Chương 6: Superior Ground

Times Square, Lab HQ Entrance Kelly needed to think. And if Kelly needed to sit anywhere to think, she would always choose the ground; the ground was superior and she did her best thinking while sitting on it. She'd passed half a dozen perfectly functional chairs on the way to her workplace. Some had been intact, many were inside stores, a few were thrown out of windows with only mild bloodstains, but she never spared them a glance—just floors with delusions of grandeur.

Chairs were created under the assumption that people needed guidance on how to sit, where to sit, leg placement, where to rest your arms—condescending little slabs of engineered plastic and pretentious little dictators, with arbitrary rules on lumbar support, bossing your limbs around—they limited free thinking and were designed for obedience and ergonomic optimization. She didn't need some corporate-backed, mass-produced hunk of plastic telling her how to exist.

The ground, though—now that was a surface that didn't care. No rules, zero intended position, no attempt to box her into a shape she didn't choose. She could fold her legs, stretch out, shift her weight however she wanted. The ground didn't make demands. It didn't pretend to know better. If she wanted to sit and think, it was the superior option by default. Plus, you couldn't cozily spread-eagle on a chair.

Which was why Kelly lay spread-eagle in the middle of what used to be Times Square, surrounded by discarded bullet casings, the occasional severed limb, and at least three different species that shouldn't exist, the cracked pavement still warm from whatever creature corporate security had vaporized there last. It was a place to think. A place to reassess.

And the loops had taught her that when she laid down, most snipers and creatures had trouble distinguishing between the dead corpses and the professionally unbothered. A large impact caused the ground to tremble, right on cue. The last run on her lab had been close, close enough that she could taste it, so close that maybe next time, she'd even have the machines in the lab running before the reset kicked in and she died horribly.

Kelly stretched her legs out on the pavement in Times Square, leaning atop a fallen signpost as if she had all the time in the world. She pulled her weapon into her lap, tapped through a few screens, made an adjustment, frowned at the readout, then made another, programming the thing to prepare for the next run on her building, and idly watching the people trying to break into her building. She'd reached Vaughn Industries. Finally. Naturally, she couldn't get inside. She'd already tried. Nine times.

Simon's men were making a lot of noise at Vaughn Industries' main entrance, pounding and prying at an entrance designed to withstand grades of weaponry that turned entire streets into footnotes. They took turns at the sealed entrance to her building. A sonic crowbar snapped and left its owner stumbling. A small charge popped into a cloud of smoke and flame that cleared to reveal the same closed doors. A climber slid down the side, shrieking, skinning his palms.

Kelly glanced up from the weapon, watched the next volunteer square up for a running start, and went back to tapping.

"Good luck with that," she muttered. They were barely a concern. Let them keep at it. They have no idea how far out of their league they are. Those doors could withstand a lot more than a few stolen police explosives and whatever else they got at hand, she thought. They could detonate that entire stack, and the building would still be standing—fully intact and self-repairing before the dust even settled. She sighed, shaking her head. Some people just didn't respect engineering. Not like I do.

She tapped her monomolecular blade, the shape-memory alloy humming against her fingertips with that subtle vibration dangerous blades tended to have. Five minutes of lying-on-the-ground-work had gone into programming the newest form, and she was pretty satisfied.

"Jen would say I'm showing off," she muttered, and the thought of her friend—still missing, still somewhere on the other side of this mess—flashing behind the words. Jennie had always teased her about her shortcuts. And if there was one thing Kelly loved, it was a good shortcut. Technically, on paper, the weapon was legal. Folding combat knife, same paperwork as the batons the police carried and used quite enthusiastically to beat wayward teenagers.

But she'd modified it herself, pushing its design into grey-market territory, then all the way to black.

"If anyone asks," she muttered to the empty square, "it's a letter opener." The weapon sported a Shape-Memory Alloy blade she'd made in her home-lab using graphene and diamond nanothreads—creating an edge sharp enough to cut at the atomic level. Technically, the blade wasn't dangerous unless you happened to be made of matter. Which, conveniently, included everything. That should've been impossible, and the fact it wasn't had wedged itself into her brain like a half-finished melody she couldn't drop.

She found it endlessly intriguing. A problem that refused to be cut was a problem worth tearing apart to peek at the insides. Its core was made from various materials mixed with nickel-titanium, a special metal that could "remember" its original shape and return to it when heated due to changes in its internal structure.

Because of this, she had programmed different shapes into the metal's memory, and the super-elastic blade remembered every programmed form, switching between them at will, obedient to its user's every command. So it wasn't actually a blade, but more of a variable weapon assembly, or VWA for short—a high-end military tool that could store the shapes of many weapons. The design had been modelled after the far superior weapons used by a distant and centuries-old threat from before the augment wars.

They were programmable, transforming weapons, complex as hell, and so lethal they were pretty much insane. The original switches paired with a single user's neural signal, transformed at will, and their lethality and capability depended entirely on the creator's skill. Most military knock-offs were rare precisely because they usually paled in comparison to the originals—soldiers called them "switches" with the tired familiarity of people who refused to risk their lives on a counterfeit.

Most folks just found it much easier to just buy several loud guns and some good ol' explosives. Kelly had looked at the problem and decided a Swiss army knife that split atoms was more her speed.

'Why carry six things when one thing can do six things badly,' she'd once yelled, when it finally worked right. except I made it do them well, so the argument falls apart. Because nobody else had designed a switch with an edge capable of slicing between atoms, a feat only ever replicated through large, complex, resource-intensive industrial machinery—which made her weapon revolutionary. Kelly wondered how her weapon would compare to the original switches from the first wars waged against humanity so long ago.

"Mine's better, definitely," she muttered. Her blade was like a toolkit for atoms—a sword, a scythe, an axe, a spoon, a wine bottle opener—all in one. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

"You remember, don't you?" she said, running her thumb along the flat, still frustrated at the fact there was a final obstacle she had yet to beat. The weapon would help with what was coming. It remembered.

"better than I do." With a flick of her wrist, the blade unfolded, extending into a vibrating edge so thin it could slice between molecules with very little force.

"They can't measure this," Kelly murmured, eyeing the weapon.

"But if they could... if it was a part of me..." Her EQ augment level would spike. Drastically. A leathery crack snapped across the square as two lizards—or things that had decided lizard was close enough—collided midair, untangled themselves with a flurry of indignant wing-beats, and resumed circling the bruised sky like the whole thing had been their idea.

Kelly watched them find their rhythm again, then flicked the blade out to a slender sword, the metal stretching into the form with that crisp little snick, and traced their spiral with the tip, the edge describing a slow, unhurried line that followed the first lizard as it banked, stalled, and wheeled into another pass. Then she got back to work. She idly flicked her blade, watching it shift through its pre-programmed forms; a lengthy military blade, a machete, a scalpel—each one a product of her own design.

Industrial tools had been the foundation. But Materials Science, Nanotechnology, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Mechanical Engineering had turned theory into something real and deadly. Kelly had studied many fields in the loops, then she decided to cheat. The stolen memory knowledge chips she'd raided in past loops had given her the raw data in exchange for many deaths. Data chips were treated like a higher commodity than credits, even higher than gold, and hoarded religiously by the very few that possessed them.

She wasted twenty loops just trying to break into one very small stash. The knowledge had been invaluable, but knowing wasn't the same as creating. Anyone could know things. Real ingenuity was in the application—using knowledge in ways nobody had thought of before. She hadn't had much at hand, but some of the critical materials were insanely expensive in larger quantities, and the little she had, had been a gift—a sentimental one that she would never have parted with before the loops.

It became a key ingredient in a rare mix of her own design, so limited and scarce that the best she could do with it was make a small weapon—so she had adapted. If there wasn't enough of it to make bullets, she'd settle for a Swiss army knife with an edge that could split the bonds between atoms. If the world hadn't collapsed into this mess and if she hadn't been stuck in a loop of endless trial and error, she could've sold the tech for a payday that would've rewritten corporate warfare...

assuming she lived long enough to complete the sale. The high-security memory chips she raided in early loops crammed entire lifetimes of expertise into her head, and in theory, the knowledge shouldn't have stayed with her. The information stored in her neural implants should have slipped away over time with the resets. The loops didn't affect her organic memory, but it reset everything else, including her augments. But her neural implants? Those played by different rules.

Whatever process initiated the loop had not accounted for the ingenuity of humanity. Memories people didn't use faded over time as the brain cleared out anything it didn't reinforce. Unused data began to weaken within days, especially if it wasn't recalled, connected to something else, or branded in by panic. Most short-term details disappeared within a week—unless they were useful, repeated, or deeply inconvenient.

Each morning, Kelly's brain still held everything from previous loops—because the reset deleted her body, not her organic memory. Her neural implant reset with the rest of her, wiped clean, but it always launched with the same protocol: scan the neurons, copy what survived, and write it all back in before she'd even finished waking up.

The implant had faster access, better pattern recognition, and stronger recall than her brain alone, so once it had the data, it instantly reinforced key information—refining everything. If she remembered it, the implant rebuilt it better: knowledge from data chips, genetic theory, material architecture, the discoveries, the breakthroughs, and the hard-won—or more accurately, hard-liberated under highly questionable circumstances—knowledge the endless days resetting would've otherwise erased. It was a loophole.

A crack in the system. And that was the real question, wasn't it? The loops erased everything. Reset everything. But not her, not completely. Her mind, her memories—all carried over, untouched. That wasn't normal, and it definitely wasn't possible. There was a clue buried in that fact. Humans couldn't use dark energy—what the status called magic. They had no circuits for mana, no natural or spiritual pathways to store and wield reality-bending power.

But the world—hell, Kelly was proof that it wasn't completely impossible. Humans might not be able to use mana—but they could be affected by it. And that proof was all she needed. Above her, something else winged and enthusiastically ugly carved a spiral through the sky, and a chunk of masonry landed ten feet away with the crunch of an apology that arrived too late. Kelly didn't look up.

She gave the blade another tap, felt the alloy's faint memory-ripple run through her fingers, and watched it fold back into an innocent-looking combat knife. The lab door stayed shut. Somewhere inside, her notes were waiting. She'd get to them. Right after she figured out why the universe kept hitting snooze on the same apocalyptic Tuesday, and why a troll in Times Square healed faster than her patience. Escaping the city? The idea was laughable. Why would she leave when her life's work was right here?

Upgrading her body wasn't impossible either, but it was a waste of time. Any augmentations had to be done in the morning, and even then, the trade-offs were brutal, as Simon had discovered earlier that day. Surgery required recovery, and she had already burned through her last expensive vial of single-use nanorobotic healing injections before the loops started—not the high-end permanent stuff, the disposable kind mercs carried for emergency patch-ups. The kind designed to keep fighting. Or twitching.

Paramedics had cheaper alternatives. Instant coagulants, synthetic white blood cells, skin sealant that stuck better to packaging than patients. It could stop you from dying, if used correctly and if nobody kicked you during application, but it wouldn't help with augment recovery in the same way. But full-scale medical nanotech? The kind that healed on the fly and hardly ever stopped? That was a luxury, not a necessity.

To get it, she had to break into private hospitals, bypass active defenses built for riots, pass high EQ guards, and win a fistfight with every idiot looter with the same idea. Which wasn't a problem—just a waste of a loop. No healing meant charging through New York with surgical glue doing most of the heavy lifting, like toothpick scaffolding holding up the statue of liberty—enhanced but still weakened from self-performed surgery.

If she did heal, she'd lose entire loops battling over medical stockpiles, gaining nothing toward her real goal, and wasting a lot of time for something she'd lose at the end of the day. Power suits were similarly fruitless. Kelly's EQ was too low to pilot one effectively—they required high strength and tailored neural augments. They also took too long to build and were extremely expensive.

And while they boosted the wearer's performance and could even boost her active EQ level, if your enhancement level was too low, once they were damaged, their efficiency could drop into the negatives. And worse, a well-placed or unfortunate attack could render your suit partially, or completely useless, leaving you either trapped in a tin can while not being strong enough to break out, or being emergency ejected into the very thing that destroyed the only thing protecting you.

They were expensive toys mainly designed for highly augmented resilience specialists who could survive the kind of impacts the suit couldn't, while having their weaknesses boosted. The monomolecular blade fixed a lot of those problems by making people shorter. In contrast, upgrading her augments or building power armour caused more problems, mostly in the form of new joints that weren't on speaking terms with the old ones. So instead, she spent her mornings experimenting.

Some loops, she built and printed weapons or tools to deal with obstacles. Other loops, she hunted down the weaker creatures, testing their biology, failing to find out how they worked—but figuring out what killed them. She'd jailbroken her 3D printer months before the world went to shit. So her morning routine consisted of printing weapons, just a low-level gun, a small amount of ammo, and a transforming weapon, enough to handle anything below 6. 0EQ.

She'd had to use all of her materials usually kept for emergency repairs, upgrades, and replacements each morning, but it didn't matter, with the city in chaos, she usually found better weapons along the way, and thanks to the Second Amendment, the city was like a Walmart for murderhobos. Her invention, the transforming monomolecular blade, remained her favorite. Most of these creatures could shrug off lower-level bullets, explosives, and even directed energy weapons, but molecular separation?

That had a way of working when nothing else did. Sometimes. Her days were split between research and field testing, scavenging through dead zones for anything useful, and inevitably, making a mad dash for her lab in the hopes of reaching it before everything reset. She'd died so many times trying to reach it that she'd lost count. That didn't mean she'd stop. She still needed more. The fabricator was there, in the building, waiting. Once the fabricator was running, things would change.