3-5. All the World's Glory
The sky over Midgar was a sullen, sludgy soup of soot and ashes. A ring of glowing wood-burning power plants, Shinra's aging jewels, studded the outer edge of the upper plate. Burning the last of the forests that had once surrounded the city, their furnaces spewed forth a constant cloud of smoke that would take half a century to clear. Under the massive steel plate lay the crowded, skyless slums, but even on the upper level of the Shinra bureaucrats and the hereditary rich, lit with floodlights, blinking marquees and searing neon, there was no sun.
In the center of the Midgar megalopolis stood a single tower, rising above all other buildings as if by divine right. The forges its engineers had built to finance it silently circled the city, their fires glowing like the eyes of dying serpents; but this monolith was glassily vibrant, stabbing directly toward heaven from the depths of hell. It was always alive, always exerting a subliminal will on all who viewed it. No one who beheld its sheer presence could forget the power that had built a city literally on the backs of the poor, then erected this high-tech monument as its home.
It was seventy stories high and packed top to bottom with the countless human cogs of Shinra Electric Company, Incorporated. Clearly, its interests had diversified beyond the merely electric.
Dr. Theophilus Gast and Lucrecia Gainsborough, two-thirds of the JENOVA Project, stood at the foot of the Shinra, Inc. headquarters and gathered their courage. Lucrecia had woken in her company-supplied hotel room with only a dim memory of leaving her sister's house, then spent the next hour slumped on the tile floor of the tiny hotel bathroom, too sick to stand. Now, with her queasiness due only to nervousness and her head cleared of the last mistiness of sleep, she stared up at the apparition of Shinra Headquarters—so familiar a sight during her years in Research, but so strange now, after all that had happened in Nibelheim—and felt as if she'd drifted back into a surreal dream.
"All right," Dr. Gast said quietly beside her. Lucrecia could not tell whether he spoke to her or to himself. "Courage."
Lucrecia drew a deep breath and tightened her hold on her stack of papers and forms, photographs, charts, references and precedents, all the proof in the world that the Project and her work were vital to the Corporation. Drawing strength from the sight of the Shinra Building—home of the brightest years of her career so far—she followed her mentor through the doors of the monolith.
The scientists flashed their identification cards toward the guard at the door; Lucrecia remembered this, too, an action that had once seemed like a reflex. Dr. Gast keyed them into the elevators, which remained empty as they soared through the glass tube, past story upon story full of file clerks, sleepy security guards, neglected stacks of books, bureaucrats, bean-counters, figureheads, and enough paperwork to bury a small city. The filtered, dry office air filled Lucrecia's lungs, now so accustomed to the bracing mountain air of Nibelheim. With it came years of memories and headaches. Shinra Headquarters was a tense circus of absurdity, twenty-four hours a day, and no one who worked there ever fully recovered.
The sixty-sixth floor seemed oblivious to the summit it hosted; the receptionist in the front room merely checked their ID cards against a typed list and nodded expressionlessly. The first sign of the JENOVA meeting came in the form of a nondescript Shinra employee, who burst into the room just after Gast and Lucrecia had finished their check-in.
"Coffee! The freakin' lunatic!"
"Problem, Dave?" the receptionist asked calmly, and turned a page in his Midgar Examiner.
"Yes! I'm a transcriptionist, not a freaking gofer! Where's the damn coffee?"
"Right where it always is," answered the receptionist. "But, uh… don't take any for yourself, all right?"
"Of course not. I'm here to fetch and carry for that jerk from R&D. Thank God and my mother I went to business school. If I worked up on sixty-seven I think I'd kill somebody."
Lucrecia stifled a smirk, and behind her Dr. Gast pretended to study a bulletin board to hide his more famous face. The transcriptionist-turned-errand-runner poured a large cup of coffee while muttering a string of curses under his breath. "There. Clark, tell me not to pour this over the weasel's head."
"Don't pour it over the weasel's head, Dave."
"Thank you! Goodbye!" The door shut behind the transcriptionist's clutched hands and flying tie. Dr. Gast turned, with a wide smile he'd been unable to stifle. A moment passed before Lucrecia broke out into a torrent of giggles. She missed Shelan suddenly, an unexplainable longing that pulled at the back of her mind. Maybe he would be at the meeting…
"I suppose you've had days like this," remarked the receptionist, opening the classified ads.
Gast chuckled. "Years, my friend. Years."
Two of the President's personal bodyguards opened the heavy wooden doors of the executive boardroom. Lucrecia's courage quailed for a moment as she caught sight of several of her superiors around the immense oak table, some shuffling through paperwork, some glaring irritably into space. The imposing atmosphere was soon broken by a faint, unpleasant smell in the air and a familiar voice, rising above the murmur of conversation in its traditional morning tirade.
"What is this sludge? I sent you to get coffee, you useless drone!"
"Sir, it's fresh-ground Mideeli." Gast caught Lucrecia's eye and smirked: Dave the transcriptionist, trying valiantly to assume a semblance of calm.
"It's fresh-ground Mideeli sludge. And it's cold. Get rid of it."
"Fine." Dave seized the offending cup and took a deep drink of it, then stalked away without a word. He settled into a small desk away from the central table, and turned on a small, sinister-looking black machine.
Deprived of coffee, Hojo continued his harangue. "And another thing! Palmer!"
"Yes!" yelped the young Space Program head from across the table.
"You sent the most disrespectful, foul-mouthed young upstart to fly that plane! What were you thinking?"
"Well… I…" sputtered Palmer, his hands fluttering nervously across the stretched vest of his suit, at a loss for words. He showed little more capability now than he had as the President's crony in a Midgar prep school, ten years ago.
"Is it wrong to wish they'd crashed?" muttered the transcriptionist, from his post behind Lucrecia.
Dr. Gast laughed. "Probably."
A short but imposing figure paused in the doorway, and most of the conversation in the room stilled. The bodyguards pulled the doors shut as the most powerful man in the world, a pudgy man of about thirty, slowly walked to his seat at the far end and took his seat, as his bodyguards flanked his chair like a pair of heavy-set hawks. The young president looked down the length of the table, regarding the small group through half-lidded eyes. Around the rest of the table sat his cabinet, most of whom were underhanded social climbers once kept down by his father's more obvious methods. Only a few embraced the blustering force of his predecessor, and it was rumored that their tenure in the Corporation was near an end. In addition to this cadre of Shinra's highest-ranking employees, the table also included two of Shinra's merciless middle managers, one driven transcriptionist, and a graduate student named Lucrecia Gainsborough.
There were no press, and no low-ranking employees other than the bodyguards. The unfiltered reports of this meeting would never see the light of day; the transcriptionist's record would be rewritten by the winner of the debate, and the world would know that account as truth.
Beside Lucrecia, Gast's face was calm and determined. He would fight for the Project as long as he could, she knew, but the central fight—the fight for her own discoveries, the fight to tell the world that the Jenova-virus was still alive—was hers alone.
The Shinra President stood, betraying his less-than-impressive height and girth as he left the shadow of his throne-like chair. Though he addressed the group in general, his gaze lingered somewhere around the opposite end of the table. The Vice-President's seat was still empty.
Shinra began, "I have brought you all here for a matter that concerns not only all of us, but all of mankind. Technology has always been a double-edged sword, sometimes allowing the Corporation to move ahead, other times stalling it with public concerns." His eyes slid quickly to the middle-aged man next to the Vice President's empty seat, whom Lucrecia recognized as Shay Garkis, the head of Urban Development. The President continued, "We are faced today with a weighty decision. The JENOVA Project is Shinra's most prestigious research project, and it has turned up more disturbing finds than we could ever anticipate.
"Today we will decide whether to pursue these finds, or let them go unspoken for the sake of mankind."
The President took his seat once again. Lucrecia focused on her notes once again. The President's mind was all but made up, that much was clear. Still, there were seven other men at the table to convince. Six: Gast was behind her. And ironically, so was Hojo; the Project was his masterwork, no matter how he twisted it. Five, then. Not so many, after all….
Dr. Gast stood, facing his supposed equals; he led Research as these men led Shinra's other arms—building, weapons, space exploration—but among them he seemed somehow out of place. For the first time Lucrecia felt worried for her mentor.
She listened and let her nerves settle as Gast outlined the JENOVA Project for his skeptical audience. He explained, calmly and reasonably, the discovery of the Ancient burials in the Northern Crater, which the Ancients had called the Knowlespole. He told of the virus Sephirisena, which modern times had renamed Jenova. And then, before Lucrecia realized, he was reciting credentials that sounded terrifyingly familiar.
"…leading her graduating class at the Midgar Science Academy last year…"
She breathed in, breathed out, scanned her notes yet again. The transcriptionist's machine hummed and clicked behind her, recording its erasable history.
"…Lucrecia Gainsborough."
Gast sat down. Lucrecia rose to her feet, ignoring the fleeting, dubious glances of the cabinet. If hearing about deadly virology from an obviously pregnant young woman offended their old-fashioned sensibilities, it was their loss. Full speed ahead. "Most of what we know about Jenova is second-hand," she began. "Anthropologists, Dr. Gast among them, have translated all the records we could find from the Ancients, but even those didn't give us a clear picture of what Jenova really was. The Ancients had a highly developed system of curing their wounded, but didn't understand what was happening to them when Jenova came. Without modern technology even the common cold virus was unknown to them, let alone a virus capable of driving a healthy adult mad within weeks.
"So when we began to study the virus, it was exploration as much as analysis. We managed to recover the virus from the frozen body of one of its victims and cultured it in Shinra's research lab, a project headed by Dr. Jones." She fended off the impulse to shiver at the thought of having to refer to Hojo by such an honorific. "Early in the JENOVA studies in Nibelheim, we confirmed an early hypothesis about the virus. In the Cetra it was documented to cause only minor physical effects, but when exposed to cells in culture we found that the virus transformed the cells—mutated them, if you will—very easily. Even more importantly, the effect it had on human cells closely resembled the characteristics of cultured Ancient cells. This, of course, seemed to be the silver bullet Shinra was looking for: a way to capture the powers of the Cetra by recreating the Cetra themselves." A few of the listeners nodded faintly; this was a dream they'd all heard before.
Lucrecia took a deep breath. "This is where the Project stood until very recently. However, while studying the virus further I found something which has challenged our ideas of Jenova's very nature. We'd assumed that the Jenova virus' life cycle was to infect a body, then influence its cells' growth, causing the hallucinations and death seen in the Cetra epidemic. After that stage, we'd never seen any live viruses, so we assumed the virus died out—its job was done, so to speak, once the virus had spread to another host. But these recent findings seem to suggest that the virus never dies out; it only becomes dormant in the host cell, maybe forever, maybe until some unknown trigger activates it again. Once infected with Jenova, a cell—or a body—never really recovers."
She doubted that all of the men around the massive table really knew what she meant, but they all sensed that this did not bode well for Shinra's silver bullet. "This means, therefore, that there are unheard-of opportunities to study this virus, because it has a life cycle completely unlike anything we've ever seen. It also means that the virus is much more dangerous than we believed, because it can't be used simply as a means of mutating an organism into a neo-Cetra. Once it mutates, it stays in the body. This is an uncertainty we don't yet know how to deal with."
Dr. Gast stood, before any questions could be fired. "Gentlemen, you have heard the background. We now set before you this proposition: will the JENOVA Project continue along this path? We may yet be able to discover a way to recreate the Cetra, which was Shinra's original aim. We may discover more about this lifeform, and about life from our planet, than we even imagined possible. It is potentially dangerous, as all discoveries are potentially dangerous. But on the other hand, we have not only Shinra's ambition to find the Ancients' Promised Land, but progress and discovery itself. The rest is up to you, gentlemen: the fate of the JENOVA Project is in your hands." He sat down again, and Lucrecia, feeling her stomach waver with fear, sank into her seat as well.
"The panel is now open for discussion," announced the President. "Dr. Gast, Dr. Jones, and Miss Gainsborough will field any questions."
Garkis, the Urban Development chairman, raised a hand. Gast nodded for him to continue. "You said Jenova never really leaves the body, right? So we can't cure it."
"Not currently," said Hojo flatly. "We have no way of curing any viral disease outright."
"So if it ever gets loose, we could have an incurable disease from outer space running amok through our city, driving people insane."
"The effects of the Jenova virus on humans have not been tested," Hojo retorted, his voice taking on an irritated edge. "There are no documented trials. I would advise you not to jump to alarmist conclusions without a shred of evidence!" Lucrecia saw Gast quietly lay a hand on Hojo's elbow. The vice-chairman subsided into a wary silence.
"We are aware of the risks," Gast said calmly. "Shinra holds the most technologically advanced facilities in the world, though, and we are taking every precaution known to science to avoid a disaster of that magnitude."
Garkis scoffed quietly. "Science. Still…"
On her notes Lucrecia surreptitiously crossed out Garkis' name. Four left to convince, to sway to their side. The President and Garkis stood against the three scientists, so far. Four left… though one was Palmer, the President's yes-man. Three…
"Any other questions?" the President prodded. The cabinet stirred uneasily.
One of the middle-ranking Shinra raised a hand. His name was Adien Amon, and he had the enviable position of managing the incalculable wealth of Shinra Inc. The President acknowledged his bid for a question. "What do you think are the chances that the JENOVA Project might still produce a new Ancient?"
Lucrecia tried not to smile cynically. At this rate, Amon, one hundred percent. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hojo's carefully folded hands twitch slightly. "We have some promising possibilities on the horizon," Hojo answered.
"Care to elaborate?" Amon prodded, sounding truly curious. The Promised Land venture would, after all, reduce his job to a formality if it did succeed. If Shinra could tap into the immeasurable power source promised by Cetra lore, it would effectively control the entire world's electricity and power reserves at almost no cost. They would have no need of reactors in every major city, no side ventures to raise funds; such power would breed money at a staggering rate.
Lucrecia circled Amon's name.
Hojo let out a careful breath. "No, Treasurer, I would rather not elaborate at this point in time." Amon nodded, only a little disappointed. Gast looked at Hojo curiously, but did not speak up.
"Further questions," the President repeated. Garkis and Amon, their minds made up, did not question further; Palmer avoided the President's gaze and traced little circles on the tabletop with his fingernail. Lucrecia scanned the rest of the table: the unknowns were Theodore Lon, who had called this meeting as Shinra's public relations expert; and an older man with a harsh demeanor, who had been infamous in Shinra since the President's father's time. Chairman Charman, he was known, at least by more polite speakers. Charman Gades was the head of Weapons Development and Manufacturing, a relic from the days when Shinra ruled with an iron fist. These were the only ones between them and destruction; the vote, as she guessed, stood at only four to three in their favor. Lucrecia's confidence began to slide.
"No further questions?"
Lucrecia looked up at Charman Gades, who had a faintly sneering look on his face even now. He glanced at the President critically, as if judging the younger man's thoughts. Definitely a relic… and that, strangely enough, was probably why he would not speak. He knew he was a relic, a bad fit to the new president's policy of a benevolent exterior; he was harsh and cruel to the populace when it benefited him, and made no excuses for it. In the old days he would have said to forge ahead; Shinra stood to benefit from this, and if the public panicked, they were easily controlled with a few careful strikes and the constant silent menace of the Turks.
But these were not the old days, and the Weapons chairman knew his position was in danger. Eventually they would take his power, piece by piece, probably starting with the Turks, then the weapons sector entirely. For this reason, he was silent, and Lucrecia knew they had lost another vote. Ironic, that she should be so disappointed to lose the support of such an unpleasant man… She crossed out Gades' name as well.
One left: Theodore Lon, Shinra's public relations manager. He scarcely needed to speak, and they all knew it. His actions were as smooth, regulated, and predictable as well-oiled clockwork. His decision would fall in whatever direction made the Corporation look best.
Lucrecia crossed out his name, and dread began to curl cold fingers around her heart.
"No further questions," the President concluded, and his pronouncement was punctuated by a crisp rattle of keys from the transcriptionist's machine. "We will now take a vote: yes, if the JENOVA Project should be continued as planned, and its discoveries publicized; no, if it should be controlled as too dangerous. Davidson Sith, you will call each member of the council."
The transcriptionist, without slowing his machine-gun rhythm a bit, read the names one by one from a list, recording his own words as he said them.
"President Conrad S. Shinra the Third."
"No."
"Frederick Palmer, Space Program."
Palmer's eyes rolled nervously toward the President. "No."
"Charman Gades, Weapons Development and Manufacturing."
"No," replied the Weapons chairman, a bit sourly.
"Shay Garkis, Urban Development."
"No," Garkis declared.
"The Vice President's position is vacant." Lucrecia wondered what that may have meant to them, if there were a vice-president… chances weren't good that the one Conrad Shinra appointed would back their project, but it could have saved them…
Davidson Sith continued the roll call. "Adien Amon, Shinra Treasurer."
"Yes." Lucrecia closed her eyes at the sound of the word. Amon had less than honorable reasons for agreeing with them, but she still thanked him silently.
"Theodore Lon, Public Relations."
"No."
"Horace Jones, Research Department."
"Yes."
"Theophilus Gast, Research Department."
"Yes."
"Lucrecia Gainsborough, Research Department."
"Yes," she said, feeling her voice was no louder than a whisper.
"The vote is four yes, five no," the President declared, with a trace of satisfaction. "The JENOVA Project's current findings will not be pursued, and they will not be publicized outside the Corporation for any reason. However, if it is still believed that the Project holds promise on the horizon—" he glanced at Hojo— "it will be allowed to continue." Lucrecia sighed in relief before she could stop herself. If the Project could go on, all of her efforts were not in vain… "I hope this will serve as a warning to the Research Department in the future: your obligation, first and foremost, is to the Corporation. Not to lofty ideals, and not to science."
She saw Hojo look away, and Gast dropped his eyes to the notes on the table. They were expected to thank him, to be grateful that their life's work could continue, however maimed. They did not speak.
"This meeting is concluded," the President stated.
The council filed out of the room in silence. The three scientists crowded into the glass elevator together; Lucrecia and Gast faced the city outside, dimly lit behind the glass and a haze of smoke. Hojo stood behind them, his reflection wavering in the glass. Lucrecia leaned her forehead against the cool glass, bracing her fingers against it. Dr. Gast rested his hand on her shoulder comfortingly, and she felt a brief caress on her other arm that quickly fell away. They knew that out of all of them, the greatest loss was hers. Shinra had stifled the greatest achievement she'd ever made, her true triumph. There was still one more chance… but she knew that even if her child became Shinra's brightest star, the glory would not be entirely hers, and its price would be great.
Theophilus Gast's voice was quiet, gently reciting their epitaph as they plunged into the abyss. "Alei, tsekine dhelar, sete a'masii maci-en."
It was the final line of a lament, written by one of the last Cetra sages as he watched his proud race fall. Thus, faced with madness, died all the world's glory.
Notes: Thanks to Davey for help on the names of the Shinra.
