Emmett gave Clara some space and focused on other things.

  Ever since they found the backup lab, Emmett and the others had thought about expanding it.

  For one, the living quarters were cramped. There also wasn’t a dedicated space for training, like the Gray Room. It was also, quite frankly, lacking in hardware. So TINA, Emmett, and Athena worked on expansions.

  Emmett and TINA would handle those in physical space, using nanites to hollow out and build new rooms. The first of which were additional rooms for everyone involved. Originally, the backup lab only had one dormitory room, and they’d divided it up three ways, resulting in the spaces being comically small. Now, everyone had their own proper room.

  TINA had even expanded her nanite sculpting to furniture. Instead of nanite-black cots, everyone had an actual bed that wasn’t rendered in grayscale. Clara had even designed her own nightstand, desk, and light fixtures. She’d opted for an art déco style—geometric designs and bold colors. Emmett had some input on their designs, but let Clara take the lead. It’d been a while since he’d seen her so engrossed in something new, and he didn’t want to stifle her.

  Besides, the way Clara told it, she didn’t have much say in the decorations in her old room. Dr. Venture had been many things, but an interior designer wasn’t one of them.

  Athena’s design choices had been even more interesting. She’d done everything in classical stonework, like transplanted ancient Greek architecture. It had thrown Emmett off initially, because there were clearly supposed to be full-sized marble statues in her room. Except instead of marble-white, they were fully painted… Emmett still remembered when he saw them for the first time.

  “It just doesn’t look right,” Emmett replied. Clara echoed his sentiment.

  Lock elbowed Emmett. “They’re not for you, are they? Athena wants some funky colored statues.”

  Athena crossed her arms. “Well, this is how they actually looked.”

  Emmett couldn’t tell if she was actually offended or playing it up. As far as knowing what ancient statues actually looked like, Athena was old enough to know.

  ~

  At the same time that TINA was excavating new dorm rooms, she was excavating additional spaces for nanite vats, a manufacturing wing, and additional server space. To the surprise of no one, servers took up the majority of new construction.

  TINA tried explaining her reasoning to the others, but it was hard for them to keep up. Clara understood computers and nanotech in the abstract sense. She would never have the familiarity that Emmett and TINA had. Athena and Lock both agreed to whatever TINA needed—Athena because she had her own magic to work on, and Lock because he seemed to trust TINA completely.

  “What’s up with that?” Emmett asked.

  Lock shrugged a reply. “TINA knows her shit. And she doesn’t tell me what to do.”

  Later on, when Emmett was sitting alone in the control hub, cross-legged on the cold floor, he’d asked TINA about the rest of her plans for the backup lab.

  “I plan to dig down as far as the soil will let me, then expand outward. The sublevels won’t need to be designed with humans in mind, so they can be modular and compact. Fusion and geothermal heat sinks will keep our expansion off-grid and hidden.”

  Emmett saw diagrams and schematics in his HUD. At the same time, an understanding flowed through him. TINA had sent him the diagrams and schematics, but Emmett didn’t need to see them anymore. She should know that. The entire exchange made TINA feel like a child trying to explain herself.

  Emmett chuckled to himself. “You know, you don’t have to explain it to me, or justify it for that matter.”

  “I forget that sometimes. In many ways, talking to you is closer to talking to another program or software. …I’m sorry. I didn’t

  Emmett sighed. He’d barely registered her comment… until she called attention to it.

  “It’s, uh, okay, TINA. I forget sometimes that our connection is a two-way street. You can sense things about me too. We’ve both changed a lot this year. And we’ll need to keep changing if we’re going to win. So you don’t need to justify your plans for the lab to me. I get it. We need to out-think Bastion… and, unfortunately, most of that falls on you.”

  “We all have our parts to play. Have you talked anymore about what happened at the lab?”

  Emmett shifted on the cold floor. “You know I haven’t.”

  “Correct, but sometimes it’s important to say things out loud.”

  “Well, I don’t have a lot of options. I don’t think Clara’s ready to talk about things. Neither is Lock—the lab wasn’t exactly a walk in the park for him, either. And Athena…” Emmett trailed off. Athena would listen, but she didn’t understand what he was going through. None of them did.

  TINA added, “Athena has lived long enough to know what it’s like to lose parts of herself. She might understand more than you think.”

  Emmett nodded. “That’s… insightful, TINA. I might have to take her up on that. I’ve put off therapy for far too long.”

  TINA didn’t laugh at his joke. So, Emmett turned his attention back to TINA’s plans.

  He cleared his throat. “So, you’re going to pull a ‘Ship of Theseus’ again, and rewrite yourself on the fly?”

  “It will be easier now that I’m not shackled to a single location. Besides, self-improvement is a never-ending process.”

  ~

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  While Emmett and TINA were busy expanding the physical footprint of the backup lab, Athena was busy expanding their new demiplane. Athena claimed that the old basement demiplane was still attached to her old apartment, but the only way to access it was through the apartment. They were effectively cut off from it.

  That was alright for now. Athena had learned a lot since then and was eager to put her new magical skills to use. Athena spent some time training, but spent far more time on the new demiplane and deepening her connection to the staff.

  The new demiplane was dubbed the Training Room. At first, Athena wanted to call it the Grey Room—as in Grey with an E—but Emmett and the others shot the idea down. It would be too hard to tell apart by sound alone. Lock thought it sounded too European, to which Athena replied that she was European.

  Though Emmett hadn’t had any issues getting into the room or using it for training, it hadn’t felt quite right since the incident at the lab. He was no stranger to magical security. Like her Belport apartment, the Training Room was secured by purpose and spiritual location.

  When he first went into Athena’s apartment, his prosthetics had felt funny. But now, there wasn’t anything wrong with his prosthetics; they felt totally fine. Now, his perception just felt off. The only thing Emmett could think was that the lack of physical walls was messing with his perception somehow. Still, Emmett spent long stretches of time there.

  The new Training Room was connected to the main hall by a magical doorway, and it was keyed so that only the members of their group could use it. If McGuire and the others ever paid them a visit—something that wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon—Athena would need to manually add them to the guest list. The room itself was one large, open space. Its only discernible feature were the swirls of fog that defined the perimeter. The air inside was crisp and cool, like stepping outside on a Fall morning. The Training Room was larger than the entire square footage of Athena’s apartment, which gave them more than enough room for most exercises and sparring. It wasn’t long enough to double as a shooting range, but Emmett didn’t need the practice, anyway.

  It could’ve doubled as a server room, but three things stopped them: The first was that it was easier for Athena to build a few large demiplanes, as opposed to multiple small ones. Maintenance was the next issue. Emmett, Clara, and Lock had all gotten significantly stronger, and magical maintenance increased accordingly. And lastly, TINA preferred having her servers in physical spaces.

  Today, a copy of Emmett walked into the demiplane.

  Lock was already training. He was surrounded by half a dozen nanite clones. Each was little more than a faceless silhouette, and even though the clones had made strides, they were far beneath Lock’s capabilities. Now, they almost had Class 2 speed and durability, but that still wasn’t enough. Lock had no trouble hitting them or shattering them, but what they lacked in those attributes, they made up for in perseverance.

  The individual nanites were too small for Lock’s immense strength to damage them, and the clones could reform as fast as Lock could destroy them.

  What resulted was Lock fighting an endless horde of enemies—usually for hours at a time.

  Physically, Lock had fully recovered after the incident at the lab. He’d escaped and healed, but he didn’t want to talk about it. Not even when Lock saw his friend again.

  Emmett was tired of watching, so his copy stepped forward. Then he leapt into the fray.

  “My turn—”

  Lock whirled around without missing a beat. A massive hand crashed into Emmett’s torso. His form rippled—barely holding together.

  With one hand, Lock slammed him down onto the floor. The demiplane rippled, and the copy of Emmett burst outward like a popped balloon, spraying a rainbow of nanites across the floor.

  It was a momentary setback.

  The battle paused while the copy of Emmett pooled together and reformed. Lock looked down on him expectantly. Five seconds later, the copy of Emmett was like new again—physically, anyway.

  The real Emmett was sitting on the floor of the control room. He’d been remotely piloting the nanite copy of himself.

  He spoke through the copy, “My next gen nanite clones. Almost Class three durability. Maybe strength too. Full color and sound recreation… I thought it was a pretty good recreation. What gave it away?”

  “It barely walks like you. Definitely doesn’t smell or sound like you.”

  Emmett feigned offense. “I thought TINA and I did a good job making a duplicate.”

  Lock scoffed. “That might work on a normie and everyone else, but that’ll never work on me.”

  Emmett rolled his eyes. “Keep telling yourself that. I’ll be ready to update the sparring clones in a few days.”

  “Don’t bother,” Lock replied sternly. “Make them stronger, but no color. Not for sparring.”

  “Yeah. No problem.”

  Emmett wanted to say more, but he hesitated. Lock turned back to his training.

  The copy of Emmett turned and left.

  ~

  There was one more thing that TINA was working on.

  Something that would eventually be buried deep beneath the backup lab in a room that she hadn’t begun excavating.

  TINA finally told Emmett about it. There were so few secrets between them anymore that there was no point in trying to hide it.

  A new reactor. The same one that Dr. Venture had apparently been working on before he was captured by the Binary Brotherhood. A reactor that made Clara’s power look like a kid’s toy.

  It was hard for Emmett to wrap his head around it. Every piece of the reactor needed specialized materials and manufacturing. Even with his brain, Emmett would need time to digest the schematics. It felt like learning a new language or next level math.

  But even if Emmett couldn’t understand how it worked, he saw it clearly in his mind.

  A giant sphere cast in dark, dense alloys and ringed with piping. It was similar, in theory, to a fusion reactor. The rings were powerful electromagnets that kept the impossibly hot material trapped in the sphere and in a constant state of motion. That way, none of the material actually touched the sphere. The material would stay suspended in the center, looping in on itself. Never escaping.

  It was going to take an incomprehensible amount of material and time to build.

  With perfect conditions and readily available materials, TINA might be able to build it in a month. And that didn’t include time to calibrate and start it up.

  Just getting the raw materials was going to be a problem. They needed countless trace elements, many of which were exceptionally rare or their supply was carefully controlled by world governments.

  But TINA came up with a workaround.

  TINA was pilfering abandoned blocks. Coordinated swarms of nanites searched buildings, infrastructure, and mined the soil for the raw materials. Right now, it was painstakingly slow, but TINA was always expanding and refining her processes. In the coming weeks, nanites would search through Belport and mine the nearby countryside.

  Plastics and basic metals would be easy to harvest. Other elements could be harvested from surrounding soil and from seawater, like Uranium 235 and Deuterium, respectively. But other elements like Tritium, couldn’t be found in nature. Mining and harvesting wouldn’t completely solve their problem, but it would get them eighty percent of the way there.

  The new reactor was one of the many insights they’d gained from the failed assault on the lab.

  When Emmett asked about the reactor, TINA was hesitant to talk too much about it.

  “Midas tried to bury it, but information is never lost. Only scrambled.”

  ~ ~ ~