COVELENT: XenoTrait

The Cain Foundation had never been silent before.

Even in the early hours of the morning, its corridors had carried the sounds of machinery, distant conversations, security doors, and researchers moving between laboratories.

There had always been something happening beneath the surface, some experiment demanding attention or some department operating beyond the knowledge of the others.

Now, with Markus Cain in control, the building seemed to be holding its breath.

He stood before the enormous glass windows of the Foundation’s central command room, watching the city below. The lights stretched across the darkness, marking roads and buildings that housed thousands of people who had no idea what existed beneath their feet. They went to sleep believing the world was stable.

They trusted that tomorrow would resemble today, that their bodies would remain their own, and that the rules governing their lives would not suddenly change.

Markus wondered how long that ignorance could last.

Behind him, several senior researchers waited beside the conference table. None of them had spoken since he entered. Some had worked under Victor for decades.

Others had inherited positions from people who had disappeared during the chaos surrounding the Mark 8 incident. Every one of them seemed to be waiting for Markus to demonstrate that he deserved the authority he had inherited.

He turned away from the window, ”I want the original records.”

One of the researchers adjusted his glasses. ”Which records, sir?”

”All of them. The original objectives, the subject files, the failed trials, the medical observations, the reports that were never included in the official archives.

I want everything that was documented before the Foundation began deciding what information was appropriate for me to see.”

The researcher hesitated. ”Some of those files were restricted by your father.”

”My father is no longer responsible for deciding what I can see.” The words landed heavily in the room.

Markus approached the table and placed both hands against its surface. ”I don’t want summaries. I don’t want reports written to make a failed experiment look successful. If a subject died, I want to know why.

If an experiment was abandoned, I want to know who made that decision and what they were trying to hide.”

”And if the records have been destroyed?”

”Then find out who destroyed them.” Markus continued.

Nobody argued and within minutes, the researchers had begun issuing instructions. Secure archives were unlocked.

Requests were sent to departments that had remained inaccessible even to senior Foundation personnel. Markus watched them work, recognizing something unsettling about the speed with which they obeyed him.

They had not needed to be convinced, they had simply needed someone with the authority to give the orders.

When the room emptied, Markus remained at the table, examining the first collection of files delivered to him.

The reports contained hundreds of observations about Mark 8, but the language differed from one document to another. Some researchers described it as a pathogen. Others referred to it as a carbon-reactive organism. A few used terminology that suggested they believed it was something far more complicated than either.

The Foundation had spent years trying to understand it.

Yet the more Markus read, the less certain he became that anyone had ever understood what they were dealing with.

He opened a report documenting the relationship between Mark 8 exposure and changes in human physiology.... The pages described crystallization, cellular adaptation, organ failure, and the rare cases in which an infected subject survived long enough to develop an ability.

He stopped at a photograph of a crystallized hand.

His own hand tightened. For years, he had believed survival was evidence of strength... The weak died, the strong adapted and the exceptional surpassed the limitations that governed ordinary people.

It was a simple principle, but simple principles had always appealed to him. They made a chaotic world easier to understand.

Mark 8 complicated that understanding.

Some of the dead had been physically stronger than the survivors. Some had been younger, healthier, and better prepared for the trials. Others had possessed qualities the researchers considered valuable. Yet their bodies had failed all the same.

Survival did not always reward the strongest, sometimes, it rewarded compatibility.

Markus leaned back in his chair and looked toward the glass wall separating the command room from the adjoining laboratory. Beyond it, technicians moved around equipment designed to monitor the enormous Mark 8 crystal beneath the Foundation.

He remembered standing before it with Victor.

The crystal had been beautiful in a way that made beauty seem like an inadequate word. Its deep-blue surface caught the laboratory lights and returned them in fractured patterns. It had looked less like a biological threat and more like something that had been waiting for humanity to discover it.

Victor had watched Markus carefully while he examined it.

At the time, Markus had thought his father was studying his reaction.

Now he wondered what else Victor had been measuring.....He returned to the files.

Ash found him several hours later in a private research room, surrounded by open reports and handwritten notes.

”You haven’t slept.”

Markus did not look up. ”Neither have you.”

”I wasn’t the one who decided to read several years of research in a single night.”

”Then perhaps you should try being more ambitious.” Markus added.

Ash remained beside the doorway. His mask covered the lower half of his face, and the tubes running from it toward his chest moved slightly with each mechanical breath.

The equipment concealed the damage Mark 8 had done to his lungs, but it could not conceal the strain that came with every passing day.

”Have you found anything useful?” Ash asked.

”I’ve found a pattern.”

”That usually means you’ve found something you want to be true.” Ashell said.

Markus finally raised his eyes.

Ash pulled out a chair and sat opposite him. ”Go on, then.”

”Every generation of life inherits limitations. Some are physical, some are biological... Others exist because an organism cannot adapt quickly enough to its environment.” Markus tapped one of the reports. ”But when the environment changes, survival depends on adaptation, the organisms capable of adapting continue...the others disappear.”

”That’s evolution.” Ash added.

”That’s the part everyone understands. What interests me is what happens when the change is accelerated.”

Ash glanced at the documents. ”Mark 8.”

”Mark 8 forces the question. It changes the human body in ways that should be impossible, sometimes it destroys the subject, sometimes the subject adapts and in rare cases, the result is something the original human body could never have produced on its own.”

”You’re making it sound like a gift.”

”I’m saying we don’t understand it well enough to call it a curse.” Markus said.

”People died.”

”People die every day.” Markus snapped back.

Ash’s mechanical breathing became more noticeable in the quiet room, ”That’s a convenient way to dismiss them.”

Markus’s expression hardened. ”I’m not dismissing anyone.”

”Then don’t use their deaths as evidence that the experiment was necessary.”

For several seconds, neither spoke.

Markus looked back at the photograph of the crystallized hand.

He had seen the consequences of Mark 8 firsthand, he had watched people suffer, seen the Foundation’s failures, and learned that the records concealed as much as they revealed. He was not ignorant of the cost.

But he was beginning to suspect that the cost alone could not answer the question.

”If Mark 8 can alter the limits of the human body,” he said, ”then studying it might be the most important thing this Foundation has ever done.”

”Studying it is one thing. Deciding that everyone who dies from it was simply unworthy of survival is another.”

”I never said that.” Markus argued.

”You haven’t said it yet.”

Markus stared at him.

Ash stood, his coat settling around him. ”Your father taught you to look for the truth beneath everything.

Don’t become so attached to an answer that you stop looking when the evidence disagrees with you.”

He left before Markus could respond.

The door closed, and the room returned to silence.

Markus remained still for a long time. Then he opened a new document on the terminal and typed a single word at the top.

EVOLUTION.

He began recording his observations, separating established facts from theories.

He wrote about compatibility, adaptation, and the possibility that Mark 8 represented a biological transformation whose consequences the Foundation had barely begun to understand.

He did not write that it was humanity’s salvation.

He did not write that its victims deserved their fate.

But when he reached the final line, his fingers paused above the keyboard, ”If the human form can be changed, then humanity’s present form may not be its final one.”

He saved the document.

A notification appeared on the screen almost immediately.

UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED: SUBLEVEL ARCHIVE 03.

Markus frowned.

He had ordered every restricted archive opened. There should have been no unauthorized access left to detect.

He checked the security feed. The corridor outside Sublevel Archive 03 appeared empty, but the system had registered two separate biometric signatures.

Neither matched a researcher, security officer, or registered visitor.

He accessed the camera footage from the preceding hour.

For several seconds, nothing happened then the image distorted.

Two figures appeared at the far end of the corridor.

Markus leaned closer to the screen.

One was a man with dark skin and a scar crawling down on the left side of his neck.

The other stood several steps behind him. He looked a native Russian with long blonde hair and a pair of green eyes.

Neither wore a Foundation uniform, neither appeared on the active subject registry.

Markus enlarged the footage, but the system could not identify them. Their files had been removed from the searchable database.

He checked the access log.

The two signatures had entered the restricted archive using credentials belonging to Victor Cain.

Markus stood.

He had spent the last several hours demanding the truth from a building full of people who had learned to survive by withholding it.

Now two strangers had walked into a locked archive using his father’s credentials, and the Foundation’s security system had failed to stop them.

He took a security card from the desk and left the room.

Sublevel Archive 03 lay beyond a corridor that had not appeared on any of the floor plans Markus had been given.

The entrance was concealed behind a maintenance panel, and the security lock required a biometric authorization from the former director.

Victor’s credentials opened it.

Inside, the archive was smaller than Markus expected. There were no rows of filing cabinets, no elaborate research stations, and no large storage units.

A single terminal stood in the centre of the room, surrounded by shelves containing sealed data drives.

The two strangers were waiting beside it.

The man with the scar spoke first, ”You came alone,” he said.

Markus stopped several metres away. ”You entered a restricted section of my Foundation.”

”Your Foundation,” the second man repeated. His voice carried an unusual calmness. ”You say that as though ownership explains anything.”

Markus studied him. ”Who are you?”

”Someone who has been waiting for you to ask the right questions.”

”That’s not an answer.”

”No,” the newcomer said. ”But it’s the closest thing to one you’re likely to receive from this place.”

A thin layer of frost spread along the terminal’s metal casing. The other man lifted a hand, and the air above his fingers distorted with heat.

” Were you subjects.” Markus asked.

”We were,” the dark skinned man replied.

”Your files have been removed from the registry. Markus explained.

”They were removed long before your father stopped allowing you into the lower levels.”

Markus’s jaw tightened. ”You knew Victor?”

Both men exchanged a glance.

The second stepped forward. ”We knew him before he became the man who ran this Foundation.”

”Don’t waste my time.” Markus snarled angrily.

”We aren’t.”

Markus moved toward the terminal. ”I’ll have your identities restored, your movements investigated, and every missing record recovered....so I can see who you really are.”

The scared man watched him with an expression that was almost pity.

”You still think the information belongs to you because you’ve inherited the authority to demand it.”

Markus stopped, ”What does that mean?”

”It means the Foundation has been showing you what it wants you to see for years. Even now, with the entire building under your control, you are searching through records that were prepared for you.”

The second man placed a hand against the terminal. Its display awakened, revealing a list of numbered subjects.

Markus recognized several entries from the files he had been studying.

Then he noticed the gap.

The earliest accessible record began with Subject 004.

”What happened to the first three?” he asked.

The scared man answered without hesitation, ”Subject 001 died. Subject 002 died. Subject 003 survived long enough to become someone else.”

Markus stared at him, ”Who was Subject 003?”

The second man met his gaze, ”Victor Cain.”

For the first time since taking control of the Foundation, Markus had no immediate response.

He looked from one man to the other, searching their expressions for evidence of deception. Neither offered him anything.

”My father was never a subject.”

”You believed he was never a subject,” the scared man corrected. ”That isn’t the same thing.”

Markus’s fingers curled around the edge of the terminal, ”What did they do to him?”

The second man’s expression grew more serious.

”That question is connected to another one.”

”Which is?”

He looked directly at Markus,”Why do you think you survived?”