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"I'll give you one chance. Activate them."
"..."
Dr. Merrick's head snapped up instinctively, staring at Hawk.
Hawk stood with his hands in his pockets, smiling pleasantly at the stunned scientist as he repeated himself. "Activate them. Do that, and I won't kill you."
Merrick stared back at Hawk. That vacant, frozen look in his eyes gradually flickered with something else—a glimmer of hope. The kind that came from the desperate Will to survive.
Soon enough—
Dr. Merrick led Hawk back to the control room and began working alone at the console, preparing to wake the remaining five clones.
Hawk stood off to the side, quietly watching the training chamber feeds displayed on the screens in front of him.
Natasha arrived shortly after with a squad of SHIELD agents in tow.
The agents fanned out, following their standing orders to search and collect every scrap of data from the cloning facility.
Natasha, meanwhile, made her way to the control room. She glanced at the monitor feeds showing five clones curled in fetal positions, floating in training tanks filled with pale blue liquid. Then she looked at Dr. Merrick, who was too busy and too terrified to even wipe the sweat dripping down his face. Finally, she turned to Hawk.
"You want to see what happens when these clones wake up?"
"Yeah."
Hawk glanced away from the screens and met Natasha's gaze. "Aren't you curious?"
Natasha thought about it seriously for a moment, then shrugged. "Alright, I'll admit I'm pretty curious."
Hawk smiled faintly.
"Then let's watch together."
"Alright."
Natasha nodded, crossed her arms, and stood beside Hawk as they both observed Dr. Merrick working frantically at the console.
The person in question was right here. If he wasn't worried, why should she be?
More importantly—
She was genuinely curious whether a clone of Hawk would have any gap in power compared to the real thing.
After all, seeing was believing.
Dr. Merrick, now under the watchful eyes of not one but two supervisors, felt the weight of their stares pressing down on his back. His anxiety spiked so high he was on the verge of passing out.
But he didn't dare.
After all, Hawk had promised him that as long as he behaved, he wouldn't have to die.
Four hours later—
Dr. Merrick wiped the sweat from his forehead, sat down at the main console, and opened the system he'd spent the last few hours fine-tuning through trial and error. He'd named it the "Soul Imprinting System." After double-checking that all parameters were correct, he took a deep breath and turned to look at Hawk.
Hawk caught the signal and glanced at Natasha. "Stay here and watch him. If anything looks wrong, kill him."
Initially, Hawk had planned to find Dr. Merrick and have him clone a body for his sister Anya so he could bring her back to life.
He still wanted that. But compared to the desperate, all-consuming urgency he'd felt at the beginning—when he would have done anything to find Merrick as quickly as possible—his sense of urgency had faded considerably.
Even without Dr. Merrick, resurrecting his sister was only a matter of time.
And he could see her whenever he wanted now.
Anya was living comfortably in the Elysian Fields of his Underworld. And she'd made it clear she didn't care whether she was resurrected or not.
As long as she could see her brother, that was all that mattered to her.
So, Hawk still wanted to bring his sister back to life. But it wasn't urgent anymore. Which naturally meant Dr. Merrick's importance had dropped significantly.
Soon, After giving Natasha her instructions, Hawk's form vanished from the control room and reappeared in the training chamber visible on the monitor feeds.
Natasha turned to Dr. Merrick.
Merrick nodded, wiped his forehead again, and pressed the button to activate the Soul Imprinting System.
Instantly, The consciousness transfer system came online. The pale blue liquid inside the five training tanks began to churn violently, bubbling and boiling.
At the same time, Alongside the turbulent liquid, fragmented images began flashing across the interior surfaces of the tanks. And the five clones floating inside—whose eyes had been peacefully closed—suddenly began to twitch and flutter rapidly beneath their eyelids.
It looked exactly like someone experiencing REM sleep, their eyelids flickering in response to vivid dreams.
Hawk watched the changes in the tanks with keen interest.
Back in the control room, Natasha was equally curious.
"What's this device for?"
"Soul imprinting... It's something I invented specifically to solve the problem of clones lacking consciousness."
As Dr. Merrick said this, a hint of pride crept into his voice. "The reason other cloning specialists have repeatedly failed is because they couldn't overcome the issue of clones not having souls. But I solved it."
Cloning animals wasn't difficult. Scientists had cracked that problem ages ago.
But cloning humans had remained an unsolved challenge. And the main reason wasn't ethical concerns.
In the eyes of scientists, ethics didn't exist.
Everything was for science.
For truth!
So even though the Big Five publicly banned all human cloning experiments, countless geneticists had secretly continued pursuing the goal of human cloning.
Many of them had reached the same level Dr. Merrick had. They could successfully clone human bodies.
But that was as far as they got.
What they created couldn't really be called clones. They were more like human-shaped corpses.
Because they couldn't solve the problem of the human soul.
But Dr. Merrick had solved it.
"My Soul Imprinting System can convert pre-programmed memories into specific neural electrical signals and implant them directly into the clone's brain."
"With memory comes consciousness. And with consciousness comes a soul."
"So..."
"That's right."
"I CAN CREATE SOULS!!"
As Dr. Merrick spoke about his greatest invention, his eyes gleamed with fanatical intensity as he stared at the screens. The liquid in the tanks continued to boil, images continued to flash, and the clones inside continued to tremble.
Natasha, listening to Dr. Merrick's declaration, felt a wave of discomfort.
After all, if souls could be created—
What did that make them?
Just then, Hawk, standing in the training chamber, seemed to have overheard Dr. Merrick's self-proclaimed comparison to God. He glanced up at the surveillance camera. "Don't listen to his nonsense. Creating souls? He wishes... If he could actually do that, Mephisto—who claims dominion over souls—would have dragged him to Hell ages ago."
Dr. Merrick, hearing someone dismiss his life's work, bristled with indignation.
Even if that person could easily kill him, he couldn't let it slide.
"Mr. Phoenix, I can create souls. Once the imprinting process finishes, you'll see I'm not lying."
"Make him shut up, Natasha."
"Ah!"
A scream echoed through the intercom.
Hawk shook his head and refocused his attention on the five clones still boiling in their tanks.
Soon—
The churning liquid began to settle. At the same time, the red indicator lights on the training chambers turned green.
The liquid inside the tanks began draining at a visible rate, accompanied by mechanical hissing sounds.
As the liquid disappeared, one of the clones' expression twisted into something that looked intensely painful. His hands instinctively grabbed at the breathing apparatus covering his nose and mouth. The moment he ripped it off, the chamber door slid open. The clone stumbled out, collapsed onto the floor, and began gasping for air.
"Holy hell."
Natasha's voice came through the intercom, shocked. "It worked??"
Hawk didn't respond. He raised his right hand slightly. Telekinesis wrapped around the clone—who had Hawk's face—and lifted him into the air.
His Sixth Sense swept through the clone's body, inside and out.
"Name."
"A... Al... Allen!"
The clone, floating in midair, freshly awakened from sleep and suddenly finding himself restrained, looked at Hawk and answered almost reflexively.
His voice was hoarse and childlike, like someone speaking for the very first time.
Natasha blinked, then turned to Dr. Merrick.
"Allen?"
"The memories of an agent. We couldn't extract Hawk's memories, so we had to extract an agent's instead. We wrote them into the system, then converted them into neural electrical signals and transferred them to the clone."
"That's your method of creating souls?"
Natasha listened to Dr. Merrick's explanation, frowning. She didn't fully understand it, but something felt off.
"This isn't a soul."
"This is a program."
"Think about Zola. The only difference between these clones and that digital ghost is that they have physical bodies."
Hawk's voice cut through the intercom.
Natasha heard Hawk's explanation and suddenly realized why something had felt wrong.
Hawk looked at the clone floating in front of him and let out a quiet laugh.
"Merrick."
"Let me guess why your first five clones failed."
"You tried to program my memories into them. But you couldn't form a coherent memory sequence. That's why the clones collapsed shortly after activation. Am I right?"
"..."
Natasha's gaze shifted to Dr. Merrick.
Merrick's expression stiffened.
He swallowed hard.
"Yes."
"See? It's exactly like a computer program. If the code is complete, the program runs fine. But if there are gaps in the code, the program crashes immediately."
Hawk said this calmly. Then, without hesitation, he looked at the clone suspended in front of him. His eyes flashed crimson. He grabbed the clone with one hand and incinerated it on the spot.
The other four clones, still lying on the ground after stumbling out of their tanks, met the same fate.
Vaporized instantly.
The next second, Hawk reappeared in the control room and continued speaking to Natasha. "All he did was create a memory program. And he didn't even create it—he copied it from someone else. He's not creating anything. He's just copying and pasting."
That's right.
Dr. Merrick's so-called "human cloning" was exactly that.
He treated the clone body like a server. All he did was copy a complete set of memories from one person, paste it into the server, and boot it up.
And he called that creation?
What a joke.
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