Years later, the Biolab eventually morphed into a small town. Kahara and Dwax had a child named Fahla. Dwax also successfully added honey badger and immortal jellyfish genes to his genome. Normally, through artificial scarcity, these augmentations would've cost a fortune. But in reality, the overall cost of the augmentations was not that high.
Since there was a fully automatic fusion reactor nearby, there was no shortage of energy either. If anything, since the city went silent, they were able to siphon far more energy than they previously could for their research projects. Dong Jun breached two dozen international laws and created a bio neurological supercomputer until making it larger hit the diminishing returns on the computing power front and became meaningless.
The supercomputer, being made of a giant brain, served dual purposes. First, it was immune to electronic surveillance. Dong Jun had calibrated the machines to give out false signals about using computing power to do survival work for the townspeople. The biocomputer provided a way to compute without risking being spied on. Second, it was way more efficient when it came to energy expenditure. A human brain did the work of a supercomputer without expanding too much power. Sure, a supercomputer was more reliable, and she had an abundance of energy due to the fusion plant nearby, but the energy expenditure was monitored, and she could not afford to draw in ire from the satellite above before the big event. The researchers had informed her that someone was searching their databases for something. She knew there was a satellite above who was tasked with organizing the people below. She made it her utmost task to feed false information to their digital probes.
After years of work, she had perfected a design that embodied her compressionist ideals. She had put a metamorphosis pod, an encrypted gene deciphering and compatibility calculating computer, and supreme digestion into one body. It was a body that required no industry to evolve. All it needed was a gene sample. Best of all, all of these systems worked on a system of being dormant until they were activated. They burned far fewer calories when not in use.
She asked Dwax to test it out. She assured him she would save him if anything happened. Dwax stepped into the metamorphosis pod, and his vision went black.
With that out of the way, Dong Jun turned her attention to her other goal. She had decrypted a lot of gene variations that had been used to attack the planet. It formed a substantial body of data. The main point wasn't the acquisition and deciphering. The main point was to piss off as many intergalactic bio corporations as possible by making their products freely available to anyone who listens to the stars for communication. Doing so would fuck over the satellite dwellers who sold their people to the galactic community, the corporations that goaded the satellite dwellers into massacring their own people. It was the perfect move, except for the fact that they would suffer retaliation from the same people they pissed off. Dong Jun remembered the time she saw Dwax kill that giant lion. He had said that some things have to be done, even if they are illogical. It has to be done to live a life with one's pride intact. What did it mean to live under people who thought nothing of killing 17 billion people? It was humiliation. It was being livestock. For that reason, Dong Jun had decided to risk everyone's life to retaliate against the galactic community and the satellite dwellers. She had sunk her javelin into the metaphorical lion.
Far above in the satellite, a fattened up Morif Salazar was screeching, beet red. His salvia was drizzling down from his chin, and he was too angry to care.
"I've let her live! I've let her live! That bitch down there ruined everything! EVERYTHING!"
The ground around him was filled with broken glass. He had slammed whatever he could get his hands on into the ground. He asked the AI to unleash the tungsten rods on them.
The tungsten rods broke through the atmosphere at 3 km per second and slammed into the laboratory and surrounding towns.
When Dwax's metamorphosis was about to end, the power to the pod was cut off. He drank the liquid and cocooned himself afterward. He had a small window to survive. The calories the metamorphosis pod fluid provided were spent in cocooning.
He got out of his cocoon and broke the glass on his pod. The pod was buried under the rubble. He squeezed through the pod's glass. The other half of the room was still standing. He pushed the loose rocks into the intact half of the room. He was skinny. He had burned through his fat reserves to finance the energy needed to complete his metamorphosis.
He picked up a rock and started slamming the wall, intent on going through it. He knew that the next room had an opening to an underground pathway to algae pools, which had a pathway to a water source. The entire building was a production line for the resources it needed. The algae fed the metamorphosis liquid-creating devices, and the water source fed the algae.
He broke the wall, went down to the metamorphosis liquid production facility, and made his way to the water source. He knew the mechanical password to all the steel doors that divided the facilities inside and outside. He dove into the water and swam into the underground cavern, where glowing mushroms were being raised. These mushrooms cleaned the water and made it safe to use. The mushrooms sometimes needed a little tending, so there was a steel door opening to the chamber. Although they were just a part of the lab economy, they looked ephemeral. The mushroom room was a popular lover spot before the attack hit. He used the steel door that opened to the mushroom room to get access to the surface. One of the corridors was full of rubble. He went to a side room and broke a window to get through, and when he found his way up to the surface, he was shocked. The place where his memories were was replaced by a bunch of craters.
All that work to increase living standards to acceptable standards was gone in an instant. It was bombarded to shreds. He quickly ran to the place where his house once stood. His house was nowhere to be found.
The worst went through his head. Where were Kahara and Fahla? What happened to them?
"I swear by blood, by ash, and by the mothefucking ink, I will make them pay. I will eat their livers!"
Dwax was shaking with emotion. He wanted to unmake the people who did this. He walked toward the place where the lab once stood. He found Warrow's arm near the botanical lab and smeared his blood into his gene harvesting organ. Dwax's auxiliary brain started decoding Warrow's mutation. Tears were streaming down his cheeks.
He walked a bit further. Where Dong Jun's office once stood was a crater. It was safe to assume Dong Jun was dead too. Everyone Dwax ever knew was dead.
He screamed. The sound echoed throughout the crater. He was pathetic. He had been brought low. Once again, he has been swiped to the side for someone else's convenience. If the people who did this saw him, they might have smirked at his emotional distress. At least Dwax imagined them doing that. They were probably laughing about taking away everything he loved right now.
He let the hatred take over every aspect of his psyche.
"By the blessings of ash, by the blessings of blood, and through the sin full of ink. I curse you. May Rukhar be my witness. I will spare no effort to eat all your motherfucking livers."
He was seeing red.
Far above the sky, the new citizens of Ashur-5 were arriving. Morif Salazar had sold a lot of land to the galactic community. The wormhole construct was way out of the system and orbited the furthest ring of the Ashur system. Since they traveled at a comfortable speed, it was going to be 20 years until they arrived at the Ashur-5's surface.
Morif Salazar had 200 years until the broadcast, when Dong Jun did come to bite him in the ass in a real sense. The message had to arrive at the wormhole and reach every connected part of the galaxy. The affected entities were going to place an embargo on goods arriving at the Ashur-5 first. Then leverage the embargo to secure the process of decryption for themselves and create countermeasures against it. They would decide to destroy Morif Salazar if they decided to be vindictive about their losses. Death was marching towards Morif slowly and steadily. He knew they took a profitable step first and a vindictive step second. That was how the galactic society operated. He could not hope the people he was dealing with would be merciful to him.