Picking up from last time: Caeleb had infected almost all of the Magna Black leadership and their kids with the Ebon Death using samples he brought back from the 500th century. If that was the only problem we had to deal with right then, that would've been plenty. But the non-linear causal disruption wave which the Temporal Authority had christened "the Rift" was working its way through several timelines and cleaving large sections of our universe right out of existence. The thought was that if we shut that down, its effects would be reversed, since the causal relationships that created everything in the first place would be put back in order. On top of that, Mark Titus was out to kill me and was willing to kill damn near anyone else that got in his way.
Mark Titus? That was your childhood friend, right?
Yeah. Like me, but evil. More evil? Who's keeping track?
We had three timeships involved trying to solve the whole thing: DANTE was trying to work out a solution to the plague; MILTON was working out the Rift; KEATS was helping track down Titus.
You'd think the plague would be simple, right? This wiped out like 90% of humanity back in the 8th millennium or so. Genetically engineered to weed out anyone who was predisposed to any known genetic disorder. Unfortunately, its design meant you were either naturally immune or it was a death sentence. Nobody ever bothered to find a cure or even a vaccine because they didn't see the point.
I just want to say again: future humanity is evil as fuck.
You'd think that's as bad as it gets, but no. So, DANTE was going down every avenue to think of a way to combat it. He ultimately came up with a metavirus that tracked down Ebon Death viruses and reprogrammed them to do the opposite of their original purpose. Instead of knocking out key DNA sequences upon detection of genetic abnormalities, it would target those abnormalities and reconfigure them into a benign form. So, if you had a gene that made you predisposed to a certain cancer, it would change it just enough to prevent that mechanism. You might still be a carrier of that gene, but at least you wouldn't get it. If you were already just a carrier, it would wipe that out instead.
Doesn't rewriting people's DNA just kill them, though?
If you fuck it up, yes. Obviously, this virus was designed to do that. It would infiltrate individual cells, and turn some of them toward replication of itself, while others would have their DNA modified to cause errors upon cell division that made resulting cells incompatible with life. It could take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to kill you, but it would get you regardless. And the particles could survive airborne for several hours, at least.
But you can modify people's DNA without killing them assuming you carefully target your knockouts. That's how CRISPR works, but the effects are localized. It's impractical to use a technique like that to spread a genetic modification throughout your body, unless you do it to an embryo.
I've heard of unethical scientists doing things like that, yeah.
Oh, that's just getting started. It won't be considered "unethical" for long, believe me. Anyway, DANTE designed a perfectly good metavirus, like I said. Manufacturing it wasn't a huge problem, either. Particles are particles; Inferno's nanotech would synthesize almost anything you needed. What we lacked was a delivery system. Unlike the Ebon Death viruses, these were pretty fragile and couldn't survive in the open air. The protein coding required for that was sacrificed to keep it focused on reprogramming the enemy viruses. Injections were a possibility but that meant finding a serum to keep them stable in, rather than the pure vacuum DANTE created them in. You can imagine that it was just one logistical issue after another. The ultimate solution was kinda brute force, to be honest. Rather than trying to make the metavirus particles do everything, DANTE paired them with little courier bots. Each bot would carry one metavirus inside its body. The bots could survive saliva and stomach acid and were small enough to be absorbed into the bloodstream. From there, they would go out to different parts of the body and start spreading the metavirus to seek out and reprogram the Ebon Death viruses. The good news on all that is once you turned some of the enemy viruses around, they would seek out others of their own kind that hadn't yet been reconfigured, and do the same to them. It would cascade exponentially.
Did any of the Magna people die??
No, thank goodness. Some of them had to spend weeks recuperating, though. Then we just had to deal with Caeleb because he was still out there possibly infecting others. I should say, Arianne dealt with him.
She was your... daughter from another timeline? Did I get that right?
Good memory. Yeah, not someone I had any memory of creating or knowing, but such is my life. Being a jilted lover shouldn't drive somebody to try to exterminate humanity, but Caeleb was a little on the dramatic side. Arianne hunted him down somewhere in Indonesia and did... I don't know what. But she refused to talk about it and he never popped up again. I'll take the W on that, no questions asked.
And then you had the Rift?
Right. Thomas helped MILTON on that count. He knew the intricacies of time fuckery better than anyone, maybe even better than the Director, he just had the drawback of being kind of insane. He said the solution was to bring all 3 of our ships together into the center of the Rift and crank the temporal cores as high as they'd go, basically seal the thing up where it started. He said he got the idea from a Star Trek episode. The risk was that we'd blow them all up and die in the process, but we all agreed it was worth it to save all of existence.
Clearly, you survived.
I survived that, yes. There was still Mark to deal with. But stop letting me get ahead of myself! We did the thing Thomas suggested. The Director went along grudgingly. I don't know how I could ever grow into someone so curmudgeonly and risk-averse but he was definitely a "road less traveled" situation.
All in all, it worked but it was costly. All three temporal cores were fried in the process. Since they were Sikaren prototypes in the first place, you couldn't exactly walk down to the local Time Machines 'R' Us and buy a new one. Worse than that, Thomas' ship suffered a serious rupture and Thomas got sucked straight into the Rift. I don't know if that means he died or turned into a non-corporeal being or what. I just know I never heard from him again.
The Director was the lucky one. He only had his ship out of sentimentality. He didn't need the core. Arianne could take him back to the 500th century at any point. But first, we had to deal with Titus.
As you know, Mark turned out to be the guy messing with me practically from the day I came to the 20th century. He was behind Peru, the Speyer incident, that whole fiasco with the Archons, etc. etc. For the longest time, I thought they were disconnected incidents, or at least that the latter events were Magna-centric problems rather than aimed at me specifically. He didn't want me to know that it was him coming after me. But once we figured that out, it was a matter of deciding how to put the kibosh on him for good.
Unfortunately, he beat us to the punch. He'd pulled together some assorted assholes who'd come after us in the past, armed them with some insane weaponry he'd smuggled through time, gave them all the security details he could on the Magna Black compound--more than he gave Speyer, guess he held out on that clown--and turned them loose. The most fucked up part is that this happened late at night on December 31, 1999.
Let me guess: you were all partying?
Naturally. We'd beaten the Ebon Death and the Rift. We knew Titus was out there, but we needed a celebration to take the edge off. The kids especially deserved it. We thought security had been stepped up enough that it wouldn't be a problem but we didn't count on him sending a bunch of guys straight through the roof with laser cutters that could vaporize a tank at 100 yards. By the time we had any idea what was happening, he'd taken out most of the Magna Black leadership.
Jesus Christ. He didn't get Celine, did he?
No. That was a minor miracle. OK, the miracle is that she ran. She and her sister hit the garage pretty much the second shit hit the fan and drove off. Not one of their finer moments, but none of the kids were theirs so I can see why they'd just fuck off when faced with odds like that. Me, being the idiot I am, decided to stay and fight--all because I did have a soft spot for some of those young'uns.
I just can't buy this whole "heart of gold" thing you do sometimes.
I definitely never claimed to have that! It's tarnished silver, at best. You're probably hoping for some amazing underdog victory here, that we stomped their asses and sent them packing straight back to Mark's base. But really, they killed me and a bunch of other people, then they burned down the whole compound.
Wait. You died??
This isn't the first story that involves me dying!
Sure, but usually it's another version of you. Is that what happened here?
Yes and no. What happened is that DANTE snagged a complete brain scan right before I croaked. My wounds were too severe for him to treat, for once. He tried. To the extent a computer can beat up on itself, he felt really bad for not seeing this attack coming, too. But that scan he took later got imprinted on this body, after a bunch of other shit happened first.
There was another me in between, logged as Maxwell-chi. That's for the Greek letter. He was something else. His timeline was created by that massacre. June survived the initial attack in the War, and so did he, and they came up in the military together. As I understand it, she later betrayed their unit because she started doubting the fascist government they served. So he killed her. That got him drummed out of the service--partly because he broke procedure, partly because the brass weren't sure he wouldn't turn coat, as well. He did what any psychotic Robert Maxwell variant would do: he went to the Focus and shot his ass into the early 21st century. He showed up claiming to just be another version of the me who died, and everyone bought it at first. They didn't buy it forever, though, and that'll be a fun one to tell you about later. Also, he dyed his hair blond.
You already said he was evil, you don't have to sell it to me.