DuoG0ds

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"no problem." i adjusted the switch on my wrist computer, warming up my QVEs and preparing to leave. "i'm headed to Lab 35. you know, the one that i established a few years ago. the bunker one." with that, i phased out, then faded back in in the center of Lab 35.
the lab was around five hundred feet below the surface of an unnamed planet in an unnamed system. the planet had at some point had some sort of civilization on the surface, but the buildings had been scorched, and the entire planet had been glassed, probably by high-intensity plasma bombardment from space, after which what atmosphere had existed would have boiled away into space from the heat. i had selected the planet because it was a burned-out husk, and no one in their right minds would even consider salvage jobs on vaporized or badly burned areas, and the glass-like surface of the world discouraged settlers. a small system of satellite buoys warning of high levels of radiation had been left by the local interstellar government, which further discouraged visitors, making it perfect for one of my labs. i stretched for a moment, then glanced around.
the reinforced concrete of the walls had been here when i had got here, presumably from some sort of survival bunker. it already had it's own power, water, and maintenance systems, which is probably why it was in such good repair, and i had upgraded the systems to be far more efficient. since i had established the lab, the walls had been slowly covered in cabinets and posters varying from scientific to the family tree of the Olympian gods. a counter had been built in the center of the main room, and it was covered in a variety of lab equipment, much like the counters circling the edge of the room. there where two doors on the far wall, both a half a foot of steel and titanium, perfectly balanced; the right one led to what i believe was a commons area, while the one on the left led to the living quarters.
i took out the vial and inserted it into a circular slot attached by USB cord to a black computer. through optical and probing tests, the computer would tell me what the powder was composed of in seconds. a moment later, a pie chart appeared on the screen.

89% ORGANIC MATERIAL
4% MANGANESE
1% PLATINUM CATALYST
6% MAGNESIUM

well, that answers that question, i thought.
 
Jesse Knight knew what creator was talking about. Knight gathered his wepons and headed off to there only to remember that he barally had enough power to get here in the first place, and the End Verse he couldn't recharge his power. Then he rememberd he had a emergency quantum vibrateional engine, or EQVE for short. It alouse for people to travel from points in spacetime.

He traveled to the small facility that creator was when he got there he was sweating and panting then Knight said "what the hell creator you left me."
 
i did a little bit of a double take at Knight's comment. "but... i didn't leave you. you're perfectly capable of interuniversal travel-" just then, i remembered that Knight had felt extremely drained back there, and still felt so now. "I... er... sorry..." i said simply, rubbing the back of my neck with my right hand. i glanced at the composition chart on the screen. "but this might make up for it." i said, gesturing to the chart, which was still displayed for all to see.
 
"It's fine, I just need to rest" said Knight. "Is there any place here that I can connect easily to the multiverse without actually going there? Oh is that the test results?" Knight asked
 
eager to change the subject, I replied "yeah, or at least what the tests could glean from such a small sample. I'm guessing that this stuff might be part skin, some sort of side-effect of the weird darkness she was using. if there had still been a body, I have no doubt that her skin would have been missing the top one, maybe two layers." I grasped the rounded top of the vial that was sticking out of the hole and pulled it out, rolling it between my fingers. "if you want, I could do some genetic mapping on this stuff as well; the skin cells haven't decayed at all, and we might be able to get some useful information as to who, and what, our newest enemy is."
 
"Yes do that I need to rest, I'm heading to the common area to sleep wake me when you get something." Knight said as he left the cluttered room. He had to squeeze past 3 book selves before he mad it to the door. When knight finally got to the common room he was using his long sword for balance. He made it to the couch and welcomed sleeps warm embrace.
 
I watched the door almost shut behind him, leaving a crack through which the muffled sounds of Knight navigating the bookshelves and stacks of books, followed shortly by a loud THUMP, which I assumed was Knight literally passing out and managing to hit the couch.
I shook my head a little, then turned to my work; the testing was probably going to take a few hours, and would need supervision for certain parts. I plugged the small sample vial into another circular opening, then sat in an office chair, turning to face the screen. I took a breath in, let it out, and stretched.
"let's do this." with that, I put my hands to the keyboard, my fingers flying across the keys, opening up menus, navigating various programs and sending queries and pings to various servers owned by my contacts, including a few military and domestic servers owned and operated by Heroes United. this would take some time, but it would answer a lot of questions...
 
Jesse Knight woke up after what seemed like hours. He sat up on the couch and put his hands on his temples. He still had a headache but it wasn't as bad as it was before.

Knight looked at his hand most of his power had come back, he stood up. And made his way back though the maze of bookshelves finally making his way back to creator.
"Did you find anything out?" He asked as he pushed his head though the door.
 
i rubbed my eyes and looked back at him. "some results, but the information is... how to put it... jumbled. at first i thought that it was just the scrambling that sometimes occurs in organic samples when jumping with a QVE, but i tested at least three times for quantum vibration caused anomalies, and nothing comes up. test is negative. so i got to thinking that it sort of resembled what happens when one of the SPIA subjects jumps with a QVE; sometimes, the first layer of their skin just sloughs off and turns to a powder-like substance, which, when tested, is rather jumbled genetically. now i compared the results of those tests-" i turned to the screen and hit a key; an image popped up of a graph showing the anomalous scrambling of SPIA subject genes in lost skin cells. the words CLASSIFIED and AUTHORIZED EYES ONLY were stamped in red on the top of the image, and some of the descriptive text was blacked out. "- to the results of the tests i just ran." a second graph popped up besides the first. "now, watch this." i typed in a command and hit the enter key. a series of dots showed up on both graphs, highlighting the tips of the jagged lines, then a single bar appeared in the center of the screen, saying simply PERFECT MATCH.
i leaned back in my chair. "now, i don't know if you were privy to the reports on the SPIA subjects, but i'll give you the basic rundown. the project was a mixing of biological and cybernetic technologies. the cybernetic is irrelevant, but the biological part is where it gets interesting." i spun the chair around, stood up and tapped the screen of a tablet lying on the counter in the center of the lab. on the screen appeared the entire dossier of the SPIA project and all it's subjects. i skipped over most of it, then stopped and highlighted a certain part. "simply put..."

"the SPIA subjects were clones."
 
"Clones, are you sure? Did you check there telomeres?" Even though Knight asked he knew the answer. "I didn't know that HU experimented with clones." He said
 
"they did. once. of the thirteen original subjects produced by the project, only five still live, and of the survivors two live in tanks under life support and one is permanently confined to a wheelchair. after subject thirteen, the project was decommissioned, the research team disbanded and cloning banned. but this..." i indicated the screen. "if she is a clone, she's definitely far more stable and advanced than most cloning projects i've ever seen. the handwork is precise, meticulous, almost obsessive, but still suffering from the same problems that plague most clones." i brought up a genetic diagram of the sample. "see that? some of her cells are attempting mitosis. most of them are successful, but in some the chromosomes are unraveling, the typical sign of decay in an advanced clone. i would guess that she was a clone of a clone or something similar; based on this, i'd say she wouldn't have lived another month. HU bypassed that by printing their clones instead of growing them, as well as giving them forced cellular regeneration, but this clone would probably have been grown in a tank, as opposed to being printed on a table. and then there are the unusually high levels of materials in the sample; i'm guessing that the magnesium was a quick-burn starter, the manganese a sort of flash-bang, and the platinum catalyst was to set off some sort of internal explosive. she probably set it off by chemical reaction, sort of like an extremely violent suicide pill."
 
"Suicided pill, probably to stop people like us from figuring out what or who she was." Knight said. Knight looked at the clones sword, which had been sitting next to creator. "Did you finds out what thoughs runes mean?" He asked
 
i shook my head. "there is no record of any language like that in the HU databases. while the resemblance to Ancient might suggest that it is a derivative, maybe a descendant language from a surviving population, that doesn't answer much; before they disappeared, the Ancients were spread out across many universes, and most of their records were destroyed when they disappeared, meaning that there is little information on whether or not there were surviving sections or where they might be." i touched the blade and felt a tingle of energy. "it is possible that this sword is an Ancient relic, but that doesn't explain the language difference." i sighed. "basically, unless we find more examples of this derivative, i can't translate the inscription."
 
"Shit!" Knight exclaimed he knew it was a long shot. "If it is a derivative of ancient, there might be a database somewhere with a Rosetta stone." Knight paused and put a hand on his chin, he began to think. "Maybe the difference is like old and new English, basically the same but different in minor ways. It's a stretch but it's something."
 
"maybe, but this inscription has verbal stresses in the wrong places. for example... " i pointed out a series of letters. "typically, this would translate as 'Fire', but the letters that it stresses are wrong, and there's a letter that i don't recognize in the place of the 'I'. i suppose it resembles Ancient in that many of the letters look similar, but their meanings and spellings are different."
 
As creator pointed to a symbol he was in familiar with knight instantly made a connection. "That letter right there, it's a character in a derivative of Japanese in a universe I visited once. That character had three meanings, it could mean Blood, Ice, and Demon" he began to look at the other symbols more closely. "This doesn't make sense, that character" knight points "looks like a symbol from another universes ancient Egyptian eye of Horus. But that's on the other side of the multiverse and as far as I could tell the ancients never went to that universe." Knight noticed 3 other symbols but couldn't make sense of them.
 
"and look." i pointed out the remaining three letters. "this first one is a letter from a dialect of Iceobaran; this one looks vaguely T'alterian, and this one is a textbook example of the letter 'D' in UMC common." i folded my arms. "if this group of people is entirely made out of clones, we might have a sort of Thieving Pot culture. Clones, being clones, would not have a culture of their own, so they would integrate small parts of every culture they encounter into their own to make up for their lacking. this includes mythology, technology, and..." i brushed the strange combination of characters. "language." i lingered on two numerals in particular. "these two are the ones that worry me. the T'alterians are the head race of the Alliance of Planets, the forerunner of Heroes United, and the UMC is one of the top five inter-universal superpowers. both possess technology superior to most civilizations in the multiverse, not to mention standing armies that number in the millions. if this group has not only encountered both but been able to defeat their forces, i think we might be looking at something far larger and more dangerous than its appearance reveals."
i opened a drawer, took out a hand-scanner, scanned the sword and sent the scan to my computer. turning to the keyboard, i opened up a file transfer and sent a copy of the scan out. "i'll send two copies of this; one to the general distribution servers that will get the information out to all the allies of HU, and one to the labs on the HU headquarters planet, Osrisis. hopefully they can analyze the information better than i could here and come up with a viable method of locating and tracking these clones."
 
"Even so these words are from different cultures what they say makes no sense, it's gibberish. These words probably have different meanings than we are use to." Knight looked at the eye of Horus. He had a uneasy feeling about it. "Even so the eye of Horus's placement is all wrong. In Egyptian the eye of Horus is the symbol of power, and because of that its the most important, in the universe that's from the eye is only to go at the beginning or end. No other universes has that eye design, it's a little nerve racking." Knight looks at the hilt "any way that symbol is not common tell your people to look for that symbol. If there is a language then symbols should repeat."
 
"already done." the computer beeped softly. "a response already?" i checked the messages. "they say they're on it, but their current conclusions are just about what we've already theorized." i paused, then considered my previous theory of a stolen culture. "it's possible that they might be taking genetic information from the cultures they encounter along with technology, and then creating a new generation with the genes gathered from various samples. it's a fool-proof plan; just take the strongest genetic attributes from each species, then combine them to create the perfect soldier. some of these clones might have physical attributes as well."
 
"Good" said Knight. He began to look at the blade again. He could hear it's voice. Was it...calling him? He wondered if creator could hear it.
"What ever this blade is its powerful" Knight looked at creator "do you hear it? If it can perce my mental blocks"
"Hold me" the sword cried
Knight gestured toward the sword and asked creator "should I?"
 
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