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LOCATION: CRAYLOCK HQ, EXECUTIVE OFFICE
CITY: AUSTIN, TEXAS
DATE: SEPTEMBER 3, 2026 | TIME: 11:42 PM
The building was mostly dark at this hour.
Only the third floor windows let in a spill of city light, the glow of Austin stretching out beneath him. Colin sat hunched over his keyboard, one hand wrapped around a cooling cup of coffee he'd nearly forgotten about.
The code and numbers scrolling across the screen were familiar. He'd written most of the monitoring suite himself, piggybacking on the constant data streams from the Vitalyx and Rejuvenex registration tablets.
Originally, members of the Council had to travel the world with special monitoring devices to measure the nanite saturation levels. Then, Ronan's team had developed an app they could load onto the phones of those working under the Voss umbrella.
That fed quite a bit of data, too. But when they'd decided to send tablets to every corner of Earth for the distribution of the two serums, Colin couldn't help building in a little module that would record and report saturation levels with every data burst it sent.
By aggregating billions of pings every few days, he could measure the global swarm with the accuracy of a doctor reading a patient's pulse.
Except tonight, that pulse had stuttered.
He'd almost missed it, but Colin Mercer had been at the cyber defense game for too long to let something like this slip by.
He frowned, tapping a few keys to dig deeper into the data.
"This can't be right…" he muttered, taking a sip of his coffee and then scowling at the stale taste.
He set the coffee mug back down, and a splash of liquid landed on his hand. He absentmindedly wiped it on his white buttoned shirt, ignoring the fact that he'd just stained it.
The global swarm had dipped by 0.1%. A minuscule amount, yes. But impossible. The nanites were either still there, or became part of human anatomy. Either way, they didn't just vanish.
He cross-checked against the production logs from Aetherdrones and nodes. Even checked weather patterns in the stratosphere. Everything else was clean. Yet the anomaly in the dataset was still there.
But that wasn't even the strangest part. Four days after the roughly five pounds of aggregate mass went missing, the global swarm showed a net increase of 0.4%.
Colin leaned back, rubbing his temples.
He'd checked everything, but there was no explanation.
He pulled the raw dataset, packaged it together, and sent it to Ronan.
---
From: Colin Mercer
To: Ronan Vale
Attachment: swarm_anomaly_log_9-3-26.csv
Ronan,
I need your eyes on this. I'm seeing a 0.1% dip in the global nanite swarm last week, followed by a 0.4% bump four days later. All checksums validated. No way I can see this as a reporting glitch.
Can you double-check my work before I bring this up with the Council?
---
He hit Send before shutting down his workstation and heading home. Austin was quiet at this time of night, but Colin's mind was racing.
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LOCATION: VOSS TOWER, 20TH FLOOR
CITY: SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
DATE: SEPTEMBER 4, 2026 | TIME: 8:00 AM
"The Vitalyx and Rejuvenex numbers have been matched and held steady for over a week now. Based on World Health Organization and UN population estimates, this represents 99.9% of humanity."
Dr. Elise Draven was going over the adoption numbers for the Core Council.
"That's really terrific," Mallory said. "I think Mr. Voss would be proud. I know I am. Think about what we've accomplished here."
It was a virtual meeting again, and everyone was in agreement. They really had come a long way.
"It wasn't even a year ago that we entered our own first Tutorial," Mallory said. "And now we've got the entire world prepped and ready to go."
"3D Forges and Aethernodes are staged globally and ready for deployment," Vanessa added, "and the nanite saturation around the planet is at peak levels."
"Peak levels for 50,000 System users," Ronan said. "Keep in mind that when more people start using skills in the world, the current nanite levels won't keep up."
"That's why we're deploying more Aetherdrones while the world sleeps," Vanessa said. "We're right where we need to be. All estimates show that we'll be fine once the entire infrastructure is in place and turned on."
Colin's brow furrowed. Ronan had indeed confirmed the data.
"Hey, uh…"
"What is it?" Mallory asked.
Colin exhaled.
"I detected an anomaly in the global nanite swarm. Ronan confirmed the dataset I sent him last night."
"What sort of anomaly?" Darian asked.
"As you know," Colin said, "we've installed nanite saturation trackers on the Vitalyx and Rejuvenex registration tablets in the backend software. With every new ping of registration data, the packet contains nanite reads for the area too."
Nobody spoke.
"Anyway," Colin continued, "the total global nanite swarm was reduced a week ago by 0.1%. Then four days later, the total swarm increased by 0.4%."
"Are you sure?" Elise asked. "The Aetherdrones and nodes are constantly producing. You're sure you factored that in?"
"It's just math. A lot of data points to be sure," Colin said, "but in the end, it's still simple arithmetic. All the nanites are traceable, and there was a dip that was later replaced with a net addition. I'm sure of it."
Ronan unmuted his microphone.
"I confirmed it, too," he said. "We need to isolate those nanites and check them. Do we have a way to do that?"
"Do you think they've somehow been tampered with?" Elise asked.
Colin shrugged.
"We won't know until we investigate."
A hundred million miles away, Skrixx and his crew sat aboard the Pathfinder on the Mars moon of Phobos.
The Orion Mercantile Syndicate had authorized Skrixx to assist the inhabitants of the planet only if their System was benevolent and carried functions that raised the participants to higher standards.
If their System only functioned to create stronger beings with no moral compass, Skrixx was authorized to intervene in darker ways.
As the Captain on site, he had wide latitude in how he did so. He could of course annihilate the entire species. Farm and strip mine the planet until it became a barren wasteland.
But how would that make him better? In Skrixx's mind, the very notion was deplorable.
No, he needed to learn more about how this System worked, so he and his team had programmed a tiny stealth probe that could enter the planet's atmosphere, take a tiny sample, and return it to the Pathfinder for study without detection.
When the probe returned, Skrixx's science team analyzed the nanites. They were elementary, to be sure. But they indeed contained enough information to extrapolate meaning and direction.
The nanites would make the humans stronger, certainly. What would be the point otherwise? But the interface code embedded deep within the framework also contained limiters.
And the feedback programming within that code showed that the System could judge a human's actions, and if needed, actually reduce their strength and effectiveness.
Skrixx only knew of one other System-inducted planet with such limiters. Evirond.
The very first planet he and his crew had witnessed and observed eons ago.
Skrixx and his team upgraded the nanites with a few additional functions he knew humanity would need if they were to succeed. He generated an extra four times the amount and sent the probe back to redeposit the new nanites in the planet's atmosphere.
Then, he sent a secure message to Syndicate Headquarters and let them know he was moving on to Phase II of his observation.