The first attempt did not look like an attempt.
That was the point.
It came disguised as curiosity—soft, plausible, deniable. A probe, not a strike. The kind of thing institutions sent when they wanted to measure response rather than provoke escalation.
Derek noticed it on a Tuesday.
The day itself was unremarkable. Los Angeles traffic, mild heat, the low hum of routine pressing in on all sides. He had left a Blackfire satellite office in Santa Monica after a closed technical briefing—nothing public, nothing that would justify attention. He should have been invisible.
Instead, something nudged his instincts.
Not fear. Not adrenaline.
Friction.
A dark gray sedan lingered one car too long at a stoplight. Not tailing—just there. When Derek turned right instead of continuing straight, the sedan hesitated before continuing forward.
He exhaled slowly.
Amateurs don't hesitate, he thought. Professionals don't rush.
This was neither.
The probe came twenty minutes later.
A near miss.
Derek merged onto the 10 freeway, accelerating smoothly, when a delivery truck in the adjacent lane drifted—just enough to crowd his space. The driver corrected immediately, exaggeratedly so, as if startled.
Too theatrical.
Derek slowed, letting the truck pull ahead. His pulse remained steady. He watched the mirrors, cataloging vehicles, identifying gaps.
Then came the third element.
A motorcycle.
Black helmet. Neutral jacket. No markings. It slipped between lanes effortlessly, slowing just long enough to ride parallel with Derek's window.
No weapon drawn.
No gesture.
Just proximity.
The rider tilted his head, as if assessing Derek's face through the glass, then accelerated away, disappearing into traffic like a thought deliberately abandoned.
Three elements.
Sedan. Truck. Motorcycle.
A triangulation pattern.
Derek smiled faintly.
"So that's how you're testing me," he murmured.
He didn't speed up. Didn't evade. Didn't confront.
He drove home.
That night, Derek sat alone in the secure room beneath his house—a space that didn't exist on any blueprint and wasn't connected to the main network. He didn't open Pandora. He didn't need omniscience to understand intent.
This wasn't a hit.
This was a feeler.
Someone had authorized a limited probe—likely outsourced, likely compartmentalized. Contractors, not agency operators. Plausible deniability layered atop distance.
The goal wasn't to kill him.
The goal was to answer a question:
How hard would it be?
Derek leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled.
"They think I'm still playing defense," he said quietly.
They were wrong.
He had never believed immortality—extended or otherwise—could be built without violence orbiting its edges. Power attracted predators. Innovation attracted fear. And fear, when wrapped in money and influence, always sharpened itself into a blade.
The probe told him something valuable.
The decision threshold had been crossed.
Someone, somewhere, had gone from contain to consider removal.
That meant time was no longer an abstract concept.
It was now a resource being spent by others.
Which meant Derek needed to accelerate—not the cure, not the science, but himself.
The changes began the next morning.
They were subtle enough that no press release would ever mention them, no casual observer would immediately notice. But anyone trained to look would understand what was happening.
The sports sedans disappeared first.
The muscle cars followed.
The sleek, impractical symbols of confidence were quietly retired, their keys sealed away in a biometric safe Derek no longer bothered opening.
In their place came SUVs.
Not ostentatious ones. Not armored behemoths that screamed paranoia. These were understated—dark paint, standard profiles, civilian silhouettes.
But beneath the panels was something else entirely.
Ballistic steel. Reinforced frames. Bullet-resistant glass rated to withstand sustained rifle fire. Run-flat tires. Independent power systems.
Not tanks.
Survivors.
Vehicles designed not to win fights, but to buy time.
Time to move. Time to respond. Time for reinforcements to arrive.
Bala oversaw the logistics personally.
He didn't ask why.
He never did.
The man had spent years in the forests of northern Nigeria hunting people who thought ideology made them invincible. He understood escalation the way sailors understood storms—by smell, by pressure change, by the way birds stopped flying.
"This is overdue," Bala said as he inspected the first SUV, running a hand along the reinforced door seam. "You've been naked."
Derek chuckled. "I prefer to think of it as optimistic."
Bala didn't smile. "Optimism gets you buried."
The second phase followed quickly.
Safe houses.
Not one or two—layers. Properties acquired through intermediaries, trusts, shell entities that couldn't be traced back to Derek without years of forensic accounting. Some urban. Some rural. Some so unremarkable they were effectively invisible.
Each stocked.
Each mapped.
Each hardened just enough to matter.
Then came the weapons.
Derek had never been sentimental about tools. Weapons were not symbols to him. They were instruments, like scalpels—dangerous only when mishandled.
Assault rifles, modern and modular.
Shotguns configured for close quarters.
Sidearms chosen for reliability over aesthetics.
Melee weapons too—not out of romanticism, but realism. Sometimes things got close. Sometimes quiet mattered more than firepower.
Ammunition was stored in quantities that would have unsettled anyone who still believed help always arrived on time.
Enough to hold.
Enough to endure.
Enough to remind anyone watching that this was not a man who intended to die easily.
The CIA handler noticed the shift within forty-eight hours.
Vehicle changes. Route variations. Subtle hardening of movement patterns.
No panic.
No erratic behavior.
Just… preparation.
The handler filed a report that ended with a line that would later be quoted verbatim in internal debates:
Subject appears to have transitioned from passive awareness to active contingency posture.
That report unsettled people.
Because contingency posture implied expectation—not fear.
Expectation implied acceptance.
And acceptance was the most dangerous mindset of all.
Elsewhere, the probe's failure was discussed in a much quieter room.
No one admitted it had been a probe.
They called it a "market stress test."
The contractors reported nothing actionable. No vulnerabilities exploited. No predictable reactions. The subject had not panicked, fled, or exposed routine weaknesses.
He had simply… absorbed the pressure.
One of the planners frowned. "He noticed."
Another shrugged. "Of course he noticed. That was the point."
"No," the first replied. "He didn't just notice. He adapted."
Silence followed.
Adaptation meant escalation.
Escalation meant cost.
And cost invited scrutiny.
"Maybe we wait," someone suggested.
"Waiting makes him stronger," another replied.
They all knew it.
The problem with singular figures wasn't removing them.
It was what they set in motion before removal became possible.
Derek stood in the garage that night, hand resting on the hood of the SUV that would be his primary transport going forward.
He felt no fear.
Fear was a tax paid by people who hadn't already accepted the price of their ambitions.
What he felt was clarity.
"They think killing me solves the problem," he said softly.
He imagined the boardrooms. The agencies. The consultants whispering in corridors that smelled of money and caution.
"They don't understand," he continued. "I'm not the solution. I'm the delivery mechanism."
He straightened, eyes hardening.
Pandora slept, sealed away, untouched. It didn't need to wake yet.
The science was already outpacing containment.
The teams were already moving.
The idea—that cancer could be ended—was already loose in the world, and ideas were far harder to assassinate than men.
If they came for him, truly came, it would not be a decisive stroke.
It would be a screw in a machine already turning.
And machines, once built, did not stop just because one component was removed.
Derek closed the garage door and locked it.
Sooner or later, someone would try to end him.
He was ready.
And somewhere, unseen, the next plan was already being written—less tentative, less curious, far more final.