, they found it in a lesser.

The boy was a rare treasure.

Just his blood, tissues, and spinal fluids were worth billions; such a waste in the hands of a kid indeed.

But the thing was, the blood, tissues, and whatever was on the specimen, could only adapt, evolve, and grow when it was on the subject.

It didn't work a single bit when they separated the two.

The growth stagnated.

Val sighed, they needed to wait.

Wait till the fruit was ripe enough to cut, but they also needed to be careful so as to not cut it too soon or too late.

Too soon as that would be stupid, too late because the fruit could grow some thorns on it to protect itself.

And that wasn't something they were willing to play with. The specimen was believed to be capable of infinite growth; that should be enough for them to be careful.

S-517 was truly terrific. He could already endure a burning temperature of 450°C for over half an hour before his brain showed signs of shutting down itself. Could survive absolute zero for over 40 minutes.

He was a really lucky find for them, the find of a millennial if you would.

And Val was nothing but hopeful at the moment . . .

Val sighed yet again, halting in front of a white door.

Letting the scanner scan his retina, he waited and entered after he heard the confirmation. Walking across the corridor leading to a familiar place inside, his steps became heavier and heavier.

Finally inside, he saw the all too familiar white sphere.

Caressing the sphere's surface gently, he coiled around it once before stopping in front. Taking a deep breath, he pressed his hands on the surface.

"Scan it." He ordered and a green hue enveloped the area around his hands. As the chime of confirmation rang, his heart pained, like it always had. His muscles tightened as looked at the figure inside.

Then, as he tensed his teeth a little, he sighed, tapping the sphere's surface with his head gently.

"I've found a way, Ashley, my daughter." He said, calmly. "I've finally found a way to heal you."

***

The specimen's body hit the ground with a thud, letting out a groan.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

"Get up," ordered Val.

The specimen stood up, teetering.

Val sneered secretly.

Without waiting for any type of signal, the specimen lunged forward, throwing a jab at Val's face.

Val cocked his arm slightly, blowing the incoming strike away with ease. He grabbed his arm, twirling around the specimen as he squeezed it.

He squeezed and squeezed, but the white-headed boy didn't let out a single yelp of pain.

Amused, Val used some strength, dislocating the shoulder.

The boy finally let out a sound, though only a little groan.

Val was not amused.

Val knew too well.

Pain.

it was something that as long as you could feel it, you could be controlled just like the others. No one got used to pain. Never. Yes, one could grow tolerant of it. Grow resilient. But it never fades away.

As long as the specimen could feel pain, Val could use it to control him.

Val continued to break the white head's bones. They'd heal, leaving the boy even more tolerant, but it amused him no less, how the boy squirmed on the ground, not letting out a yelp of pain.

Quite a stubborn one he was.

Val chuckled as he recalled.

The screams and tears of the boy as he'd cried when Val had shoved a piping hot rod inside his throat still sent him the sadistic chills.

Ah, how he'd squirmed and writhed in pain like a headless snake. The screeches were still fresh in his ears. Though even the screams had quietened when the boy's throat and innards had been melted.

The tears hadn't stopped even after an hour, and the screams had only grown as the throat had recovered; healed.

Truly, there was nothing more frightening than having a healing factor.

One could heal, but the pain, the pain was double. He still remembered crystal clear how the boy had almost taken more than two hours before he quietened again in a pool of his own blood.

A sharp pain bolted him out of his memory lane, looking down at the boy who had head-butted him, Val's eyes flared in prideful anger.

Raising his foot, he hit the boy to the doors of death before turning around.

The look in the boy's eyes didn't amuse him one bit. Any normal person would have broken down long ago, but as time passed, the boy only grew more vengeful.

Val turned and walked up to the person who has been standing there for a while now.

He needed to add more to the boy's training regime.

He wanted his daughter back in her full health as soon as possible. The flames of sympathy had long been extinguished. The thing that remained was nothing but a shell of a human.

He believed that his daughter would 'forgive' him after what he'd done with countless lives.

After all, he'd done it for her and no one else.

***

With a loud and painful thud, I was dropped in my cell.

'Finally some alone time.' I sighed.

It had been a few months since I'd arrived in this 'tutorial'.

And there were things I'd discovered. About me. I was growing at an inhumane rate. Too fast. And the other most important thing was that I could enter a kind of . . . State.

let's call it a state for now.

A state where I was inside myself . . . That sounded weird. Anyway, I could go inside myself.

Inside there, it was nothing special.

Closing my eyes, I breathed out, letting the air drain out of my lungs. In the end, when I had no air left inside, I held my breath. I just wanted to fall asleep, or unconscious.

Now, I could've done it with some other, more easy way if the f*cker hadn't broken my bones.

After struggling for more than half an hour—yeah, the breathing techniques had trained me to hold my breath that longer—I finally lost consciousness.

With a loud static noise, I found myself inside a dark place, a single spotlight in the distance.

Walking up to it, my gaze landed on a single chair, a table, a single screen, a mouse, and a keyboard. Nothing else.

Sighing, I sat down on the chair, letting my right—yes, my hand was there, not the weapon Kismet gave me, but my real arm—hand rest on the mouse and the left on the keyboard.

My surroundings changed, and several things appeared out of thin air.

Mainly holographic.

A single screen-like hologram hovered in front of me.

A white fog-ish spherical shape—which wiggled from time to time—and a single magnificently large red-colored cube.

I sighed again, and raised my hand, mentioning towards the white sphere.

I did a swiping motion towards the screen in from of me.

]Subject: #10994773892 — Aidan Cyrus[

That was the title that appeared in front of me.

Leaning towards the sphere, I enlarged it with a gesture.

It expanded, so far away that I couldn't see the end of it.

It appeared as if white-colored nodes and code connected. It was way more complicated than I could ever understand.

It was ever-expanding . . .

With every thought, with every motion, it expanded.

This . . . was my code.

My whole being.

My history, my present, and my future.

Everything the existence known as Aidan Cyrus was.

Pushing the thought away, I focused on the things floating around me.

I was working on cracking open my own code. Crazy, yes, but that was why I'd read the ever living sh*t out of the books that had been given to me—about coding and whatnot.

Which the Ataraxis had provided me to check my mental capabilities, I believed.

But it was helpful, I had memorized and learned everything in them—though I still acted as though I hadn't and opened one of the books and stared at it so that the Ataraxis organization—or whatever it was—wouldn't find something else which could be considered interesting about me.

I didn't want my brain to be torn apart.

Anyway, I had been trying to find and learn whatever I could about myself through this . . . file on my existence.

Shifting my mind away from a possibility plaguing me, which I was definitely not ready to face yet, I looked at the big red cube and gestured towards it

[Access denied . . . project Terminus is still booting up.]

A red warning appeared in front of me, making me sigh.

Shuffling inside my 'file' for a while, I came across something which caught my attention.

[161.124343 cm]

A float value inside a single node connected to uncountable other nodes and then somewhere along the way, my whole existence.

This was a familiar number.

161 cm. That was my exact height at the moment. Having something akin to an epiphany, I touched the hovering value and a keyboard manifested out of nowhere.

And a "|" blinking in and out of existence.

I stiffened.

'I . . . I can change these values?'