“What do you mean you thought it would be a fun surprise?” Dan fumed, staring at Henry Ibis. The worst of it was how nonplussed the Director was. Through Dan’s entire tirade, the old man’s smile hadn’t changed at all.
“Dan, my boy,” the Director shook his head while rubbing his hands together. “You have the sense of adventure down. Ever since you came back from Twilight, you’ve been wearing an aura of danger like a cloak, but you don’t have any sense of style. Everything you want to do is logical and boring; there’s no panache to it! “ Ibis snapped his fingers, punctuating the final clause. “I’ve read all of your recruiting proposals, Dan. Sure, I could have drawn from the pool of olympic hopefuls. You’re completely right that biathlon competitors would have a great combination of drive, physical fitness, and weapon proficiency.”
Dan frowned at Ibis, only for his boss to raise a hand, shushing him before he could utter a syllable.
“Hell,” Ibis continued with a chuckle. “You also had a point when you said we should be up front about everything. I think you suggested that we should use online advertising to let people know that we were looking for super soldier candidates to beat back the alien menace. What if I did? It would have been as interesting as reading a menu. We wouldn’t have fish out of water, we wouldn’t have personal growth, we wouldn’t have had any of the elements we need to breed a good and proper protagonist.”
“Protagonist?” Dan closed his eyes and counted backwards from ten. He wasn’t sure if his mana addiction was getting worse or if an entirely different part of his personality was screaming at him to murder Henry. “This isn’t a book or story, Director. People in Brazil are dying right now, and if we can’t stabilize the situation, the elves are going to keep bringing soldiers through their teleport beacon until they have something that can fight our air force. The last I heard, satellite footage has already revealed elves riding what look like griffons.”
“I know!” Henry’s eyes glowed with excitement. “Isn’t it great? They’re already putting together the perfect whetstone we will need to sharpen our heroes. Once you triumph over the elves in Brazil, we will be ready to put together a force capable of protecting Earth from any enemy be it Orakh, Elven, or even human.”
“I don’t think I’ve read about any human polity with void ships in the Tellask records,” Sam interjected, frowning slightly. “It sounds like dwarves and dragons have their own way of traveling between worlds, but beyond them, it’s mostly just the Elves and the Orakh.”
Dan shifted slightly in his seat. They were in the conference room where he had spent so much time on weekly briefings during his training at the Thoth Institute. Not much had changed in the dimly lit room since that time; it was only Ibis, Sam, Dan, and Ibis’ omnipresent bodyguard. Except now, they were discussing the training regimen for others.
“Humans don’t have to get off of a void ship to be an enemy of Earth,” Henry replied with a wink.
“That ominous statement aside.” Dan waved his hand to draw attention back to himself. “Even with non-disclosure agreements, we can’t just keep so many of your candidates against their will. Most of them are minor celebrities with legal and public relations teams. The public is going to notice if they just disappear from the public eye while we train them.”
“So?” Henry shrugged. “If their legal and public relations teams were so good, they never would have signed the contracts we sent them. The non-disclosure agreements are ironclad, and they waived their right to leave the compound or communicate with the outside world during the testing process. There’s even a clause in there allowing us to seek injunctive relief to enforce the contract. A clause that I’ve talked over with the local judges at the nearby country club. They assure me that it’s enforceable. Given that they would be the people enforcing it, I feel like your statement was a bit incorrect. We can hold them here against their will, and we are going to.”
“Is…” Dan glanced nervously at Sam, who was also fidgeting across the table from him. “Is any of that in my contract with the Thoth Foundation?”
“What a silly question, Dan!” Henry smiled, displaying his perfect teeth. “Now, please give me an update on your experiments with awakening animals. I want to make sure you have the process down before you get started on any of the candidates. Even though the contracts do waive all liability, we still wouldn’t want any accidents.”
“They’ve gone pretty well so far,” Sam interjected, giving Dan a second to breathe. “The first couple experiments were a bit messy and ended in spontaneous combustion, but since then, we’ve had a great amount of success. The only limiting factors we’ve been able to discover are size and complexity. Dan hasn’t been able to find any mana to awaken in smaller animals such as rabbits, guinea pigs, and parakeets. Similarly, even larger creatures without developed nervous systems such as tapeworms and plants have been an impossibility. He has been successful in awakening mana in a wide variety of larger animals, such as komodo dragons, squid, eagles, condors, dogs, bears, wolves, dolphins, sharks, and most recently, monkeys. Per your instructions, he has awakened two breeding pairs of each animal so that we can see if their offspring inherit their magic. At this point, I believe that he is ready to move on to human experimentation.”
“Good!” Henry nodded enthusiastically before rolling up his arm. “Do me, right now.”
“Director,” Dan replied hesitantly, “I’m not sure that this is the best idea. My first couple of attempts went explosively awry, and this will be the first time I try this on a human. Maybe we should start with someone from death row or something like that, where I can afford to make a mistake.”
“Dan, my boy!” Henry shook his head while smiling. “I’ve seen your work. At least before you came back, you were timid to a fault, but you’ve always been meticulous. You don’t make mistakes. Now, quit dawdling. If I’m going to ask a room full of internet celebrities to submit themselves to this procedure, the least I can do is go first.”
Dan shrugged and looked at Sam but she gave him no support. Sighing, he walked over to Henry and put both of his hands on the older man’s exposed forearm. For a second, nothing happened, but then his senses moved through his fingers and into Henry’s body. The process was always a bit jarring. One second, Dan was standing in a conference room, and the next he was more or less inside another being’s body. He moved his perception around and frowned. There was mana in Henry, but he couldn’t find an affinity. From his experience with animals, he knew that he would need to use an affinity as the core of that creature’s spirit sphere. Only after one or more affinities were bound together in the creature’s chest could he begin to weave the mana flowing freely in their system into a ball of energy around the cluster of affinities. Without an affinity, even if Henry had mana, he would simply die if Dan tried to coalesce it into a usable form.
He released the Director’s arm and stepped back, shaking his head. “I can’t find an affinity to latch onto, Henry. I’m sorry.” His voice lowered with regret. He knew how much having magic meant to Henry. The old man’s face sank.
“Well,” Henry said, trying to keep his attitude up, “I have my good health, my looks, and my nearly limitless wealth. I guess it was a bit much for me to hope for everything. Try Dr. Weathers next.”
Dan glanced at Sam, and she nodded tightly before extending her arm. After grasping her, almost immediately he found an affinity and then another. Dan collected the shards of light and metal affinity together in his friend’s chest and began pulling the mana from the rest of her body toward them. Almost immediately, Sam shuddered and began screaming as her body rejected the unnatural and unstable method of collecting the energy. Then, in a second, it was over. Sam was gasping, face down on the table and her mana was collected into a stable sphere in her chest.
A part of him was a little annoyed that the process was so simple for her. When he had awakened and ranked up, it had taken hours of the most agonizing pain that he had ever experienced. Still, his process had been abnormal to say the least, and it had his benefits. The five spirit spheres in his chest reflected a prism of affinities, and each sphere regenerated mana at almost three times the speed of the sphere in Sam’s chest. He wasn’t sure that he would take the risk of self immolation again in order to gain those benefits, but what was done was done.
“Light and metal,” Dan announced as he stepped back from Sam’s heaving form. “Dual affinity.”
“It isn’t fair that she has two while I have none,” Henry mumbled, his eyes clouding slightly. Then he perked back up to his usual state. “Well, no one said that the world would be fair. I suppose it’s time for us to test the candidates and see what affinities we’re looking at. I know I’m certainly excited to see what abilities will be available to them.”
Over the next two days, Dan and Sam processed the Thoth Foundation’s reluctant applicants. Dan awakened them, and Sam injected them with a pared-down version of the System. Unfortunately, the Thoth Foundation’s source for the nanites couldn’t produce massive batches of the powerful and robust prototype used on him. The only way to keep up with demand was to grow smaller and cheaper colonies of the tiny robots with greatly-reduced functionality.
Instead, their Systems were modified based upon the data recovered from Dan’s nanites upon his return from Twilight. Compared to his System, the new ones almost made up in increased efficiency what they lacked in processing power, but when it came to their ability to mentally link with and reconstruct the user’s body, they were clearly inferior.
At first, it was a bit difficult to deal with the recruits’ whining and cajoling as they tried to talk their way out of processing. Some threatened to call lawyers, others made up imaginary medical conditions that Sam was able to quickly rule out. Eventually, promises from Sam of money and “social media exposure,” whatever that actually meant beyond a buzzword, were sufficient to silence them.
Still, a couple of them, including the brunette that had spoken up on the first day, handled it like champions. They took the injections, gritting their teeth through the pain, reduced from the mind-blanking agony Dan had suffered through by the comparative simplicity of their systems. These candidates were excited enough by the prospect of gaining the powers normally consigned to their video games to swallow their complaints.
By and large, the Thoth Foundation recruits could be divided into three camps. About forty percent of the applicants simply didn’t have an affinity and couldn’t be awakened. Henry took charge of them immediately after they failed their testing. Dan hoped that they were being released, but he wasn’t willing to put any money on it.
The remaining sixty applicants were divided almost equally. Half of them were upset and tried to fight the process every step of the way, alternating between bribes, promises, and legal threats. The other half, once they found out that they would be learning magic and getting training in order to protect Earth from alien invaders, were oddly enthused.
Dan couldn’t help but empathize more with the second group. Their world and way of life was at risk, and these people had the opportunity to learn magic and become something more. How could anyone willing to devote fifty hours a week to becoming a top player in a game called World of Magic Online not want to become an actual wizard and honest-to-God super soldier?
True, there were risks involved, but doing nothing would likely lead to being enslaved by elves and forced to the Orakh front without proper preparation. At that point, you might as well try to take charge of your situation and make the best of it. Being able to toss balls of energy around was a welcome plus.
As for the people with magic who chose to fight the program, Dan didn’t put much stock in them. They were cowards both physically and intellectually. They were too scared to fight the elves even if they were given the tools they would need, and utterly unconcerned with learning the new rules of magic and physics that apparently governed the cosmos.
If he had his way, Dan would have remanded them to Henry as well, but the Director insisted that both camps get the same training. He wasn’t exactly sure how he would feel with one of the awakened, too afraid to properly learn magic, being tasked with protecting him while he was in combat, but ultimately Henry was his boss, and it was his call.
Finally, a day before the military candidates were set to arrive, and while all of the Thoth candidates were recuperating from their treatment, Henry took him aside and had him test the Foundation’s security staff.
They were down forty candidates, given the members of the program that simply didn’t have an affinity. It only made sense that they do their best to replace those missing recruits from a pool of competent people.
The security staff were a mixed bag. Dan didn’t doubt that they could handle themselves, most of them were ex-special forces or private military contractors, and almost as fast as he was with his enhancements, without any magic of their own. Still, they had an arrogance to them that he found off-putting. Like they were humoring Henry and Dan when they went through the testing, but they didn’t take any of their directions all that seriously.
He hoped the growing divisions in the Thoth Foundation’s candidates wouldn’t develop into a problem later, but at the same time, he was worried. He had faith in himself, but his luck dealing with others had never been that great.
