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you'll be doing the world a service—these warlords are all the same. You won't feel bad about killing a man like that. Please know that I wouldn't ask you to undertake such a dangerous venture if it weren't vitally important."
    "Yes, Citizen-President. I understand the dangers, but I'm willing to serve. I stand ready to commence preparations whenever you want me to."
    "There is no time like the present, Skye. You still haven't asked about your franchise, but I'm happy to tell you that you'll be preemptively earning the nanite injections right now. I—"
    He looked at the guardsmen who'd accompanied us down in the elevator, and pointed back at the door.
    "Please wait for us at the elevator. I'm perfectly safe with Skye."
    We watched the guards retrace our path and then once the door was closed behind them, the Citizen-President led me through another set of doors.
    "As I was saying, undertaking this mission earns you your franchise as a full citizen inside our Society, but you actually won't receive the standard set of injections."
    "Of course, sir. I'm aware that our military personnel receive a different set of injections to increase their strength and speed. It only makes sense that you'd want to give me every possible advantage before sending me out to infiltrate Brennan's organization."
    "You're right that I want to send you off with every advantage, but there is a reason that I sent my guards away, Skye. The nanite injections our military receives has always been the best available to anyone in the Society—until now."
    My mind was reeling. "We've done it? Our scientists have finally managed to crack the secret to immortality after all of these decades?"
    "No, I'm afraid that is still outside of our grasp, stolen by the Destroyer when he sabotaged the research he was pursuing with the Founder, but we have made advances. They are still limited—much more so than I would like—but real advances nonetheless."
    He opened a glass refrigeration cabinet and pulled out a handful of syringes—three were full of clear liquid in various shades of light green, the others full of a gray metallic fluid.
    "These nanites are incredibly expensive to produce—several orders of magnitude more costly than even the military nanite pack—but they will drastically increase your odds of survival. These will slow the aging process by an additional ten percent over the military nanites—twenty percent over what the general franchised citizen receives. You'll gain more than double your current strength levels, with corresponding increases to your speed and reaction times."
    He stared at the syringes with the metallic liquid in them for several seconds before continuing. "This is the next step in the evolution of mankind, Skye, but it's imperative that you never mention this to anyone. If all goes well, I'm told that we might be able to ramp up production over the next two generations to the point where all of our military forces can be equipped with the same variant you're going to receive, but you must understand that word of this can't get out."
    "Of course not, sir. There would be riots in the street. Even the most self-actualized person is going to want a shot at an improved nanite pack with those kinds of benefits. Even once you explain that they are too expensive for use by the general populace, there are people who will start demanding military injections."
    "I know, but the simple fact is that injecting even half of our citizens with the military nanites would bankrupt our economy. We would have to pass across-the-board increases to the franchise requirements. Provisional citizens would have to work for thousands, possibly tens of thousands of additional hours to provide the additional resources for that kind of upgrade program. Our entire society would be thrown into disarray as people stopped seeking self-improvement, abandoning the precepts in favor of unsustainable increases to their life expectancies."
    "I will never speak of