Grayson drifted back to awareness slowly. His mind felt sluggish, thoughts blurred. It took effort to peel open his eyes. The world seemed tilted until he realized he was upright in a contoured chair, strapped in by harnesses. A compact chamber surrounded him—gleaming white walls, cold LEDs, and the faint hum of life-support systems.
An escape pod. Emergency landing seat. That realization struck like ice water.
The last thing he remembered was the crystalline cube from his parents—blinding light, a paralysis creeping through his veins—and then nothing.
His pulse quickened as he peered through the small porthole. Not Earth, not yet. Only the inky black of space, stars sharp against the void. The pod must still be in orbit on the ring-rail. Where were his parents?
"Where am I?" he croaked, voice raw in the stale air.
A calm reply vibrated directly in his jawbone: "Yes, sir. I am here." The tone was smooth, precise—like Room, but different.
"Room?" Grayson asked. "Explain what's happening."
"No, sir. My name is Egg. I am your personal AI assistant. Let me summarize the situation. Your parents have initiated the next stage of their project. The gift you received contained initiation code for nanomachines. They are now integrated into your tissues and neural architecture."
Grayson's throat went dry. His heart hammered. "Integrated?" His fingers trembled against the straps. "You mean I've been—altered? Without consent?"
Egg's voice remained measured. "A neural lace is threaded through your brain, along with embedded biometric monitors. You now have direct interface with me, with global communication, with fabrication and ecological engineering tools. These are extensions of the common implants your peers already use. Yours are… considerably more advanced."
Grayson squeezed his eyes shut, willing it to be a simulation, a prank, anything. But the hum of the pod and the cold bite of the harness told him it was real. Terror flared into anger. His parents—every lesson, every game, every proud smile—had it all been grooming for this?
"Why?" he whispered hoarsely. "Why would they do this to me?"
Egg paused. When it spoke again, its tone had shifted—quieter, almost personal. "Your father believes that advance warning of great responsibility only breeds anxiety. That humans perform best when thrust into circumstances where choice is gone and action is the only path. He has studied many lives and concluded: greatness is rarely chosen. It is given."
Grayson felt his jaw clench until it ached. His parents hadn't asked—they'd decided. Decided what he would be. Decided what he would carry. He shook against the restraints, then sagged back, breath ragged.
"So I'm his experiment," Grayson spat bitterly.
"No more than any child is," Egg answered. "All children are experiments. None of us know the future. Parents only prepare for adaptability. Your father prepared you as best he could."
The words hung heavy. Grayson turned them over in his mind—part insult, part truth. He stared at his hands, wondering what they were now, what they would become. His world had tilted forever, and he hadn't even touched Earth yet.
Grayson sat hunched in the half-light of the pod, still feeling the echo of Egg's words. His skin prickled, the sense of something foreign already working through his veins. Then a blinking icon flared across his vision. With a shaky breath, he focused and opened it.
His father's face appeared in the air before him—Trevor Reese, stern-eyed, silver creeping into his dark hair. The familiar warmth of his grin was missing. His tone was brisk, almost clinical.
"Gray, if you're seeing this, then the gift has done its work. You've been equipped with tools that no human has ever carried before. Nanites, a neural lace, and the Synthesis Virus. These aren't toys. They're what we hope will keep life on Earth from collapsing completely."
Grayson felt bile rise, but Trevor pressed on.
"You need to understand the Synthesis Virus. It's a retrovirus, custom-designed. It lets you incorporate beneficial traits from other organisms into your own biology—and, more importantly, lets you use the same mechanism to adapt other species. Plants, animals, microbes, even constructs we design together. In short, you carry the seed of directed evolution."
The image shifted to a schematic: glowing strands of DNA split, spliced, recombined with foreign code. Animated enzymes stitched them like tailors working at frantic speed.
"Safeguards are built in," Trevor added. "Time-locked feedbacks, terminator genes, circuit-breakers. Nothing happens without your consent. Any dangerous expression dies before it spreads. You are not a weapon. You are a gardener, a catalyst."
For the first time, Trevor's tone softened, though his eyes remained sharp. "I know what you're thinking—that you never asked for this. But forewarning only breeds hesitation, and hesitation gets people killed. History is clear: greatness is rarely chosen. It is thrust upon us. All I could do was give you the character to meet it when it came."
His father leaned closer to the recorder. "All children are experiments, Gray. Parents don't know the future any better than their kids do. We throw everything we can into raising you, hoping you'll be adaptable enough to meet what we can't imagine. This—" he gestured vaguely, encompassing the virus, the lace, the mission itself— "this is the same. My hope is that you'll rise, because that's what you've always done."
The message ended abruptly, leaving Grayson staring at the empty air. His fists tightened in his lap.
Experiment. Gardener. Catalyst. Words his father had tossed like weights onto his shoulders. Grayson wasn't sure if he wanted to scream or collapse. But the weight was there now, and no shrugging it off would change that.
Another icon blinked to life in Grayson's vision, gentler this time. His mother's face appeared—Charlotte, her blonde hair tied back, her eyes tired but kind. Behind her, he noticed the background clutter of her workbench: dried flowers, pressed leaves, little fragments of green she'd always tried to save. She smiled, but grief softened its edges.
"My beautiful boy," she began, her voice warmer than Trevor's ever could be. "I'm sorry this had to come to you so suddenly. But you'll understand why soon. The truth is, things down here are worse than the feeds ever showed."
The image shifted to recorded footage—reefs bleached bone-white, forests burned to ragged stumps, clouds of insects dwindling into nothing. "The reefs are collapsing. The forests thinning. The insects that pollinate them vanish a little more each year. Whole chains of life are breaking apart."
Her gaze returned to the recorder. "You've read about the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs. That was a single strike, and it still took millions of years for life to recover. What's happening now is slower, but in some ways crueler. We've burned our own planet from the inside. Evolution simply can't keep pace. Not for humans, not for elephants, not for anything with more than a few cells to its name."
Grayson felt his throat tighten. The scale of it pressed on him, larger than his father's words, larger than anything he'd ever imagined.
Charlotte's voice softened further. "We believe intelligence wasn't a mistake, Gray. We believe it's the one gift evolution got right. You can prove it wasn't squandered. You can help life catch up to the damage we've done. It will be messy. There will be false starts. But there is still beauty to be made, and beauty worth saving."
She leaned closer to the recorder, her palm raised as though in benediction. "Whatever you become, just try to make a little beauty in the world. That's all I ask. We believe you can."
The message cut, leaving silence in the pod. Grayson sat rigid, his chest heavy. His father had given him a burden. His mother had given him a plea. Together they had handed him the fate of the biosphere itself.
The pod rattled violently as it hit the atmosphere. Grayson's chest compressed under the g‑forces, every muscle straining against the restraints. Heat bloomed against the hull, a deep shuddering roar filling the chamber. His mind spun with his parents' words—virus, collapse, beauty, burden—until the noise and fire drowned them all.
Parachutes cracked open. Retrothrusters burned. Through the porthole he glimpsed flashes of ocean, clouds, jagged stone. Then the impact came—WHAM. The pod skidded across ancient lava fields, tilted, groaned, and finally righted itself.
For a long moment Grayson sat, chest heaving, waiting for the world to stop lurching. Then he released the restraints and dropped shakily to the floor. His legs felt weak. He forced the emergency hatch open with both hands until it gave, spilling sunlight into the chamber.
Real air rushed in—salt, floral, wild. He crawled out onto the warm rock, panting, staring at the volcanic slopes and scrub clinging to cracks in the stone. "So this is Earth…" he whispered.
Egg's calm voice cut in: "I suggest recovering supplies before the tide rises."
Grayson blinked, realized the pod had come to rest precariously close to the surf, and scrambled back. He hauled out survival packs and the heavy 3D printer/assembler, dragging them to the shelter of a lava tube cave inland. His shoulders ached with every trip, but he refused to stop until it was done.
Inside the cave, he unrolled a mat on the stone floor and collapsed onto it, sweat soaking his collar. "No major damage from landing," Egg reported after a quick biometric scan. Grayson laughed bitterly. "Good to know."
Exhaustion pressed down, but rest felt impossible. He kept seeing his father's eyes, hearing his mother's plea. The fate of the biosphere, dumped onto his shoulders like baggage from a collapsing world. He muttered to the empty cave, "Just save the world, Grayson. They aren't asking much."
Sarcasm couldn't mask the truth: he wasn't going home, not anytime soon. Tomorrow he would set up the solar rigs, map a base, begin the work. Step by step. He closed his eyes and let the sound of waves echo through the cave.
Above, invisible against the brightening sky, the Ring traced its silent arc across the horizon. Grayson pictured it as he drifted into fitful sleep—a second horizon, watching. The work of his parents, the home he had left, the measure of intelligence itself waiting to see if he could prove it wasn't a mistake.