In the year 2089, the society was blessed by wonders of technological progress, human augmentations, bioengineering and the AI gamble was won by the humanity. Even though general lifespan in developed countries bypassed the initial threshold of one hundred twenty years of maximal life-span expectancy for human beings, death still plagues the human race.
And at that moment the lyrics of Blue Oyster Cult's don't fear the reaper never seemed as frightening for Victor Fedorovich Petrov as now. The emergency room's ceiling was a blank rectangle above him, too brigh, making it difficult to discern anything around clearly.
« Losing… Defib… »
He wasn't able to hear most of what was said by the nurses and doctors who swarmed him as a deafening but also muffled strident noise rang inside of his head. Somewhere to the left, a heart monitor displayed a struggling red line, then there was a shout, the line stayed flat, and a bright white light was blinding him now, the brightest light he has ever seen until now.
« Able to fly. » was his last though before he lost all sensation and feeling of existence.
It was a strangely mundane ending for a man whose head has always been full of drems, words and ideas. Not just molecules and protein chains and CRISPR schematics, which he had to deal with, everyday at his job. He dreamt of ki blasts, time rings, and impossible androids. His students knew him as Dr. Petrov, molecular biologist. His peers knew him as Dr. Petrov, the inventor of the cell restauration serum. But his close friends and comrades he was in contact with, in the depth of the internet's chaos, knew him as Darkavengerdu13, a Mushukou Tensei enthousiast and DBZ connoisseur, cursed by the weaboo deep knowledge and the forbidden arts of the Otaku. Suddenly, the nothingness was dissolved into a roar. Victor became aware of motion without movement, of speed without distance, and around him, shadows of realities twisted and overlapped: a boy with lavender-colored hair was stepping out of a very familiar machine; a green instectoid creature was gestating in a glass tank; an old man's silhouette surrounded by cables and steel. The images crackled in and out like channels on a broken TV. And over it all, a humming, a frequency that was not sound but structure: equations for gravity folded into themselves, the curvature of spacetime tightening like a fist.
« What is this?'
If he had a body, the scientist brain would have been hyperventilating, instead, stripped down to something bare and luminous, he understood. Not the math, this was beyond math, but the truth.
Somewhere in another reality, a time machine was punching its way backwards along the universe's timeline, dragging a tail of fractured causality behind it like a meteor shower of broken laws. It was Trunks! Victor recognised the energy signature without knowing how. Maybe because he'd seen it a thousand times on screens. Or maybe because, as his physical brain shut down, whatever deeper layer of consciousness remained was grasping at familiar shapes. Two timelines brushed and their boundaries stuttered... and something slipped. The overall pressure sharpened, focused and suddenly Victor was aware of another presence in the distortion with him. And that presence felt like a grumpy grandpa. It coiled into itself then lunged at him!
Dr.Gero. vs Dr. Petrov. Fight!
It was not the Dr. Gero in flesh and wrinkles though, he died long ago and his throat was crushed by his own victims, former human beings turned into machines. What Victor collided with now was the echo of that man, the imprint of his intellect and will, everything that had clung to the universe too hard to simply disperse. Two souls, two words, everything was smashed together in a place where time had no grip and space had no rules. After the impact Victor felt an intense pain and was drowning in agony. There was no body to injure, but there was structure, his self, his ego, his soul. He felt that he was bending, cracking, braking, and something foreign was untangling itself in him. He remembered his seventh birthday, the moment he was unwrapping his first Dragon Ball VHS tape. His PhD defense, during which his hands were shaking as he explained mitochondrial gene editing. He remembered the long nights with coffee and simulations, all the moments he was asking himself if the ki could be quantised if it were real? And what would be his age in Namek's time.
Opposite to him, Gero's life, that was spent in and for the Red Ribbon Army, the painful feeling of his organisation and son being crushed under a kid's ruthless fist. All his hopes and dreams shattered. Decades of experiments wasted and his triumph after the creation of the first prototype of an infinite-reactor core, providing infinite energy! And under it all, a single note of iron desire: make them all pay!
Gero's presence struck like a needle of ice, trying to pierce and overwrite Victor's sense of self, to use him like a host or more exactly as new hardware. But Victor was not a passive observer, he spent years studying Gero on screens and paper, not as worshipper, but as a fanatic of the universe created by Toriyama. He pushed back, distending the horrendous pain, he pushed back with all he had in him. And surprisingly he had more left in him than Dr. Gero.
Gero was little by little converted into data, and absorbed. Victor absorbed his adversary's knowledge that was completed and improved by his own. Every experiment, every failure, every horrible success was sublimated by the science he loved and cherished. Like enzymes latch onto foreign proteins, Victor's consciousness latched onto Gero's and began to break it apart aggressively. Gero realised too late that he lost, he woke up too late from his blind rage.
«You parasite! » The old scientist shrieked, not in words, somehow differently, like a sudden feeling appearing out of nowhere.
« Loser, you built monsters to avenge your selfishness, I will take everything from you and surpass you one hundredfold, no, I will become God ! » Victor yelled back.
The new moments were brutally quiet. Victor kept devouring his vanquished foe. He felt the man's genius flare inside him like a second sun, and then settle, belonging only to him from now on. When it was over, Victor drifted alone in the anomaly for an unknown amount of time. He wasn't Victor anymore, he was a new being. After an unknown amount of time, maybe seconds, days or an eternity, the fabric around him shivered and images flickered very fast in front of him.
He saw Trunks arriving to warn Goku, tha androids waking up, Cell's gestation and the Time Machine creation by Bulma. Trunks surely did not mean to do this, his journey backwards has been calculated for his own timeline. But time travel in any universe is messy, and in this one it was worse, an alien being sneaked in the world he was traveling towards to, but arrived long before he did. A man named Victor Petrovich Petrov died in a hospital. And a your Dr.Gero, at that time still an assistant in the Ferbolg labs opened his eyes.
« Gero. Hey! Earth to Gero! »
A face hovered above him, a young one adorned by wild teal hair, pulled back in a loose tie, a soft beard, round glasses slightly fogged from leaving too close. The same face was grinning with relief.
« There you are. I though you managed to concuss yourself on my prototype, which, for the record, would be my fault somehow. »
Victor's mouth shaped a reflex: « Young man I am Victor » and then his mind slammed back into place. After a few more moments he stabilised this new representation of himself. He was on the floor of a cramped lab. Oscilloscopes, half open casings, and ugly beige computers crowded every surface. A half-disassembled machine, a generator prototype by the looks of it, loomed over him.
« I... I'm fine. » He said lastly, still embarrassed by the thought he was about to rebuke the young man just like the old fossil he was. « I just stood up too fast. »
« Mmmhh-hmm! » The teal-haired man straightened, offering a hand. « You've been running on coffee and spite for three days, that's what happened. Go get some rest. »
Gero took the hand automatically. It was warm, callused in a way that came from tinkering rather than manual labor. A badge swung into view on the other man's chest:
Brief, D.
Doctoral Candidate.
West City Technical University - Applied Physics.
Underneath, in a smaller company font:
Partner: Ferbolfg Labs.
Brief! Gero's new heart stuttered. It was Dr.Brief before the Capsule Corp!
They were both in plain lab coasts, but the room itself was clearly not Ferbolg's main facility. The walls were painted white. A banner over the far wall read:
«Joint Innovation Program - West City U x Ferbolg Labs. »
Gero's gaze dropped to his own badge.
Gero. L.
Assistant Researcher - Ferbolg labs.Double PhD Candidate - Computational Science and Engineering.
Last semester, final stretch, two thesis projects and a company partnership all braided together. And Capsule Corp. didn't exist yet! The world was already familiar, the architecture, the mix of tech levels, the style of lab equipment - but there were differences. No capsule logos anywhere, no tiny multi-purpose capsules on anyone's belt. No floating ads for Hoi-Poi storage. It wasn't invented yet.
« I's before Cell arc! » Victor realised. Same universe Trunks was aiming for… far long before he would arrive.
Before Brief made capsules. Before Gero became a monster. Before Beerus descended and ate noodles! The lab flickered in his vision as old Gero's memories aligned with his new version's. In the original timeline, this year, Gero was a promising researcher with a growing bitterness and an eye for military funding. Brief was another rising star in physics, dabbling in space distortion as a word side interest. This time Gero was different, he had his enormous experience from his past life, and he knew how to navigate the intricate waters post graduation. He knew Dragonball's story beforehand. He could get rich, powerful, immortal, and everything he ever wanted!
The first step: an auto-recharging, long lasting battery. The ancestor of the infinite energy reactors, but much more basic, good enough to earn a quick buck and get a foothold in the industry.
« Sit. » Brief said, pushing him onto a lab stool. « Drink water. If you die before your defence, my timetable will get ruined and I will never forgive you. »
Gero forced a faint apologetic smile. It felt brittle but passable.
« I'm not planning to die. » He said, withholding the again out of the affirmation. «Just overclocked.»
Brief laughed, and quickly turned back to his own bench.
« Speaking of overclocking, look at this, if I can get the field compression stable, we could actually shrink stable volumes of gas. Imagine shipping air in pellets. Or fuel. Or…»
He cut himself off, eyes shining.
« I keep telling the faculty, dimensional compression is the future. Nobody listens. They just want smaller generators and better batteries. »
Gero knew Brief was right but also so wrong. Compression is not miniaturisation, and for now the technology is way much more undeveloped than in his Earth's nineties, the cellular phones were huge boxes, and the few more normal ones that could be folded in two and placed in a bag were limited to the ones who made them themselves. No phone identification existed, one could pirate a cellular line with ease with enough of knowledge. But people in this world were not very knowledgeable.
That afternoon, at the university, he stood on the platform of a lecture room, chalk dust on his fingers, diagrams on the board. His seminar title was: «Autonomous Energy Storage: long-Life Cells with Ambient Replenishment Pathways. »
What it meant was simple: batteries that recharge themselves just by existing. He spoke about the shortcomings of conventional cells: capacity fade, temperature sensitivity, mechanical fatigue. He slipped in the idea of layering energy sources, thermal gradients, vibrations, electromagnetic background, and all of this into a single self-feeding unit. « Think about it as lungs, not tanks. » He told the half-interested students and the two faculty members watching more closely. « Constant exchange, not one time filling. » Someone asked about efficiency limits, and another about materials.
« That's the crux, we need composites that can support stable polarisation domains, cycle after cycle, without cracking. Ferroelectric-ceranic hybrids. The kind of thing Ferbolg Labs may almost be willing to pay for, if I ask nicely enough.»
He heard some chuckles. But professor Nira Yasuhara, his advisor, did not, she scribbled a note and spoke up.
« You mentioned ambient replenishment three times, right now that means scavenging tiny amounts of environmental energy. Hardly enough to run anything serious. »
Gero nodded and answered: « Today yes. But if we design the core with future bandwidth in mind, stronger, more flexible domain structures, we won't have to rebuild everything when a more potent Ambient source becomes available. »
« Such as? »
Gero held her gaze, thinking of ki, of martial artists flinging mountains with their hands.« Such as… new fields we don't yet fully understand, call it theoretical prudence. We future-proof the architecture. »
After the presentation Gero sat in the tiny over stuffed common office that Ferbolg Labs rented on campus for its joint program. He was scheming. He was alone; the other assistants were already gone, the cheap wall clock ticked a metronome for his thoughts.
On his desk, he had a stack of thesis drafts, a binder of Ferbolg's curent projects, and an ash coloured notebook with « Hot Pizza » written on the inside cover. He opened the binder first. Fervolg's energy division looked different in a pre-Capsule era, clunkier designs, no capsule packing angles, no automatisation and pure human labor. The contacts were smaller but familiar in shape: long-life power packs for remote mining equipment, rugged batteries for primitive scouting drones and prototype cores for unmanned satellites.
The Red Ribbon Army were absent yet, but he spotted the name on a prospective-client list: Red Ribbon Security Solutions. A small and ambitious military contractor sniffing around. He knew that he had to profit but avoid the entanglement in the mess that was the Red Ribbon Army. In the original story all Gero's family was linked to it, and their end wasn't pretty. He then shifted to the notebook and flipped to hand-sketched concentric rings, domain partitions, interface nodes. The infinite energy core as it would one day be. What he could build now was only Stage 1, a mundane but extreme battery, self-recharging trough stacked harvesters, designed to last years with minimal loss. But if he was careful, the shape of it could be scaled, refined, and eventually turned into a electro-ki reactor.
The bottleneck was obvious: materials and tools. He needed high-grade ferroelectric ceramics with exotic dopants and incredibly tight tolerances. This world barely made rough versions under defence grants. As for tools, it was like being in a stone age of processors and lathes. At least, the university could get sample quantities if he made a strong case. Ferbolg could order more if he hid the real reason in paperwork. And so he began composing the plan.