Getting old was a miserable process, and Kouta knew this better than anyone because, well, he was a bioengineering researcher, so aging was literally his field.
Telomere degradation, cellular decay, the whole slow collapse of the human machine—he wrote papers on it once, back when people still existed, but knowing the science didn't help when it was your own body doing the collapsing, which it very much was.
His left leg dragged when he walked now due to nerve damage from about fifteen years back, his hands trembled on bad days and ached on good ones, not to mention his eyes that needed three separate corrective implants just to read his own notes.
The cough that showed up six months ago and never left, was probably something serious, but honestly, it didn't matter, since he wasn't planning on needing his lungs much longer anyway.
He pulled himself off the lab cot slowly and stood in the underground laboratory that was basically his entire world, where generators hummed from the core's energy in a low vibration more felt than heard, though he stopped noticing it about forty years ago.
Morning routine was the same as yesterday and the other ten thousand yesterdays before that.
The nutrient paste from the dispenser were grey and flavorless, tasting like chalk mixed with the vague memory of protein, which he ate standing because his knees only had so many favors left.
Next to the dispenser were tally marks on the wall where he stopped counting at year forty, not because he lost track- he was a scientist, losing track of things was not something he did. It was because the number got heavy enough that looking at it made the paste taste even more worse.
Now here's the thing about Kouta's lab: if you saw it, you would be impressed, and you should be. The place was enormous, carved from bedrock and running on alien crystal energy, packed with fabrication units and analytical equipment that could measure things no human instrument was designed to detect.
All powered by systems built on principles so far outside normal physics he stopped naming them and just called the whole discipline "core mechanics." Sixty years of work, all solo, all done by a man who started with a bioengineering degree and taught himself five additional fields because nobody existed to do it for him.
Impressive, right? Exactly what you would expect from a genius scientist who had unlimited time and zero distractions.
Kouta didn't feel proud of any of it, he felt the same thing he always felt- zero conversations everyday, until he was dead, which at his current rate of decline was maybe two or three years out.
That's what seventy years of solitude does, it turns every achievement into a distraction from dying.
The android hall was between his cot and the main console, a layout he designed that way on purpose, and if he was being honest with himself-which he tried to be, since lying to yourself when you're the only person alive is a special kind of pathetic- the reason was exactly what it looked like.
He had twenty-three androids, all built over the course of five decades. The early ones were boxy but functional, if you can even call it that. They were basically robots with arms serving as research platforms and tools.
The later ones were beautiful.
And look, he knew why they were beautiful, since he wrote the design specs, picked the faces, the proportions, and skin-analog materials. He told himself it was bioengineering research, which was technically true, but the real reason was a lot simpler and a lot sadder.
After thirty years of being alone, the human brain starts reaching for anything that looks like a person, and after fifty, you start building what you can't find.
The clinical term was parasocial attachment in prolonged isolation environments, which he knew since he coined the term himself in a paper nobody would ever read.
He stopped at the third from the end, the one he stopped at every morning- some habits are just too human to break even when you know the psychology behind them.
She was his best work, objectively, with dark hair, closed eyes, and a face he composited from no specific reference, just decades of iteration until something looked right.
"Morning," he said.
She didn't answer, obviously.
"Big day, running final calibrations on the compound, and if it holds stable for six hours, I'm going tonight."
He rubbed his old head, "sixty-seven years of work... not bad for a guy who panicked and hid in a freezer."
He touched her face and stood there for a moment doing something that a psychologist might call meaningful and a realist would call sad. After a few minutes he turned and walked to his console, after all, the science wasn't going to do itself.
The main console sat at the center of the lab, a semicircle of screens and interfaces built around the one thing he didn't create.
The core.
It was a big crystalline structure, roughly shipping-container-sized, glowing a color that wasn't quite any color in particular, and the instruments measured its energy output at levels that made nuclear reactors look like batteries.
This thing killed his world when the energy it released- after some construction crew cracked open its cavern- burned through every living organism on the planet inside a year. Eight billion people, gone... every animal, plant and bacterium, all of it was gone.
Now it was the only working power source on Earth, and Kouta's entire life ran on it.
Irony doesn't even begin to cover it.
He sat at the console, the chair conforming to what was essentially a skeleton with ambitions, and started the final calibration for the System, his masterwork, the thing seven decades of his life were actually building toward.
It was a framework, basically, a structured interface between the core's energy and human biology. The idea was to feed the core's power through the System's architecture, channel it into a human body, and in theory-in theory- you could survive the connection, turning the core from a planet-killer into something one person could wield.
That was the theory, but practice was the part coming up tonight, and it was the part most likely to kill him.
The calibration data scrolled across his screens and he tracked it how tracked everything, which was to say, he had obsessive precision because he knew a mistake here meant death.
There it was, a deviation. Energy coupling matrix, 0.003% drift in the thermal exchange layer. Most people would round that to zero and move on, but Kouta was not most people.
He traced it to thermal expansion in conductor array section 14, the junction he rebuilt nine years ago with a core-alloy composite that had a different expansion coefficient under sustained load, almost identical to the original but not quite.
At injection temperatures, that tiny difference would compound through the chain reaction and hit roughly 12% phase misalignment by the time the energy reached biological tissue.
A 12% misalignment in a system channeling alien god-energy through human cells is asking for your circulatory system to be turned inside out.
He adjusted the coupling coefficient from 0.7831 to 0.7845, three layers deep in the architecture, a value he set six years ago, and the system recalculated until the deviation was gone.
Three seconds of work, with decades of understanding behind it.
He was well aware of the irony in what he was doing, spending three seconds to fix a problem that would kill him, so that he could proceed with an experiment that would also probably kill him, but there's a difference between dying from a calibration error and dying from the expected outcome, and if you don't understand that difference, you're not a scientist.
He set the calibration running, with six hours for stable output being the threshold.
While he waited, the numbers came back: survival probability at current physical baseline was roughly 11%.
The System was designed for a human body in peak condition, but his body was as far from peak, meaning the energy load would almost certainly overwhelm his failing cardiovascular system before the transfer could complete.
An 11% chance he survives and goes somewhere impossible versus an 89% chance he dies in this chair.
The alternative if he doesn't try is to die in this chair in two to three years anyway.
So 11% versus 0%- you didn't need a bioengineering degree to do that math.
He could wait, sure, refine the compound further and push survival odds to maybe 15 or 18%, but a few more years of refinement meant more years of this: nutrient paste, silence and talking to machines that couldn't hear him.
Frankly, his body was running out of time faster than his science was running out of improvements.
So that settled it, no matter the survival chance, it was better than living in this hell.
Six hours later the calibration still held and Kouta was standing in the preparation bay with an injector in his hand, a small device about the size of a pen, loaded with a compound that took twenty-three years to synthesize.
It was god-core energy in liquid suspension, refined and structured to interface with the System the moment it hit his bloodstream.
One press is all it would take to kick the whole thing off.
He decided not to use it there, he walked back to the android hall, because if this was his last act on Earth one way or the other, the part of him that was still human wanted to do it here, among the faces of his creations.
He went back to his best creation and just stared at her again.
"The coupling matrix is stable and the compound is within the accepted parameters, but, the survival probability..." he trailed off, a smile almost crossing his face, "Haha, you don't care about numbers... I don't know why I keep giving you about my problems."
He knew why, fear made people talk, and she was all he had.
"I've been thinking about where the core connects to... the energy is giving off isn't self-contained, it's flowing somewhere, like one end of a line, and wherever that somewhere is, it has whatever the core came from. And if it has that..."
He looked down the row of his creations. "Maybe it has what you need... what you're all missing."
A soul, the one thing that no matter what angle he approached it, he could never figure out how to create it from scratch.
It was the one thing that made the difference between a beautiful machine and a person.
"So if I make it," he said, quieter now, "I'm coming back for you... all of you. I'll find a way."
It was a promise to twenty-three machines that couldn't hear it, from a man whose promises have not meant anything to anyone in a very long time.
He sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall, pressing the injector to his neck where the carotid would carry the compound straight to his brain and heart.
"When the virus hit, the cryo pod fit one person and I got in it without a second thought. I was selfish, I didn't try to save a single person, not even my family."
He closed his eyes and exhaled, "I've had seventy years to think about that, and I still don't have a good answer for why I did it."
He pressed the injector a little harder against his skin. "But if there's even a chance that wherever this takes me has what I need to fix what I broke..."
He pressed the trigger.
What happened next is hard to describe in normal terms. Assume you have a body, senses and a standard relationship with physics, now imagine you were currently losing all three.
The compound hit his bloodstream and the System activated in the same heartbeat, every cell lit up at once, core energy flooding through channels the System was building in real time, and his body lasted about half a second before the whole thing went sideways.
His heart and lungs stopped at the same time, followed by his vision whiting out- the 89% scenario was right on schedule.
But the System was not giving up.
It was doing the thing he built it to do, the one function that mattered more than any other: catch him when his body failed, thread the pattern that was Kouta- memories, consciousness and identity- along the core's energy current and pull.
And pull it did, the lab was the first thing to disappear and after that it was all blank. Everything was stripped away as he moved along a current of energy toward something he spent decades trying to identify and never could.
He was being unmade and remade in transit, rewritten from a template he didn't remember providing.
The system also decided his current body was not up to standard so it built him a younger and stronger one, pouring his soul information inside.
After some time, how ever long it had been, the current ended. The first thing he left was light hitting his eye lids, followed by air that tasted like nothing he ever breathed, and beneath his hands-
"N-No way."
This was the first time in so many decades he has seen grass, "Haha... it worked..." He could not help but let out tear of joy. His hard work has paid of and now a new start awaited him.