The Laboratory Omnibus 2

by Skyler Grant

  Anna wasn't regaining consciousness. I kept Ophelia in the room with her while I went about further gathering material on this new world we had created. Earth was where it had always been, more or less. Old databases revealed star patterns and while they had drifted marginally I could identify them.

  The geography didn’t match. Earth's surface had once been mostly water and it now seemed to be over ninety percent landmass with a few massive lakes.

  Aefwal and Diamate had both been in Divine lands but well separated when the sphere activated . Now they were within a few hundred miles of each other, as were the Divine settlements. In contrast, most of the Scholarium appeared to be thousands of miles away with settlements surrounding a vast mountain chain. The Righteous were just as distant, now on the frozen tundra surrounding the southern magnetic pole.

  Anna awoke after several hours. I wasted no time in materializing a platter of cookies, Recipe 9178 specifically formulated with increased levels of iron to add a hint of the tang of fresh blood. I thought she'd appreciate it.

  "I guess I lived," Anna said, turning to reach for a cookie and grimacing. "Ouch, I'm not feeling very invincible."

  "You're physically in perfect health. Still out of shape, of course," I said.

  "Lies," Anna said, grabbing the cookie and taking a bite. "I like these. So what happened?"

  "We fixed the Earth, maybe. From what my sensors can detect we're all working under a single set of physical rules now, and they're loosely defined—like I wanted," I said.

  "Vinci?" Anna asked.

  "Her lands are near those of the other Scholars. We have some distance between us. From what we know she has the Beryl and Chalcedony crystals," I said.

  "Which means she won't be peaceful," Anna said, sitting up and again wincing. "I'm serious, Emma. I'm in a lot of pain. It didn't feel like this before? Why?"

  I didn't know. Every sensor I had was showing that she was in an absurd state of good health.

  "I don't know, but I can run some tests."

  Anna considered and shook her head. "No, we don't have time. I need gowns, red and black and barely covering anything. You know what I like."

  I wished I didn't, why couldn't it be her fashion sense that had gotten powered up?

  "I'm not sure indulging in your exhibitionist streak should really take priority over medical testing," I said.

  "It isn't that. Well, only a little. We're on a timer, we just altered the world the most it has been changed since the Cataclysm. We're going to do a little advertising," Anna said.

  Anna wanted to play politics.

  "I know it is pathetically underdeveloped, but use your brain. You're sick," I said.

  "I'm Anna Berasi and I'm Queen of the whole damned world. Now that there is a world, we need to show people who gave it to them and who they'd better bend the knee to," Anna said.

  I thought it a tremendous waste of time, but Anna is Anna.

  The video took a few hours to film and soon I had it bouncing off the communications satellites again functioning in orbit and broadcasting to the entire planet.

  Less than twelve hours later seventeen independent cities, a faction called the Wanderers, and the former King Boreas and Queen Astrid had all made their way through a teleportation gate to Aefwal to take a knee before Anna and swear their fealty.

  Upgrade Notification

  Congratulations

  Your hierarchal command structure has expanded to encompass multiple provinces

  New Classification

  Nation

  All abilities have been upgraded

  Appoint a new Province Head

  There was never any question who that would be. Aefwal had long been our capital city, and Ophelia ruled there, but she wasn’t ready for a promotion of this level. It would put her up alongside the former Royals and she wasn't prepared for that. I designated Caya the new Province Head and moments later she signaled her acceptance.

  I let her pick her own successor to rule Diamate. The city had a unique culture and populace I still didn't completely understand.

  I had more resources now than I'd ever had to conduct SCIENCE and a whole universe full of possibilities to explore. I wished I felt better about it, but I couldn't keep the politics out of my head.

  Vinci hadn't bent the knee and she’d proved willing to take great risks to obtain the Beryl. I didn't know what all three crystals could do if combined, and I expected Vinci wanted to find out. She would want the Agate. I didn't doubt we had spies and traitors among us, it was how the Scholarium operated. If she didn’t know already, Vinci would soon learn the Agate now rested inside Anna and the only way to get it was to destroy everything we had.

  It might not be today, but a fight was coming. It made even SCIENCE bittersweet.

  Coming Soon

  The Nation

  Earth has been restored from a broken series of disconnected planes into a single world once more, but the struggle is not done. With the world restored the reason for the Cataclysm becomes clear and the factions square off. The Righteous have been forever transformed by the reunification, Vinci’s fleets fill the sky, and those who once held power begin to plot and plan to get it once again. Will a new threat be enough to unify them?

  21

  Author Notes

  Author Notes

  If you've gotten far enough to read this let me just thank you so much. When I wrote The Laboratory, I had no idea if anyone else would be into this crazy idea in my head and the response of fans to this series has been inspiring. Emma and Anna have both come a long way, both made mistakes they've had to fight their way out of, and made bold moves that have sometimes paid off.

  If you make a habit of reading these notes you know that a goal of mine was always to see what happens after the dungeon. What happens if you kept moving out of the walls a game set up for you and take some of the same mechanics into the larger world. Emma is still making drones to defend her resources; those drones just now happen to be a civilization of humans.

  There is more to come. The next book I release is going to be the first in a new series taking into account all the feedback I've ever gotten from fans. Longer, a crunchier game system, some neat mechanics that are going to blow you all away. If you want news on it join the mailing list and stay in the loop, The Nation will be coming soon afterward and is going to be a great mix of these characters further developing and action.

  <<<<>>>>

  22

  The Nation

  "Emma doesn't have our best interests at heart. You have to know that. If she even knew we were having this conversation she'd kill both of us."

  The monitored conversation was taking place in a storage room of Tower JL9. The would-be rebels had disabled the electronic cameras but forgotten my biological components running through the walls. My nerve-endings throughout the towers were more than enough to monitor everything. These days, the cameras were largely for show.

  "The cookies might have been an accident," said Sven, a.k.a. Citizen 7AL3J. I appreciated his attempts to defend me, but really, he was wrong. I was testing explosive compounds in their tower and I'd found that humans would eat just about anything if you put it in a cookie. The first few attempts had made people ill, but the last batch had been a success. Once metabolized by the body, it turned into a powerful, explosive goo in the stomach that blew people apart. I’d achieved a success rate of over thirty percent.

  I'd bring the people back, of course, from a backup that didn't even have the trauma of being exploded. I wasn't a savage, SCIENCE just needed test subjects.

  The conversation wasn't anything to be concerned about. I could let this run its course.

  "Akane exploded right there in the middle of the lounge. That isn't right man, and Emma isn't right. You're maintenance, we don't need you to do much. Just leave a camera broken every so often so we have safe spots like this to meet," said Kara, a.k.a. Citizen 1PK4L.

  I was curious to see where this went, but I was on a sche
dule and it was time for Tower JL9 to get a reset. Explosive charges were teleported to key points in the structure and detonated 0.001 seconds later wiping out key structural supports. In less than three minutes the tower implosion was complete and I had maintenance drones swarming the area, moving Bio-matter and material waste to the recyclers.

  Replacement clones had been prepared. Sven and Kara were already being uploaded to their new bodies in Tower KA27. We'd be repeating many of the same experiments there, however with a color palette of the tower decor in tones of neutral blues and greens. I wanted to see if it lowered the rebellious thoughts of the residents.

  Anna had taken to calling our fledgling nation the Laboratory Empire, proving I suppose that given enough time even the most primitive of brains will occasionally come up with a good idea. A society built upon the concepts of SCIENCE and ruled over by an empress who was the most powerful woman on the planet after she'd absorbed countless Source Orbs, power crystals, and the Agate.

  I'd been busy with experiments nonstop since the Earth had been restored to its place in the cosmos. Although the physical laws were similar to what we'd grown accustomed, nothing was quite the same and none of our systems were optimized. The return of electricity meant that old world technologies were valid again, thousands of years of scientific progress that couldn't be simply discarded.

  Apart from all the science there was the land-grab. Everybody was eager to claim as much of the new Earth as possible and to tap into its resources. Queen Vinci's focus on industrialization was paying dividends. She could set down an auto-miner and auto-factory and within a few days have a sprawling citadel with defense cannons on the perimeter and aerial drones soaring overhead.

  I couldn't compete with that, but I had an edge of my own with my ability to rapidly create new drones. I'd had the growth vats pumping out people as fast as I could make them. Create a tribe and give them weapons, armor and tools, and they could build themselves a settlement quickly and establish their own set of growth vats to further populate the area.

  The Scholarium had spread themselves far and wide. Anyone who had absorbed a power crystal becoming at least minor nobility, holding as much land and commanding as many unpowered serfs as they could hold onto—which wasn’t many.

  I was offering any serf who crossed our borders abilities of their own through my upgrade powers, and a role in our civilization. Queen Vinci ruled a vast empire of machines and was desperate for people to compliment the machines’ functions. Those willing to serve her were being offered the best life her industrialized society could provide.

  Both I and Vinci appealed strongly, offering more than a life of being subjugated, and the Scholarium was bleeding people to us. Its heavy-handed attempts to impose order by use of force only escalated the problem. The endless, internal struggles between the Scholarium factions weren’t helping.

  We weren't free from our own subversive problems, of course. It seemed that many people who were not born one of my drones didn’t really trust me, and questioned my constant surveillance and direction of their lives. Suspicion had begun to grow even among the ranks of my own creations.

  Under the guidance of Caya, the Flawless were rapidly expanding. They had taken to my growth vat technology happily and were creating millions of genetically perfect humans. The people of Diamate remained almost entirely Flawless and now represented almost a third of the population of Aefwal.

  The Divine among us had prompted a growing religious movement. Many regarded us as Emma, the Goddess of Birth and Creation, and Anna, Goddess of Death and Rebirth. Together we had grown the world anew. Anna liked it, but it concerned me. The Divine always thought their connection to these archetypes strengthened them. I believe that defining who you were to that degree limited your options and made you weak. I wasn't going to let anyone define me.

  At least the Gobbles didn't go in for religion, and they had more reason than most to think of me as their creator—I'd designed their entire species, albeit after the initial accident that spawned them. They now had a city of their own. My attempts to bolster their intelligence had been more successful than even I expected. They even had scientists, physicists proving particularly valuable editions with ways of thinking well outside of the human norm—or my own.

  They were still cats, generally, although now they stood a little over two meters in height and were massive constructs of fur and muscle. Wolf had once used his people as shock troops and they had been very good at it. My Gobbles didn't work quite as well as a unit, but individually were far more dangerous.

  Their latest request was that I build them a race of super-powered mice to make their lives more interesting. It was a challenge, but as I needed more stealth experts anyways and scientists with an understanding of dimensional rifts, it was a challenge I was happy to undertake. So far the current mice models weren't even as intelligent as the original Gobbles and had little control over their teleportation abilities. Still, with improvements, one day I'd make sure my Gobbles had something to give them an interesting hunt.

  A communication was coming in, picked up by one of the outposts near the southern pole.

  That was home to the people once known as the Righteous, these days calling themselves the Fallen. The Fallen were a complicated case. They built the device that I and Anna used to remake the Earth. Their intent had been to return everything to the physical laws that once governed the world.

  The Righteous’ proximity to the device exposed them all to a massive burst of power that left them transformed and thus became the Fallen. Based on my scans it seemed that over ninety percent of the people had become tertiary recipients of Anna's gifts. Far weaker than Anna, yet still among the strongest of the Powered now on Earth. Most had gotten three abilities, a few four. And these were a people who had always hated the Powered and done their utmost to see them stripped of their gifts.

  We'd tried diplomacy and every effort had been rebuffed. They didn't want to talk. Fortunately they didn't seem to want to fight either, so we'd been content with leaving them to do their own thing.

  Suddenly, the Fallen wanted to talk now. In fact, they were requesting military aid.

  In the past, the Righteous were more often enemies than allies and I should care less. However, if something was threatening them I wanted to know all about it. It was also an opportunity to see what they'd been up to.

  Anything that could threaten them must be powerful. I had to call in my heavy hitters for this.

  I had just the people in mind.

  23

  Many things had changed with our new world. Before, dispatching forces would have been an almost instantaneous affair. No longer. While I could still teleport a mission it was limited, and dimensional drives didn’t function with the Earth no longer in tatters.

  I'd retooled airship engines to allow for rapid travel. Even so, getting people to the southern pole was going to take over an hour.

  "Do you think there will be anyone to kill? I haven't killed someone in way too long," Sylax said, sprawled out in one of the cabin seats.

  "You killed someone this morning," Bana said.

  There weren't many who could bond with Anna's new power set. Most simply exploded when that much energy began coursing through their veins. Sylax could though, and so could Anna's clones. They'd been created to be under Sylax's command when she had first claimed Aefwal, disposable forces to throw at an enemy. Despite that I produced them, they weren’t actually my drones and I couldn't back them up except for the survivors from that era who since joined the network. There were only eighty-three of them left. Most had taken jobs in engineering. Twenty had volunteered to work with Sylax.

  They had the second generation of Anna's power set, what I once would have called lieutenant level. That made them each a good bit stronger than the Fallen.

  "That? What was just for fun. It doesn't really count unless they are trying to kill me," Sylax said, rolling her head back. "Tell her, Emma."

  "Don't dra
w me into your sociopathic chit-chat," I said through the ship’s speakers.

  "You know how to explain things to them," Sylx said.

  Fine, I could play translator.

  "It is like the pleasure of a cookie stolen from the cookie jar, rather than one taken from the plate offered in front of you," I said.

  "Oh. That makes perfect sense," Bana said.

  The clones all had their personalities. Still, some things they shared in common with Anna.

  Dasana said, "Fun as it is watching you get all twitchy with want for a murder, how about we actually talk about the mission? What the hell are we heading into?"

  All the Annas had taken the suffix “ana” as a part of their names. It was an improvement over them all being 'Anna' at least. Unfortunately, they hadn't kept my efficient and practical numbering system.

  "Any sensor readings yet, Emma?" Sylax asked.

  "The Fallen create a lot of distortion from a distance. I'll let you know when I have something."

  "It's got to be Vinci. We all know she's not done," Bana said.

  It was a logical thought. Vinci had been the most aggressive about claiming territory and while she might not want to pick a fight with us just yet, the Fallen were another matter and Vinci could be making a move. Individually, the Fallen might be stronger than her—so was almost every passenger of this airship—yet no one could ignore the threat she posed. Vinci could send automated drones in vast numbers and swarm an enemy,

  "There are other threats out there. The Scholarium isn't done either and we don't know what new kings and queens might have arisen," Sylax said.

  Distance and change had done much to cool the infighting of the Scholarium. I was sure they would be back to it, eventually. For now, things were relatively peaceful there.