“Yeah… I guess. I leave all the business stuff to him,” Declan said, slightly uncertain.

“Do you even know how much money you have in the bank right now?” Stacia asked him, amused.

He looked affronted but after a second reluctantly shook his head. “I let—” he began, but Stacia interrupted.

“You let Omega handle that?”

“Er, yeah.”

“What if the machine embezzles your money?” Galina asked.

“What? He would never!” Declan said.

“You wouldn’t know if he did,” Tanya’s mother said.

“I wouldn’t have to know. Whatever I needed would be there when I needed it.”

They all looked at him a second, but no one disagreed.

“Faith-based finance aside, you haven’t done a good job of explaining, Tanya dear,” Senka said.

“My bad. So… we’ve been funding research into exactly this topic. And it’s direct research, as it impacts both V-squared and LV and witchcraft as well as cancer,” Tanya said. “The researchers work directly for us.”

“Holy shit, that’s a wide supernatural range,” Declan noted.

“Yes. But here it is, boiled down to basics. There is a theory called Cell Brain Theory. Essentially, scientists have known that much of what happens in living organisms can’t fully be explained by DNA. Yes, it’s the building block of life, but what actually directs the building?”

“These centrosome thingies?” Nika guessed.

“Yes. They act as the cellular brain, organizing cell activity and coordinating with other cells to establish what cell is going to do what job,” Tanya said.

“Coordination? That implies communication… hormones?” Stacia guessed.

“Yes to communication, no to hormones. You’ll never guess,” Tanya said, looking around the table. “Radio waves. Specifically terahertz waves, or T waves.”

“Wait, I know about those. Penetrates flesh and clothing but not metal or ceramics, so it’s being studied for weapon scanning potential, but very difficult to detect. Not a lot of useful tech that can work with it yet.”

“Exactly, Father. The working hypothesis is that the centrioles act as both receivers and transmitters for terahertz frequencies, speaking to other cells. And in the human brain, which contains over one hundred billion cells, thus creating over a trillion connections, the centrioles are stepped up exponentially in power.”

“Giving rise to ESP? Street light phenomenon, telepathy?” Lydia said, catching Nika’s gaze.

“Or, in some individuals who have unusually high concentrations of centrioles, we get a broad range of power manipulation,” Tanya said.

“Witches,” Stacia said.

“Father has the highest concentration of centrioles currently catalogued.”

“But what about V-squared and LV?” Nika asked.

“Each virus changes and concentrates the centrioles of infected cells as well as produces the unique proteins we’ve already studied. So when Chris and Elder Senka generously gave Declan blood—” Dr. Singh started.

“Thank you both for that, by the way,” Declan interjected.