Usually the day a child's quirk manifests is a day filled with joy. Unfortunately that's not always the case, I don't remember much about the day my quirk manifested but I do remember the pain. I was sitting on the couch at home when I noticed my mom was paying attention to something on the computer. I was curious so I walked over, "What are you looking at mum?" She smiled and lifted me to her lap, "Well honey, I'm going over some research that was recently published about the applications of mimicking quirks with technology." My mom was an engineer and was always willing to expand my knowledge. Her quirk, Material Analysis may have helped with her job but it did not help her simplify things so a child could understand them. As such I quickly got bored and reached out to mess with the computer, maybe I could find that game she let me play a few days ago.
The moment my finger made contact I was bombarded with information. I don't remember anything other than pain but when I asked what happened years later my mom told me I started to scream and seize. She immediately tore my hand from the computer but by then the damage had been done. It wasn't the computer itself that was hurting me but my mind being bombarded by unfiltered information from the internet. My newly manifested quirk had turned my brain into a computer and all that information was flowing through my mind. Every single input from all of my senses were causing my brain to move from one thing to another. My mind was bombarded with countless snippets of information on everything from the latest news about All Might, to cat videos, and even some of the most obscure scientific articles. But all this information flashed by and I could hold onto anything, it was too much.
By the time my mom got me to the hospital I had slipped into a coma from information overload. This was both good and bad, the coma reduced the amount of information my body received and let my unconscious mind start to build protections. Unfortunately the subconscious is not very focused so it suppressed all input instead of just the input I was getting from the internet. During the week I was unconscious, my mind tried to find a balance. Which systems were needed to keep me alive? So it started to play with them, seeing what each system did to keep me functioning, including my heart and lungs. It was like trial and error, so each failure would only happen once before my body noticed that I did in fact need my heart to pump. It was very stressful for my mom as she sat by my side and watched as my brain played with the switches that kept me alive. But after half a week passed I had stopped outright dying every few hours and started to get things a little under control.
A week after the incident my eyes opened and I sat up. I looked around the room I was in and I saw the world differently than I remembered. When I looked around I knew what every object was, how it worked, and what it was made of. When I looked to my left I saw my mom asleep in a chair beside my bed, "Mother. Awaken." She flinched as sat up, rubbing her eyes before freezing slowly, raising her head, almost as if she were afraid of moving too fast. Then she lurched towards me and wrapped me in a hug crying in relief. I just sat there, the consequences of my quirk awakening had more effects than just my comma. My emotions had been suppressed along with the information flow, and because I couldn't test it while I was in my coma and now that I was awake and using my conscious mind I couldn't just turn them back on.
My mother didn't seem to notice as she just cried and held me in her arms. The doctors must have heard something as they entered the room shortly after. Mom pulled away reluctantly and wiped her eyes, only now noticing my blank look. She started to worry but the doctors insisted they run tests before they made any judgment. After they ran their tests they concluded I was healthy and my state must be related to my quirk. At this point I interjected, "My emotions have been suppressed along with the flow of information I was receiving from the internet. I will need time but eventually I will be able to build my emotional responses from scratch." Mom looked devastated at that and almost started to cry again, but she pulled herself together and turned to the doctors, ready to ask what the next step was. They kept me in the hospital for another day to do some more tests. While we were there I filled out some paperwork about my quirk, which I ended up calling Technology Mimicry.
When the doctors let us leave the next day they made sure to schedule regular appointments in case there were any more unexpected side effects to my quirk. Once I got home my mom immediately wanted me to rest but I argued with her, "I need to work on my quirk to get better." She looked hesitant but nodded, "What do you want to work on?" I started to explain the ideas I had come up with on the ride home. "There are two parts so far, the first thing I need to do is collect as much information as possible on different science related fields. Once I learn all I can about them I can start making adjustments to myself, one of them being a program to build my emotional responses." She looked worried again when I mentioned adjustments but she seemed to understand why it was necessary. The next few years passed without much improvement. I had finished gathering all the information I needed a year after I got out of the hospital. But it took a lot of time to safely build the programs that would help me recover.
By the time I turned eight I completed my emotion recognition software, and I was ready to move onto the next step. For the next year everyday I would go to a different part of the city and simply observe the people around me. Their every reaction was cataloged by the program and sorted into healthy or unhealthy behavior. As the months passed I began to emote more, and my mom was over the moon. She was thrilled I was finally recovering and every time I smiled or gave her a hug she would try to hold back her tears. It didn't always work but it was the thought that counted, of course there were a few hiccups. I had observed adults as well as children so I picked up the habit of swearing as an appropriate way to relieve stress, when my mom tried to get me to stop I couldn't understand why. That combined with tantrums and teenage rebellions I had seen made me continue. She seemed resigned to the fact and stopped protesting soon after I refused to stop, and once she stopped insisting I cut back as well. That seemed to make her both happy and frustrated.
Once I felt I had enough data I stopped going to public places to watch people and started to work on other aspects of my quirk. I kept the program running in the background so I was always learning but didn't go out of my way to see as many people as possible. My quirk was much more interesting to me now, the ability to mimic technology had limitless possibilities. So I dived into experimenting with what I could do. I worked on material science first to see what the limitations of my quirk were. I found there weren't many but the more complex something was the longer it would take to make. Once I understood what I had to work with I started enhancing what I had before making anything new. First I replaced my bones with a crystal composite in a matrix pattern that could absorb shocks much better than normal bones. Once I finished with my bones I moved onto muscles, with stronger bones I was able to strengthen my muscles, tendons and ligaments.
By changing their composition to a rubber like substance they gained more resilience and a greater flexibility. Once I noticed that I worked on my joints to allow more range of movements, by the time I was finished with them all my joints could move any way they wished. During the whole process I made sure to keep my mom informed. I wanted her to know the whole process so she would be more comfortable with some of the more radical changes I would be making in the future. But once I fished with my muscles and bones I wanted to move onto my organs. I got a lot of pushback and it took a while to convince her I was ready. She had a few conditions before I was allowed to get started, the most important was that I had to work on whatever adjustment I was making outside of my body and work out all the kinks before I could integrate it into my body. This was much harder as I had much more control of machines inside my body. But she laid down an ultimatum: if I ever tried to move ahead before I had her approval, I would be banned from working on machines and only be able to write new software for my brain.
I agreed and moved on rather quickly when I realized how serious she was. The first thing I wanted to do was replace my digestive system with a molecular forge, that would allow me to turn matter directly into energy and even turn energy back into different materials. This would help me in the future as I was already running into problems with material acquisition. It would be able to turn waste into something useful to make better upgrades even faster than before. But this was a huge project and before I could even start I had to expand my knowledge beyond the biology and material science I started with. It took me just under two years to finish a prototype that satisfied my mom. I kept the prototype to help make even more materials outside my body.
Once I had enough energy and resources to work with I started on some of my more intensive projects. First on the list was enhancing my senses. I had two ideas for this, one was giving myself echolocation, the other was a massive increase in my hearing range, both in frequency and distance. But I decided to use the second idea as I figured out another way to give myself the same ability. I changed each strand of my hair so that they could sense vibrations in the air that were far beyond the ability of my ears. Next I expanded my vision to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. This was more difficult as I not only had to change my eye but the optic nerve as well. One optic nerve could not handle the load of everything I could see so I enhanced it and added two more nerves to help bear the load. The next step was much harder as taste and smell often worked together and changing just one could have unexpected results. Eventually I was able to turn them into a chemical identifier, but I ran into a problem, all my enhancements were starting to require an enormous amount of energy.
I had barely gotten started with adding modifications and I was already spending more time than I wanted eating. If I added everything I wanted I would need to eat constantly and I would only eat nutrient dense foods specifically made for quirks that consumed calories for energy, which tasted horrible. Every time I had to eat them it felt like I was eating sandy cardboard sludge, I needed to fix that quickly. So I left my sense of touch alone for now and looked for more ways to gather energy. First I modified my bones to produce paseo electric energy so every movement I made would generate energy. This took some time to do as I still wanted them to absorb impact, so I kept them in the matrix pattern but I added layers of graphe in certain areas that wouldn't compromise the matrix. Someday I would try to modify the matrix so it could absorb energy from impacts as well, but the current matrix would break down if too many graphed layers were added.
This helped as I could stop eating that horrible food but it still wasn't nearly enough so I moved onto the skin. I gave my skin the ability to photosynthesize, making me solar powered. It made my mom laugh when my first iteration caused me to sparkle. These were good stop gaps, but it would barely cover what I wanted for my baseline, not even taking into account all the extras I wanted to add. I needed to work on more power generation, so next I moved on to my lungs, the easiest change I wanted to implement. First I changed the cells in my lungs into a bio composite that would allow me to deflate my lungs to the size of a baseball. Next I modified a machine that drew power from waves to work with the motion of my inflating and deflating lungs. This meant the faster I breathed the more power it would generate, thanks to my enhanced brain I noticed the strain it put on my lungs pretty quickly. So I did some research on origami. By combining the ancient art with my version of the wave machine I was able to do both at once. Covering my lungs in a matrix that would fold and compress in conjunction with my lungs it both saved space and strengthened their structure.
It took some time to find the proper positioning to allow the lungs to compress fully, but once I did the power I received was beyond anything I had tried so far. I was excited to see the full scope of my last plan for power generation, so I moved on to my heart, this was a bit more difficult because I was unsure what would provide the most power. I could do something like I did with the lungs and derive power from blood flow, but I had another idea that would work much better. If it worked. It took a month to just plan out what I was going to do, this would be the most intricate project I had ever done. I worked on my circulatory system first, I added insulation outside my major veins and arteries while putting a permeable membrane that would allow blood to circulate to the rest of my body, but would keep a charge above a certain level in. Next I changed the plasma in my blood to a more conductive fluid, kinda like how salt water is more conductive than pure H2O. Next I had to modify the inner lining of my veins and arteries, along with the outside of my blood cells and everything else that kept me alive, to be extremely resistant to heat. After all, I wouldn't want any of my cells combusting from the pure heat that will be racing through my body.
Once I was done with my preparation, it was time to work on the 'heart' of my project. Using the principles of polarity I designed an electromagnet to replace my heart, so instead of my heart pumping blood through my body it would spin it. By connecting it to my lungs it would act as a power amplifier, the faster I breathed the more energy would be put into the magnet, the faster my blood would spin, and even more power would be generated. I was very glad my brain had such advanced simulation software as the first couple iterations I tried caused me to literally explode after the blood spun too fast and caused a cascade failure. But after a few false starts I got a version that didn't explode, it still needed some work in order to get maximum efficiency but it actually worked. It took another couple weeks to work out the rest of the kinks and I even had to stop working once as I noticed some of the veins were causing the flow to hitch and decreasing the output. That cost me a day as I had to work out the optimal vein placement. But I was finally ready to put it all together, and my mom freaked out again when I told her I was going to be messing with my heart.
By now my emotion recognition program had moved beyond merely recognizing emotions and started predicting their causes. So after a long talk with her I calmed her down and walked her through everything I had done to prepare and everything I was going to have in place in case of an accident. She was still hesitant, "Why do you have to do this, can't you just do something easier and not as dangerous?" I shook my head, "I could but this is the best choice if I want to be a hero, every other system I thought of had a constant range of power generation. While some produced even more power than this design, none of them could reach the heights this one will. Thanks to connecting it with my lungs my breathing rate determines the amount of power. So to produce more power I just have to breathe faster, and when I'm a hero I will be in situations that will cause me to breathe faster naturally." She seemed to understand but still pulled me into a tight hug, "Ok. I understand and I'm proud of you. I'm sure one day you will be a great hero." With my mother's blessing I immediately started the final stage of the integration of my new power system, and a few hours later a soft glow started to spread from my chest to each one of my limbs.
I clenched my fists and breathed in deeply before letting my breath out, the glow pulsed for a moment before it returned to normal. I guess one side effect I didn't take into account was the fact I turned into a nightlight. During the next few days I ran tests on my new heart to see just how far it could go, and it performed better than expected. I now had enough power in resting mode to add the last few things I wanted before I started to work on my combat systems. While I was working on my heart and lungs I realized that solar cells were not a good idea because as time passed I would lose them as they naturally flaked off with the rest of my skin cells. So I built a matrix under the outer layers of skin in a honeycomb pattern, this would reduce the possibility of my skin tearing. In each vertex I added a solar cell that would allow me to photosynthesize without having to replace a cell every time they flaked off. Next I amplified the nerve fibers in my skin to be able to feel ambient electricity, I had some problems with that as air wasn't the most conductive material. So my range wasn't as big as a shark, but it would still help.
The last thing I worked on was turning my fat deposits to store excess power, for emergencies. It wasn't very difficult to do, but I would need to work on it in order to increase their capacity. Once I finished all of my standard modifications I had two years until I would need to apply to UA. I still had a few things to work on, first was writing software that would allow me to understand all the new information my senses were receiving. Right now I could use all my new senses but once I wrote programs I would be able to see radio waves and tap into them to understand what was being transmitted. And that was just one aspect of my new senses, once I wrote software for all of them a whole new world would open up to me. Another aspect I was excited about were my combat systems, to be a great hero I would need something to put me above and beyond. To do this I was going to design a bunch of gadgets that would help in every situation. Like Batman I would have a gadget for everything, only I would be using a different method instead of his magical utility belt. I was a little worried that I wouldn't have enough time to get everything done before the exams but I would try my best, PLUS ULTRA after all.