#surprisingly putting her eye in her computer is improving her code!!

[meechiconic]

remembering my beautiful tma oc who cant stop cyberstalking people.... but recently she's starting to get the feeling that somebody is watching her..... (probably the government) ((its not))

[pixiebuggiewrites]

Sorry Wrong Number!

Masterpost - Previous - Next - Ao3 link

Chapter 2:  Hawkmoth has really bad designs and perhaps even worse timing

Since it was her off night from patrol, Ladybug was the last one onto the scene. She landed down on a building next to Viperion, who was observing the akuma’s skillset as Kuro Neko played distraction down below them.

The villain of tonight's look was... interesting to put it nicely. They were a boy around the same age as the heroes that seemed to be wearing a slightly oversized purple and blue three piece suit with a not-so-subtle lightning pattern running up the arms. His hair was shock white and seemed to be defying gravity while his eyes were protected by bright blue goggles-possibly where the akuma was residing. More importantly, he seemed to be covered in electricity, which was gonna make it difficult to get any hits in. He also had a laptop with him- another contender for the akuma’s hiding place but most likely just a weapon.

Not Hawkmoth’s worst design, but it definitely wasn't his finest work either. Though to be fair she had run around in spotted spandex for two years before she found out she could change her costume, so those in glass houses she supposed.

Viperion, noticing the team leader's arrival began to fill her in on what they knew so far.

“They're calling themselves ‘Elect-Trick’, keeps sending out shockwaves to try and knock us back which is frustrating but our suits seem to take the brunt of it which helps but Neko’s staff is a no go at the moment since there's no way to know if it’ll conduct the electricity.”

It likely would, something they had found out the hard way during the last weather akuma they had to face. While magical it was still metallic in nature sadly, which meant she needed to also be careful with her yoyo. She still isn't really sure what it’s made of besides magic, but this was not the way she wanted to find out.

“Alright, in that case we’ll continue to keep him away from the Eiffel Tower, it’s likely the akuma’s going to try and use it as a large conductor. I’m gonna head down, stay up here and be ready to use your second chance at the signal.” She instructed

Viperion nodded and went back to watching the fight just as Ladybug swooped down to join in. She was just in time as the akuma had begun to corner Neko, who had no choice but to rely on playing defense while her staff was out of the mix. The two heroes nodded their heads in greeting as Ladybug yoyo-d her cat themed friend over putting the duo back on even ground with the villain, who seemed to be ranting about school elections of all things.

Which would be a probable explanation for the first half of his name.

The two continued to fight back against the akuma, neither side quite able to grab the upper hand. Ladybugs yoyo-as it turned out, did not conduct electricity afterall. And, seeing as it's practically indestructible she was able to land hits on the akuma without getting shocked. But the akuma had realized the issue with Neko’s staff and was using that to their advantage, aiming a decent chunk of their attacks at the cat hero which forced them to go back on the defense.

As the fight had been going for over an hour at this point, the spotted heroine decided to bring out the big guns. After doing a silent signal letting Viperion know to start his timer, she got in position to call on her lucky charm.

But she didn't get a chance to. Just as she went to throw her yoyo in the air, Viperion called out a warning that sent a feeling of dread through her.

“LB watch out, There's an amok headed straight for the computer!”  

Sure enough, there was an all too familiar purple feather floating through the air on track for the laptop that she quickly caught and purified it before it could land. Thank the Kwami for the power of second chance, nobody wanted to deal with a sentimonster on top of everything else tonight.

Keeping Kuro Neko on the lookout for anymore feathers, She finally activated her lucky charm. Throwing her yoyo up she manifests… a slingshot! She could work with that, just needed to find ammo. Looking around her eyes land firmly on the window of a small toyshop.

Bingo!

Having Viperion keeping an eye out in case he was needed temporarily as backup, she sneaks over and breaks the window with her yoyo. Typically, the heroine would feel bad about causing this much property damage but tonight she’s tired and wants to get this over with so she can make a plan of action for the whole ‘Mayura seems to be back’ thing with her team and maybe get at least a couple hours of sleep. Anyways her miraculous cure would fix the window and return the bouncy balls she was actively stealing so no harm done? After finishing committing what was technically a misdemeanor, she made her way over to the roof Viperion was on and handed off the slingshot supplies before making her way back down.

Luckily Neko had managed to keep Elect-Trick distracted enough for the team to catch him off guard. On Ladybugs call Viperion began to pelt the Akuma with rubber balls, drawing his sight away for long enough to tie him up and take his glasses. One cataclysm later, the teen had been successfully deakumatized and she was able to cast her cure, fixing the decent chunk of property damage caused that night. After making sure the teen was okay to get home safe and getting his address for the interview she would have to conduct later, she turned to her team.

“Good work today guys, let's meet back at base in 30.” Her eyes communicated the urgency of the meeting despite the neutral tone of voice she tried to maintain.

From there the teens all departed in separate directions to recharge their powers and head to the team's secret base.

----------

Okay so secret base was a bit of an overstatement. It is a secret place that the team uses as a base of operations but it was less of a Batcave and more of a repurposed hotel room in Le Grand Paris.

Chloe had brought up the idea after one too many close calls with Marinette's parents while the girls were investigating Hawkmoth. They needed a place to discuss hero work safely without having to talk in code but the question was where. Obtaining an apartment would be difficult as all of them but Luka were still underage, not to mention the issue of trying to pay rent without any parental suspicion. Luckily for Chloe, it's surprisingly easy to just claim a hotel room without being questioned when your Father owns the hotel.

And while it was no Batcave, it wasn't anything to scoff at either. The four teens had been able to pool together enough money in the beginning for the basics, which meant that now any small snuck away chunks of commission money, music gig payments, competition winnings, and allowances were all able to go to improving things bit by bit.

The room was already quite nice, having a separate bedroom that they used as a gym and a kitchenette that was kept well stocked with kwami snacks. Then there was the  main area, which had been split down the middle. The first side was dedicated to the investigation and housing Marinette's Guardian materials, While the second half was a hangout zone where they could chat or decompress after any particularly rough fights.

The base was also secure, Marinette had put so many spells and protections on the room with the help of the kwami that it might as well be a pocket dimension of sorts. The magical security system of sorts was extremely complicated, being tied to the teams auras in a way so that the only way to even find it without being one of them was to be taken there by Ladybug herself. It had taken weeks to pull off but was well worth it to give her team a place that was safe from the outside world.

Ladybug was the first to arrive this time, having flopped down into a chair at their meeting table as her two friends entered the room and joined her. They all sat there for a moment, processing the fact of Mayura’s return. Of course this would happen when they were down a member, it wasn't a complete surprise that the peacock miraculous would come back into play at some point but it was really bad timing.

“So what exactly is the plan?” Viperion asked, finally breaking the silence.

Ladybug sighed, knowing that their workload was going to increase once again. At least it was close to summer vacation.

“First we need to increase patrols- especially around the typical hot spots, Neko do you think we’ll be able to finish those jars by this time next week?”

The cat hero nodded “They're almost done, we’ll need to test them somehow though.”

The two of them had recently been working on a variation of an object enchantment technique mentioned in the grimoire. The original object was dubious in nature, having been used as a cage of sorts that kwami wouldn't be able to phase through. Marinette was disgusted by the thought, further feeding into some suspicions she had about the old order. As she was ranting about it to Kagami about it, her fencer friend got an idea for a way to repurpose the spell to trap akuma when Ladybug couldn't easily get to a fight. It would also allow them a new way to prevent possessions when Ladybug wasn't actively on patrol.

“That's good. Lastly I need Bee’s new number, I was going to ask you for it tomorrow but I need to give her a heads up to start on a new case file. We also might want to move up our plans to contact the heroes there.”

Kuro Neko quickly jotted down the number on a nearby notecard and handed it to Ladybug. After hammering out a few last details about their new patrol schedules the heroes were all free to head home for the night.

The trip home was uneventful, and she arrived home to see that it was just past midnight. She also noticed that her bath bomb had been fixed! It was sometimes a gamble on if something like that would count as akuma damage so it was a nice victory after the day she’s had.

Marinette quickly put in Chloe's number, eager to get to bed. She sent her blonde friend a summary on what happened and let her know to be on the lookout for an email tomorrow with the information to assemble a case file. And with that, Marinette drifted off to sleep.

She had made a small mistake though. In her tired state the young designer’s finger slipped, putting a 5 where there was meant to be a 4.

Meaning Chloe Bourgeois was not the recipient of her intended message.

Good thing she wrote the message in code?

----------

Across the ocean, Damian Wayne received a strange text message.

--------------------------------------------

Taglist (open!!): 

@queencommonsense

[kassies-take]

The Beginning Of The End

Request by @xiaolinweretiger : This comes in story, headcanon, or "If You" form: "Being from the Earth of Brandon Ruth's Superman and ending up on the Earth of Supergirl/with the Legends, where you join them. But you're also dealing with knowing about the upcoming Crisis."

A/n: The crisis is coming! Are you all ready? I’m not. I added my own twist to this request.

Warning: ...

Word Count: 2121

You and most of the League were in the watchtower. A wave of red absorbed and destroyed everything in its path, it was heading closer and closer to Earth. You and the League tried coming up with a plan but so far no use.

The Sector House Alpha, home to the Green Lantern Corps, went offline 10 months ago. Starhaven, Colu, Naltor, and Argo City followed after. Considering that they were light years away this wave was going fast.

When the wave hit you were with Clark in Metropolis to help him with Darkseid when he solar flared. Darkseid in search for his “Anti-Life Equation” has found it but was vaporized 30 city blocks away. You opened a portal to another dimension. Clark watched in horror as his city began to vaporize, they had screamed for Superman to save them but he couldn’t save everyone.

Superman started to gesture and cry for people around him to enter the portal.

“Watchtower to citizens of Earth. We can’t save the Earth but we will do everything to save you.”

“Glitch to Watchtower. I’m trying to make portals around the world. Get to your respective cities and get citizens there!”

As the member of the Justice League you made an oath to put your life in danger to save Earth. J’onn had wisely advised not to create a portal for the whole Earth, but with not many options left you had to. Your hands shook violently, blood percolated from you nose and you could taste the iron from it as you pushed further into your powers.

“Hope is the light that will lift us out of darkness!” Superman said to remind himself.

He closed his eyes and like a beacon of hope he felt his strength regain. A gust of wind flew past you. Clark sped around the remaining Earth and helped people get to portals.

You were losing energy and fast you could feel some portals dying and evaporating, taking your power with it. You pushed past your limits and collapsed onto the floor, all the portals you had started to disappear.

Clark flew back to your location before taking an inter dimensional extrapolator from his suit and portals himself and you to another planet.

“Put the girl down! Put your hands above your head!” Agents surrounded you and Clark.

He wasn’t afraid of getting hurt but your were a lot more vulnerable than you ever were having just solar flared, at least your version of it

“I mean no harm. My Earth has been destroyed, we were saving the Earth with portals, (Y/n)’s portals when she collapsed.”

“Alex! I heard the alarm is everything okay?” Kara flew in from the D.E.O balcony and spotted Clark! “Ray!”

“Kara! You’re alive!” He stood up and hugged the Girl of Steel.

“Yeah, I’m alive. And you’re Superman!”

“Oh well actually I’ve been Superman for quite a while. Does your Superman go by Ray? I’m Clark.

“Uh well our Superman is off world at the moment, but I have a friend named Ray and he looks just like you.”

Alex coughed to bring back the two super’s attention.

“Right, this is my sister Alex.

“Nice to meet you. This is...”

“(Y/n)!” Kara kneeled beside you. “She’s from the planet Ieilen (ieilen). Their planet shifts so much that it’s citizens developed powers to make sure they stay on their planet. And when she’s off her world, her Ieilen body structure glitches out making it hard for her to stay in one place. She was my best friend when I would visit her planet.

“So how is she here now?” Alex asked.

“She’s here because of you, well a version of you. You made her a chip to help stabilize her when she ended up on my Earth. She was able to concentrate her powers to teleport objects, people and herself and create portals for inter dimensional travels.”

“What happened for her to be like this?” Kara asked from concern.

“There was this wave of red the vaporized our whole universe. She was able portal some people into a different dimension. We don’t know who made it and who didn’t. She collapsed, solar flared, all the portals disappeared and I brought her here with the device Cisco gave me.

The D.E.O was packed with heroes from Earth-one from team flash, present team arrow, future team arrow, the bats, and the legends. Oliver and Barry were giving information on the incoming crisis. You were in the MedBay when you started to glitch.

“Director Danvers, we have a code blue.” Alex immediately ran into the MedBay.

“Supergirl don’t let anyone in!”

“What’s a code blue,” Mick grumbled while Zari smacked him.

Kara grabbed Clark’s arm to prevent him from entering the MedBay

“I have to see if she’s okay.”

“I can’t let you cuz. She’s in good hands with Alex. If she says not to let anyone in, you don’t get to go in. You are more than welcome to fight me.”

“Kar! Get Caitlin! Lena too!

Team flashed look at Frost before she rolled her eyes and sighed. “I’ll get Caity.” Her silver hair dissolved into brunette as her blue lips reverted back to its pinkish color.

Caitlyn ran up the stairs from the control center to the MedBay as Lena exited Alex’s lab. Lena froze in the entrance of the MedBay as a pinkish-purple portal like thing flickered towards an unknown place before it disappeared.

“She’s in respiratory distress and her temperature is spiking. Her heart rate is faster than normal.”

You began to convulse and a whole commotion was heard from the D.E.O as a pinkish-purple portal opened on a highway with a car skidding towards the portal.

“Barry! A little help here!” Cisco called as he braced himself against the control panel.

Barry does the family out of the car as Nate steeled up and both Supers stood in front of the portal. Before the car could slide through, the portal closed as Frost lowered your temperature. The back end of the car hit Kara and Clark as it stopped in place.

“What the heck was that?” Connor asked as he stared at the backend of the car.

“My guess, our little friend upstairs is the cause.” Kate Kane pointed.

The same portal opened twice before portals emerged in its wake, throughout the whole D.E.O. Agents and heroes alike took cover as objects flew through portals and energy zapped in between them. You continued to glitch, tremor and convulse before Lena mentioned you potassium levels and Alex ran to get the injection, that subdued you.Slowly but surely the portals began to disappear as the D.E.O began to quiet down.

“Dang, that girl can give Sara a run for her money.” Ava said as she dusted off her pants suit.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Sara got defensive.

“You destroy everything you touch.”

“I do not,” Sara balanced herself on an office chair and it broke apart. “To be fair most of the stuff I break, is you landing on furniture.” Sara argued as Ava blushed.

“Sara,” Ava said through gritted teeth. “I meant any mission you and the Legends go on, end up in a disaster. Like this,” Ava gestures around the D.E.O.

“I’m glad I’m not them,” Kate smiled.

“You went back to Gotham for a woman who is married.” Luke commented.

“Luke!”

“Does this happen every year?” Mia asked her father.

“Yeah, around every December.” Kara smiled.

“Immortal tyrants, aliens, Nazis, a change in reality. You would think you would get used to it by now.” Diggle crosses his arms

“Yes but this crisis is the worst of the worst. The multiverse will crumble, all life will cease to exist.” Oliver said. “Laurel lost her Earth, Clark and Glitch lost theirs.”

“Her name is (Y/n),” Clark interrupted.

“The point is that these are the only Earth’s we know to have disappeared. More could’ve disappeared and as each second passes another Earth can be gone.” Oliver continued.

“How do we fight something that can wipe us all out?” Nia asked.

“It’s not like we can punch our way through the antimatter,” William agreed.

“We can’t but if we can defeat the man behind it, the Anti-Monitor” Barry started.

“Then we can defeat this crisis.” Kara finished.

“Anyone good with a computer, find a way how to track this Anti-Monitor,” Alex said from the stairs.

“Everyone else, suit up and work with people you don’t normally fight with to know their skills and how your abilities can improve each others” Oliver commanded.

“Alright team! Let’s save the multiverse!” Sara clapped as the heroes began to disperse into locker rooms and training rooms.

The whole day was spent training, and surprisingly you were paired with Sara, Nia and Conner when you woke up. Team Genius were able to track bits and pieces of the Anti-Monitor. And now Barry, Oliver, Sara, Kara and Kate were coming up with a plan, a plan that wouldn’t necessarily be a win, but was a plan that could get them answers.

No matter how much you had trained you were not ready to face this enemy. Your breathing stiffened, there was obvious tension in your shoulders, and if that was no indication the scowl on your face did.

The plan was already in place, left and right heroes were ready for battle. You took the perfect opportunity to escape the room, which didn’t do unnoticed by Clark.

“(Y/n)?” Clark had followed you.

“Clark,” your voice fell to a whisper of regret. “I can’t go out there again.”

“Your powers aren’t back?”

“They’re fine. I can’t go out there knowing what I know. I ...” you paused to retain your composure. “I couldn’t save our Earth, how can I save the multiverse?”

Clark knew what to say, but he knew you needed a new voice to hear. You hadn’t even knew he left until two female voices entered the room.

“Okay I heard someone was having performance issues!” Sara clapped.

“That’s how you’re going to start that?” Kara asked with her hands on her hips.

“I run a ship full of children. I know what I’m doing.”

Kara rolled her eyes before she wrapped her arms around you. The moment she did the tears began and didn’t stop. You remembered the way your Kara had wrapped her arms around you, all the memories you shared. Unlike the rest of the League you pulled away and isolated yourself when the person you loved had sacrificed herself to save the world, only to have it fall in your hands. Now having scene her again, you wished it could go back to how things were before. But they wouldn’t because this was not your Earth, nor was it your Kara.

~Time Skip cause I can’t write the Crisis Part~

The multiverse was saved. Oliver, Barry and Clark were gone. Many had followed and life would never be the same again. Vanished Earths would not be repaired and you didn’t have a home. You were watching the city when Sara approached you again.

“Hey, there’s an extra room on the ship if you want to join.”

“I wouldn’t want to-“

“I insist. I could use someone like you on the ship.” Sara saw you hesitate and knew you were dealing with a loss greater than hers. “You’re not letting them down, you’re continuing their legacy. Your Earth, your team, your family, your friends and your Kara live inside you. You keep their legacy going. And we would too, you’re a legend now.” Sara smirked. “We’re making our final goodbyes. We will meet you back on the ship.”

You said your short goodbyes with Kara being the last one.

“On your Earth we were something more than friends right?”

You smiled and nodded.

“That’s why you were willing to lay down your life for me. What happened?” Kara asked.

“She is a hero.”

“And now you’re joining the Legends.”

“I have you to thank.” A comfortable silence came to the both of you before you built up the courage to ask. “Kara, I know it’s not the same but can I kiss you?”

The two of you shared a slow kiss, you didn’t want to pull away, it felt as if the moment you would you would be different. When you did pull away your forehead lingered on hers.

“Ask Lena out, you never know when it’s gonna end.”

“Goodbye Kara.”

You entered the Waverider with Sara smirking at you.

“What?”

“You are a Legend after all.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because every good Legend ends with a kiss.”

[lurafita]

Rich!Tony/Artist!Peter, part 2

Go here for Part 1

Okay. Gotta be honest, this part isn’t that much more interesting than the first part was. But I did some actual research for this one and most of the artworks described in the text were inspired (or unashamedly stolen) from this site: https://theartofeducation.edu/2017/10/26/11-fascinating-artists-inspired-science/

So, let’s get this done!

The Art of Science and the Science of Art

While self-satisfaction might not be very virtuous, Pepper couldn't help the proud smirk that spread over her face, as she watched Tony all but fawn over the different artworks.

“Are you seeing this, Pep? This is a glass model of a magnified virus cell. They installed tiny light sources in specific places and angles to show how and where the cell interacts with the human body. And then there is a whole other set of lights and mirrors that indicates which parts are targeted and gradually destroyed by an antiviral drug. Actually, the way the mirrors are positioned here... yep. If you go around the pedestal and look at it from the different angles, it's like a little movie. First you see the lights indicating the parasitic effect of the virus on the body, then the way the drugs counteract the effects, and once you reach full circle; Ah, see here? Now the lights and the mirrors and the shadows create the effect that the virus evaporated. Damn, that's clever.”

Tony walked around the pedestal once more, trying to make out the positions and calculate the angles of all the lights and mirrors used.

Pepper's previous gleeful smirk softened, as she watched her boss move on to the next exhibit, a gorgeous piece created with metals and specially coated glass. The reflected images and light created 'Sun Drawings', that moved and changed in response to sunlight and the passage of time.

Having been Tony Stark's personal assistant for almost 8 years now, Pepper had learned much about the inner machinations of the man. And at his very center, Tony Stark was an engineer. A mechanic. He could talk theoretical physics with the best of them, but he preferred practical results. Tony's work had a purpose, a direct impact.

Which was one of the reasons why he wasn't normally swayed by art.

“Okay, this here? Classic movie effects. Chemical reactions used to visualize the images of a nuclear explosion, but it all happens under a microscope.”

While the billionaire could certainly appreciate beautiful art, something that was nothing more than 'nice to look at' held no value to him. It was the same reason why he had tons of one night stands, and hardly any actual relationships in his life. He was at first attracted to a person's physical beauty, which usually led to sex. But when the sexual need had been sated, mere physical attraction wasn't enough to keep him interested in the person he had bedded the night before.

“Now this, this is art. Applied physics at its finest. Do you see how the magnets interact with and against each others polarity? This is a perfect demonstration of the symbolism behind the theory of gravitational forces.”

It was why Pepper had jumped on the chance to get her hands on the tickets to Peter Parker's first ever art exhibition. He had been steadily making a name for himself over the last two years, and the redhead had seen some of his early works while she was on vacation in Europe. The young man had been set up in a corner of a street market in Marseilles, and with the help of various visual and practical effects, had explained the complex mechanics behind aerodynamic principles, to his wide eyed and utterly fascinated audience.

“A model of Nikola Tesla's early design for a solar collector made by modern computer code. See this section here? That's programming code for data extraction. In this context, it translates to Tesla's attempt to convert the energy of solar rays into electrical power. It serves as a parallel between combining old and new resources. See? This is the kind of art one can actually talk about. Not a painting of a stupid fruit bowl.”

Whereas Tony used his genius and understanding of different areas of science to create and improve, Parker used his to teach and inspire. Parker's art was something that Tony could not only relate to, but also admire, because it had purpose beyond it's beauty.

The hour that Tony had initially given himself to suffer through the showcase had long since passed, as the billionaire found himself unable to curb any of his enthusiasm, as he grew ever more fascinated with every new piece of art. Other people milling about the rooms 'oohed' and 'aahed' as they inspected the different works of the artist, sipping on their glasses of complementary champagne. But Tony doubted they could truly grasp the idea; the genius behind it all.

He was going to buy it all. The whole exhibit. Everything. He wanted those pieces in his company, in his home, in his workshop. He wanted to have the computer coded Tesla piece in his office, as a symbol of Stark Industries work on renewable energy. He wanted to gift the glass model of the virus cell to Bruce, to celebrate the biochemist's latest break through in the field.

He wanted both the magnetic force field work and the microscopic chemical reactions in his workshop, as a source of constant inspiration. His fingers itched with the want to create, the need to pour his skills into his work.

He wanted... He wanted to meet the artist.

When they had made their way almost full circle around the exhibit, they stopped at what appeared to be the last of the show cases. This one was different from the rest. For one, it was made out of Play Dough, though that was a fact Tony only realized by reading the description. How the hell this Parker guy had managed to form a completely genuine looking circuit board out of such an inferior material as children's clay, he could only guess.

He wanted to talk to the artist.

Another thing that struck Tony was that this circuit board looked somehow familiar.

He leaned in closer.

“This one section here looks like a rather awkward welding job. The connections between the wires seem a bit clumped. I would put it down to the use of Play Dough, but the other details on the board are so clean... You know, this looks almost like-”

“-the circuit board you built when you were five years old.”

Both surprised by the new voice, Pepper and Tony quickly turned around. Just a step behind them stood a young man, dressed in a casual but nice enough suit, with deep brown eyes, fluffy looking chestnut hair and a shy smile. Pepper recognized the man she had seen in France right away, and held out her hand to him.

“Mr. Parker. It's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Virginia Potts. But please, feel free to call me Pepper. Everyone does.”

The artist took her hand with a pleasant smile.

“In this case, I insist on Peter. And the pleasure is mine, Pepper.”

Tony could hardly wait for the handshake to end, to insert himself into the introduction.

“So you are the surprisingly gorgeous face behind all these beauties. I'm-”

“Tony Stark. I know. I'm a big fan of your work, Mr. Stark.” Parker smiled brightly (and blushing heavily) at him and eagerly reached for his hand. Then he shyly nodded to the pedestal display. “Your earliest work included.”

He wanted...

“Just Tony will do. One question, though. Why Play Dough? I may not have been very skilled with the welding equipment back then, but I do remember using the actual parts needed.”

Peter turned to his work, a helpless sort of smile on his lips, as he explained.

“When I was in my last year of highschool, and it was time to make a decision regarding college, I felt helplessly defeated. Was I supposed to attend one that focused on all the things that fascinated me about science, or one that focused on all the things I loved about art? I didn't know if I would ever be able to meet the expectations others had placed upon me, and the ones I had placed upon myself. I became wary and anxious about every choice I made. Constantly questioning myself if it was worth it to try to combine the things I loved, or if I wouldn't be able to hold on to both at the same time. Science versus art. Wanting to pursue such opposite things seemed ridiculous. But then my teacher gave us the task of writing a paper about a person that had greatly influenced our society and progress. I chose to write about you. And during my research, I found an old newspaper article, front page, about the young Stark prodigy, who was already showing the whole world how smart he was. The ordinary 5 year old makes crayon drawings and forms simple shapes out of Plasticine. A few can already read some of their children's books, but many are still more focused on the pictures in them. But the 5 year old you broke out of the limitations perceived for kids, and defied expectations. And I thought to myself ‘Hey, if Tony Stark can build a circuit board at such a young age, then maybe I can find a way that doesn’t mean I have to give up on one of the things I love.’ So, I guess I used the clay to symbolize what was expected, and your final design to show how you rose above.”

That shy little smile again. He wanted...

“In fact, you have done nothing but risen, Mr.- Tony. You have been a great inspiration for me, over the years. Quite possibly even a bit of a muse, if you will.”

Tony was a bit stumped, honestly. He had never been lost for words before. Thankfully he caught himself quickly. 

He wanted...

“So, philanthropist, billionaire, genius, muse.” (Had he just replaced his usual playboy title with ‘muse’?) “I like that.” (He did.) 

Peter.

“As your muse, I get dibs, right?”

A confused little head tilt. 

Cute.

“Dibs?”

On you.

“On the art pieces.” Tony elaborated with a sweeping gesture of his arm. “They are up for sale, right?

“Oh, yes. It’s uhm... we will hold an auction in a bit, after I have officially introduced myself to everyone here and said a few words.” Peter looked distinctly uncomfortable with that bit.

Tony was just opening his mouth to say something else, when suddenly Pepper inserted herself back into the conversation. (He had admittedly forgotten that she was there.)

“Peter, I think the woman over there is trying to get your attention.”

They turned to see a middle aged woman in an elegant dress, subtly gesturing to him. Peter grinned a bit ruefully as he turned back to his two companions.

“That’s my aunt, and also kind of my manager. I guess it’s time for my big entrance.”

He offered his hand once more first to Pepper, then to Tony.

“Pepper, Tony, again, it was a pleasure meeting you. Since it’s an auction, I can’t exactly grant you dibs, as much as I would like to.” He grinned at Tony. “But about 75% of all our revenues tonight will be donated to The Future Hope Foundation, which is a research center focused on developing cures for different diseases, speacially in children. I will be talking a bit more about that one in my speech, provided my severely repressed stage fright doesn’t hit me in a few minutes. So just know that whatever you decide bidding on, it will be worth it.”

Tony wanted to keep holding on to that hand. A hand that was just as calloused as his own, but still somehow softer and more delicate.

“I’m sure it will be.”

You will be worth it.

Just as Peter turned to leave, he cast one last look at the Play Dough model.

“Take a look at the note beside the general description before things start going, would you?”

Then he and his aunt vanished out of the room, to prepare for Peter’s introduction.

Curious now, Tony and Pepper turned back around to the pedestal and found what Peter had been talking about.

‘Of all my works, this one is my favourite, not only because of what it represents to me, personally, but also because of the person who inspired it. Unlike many of the other pieces, that are named after that which they represent, for this one, no other title than

Indomitable

could have ever come to mind. This is the only piece in the show case that will not be part of the auction. As this one already belongs to Anthony Edward Stark.’

“Pep.”

“Yes, Tony.”

“If I win every single auction bid, which I will, I would be entitled to a date with the artist, right?”

“You are probably still going to have to ask him the old fashioned way.”

“Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you all for coming tonight. Without further ado, it’s my sincere pleasure to introduce you to the man whose art work has brought you all here.”

Tony smiled. “I can do that.”

“I proudly present to you, Peter Parker!”

_________________________________________________________

The End.

Thanks to everyone for reading and liking the story! I hope you all enjoyed it, even though the story ends before Tony and Peter’s relationship really begins.

Thanks to the original prompt giver as well, due to the research I did for this story, I was able to see quite a few amazing art works.

Tagging: @unicornpower5301 -->why isn’t this stupid tag working?

[jimbleswrites]

Pantheon 2022

Chapter 5: Bring home the bacon

A/N: This took like no time to edit, surprisingly. Shout-out to my buddy Mark, who is cheering me on from my couch while I post this.

I woke up, still behind the server wall I picked to nap at.  I rubbed my eyes and looked at the clock again. 11:55, meaning I still had 5 minutes until my phone was ready. I peeked around the corner, making sure no one came in while I had been resting. The room was still empty, with my phone still tucked under a folder to hide from view. I came out and watched the monitor, as I was marked as finished. Must have gone a little faster than expected. I unplugged my phone and yawned.

“Working late, buddy?” I whipped around to see a janitor leaving the elevator. I hadn’t realized how quiet the elevator could be, but this guy seemed nonplussed that I was there. He smiled as he pulled a broom off his cart.

I laughed awkwardly. “Yeah, these codes aren’t programming themselves. I was just heading out.” I started toward the elevator. I pushed the button, only for it to glow red. I tried again, just to see more red.

“You still half-asleep?” The janitor joked. “You need your ID to open up after-hours.” I took out my ID and pressed it to the pad. No response. It seemed my fake ID was no good for opening doors.

“I think mine is broken. Can I use yours?” I asked sheepishly.

“Nope. I got chewed out last time I let my brother in, and we work in the same department. Just call security and have them come get you.”

“Come on, that will take so much longer. At least get me in the elevator.” I tried to bargain. I couldn’t call security and there was no other way out of the room.

“Just call them man. I’m not doing it. I need this job.” He turned his back to me, his ID attached to his back pocket taunting me. I decided I would need to pull something sneaky. I reached down while he was emptying a trash can. I quickly swapped our ID’s, putting my fake on his chain and taking his for my own. I swiped his ID on the elevator, and it turned green.

“Looks like it’s working now, have a good night.” I quickly got in the elevator. The janitor just shrugged and put on his headphones. At least he wouldn’t immediately notice he was stuck there. I watched the doors open on the new floor, and quickly swept the area. No other people in sight. I walked back to the first elevator back to the main floor, and took that down. I walked quickly past the desk, the one guard there too absorbed in his phone to even look up. I walked down the lobby and dropped the guy’s ID as I went out the door. I walked for a block, and looked behind me. No one was following me, and I smiled to myself as I found a dark alley. I moved out of the bright street lights. I breathed a sigh of relief as I re-focused and waved my hand over an empty patch of wall. A door frame formed from the concrete and opened inward, showing the familiar sunset-laden beach that I was used to. I stepped through, and saw Vida working on a computer desk next to the waves. The waves splashed over her feet from under the desk as she worked on a laptop, typing away.

I walked up to the side. “I take it you got the job done?” Vida asked without looking up.

“Yeah I got the data here, and I deleted the champion’s data.” I placed my phone on the desk next to her. “It went pretty smooth actually.”

Vida smiled and plugged my phone into her laptop. “Good job, Rob. I knew you could do it. All though, your improv skills could be better. You invented the Grand Slam?” She looked up at me, smirking.

I laughed sheepishly. I guess it makes sense she was watching me somehow. It was reassuring that I was able to get this done on my own, even if she was supervising me. “I’m new to this, I'd say I did pretty well.”

“You did leave behind your fake ID with that poor janitor, but given the circumstances you played it well.” She turned her laptop, showing me a video of someone. I recognized it as the janitor I swapped IDs with. Vida tapped something into the keyboard and the fake ID attached to his chain dissolved into nothing. The janitor was none the wiser, still listening to whatever as he slowly swept up the empty office.

“I half expected you to bust out with your powers, but you chose to stay low profile. Nice job. Now I get to work on the godhood lesson.” her computer beeped, and She unplugged the phone and handed it back to me. “All this human data on gods will be a solid reference for me to use for our lesson”.

I paused and stared. “Wait, I did all that for your lesson plans?” I was confused on why she would need them. “Surely you have a better list somewhere then the half-facts in there?”

Vida giggled.  “I’ll touch on that in the lesson. But this was also a chance for you to stretch your wings and show me what you could do. You know what?” She interrupted herself, “Actually, you’ve been cooped up here with me for a while. Get out of here for a while, I'll call once I have this done.”

I had just gotten freedom and I was unsure what to do. I stood there nervously like a toddler waiting to tell a parent they missed the bus. Vida looked up and sighed. “You should probably start with just exploring earth a little. Give yourself some more ideas for your off-time.” With new instructions, I nodded and turned around, opening another portal to New York, confident something would strike my interests.

***

I had been wandering around New York for maybe an hour, and had no real call for anything. I had just been aimlessly walking, looking at the various people that occupied the city. There was almost too much to do, even in this one city. I felt overwhelmed, despite this being for my relaxation. I decided to stop in at a bar and think it over while grabbing a meal. I found a smaller bar under an apartment complex called Cranberry Kiss. I opened the door to see a simple bar with a bar wrapping around the far walls. It only had 2 tables, and there were only a few people sprinkled around. A tired-looking bartender was cleaning off a part of the bar, and talking with a cook through a pass. They were a pair of younger boys playing on a dart board and chatting. It was a cozy atmosphere, despite the lack of natural light.

I grabbed a seat at the bar, and the bartender pointed at me, clearly ready to make something. I saw a special with vodka & cranberry on the board behind him, and ordered that. He mixed together several liquids and quickly slid a small glass my way with a dark red cocktail inside. As I sipped it, I thought of what my free time should be. Maybe I could take a road trip? That seemed redundant with my power to basically teleport anywhere. Also, any sightseeing could be cut short by a new mission. Maybe I could try to strengthen up, but it would be hard to learn my powers in a gym surrounded by other people. I could call Mr. E and Mrs. R to set up another match, maybe that would help? I opened my phone and looked at my contacts. It seemed to add gods and champions I met automatically, but no other names popped up.

I was lazily scrolling when I had someone bump into my back. “Oh shit, man, I'm sorry.” A smaller dark-skinned man wearing a press lanyard sat next to me. He must have bumped me when walking by.

“No problem, man.” I went back to my phone only to be interrupted by him again.

“Hey, you seem like a smart guy. Can I ask you something?” he looked intently. I nodded back, unsure why so many people just sit next to me and ask me things. “I’m working on an article and I want to know if this headline sounds good.” he opened up a small notebook from his jacket and set it in front of me. There was some titles written out inside

Grand Slam or Grand Failure? GIPA executive speaks! How 1 Denny’s employee came to the most secretive company in New York Paladin for his department? New GIPA executive tells all!

I looked over the options, almost appalled. I somehow went to the one bar that has the same news team that I just lied to. The man adjusted his glasses and pulled his journal back. “Judging on your face, they're all pretty bad.” He groaned. “I’m trying to work with this interview but there’s so much nothing in it. Like it's all nonsense and metaphors with no actual info. Typical marketing exec, I guess.”

“I guess so.” I responded. It seems like this is Dan’s co-worker, but they both just bought the fact that I was a legit worker.

“You know, you’re a good listener.” He said, his eyes lighting up. “And I bet you have a thing or two to say about GIPA, right? Who doesn’t with everything going on?”

“Sure, I guess I do.” I was just playing along, with no idea what he meant.

“Tell you what. I need to fluff this article and you want to speak your mind. My office is just upstairs, come have an interview with me. I’ll even cover your tab to make it worth your while.” He stood up, slapping a few bills on the bar.

“I don’t know…” I started to backtrack, but found myself being pulled away from my stool.

“It’ll be fine, just a little time. Hell, you can stay anonymous if you want.” He was already pushing me out the door and into a side door nearby. He escorted me straight into an apartment above the bar. He opened the door and chauffeured me inside. The living room had been converted into a smaller press room, with a few desks and a makeshift studio and camera. He sat me in front of the camera and ran around haphazardly, quickly turning on recording equipment and grabbing water for both of us.

“Can this be anonymous, actually?” I looked at the camera, unsure if I wanted my face plastered over the news. Lights shone a little too bright and reflected off this reporter’s bald head as he continued to scurry around.

“Of course, my friend! I use the recordings for writing, but we’ll cut your name and face off.” He sat in the chair and pressed the record button. “Interview for the GIPA article, current date November 2nd, 2022. I’m Pat Rhodes, for the Weekly Eagle. Can you please say something, just so I can check the audio levels?” He edged the microphone closer to me.

“Uhhh, hello?” I tried to speak clearly for the mic. A nearby monitor filled with various bars lit up as I spoke.

“Perfect,” Pat continued “now let’s just get some info about you. No specifics are needed, but let the people know what you do and who you are.”

“Uhhhh…” I paused, trying to think of a cover. “I’m a chef at a chain restaurant, I like long walks on the beach, I’m gonna turn 30 next week.”

“You don’t look a day over 25.” Pat smiled at me. I wasn’t really sure how old I was, but I guess it didn’t matter if I was Vida’s champion for eternity. “Now, let’s establish a baseline before I get your reactions. What are your thoughts on GIPA, the company?”

“They’re a good source of info.” I thought back to the hundreds of files I saw that still need to be sorted from the computer I saw earlier today. “There’s almost too much info they have.”

“Considering that’s the main point, that makes sense.” Pat added. “Now, do you know much about the inner workings of GIPA?”

I thought back to what he said at the bar. “Not much, but I guess I never looked too much into it. I figured it was like any other big office.”

“Can you elaborate on that? What’s your thoughts on big businesses like this?”

“Like, it’s mostly the big wigs that make the big decisions, right? A board of rich guys, and the other employees just have to deal.”

“I see, do you have any thoughts about the recent controversies of GIPA?” Pat prodded me along.

“You mean the fake info thing?” I wasn’t fully aware of the scope of this, so I went with a vague response.

“Yes, but for context, I'm asking about the info leaked about the UN secret chapter that was redacted.” Pat elaborated.

“Sure, I think-” I was partly into responding when the door opened and a familiar face walked in.

“Dan, come on! Knock next time, I'm doing an interview!” Pat groaned.

“Sorry, i was just-” Dan stopped his sentence when he saw me. “Mr. Paladin?”

Oh no. I should have thought this would happen but instead I was speechless. “You know this guy? I’m doing an interview about the GIPA stuff you got today.” Pat asked.

“With the same guy? And how’d you talk him into coming into our office?” Dan questioned.

“Same guy?” Pat turned to me. “You’re Robert Paladin?”

“Uuhhhhhh…” I wasn’t sure how to answer this. I didn’t really want to lie, but i couldn’t really tell the truth. “Yes and no?”

Dan raised an eyebrow as Pat pressed on. “So which is it? Yes or no?” I sighed, deciding to be as truthful as I could. “I don’t work for GIPA, I was there looking for information and when you wanted a tour, I saw a way in.”

“So you’re a reporter?” Dan questioned.

“My job was to gather info.” I couldn’t really say much else.

“OK, so you used me to get in and just lied about it all? What about the ID you had?” Dan asked.

“A fake. Couldn’t use it to open doors but looks legit." Just then, I heard my phone ring. I pulled it out to see Vida was calling me. “I have to take this, hold on.”

“Buddy, you just made us lose an article. You don’t get to just wave us off.” Pat complained. “The phone can wait.” He was clenching his fist, understandably upset.

“We can sort it out in a second, I need to answer this.” I stood up and turned away, pulling my phone out of my pocket.

I was interrupted by Vida’s voice inside my head. “Watch your back.” I turned to see Pat, frozen in place, with an outstretched hand. I looked over to Pat, who was frozen in a similar state. Time had simply stopped in this little apartment. I took a step back, and felt a presence behind me. I whipped around to see Vida towering over me, looming in the corner. She was tapping something into a phone, and snapped it shut once I noticed her. “You really found some trouble as soon as you got free, huh?” she pointed over to the frozen reporters. “I’ve just put a little pause on them so I can talk to you alone.”

“OK, so what’s the deal now?” It was easy to forget that Vida was an all-powerful goddess, or maybe I was just getting used to the more unearthly matters I was involved in.

“Just a little mission for ya. I put the info you got together into a list of things for a news site. We are gonna whistle-blow a little so GIPA won’t poke around as much. You just need to send it to any news outlet.” Vida replied.

“Any outlet?” I asked, seeing an opportunity.

Vida looked past me to the two men frozen there, and shot me a smug look. “Honestly, a smaller place like this could be just the right thing for us.” She gave me a thumbs up, and my phone buzzed. I looked at it, and saw a file sent to me labeled ‘GIPA LEAK’. Vida walked past me to the door and left the apartment. I turned around and saw the brothers moving again.

Pat grabbed my shoulder, suddenly shifting forward as time started again. “Buddy, you have got to explain to us.”

“OK, so here’s a proposition for you.” I started to explain, “My boss wants this info to go out ASAP and you need an article. We can help each other.”

Dan looked perplexed as Pat answered. “Who do you work for? I don’t like publishing from bad sources.”

“I can’t say who I work for, but I pulled this info from the databases of GIPA itself. It’s real, just needs an outlet.” I hoped they would bite, but they seemed reluctant.

“I’ll read it first, then we’ll publish it IF it’s good.” Pat waved me over to a computer and motioned to it. I plugged my phone into the tower and pulled up the file. A piece about GIPA’s hidden files came up, already edited and ready to release. The brothers scanned it over and they both lit up in surprise as they kept reading. They nodded to each other, and Pat stuck out his hand. “We got a deal!” I shook his hand, happy to hit two birds with one stone.

[jimlingss]

Annihilation of You [2/2]

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 (finale)  Words: 9.9k Genre: Fluff, Slight Crack, Soulmate!Au, Evil Genius!Au, Post Apocalyptic!Au  Summary: You have one goal: destroy the world. Only one thing stands in your way: your soulmate. Looks like you’re going to have to destroy him first. → Inspired by this and this. 

He gawks at you in utter bewilderment. Then, he points to himself with an open mouth and leans forward. “You want me….to stay with you?”

“Yes.” You state plainly. “If you were to accept, which I find no reason why you wouldn’t, there will be a better and more suitable bedroom that would belong to you. If my vitamin fluid does not suit your tastes then meals can be easily provided and accessible. Here, you will be treated luxuriously and you will no longer have to be victim to labor and meagerly scavenge by with your life.”

You add, “of course, I will respect any course of decision that you make. If you do so refuse my offer, then there will be no harm and you can go on your merry way.”

“I…” Jin seems stunned but then he sheepishly smiles at you, making your cardiac organ inside your chest do odd flip flops. You must check out if these are symptoms to an illness with Elise immediately. “Is there a reason for all of this? I mean...we’re practically still strangers.”

“Yes. I am fully aware that we have had limited interaction thus far. But I am hoping that we can increase it with the time to come.” You nod to yourself. “If there is any reason...then I must admit, it’s because I’ve become quite interested in you, Jin.”

He lifts his eyebrows. “Me?”

“Indeed. It is strange to myself even.” A finger on your chin and with a glance at your console, you sigh again. “I am trying to comprehend the fervor I experience when I am in your presence. Once you have said that I am of interest to you and now the tables have turned - you are of interest to me. And my curiosity cannot be sedated.”

There’s an absence of sound, a minute or more, as you wait for his decision and ultimately the answer surprises you.

“Okay.” Jin thought long and hard. He really didn’t have anything to lose. Somehow, he already knew the response before you even asked. It feels...right. It feels right to be with you. To answer yes. To stay with you. To be here. “Even though I don’t know what you might be hiding or if you’re a murderer and I’m stupidly going to die by agreeing…”

You laugh nervously at how accurate his rambling is.

Finally, he inhales a breath and smiles at you. “I’ll stay, if the invitation still stands.”

Everything is going according to the new plan. It will be simple to strip down the prison cellar and replace it with regular walls, install a regular door and remove the toilet. The ingredient shipments to your dome will have to double as there are now two portions instead of one. Maybe you’ll get him a desk in the corner of the main room.

The thoughts suddenly excite you and you spin around to meet his eyes once more but this time with a bright smile of your own.

“I am glad at your decision, Kim Seokjin. You interest me greatly.” You tuck a stray hair behind your ear while you glance down at the floor, without realizing how coy the action is and how his heart twists inside. “That and because you are my soulmate.”

He tilts his head with a slight frown. For saying it outloud for the first time, it sounds mad to your own ears. But it is the truth. And even if Jin is skeptical and amused all at the same time, he can’t help but believe it too.

//

One throat clearing, a few buttons pressed upon your console and you are perhaps making the biggest mistake of your life - second biggest mistake of your life since the first was allowing Jin to live.

“Let me make something clear to you...Jin.” You walk by him, sweeping a finger on your giant computer desk. “Elise is everything to me. She is the core of this very dome, artificial intelligence that I have developed and tweaked down to the very periods in her code. She holds all the information and replies to all my commands. Of course, she is replaceable but not without much sweat and effort. Without her, this place-” You motion all around you, adding to the dramatic effects. “-would not be the place that it is.”

He nods meekly, mirth twinkling in his eyes at your obvious passion. “Elise.” You swivel on your heel, staring straight into the main screen that occupies the space of the wall. “Allow Kim Seokjin access. He will now be the second person on this planet allowed to operate you.”

“Registering…” She waits. “Completed….”

“Kim. Seokjin. may. now. be. able. to. instruct. me. with. any. command. His. voice. will. be. acknowledged. by. the. entire. system.”

You’re not a big enough fool to allow him the entire system. Please. There’s still a long ways before you completely lose your wits. He is not allowed access to detonate any of your numerous weapons or to see your blueprints; important things for that matter. Elise can now simply speak to him and he can open doors, call for food and other information.

This is all a big tactic to gain his trust. Yes.

Not because you actually trust him or anything. Definitely not because you want to make him feel comfortable and to make him feel like he is a part of this place and might be able to call it home one day. No.

“Are you sure?” He asks you in reluctance.

A few days have transpired since his established decision to stay at your dome - those few days consisted of him awkwardly lingering around while you were drowning in work and him coaxing you to take breaks. You must say...it is quite enjoyable to have a companion around.

“Yes I am.” You fold your hands behind your back. “It isn’t a big deal.” You begin to walk and you steal a glance of his seated form on his own swivel chair. “Come along. There are more important matters to discuss.”

You wait until he catches up with you. There has since been an expansion to the area of your dome. Now a bright hallway leads to a kitchen, an eating space, a bathroom and his bedroom.

“I believe there might be a few questions that you have since a few days have ensued. You are free to ask me anything in the limits that I am able to provide you a plausible answer.” There are a million of them. But one that mainly sticks out. He just can’t find a way to bring it up naturally. “Do not hesitate.”

“So….you’re going to really kill all of humanity?”

“Yes.”

“Can I ask why?”

You contemplate. “You may.”

“Then why?”

Your toes twist, nearly running into his frame but you maintain stern eyes, poking a finger into his chest which is surprisingly sturdy. “Have you become blind to your own kind? Humanity is inherently evil - cunning with each individual’s self-interest valued above all. This planet has turned to absolute shit because of their selfishness, the willingness to reach their ambition at the expense of everyone and everything else in the world. And worst of all, humans remain oblivious because they’re content in living in ignorance.”

Kim Seokjin gazes straight into your orbs, a look of tenderness and kindness. Kindness….

...is weak.

The ambience dials down to an intimacy that you’re unable to handle. With a clearing of your throat, you step away from him and continue. From the corner of your eye, he smiles and nods in empathy. “I think everyone has their darker side, some more than others and others less than some. I’ve met very compassionate individuals and many others that weren’t. But what would mankind be without their flaws?”

“If everyone was created perfectly, then there would be no one exceptional.” He meets your eyes, a thoughtful hum escaping the back of his throat. “The shortcomings in humans is the catalyst for change, the cause of why we work towards improvement and what leads us to experience. Flaws make us who we are.”

You allow his words to linger in your mind, storing them deep into your subconscious.

“Don’t you have any parents? Any family members?” He asks out of curiosity. “What will happen to them after you wipe out the planet?”

“I’ve already put rockets underneath their dwelling. The minute I begin the countdown, they’ll be launched into space where it’s safe.” You pride yourself of already developing such an intelligent plan. “And my idiot brother will just have to fend for himself.”

Jin’s head tips to the side at you, ready to burst out into laughter but instead he chuckles to himself, mildly interrupted by the sudden ringing that erupts down the hallway. “Elise. What is that?” You call out to her.

“It. is. a. phone. call. from. your. mother. Shall. I. ignore. it.”

“How serendipitous.” You mumble, speculating if your mother really had divine powers. “No. I will accept the phone call.”

You exchange looks with Jin, signaling him to stay quiet. He agrees, though not without fixing his focus onto you with amusement. It takes a long second for the call to go through. A very dreadful second. Then you’re hit with-

“Do you know how long it’s been?!” Her voice roars down the metal hallway, all inside your dome and making your ears bleed. “What have you been doing that you haven’t been picking up my calls?!”

“God.” You moan, throwing your head back in exasperation. “You’re not going to greet me with a single ‘hello’? Stop nagging. I’ve been extremely busy, okay?”

“I don’t care what you’ve been up to, young lady!” She spits out through the speakers. “Tomorrow night, the entire family is having dinner at your dad’s place. And if you don’t show up, Heaven better have pity because I will show up to wherever you are and drag you out by the ear.”

There’s an extended pause, one where you downcast your head out of embarrassment, glaring at Jin through the corner of your eye. He’s swaying on his feet, arms behind his back and smiling without guilt, still staring at you. Your mother roars, “do you hear me?!”

“Yes.” You huff out. “I’ll be there.”

She hangs up on you. Elise confirms the call is over. Jin laughs. You facepalm.

//

Frost bites the air with the breath of Jack Frost, painting the terrain in milky shades that reflect the sun rays like a glass mirror. Here it is still and hushed, the stream of melting glaciers washing away fallen snowflakes. When you trail forward, your eyelashes become dusted in the white and even your warm skin cannot break apart the intricate patterns of the fragile crystals.

The whipping helicopter blades are the only disturbances in the otherwise peaceful area. It uproars, making you wince away and shudder again at the gnawing cold. “It’s amazing.” Jin shouts as he stares at your glass greenhouse and the solar panels above that power your entire plantation.

“Thank you.” You cry back to him. “I appreciate that you appreciate my ingenuousness.”

With a trembling hand, you punch in the number code and the machine runs a recognition test. The steel doors swing open and the two of you step in, allowing the icicles to melt with the intense heat that slams into your bodies. “It’s so much better inside.” You brush off your clothing. “The arctic was a great place to set up my dome but honestly, the location isn’t that great with the climate conditions.”

Jin doesn’t respond to you. Rather, he turns in circles to stare at your planter boxes and the rows of food that are otherwise impossible to grow outside where the soil has lost all of its nutrients. “This is...wow.” For lack of better terms and in sheer awe, he isn’t able to articulate properly.

You take note of how much it seems to interest him. “I..I was a gardener back in the town.” He explains, running up and examining something that’s ready to harvest. An android arm runs itself on a conveyor belt, plucking it out of the dirt and moving it down another conveyor belt. “There’s...there’s so much you can grow here. You could grow exotic fruits…..flowers! Flowers that we haven’t seen in the past decade!” He shouts, spinning around and grabbing your hands to interlace with his. “You’re a genius!”

“I...uh..” You’re flustered by his action, looking down to stare at the intimate feat. “I only grow things that are required in my nutrition drink. Flowers have no use….” A loud ‘ahem’ leaves your mouth as you attempt to regain composure.

You don’t.

“But if you are that interested in perhaps increasing this greenhouse and the types of produce grown here….I don’t see why not.”

“I…” His eyes shine in a way that causes fluttery feelings inside your stomach. “...would love to.”

The both of you dawdle for a bit before you chop a fresh hedge of cabbage and begin making your way back to the helicopter. “Aren’t you cold in that?” He eyes your thin clothing. You had to forgo your velvet cape as your mother spites it each time it comes into her vision.

“Pft.” You shake your head. “Evil geniuses don’t feel cold.”

He ignores the way you wave him off, simply scoffing and rolling his eyes. Kim Seokjin proceeds to rid himself of his wool jacket and he bends down to your height, securing the coat around your shoulders and zipping it up. Your eyes double in size and you freeze, focusing on the ground as the warmth envelops your figure. Shifting his focused eyes from the zipper, he pins it on your flustered form and his hands slow. You don’t realize how he’s smirking at you, how his pace is excruciatingly snail-like, all so he can soak in the image of you in complete shyness.

After what seems like an eternity, he steps back and nonchalantly walks towards the helicopter pad.

You cuss at the way your cheeks heat up as you follow suit.

Damn him. Damn you. Damn your biology and the science of attraction. Curse your animalistic instincts to procreate and the hormones inside your brain that have shifted gears into overdrive. Curse everything that isn’t logic or anything that can’t be reasoned. Kim Seokjin will be the death of you. And you’re at his absolute mercy.

//

The low temperatures begin to pick up as the chopper flies towards east, mahogany mountain tops coming into view and the blue ocean tide sweeping across the shore. With a cabbage held in his hand, Jin cautiously peers downwards. There he notices a metal shaped dome, much like your very own, amongst the thick pine forest trees. “We’re descending.” You shout into the helmet microphone and he looks over to you with a firm nod, fascinated at how you can fly a helicopter - it’s easy, you had said to him earlier. But Jin believes that even if you learnt how to fly a kite, he’d still be impressed by you.

Once you land and pull the keys from the ignition, stopping the engine, you slide open the door and jump downwards. “So...we’re meeting your parents?” Jin matches your quick pace, cabbage sandwiched between his side and arm.

“Yes.” You march up to the brown double doors. As you ring the bell, you peek a glimpse at the tall man. He’s rubbing his palms together, diverting his pupils elsewhere. Is he perhaps...nervous?

You’re about to convince him that he’ll be perfectly fine, your family members are like you and there’s nothing to fear. Well...if they’re anything like you….he should be afraid..but…

A robotic voice from the overhang speaker cuts off the words swelling in your throat. “Initiating….” There’s a delay and then a green beam shines into your eyes, running up and down your body. “Security check…”

“What do you mean security check?!” You shout, banging onto the wooden surface. “What the hell? Taehyung! It’s you, isn’t it?!”

A chuckle coming from the intercom near the doorbell is added to the sound of the bar of light still whizzing through the length of your body. “I have to make sure you don’t have any weapons. It’s a precautionary response and for security purposes that’s conducted with all visitors.”

“The only weapon I have on me right now is my fist. And you’re going to meet it.” You press your eye right into the peephole, glaring as hard as physically possible. “And I’m not a visitor, dumbass. I’m the daughter of this house, treat me with some more respect.”

“Oh. How violent. You never change, my dear Y/N. Perhaps you need to be detained?” He questions, adding to your fire of irritation. You bang the door again, now spamming the doorbell with your finger. Jin nearly bursts out laughing at your unusual franticness but he holds it back, slightly troubled at who is on the other side….and why they called you ‘my dear’.

“But alright, alright.” The door finally swings open. “And I need to be treated with respect too! I’m the son of this house and older than you.”

You grumble some sort of insult back at him, stepping inside and Jin follows behind quietly. Though the outside is a metal dome identical to yours...the interior is that of a regular home. Jin scans the place with amazement. It’s cozy, wooden floorboards and white walls decorated with the occasional painting. There’s a kitchen, a living room, a dining room, all lit by yellow dim lights and not bright white ones. It reminds him of the houses that used to exist a hundred years ago, the ones he’s heard about and seen in books. Compared to your living space that reminds him of a science laboratory, this home is so….normal.

“Oh my god!” The man of equal height drops his jaw. He dons a pair of thick, black framed, square glasses on his eyes and a white lab coat over his body. His hair is that of a dark cinnamon colour, softly ruffled around. “You brought a visitor!”

Without a warning, the stranger jumps onto Jin and begins to squeeze him in a locked embrace, spinning the unsuspecting man around and around. The cabbage thunks to the ground, barely missing their toes. “Yeah.” You free him. “Jin, this is my idiotic older brother I told you about.”

“Wow.” Taehyung feigns a pout. “Whatever you say, Y/N…” He takes a large step forward while you shuffle backwards, having an inkling of what he’s about to do.

“Taehyung…” You warn him with a threatening tone.

“You’ll always be my sweet sister.” He smothers you practically to death, probably on purpose so he can kill you and when your parents confront him, he’ll just use his puppy eyes and say it was an accident.

“Shut up.” Your cheek is squished against his and it takes your best effort with flailing limbs to pry him off. “Gross. Disgusting. I’m going to have to strip my skin now to rid of your diseases.”

He snaps his fingers. “There she is.”

“What’s taking you two so long?!” Your mother’s voice roars down the hall, inherently making you roll your eyes. “Get your asses down here this instant!”  

You two exchange looks before huffing out a clear ‘yes’. Taehyung swipes the cabbage and throws it onto the coffee table before the both of you drag your feet to the dining room. As independent as you are, the moment you step back to your parent’s home, everything reverts back to your childhood.

Before you enter, you turn around. Jin’s lagging behind you a few meters, rubbing together his clammy palms. You stare at it for a heartbeat before grabbing his hand between yours.

There’s a lot you could say...want to say. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re great. They’ll love you. But you’ve never been skilled with words, especially those that require expressing your inner emotions. So with your fingers twining between his and gazes lining up, you hope your eyes can tell him more than your words you can speak. “Let’s go.”

He seems to ease with your touch. You don’t let him see your tender smile.

“You’re late.” Your mother glares and you pout, pulling out your chair and plopping down across from her.

“Sorry.”

Jin is completely bewildered as he sits next to you. No one notices him.

Your mother, carrying quite a resemblance to you, is busy scooping out some mashed potatoes on every plate and scolding you and Taehyung when you both get too loud, shouting over each other. Your father is rambling about some sort of new scientific discovery that he found during an expedition to the mountains. He wants to recover some fossils that are from a century ago. Taehyung’s eyes sparkle as he suggests they build a museum with the fossils down in the Antarctic where the penguins could toddle inside and it would be- ‘soooo cute, like could you imagine?’. You scoff, advising that a machine could be developed to turn the fossils back into lifeforms and if that was possible, ancient dinosaurs could roam free again and they could be used as a method to wreak havoc against civilians.

“Um...Y/N.” Jin leans over to whisper in your ear. “Can you pass me the salt?”

“Sure.” You grab the salt shaker, passing it over to him. “Anyways, back to what I was saying, we could bring back all the species that have been made extinct over the decades because of human pollution and- what?”

Both your parents’ jaws have dropped, their vision cemented onto Jin’s face and their eyeballs almost falling out of their sockets. Your mother’s food on her fork drops to plop on her plate.

Your father clears his throat after a long moment, shifting his glasses that are perched on his nose an inch higher. “Who is this?”

“No one really.” You shrug it off. “He’s just my soulmate. Taehyung, pass me the gravy? Back to more important things. If dinosaurs are brought back into this world, there might be a lot of benefits. I’m just saying that this is something to consider.”

Your older brother passes the bowl and you scoop out a spoonful. When you set down the bowl and feel Taehyung’s eyes on you, that’s when you realize that it’s deathly silent. “He’s your...what?”

“Your…” Your mother stammers. “Your soulmate?!”

“What is going on?” Your father grips the edge of the table.

“Yeah. He’s my soulmate.” You bite the garlic bread. “Is there something wrong?”

“I mean...it’s...this is..uh...um…” Your mother has to physically grab her arm to set down the utensil. Her hands shake and she clasps them into her lap. “This is huge. How do you even know?”

“Well…” You inhale a huge breath. “It’s a pretty long story. But...I  have this future portal...it gives me a window to view the most likely outcomes three months into the future. He’s in all of them.” You nod. “Elise - my computer program - ran down his information and she confirmed it.”

“Are you sure?” The people around the table gawk at you. The last word they thought they would never hear - soulmate - utters so simply out of your mouth. The entire concept of it is against logic; the very logic that you wholeheartedly believe in. It’s not like you to believe in princesses or fairytale godmothers, love at first sight or true love’s kiss….fantasy and something so fictitious.

“This isn’t just something that any machine or engine can deduct, Y/N.” Your mother attempts to reason and make sense of this entire situation. “I know you believe in your devices and that you’re never wrong but-”

“I know.” You declare, grabbing Jin’s hand from his lap. His eyes that have been focusing downwards, nervous of the entire ordeal, suddenly pin onto you. Sweat has built on top of his forehead, dampening his bangs and his skin is hot to touch. A tiny smile itches up your face at how...cute he is in front of your family. “From the first time I laid my eyes on him…”

You knew he was it. The way he calls your name. The way he touches you, hugs your frame with his bigger one or even the pace of which he matches your feet when walking alongside you. He isn’t your other half and his purpose isn’t to make you whole, rather, he’s the companion you’ve never realized you craved. He is the extension of your existence, someone who helps expand your worldview. Kim Seokjin is not a need. He is a want. He is a kindred soul that you do not own.

He is someone you yearn to keep safe and happy.

“You know..” You shrug again. “I just know.”

There’s another silence, the creak of your brother’s chair as he shifts and the spoon that drifts from the staggering air. You take your fork, continuing to eat as you ignore the way your cheek heat up excessively. Jin finally meets your parents with a soft smile, one that makes you focus on stuffing your face more quickly to avoid staring. “Hello. I’m sorry about my held up introduction. My name is Kim Seokjin. Your daughter is really...beautiful and I’m happy to be with her. Oh..um...I’m from a town that’s a little bit aways from Y/N’s home. I was a gardener where I came from. ”

Your father takes a long drink of his water before he clears his throat. “And your parents?”

“They’re travellers. Like merchants, just seeing the world and trading things.” He says, “so they don’t really stay in the same spot.”

“I see.” Your father nods. “Whelp, shall we continue eating?”

Jin was expecting to be bombarded and interrogated. There were thoughts of your family members booting him out but if you came from them, he was expecting much worse. There was an irrational fear at the back of his mind that he was going to be drugged, genetic mutations injected into his bloodstream and he would be a victim of your family’s evil science experiments.

Instead, everyone is normal. Bellies are full, laughs and conversations barrage past lips.

He turns to look at you, how your eyes are crinkled when you smile and how it’s so...free. There is seemingly nothing holding you back, no arrangements for chaos and destruction, nothing corrupt or malicious in your happiness.

“Isn’t that right, Seokjin?” Your mother interrupts his daydreaming, a twinkle in her eyes at how he caught him gazing tenderly at her daughter. “Wouldn’t it be ridiculous if we transported goats onto Mars?”

A puff of laughter escapes his lips. “Yes. That would be really strange.”

Granted, as warm your family is, the topics of conversation are a bit odd.

//

Shelves lined to the wall, craning up to the ceiling; each occupying hundreds of written work inscribed by the most historical and distinguished. From the monstrosities that have occurred a century ago, many books burned along with human bodies but there was a multitude in the oblivion. Through the decades, your ancestors found and collected them as treasures. They were passed along each generation, inevitably belonging to your father’s library and his vast collection.

This is the same place where you spent your years of childhood, curled up in the armchair in the corner with the covers over your lap. You have touched each spine, read each word from the front till the end. The aspiration that drives you to this very day was born and nurtured in this same room. The inspiration and the method in which you lead your life began here.

“Look who it is.” Taehyung pops his head through the door at the same time as you pull a book from the shelf. You’ve already read all of them but for memories sake, you wanted to take a novel home with you.

The genre of the particular one you chose is romance. It has a very ridiculous plotline, two individuals fallen deeply in love, and it had you scoffing several years earlier. You finished it, for the sake of finishing it, but now you want to give it a fresh chance. Maybe it’s not as bad as you remember….

“What do you want, Tae.”

“To catch up.” He pouts exaggeratedly. “C’mon, it’s been so long. And I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about Jin!”

You groan. It’s not like you’re not fond of your older brother - you are. It’s the type of love that remains between bickering siblings but deep down, you’ve always been consumed by the green monster of envy. Aside from the times he’s beaten you up and held you down so he could fart on you and the other incidences where he would make you piggyback him and he was at least twenty pounds heavier than your own weight - though they were bitter at the time, they eventually became good memories. The sour ones are where your parents not purposely but subtly indicated their love to your brother was stronger than their love towards you.

When you built your first robotic arm, you got a pat on the head. When Taehyung was randomly pouring chemicals into a beaker and caused an explosion, your parents laughed and then hugged him. When you built a machine that compressed coal into diamonds in a matter of seconds, you got a thumbs up. When Taehyung ‘invented’ the sewing machine, your parents praised him, gave him a cookie and told him that he re-invented something that had already existed. These were only a few of the instances.

Taehyung was known as the family genius.

You..well….at that point, you began cursing all of humanity.

Though, as you grew older and more mature, the jealousy washed away. You discerned that your parents do love you both equally. However, the memories of resentments remained.

“What do you want, Taehyung?”

“To show you my invention.” He grins, the same mischievous one that tells you he’s up to no good as he pulls out a silver canister.

“Don’t you dare.”

“Y/N...I just want to show you…”

“No. I don’t want to see it.”

“I know you do.”

“I don’t.”

“You do.” He pulls off the lid.

“TAEHYUNG!” You’re attacked by a swarm of robotic flies, the buzzing congregating around your head like it’s a nest. Their legs eject, coming into contact with your skin in jerking motions. They press into spots that make you choke out laughter, stomach squeezing and your limbs convulsions.

“They’re tickle bugs!” He chirps out. “I’ve been developing them for half a year now. Very difficult devices to hone in on. I had to modify each on-”

“Taehyung!” Tears are falling from your eyes. “Get it to stop!”

You begin to swat at them and he immediately screams for you to stop, that they’re delicate and fragile. As you run across the room, Taehyung follows, attempting to trap them with the lid.

It takes ten minutes, a few bruises on your knees from bumping into furniture, Taehyung drenched in his sweat and the buzzes in the closed canister before everything’s settled down again. “Are you….” You hyperventilate. “..kidding me?!”

“You got a good laugh, didn’t you?”

“You’re the worst.”

The two of you are laid sprawled out on the rug, limbs stretching out like starfish and your lungs burning. A tiny smile lifts itself on your lips, reminiscent of your youthful days with your brother. Sincerely, it has been too long since you’ve hung out with the idiotic dumbass.

“Y/N.” He hums out. “Are you still going to destroy the world?”

The both of you sit up, staring straight at each other. “Yes.”

Taehyung sighs, the light atmosphere nipped in the bud and replaced with something more grievous. His brows knit together but his eyes are washed with concern. He looks almost...disappointed. “Y/N...you’re not going to destroy the world.”

Irritation and anger holds you by the bone. “I will.”

“No, you won’t.” He retorts. “You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not a murderer.” Taehyung huffs out in annoyance as if it’s obvious. “You shouldn’t. And you won’t. I know humans may seem sometimes dumb to us but I think you’re forgetting something...we’re human too.”

Your hand grips together into a fist, nails digging into your skin. Your teeth sinks into your bottom lip until blood draws. “You’ve never appreciated anything I’ve done. No one ever has.”

Taehyung doesn’t hear with your mumbles. Though as your eyes well up with fury and you rip your eyes away from your brother, standing up and ready to storm out the room, the door creaks. Jin appears at the frame, instantly aware and distressed at the way you’re holding back tears and your jaw is clenched.

“Y/N…” He calls your name quietly, somehow relieving you from your restraints. Though, once the walls have been crushed down, the tears begin to mark your cheeks and you can only hastily wipe them away, ignoring his warm orbs. “What’s wrong?”

“In my entire life…” Your voice croaks unwillingly. “No one has ever supported my goals or dreams. I’ve always been alone, now and until the end.”

You turn on your heel, mustering a glare at your brother which is all too weakened. Your fist tightens and you consider throwing it straight at his face to settle the turmoil in your very being. Jin in some way is able to sense the contemplation and he discreetly takes your hand, loosening your fingers as he knits his between yours. With a staggering breath, you look at him fleetingly before leaving.

“Let’s go, Jin.” You tighten his coat around your shoulders, disappearing down the hall.

The two men exchange looks before your brother simply breaks out into laughter, shattering the tension within the room. “Don’t mind her. She might not show it but she does have emotions. You just gotta know the right nerves to step on to get her winded up.”

“I know she feels more than she shows.” Jin’s eyes linger to the space you previously occupied. “I just don’t want her to feel sadness or anger.”

Taehyung hums. “You’re a good guy, Jin. I’m glad.” He embraces the other man before pulling away with wide eyes, patting Jin’s shoulders. “Wow, good shoulders too. Reliable.”

“Take care of her, okay? She’s too smart for her own good. She thinks she knows everything but she doesn’t.” Your older brother reveals. “I trust you’ll treat her well, brother-in-law.”

He nods and although your brother’s made his begging request, from the very beginning, Jin was already set on making you the happiest person alive.

//

Hands smash against the keys, fingers running along faster than a master pianist in the midst of an acute sonata. Though less musical and fluid, your movements are that of wrath and indignation. The monitor flickers in various ways, blueprints swiveling across as you begin a new project.

Jin approaches cautiously, tipping his toes against the tiles. “Y/N…what are you doing?”

“I’m preparing a rocket.” You mumble half-heartedly, lost in concentration. “I’m going to nuke my imbecilic brother.”

“Oh.” He stands behind you, listening to the rapid clicking of the keys. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Right.” Jin takes a step, leaning down to prop his chin on the edge of your swivel chair. He speaks gently, a breath away from your ear and you ignore the desire to pull him closer. “Do you want to take a walk with me?”

“I’m busy.”

He snakes his arms around the chair, clasping his hands together around your abdomen in a comforting embrace. “Do you want to eat something, then?”

“We literally just got back from my parent’s house.” You mutter. “Are you still hungry?”

“No.” Your soulmate grimaces and from the reflection of one of the screens, you can see his tiny pout. “Okay…” He detaches himself from your back. “I’ll just...I’m..I’ll go. Don’t stay up too late, Y/N. You need rest in order to work.”

The shadow on the monitor becomes smaller as he retracts back, returning to his room. There’s something inside you that tugs, something desperate and a means to fulfill the lonely void deep inside.

“Jin!” You cry out his name, turning around to stand up.

He immediately halts and meets your eyes. “Is there something wrong?”

A sheepish smile forms on your mouth. At your request, he swiftly accepts with his own grin. “Shall we engage in a round of pillow talk?”

//

The room is pitch black, not a window in place but steel walls and a door. After all, the initial blueprints of this entire abode is to be as efficient as possible, thus why your bedroom only had a single sized bed. Bedrooms are for sleeping, only sleeping, and the plan was fit for you alone, a single person. The plan never left room for soulmates or pillow talks. But here you are…

You’re positive that Jin’s feeling cramped. With his broad shoulders, half of his body is on the mattress and the other half is hanging in the air. The two of you are sharing one pillow, staring up at the ceiling, squished up against each other without room to even shift more comfortably. It’s as cramped as a can of sardines.

“I apologize for the lack of space.” You shatter the tense atmosphere. “I should really install a bigger bed for future purposes.”

He chuckles softly, a vibration that causes you to steal a glimpse of his profile. “Future purposes?”

“I mean if we wish to share the same bed for-” Your voice cuts off when you realize what’s about to spew past the seams of your lips.

“For what?” He laughs again, lifting a brow and moving to lie on his side facing you, arm folding to support his head. “For what, Y/N?”

“Recreational purposes and the purpose for procreation.” Your hand movements begin to become erratic, your face rising with red and you ramble. “I mean, if you ever want to, it’s not like I’ve been thinking about it and why would I want to, right? That kind of thing is to conceive offsprings which is obviously a biological desire in order to sustain the population and species. And why would I want more humans on this earth? Of course, I’m sure our children would be of the highest quality as my genuineness would most likely pass on and your handsome looks would also be passed on. By handsome, I mean, of course, you’re objectively very very good looking. You have a very symmetrical face, trust me, I got Elise to run a test. Your eyes are also quite nice, very warm shade of brown. Anyone who is able to perceive vision would agree, not just me...right?”

Jin’s pupils adjust to the lack of light and he’s able to make out your frantic features. He stares at you with the corners of his lips upturned, intently listening to every word mindlessly spewing out of your mouth.

“Maybe we should get married. I mean, marriage is entirely a human concept that was mainly prevalent a century ago. It doesn’t really signify anything as we no longer have constitutional governments but it still carries symbolic meanings. My parents got married, like, my father arranged this whole thing for my mother and I remember hearing about it as a child and I thought ‘oh, that’s nice’. By all means, we don’t have to do that. I’m sorry, I don’t want to assume things. I didn’t even consider that you want to be with me. Why would you? There’s nothing really spectacular about me…” You babble. “..aside from the fact that I’m gifted with high intellect which isn’t boasting, it’s factual. I took a test and I do have an exceptional IQ. That and the fact that I have a metal dome. Other than those things, there’s nothing special. I mean a vow of an entire lifetime until death is kind of ridiculous, right? Marriage itself is pretty ridiculous...right?”

“Jin……………...do you want to marry me?”

When you turn to him to hear a response, you’re taken back at the way he’s gazing at you. He looks at you with adoration and fondness, evoking a lump to stick in the middle of your throat and your heart drumming into your ears. “Yeah..” He hums and nods. “I’d want to.”

If possible, merely just a smidgen amount, your cold heart starts to thaw.

You move an inch closer, pressing your lips against his. Jin smiles, happily kissing you back as his arm wraps around your shoulder. After a long moment, the both of you pull away from each other and you’re finally able to relax, leaning into his body. The pillow talk draws out into the night.

“Y/N…” He whispers your name, smirking discreetly at the way he can feel goosebumps raise on your arm. “If you have Elise, why do you have to micromanage so much? Can’t you just let her do it?”

You scoff, answer obvious in your mind. “If you make a robot more intelligent than yourself, do you know the risks associated? What will happen when it turns against you?”

“Ah, I see.”

“Elise is simply an information holding platform. She can’t do anything without my command.” When it’s your turn to ask the next question, hesitation does not allow you to jump immediately.

“You don’t want me to annihilate humanity, do you?”

“No I don’t.” He exhales. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not here for you. Y/N….I think- no...I know you’re brilliant. You’re independent, beautiful and strong, everything I could have ever dreamed in a partner. I’m here for you. That much, you can believe in. I just can’t support pain and destruction.”

As expected.

Your heart ices over and you shift to lie on your side, facing the wall. “I understand.”

When the both of you fall asleep, the emotion of contentment is far out of reaches but with his caress, loneliness and turmoil ceases to exist. Why must your happiness lay in one or the other? Your slumber is dreamless.

//

A thousand and one things keep you restless, different thoughts plaguing your mind and keeping your perception clouded. There’s a strain, a sort of weight that surpasses that of an anchor, perched on top of your head mockingly. The anxiety and worry keep hold you captive to completing anything remotely mundane; walking into rooms without a purpose, stopping in the middle of a sentence and forgetting what you were going to say. Hence, it is only natural for Jin to become uneased by your unusual behaviour.

“Y/N?” He crouches down to where you’re seated on the floor with metal parts, nuts and bolts by your ankles and a screwdriver in your hand. “What are you building?”

“A robot.” You say in a hush tone. When Jin asks you more questions, it’s not that you’re ignoring him but the words shoot past your ears, lost in the focused mind that has tunnel vision.

“Elise…” Jin stumbles to the console with uncertainty.

“Yes. Is. there. anything. I. can. help. you. with. I. also. serve. you. Kim. Seokjin. Please. do. not. hold. back. on. any. topic. you. may. be. curious. about. I. am. the. bearer. of. all. knowledge.”

He opens his mouth. “...Right. Then, can you tell me why Y/N’s acting so...strange?”

“Certainly.” She waits, registering the information in. “Currently. Y/N. is. questioning. her. quest. for. human. eradication.”

“What?” For the past three months since Jin has met you, he’s aware that your ambition of eliminating humanity has been your drive. From what you’ve told him, he knows that it’s been your childhood dream since you could remember. It’s been the reason for your own existence. “Why?”

“Her. indecisiveness. stems. partly. from. her. older. brother. Taehyung’s. disapproval. However. a. larger. influence. originates. from. you. Seokjin. It. seems. like. you. are. have. the. ability. to. persuade. her. otherwise. However. as. a. resulting. factor. it. has. created. much. confusion. strife. and. conflict. within. Y/N. herself.”

Jin spins on his feet, looking at you disconnected with reality. You’re attaching metal pieces together while chattering incoherently to yourself. He sighs, oblivious of what to do.

On the other hand, you know exactly what you’re doing, at least in your delirious mind. It had occurred to you, one fine evening as you were boring your eyes at the white wall, that you were quite inadequate as a companion. With a lack of understanding for emotions and being insensitive by nature, sooner or later, there were to be troubles in your relationship.

There’s a high chance that Jin will feel neglected. His needs will be overlooked and he’ll be injured in the process.

The mere thought of his harm due to your insufficiency in love only hurts you more.

“Done.” On the second day, you’re able to wipe your forehead drenched with sweat. “Finally completed.”

Jin peers over your shoulder cutely, lips pursed together. “What does it do?”

“You’ll see.” A laugh sounds before you turn to your console. “Elise. Boot it up.”

The robot jolts, eyes flashing before it lights, the core placed in the center illuminates to pink. It’s round head swivels to scan the surroundings before they land on Jin. You stand back with a smile. “I call it Namjoon 2.0. I came up with the name as I was writing the code.” A shrug loosens your shoulders. “I’m not sure, it just came to me.”

“Oh.” Jin scratches the back of his neck, nervous as to why the android is fixing its focus onto his face. Does it have lasers? Will it kill him? No...you would never do something like that. “What does it do though?”

“It loves you.”

“What?”

“It does what I can’t.” You clap your hands, dusting it off. “It will fulfill all your desires, providing you with enough affection and love.”

Jin takes a step back and it follows. “Greetings, Kim Seokjin. I love you.” It says motionlessly, the springs of it’s legs shaking as it approaches him.

You stretch tiredly, walking off to your bedroom to catch up on the countless hours you’ve missed. “Wait Y/N!” Jin’s shout goes unheard as you shut the door.

Perfect. Now that your soulmate is comfortable, now you can continue on with your plans.

Little do you know how another robot, abandoned in the corner, also lights up.

//

The android, though only up to the height up to his hip, terrorizes his very life. When he runs, it chases. When he hides, it can find him within a second. And all it wants to do is hug him with its metal arms, declare with a screeching voice ‘I love you’. When it senses that he needs to use the bathroom, it drags him to the toilet and insists on watching him take his leak. When he showers, it persists to assist him and wash his back. Only when he shuts the door and it goddamn nearly breaks the steel down, does he manage to get a one minute shower in.

For something that loves him so much, he’s never hated anything more.

“Y/N.” The robot is attached to his leg but Jin has long given up outrunning it. All it does is shout ‘Jin, Jin, Jin’ while it pursues him across the room. You’re standing in front of the door, securing your black cloak around your body. “We need to talk.”

“Wait…” He scans you from head to toe. “Are you leaving?”

“Oh…I’ll be back.” You turn to sweetly smile at him, soaking in each of his features and every detail of his face. “I’ll be gone for awhile though. Don’t wait for me, have dinner and go to bed. You’ll become ill if you stay up too late. If you need anything, just ask Elise.”

“Where are you going?”

“Somewhere.” You shake your head. “That’s not important. Just…..stay safe, Seokjin. Stop worrying about others for a second and worry more about yourself. I’ll be perfectly fine, so, don’t worry about someone like me.”

“This robot will protect you until the end.” Your eyes trail to his leg and you lower yourself down. “By all means, take care of him, Namjoon 2.0.”  

The machine responds immediately. “I will, master.”

When you straighten your form and look back into Seokjin’s eyes, his warm orbs washed with concern squeezes your hearts and prompts somersaults in your stomach. With an impulse taking control, you reach up to press a brief kiss to his lips. It’s a warm and soft sensation, too short to subdue the pain of parting.

When you pull away, a gentle giggle emits at his stunned form. “I love you.” It’s a simple whisper that only he can hear. “Goodbye.”

There’s one fleeting glance before the main doors close.

Jin is held captive to his spot, trapped in a daze of the sweet words he thought he’d never hear, spoken from the same lips that touched his. It’s all too late when he reaches his senses.

“Wait! Y/N!” He reaches for the door handle but is stopped by Namjoon 2.0.

“You cannot.” The android speaks. “It is far too dangerous.”

“I have to!” He shouts, struggling but somehow the immense strength of the machine’s grip is able to hold him down. “I have to know where she’s going!” It scares him to the very core, how your goodbye sounded all too well like the final farewell.

“Apologies, Seokjin.” Namjoon 2.0 tugs him back inside. “I love you.”

Oh god. He bangs his head against the wall and facepalms.

As if sensing that the end is coming, in the dusty corner by the future engine, a robot who has been long abandoned awakes. “Annihilate Kim Seokjin.” It rolls out into the middle of the room. “Annihilate Kim Seokjin.” When it spots its target, attempting to pry off another robot’s hands, its eyes flash to red. “ANNIHILATE KIM SEOKJIN!”

Poison darts shoot off its arms, at the exact same moment that Jin falls from the tug of war with Namjoon 2.0. The darts whoosh by his ears, missing him by mere millimeters and they pin against the steel walls. “What the fuc-”

“ANNIHILATE KIM SEOKJIN!”

Jin nearly slips as he rushes to stand and run. The two robots chase after him relentlessly.                       “Jin, where are you going?! I love you! Come back!”                                        “ANNIHILATE KIM SEOKJIN!”

He locks himself into the bathroom, rushing to the tub to hide; folding his legs together and tucking his head down. “Elise. What is going on?!” It’s the first time that he’s thankful your computer program has speakers everywhere and is accessible from any part of the dome.

“It. seems. as. though. the. robot. that. has. been. discarded. by. Y/N. has. come. to. life. Its. purpose. is. to. eliminate. your. existence. When. she. built. it. she. was. quite. determined. Perhaps. from. its. sheer. determination. it. awoke. Quite. amazing. in. fact. as. the. code. of. the. device. is. on. the. USB. you. returned. to. her. when. you. first. arrived. here. Odd. how. it. is. operating. without. the. code. Quite. miraculous. indeed.”

The needles of the darts appear from the other side of the door, scaring Jin shitless. The weapons have punctured holes past the steel and then...the entire frame falls from Namjoon 2.0’s strength. “Jin. I love you. Come back.”

“ANNIHILATE KIM SEOKJIN!” The other one shouts, spraying another round of poisonous darts towards the wall where it fails to hit him. “ANNIHILATE KIM SEOKJIN!”

He jumps up and sprints past the two machines, scarcely missing Namjoon 2.0’s grip and the death robot’s weaponry. Jin runs up to the console, pressing random buttons. “Deactivate both devices! Elise! Deactivate both devices.”

“Unfortunately. I. cannot. They. are. independent. and. beyond. my. abilities. to. deactivate. I. apologize. Kim. Seokjin.”

A dart is flung towards his foot, causing him to stumble back and knock his knee against the underside of the table. He screams out - “ow” - and as he falls back onto the chair, he hits his funny bone against the armrest. “OW!”

Namjoon 2.0 slowly cranes its neck towards the death robot, the creaks echoing through the metal dome. It rolls forward an inch. “You….dare…” It rolls forward another inch. “...hurt...Kim..Seokjin?”

“ANNIHILATE KIM SEOKJIN!”

“YOU CANNOT!” Namjoon 2.0 hurls itself towards the death robot while the latter machine throws more darts, spearing the former’s steel. The androids rush towards each other in screams and cries- “ANNIHILATE KIM SEOKJIN!” “YOU CANNOT!”

And as they hit each other, a burst of orange flames erupts. Time slows as Jin’s eyes are forced to close, the light burning to the back of his lids and broken debris brushing through his locks. The explosion dies down after ten seconds but an uncontrollable fire replaces the killing devices.

Jin coughs, covering his mouth with his arm as he reaches over to the console. “Elise! The fire!”

“The. sprinklers. require. a. system. update. I. have. reminded. Y/N. previously. However. she. informed. me. that. she. is. concentrating. on. building. Namjoon. 2.0. who. is. now. deceased. Therefore. the. console. has. not. been. updated. since.”

“What?” His lungs squeeze and the flames roar behind him, burning through the engines you’ve built. He dismisses the pain to shout towards the speakers. “Okay, fine! Tell me where Y/N is! Where is she, Elise?!”

“Unfortunately. it. is. strictly. confidential. Therefore. I. cannot. inform. you. of. such. information-”

“ELISE!” Jin slams down against the keys. He doesn’t realize that he’s shaking and that he’s crying until the water drips onto his fist. “Please...I need to find her.”

She stays quiet for a moment. And for the first time in her existence, she breaks your bond of loyalty.

“She. is. located. a. kilometer. north. ready. to. detonate. the. rockets. to. destroy. the. world.”

Kim Seokjin breaks through the doors, leaving the flaring metal dome behind him, rushing past the clearing, running with all his might. The cold oxygen bites at his skin but he persists, ignoring his withering lungs and his trembling legs. He darts past tree branches and flower fields, barren dirt that would be worthless to farm and when he finally finds the dawn horizon, does he recognize your figure.

“Y/N!” He cries out your name as you twirl around. Like the first time you ever laid eyes on the boy, time spins around you in twisted seconds. An invisible tie bounds the two of you together and your breath hitches. Your heart palpitates and you don’t hold back the grin that spills across your cheeks. “Y/N!”

As he coughs, crouching down to steady his breathing, he lays a hand on your shoulder. “What are-” wheeze. “you-doing?”

“Killing humanity.” You say nonchalantly. “How did you get here? Did you run?”

“Yes I ran. And what?!”

“Oooh. Quite a distance you’ve made. I didn’t know you were a runner.” You hum, looking up at the dark blue sky. “But yes. I’m afraid you’re too late, Kim Seokjin.” You hold up the remote with a huge red button labeled ‘die’.

He sighs. “So this is really happening, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” You breathe. “It’s happening.”

There’s a long silence and you expect him to break into outrage. But instead, the pacifist unusually nods, a hum leaving the back of his throat. “Okay.”

You look over at him with a frown. “You’re okay with it?”

He weaves his hand through yours. “I’m still angry with you. I can’t believe you left me with a robot and you were planning on killing everyone off-”

“He was going to protect you!” You retort.

“And what about you?!” He shouts back, hurt inscribed across his features. “Why are you standing in the middle of nowhere?”

“I wanted to watch it happen.”

“And if you got hurt?! And if you died?”

“Then so be it.” You murmur. “I have lived a rather content life.”

“That’s-” He sharply inhales. “That’s not the point! Don’t you understand, Y/N? Whatever you do, I want to be there with you. I don’t want a robot to fulfill my needs. I want you! I want to be with you!” Jin declares, catching you off guard. “And if destroying the world is what you want then so be it! I still want you and only you. I just want to be with you. I love you, Y/N. Why don’t you see that?”

He leans his forehead down at your shoulder and you sigh, clutching his hand tighter in yours.

“I’m sorry. I love you too, Kim Seokjin. I may not be skilled with words but every moment with you has been worthwhile. Sincerely, you have given me the greatest honour of my life.”

“How much time do we have left?”

You look towards the dawn, the sun barely peeking out past the clouds. “I’d say about one minute left.”

“Your dome’s on fire.” He mutters.

You smile. “Is it now?”

“Elise couldn’t activate the sprinklers because you haven’t updated the system.”

“Dammit. I should’ve really fixed that.” You sigh. “There was a lot that we should have done.”

“Yeah. But what are you thinking?”

“I don’t know.” You admit. “Getting married I guess. Maybe having cute kids. I should have built a better home. I’m seriously getting sick of that iron piece of junk.”

Jin laughs. “I should have proposed sooner. I missed my chance.”

“It’s okay.” You ease his worries. “You know, Jin, you’ve taught me that humans aren’t disgusting like I initially thought. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

The sunlight begins to rise beyond the boundary. The sky is painted in orange, lilac and rose shades dancing on top the clouds. A breeze tickles your cheeks. You prepare yourself, inhaling sharply as you lean into Seokjin. He curls his arm around you, moving you closer as the two of you gaze out at the rising dawn together. “It’s happening.”

“I love you.” He cries into your hair, shutting his eyes as he braces for the shock.

The end of the world. Your dream achieved. Humanity is ridded forever. The planet is liberated.

It never happens.

“Open your eyes, silly.” You knock gently on his head and he peels back his lids, utterly confused as daybreak has begun. He’s still tangible, you’re still with him and no screams are heard from the distance.

“Wha-”

“I never said I pressed it.” You tease as his jaw drops. “We were just watching the sun rise, stupid. Did you really think I wanted to kill everyone? Sweetheart, we still haven’t lived till our old ages yet. There’s a lot of things left to do.”

He takes a step forward and you spin around, taking off around the field. “Y/N!” Kim Seokjin chases you to the end of the Earth. All you can do is laugh-

Laughter. It isn’t menacing. It isn’t ominous or threatening. It doesn’t loom darkness over sunlight, doesn’t rise goosebumps on skin or cause vicious animals to shudder. It’s the type of laugh...or rather...giggle that bubbles from the heart and swelled cheeks sore from smiling. It’s a sound so unlike your evil snickers. It’s genuine and light, floating like innocent clouds. And it’s your voice. It’s your laughter.

“I love you.”

The days with Kim Seokjin have only begun. At this rate, out of pure and unaltered happiness, he’s going to annihilate you first.

You’re content with letting it happen.

[a-dauntless-daffodil]

Between Us

Pidge and Allura accidentally start a 'Can't Sleep Too Busy Thinking About the Family I've Lost' club. 

Pidge blinks in the harsh light of the computer screen and tries to refocus both her eyes and mind connected to them. 

It's been 65 hours and 8 minutes since Pidge has managed more than two hours of consecutive sleep, and she's starting to think it might be starting to affect her.

Either that or Earthing's just weren't meant for Galra and Altean alphabets. 

Which could be possible, she supposes. 

But sleep deprivation seems the more likely cause.

It's also been 49 hours and 32 minutes since Pidge was kidnapped by a giant blue cat and named a defender of the universe by an alien princess hellbent on taking down the biggest empire the galaxy has ever seen, even if all she has to do it with is four strangers who can't even properly read the controls of the weapons they're supposed to be piloting.

Pidge has sneaking suspicion that Allura would happily chuck all five of them into a black hole if she thought it'd help them improve as Paladins and a team. 

Pidge is very grateful they managed to intentionally form Voltron yesterday. And that there are no nearby black holes to tempt Allura.

Shaking her head Pidge tries to shake the jumbled thoughts out of her mind as well.

Focus. 

Focus, focus, focus. 

Somewhere in this mess of data there might be a crumb that she could turn into a trail and trace across the galaxy to wherever Matt and Dad have been taken. 

If she can find them there's a real chance she can rescue them now.

She's got Shiro and his handy- Heh- Glara tech arm on her side. She's got a giant cat mecha of her own. She's got all sorts of incredible new tech to play with and re-purpose for her own uses. 

She's even got the promise of a princess that if Voltron gets the chance to save her family, they will- and Pidge is pretty sure she can trust Allura to keep that promise. Allura knows what it's like to lose people she loves. 

Princess Allura... 

It's weird how Pidge can see more of herself in an alien princess she's just met than she can in any of the four other humans in the Castle.

When the cryo pod had opened the first thing Allura had done was cry out-

"Father!"

And Pidge had been back on Earth, back in her mess of a room, back to being Katie Holt and waking up in a cold sweat with her brother's name on her lips, her father's face flashing before her eyes. Back to hearing the chant of 'they're gone they're gone they're gone' thundering in her ears in time to her hammering heartbeat. 

The memory makes Pidge swallow hard even now, the equivalent of two or so Earth days after being reminded of it. 

She hadn't known the stranger who had fallen into Lance's arms and put him in restraining hold a second later, but she did know what it's like to call out for your family like that. Panicked. Desperate. Terrified.

Things like that, like the memory she'd just fallen into for a second, make sleeping hard. 

On Earth Pidge had delt with that by working instead, and not much has changed since she got thrown into space. 

The only real difference is she might actually be able to do something with what she learns now. She might actually be able to find Matt and Dad bring them home to Earth and to Mom.

Mom. Mom who had probably heard by now that Katie's alias has gone missing. Mom who'd watched Katie build a scanner powerful enough to listen to the edge's of their solar system and who might be making another one of her own now.

Setting it up and listening just like Pidge had, sitting in the dark with Gunther in her lap, hoping to hear something, hearing nothing. Going home to an empty house. Going up to Matt's room or Katie's or the one she used to share with Dad and sitting there in the dark instead, looking around in the dim light that hides the dust and the year-old dates on all the science journals and pretending, for a second that they aren't really gone, that she hasn't been left behind.  

The thought makes Pidge feel sick. 

Pushing up her glasses she rubs impatiently at the telltale burn behind her eyes. 

She doesn't have time for this. 

Wallowing in homesickness and guilt isn't going to help her figure out where the other prisoners got sent, or make predicting the Galra's next move any easier. And she's going to have to do both if she wants to make any difference out here, here at the start of a war with a ruthless, tyranical empire that's been gaining strength and expanding for the last ten millennia. 

Scowling Pidge shoves her glasses back in place and bends over her computer again, determined to force the lines of code into making sense.

She's so focused on that one goal she almost doesn't see the flicker of movement to her right. 

Looking around she sees someone at the far end of corridor, walking slowly.

It's the princess.

And she looks... off. Odd. Wrong.

Maybe it's because she isn't striding around purposefully for once, maybe it has to do with the loose clothes Pidge assumes are an Altean nightgown. 

Or maybe it's the lost look on her face.

The way she doesn't look round or see Pidge even though Pidge is sitting right out in the open. Maybe it has to do with how she's trailing her fingers along the wall as she walks, feeling her way along as if the Castle might vanish if she doesn't keep checking on it.

In the end it doesn't matter what makes Pidge thinks Allura looks wrong. All that's important is Pidge thinks she knows why the princess is padding listlessly though her empty home when she's supposed to be sleeping.

It's something Pidge used to do a lot too.

She watches Allura turn a bend and disappear. She hesitates, unease twisting in her gut until she can't ignore it anymore. 

And then she gives in.

The laptop snaps quietly as she shuts it. Picking it up she hauls herself to her feet and sets off down the corridor, now focused on her new objective for the night.

Find Allura. See how she's doing, see if she's feeling okay, and if she's not-

And Pidge already knows she isn't.

-If she's not, then maybe talk to her about it a little. If she wants to. Or something. 

Just try, basically. Not because Pidge thinks she'll be any good at it but because she's the only one here, and she does know something about what Allura's feeling. 

That has to count for something. Right?

-

Allura wanders down the corridor, not heading anywhere in particular as she runs a hand along the wall, fingers trailing the familiar cool patterns and gaps. 

The Castle, her home, is filled with unfamiliar silence. 

It's a silence that has reigned here for longer than her family once ruled over Altea, but is alien to Allura. 

And so strange to find it here of all places. To walk down these halls without meeting anyone or hearing the constant announcements filtering over comms. To be followed by the empty echo of her own footsteps and turn each corner with no one there to meet her, no technician or guard or ambassador smiling as she greets them as the lifelong friends they so often are- 

Were, Allura corrects herself with a bitter smile. As they were when they lived, all of ten thousand years ago. 

But ten thousand years of silence has settled over the Castle of the Lions like a curse, and there is no one to greet her, no matter how many turns she takes.

Lifeless, she thinks as she passes a doorway and cool air opens up under her fingertips.

Even though she and Coran are still here, even with the new Paladins of Voltron making themselves comfortable in their rooms, the Castle is lifeless and dead compared to how she always knew it. With how it should be.

Coming to a stop at the door of the dining hall, Allura traces her gaze over the familiar long table and chairs, the ghosts she can still see sitting there.

The room has been washed clean of the evidence of that surprisingly fruitful food fight. Now there is no one and nothing to distract from what is missing, the people whose absence she can feel as if their silhouettes had been cut out of the air.

She has so many memories of this room. 

Memories of family instead of strangers turned allies, of safety instead of frustration undercut with fear and desperation. 

She has these memories, but they are not old enough to be just memories yet. 

They live and breath inside of her as fresh as if they had happened yesterday- Which they had, from her perspective if from no one else's. 

The gap between what she knows from reading the Castle logs and what she still expects to see as she walks it's halls is inconsolable. It makes her pull a little bit of the heavy silence into her chest with each breath she takes. It makes her eyes sting as she stares at the empty seats at the dining room table. It- 

"It feels weird, doesn't it?"

Allura spins around at the voice. 

"What?" She blurts out, the word coming out sharp as her eyes fall on the fluffy mess of Pidge's hair and the green and white of the Paladin's overlarge sweater.  

She hadn't expected anyone else to be awake and wandering the Castle halls at this time. Everyone aside from Coran should be resting in their quarters, and yet here is Pidge, still in day clothes and with an Earthling computer tucked under one arm.

"The Castle." The Paladin waves a hand at the dinning hall beyond Allura. 

"You lived here back before Zarkon killed everyone, right? So it probably feels weird to you now, empty but also full of the people who should still be here. Like walking through a graveyard."

Caught off guard by the interruption- as well as the fact that Pidge just spoken an entire sentence that did not have anything to do with technology, upgrades, or scans- Allura finds herself staring back blankly.  

Empty but full is a good way to put it. And the Castle's silence does remind Allura of a tomb, now she thinks of it. A tomb full of restless ghosts.

And at least one restless Paladin, apparently.

Drawing herself more properly upright Allura schools her expression into composure.  

"You should be resting." She tries to fix Pidge with a stern gaze as she says it. "Tomorrow will be busy as well, you five have still a lot of training to do before you can properly fight as Voltron."

Pidge, looking wholly unaffected by Allura's attempted stern look, raises an incredulous eyebrow. 

"And you've still got a whole Castle to de-bug, on top of putting us through our paces." The Paladin's tone is very dry. "I'm sorting though Rover's data trying to find some clues about where all the prisoners we weren't in time to rescue might have been sent. What's your excuse for still being up?"

Allura scowls. Of all the alien species who could have ended up in her Castle, why did have to end up being ones as argumentative as Earthlings? 

She opens her mouth to snap back, perhaps to even try ordering Pidge to sleep even though it likely wouldn't do any good- the 'no princess of ours' stance had apparently not changed at all since it spurred Allura into starting a rather childish but effective fight-

-and stops herself just in time.

The prisoners. 

She had forgotten, in the rush of reclaiming all the Lions and defeating a Galra battle ship, that Pidge had deviated from the original plan in order to rescue prisoners from that same ship. 

She had also forgotten the reason Pidge had later given for this. 

A missing father and brother. A family left broken. A very personal reason to hate the Galra and the empire Zarkon had built.

Looking at the Green Paladin again, Allura sees a hollowness to Pidge's face. 

Tired shadows linger under brown eyes, tight muscles clench unconsciously at Pidge's jaw and there's something familiar about the slight slump of Pidge's shoulders. Something Allura has glimpsed in every reflective surface she's passed since waking up to find her own family gone.

Allura feels her posture fail and droop again as all of her irritation with the Paladin drains away. 

"I don't know." She admits quietly. "And to answer your earlier question, yes. It does feel strange."

"Too quiet." Pidge suggests, voice flat and knowing.

Allura bows her head and nods.

"Too quiet." The words leaving her lips reluctantly, her throat growing a little tighter with each one. "And yet at the same time I feel as though I can still hear them, even see them sometimes, like glimpses at the corner of my sight."

What Allura sees out of the corner of her eye right now is an uncertain shift of white and green. 

Pidge hesitates, lingers for moment, and then steps over to join Allura at entrance of the dining hall, carefully keeping some distance between them by leaning on the opposite edge of the door frame.

A silence wraps around them. A silence Allura cannot stand to listen to right now.

"I did try to sleep."

Fingering the cuffs of her dressing gown she pictures the Castle mice as she had left them, curled up in a fluffy pile on her pillow.

"I know how important it is that we rest, so I did try. But..." 

Swallowing hard she feels her chest ache even at just the memory. 

"As I was drifting off I thought I heard him. My father. Wishing me goodnight. Just as, just as he always used to."

The pain in her throat makes Allura stumble and leaves her eyes stinging worse than ever. The dining hall blurs slightly and she binks furiously to bring it back into focus, pushing the threat of tears aside.

"And I know I can speak to a hologram of him whenever I want to, but that isn't really him, just a shadow of his memories..." Just another ghost. "...He can't... truly hear me now."

Her throat closes up. 

Shutting her eyes Allura focuses on controlling her breathing and keeping it steady. She does not want to cry. She is a little afraid that if she starts she will not be able to stop.

A long slow sigh fills the air. There's a soft thud as Pidge's head falls against the door frame.

"You'd think it'd be comforting or something, still having part of them with you." The Paladin's mutter is low with bitterness and anger.

"But it just hurts." Pidge goes on, sounding all the more angry for not having anything more concrete than imaginings and dreams to blame the hurt upon- A feeling Allura knows from when she woke up in room that was dark and empty and completely devoid of any sign of Alfor.  "Because the next second you remember they're not really there, they're gone, and in a way it's like-" Pidge's voice catches suddenly and goes quiet. 

Opening her eyes Allura watches the Paladin hunch inward and feels her own aching heart echoed in the the trembling line of Pidge's lips, the hard, brittle light burning in brown eyes that stare into nothing. 

"... it's like losing them all over again." She finishes for Pidge, for herself, for both of them.

A jerky nod from the Paladin. 

"Yeah." 

The word comes out rough and scratchy, makes Pidge flinch and flush with shame.

When Pidge glances over in embarrassment Allura very purposefully meets the Paladin's gaze, holds it so that Pidge can see the dampness at the corners of her own eyes.

Some of the tension fades from Pidge's face.

The sound of a throat clearing conscientiously is almost comically loud in the quiet and Allura can't help the faint upwards twist of her lips at hearing it now, right after sharing such a raw and delicate moment. 

But perhaps Pidge deliberately exaggerated the sound, because the Paladin's mouth is quirking up into a wry little smile of it's own.

"Loosing people fucking sucks, doens't it?"

Allura laughs- a bark of suprise at the wording and the tone Pidge put on so serious a sentiment- and surprises herself both with the sound and the realization that she can still laugh, even if just bitterly, after everything that has happened.

The air only rings for a moment with Allura strangely placed mirth, but it's long enough to turn Pidge's crooked smile into a small grin.  

Seeing that, Allura decides the break in the gloom between them is good thing. Good enough for it not to matter if it was achieved by a somewhat irreverent or inappropriate attitude, the dead and the missing would not know if they laughed, and would probably want them to not be utterly miserable in any case.

So Allura let's her smile grow into something real as well. 

"It is a pain in the yulschtrix." She says in the most agreeable tone she can muster, crossing her arms casually as she leans back against the door frame. 

"Which only makes me that much more eager to return Zarkon the favor ten times over."

Pidge snickers. Allura listens and feels an inordinate amount of satisfaction at having coaxed out the sharp little chuckle. 

Glass flashes startlingly bright under the dimmed rest-cycle lights as Pidge looks up at her, grin somehow becoming warmer and at the same time taking on a dangerous, eager edge.

"You know what, Allura?" 

The Paladin doesn't leave room for a reply before going on, tone friendly in a way Allura has never heard from Pidge before. 

"I think you're exactly the sort of royalty I can follow after all."

Allura stares. 

She isn't sure if she should take that as a clumsy compliment or a retroactive insult. 

Pidge probably meant it as the former though, considering the Paladin is a blunt and straightforward person with no hint thus far of passive-aggressive slyness, so Allura will treat it as such.

"...Good." Allura says finally. "You don't have much of a choice in it, but I'm glad to hear that from you anyway."

That gets another snort from Pidge, lighter and more amused than the last one.

"Fair point."

Pushing off the door frame the Paladin's arms lift in quick stretch. 

"I'm gonna go back to finishing this." Pidge says with a yawn, arms lowering and fingers tapping at the extraordinarily primitive Earthing computer. "And then I'll hopefully be tired enough to just black out as soon as my head hits the pillow. It was good talking to you, Princess. See you in the morning."

Offering up an awkward little wave the Paladin turns and heads down the corridor, obviously a bit rusty when it came to politely end a conversation.

Allura watches Pidge go with a smile. 

"Sleep well, Pidge."  

Almost at the corner, Pidge stops and slowly looks back, frowing slightly. 

The look makes Allura think the Paladin might be deliberating something internally. She tilts her head at Pidge, wanting to ask what the problem is but also not wanting to intterupt.

Brown eyes firm as they meet Allura's. The Green Paladin swallows, throat bobbing silently, and says softly-

"...Goodnight, Allura. Sleep well."

With that Pidge slips around the corner and out of sight.

And Allura is left staring, heart pounding out a slow but strangely thundering beat as she hears another voice whisper goodnight to her, a different someone she used to also have late night talks with when sleep proved hard to find.

For some reason remembering her father does not hurt as much as it did before. 

Taking a deep breath Allura casts one last glance back at the empty dining hall and then moves off down the corridor, opposite the way Pidge had gone and towards her own private rooms.

It was time to give getting some rest another try. 

Allura has the feeling she will have a better time of it, now.

Now the silence of the Castle has been lightened enough to let her breath without drowning. Now that she has a real voice to mix with and soften the one that has been haunting her, a tangible 'good night' from someone who is here, instead of the ghost of one from someone who was lost long ago.

She's glad Pidge found her tonight. 

Slightly awkward though it had been, she's grateful they talked, feels better for knowing that someone else understands this brand of loneliness. 

That is almost the same as not being alone in a way. Or at least that's how it feels to Allura. 

-

Back pressed against the wall, Pidge lets out a sigh of relief as she listens to the princess's footsteps fade away. 

"Mission success." Pidge whispers to herself. 

"You didn't accidentally make her cry and even got her to smile and laugh a little. Job well done, Gunderson. You also managed to avoid ugly crying in front of her- Maybe next time you can get through it without loosing half your body fluids in sweat, either."

Next time. Was there going to be a next time?

Was she going to start making a habit of searching the Castle at night, checking to see if Allura was up and wandering around again?

Probably, yeah. 

Talking to her hadn't just been nerve wracking, it'd been nice. It'd felt good. Like venting to a rubber duck or similar when she got stuck programming. And she'd even gotten to hear Allura use what sounded like an Altean swear word- Pidge mentally filed 'Yulschtrix' away for later research and possible use- and that in it's self is worth some embarrassment.

And getting to hear Allura laugh feels like it's worth a lot more, for some reason. 

Peeling herself off the wall Pidge cracks her stiff neck and sets off again, this time with a slight bounce in her step.

[rolandfontana]

‘When Most of Us Struggle, We Just Need a Shoulder to Lean’

How would you improve police-youth interactions in this country?

Plenty of academics and advocates have weighed in on this question, but the voices of young people are rarely heard.

So we decided to ask them.  In the first annual Youth Voices Contest sponsored by Strategies for Youth (SFY),  a  nonprofit committed to improving relations between cops and kids, over 120 youth, aged 12-18, from 10 states, submitted writing and artwork in response.

They dazzled us with their honesty, creativity, and ideas for change.

Our staff regularly interview youth about their interactions with law enforcement.  We play a computer-based game, Juvenile Justice Jeopardy, to help them understand the law, and to master strategies for engaging with police without getting arrested.

During our Policing the Teen Brain trainings for law enforcement, we engage young people in skits and controlled dialogue, that is, we give priority to what youth want to tell police, in order to explain why certain interactions with police “work” with young people and others provoke defiance and rage.

But we wanted to learn more, and saw this contest as a different forum for engaging young people, and hearing about their experiences with police.

The contestants—some of whom submitted pieces from detention centers—wrote and drew stories of fear, of powerlessness, and of feeling disrespected. Over and over again, these young people told us how they felt dismissed, ignored, and automatically presumed guilty.

Many noted that police neither comprehended, nor cared, about the anguish and insecurity so prevalent in their lives.

One of the most upsetting lines came from a 14-year-old boy in a Texas detention center:

Don’t think I’m dissing the law, Because some cops are good; protect and serve for all But some cops take advantage. If they respect us, then it’s likewise they can have it. I’m not sure why cops half the time be mean

When most of us struggle, we just need a shoulder to lean.

  Kaleb Chew

But not all of their responses were critical or negative. One winning contestant in the 12-14 year old category, Kaleb J’bez Chew, an eighth-grade student at  McKinley Middle Magnet Performing Arts School in Baton Rouge, LA.  created a graphic arts storyline of an officer exiting his car and challenging a teen to a basketball game after the teen mocked his age.

The drawing ended with the two of them shaking hands.

To see the full version of his drawing, please click here

Evelina Cheng, a seventh-grader at Norwood Jr. High School in Sacramento, CA., described a police officer who uses “developmentally competent” approaches, hugs cancer patients whom he visits, and explains the law to the teenagers he interacts with.

Evelina Cheng

Kaleb and Evelina tied for their artwork submissions in the 12-14-year-old category, and will share the prize purse, winning $500 each.

The entries, which were stripped of all identifying information except the contestant’s age (name, town, school, gender) to remove any possible bias, were judged by 30 people around the country.

In the four-part drawing of Azaria Porter, the winner of the 15-18-year-old art category, we can see an evolving recognition of the complexity of youth-police interactions.

In her final drawing, Azaria, a 17-year-old junior at Health Sciences Charter School in Buffalo, N.Y., won first place in the 15-18-year-old art category and $1,500.

Azaria Porter

She traced a renowned photograph of a Seattle police officer comforting a crying child during a post-Ferguson rally.

This complexity is deftly addressed in the final lines of 13-year-old Alexie Boursiquot’s poem. Alexie, an eighth-grader at Dunloggin Middle School in Ellicott City, Md.,won first prize and $1,000 in the 12-14-year-old category, for her moving appeal to youth to be calmer with officers, and to officers to be slower and more reluctant to pull their weapon:

Unless We look them in the eye, Put our hands in the sky, Don’t run, don’t try to hide, It would save countless lives Unless They would look, but not judge Hold not a single grudge, The gun would never have to budge

Alexie Boursiquot

The essays submitted by 15-18 year olds revealed a surprisingly nuanced, sober and mature understanding of the dangers inherent in police-youth interactions and of the violence so common in their communities.

Baltimore resident Keyma Flight, 17, who identifies herself as “an activist and social butterfly, and an advocate for black rights, mental health care, and LGBT+ rights,” describes about following a teacher’s direction to send a letter to a school resource officer who has punched her friend in the eye.

Her letter, which earned her the top place in the 15-18 year-old category and a $1,500 prize, conveys both resignation and determination to communicate what adults either can’t or won’t see, and refuse to make right:

I didn’t ask to be an activist. But I didn’t ask to be oppressed for my skin tone either. I think I’d take the former any day…It feels like I have to be [an activist] in order to tell my teachers, parents, police officers, that I deserve to feel human and not a chain in the system…

For once I’d like to see an officer writing, talking to the youth. Unfiltered and morals over code.  I’d like to not feel like an activist for once, but a person.

Keyma Flight

Keyma’s essay confirms SFY’s resolve to lighten her burden and the burden of so many of her peers.

But all of the work by these young people help to show us the path forward.

Lisa H. Thurau is executive director of Strategies for Youth. In 2020, for the Second Annual Youth Voices Contest, SFY hopes to double the number of youth participating, and will create a new category for submissions: short films.  All the winners’ work is available on SFY’s homepage at www.strategiesforyouth.org

‘When Most of Us Struggle, We Just Need a Shoulder to Lean’ syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

[trendingnewsb]

Inside the Race to Hack the Human Brain

In an ordinary hospital room in Los Angeles, a young woman named Lauren Dickerson waits for her chance to make history.

She’s 25 years old, a teacher’s assistant in a middle school, with warm eyes and computer cables emerging like futuristic dreadlocks from the bandages wrapped around her head. Three days earlier, a neurosurgeon drilled 11 holes through her skull, slid 11 wires the size of spaghetti into her brain, and connected the wires to a bank of computers. Now she’s caged in by bed rails, with plastic tubes snaking up her arm and medical monitors tracking her vital signs. She tries not to move.

The room is packed. As a film crew prepares to document the day’s events, two separate teams of specialists get ready to work—medical experts from an elite neuroscience center at the University of Southern California and scientists from a technology company called Kernel. The medical team is looking for a way to treat Dickerson’s seizures, which an elaborate regimen of epilepsy drugs controlled well enough until last year, when their effects began to dull. They’re going to use the wires to search Dickerson’s brain for the source of her seizures. The scientists from Kernel are there for a different reason: They work for Bryan Johnson, a 40-year-old tech entrepreneur who sold his business for $800 million and decided to pursue an insanely ambitious dream—he wants to take control of evolution and create a better human. He intends to do this by building a “neuroprosthesis,” a device that will allow us to learn faster, remember more, “coevolve” with artificial intelligence, unlock the secrets of telepathy, and maybe even connect into group minds. He’d also like to find a way to download skills such as martial arts, Matrix-style. And he wants to sell this invention at mass-market prices so it’s not an elite product for the rich.

Right now all he has is an algorithm on a hard drive. When he describes the neuroprosthesis to reporters and conference audiences, he often uses the media-friendly expression “a chip in the brain,” but he knows he’ll never sell a mass-market product that depends on drilling holes in people’s skulls. Instead, the algorithm will eventually connect to the brain through some variation of noninvasive interfaces being developed by scientists around the world, from tiny sensors that could be injected into the brain to genetically engineered neurons that can exchange data wirelessly with a hatlike receiver. All of these proposed interfaces are either pipe dreams or years in the future, so in the meantime he’s using the wires attached to Dickerson’s hippo­campus to focus on an even bigger challenge: what you say to the brain once you’re connected to it.

That’s what the algorithm does. The wires embedded in Dickerson’s head will record the electrical signals that Dickerson’s neurons send to one another during a series of simple memory tests. The signals will then be uploaded onto a hard drive, where the algorithm will translate them into a digital code that can be analyzed and enhanced—or rewritten—with the goal of improving her memory. The algorithm will then translate the code back into electrical signals to be sent up into the brain. If it helps her spark a few images from the memories she was having when the data was gathered, the researchers will know the algorithm is working. Then they’ll try to do the same thing with memories that take place over a period of time, something nobody’s ever done before. If those two tests work, they’ll be on their way to deciphering the patterns and processes that create memories.

Although other scientists are using similar techniques on simpler problems, Johnson is the only person trying to make a commercial neurological product that would enhance memory. In a few minutes, he’s going to conduct his first human test. For a commercial memory prosthesis, it will be the first human test. “It’s a historic day,” Johnson says. “I’m insanely excited about it.”

For the record, just in case this improbable experiment actually works, the date is January 30, 2017.

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At this point, you may be wondering if Johnson’s just another fool with too much money and an impossible dream. I wondered the same thing the first time I met him. He seemed like any other California dude, dressed in the usual jeans, sneakers, and T-shirt, full of the usual boyish enthusiasms. His wild pronouncements about “reprogramming the operating system of the world” seemed downright goofy.

But you soon realize this casual style is either camouflage or wishful thinking. Like many successful people, some brilliant and some barely in touch with reality, Johnson has endless energy and the distributed intelligence of an octopus—one tentacle reaches for the phone, another for his laptop, a third scouts for the best escape route. When he starts talking about his neuroprosthesis, they team up and squeeze till you turn blue.

And there is that $800 million that PayPal shelled out for Braintree, the online-­payment company Johnson started when he was 29 and sold when he was 36. And the $100 million he is investing into Kernel, the company he started to pursue this project. And the decades of animal tests to back up his sci-fi ambitions: Researchers have learned how to restore memories lost to brain damage, plant false memories, control the motions of animals through human thought, control appetite and aggression, induce sensations of pleasure and pain, even how to beam brain signals from one animal to another animal thousands of miles away.

And Johnson isn’t dreaming this dream alone—at this moment, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are weeks from announcing their own brain-hacking projects, the military research group known as Darpa already has 10 under way, and there’s no doubt that China and other countries are pursuing their own. But unlike Johnson, they’re not inviting reporters into any hospital rooms.

Here’s the gist of every public statement Musk has made about his project: (1) He wants to connect our brains to computers with a mysterious device called “neural lace.” (2) The name of the company he started to build it is Neuralink.

Thanks to a presentation at last spring’s F8 conference, we know a little more about what Zuckerberg is doing at Facebook: (1) The project was until recently overseen by Regina Dugan, a former director of Darpa and Google’s Advanced Technology group. (2) The team is working out of Building 8, Zuckerberg’s research lab for moon-shot projects. (3) They’re working on a noninvasive “brain–computer speech-to-text interface” that uses “optical imaging” to read the signals of neurons as they form words, find a way to translate those signals into code, and then send the code to a computer. (4) If it works, we’ll be able to “type” 100 words a minute just by thinking.

As for Darpa, we know that some of its projects are improvements on existing technology and some—such as an interface to make soldiers learn faster—sound just as futuristic as Johnson’s. But we don’t know much more than that. That leaves Johnson as our only guide, a job he says he’s taken on because he thinks the world needs to be prepared for what is coming.

All of these ambitious plans face the same obstacle, however: The brain has 86 billion neurons, and nobody understands how they all work. Scientists have made impressive progress uncovering, and even manipulating, the neural circuitry behind simple brain functions, but things such as imagination or creativity—and memory—are so complex that all the neuroscientists in the world may never solve them. That’s why a request for expert opinions on the viability of Johnson’s plans got this response from John Donoghue, the director of the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva: “I’m cautious,” he said. “It’s as if I asked you to translate something from Swahili to Finnish. You’d be trying to go from one unknown language into another unknown language.” To make the challenge even more daunting, he added, all the tools used in brain research are as primitive as “a string between two paper cups.” So Johnson has no idea if 100 neurons or 100,000 or 10 billion control complex brain functions. On how most neurons work and what kind of codes they use to communicate, he’s closer to “Da-da” than “see Spot run.” And years or decades will pass before those mysteries are solved, if ever. To top it all off, he has no scientific background. Which puts his foot on the banana peel of a very old neuroscience joke: “If the brain was simple enough for us to understand, we’d be too stupid to understand it.”

Goran Factory

I don’t need telepathy to know what you’re thinking now—there’s nothing more annoying than the big dreams of tech optimists. Their schemes for eternal life and floating libertarian nations are adolescent fantasies; their digital revolution seems to be destroying more jobs than it created, and the fruits of their scientific fathers aren’t exactly encouraging either. “Coming soon, from the people who brought you nuclear weapons!”

But Johnson’s motives go to a deep and surprisingly tender place. Born into a devout Mormon community in Utah, he learned an elaborate set of rules that are still so vivid in his mind that he brought them up in the first minutes of our first meeting: “If you get baptized at the age of 8, point. If you get into the priesthood at the age of 12, point. If you avoid pornography, point. Avoid masturbation? Point. Go to church every Sunday? Point.” The reward for a high point score was heaven, where a dutiful Mormon would be reunited with his loved ones and gifted with endless creativity.

When he was 4, Johnson’s father left the church and divorced his mother. Johnson skips over the painful details, but his father told me his loss of faith led to a long stretch of drug and alcohol abuse, and his mother said she was so broke that she had to send Johnson to school in handmade clothes. His father remembers the letters Johnson started sending him when he was 11, a new one every week: “Always saying 100 different ways, ‘I love you, I need you.’ How he knew as a kid the one thing you don’t do with an addict or an alcoholic is tell them what a dirtbag they are, I’ll never know.”

Johnson was still a dutiful believer when he graduated from high school and went to Ecuador on his mission, the traditional Mormon rite of passage. He prayed constantly and gave hundreds of speeches about Joseph Smith, but he became more and more ashamed about trying to convert sick and hungry children with promises of a better life in heaven. Wouldn’t it be better to ease their suffering here on earth?

“Bryan came back a changed boy,” his father says.

Soon he had a new mission, self-assigned. His sister remembers his exact words: “He said he wanted to be a millionaire by the time he was 30 so he could use those resources to change the world.”

His first move was picking up a degree at Brigham Young University, selling cell phones to help pay the tuition and inhaling every book that seemed to promise a way forward. One that left a lasting impression was Endurance, the story of Ernest Shackleton’s botched journey to the South Pole—if sheer grit could get a man past so many hardships, he would put his faith in sheer grit. He married “a nice Mormon girl,” fathered three Mormon children, and took a job as a door-to-door salesman to support them. He won a prize for Salesman of the Year and started a series of businesses that went broke—which convinced him to get a business degree at the University of Chicago.

When he graduated in 2008, he stayed in Chicago and started Braintree, perfecting his image as a world-beating Mormon entrepreneur. By that time, his father was sober and openly sharing his struggles, and Johnson was the one hiding his dying faith behind a very well-protected wall. He couldn’t sleep, ate like a wolf, and suffered intense headaches, fighting back with a long series of futile cures: antidepressants, biofeedback, an energy healer, even blind obedience to the rules of his church.

Bryan Johnson has long been obsessed with “reprogramming” the operating system of the world.

Joe Pugliese/August Image

In 2012, at the age of 35, Johnson hit bottom. In his misery, he remembered Shackleton and seized a final hope—maybe he could find an answer by putting himself through a painful ordeal. He planned a trip to Mount Kilimanjaro, and on the second day of the climb he got a stomach virus. On the third day he got altitude sickness. When he finally made it to the peak, he collapsed in tears and then had to be carried down on a stretcher. It was time to reprogram his operating system.

The way Johnson tells it, he started by dropping the world-beater pose that hid his weakness and doubt. And although this may all sound a bit like a dramatic motivational talk at a TED conference, especially since Johnson still projects the image of a world-beating entrepreneur, this much is certain: During the following 18 months, he divorced his wife, sold Braintree, and severed his last ties to the church. To cushion the impact on his children, he bought a house nearby and visited them almost daily. He knew he was repeating his father’s mistakes but saw no other option—he was either going to die inside or start living the life he always wanted.

He started with the pledge he made when he came back from Ecuador, experimenting first with a good-government initiative in Washington and pivoting, after its inevitable doom, to a venture fund for “quantum leap” companies inventing futuristic products such as human-­organ-­mimicking silicon chips. But even if all his quantum leaps landed, they wouldn’t change the operating system of the world.

Finally, the Big Idea hit: If the root problems of humanity begin in the human mind, let’s change our minds.

Fantastic things were happening in neuroscience. Some of them sounded just like miracles from the Bible—with prosthetic legs controlled by thought and microchips connected to the visual cortex, scientists were learning to help the lame walk and the blind see. At the University of Toronto, a neurosurgeon named Andres Lozano slowed, and in some cases reversed, the cognitive declines of Alzheimer’s patients using deep brain stimulation. At a hospital in upstate New York, a neuro­technologist named Gerwin Schalk asked computer engineers to record the firing patterns of the auditory neurons of people listening to Pink Floyd. When the engineers turned those patterns back into sound waves, they produced a single that sounded almost exactly like “Another Brick in the Wall.” At the University of Washington, two professors in different buildings played a videogame together with the help of electroencephalography caps that fired off electrical pulses—when one professor thought about firing digital bullets, the other one felt an impulse to push the Fire button.

Johnson also heard about a biomedical engineer named Theodore Berger. During nearly 20 years of research, Berger and his collaborators at USC and Wake Forest University developed a neuroprosthesis to improve memory in rats. It didn’t look like much when he started testing it in 2002—just a slice of rat brain and a computer chip. But the chip held an algorithm that could translate the firing patterns of neurons into a kind of Morse code that corresponded with actual memories. Nobody had ever done that before, and some people found the very idea offensive—it’s so deflating to think of our most precious thoughts reduced to ones and zeros. Prominent medical ethicists accused Berger of tampering with the essence of identity. But the implications were huge: If Berger could turn the language of the brain into code, perhaps he could figure out how to fix the part of the code associated with neurological diseases.

When one professor thought about firing digital bullets, the other one felt an impulse to push the Fire button.

In rats, as in humans, firing patterns in the hippocampus generate a signal or code that, somehow, the brain recognizes as a long-term memory. Berger trained a group of rats to perform a task and studied the codes that formed. He learned that rats remembered a task better when their neurons sent “strong code,” a term he explains by comparing it to a radio signal: At low volume you don’t hear all of the words, but at high volume everything comes through clear. He then studied the difference in the codes generated by the rats when they remembered to do something correctly and when they forgot. In 2011, through a breakthrough experiment conducted on rats trained to push a lever, he demonstrated he could record the initial memory codes, feed them into an algorithm, and then send stronger codes back into the rats’ brains. When he finished, the rats that had forgotten how to push the lever suddenly remembered.

Five years later, Berger was still looking for the support he needed for human trials. That’s when Johnson showed up. In August 2016, he announced he would pledge $100 million of his fortune to create Kernel and that Berger would join the company as chief science officer. After learning about USC’s plans to implant wires in Dickerson’s brain to battle her epilepsy, Johnson approached Charles Liu, the head of the prestigious neurorestoration division at the USC School of Medicine and the lead doctor on Dickerson’s trial. Johnson asked him for permission to test the algorithm on Dickerson while she had Liu’s wires in her hippocampus—in between Liu’s own work sessions, of course. As it happened, Liu had dreamed about expanding human powers with technology ever since he got obsessed with The Six Million Dollar Man as a kid. He helped Johnson get Dickerson’s consent and convinced USC’s institutional research board to approve the experiment. At the end of 2016, Johnson got the green light. He was ready to start his first human trial.

Goran Factory

In the hospital room, Dickerson is waiting for the experiments to begin, and I ask her how she feels about being a human lab rat.

“If I’m going to be here,” she says, “I might as well do something useful.”

Useful? This starry-eyed dream of cyborg supermen? “You know he’s trying to make humans smarter, right?”

“Isn’t that cool?” she answers.

Over by the computers, I ask one of the scientists about the multi­colored grid on the screen. “Each one of these squares is an electrode that’s in her brain,” one says. Every time a neuron close to one of the wires in Dickerson’s brain fires, he explains, a pink line will jump in the relevant box.

Johnson’s team is going to start with simple memory tests. “You’re going to be shown words,” the scientist explains to her. “Then there will be some math problems to make sure you’re not rehearsing the words in your mind. Try to remember as many words as you can.”

One of the scientists hands Dickerson a computer tablet, and everyone goes quiet. Dickerson stares at the screen to take in the words. A few minutes later, after the math problem scrambles her mind, she tries to remember what she’d read. “Smoke … egg … mud … pearl.”

Next, they try something much harder, a group of memories in a sequence. As one of Kernel’s scientists explains to me, they can only gather so much data from wires connected to 30 or 40 neurons. A single face shouldn’t be too hard, but getting enough data to reproduce memories that stretch out like a scene in a movie is probably impossible.

Sitting by the side of Dickerson’s bed, a Kernel scientist takes on the challenge. “Could you tell me the last time you went to a restaurant?”

“It was probably five or six days ago,” Dickerson says. “I went to a Mexican restaurant in Mission Hills. We had a bunch of chips and salsa.”

He presses for more. As she dredges up other memories, another Kernel scientist hands me a pair of headphones connected to the computer bank. All I hear at first is a hissing sound. After 20 or 30 seconds go by I hear a pop.

“That’s a neuron firing,” he says.

As Dickerson continues, I listen to the mysterious language of the brain, the little pops that move our legs and trigger our dreams. She remembers a trip to Costco and the last time it rained, and I hear the sounds of Costco and rain.

When Dickerson’s eyelids start sinking, the medical team says she’s had enough and Johnson’s people start packing up. Over the next few days, their algorithm will turn Dickerson’s synaptic activity into code. If the codes they send back into Dickerson’s brain make her think of dipping a few chips in salsa, Johnson might be one step closer to reprogramming the operating system of the world.

But look, there’s another banana peel­—after two days of frantic coding, Johnson’s team returns to the hospital to send the new code into Dickerson’s brain. Just when he gets word that they can get an early start, a message arrives: It’s over. The experiment has been placed on “administrative hold.” The only reason USC would give in the aftermath was an issue between Johnson and Berger. Berger would later tell me he had no idea the experiment was under way and that Johnson rushed into it without his permission. Johnson said he is mystified by Berger’s accusations. “I don’t know how he could not have known about it. We were working with his whole lab, with his whole team.” The one thing they both agree on is that their relationship fell apart shortly afterward, with Berger leaving the company and taking his algorithm with him. He blames the break entirely on Johnson. “Like most investors, he wanted a high rate of return as soon as possible. He didn’t realize he’d have to wait seven or eight years to get FDA approval—I would have thought he would have looked that up.” But Johnson didn’t want to slow down. He had bigger plans, and he was in a hurry.

Goran Factory

Eight months later, I go back to California to see where Johnson has ended up. He seems a little more relaxed. On the whiteboard behind his desk at Kernel’s new offices in Los Angeles, someone’s scrawled a playlist of songs in big letters. “That was my son,” he says. “He interned here this summer.” Johnson is a year into a romance with Taryn Southern, a charismatic 31-year-old performer and film producer. And since his break with Berger, Johnson has tripled Kernel’s staff—he’s up to 36 employees now—adding experts in fields like chip design and computational neuroscience. His new science adviser is Ed Boyden, the director of MIT’s Synthetic Neurobiology Group and a superstar in the neuroscience world. Down in the basement of the new office building, there’s a Dr. Frankenstein lab where scientists build prototypes and try them out on glass heads.

When the moment seems right, I bring up the purpose of my visit. “You said you had something to show me?”

Johnson hesitates. I’ve already promised not to reveal certain sensitive details, but now I have to promise again. Then he hands me two small plastic display cases. Inside, two pairs of delicate twisty wires rest on beds of foam rubber. They look scientific but also weirdly biological, like the antennae of some futuristic bug-bot.

I’m looking at the prototypes for Johnson’s brand-new neuromodulator. On one level, it’s just a much smaller version of the deep brain stimulators and other neuromodulators currently on the market. But unlike a typical stimulator, which just fires pulses of electricity, Johnson’s is designed to read the signals that neurons send to other neurons—and not just the 100 neurons the best of the current tools can harvest, but perhaps many more. That would be a huge advance in itself, but the implications are even bigger: With Johnson’s neuromodulator, scientists could collect brain data from thousands of patients, with the goal of writing precise codes to treat a variety of neurological diseases.

In the short term, Johnson hopes his neuromodulator will help him “optimize the gold rush” in neurotechnology—financial analysts are forecasting a $27 billion market for neural devices within six years, and countries around the world are committing billions to the escalating race to decode the brain. In the long term, Johnson believes his signal-reading neuromodulator will advance his bigger plans in two ways: (1) by giving neuroscientists a vast new trove of data they can use to decode the workings of the brain and (2) by generating the huge profits Kernel needs to launch a steady stream of innovative and profitable neural tools, keeping the company both solvent and plugged into every new neuroscience breakthrough. With those two achievements in place, Johnson can watch and wait until neuroscience reaches the level of sophistication he needs to jump-start human evolution with a mind-enhancing neuroprosthesis.

Liu, the neurologist with the Six Million Dollar Man dreams, compares Johnson’s ambition to flying. “Going back to Icarus, human beings have always wanted to fly. We don’t grow wings, so we build a plane. And very often these solutions will have even greater capabilities than the ones nature created—no bird ever flew to Mars.” But now that humanity is learning how to reengineer its own capabilities, we really can choose how we evolve. “We have to wrap our minds around that. It’s the most revolutionary thing in the world.”

The crucial ingredient is the profit motive, which always drives rapid innovation in science. That’s why Liu thinks Johnson could be the one to give us wings. “I’ve never met anyone with his urgency to take this to market,” he says.

When will this revolution arrive? “Sooner than you think,” Liu says.

Now we’re back where we began. Is Johnson a fool? Is he just wasting his time and fortune on a crazy dream? One thing is certain: Johnson will never stop trying to optimize the world. At the pristine modern house he rents in Venice Beach, he pours out idea after idea. He even took skepticism as helpful information—when I tell him his magic neuroprosthesis sounds like another version of the Mormon heaven, he’s delighted.

“Good point! I love it!”

He never has enough data. He even tries to suck up mine. What are my goals? My regrets? My pleasures? My doubts?

Every so often, he pauses to examine my “constraint program.”

“One, you have this biological disposition of curiosity. You want data. And when you consume that data, you apply boundaries of meaning-making.”

“Are you trying to hack me?” I ask.

Not at all, he says. He just wants us to share our algorithms. “That’s the fun in life,” he says, “this endless unraveling of the puzzle. And I think, ‘What if we could make the data transfer rate a thousand times faster? What if my consciousness is only seeing a fraction of reality? What kind of stories would we tell?’ ”

In his free time, Johnson is writing a book about taking control of human evolution and looking on the bright side of our mutant humanoid future. He brings this up every time I talk to him. For a long time I lumped this in with his dreamy ideas about reprogramming the operating system of the world: The future is coming faster than anyone thinks, our glorious digital future is calling, the singularity is so damn near that we should be cheering already—a spiel that always makes me want to hit him with a copy of the Unabomber Manifesto.

But his urgency today sounds different, so I press him on it: “How would you respond to Ted Kaczynski’s fears? The argument that technology is a cancerlike development that’s going to eat itself?”

“I would say he’s potentially on the wrong side of history.”

“Yeah? What about climate change?”

“That’s why I feel so driven,” he answered. “We’re in a race against time.”

He asks me for my opinion. I tell him I think he’ll still be working on cyborg brainiacs when the starving hordes of a ravaged planet destroy his lab looking for food—and for the first time, he reveals the distress behind his hope. The truth is, he has the same fear. The world has gotten way too complex, he says. The financial system is shaky, the population is aging, robots want our jobs, artificial intelligence is catching up, and climate change is coming fast. “It just feels out of control,” he says.

He’s invoked these dystopian ideas before, but only as a prelude to his sales pitch. This time he’s closer to pleading. “Why wouldn’t we embrace our own self-directed evolution? Why wouldn’t we just do everything we can to adapt faster?”

I turn to a more cheerful topic. If he ever does make a neuroprosthesis to revolutionize how we use our brain, which superpower would he give us first? Telepathy? Group minds? Instant kung fu?

He answers without hesitation. Because our thinking is so constrained by the familiar, he says, we can’t imagine a new world that isn’t just another version of the world we know. But we have to imagine something far better than that. So he’d try to make us more creative—that would put a new frame on everything.

Ambition like that can take you a long way. It can drive you to try to reach the South Pole when everyone says it’s impossible. It can take you up Mount Kilimanjaro when you’re close to dying and help you build an $800 million company by the time you’re 36. And Johnson’s ambitions drive straight for the heart of humanity’s most ancient dream: For operating system, substitute enlightenment.

By hacking our brains, he wants to make us one with everything.

John H. Richardson is the author of My Father the Spy. This is his first piece for WIRED.

This article appears in the December issue. Subscribe now.

Listen to this story, and other WIRED features, on the Audm app.

Wardrobe styling by Michael Cioffoletti/Art Department; Grooming by Hee Soo Kwon/The Rex Agency using Malin + Goetz; blazer: Vitale Barberis Canonico from Barney’s New York Beverly Hills; Sweater: Rag and Bone from Bloomingdale’s

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Inside the Race to Hack the Human Brain

In an ordinary hospital room in Los Angeles, a young woman named Lauren Dickerson waits for her chance to make history.

She’s 25 years old, a teacher’s assistant in a middle school, with warm eyes and computer cables emerging like futuristic dreadlocks from the bandages wrapped around her head. Three days earlier, a neurosurgeon drilled 11 holes through her skull, slid 11 wires the size of spaghetti into her brain, and connected the wires to a bank of computers. Now she’s caged in by bed rails, with plastic tubes snaking up her arm and medical monitors tracking her vital signs. She tries not to move.

The room is packed. As a film crew prepares to document the day’s events, two separate teams of specialists get ready to work—medical experts from an elite neuroscience center at the University of Southern California and scientists from a technology company called Kernel. The medical team is looking for a way to treat Dickerson’s seizures, which an elaborate regimen of epilepsy drugs controlled well enough until last year, when their effects began to dull. They’re going to use the wires to search Dickerson’s brain for the source of her seizures. The scientists from Kernel are there for a different reason: They work for Bryan Johnson, a 40-year-old tech entrepreneur who sold his business for $800 million and decided to pursue an insanely ambitious dream—he wants to take control of evolution and create a better human. He intends to do this by building a “neuroprosthesis,” a device that will allow us to learn faster, remember more, “coevolve” with artificial intelligence, unlock the secrets of telepathy, and maybe even connect into group minds. He’d also like to find a way to download skills such as martial arts, Matrix-style. And he wants to sell this invention at mass-market prices so it’s not an elite product for the rich.

Right now all he has is an algorithm on a hard drive. When he describes the neuroprosthesis to reporters and conference audiences, he often uses the media-friendly expression “a chip in the brain,” but he knows he’ll never sell a mass-market product that depends on drilling holes in people’s skulls. Instead, the algorithm will eventually connect to the brain through some variation of noninvasive interfaces being developed by scientists around the world, from tiny sensors that could be injected into the brain to genetically engineered neurons that can exchange data wirelessly with a hatlike receiver. All of these proposed interfaces are either pipe dreams or years in the future, so in the meantime he’s using the wires attached to Dickerson’s hippo­campus to focus on an even bigger challenge: what you say to the brain once you’re connected to it.

That’s what the algorithm does. The wires embedded in Dickerson’s head will record the electrical signals that Dickerson’s neurons send to one another during a series of simple memory tests. The signals will then be uploaded onto a hard drive, where the algorithm will translate them into a digital code that can be analyzed and enhanced—or rewritten—with the goal of improving her memory. The algorithm will then translate the code back into electrical signals to be sent up into the brain. If it helps her spark a few images from the memories she was having when the data was gathered, the researchers will know the algorithm is working. Then they’ll try to do the same thing with memories that take place over a period of time, something nobody’s ever done before. If those two tests work, they’ll be on their way to deciphering the patterns and processes that create memories.

Although other scientists are using similar techniques on simpler problems, Johnson is the only person trying to make a commercial neurological product that would enhance memory. In a few minutes, he’s going to conduct his first human test. For a commercial memory prosthesis, it will be the first human test. “It’s a historic day,” Johnson says. “I’m insanely excited about it.”

For the record, just in case this improbable experiment actually works, the date is January 30, 2017.

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At this point, you may be wondering if Johnson’s just another fool with too much money and an impossible dream. I wondered the same thing the first time I met him. He seemed like any other California dude, dressed in the usual jeans, sneakers, and T-shirt, full of the usual boyish enthusiasms. His wild pronouncements about “reprogramming the operating system of the world” seemed downright goofy.

But you soon realize this casual style is either camouflage or wishful thinking. Like many successful people, some brilliant and some barely in touch with reality, Johnson has endless energy and the distributed intelligence of an octopus—one tentacle reaches for the phone, another for his laptop, a third scouts for the best escape route. When he starts talking about his neuroprosthesis, they team up and squeeze till you turn blue.

And there is that $800 million that PayPal shelled out for Braintree, the online-­payment company Johnson started when he was 29 and sold when he was 36. And the $100 million he is investing into Kernel, the company he started to pursue this project. And the decades of animal tests to back up his sci-fi ambitions: Researchers have learned how to restore memories lost to brain damage, plant false memories, control the motions of animals through human thought, control appetite and aggression, induce sensations of pleasure and pain, even how to beam brain signals from one animal to another animal thousands of miles away.

And Johnson isn’t dreaming this dream alone—at this moment, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are weeks from announcing their own brain-hacking projects, the military research group known as Darpa already has 10 under way, and there’s no doubt that China and other countries are pursuing their own. But unlike Johnson, they’re not inviting reporters into any hospital rooms.

Here’s the gist of every public statement Musk has made about his project: (1) He wants to connect our brains to computers with a mysterious device called “neural lace.” (2) The name of the company he started to build it is Neuralink.

Thanks to a presentation at last spring’s F8 conference, we know a little more about what Zuckerberg is doing at Facebook: (1) The project was until recently overseen by Regina Dugan, a former director of Darpa and Google’s Advanced Technology group. (2) The team is working out of Building 8, Zuckerberg’s research lab for moon-shot projects. (3) They’re working on a noninvasive “brain–computer speech-to-text interface” that uses “optical imaging” to read the signals of neurons as they form words, find a way to translate those signals into code, and then send the code to a computer. (4) If it works, we’ll be able to “type” 100 words a minute just by thinking.

As for Darpa, we know that some of its projects are improvements on existing technology and some—such as an interface to make soldiers learn faster—sound just as futuristic as Johnson’s. But we don’t know much more than that. That leaves Johnson as our only guide, a job he says he’s taken on because he thinks the world needs to be prepared for what is coming.

All of these ambitious plans face the same obstacle, however: The brain has 86 billion neurons, and nobody understands how they all work. Scientists have made impressive progress uncovering, and even manipulating, the neural circuitry behind simple brain functions, but things such as imagination or creativity—and memory—are so complex that all the neuroscientists in the world may never solve them. That’s why a request for expert opinions on the viability of Johnson’s plans got this response from John Donoghue, the director of the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva: “I’m cautious,” he said. “It’s as if I asked you to translate something from Swahili to Finnish. You’d be trying to go from one unknown language into another unknown language.” To make the challenge even more daunting, he added, all the tools used in brain research are as primitive as “a string between two paper cups.” So Johnson has no idea if 100 neurons or 100,000 or 10 billion control complex brain functions. On how most neurons work and what kind of codes they use to communicate, he’s closer to “Da-da” than “see Spot run.” And years or decades will pass before those mysteries are solved, if ever. To top it all off, he has no scientific background. Which puts his foot on the banana peel of a very old neuroscience joke: “If the brain was simple enough for us to understand, we’d be too stupid to understand it.”

Goran Factory

I don’t need telepathy to know what you’re thinking now—there’s nothing more annoying than the big dreams of tech optimists. Their schemes for eternal life and floating libertarian nations are adolescent fantasies; their digital revolution seems to be destroying more jobs than it created, and the fruits of their scientific fathers aren’t exactly encouraging either. “Coming soon, from the people who brought you nuclear weapons!”

But Johnson’s motives go to a deep and surprisingly tender place. Born into a devout Mormon community in Utah, he learned an elaborate set of rules that are still so vivid in his mind that he brought them up in the first minutes of our first meeting: “If you get baptized at the age of 8, point. If you get into the priesthood at the age of 12, point. If you avoid pornography, point. Avoid masturbation? Point. Go to church every Sunday? Point.” The reward for a high point score was heaven, where a dutiful Mormon would be reunited with his loved ones and gifted with endless creativity.

When he was 4, Johnson’s father left the church and divorced his mother. Johnson skips over the painful details, but his father told me his loss of faith led to a long stretch of drug and alcohol abuse, and his mother said she was so broke that she had to send Johnson to school in handmade clothes. His father remembers the letters Johnson started sending him when he was 11, a new one every week: “Always saying 100 different ways, ‘I love you, I need you.’ How he knew as a kid the one thing you don’t do with an addict or an alcoholic is tell them what a dirtbag they are, I’ll never know.”

Johnson was still a dutiful believer when he graduated from high school and went to Ecuador on his mission, the traditional Mormon rite of passage. He prayed constantly and gave hundreds of speeches about Joseph Smith, but he became more and more ashamed about trying to convert sick and hungry children with promises of a better life in heaven. Wouldn’t it be better to ease their suffering here on earth?

“Bryan came back a changed boy,” his father says.

Soon he had a new mission, self-assigned. His sister remembers his exact words: “He said he wanted to be a millionaire by the time he was 30 so he could use those resources to change the world.”

His first move was picking up a degree at Brigham Young University, selling cell phones to help pay the tuition and inhaling every book that seemed to promise a way forward. One that left a lasting impression was Endurance, the story of Ernest Shackleton’s botched journey to the South Pole—if sheer grit could get a man past so many hardships, he would put his faith in sheer grit. He married “a nice Mormon girl,” fathered three Mormon children, and took a job as a door-to-door salesman to support them. He won a prize for Salesman of the Year and started a series of businesses that went broke—which convinced him to get a business degree at the University of Chicago.

When he graduated in 2008, he stayed in Chicago and started Braintree, perfecting his image as a world-beating Mormon entrepreneur. By that time, his father was sober and openly sharing his struggles, and Johnson was the one hiding his dying faith behind a very well-protected wall. He couldn’t sleep, ate like a wolf, and suffered intense headaches, fighting back with a long series of futile cures: antidepressants, biofeedback, an energy healer, even blind obedience to the rules of his church.

Bryan Johnson has long been obsessed with “reprogramming” the operating system of the world.

Joe Pugliese/August Image

In 2012, at the age of 35, Johnson hit bottom. In his misery, he remembered Shackleton and seized a final hope—maybe he could find an answer by putting himself through a painful ordeal. He planned a trip to Mount Kilimanjaro, and on the second day of the climb he got a stomach virus. On the third day he got altitude sickness. When he finally made it to the peak, he collapsed in tears and then had to be carried down on a stretcher. It was time to reprogram his operating system.

The way Johnson tells it, he started by dropping the world-beater pose that hid his weakness and doubt. And although this may all sound a bit like a dramatic motivational talk at a TED conference, especially since Johnson still projects the image of a world-beating entrepreneur, this much is certain: During the following 18 months, he divorced his wife, sold Braintree, and severed his last ties to the church. To cushion the impact on his children, he bought a house nearby and visited them almost daily. He knew he was repeating his father’s mistakes but saw no other option—he was either going to die inside or start living the life he always wanted.

He started with the pledge he made when he came back from Ecuador, experimenting first with a good-government initiative in Washington and pivoting, after its inevitable doom, to a venture fund for “quantum leap” companies inventing futuristic products such as human-­organ-­mimicking silicon chips. But even if all his quantum leaps landed, they wouldn’t change the operating system of the world.

Finally, the Big Idea hit: If the root problems of humanity begin in the human mind, let’s change our minds.

Fantastic things were happening in neuroscience. Some of them sounded just like miracles from the Bible—with prosthetic legs controlled by thought and microchips connected to the visual cortex, scientists were learning to help the lame walk and the blind see. At the University of Toronto, a neurosurgeon named Andres Lozano slowed, and in some cases reversed, the cognitive declines of Alzheimer’s patients using deep brain stimulation. At a hospital in upstate New York, a neuro­technologist named Gerwin Schalk asked computer engineers to record the firing patterns of the auditory neurons of people listening to Pink Floyd. When the engineers turned those patterns back into sound waves, they produced a single that sounded almost exactly like “Another Brick in the Wall.” At the University of Washington, two professors in different buildings played a videogame together with the help of electroencephalography caps that fired off electrical pulses—when one professor thought about firing digital bullets, the other one felt an impulse to push the Fire button.

Johnson also heard about a biomedical engineer named Theodore Berger. During nearly 20 years of research, Berger and his collaborators at USC and Wake Forest University developed a neuroprosthesis to improve memory in rats. It didn’t look like much when he started testing it in 2002—just a slice of rat brain and a computer chip. But the chip held an algorithm that could translate the firing patterns of neurons into a kind of Morse code that corresponded with actual memories. Nobody had ever done that before, and some people found the very idea offensive—it’s so deflating to think of our most precious thoughts reduced to ones and zeros. Prominent medical ethicists accused Berger of tampering with the essence of identity. But the implications were huge: If Berger could turn the language of the brain into code, perhaps he could figure out how to fix the part of the code associated with neurological diseases.

When one professor thought about firing digital bullets, the other one felt an impulse to push the Fire button.

In rats, as in humans, firing patterns in the hippocampus generate a signal or code that, somehow, the brain recognizes as a long-term memory. Berger trained a group of rats to perform a task and studied the codes that formed. He learned that rats remembered a task better when their neurons sent “strong code,” a term he explains by comparing it to a radio signal: At low volume you don’t hear all of the words, but at high volume everything comes through clear. He then studied the difference in the codes generated by the rats when they remembered to do something correctly and when they forgot. In 2011, through a breakthrough experiment conducted on rats trained to push a lever, he demonstrated he could record the initial memory codes, feed them into an algorithm, and then send stronger codes back into the rats’ brains. When he finished, the rats that had forgotten how to push the lever suddenly remembered.

Five years later, Berger was still looking for the support he needed for human trials. That’s when Johnson showed up. In August 2016, he announced he would pledge $100 million of his fortune to create Kernel and that Berger would join the company as chief science officer. After learning about USC’s plans to implant wires in Dickerson’s brain to battle her epilepsy, Johnson approached Charles Liu, the head of the prestigious neurorestoration division at the USC School of Medicine and the lead doctor on Dickerson’s trial. Johnson asked him for permission to test the algorithm on Dickerson while she had Liu’s wires in her hippocampus—in between Liu’s own work sessions, of course. As it happened, Liu had dreamed about expanding human powers with technology ever since he got obsessed with The Six Million Dollar Man as a kid. He helped Johnson get Dickerson’s consent and convinced USC’s institutional research board to approve the experiment. At the end of 2016, Johnson got the green light. He was ready to start his first human trial.

Goran Factory

In the hospital room, Dickerson is waiting for the experiments to begin, and I ask her how she feels about being a human lab rat.

“If I’m going to be here,” she says, “I might as well do something useful.”

Useful? This starry-eyed dream of cyborg supermen? “You know he’s trying to make humans smarter, right?”

“Isn’t that cool?” she answers.

Over by the computers, I ask one of the scientists about the multi­colored grid on the screen. “Each one of these squares is an electrode that’s in her brain,” one says. Every time a neuron close to one of the wires in Dickerson’s brain fires, he explains, a pink line will jump in the relevant box.

Johnson’s team is going to start with simple memory tests. “You’re going to be shown words,” the scientist explains to her. “Then there will be some math problems to make sure you’re not rehearsing the words in your mind. Try to remember as many words as you can.”

One of the scientists hands Dickerson a computer tablet, and everyone goes quiet. Dickerson stares at the screen to take in the words. A few minutes later, after the math problem scrambles her mind, she tries to remember what she’d read. “Smoke … egg … mud … pearl.”

Next, they try something much harder, a group of memories in a sequence. As one of Kernel’s scientists explains to me, they can only gather so much data from wires connected to 30 or 40 neurons. A single face shouldn’t be too hard, but getting enough data to reproduce memories that stretch out like a scene in a movie is probably impossible.

Sitting by the side of Dickerson’s bed, a Kernel scientist takes on the challenge. “Could you tell me the last time you went to a restaurant?”

“It was probably five or six days ago,” Dickerson says. “I went to a Mexican restaurant in Mission Hills. We had a bunch of chips and salsa.”

He presses for more. As she dredges up other memories, another Kernel scientist hands me a pair of headphones connected to the computer bank. All I hear at first is a hissing sound. After 20 or 30 seconds go by I hear a pop.

“That’s a neuron firing,” he says.

As Dickerson continues, I listen to the mysterious language of the brain, the little pops that move our legs and trigger our dreams. She remembers a trip to Costco and the last time it rained, and I hear the sounds of Costco and rain.

When Dickerson’s eyelids start sinking, the medical team says she’s had enough and Johnson’s people start packing up. Over the next few days, their algorithm will turn Dickerson’s synaptic activity into code. If the codes they send back into Dickerson’s brain make her think of dipping a few chips in salsa, Johnson might be one step closer to reprogramming the operating system of the world.

But look, there’s another banana peel­—after two days of frantic coding, Johnson’s team returns to the hospital to send the new code into Dickerson’s brain. Just when he gets word that they can get an early start, a message arrives: It’s over. The experiment has been placed on “administrative hold.” The only reason USC would give in the aftermath was an issue between Johnson and Berger. Berger would later tell me he had no idea the experiment was under way and that Johnson rushed into it without his permission. Johnson said he is mystified by Berger’s accusations. “I don’t know how he could not have known about it. We were working with his whole lab, with his whole team.” The one thing they both agree on is that their relationship fell apart shortly afterward, with Berger leaving the company and taking his algorithm with him. He blames the break entirely on Johnson. “Like most investors, he wanted a high rate of return as soon as possible. He didn’t realize he’d have to wait seven or eight years to get FDA approval—I would have thought he would have looked that up.” But Johnson didn’t want to slow down. He had bigger plans, and he was in a hurry.

Goran Factory

Eight months later, I go back to California to see where Johnson has ended up. He seems a little more relaxed. On the whiteboard behind his desk at Kernel’s new offices in Los Angeles, someone’s scrawled a playlist of songs in big letters. “That was my son,” he says. “He interned here this summer.” Johnson is a year into a romance with Taryn Southern, a charismatic 31-year-old performer and film producer. And since his break with Berger, Johnson has tripled Kernel’s staff—he’s up to 36 employees now—adding experts in fields like chip design and computational neuroscience. His new science adviser is Ed Boyden, the director of MIT’s Synthetic Neurobiology Group and a superstar in the neuroscience world. Down in the basement of the new office building, there’s a Dr. Frankenstein lab where scientists build prototypes and try them out on glass heads.

When the moment seems right, I bring up the purpose of my visit. “You said you had something to show me?”

Johnson hesitates. I’ve already promised not to reveal certain sensitive details, but now I have to promise again. Then he hands me two small plastic display cases. Inside, two pairs of delicate twisty wires rest on beds of foam rubber. They look scientific but also weirdly biological, like the antennae of some futuristic bug-bot.

I’m looking at the prototypes for Johnson’s brand-new neuromodulator. On one level, it’s just a much smaller version of the deep brain stimulators and other neuromodulators currently on the market. But unlike a typical stimulator, which just fires pulses of electricity, Johnson’s is designed to read the signals that neurons send to other neurons—and not just the 100 neurons the best of the current tools can harvest, but perhaps many more. That would be a huge advance in itself, but the implications are even bigger: With Johnson’s neuromodulator, scientists could collect brain data from thousands of patients, with the goal of writing precise codes to treat a variety of neurological diseases.

In the short term, Johnson hopes his neuromodulator will help him “optimize the gold rush” in neurotechnology—financial analysts are forecasting a $27 billion market for neural devices within six years, and countries around the world are committing billions to the escalating race to decode the brain. In the long term, Johnson believes his signal-reading neuromodulator will advance his bigger plans in two ways: (1) by giving neuroscientists a vast new trove of data they can use to decode the workings of the brain and (2) by generating the huge profits Kernel needs to launch a steady stream of innovative and profitable neural tools, keeping the company both solvent and plugged into every new neuroscience breakthrough. With those two achievements in place, Johnson can watch and wait until neuroscience reaches the level of sophistication he needs to jump-start human evolution with a mind-enhancing neuroprosthesis.

Liu, the neurologist with the Six Million Dollar Man dreams, compares Johnson’s ambition to flying. “Going back to Icarus, human beings have always wanted to fly. We don’t grow wings, so we build a plane. And very often these solutions will have even greater capabilities than the ones nature created—no bird ever flew to Mars.” But now that humanity is learning how to reengineer its own capabilities, we really can choose how we evolve. “We have to wrap our minds around that. It’s the most revolutionary thing in the world.”

The crucial ingredient is the profit motive, which always drives rapid innovation in science. That’s why Liu thinks Johnson could be the one to give us wings. “I’ve never met anyone with his urgency to take this to market,” he says.

When will this revolution arrive? “Sooner than you think,” Liu says.

Now we’re back where we began. Is Johnson a fool? Is he just wasting his time and fortune on a crazy dream? One thing is certain: Johnson will never stop trying to optimize the world. At the pristine modern house he rents in Venice Beach, he pours out idea after idea. He even took skepticism as helpful information—when I tell him his magic neuroprosthesis sounds like another version of the Mormon heaven, he’s delighted.

“Good point! I love it!”

He never has enough data. He even tries to suck up mine. What are my goals? My regrets? My pleasures? My doubts?

Every so often, he pauses to examine my “constraint program.”

“One, you have this biological disposition of curiosity. You want data. And when you consume that data, you apply boundaries of meaning-making.”

“Are you trying to hack me?” I ask.

Not at all, he says. He just wants us to share our algorithms. “That’s the fun in life,” he says, “this endless unraveling of the puzzle. And I think, ‘What if we could make the data transfer rate a thousand times faster? What if my consciousness is only seeing a fraction of reality? What kind of stories would we tell?’ ”

In his free time, Johnson is writing a book about taking control of human evolution and looking on the bright side of our mutant humanoid future. He brings this up every time I talk to him. For a long time I lumped this in with his dreamy ideas about reprogramming the operating system of the world: The future is coming faster than anyone thinks, our glorious digital future is calling, the singularity is so damn near that we should be cheering already—a spiel that always makes me want to hit him with a copy of the Unabomber Manifesto.

But his urgency today sounds different, so I press him on it: “How would you respond to Ted Kaczynski’s fears? The argument that technology is a cancerlike development that’s going to eat itself?”

“I would say he’s potentially on the wrong side of history.”

“Yeah? What about climate change?”

“That’s why I feel so driven,” he answered. “We’re in a race against time.”

He asks me for my opinion. I tell him I think he’ll still be working on cyborg brainiacs when the starving hordes of a ravaged planet destroy his lab looking for food—and for the first time, he reveals the distress behind his hope. The truth is, he has the same fear. The world has gotten way too complex, he says. The financial system is shaky, the population is aging, robots want our jobs, artificial intelligence is catching up, and climate change is coming fast. “It just feels out of control,” he says.

He’s invoked these dystopian ideas before, but only as a prelude to his sales pitch. This time he’s closer to pleading. “Why wouldn’t we embrace our own self-directed evolution? Why wouldn’t we just do everything we can to adapt faster?”

I turn to a more cheerful topic. If he ever does make a neuroprosthesis to revolutionize how we use our brain, which superpower would he give us first? Telepathy? Group minds? Instant kung fu?

He answers without hesitation. Because our thinking is so constrained by the familiar, he says, we can’t imagine a new world that isn’t just another version of the world we know. But we have to imagine something far better than that. So he’d try to make us more creative—that would put a new frame on everything.

Ambition like that can take you a long way. It can drive you to try to reach the South Pole when everyone says it’s impossible. It can take you up Mount Kilimanjaro when you’re close to dying and help you build an $800 million company by the time you’re 36. And Johnson’s ambitions drive straight for the heart of humanity’s most ancient dream: For operating system, substitute enlightenment.

By hacking our brains, he wants to make us one with everything.

John H. Richardson is the author of My Father the Spy. This is his first piece for WIRED.

This article appears in the December issue. Subscribe now.

Listen to this story, and other WIRED features, on the Audm app.

Wardrobe styling by Michael Cioffoletti/Art Department; Grooming by Hee Soo Kwon/The Rex Agency using Malin + Goetz; blazer: Vitale Barberis Canonico from Barney’s New York Beverly Hills; Sweater: Rag and Bone from Bloomingdale’s

Related Video

Science

Neuroscientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty

The Connectome is a comprehensive diagram of all the neural connections existing in the brain. WIRED has challenged neuroscientist Bobby Kasthuri to explain this scientific concept to 5 different people; a 5 year-old, a 13 year-old, a college student, a neuroscience grad student and a connectome entrepreneur.

Read more: http://ift.tt/2zHbAtK

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2jzrtbA via Viral News HQ