I scoff. “Why not just repeal the laws and let everyone repopulate the world naturally?”
He scrunches his face like I’ve said something distasteful. “Bah! I never took you for a simpleton!” He looks down his nose at me and sneers. “You’d let every dirt farmer have as many brats as he wanted, wouldn’t you? You’d let the lawbreakers go unpunished?”
“My way would make Census obsolete.”
“Your way will never happen.”
The elevator doors open. Before me sprawls a state-of-the-art laboratory. It’s eerily dim, lit by a low blue haze that seems to come from the floor. Incubation capsules resembling giant wombs hang from tubing in neatly lined rows and columns. I stand frozen, mouth agape. Agent Crow exits the car, turns, and gazes at me, his hands still clasped behind his back.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he asks. Technicians in gloves and black lab coats tend to the wombs. “The next generation of zeroborns. We use zygotes taken and produced from captured thirdborns before we execute them. We used to genetically engineer our batches through cloning, but we’re getting much better results now—from diversity, of all things. Diversity has been the key to hiding our progeny. Clones don’t blend in well, but clones are useful in running our secret facilities.”
Hawthorne shoves me in the back, and I stumble from the elevator. Agent Crow turns and continues walking, passing rows of swollen, veiny, synthetic-flesh bladders filled with fluid and floating fetuses.
“Once the first generation of zeroborns was created,” he says, “the operation became self-perpetuating. Zeroborns manufacturing zeroborns to work in the embryo centers, as caretakers, as population-insertion specialists—chemically mapping the brains of our progeny with false memories so that individuals can be inserted, undetected, into the population in any Fate we choose.” The technicians resemble one another, some right down to their freckles. They have zero-shaped monikers.
“How did you keep the zeroborns a secret for so long?” I ask.
“The zeroborns who are inserted into the population receive new monikers representing whatever Fate they’re assigned to. Take, for example, zeroborns earmarked to become Sword soldiers. We create them here, in our underground facilities. Other zeroborns care for them. They leave this facility when they’re infants. The zeroborn soldiers are raised at other secret military facilities, where they’re trained and given false memories of a life and family in Swords that never existed.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “How do you give someone false memories?”
“Reality and perception are easy to manipulate. Your eyes, as it happens, aren’t the best way to perceive the world. They’re horrendously inadequate filters. We don’t perceive most of what there is to see. Perception is a guessing game for the brain. Once you understand that, then you know that everything you perceive with your senses can be altered and manipulated, especially your visual perception. Take our cornea implants—the silver shine results from an alteration to the visual acuity. The Black-Os aren’t seeing what you and I see. They’re being fed a virtual reality on top of the world at large. Their cornea implants, coupled with alterations to the chemicals and electrical impulses, override their higher cognitive reasoning, replacing it with artificial intelligence that we control. We can implant any memory we see fit.”
I glance at the black disc on his temple. “How do you control them?”
He pauses next to a fleshy womb. In the translucent sack, a fetus floats, blissfully unaware of its very unnatural environment. “The Virtual Perception Manipulation Device, or VPMD, began as a toy,” he explains. “It was a form of amusement—tricking our brains with enhanced optics. Recreational visual deception. Eventually, Census created our own virtual worlds by implanting devices into the brains of zeroborns. The implants, once embedded, create their own unique neural pathways. Biochemically, we manipulate visual and aural perception, and with implants in the cornea, show them images they perceive as ‘real.’ We have complex programs and protocols. When we send Black-Os out to perform a mission, there are ‘laws’ that they have to follow, but the program also incorporates artificial intelligence. How the collective reaches the goal is almost entirely up to them. They just have to adhere to certain rules.”
“Rules like ‘Don’t kill Roselle. Bring her to the Sword balcony while you slaughter everyone else’?”
Amusement dances across Crow’s lips. “We gave them your scent. Did you know that? They smelled you, like maginots would.”
“So they have olfactory enhancements?”
“And so much more.”
“You use that device on your temple to communicate with the Black-Os,” I say. It’s not a question.
“That information isn’t part of the tour, Roselle,” he admonishes. “We’ve already created our own population—our own elite forces. The time for a great change in power has begun. No longer will we be subject to the idiocy of the Clarities of the Fates Republic. Census will make the laws now. Your mother, of course, is the exception.”
“It always comes down to power, doesn’t it?”
“Everything is about power, Roselle. The war between the Fates Republic and the Gates of Dawn has accelerated the transfer of power. Census has been hiding our declining population with zeroborn replacements masquerading as Swords, but we’ve been having trouble keeping up with your mother’s production demands. If things continue at the current rate, secondborn Swords will go extinct in a generation. The Gates of Dawn keeps throwing their martyrs at us, and we can’t grow new organic soldiers from infancy fast enough. We had to find a way to convert existing assets.”
“Assets?” I spit. “You’re talking about people!”
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it, Roselle.”
“If the ban on procreation were lifted,” I snap, “Census would lose its power. So instead you kidnap people like Hawthorne and insert VPMDs to make them obey you?”
“It’s called conversion, Roselle. We implant devices that allow us to control the host. Let the Gates of Dawn throw as many bodies at us as they want. We’ll just keep killing them and producing enhanced reinforcements until there’s no one else left.”
“My mother knows?” I can barely contain my rage.
“We needed each other, Census and The Sword.”
“How long will that last?” I ask him. He smirks but doesn’t answer. “How long has Hawthorne been your convert?”
“Not long. A few weeks. We grabbed him at his home after that little stunt you two pulled at the Sword social club—the Rose Goddess Massacre. We had to wait until after he gave his testimony of the event to The Virtue at the Halo Palace, but our patience paid off. I must admit that I was impressed with how you handled our non-converted zeroborns. It showed just how weak they are compared with our enhanced AI versions.”
“Non-converted?” I ask.
“None of the assassins you fought at the Sword social club had cerebral enhancements. It was too risky. If the implants and other enhancements had been found before we were ready to unveil them, it could have ruined everything.”