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The blaring klaxon was a long, loud buzzer, broken by periodic silence. The thick material of the radiation suit compressed her fur around her, and she could hear her breath, sounding amplified all around her in the enclosed protective gear. Through the transparent plastic face shield, she saw the ruin of the Paradigm Biotech facility, chunks of rubble piled in mountainous heaps, bits and pieces still falling as she followed the soldiers through the power plant.

"You okay, Dr. Sampson?" one of the soldiers ahead of her asked, turning back. She nodded. They moved on.

Tanya might have been in over her head on this one, but she wasn't about to admit that. She was the foremost nuclear physicist in the world, after all. If she was in over her head, there was no one who could do this. She was a white fox--not that anyone could tell, with the hood of the radiation suit over her head. She knew the way to the control room as well as any of the soldiers. They'd all studied the map of the facility before the operation began, but she had been working in nuclear reactors like this for most of her life. Well, perhaps not like this one.

The alarm was still blaring, incessantly. It was very loud, even through the suit. Tanya was glad they'd managed to capture the place so swiftly, even with them usually being guarded by a troop of security with enhanced strength and speed, bestowed unto them by Paradigm's horrible experiments. At least, she did hope they had gotten them all. It didn't stop her from jumping at shadows.

She kept her ears open for that clicking, the sound she hoped never to hear, but had grown well accustomed to anyway. She was amazed the soldiers had done as she advised and managed to preserve the reactor; she was almost certain they'd bomb the hell out of it. But of course their careful efforts to infiltrate this facility would be for nothing if the reactor itself blew and took them all with it. She hadn't mentioned to the soldiers around her that there was a theoretical possibility that this reactor melting down might result in an energy-based singularity which destroyed the planet, and quite possibly the universe, in either an all-consuming supernova or black hole. That worry wouldn't do anyone else any good. It wasn't doing her any.

Infinite power. That was the promise that had brought them here, the secret Paradigm was trying so hard to hide, badly enough to intentionally blow up their own reactor and maybe take everyone else with them. That was the brilliant secret that powered the source of the so-named Alpha Reactor. It wasn't far now. The control room was just through here, then across an open--

There was a click from her dosimeter. Then another. They picked up, rapidly, growing in frequency as they got closer to the control room hall. It was just ahead, so close, but the reactor itself might kill them before they got there.

"The hallway's hot," one of the soldiers said, a muscular German Shepherd. "Hurry through."

He shoved open the door labeled "Control Room" and she followed, stumbling through. The clicking silenced as the doors closed behind them. They were safe, behind shielding. For now. But they were a few hundred meters from the reactor itself, and according to the largest of the display screens, it was on the verge of a meltdown. They had seconds before the controls became useless, rendered non-functional by the overheating of their own systems.

She scanned the controls and found many of them familiar. She activated the coolant, followed by the intake and exhaust fans. But as many controls as she recognized, there was an entire panel that baffled her, albeit not in the way she'd expected to be baffled. She'd studied the plans for the reactor, hacked from Paradigm's servers, but despite reading what intel they could obtain backward and forward, she couldn't figure how they had been able to use this reactor to produce unlimited power. Whatever it was, this magical fuel source, it was kept inside the circular structure at the center of the reactor--not labeled "Core," as one would expect, but instead marked as the "Containment Chamber."

Yet where she had expected to see unidentifiable controls, levers and switches marked with alien symbols or acronyms that she had no context for, Tanya found she could understand them, they were just controls that had no manner of relevance to a normal reactor. There were two monitors, first of all, which seemed devoted to tracking the heartbeat of a living thing. While one read "ERROR," the other had an irregular reading of nearly 200 BPM. Then there was a monitor showing adrenaline levels, respiration rate, and something noted as "BUL."

She couldn't think about this now. She turned and saw more familiar controls, a lever for pushing in or retracting control rods, a switch for controlling the speed, and--ah-hah! There! The SCRAM button, a facet of every reactor control panel in the world. She flipped up the cover and jammed it. There was a loud buzzer.

Tanya sighed as she saw the panel indicate the control rods had all gone in. Reactivity and temperature were dropping rapidly. But then they slowed... and began to rise again. She looked back to the other controls, the ones that made no sense, and saw that none of them had changed. The heart rate monitor showed 197 BPM. Adrenaline levels were through the roof.

Finally, it hit her. She wheeled to face one of the soldiers.

"Where is Dr. Lockwood?"

"Can I get a twenty on Dr. Lockwood?" the soldier said into his headset.

"The genetics laboratory," he said after a moment. "East wing."

"Get him here, now," Tanya said.

***

He looked around frantically, searching the bullet-ridden laboratory for any trace of what--or rather who had brought him here. Genetics; that was the work of Dr. Ambrose Lockwood--"Rose," as they called him, despite this being a traditionally female name. The touch of feminity did match his general outward appearance, but he identified as male, though he'd been mistaken for a lady many times. Gender was, after all, a social construct, and he'd learned not to mind what other people identified him as. Well, he still minded. He'd just learned not to by keeping away from those people most of the time.

"When I said 'you need to get out more,' I did not mean go on more missions with the army!" his mother's voice said in his mind. He sighed and moved on.

It was far too late for most of the test subjects in the holding cells. Unlike many of their other facilities, in which Paradigm experimented with reckless abandon, the subjects in this one were all presented with the very same test: direct exposure to Uranium-235, refined nuclear reactor fuel. He remembered scrolling through the hundreds of test subject files they'd recovered from Paradigm servers, all marked with the word "FAILURE," the subjects deceased. Only three of these subjects were designated successes; Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Beta they'd killed afterward with further testing, and Gamma was kept off-site in a facility they currently had no way of locating.

The important question, which he and Dr. Sampson had already asked, was: if failure meant death, then what was success? The files didn't specify, other than that the test subjects had survived. But none of the subjects before him now appeared to have done so. Rose noted that many of them seemed to have been shot-- probably the best these people could hope for-- but his heart sank as he saw this, knowing perhaps the rare survivor he sought might now lie dead, this whole trip for nothing. Perhaps the mysterious Alpha was here, full of bullet holes.

Wait, was that-- He reached up to brush the dust off the sign by one of the isolation cells, confused for a moment when he didn't see his own grey wolf paw, but rather the bulky glove of his radiation suit. He brushed off the dust from the sign and... No. His heart sank; what he'd thought was an A was just a 4.

As the files had said, most of the subjects in the cells were wolves, Canis lupus. At first, they'd thought these were taken like any other test subjects of Paradigm's, but they didn't fit the company's typical MO of grabbing people off the street. No, these test subjects had another similarity: all of them were very distantly related, sharing the same ancestors, and all were lured in by fake job offers, raffle winnings, and other such dishonest methods. Paradigm was looking for subjects which shared the same genes; evidently, they were looking for a specific gene, one that allowed them to survive direct exposure to otherwise lethal gamma radiation.

"Dr. Lockwood."

He jumped as one of the soldiers grabbed his arm.

"Dr. Sampson needs you in the control room, says it's urgent."

"What?" he said. "But..."

She was the nuclear physicist! What could she need him for? Besides, he was busy looking for data. But he wasn't about to argue with the soldier holding an automatic weapon. He went where they told him to go, as he always had.

He found Dr. Sampson in the control room, surrounded by, well, by the controls. She waved him over and he joined her quickly, though he was still confused as to why she thought he could possibly help, and why she hadn't shut the reactor down yet. She pointed, and then he saw the controls.

"Rose..." she said. "I think the reactor has a biological component. I think it's..."

"Alive," he finished for her.

He looked at her. It all made sense now. Alpha. This was the name given both to the reactor and to the first of the three test subjects to survive the testing. What if this mysterious gene not only allowed the subject to survive direct exposure to radiation, but also emit it? What if this test subject was the reactor?

"Alpha..." he whispered.

He looked over the controls.

"Adrenaline's spiking, he's tachycardic... shit, this is why I didn't finish med school," he muttered. "Don't know how you focus with all these alarms!"

"Look, just focus on what we do know," she said. Then, "Ah, here."

She hit a button, helpfully labeled "Mute Alarms," and many of the noises ceased, though there was still the buzzer blaring throughout the facility.

"Well," Rose said, "assuming these are directly connected to his radiation emissions--otherwise, I'd assume they wouldn't be displayed here--we've gotta bring these levels down."

"There!" Dr. Sampson said, pointing to a series of dials. "Benzodiazepam, isn't that a sedative?"

"No!" Rose said. "I mean, yes, it is, but look:"

He pointed to another series of dials, these pertaining to systems apparently devoted to dosing the subject with pure adrenaline.

"They must've shot him full of adrenaline just before we got here, to--"

"To ensure a meltdown," she said, nodding.

"Yes," Rose said. "If we added a sedative now, it might just mix with the adrenaline, make him even more unstable, prone to fluctuation. I'm afraid it's in his hands now."

"Wait," Dr. Sampson said, reaching down by one of the controls. She held up a book. "Hah! They must have been in such a hurry to leave, they forgot the operation manual!"

She began scouring the pages, then paused briefly before scrambling for the phone at the end of one of the control panels.

"We can talk to him!" she gasped. "Extension... 325."

She punched the numbers into the keypad and held the phone up to her ear.

"Damn," she hissed. "It's been overloaded by the power surge."

"There's another intercom," Rose began, flipping through the manual, "but--"

"What?" Dr. Sampson said. "Where?"

Rose looked up.

"It's just outside the containment chamber," he said.

Dr. Sampson's face fell.

"We have to go in there," she said. Another quick glance at the controls and she nodded promptly. "Well, let's go."

She made for the door, and the soldiers turned to follow, as did Rose, after a moment of silent dread and hesitation.

"Don't," she said to the armed escorts. "It's far too dangerous, we don't want to expose any more people than we have to."

"We've been assigned to escort you, Doctor," the soldier said. "The inner chamber could be guarded."

"If there are any guards in there, they're dead already," she said.

"Even so, ma'am," the soldier said. "If this is our best chance to stop a meltdown, we're going in with you."

She nodded, taking not a second more to deliberate.

They walked out into the hall, up to a large airlock, a massive circular metal door barring the way, like the entrance to a vault. Dr. Sampson pressed the button off to the side and, after a loud hiss of pressurization, the door retracted into the right wall with a groan of metal. They moved into the airlock.

"You... don't have a problem with this?" Rose asked.

"Death by radiation was always in the cards for me," she said. "Knew this would happen sooner or later."

Rose had acknowledged much the same when he signed all those waivers, back when he first joined. Signing up to be a genetics specialist for the military, he knew there would be risks. He'd been on missions before, delving deep into the bowels of Paradigm facilities, always half expecting some mutated monster to crawl out of the shadows. He'd figured the last thing he saw would be teeth or claws. Radiation was a different thing.

"For the record," one of the soldiers said, "what you're doing is incredibly brave. The world will lament losing a mind like yours, Doc."

He turned to Rose with a nod.

"Both of you."

"Thank you," Dr. Sampson said. Rose could have sworn he'd heard the slightest tremor in her voice, like the gravity of this situation was only just sinking in.

The airlock opened on the opposite side. As soon as it swung wide enough for them to see the chamber, their dosimeters went crazy, not so much emitting a series of clicks as much as one long sound.

The mysterious containment chamber, a cylinder of glass not but ten feet in diameter, held the truth they'd been searching for this whole time. The glass surface was cracked, water shooting outward, but in the center, between the forest of control rods, they could see a figure. It was a male wolf, naked, with black fur and strange green markings all across his body that glowed with an intense light. Some kind of bioluminescence. Beautiful. The sight of Alpha was beyond words. If he'd died right there, Rose thought, if this were the last thing he saw, it would be worth it.

There was a respirator over the wolf's muzzle, the tube traveling upward to the ceiling, and he floated there in the water. He was tensed, his arms pulled tight to his sides, fists clenched, his legs squeezed together.

"Oh my god..." Dr. Sampson breathed.

They stepped forward. The floor around the chamber was wet, their boots splashing in the water.

"There," Dr. Sampson said, "the intercom."

She grabbed the phone from its little podium in front of the chamber and hit the speaker button. The light went green, which Rose figured was a good sign. Then Dr. Sampson turned and handed the phone to him.

***

This was it. At last, it would all be over.

Alpha felt the radiation permeate the reactor, roaring around him like he was standing in a raging bonfire. The water was boiling away, the heat blazing through his veins. It had felt like a high fever at first, stifling, weakening him. Now, he could almost feel his flesh sizzling, his fur searing, organs boiling from the inside out. The uncomfortable warmth had grown into a painful, screaming burn all over. Considering his normal body temperature was around 1,000° Celsius, this meant it must have been beyond 3,000° C, maybe four or five thousand now. His heart raced in his chest, threatening to burn right through him. Good. Let it end.

But then... it cooled. The water around him rapidly dropped in temperature. He saw the control rods slam down into the core. Had they changed their minds? He didn't know why they'd chosen to kill him in the first place--maybe they didn't need him anymore, maybe they just wanted to see how big a fireball he could make, watch him go out with a bang. Regardless, he'd wanted it, he'd accepted his end. But now they'd changed their minds? He realized this may have all been nothing more than a safety test, a way to see if they could bring him back from the brink. Any time now, they'd sedate him again.

He wouldn't let them. He huffed, his breath muffled in the respirator attached to his face, meant to keep him from drowning in water and coolant. He breathed faster, harder, trying to bring his heart rate up again. The reactor around him had cooled, but he was still burning hot. He wouldn't let them control him anymore.

The intercom clicked. There was a pause.

"Alpha?"

The voice was male, timid, not one he recognized.

"Is this Alpha?" the voice said, sounding shaken. "Is that your name?"

Alpha hesitated.

"Yes," he said. "Who is this?"

"I'm Dr. Lockwood," the new voice said. "I'm a geneticist, here with the United States Army. We're not going to hurt you."

He looked down, peering through the rods, and saw them just beyond the glass, several figures in hazmat suits, some with guns. They weren't the usual hazmat suits, though. These were cruder, baggier than the ones that usually confronted him.

"We can help you," the one with the phone said, "but we need you to calm down."

Someone else? There was someone else? All these years and now someone else had shown up? His heart still pounded, reactor fuel pumping through his veins.

"Help me how?" he asked.

Even if this was some other group and not some test by his captors, even if they were offering the best they could provide, what could they do for him? He was a walking nuke. No one could even get near him.

"Alpha," a new voice said, and now the other unarmed figure had the phone, this one female--or feminine, at least. "We can help you. I can't imagine what you must have suffered here, but we want to help."

He felt a rush of anger and the power within him surged, the reactor growing hotter.

"How can you help me?" he asked. "What can you do different?"

"What do you want?" she asked.

He looked at her, but her face was an expressionless gas mask. It was a simple question, yet it made him pause. No one had asked him that before.

"I want it to end," he said. "I want all of this to be over."

"Okay," she said. "Try and calm down and we can see about taking away your abilities. Help you become normal."

Maybe it was the firmness in her voice, but he believed her. He nodded.

"Alright," he said, letting out a long breath into the respirator.

Slowly, he breathed in and out, feeling the radiation around him slow as well. The control rods absorbed much of it, the water slowed it down, and he let the coolant relax him. He breathed.

The alarm stopped. Everything was silent.