Revelation

[_______________Jaxxa]

A wisp escapes a surgeons cap and she frowns in annoyance as a lock of fire tickles the bridge of her nose above her sterile mask. She flicks her head to toss the unruly curl out of her eyesight as she aims the beam at the patient lying asleep on the cold table.

A specialist in her field, she wonders why her talents aren't being used in her normal way of doing things, cloning and genetics.....what a coup that would be if she'd been on that project involving the Council that just disbanded. She'd heard the clone pulled the job off perfectly.

The embryo is carefully extracted from the blond beauty...pity about that mole on her face.....probably considers it a beauty mark. Well...she'll never know her daughter will be born without one...well perhaps "born" isn't the right word. But why take an embryo when they can just clone the woman. Hmm. Maybe it's something to do with the genetic combination of her line along with whoever the embryo's father is.

The surgeon shrugs the thought away. She knows the long lineage of the Craddock family, knows the girl has been watched carefully and was genetically tested and proven to be the daughter of her collegue, the now deceased Dr. Craddock, nee Skabo. But the embryo's father.....why trust a wild card when genetic creation and cloning can produce anything they want?

The embryo is placed carefully in the Utero Tank and is swept away for the Accellerated Maturation Programmers....what an ironic name for a bunch of Java guzzling scientists, AMP's. The surgeon nods at the security people. The patient is ready to be returned to her life with no scars and knowing none the wiser. Probably didn't even know she had concieved.

She pulls the surgical scrubtop off which pulls the cap off with it, allowing the rest of her vibrant red hair to cascade down her back. She pulls the scrub pants down over long, tanned legs and flips the pants up and into the discard can with a pedicured toe.

Hours later she checks her watch as her shuttle returns her to the ship in orbit around a red planet and her mind shrugs off her mission and moves onto plans for the next one.

[_______________Jaxxa]

He pushes his broom around the floor, mindful of large tubes and cables. The room is dark except for a few discreet reading lamps that reflect eerily off the utero tanks that bubble softly. He knows inside them are the bodies of the latest batch developing to full maturation before being moved to the programmers. Just a huge mass of cells and flesh without souls, without history, without names, not yet ready to breath life and begin a road of choices that are guided by their programming.

He bumps into a tank that wasn't there the night before, strange that....this one isn't part of the batch...huh. He turns to look at it more carefully. At first it appears empty. He looks at the others again, yep, they're about two meters long and filling out....some are even starting to grown hair. He looks back at the new tank... Squints... Wow... An actual baby. Normally they start out with a child-size spine with muscle and a bag of skin lacking any adipose tissue. Natural curiosity takes him halfway around the tank to see if it's a boy or girl....girl....WHA THE FU... it BLINKED....the room echos with the broom he dropped. Feeling one of the lamps behind him and realizing he had just jumped back from a tank with a helpless thing in it, he shakes himself and looks furtively about to make sure there's no real living people watching him act stupidly. He picks up the lamp and holds it toward the tank. The baby makes a feeble swiming motion and turns from the light. He notices the brass label under the glass on the instrument panel and reads: "W.akened I.nfant C.ognitive C.ompression E.xperiment"

Hmm, just another experiment. Probably bound for the bio-freak dump. He puts the lamp back, picks up his broom, and goes back to his task. The baby turns back and watches the man's back as he sweeps his way out of the room.

[Gridstatic]

Manex Catastrophe. A weapon that truly earned it's name. It was only a third as fast as his Old Kerans, yet hit more than 3 times as hard. These thoughts all coursed through Gridgrinder's head as he fought a Clan Enforcer with his shiny new toy. Gunning him down finaly with a burst of gunfire, he calmly walked over to the chest that the Clanner had been guarding and daftly picked the lock. Then everything went black.

"Dammit, I never did practice disarming traps, did I.."- he thought as the cloud of nanobots swarming over his eyes began to dissapate. He moved the the next room in his mission, glancing at his digital map exspecting a probe or 34-V droid, and finds....An A-1000 Elite. It clicked and whirred as it turned to face him, and Gridgrinder let out a gasp and aimed his Manex at the head of the monstrous warrior. Letting out a shot that registered at his max damage ratio on his datapad, and seeing barely more than an iota of health dissipate from the beast, he formulated a new plan: Run. Run very fast. Look at his map readout, look at the A-1000, and run for the exit. It was effective enough. As he left the mission site panting, knowing the machine wouldnt leave the place for fear of being seen and attacked by a guard.

Hunched over, Gridgrinder regained his breath, and while the swarm of nanobots around him were making repairs to his injured body, he figured he'd kill some time, reaching into his backpack, and pulling out a small device, he glanced at the cover, chuckling as he read the words 'Don't Panic' written in warm, reassuring letters. Just below it he glanced at the title of the mini-encyclopedia, laughing again as he read it, "The Extended and Revised Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe." He took the cover off and keyed in the word 'Robot.' finding the passage in the electrical index, he laughed as he read the book's take on machines, and liked the reference to the Robotic's Marketing Division of Omni-tek as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes" He chuckled a bit more as the nanobots swirling around his body had finished their repairs. He was still a bit achy, but his overall pain was gone. Suddenly, as he began to get up, he heard his Comm-link beep, in the tone he had preprogrammed to register whenever the glasses he had 'given' Jaxxa made a large move in location. He figured she probably had just Whom-pah'd somewhere, but as he glanced at the glasses' SPS he had installed, he saw she was out in a very peculiar location, even for an agent of her experience to be in.

He opened the program that displayed the camera in the glasses' broadcast, and saw she was in a sort of surgury clinic. As he focused and adjusted the camera, he saw a red-headed woman washing her hands near the Operating Table that Jaxxa was apparently laying on. As she finished, she slipped on a pair of gloves, and motioned to an assistant to do something, what he didnt know, wishing he'd put sound into the camera. Soon he found out, as the Intern came and began removing Jaxxa's sunglasses. Gridgrinder adjusted the camera a few more times until he got a clean shot of the surgeon's face, and took some screen captures, storing them in his datapad. He took a few more shots of the lab, and then frowned as the glasses were placed on a desk directly opposite the Operating table. Setting the camera to log all of it's recordings, he shut down his Comm-link, and headed to a Grid terminal, hacking the datastream and entering the Rift. "No one's gonna hatch any schemes while I still have plans.." he thought, entering the grid node that was closest to Jaxxa's position. Hopping into his Kodiak, he drove in the direction of a lab that was 'supposed' to be nonexistant.

[_______________Jaxxa]

All dressed back up in her ducky-jammies and sunglasses (she really should get that light switch fixed in her apartment....kinda weird finding her asleep in a fully lit apartment), the security woman nods to the atrox to pick the patient up. They digitilize and appear near Jaxxa's apartment and carefully sneak her back.

The woman reaches behind the fridge for the sleeping-gas device that had been stashed there the day before and looks about to make sure there are no signs of their visit.

Satisfied, she and the atrox digitilize out with a grin.


Hours later, Jaxxa wakes up with her arm draped over her stuffed Leet, a childhood toy that had been returned to her by Sejanus when her identity had been confirmed. She rolls over, wrinkles her nose at a sudden cramp in her abdomen. Damn.....well, better late than not at all. She walks sleepily to the bathroom for a feminine hygiene ritual, decides to take the day off and cramp in her cozy apartment. Finishing, she walks to the fridge, pulls out a partially eaten chocolate cream pie with the fork still in it, carrys it back to bed and hits the remote to turn on the vid before fluffing up her pillow and sitting back for a day of lounging and decadent chocolate binging.

[______________Barlau]

(( ooc: Jax, what can I say? Brilliance, sheer brilliance I loooove the story twist

But... now we are all *dying* to know..

Who's the daddy? ))


KB

[_______________Jaxxa]

A toddler with blond curls yawns as she floats in a utero tank. Innocence and wisdom in one small body of flesh and bone. She scratches at one of the electrodes attached to her forehead and a woman monitering a computer frowns at a screen and turns to check on the child.

"Stop scratching at those, Wicce, you know it messes up the patch cords," she admonishes the child who answers by sticking her tongue out. The scientist sticks her tongue out in return and they both grin at each other.

It's hard telling with the goo the child's floating in, but the scientist knows by the genetic code that the girl has green eyes, unlike either of her biological parents, but carried down by her maternal grandfather, a man of black hair and green eyes, one of the Omega Craddock's. Classified, of course. The blond hair comes from the genetic code of the Skabo's. Also Omega, not that this one's mother will ever know that. The Craddocks know what they are about... but the Skabo's are part of the Omega's breeding stock along with Wicce's biological father. That lineage has also been carefully monitered on that mining planet ever since it's terraformation. Omega's have been careful about exposing their breeding stock to different environments, gaining the best of adaptability to their bodies while they enhance their minds and longetivity with genetics and technology.

And now we experiment with taking what we have learned by growing beings in vats and figuring out how to instill them with knowledge to now finally being able to instill knowledge into our own Omega's from their birth and producing our super race. Yes, the scientist thinks to herself, we have come a long way from the bio-freaks to where we are now. From every small experiment to the solid races we have created across several planets, all contribute to our goal within the Omega. And with Notum....now perhaps...gods.

[_______________Jaxxa]

In a quiet tower at the edge of the city, a man looks down through windows to a sea of grey clouds. So many clouds are spread across the Omega sea. Striations and groupings, oblivious of those other clouds of investigation and thoughts. One storm studies inserting the knowledge of all we have learned into newly born infants. Another studies on immortality, with great success. After all, the storms are lead by a small council of Thors and Freya's who have lived so long....so very long. How do they not tire. I am tired, he thinks to himself. And still, another storm begins to rise, they wish to try inserting their near-immortal minds into newly grown bodies. In theory it should work, after all, we can digitalize ourselves. The trick has been in separating what counts as a "soul" from the body in the insurance program and inserting it into a separate host body. Yes. I am tired.

[_______________Jaxxa]

Jaxxa hears her com-link beep, groans when she looks at the clock and realizes it's still the butt-crack of dawn. Damn. She left it on the other side of the room. She bounces out of bed and immediately trips over a box holding her latest purchase. "Yep, that's me," she swears to herself as she swipes in the direction of the com and snags it with the nail she just broke, "super omni-agent with the grace of a bronto."

Rolling on her back she speaks into the com as if she were in a freshly starched uniform and not in ducky-jammies, "This is Jaxxa."

[_______________Jaxxa]

The pre-adolescent no longer complains of the wiring attached to her skull. It is her only link outside this tank and away from the boredom. Behind her she can see other tanks, and tried to communicate with them for a while until she realized they were mentally dead and no more than growing hosts.

At first her trips outside this lab were tentative, afraid of what the scientists that keep her alive would do if they realized she was using their incoming feeds to sneak out with her mind through their systems into the electronic world that surrounds Rubi-Ka. Then with the boldness of budding adolescense came the nonchalant attitude of immortality and whisking her mind out to freedom became second nature.

How easily she found her way past all their firewalls meant to keep her mind locked at her lessons. She had no freedom of her body locked in the tank, but her mind, growing even faster than the body rapidly maturing in the tank, relished in the freedom of a digitalized microcosm.

[_______________Jaxxa]

Budding at maturity, she raises an eyebrow at the man sweeping in the lab when he leers at her. Funny, the power of sex that women seem to have over men. They do the stupidest things over it. Information to store away for future use. All she has to do is arch her back to make the stupid man freeze in a moment and forget what he was doing.

She had to laugh inside while sneaking out in the digital world....watching from inside a camera she sees a clanner freeze an omni cop at the perfect moment by pulling her top up....shot him square between the eyes while he stood helpless staring at her breasts.

Clanners and Omni's...how they do carry on. Days ago she owed her life to Omni for creating her. Yesterday she envied Clanners for their freedom. Today she struggles with whether she will use the body they grow for her and take her own freedom, or escape forever in the digital world and take the freedom of having no body at all.

[_____________Sejanus]

(OOC: Just a bump to the story as we start a new story thread about the characters. See "A Friend Is Missing" by Barlau for the new story thread.)