Chapter 18 #2
“Thank you for the invitation.” I accept her handshake—firm, dry, and a little too tight. “This is quite a view.”
“It is, isn’t it?” She moves to stand beside me at the window, her gaze tracking over the city below.
Her perfume is subtle, but it tickles my nose.
“I’ve spent thirty years looking at this skyline.
Watching it change. Watching it nearly fall.
Watching us rebuild it, brick by brick.” She glances at me.
“Do you know the term ‘fail forward,’ Mia? It’s IT speak.
It’s when you have an issue during an upgrade, and there’s no clear path back to the last good state, which means you have no choice but to keep moving on and rebuild the system.
Whatever works, you keep; what doesn’t, you discard.
I know things haven’t been great this last century in Great Britain, but over here, we had to fail forward until we were successful. I think you could say we succeeded.”
I nod cautiously, prepared to agree with her instead of telling her what I really think, which is that I’m not sure the system was rebuilt to serve the people the last one fucked over. “Well, it seems Global Dynamix was certainly instrumental in failing forward,” I comment.
“Instrumental.” Her lips curve into an icy smile. “Such a diplomatic word. You’re good at that, aren’t you? Diplomacy. Saying the right thing at the right moment.”
“I would like to think so,” I say with a shrug, not wanting to take the bait. “It’s part of the job.”
“Mm.” She turns to face me fully, and I feel like a butterfly being examined before the pin goes in. “You have a talent for making people comfortable, I’ll give you that. For getting them to reveal things they might not otherwise share.”
“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.
“When Vanguard is injured—which happens more often than the press knows—we can repair him at the cellular level,” Julia explains.
“He heals fast, no doubt, but injuries can take their toll over time. Here, we can grow replacement tissue matched perfectly to his genetic profile. Skin, bone, muscle. Anything the human body can produce, we can replicate and improve upon.”
“Um, where do you get the base genetic material?” I ask, keeping my voice neutral despite the chill running down my spine.
“Various sources. Volunteers, primarily.” She pauses by one of the tanks, watching something pink and glistening pulse with artificial life.
“The enhanced program requires a significant pool of biological data. Tissue samples. Genetic profiles. The more diverse our database, the more effective our treatments will be.”
Volunteers. I think of Kozlov at the gala, shaking hands with Matthew Webb.
I think of the Prometheus files and their horrifying failure rates.
I think of refugees and migrants and people desperate enough to sign anything for a chance at a better life, because they were told things in the US would be better now.
“That must require quite a recruitment effort,” I say carefully.
“It does.” Her eyes meet mine, narrowing just a little. “We have partnerships with various organizations around the world. Medical facilities. Research institutions. Immigration services.”
Immigration services.
“Shall we continue?” Julia gestures toward another door. “I’ve saved the most interesting part for last.”
The final room is the largest yet, a circular space lined with screens, dozens of them, all displaying streams of data I can barely parse.
Numbers scrolling, graphs fluctuating, images cycling—and at the center of it all, a massive holographic display showing what appears to be a human body, rendered in blue light, rotating slowly.
It takes me a moment to recognize the figure.
Vanguard.
“Our biometric monitoring center,” Julia says, and there’s no mistaking the pride in her voice now. “From here, we can track our enhanced assets anywhere in the world. Every vital sign. Every movement. Every fluctuation in their physical and psychological state.”
“Assets?” I say. “Plural?”
“Well, Paragon makes two,” she says.
I step closer to the holographic display, watching data cascade around Vanguard’s rotating form.
Heart rate: 58 bpm. Blood pressure: 118/76.
There are numbers for his cortisol levels, adrenaline, testosterone.
Brain activity patterns I don’t understand but that seem to pulse and flow like weather systems across his skull.
It’s strangely beautiful and bloody disturbing all at once.
“This is all from his watch?” I ask. My smart watch could never.