Chapter 586: Moving Forward
With Maybourne group finally taken care of, Meridian Continuum group has now lost their attack dogs, and they were currently having a conference video call to discuss their next line of action
"What a waste," the pharmaceutical company owner said. "They talked about bringing him to his knees and got arrested before they touched anything."
"They were never meant to succeed," the leader said. "They were expendable. What we wanted was to observe how he responded to a threat. And they gave us exactly that."
The others were quiet for a moment.
"I expected him to act personally," a woman said. "Direct action. Something that would tell us what he’s capable of physically. Instead he used the President."
"Does he control the government?" someone asked.
"Just the President, from what my contact at the Pentagon could determine. But that’s sufficient. Whatever he asks of her gets done. We saw that."
"The question is how he got her there," the leader said. "Willingly or under threat."
"Not willingly," the woman said. "She moved against Pierce. Nineteen years in the Senate, deep congressional relationships, allies in every relevant committee. That’s not a move any president makes without extraordinary pressure. She knew exactly what she was making enemies with."
"Then he threatened her but with what?" the first man asked.
"She’s a politician," another man said. "There are a ton of things he can threaten her with. The question isn’t whether he had leverage. The question is what specifically he used and how he got it."
"And we don’t know," the leader said.
"No," the woman said.
"We don’t. But my contact at Bloomberg received an anonymous package," the woman continued. "Comprehensive financial documentation on Liam Scott. Wealth profile, asset trail, source documentation. Everything."
"He sent it himself," the leader said immediately.
"You’re certain?"
"The Maybourne Group was trying to expose him without his control. If they had released whatever they found, they would have shaped the narrative — what to emphasize, what to omit, what framing served their purposes. By releasing it himself through an anonymous source, he controls what the world sees. He chose the information. He chose the timing. He chose the channel." The leader paused. "That’s not someone reacting. That’s someone who was already ahead of the people trying to move against him."
"Have you read the documentation?" someone asked.
"I have," the woman said. "That’s what concerns me most. Not the amount — though the amount is significant for someone his age. It’s the trail. Every figure sourced, every transaction documented, every legal threshold satisfied. Spotless."
"Everyone has something they’d rather not surface," the pharmaceutical owner said.
"That’s my point. He doesn’t. Or if he does, it isn’t in anything we can reach." She looked at her screen. "My people have been trying to find the origin of his primary wealth for six months. Not the visible assets like the aircraft, the properties, but the foundation under them. Where did the initial capital come from. Every thread we pulled hit a wall that shouldn’t exist. Clean documentation that satisfies every legal requirement and explains nothing about the source."
"You can’t confiscate clean money," the leader said. "You can’t investigate a spotless trail. You can’t build a case around a wall that doesn’t show its seams." He looked at the others. "Which means whoever is managing his financial architecture isn’t working like any human team we’ve encountered. No human operation produces documentation at that quality with zero exposure across that volume."
The woman nodded. "That’s the conclusion I reached."
"So we have a young man with an unknown ceiling of personal capability, leverage over the American President, financial infrastructure that doesn’t behave like human work, and a company that has spent six months dismantling every assumption we had about what technology can do." The leader’s voice remained even. "And we still don’t know what he actually is."
"We need to find out," the pharmaceutical owner said.
"And we need to find out carefully," the leader said. "The Maybourne Group tried to find out carelessly. We saw what that produced."
A brief silence settled over the call.
"Then what’s our next move?" the woman asked.
"We need to gather more information before we can decide anything else. But I think that an opportunity would come up soon," the leader said.
The others nodded, saying nothing else.
The call ended almost immediately afterwards and everyone went back to what they were doing.
***
It’s been almost a month since the clinical trial started and a lot of progress has been made so far.
All 100 volunteers had arrived at the Base, and also the observers. The volunteers had all received their nanite injection.
For volunteers that had arrived earlier, like Diego and Maya, they had recovered immensely.
Diego’s legs had completely regenerated and he was currently undergoing therapy to help him with recover his motor skills.
Maya had been walking unassisted for a few days now.
The first time she had stood without support — without her mother’s hand, without the nurse beside her, without anything between her and the floor except her own legs — she had stood completely still for several seconds before taking a step. Her mother had watched from the doorway with both hands pressed flat against her mouth.
Maya had taken three steps, stopped, and looked at her feet.
Then she had looked at her mother and said, simply: "I can walk, mom."
Rosa had laughed and cried at the same time and Maya had crossed the room to her on her own legs and walked into her arms.
That had been six days ago. Now Maya walked the base corridors with the energy of a nine-year-old who had recently discovered that running was an option.
The nurses had stopped worrying about her falling. The psychologist assigned to her had noted in her observation log that Maya’s psychological profile had shifted more completely and more rapidly than any case she had encountered in twelve years of practice. Not because the trauma was gone — it wasn’t, entirely — but because the framework the trauma had built around had been removed, and what remained was a child encountering the world on different terms than she had ever known.
Her mother walked with her when Maya wanted company and stayed in the room when Maya wanted to move on her own, and the expression she wore in both situations was the same one she had worn on the shuttle watching Earth shrink behind them.
It was something of awe.
***
The progress varied across the hundred volunteers.
Conditions that were primarily physical — the amputations, the mobility impairments, the structural damage — showed the most visible change the fastest, and visible change was what the livestream carried to the six billion people watching.
The neurodegenerative cases moved differently. The repair was happening — the monitoring displays showed it clearly, the observers documented it carefully — but the timeline was longer and the visible markers arrived later.
The Parkinson’s volunteer, Volunteer 42, had regained fine motor control in her right hand on the nineteenth day. The occupational therapist had been present when it happened, watching her attempt the task she had been attempting daily since the first week, and had watched the tremor that had defined every movement for four years simply stop.
She had looked at her own hand for a long time.
The occupational therapist had not spoken. Some moments didn’t need narration.
The ALS volunteer from France, a forty-two year old named Volunteer 5, had shown the most dramatic progression of the neurodegenerative cases. The monitoring display for his respiratory function had begun moving on the seventh day, the indicators climbing steadily, the nanites working through the motor neuron damage in a sequence the medical data analyst had documented across fourteen consecutive pages of observation notes.
On the twenty-eighth day, Volunteer 5 had stood up from his wheelchair without assistance.
The room had been quiet when it happened. The nurse present had not moved. The observer from the French delegation, standing at the corridor window, had lowered his notebook.
Volunteer 5 had stood in the center of the room and looked at the walls around him — the monitoring display, the transparent window, the nurse still standing motionless at the station — and had said, in French, something that the translator rendered simply as: I forgot what this felt like.
The French observer had written three words in his notebook and underlined them twice.
Then he had closed the notebook entirely and simply watched.
***
The observer delegations had been producing documentation at a rate that none of their home institutions had fully anticipated.
The WHO delegation’s daily observation logs had grown to encompass not just the clinical data but the framework questions that the trial was raising faster than any existing literature could address.
Miriam Stein’s legal documentation had expanded from her original mandate into territory that had no existing category — not because the trial was violating frameworks, but because it was operating in spaces the frameworks had never imagined needing to address.
Dr. Diallo had submitted her first interim report to the WHO Director of Health Systems at the end of the third week. The report was forty-seven pages. The covering note was three sentences.
*The trial is performing as announced. The conditions being treated are responding as described. I do not have adequate language for what I am witnessing and I have been practicing medicine for fifteen years.*
The Director had read the report twice and forwarded it to the Director-General’s office without comment.
