Quantum Cultivation by Jace Kang (simple e reader TXT) 📕

all seventy-three videos of Ishihara Ryusuke defeating two shocktroopers.

The raw footage.

Not the edited story which the government had released. Witnesses knew to stick to that fiction. To do otherwise would mean their social score would sink so low they couldn’t even get a Purebred’s job.

While even the simplest AI could use one camera angle and extrapolate details into a 92.7% accurate 3D rendering, Aya had taken all available views and merged them into a 99.99997% accurate replay of the fight. Now, she rewound it back to Ishihara’s confrontation with the shocktroopers, and walked among them in the simulation.

Her EtherCloud Avatar flickered, tethered as it was to her real body. “Freeze,” she commanded.

Gasping for air, she jacked out of the EtherCloud and returned to reality. Dizzy, feeling sluggish and slow in real time, she fought the rising nausea. Mucous was flooding her lungs. Coughs racked her body as phlegm scoured up her throat and filled her mouth.  She spat it out into a glass, leaving a salty aftertaste on her tongue.

Aya heaved a few breaths as she looked around her lavishly furnished bedroom. She snorted. The decorations were a waste, but her parents figured that making her living space as luxurious as possible would keep her from leaving the house.

Because in a world where all humans but the Purebreds had reached genetic perfection, Aya was a one-in-six-billion accident.

She was supposed to have been just a bundle of engineered stem cells, a base from which to create designer hair color for the one who’d become her elder sister. When her parents were ready to have a second child, a B8 AI mistake in the embryo lab management system had led to her being implanted in her mother’s uterus instead of a younger sister. By the time anyone realized what had happened, she’d been born the genetic identical twin of her older sister, save for six genes that gave her gold hair and an incurable disease that had been eradicated six centuries before.

Back then, during the Age of Greed, people still used pharmaceuticals to manage the symptoms; now, nanobots did the work, and the sole sufferer of an ancient ailment wouldn’t live long enough for a nanotech company to recoup its investment costs to program a treatment.

At last, fresh air filled her lungs. The ten minutes of open airways in real time translated to what felt like a day in the EtherCloud. She jacked back in even before acclimating to real time, leaving behind the limitations of her flawed body.

Her Avatar, a black-haired beauty with honey-toned skin from her homeland’s brutal past, reappeared in her firewalled EtherSpace, back in the simulation she’d paused.

Ishihara’s stunningly handsome figure stood to one side, the two shocktroopers on the other. At full speed, he’d moved like a blur, faster than the Peacekeepers in their reflex-enhancing armor and tactical suits, and just as fast as the shocktroopers in their power armor.

“Ai,” she said, fusing the letters for her Artificial Intelligence assistant to sound like the ancient Japanese word for love. “Play at one-quarter speed.”

Appearing as a nine-tailed fox in the corner of her vision, her assistant bobbed its head. As the scene repeated itself, she froze it in certain places. Ishihara didn’t appear to be wearing any technology to enhance his speed or strength, but perhaps he was one of the Ministry of Defense assassins with internal wiring and a tenuous grip on sanity.

His fingers had been injured in the minigun, and yet with the wave of his other hand, the shocktroopers’ blade emitters had just broken off.

Which should’ve been impossible.

If only she dared to hack into the Ministry of Defense’s EtherSpace, she could acquire the shocktroopers’ feeds from their state-of-the-art sensors. But only another hacker, Slash, could do that. Maybe she could talk him into trading some code…

But for now, she’d have to make do with her own resources. She leaned in to examine the sheer cut in the tube.

“Reverse to timestamp 11:04:03:91.”

The scene jumped back in time to where the first emitter failed. The slice was just appearing in the conduit.

“Magnify.”

The image zoomed in closer and closer, with still no sign of what had disabled the shocktrooper weapons. The resolution surpassed the several civilian videos that she’d knitted into the replay, and was limited to the feeds from the Peacekeepers.

“Stop.”

The image, caught by that bitch Keiko’s camera, froze at the atomic level, where water molecules interlocked into a line, slicing through the emitter.

No, that couldn’t be.

Because if what she was seeing was true, Ishihara could control water at the molecular level.

That was supposed to be only theoretical, the technology in the experimental stage. And it didn’t explain how Ishihara could move so fast.

“Ai, zoom back to standard size and resume play.” She watched another second of the fight, to where he jammed his fingers into the revolving minigun barrels. “Pause. Zoom in.”

Unlike the revelation of the water molecules, nothing on the surface showed just how he’d been able to stop a durastrium alloy rotating at 8000rpm. Thankfully, government cameras included wide spectrum electromagnetic scans as well.

“Shift to X-ray CT and magnify.”

Filaments of some kind webbed through the layers of his skin and muscle fascia. The protein structure of his ligaments and muscles looked strengthened by coiled proteins. Foreign minerals reinforced his bones, and his blood vessels…

“Cross-reference.”

Organic polypeptides in the subject’s connective tissue, Ai’s voice spoke in her mind. Images of the long-extinct orb spider flashed, along with the chemical structure of its silk. Several different iron alloys make up the network in the subject’s skin.

How was this even possible? If Aya’s Avatar could gasp, she would’ve.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at his eyes.

The nine-tailed fox gestured to the cellular structures. Cone and rod density is six times greater than average.

“What does that mean?”

Subject is able to see clearly