Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0140

Chapter 140: The New Species

The bottle rested between Erick’s fingers as if he knew his own worth.

The liquid inside had a bluish hue that seemed to emit its own light, a soft glow that rippled when he swirled the vial against the laboratory light. Months of work fit into those few milliliters. Months of nights when he and the Doctor had dissected every molecular chain of the super-soldier serum extracted from Deathstroke, tested variations, discarded dead ends, started over. Morgana had entered the equation at the exact moment when pure science reached its limit, and it was she who had pointed the way to fuse the compound with Bane’s refined venom, stitching together chemistry and principles that no earthly manual cataloged. The result was not a mixture. It was something else. Something that did not exist before them.

The latest tests had confirmed what the projections promised. Cognitive expansion on a scale that graphs could barely keep up with. Accelerated reasoning, neural plasticity elevated to levels that made human geniuses seem slow. And the body kept pace with the mind: strength, speed, regeneration, bone and muscle density, all recalibrated to a standard that left the “ordinary meta-human” category behind. Whoever received that formula would not be an improved version of what they were. They would be another species.

Erick smiled at his own distorted reflection in the glass.

The last few weeks had been kind to him. The hero’s work was paused, at least on paper, and the absence of patrols and missions had opened up a space of time that he filled with the voracity of someone who knows exactly what to do with each hour. The project that had required Tala’s help was now advancing under Morgana’s care, layer by layer, without the bottlenecks that had stalled it for months. Natasha was expanding the global espionage network using the demons as eyes and ears, a surveillance web that didn’t depend on computers, signals, or remote access, invisible to any technological countermeasure on the planet. The Engineer had locked himself into a private project about which he only responded with progress reports and unusual enthusiasm. And the Doctor had finalized the last step of the serum, the piece that Erick had been searching for and waiting for for months.

And there it was, in the palm of his hand.

He looked up from the bottle.

Before him, arranged in a semicircle in the center of the chamber, five capsules rose from the floor like monoliths of glass and metal. The blue fluid inside bathed the bodies that floated in suspension, small, serene, oblivious to what was about to happen. Goliath and Ambos, the two gorillas, occupied the capsules at the ends. Zack, Zoe, and Otávio, the three chimpanzees, floated in the central ones. Still babies, in physical terms. Minds that had already lived for years within the virtual world, molded session after session until they became the five most interesting reactions that Erick had collected in recent months.

Five bets. Five answers about to be written.

He turned to the hologram of the Doctor, who stood silently beside the main panel, his round glasses reflecting the bluish light from the capsules.

“Activate it. Inject the serum into them.”

The Doctor nodded only once.

The commands raced through the systems faster than any eye could follow. Inside each capsule, a mechanical arm projected from the inner wall, gliding through the fluid with surgical precision. At the end of each arm, a syringe loaded with the bluish substance, identical to that in the vial in Erick’s hand, found the exact point previously mapped on each primate’s body. The needles penetrated in perfect synchrony. The plungers descended slowly, dosing the compound into the bloodstream at a rate calculated not to overload such young hearts.

Erick watched the blue liquid disappear inside them, milliliter by milliliter, and didn’t look away once.

When the final dose was administered, the syringes were retracted and the Doctor plunged into his work. Dozens of data windows blossomed around his hologram: vital signs, neural activity, hormonal markers, real-time cellular readings. He analyzed everything simultaneously, cross-referencing each variation with the projections built up over months of simulation.

The minutes passed in silence, broken only by the low hum of the equipment and the occasional bubbling of fluid in the capsules.

Then the Doctor began to report.

“Thirty minutes since the injection. The morphology is changing as expected. The muscles are gaining density, the fibers are reorganizing into more efficient patterns. The brain shows active changes in plasticity. Neural activity increases every minute, with no signs of overload.”

“How long until it stabilizes?” Erick asked, his eyes fixed on Otávio, whose small body already showed subtle muscle contractions beneath his skin.

“Inconclusive, sir. Each organism is responding at its own pace. Octavio leads the curve of neural adaptation. Goliath leads the physical adaptation.”

Erick walked slowly past the capsules, studying each one. “And how are they? Are they conscious of anything?”

“The Sensei and I decided to keep them in deep sleep throughout the entire process,” the Doctor replied. “The ongoing neural restructuring is too violent for an awake mind. If they were awake, there would be a real risk of psychological disruption. While asleep, the brain absorbs the changes like one absorbs a long dream.”

It was the right decision, and Erick acknowledged it with a nod. The minds of those five were worth more than their bodies. The serum would rebuild the bodies anyway. The minds were irreplaceable.

“Good. Very good.” He stepped away from the capsules, casting one last glance at the small bodies suspended in the blue air. “Call me when the process stabilizes.”

The Doctor inclined his head toward his master, and Erick left the chamber.

…

Twenty-four hours later, the call came.

Erick crossed the doors of the chamber and stopped three steps from the entrance, because what lay before him demanded a moment of contemplation.

The five of them were no longer the same.

The bodies had doubled in size. Goliath, who just days before fit comfortably in the center of the capsule, now occupied the space with presence, his arms visibly thicker, his chest expanded, his shoulders gaining the width that would one day support the structure of a silvery back. His legs had grown along with him, dense, proportionate, built to carry tons. Both, in the opposite capsule, exhibited the same transformation in a more compact and harmonious version, each new muscle seemingly positioned with the precision that suited it. Even in deep sleep, even suspended in the fluid, it was possible to see that the bodies were still working, fibers adjusting, tissues settling, the transformation finding its final form.

And the three chimpanzees were not left behind. Zack, Zoe, and Otávio seemed to have aged years inside those capsules. Their childlike features had given way to more defined structures, longer limbs, larger hands. Where infants had once floated, now floated young adults in full vigor.

Erick scanned the five capsules with his eyes, searching for what he feared he would find. Deformities. Asymmetries. Tissue that had grown incorrectly, crooked bones, any sign that the formula had exacted the price that experimental formulas usually do.

He found nothing. Not a single flaw. Not a single deviation.

The smile came on its own.

He turned to the hologram of the Doctor. “Report.”

“Sir, everything went perfectly well.” There was something close to pride in the synthetic voice, the satisfaction of a scientist before an experiment that surpassed his own projections. “Their minds are operating at an extremely high level. In the passive cognitive tests I conducted during sleep, all five surpassed parameters of humans with intelligence far above average. And the curve is still rising. Their bodies are following suit: muscle and bone density at levels that place any one of them, today, above the best human athlete who ever lived. And they haven’t even woken up yet.”

“Sequelae?”

“None detected. No rejection, no metabolic instability, no neural degradation. The fusion of the two compounds behaved better in their organism than in any simulation we ran.”

Erick let his gaze linger on Otávio for a moment longer than the others. If the passive tests already showed that, what that specific mind would be capable of doing while awake was a question he could hardly wait to answer.

“I need to speak with them in person,” he said finally. “I need to see the fruits of our labor.”

He crossed the chamber to the corner where a sixth capsule awaited, different from the others, built for a single occupant. Erick removed his coat, climbed onto the platform, and docked himself to the structure. The glass slid, sealing him inside. The fluid rose in seconds, warm, enveloping his legs, his torso, his neck, until he was completely submerged. He closed his eyes the exact moment the connection was established.

When he opened them again, he was in another world.

…

The virtual world built by the Engineer and the Doctor had grown along with its inhabitants.

The playground that had once sheltered five clumsy puppies no longer existed. In its place, a valley stretched out under a perpetual late afternoon sky, divided into distinct territories that fit together like organs of the same body. Erick materialized at the highest point, an elevation from where he could see everything, and allowed himself a long moment of simply observing.

Each of the five was in his own domain. And none of them were doing anything childish anymore.

The first sound that reached him was an impact. Deep, dry, the kind of sound you feel in your chest before you hear it.

He came from the nearest territory, where a dohyō was surrounded by empty bleachers under paper lanterns. The elevated sumo ring, made of beaten clay and delimited by a circle of woven straw, obsessively reproduced the arenas of the drawings that Goliath devoured as a cub. But there were no drawings there anymore. There was Goliath, his new body glistening with virtual sweat, advancing against an opponent his own size.

The opponent was a construct of the system, a colossal fighter with the mass of a bear and the technique of a yokozuna, and Goliath faced him in hand-to-hand combat with a seriousness that didn’t exist in the afternoons when he merely clapped in front of a screen. He had absorbed those designs for years. Now he executed what he had learned. His feet dug into the mud in the charging stance, shiko after shiko, and when the two bodies collided in the center of the circle, the entire virtual world seemed to tremble. Goliath took a half-step, growled, rotated his hip, and turned his opponent’s weight against himself, guiding the opposing mass out of the circle with a throw that ripped straw and clay from the ground.

On the edge of the dohyō, a clone of Erick watched with his arms crossed, and Goliath turned immediately to him. Not to the audience. Not to the defeated opponent. To him.

The clone nodded once, slowly.

The effect of that simple gesture was visible from the top of the hill where the real Erick watched. Goliath’s chest swelled, his eyes gleamed, and he beat his own chest twice before returning to the center of the circle and assuming a stance for the next combat, without anyone needing to ask. The most physically devastating creature of the group, shaped by the designs where the fighters loyal to the Great General always won, now fought for a single coin: that nod.

“He asked for stronger opponents three times this week,” said a voice next to Erick.

The Sensei had materialized on the rise, his hands crossed behind his body, his gaze following the same spectacle.

“And did you give?”

“We gave him two. He didn’t deserve a third yet. He knows that. That’s what makes him come back to the ring every day.”

Erick smiled and shifted his attention to the next territory, where the landscape changed abruptly and deliberately. The Japanese clay gave way to dust, dry wood, and midday sun. A complete Wild West town stretched out there: main street, saloon, barn, water tower—everything straight out of the movies that were the only force in the universe capable of keeping Zack still for more than fifteen minutes.

But Zack wasn’t standing still. Zack was never still. The difference was that now the chaos had a purpose.

Erick located him by the movement: a dark blur crossing the saloon roof at the instant the entire town turned against him. It was an ambush scene, Erick realized, and a difficult one. Virtual snipers appeared in windows, behind barrels, atop the tower, and Zack needed to cross the main street from one end to the other without being hit even once. The rules of the Wild West converted into infiltration and reaction-under-fire training.

The chimpanzee leaped from the roof at the exact moment two snipers locked onto him, landed on the cart, rolled underneath it while projectiles of light ripped through the air where his body had been half a second before, and emerged on the other side already sprinting. Nothing in that sequence was rehearsed. The system randomized the enemies’ positions each round precisely because, against fixed patterns, Zack had become unbeatable in two weeks. Against pure chaos, he was even better. His new body responded with a speed that the eyes of an ordinary human could not process, and Zack laughed as he moved, that unmistakable sound that had always accompanied his escapes since he was a cub, now interspersed with the whistle of gunfire.

He crossed the street’s end line in a leap, landed in front of Erick’s clone who was waiting on the police station’s balcony, and raised both arms in the old victory pose, panting, his eyes gleaming.

The clone took a sheriff’s hat off his own head and placed it on Zack’s head.

The real Erick let out a low laugh from the top of the hill. Zack adjusted his hat with an almost reverent care, completely different from the creature that destroyed any object that remained still for too long near him, and dashed back to the starting point of the course to run it all again, now with an audience.

“His reaction time?” Erick asked.

“We no longer have a scale to measure precisely,” the Sensei replied, and there was something dry and satisfied in the way he said it. “Improvisation under pressure remains his strongest point. The worse the scenario, the better he operates. We’ve stopped trying to surprise him. Now we just try to delay him.”

The next territory was quiet. It made sense.

An open-air workshop stretched across the eastern slope of the valley, workbenches arranged in rows with millimeter precision, tools suspended from panels, and at the center of it all, a partially disassembled structure that took Erick two seconds to recognize: the propulsion engine of a spaceship, a functional replica of the models that populated the science fiction stories that Ambos had been consuming since his first months.

The gorilla was bent over the engine core, and the scene captured everything Sensei had once described about her. The colorful blocks that her cub-like hands stacked with absolute concentration had evolved into this: real components, interdependent systems, a puzzle with consistent internal rules. She didn’t assemble by instinct or trial and error. She studied. Erick watched her remove a piece, examine it against the light, rotate it, compare it to the holographic diagram floating beside the workbench, and then set it aside, deliberately choosing not to use it yet, because something in the assembly sequence that only she could see told her that that piece belonged to a later stage.

Erick’s clone worked alongside her, but not as an instructor. As an assistant. It was both of them who pointed, who requested tools with precise sign language gestures, who drove. And when the core finally clicked into the casing with a deep click and the entire motor awakened with a roar of energy, bathing the workshop in blue light, she didn’t celebrate as Zack would have. She took two steps back, tilted her head, and studied her own work in operation with that critical, evaluative expression she’d had since infancy, looking for what could be improved.

Only then, satisfied, did she turn to the clone. And the hug she gave him was the usual one, the hug of Both, long, enveloping, the most affectionate creature in the group demanding its payment in contact and presence.

“She’ll take it all apart again tomorrow,” the Sensei commented. “That’s her pattern. Assembling isn’t enough. She needs to understand why it works. She’s building an internal library of systems, exactly as we designed it. The difference is the speed. With her fresh mind, she absorbs in an afternoon what used to take her weeks.”

“The engineer,” Erick murmured.

“The engineer,” the Sensei confirmed.

On the other side of the valley, where the slope descended to a forest that seemed hand-painted, with trees of impossible canopies and light filtering through the leaves in exactly the way it did in the films of the Japanese studio that Zoe loved, music was coming.

It wasn’t background music. It was music being made.

Zoe sat in the center of a clearing transformed into a studio, surrounded by instruments, canvases, paints, and work surfaces, and at that moment her long fingers ran across the keys of a piano with a fluency that no primate in the history of the planet had ever possessed. The melody she was constructing was hers, original, and bore the signature of everything that had shaped her: the delicacy of her animations about belonging, her attention to the beauty of small things, the search for a place in the world processed through narrative and now through sound.

But the training was in the details, and Erick identified them one by one. Before Zoe, a screen displayed dozens of human faces in sequence, each carrying a different emotion in varying intensities, some obvious, others subtle enough to deceive a trained adult. And Zoe translated each face into music. Fear became one progression. Contained joy, another. Lies, a specific dissonance she had developed on her own. The system measured the accuracy of her emotional reading through artistic translation, and the indexes floating beside the screen told the story: Zoe read people with an accuracy bordering on discomfort.

The communicator. The one who would understand how things look, how they are perceived, how the emotional environment of a space affects those who inhabit it. The adult version of the drawings she held up with outstretched arms, waiting for approval, was that: a creature learning to read and touch the inner world of people.

The clone sitting beside her on the piano bench waited for the melody to finish. Then he pointed to a specific choice in the composition and asked something. Zoe responded in sign language, quick, articulate, defending her choice with arguments. The clone laughed. She laughed along, that high-pitched, luminous sound, and rested her head on his shoulder with the naturalness of someone who had never doubted, not for a single day of her existence, that this place belonged to her.

Erick watched for a long moment, and the smile on his face had layers that he didn’t bother to separate.

There was one left.

The last territory was located at the highest point on the opposite side of the valley, mirroring the position where Erick himself was, and the choice of location was no accident. It was an open, minimalist pavilion, and inside it Otávio stood before a table that did not hold a chessboard.

He supported twelve.

Twelve simultaneous games, each against a virtual opponent of a different level, and Otávio circled the table slowly, moving one piece here, another there, without a perceptible pause for calculation, as if the twelve games were a single game that only he could see in its entirety. But Erick noticed what lay beyond the chessboards, and that’s what made him narrow his eyes with genuine interest. Above the table, a holographic map floated. Terrain, units, supply lines, weather conditions, troop morale. A complete war simulation, and each chess game on the table was connected to a front of that war. The twelve games were not twelve games. They were twelve battles of a single conflict, and Otávio commanded the entire campaign, translating military strategy into the language of the game he had learned before learning anything else.

On the other side of the table, commanding the opposing army, was Sensei himself in embodied form.

“You’re playing against him,” said Erick, glancing blankly at the Sensei beside him, who existed simultaneously in both places.

“I’m losing against him,” the Sensei corrected, with the serenity of someone stating a technical fact. “Third consecutive campaign. I use real military doctrines, sir. I’ve compiled strategies from all the great commanders in human history. He doesn’t know any of them by name.” A pause. “He reinvents them when he needs to. And then discards them when he finds something better.”

In the pavilion, Otávio moved a horse on one of the boards. On the map above, an entire unit changed position, and three enemy supply lines were exposed at the same time. The chimpanzee then raised his eyes across the entire valley, directly to the point on the hill where the real Erick was.

It shouldn’t have been possible. The five of them hadn’t been informed of his presence at that session.

Otávio stared at him for two seconds, inclined his head in a restrained, almost formal greeting, and returned to his chessboards.

“He knew,” said Erick.

“He always knows,” the Sensei replied. “We’ve stopped asking how.”

Erick went down the hill.

The reaction to their arrival spread through the valley like an electric current. Goliath abandoned the dohyō mid-charge. Zack plummeted from the water tower in a series of leaps that completely ignored the ladder. Both dropped their tools on the workbench with a care that lasted exactly one second before hurtling down the slope. Zoe crossed the woods in a straight line. And Octavius, without haste, ended the twelve games with a single gesture and walked to meet the others.

They surrounded him, and Erick allowed himself to be completely present in that moment.

The eyes. Five pairs of eyes shining, fixed on him with a devotion that no isolated training could manufacture, because it wasn’t manufactured by isolated training. It was built day after day, year after year of extended time, by each clone who celebrated a fitted block, each story where the General’s figure was just and protective, each moment of security associated with his presence. They looked at him as if they were looking at their father. As if they were looking at something above a father. And the loyalty that emanated from that wasn’t the conditioned loyalty of a trained animal. It was a choice. Within the structures he had built, within the limits of their understanding, but a choice nonetheless.

Goliath tilted his head and rested his gigantic forehead on his shoulder, with an absurd gentleness for a creature that minutes before had been throwing colossi out of a ring. Zack orbited around the group, unable to stand still, his sheriff’s hat still on his head. Zoe held his hand with both of hers. They both simply hugged him, long and completely, in her own way. And Octavio stood half a step behind the others, observing, present in the exact measure he chose to be, and when their eyes met, the chimpanzee held his gaze in a way that none of the other four could.

Erick spent time with each of them. He watched Goliath win a fight and personally gave him the wave that was worth more than any prize. He ran the Wild West course alongside Zack, who adjusted his own speed so as not to leave him behind and spent the rest of the time visibly proud of it. He sat in the workshop while Ambos explained to him, in increasingly sophisticated signs, how the engine he had assembled worked. He listened to the music Zoe composed right there, on the spot, looking at him, a melody he recognized as being about him without anyone needing to translate it. And he played a game against Otávio, just one, which lasted forty minutes and ended in a draw that Erick had the distinct impression of having been a gift.

When he finally moved away from the group, holograms of the Doctor and the Sensei awaited him side by side at the edge of the clearing.

“Doctor,” said Erick, still keeping his eyes on the five, who were returning to their territories exchanging signals with each other. “Ready for surgery? The adaptation so they can communicate with us humans.”

“Everything’s ready.” The doctor adjusted his glasses. “I have the entire procedure mapped out. The reconstruction of the vocal tract, the adaptation of the larynx, and the neural interface for fine speech control. With the brain plasticity they now exhibit, the expected post-operative adaptation has dropped from months to weeks. They will speak, sir. And I suspect that, in the case of one of them in particular, we will wonder why we took so long to give him a voice.”

Erick smiled and turned to the Sensei. “And is everything ready to begin combat training?”

“Yes.” The answer came without hesitation, and there was in that voice what every master has before the best class of his life. “The individual resumes are finalized, designed around the personality and vocation of each one. Goliath in frontal combat and protection. Zack in infiltration and operation under chaos. Both in field engineering and sabotage. Zoe in target reading and psychological warfare. Octavio in tactical command.” A brief pause. “They will exceed our expectations, sir. I would say that cautiously about any other group. About these five, I say it as a fact.”

Erick let his gaze sweep across the valley one last time.

Goliath was resuming his position in the dohyō. Zack restarted the course for the third time, faster. Both were already disassembling the engine. Zoe would record something new on a screen. Octavius ​​was rearranging the twelve trays for the next campaign. Five minds of another species, five bodies that the outside world couldn’t even imagine existed, five absolute loyalties growing silently within a secret that only he possessed entirely.

Months of work. Nights of research, dead ends, restarts. And now it’s working before your eyes, better than any projection had promised.

He sighed, and the sigh carried only satisfaction.

Another step taken. Another obstacle overcome that, soon, will be just another thing left behind.

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