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  1. Prompt: You have the super power to repair anything to a perfect state by touching it an concentrating, you’ve fixed cars, houses, etc but you’ve never done it to living tissue. You find out you have a life threatening disease years later and decide to try it on yourself…
  2. ————————————
  3. It started with simple things. Little statues and figurines, jewelry, baubles and knick-knacks. It’s really all about knowing how something works and fits together. My grandmother had a little bear figurine that she loved, and when it broke, all it took to repair it was researching the mineral structure of rose quartz and applying that knowledge with a little bit of willpower. As I grew up, more complicated things opened themselves to me. I learned to fix mechanical things, like clocks and keyboards. When I was sixteen, I repaired my best friend’s fried motherboard, after about two months of research and dismantling cheap hardware to learn what makes it tick.
  4. Things get exponentially harder to fix as you climb the scale of complexity. A crystal is easy to fix, since it’s really just a giant fractal of the same mineral structure. You look up the base structure of it and you repeat that on a grand scale. Broken pencils and things of that sort are slightly more difficult. It’s still a simple contraption with a simple repair, but now you’re dealing with multiple materials within the same object. You have to know wood, graphite, metal, and rubber on an intimate scale. Even something as relatively simple as a watch has a truly vast amount of information contained within it.
  5. I took up mechanics as a hobby when I was a teenager, and it carried through into my adult life. Eventually, I learned to fix my old Ford clunker with my Touch instead of with a wrench. I couldn’t just roll into work and touch people’s cars and make them magically better, however - that would get me on a list with the alphabet agencies, no doubt. I’d have to fake it, at least. Once I was under the hood, I could fiddle around a bit and then just Touch the radiator and make it better, but as far as anyone knew I was just an exceptionally skilled and knowledgeable mechanic. Cars were about as complicated as I ever got, though, because even those require a depth of knowledge that taxed my mind and body to the limit. I’m pretty sure I know more about cars than just about any other human being that has ever walked this planet, including some of the guys that invented the damn things.
  6. I remember that doctor’s visit like it was yesterday, even though it was so long ago. I developed something of a near-photographic memory, as a result of so many years spent studying and memorizing, but even if I hadn’t, I’m sure the memory would have been burnt into my skull regardless. Heart disease. Doc told me I had a little over a year to live, and after that, it was anybody’s guess. I could drop dead in 365 days, or I could live for another thirty years with that looming over my soul every day of it. I was scared. I didn’t want to die, more than anyone else would. There were so many things that I had left undone. A life spent reading books and schematics, memorizing chemical compounds and engineering blueprints, had left little in the way of free time. I had no wife, I had few friends, and I had even less adventure.
  7. The news… broke me, a little bit. I quit my job and spent the next months living on the little bit of money I had saved up over the years. I became alternately reclusive and fiercely extroverted, spending weeks locked in my bedroom and hardly eating, followed by drunken bar-hopping benders lasting days at a time. I took up amphetamines and psychedelics. The acid showed me a whole new world, something that I could never hope to diagram and blueprint, and strangely, I took comfort in that. Everything else in the world ran on strict parameters, everything had a set blueprint to it. If you put your mind to it, you could diagram and plan out anything you could find in the world. I could write a paper on exactly what lysergic acid was and what it did to my brain chemistry, but I couldn’t go into AutoCAD and draw up what a trip felt like, and that was something that was entirely new to me. I loved it, and I disappeared into that strange, alien world more than I care to admit. But in the end, that led me to where I am now.
  8. You CAN diagram everything, I thought. Everything in the real world has a schematic. My house has a blueprint, my phone has an engineering diagram, and my body has DNA. When I was younger, I studied some simple insects, and then tried to fix them. I tore the wings off of dragonflies and tried to graft them back on, I smushed ants and tried to reinflate them, but none of it came out quite right. At best, I made a half-living, pitiful creature that existed for hours before giving in to death’s sweet embrace. Biological organisms are mind-bogglingly complex, and I could never hope to comprehend them enough to be a doctor. But, one night, tossing and turning in my bed during the wee hours of the morning, I had what I can only call an epiphany. My DNA is what caused this heart disease, according to the doctors. It was a genetic thing, and there wasn’t really much that anyone could do to fix it. But, I thought - when you get a flat tire, a normal person will patch it with new rubber, or else replace the tire entirely. Repairing an object doesn’t always require restoring it to its original state. When your engine block cracks, normal people will drop the entire thing out and replace it with a nice, shiny new V6.
  9. I didn’t leave my house for weeks. I immersed every waking moment in medical texts and mechanical schematics. If I fucked this up, I would die, there was no doubt about it. But if I didn’t do something, I was due to die soon anyway. Better to go out of my own accord than to wait for myself to waste away, right? After nearly two months of constant research, memorization, and development of a crippling amphetamine addiction, I deemed myself ready. I bought a 3D printer with some of the last of my quickly-dwindling savings, used the rest of it to order some things from the internet, and I crafted myself something that would either save my life or kill me outright. I phoned my best friend Will and I asked him to come to my house and not to ask questions, but I needed his help for something incredibly important. When he arrived, I gave him a set of very explicit instructions, and I put myself under the knife.
  10. The first thing I remember thinking when I woke up was a sense of wonder that I was still alive. The second thing was elation. I was still alive! Fuck, this actually worked! Holy hell! I leapt out of bed and immediately cracked my head on the bedside table when my legs didn’t want to work properly. They were well and truly asleep, but after a few minutes of convulsing on the floor and massaging the blood back into my limbs, I was able to stand. I had a wicked scar across my chest, but it seemed that I healed up more or less the way I intended. Will was asleep in the guest room, and upon waking him, I learned that I had been out for the better part of a week and he was seriously debating calling a doctor, despite my instructions to the contrary. I wasn’t even mad. It worked! I couldn’t get over the fact that I was still alive. I had crafted an artificial heart with my own two hands, stuffed that fucker into my chest and sealed it up with nothing but willpower and an extensive knowledge of human anatomy, and I lived through it. I guess I was now officially a cyborg, but I was alive, god damnit, and that’s what was important.
  11. Sometimes I wonder what the rest of my life would have been like had I stopped there.
  12. I became intensely interested in transhumanism. After all, I was a walking advertisement for their ideals, was I not? And if I survived replacing one of the two most integral organs in the human body… what else could I get away with doing to myself? Over the course of a couple years, I accumulated more and more inorganic parts. I replaced my lungs with artificial lungs, and eventually fitted those with something akin to internal gills that let me process the oxygen out of water. Breathing out straight hydrogen gas took a little bit of getting used to, though. Eventually I thought, hell, why even breathe it out? I implanted some hydrogen fuel cells and rigged those to my biomechanics, and removed the need for underwater respiration entirely. I would just take in the water, filter the impurities and use 100% of what was left as fuel for my body. I created a network of wires through my body to work alongside (and in some cases, instead of) my nervous system. I shorted out one of my kidneys once, by accident. Luckily you only really need one of those at any given time, so I had enough time to replace the cooked one without dying on the spot. I had become a living, ticking, biomechanical machine. My nerves were made of copper, my muscles of steel, and my heart of metal and 3D-printed plastic. At some point, I realized that I could no longer be called human, but I didn’t care. Why would I want to be human when I could be a pseudo-immortal machine?
  13. As years passed, I found myself unsatisfied with my current level of knowledge. I plugged SATA ports with petabyte hard drives directly into my skull to expand my available memory space, and rigged myself with a wireless adapter so I could connect to the internet. Coding a web browser that runs on Brain OS is harder than the average person might suspect. At times, I found myself simply sitting in a room, motionless for days at a time, exploring the wealth of knowledge that the internet had to offer. I no longer had to memorize things, since I could literally just download the schematics into my head. It was beautiful. I had transcended humanity, and become the ultimate biological machine. I loved what I had become, but I was never satisfied. I wanted more, always more, always an upgrade.
  14. I no longer care for who I used to be. I have deleted my given name from my data banks, and I no longer care to interface with those I used to call friends. Humans are an inferior creature, and I have become the future of evolution. I have taken the name Shodan, and I am the god of the machine.
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