Kevin and Angela had spent weeks refining the Vault 22 plants until the mutations that once turned colonists into walking vines were stripped away and what remained was simply efficient, resilient food, and when the last round of lab trials came back stable they knew it was time to scale, which meant building the first run of G.E.C.K.s, not the portable suitcases Fallout players remembered but heavier modified versions built in sections by vending machines, modular reactors, atmospheric scrubbers, soil fabricators, and water filters locked together into crates, shipped out on trucks that looked like ordinary clinic supply vehicles, and Kevin stood over the final assembly bay with his hands braced on the rail as the first kit locked into place with a hiss of seals and a steady green light on the panel; he had made more than two because he didn't know how many it would take, so the answer was simply "a few," enough to seed multiple zones without drawing a map straight back to him, and Angela logged their placement on a slate that would never touch an outside network, her calm voice listing coordinates in the old desert outside the city, near collapsed highways, near ruins people didn't bother with anymore, because that was where you could plant new life without immediate theft. Deploying them meant sending squads of synth soldiers built for endurance and silence, enhanced with chrome and biology both, not flashy but efficient, and he gave the order with no ceremony, just a nod to Angela who relayed it across the secured channel, and within hours the kits were moving under cover of night, loaded into armored carriers that rumbled through scrub where no one looked twice. The first activation lit up the desert sky with a green column that pierced clouds before fading, visible for miles but too fast for most to understand, and Kevin muttered a curse because he had hoped to dampen the signature but the physics still worked the way Fallout had taught him, the energy release not something you could hide, and Angela said quietly, "If anyone asks we point to Biotechnica, they already take blame for half the biotech in this region," and he nodded because the corpos needed scapegoats and Biotechnica's name fit any blank. Days later the reports started, chatter from nomads on open bands saying the air smelled fresher near the old highway, scavenger gangs complaining that their boots sank in mud where dust should be, and locals in Night City noticing that the horizon wasn't just brown haze anymore but streaked with green, not much but enough to notice, and Kevin read the feeds at his console with his chin in his hand and told Angela this was phase one, not the end, because fixing patches of desert was nothing unless it scaled. Meanwhile David's life was shifting in smaller ways that felt huge to him—running deliveries with Vera's crew in the van, sneaking small bursts of Sandevistan when needed, checking in with his mother each night and seeing her hand twitch stronger than before, the kind of progress that made all the hard days worth dragging through—and when he wasn't working he practiced control in empty stairwells, sprinting ten steps, cutting time, breathing slow, repeating until his calves burned, and then walking out into the city where new signs of change were creeping in: cracks between slabs sprouting shoots, gutters trickling with clear water after rain instead of oil slick, birds darting across rooftops in pairs that nobody could explain because they had all been gone for years. Kevin tracked that too, his engineered animals seeded in the forests around the city, immune to plagues that once forced laws to wipe out entire species, and he watched with something close to satisfaction as cameras hidden in drone eyes and synthetic crows showed footage of children pointing and laughing at a bird on a railing, stray dogs sniffing at rabbits, even a deer crossing a broken street while cars honked and people just stared; Angela reviewed the same footage and said, "They will adjust faster than we expect, humans adapt to what they want to see," and Kevin said, "Good, because they'll need to." The G.E.C.K.s kept running, not just greening patches but scrubbing the air and seeding rain, and Kevin saw the models project new weather patterns, more rainfall across California, more stable streams, soil recharged faster than depletion, and he felt the pull of wanting to do more, to throw a dozen more kits into the ground, to push the whole state at once, but Angela reminded him that too much too fast would bring attention, and attention from corps meant military contracts, meant surveillance, meant raids, and he listened because she was right, patience mattered, even if patience was the hardest thing in a city where death came fast. In the meantime he added another project to the list: synthetic animals to fill niches beyond birds, wolves and coyotes to regulate prey numbers, boars and rabbits for balance, fish for streams and lakes, each one a Gen 3 baseline body tweaked for disease resistance and longevity, programmed not with obedience but with natural drives so they lived as animals, not machines, and he justified it by reminding himself that ecosystems needed balance, not just plants and dirt. Angela asked him once if he ever thought he was playing god and he said no, gods take credit, I build tools, and she let that answer sit without pushing it further. David's part intersected only by what he noticed on route, his eyes catching fresh graffiti tags that talked about "real food" and "green air," slogans painted by hands that wanted to believe something good could exist, and he started to wonder if maybe his city wasn't entirely locked in the same cycle forever, though he didn't voice that to anyone because hope in Night City was a currency you didn't flash. He still spent his nights talking to his mother about safe topics—funny delivery clients, odd things Kite said, a street vendor who joked about selling rabbit stew even though no one believed rabbits were real until one ran through the stall line—and when her fingers squeezed his hand he told her quietly that he had things under control, and he wanted to believe it himself. Kevin and Angela monitored the rollout in silence most nights, reviewing drone feeds, adjusting nutrient dispersal ratios, calibrating atmospheric scrubbers, the kind of minutiae that determined whether the change held or collapsed, and Kevin admitted he felt nervous about the column of light but Angela reassured him again that Biotechnica's name was already circulating in rumors, people speculating about new bioweapons or experiments gone wrong, and that gave them the cover they needed. When the first month ended and the desert outside Night City was no longer barren but dotted with oases—pools of clean water, patches of grass, clusters of trees grown tall enough to cast shade—Kevin stood on the ridge with Angela beside him, both of them wearing plain clothes like ordinary nomads, and watched a group of travelers set up camp under the branches without realizing someone had engineered the scene for them, and Angela asked softly, "Do you ever wish you could tell them?" and Kevin shook his head and said, "Not yet, maybe not ever, it's enough that it works," and the two of them stood in the wind smelling dust and green mixed together, both knowing the work was far from done.
