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I was already starting to feel a little nervous; a slight sweat, a noticeably raised thrumming heartrate, pronounced deep breathing. What I was doing had the potential to go horribly wrong, completely melting my brain and every other nerve cell connected to it; directly or otherwise. There had been that one time that a monkey’s brain had started oozing out of all the orifices in his head: ears, eyes, nose, the mouth, and though it was hard to tell, I think some of it somehow made it to the sweat pores. His whole head was completely drenched in something that was most definitely not sweat, blood. But brain matter. So, yes, I was considerably nervous.

It’s not like I hadn’t done this before. This wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last, hopefully. No, matter what, as long as I came out alive. I had lost count how many times it had been by now. The team of scientists, five of them, on the other side of the viewing mirror would now. It was their job to keep track of that. And also make sure that my brain didn’t melt out of me, that too. And all the other things. They were competent enough, but this was my life on the line. I was allowed to be nervous.

The crawling feeling was supposed to last a few seconds. But it always felt like eternity before the body got used to it. It was like having fire ants crawling under your skin, reaching over every pain receptor the body had from head to toe, and having their sweet time inflicting the most pain they could think of. The first animal tests had seen the animals completely clawing themselves to death in less than a minute. They must have been idiots; there is no amount of clawing that involved severing important vessels within the body that would save you. It was basic science; they were supposed to possess some degree of intelligence. Or were the basics of what could kill them too much for them too?

After the first few bloody suicides, the scientists had been forced to put the animals under anesthesia for several minutes. Even the monkeys hadn’t fared better. It wasn’t until they started on humans that the first test subjects capable of enduring the first few seconds without attempting suicide existed. But most still preferred to go under.

Never me though, never. If something was happening inside my body, I wanted to be conscious to feel it. Experience it. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not an adrenaline junk, or a masochist for that matter. Never have been, never will be. And if I ever find my future self any or both of those two, I would give myself a bloody scolding. But this always proved to be too close to my threshold. Why hadn’t they tried to lessen the pain. ‘We have done all we can,’ they said. ‘We cannot possibly bring it lower than that.’ Maybe I should have them try it out for themselves. Who am I kidding? That would only accomplish the opposite. They might even try to forcibly put me under. Though I didn’t think anyone of them had the galls to try that. Healthy fear, that was nice.

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Welcome back, Mativo.

The pain was receding now, the nanobots must have finished establishing themselves. The words interposed on my vision had finally settled down into clearly distinctive letters. They were displayed in a deep blue color within a window with a deep blue border. The first time they had used a bright green color. I couldn’t understand how the other test subjects had been able to abide them. Maybe that’s why the monkeys kept trying to swat at the images they had been interposed with. I never really understood why we had to go through so much animal testing after the initial successes of the tests. It wasn’t like the monkeys, or any of the other animals, could understand any of what was displayed in their visions. Some of the monkey’s behavior had had me somewhat questioning that though.

Finally, it was over. After three minutes. Three minutes fifteen seconds and twenty-two milliseconds, to be precise. There were nanoseconds too, but I couldn’t recall them. At least not now. The exciting parts were about to begin. This was why there hadn’t been any other test subjects other than myself. After all, this was a very deep company secret.

Current Physical Attributes

Muscle power: 64/100

Signal speed: ~0.0012345s

Muscle efficiency: 86%

Stored energy: 20000calories

Muscle fatigue: 24%

Stored Oxygen: 200s

It was a very simple technical report of my body’s current performance metrics. That wasn’t a concern right now. The major priority at the current stage of research and development was getting it work. For it help the body perform feats only humans could dream of. Magic.

A few minutes were spent doing basic warm up routines as if preparing for a high level competition event. And it was on par with those. In less than ten minutes, the test would fail spectacularly or I would run out of energy. Most of the times, nearly all to be honest, it was always the former. But the latter had happened in two previous occasions. I was hoping this would be third. Running out of energy had the unintended consequence of me just dropping like a puppet with its strings cut. The nanobots hadn’t been fixed with a safety measure to stop before it got to that point, and I was dumb enough to push myself to that point. That was what was being tested today. If the nanobots could safely stop me consuming my stored energy reserves to render myself unconscious in less than a second.

The warm up was done, leaving my fatigue raised further still and my stored energy having dropped by a small, but significant amount. I started preparing myself for the actual magic routine by vocalizing simple basic commands that accomplished nothing more than display different parts of my attributes. Then came the basic commands to send energy throughout my body. It didn’t leave behind any feel of pain whatsoever. But by the end of the session, I would be feeling those energy movements. In the early days, I could feel them even at the start of the sessions. That was one of the first things the scientists worked on.

“Okay, you can start now,” Jacy said over the intercom, her voice soft as ever. To be honest, I had never heard her raising her voice at anyone, or changing to any other tone. No matter the situation we found ourselves in. Maybe that was why she was the only one ever talking over the intercom. At first, they would talk whenever they had things to say, but they somehow had a way of getting under on nerves, so it was soon settled on Jacy been the only intercom user.

“Roger that madam,” I replied. She had never complained about it; and I had asked her. It looked like we could be of an age. I never asked about that, and never will. Nowadays, it wasn’t so easy to tell someone’s true age. It hadn’t been for a while now.

Simple. Start simple. That was always for the best. No point burning myself out in the first two seconds.

Fire. I subvocalized as I thrust my right fist forward. Fire came out, not. Just a whiff of hot air. Very, very extremely hot air. Enough to ignite a piece of cloth. I was sure it was more that the air around my fist was heated and then my fist caused it to move. Creating the whiff. One of these days, I would be able to produce a flame, I knew it.

Water. A clear liquid was sprayed with the movement of my left hand slash. The energy movement always felt different for everything that I subvocalized. But the water one had kind of felt a little hot. And the warmth was not dissipating off.

Air. I heard the wisp of air more than I felt it. And the warmth throughout my body still persisted. It was more than what I normally felt from the exercises.

“I feel a little warm here guys. Anything you want to tell me?” I asked the scientists, hoping they had already noticed and knew what the issue was.

“Your body temperature is within the range we normally see. The nanobots are a degree higher than normal after those tests.” Jacy informed me. “Do a few non-intentioned movements.”

“Roger.”

That’s what we called what I did. Intentioned movements. The thing is, I wasn’t supposed to be subvocalizing, rather issuing the intent purely with my brain. But I was having a few imagination issues where these things were concerned.

I went through three minutes of normal air-sparring. Imagining whipping through my foes like a tornado through a field of maize. I liked to think I was a good fighter. I wouldn’t call myself unstoppable, Jacy had proved on more than a few occasions that I could be stopped. I imagined her standing in front of me and tried slashing her with a wind blade. Like I saw in the animations and cartoons.

Suddenly, a wisp of a wind blew from my side swing, following the arc my hand had. I tried doing it again but got nothing.

“That was good. Used up less energy.”

“Now or before?” I asked her for clarification.

“Before with the wind slash.”

After trying all the other things I could think of and coming up with nothing, I went back to subvocalizing.

I followed a fire sub-vocalization immediately with a water one, then air. And each time, I imagined them, feeling their energy moving through my hands faster than I could track it. And each time, I got results. And I got the warm feeling. Each time getting warmer. I mixed up the sub-vocalizations with just imagined intents. But each of those got me nothing.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

I was sweating already. From the exercise or the heat building up inside, I couldn’t really tell. Jacy had informed me that the nanobots were heating up more than normal, but I had said I would push a little more.

The heat was becoming unbearable by now. It felt like I was going to melt from the inside. Maybe this was what that monkey felt like when his brain was about to melt. Though highly doubtful as my brain was about the only part of me that wasn’t experiencing the heat. Or maybe it had become unsensitised to it. There had been those few minutes when my brain had felt warmer before the body’s temperature skyrocketed. Or it was the case of one pain been too much more than the other that it overshadowed it. I issued a command to create a left hand shield. The energy travelling through my upper arm was like dipping my arm in boiling oil. I couldn’t take it anymore.

Abort!

The energy dissipated. And it got worse, feeling like my arm was melting off the bone. After what felt like eternity, the pain started dropping to bearable degrees. By then, I had dropped to the ground, writhing in pain. The air I was breathing in felt cold. The scientists must have turned the temperature of the whole room down to help, before they were allowed to come in. They couldn’t come into the room, not unless my life was actually in danger. Funny, even after all that, my life was never in danger?

Or the test was done and the chip in my brain had completely shut down. We had learned that the hard way. During one of the human experiments, one of the test subjects had seemingly collapsed, Mbithe, one of the scientists, had rushed in to determine what was wrong and try to help. The chip had reacted immediately to her proximity to the collapsed subject and send out a wave of ice shards her way. The observation room scientists’ warning had been too late when they noticed the executed command. She was perforated through by most of them. But they somehow missed the most vital of organs allowing for Mbithe to survive long enough to receive life-saving medical attention. From then on, unless someone’s life was clearly in danger from their observation monitors, the scientists weren’t allowed in until the chip was completely offline. Funny how even I have never been able to achieve that kind of attack. In all fairness, the test subject had completely ruined their nerve cells. They never recovered.

By the ten-minute mark, the pain was no more and I was starting to feel a chill set in. It took me a minute to realize why the scientists hadn’t come in.

Shutdown.

“What took you so long?” Dominic asked after arriving to my position. Ever the worrywart that one.

“I was enjoying a cool relaxing paradise after experiencing what I would only equate to being dropped to the surface of a star. Any star, take your pick.”

“You’d never make it to the surface, your whole body would evaporate away long before,” Park commented.

“My point exactly.” Only Jacy and Andrew hadn’t come. Most probably Jacy went to get something to replenish my energy, not that I had dipped that low today. And they had to leave at least someone at the observation room. They didn’t have to come here at all. I could have walked myself out. And they knew I preferred that. Maybe I should have waited a while longer before shutting down the chip. But I couldn’t blame them, this was one of the worst cases I had experienced so far. The temperature had started going back to what was comfortable for the sane human. That was important there. There were people who just didn’t understand the meaning of normal. I meant twenty-five degrees Celsius, otherwise known as room temperature.

I sat up with slight effort and huge discomfort. After a session, it always felt like I had had the most intensive workout ever created by humans. And it would only get worse once the nanobots left my body. Oh! I had finally realized the real reason Jacy was not part of the unwelcome welcoming party. She had gone to get my ‘deworming juice’, as the first human test subjects started calling it. It still contained calories to restore some of my spent energy. Thinking about her, seemed to be her calling card. She appeared holding the cup to me, with a smile on her heart face that seemed to make people want to just smile back at her; like she was offering fruit juice to a kid. It wouldn’t have been wrong if it had been fruit juice. I loved fruit juice with a passion, and I enjoyed it maybe even more than a kid. But what she was offering wasn’t fruit juice and I wasn’t a kid. They had tried their best to make as good as fruit juice, but at the end of it all, I knew what I was drinking. And it did leave a tangy aftertaste. I took it and downed it as fast as I could. This was not something that I could thank her for.

Dominic helped me up, as much as it peeved me, his lanky body struggling with my weight. We were of a height, him and I. About a meter seventy; but at sixty-five, I outweighed him by over ten kilograms. I was still low on energy, and wasn’t as coherent in my movements as I would have liked. He started leading me towards the water bath where I would spend the next thirty minutes. There, I would relax as much as anyone could while the nanobots slowly seeped out of me from anywhere they could get through.

“You are fine now? Nothing hurting that shouldn’t be?” Park asked, the hint of concerning on his tone, but very absent from his face. It was like he was trying so hard to prevent his face from ever developing wrinkles.

“I’m fine, and you would know if you were back in the observation room watching my status,” I replied, trying not to lean too much on Dominic’s shoulder. No need to make him think he was more needed than was necessary. “All of you,” I added after a while.

I was starting to feel more tired than normal. Or was that sleepy? I had trouble keeping track of what my body was feeling. It was becoming harder and harder still not to lean heavily on Dominic. I felt like I was barely dragging my legs. I thought I had been stoic before, but now I was certain that I looked pathetic. When my eyes closed off on their own and I had to force them open again, then I knew for sure she had done something to that drink. I tried shooting her a glare, but she looked back at me stoically; as much as someone as short as her could manage. As if daring me to complain. It seemed she had forgot that I would still wake from it.

Unless it was final. That thought was not a fun one to entertain. No. Not fun at all. After that day’s test, it would be disappointing to die. Apart from the overheating problem, it had been the most promising test we had taken yet. We were on the cusp of a breakthrough. Slowly, but surely, awareness left me.

…

I woke up as I had gone to sleep. If you could call it that. Slowly, but surely. And still unwilling. I was on the fringes of a dream I couldn’t really recall about when I fully awoke. I had been trying to make it go my way and it was finally responding. My happiness at having wrestled my unruly dream to submission was fast quenched when I realized that I was fully awake. I hadn’t wrestled the dream to submission. Just switched from having dreams in my sleep to daydreaming. Awake dreaming to be more precise, there was no telling what time it was.

And when I realized that I was finally awake, the last thing in my mind before going to sleep came to the forefront of my mind. Anger at a particular someone. My body responded by thrumming. Well, that was in my head, but no point arguing it. But mind and body were in agreement. There was anger to vent. And we knew where to direct it towards. Maybe that was what I had been dreaming about. Ways to exact my revenge for having been nonconsensually drugged. I was resting on a bed with a soft mattress. In the same room as the water bath. They must have taken me out of the water bath after the last of the nanobots left my body; dried me up and put me to bed. I didn’t want to think much about that.

I tried getting out of bed. And simultaneously fell down to the hard concrete floor. You’d think with the current developments in medical biology, that someone would have figured out a way to do away with muscle soreness. Because that was what I was feeling. Except for my head, everywhere else was sore beyond compare. It was definitely the worst I had felt since I became a test subject for the experiments. There was a wheelchair by the wall near the door. I had had to use it on few occasions before. So it wasn’t unexpected to find it there. But had the distance always been so long. By the time I made on the wheelchair, I was perspiring.

Using my thoughts to control the wheelchair allowed me to relax back as the door opened before me. I slowly made my way to the conference room. That was where they would be, studying the data gathered from the last test. I may or may not have dozed off on my way there. By the time I made it to the conference room, my anger had dissipated somewhat.

I found them busy analyzing the results. As I much as I liked to read their reports and have them explain everything to me, I still couldn’t keep up with them on their heated discussions. Jacy was the first to notice me after nearly a whole minute in their midst. A look of surprise flashed across her before it was replaced by resting smiling face we were all used to.

“You could have at least told me.” I preempted her before she could speak, leaving her stuck with a half open mouth.

After a few seconds to recollect herself, she asked, “Would you have drunk if I had?” We both knew the answer to that, and her smile widening said it all.

“So, what can you tell me?” I asked the team in general.

“We are not sure yet. But considering the only thing different from the last test was the safety module we installed, it might be at fault,” Andrew offered.

“And have you figured out why? Or how?”

“No, we haven’t had the time to do that,” Jacy answered after everyone stayed quiet. They tended to do that with news they thought I wouldn’t like. Leave it all to Jacy. If it had been me, I would have argued with them a long time ago. But she just seemed to take it in stride. Sometimes it gave her the unofficial leader status of the bunch.

“How long was I out?” Either they had been slaking or I hadn’t been a sleep for as long as I thought I had.

“Two hours. Give or take.” It seemed my body didn’t like been knocked out either.

“And in all that time you had only been debating what could have been at fault?” This was incredulous.

“Not exactly. We did come up with a few hypotheses on the how and the why,” Andrew said fast.

“Okay, let me hear them.”

“Well, the simple explanation could be that the safety module keeps running more than we intended. It’s power consuming, and that means—” he began explaining.

“I know what that means. Isn’t that what is needed? For it to run the whole time?”

“No, not exactly. Running that way is possibly what led to the heat issue. It had been planned to run on intervals. That would have been enough to provide the safety protocol we wanted. Anything that could bypass that would be too much for even a continuously running module to arrest in time.” Jacy explained.

“So, what haven’t you figured out?”

“The why it did the that. It could take us a few hours to analyze on how the modules were executed during the test and figure out where the problem lies.”

“Yeah, what she said.” Sometimes Andrew behaved like he was always a step behind the rest of the team. That would be wrong, but he still came across as such. His more jock-like appearance didn’t help his case either. He had beach blonde hair, blue-gray eyes and sun-kissed skin; it never lost its tan no matter how long he stayed indoors. His was tall, well over two meters, and had muscle enough to fill out the body frame. He once said that he had played American football in college; and that he still did on amateur level, when he had the time. That was becoming less and less as the project moved on to the more advanced aspects. But there was a gym in the facilities, and he was the only one to visit it on a frequent basis from the team. The others tried, but never that much. Some considered the company imposed self-defense classes exercise enough.

“I guess it’s off with me then. Call me when you have figured things out. If haven’t come to check for myself by then.” I said after looking around at the group. They seemed a little uncomfortable with my presence, though I couldn’t tell why. Maybe they wanted me gone so they could get back to their work. I turned around and bee-lined for my car. Advantages of owning a self-driving car, I would just tell it where to deposit me and it would take me to my garage. I could even spend the night there if I didn’t feel like I had the energy to head for my bed; the advantages of living alone.