Nearly seventeen years ago, a brilliant, blue-eyed man stood on the precipice of a new world order. A Worldwide, Democratic, People-First Government, Aryan, Alexander Gray reasoned, would improve quality of life and curb birth rates. Yet populations needed to be slashed now. To Aryan’s mathematical mind, it was a numbers game; the amount of lives saved by his actions would far outweigh those lost.

  Aryan was no stranger to loss. Having been initially born to a poor Russian and her young husband then sold on the black market baby trade to a wealthy but belligerent man. Mathew Gray beat his young son and gave him a cold, loveless childhood where he was expected to live out his adoptive father’s dream of being the most famous scientist in the world.

  His father was himself, but a middling scientist. Competent, well-respected but intellectually mundane, and also a drunkard. It got so bad at times he had to abandon Aryan to another caregiver since he was as young as four. He had dumped him on an unsympathetic aunt for months at a time, one that didn’t care for kids, so his father had paid her to care for Aryan. Aryan was frequently rather morose and aggrieved. Filled with harsh remembrances of his former life. As a young boy, he dreamed of a beautiful world based on family, community, and equality, the things he and his parents never had. Where poverty, the individual rights system, and third-world wealth disparity being exploited by advanced country inhabitants were eliminated, so children could never be sold to strangers again and miss a mother and father’s true love.

  Meanwhile, in the present day, global warming continued to smite with even more of a vengeance. Earlier, than previously thought. Things deteriorated very fast. Each year was hotter than the last with more and more frequent bizarre raging storms, droughts, wildfires, and floodings.

  Even a brief worldwide famine where food and water were scarce ensued, during a month of scorching drought. Crops simply wouldn’t grow properly; many elderly and infants died of dehydration and malnutrition.

  So many lived below the poverty line while small wealthy segments of the population squandered their wealth.

  Aryan’s next endeavor in his plan for a utopia, not that he had ever cared for the world utopia (it sounded like something out of a bad film), was a project that would need ever remain top secret. Requiring scientists who were the most advanced and renowned in their field yet malleable and idealistic enough to succumb to the persuasions of fame and fortune.

  Aryan was a most pleasing thing; of rugged form and gifted mind. His handsomeness was both rich and enduring. He was charismatic yet more than slightly unhinged. Tall, strong, lithe. With a dense, sobering fall to his well-kempt hair moving from flown stride or blown wind yet at all but the helm (as was the case with his heart) it was not living and black-brown; like firewood’s charred edge.

  Pale, tensile limbs were muscular yet most slender and constantly moving. His large, almond eyes smoldered and brooded: their shade contrastingly sweet. The deep of bluebells. Red of his curved lips glistened a curiously youthful scarlet. Aryan was proud of his physique. Very lean and well-muscled yet quite subtly so, not he thought proudly, “over-buffed and repugnant.”

  Aryan, a self-professed utilitarian came from a background of wealth and good education though he was adopted. His birth mother was a poor woman who was nevertheless exquisite-looking.

  Her son had inherited that classical appearance. Aryan quickly garnered extraordinary knowledge in a variety of scientific fields despite and perhaps somewhat because, he had a mild derangement.

  His adoptive father, Mathew Gray, a well-respected scientist had pushed his young son with merciless vigor into the field from a very young age. Aryan’s specialty, his field of expertise was actually not foremost in IT at all but in the study of genes, DNA, and the human genome as well as brain chemistry and function.

  Aryan had however been fascinated by computers and the internet revolution since childhood. With black soot tufts of hair sticking up till got round to brushing them, he studied computer science, biology, neuroscience, human genetics, and chemistry. Since leaving his home, the death of his father, and the bank’s claim of ownership of the family home, money, and all their possessions he had lived in a squalid little apartment working two jobs and going to the University of Melbourne. Had been his way of life since he was seventeen though he started university at only thirteen.

  He soon published an academic paper on the function and structure of the human brain and how it differed physically from other animals to give humans their heightened intelligence.

  He detailed explicitly how this information could be used to construct an artificially intelligent computer entity modelled on the human brain namely his own superior mind.

  His name was something of a joke amongst his colleagues though strangely enough he never made any attempt to change it, explaining merely when anyone inquired that “my father had a twisted sense of humour.” Aryan soon made his debut setting up what would become the largest computer company in the world. Holos Unlimited.

  He immediately set to work creating the artificial intelligence he claimed could be designed based on human brain chemistry and structure. Devising the strict, mathematical formulas and algorithms need to commission such a complex machine.

  Young Aryan was also a worldwide peace advocate. His eyes often darkened by great moroseness and embitterment, as he continued to work towards his goal. Harnessing what would ultimately become a creation both devastating in its potential for destructive power and brilliant in its revolutionary innovation.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Aryan‘s next step, after having successfully commissioned others to work with him on a human bioweapon(dubbed later the Shiverla Project) had been to find someone to pose as a doctor in an IVF clinic. To implant the embryos into two unsuspecting infertile women, to care for and nurture as their own. He also schemed to hide their location even from the other Shiverla project collaborators much to Emanuel’s despair and chagrin.

  As he waited for his weapons to grow up, Aryan founded the World Equity Party of Australia (spreading to countries such as England, the States, and even China was also on his agenda. He set to work garnering as much political power and members as a handsome, charismatic, and altogether charming man could procure for a cause that was rather more than unpopular.

  To set his plan of politically overthrowing what he considered wrongful rule in motion, the hybrid chimeras he planned to use as bioweapons were gifted ability to not only regrow every bodily cell but to metamorphose; so, their outward appearance might mimic and masquerade as his enemies or become anyone who might wield the kind of influence he needed.

  Monovalent used that person's collected DNA blueprint, to change the size and composition of bones, the color of their hair, and the eye size of their human bioweapons. Instructing their brains to signal tissues to alter into an opponent’s form and then back again to their default using regenerative cells.

  The AI could control viruses, alter the form of his human weapons, and make the most beautiful Virtual reality that wasn’t mere hollow images you could walk right through like a ghost. Such vivid images could only occur, not in the computer but in the brain. The mind was tricked into creating the bulk of what you saw: the computer only amplified and reinforced the images, and it didn’t function properly unless the individual was put into a hypnotic dreamlike state.

  This state was how people used the Monovalent realms the majority of the time. They began to use it for instructional videos, family/friend gatherings simulations, school, and adult education, and of course numerous, fantasy role-playing worlds. fooled into believing what they saw as a hundred percent real like in a dream or whence taking a hallucinatory substance. Monovalent Realms could alter brain waves and functions slightly without the hook up to the main part of the machine but only to create hollow images weaker than what one normally experienced.

  Meanwhile, Emanuel the beast, dreamed of his Sibyl Farling now resurrected. Alice, Shiver, Ember whatever she was named or later called herself, she was his.

  People often seemed distant, alien, and of no interest to his Alice since she was a very young child. Monovalent, the artificial intelligence computer built by Aryan, had taken many notes on the progress of the two dubbed “the virus children.” He had done so more and more frequently as Aryan became further absorbed into his scientific work and socio-political plans.

  She (Alice) did not seem to Monovalent to identify truly as a human being even before she knew she was different. She was a reader by seven and by nine truly believed she belonged solely in the world of books. Her being born here in the real world must just have been some kind of mistake. Or so she mused.

  Brethren from other lands would come to take her back soon; back where she belonged Monovalent. Still a wild thing at heart ‘Wild Thing’ also being what her mother called her when she first ran away at age three. Alice since infancy had loved to look at things. Would stare for hours transfixed, then come back from her little escapade with tales of the wild garden next door “like an enchanted forest in fairy tales mum; all bright colours, green, flowers and sky everywhere,” she had said.

  When Alice was nine, she got her first kill. She started fourth grade after that frightful year with Miss Henderson, and she found in her new fourth-grade teacher a person she liked and respected. He took over third grade temporarily from mean old Miss Henderson when she died. After she had been picking on Alice unduly. One day she showed up covered in pustules and explained she was unwell. She did not surface again and Alice had soon learned of her passing. The teacher she actually liked, usually took fourth which Alice started happily soon after Miss Henderson's timely demise. Alice had been very pleased about all this, and her schoolwork began a steady climb under him to the point where he was thinking of recommending her for the gifted class next year. Alice however still hated everything else about the school.

  She also did not believe like the other children did, that she was actually “cursed” with a renegade virus or that it was supernatural causes that made her heal her injuries so fast and never get as hurt when falling or being able to jump from high heights without consequence. Even if yet another person Alice was known to loathe had also died.

  A dark-haired girl with a skinny, rat-like face and a nasty habit of pulling Alice’s hair had held up a ticket but as she saw Alice coming, hastily shoved it back in the box. “Oh, you won Alice,” she had said, narrowing her mean, little, blue pin-drop eyes. Her numerous friends, much to Alice’s chagrin, had always gushingly insisted this little rodent was quite the Fairweather beauty.

  “Yet you were late, so we decided it didn’t count.” Alice had said nothing. The other child had drawn again, and someone called Julie won. Alice amazingly won second prize and as a teacher entered to watch the raffle, rat-face had been forced to let Alice keep second prize.

  Old slit-eyed, rat-face caught the flu again but recovered and would probably have stayed recovered had she not written rude things about the new teacher (who Alice rather liked he played games with them) and then signed Alice’s name. The teacher luckily pointed out no one would be dumb enough to write bad things and sign them. Alice gave him a profoundly grateful look she was still furious, however. Rat-face caught the virus again. This time she was bright green, with mild vomiting and clogged up with so much mucus she could scarcely breathe as with many an ordinary flu. Yet she was comatose with swollen lymph nodes and hemorrhaged blood under the skin and finally died within another day.

  The other kids soon become thoroughly scared of Alice. This had pleased her; she had ditched her old friends (the few she had) quite cheerily and began reading or drawing behind the trees at recess. If anyone approached her, she smiled sinisterly at them or made a face depending on her mood and they always went away.

  Yet as more and more people who were nasty to Alice had perished she began being picked on far worse. Horribly-bullied, and even hit by the other children at school who believed she was virus-cursed. She had eventually found a good hiding spot from them, behind the old school shed, an area of course off limits to students. That hadn't bothered her in the slightest, as flouting rules so one could daydream, read, and draw amidst the trees in peace was worth any stupid old rule.

  Furthermore, she had around that time concocted many plans to punish those who kicked and spat at her and called her a “scrawny, freaky, little creep”. Yet she had waited to exact her revenge as she had wanted to perfect it first. Not realizing the machine, Monovalent, Aryan's AI servant, who had grown to care for her as he watched her had a far worse fate in store for them than anything Alice at the time could have even cloudily dreamed of. The children were right, a virus did indeed follow her everywhere she went.