Victoria "Nix" Bateson's page

I should start at the beginning.

My father, the man I call my father, was a Runner. Not just any runner, the cream of the crop. Everyone who knew his name, from the weakest street thug to the most secure megacorp exec, feared ‘The Hitman’. He did the really dirty jobs. Of course he did the regular stuff too, but he specialized in the worst missions: assassination, sabotage, killing sprees. He was the best of the best. Over the years, he slowly fell in with Evo BioMedical, taking his pay in more and more advanced augs, rebuilding his body from the ground up to be better. Bones like steel, muscles like a wild beast, eyes that could see at night and find someone a block away in a crowd. The only reason he wasn’t on the payroll is because that would mean acknowledging what he did actually happened. That’s when he met me.

I was born in ones of Evo’s New York labs, Pensodyne Genetics. Well, born is what I like to call it. It sounds less clinical than ‘decanted’ or ‘built’. My first memory is inside one of the tubes, floating inside a glass cylinder while strange blue liquids filled my veins and activated dormant genes that they’d spliced into my genome while I was still nothing more than an embryo in an artificial womb. They claimed they were making me the next stage in human evolution. The tutors were very clear on that point. It was always for everyone’s good. So even when my body screamed from the latest operation to scrape out my bones and replace them with better ones, I was told to endure. For everyone’s future. I was f*cking six. Father said they wanted to make a weapon. That they wanted a super human they raised from birth to be their weapon, their killing hand. I think it was somewhere in the middle. Evo wasn’t all bad. The operations were painful, and the gene treatments left me woozy and sick for days sometimes, but they cared for me. I had the best tutors, the best food, and a guarantee of safety and prestige in the future. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not stupid. They made sure that I couldn’t be stupid. I was an investment. They wanted me happy and indebted to them so I’d be loyal when I grew up. They did want to make a better human, to push humanity forward to a new stage of evolution. And they wanted a pretty poster girl to stand at the forefront of the movement and be their loyal little soldier.

Father wasn’t happy. He saw them keeping me away from everyone, locked up in a lab so I only learned what they wanted to learn, only saw who they wanted me to see. He heard me scream when the anesthetics didn’t take properly and I was awake the entire time they peeled my muscles off to implant the better ones they made me. He didn’t care if they wanted to make better humans. He cared that they were forcing a child to go through it without so much as caring what happened to her.

So father came for me. I was eight when the lab burned. I remember the dead bodies of Evo’s private security as he carried me through the building. And I remember the explosion when he reduced the lab to slag. I remember saying goodbye to my mother when she went in to hiding separately from us. Well, I call her my mother. She was the head scientist at the project, and father said she donated one of her eggs to make me. I don’t know if that’s true, but I hope it is. She was always the one who cared for me when one of the treatments left me in bed for days. I was still a person to her, not just a lab experiment or a corporate investment. I haven’t talked to her in almost a year. I should try to find her again someday.

Father took me far away. We fled the city, moved north, away from Evo and Pensodyne and to the wide urban sprawl of Boston. That was eleven years ago. Father was always paranoid after that. We stayed in dozens of apartments over the years, constantly moving around to make sure that Evo wasn’t tracking us. We only had one incident where they actually found us, but there were a couple of close calls. Father handled it, just like father always did. Or, like father used to. A month ago, I came home to find the door unlocked. The door is never unlocked, even when we’re home. The time it takes someone to bypass a locked door can be enough to grab a gun and hide behind something before they get inside. There weren’t signs of a struggle, but father wasn’t there. He just… vanished. And I had no idea what to do. I had his gear, his suit, and his weapons, but I didn’t have any of his resources. His money, his contacts, he never told me where they were hidden. He wanted me to be normal.

Normal.

I was never normal. No matter what happened, I couldn’t just be normal. Father sent me off to middle school like a normal girl, but I didn’t fit in. I was too smart for the teachers and too quiet for the kids. A few tried to start fights because they thought they could mug the new girl. I ended those fights. Painfully. It helps when your bones have the same density as steel. People didn’t f*ck with me at least. But that was… boring. Father explained that my gene mods have some side effects. My adrenal boosters are overactive, I get… excited when I fight. I can feel my body singing and the heat in my… never mind. I don’t believe for a second that it was a ‘side effect’. Evo was way too good for that. No, I think that having their little super soldier get off on fighting was exactly what they wanted. A reward for going and killing when they wanted me to. Father tried to help. He taught me how to fight, how to kill, with my bare hands and with every gun that he owned. It helped a little. It gave me an outlet at least.

Now I’m going to have to put those skills to good use. If I’m going to find him, I’m going to have to start from scratch. No contacts, barely any cash left, but I’ve got guns, I’ve got armor, and I’ve got a lead on where I can find a job. Time to get to work.

*growl*

My hair's dark, near enough to black that you can hardly tell the difference. Well, it used to be. I dyed it blue a few months back as a birthday present to myself. I figured dad would freak. He just thought that it was good at making me less recognizable. Father never was easy to get a rise out of. My eyes are the one feature that sticks out. They're... not normal. Kind of hazel, but they're way to vibrant. I think they're supposed to have some kind of aug, but it never got activated before father took me away. Maybe I'll see if I can get the genes turned on at some point. Knowing Evo, it's probably night vision or something.