3G: the Glowing Green Goo

Floating.

It was the first sensation Zax felt when he regained consciousness.

No touch. No sound. No smell. No up or down. Were his eyes open or closed? In-between?

A vague awareness of his body.

He tried twitching. Something small. A finger. His right pinkie. Maybe he succeeded. Maybe not. His awareness grew in this area. Not what position his finger was in. Its nature.

The bones. The joints. The sinews. The muscles. The nerves. The veins. The skin. The nail. The recent addition of chlorophyl.

The structure. The transitions between parts. The hunger for more material.

The meridians.

He was savvy to the least detail. It was not more precise than what his nanites could show him, but he could see more at a glance. More importantly, he could understand like never before.

How the cell was structured. Its related function. How they assembled to make a tissue. The relations between every element. How the many, many parts built around each other to make a greater whole. The strengths and the weaknesses of the design.

The possible improvements.

Improvements he could do. Not merely on himself.

That's what I want to do.

An idle thought, half-cognisant.

We will.

The foreign answering thought startled him awake.

He was on his back, in the bed, next to Migo. His body was itching from dried sweat, but nothing was amiss.

More pressing, he remembered. Not only the last moment, but what he had been missing when he awoke from the experiment.

Mentally exhausted, all his energy and focus had narrowed down to the idea of saving Migo. He had never gone so far, not even in meditation, so he had no way of knowing how much free reign his nanites would have through his mental interface. His nanites took over every function they could, without his active input. In his case, they could take a lot. Physical, mental, and all his programs.

Enough to exploit both Resonances. Which let them affect meridians, albeit indirectly. Crazy. Which let them understand them. Which led to something Zax would have never seen coming. Something thought impossible.

His machines saw the mutation as it unfolded.

The source was in the Egg. No, it was the Egg itself. Their Core. Every alteration, every mutation the subject ever had, was written in there. In a layered chronological order, even. Each activation added a new layer.

Probably why it needs more 3G every time.

Looking further, they could see everything the 3G had done. What it had changed, what it had kept.

Explicit instructions, unreadable but clear as day. The core sent them; the meridians followed.

He could not understand the details themselves, but he saw what they were about. Similar to his "Skill Book" tool, in a way. It watched neural patterns and assigned a meaning to them without understanding them as skills. His nanites had boxed and labelled what they detected.

As Zax clumsily maintained the eggshell, his nanites had emulated a command like the core's. The command to rebuild, following their own blueprints. The meridians had followed, a new set growing where the other had disappeared.

Whether the command was wrong or the blueprints not right, it had resulted in an imperfect reconstruction and their current bodies.

Right enough to stay alive.

Zax wouldn't complain from the result.

He confirmed not only had their bodies merged, their cores had started to as well. Had it helped? Made it worse?

The current "cellborg" state might be from the interaction between his nanites and the 3G, or from a way to compensate the imperfect rebuilt of his body, or something else entirely. In any case, they had been wiped clean. They couldn't be called nanites anymore; they were something between nano-technology and biology. The same applied to their language.

There was no program anywhere. Not his, not anything else. No logs. No connection. Nothing. The flurry of messages had been the remnant of what had been sent in his optical nerve beforehand, when he was unconscious.

Yet they maintained functionality. It would simply be new functions.

Case in point, he remembered all those events, he knew for a fact they had happened, but he couldn't remember them happening. It was uncanny, like remembering a movie in great detail, talking about it at every social gathering, but not remembering when and where he had seen it nor what the characters looked or sounded like.

It might be the cellborgs' version of logs. He wouldn't read a screen anymore. He would remember.

Index research might take some getting used to.

As alien as the process was, Zax couldn't find in himself to be worried. His nanites had proven their reliability many times, and the 3G had never harmed anyone. They were never supposed to work together, but there was no reason it would change those points.

The recent foreign thought, wherever it came from, hinted in this direction too. He made a mental note of it, but didn't press the topic. Just in case.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

With the "memories" and their understanding came the cellborg neural interface. It had always been there, waiting for his call. He was giving the wrong order in the wrong channel. It only required a certain mental frame, not an order.

It was actually quite easy and intuitive, like mentally going from work-mode to home-mode or hobby-mode. Closer to consciously moving a muscle than consciously saying a word. An exertion of will instead of a pre-set command. Zax quickly got the hang on navigation; it wasn't so different from mentally nudging nanites once they were synchronised enough.

On the other hand, the HUD was completely unfamiliar and confusing. Four elements were shifting and bouncing around in his perception, all distinct but ever changing.

He focused on the one blue ball, which faded in a hot sound, which morphed in a thorny smell.

They were supposed to be icons, but they mixed sensory inputs in every way imaginable, and even some Zax would've never imagined on his own. Despite this, they were surprisingly easy to follow and unintrusive. They were always just there, never hidden, but only remarkable when he was thinking about them.

Whether he actually wanted them or not.

One of them was always more muted than the others, he noted. It was even resisting his attempt to focus on it somehow, slipping out of his mental grasp when he tried to close it.

It'll take some getting used to.

Now, what is this one about?

Reacting to his thought and curiosity, three faded in the background while the one filled his sight without hiding the world around him. He closed his eyes to avoid distractions.

What resolved was a three-dimensional model of his body. It mirrored his actual body's position, and his vital signs were cleanly displayed on the side. It was a familiar display; his diagnostic software's. It was missing every control slide and button, but the display reacted to his thoughts; zooming in and out, changing the orientation, overlaying highlights of what he wanted. It didn't answer his questions, but having a clear idea of what to see made it happen.

It could even show his meridians. His complete blueprint, one simple thought away.

Awesome.

When he focused on the meridians, he could feel his thoughts probing in two directions the same way he "remembered" what the cellborgs had recorded. First, this section had more in store, but something missing prevented access to it. A resource he would not produce over time. 3G, most likely. Second, his thoughts were pushed towards the other icons, one more than the other.

When he focused on anything but the meridians, his thoughts pushed the same way, but more toward the other icon.

Always good to start with the basics.

He focused on one of his bones. His right pinky's tip. Without opening his eyes, he held his finger up and focused his gaze on it.

The model in his mind followed his movement. Pressing his will, irrelevant parts were peeled off one by one, fading in the background of the HUD and his mind. When the distal phalanx was all that was left, the phantom connection to the other icon faded in. Zax followed it and fell in another section.

[STR: N/A]

[STA: - - (↑)]

[AGI: N/A]

[VIT: *]

[INT: N/A]

[WIS: N/A]

[PER: N/A]

[WIL: N/A]

Are those… RPG Stats?

It was. Obviously. It only took him by surprise. Focusing on individual parts of the first line confirmed his thought.

[STR: Your aptitude to exert force]

[N/A: Not applicable to current selection]

Simplistic, but sufficient. The other lines were similar.

[STR: Your aptitude to exert force]

[STA: Your aptitude to maintain your state of being]

[AGI: Your aptitude to move]

[VIT: Your aptitude to restore yourself]

[INT: Your aptitude to process information]

[WIS: Your aptitude to apply information]

[PER: Your aptitude to perceive the world]

[WIL: Your aptitude to keep moving forward]

Seeing all the descriptions, the laconism felt intentional. None mentioned the body or mind, and the wording implied they could all apply to both.

Interestingly, they didn't use numbers. Zax could approve this design choice; numerically quantifying attributes helped with game mechanics but it wouldn't make sense in real life. His own software kept score rather quantified anything. On a single bone, the only stat with a meaning were stamina, which seemed to include resilience, and vitality.

[ - - (↑): Significantly below natural baseline (Improvement in progress). Caution is required in normal exertion.]

It didn't take a genius to see the relation between his lowered stamina and his current shrunken state, and the upward arrow confirmed it had been a price, not a goal. A debt which was being repaid, apparently.

He didn't enjoy being more brittle than usual. At least, among Explorers, the difference was negligible. Everyone was brittle for them. His VIT hadn't suffered either. Reassuring.

He added the second phalange to his focus. Another attribute became relevant:

[AGI: *]

[*: No significant change to natural baseline.]

Ligaments between the two didn't change anything, but the AGI stat felt more. There was no visual change in the HUD; it simply felt more substantial, somehow. Zax hadn't noticed how flimsy it felt before, but it was clear by comparison.

He tested more selections. Muscles had STR and AGI. Skin had STA, AGI and PER. Unexpectedly, its AGI was at [+: slightly above natural baseline]. Checking on his normal template, he confirmed a slight change in the amount of elastin, the protein responsible for skin elasticity. It had been noted, but deemed "not a meaningful alteration".

Everything had VIT. His stomach and his respiratory system were at [+] in STR and [*] in STA. His thought about the descriptions was confirmed, else both would have been N/A.

Interesting.

Focusing on his whole body wasn't different. Not more mental effort, not less. It confirmed his weakened physical and mental state, but they were improving.

Besides not using numbers, the comparison to his "natural baseline" felt significant. It was not measuring his health, only his mutations.

The constant push toward the other icons was still there. One was back to the 3D model of his body, but with options and annotations. Options to manage resource allocation for faster recovery or growth, although most were greyed out. No option to have more than he could afford and pay it later, though.

Did it happen from extreme circumstances?

Annotations to sleep to help his mental attributes.

Uh.

Solid advice but first he wanted to see what the last icons were about.

He was also advised to provide more of certain resources; proteins, sodium, zinc... which explained his unnatural appetite. This idea pointed him to a [Storage] tab, with two sub-sections. One was an unreadable mess, the other was totally empty, but he naturally knew what they were.

The first one tallied his physical resources. What he ate, whatever ended in his body one way or another. No sorting whatsoever, only an ever-updating list of what was there. The second, empty one, was how much glowing green goo was currently available.

Not necessarily in him, simply ready to b used. He didn't understand the distinction, but his mind wouldn't frame it differently.

The third icon was next. Again, he narrowed his focus to the bone at the end of his finger.

[Relevant Skills Detected: 0]