Mallory hadn’t spoken in several minutes.
Voss stood in silence across from her, sipping his tte. He watched her. Not with impatience, but with anticipation, waiting for the questions he knew were coming.
Questions she had to ask.
She looked up at st, her eyes searching his. Concern etched deep across her features.“If this is real... Every elite on the pnet will come after you.World leaders. CEOs. The ultra-wealthy.They’ll see this as a direct threat to everything they’ve built.Aren’t you afraid they’ll destroy it before you have a chance to make it real?”
She wasn’t thinking of wsuits and injunctions.Not just boardrooms and bureaucrats.
She was thinking of assassins.Surveilnce.Quiet disappearances in the middle of the night.
Something this powerful, this transformative, could spark wars before it ever saved a single soul.
Voss nodded slowly, no hesitation in his eyes.“Yes,” he said. “They will come. That’s why I’ve prepared for every contingency.”
He stepped closer, setting his tte down with gentle precision.“I’ve been building this for decades. And by the end of today, you and Graham will be the only other two people on Earth who know the full picture.”
He held her gaze with calm intensity.“More will join the circle, eventually.But first... You need to see it all.”
He pressed a button on his desk console.
A new image filled the LED screen—a small, pearl-colored vial, roughly the size of a Five-Hour Energy bottle. Simple. Unassuming.
Then a logo appeared, soft and clean:
VITALYX
Mallory leaned forward instinctively.
It looked so… ordinary. Like something you’d find at a grocery store checkout, nestled between the Tic Tacs and the ChapStick.
That somehow made it even more surreal.Yet she couldn’t take her eyes off it.
Voss began, voice steady.“Vitalyx is the first step. Because before we elevate humanity—We must heal it.”
He let the words hang for just a breath.“One dose. One time. No injections. No side effects.You drink it.You go to sleep.And eight hours ter...You’re healthy.Completely healthy.”
The screen shifted again.
A stylized human figure appeared, composed of pulsing red light and swirling particles.Waves of energy—blue, white, then silver—swept through the form in elegant succession.
Each pass left behind crystalline crity, like frost melting off a windshield, revealing something sharper. Stronger. Purified.
“Vitalyx is a synthetic nanobiotic,” Voss continued. “Built on programmable peptide scaffolding—Medical code that assembles itself inside the body.Once ingested, it activates with body heat.It scans your bloodstream, tissues, and cellur structures—reading your biochemistry, your DNA itself. It identifies anything that doesn’t belong:
Viruses.Tumors.Heavy metals.Nutrient imbances.Even inherited mutations buried in your genetic code.”
He tapped the console. The figure’s red particles broke apart and reassembled in tighter formation—cleaner, more cohesive.
“Then it dismantles them.This isn’t symptom relief. It’s systemic correction.It rewrites your biochemistry while the system is still running.”
He chuckled softly.“The bathroom trips afterward are... not gmorous.Every toxin has to leave somehow.We package it all at the cellur level and send it on its way.”
He smiled.“Think of it as the body’s final exorcism.”
Mallory blinked, still transfixed. The animation ended with the figure now whole. Brighter, more defined, better. She barely noticed how tightly she was gripping her pen.
Then Voss continued, more quietly:“Day two, you’ll feel sluggish. That’s when the peptides begin editing your DNA—Eliminating inherited mutations.Rewriting faulty code.Not just healing you—but protecting future generations.”
Mallory stared at him.“You actually built this?”
Voss shook his head.“No. They did.”
The screen shifted again, now dispying a glowing grid of familiar logos. Companies Mallory herself had helped him incorporate and oversee.
CleanGene TherapeuticsOncoWave BiologicsAeonCellZephyros
Her breath caught.
Each name carried weight. History. Late nights and closed-door meetings.But she’d never seen them side by side.
“Each solved a different piece of the puzzle,” Voss said.“Autoimmune disease. Targeted cancer therapies. Adaptive enzymes.And one, brilliantly and quietly, figured out how to replicate synthetic amino sequences inside human cells… for two cents a dose.”
He paused, admiring the quiet consteltion of logos.“They thought they were solving isoted problems. Noble goals, every one of them.But together… They built the most important compound in human history.”
He turned to her, voice steady.“Vitalyx isn’t a miracle drug, Mallory. It’s only the beginning.”
She blinked. Confused.“The beginning?”
The beginning? As if curing cancer, ALS, and a thousand chronic afflictions was just—the starting point? What kind of world starts there?
Voss nodded.“Yes. A new baseline. A reset for humanity.We can’t expect people to evolve if they’re too sick to move. Too malnourished to think.Or dying of diseases we already know how to cure.”
He looked away, his voice softening.“You should’ve seen their faces. We watched miracles. Real ones. And every single time… it reinforced something in me that had been broken for a very long time.”
His voice cracked. Just slightly.Raw. Unshielded.He cleared his throat, composing himself again.
“You can’t climb when you’re bleeding out at the base of the mountain.You have to heal first. Only then can you truly rise.”
Mallory sat back, stunned.“This would bankrupt the entire medical industry.”
She didn’t say it with shock.She said it with a quiet dread—like someone who knew exactly how the world worked, and what it did to those who tried to change it.
Shit, she thought.That’s precisely the reason he’s doing all of this… isn’t it?
Voss nodded slowly.“The medical industry and then some. And I’m sure they’ll try to kill me for it.”
He said it without fear. Just... fact.
“But that’s not your problem. I’ve accounted for it. This isn’t about profit. It’s not about power.It’s about repcing a broken system. No more billion-dolr pills. No more lotteries for treatment.Everyone gets a fresh start—regardless of race, socioeconomic status, or country.”
He began to pace again, slowly.“We’ve already tested it. Quietly. Refugee camps. War zones. Underfunded clinics off the grid.”
He stopped. Turned.“People who were hours from death... walked out within two days of a single dose.”
Mallory’s voice cracked.“You’ve cured people already?”
He nodded, softer now.“Hundreds. More. We didn’t tell them what it was. Just called it a ‘trial.’ Simple NDAs. No promises. No press.”
He looked past her, into a memory.“It was truly a sight to behold. Vision restored. Mobility regained. Autoimmune conditions reversed. One man, paralyzed from a viral spinal infection, walked the next morning.”
Silence. He let it hang there, heavy and holy.
Then, his voice changed. Sharpened.“But healing is only half the battle.”
He looked her straight in the eyes.“Distributing it, without igniting a firestorm... Well, that takes pnning.”
Voss tapped his desk idly for a moment. Mallory waited for him to continue.
“Before you ask about the questionable decision to send eight billion pstic bottles out into the world,” Voss said with a knowing gnce, “the vials are made from PHA biopstic. Temperature-stable. Shatterproof. Compostable. Once used, they dissolve into starch again in hot water. Or they’re collected and recycled. No micropstics. No carbon footprint. Just the future—bottled, biodegradable, and waiting to be born.”
Mallory tilted her head.“Is that why you bought all those sugarcane fields in Jamaica?”
Voss grinned.“One reason. You know I love creating and protecting jobs wherever I can.But yes. Sugar feeds the microbes.The microbes make the polymer.And the polymer makes the bottles.”
She nodded her head slowly.“Why keep all of this a secret?”
Voss’s smile faded, repced by steel.“Because the second it becomes public, it becomes a target.Governments will seize it. Corporations will sue to suppress it.Billionaires will scramble to own it, patent it, weaponize it.Everything we’re trying to undo—they’ll reinforce tenfold.”
He stepped back to his desk, his silhouette framed by the glowing sunlight behind him.
“Vitalyx isn’t about treatment. It’s about transformation.It’s the gateway to The System. The starting line.”
Mallory stared at him, stunned.“So you’re really going to release this? Globally? Without regutory approvals?”
Voss nodded.“Yes. Simultaneously everywhere. Every pharmacy chain we control, every clinic, every delivery network, every logistics company—It’s all been building toward this. We’ve already manufactured six billion doses. The rest will be completed soon. Once ready, we’ll move from the secret warehouses to the final distribution points. Overnight.”
He continued, calm and certain.
“We never cimed it was a cure. Too many regutions for that.It’s filed as a wellness supplement. A nutraceutical.Over 85 countries and counting.No marketing. No website. No red fgs.”
Mallory blinked.“You never asked me for a legal review. That’s not like you.”
Voss softened.
“I wanted you to enjoy the st few months of normalcy before everything changed.You’re needed now more than ever. And I didn’t want to burden you early.”
He smiled, walking toward the door.“Now—shall we order lunch?”
Mallory gnced at the time.Three and a half hours had passed.Her stomach rumbled, as if finally catching up.“Yes, sir,” she said, rising. “Sushi? Feels like a good day for Japanese.”
Voss nodded enthusiastically.
As she turned to leave, her hand paused on the doorframe.
She looked back.
He’s not thinking about changing the world, she thought.He’s already started.Holy shit.
Her gaze drifted to the screen behind him.
The name still glowed:
VITALYX
And all she could think was—This changes everything.He wasn’t embellishing. Not even a little bit.