Disclaimer: Characters are not mine. All is the property of DC Comics. I'm just borrowing them for some non-profit entertainment.
Artificial Scion
Chapter Two: Core Conspiracy
Doctor Serling Roquette observed her creation through the two-way mirror fitted to his cell. She hovered in the zero gravity of Space Lab's core, one hand closed around a wall handle so that she did not go drifting off along the currents of artificially circulated air. The other hand resting critically on her hip. Behind her, the rest of her team monitored the subject's functions -his heart rate, respiratory pace, brainwave activity, etc.- as well as how much weight they were exerting on him.
The 'weight' was technically a hydraulic crusher that extended out from one of the six walls of his cell. In zero gravity there really is no such thing as 'up' or 'down', but from the perspective Roquette was watching, let us call it the 'ceiling' of the subjects cell. She watched him hold the weight up over himself as it tried to crush him.
His feet were not touching the opposite wall of his cell. In fact, with the exception on his hands on the hydraulic weight, no part of his body was touching anything. He was pushing the weight back all by himself, without pushing off of any other surface. In a zero gravity space, that should not have been possible. But then, kryptonians could fly under their own power and that was also anomalous. In addition to that, the subject also had the strange and unforeseen ability of 'tactile telekinesis'.
Without looking behind her, Roquette ordered, "Increase weight by sixty kilograms."
The increase was not much, but it wasn't expected and so it pushed him back a fraction of a meter before he compensated and was once again holding back the press.
His eyes flicked to the mirrored wall for a moment and the intercomm crackled for a moment. He must have pressed the button using TTK. That meant he now had fine motor control of his telekinetic power. Interesting. How fine were his motor skills with the power? Roquette made a note in his file to design a series of experiments to test it.
"I can take more, Doctor." He said.
Roquette held down the intercomm to reply, "All things in moderation, Kid."
...
The data copy was at fifteen percent and had already filled up its first jump-drive. Tim had switched out the multi-terabite drive that morning, pausing the download just long enough to open up his PDA and make the switch. He watched the status bard as he ate his breakfast.
The ring was equipped with five different mess-halls, the one he was assigned to was on the inner most level of the ring and sported wide windows made of the same glass-kryptonian crystal composite as the docking tail's transfer tube. That meant that no matter what side the ring was facing -Earth side, or space side- you could always see the core cylinder as you ate. When Earth wasn't in the backdrop, Tim could pretend he was at a restaurant on the top floor of a business high-rise. Wayne Tower had a pretty decent cafeteria on one of the upper floors. With the station's rotation carrying Earth out of the picture, he could pretend that was exactly where he was -having a late dinner in the Wayne Tower cafeteria, high above the city lights so he could actually see the night sky.
The food, however, was not the kind Tim Drake would receive in the Wayne Tower cafeteria. Not by a long shot.
The ring's rotation simulated gravity, so thankfully, Tim was not sucking his meals through straws from plastic bags. But it still wasn't exactly Earth-norm fair. Nothing that made crumbs or required assembly at the table, and absolutely no liquids. So, no toast, or cereal. Soup? Forget it! Oatmeal was also problematic, but it was naturally sticky and so would be less likely to go flying if the spin randomly halted and the gravity went out.
"Hey, Draper!" Another technician on Tim's shift flopped down on the opposite side of the table, an innocent motion on earth, but at two thirds Earth's normal gravity it made him bounce slightly before settling himself by gripping the edge of the bench. "Got your space legs yet? Think fast!"
He kicked the table suddenly. It was bolted down, like all the large furniture on Space Lab, but in two thirds Earth's gravity the small jolt would have been more than enough to send Tim's breakfast sailing if he hadn't slammed his hand down over it. The worst that happened was that he got warm sticky oatmeal all over his palm. Tim glared reproachfully at the man as he whipped his hand on a napkin. "I told you, I've been in space before."
"In another low grav place like this?" He smirked. "Luna City or maybe another station. Oh, gosh, don't tell me your only real space experience was space-Disneyland!"
Tim remained silent. Timothy Drake, third ward of multibillionaire Bruce Wayne went on space cruises between Earth an Luna City, Earth and Mars, Luna City and the Russian Space Habitat. Accumulatively, he'd probably logged almost a year of time spent in space. Seventy percent of that time spent in zero gravity, the other thirty percent in low gravity like this. But Alvin Draper was not Tim Drake. So, he said nothing, neither confirming or denying and allowing his shift mate to draw his own conclusions.
"Ah, Draper, next time they call nagging about a loose screw in the core, I gotta take you with me." He said. "Working in zero G, tools floating around... Its great!"
At that Tim paused. "But..." He said, slowly. "We're level 4 techs. We work on the computers terminals and the labs' hardware. Wouldn't something in the core be a level 1 responsibility?"
He shrugged. "If you're talkin' 'bout the docs, yeah. That's all level 1 guys' stuff. But if its anything within thirty meters of the lab they've got there, that's a level 4 job."
"There's a lab in the core?" Well, that was interesting. None of Bruce's or even Barbara's research mentioned anything about that. If it was in the station's core cylinder then it must be a zero G lab. What could they be growing in zero gravity? Or, was the significance of its location just to keep it isolated from everything else?
"Yup. rumor is that's where they're keepin' JFK's remains."
Of course it is.
...
Tim thought it was interesting that the station had a lab that wasn't in any of the official reports or even the unofficial ones Barbara managed to dig up as Oracle. It became even more interesting when he pulled up an in-house schematic of the station and it still did not appear. As far as anyone else was concerned, aside from the ship docs in the tail, there was nothing in the core cylinder except the machinery that spun the ring.
His curiosity was piqued.
His main objective would still have to remain the discovery of what Cadmus is really doing with the alien gene samples they collected, specifically the Kryptonian Ambassador's. Since a direct communication with Bruce from Space Lab was to risky, he couldn't get clearance to change mission parameters halfway through his first week. Tim would just have to prioritize. Main objectives over deeper mysteries. For now. Investigate, but do not get side tracked.
Right then.
Tim waited until his barracks mates were gone before putting a sock on the outside hatch handle to ensure that he would not be disturbed and hopping on the room's terminal. He started simple. No sense pulling out the big guns before they were necessary. Try the average dumb guy stuff first and don't over think things. He did a database search for the keywords 'genetics', 'hybrid', 'alien', 'homo-sapien' and, just to make sure all his bases were covered, 'clone'.
None of the hits he turned up were even remotely relevant to what he was looking for. They had a genetics project on Level 5 of the ring that was attempting to combine tomatoes with tobacco. On Level 3 a botanist was cultivating a crop of hybrid day-lilies that were supposedly non-allergenic. There was a wide enter-department debate going on, on the effects of low gravity on homo-sapiens. Finally, countless hits on cloning projects. Food production, cloning an entire crop from one carrot. Surplus wool, mutton, leather, beef. The seemingly eternal ethical debate. Then, technology cloning techniques and possible ways to guard against having your cell phone or computer cloned.
Plenty of interesting stuff. Nothing even close to what he was looking for.
Okay, the every day dumb guy stuff had failed. Tim hadn't expected it to work anyway, but he had to try just to say that he had, in fact, tried everything. Now it was time to bring out the big guns. He plugged his personal PDA into the terminal's USB slot. The new task would slow the copy and download of the Space Lab's mainframe, but it was a calculated and necessary consequence. His objective was to discover what Cadmus had done with the Kryptonian Ambassador's blood after all.
With his PDA it wasn't hard to break the first layer of firewalls that protected Cadmus' secrets. Not that there were many secrets to be found under the first layer firewalls. Or the one under that. Somewhere around the fifth firewall Tim started to find the really interesting stuff. Apparently, yes, Nicolas Cage was, in fact, a vampire. Twenkies had been discontinued in order to prevent a zombie outbreak. Mitt Romney was actually a Dalek puppet. Stephanie Meyer's books were a secret Cadmus plot to control the planet's youth. All fascinating stuff. Still nothing relevant to his mission.
Finally, he found something odd.
Buried under ten different layers of security protocols and redundancies was one single file. It was a large file according to the terminal. But it sported no description. Just the project title, 'Experiment 13'. Most interesting of all, however, was the fact that Tim could not break into it. He must have tried almost two dozen different codes, but the file would not open for him.
Finally, his barracks mates returned and demanded to be let in. Tim was forced to shut down his operation and hide the evidence of what he'd been doing. The last thing he did before opening the hatch was to changed into s pair of sweatpants, rumple his hair and the sheets of his bed so that it looked like he had been doing exactly what that sock on the handle implied he was doing.
He made sure to act extra snappy and irritable as he opened the hatch to let his barracks mates back in.
...
Experiment 13 was feeling the strain now.
Roquette said everything in moderation, and so the pressure had been added on slowly. So slowly that he didn't really notice until things started getting into the hundred mega-ton range. Now he was sweating from the effort. Yes, Experiment 13 was actually perspiring. They would probably want to send someone in to swab it after this was over. He sweated so rarely, it was like Christmas had come early for the scientists whenever he did.
What was 'Christmas' anyway? Something exciting?
Focus! Oh, this was heavy! Experiment 13 grit his teeth as he returned his full attention to the weight he was attempting to push back. It was heavier than the last time Roquette had attempted this test. Just like it was the time before that. Every time they brought the weight out to measure his strength, they made it a little heavier. They said it was because he was still developing, that he was getting stronger. Eventually, he would reach a plateau and that would be his full strength until he reached full adulthood.
For the moment, Experiment 13 wondered if he might have already found his plateau.
The weight was putting enough pressure on him to force him backwards. Teeth grit, muscles straining, he tried to push it back. But instead, he was the one being forced backwards. His eyes flicked to the intercomm button and for a brief moment Experiment 13 thought about asking Roquette to stop. They had found his limit. End the test. But this his feet touched the opposite wall of his cell. He was stuck between the hydraulic press and the edge of his little world. Then he didn't think at all, just acted on instinct.
Experiment 13 wasn't sure what he did exactly. He knew it was his TTK that did it, he was wasn't sure how. One moment he was the meat in a metal sandwich, the next moment the hydraulic weight ruptured and fell apart. Every moving piece coming apart at once. The debris hovered around him, his own personal asteroid belt of junk metal in the zero G cell.
Roquette was on the intercomm in a second. "What happened, Kid!?"
He floated over to the mirrored wall, tapping the intercomm button to explain. "I, uh..." Searching his brain for the correct term to describe the moment for the doctor. "I got scared. Then... poof."
...
