Chapter 30: Self-Improvement Surgery

12:43 PM

June 26th

Ripley

The last four hours had been spent mindlessly putting together, removing and rebuilding the arm according to my own measurements. I’d never come to truly appreciate just how much I used my non-dominant hand for Shard Operating until now, all the little things I would hold or stabilize now had to be managed by careful and precise movements of my right Claw.

Shard Op’ Claws weren’t confined to the normal range of motion used in most day-to-day Shardware. They needed a mix of flexibility and durability to dig deep into overheated electronics, each of my fingers were nimble mantis-legs bending inhumanely… prying deeper.

Even Procedure Repetition couldn’t perfectly build up the arm for one simple reason, everything was mirrored. As such, I had to take things slowly, layering everything from the ground up and soldering each article according to the floating schematic I’d drawn up in my lens. Fortunately, my work on the experimental Claw Tips had been fortunate enough to let me modify the plethora of broken down tips from my expenditure into a proper set of claws of my own creation.

Were they as good as the ones in my right hand… no. They weren’t compatible with the Livewire. And speaking of the Warp Material, it seemed like Harold Anderson was not aware of that specific information regarding me. Or at least, he wasn’t showing it.

Still, I focused on everything other than the idea that I’d be cutting my own arm off today. If I was fortunate, Psyche would update to give me a way through… if I wasn’t, then this was going to hurt. A lot.

It was noon when I was finally satisfied with the rough design I’d scrapped up. A simpler redesign of my right arm, using the Endo-Skeleton bone-plating along some cheaper steel cores from the broken down Claws I’d bought. It was disproportionate to my right arm, weighing slightly more and not as strong or mobile, but it was still an incredibly high quality Claw for an Iron Grade.

Custom-made Shard Op’ Claw

Integrity: Iron II

Energy: Iron II

Capacity: Iron I

Grade: Iron II

All these different parameters, I’d still never truly understood what they meant. All I knew was that they’d be more important once I finished converging… which I was quite close to. 95%… if I was lucky, a few more updates today would get me there.

And so, as I prepared to delve into the mysteries of a synthetic liver, I pulled up two Iron BUGs when the room was empty. Both from people I’d killed, the first from the man in little Requiem, and the second from Emily who I’d slain yesterday.

I didn’t know when, but at some point when I’d lost conciousness I’d lost the Analyze Feature I’d mimicked. So I tried to regain the ability once more.

Reading Data…

Data Mimickry V.0.02 has updated to V.0.03

Effect: Increased speed of reading Warpcode Data that has already been mimicked once.

Features Available: [I] Analyze

Not finished yet, I flexed up my Energy into the second BUG, hoping that another reading would get me another update.

Reading Data…

This one took much longer, maybe six minutes as my mind sat in stillness poking and prodding around the hidden streams of information within the Implant.

100%… Data read successfully.

BUG scanned…

Grade: Iron

Tier: 1 [Foundation]

Features: [Iron] Overclock V.1.02

Previous Adapters: Emily Wilbur [Three years]

You may mimic the feature: Overclock V.1.02

An Overclock function? I couldn’t see what use that would be for a drug dealer other than to temporarily push her Shardware over the limits for combat but as a Shard Op…

I mimicked the Feature, feeling it’s inner workings merge with my own.

Update Summary:

* Increased functionality of Shardware with Warp Energy input

* Increased efficiency of Shardware when pushed into an Overclocked state.

* Output of Feature Links can be increased with further usage of Warp Energy

* Feature Protocol: Damage Frenzy allows the Adapter a burst of energy when critically damaged.

Alot of it could more or less be covered by my Energized Feature, but that was more generalized compared to Overclock. Synergized together however? And with a Feature Protocol layered on top of it, the effects would be nasty, I pulled in the Warpcode like my mind had become a vortex of endless hunger and-

Error: Warpcode Limit has been reached, unable to Mimic full capacity of Feature…

Error: Unable to Mimic the Feature Protocol: Frenzy; Warpcode too complex, unable to synchronize Protocol Data with current limitations…

Data Mimickry V.0.03 has updated to V.0.04

Effect: Higher instinctual awareness of Warpcode complexity during Data reading.

Data Mimickry V.0.04 has updated to V.0.5

Effect: Reactive limiting of Mimicked Feature output if at risk of harming Iplant.

And I felt like I needed to puke, seriously, it felt like my stomach had just taken all of my neural burden all at once. I would have probably passed out from the stubborn nausea if it wasn’t for the next few lines of information peering mercy at me.

Report: Feature is underdeveloped and Neural capacity is too limited to make full use of Overclock’s capabilities… adjusting…

Feature: Overclock is acting at 65% of its full capacity.

Then it stopped as my brain fastened a glorious wall to block off all the invading streams of information from tearing my brain apart. At once, I felt the Feature’s knowledge become one with me in the simplest passage of my arm.

The image of someone with the Overclock Feature was all too simple, you visualized a tired tank-of-a-human, arms and body beefed up like they’d injected the muscle mass of a horse into their arm. They had just killed twenty assassins chasing after them, foreign blood drenched their clothes and every step seemed like it shook between the line of death and life.

Then a new enemy appears, maybe they’re tough — maybe they’re fast. It doesn’t matter, because you’re tired. At least, you should be. You activate the Overclock feature and your arm-cannon charges up so bright it almost melts, and in the blink of an eye you have one less head to worry about.

Yeah but I didn’t have an enemy like that on my tail right now, so what difference could this make? A whole lot, it turned out. The higher the grade, the more specific your updates to the specific stimuli developing them. Which meant Iron Grade was a loose boost to all capabilities in most cases rather than a targeted approach. Something that was fine in the short run of things, but not all too feasible in the long run.

While I would have liked something solely for my brainpower, the quicker response time and slight boost to my Shardware was an added bonus. I’d also needed to adjust my strength now, even light scratches from my claw were now a cleaver to these metallic sculptures. Not a deadly, slash right through my foes cleaver — but a softer, denting metal and putting a heavy hole in their wallet kind.

My arm was a machination of engineering, burning my wisps of Gold into tangible results out of brief images I’d thought too technically articulate for me to feasibly manage in this short period of time. In record time, I had slimmed down my left arm by about twelve-percent, condensing or cleaving off mass that had been redundant.

It didn’t seem like much, but every percentage in every parameter could make a difference.

“Good.” Harold gruffed as he leaned over an unconscious patient, his body prone in a chair that was faced away from me. There were no cameras, none that I could see from here anyway, but it was directed to me.

With enough Gold to run me in this state for another hour, I started to work on the liver.

2:49 PM

An hour was an overstatement, Overclock users were generally burst of energy types of people. It was easy to see now, what should have been a minute long spur of work from me ended up being a solid twenty minutes of confusion and terrible management of my limited resources until my internal storage sputtered out into exhaustion.

Harold hadn’t even ordered me food, but Topaz had been kind enough to get me a burger before he left. He said someone would be coming later on the day to pick me up, then left.

Crunching the plastic-feeling lettuce between my incisors, I mulled over the liver. It reminded me all too much about why I preferred the musculoskeletal parts of the human body, they were simple and it was that fact that allowed them to be so readily modifiable. You don’t often hear of a man transforming a gun out of his intestines now, do you?

Muscles and bones held a basis on the integrity and movement side of things, they rarely needed to produce complex hormones or chemicals needed to keep the body in stasis. Other than bone marrow, off the top of my head any way.

I wasn’t an expert in anatomy, but I knew the function of the liver pretty well. Hormone production, blood filtration, and toxin removal. All using a complex mixture of cells layered in discs which composed even more sophisticated manners of lobules and lobes. With this artificial organ, it would be mimicked by machinery, intricate scanners would track through my blood and perform the necessary tasks if needed.

In summary, even minute damage could spiral out of control since the machine lacked self-regenerative properties. The good thing about an organic liver was that it had some healing capacity, and recent gene therapy could even keep an alcoholic’s liver in prime condition if they had the Shardyne for it.

A good thing was that buying Shardware always came with a library of various manuals ranging from safety to insurance — which I would very quickly be voiding by intermingling the Warp Generator into the fold. At least it showed me which parts of the liver served what function, so by the time my burger was finished I was a little more confident in what I was handling…

Let’s get to work.

6:23 PM

My right hand burned, the metallic joints and muscles feeling like they’d been dipped into scorching acid and left raw. An adverse effect of Overclock was burnout of your Shardware, it even climbed upwards into my organic back as the various muscles connected to my scapula ached from the vibrations breaking them apart.

So that might be the reason why every Overclock Adapter was beefed up. I pushed the pain aside, my Preservation Matrix keeping my thoughts in order as I derived more from my Technician Feature’s Reverse Engineering protocol.

Turns out there was a time limit and also a sort of cooldown for my Data Mimicry. The more I used the Feature, the more I utilized some sort of internal store of the memory until it was depleted and I’d need to read the Data again. But it was like trying to fill a bucket with holes in it. I found the next attempt had lowered the capability of Overclock to 35%, and it drained even quicker than my previous use.

After about an hour of no mimicry, I had now switched over to Analyze which fortunately seemed to be much longer lasting. Maybe it was because the Feature wasn’t updated as much, or since the Feature itself took a more passive role. Either way, it was a tiny boost to my understanding, it let me know which parts of the liver and Generator held value and which served a more aesthetic purpose.

The gym was closed now, and Anderson was busy taking notes on a pad in the opposite corner of the room as I held two pieces of living metal in my hand. He hadn’t addressed me at all, even skirting past the questions of other clients who pressed on about my appearance.

I was running out of time. The Warp Generator had been broken down and rebuilt at least seven times by now, the liver twice. And as I quickly sewed up two springy blobs of carbon together that made a third time.

Then I got another update to my Technician Feature, the third one today.

Technician V.1.02 has updated to V.1.03

Effect: Increased understanding of bio-integrational units of Shardware.

Technician V.1.03 has updated to V.1.04

Effect: Internal calculation of Warp Physics is now more more efficient

Technician V.1.04 has updated to V.1.05

Effect: Reverse Engineering Protocol is now more efficient in reconstructing internal organ Shardware.

Each update just teased me closer to the edge. 98% now… I was so close, but each increment was slower. What should have been solved by one update now took several. The table rattled as my nerves got the better of me, my steel fist reverberating from the light impact.

What else could I improve? Energized? Psyche? No, there was nothing today that warranted them to be pushed beyond their limits. Nothing else but to just step on ahead into the abyss of my own operation and combine the liver and generator into one seamless piece.

I’d spent a while already just tinkering with the Warpcode of both, they were ready to merge on the digital aspect. If I had a Jailbreak Feature or hell, even an Integration Feature… this would be much easier. Maybe even Dataweaving but…

I didn’t, I had a limited amount of resources.

I laughed… limited?

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

I had four fucking Features! I could mimic any Feature I had an Implant for! I had a gold mine and yet I couldn’t even cough up a piece of coal.

The two technological pieces in front of me were entirely compatible in a theoretical point of view but I just couldn’t find a way to blend them together into a seamless physical element. With my Claw, I’d only ever put together pieces of the same thing in different shapes. It was easy. This was like trying to mix water and oil without an emulsifying agent.

“How long would it have taken you…?” My tired voice radiated to the other side of the wide room.

“An hour, at most.” The succinct reply only weighed on me. I could do the arm now, that was part of the deal but I needed this liver arguably even more. My Gold was a walking treasure map pointing at the base of my skull, any Operating I do here without it would be like waving a treat in front of a starving dog.

All sense of camaraderie this place had built would crumble under the weight of my value.

So then what could I do? One arm was hardly enough to manage all these pieces together, so then-

Of course. I felt like an idiot. I didn’t have one arm available to me, my gaze landed on the wide disk with six spider legs sprouting out. Silently, my chair rolled towards the machine as it’s connection dock fit into my focus.

The thick chord spilling was two inches thick and ended with an equally arachnid vessel, a hollow pyramid glowing with faint wires of bronze that would fit right over my Neuroframe and synchronize me to the Arachne.

Holding the hefty port right behind my neck, I aligned the two… and then my mind screamed out as a gaping hole tore through it.

External Connection Establishing… [Redacted] Arachne Mk 1

7:21 PM

I couldn’t believe it had taken me this long to use the operating machinery that I’d been dreaming of for so long. It was everything I imagined and more, my own body was slumped over as I saw it through the cameras of each arm, our connection pulling an overwhelming flood of information spilling into my mortal vessel.

With a mental blink, I could see into various spectrums… visualize my organs, trace out my nerves and blood vessels, align my skeleton and muscles at a glance. Not to mention, each arm held a fiesty hunger to drill into metal, their heads clamping open and shut like lotus buds fed a diet of steel.

Of course, they couldn’t do that. Arachne’s were infamously brittle since they were loaded up with all sorts of sensitive equipment. They were more delicate weavers of steel than the hungering clamps of an actual spider. That title belonged to the Yuzhou model: Tsuchigumo, a massive exoskeletal suit that provided four additional arms loaded up with cannons and blades.

An entertaining thought flowed through me; I had Livewire which sort of had a thematic resonance with the reflection of weaving, but it was just an idea… for now.

The liver sat on the operating bed, in pieces. The Warp Generator was in a similar state, the actual mechanisms providing it with the ability to shift grades up and down were conserved even if the overarching structure was dismantled. The theory behind it was all too complex for me to confidently shatter the processor with the hope that I’d be able to put it together again. Even if I managed to keep it mostly the same, there was no way to tell if I’d screwed something up in the long run.

For the important bits, there was an input funnel that would consume my Warp Energy from the hepatic plexus, which fortunately ran along a surplus of blood vessels entering and exiting the organ at the portal triad. Then there was the much larger processor which held the divine secret of shifting grades to be placed within any empty space of the liver’s actual body, and a much simpler outflow stream that could sink into my Inferior Vena Cava.

As for the liver itself, I’d mostly exposed the rudimentary bits and shaved off what was more aesthetic. The vital core components were largely untouched, at its simplest what I needed to do was uncrowd enough space that I could fit in the generator to complement the blood vessels without removing any functionality from both.

With the Warp Generator’s complete size being a third of the liver, it was proving to be difficult. But with the Arachne came some… benefits. Each arm held a unique Feature Link.

Feature Links: Shardware Scanner [Analyze]; Resuscitation Synchronizer [Sustain]; Warp Stability [Energized]; Precise Operation [Technician]; Shardware Slicer [Technician]; Data Syncing [Dataweaving]

I don’t know how I never saw it, that each arm was in itself a unique Iron-Grade Shardware all connected to a central Bronze-Grade network. That way, each arm could hold a unique Link without joining that same Pseudo-grade my Claw was held at.

Controlling all six arms simultaneously was impossible with my current state. For all my life I’d only ever used two, with thrice as many I was constantly jumbling my focus between them and praying that one day an Integration Feature would fall into my hands. It was one of the most sought after Features for this very purpose, it allowed the nervous system to adapt to foreign tech with ease without permanently adding it to your system.

As four arms lazily swayed, two other arachnid limbs moved to the hold I had drenched over them. At the same time, they spurred to motion in a way both rapid and clunky. They acted in a rehearsed manner that was stumped by my lack of control, blades and hooks evolving from their sharp tips to pry and lift bits of metal and carbon.

Keeping the lifted pieces steady in the air, the second arm whizzed from beneath to delicately pluck out wires. Switching my control, a third cut into their outer casing while a fourth brought out new wires from the liver. The fifth soldered them, and the sixth sprayed a new insulating case.

It was a conveyor belt of action, each arm focusing on their specific purpose on the production line. I repeated the process with a careful focus, one-at-a-time, until I could safely ensure that I hadn’t screwed anything up…

Energized V.1.05 has Updated to V.1.06

Effect: Increased control over non-Adapter Warp Energy in External Shardware

Right, I technically wasn’t using my own Gold to control them. Instead, my energy connected to the central network which had its own Bronze Storage unit used to power the six arms. I mentally clicked to check my progress… 98%.

So two more updates if my calculations were right. Just a few more hurdles, then I would be past Tier 0. I would be a true Adapter.

Unfortunately, by the time I was finished with the liver nothing else had come. I only had one last challenge to the day, my own surgery.

8:12 PM

“I can’t sedate myself, can I?” I framed the question more towards me, but I couldn’t help but feel relieved when I got an answer.

Harold Anderson answered amidst a mountain of Shardware in his hands. “Nothing that impacts your own mental faculties.”

“So localized anaesthesia… as I remove my arm. And my liver.” A groan carried all my dread at the upcoming procedure. I’d outlined the entire process in my head since the day started, a complete removal of my left humerus and everything below it.

At the very least, this would without a doubt get me some updates to my Features. I can’t imagine I would want to adapt to anything more than removing my own flesh at this moment. A breath drilled out of me, this wasn’t my first limb replacement. Around four years ago I’d lost my right forearm while disarming a container for Shaun, and four months ago I’d gotten the same procedure as today.

The rehabilitation would suck, but it would be quicker now that I’m an Adapter. A Gold Adapter.

Lining myself up on the Arachne’s bed, I flinched as my limbs were strapped in place and the chord in the back of my head buzzed tightly. The droning of bees drowning my thoughts as my vision slowly overlapped with six more eyes, until my organic ones rolled back.

That pain of opening your mind up to a machine, it was like a festering wound bellowed at the back of my skull until my entire presence could fall through. The aching disappeared in seconds, but the hollow void of the gateway existed as an annoying presence in my thoughts.

I stared at my body through the cameras in each Arachne arm, six overlapping images formed an understandable sphere of awareness I could flow through. I poked my shoulder lightly, and the phantom sense of awareness in my physical body flinched in the sight of the Arachne limbs.

A witness to my own mutilation, how morbid. I could quite literally see the tortured expression in my face as each thought passed into the mechanical limbs, the momentary relaxation as I thought that this wouldn’t be so bad, to the all too dreadful tension as I envisioned my blood vessels.

I still held onto the mimicked Overclock Feature, perhaps out of the desperation that it could possibly blitz the arms into completing the procedure for me. In the end, there was nothing else for me to do but start.

Each limbs injected a precise vial of clear liquid through my arm, but since I lacked a clear circulation and most of the nerves were already disconnected there was little sensation except for my shoulder.

I had amputated arms in the past. It was one of the most common requests as a Shard Op’, and the procedure was always the same. First, my skin was cut lightly by blades to expose the underlying muscles of my shoulder and parts of my clavicle. Then the blood vessels were sealed or redirected, nerves were severed in precise locations of the brachial plexus that my prosthesis would later connect to.

Like a puzzle, my body unraveled from a living being to a mass of interconnected flesh and bone. Staring at my exposed shoulder and collar muscles, I couldn’t help but envision myself as a statue of some kind… a statue very much in pain. Careful injections relieved me, but I couldn’t push any further into my neck or else I could seriously fall asleep while performing my own surgery.

Besides, I hadn’t even cut into the bone yet. Once blood vessels were no longer an issue, a thick slab of metal slid forward into two of the Arachne limbs. They began to hum as a blurring ghost of their own image drifted over them, yeah this was going to suck.

The pain medication was just enough that the second I pierced my deltoid muscles I didn’t awaken to scream at the alien limbs dissecting me. It didn’t mean I was okay though as the fleshy chords seized up in reflex, their tightness exploding away as I sawed around the lips of my clavicle and scapula.

A painful minute later and I removed the flap, my blood pressure and respiratory rate spiking high that prompted an intravenous release of agents to relieve it. A moment later, I dug deeper again. I could preserve the muscles of my scapula, but I still had to disconnect them from the humerus. The rotator cuff fell loose, the four muscles keeping the arm stabilized now flapped back and pinned until further use. The arm itself completely limp.

One more checkup on any bleeding and exposed nerves, and then the saw hummed deeper as its fangs grew bigger. I couldn’t sedate the nerves within my bone, not without risking serious risk to the procedure. Even then, I underestimated the pain I would feel sawing through them.

Psyche V.1.08 has updated to V.1.09

Effect: Increased tolerance to self-inflicted pain.

It was a translucent cloth atop the searing light of agony. I couldn’t even spare a moment to check my progress until the few inches of bone were entirely cut through along with my biceps and brachialis muscle. Slimy webs of my bodily fluids grasped in desperation as the dead arm was lifted off me, blood desperately clings with a thin thread until it snapped.

Only air remained beneath my left shoulder.

A few lighter cuts removed any bits of my remaining humerus bone, a quick transfusion of blood keeping my body stable.

Technician V.1.05 has updated to V.1.06

Effect: Increased efficiency in removal of organic components during Shard Operating.

That would have been good to have two minutes ago, but it didn’t clinch in any notice that I’d gotten past Tier 0 of Convergence. As the metallic twin of my left arm came up in view, a deep sense of loss perforated through the tired motions of the Arachne.

My arm was truly separate from me now, a piece of my human body.

That same arm I’d used to hold onto my mother, that had been with me since I was a child and grown along my life, now sat dead on a tray. I was hardly the sentimental type, but… I don’t know.

I was just sad.

8:34 PM

Metallic strips lined my new wound, a mound of metal sculpted to create a dark-steel stump over it. My nerves fed through the processor, branching out into muscles and the new bone that replaced my old organic pieces. The biomonitor showed my signs as stable, the linkage process already underway subconsciously.

The operation was a success, but it had taken too much from me. I’d been scraped raw, like my mental skin had been torn against miles of concrete and tarmac over the ordeal. But I hadn't finished, not while there was still the liver.

A more personal project in an ironic sense. Even though I’d secured my place here, the heavy organ lifted up in the claws of three limbs that I pushed on. That I persevered with.

Another few injections under my ribcage prepared it for the sharp sting of a scalpel skirting beneath the curvature. I won’t go into the details, but the amount of blood I’d suctioned out was proof of my inexperience, the clamped arteries and veins only proving to be highways that many smaller roads stemmed from.

The dull thud of my organic liver on the tray was exhausting, my blood pressure had lowered until I could feel the grogginess wade into the limbs. Biomonitor alerts flashed one after the other, and I’d made the metallic droids work to keep me stable but I was… I was…

I’d messed up somewhere. Maybe it was too much organic trauma for one night, maybe my Preservation Matrix just couldn’t keep up with it. By the time I’d set the new liver into the arachnid arms, I was just… so fucking tired.

Sleepy and… oh god, I was probably dying.

Even with a shunting vessel pathing an exodus of blood into my heart, I had fucked up predicting the sheer shock my body would face all at once. I should have taken things more slowly and methodically, rather than just performing one step after the other out of the fear that if I took a moment’s pause then I’d never start again.

And Harold… yeah, he was probably going to let me die. A Gold Implant would literally fall into his lap, maybe that was his plan all along. I carried on, or atleast that’s what I would like to say. My Matrix pushed my mind into conformation, yelling out orders into the alien limbs that attempted to fumble my blood vessels into specific paths.

I needed to use more arms at once, but I was failing at managing even one now. One alert called out another into my vision, then another, until I was swarmed by a sea of noise and light all spelling out my impending death. I was scared, I was so scared until-

Psyche V1.09 has updated to version 1.10

Effect: Reduced fear of death.

…

100% Convergence achieved… calibrating…

Darkness snapped over me.

Calibrations complete. Implant is reconfiguring…

Adapter is now in Tier I: Foundation; with the Implant and Adapter now acting as one functional unit, they will now build a foundation until further modification can occur.

Grade calibrated… Gold I

Integrity calibrated… Iron IV

Energy calibrated… Iron V

Capacity calibrated… Iron VII

Tendency Calibrated… [Requirements not met]

Compatibility calibrating… 99.9%

Feature pathway analysis…

* Psyche V.1.10 has Adapted to prevent previous sources of trauma from conflicting with the Adapter’s present desires… Effect: Substantial. Pathway promoted; feelings, emotions and memories can now be subconsciously sealed.

* Energized V.1.06 has Adapted to allow increased response with Shardware and project externally… Effect: Mediocre. Pathway altered; repurposing Warp Energy internally to further boost past neural restrictions.

* Technician V.1.06 has Adapted so that information may be extracted by breaking down technology… Effect: Substantial. Pathway promoted; Technician now also envisions possible repurposing of learned technology into other forms.

* Data Mimicry V.0.05 has Adapted to allow the brief mimicking of other Features… Effect: Minimal. Pathway prioritized; Data Mimicry will assimilate further information into the Adapter from read sources of Warpcode.

And then my six eyes snapped open. Aware in a way they never had been before, each and every trickle of information a light breeze of profound data. All of them buzzed to work, in a synchronized manner they sealed blood vessels and spliced nerves to join with the wires of my liver.

Fastened into a pool of my blood, the liver was a bug caught up in the web my six soldiers knitted. Warp Energy burned through them, my own Warp Energy, working them to the bone as they spurned like puppets to my every thought.

In minutes, my liver was tied up in organic ligaments and electrical tubes. Then my skin was sewn tight, a soothing spray spacing in between any clots wanting to form. Slowly, my mind pulled back into my human body, returning to experience what had changed.

The first conscious breath I drew was unlike any other I’d ever had, it was flavorful in the essence of life. The oxygen within was telling in the way it seeped into my blood, rushing through my heart to vitalize my body.

I never imagined that coming out of a surgery could feel so… energizing. As my new liver set itself to work, I had an acute grasp over the composition of my blood and the cleansing it experienced. Muck and grime that had built up in me for years washing away as each heartbeat left me clearer and focused.

“Something else isn’t it. A new liver.” Mr. Anderson was leaning on the wall right beside me. “Of couse, that’s not the only thing that’s new to you. No longer in Convergence?”

I shook my head, and in doing so I was amazed at how much I could glean from the muscles in my neck. Their exact position, their tension and expectations. “Feels like I’ve been born again.”

“Except this time without being covered in your mother’s juices.” He barked, much to my ajared wince. “Takes some time getting used to, did your compatibility go down?”

“Nope.” And I left it at that as my eyes honed in on the new number. 99.9%… now it had an additional decimal added after that. It may not seem like a lot but in a sense I had one-tenth of my old incompatibility at 99%. A 1% turned into 0.1%

“With a BUG… you won’t be feeling any massive improvements to your body like you would with a SIM. All we get is a boost here.” Mr. Anderson pointed at his head. “But that means there’s a whole lot we can do with the Shards in our hands.”

“Makes sense.” The vibrations running through my tongue as I spoke were precisely filtered into my consciousness, I could feel the confidence running through me.

“Now, from what I saw. You’ve got potential. Honestly, that’s almost all that you have. Doesn’t mean you’re bad though, quite the contrary. Credit where it’s due, you did something I wouldn’t have been able to commit when I was at your age or skill level. Even with a Gold, I wouldn’t have done it.”

“Uh huh.” I quickly got to the point. “So I have the job?”

“You do. You’re my assistant, starting tomorrow.”

And here it was, finally. A new job.

———

Harold Anderson stared at the man who was Alberich Gravas’ grandson, his body slumped over the desk as well-deserved sleep cast over him. He had doubted Missy, not just when she informed him of who Ripley was but also what he had.

Today was eye-opening to say the least. He had a principle of not getting involved, it was better this way. Yet he couldn’t help but feel like some part of him should say something, after all, everyone deserves to know who their family is.

And a man like Alberich? Harold both revered him, and hated him. Maybe in some sense, it was time for revenge. In another, it was time to grow past it, he was growing too old to waste his life on matters like revenge anyway.

Yet neither of that was why Harold had accepted Missy’s request.

It was curiosity. What would happen if a man like Ripley, detached from any corporation or gang, was to develop his powers to the fullest. What would he become?