Kevin spent more of his eighteenth year buried in his hidden base than in the public halls of the clinic, because the cover of an aide was enough for the outside world, but the work that mattered happened underground where only Angela joined him, her presence more natural now than it had been when she was first activated, the two of them moving through rows of hydro trays and vats with the comfort of people who didn't have to explain themselves; he had been chewing on the state of the world since the day his Fallout knowledge had come back, and even though Cyberpunk's Earth wasn't a radioactive desert, the more he looked at it the more it felt broken in a quieter way—wildlife gone, seas clogged with trash, forests cut back until only weeds grew, air thick with exhaust and chemical burn, and whole stretches of land turned to dust, and the irony wasn't lost on him that his second life had taught him how to survive wastelands and now here he was in a place that called itself modern but rotted in different directions. He talked to Angela about it because she could keep up, and she didn't blink when he floated the idea of making a G.E.C.K., the Garden of Eden Creation Kit from Fallout lore, not a toy but the real thing using his vending systems, the printers, and the engineering he had smuggled into this timeline; she listened with folded arms as he paced, laying out the problems—if he lit a G.E.C.K. it would draw attention, the beam would scream across the sky and the corpos would send drones before the dust cleared, and if he seeded land near Night City people would strip it bare faster than it could root, not out of malice but out of desperation, because survival in Night City always came first, and he needed a solution that could work without flashing alarms. He remembered Vault 22 from New Vegas, the plants that grew fast, thrived in low light, needed little water, and produced fruit bigger and richer than baseline stock, and he remembered how they had failed, mutating and consuming, turning people into husks, and he told Angela that failure wasn't inevitable if you approached the genetics carefully, if you stopped the aggressive parasitism and tuned them for stability, and Angela tapped her fingers against the console and asked, "Do you think you can?" and Kevin said, "I have to." The first step was growing samples under controlled light, grafting stable lines, stripping the invasive traits and reinforcing the productive ones, and that meant hours standing over nutrient baths while Angela ran sequences through the system, pointing out probability errors and muttering when something flagged too close to mutation, her tone calm but sharp, the way only someone designed to think could be, and Kevin laughed once, telling her that arguing with her felt more human than talking to half the staff above them, which got him a glance that lingered longer than necessary before she turned back to her work. Nights blurred into mornings and mornings into nights, no sun underground, just the rhythm of sleep snatched between experiments and meals they didn't have to cook because the vending system produced packs, and in those hours he found himself enjoying her company more than he expected, not because she flattered him or played roles like the other synths but because she gave him honest feedback, sometimes blunt, sometimes dry, never wrapped in false approval, and he realized it felt close to what he had been missing since his first life, someone who could keep pace with his obsessions without looking at him like he was insane. When the first batch of plants reached harvest stage he cut one open and stared at the flesh, thicker and brighter than standard, dripping with juice, and he made Angela taste it first, because if it failed he would rather it burn him than her, but she bit and chewed and said, "It's good," with a tone that didn't sound like programming, and he let himself bite after, and the taste was sweeter than anything he remembered from Night City stalls, not poisoned, not invasive, just food. That was one piece of the puzzle, but fixing land meant more than food, it meant cleaning oceans, fixing skies, repairing ecosystems, and that's when Kevin walked to the side wall and started sketching on the panel, shapes of a machine shaped like a shark, a mechanical basking shark that would swim and devour trash, shredding it inside its metal belly, recycling what could be recycled, storing what could be stored, a thing that looked like an animal but was nothing but steel and program, and beside it he drew a whale that would filter water, sucking in the sludge and spitting cleaner flows, stripping oil and chemicals, and he told Angela they would work with the G.E.C.K. because one without the other wasn't enough, and she looked at the lines and asked if he thought the world deserved that kind of effort, and he said, "Deserve doesn't matter, possible does." The ocean project stayed on paper for now but the idea was there, waiting, and in the meantime he needed more hands because even with the synth staff above ground he didn't have someone to delegate the heavy work of balancing three companies, watching the city, building new tech, and running his underground labs, so he decided to make another aide, not just another copy of a Gen 3 but something closer to Angela, someone who could think freely, form opinions, grow with him, and he already knew who it would be. He told Angela one night as they checked readings, explaining he wanted to model the new aide after Angela from the old game Lobotomy Corporation, not the version who grew bitter and transformed in Ruina, but the first version, the one who managed, learned, and spoke with clarity, because that was the part he admired, the ability to organize chaos without drowning in it, and he said she would be named Angela again because names mattered, and the current Angela smiled faintly at that, maybe because she knew it was a compliment, maybe because she liked the thought of not being alone. He built the new Angela as a Gen 3 with upgrades, cybernetic reinforcements in the brain to handle complex calculations without burnout, a balance of biological emotion and synthetic precision, immune to the loyalty flaws of the other synths but without the chains that kept them locked, and when she woke in the vat and opened her eyes she looked at him like she was alive, not like she was waiting for a script. She integrated fast, sliding into the roles he had prepared, helping to manage files, calculate production, predict financial movements, and she spoke with a cadence that was different from the first Angela but close enough to echo her, and he found himself sitting longer in the lab just talking because now there were two minds that could share the weight with him. For all the exhaustion of splitting his focus, Kevin felt something like momentum for the first time, not just reacting but shaping, pushing forward into something that looked like a plan rather than survival, and when he stood back at the end of a long shift, looking at the rows of stable plants under light and the lines of notes on the panel, he thought to himself that maybe this world wasn't as different from Fallout as it wanted to pretend—still broken, still cruel, still in need of fixing, just in another shape—and he wasn't about to waste the second chance that his third life had given him.
