Part 24 - Side Story (couldn’t fit it into the Lexi-focused section, but it’s happening concurrently)
Spoilered: Vulgar.

“The most important part is not to flail, even if you need to respond quickly,” Jay said as he watched Darius practicing with the short, thin sword in the basement of the spacious Kingston mansion. “Don’t panic, just do the same movements quicker. Build up to the speed, but keep your form tight.” Darius practiced the routines and stances he’d been shown earlier in the morning, gradually increasing the rapidity of the movements, but careful to keep the arcs as close to identical as possible. “Good, and your footwork is good too,” Jay said after a set concluded. “In tight quarters, you can’t just swing wildly. It’s lucky for us all you have some fencing experience.”
Darius let his blade arm rest, reaching for a towel to wipe the perspiration off his face. This was far more tiring than his old foil. The blade had a mass of nearly a kilo, moving it quickly was taxing. But even more taxing was the silence. “I think I should check on Alex,” he said. The staffer who’d been managing his phone while they were on their trip handed it over dutifully. But when he brought up his messages, the group chat was gone. Puzzled, he went to his Contacts. There was no ‘Lexi’ in the L’s. “What the fuck is this?” he said, drawing Jay’s attention. He showed the erstwhile trainer what wasn’t there to be shown.
“It’s a warp,” Jay explained. “Simonson’s layering things into the weft again.”
“I thought that didn’t reach to the mansion,” Darius said, growing upset. “I thought you said the cuff links would keep it from affecting us!”
“It’s complicated,” Jay sighed. “Yes, you’re protected here in the mansion, your father’s petroglyphs ensure it. And yes, the cuff links will protect you when you’re outside. But electronics? They’re too ephemeral. Their stored charges are too flimsy to stand up to the nudges of warping. They never resist the influence. Check your contacts again, for your friend’s old name.”
Darius looked in the A’s. Sure enough, there was one for ‘Alex A.’ near the top: annotated Best Bro. It had a picture of Alex’s goateed, glasses-wearing face, just like Darius remembered it when his fog was lifted last week. It was like ‘Lexi’ never existed. Or at least like he’d never met ‘her.’
“What… the hell…” Darius said, puzzled at the discrepancy between what he knew and what the world wanted him to think.
“You get used to it after a while. By the way, do NOT reach out to Alex under any circumstances. I know you want to-”
“I have to!” Darius shouted. “We’re doing all this for him! Why can’t I talk to my friend? I need to know he’s alright, I need to know what-”
“You cannot do anything for him yet,” Jay insisted. “If you tip Simonson off to us, it’s all over. Alex, the toy shop, maybe even the whole mall; like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Vanished, pulled beyond our reach. We may never find them again.”
“You said he already knew about us,” Darius said.
“He knows he’s being watched by Firmament, he sensed one of their other agents. But he apparently doesn’t know about us. You, your father, your girlfriend, what we’re doing here. He can’t see into this place. He thinks it’s just another routine Firmament sting operation. He might be right; they don’t keep us in the know. Simomson’s got his facilities locked down, there’s only be one movement in the last few days that we could see, but if he thought Dev was on his case it wouldn’t even be that. He’d just be gone.”
“He’s that scared of Pops?” Darius asked, struggling to take in more of the picture.
“He’s scared of what your father knows, what he can do given half a chance, and what he might suspect about Simonson’s projects. He knows Dev could shut it down if he brought all his attention to bear on it, with just one opening. And that’s why we know he doesn’t suspect. He’d have already bugged out.”
“Jay, who is my Dad?” Darius asked, looking at the iridium sword where it sat on the bench. “And who are you guys? I mean, Firmament, but also you. How do you know my Dad? What did you do before I was around?”
Jay took a deep breath. He clearly wanted to talk. “That isn’t… my story to tell. Not all of it. I can say your father brought… significant contributions to Firmament.”
“He told me our family used to do horrible things,” Darius said, looking aside. “He said they used to be involved with… Foundation, or whatever. He didn’t tell me all of it.”
“He wants you to live your life as free from the taint of Foundation as you possible can, and for good reasons. Dev made a lot of enemies when he … turned away from the family business. Ever since you came into the picture, 110% of his energies have been devoted to raising you so well that you’d never even be tempted to the things Foundation does. Not just for your sake, either. You’re his clean break,” Jay said, drawing Darius’s eyes once more. “Yes, the fact that you exist and are who you are is his strongest rejection of Foundation, and he clings to that- he clings to you and the good person you’re growing into, like a man with cement shoes clinging to the planks of a pier, feeling the waves lap at his back.”
There was quiet in the room for a long moment.
“So it’s like that, is it?” Darius asked quietly.
“That’s why he’s been an absolute wreck ever since the plan,” the man with the greying goatee said. “He’s sending you into the lion’s den and if he thought there was any other way he’d choose it. But your father’s mind is one of the keenest on our side, and he can see the way things unfold more clearly than most of us. So,” Jay said after breathing in again. “Please don’t blow it by giving into that cell phone addiction you kids have these days.”
Darius cut short a surprised laugh. Okay, he thought. I guess I can hold out a little longer. “My arm is killing me, though,” he said out loud. “I think I’m done swashbuckling for today.”
“Yeah, let’s not blow out that shoulder,” Jay agreed. “I guess class is dismissed. And we’ll let you know as soon as we have something we can work with. I promise you that, kiddo.” He held out his hand, and Darius reluctantly surrendered his phone.

“Any word? Your dad won’t tell me much,” Selene said as Darius, rubbing his aching shoulder, walked into the underground gallery that had been hastily converted to a serviceable shooting range. She was practicing with the scrimshaw-handled revolver, but bullets that were only superficially similar to the ones lent out by the university library. Single-motion draw, already be sighting your target’s center mass before the gun is even level. Squeeze without jerking, look at the target not the sights.
“Good news and bad news,” Darius said. “First the bad news: we still can’t contact Al- uh, Lexi,” he said, using Selene’s preferred name. She’d never known Alex like he did. “Also, we may have to keep sitting tight for a while longer until there’s an opening to move on.”
“What’s the good news?” Selene asked, loading more rounds into the cylinder. The waiting in silence was the hardest part as far as she was concerned; this enforced ‘radio silence’ was eating away at her like acid reflux. Shooting, at least, gave her something else to fixate on. And maybe she was even getting better at it.
“They say Simonson doesn’t suspect we’re even up to anything, or else he’d have already disappeared, I guess. Just up and taken his whole shop with him like a hermit crab scurrying with its shell into the tide, or something.”
“Hm,” she acknowledged before lining the gun up with the down-range dummy and disengaging the safety. It took ten seconds for her to deliberately send all her bullets down the gallery; three of them connected. “So I guess I shouldn’t even bother asking for my phone back,” she said with a resigned sigh.
Darius was then surrounding her from behind, comforting her not by dismissing the validity of her fears, but instead comforting her with the knowledge that they both shared them, and how much they were in this together.

The thing identified as Simonson was pleased indeed. A test vessel, grown from one of the precious eggs and given no imprinting, proved to be fecund itself. Better yet, the second generation of eggs looked identical to the first. Even the double-layered imprints were passed through without appreciable generational loss. Production could be ramped up as soon as he expanded the facilities and had the living biological factory secrete more of the necessary inputs. So many decades of research, so much effort to lay the groundwork, and all it took was one especially rude customer to trigger the chain of events that provided the master key. With these advances, he could break the cycle; break the dependence that had become anathema to him in his long singularity of being. No more being regarded as an expendable, “acceptable loss” to the larger whole. No more being a mere finger groping about in this layer. He could sever the link and not whither away! Not perish like a lizard’s tail dropped to distract the predatory bird and preserve the whole.
Surely the sacrifice of his first, hand-made drone was a small price to pay for such promise. He valued it above any fodder, but now that he knew there could be others in greater numbers, it was less crucial to preserve it. A few lizards’ tails could be dropped as needed, after all.
Speaking of which, his first priority was now to grow something special. He was eager to see if his designs panned out, an eagerness he allowed to flourish despite the incredibly depth of patience that time had imbued him with.

Part 24

Spoilered: Explicit, vulgar, mind stuff, gaslighting, corruption, remote control, personality alteration, expansion, dark.