Righting an old wrong

You fumed as you paced back and forth along the row of cryo-chambers squirreled away in a room attached to Zoe and Chloe's old lab.

Reginald Brooks was an arrogant, short-sighted bastard who'd long deserved to be out of work, as far as you were concerned.

In a sense, you supposed you shouldn't be too mad. By ruthlessly abandoning earlier versions of the biopolymers and AEGIS forms, he'd ended up with Zoe Hildebrand and Chloe Walker just before the project's private financing abruptly dried up. Even the project's main successes prior to that, frozen in the two cryo-chambers you stopped at, had had difficulty holding their human forms and retaining memories. It was possible they could have fused with Emilia King, but the fusion wouldn't have been especially stable. But that hadn't been good enough for the former Director, so he'd ordered them put on ice.

Of course, when Zoe and Chloe proved completely successful, he wanted to reject them on the basis that they were too independent and intelligent! Fusing them with Emilia King wouldn't have freed her from the entirety of her curse, but it would have both substantially mitigated its effects and left her with an intellect unparalleled in human history. It was a distinct possibility that she could have developed Project Quicksilver on her own, and maybe gone on to do what you'd done, or at least face the choice to do it.

Emily Lockard had been no slouch in the intellectual department, but Emilia King outclassed her by a mile and a half.

The world could've been a very different place if Ichiro Hasegawa managed to get in touch with Safiya, who was the main trustee of the King estate in the wake of the disaster that claimed nearly the entire family, and explained the situation. The project was supposed to be for Emilia's benefit, after all. Valuable Zoe and Chloe might have been, but if Safiya and Emilia had demanded it at any point, there wouldn't have been much Hideki could have done to prevent at least an attempted fusion, given that all of Project Inside Out's initial capital had come from the King family.

Maybe there was a timeline in which Emilia King--or whatever she ultimately called herself--became every bit as omnipotent as you were. The Goddess of Spiral City.

You weren't especially interested in attempting to work through the twists and turns of could-have-dones and might-have-beens, though. You brought your focus back to the present.

Brynn and Wren hadn't been too far off from what Reginald Brooks had wanted from Project Inside Out. They were intelligent beings, capable of maintaining a human appearance for a time, who could potentially fuse with a human. Unfortunately, Wren couldn't maintain her compression cage for any length of time without a taxing mental effort, and would eventually have completely deteriorated, while Brynn's shapeshifting disrupted her ability to form short-term memories.

The problems really weren't that hard to fix, as other researchers on the team had tried to tell the Director. There hadn't really been any need to move on from their basic designs, just to tweak them. Brynn and Wren would have stabilized, Dr. Brooks would have had his success, and Emilia King would've mostly been immune to the curse that had started the entire affair.

Instead, he ordered the activation of biopolymer 4.39-C, which had eventually become Chloe Walker, and AEGIS revisions X, Y and Z. Z, of course, had become Zoe Hildebrand, after examinations of revision X, Xandra, and revision Y, Yolanda. Zoe was effectively a combination of the two: Xandra could maintain her compression cage for about a week at a time, but did not exhibit even the intelligence of Wren, while Yolanda had been almost as intelligent as Zoe, but effectively couldn't function except in concert with a human host.

It was Brynn and Wren in whom you were most interested, though. They incorporated all the lessons of the earlier models, and your ideal outcome for full possession and encasement healing was exactly what Reginald had disdained: perfected versions of them.

Still, the limitations they had were a barrier to reactivation. If you didn't fix them, they wouldn't be especially useful as objects of study because careful review of the research notes from the time would tell the same tale. But if you did fix them, then your team wouldn't be left with anything to do, which was not an outcome you considered desirable.

And, of course, you had no intention of repairing their flaws only to break them again. If anyone else had suggested that, you knew it would be a distinct possibility that you would simply have deleted them from existence.

Ultimately, you decided to alter history, though only that of Zoe, Chloe and yourself. There were many times when you'd all been at a loose end, and had been largely unproductive. Rewriting things ever so slightly to put some of those spare moments toward incremental changes to Brynn and Wren did not sufficiently perturb the timeline to prevent your ascension, and spaced out properly the last change, the only one you'd made, would just now have come to fruition. The sequence of surreptitious alterations had resulted in the beings in the chambers before you being exactly what you needed--and history recorded that no divine intervention had been required. As far as you were concerned, the only thing that made them unsuitable for your applications was the fact that they still could potentially fuse.

The chambers themselves were mobile, so you wheeled the two out into the main lab. Punching in the access codes, you reorganized the room to how it had looked almost thirty years prior, the last time either of them had been conscious.

A little prodding from you had ensured that both would emerge in a human shape, and have energy sufficient to maintain those shapes at least until Kelly Lancer arrived. You were probably going to end up using them as "test subjects" for your proposed microreactors, delivered via nanites based on Lina's technology, so that they could maintain these forms indefinitely. The same technique wouldn't work later, of course, but you could easily explain that as being a side effect of the removal of fusion capabilities, which itself was done to prevent inadvertent fusion and loss of Hideki assets.

Brynn was the first to emerge, sitting down in one of the old chairs you'd put near the chambers. Wren came out only moments later, sitting down in the other chair. Neither was concerned about her nudity.

Brynn reached a tendril toward Wren, her instincts still sound in that regard. Wren's fingers played along it. It wouldn't immediately occur to Wren that she was capable of vocal speech on her own now.

"You're not Dr. Brooks," Brynn said, voicing both her own thoughts and her counterpart's.

"No, I'm not. He's since departed. I'm Juno Ternion, the new Director of Hideki Labs."

Wren looked at you closely, then her fingers played along Brynn's tendril. The slime translated. "You... seem... familiar... You... seem... like... me."

"In a sense, I am like you," you agreed, and collapsed into thin ribbons, just as Wren had been so prone to doing the moment she relaxed. You stayed in that form for about half a minute, letting the two fully absorb the implications, before reassembling yourself.

"But you also seem like me," Brynn added.

This time you turned one of your hands to slime, making sure not to have any nanites in it.

"I'm like both of you," you said. This time, you summarized the later years of Project Inside Out and its eventual co-option for military purposes. "I guess you could say that I'm your daughter, in a sense."

Wren coughed, then spoke. Her voice was hoarse and hesitant. "What do... you want with... us, then?" Her fingers still played along Brynn in time with her words.

"Between us we represent the greatest successes of Hideki's biomedical research. I'm looking to replicate that success, a quarter-century after it was abandoned. Developments since then have left me less than suitable as a subject for examination, but I'm hoping the two of you will be willing to help out in that regard."

Brynn nodded. "Helping out is what we want to do."

"Good. And in exchange, I'll find a way to stabilize you permanently. That's my first priority. But I also know that you'll still feel like you want to wrap up and fill out a human, and I've got just the person for it on the way."

"I knew we should... have done that, always wanted... to do it, but never had... the opportunity after the first time. Then... it was cold, so cold," Wren said, her voice not quite as hoarse from disuse.

"How long has it been, Doctor?" Brynn asked.

You took a deep breath. "Almost thirty years, Brynn. Dr. Brooks only left recently, and he was adamantly opposed to any reactivation."

"The lab looks no different," Wren pointed out.

"I had it rearranged to appear as it had when you were last active in preparation for bringing you both out of stasis, in order not to disturb you overly," you explained. "It will have to be changed back, of course, but that is a relatively straightforward process."

"We'll still need energy," Brynn said.

"The alterations Zoe and Chloe made over the years should have left you able to maintain yourself, at least minimally, from standard electrical power sources." Out of sight of either of them, you made another small fusion reactor appear. "Attach yourself to that and you will at least be able to maintain your solidity until you can attach to a human and, eventually, I can stabilize you completely."

Both of them nodded, and you stood.

"You were left there too long, and all because the ego of one man wouldn't allow him to admit he'd made a mistake in ordering you frozen away in the first place. You didn't deserve that. Please accept my apology on behalf of Hideki Labs." You bowed.

Brynn and Wren just looked a little confused, but it was apparent that they'd acceped the apology.

"Welcome home," you said.

--

"So the pieces are in place," Kazumi Ishida said as she nestled against you, her bare back rubbing delightfully against your exquisitely sensitive skin. She squealed a bit as your upper arms reached around to play with her nipples and lower arms sought to tickle her abs and thighs. The fire in the cottage's hearth crackled warmly.

"The pieces are in place," you agreed. Kazumi made her breasts grow under your ministrations. "Tori will be flying out tomorrow, and Kelly will be reporting a day later. The core of the engineering and neuroscience teams have already been reassigned internally." You smiled. "The profit potential of leasing, as opposed to selling, especially when demand will be so high either way, was more than enough to convince the Board to make Project Inside Out their top priority."

"I imagine the military brass weren't too thrilled with the idea that even they wouldn't get access without going through the consent leasing procedure," Zumi said.

"They know they won't have a choice anyway. Brynn and Wren, Zoe and Chloe, they could all simply choose not to heal someone if they didn't want to. Later models will be no different. Believe me, if anyone had attempted to **** the issue, they could've found themselves stricken with all manner of mysterious, incurable ailments." You shook your head, even though you had no sympathy for anyone who might have tried that. "They'll just have to settle for the cut rate."

Kazumi made her butt grow, grinding against your crotch. "So does that mean you have tomorrow off?"

"Aside from meeting Tori at the airport and escorting her to her new apartment?" you asked. You weren't about to let anyone else handle one of your prize recruits. "It's not like there's much to do on Project Inside Out until Kelly arrives, and even then the full team will take a while to assemble. Some of the people I'm getting are on some other pretty important projects, and they're not being pulled off those just yet."

Kazumi angled her hips, thrusting her butt up toward your breasts, her legs intertwining with yours. "How about we talk about work later and you fuck me now?"

"Sounds like a good idea," you agreed, nibbling lightly on her ear even as a tongue grew out of your own vagina to start eating out Kazumi.