Titans of Chaos

I looked inside Victor. He had been doing massive alterations to his internal organs. He had runtubes of nervous tissue down his spine and into his abdominal cavity, creating backup brainsprogrammed to come online should his main brain be destroyed. Instead of a central heart, therewere millions of photochemical bodies lining his now inert bloodstreams, making oxygen byphotosynthesis out of carbon dioxide in the blood. The muscle tissues had a different texture andarrangement, and were supersaturated with additional blood capillaries coming from some sort ofreduction-still in his lung cavities, which was making pure oxygen by breaking down excess bodilyfluids. Nerves had been replaced by superconductors. There were electric eel cells lining certainlimbs, linked in parallel, special analytical amplifiers built behind his eyes and ear cavities, extrajoints and subcutaneous armored plates, chemical packages, groups of metallic crystals held infrictionless matrices of bone, energy cores, lubricant slurries, two additional parasympatheticnerve webs to carry and prioritize the extra sensory information. Radar bafflers. Repair microbes.

Flares. He had done away with his digestive tract and replaced it with a series of molecularassembly-disassembly sieves.

"Oh my heavens," I breathed. He had turned himself into a killing machine. I am not going tomention what he did to defend against groin kicks.

Each atom and cluster of atoms in his body had a set of monads, linked in a preestablishedharmony with his cen-tral, controlling monad. The explosion from the rifle had disorganized hismonad hierarchy, as well as doing physical damage to his skin, muscles, and nerves. It hadoverloaded and burned out nerve ganglia that acted as circuit breakers, destroyed part of hismagnetic control array, fused his power supply, lost mass as his skin was burned and flaked off.

Okay. Start with first things first. I reached out, found one monad that governed one part of afused metallic crystal, straightened it. There. Now it was back in harmony with the upper-levelmonad that governed the whole microscopic crystal. With five or ten more twists like that, I couldrepair one nucleus of one damaged nerve cell.