The four days after the meeting with Sandra and Joy were interesting. Not because something happened, no, they were interesting because of the opposite. Nothing truly happened and it gave me insights into myself. I could not take confinement, even if I confined myself.

After the meeting, I prepared my isolation-suite for the gene-treatment, complete with its own air-filter, food and everything. Essentially, it was about as well appointed as a solitary confinement-cell, only with access to a computer and the net. Which obviously made a huge difference. But even the simple knowledge that I was confined threw me for a loop.

In the evening, I went in, after calling Sophia and talking to her a bit, telling her I would be unavailable for a few days, but if she wanted to come over, she could. Then, I placed the infusion into my arm, feeling so very similar to the moment I had activated my fusion-generator for the first time. Back then, it had been a moment of elation, the knowledge that I had taken the first step on my path to freedom. Since then, I had taken a few more steps, some big, some small. And now, I was taking another one. All my gear, everything until now, had been external sources of power. Sure, they were more powerful than anything I could do with my body, at the current state of the art. But they could be stolen or lost. The treatment, however? It would stay with me, until the day I died, an internal source of strength, an inalienable power I could always rely on. If it worked, that is. With a smile on my lips, I opened the valve, letting the virus stream into my blood. Once again, I felt that there should be a meaningful statement said, but, once again, I drew a blank and I did not feel like copying one of the great man before me, it would feel trite.

The first night, I was restless, I was tired but could not sleep, I was feeling as if hundreds of thousand ants were crawling over my body, stinging me, I felt as if I was going insane.

Partially, the treatment might have been responsible, but it was only slowly seeping into me via the injection, it would take time to take effect. It might have been psychosomatic, the knowledge that I was changing myself on the most fundamental level causing symptoms induced by the knowledge but without some sort of control-test, I could not say.

So, I did the only thing I knew would keep my mind occupied, I started a new project. Or rather, I buried myself in an old project. I had played with a personal flight-system for a while, looking at it on and off, but never managed to get something I was happy with.

Flight itself was easy, controlled and sustained flight was harder and what I wanted was even harder still. What I truly wanted was a system that let me fly about with the speed of an jet-plane and the maneuverability of a helicopter. Not at the same time, obviously, violating inertia was something I doubted to be possible. But switching between modes, from a swift flight-mode to a slow, controlled hover-mode, that was something I wanted. And if I managed to make the whole thing stealthy and compact, I would be overjoyed, or it would simply be a toy but nothing truly useable, at least until I got into the Guild and was protected by international treaties.

My first design-version was undoubtedly flight-capable. Sadly, the exhaust was slightly warm. As in, over one-hundred and fifty times the temperature of the sun’s surface. It would be perfectly workable in the vacuum of space, but in an atmosphere that conducted heat? Not so much.

There were other possible ways explored already, but they all had some sort of problem, some sort of hindrance that kept me from using them.

At the end of the day, I went back to the basics. Well, my basics. My plasma-cannon was already ionizing air into plasma while compressing it into projectiles. Why not keep the projectile open on one end and letting a continuous flow stream out under high pressure on the other side. A cold-plasma-thruster. The energy-draw would be intense, but it seemed to be practical.

I would have to design a harness, basically a flight-pack in which I could strap myself, with main-thrusters for jet-flight modus and multiple smaller, steerable thrusters for a hover-mode and to steer the whole thing.

Putting the numbers into a simulation, showed that the math predicted irrelevant upper-limits for acceleration, they would turn the squishy human inside, namely me, into a corpse post-haste, but limiting those would be easily possible. I added the limits I was willing to take on my body, with a second set of emergency-limits for very short usage and it looked good.

“Cat! You should rest for a while!” Galatea broke me out of my trance.

“Mh? Whaddayawant?” For some reason, my eyes did not want to work as I wanted them to. Everything was rather blurry. And my voice sounds scratchy.

Suddenly, a brutal growl made me jump, was there an animal in here with me?! For a moment, I panicked before my mind parsed the information from the rest of my body, deciphering the growl as what it had been. It was a desperate call to revolution, the digestive tract was trying to unite the other internal organs in a revolt against the brain and my kidneys were manning the barricades.

In my focus, I had spent three days without listening to either of them and neither of them were happy with me. After slowly sipping some water and eating some easily digested food, my brain sent notice, it would not come back to work, until I satisfied its demand for sleep.

On the fourth day of my self-imposed confinement, I woke up to a painfully full bladder and took care of it. In addition, my body ached all over and screamed for nourishment, more than it should after three days of fasting. But the data I had, had suggested that there would be a greatly increased requirement for nourishment after the treatment had run its course, my body was trying to adapt the current structure to the changed version, replacing the tissue at a greatly increased rate. It would only take months instead of years for the treatment to fully express.

In effect, my body was trying to rebuild itself at a highly accelerated rate and I would pay the price for it. That was the ache I was feeling, in essence growing pains, only taken to eleven and not limited to the usual joints. All my muscles, all my sinews, all blood-vessels, every tissue in my body was affected. And my bones were greatly increasing their mineral density, adding to the whole effect. The next few months would be fun and games all around.

Once I had sated the primal parts of my body, I took some blood to check for remaining viruses in my system and to get an idea how well it had worked. I got a clean bill of health, no more viruses in my blood and the treatment had worked slightly better than predicted, making me think that my safety margins had been maxed out in the positive direction. Knowing that there was no way I would infect anyone from now on, I moved to the next step.

An the next step was a fun one. Disinfecting all surfaces in the room and washing everything I had been in contact with. But it had to be done, so there was no danger of anything getting out.

In addition, I set the equipment in the bio-lab to a new task. The tissue-growth solution I had used to accelerate the growth of my body-double, the one burned during the pyre-option, I wanted a version that would not cause the tissue to grow out of control, effectively causing cancer.

After disinfecting everything, I looked at the design I had worked on before I had keeled over. It looked quite good, basically a frame to strap my armour in, locking me in place while I hung under a highly advanced hybrid between a cruise-missile and a harrier-jet. I would have to built a prototype for the thrusters, testing them for heat- and noise-generation, I already knew that my ceramic-metal compound was excellent at absorbing radiation, so it stood to reason that it would also do so with radar-waves, making me invisible to the most common form of detection. Unless the plasma-exhaust was a lot more energetic than my math predicted, it would not shed a lot of light, maybe a dim, red glow. So, if it was not too loud or too hot, I could fly around during the night, without getting spotted.

The accelerated effect of my treatment also meant that I would have to step up the training. For now, I would have to work out multiple hours a day, to get the maximum effect of the treatment. So, after cleaning the isolation-room, I checked for non-priority messages, basically everything not from Sophia, and started to hit my gym and kept at it for a while. After the days of confinement, it felt excellent to move my body and a part of me believed that I was already feeling the effect of the treatment. But that was most likely only an effect of increased dopamine-levels, the simple fact that the treatment had worked better than planned, made me feel awesome which increased my performance. Which a subconscious part directly attributed it to the treatment. But knowing what the reason for my elation was and that the better performance was mostly due to my psyche did not change the awesome feeling in any way, shape or form.

After my workout, I fell into bed with a big, fat smile on my face. The only thing that would make me feel better, was having Sophia by my side. But alas, it was not to be.