< Command: Display/to do list >
When Zax woke up, he sent the command without thinking. He frowned, staring where his clock overlay should be. It took him too many seconds to figure why nothing was reacting.
Active nanites were forbidden in healing centres, so he put his to sleep at every visit, medical or not. They did use waves to communicate, even if the main worry that nanites might infect someone were ludicrous. In that environment, their absence for the last week hadn’t felt abnormal, merely long. At home, it felt uncanny.
Home.
His place.
He truly was back.
The soft light from behind the window. The low hum of the street. The familiarity. He had never paid attention before, taking them for granted, but after a week in a windowless and soundproof room, it all brought untold relief. He felt… serene. At ease, in a way he had never felt before.
After enjoying the sensation, he forced himself to stand up. Aran was already at work, but she had left a breakfast pill on the table. When he had come back and his mental exhaustion had caught up, he had dropped everything where it was without bothering to empty his bags. He wasn’t even sure he had wished good night to Aran.
Now that he had released tension he hadn’t been aware of, it was finally time for what he had anticipated all week: to peruse his benefits. He put his bracelet and three heaps of nanites containers in his personal workshop. Seeing his plants, he also checked on their state; the child lock prevented him from giving access to his unofficial roommate without being present. They would have to fix that. His plants had been left alone for a week now, but they were not high maintenance species – Zax found gardening boring – so they were still fine. A bit of water and cheap nutritive solution and he was done. Now back to the rewards.
The first and most straightforward was also the one he knew the least about: his pay. Learning advanced first aid and helping authorities in times of need was nice and all, but not enough people would bother if the Main Computer didn’t pay its civilian responders accordingly. He wasn’t exactly hard pressed for units, but after the efficiency he had displayed and the initiative he had shown before going in, he was sure to have a serious bonus. The danger he had willingly subjected himself to should be sure to substantially add to it, but since the Core was outside the Main Computer’s purview, he wasn’t sure it would count.
His bracelet told him he had slept more than half a day, and it had definitely counted. The amount was impressive, but he knew he would find a use for it. Especially with what he had brought back; it would be sure to give him a lot to do. He wouldn’t have to work for a long while, but that never stopped him anyway. He was too used to simply doing something, even if he didn’t believe it would help him mutate anymore. Physical or mental activity were the most common triggers in the dot, since the amount of 3G stored in the body was rarely enough for a natural activation.
Too bad I couldn’t test that.
Zax chased the treacherous thought away. He didn’t want to dwell on that part.
He proceeded with his other gains, starting with the easiest. He did a run of his usual mental scan, mostly personality quizzes and intellectual games, and used it as a fulcrum to compare his archives with the more complete results from the centre. The medical scans were easier to match directly.
For better or worse, he could only confirm the doctors’ reluctant conclusions: even after years with a swarm of tiny machines residing in most parts of his own body, and his interactions with the Core, there was no medical side effect. Psychological effects were trickier to pin down, but the deviations were more compatible with a natural consequence of what he didn’t want to think about. It was reassuring, his caution in making and programming his nanites had paid off.
Maybe I can go further now.
It was too early to jump to conclusions though, he still had to assess the nanites themselves. During the lengthy and gradual process of extraction, the Centre’s personnel had stored them in specific conditions according to his instructions. He was the best choice to see what had changed after all, when his judgement was not compromised.
He had to improvise an adaptor to connect the boxes to his own equipment without air contact or other pollution, but he had more than enough material for that. An in-depth examination of each batch and types showed no tampering, hardware or software-wise. Same with his B-Box.
There were strange signs of lowered efficiency however, compatible with common wear. It was something Zax had never considered before. Devices of that scale didn’t slowly deteriorate over time; each nanite was perfect until it broke, any slight mishap, distortion or flaw making the whole unfunctional. That was also why they were so sensitive to disruptive fields.
At least he had been taught that way, but thinking back, who had ever used biocompatible nanites in their body for so long at once? Actually, his nanites lasting that long without issue was probably more a testament of his teacher’s skill than his own care.
He would have to visit her soon.
The Core using barely compatible software to give him pareidolia on their first exchange had probably worsened the attrition, but Zax couldn’t deny that it had not infected his nanites or himself in any way, not even as a dormant precaution. No mind virus, no hidden triggers for secret commands; everything was exactly where it was supposed to be. The expert had no doubt that it could have forced them to act in a myriad of ways, but after the first contact, it had restricted itself to those not involving his personal nanites.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Even if he had made any such tampering as difficult and useless as possible by warning the Enforcers, Zax didn’t know what to make of it. None of their method were perfect, it would have been able to bypass them, but it hadn’t. More importantly, it seemed like it hadn’t tried. None of the hard-coded restrictions he had seen would explain such… restraint.
However, as curious as it was, it had nothing to do with him anymore. It wasn’t like he would ever go back there; that kind of adventure didn’t happen twice in a lifetime. Fortunately.
Done with this part, Zax sent his report and moved on to the Residents’ nanites. With neither he nor his B-Box around, their extraction hadn’t been smooth. The nanites themselves were damaged, but he managed to recover most of the data. As a precaution against 3G activation, he always programmed them to keep a copy of their records in deactivated nanites whenever possible. It was not perfect, they needed to be activated for each update, but it helped.
At first, he was surprised to see a full scan of the advanced mutants’ bodies. It was what he had made the nanites for, but he hadn’t told them to. The traces of a foreign command added to his normal ones shed light on this mystery: once the scan was done, the nanites were to use it to migrate in and around vital organs, mostly heart, brain and lungs, stay there, and upon not receiving a certain signal, they were to… build something?
Zax couldn’t tell what simply by looking at the remnant of code, but a simulator helped to complete it and revealed… a diamond? A long, flat, four-sided shape, not requiring many nanites, too small to do much, but of great structural stability. Perhaps the greatest Zax had ever seen on a construct that size. He was confused about its function, until he went back to the code and noticed the open end in the construction loop. The parameters were not fixed. The nanites would continue to make more diamonds and grow them as they met more of themselves, until none were left. A new batch would make it start anew. Then it dawned on him: those were blades.
An activation would only help so much; the blades would stop growing, but the stability would make them keep their shape. Millions, billions of tiny blades, all over the body, surrounding the vitals, pushed by the bloodstream, ripping apart every cell and tissue they came across…
Only a strong activation of enough 3G to fix the tremendous damages and either expel the blades or reinforce the body at a cellular level would save them. Zax had no idea if it was even possible.
Terrifying.
Luckily the Residents hadn’t tried anything. Massive internal bleeding, generalised organ failure, global paralysis, and who knew what else, the already traumatised programmer didn’t want to picture the result.
He shoved the file in a folder to never be seen again, and focused his attention on the body scans. He never had one of a Resident of the first Circle before, and now he had two! He was boiling with anticipation.
He let himself go, brought back to this old flame that had attracted him to this hobby, even after it was clear it would never apply to him. He spent the rest of the day examining the structures and physiologies of the advanced mutants, the shapes and functions of their organs, comparing and matching them with each other and with dotter mutations.
He wasn’t sure how to classify Kad, but he included his too. He briefly pondered how he was; he hadn’t received any news of his childhood friend since the party he had met Aran. He didn’t let that bog him down, it was expected.
Instead, he dove back in his theories, extrapolating scenarios, streamlining his results. His old habit of voicing his rapid-fire thoughts even resurfaced without him realising:
“Too bad the scans didn’t examine at cell level.”
“Let’s forget Kad’s multi-arms for now. Too outlandish. His structural and metabolic enhancements are the same as usual. Pushed further. Not the same as advanced mutants, but there is some overlap.”
“Officer Bor should have the same as him but even further. He was larger, but not maybe not proportionately stronger. Two sports buffs, use strength in their daily jobs, Officer Bor’s is possibly related to survival too. That would make sense. That’ll be a ‘to check’ for now.”
“Are there are qualitative and quantitative enhancements? Several types of each? I didn’t think there were both types for similar effects.”
“Are there both in the same person? That would explain the overlap.”
“Do they interact? Obviously, but how?”
“Do non-enhancing changes affect that choice? How? Why or why not?”
“Guess the qualitative ones took priority for Cat and Dog.”
“Maybe their higher amount of 3G oriented them toward qualitative changes first? Or is it how fast they got it?”
“We know- GYA!”
“Knock knock!” Aran chuckled at his shout. “Glad to see you’re doing fine; I was worried when I didn’t see you this morning.”
“Aran! Yes, just peachy, I slept like a log. Back already?” The embarrassed handyman quickly changed the subject.
“What do you mean ‘already’? It’s almost curfew, and I’ve been here a while now. I didn’t understand everything you said but that was… interesting to see.”
“I do that sometimes.” Zax shrugged. “Come in, I’ll explain.”
“Pass. It’s too late for one of your lectures.”
“Ah!”
“What?”
“I was so caught up in the new templates, I forgot to examine the new nanites I brought from the Core.”
Zax sheepishly laughed and scratched his hair, he could lose himself in his hobby at times. He was about to fix that oversight, but his friend pulled him away from his workshop. They had both missed each other and she didn’t want him to isolate himself again.
The irony wasn’t lost on either of them.
Aran had Zax test her on her new programming skills; she had kept training on her own. She had made some progress, but her idea of a WIL add-on for his RPG stater was still far away. She might be able to make a living of her technical skills sooner than expected, but he didn’t bring it up. Too early, he would wait until she could make simple games on her own at least.
Her RPG stater score had filled out some too, lots of points in many categories, but they still had no idea why her template couldn’t be made the usual way.
They also discussed their plans for the next day. Aran had new games to try, while Zax still had to examine the Core’s nanites and the recordings he had brought. Before that though, he wanted to visit his teacher, to thank her for everything she had taught him. He had realised the value of the foundations he had been taught, and it definitely wasn’t a way to stall the last task. He proposed Aran to come with him, she agreed out of curiosity for this teacher that had so much impact on his life.
They spent the rest of the evening enjoying the peace and the simple comfort of being with a friend.