Chapter Text
Good morning Morgan. Today is Monday, March 15th, 2032.
The Typhon break containment thanks to one of the workers forgetting their Psychoscope and being dragged under the Typhon’s influence. He was quarantined, but not before he let a single mimic out of its container. The Typhon were operating under some bullshit Alien Vs Predator logic, because all it took was a single bottom of the food chain organism getting loose to unleash hell on Talos 1.
Then Morgan Yu wakes up. Escapes the memory hamster wheel he’d been on for three years. He learns- technically RE-learns everything that’s been happening on Talos 1. The Typhon. The experiments. The neuromods. Everything.
With the help of January, Morgan’s customised rogue operator, he managed to learn the Typhon’s weaknesses, save as many personnel as he could, got his parents contingency Dahl to get everyone off the station, passed an incriminating thumb drive he found in the cargo bay to Mikhaila and blasted every Typhon he came across in the face with a shotgun. Turns out a human being is capable of incredible things with an endless supply of neuromods and a 12 gauge.
He had a few options when it came to dealing with the Typhon, specifically the Apex that showed up. In the end, he chose to blow the whole thing up. Nothing can survive. Not the research, not the neuromods, not the Typhon, not even Morgan. In an act of desperation he installed Typhon based neuromods just to survive the hellhole that was Talos 1. And if even one cell got back to earth, they were lost.
But there was another, more selfish reason for him to stay behind. He was afraid. He’d discovered so many iterations of himself. Most of them he wasn’t proud of. He’d seen versions of himself be greedy, cowardly, power hungry and everything beyond and in between. And that frightened him. If any of the neuromods he’d installed were ever removed, it’d be too easy for someone to turn him back into that. Turn him into someone willing to hurt people, to watch the world burn for his deluded fantasies of power. And he didn’t want to be that person. Never again.
He was a little annoyed that January took it upon himself to tell them he wasn’t going to make it, but he wasn’t exactly wrong. Instead of racing against the clock to reach the shuttle, or even the escape pod December told him about, he simply grabbed the nearest bottle of booze, sat in the captain’s chair, and poured one out for all the people his pursuits had killed.
A small part of him was glad he wasn’t dying alone. Even if it was simply the roboticised equivalent to his own conscience, January served as evidence that at least one version of himself wasn’t all bad.
With all the eye witness accounts and damning evidence Morgan sent them off with, TranStar was finished, all their research on space travel and the Typhon, completely torched, and the three surviving members of the Yu family were all given extensive jail time. For those not mourning the man who saved them all, it should have been a happy ending. But it wasn’t.
As it seemed to usually be the case, Morgan made one last mistake before blowing himself and the Apex to kingdom come. A shuttle had left Talos 1 just before the lockdown. An estimated half an hour between them leaving and the Typhon making themselves known. Morgan could either not take the chance and blow it up along with the people on board, or let them land and pray they were in the clear.
His hand hovered over the trigger for a while before he let it go. Too many people had already died. So he did something he doesn’t think any other version of himself had done before. He let himself hope that maybe, just maybe, everything would be ok. He was wrong.
The Typhon were unstoppable when unleashed on earth. Talos 1 barely had a population in the hundreds and they were completely overwhelmed. Earth had billions of minds for the Typhon to manipulate, billions of corpses to duplicate and spawn from. It was beyond a nightmare.
Humanity was overwhelmed, entire cities consumed by coral. It was by far the biggest threat humanity had ever faced. It was a massacre unlike anything they’d ever seen. Then, out of nowhere, a beacon of hope. A beacon that, surprisingly enough, came from Alex Yu.
A single Typhon, modified with Morgan Yu’s cells and memories, was put through a simulation, stimulating its infantile mirror neurons. After years of putting what the Typhon can do into humans, he discovered a way to put what humans can do into the Typhon. For the first time, Alex was cleaning up his own mess.
Using the coral and a modified nullwave transmitter, they recreated the result across all the Typhon. The two species were finally capable of seeing eye to eye. Everything changed. It was an unprecedented era for both species. Typhon Morgan even managed to fall in love with Mikhaila. She was less put off than most would assume. Then again, she has experience falling in love with different versions of the same man.
Then, as what seemed to be the norm, something fucked it up. A glowing baby in China.
Some said it was due to the new neuromods, now developed in a more humane way for both species. Others said it was the constant exposure to the Typhon or their coral. Whatever the case, humanity was changing independently of their choices. They didn’t like that.
The Typhon and those that were born with what would one day be called “quirks” were persecuted. Ashamed of their past and guilty over the changes overtaking humanity, the Typhon left, with only Morgan staying behind, hidden in plain sight.
Over time, order was brought to the world by heroes. But not before every record of TranStar, the Typhon, the neuromods, everything regarding interstellar travel was erased from the history books. Everything Morgan and his Typhon counterpart worked for, everything that the Talos 1 survivors endured, all the mistakes they hoped would never be made again, wiped away in fearful ignorance. Most even went so far as to turn back their calendars in the deluded hope of forgetting it all.
As far as the future generations were concerned, quirks were a naturally occurring phenomenon. And so, the great lie persisted. To this very day.