He found the laboratory with no difficulty at all, and when he walked in he found himself looking at huge things standing in tanks.
Where Liam had found the money for all this, and when he had found the time, was not clear to Shawn and never became clear.
So this is what the man's great scientific dream looks like, he thought. A place that would be better off simply burning to the ground.
At that moment the professor came in.
"So he came." Liam sounded genuinely pleased. "I knew he would. How could such a perfect specimen be content with an ordinary life? Has he finally thought it all through? Is he ready to sacrifice himself for the sake of human evolution?" He walked between the tanks as he spoke. "That bunch of snot-nosed brats in the Ark faction will achieve nothing at all. Every real leap in the progress of our species has been made by people willing to walk over corpses and wade through rivers of blood."
Shawn had walked over plenty of corpses. He had simply never done it for progress; he had done it to get what he wanted that afternoon.
"I don't care about your human experiments," Shawn said. "The only thing that made me angry is that you disturbed my peace."
"He is still too naive." Liam's hand had already moved to the console. "If I let him in here, then I am entirely prepared to make sure he stays. After that battle — how much strength does he really have left? Let him be a good boy and submit."
"And if I refuse?"
Liam pressed the button, and the monsters came out of their tanks.
They came down on him all together, and Liam stood behind the glass screaming with laughter, promising that Shawn would be his next experiment.
Wounded and tired as he was, Shawn had no trouble at all. He cut them down one after another, working through the room as though he were clearing brush, while Liam shouted at him to stay, to stay here, that he would make him stronger than anything walking.
"I really thought he had some aces up his sleeve," Shawn said, stepping over the last of them. "And he decided three freaks would be enough to hold me. The naive professor, all alone in here." He came up the steps. "He's lived the last half century for nothing."
He cut Liam's throat.
The professor went down onto his knees with his hand at his neck, and what he said, with the last of it, was that the data on the mutation serum had already been transmitted. All of it. The seeds were sown.
"This world," Liam said, "will become more and more interesting."
Then a voice came out from behind the racks.
"If you leave here in that state, you won't make it home." Ren took a case down and opened it. "This is a restorative serum. It stops bleeding quickly and stabilises wounds. The medicine is safe. If you don't use it, those wounds will fester within a day."
"Why should I trust you?"
"Your doubts are justified," Ren said. "But there's something else here that might be useful to you. If you've still got strength left, follow me."
Shawn obediently followed her.
She showed him Liam's supplies — shelf after shelf of them. Liam had no further use for any of it, she said, and she herself was leaving this place regardless, so Shawn could take whatever he needed.
She had applied to be the professor's graduate student because she had believed that Liam was a true scientist. It was only recently that she had learned what his actual plans were. She was going north, to a research base, to continue the work they were supposed to have been doing all along.
When Ren had gone, Shawn started going through the place and taking everything he needed, and then everything he did not need, and then everything else. All of it went into the spatial pocket, crate by crate, shelf by shelf.
Then it was time to burn it.
He burned the entire laboratory to the ground and walked home through fifty-eight degrees.
The World Meteorological Administration has issued another red warning. With the permafrost now melting entirely and releasing massive quantities of methane, experts state that the greenhouse effect has entered an irreversible cycle.
And Shawn did not have enough negative emotion points to buy himself any more perks. So he decided to become an even sharper thorn in the side of everyone around him.
Water was the hardest currency there was now. He wrote to Min and they agreed to meet, and Shawn told him to choose somewhere discreet for it.
A man came to trade. He had reached the stage of desperation where a man will carry anything at all across a city, and he put what he had on the crate between them and asked how much he would get for it.
Shawn looked at it and became, immediately, a genuine pain in the neck.
"Do I look like the right man to ask? One bottle."
The man's face went dark and he began to argue.
"Then the price has just gone up," said Shawn pleasantly. "Still one bottle. But now he looks at me and he says: thank you, saint."
The man refused. Then he understood that refusing again would only push the price up further, and he said it.
Shawn was in his element. Being a scumbag was never going to be difficult for him.
Afterwards an old man came down the road, and Shawn asked why grandfather was not asleep at this hour.
"Aunt Lily, from the complex next door," the old man said. "She's raising her granddaughter alone, and the poor child has gone down with heat stroke. She can't manage on her own. I'm going over with some water."
Shawn did not have any empathy on hand, so he said, "You just need to take care of yourself."
"I know it." The old man shifted the bottles in his arms. "But I'm old. I've lived long enough. I simply can't watch a child suffer."
That old man, it must be said, would have made a far better protagonist for this story than our touchy boy.