CH6 - Transition

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"It would be poetic – albeit deeply frustrating – were it ultimately to prove that the one thing the human mind is incapable of comprehending is itself. An answer must be out there somewhere. And finding it matters: indeed, one could argue that nothing else could ever matter more. [...] Nor that, were we to stumble on a solution to the Hard Problem, on some distant shore where neuroscience meets philosophy, we would even recognise that we'd found it." - Oliver Burkeman

— — —

"This is incredible," she breathed, running her fingers across the surface of the organoweave. "What is it?"

"Organoweave. High-modulus polyethylene thermoplastic, aramid fibers, strategic carbon nanotubing, threads of various organometallics and memory metals. The exact composition can vary depending on the desired properties. That one... is closer to a silk texture."

The fabric lifted from her hand, twisting in the air in front of her. She played with it a while longer, before turning to me. "So you said you had customers lined up?"

"That depends. You're fine with the neutral angle? Both heroes and villains."

She stood silently. Looked at the fabric in her hand, and glanced again around the impromptu showroom in my base. She sighed. "As long as it's discreet, and my role is just the art. Explicitly. I'm not arming criminals if I'm just making things look good…"

She looked at me. "And this place. They say never attack a tinker in their workshop. With the bombings… I'd expect to be accommodated. If it came to that."

"Absolutely," I said. "You'd be welcome here. As far as discretion, you'd be listed as a fashion consultant, artistic input… something like that."

"And you were serious about a fifty fifty split?" she confirmed.

"...Okay." She sounded uncertain, so I stayed silent. "Okay."

"I have something lined up today, actually— if you need time to think about things, I can do this as I have before, or you can sit in…"

"Watching can't hurt," she said.

"Great," I said, smiling. "They're arriving any time now— you're familiar with the Undersiders?"

"Villains." There was a faint edge of distaste, but she didn't move.

There was a chime, and even from in here the sound of the door sliding could be heard.

"Relax," I said to Parian. "It's no big deal. You don't have to do a thing; they aren't expecting you at all. Nobody is going to start anything in my workshop."

The tension started to bleed out of her frame, just as Lisa stepped through the door.

I'd seen them all in photographs, but it wasn't the same as a first impression. It went without saying I wasn't looking closely during the fight with Bakuda.

Lisa was clad in a skintight outfit of black and lavender, her long hair hanging loose. Unlike myself, there was no saving grace in the form of armor plating. The clinging fabric showed absolutely everything. A belt was slung diagonally across her hips; I could see various items tucked in the pouches.

She came in, laughing about something.

A well built man followed her in, wearing thick motorcycle leathers and a skull-shaped helmet. Vents in the helmet emitted streams of black mist.

"This is Grue," Lisa said. Grue stuck out his hand, and I shook it.

Regent wore a simple white mask, reminiscent of a carnival. The rest was just a renaissance type costume, more what I'd expect to see at a convention than for a fight. A cheap scepter was being spun lightly in one hand.

It was a lie. A brief burst of terahertz radiation had already revealed hidden mesh armor, and a taser mechanism in the scepter.

Bitch… had no costume at all. A cheap halloween rottweiler mask was the only token of compliance. Otherwise, it was just a skirt, boots, and a torn shirt. I wasn't impressed.

Lisa introduced them, though with only one guy and girl left I had already guessed. Regent seemed indifferent, but Bitch was scowling, choosing to stay standing even when the rest sat down.

"Most of us have spoken already. For those that don't know, my name is Epsilon. Henry Svanta, to friends." Giving my name seemed to surprise them, especially Parian.

"To be clear, I'm giving you my name for a reason. Costume work means seeing you outside your costume, or at least it does if you want it done right. Even if you use a changing room, you don't really know no one can see. Consider it a token of my sincerity about keeping the identities of my customers a secret."

"Still seems a bit dangerous," Grue said, his voice reverberating strangely.

"To be fair," I said, gesturing toward my heat fins, "I don't have as much of a secret identity as others might. But it is what I can do." I shrugged.

"And you have Parian here, I see?" There was an edge to Lisa's usual tone.

"I thought she might be able to help me with the artistic aspects. Of course, that's up to her."

I turned to Parian. She was silent for a moment, before she spoke. "I think that's fine."

"Great," I said, smiling. A holographic projector in the table lit up. With a thought, a photogrammetically generated model of Grue sprung up in miniature. A moment later, a stock idle animation started playing on it.

"I'd originally intended to push a redesign of your costumes, as in my opinion they should be armor first." I inclined my head to Grue and Regent. "But given the recent insanity, I'm thinking we should skip to just cloning your current designs, with better materials and smartmatter armor applied. ...As much as Tattletale will tolerate, anyway."

"From the way you looked at me coming in here, I don't think you're complaining," she retorted.

I glanced over them, stopping on Bitch. I paused.

"I don't know what to do with Bitch."

She stared at me resentfully.

"Nothing," Tattletale said.

"She needs to wear something," Grue interjected. "Especially after getting kidnapped."

"This is stupid," Bitch said. "Can you armor my dogs?"

"...No," I said slowly. "I don't fully understand what your power is doing, but I can't make armor that gets bigger. I could make partial armor, like horse armor, but even that would require a predictable size and would need to be put on after they were bulked up."

Bitch snorted, then turned away, her stance dismissive.

"Okay," I said. "Those of you who actually want armor, please remove helmets and accessories so I can get a good scan of the color and texture of your bodysuits or underlayers…"

— — —

Organoweave, and it's various design suites, was the last answer to clothing design. Getting that into the hands of Parian was a bit harder, as the software had been refined for nearly a century for mental interfaces and muses, but I had a workaround for that.

Ectos could do everything basic mesh inserts could. Formatted as tablet-screens of various sizes and a fork of Sia loaded, actively interpreting voice, gestures, etc into the proper commands, it didn't take long for Parian to get the hang of it. The suite calculated the optimal material composites for outfits across every inch of the human body, and a plugin allowed armor like smartmatter to be applied or erased at will, the result rendered holographically in real time.

If anything, the design software had Parian more hooked than the cloth ever could.

We'd settled the updated designs for everyone except Bitch within an hour. Grue said something about having to have a talk with her, but I didn't really care.

"So when do I get a bullshit AI tablet," Lisa said, slouching insolently across a couch. The other Undersiders had already left. Parian was sitting at the table, glancing at Lisa occasionally while playing with the program.

"Should you?" I said.

"Yes!"

"Very convincing argument."

She looked at me, her face stormy, before suddenly exploding. "Why didn't you call me after the fight!"

I sighed. "Because I don't trust Coil." I didn't say anything more, with Parian in the room, but I didn't need to.

"You thought— but— ugh!" Lisa stood up. "I…" She went silent, then just walked out. I didn't move.

I would not bend for her. She would have to decide for herself what was important, and act accordingly.

"...That was intense," Parian said, her tone tentative. I looked at her and shrugged. "Tattletale is still learning that sometimes you can't have everything."

"I see," she said unconvincingly. "...Did you make this program?"

"...Yes," I said, for lack of a better answer. "Nothing like it exists anywhere else."

She sighed, and leaned back, working her shoulders. "With these scanning modes and everything else... masks are pointless." She reached up, and pulled off her mask, revealing a dark face. Middle eastern, not african. She pulled off the metal frame the mask had rested on, wincing, then gave a sigh of relief.

"We don't all have a program that can create the perfect supports for any occasion," she said, glancing at me almost nervously.

"I understand," I said. She relaxed, pulling the wig off to reveal black hair, pinned up in such a way as to be completely obscured. She unpinned it and let her arms drop.

"I expect the same courtesy you offered the Undersiders," she said after a moment.

"Of course," I responded. "You're planning a big reveal later on, I think it was?"

"Yes," she said. "Standing out from the crowd as a new designer is difficult. Much more difficult than as a cape. I'm going to use my following as Parian to get around that, so my designs get real consideration from the start."

"It's a good plan," I said. "You'll be accused of 'cheating' at every turn, of course— your competition will latch onto any excuse to trivialize your accomplishments."

The room was quiet.

"...I know," she finally said, her voice tired. "...But they'll do that anyway."

— — —

The healing vat was the bleeding edge of modern design. Or it was supposed to be.

The machine I ended up fabricating was a crude model, the pipe pistol or AK-47 to the M16, to use the weaponry of this time for an analogy. Pipe pistols or even an AK could be made by hand or by pressing steel, where the M16 required more advanced manufacturing processes. For this, 'advanced' meant 'slower'.

I had needed to fix my body immediately, however. I ended up printing a pelvic and thigh bone, replacing them— which was exactly as gruesome, and crudely done, as it sounded— then running an IV of the same soup a healing vat would use, supercharging my medichines to regenerate and correct the rest of the damage. That was enough to get back on my feet before the meeting.

The pared down healing vat, and an ego bridge were re-queued afterward, and it was only today, three days after the meeting at Somers' Rock, that they were ready.

Coil's deliveries had stopped a few days after fighting Bakuda, a few days after I stopped taking calls. After the meeting, the missed calls stopped completely.

The silence… I was sure it was just that which came before a storm.

I was now faced with a more daunting issue.

As an async, I couldn't live indefinitely as a infomorph, data in the mesh. In time I'd go insane, or worse. But to create a biomorph from scratch took months.

Before the Fall, it was if anything convenient. Exowombs were good enough, just scale it up. Don't make it faster, just make more. One more barrier against challengers to the hypercorps.

After… who had the skill, and the time, and the will to come up with a new process to print the entire body without error? This organ needs that organ needs… better to just accel-grow from an embryo. It works. Somebody could design a better way, maybe, but if they did it never reached me. The powers in transhuman space wouldn't like it anyhow. Between that, the scarcity of those who could do it, and the ease of getting bodies for those same kind of people… well. I'd never know the real answer.

All I knew was that if I wanted a spare body I could use, without issues, I'd have to wait months… or steal someone else's. Distasteful.

— — —

The body was dragged, limply, into the room, and the robot dumped it into the vat. The ego bridge was already attached to the system. The lid closed, and it began installing the basic slew of mods.

Basic biomods, a slew of virii splicing in genetic tweaks for healing speed, some regeneration, disease resistance, slowed aging, reduced sleep requirements, a general immunity to depression, shock, allergies… basic fixes.

Mesh inserts, the cybernetic brain implants and the weave throughout the neural tissue that enabled the most critical parts of transhuman life. Backups, skillsofts, augmented reality, the computational substrate for muses and other quality-of-life software, network connectivity, medical sensors… as with biomods, it was a laundry list of small but important things.

The cortical stack. The tiny synthetic diamond shell that ensured immortality itself. A continuous backup of everything that defines a person, repeated every second, over 86,000 times a day.

For all that, the body was still a flat, an unspliced, standard human. It was in every way inferior to even the crudest of cyborgs or robot cases. It's only virtue was the purely biological brain, that which an async required to pretend at sanity.

Hopefully, this contingency would never be needed. Hopefully, I could release it back onto the street, the original mind restored into this generously refurbished shell.

Only time would tell.

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