by Tobias Roote
Dust seem to drop from the beam. A grey sponge-like substance that constituted the floor appeared to collect the dust and spirit it away so that the floor remained unmarked and clean despite the amount that fell out of the beam.
After a few minutes, the spark intensity reached its zenith then began to drop off rapidly, the whole process seemingly responding much quicker in reverse. When the sparks stopped altogether, the reflected surface vanished, showing the materialisation of Zeke’s body, hairless and completely naked, on the floor of the ship. The process having completed, the red beam zapped off and left Zeke prone on the floor in the identical position he had been in his room, which was now completely empty. His clothing had mysteriously disappeared in the process.
More importantly, where he had previously sported a metal plate in his head, Zeke now had a complete bone skull and natural skin covering. It was so well integrated into the rest of his head that it was impossible to see the join. The nanobots that had knitted the cells together with the culture of organic material collected in the previous scan, were still inside his body continuing to repair the badly damaged organs. The excess heavy metal in his bloodstream had been removed by the same process which had formed the dust that had dropped to the floor and was even now being reconstituted as a small ingot of Pheson Alacite.
Zeke was still in a bad way, although the toxin induced delirium had given way to a medical coma. He needed to stay perfectly still while the alien micro robots who were working hard to save his organs, continued their work uninterrupted.
The main prognosis of the pod AI that was conducting the whole process was that Zeke would live.
- 8 -
Zirkos dwelt overly long on one decision of the many needed. Should he return the human to the locked room, or keep him on the T-Ship until the experiment was complete. He was curious as to why this human, in the condition he was in, was alone and locked in a room, when the technology abounded on his planet to keep him in health, if not heal his current terminal sickness.
All of Zirkos’ research had led to the belief that people like this human were generally treated, whatever the condition. Yet this human was totally isolated. The sentient looked forward to the human awakening. He would then be able to ask him the reason and also practice his now fluent human language. Strange though, that he should even want to do so, after aeons of being alone.
He acknowledged that he found the human race intriguing and colourful, and that he had been far too long without company. For this reason, he had perhaps deliberately immersed himself in their languages, cultures, histories and belief systems, as well as their sciences, which were amazingly imaginative. The whole concept of everything being driven by a monetary system left Zirkos totally baffled. It seemed to be used as a means of selectively restricting progress. Yet when desired, it was provided in almost unlimited amounts to achieve what were, in his mind, limited returns.
A strange ethos, he thought, and not for the first time was tempted to consider intervening in their path of progression. He could help them achieve so much in many of the fields of science they were exploring if he just tweaked their understanding, or approach, by a small degree of perception.
He took control of his idle thoughts, which had no place in his electronic brain right now, with so much still to be done.
The T-ship was finished. It only awaited the reconstitution of the ship’s AI before the project was complete. Until then Zirkos could not re-materialise as he needed the AI installed to run the life support systems.
Whilst Pod might be able to manage the human’s needs its arrays were not suited to such critical ship-wide support. The ship’s AI was one Zirkos was familiar with, based as it was on his own original brain pattern. The AI would sense any problems if they occurred, and Zirkos would trust his physical rebuild to it, and it alone.
The pod AI flagged his attention. It had found something.
***
Zeke awoke. As was his recent habit, he refrained from moving immediately, lest he spark a new wave of agony. Instead, he briefly tried to think of where he was and how he got there.
On a conscious level he realised that something was different. It took him a few minutes. His eyes remained shut, unmoving while he tried to place everything.
Then, all of a sudden, he had it. There was no pain !
Laying with his head on the floor he tried hard to remember what had happened.
He did remember the excruciating pain in his whole body, and using his chair as a headrest after collapsing on the floor of his digs while not having the strength to move. His head was now on the floor, therefore, he must have slipped off the chair.
He slowly opened his eyes half expecting the pain to return.
Instead they focused clearer than they had for a long time.
He noticed the grey furrowed mesh that he was lying on. He still felt no pain.
Where did the new carpet come from ? It felt spongy, hard but forgiving.
He could see a good distance from where he lay and he immediately cottoned onto the fact that he was no longer in his locked room.
He absently decided he was nowhere he recognised. The wall that he could see was grey and featureless. The white painted brick with stains from years of abuse was no longer there. He needed more information, but that required he move which brought on a sweat just thinking about the agony it would cause.
He moved his arms tentatively and still... felt no pain.
Dammit, he thought, those scientists had got him back after all ; that light beam must have been theirs.
They must have given him a shot of something to kill the pain.
He pushed himself upright, resting on his heels... he still felt no pain, no pressure, or vertigo.
Indeed, that’s interesting, Zeke pondered, as he felt the total absence of any discomfort. Not even stiffness from lying on the floor like that. He swivelled his head from side to side with his eyes closed to reduce any dizziness the action might create. Then when nothing happened, he opened them.
Now resting on his heels, he was able to take in his surroundings. Whereby the total strangeness of his situation became quickly apparent.
He was squatting on the floor in a grey room, much smaller than his lock-up. He judged it to be ten foot by fifteen and the height about normal, say seven to eight feet, probably nearer eight, he decided. Disturbingly, he realised that he couldn’t see a door.
The floor-covering was some kind of grey matting which, as he stroked it with his hands, felt nothing like anything he had ever touched before. It felt different, not woollen, fabric or fur. Not nylon either ; absolutely nothing he could place in his memory as having a comparison.
Looking around the room with his totally recovered vision, Zeke saw a plinth coming out of the wall at one end that had bedding on it. The other end, on the narrow side, was a washbasin, a toilet and a shelf with items on it. Even from here he could clearly see they were from his bathroom.
He must be in a prison cell, he decided. There was simply no other explanation. His clear head indicated that something was different, being in a cell did not account for his lack of pain, any pain.
Was it the scientists ? But then, wouldn’t they have come in as soon as they saw he was awake ? Were they watching him now ?
No, he decided, everything seemed too weird. He knew deep down that if he had been recaptured they would be sitting there crowing at him, having retrieved their research guinea pig, eager to carry on testing, prodding and probing. He would already have be assailed with questions, stuck with probes and they would be cutting off skin tags for biopsies. Talking of which, he took a good look at his skin.
All the veins were back to normal, no discoloured shimmering red-blue vessels protruding. He suddenly noticed that he could see his whole arm, leg... chest. He was naked.
“What the fuck !” he exclaimed out loud.
He stood up, looking down at his naked body. He discovered more...
“Chr
ist ! I’m stark bollock naked. They even removed the hair...”
Now he was decidedly disturbed. Not quite frightened yet, but he was getting there, fast.
He was in a strange room, decidedly not normal, totally naked and feeling... healthy.
No... not healthy... he was feeling... really felt... absolutely GREAT !
He walked over to the washbasin for no other reason than he wanted, or needed to move. His bare feet felt the strangeness in the carpet stuff on the floor. He’d intended for the movement to remind him of the joint pain as he walked, but there wasn’t any.
Instead he felt twenty years old again.
The strange feeling extended to his walking, like his weight wasn’t quite right, too much bounce. Was it the flooring ?
His body felt supple now, flexible, or what !
He did a knee bend, it was perfect, not a twinge. The same weird sensation of his weight distribution didn’t go away.
Reaching the wash basin he turned on the tap. Water flowed from the single faucet. It flowed, but... weird, it seemed a little hesitant. He dismissed the oddness of it.
He looked up and into the mirror, immediately leaping back several feet from where he had stood.
“SHIT !”
He was bald...
HE. WAS. BALD !
He stepped closer to the washbasin, warily keeping his head in view in the mirror.
Yep, he was definitely bald, no head hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. No four o’clock shadow, no stubble, none.
What’s strange about this, he wondered. Something didn’t quite fit... he looked like him, yet he didn’t fit his mental image of himself. Why was it not just about the lack of hair, eyebrows, even eyelashes ?
He didn’t seem able to connect the dots.
Then, all of a sudden, the dots DID connect and it hit him like an express train sending him sprawling backwards onto the floor where he sat, stupefied by his discovery.
He had seen what it was that was different and it totally screwed with his head, literally, he thought.
He put his hands up to his head, and felt... scalp...flesh...bone... no scars, no metal, no lumps... no seams.
He rubbed his head harder until it hurt and he felt the pain. Normal pain. NO METAL PLATE.
He was dreaming. It was the only explanation.
He pinched himself, they had always said if you pinch yourself in a dream it will wake you in real life.
Nothing.
He punched himself in the face, hard.
Ouch ! Yep, that should do it, he thought to himself.
He watched as the flesh turned from white to pink around where he had hit, his knuckles hurt. His cheek hurt.
Using both hands, plying the fingers hard around the area of the scalp where the plate had been, he again tried to find a joint, anything that would tell him the plate had once been there and had been removed. There was nothing, no join, no seam, no ridge, no lump and no scar. It wasn’t even sensitive.
How could that be ?
How long had he been ‘gone’ from his room ?
He stood in front of the mirror for a long time, looking at his bald scalp.
Inside, his brain kept trying to keep pace with the heavy emotions as they bubbled inside him.
Zeke stood there, totally naked, and absorbed the physical changes to his body.
The tears ran down his cheeks as he cried. The pent up grief and emotion that he had been carrying since waking in that beaten up old Arabic hospital to find he had a meteoric helmet for a skull that they wouldn’t ever be able to remove, spilled out.
He cried as he realised why he no longer felt pain. He had been healed somehow. He didn’t yet know how, but somehow they had taken the toxins in his body, removed the plate from his head, grafted new skin and bone and left him - whole !
He was no longer a scientific curio, a sight to behold, something a child would point at scared, and say... I don’t like him, he looks funny.
Zeke continued to stand there while emotion washed over him, through him, and in the end out of him.
When he was all spent, he washed his face, the water in his hands going over his scalp with the wetness. The feeling was incredibly different, but somehow whole.
He then dried himself on the towel folded on the side of the washbasin and felt the rough texture as it rubbed over his new scalp.
He went and sat on the bed, no longer thinking about the strangeness of everything. No, not thinking at all.
Instead, Zeke was at peace with himself and everything around him, all the strangeness temporarily put to one side.
For the first time in years Zeke felt whole. Whoever had done this, for whatever reason, he knew he would forever be in their debt.
Then he wondered, just what that debt would be, and how much it was going to cost him.
Zeke decided, regardless of the cost, he would pay it. He smiled and rubbed his scalp again. He would pay whatever they asked and as he lay down to sleep, Zeke, for the first time in many years, knew total peace of mind.
***
Zirkos watched the wide display of emotions on the human’s face and monitored the human’s vitals, noting the difference in them now the Alacite had been removed from his body.
It felt like time had been well spent in learning about these people. Zirkos understood that this human was indeed happy, pleased.
Through the ship’s sensors, he observed the change in the human. He felt something important had occurred in that room, but didn’t yet fully understand what, as he had yet to fully understand the emotive reflexes of humans.
As the man slept, Zirkos considered what to do next.
The pod AI had discovered that, using the D-field, they were able to remove the Alacite at the molecular level, including the plate. Because it would be effectively dissolved at the molecular level off the human’s brain matter it was a simple process to rebuild the skull and flesh using the patterning that existed ; restoring the human to a normal condition, except for the genetic changes that had occurred already. Those were irreversible.
To restore him to his original state, they would have needed a copy of his pre-mutated DNA which was not available.
When they transferred the human to the T-ship, the pod AI had combined the replication of his skull with the extraction process, effectively removing the alloy while he was in a de-materialised state.
They had retrieved a total of eighty five percent of the Alacite. The remainder, which was too deeply embedded in his molecular structure, would no longer harm the human. However, it would continue the DNA mutation, but at a much slower pace and without further negative cell damage, although the AI could not say for certain how that was going to resolve itself.
What the pod AI had brought to Zirkos’ attention was far more interesting than Zeke’s altering DNA.
The results that the AI had isolated were simply that the Alacite in the human’s system had changed as a result of coming into contact and melding with his blood. In some way it had slipstreamed its molecular structure into a modified form and was now more efficient. A lot more efficient. When it was tested by the AI it peaked at fully five times better and faster.
The AI did surmise that it might be higher, but was unable to measure beyond that on its limited sensors. That would fall to Ship once he had been reactivated.
However if they used the mutated Alacite, the T-ship’s AI would be amazingly powerful and Zirkos pondered deeply on that. What manner of intelligence was going to be born if the AI rebooted into a brain more than five times its previous power.
Zirkos wisely delayed giving the order to the pod AI to proceed with using the modified Alacite.
As he dwelt on the issue he remembered he had cause to rue such errors of judgement where they had caused irreparable harm. He did not intend to become the originator of another one.
No, the risk was too great without knowing all of the possible outcomes and right now Zirkos could not afford to take any chances
at all.
He flipped his thoughts aside and addressed the pod AI.
“I have decided that we will not use the modified Pheson. Its effects are unknown beyond that of increased power. Instead we will use only the Alacite that has been unchanged by the proximity of the human’s DNA.”
Having anticipated by 80% that Zirkos would choose that solution over the unknown quantity, the pod confirmed the command by selecting the algorithm that would press the modified Alacite into a square ingot and activated selection of the original Alacite from the metal plate that had not been transformed.
Instantly a small modified block materialised on the top of the manual controls section, where it would remain for the Maker to do with as he pleased.
Because they hadn’t removed all of the modified Alacite from the human, which would have killed him, the gentler metamorphosis his body was now going through required it to remain permanently in his bloodstream. Aware that they might have misjudged the situation Zirkos intended to monitor the human’s situation for the foreseeable future.
To this end, he resolved to keep the human nearby on the ship.
- 9 -
The pod was handling a delicate project. Under supervision, it was producing the Alacite processors for the new ship’s AI. All sixty thin wafers had to be individually materialised from the Pheson Alacite extracted from Zeke’s head. The Alacite had been refined several times in an attempt to remove all traces of organic molecular residue. As far as their facilities allowed there was little, or no chance that any remained.
Nonetheless, it was noticeable that the Pheson Alacite differed slightly in its molecular make-up, although by an insignificant amount. Neither the pod AI nor Zirkos considered it notable and the manufacturing process continued.
The tiny wafers were inserted into the back of the small black box which was only as big as it was because it contained its own power source, dematz generator, shield and cloaking device. Once inserted, the nanites took over, laying down the links between each of the processors and the archival nodes.