by Aer-ki Jyr
“How long are you sticking around before you need some sleep?”
“At least another 10 hours.”
“And then?”
“I sleep and get back here while my staff takes my place.”
“Where are they?”
“Working the data I’m sending them. We’re learning more by the minute than we’ve uncovered in years previously.”
“Enlighten me,” he said as Amy lightly touched him on the shoulder as she left.
“Both the physical and mental changes have begun, which is causing him the pain. They’re not advancing rapidly enough to incapacitate him, but they’re not moving as slowly as I anticipated. However, there appears to be a lot more going on than I thought so this should still take days to work its course.”
“Welcome back,” Nefron said as he appeared in the lab area again in response to Amy’s departure. “How do I look to a fresh set of eyes?”
Kip glanced at him, immediately seeing the changes in his skin. The red glow persisted, but the green had dimmed so far his skin almost looked black while his exoskeletal patches were actually shedding their outer layers.
“Not good,” he said honestly.
“That’s about how I feel.”
“Any new memories popping up?”
“Just a sense of the importance in this. I feel like crap, but part of me says this is the most important moment of my life. Call it a destiny sense. Can you feel it?”
Kip concentrated, pushing his way through everything else swirling in his mind. “Just a touch. Your head is a mess right now.”
“Not so much a headache as a disconnect. Like I’m fogging over. I’ve stumbled a few times, but I can still move around if I focus.”
“Have you tried sleeping?”
“Hurts too much for that.”
“Running?”
“Did a little earlier and it helped, but tried again an hour ago and my insides complained mightily. I think I’m going into a cocoon or something.”
Kip raised an eyebrow at Vortison.
“A metaphor,” he assured him.
“Need a break from the pain?” Kip offered.
“Amy was helping me a bit, but I don’t want to get reliant on you guys and then have it smash me in the face later.”
“A couple minutes…long enough for me to help you assess what’s going on internally?”
“Sure,” Nefron said, with Kip numbing out most of the pain the next second and the Protovic sucking in an audible breath.
“You didn’t realize how bad it’d gotten.”
“I guess not,” he admitted. “Thanks.”
“Focus on what’s different and I’ll piggyback on your thoughts. Show me around inside your head.”
“I’ll try,” he said, grabbing the wall for support before he closed his eyes and poked around his own thoughts as he stood. Kip followed his mental course, poking around himself off tangents and beginning to get a grip on how much the alterations were affecting him. His entire head felt like soup, with a lot of the foggy areas covering the changes. Kip pressed into a few of them but didn’t have much better luck than he did, though he did pick up a lot of conversion issues.
“I think his genetic memory is unspooling and trying to interface with his language processors. I can feel a lot of back and forth going on.”
“The code is very active and adaptive,” Vortison echoed. “I think it’s looking for the path of least resistance to reduce the damage being done to him in the process. I expect his condition to get a lot worse going forward.”
“You still game?” he asked Nefron.
“This hasn’t licked me yet.”
“Good man. I’ll stick with you the next few hours and whenever you need a break let me know and I’ll numb it out. If you want to try and sleep an hour now I can hold the pain back for that long.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” Vortison suggested.
“Your range reach all the way to the bed?” Nefron asked.
“Easily.”
“Then I’ll take you up on that offer. Now that the pain is mostly gone I’m getting drowsy already.”
“Night night,” Kip said, pointing to the doorway.
“Wake me in an hour regardless, ok?”
“Deal.”
“Night then,” he said, disappearing into the other chambers, though Kip could still see him with Pefbar and was connected to him mentally.
“I’m getting a little worried,” he whispered to Vortison.
“I can reverse this and flash heal the physical damage whenever you give the word.”
“Why is the pain this bad?”
“Rather than upgrading his existing body, he’s growing a new one piece by piece and those pieces are incompatible with the old ones. The transitional tissue is holding him all together and keeping him functional, though I imagine it will disappear eventually. When this is done he will cease to be Protovic rather than being an upgraded version. You knew that already.”
“It feels like its tearing him apart from the inside out.”
“More true than not.”
“At least our ascensions happen quickly. This is approaching pure torture.”
“I think it’s a necessity due to the transition material. Leaving him in limbo for a longer period of time to reduce the pain might actually put him at more of a risk of death. He can’t be two races at the same time, and this tissue is cheating to keep him alive while he is. I think the programming is pressing him through the most vulnerable part as quickly as possible…and I think we’re just beginning to enter that phase now. Some of his organs are literally failing and being cannibalized into new ones while the transitional tissue takes over their functionality. Are you feeling it or just numbing it out?”
“I can feel it when I choose to, and it’s getting very nasty. What are your readings saying now? He just fell asleep and I felt a change.”
Vortison studied his displays, cycling through a few options. “Everything just sped up across the board.”
“That’s what I thought. Is that bad or less bad?”
“I’m not sure.”
Brad had been in bed for no more than 10 minutes when Kip’s mental contact slapped him awake, with him not being gentle about it.
Get down here now. We have a problem.
What is it? he asked, shaking himself fully awake.
We screwed up and I need your help. Hurry.
On my way, Brad said, heading straight to the door and telekinetically grabbing his slip-on shoes as he ran. They flew onto his feet as he headed out of his quarters and darted through the hallway traffic in his white pajamas that weren’t all that different from their casual uniforms. Kip didn’t say anything more to him and he took that as a bad sign, running as fast as he could and using his telekinesis to move aside those ahead of him that weren’t responding to his telepathic warnings to clear a path.
He got back to the medical chamber within a few minutes, finding Kip and two other Archons seated next to the energy shield with Nefron standing on the other side looking at them, his glow gone from his skin and eyes and his shirt now removed, with Brad able to see his exoskeleton almost having completely flaked off, now replaced by several growths on his skin and a lesser wrinkling that was beginning to resembled the original Blue enhancement that had turned Memma into a living tank for a short period of time before they’d changed him back.
“Hello…Brad.”
“How you doing?” he asked, mentally making contact and being freaked out by the changes. There was a whirlwind of activity, with the mind that he’d previously known only being partly there…with something entirely new alongside it.
“I don’t…know. Can’t seem to…focus.”
“I screwed up,” Vortison said in a mortified voice.
“How?” Brad demanded, still looking at Nefron.
“I can’t change him back.”
The trailblazer’s eyes turned straight to the medtech. “What…” he said i
cily.
“I can change his body back, and I can remove the genetic knowledge being given to him. That hasn’t changed. But the coding is doing more than adding memories, it’s corrupting and altering his existing ones. It’s infecting them, so if I remove all the new material, physical and mental, it’ll rip out his old memories along with them. He’ll be a blank slate, not knowing who he is, or was…he may not even be able to walk or breathe. I can’t say for sure, I had no idea the coding could even do something like this, but if I try and change his mind back he will either die or become a vegetable. I’m so sorry, I missed this. I missed this,” Vortison repeated, and Brad could feel the anger the man had for himself.
“Kip?”
“We’re trying to slow the changes and isolate portions of his memory to preserve them, creating a bubble for him to function within. Help us.”
“How?”
Kip and the other two sent him an instantaneous battlemeld link and he accepted from all 3, forming a 4-way bond that answered all his questions immediately. Adding his considerable mental power to theirs he put down walls attempting to block the invasive programming and undoing the bits of it that were creeping in. So long as it was software they had a chance, though physical alterations were outside their ability to manage…but Vortison could handle that with the machine, though Nefron wasn’t standing in it.
“Vortison, we want to try something but we need your help. I’ll feed you the information as we go, but we need some physical blocks made or we’re going to lose him eventually.”
“Ready,” he said, wanting to do something, anything to fix this.
“Nefron, please step back into the chamber,” Brad said.
“My name…” he uttered, not moving and staring confused at the ground in front of him. “My name…”
“Move him inside,” Vortison urged.
“My name…” the transforming Protovic said as his mind suddenly shifted and a clouded piece of it gained focus, “is Radonon.”
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