“Kill it!” Shesh said. His voice quivered with enhanced rage. His eyes sparked with seething hate as he watched. The squirming nanostructured worm charged the quailing Rust Dog with unnerving speed. 

There was a horrible goat-like shriek as the Dog, hit by the heavy preturnatural flatworm, exploded into sparks, and shreds of plastic and steel.

Shesh watched fascinated as the iridescent grub-thing consumed the quivering and bleating remains of the drone. It redistributed the material of the fallen into its own body, as new nanites were formed it grew ever larger.

After the sickening clamor the fat worm inched, almost contentedly, back to Shesh’s feet. The boy stooped and picked up the monstrosity that had saved his life. The boy jumped when organism split itself and became two flatworms of smaller size. One curled around Shesh’s new arm, then melted like butter, reinforcing the limb with winding tendrils that looked like fiber optics. They blossomed with rigid shapes that interlocked into a solid synthetic arm. This time even denser and more aggressive to the eye. Shesh curled the fingers of his gifted hand and could feel the heat emanating from the billions of nano-sized robots delivering his powerful grip.

The other worm climbed his torso then draped lovingly around his shoulders like a horror-show fox fur. Or a thick corrupted cobra.

Shesh walked out of the drip echoing chamber that hid this altar to Shiva the Destroyer. He stopped and looked back for a moment. Took in the great glowing machine that had rebirthed him. The glass stood jagged and smashed. The many robotic arms hung loose and dead, the discarded husk of the pupae. The tank loomed forlorn in emptiness.

Shesh climbed out of the ruin of ChiraliTech’s top secret R&D facility.

Much later, the boy gazed out over Sun City. He stood at the precipice of the great dam that overlooked the lake and the glittering Mumbai Arcology beyond. The slums seemed to claw at the knees of the glowing tower. Even the buildings begged at the feet of the wealthy.

Shesh’s shirt had been reduced to rags tucked into his shorts. His body had been torn by machines and repaired by them. Where there had been one synthetic arm at the Chiralitech laboratory, there were now three. They seemed to sprout from his collarbone on a reinforced shoulder. The feather light material seemed not to affect his balance. He looked like the many armed gods of old, each limb almost acting of its own will. At his battered feet dozens of the monstrous nanostructure worms slithered over and through each other. At will they combined mass, and seemed to trade bits and contours. The creatures had become different, more complex. Evolving. 

The roar of the sickly water below sputtered its pink noise. Garbage flowed down the creeping river to the distant steam stacks. 

Shesh could see the sky was lightening.

His trek back through the Red Zone had been eventful. More Dogs come. They screeched out of the darkness of the ruins and jungles. They attacked from all sides, at times. Firing darts, and worse, at the child-god. These all fell as quickly as the first. Each added to his power. Billions of new nanites were formed from the ash and wreckage. His body modified as he walked, knitting new limbs, upgrading his new hardware. More worms followed him, writhing in bundles, like mating snakes. The air drones had followed him for a few kilometers but suddenly disappeared. The rest of the journey here was quiet.

He stood there. Gazing at the mega-city and the slums. He missed his friends. He had cried all of his remaining tears as he walked. He had been patched by the nanomachines, but at his center gaped a hole that this dodgy technology could never heal. Shesh pushed the pain down, feeling it harden in his stomach.

"I heard," he began, his voice cracked and ragged from screaming and heartache. "I heard that the Arcology was eaten alive by maggots."  The creatures winding between his ankles shivered with hunger.

I have been given a wondrous gift, he thought.  The slug draped around his stared at him, perhaps reading his mind. Green text flickered in the periphery of his vision. A row of numbers appeared.

There were still twenty three days, seventeen minutes, and thirty-one seconds to change everything. The boy didn't think it would take that long.

Shesh grinned, tears in his eyes. A phrase came to him, lilted from his mothers lips.

“Lord Shiva destroys the world so that it may be reborn,” he said. 

He curled his fingers, flesh and synthetic, around the guard rail where the children had tucked their chins– was it only hours ago?

“Hzzzt… Destrooooy,” purred the synthetic worm curled over Shesh’s shoulders. It closed it’s six scarab-colored eyes and rested.

Shesh began his decent toward the city.