Introducing Ciel's ancestor. The name means something in hymnos, which is actually amazingly appropriate to Ciel, too. Technically, this is buildup to the plot of the second arc, meaning I shouldn't post it until I finish that arc, but at this point nothing's kicked off yet so I could fudge a quick solution (kill Weil and Lumine, of course) pretty easily if I decide to let things stay like this instead of going in to the Elf Wars-equivalent.
The chapter title is for the 'invasive species' meaning of the word. Not to mention that a weed is a plant that shows up in gardens when the gardener intended no such thing. Personally, I'm pro-weed in most cases, because lawns are a stupid idea and people who knock all invasive species and environmentalists of that nature often make me roll my eyes and wonder if they slept through history and biology. They're generally appallingly humanocentric about it, too. Sure, I like wildflowers and I'd kill anything that tried to kill heirloom tomatoes if I gardened, but that would just be me acting as part of natural selection and trying to alter my personal environment to suit myself, like all the other living organisms. It's ridiculous to call this attempt to control what goes where either a holy crusade or humans destroying ecosystems when everything has been doing it since back before the dawn of photosynthesis. A lot of environmentalists (as a general rule, every environmentalist that opposes hunting) need to get over themselves and start paying some actual attention to nature for once, because if they don't know how it works then they'll just muck it up if they try to 'fix' it.
Oh boy, did the wikipedia article on invasive species make me headdesk. Saying that species 'died out' because of naturally occurring hybridization that got them good genes and this was a bad thing? What? Seriously, what? If that's your definition of extinct, descendants having different genes, then humanity's gone extinct what, a billion times over? I wanted to hit that editor over the head and say 'it's called evolution, moron.' That kind of thing is why sexual reproduction exists in the first place. Not to mention that I have to take some issues with how they're defining species in that case, since we're talking about plants that interbreed naturally and produce fertile offspring. It's racial purity is good ideology with daisies, for crying out loud! I thought we grew out of that eugenics idiocy and realized that genetic diversity was a good thing decades ago! Did Neo-Nazis infiltrate the environmental movement while we weren't looking? I'm joking, but then again that would explain Greenpeace outright lying to African governments about food safety and causing tons of black people to starve to death...
Ar Ciel just had to facepalm.
Sure, sure, the project had been a stroke of genius at the time. She had to admit that they'd done a good job with containment, too. That wouldn't keep less-informed people from squawking when they found out, but whatever. Success justified itself, and if the wars were still going on then these two would be getting all sorts of medals if that wouldn't have been signing their death warrants.
From what they'd showed her, they'd achieved 'yellow demon' level… whatever they were going to call these around the fourth war. They could have spread those designs then, replacing mechanaloids like the one in the space shuttle, and that would have saved lives, but that would have let Sigma know about the existence of this project when the real goal was still out of reach.
It was very intelligent. Zero's atypical nanite structure is the reason he's immune? We can't get atypical nanites to work withoutscavenged antique parts like his and antique control chips can't be found for love nor money? The Yggdrasil weather control system had contained some, but it had been one of Sigma's first targets, of course.
They had nanite-only autonomous robots way back when? Dr. Light used recursive self-editing to create X, so he would have an intelligence free of programming, and probably did something similar to create a robot capable of actual problem-solving, as opposed to, 'when X happens do Y' or 'try to calculate every single possible factor and outcome until you crash?'
"Alright. What aren't you telling me?" Because this was too logical, too perfect.
Despite the problem of what to do with their project. The only thing to do was let him out into the real world, probably with supervision, and that was just peachy from their point of view. They could get performance data and accolades.
They looked at each other, trying to pretend they didn't know what she meant. Wasn't having to tell the new Conclave Research Oversight Committee that they'd been playing with nanites they'd made themselves bad enough?
"Look. I've got forty-five other projects to write preliminary findings for, but that doesn't mean I'm going to let any of you slip something past me. You were a private project. You spent years not telling anybody anything. I know what that's like." She tapped her stylus on the table. "To make it work, you have to present a false front. You have to believe the act, that there's nothing going on. The aversion to telling anybody anything has to be so deeply ingrained that you won't even let your friends know that you're excited about something. You have to have dedication. You have to accept the fact that…" This wasn't her they were talking about. She shouldn't go on the defensive.
She shouldn't give anything away: she knew that.
"You are holding at least two things back. One thing so that if people know you have a secret, they'll find it out and go ok, that's what you were hiding. Like the affair you were having." Shared secrets connected people. "And at least one thing that matters. Fork them over."
Now they looked at each other in a way that seemed a little more genuine. "We're working on a project to mass-produce edited copies of these nanites, to replace conventional reploids."
She nodded slowly, making a mockery of the avid, admiring listener hanging on their every word."And?" Because that was just another thing that made them look good.
"It was my idea," the redhead said. "It's not her fault, I released it while she wasn't here."
"Released," Ciel repeated.
"Don't you dare try to say it wasn't my responsibility! This is our project!"
"Stop that right now!" Ciel stood up, trying to loom. "You! Stop trying to take the fall. You! Slapping her isn't going to solve anything! Released it. If you don't tell me what you did right the waste now, I will personally see to it that you don't get amnesty!"
They stared at her, pale. "The amnesty for experimentation on sentient beings covers the period of the wars. If the world is still at risk because of something that you are doing, or not doing, now, then it is up to the discretion of the Committee. So start talking."
"Lumine is our second project. When we had evidence of higher cognitive function on the first one, we thought that with the copy ability he'd demonstrated… We couldn't stimulate a mind to develop in a tube, neither of us is any good with virtual reality." The way Dr. Light had been. "So I-"
"-So we-"
"Tried to wipe what memories he had and… put him where he would be found by one of the local militias. We didn't put a tracker into him, because that might have led back to us."
"And he would probably have stripped it down for raw materials anyway." The thing had never listened to a word they said. They'd known what to do with Lumine, and he'd turned out far better.
"It was hard to get information on a random militia member in another city without the interest being odd, and we don't know what form he took. He might not have joined the militia. Ideally, though, he would have survived in the militia long enough for the hunters to notice him, everyone knows they were trying to study what causes some people to last longer."
"And the discovery of a reploid with atypical nanites who was immune would have validated your hypothesis. You could have come forward with Lumine and this replacement program and people would have been too grateful to care about the risks you took. You cancerous wastes of space." She regretted that as soon as she said it.
Really, there was nothing that wrong with it. The world wasn't being devoured by nanites, so their design had obviously worked, although it might have already malfunctioned some other way. Or been blown up. "Excuse my language, but what in Light's name… You are going to give me everything you have on the first project, right now, and maybe, if you cooperate fully, we can get this tidied up, swept under the rug, and I won't have to publically reveal the limits on the amnesty so people keep coming forward and we don't find out about the next mad science project too late."
"I'm sorry to treat you like staff on retainer, but we have another situation."
"That's alright. That's part of why I'm working on projects that will mostly look after themselves." Well, with the help of the sprinkler system. "It's almost nostalgic to get called in because they need help trying to fix an irregular." A lot of the projects were irregulars. Some of the early irregulars had happened when people tried to get creative: sometimes their ideas had worked, sometimes they hadn't.
Dr. Weil chuckled. "I'm afraid it's not as simple as that this time."
He almost enjoyed explaining the situation. It was rare to see X worried about whether or not he could solve a problem.
X's ability to affect the systems of other reploids without the virus had such potential. All medicines were poisons, after all.
"If he can pretend to be a reploid well enough to fool a modern scanner, I don't think there's any way I could tell just by looking. Except… if he was built to repel all types of hacking, he might reveal that he's not a reploid if I try to hack him." That was far from ideal: it would take forever and Zero would protest X putting himself in danger like that. A lot.
"We can start with the local militia members who have joined since the release."
"If his systems work by copying, then it's possible he replaced an older member. I hope not." Since that begged the question of what had happened to the reploid he'd replaced. "Or he might not have joined the militia in the first place. I suppose you're right, though. I should check the militia first, since they're the most likely."
"Dr. Ciel is looking through the data, trying to find additional clues." Dr. Weil tried to hide his smirk, looking down at his datapad and frowning. "We can set up equipment at their base, then call in the former militia members to be scanned. Mind wearing standard medic gear?" X's armor was too recognizable, and the point was to avoid causing a panic.
Not that it would be standard medic gear, of course. This was too valuable an opportunity to study X's ability.
X sympathized with Dr. Ciel's stress headaches. Yes, she was right, Axl should be studied more closely, and it would put people more at ease if X was keeping an eye on him to make sure his nanites weren't wandering off on their own, since X had offered his home as an alternative to stuffing the boy back into some lab. Axl would go crazy, an active boy like him, and they wouldn't know if it was because of his design or just regular stir-crazy.
Omega wasn't blaming X for being wrong about whether or not humans could make reploids without the virus. X still wasn't wrong: Axl, or 'Fortunatus' but Axl had the right to decide what he wanted to be called, wasn't a reploid. Nor did he lack the virus: his body copied optimal systems, and the virus was something to copy, after all. He wasn't quite on Omega's level, but his ability to affect the virus was somewhere between X and Omega's.
A third, no, fourth, species, and Omega did not play nice with others. Omega wanted to try to get Axl under control, but from what X had read that just wasn't going to work. X had managed to adapt around the virus, and Axl could run rings around X (and Dr. Light's by extension) capability to do that. The virus might adapt to systems, but it just wouldn't be able to keep up.
Because Axl, like everyone else, identified Elysian viral nanites as harmless it meant that Axl hadn't made any connection between X's scan and the virus, it had just made him jump about five feet and say, "Don't do that!" Because it had been weird.
Luckily, Axl was willing to forgive him, once they sat the young one down and explained the situation.
However, he wasn't willing to budge on one thing: he wanted to stay with Red, the former militia leader. His foster father, although Axl hadn't thought of it in those terms. He was being incredibly obstinate about it, cheerfully saying that if they took him somewhere else he'd just sneak off. Which was not making Dr. Weil happy. The man was a stickler for rules and authority, which was why Ciel, instead of him, had been put in charge of analyzing the projects that had been outside Conclave authority. Dr. Weil was trying not to let it get to him, since he understood why she'd been promoted over his head, but everyone could tell that it grated on him.
"Alright. Dr. Weil is right, Axl. We need to learn more about your species. Right now, if anything happened to you, we wouldn't have any idea how to fix you."
"Nothing's going to happen to me! I'm not going to let my nanites go nuts."
"I know, Axl. We've all looked over the data, so I'm sure we believe you when you say you have good self-control… Of your systems, anyway." Not his behavior.
That made Red chuckle.
"But accidents happen, and I'm sure Red," since he'd given X permission to use the nickname, "would be sad if anything happened to you."
Axl had to think about that for a second. 'Theory of mind,' was imagining what other people would think or feel in their current situation, among other things. Axl was aware that other people were their own people, but putting himself in their shoes and anticipating their reactions seemed to be incredibly counter-intuitive to him. "I guess." That seemed reasonable to him, but he still didn't like the idea of someone deciding what someone else thought, even if it was only in theory. "Would you, Red?"
"Of course." Most people would have been hurt by the idea that Axl might think he didn't. The fact that Red took this in stride, finding it endearing instead of hurtful, explained why Axl wanted to stay with him so strongly even though, from his profile, he should have a very hard time forming any sort of attachment.
His model name had some truth to it: Fortunatus could be read as a portmanteau meaning fortunate child, and he was lucky he'd found someone like this to take him in. "Your creators were also right, Axl. Being out in the world the way you are, having adventures, is a good way to find out what you're capable of. A lab is a safe, sterile environment. I think that Ciel is worried too, that something might happen to you if you stay out here." He looked at Ciel, waiting for her to nod. "However, your younger brother has already said that he'd be happy to stay at the Memorial Hospital with Dr. Weil, since he wants to study. If he's willing to be the control group, then I don't see a problem with you taking risks and living your own life. If anything, it should be helpful."
"We don't want to build more people like you until we know it's safe," Ciel added. "For them, not just everyone else." She'd made a major blunder by saying that Axl was a danger to other people, and was still trying to recover from it.
"But you made Red when he could have gotten taken over!"
True. X had to bow his head at that. "I know. I knew that there were risks of irregulars being built, when I let everyone have access to my technology in the first place. But people were dying. Then, the virus came, and both humans and reploids were dying, under attack by two different threats." The virus and the harsh world. "But children were still being born, and built. We couldn't just give up and let the virus take or kill us all, and that was what ceasing to build reploids would have meant. Eventually, without replacements, the virus would have taken everyone. Would you want to live in that world? I know you wouldn't want Red to suffer that fate."
Axl shuddered at the idea.
"I hope you can forgive me," X said quietly, looking at Red.
"That's not your fault, and I'm glad to be alive. We won, didn't we?"
"Thank you." X shook his head. "Still, I doubt I could have stopped construction if I'd tried, and no one could have foreseen the virus. The one who suffered the most because I started building too quickly, too rashly, is Zero."