The Nation Read online

  The Nation

  Skyler Grant

  The Nation

  Skyler Grant

  Copyright © 2018 Skyler Grant

  All rights reserved.

  This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously, or are entirely fictional.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be addressed via email to [email protected]

  Cover designed by Kismet Covers

  Editing Polgarus Studio (www.polgarusstudio.com)

  Electronic edition, 2018

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  Contents

  Previously

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Previously

  Previously in the Laboratory series

  An insulting AI named Emma was awakened by an engineer with a fondness for cookies named Anna. Emma soon learned an apocalypse had befallen the Earth, the world had been fractured into shards through dimensional space operating on different physical laws and populated by insane overlords with superpowers. A heck of a lot of SCIENCE happened and all was good until one especially vicious overlord by the name of Sylax attacked the laboratory.

  Emma transferred herself into Sylax’s flagship, although it was badly damaged in the process and for awhile everything was absolutely terrible until they discovered the lost city of Aefwal. Cities meant power and Emma meant to claim Aefwal for herself, she failed.

  Sylax won the city, although Emma managed to claim one of the districts becoming one of Sylax’s commanders in the process. When Sylax went missing there was a big civil war and a lot of super-powered brawling and Emma finally came out on top.

  With a bit of power Emma finally figured out what had happened to the earth and tracked down one of the three crystals that had torn it apart. For a time the Agate crystal powered Aefwal but after Emma was betrayed by her copy/sister Amy who wished her to become stronger and it wound up implanted into Anna along with a powerful amplification crystal once held by Sylax. With this much power Anna became the most powerful person on Earth.

  The Righteous were building a vast machine to transform the entire Earth back to “Reality zero”, a realm without superpowers. Emma instead reasoned out a way to use the device to restore the Earth, but to one with altered physical laws.

  It is a new world, with new rules and new powers. Our story resumes.

  1

  "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 schedule 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.

  2

  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 draw 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.

  "What about one of the AIs? There are two in the wild that we know of, and with the old world technology restored there might be more?" Dasana asked.

  Amy was cloned from my processes and had recently, and very effectively, betrayed us. Tobias had been aligned with the Righteous before the restoration of Earth and we hadn't heard a peep from him since. While it was possible he was destroyed, I feared it even more likely that, just like the Righteous, he too gained some sort abilities from Anna.

  If that was the case then Tobias was out there somewhere—and probably the most powerful AI on the planet. It wasn't a comfortable thought.

  "I think if anybody wanted to wage war there are easier p
laces to start," Sylax said.

  "Not everyone enjoys preying on the weak," I said.

  "Please. You know I like it when they're strong enough to scream a very long time," Sylax said, with a half-smile.

  "Well, as you have spent so long fantasizing about who you are about to murder, perhaps you have some insights to share?"

  Sylax leaned forward, her expression serious. "We all know who it probably is. I agree it’s likely Vinci, but we can't get complacent. When you brought this world back together you drew a lot of different lands here too, many of them never connected by dimensional drive at all."

  Predators usually focus on the prey directly in front of them. A narrow, intense focus that blinds them to outside possibilities. It is the hapless prey that sees unknown threats lurking in every bush. This focus on the unknown from Sylax troubled me. It wasn’t her style.

  "You know something," I said.

  Sylax gave another smile, wider this time. "I know lots of things, Emma. I don't know what we are going into today, but I do know how dangerous this world is.

  That wasn't an answer, not really. We had a lot of enemies who had become allies, and some of them I trusted a great deal. I'd trust Hot Stuff with my life, or Caya, even Mechos had proved his worth more than once.