Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
“I try to listen more than I talk.”
And I see more than I say I do.
“A rare quality. Shall we begin the tour?” she asks, gesturing toward the door. “I thought we might start with some of our research facilities, give you a sense of what we’re really working toward here. The context that never makes it into the press releases.”
I follow her out of the conference room and into another glass elevator, this one descending rather than ascending. The numbers tick down—fifty, forty, thirty—and Julia stands in silence beside me, her reflection ghostly against the city beyond.
“I understand you and Vanguard have become friendly,” she says, not looking at me. “During your interviews. You have a nice…rapport.”
My pulse jumps, but I keep my voice steady. “He’s been very generous with his time.”
“He has, hasn’t he?” A pause. “Nate can be quite attentive when something catches his interest. It’s one of his more charming qualities—and one of his more dangerous ones.”
My brows knit together. “Dangerous?”
“Intense focus is useful for a superhero, less so for personal relationships.” She finally turns to look at me, her eyes seeming colorless. “He has a tendency to become fixated. On things. On people. It can be overwhelming for those who aren’t prepared for it.”
“I appreciate the warning,” I say carefully. “I can handle it.”
“It’s not a warning, my dear. It’s merely context.” The elevator stops. “For what I’m about to show you.”
The doors slide open to an area that’s noticeably different from the sleek corporate aesthetic above. It’s more institutional, with harsh fluorescent lighting and numbered doors that suggest laboratories rather than offices. The air smells faintly of antiseptic and something else, something metallic that makes my nose twitch, though that could just be her perfume.
“What I’m about to show you is not public knowledge,” Julia says, leading me down the hall. “I’m trusting you with this because I believe you’re intelligent enough to understand its significance and professional enough to represent it fairly.”
“Well, thank you. I appreciate your confidence.”
“Confidence has nothing to do with it.” She stops outside a door marked simply Suite 7 and presses her palm against a scanner. “This is about making sure you understand what Vanguard is and what it takes to…maintain him.”
The door slides open, and I follow her inside.
The room is smaller than I expected, maybe twenty feet square, dominated by a single piece of equipment at its center. It takes me a moment to understand what I’m looking at.
It’s a chair. Not a simple one, but a reclining apparatus of chrome and leather, with padded restraints at the wrists and ankles and a curved headpiece studded with electrodes. Screens and monitors surround it, currently dark, and cables snake from the headpiece to a bank of computers against the wall.
It looks like something out of a nightmare, or maybe a horror film about mad scientists. Frankenstein meets Marathon Man.
“This is our enhancement maintenance suite,” Julia says, her voice perfectly casual, as if she’s showing me a conference room. “When you push the human body beyond its natural limits, it requires regular calibration. Tune-ups, if you will, like a high-performance vehicle.”
“You mean Vanguard…”
“Sits in this chair every month.” She runs her hand along the armrest, almost lovingly. “The process takes approximately four hours. It’s not painful. He doesn’t really feel pain in general, as you may know, but we sedate him regardless. Without regular calibration, the enhancements begin to degrade. Muscle control deteriorates. Cognitive function becomes erratic. The body, quite simply, starts to reject what we’ve done to it.”
I’m surprised at the part of him not really feeling pain, but I file that away in the back of my head. Instead, I stare at the chair, imagining Nate strapped to it. The idea of seeing him helpless and unconscious while Julia and her team do whatever they do to keep him functional is unsettling.
“That sounds…” I search for an innocuous word. “Invasive.”
“Progress often is.” She moves toward the door, apparently done with this room. “This way. There’s more to see.”
I follow her back into the corridor, my mind racing. Regular calibration. Sedated. Erratic cognitive function. Are they able to, like, control him in any way? Is he aware of this? He seems to be of the mind that he has autonomy, but how much does he even know about what they do?
The next laboratory is larger, brighter, filled with equipment I don’t recognize and some I do—glass tanks filled with viscous fluid, robotic arms performing delicate operations, screens showing what look like cell structures dividing and multiplying.
“Our synthetic biology division,” Julia announces, a note of pride creeping into her voice. “This is where the real magic happens.”
She leads me past rows of tanks, each containing something organic and unsettling—a length of muscle fiber suspended in gel, what looks like a section of skin growing on a frame, a pulsing mass that might be cardiac tissue, all completely disgusting. I can’t help but feel a little nauseated.