“ChiraliTech R&D Protocol 4. Established main…hzzzt… biological status… hzzt. Interrupt…” sputtered a mechanical voice, in English. “This is the one… hzzzt… after so long, I will… hzt… ice cream sandwiches,” it whispered.

Shesh woke bathed in warm greenish light. His mouth tasted of vomit and his nostrils were clogged shut with plasma. There was so much blood.

“Nanopod compound… hzzzzzt… hzzt. I saw the bison. Bad bison! …hzzt. Systems active… hzzt. Awaiting sample…” the thin mechanical voice echoed in what felt like a large chamber.

Shesh blinked. He was laying on the ground. His left hand sought his right. It came back sticky with gore but otherwise empty. He had tied off his stump somehow. The shoelace he had used as a belt, maybe? He grimaced in pain.

“Awaiting… hzzt…ample… Hzzt… shattered plastic… broken toy.”

Shesh slowly rose. His body lanced with pain. It felt like he had jumped into a bin of broken glass. His torso bristled with some of the marker barbs the Dog had shot him with.

Before him was a huge transparent plexiglass tank filled with greenish liquid. All around the room were panels and instruments. Their lights and screens blinked under layers of dust. There was no one in the room with Shesh. There was something majestic about this room. Perhaps it was the quiet echo of water dripping, or the blue green glow. To Shesh’s pain-addled mind it felt like an ancient temple. The room seemed to breathe. His undamaged skin pricked with cold, or was it shock?

The tall green cylinder in the center of the room was crowned by large multi-jointed mechanical arms. It looked like a robotic Shiva. Shesh felt faint. His body seemed to lurch over his feet.

“Sample acquisition… hzzt… preparing nanite solution. Hzzt… is it lonely?” the automated voice asked.

A loud rushing sound like monsoon rain on a corrugated aluminium roof emanated from the tank. Shesh flinched at the brief roar. The liquid inside the gigantic glass tube sparkled and bubbled. It shimmered with the bright blues and vivid greens from old image files of sunlight in the ocean. It was beautiful.

Strange metallic cubes rhythmically plunked into the tank, from above. They slowly drifted to the floor, where they began to dissolve. They effervesced, like thin columns of smoke. Shesh took small heavy steps toward the tank.

It sat on a mass of tubes and wires that met in what looked like an altar…or a surgeon’s table.

He rested his mangled face against the glass. It was cold. The emerald and cobalt sparkles encompassed all of his vision. He thought of his gang. His friends. What a foolish dream they had all kept. How many orphan gangs thought they could find a way to be free of the slums? How many risked life and limb, just for a chance? How many ever made it anywhere?

“Nanites… prep…hzzt. Hzzzt. Wake up…hzt…marmalade.”

Shesh slowly closed his remaining eye. Death was coming for him. What he would have given to hear his mother’s voice, not the digital ravings of this malfunked AI. His mother’s warm smile and the scent of the spices she crumbled with her careworn fingertips overtook Shesh’s senses.

The plague took her years ago, he reminded himself. Crying like a pathetic baby for his dead mother was a waste of time. He sobbed weakly against the cool tank, anyway. And bled.

Shesh registered a weak shock as he felt the cold grip of rubber and steel. The robotic arms of Shiva were tenderly raising him high to the top of the canister. He suddenly felt weightless as he was lifted. His breath was growing shallow. At that moment he violently shivered as his legs and then body slid into the icy sea colored substance. And once again, green faded to black.

Shesh woke surrounded by a cold his body had never encountered. He felt encased in ice. His brown eyes popped open with shock. His skin crawled with what felt like biting ants. Tickling pain seemed to pass in waves. It slid over him and pulsed inside of him, like a foreign heartbeat. He realized he was suspended in the liquid. He flailed desperately to emerge from the cold tank, to draw breath, but he was shut under some kind of lid. He convulsed, choked, and gagged as his pulling lungs awkwardly drew in blue-green ooze.

“Relax, little… hzzzt… cuttlefish.”

Shesh heard it clearly within the tank. “You’ve…hzt…breathing solution…hzzt… hour.”

After a moment he relaxed. Breathing was incredibly strange and a little strained. The cold liquid rushed in and out over his tongue as he breathed. He tried to speak but he only pushed icy fluid with his lungs. He could make no sound.

Shesh pushed against the glass with his hands. He had to escape this weird new hell. He pounded both of his fists against the glass.

He thickly gasped. The liquid chilled his teeth.

Once again…he had his right arm. It was there, just as solid as the other. But, something was different. Alarmed, Shesh studied the replaced limb. It was nothing like his real arm. There was something inorganic about it. It seemed to be crystalline in structure. Was that… plastic? The new arm had strange projections and shapes. It was made of something other.

The gaping craters in his chest and neck were covered in patches of the strange new material. The marker barbs were all gone. With his good hand he tenderly explored the new contours of the right side of his face. Faceted surfaces replaced his cheek and the yawning socket of his lost eye, but he could see his own hands clearly.

He heard the tinny broken voice through the thickness of the green gel, “Nanopod Compound fusion… hzzzt… hzzt… uction complete.”

Shesh was startled when the many arms of the techno Shiva suddenly dipped into the fluid. He wrestled against their grip but to no avail. They smoothly removed him from the tank and delivered him onto the ground.

The liquid saturated his body. He fell to his knees and tried to cough. The green ooze came out of him in a slick tube as he vomited. By the time it hit the ground between his hands it had hardened and shattered like glass. The drops that fell from his body exploded like lotus petals into fibrous dust when they hit the floor.

Inside him he felt as though he was filled with maggots. He coughed and bits of the substance that made up his new arm and face launched from his lungs, like greyish snot.

To his horror the little clumps indeed coalesced into minute worms. They slithered and curled around the pieces of shattered green crystal.

Then…they seemed to consume the shards.