MTLNOVEL Chapter 27: Rick doubt himself
Rick stared at the screen long after the video ended, the lab's hum fading into a hollow buzz behind his eyes.
His fingers hovered over the replay button but dropped to his side with a sharp exhale. He'd seen enough. Morty's face, empty of hesitation, calm as a man ordering a coffee seared itself deeper with each passing second.
Rick grabbed a portal gun off the bench, dialed coordinates with practiced indifference, and without a word stepped through into a dimension that stank of sulfur and rot, a place crawling with creatures whose names even he didn't bother to catalog. They hissed and slithered around him, giving wide berth like wolves smelling fire. Rick barely noticed. His boots crunched over the glassy black soil toward a rusting outpost a forgotten tech station manned by things cleverer than him, meaner, and hungry for trade. The kind of place he went when he needed black market parts for projects too insane to build back home.
Inside, the air pulsed with the metallic scent of old blood and ozone. Rick slid a schematic across the counter to a reptilian merchant with four eyes and a mouth full of iron teeth. "Quantum-stabilized neural chip," Rick said flatly, voice low. "I want it bound to a cortical relay with adjustable inhibitors. Deadman failsafe. No feedback loop."
The merchant's eyes flicked over the design, a slow, predatory grin spreading. "Dangerous tech, even for you," it rasped. "You planning to control a god… or kill one?"
Rick didn't answer. His jaw clenched, eyes locked on the schematic like it might blink back. The creature chuckled a deep, grinding sound and slithered into the shadows to fetch the parts.
Rick stood there alone, staring into his reflection in the warped metal wall.
He didn't know what chilled him more that Morty had become this… or that he couldn't tell if it was because of him. Was this another byproduct of dragging a scared kid through a thousand worlds of horror? Or had this darkness always been inside Morty, waiting for the first crack to crawl through? Was this even something he could stop, or just the inevitable conclusion of a life stretched across universes, running on borrowed time and borrowed blood? He'd built monsters before gods, abominations, things that chewed up galaxies but this wasn't a creation. This was Morty. His Morty. The one who used to stammer, the one who used to flinch when a portal opened, the one who used to beg him to stop. The one he thought he could mold without breaking.
And what scared him worse… did he even have the right to fix it? Or was he just trying to leash something that had finally slipped out of his control?
The merchant returned, setting the pieces down with a clang that echoed in the dead air. Small, innocuous pieces cold metal and silicon, humming faintly with the promise of absolute control or absolute destruction.
Rick pocketed the chip without a word, portal gun humming softly in his hand.
He turned, catching his reflection again in the oily sheen of a cracked viewport. His own eyes stared back older, colder, rimmed with lines he couldn't remember earning. The eyes of a man who'd spent his life dancing with death and now couldn't tell if he was protecting his family or preemptively killing them.
As he stepped back into the swirling green light of the portal, the only thing following him was a thought he couldn't shake...
Maybe this wasn't Morty breaking.
Maybe this was just Morty waking up.
The portal swallowed him whole, dumping him back into the garage's cold, sterile light. Rick stood still, the chip heavy in his pocket like a loaded gun. He ran a hand through his hair, breath leaving him in a low hiss. His eyes flicked toward the house toward the walls that barely kept this family together.
Was this what it came to? Leashing Morty like some interdimensional beast before he went too far? Before whatever spark had ignited behind those dead eyes became a wildfire? He thought of Beth's message, of Jerry's radio silence, of Summer's clipped tone. They all felt it. They all saw it. And yet… none of them moved.
Because deep down, they all wondered the same thing.
Is it already too late?
Rick glanced at the chip, rolled it between his fingers. He could build it tonight. Install it with a flick of the wrist, slide it behind Morty's neck while he slept. He could shut this down before it burned him too. But what if it wasn't a glitch to fix? What if this was who Morty was always meant to be and Rick was just another blind man trying to put a leash on the dark?
The silence stretched.
Rick stuffed the chip into a lockbox, sealing it with a muttered code.for now, His hand hovered over it for a moment longer.
And then, with a slow breath, he whispered to the empty lab, "What the hell did I make you… kid?"
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Enjoy these while you can 😶