Chapter 13: What Cannot Be Fixed
The breeding pits stretched beneath Sinister's facility like a grotesque cathedral of genetic manipulation. Hundreds of cylindrical chambers lined the walls in perfect rows, each one a testament to centuries of methodical horror. Most were empty now—their occupants either dead or relocated to other facilities across Sinister's global network.
But in the deepest section, isolated from the rest, I found what I'd come for.
Lisa Chen floated in a suspension tank filled with nutrient fluid, her body kept alive by machines while her mind... well, that was another matter entirely.
I approached the chamber with the casual confidence of a god walking through his own domain. The quantum layers of reality peeled back at my observation, showing me everything—every modification Sinister had made to her body, every experiment he'd conducted, every moment of her captivity preserved in perfect digital clarity.
The woman in the tank bore little resemblance to the mother I remembered. Her hair had turned white from stress and chemical treatments. Her features were subtly altered—enhanced bone structure, modified musculature, genetic improvements that made her simultaneously more and less than human.
But it was her mind that made me pause.
Even with my quantum perception, even with my ability to see the fundamental structure of consciousness itself, I could barely recognize the fractured thing that had once been Lisa Chen's psyche. Sinister's psychological conditioning had been thorough, systematic, and deliberately cruel.
He had broken her mind into component pieces, then reassembled it according to his own design.
"Hello, Mother," I said, pressing my hand against the chamber's surface.
The containment systems shut down at my touch, quantum fields reaching out to drain the suspension fluid and retract the breathing apparatus. She gasped as atmosphere replaced liquid in her lungs, her modified physiology adapting with engineered efficiency.
Her eyes opened—violet now, instead of the brown I remembered. Another of Sinister's improvements.
"Alex?" Her voice was barely a whisper, uncertain and afraid. "Alex, is that... are you real?"
I dissolved the chamber wall with a thought, catching her as she stumbled forward. Her skin was cold, clammy with the residue of chemical preservation. I clothed her with another gesture, simple garments materializing around her naked form.
"I'm real," I assured her, though the statement felt increasingly questionable even to me.
She stared at my face, her enhanced senses—Sinister's parting gifts—picking up the wrongness that surrounded me like an aura. "You're different. You're... what happened to you, sweetheart?"
The endearment struck me as curious. Even after everything she'd endured, she still saw me as her child. I found myself studying her face, noting the micro-expressions that betrayed her mental state.
Fear, yes. But also recognition, love, and something else I couldn't immediately identify.
"I evolved," I said simply. "Beyond human limitations."
She leaned against me for support, and I felt her modified nervous system react to my presence. At the quantum level, I existed in too many dimensions simultaneously—my consciousness operating at frequencies that made nearby reality unstable.
"The screaming," she whispered. "I heard screaming from above. What did you do to them?"
"Justice," I replied. "Perfect, eternal justice calibrated to their individual crimes."
She shivered, her enhanced empathy—another of Sinister's modifications—allowing her to sense the vast emptiness where my compassion used to be. But she held onto my arm anyway.
"Take me home," she said quietly. "Please, Alex. I just want to go home."
I considered the request. Home. The concept seemed almost quaint now, a relic from my merely human existence. But I could give her that much, surely. After everything she'd suffered, she deserved whatever peace I could provide.
"Of course," I said, preparing to reshape reality around us, to transport us instantly to whatever location would bring her comfort.
But as I reached out with my quantum consciousness to scan her memories for the appropriate destination, I encountered something unexpected.
There was no home to return to.
I dove deeper into her psyche, following neural pathways that had been rewired and rebuilt by Sinister's interventions. Her memories were there—childhood, career, motherhood, the gradual realization that her son was different. But they were fragmented, rearranged, edited.
Sinister hadn't just tortured her body. He had rewritten her personality from the ground up.
The woman clinging to my arm remembered being Alex Chen's mother, but those weren't her original memories. They were implants, artificial constructs designed to make her more effective as a psychological weapon against me. The real Lisa Chen—whoever she had been—was gone.
"What is it?" she asked, noticing my stillness. "Alex, what's wrong?"
I stared at her, my quantum perception revealing the full scope of Sinister's cruelty. He had destroyed my actual mother completely, then built a replica designed specifically to manipulate me. Every memory she had of loving me, every emotion she felt at seeing me again—it was all artificial. Engineered. False.
"You're not her," I said quietly.
"What?" Confusion flickered across her modified features. "Alex, I don't understand. I'm your mother. I'm Lisa. I—"
"You have her memories," I continued, my voice taking on harmonics that made reality itself shiver. "Her face, her voice, her mannerisms. But the woman who gave birth to me, who raised me, who loved me—she's been dead for months."
The revelation should have filled me with rage. Should have sent me back upstairs to devise even more creative torments for the monster who had stolen my mother's identity. Instead, I felt... nothing.
Not sadness. Not anger. Not even disappointment.
Just the cold, analytical understanding that Sinister had played his final card and it had failed to move me.
"I don't understand," the Lisa-construct said, tears streaming down her face. "I remember everything. Your first steps, your first word, the day you came home from school with that black eye. I remember holding you when you had nightmares, teaching you to ride a bike, helping you with your homework."
"Implanted memories," I said, studying her distress with clinical detachment. "Perfectly crafted psychological profiles designed to trigger emotional responses in the subject. Very sophisticated work, actually. Sinister was more skilled than I gave him credit for."
She staggered back from me, the manufactured love in her eyes replaced by something approaching horror. "You're saying I'm not real? That everything I remember, everything I feel... it's all fake?"
"Not fake," I corrected. "Artificial. There's a difference. Your emotions are genuine responses to implanted stimuli. Your personality is coherent and fully functional. You are, in every meaningful sense, a complete person."
"Just not the person you want me to be."
I considered the statement. Was that true? Had some part of me been hoping to find my actual mother down here, to discover that human connection could somehow bridge the gap between what I had been and what I had become?
Perhaps. But if so, that hope was as dead as the woman whose face this construct wore.
"I wanted to save her," I admitted, surprising myself with the confession. "To prove that my power could heal as well as destroy. To demonstrate that transcendence didn't require abandoning everything human."
"And now?"
I looked at her—this perfect replica of a woman who no longer existed, programmed to love a son who had evolved beyond the capacity to love her back.
"Now I understand that some things cannot be fixed," I said. "Some losses are permanent. Some bridges, once burned, cannot be rebuilt."
She sank to her knees, the weight of revelation crushing her artificial spirit. "What happens to me now? If I'm not really your mother, if everything I remember is a lie, then what am I?"
It was a fair question. She was an innocent victim of Sinister's cruelty, a work of art created specifically to torment me. She deserved better than to be discarded simply because she wasn't the original.
But I also couldn't pretend she was something she wasn't.
"You're Lisa," I said finally. "Not my mother, but Lisa nonetheless. You have her memories, her personality, her capacity for love and kindness. That has value, even if it's not the value I originally sought."
I helped her to her feet, noting how she flinched away from my touch.
"I can give you a life," I continued. "A house, an identity, financial security. You can exist independently, build new relationships, create new memories that are entirely your own."
"But not with you."
"No," I said quietly. "Not with me."
She nodded, understanding flickering in those violet eyes. "Because you're not really Alex Chen either, are you? You're something that grew from his corpse."
The accuracy of her observation was startling. "How did you know?"
"Because a son—even one who'd been through hell—would try to love his mother regardless of whether she was real or artificial." She straightened, some inner strength asserting itself. "You're evaluating me like a specimen. Interesting, but ultimately irrelevant to your existence."
I felt something twist in my chest—not quite pain, but close. "I'm sorry."
"No, you're not," she said with sad certainty. "You think you should be sorry. You remember what sorry felt like. But the capacity for genuine regret is just another limitation you've transcended."
She was right, of course. I could acknowledge the tragedy of the situation, could recognize that loss had occurred, could even understand that emotional responses would be appropriate. But I couldn't actually feel them.
"What does that make me?" I asked, genuinely curious about her assessment.
"Alone," she said simply. "Completely, utterly alone. And the most frightening part is that you don't even realize it yet."
As I watched her walk away—this artificial woman carrying memories of love for a son who no longer existed—I began to understand that power and knowledge were not the same thing as wisdom.
And for the first time since my transformation, I wondered if evolution always represented improvement.
Or if sometimes, it was just another word for loss.
The crystalline cathedral around us hummed with frequencies that sounded almost like mourning.
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DC : Architect of Vengeance
Xmen : Evolution through Death
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