Trace’s entire body ached when he finally came back to consciousness. His muscles all felt as though they had been twisted tight and then left in that position for several hours. Even worse was his brain, which currently felt like mush.

  His thoughts were slow, each one taking ages to process and move through his brain.

  Even though he was awake, it didn’t feel like he actually was. With how long everything was taking, even the simplest things had taken on an unreal quality. He swore he could hear every beat of his heart, far slower than it should have been, but gradually coming up to a normal speed.

  It took some time, but over the course of an unknown amount of time, he became aware of the world around him. He was lying on his bed, and Ko was pacing around the floor of his apartment in a very agitated fashion. She was trying to chew on the nail of her thumb with little success. That particular nervous habit tended to not work as well once your hand became cyberware. Not that it was preventing her from giving it a solid try, regardless.

  “He’s awake, I think,” Deckard said from the side. His voice was slightly drawn out as Trace’s mind was still working at the wrong speed. “I’m only getting a basic reading from his nanites, but the information they’re sending me is all over the place. I can’t even begin to make a guess about what is going on inside his head.”

  “Is he going to be alright?” Ko asked, rushing over to his side.

  “Well, the update and new knowledge pack look as though they finished without a problem. I’m worried that this points to a larger undetected issue within Trace. How were your first knowledge pack upgrade experiences? Were they similar to each other, or did they differ somewhat even back then? I need to know if this is an issue caused solely because of the update along with the normal knowledge pack, or if it is part of a larger issue. One related to Trace or the system itself.”

  She had a cord plugged into the back of Trace’s neck and was monitoring his vitals on an ink-sheet while talking with Deckard. “Um, I think our experiences were mostly the same overall. I think I experienced slightly worse issues with equilibrium than he did, but he did complain about his tongue tingling, which I didn’t experience.”

  “How… long… was I… out for?” Trace struggled to ask aloud, his tongue feeling more than a little awkward in his mouth.

  Ko took hold of his hand, relief clearly showing on her face. “Forty-five minutes. Trace, do you have any idea what happened? You had most of the symptoms of a grand mal seizure, physically at least. Your brain activity was nothing like that of a person going through a seizure.”

  He grunted with a soft nod. That explained why his entire body hurt. “What did you put in my mouth?”

  “Your comforter.”

  “Huh,” He looked up at the ceiling as the speed of his mind finished returning to normal. “It wasn’t as much of an issue last time, but it might have been the trigger to reignite an old issue of mine.” Trace wet his lips and struggled to sit up. “The truth is, I was part of two different corporations’ experiments when I was a kid. The first one, it maybe, helped me better able to digest the rotten food and dirty water I subsisted on afterward. It’s hard to say I was young, and it could have just been my body adapting to things.

  “The second time, I barely survived. The experiments the corporation was conducting back then were more focused on the brain and nerves. I think I made it to the… third, or fourth round of experiments? Before, I proved unviable as a candidate for further testing purposes, and they threw me out. In those days, nearly everything caused me to lose my sense of equilibrium and then my tongue would begin to tingle. Walking, moving my head too fast. I swore to stay away from the experiments after that, and in time, the problem got under control.”

  “I want you to have the nanites run a full, deep scan on your brain,” Ko ordered him, tapping away at her ink-sheet. “Deckard has the program for it. Get it from him. It’s a diagnostic function. I had this recording what it could, but I didn’t bring any of my specialty equipment. Run those scans, and then send them to me. We need to figure this out before it becomes a larger issue. You said it was under control, well it obviously no longer is.”

  They continued to talk for a while longer, before she finally left, eager to begin reviewing the information that she had gathered.

  “She was very worried about you,” Deckard told him once Trace was sitting in his chair again.

  “I know, I could tell.” He sighed and looked at the screen. “Alright, now tell me the truth. What do you know? I saw the way you looked at me right before I lost all comprehension. It was as though you knew something.”

  The avatar chuckled and shook its head. “I should have known you would see that. You’re not wrong, unfortunately, you also aren’t right, at least not in the way you’re hoping. If you remember, we had previously discussed your issue, and I had an inkling at the time that it might cause issues such as this one in the future. As soon as you began to display those issues, I sent an override command to your nanites. One that can only be used when they detect an emergency, and that works along with their existing prerogative or orders. Which, in this case, was to keep you alive. All my override command did was tell them to also perform a deep scan while they were already inside your brain.”

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  “So, you can’t just take control of them normally?” Trace asked, wanting some clarification first.

  “No,” Deckard explained in exasperation. “Can you imagine the nightmare that would have resulted in, if other people could take control of your nanites at will? Medical necessity meant we needed to place a limited one in for certain situations, but that is it.”

  “You had better make sure the G.H.O.S.T. System OS is encrypted and ultra-secure if you ever choose to release it,” Trace muttered while massaging his muscles one by one. “What did you learn?”

  “Nothing yet. Since you woke up, the file was never sent. You’ll have to send it to me before I can take a look at it.”

  It took Trace a few moments of digging around with Deckard’s guidance to find the file and send it to him. After that, he relaxed on the bed, and went through everything in the knowledge pack and update while he waited. Selecting ‘General Engineering+’ had been a good choice. Perhaps not the best one he could have made, but it definitely wasn’t a waste either.

  The two combined had now given him the knowledge he needed to work through the entire filtration system. He could also start on his stealth suit and create something better than amateurish as an end result. Perhaps, the best part, at least in his own opinion, was that he now knew how to use the 3D printer and its design software. He would no longer need to depend on Deckard in order to incorporate it into his various projects.

  The new knowledge felt good, and going through the courses in the teaching modules would help settle it all in place even more.

  ***

  As an experiment, and also because his muscles wouldn’t let him do anything more, Trace spent the rest of the day working on the water filtering system. The box of filter cartridges had come with a frankly obscene number of them. That said, he didn’t want to waste them either. Filters were expensive. He was unlikely to purchase more of them in the near future.

  He needed to put enough of them in this system to work, but not so many that it became wasteful. If that was even possible.

  Trace had purchased twenty of the container bowls earlier, with the idea that after five he would add one of the pumps. The last one would then simply be helping to increase pressure after everything. The question was, did he want to use twenty filter cartridges or less?

  After lining everything out on the floor, Trace decided to go with a three-layered design attached to the wall above the water main. Each layer would hold four filters and then end in a water pump that would push the water through the next layer. The pump at the end of the third layer was there to give water pressure to everything inside the warehouse.

  Despite having the knowledge, he lacked the practical experience, and it took Trace a while to actually put everything together. When he was finished, he watched the water cycle through each of the clear bowls. All of the ones on the first layer turned color almost instantly, followed by the first one on the second layer. The second one took a while longer, and the third even longer.

  The last three filters on the third layer remained clear no matter what.

  Taking a tentative sip of the water that came out of the system, Trace was impressed. Kenshin had been right; the water really did have no taste. There was still a slight bit of scum to it, but it was even less than what you would get with certain brands of sodas. How had he not known that water could be this good?

  Turning the system off, Trace screwed in two more filters at the very end. Sure enough, that was enough to take care of the last of the scum as well. Fourteen filters, six less than what he had originally been aiming for. A win, even if it was an expensive one. He really needed to get all the bottles he could get his hands on and start to bottle this liquid gold.

  Unfortunately, it made sense why no corporation had ever tried to sell fully purified water before. With how expensive filter cartridges were, and just the setup he needed here, the cost would be astronomical. A can of soda from the vending machine could cost on the cheap end five credits, almost double the price of a sandwich, to fifteen credits. That wasn’t even getting into what they could cost at the stores or in a bottle.

  People had to drink those every day to survive. It was a necessary expense if they didn’t want to deal with the taste and scum of barely filtered city water.

  If a corporation were to try and sell a bottle of this filtered water, he estimated it would cost at least five hundred, or six hundred credits. Perhaps more, since they would need to not only recoup their expenses, but also make a profit.

  Only the rich would be willing to pay that. The same people who already lived in megastructures with filter setups built in. The math just didn’t make it a viable business opportunity.

  Inside the apartment, he laid out the black one-piece suit he had bought to serve as the basis for his stealth armor. He still wasn’t feeling one hundred percent, but working on the filter system had loosened up all his sore muscles enough that he was able to get going.

  While he began working on his new suit of stealth armor, Deckard was still working through all the information he had gotten from the file Trace had sent him.

  Spread all over the floor of his apartment were the various pieces of light armor he had either bought or retrieved from the personnel carrier in the basement. He had duplicates of each, as they came in different sizes, and this was going to be a custom job from beginning to end.

  It was a good thing he had a couple of vibro-blades, as even they needed to be sharpened. He had just sharpened the one he normally carried, actually, and now he was about to wear its edge down again, shaping these pieces.

  The real pain would be working with the helmets. Everything up to that point would be mostly shaping and figuring out the best placement on the suit. He would secure it all later. The helmets were truly items of engineering, and as far as he could tell, the original works of Vinna-Kwoi. If he broke them, there was only one way to get replacement pieces.

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