But the reason why he was walking the streets of Olympus City was because his body wasn’t at the same level as that of his ancestors, for whom the psionic abilities had been intended. His body simply couldn’t handle the stress that the full use of the psionics entailed. He could push his natural limits by training, but he would never be able to use them to the same extent as the People were. Which was why he was now standing in front of the Empire’s leading research center.
“Nervous?” A shape appeared in front of him. A holographic representation of Adrian’s personal AI, Iris. She appeared as a small, fiery woman clothed in a dress, something like fairies from the old stories. Her features were a meld of Laura Reiss, Adrian’s adoptive mother, and Bethany, his first and only love.
The two of them had been through a lot together. Her previous home had been an AI core inside the implant in Adrian’s head. But once he had triggered the change, the implant had been in the way, so Iris had ordered the nanites in his body to remove them. Thankfully, her core had survived, and she now had a new home in the form of a bracer that Adrian wore. It came with a few upgrades, one of which was the ability to project holograms in the two-meter radius around the bracer. The drawback was that she could no longer talk inside his head, as at the time he hadn’t had an implant inside his head. Since then the Empire had gained a lot of knowledge from Axull Darr’s sphere, and they had managed to build an implant that could interface with his slightly changed brain, so now Adrian once again had an implant inside his head, which Iris could access from the outside, so they could talk internally again. But Iris and he had decided not to transfer her core back inside; there was no need, and with her being external, they could upgrade her hardware easily.
“A bit,” Adrian responded, looking fondly at the fiery shape floating in front him.
“Don’t worry, I doubt that Seo-yun would have called you if she wasn’t sure that they had something,” she said, and then disappeared.
Adrian nodded, then let the small, heavy ball fall into his palm and put it into his pocket. He entered the building and made his way to the second floor, already knowing the way. A minute later, he arrived at his destination. He approached the desk clerk and announced himself.
“You can go in, Clan Leader. She is expecting you,” the clerk said.
Adrian smiled and entered the office, Akash and Sora following behind him. Inside, he was met by a short woman who, upon noticing him, got up and walked around to meet him.
“Ah, Adrian. Thank you for coming,” she said.
“I couldn’t refuse a call from you, Seo-yun,” Adrian said, smiling at the older woman. Hyeon Seo-yun was the Empire’s Minister of Science and the partner of Emperor Tomas Klein. Also, one of Adrian’s closest friends. She and Tomas had been together for a long time, and although they’d never married, they did make their relationship public. Marriage was something that occurred less and less in the Empire; people didn’t feel the need to validate their feelings with a written agreement. They just started being a family. Adrian was envious of their relationship; it was something that he desired for himself, yet had never found.
“I gather that you finally have something to help with my little problem,” Adrian said.
“I’m sorry that it has taken so long, Adrian,” she said seriously. “But yes, I think that we finally have a solution.”
Adrian looked at her expectantly as she gestured for him to take a seat. Seo-yun shook her head as he made himself comfortable and she sat across from him on the two couches to the side of the room.
“Times have changed so much since Earth. For the newer generations born here, this is their way of life; they have never known anything else. But we from the old world know, and remember.” She looked at him with a sad smile. “Did you know that we were just a few generations away from awakening the psionics by ourselves naturally?” she asked, but continued before Adrian could answer. “Fifty years, a hundred at the most, and the code in our DNA would have unlocked on its own. But we meddled…”
“So have you found a solution?” Adrian asked.
“I am confident that we have. But it will not be easy, nor painless,” she said.
“I figured, but I still need to do it. Having these abilities and not being able to use them to their full potential is frustrating.”
“Are you sure that you want to do it? We are just at the cusp of figuring out how to trigger the change in embryos; in a few years, we will have children who will be able to take advantage of everything that Axull Darr engineered. In a couple of decades, there will be plenty of people with psionics.”
“And what of us who were born without them? We will be inferior; we need to change too. And besides, we know that it is possible for us to trigger the failsafe if we push ourselves far enough. We need a way of making ourselves as able as the new generations.”
Seo-yun sighed. “Alright,” she said, defeated.
“Tell me what you have in mind.”
“We can’t trigger the same upgrades as what Axull Darr imagined to come naturally; for those, we require an undeveloped body, so we can only trigger those switches in embryos. But there are other ways of upgrading your body. It won’t be the same. Actually, if we succeed, your body will be better in some ways, and worse in others.”
“What do you mean?”
“What we need to do is reinforce your skeletal system, muscles, and skin, make them strong enough to handle the stress of your psionics. Your nervous system is already on par; it has been upgraded fully, so it is the same as that of the People. Axull Darr made sure that our nervous system evolves along a strict path, but for the rest of our bodies, he left some room for natural evolution. The change affected your organs, too. They have been reinforced a bit—not fully, but enough that it doesn’t matter. It is the rest that Axull Darr couldn’t change with the failsafe, partly because we have already meddled and changed things, and partly because our natural evolution differs from that of the People, courtesy of the environment we evolved in. It is just something that he didn’t anticipate. The same would happen to the Nel if they triggered the failsafe,” Seo-yun said.
“Alright, and how do you intend to make that happen?” Adrian asked, leaning forward.
“We possess a lot of genetic material that Olympus brought here, samples from many animals from Earth and such. What we are going to do is infuse your bones with the DNA of limpet sea snails; more precisely, their teeth. We will change your bone structure to that of limpet teeth, with a few of our own additions.”
“Snail teeth?” Adrian asked incredulously.
“Yes, they possess the strongest biological material we have ever discovered. We can apply that unique structure to your own. But we will add some other things that we have developed precisely for this procedure. We will add carbon net over the bones to make them even stronger. The drawback is that this will almost double your bone density, which will make you heavier. But we will also reinforce your muscles. We can use one of the genetic upgrades that the People used for themselves; it is not something that they were born with, but an add-on. They were in the habit of altering themselves constantly, at least in the early days of their civilization. It is an old treatment, but we have managed to rework it a bit and adapt it for you. It will make your muscles denser, giving you more strength and speed.”
“Wait,” Adrian interrupted. “You have access to the treatments that they used on themselves?”
“Yes,” Seo-yun said slowly.
“Why don’t we just use another one of those for my skeletal system?” Adrian asked.
“We can’t,” Seo-yun said. “Those were developed for their genetic makeup, and while we do possess a lot of their DNA, Axull Darr infused it in a lifeform from Earth and made sure that we could be shaped by our environment. Our bones are different from theirs; we can’t upgrade them by using their methods once they are developed.”