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

she duplicated the file and stuffed it into her robes. Upon leaving the archive, she used the Shell of a carrier pigeon and flew out of the Peacekeeper’s EtherSpace.

Returning to her own firewalled EtherSpace, she opened the package.

Riffling through it, she discovered yet one more surprise: the Peacekeepers knew only a little more than she did. They had yet to discover the structure of his muscle fibers and bone matrix, and his ability to manipulate water molecules.

Double-checking to make sure the package’s contents were indeed the original classified files, and not a false trail, she proceeded to the DNA tests. Several had been run, from spectral analysis of skin to saliva testing.

“Ai, Analyze subject’s DNA.”

In a billionth of a second, the fox spirt bowed and flashed the results in her vision.

No, this couldn’t be.

A map of Ishihara’s DNA lined up beside that of the average human.

The only thing special about his DNA, when compared to a billion other samples, was that he was totally ordinary. Not even XHuman.

He was Purebred.

Aya flipped to the earliest files on him, which were created an hour ago in real time.

The information appeared as brushed ink on rice paper, which meant the Peacekeepers had dug deep to determine his identity. These were ancient files, from three centuries before the Onslaught.

An image of a birth certificate appeared, identifying him as Ishihara Ryusuke, born in 2015.

He was nearly eight hundred years old!

How was that even possible? Even with genetic engineering and nanotechnology, Homo sapiens’ maximum theoretical age was half that. Practically speaking, no human had lived past three hundred.

Unless this was some elaborate hoax. No, fingerprints—to think the ancients used such unreliable biometrics!—and retinal scans all confirmed that this was indeed a man from the Age of Greed.

Primary school reports showed he had enjoyed something called Physical Education, though his poor health limited him; while junior high school records noted he hated English—now the common language of Earth.

And then, at age fifteen, all record of him disappeared.

She froze. Poor health? She swiped over to his medical records. “Vaccinations,” whatever those were, were “up to date,” whatever that meant; and he’d suffered a greenstick fracture of his tibia as a three-year-old.

Then, the words burned on her virtual eyes.

He had cystic fibrosis.

Same as her.

Could it be? She pulled over an image of her own DNA and had Ai compare it.  The gene regulating CFTR in both their samples overlapped.

The silly notion of him not having gold hair flitted by, replaced by the obvious: he shouldn’t have lived to reach eighty, let alone eight hundred. Everything she’d read about the disease suggested that there had been no cure until CRISPR advances had allowed mankind to edit it out of the genome.

In the real world, tears welled in her eyes, and it took all her concentration for her consciousness to remain anchored in the EtherCloud. If he knew the cure…

Not like she’d want to live in the real world.

What could it offer, beyond actual people with their unfathomable mores? Whereas the EtherCloud made sense. AI constructs followed logical patterns, and whatever she didn’t like, she could reprogram in her own firewalled EtherSpace.

Still, with healthy lungs, she’d be able to stay in the EtherCloud indefinitely; tethered, but no longer chained to a frail body.

Again donning a Sentinel Shell, she opened a portal back to Kyoto Central Peacekeeping Headquarters and stepped through. Ishihara’s file still glowed brightly as even more authorized Avatars from Peacekeeper facilities all over the world accessed it. Several Sentinels prevented Ministry of Defense Avatars from entering the EtherSpace at all.

No doubt, once someone near the top of the Peacekeeper hierarchy realized what they had, they’d place the highest level encryption on it. That was a few levels beyond her ability to crack. With no Sentinels monitoring the crowd at this split second, she changed her Shell to a human Avatar with Level Five clearance. Just high enough to access his files without drawing undue attention.

A quick scan revealed Kyoto Central was keeping Ishihara in a low-security medical unit. He was still unconscious, and staff continued to monitor and run tests. But once they’d cleared him, they’d likely transfer him to the top-level holding area, which was the most heavily guarded, and also close to the sub-light transport.

Swapping her Shell for a Sentinel’s armor again, Aya jumped over to the surveillance partition and hacked into the medical unit’s cameras.

Ishihara lay on a biobed, eyes closed, wearing nothing more than organic-fiber underpants and the Ballistrax restraints that secured him. Deliciously lean, toned, and hairless, he looked frail compared to the chiseled bulk of shocktroopers. He might’ve been mistaken for XHuman if he weren’t so tall.

His chest rose and fell. Curiously, his hands lay palms up, index fingers touching his thumbs. Even more curiously, his injured hand didn’t look as if it had just been mangled in the rotating barrels of a power armor minigun. Transdermal pads connected to various points on his body sent data to several data projections on the otherwise sterile walls. What exactly they were monitoring, Aya didn’t know, but she copied the data stream.

“Another one!” A nurse dressed in a high-collared white uniform threw up his hands and tossed a bent bioinjector needle onto a table with several others. He stomped off.

For the moment, Ishihara was all alone. Well, save for the people connected to the EtherCloud, running scans on him.

So far, they hadn’t looked at his lungs, and this camera couldn’t scan that deep. She switched to another angle, where the camera could do a chest CT.

A young man in the high-collared grey suit of cleaning staff crept in, blocking the camera’s line of sight. Mop in hand, he was undoubtedly Purebred, like all people in this line of work. He was quite good-looking for his kind.

Still, he