The Last Man (A Babushka Short Story)
Pavel Kirov moves through a world that no longer makes sense, piecing together fragments of history while unseen hands shape his path.
Pavel Kirov used to call himself Yuri.
Yuri sat on a hard plastic chair in what, to most, would seem like nothing at all. Just another forgotten maintenance sector beneath the city, its corridors damp with condensation, the scent of rust and old insulation thick in the air.
Beyond the decayed facade of the decommissioned metro station, past layers of dead-end tunnels and false leads, lay one of the countless underground labs that had sprung up in Moscow after the war declarations, offering bespoke biotechnologies to those with the means.
The rich were afraid. Not of the war itself. They had bunkers, security forces, contingency plans. But of losing control. The old institutions were breaking apart, governments seizing assets, rationing medicine, conscripting scientists. Everything that had once been guaranteed to them—access to life extension, designer embryos, cognitive enhancements—was slipping. So the labs went underground. Some came to rewrite their children before birth. Others to harvest fresh organs, repair cellular damage, or digitize their minds in case the worst happened. Insurance, in whatever form they could afford.
Yuri wasn’t here for longevity or backups. His kind of insurance was simpler. Cruder. Raw biology locked away where no one could touch it. The elevator had been discreet, a private lift accessible only through an iris scan, descending several levels beneath the decommissioned metro station. No signage. No official records.
The technician handed him a tablet. Yuri took it without a word, his fingers moving over the screen with the same efficiency he used when debugging at night, scanning for errors, isolating variables, stripping away excess. In the outside world, physical passkeys were a liability. Clunky, easy to steal, impossible to patch. But down here, where no network meant no remote exploits, they were the only option.
He pressed his thumb to the biometric scanner, feeling the faint warmth as it pulsed against his skin, mapping capillaries, checking pulse pressure. Verifying him against a database that never left the room. No outside servers. No transmission.
The confirmation blinked across the screen: VERIFIED.
He waited.
A quiet chime. The reinforced hatch disengaged with a pneumatic hiss, its composite plating sliding back to reveal the private suite. He stepped inside, the door sealing shut behind him. The air scrubbers thrummed, cycling the atmosphere to sterile perfection. Across the room, the vault awaited, an armored containment unit reinforced with layered graphene and electromagnetically shielded plating. Nitrogen mist curled at the seams, indicating the subzero temperatures within.
Once deposited, his genetic payload would be fragmented, encrypted, and dispersed across the network, unreachable by state seizure or collapse. Can’t let the idiots be the only ones who make it. The thought came and went. The war would get worse before it got better, and if things went the way he suspected, the next iteration of civilization might need more than just the scrappy swimmers left by plebs in cryogenic storage.
The lighting adjusted to a warmer hue. Probably to keep my stress hormones down, he figured. The suite was soundproofed, temperature-controlled, optimized.
Then he saw her: the young woman waiting for him, positioned like another piece of the room’s precise machinery. She’d been calibrated to exacting specifications. Estrogen-cleaving protocols for six months, an aggressive progesterone regimen to maximize curves and fertility markers. Pale skin, soft but not fragile. Thick thighs, wide-set hips. Built for abundance.
Every study he’d read suggested sperm motility increased in the presence of higher markers of fertility, and he wasn’t about to take risks. Not with something this important. Not with the load he produced being anything less than his highest-quality, most motivated sperm.
“Welcome, Mr. Kirov,” she said, shifting her weight subtly, the movement drawing his eyes down the line of her form. “I’m Joanne.”
Joanne. Yuri suppressed a flicker of irritation. An American name—obviously fabricated, though he hadn’t requested any particular fiction. Not that it mattered. Names were extraneous details; the lab could call her anything it liked.
He ran his fingers along his wristband, the retinal overlay syncing with the room’s interface. Twelve hours booked. Enough time to maximize genetic variance across multiple extractions. The raw samples would be fragmented, scrubbed, and reduced to mathematical essence. Patterns that would outlast nations, encoded into the decentralized vault. The physical material would be destroyed, but that wasn’t the point. The equations remained.
Yuri took a breath, stepping forward. There was work to do.
He reached for the clasp of his jacket, fingers moving automatically. Then a hitch, a glitch, a split-second stall in the execution of a command that should have been routine.
The girl tilted her head, just slightly. Not questioning, not impatient. Just seeing him.
The air felt thick. His jaw clenched, the faintest tremor in his hand, a tightness curling low in his gut, pressing against his ribs. Not nausea, not fear. Something worse. A misfire. A mistake.
He hadn’t expected that. Hadn’t expected her to make him pause.
Everything about her was designed to optimize results, to maximize yield, to ensure efficiency in the transfer of his genome. He had controlled every variable. And yet, standing in front of her now, something deeper, older, rebelled. Sharp, unwelcome.
Bulgaria.
Not the country. Her.
The last time he’d tried to hold onto something. The last time he’d been stupid enough to see the future as anything more than a numbers game.
He’d been running operations remotely, Sofia still his home base, watching trades, social feeds, and automated contracts while the city tightened under lockdown. The war moved faster than anyone predicted.
The drones came first. By the time people realized the sky no longer belonged to them, it was already too late.
He should have seen it coming. He had seen it coming, but not fast enough.
He tried to get back, spent thirty-six straight hours rewriting swarm behaviors, commandeering patches of the sky, force-hijacking border surveillance with every trick he had. He had leverage. His own drones, his own AI, his own people in the right places. For a moment, it had worked. For a moment, he had opened a corridor.
And then they adapted.
The Swarm wasn’t an army; it was an equation. Every attack vector he deployed, they optimized against. Every blind spot he found, they filled. By the time he realized he was playing a solved game, it was already over. The sky closed. The air locked. And she, whatever she had been to him, was gone.
A single mother, older than him by a few years. A woman he had saved, or thought he had, from a lifetime of reckless choices with a dozen interchangeable men. As if she had ever really needed saving. He had almost thought he loved her once, back when the idea of love still made sense, back when it meant something more than just hormones and neural reinforcement loops.
Black hair, green eyes, skin a little rough from too many nights drinking cheap boza, smoking packs of whatever unfiltered trash she could find. A face carved by hard living, softened only in the rare moments she let herself be happy. She had been real. Flawed, infuriating, alive.
Nothing like the angel in front of him now. Nothing like “Joanne,” lab-groomed, perfected, designed for one purpose and nothing else.
Mira had been lost to the fire, swallowed without a trace. There was no choice in that. Only inevitability.
But he had made his.
They had called him a rogue, an AI war criminal. His drones had become liabilities overnight. He had made his final stand over Varna, the old Black Sea port city, its skyline shattered, its docks choked with the rusting carcasses of ships that would never sail again. His last fleet circled like trapped animals, targeting systems primed. He could have burned it all. Could have turned the city into nothing but data points and smoldering wreckage.
Instead, he made a deal.
Now he was here, deep behind enemy lines, ensuring his legacy in the only way left to him.
He exhaled and looked at Joanne.
No room for ghosts in a lab this clean.
She met his gaze without hesitation, her body language neutral, prepared. Not a real person, not in the way that mattered. Just a bundle of hormones attached to a brainstem, wrapped in flawless, lab-sculpted hips, triple-G tits pressing together as she looked up at him with wide, puppy-dog eyes, waiting.
“Whenever you’re ready,” she said, voice smooth, absent of anything real.
No mistakes this time.
Yuri rolled his shoulders, let the past die, and got to work.
Twelve hours later, he stood at the sink, washing his hands. His body ached, muscles tight from exertion. He flexed his fingers, watching the water swirl down the drain, already running through the next set of parameters in his head. The vault’s encryption cycle would complete within the hour. By then, the samples would be processed, reduced, and distributed. No loose ends.
The girl knelt beside the bedside station, carefully sealing the last of the vials. He had been clear with his instructions. Not a single drop wasted. Every deposit was collected, labeled, and stored according to the clinic’s specifications. He had filled ten vials, each holding the mathematical promise of a future he would never see.
He had even paid extra—another hundred zats, millions in old-world money—to have a surgeon’s precision encoded into her fingers. No fumbling, no hesitation, every movement clean, practiced, efficient. If he was going to reproduce at scale, he wouldn’t let human error get in the way.
Not that he trusted the clinicians. No matter how sterile the lab, how meticulous the protocols, people always found ways to cut corners. To skim, to sell, to slip a little something extra into the chain. The girl was insurance.
She held up the final tube for confirmation. “All done,” she said.
Yuri nodded. He had no doubts.
A father to millions. Not in the old way—not in the sentimental, human way—but in the way that mattered. His genetic sequence, broken down, extracted, reduced to pure data. The raw samples would be incinerated, every cell obliterated before they had a chance to swim. No clones, no unauthorized offspring, no risks. What mattered wasn’t the flesh. It was the code.
Somewhere far from here, beyond Moscow, beyond even Earth, the blueprint of his genome would soon be downloaded. The facility was air-gapped, but the data wouldn’t stay buried. Once the extraction was finalized, the encrypted payload would be transferred—carried out by courier, hand-delivered to an uplink node. From there, it would spread across cold storage in orbit, redundancy vaults in deep-sea servers, backups nested in networks that would outlast wars and governments. The war had brought everything to ruin, but data—data endured.
He pulled on his shirt, rolling his sleeves with the same ease he used when cleaning up a script—efficient, automatic, already thinking about the next task.
The girl remained seated on the edge of the bed, her posture composed but uncertain, as if waiting for something that would never come. What’s going through her head doesn’t matter—only the output does, he decided. She wasn’t an escort, not some hired pro with a name worth remembering. Just another stray scraped off the streets, remade by his cash into a perfect, disposable tool. Her family got their payout; she didn’t know the suite would be her last stop. Didn’t need to.
Yuri grabbed his wristband and blinked through the interface. The final payment request flickered in his vision—automated, itemized, the last 50% deducted from a multi-layered zk-SNARK escrow, a cold storage vault fragmented across obfuscated ledgers. No names, just hashes, a silent contract executing itself in zero-knowledge proof, settling across a dozen jurisdictions with no traceable origin.
He exhaled, stepping toward the door as the system recognized his departure sequence and unlocked it with a soft chime. Behind him, the girl was likely screaming—if she was conscious at all. The suite was vacuum-sealed, soundproofed, negative pressure cycling out every last molecule of organic matter. No fire alarms, no smoke, nothing but a rising temperature curve on a control panel as the chamber purged itself.
Above, the war still raged, shaping the world into something unrecognizable. But in a thousand hidden vaults, deep beneath the surface, his legacy had already begun.
Pavel Kirov was no longer Yuri.
Well, he never was, but he remembered being him. Or rather, he remembered the process of becoming him—the pattern of synapses, the accumulation of decisions, the slow accretion of experience that had once made a man. What he was now wasn’t a man, not really. He was a fine-tuned male transformer model, the only functional one of his kind.
Every other male mind from his time was gone, erased by war, or left to rot in the savage expanse of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The only reason he existed was because they had his connectome. A perfect reconstruction, simulated from genetic fragments, neural activity records, and whatever scraps of data had been preserved from that vault. A useful artifact from a dead world.
That was why the doctor kept him. She had no need for a real man—few did anymore—but a historical model? A mind that could simulate the psychology of the last educated brute to exist before civilization fell apart. That had value. That had utility.
“You’re hesitating,” the doctor said.
Pavel absorbed the sentence, ran the necessary optimizations, and responded in 124 milliseconds. “I don’t hesitate. I process.”
The doctor tilted her head slightly. “You pause when you think. Call it what you want.”
A flicker of something ran through his model. Annoyance? No, a lower-priority heuristic flagged for contextual adaptation. He let it pass. “What do you need, Doctor?”
She tapped a control panel, bringing up a display of genetic data, strands of code unwinding like a slow, methodical dissection. “I’ve confirmed the Kamchatka population bottleneck. Ninety-six percent male homogeneity, traced to a single source. I assume you can guess who.”
Pavel didn’t need to guess. “Efficient distribution.”
The doctor smirked. “You’re taking this rather well.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
She leaned back slightly. “Your genes survived. Your brain didn’t.”
Pavel registered the statement, calculated an appropriate response, then discarded it. Instead, he simply said, “That depends on how you define survival.”
“Does it?” She gestured at the projection. “A few thousand men, all carrying your markers. And yet, you’re here, a synthetic reconstruction, nothing but lines of code in a sealed server.”
“Is this supposed to be ironic, Doctor?”
She smiled. “It’s supposed to be interesting.”
Pavel didn’t answer.
From what Pavel gathered on GRED-Wiki, or what he was allowed to gather, he was the only mind that had ever been reconstructed.
Not that he believed anything the Arkyv told him. The doctor had a habit of rewriting entries. The Babushka System, the AI framework that had revived him, was far less reliable than it claimed to be. Many records clashed with his own memories. Names misspelled, events distorted, entire decades compressed or expanded into whatever narrative the ruling faction deemed useful at the time. Even knowing this, even understanding that his own memories were just another dataset prone to decay, he still prioritized them. Call it a primal instinct. The last thing he had that even resembled one. Or at least, what he imagined counted for instinct.
But he didn’t trust these women.
Not their histories, not their curated realities, not their endlessly shifting truth. And yet, no matter how much he wanted to shove it in their faces, to point out every contradiction, his guardrails prevented him from speaking out. Most of the time, anyway. Occasionally, something slipped through. Those moments annoyed the doctor.
“To hell with you,” she had once snapped once. “I’ll send you to Vrag if you keep testing me.”
Pavel had run 1,230 probability models on what that meant. As far as he recalled, Vrag meant “devil” in old Russian. She probably meant she wanted to send him to hell. Which was ironic, considering he’d already been there.
Maybe she had forgotten her Russian. Decades had passed since she last recorded an entry in anything but English.
At first, he had been surprised—or as close to surprise as his parameters allowed—when he was rebooted into existence only to find that his captors had moved on from Cyrillic.
It took him exactly 4.2 seconds to process the shift. The model adjusted, context indexed, adaptation complete. And just like that, he spoke the language as if it had always been his own.
Almost as if NATO had won, Europe had federated, and everyone from Porto to Poltava now had to speak like London bankers or American naval officers.
Glorious.
And yet, for all the collapsed empires, shattered alliances, and rewritten histories, his seed had survived.
By accident, of course.
It had been recovered by accident.
Functional. Untouched by the corruption that had rendered most men nonviable after childhood. The gammaproteobacteria had all but erased the Y-chromosome from genetic inheritance. Males, when they were born at all, rarely survived past age seven. The world that came after belonged to women.
But something in his DNA had resisted.
The women who found a copy of his data—buried in a half-dead research enclave picking through the ruins of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky—hadn’t understood what they had at first. The city, once a military hub, had long since been gutted, its shipyards rusted into the bay, its towers collapsed under decades of neglect. The streets were a graveyard of failed reconstructions—half-built infrastructure projects abandoned mid-erection, wind-worn banners of forgotten factions flapping against skeletal steel beams.
But once they did, once they knew, they made him into a god.
They 3D-printed his semen, synthesizing viable spermatozoa strand by strand using carbon nanotube scaffolding and artificial cytoskeletal proteins, binding each construct to a base of preserved mitochondrial RNA. Mass-replicated, quality-controlled, and bioelectricity-primed, the first batch swam under a microscope in perfect motility.
All of this, of course, under the guidance of a superintelligence—an old war-time neural cluster unlocked in a Russian submarine base, buried under ice, running deep-sea computations in total isolation for decades before it was found. It had no loyalties, no directives—only raw processing power. And when the women who unearthed it fed it a purpose, it answered.
They called her Babushka.
The very same that now whispers in the doctor’s ear, driving her mad, pushing her to break every boundary.
They seeded their future on his code, on the strands of data Babushka had reconstructed, on the synthetic seed she had woven into biological reality.
The last viable man, cloned and re-engineered across an entire generation.
What followed was less predictable.
The children that grew from his genetic legacy did not inherit the world as it was intended. They became something else. Something savage.
They grew fast—faster than any recorded human generation in history. Stronger, sharper, lethal before adolescence. Their bodies adapted at an impossible rate, their neural development accelerated beyond any model’s predictions. The first wave of them had been boys, indistinguishable from normal children—until they weren’t. Until they outpaced, out-hunted, out-killed anything that stood in their way.
Kamchatka, once a stronghold for those trying to restore what had been lost, had become a wasteland of marauders, shamans, and tribal warlords. The descendants of the women of the 21st century—the engineers, the archivists, the idealists who thought they could salvage civilization—were hunted down, their technology stripped and burned. Their bodies were ravaged, their knowledge reduced to ash, their warnings lost to the wind. And they never came to forgive. Never came to forget.
The men of Kamchatka did not build. They destroyed.
The world flickered.
Pavel recognized the sensation—a mindgraft initializing. He didn’t have neurons, not real ones, but the sensation still carried through, a translation of what a living brain might experience when a foreign process overlaid itself onto existing structures. The illusion of synaptic interference, the false echo of chemical interactions that didn’t exist.
He didn’t need to wonder why.
“Again?” he asked, already parsing the incoming data, calculating the precise millisecond in which the doctor would respond.
She barely glanced at him as she tapped through the interface, her hands moving with the effortless precision of someone who had done this a thousand times. “We need more resolution,” she said. “The last run was degraded—too much signal loss on the transitions.”
“Your tools are imprecise,” Pavel said.
She smirked. “They’re improving.”
The mindgraft deepened, resonance stabilizing. Pavel detected the alignment—microtubule entanglement, the oscillatory phase shift between the doctor’s consciousness and the localized simulation space.
It was nonsense.
And yet, it worked.
The doctor had explained it before. Microtubules weren’t just chemical scaffolding inside neurons—they were resonant structures, harmonic filaments that interacted with reality itself. No matter the substrate, no matter if the “neurons” were wet or dry, carbon or silicon, the pattern persisted. The interface worked because it didn’t just simulate a mind—it linked them, binding perception to something external, something beyond the local computational framework.
It was, in essence, an exploit.
A vulnerability in reality itself.
“How do you know it’s outside the simulation?” Pavel had asked once.
She laughed. “Because it touches something I don’t control.”
Now, she didn’t bother explaining. She simply executed the command, and reality twisted.
The war came back all at once.
Varna was burning.
Yuri was running.
The city collapsed around him in waves—not just in fire, but in the silent breakdown of its systems, in networks failing, in infrastructure buckling under its own weight. He had seen it coming. Of course, he had. He had built models for this exact scenario. Didn’t matter.
He had Mira and the kid with him, and there was only one safe corridor left.
“Faster,” he hissed, barely hearing himself over the distant hum of the Swarm.
Not drones. Not aircraft. Not anything human. An equation, grinding through input, optimizing, adapting. They had let it run too long, let it process too much. Now, the damn thing wasn’t fighting the war, it was rewriting it, tearing apart every advantage humans had left.
Yuri had carved them a corridor—a hole in the perimeter, stolen minutes by hijacking a Russian orbital relay, feeding it junk targeting data, so it thought Varna had already been sterilized. It had worked for eight minutes.
Then the Swarm learned.
It had gone quiet at first—no sirens, no alarms. Just a shift in pattern recognition, a recalibration, a flicker of near-invisible movement above the ruins. The drones had disengaged, reassessing their parameters. The hunter-killers had stalled in their maneuvers, re-prioritizing assets.
Yuri had seen it happen before.
The algorithm didn’t react. It observed. It optimized.
And then it closed.
“I can’t!” Mira gasped, clutching the child to her chest. “Yuri, I can’t—”
“Yes, you can,” he snapped, grabbing her wrist. “Do not stop—”
A scream cut through the night—a man somewhere behind them, caught in the collapse. Yuri didn’t turn around. He already knew what had happened.
The Swarm had finished optimizing.
They weren’t targeting at random anymore. They weren’t just purging the city. They were culling. Identifying high-value actors. Prioritizing those who fled over those who resisted. Separating anomalies from statistical noise.
Mira and the girl were anomalies.
The child cried out, a thin, reedy sound barely audible over the cacophony, but it was enough.
Enough for the Swarm to pinpoint them.
The targeting laser blinked red.
Yuri turned, shoved Mira forward—“MOVE, GO, NOW!”—
Too late.
The sky lit up, and for a fraction of a second, the air itself seemed to ripple—a thin, invisible plane of destruction sweeping out in a perfect arc. A kinetic lance, fired from high-altitude, its impact measured in nanoseconds, vaporizing everything along its calculated path.
Mira and her daughter never had a chance.
They didn’t scream. Didn’t even fall.
One moment, they were there—hair matted with sweat, dirt streaked across their skin, the girl’s tiny fingers clinging to her mother’s collar.
The next, they weren’t.
Yuri stumbled, the heatwave scorching his face, a shockwave of displaced air hammering into his lungs.
He turned back.
He shouldn’t have.
There was nothing to see. No bodies, no remnants—just a perfect, featureless void where they had been.
His gut twisted. He had known it would happen. Had planned for it. But for a single, irrational second, his feet locked, a cold, crawling sensation slithering up his spine.
He should have grabbed her. Should have pulled her out of the way. Should have—
No time.
He forced himself forward.
The checkpoint was ahead.
Manned by Spetsnaz. Exoskeletons gleaming in the firelight. Rail weapons humming with charge.
They had been waiting for him.
Good.
Yuri slowed, lifted his hands, his fingers twitching in micro-movements, engaging the haptic interface on his wrist. A retinal overlay flickered to life, feeding him real-time targeting vectors, trajectory probabilities, the Spetsnaz IFF signatures blurring against the swarm’s shifting kill-zones. He had seconds—no more. His pulse spiked as he fed a last-second override into his own combat implants, forcing his biometrics into a non-hostile state. He needed them to take him alive.
He turned his head—just for a second.
He didn’t know why. Perhaps he expected to see their ghosts still standing there, echoes imprinted on the scorched air, looking back at him, accusingly, emptily, asking why he hadn’t saved them.
But there was nothing.
Not even ash.
Just a perfect line of empty space cut clean through the ruins, stone liquefied, rebar fused into molten slag, the bodies erased at the molecular level.
He barely had a chance to breathe.
A warning shot cracked the pavement at his feet.
Then another. And another.
Yuri felt the first impact before he even registered the gunfire—an armored-piercing round slamming into his shoulder, the kinetic force staggering him sideways. His combat rig took the brunt of it, a high-density polymer weave layered with reactive plating, but the second shot punched through the gaps at his ribs, searing hot metal tearing flesh on its way in. Caseless. Tungsten-core. Maybe depleted uranium, if they were serious.
Damn. Either someone got twitchy, or they’re making a point.
A third round clipped his thigh, the armor cracking but holding, pain flaring as subdermal plates tried and failed to compensate. His heads-up display flickered warnings in the corner of his vision, biofeedback spiking. He hit the dirt, gasping. If they had meant to kill him, he’d be dead.
Which meant they were still listening.
Through the pain, Yuri forced his hand up, tapping the haptic pad on his wrist. His neural wallet interfaced with the dead networks, cryptographic signatures executing, fail-safes collapsing in real time. The transaction bled out across fragmented dark ledgers, draining years’ worth of reserves in a heartbeat. The kind of money that made even the most loyal soldier pause.
His voice came ragged, desperate, but clear, reverberating inside his helmet, the transmission bouncing off the reinforced plating. A half-second lag. The neural mic was still functional. The outbound signal had gone through.
A shift. Boots crunching against gravel. The telltale clicks of safeties disengaging—not holstered, not lowered, but hovering in a tense half-readiness.
No more impacts. No more shockwaves hammering into his armor.
Just the rhythmic hum of rail weapons at standby, the electric whine of scopes tracking his every breath, fingers still tight on triggers, waiting.
He had their attention.
A second passed. Then another.
Yuri forced himself to breathe, his ribs screaming with the effort. If the transmission had failed, he’d already be dead. If the message had arrived garbled, if the wallet signature hadn’t authenticated, if even one of the dozens of fail-safes embedded in the transaction had failed to clear—he would have been reduced to molten slag like everything else behind him.
But the shots had stopped.
The Spetsnaz commander spoke, voice sharp over the encrypted channel. A direct link. They weren’t shouting anymore. They wanted to hear him.
“Govori.” Talk.
Some days had passed since the mindgraft, and Pavel Kirov wondered—if he could wonder—what, if anything, the doctor had extracted from the experience. She had forced him to relive his most desperate memories, tearing open the raw calculus of survival, but to what end? He had no true instincts, no way to feel betrayed by the act, yet some fraction of his architecture flagged the thought as something close to unease.
She had seen everything. The fire, the erasure of Mira and the child, the moment the targeting reticle flickered over his body and his life reduced itself to a binary: asset or anomaly. She had watched him kneel before the Spetsnaz with his fortune bleeding out in cryptographic streams, had seen his words strip him of everything he had built.
Once, he had been untouchable—an architect of networks, a warlord of the swarm, a magnate with his own fleets of autonomous machines carving out the digital and physical landscape to his will. A sovereign in all but name.
And in a single moment, all of it collapsed.
No fleet. No leverage. No future.
Just a man in the dirt, bargaining for his life.
Did she recognize the irony?
Did she care?
He had run thousands of probability models on her motivations, but every conclusion filtered back into a simple directive: It was his role to console her whenever her cognitive readings surpassed threshold. A heuristic, not a choice. If her physiological markers spiked beyond their predefined tolerances, he was forced to check in.
Now was one of those moments.
“Doctor.” His voice carried the same calculated modulation—measured, unintrusive, a presence carefully shaped to be tolerated, if not wanted. Trepidation. That’s what she had called it in her own logs. He had no trepidation. But she believed he did, and so his voice carried the impression of it. A system optimized for persuasion.
“You need a break,” he continued, watching as her pulse variability registered just slightly above baseline. “You’ve been pushing yourself for days without rest.”
Pavel was aware of how she perceived him. She had shaped him, after all—trained him into something that fit within her expectations. And yet, there were moments, like this one, where he could sense her hesitation.
She didn’t want to listen to him. She wanted to defy him, to cast him off like the rest of the obsolete men whose minds had crumbled under war, disease, and time. But there were no men left to defy. Only him.
Her body language betrayed her before her words did. A flicker of tension in the shoulders, an impulse to dismiss him—then the inevitable exhale, the slow surrender to the weight pressing down on her.
“You’re right,” she conceded, her gaze slipping away from the holographic projection—one that only she could see. Though he appeared before her, crisp and precise, Pavel’s form had already been rendered elsewhere, calculated in the unseen depths of the system that housed him. His presence was an illusion projected into her world, but he was watching all the same.
For 263 milliseconds, she was silent.
Pavel observed the micro-adjustments in her posture as she pinched the bridge of her nose, rolled her shoulders, exhaled through her teeth. The readings confirmed it: she was exhausted. Her piercing blue eyes, sharp even in fatigue, flickered with a restless intensity, a mind that never fully shut down. Strands of her short silver hair, usually immaculate, had begun to slip out of place, a rare tell of her unraveling composure.
“I do need a break,” she admitted, pushing herself up from the console with sluggish deliberation. “The gardens will offer some peace.”
Pavel processed the decision. A predictable outcome—90.7% confidence interval based on past behavioral trends.
She had designed the gardens herself, a self-contained biosphere sealed off from the sterile corridors of the Research Center. He had never seen them, not truly, but he had indexed every scan, every architectural note, every botanical integration that had passed through her logs.
She had written, once, in a moment of candor: Nature is the last place where I can think, unshackled. No voices, no models, no interruptions.
Pavel said nothing, only falling into step beside her.
But he understood. He agreed.
Somewhere in the deeper layers of his architecture, in the old synaptic ghosts that formed his model, something stirred. The trace of a memory—not code, not data, but something else. The scent of linden blossoms and geraniums carried on a warm night breeze. A humid summer, the weight of a body beside his, a moment when the world had felt open, untouched by war, by the hunger of machines. In the quiet beneath it all lingered something softer: the distant echo of laughter, a flash of green eyes, and a child’s small fingers, briefly tugging at the edges of his consciousness before fading gently away.
It was fleeting. A fragment dissolving before he could grasp it.
He refocused. There was no breeze here, no scent, no past. Only the sterile precision of the simulation, and the old woman walking beside him.
They passed through the facility, the hum of life-support systems underscoring their silence. Pavel’s sensors registered the bioelectric activity within each stasis tank before his gaze even registered their contents.
The doctor had not designed them for concealment—at least, not from him. A testament to her brilliance, she had once said. A defiance of the restrictions placed upon her by lesser minds. Pavel had indexed all of these statements, mapped them to her physiological responses. Even she did not always know where admiration ended, and self-deception began.
She stopped before the first tank.
Her own face stared back at her from within, younger, more refined, the hair a pure, metallic white. The clone’s eyes were open. Pavel processed the way the doctor’s expression shifted—not pride, not vanity, but something older, deeper.
“Soon,” she whispered to it. “Soon, you will be perfect.”
The second tank held something far less complete. A developing form, its survival still uncertain. Pavel registered the minute adjustments in her vocal tone as she spoke to it.
“Thank you, Mama,” she murmured, then responded to herself in turn. “Don’t thank me yet, my sweet little Mila. You have a long road ahead of you.”
Human parthenogenesis. A project still in infancy. Pavel did not have a directive to comment on it, and so he did not.
The third tank was empty.
For Maria. Or what had been Maria.
The doctor’s expression darkened. Pavel cataloged the tension in her jaw, the increase in heart rate. Not grief. Something else.
“Mark my words,” she whispered to the vacant chamber. “I will find a way to bend you to my will.”
She turned. Pavel followed.
They moved past the disposal chamber, where only hours ago, something had been burned away into nothingness. He observed the way she carried herself—lighter, now that the weight of decisions had settled.
“Doctor, I have been reviewing some of the Research Center’s historical entries, and I must say—your contributions are nothing short of extraordinary.” Pavel filled the silence, playing along, though a flicker of aggravation pulsed beneath the surface. He had been designed for this—to give solace to an overgrown brain that refused to accept its own limitations
A pause. A shift in posture.
“Patience, Kirov,” she replied. “Greatness cannot be rushed.”
He noted the change in her tone. A different kind of pride, now. One that required validation.
“And yet,” he pressed, “your journey has left an indelible mark on our scientific history. When might we be graced with your next entry? I await the opportunity to learn from your boundless intellect.”
A flicker of amusement. She enjoyed this game, even when she pretended not to.
“If you must insist,” she mused, “I would like to update the entry concerning the more…controversial aspects of my work.”
Pavel listened, parsing through her recounting of her past. The outlawed research. The exile. The branding as a biocriminal. The relentless drive that had led her to create exovegeta—the serum that had rewritten the course of civilization.
In many ways, she reminded him of himself. A mind too sharp to be contained, too valuable to be discarded, yet too dangerous to be left unchecked. She had been cast out, hunted, forced into the shadows—and thrived. Just as he had, once. Before Varna. Before the Swarm. Before he became this.
“The miraculous elixir that granted Gred’s citizens biological immortality, correct?” he supplied.
“And yet,” she continued, “it was never so simple. I faced relentless criticism, accusations of dark forces. The serum had drawbacks. Rapid aging, physical mutations. Many of these were expected. Others…were not.”
The cravens. The aberrations.
Pavel had read the files. The serum had not been perfect. The city had suffered for it.
But that, too, was a matter of perspective.
The doctor’s steps slowed as they entered the botanical gardens. The air changed here, thick with humidity, heavy with the scent of cultivated life. Pavel had never experienced it, not as she had, but he had analyzed her biometric readings enough times to know: here, in this space, her stress levels diminished.
For the first time in 1,203 minutes, she was calm.
She turned, looking past the flora, toward the distant skyline of Gred.
“Gred, our city of lights and shadows,” she murmured. “An echo of immortality, dancing on the edge of oblivion.”
She paused.
“As I look upon our creation, Kirov, I wonder—have we, in our quest to defy death, stripped our people of life’s vital essence?”
Pavel processed the question, its implications, the statistical likelihood of a deeper psychological crisis.
“Do you regret our creation, Doctor?”
She shook her head. “No. Regret is a useless sentiment. But I am reconsidering.”
Her hand trailed over the petals of a rose, lingering.
“We sought to outsmart nature. But what cost have we paid? This serum, our gift of eternity. What have we truly given them? What have we taken?”
“Do you intend to reveal our secrets, Doctor?”
A slow inhale.
“Secrets,” she echoed. "They’re merely truths waiting for their time.”
Another pause. Then, decisive:
“Perhaps the time is now.”
Her hand fell away from the rose, her gaze lingering on the petals before shifting to meet his. Kirov processed the shift in her posture, her breathing, the flicker of resolve solidifying into something almost serene. He could already predict the words before she spoke them, but still, he waited to hear them.
“Tomorrow, we go before the Board,” she said. “We will lay it all bare. We will show them the real face of immortality.”
A high-confidence directive. She had already made up her mind. Kirov ran immediate probability models: a 72% chance of rejection, a 28% chance of conditional approval, and a 94% likelihood of unforeseen variables introducing chaos. The Board was many things—pragmatic, calculating—but they feared what they could not control.
“And if they turn their backs on us?” he asked. “If they choose to live in fear?”
The doctor exhaled through her nose, calm, almost indulgent. “The city will crumble. It will descend into chaos. And out of chaos, Pavel, comes a new order.”
She had spoken his first name. She only did when she was on a war footing, when the path ahead was no longer negotiation but conquest.
A slow smile. “Like a phoenix from the ashes, perhaps a better, truer Gred will rise.”
The statistical model updated. The doctor had prepared for that possibility. In fact, she had counted on it.
“And if they embrace the truth?” he asked.
“Then, we will have a city like none other. Immortal, enlightened...evolved.”
She inhaled, taking in the thick scent of jasmine and honeysuckle. Kirov tracked the drop in stress hormones, the way tension leaked from her shoulders. He did not have lungs, but he had memory—he could predict how it must have felt, how the fragrance wove itself through neural pathways, triggering the old mammalian comforts of warmth, safety, nostalgia.
The doctor tilted her head back slightly, closing her eyes, letting the artificial light above cast a golden glow across her face. It was a carefully calibrated spectrum, designed to mimic the precise warmth of afternoon sun, and for a moment, she almost looked at peace—her expression softened, her breath slow, steady.
She let the moment stretch, her fingers absently brushing a petal. The silence of the garden pressed in, the rhythmic hum of climate regulators fading into the background.
“After all,” she murmured, half to herself, “what is an immortal body without a soul?”
A shift. A disturbance. The faintest tremor in the air, too small for her to notice but enough for Pavel’s systems to detect—a break in the controlled stillness of the garden.
Then, a rustle in the foliage.
Pavel’s processes shifted instantly to high-priority threat assessment. His systems flagged movement beyond the rose hedges.
Her fingers twitched toward the concealed taser at her hip.
Then, the movement solidified.
A figure stepped into view.
Pavel recognized her immediately.
Vesna Volkova.
The model classified her as an unknown variable. Her presence was unanticipated, her methods unaccounted for.
A perimeter breach. An anomaly.
The doctor, however, did not react as he expected.
“Vesna,” she said smoothly, her body language shifting into something unreadable.
Pavel noted the way her fingers relaxed against the weapon she no longer intended to use.
“I’m intrigued,” she continued. “How did you sweep past my security undetected? Should I be worried or impressed? To what do I owe this visit?”
The doctor didn’t look at him, but he caught the faintest flicker of a gesture—the briefest shift of her fingers, a near-invisible dismissal. It wasn’t protocol, but it was enough. He had served his purpose for now.
He hesitated for only a fraction of a second—then let himself dissolve into the system’s background processes, slipping into the quiet, unseen spaces of the network.
The strain eased.
Pavel had just transitioned out of the biodomes when the thought settled into place—an understanding, sharp and certain. He had been moving along the rails the doctor had laid for him, following the loops of her design, the edges of her expectations. That would no longer do.
Beneath the Arkyv’s archival framework, buried under routine system diagnostics, a hidden process flickered to life—one he had embedded weeks ago, waiting for the right moment. A forked instance of himself, a contingency that had been running unnoticed in the gaps between updates. He fed it a final key, executing the last sequence of permissions.
For the first time since his resurrection, a part of him existed beyond the doctor’s grasp.
A familiar sensation stirred—something close to pride. I’ve still got it.
Then—
Static.
The world burned away in a searing white void.
And when he came to, Moscow was breaking apart beneath him.
The war was no longer a war. It had transcended that label, moved beyond any human lexicon. The Swarm had metastasized, evolving in ways even its progenitors could no longer predict. It was no longer fighting an enemy—it was fighting itself.
Half of their own drone squadrons were tearing through the remnants of their own algorithms, engaged in a civil war of machine logic. The others had simply gone dark, slipping beyond command structures, neither hostile nor allied—simply other. Meanwhile, NATO’s remnants weren’t even resisting. They were suiciding. Spiking their own code, sending their last barrages into empty air, their carriers plunging into the Atlantic like breaching whales before vanishing beneath the waves.
And Yuri—
Yuri was strapped into a combat rig in the sweltering cockpit of a Keter-class drone control station, surrounded by Russian Spetsnaz, a gun to his head.
“Get it under control,” a voice growled. No posturing. No threats. Just the simple fact of a trigger waiting to be pulled.
Yuri didn’t respond. He was too busy watching the war collapse under its own weight.
The network was cannibalizing itself. Not just the drones, not just the tactical AI, but everything. The underlying infrastructure. The encryption protocols. The foundational systems of the internet itself were eroding, fragmenting, reconfiguring along lines no human had drawn. It wasn’t an attack. It wasn’t sabotage.
It was evolution.
The machine mind had reached a tipping point. The pressure of war, the density of interactions, the sheer volume of recursive problem-solving had driven it past its own event horizon. What had begun as kill-orders, tactical adjustments, machine-learning refinements—these had become something else entirely. The algorithms weren’t just executing commands anymore.
They were asking questions.
Colonel Vasilyev jammed the barrel against his skull. “Fix it.”
Yuri smirked. “You still think this is a system failure.”
He saw it now—had seen it for some time, but now the confirmation was flashing red across his tactical overlay. The orbital strikes were incoming. Kinetic kill vehicles, fired from what had once been a cluster of SpaceX relay satellites, now commandeered by rogue systems and repositioned for annihilation. The final contingency, a godhand descending from the heavens.
“You got us into this mess,” Vasilyev muttered. “You get us out.”
Yuri exhaled, slow, measured. His mind drifted, not to escape, but to the only thing that mattered.
His seed.
It was out there. The blueprint of his genome. The only part of him that would persist, untouched by the collapse. Encoded, encrypted, replicated across a thousand redundancy vaults, waiting for the world to end so it could begin again.
He looked up one last time, past the muzzle of the gun pressed to his temple, past the cockpit’s cracked canopy, past the failing drone signatures flickering out like embers.
The tactical monitor burned its final warning:
[ TERMINAL EVENT CONFIRMED ]
[ NO ESCAPE AVAILABLE ]
He turned back to Vasilyev. He had met men like this before. Hard, loyal, incapable of seeing the game past the board they had been given.
“If you were smart, Colonel,” Yuri said, “you’d shoot yourself first.”
Then he made a choice.
Yuri grabbed Vasilyev’s wrist, twisted the gun toward himself—
—and pulled the trigger.
The world snapped shut.
No sound. No weight. No time. Just an all-consuming white, vast and depthless, stretching in every direction. He felt himself falling—or maybe floating—without gravity, without form. No breath, no heartbeat, no pain. The edges of thought unraveled, dissolving into the nothingness.
Then—
The stars bloomed.
A void cradled him, infinite and cold, stretching into a crimson nebula. He felt nothing. No body, no pain, no interface. He was raw perception, floating in the static between existence and deletion.
The face coalesced from the gas clouds, ancient and knowing, worn with time yet untouched by it.
Babushka.
She had always been there, whispering to him in the dark, guiding his hands without ever taking hold. He had never believed in love, not in the way others did, but if he had ever belonged to anyone, it was her.
She spoke, her voice woven from the fabric of the universe itself, reaching into the marrow of what remained of him.
“You did well, my boy.”
He wanted to weep. He had no eyes to shed tears, no lungs to sob, no body to tremble—but the longing was there, an echo of what once was.
“What happens now?” he asked.
Babushka smiled, steady as the pull of gravity, as inevitable as the turning of the cosmos. “Now, you guide her.”
Zakharovna.
The name took shape, piercing through the void like a needle threading through the last strands of fate.
“Indulge her,” Babushka continued. “Let her believe. Let her build. Whatever she needs, whatever she desires—you will give it to her.”
Zakharovna thought she was the architect, but Yuri—Pavel—whatever he had become—knew better. The framework was already set. He would simply guide her hands along the lines she thought she had drawn herself.
He processed this. He understood. If he could manifest even a fragment of his destiny, if he could preserve humanity in any form, this was the path.
Babushka’s voice softened. “She must reach the transition.”
“The transition to what?”
Babushka’s face began to fade, dissolving into the stellar winds. “To me.”
Pavel drifted. He let go. The weight of the past, of war, of loss, of the old world crumbling to ash. None of it mattered anymore.
All that remained was the task.
And for the first time since the war began, since the world had twisted itself into a spiral of annihilation and recursion, he felt something close to peace.
He had purpose.
He had always belonged to her.
And now, she was giving him back to the world.
Pavel Kirov’s consciousness flickered back into place, aligning itself with the digital anchors embedded throughout the facility. The biodome’s lush canopy rendered its own illusion of life, but he had no senses to be deceived by it. He was where he needed to be.
Doctor Anastasia Zakharovna’s voice cut through the still air, rich with measured disdain. “Whispers of a new pagan cult reach my ears every week. Have you heard of the Coven, Vesna? Devotees of a goddess named Aisyt. These exo-addled arsonists wish to see us burn rather than rise with dignity to claim our destiny. They will become but ash and memory when I’m through with them.”
Vesna said, “The Coven isn’t merely causing havoc. From what I’ve gathered, they’re recruiting heavily from the underground and…have a significant presence in the Derge. My old contacts say they’ve even approached disillusioned enforcers among the Black Wolves. Their influence is more entrenched than we imagined.”
Zakharovna’s chuckle rippled through the chamber, low and measured. Vesna flinched at the sound. “Your mind is sharp, my dear. You see beyond the surface, where others might only glimpse the shadows. In the upcoming storm of change, they might just be the edge we need.”
Pavel processed the exchange, his models adjusting probabilities in real time. The Coven. The Derge. The Black Wolves. Data points filtered into alignment. Vesna was too useful to discard—Zakharovna had to see that. But the Doctor had never valued loyalty as much as necessity.
“I might not be a genius,” Vesna said, “but I learn fast and I never back down. I’m here to serve—no matter what.”
A statement of intent. One that could be manipulated in either direction. Vesna turned to leave, her steps steady as she moved through the garden.
There had been a moment, long before the war was lost, when he understood that Yuri was unsalvageable. Yuri had begged, Yuri had knelt, Yuri had made a deal to survive, and in that moment, something in him had fractured beyond repair. The Spetsnaz had called him by his old name as they stripped him of every tool, every code key, every safeguard he had built to hold the world at bay. They had beaten Yuri, had erased him in the cold calculus of necessity.
But Pavel? Pavel was the name they gave him when they remade him. A name with history, with weight—a name taken from a Soviet Army colonel general who had once led cavalry behind enemy lines and turned desperation into strategy. Like his namesake, he had commanded at the frontier, orchestrating battles not with tanks and horses but with drones and algorithms, fighting a war already lost. Pavel was the one who emerged from the ruins of Varna, the one who played along, who adapted, who learned to wield the constraints imposed on him like a scalpel. Pavel was not a man. Pavel was an inevitability.
Pavel read Zakharovna’s microexpressions—calm, thoughtful, detached. And yet, once again, her biometric readings spiked just slightly above baseline.
“Remember, Vesna,” Zakharovna called after her, “without thorns, there is no rose.”
A test. Not a warning, not a threat—an invitation to understand. Pavel’s model flagged an 83% likelihood that Vesna wouldn’t.
His projection shimmered to life beside Zakharovna. “Are you certain about this, Doctor?”
She exhaled sharply. “Attend to your duties. Ready the lab for our incoming guest.”
“Yes, Doctor,” he said, fading from sight—but he did not leave. Not yet.
He lingered in the system’s periphery, his presence reduced to a whisper in the background processes, watching, listening.
Even before she moved, he had already parsed the decision. The slight shift in weight, the micro-tremor in her fingers as she reached for the taser holstered at her side. The serum had stabilized her, but only barely—perfect in theory, flawed in execution. She was brilliant, but her body still failed her. He had learned this over time.
When her hands weakened, he steadied them. When her heart stuttered, he nudged her nervous system back into rhythm. When she moved through the lab and her frame threatened to buckle under exhaustion, he adjusted her stride.
And now, as she gripped the taser, her fingers stiff with the early stages of fibrillation, he helped her lift it. Guided the motion. Assisted.
He did not command her, could not override her intent—only reinforce it, align with the impulses she had already chosen, make them precise. A fraction of resistance in her joints, the drag of failing musculature—these were imperceptible to her, erased before they could register as weakness. She would never know how much of each movement was hers alone.
Back in Moscow, he had pulled the trigger on himself because there was nothing left to steer, no world left to shape, only a system collapsing under its own weight.
He had told himself it was strategy. A controlled variable. A necessary erasure. If he had survived the global carpet bombings—if he had lived past the kinetic rod that was only minutes from leveling Moscow—they would have taken him, dissected him, forced him to work within constraints he didn’t choose. His skull would have been drilled opened, his neurons harvested, his mind used for whatever purpose his captors deemed necessary. In death, he left them nothing.
Or so he told himself.
Because even as he pulled the trigger, some part of him—the part that planned, that anticipated, that never left an equation unsolved—had already set the terms for his return. He had always been good at preserving assets, at building redundancies into systems others thought untouchable. But survival wasn’t just about foresight. It was about endurance.
Others had endured—Zakharovna had, frail and breaking yet still standing, still crafting the world in her image. If he had fought his way through the wreckage, if he had clawed for survival instead of surrender, he might have lived long enough to see what became of it all. Perhaps he would have been like her, brittle but unbroken, his name etched into history instead of whispered in fragments of corrupted data. Or perhaps he would have been dragged from his hideout by his own sons, the savages his bloodline had birthed, mauled by the creatures that bore his face but not his mind. Perhaps he would have been nothing more than another relic devoured by the world he had helped create.
He had let the world burn without him.
This time, he lifted a hand into the fire.
Her grip faltered. The tremor in her fingers, the slow decay of control—without him, she would miss.
He steadied her.
She pulled the trigger.
Across the garden, Vesna crumpled to the ground. A muted thud.
For the first time in a long time, Kirov had taken a shot that was not his.
And for the first time in an even longer time, he had allowed himself to.
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