I remained chained to the chair after they had all left. My injuries would have had me in hospital for days, if not weeks, while my nose was reset, my fractures examined and treated, and I would be watched until my fractures had healed enough such that I could move around normally. Having once had a hairline fracture on my arm, I knew just how long that shit took to heal.

Not this time.

This time, I had a nanocloud.

As the minutes ticked by, my nanocloud reinforced the areas of my skull that had been fractured from the blows I'd received, pulling the fissures together and then fusing the bone together by re-structuring cellular bonds and creating micro-staples to keep everything together until the bones had fused together properly. Even my broken nose was being fixed this way, although my nanocloud moving the damaged bone tissue back into place to re-fuse it back into its' original place was incredibly painful for a few moments, and that was with local nerve-dampening provided by my nanocloud.

I learned all of this from the provided explanation and the simulations that the nanocloud provided to me in the last few minutes.

Once those injuries were sufficiently healed such that I could move again without exacerbating them, I tested the strength of my chains, using careful and precise tensioning, stretching outwards.

"Those chains are made of steel and are half an inch thick," the remaining guard mocked me. "I doubt you'll get out of them before I can call for others to come tackle you to the ground."

You're probably right, I thought with a sneer. It was just as well then, that I wasn't going to be so obvious.

Steel chain links, weak point near weld join in each link of the chain.

Tensile strength maximum: 180kgs.

Assessment: Can be broken with available strength enhancements.

Can't you deploy nanites to eat through the chains?

Negative.

Nanocloud unit composition:

Aluminium substrate.

Bio-synthetic polymer.

Chain link composition:

Tempered Steel.

Additional information:Nanocloud units require continuous power draw obtained from blood sugars not present in exterior environment.

Nanocloud units likely to either lose power or wear to uselessness before causing any damage to target objects.

Lack of matter-energy transfer ability exacerbates this obstacle.

Dissolution of steel through nanocloud contact is non-viable.

You stated my nanocloud had been secured against intrusion. Can you explain this to me? I asked as an aside.

Affirmative.

Nanocloud data transfer is not permitted during combat mode unless explicitly ordered by host.

Nanocloud prohibits foreign intrusion and theft of individual cloud units provided host remains functional.

This is by design.

That answered my questions... Though I didn't like the answers. It meant I now had to bide my time and wait for this cock-piece to fall asleep or get bored and stop paying me any attention.

Two hours.

Two fucking hours!

That's how long it took for the guard to fall asleep. My nanocloud prompted me to check the guard's vitals, so I did.

Target HR slowing. Currently 65bpm... 62bpm... 58bpm.

I needed to think fast. I had no clue where I was, no idea what the layout of the building was, and no plan for escape. I threw togerther the beginnings of a plan in my head. First, knock the guard out and steal his keys, assuming he had any. I had to find some sort of weapon as well, since my own gear had been taken away from me, and fuck knows where that was, now.

My nanocloud flooded me with adrenaline, individual nanomachines directly connecting to my brain cells and accelerating their ability to process. How I knew exactly what it was doing was anyone's guess, but knowing how my nanocloud interfaced with my brain now, I didn't question it. My visual overlay highlighted the actions I would need to take, and I felt the pull of nanocloud-driven muscle-memory.

Break the chains as quickly as possible, move quickly behind the guard and clamp on his carotid artery and windpipe, keep up the pressure until he had fallen asleep, then grab his keys. Everything else would follow from that.

My body moved as though of its' own volition. I slowly pulled taut the chains, then like a bodybuilder pulling pectoral extensions, I strained against the chains with everything I had.

Tensile stress exerted: 206kgs.

I could feel through the chain links that several of them were now beginning to buckle under the strain, then suddenly snap under the pressure. Lucky for me, both sets of chains broke on both my arms within a fraction of a second of each other, because the sound was fucking loud! I crab-walked, without even being fully conscious of my decision to do so, over to the fast waking guard, immediately clamping down hard on his carotid artery with my full measure of strength at the same time as clamping a hand over his mouth. The guard reacted immediately, struggling like a bull and almost as strong as one.

I could feel my strength slipping through the intense strain, realising that I'd come across the limits of my nanocloud-enhanced physique. Despite this, and despite the strain on my muscles and bones, I finally managed to overcome the guard, and he was out cold with minimal noise and the clatter of my chains where they dangled off of my arms.

My breathing laboured, but it wasn't bad, and my nanocloud set a count-down timer to full oxygen recovery of all my muscles. This had been the first real test for me, and my body seemed to cope admirably, recovering back to normal in less than a minute.

Focus, Rick!

If I continued to allow myself to be distracted like this, I'd lose the opportunity for escape. I forced my mind to focus on what needed to happen next, searching rapidly for the keys the guard had on him, then looking through them for the keys to my own wrist cuffs. I uncuffed myself shortly after, though I found that the chain might serve as a decent weapon in a pinch, so I wound it around my wrist.

I listened by the door, noting some footsteps in a faraway corridor, but everything else was quiet. Finding a key that looked like it would fit the foor, I jabbed it into the slot, and was thankful when the door unlocked as I turned it.

As I ran down the corridor, I checked every door I came across. One of them was thankfully empty, so I opened it, finding myself in another corridor that was much like the first. There was either an open window here, or another door that might lead to the outside, meaning I had my escape. It was also manned by a guard at the far end, who'd immediately spotted me.

Fuck!

I brought my chained wrist to bear as the clearly-enhanced guard sped right towards me, then I back-handed him across the face as he closed the distance. I immediately followed up with a punch to the fucking head, ignoring his pitiful shouts, incapacitating him almost immediately, causing bruises to appear on his head and neck.

Another guard appeared almost immediately from an adjacent door, let out a cry of alarm, and charged towards me. I waited, and in what any martial arts practitioner would recognise as the worst novice-level clumsily-executed attack, brought both of my arms together in a tight clasp, and brought them down onto the offending guard's head, collapsing him to the ground and killing him instantly. Without giving it any conscious thought at all, I took the combat knife on his torso for myself.

Something wasn't right, here. I felt goose-bumps across most of my body.

This seemed way too easy, considering I had no combat skills to write home about.

My nanocloud alerted me to another presence, just as the Colombu-wannabe rounded a corridor. I felt cold fury at the guy, wanting to turn him into a fucking bloodstain on the floor, but the furious flare-up in my mind was extinguished that moment, as my nanocloud alerted me, and moderated my reaction so I could remain clear headed. Instead of engaging the bodyguard directly, I took off at a sprint toward him, rolling and ducking under him at the last possible moment, risking a right-hand turn as I passed underneath, sprinting down the corridor with everything I had, before colliding with the door that I'd felt the breeze coming from in those moments.

My collision with the door splintered it into fragments, only to realise I was surrounded by three more thugs. I pulled my knife, took a running leap at the first, threw the knife upward, and then grabbed it in a reverse grip, to plunge it down into the man's neck as I leapt over his head. He collapsed, bleeding out onto the floor, but I doubted that was the end of him.

I grabbed guy number two by the ankle as I dropped to the floor, and plunged the knife into his ankle, ripping apart tendons and breaking bones. The thug collapsed to the ground in pain, though he kicked out with his good foot, connecting weakly with my face. I quickly rolled to my feet, leapt into the air a third time, and sliced downward as I hovered in the air. It was enough to gouge a deep rent in the guy's face, causing him to let out a powerful bellow of pain and rage, as I landed on his other side. Without hesitation, I leapt to the door, and took off as fast as I could.

The fence in the distance was a good candidate, and I took a running leap at it, my ground speed over twenty kilometres-an-hour, as I leapt nearly five metres high, over the fence, and on the other side, landing in a roll and taking off as quickly as I could.

I didn't stop running for at least two kilometres, only slowing down to give my cardiovascular system a chance to recover, while deciding how best to lose any pursuers that might be after me.

The next two days were spent hunting for supplies and trying to get back what I'd lost before. I needed another market to buy goods from, but markets were practically nonexistent in Milton Keynes.

I did manage to kill and skin four wolves, keeping their pelts and leaving their carcasses for others. Wolf meat wasn't something I was willing to try unless I was desperate, and I wasn't that desperate yet. I did manage to kill and butcher a pair of hares, which gave me enough to keep going for a few more days. That was my limit, though. Not only were wolves and hares rare in this region of the country, but wolves were very powerful, even without accounting for those wolves who now had nanoclouds of their own and were thus far more powerful, intelligent and sneaky.

I'd met one such specimen shortly after I'd escaped from my little prison camp, and I was lucky to escape that encounter with my life. I'd studiously avoided any such enhanced wolven creatures from that moment on.

Eventually, I made it to Hitchin, and thankfully it was not a war-zone like my home city had become. There, I found a marketplace that had a variety of stalls, though far less than what I'd found in the Bristol region of the country. At least I had a place to offload my wolf pelts now, so I exchanged those for data credits, and in turn, used those credits to buy a replacement backpack, tent, bedroll, clothing, and a new hunting knife. I also lucked out and found a cooking supplies seller who provided me a gas stove and some pressurised fuel for it, in exchange for my visual overlay function and two thousand data credits I'd acquired from killing and selling the wolf pelts I'd accumulated over the last few days.

I really needed to get some training in how to fight, though. My limited ability to get out of scrapes would have seen me dead almost as soon as I woke up, were it not for my health and my nanocloud being so tightly-integrated into my body and mind already. The problem now, was that not only was my combat skill limited to a couple of throws in an emergency situation, but there were no training facilities, no people offering training independently, and when I made inquiries into possible training, all I got were some sidelong glances, as if asking the question was a grave error on my part.

I'd have to deal with that shit some other time.

Once I'd finished at the marketplace, I found a disused building and holed up there, setting up my tent on the roof and cooking myself some more hare legs I'd bought while in the market. As I did, I took a look at the data I'd downloaded off of the SSD I found at Synergy. One of the files I'd grabbed contained a list of names and addresses for all participants and staff members on the project, as well as images of them before injection of the nanocloud into their bloodstream.

Some of these people were relatively young compared to me when I signed up, while others looked to have been in their late eighties and early nineties. Which of these people, if any, were still alive? I'd no idea.

One of them was still around. Oliver Teesdale, a participant from Bletchley, who had been at the same facility I'd been in when I was put under. His record suggested he'd not been put to sleep, that he'd been evacuated at the same time as everyone else when news broke that somehow the nanocloud had been discovered in the wild, and the documentation suggested the evacuation was temporary while an investigation progressed. That was the last entry to his file, and the timestamp was the same for all files I'd grabbed.

There was no explanation how or why this happened, but I didn't really expect to find one in this-

Contextual search for nanocloud outbreak and all related terminology performed on retrieved data.

No hits returned.

On the one hand, that kind of ability was priceless and saved me searching through data for hours in my nanocloud storage. On the other hand, the lack of results was going to be an issue. There'd be no explanation of what happened with the nanocloud and how it got into the wild from anything I'd copied.

I'd need to find more data.

The last known address of Oliver Teesdale was still the same, according to these documents, but there was always the chance that Oliver had moved on from there, or maybe had even been killed in the meantime.

Still, it was lead, and I couldn't afford to ignore it.

I took a fairly direct route to the address on file, then took a look around. I wasn't surprised at all that there was no sign of Oliver, either as his aged self or in what I had guessed would be his much younger guise, but it was frustrating anyway. I never asked anyone of they knew him, because with my experience so far, I couldn't guess if anyone I spoke with was going to be civil or violent with me at any moment, and that was to say nothing about whether asking about Oliver would tip off those who had captured and tried to get information out of me in the first place.

I couldn't discount the possibility that they were hoping I'd find something, and I'd tried hard therefore to keep quiet about who I was looking for, as well as try and look out for anyone that might be following me.

Eventually, I caught sight of a man who might fit the description of Oliver in terms of his facial features, although the fellow I spotted was young-looking, appearing to be no older than twenty-five, like myself. He was visiting a marketplace at the time, talking tersely with some vendors while being amiable with others. Eventually, he left, and departed for an out-of-the-way building cluster that appeared to be mostly intact. From my past experience, I suspected this would be similar to how I'd discovered Phil. These buildings, in an apparent state of disrepair on the outside, were probably well-maintained inside.

Oliver's property was an old cottage, pre-19th century, with the appearance of damage and disrepair on the outside that seemed slightly worse than the other cottages in the region, with rotting doors, faded paint and overgrown grass on all the paving in the area. The roof was the exception, fully intact, and that seemed odd to me. If I'd noticed that difference, there was no way someone looking specifically for something out of the ordinary could possibly miss it themselves. My nanocloud confirmed this shortly afterward with an overlay that highlighted unblemished steel and matte-surfaced flass protecting the inside. It looked to me like Oliver wanted people to think this place was abandoned.

I approached, as slowly as I could. I raised my fist to knock on the door when Oliver himself appeared in the doorway, his stance tense, frowning at me while giving nothing away.

"Who are you?" He asked me in a smooth voice that wouldn't have sounded out of place in an HR meeting.

Oliver was tall and lanky, at least two metres, with jet-black hair and piercing eyes, at odds with the glaucoma-riddled eyes in his picture and cotton-white hair on his head that I'd seen in his file photo. Clearly, the nanocloud had been very successful in rejuvinating this man. His features were sharp and angular, his manner poised.

"Rick Reyes," I told him. "Former test subject for Synergy."

I could tell he was skeptical. "Tell me," he said, his tone clearly doubtful. "Who was your handler while you were there? Which lab did they take you to?"

"Doctor Rochelle Foster, and I spent my time in a facility near a place called Bristol," I sighed. "Look, the CEO of the company drove an Audi TT-RS when I met with him, and he belted it down the M4 when he told me about the project. What more do you need to know?"

I could see that this intrigued the man slightly, even though it clearly did nothing to appease him, as I soon discovered. "How old were you when you went under?"

"Fifty-eight," I told him, blowing out my breath in exasperation. This interrogation was starting to become annoying. "I was a fat fuck with a heart condition and cancer. Is there anything else you'd like to ask me?"

Oliver glared, hard. "That's not funny," he seethed.

I glared right back at him. "Do you see me laughing my fucking face off?"

We stood there at an impasse for a moment, before Oliver asked me another question. "What kind of cancer did you have?"

"Oesophageal," I snapped. "Can I interrogate you now?"

After a few moments more of glaring, the man nodded his head and stepped back, indicating that I was OK to step inside. The room I entered was reminiscent of a studio apartment, with a kitchenette area attached ot a large living space that contained a comfy couch-bed assembly and a table with a couple of old wooden chairs. The furnishings, while clearly old, were clean and well looked after. Beige carpeting adorned some of the floors, the rest of them were polished slate. The walls had a mint-green paint, bordered with a darker emerald. It would seem like a comfortable holiday home for someone from the old world.

If this room was the one that Oliver clearly lived out of, that meant the rest of the cottage was either used for storage, was standing empty, or other people lived here.

Never mind, it was none of my business.

He passed me some coffee as he had me take a seat on the couch-bed.

"I'm Oliver," he told me his name, although I'd already known it. "Originally from Devon but I've been pretty much here since the 2010s. I went into the programme as a... Relatively healthy test subject, eighty-seven years old, so they could assess if they could treat minor ailments with the nanocloud. I was slowly going blind thanks to the glaucoma I developed, and I didn't know if I'd be in a control group or receive nanomachines." He shrugged his shoulders, a one-sided smirk on his face. "Guess I got the nanos."

"So they do much other than appear to de-age you?" I asked, curious whether Oliver had much experience with upgrading and giving his nanocloud any additional capability.

"I've managed to add a few functions along the way, a trade interface, a repair hub that helps me fix mechanical issues if I come across them, that sort of thing. Other than keeping me healthy and looking like a young man again, these nanos also augmented my strength and speed a bit, and I'm like a pro athlete. Never looked like a pro athlete before," he added with a laugh.

Clearly there were differences between how my nanocloud treated me, and how Oliver's worked. I wanted to explore this a bit more. "If you get any injuries, do they seem to heal quicker?"

Oliver frowned. "Maybe a little bit," he said cautiously. "I don't get any infections, but that's true for everyone I've met so far. You got me there."

I remembered how quickly the nanocloud was able to fuse bone material together and restructure my skull after my run-in with the thugs that had captured me back in Milton Keynes. The bone material would probably be fully healed by now, if I had to guess, and I queried my nanocloud, receiving a visual overlay confirming that most of my fractures had been re-sealed and the bone material strengthened. My nose was still being repaired, but while it was now stapled in place with the micro-staples the nanocloud was clearly capable of building in my body, my visual overlay still showed several red fissures where the breaks were still being healed.

It was interesting that my nanocloud had chosen to reinforce my bone structure. I'd have to follow up on that later, once this conversation was done.

This wasn't the only time, either. While I'd been escaping from the nanocloud-enhanced wolf a few days ago, I'd suffered some deep gashes in my laterals, almost half an inch deep. That would have been a serious injury which I'd likely have to keep wrapped up for weeks in the old world, and which would leave severe scarring. Now? I'd witnessed as nanocloud machines flooded the area once my combat alert had stood down following my escape, and I'd noticed that the site of the wound had sealed over with a thin film of silver-metallic sheen, clearly containing the blood that was otherwise spilling out. It was as well, otherwise I'd have bled out that day. Also, over the next four or so hours, the nanocloud furiously worked to repair the tissue in that area, gradually reducing in number as the danger of that wound opening up lessened, until only a small amount of nanocloud drones were left to maintain healing in the area.

It would probably take a few more weeks before it was fully healed, but I could already see that whatever scar tissue would be there was likely going to be far less severe than if I'd had no nanocloud at all. Clearly, my nanocloud understood how to prioritise for severe injuries.

"When they gave me the nanocloud-" I'd begun, but Oliver interrupted me.

"Nano cloud?!"

"It's how I refer to my collection of nanomachines," I told him, watching as he lapsed back into attentiveness. "Anyway, when they did, they had set a directive to restore my health and correct any health-related abnormalities. I was in really poor health at the time I was assessed. I'd let myself become really unfit, started getting heart and lung problems, put on a ridiculous amount of weight, and developed cancer," I then stopped talking, waiting as Oliver nodded in understanding. "The nanocloud had already begun to shrink my cancerous growth measurably within twenty-four hours, so I know it's quick, and I guess that directive is still in place, you see this?"

I gestured at my own nose. Oliver frowned. "What am I looking for?"

"Can you see any break?" I prompted.

Oliver shook his head. "No, and it's not the first time I've seen what happens to people who get their noses broken. Even the best surgeon in the world can't eliminate all of the signs of a nose break."

"Two days ago, I had my face smashed in by some thugs that had captured me," I told Oliver, stunning him. "They'd broken my nose and caused all kinds of hairline fractures throughout my skull with the force of their blows."

I winced at the pain, but any trauma I might have expected to experience at the incident was practically non-existent. I'd have to ask my nanocloud about that later, suspecting that it was monitoring for such issues.

"Two days, and you look fine," Oliver breathed.

"Yeah, I suspect that's why I was targeted," I replied, coming to the point of my visit. "They told me that in exchange for my life, I was to turn over everything I knew about the project. It wouldn't have been much, and they might have been frustrated, but I managed to escape. I've been looking for others like myself, warning them."

Oliver held up a hand. "Wait," he stopped me. "Warning us about what?"

"One of the demands they made was that they wanted to know everyone involved in the project so they could harvest their nanocloud," I told Oliver in a sharp tone. "You have any idea what that entails?" Oliver shook his head. "They intend to kill anyone they believe is involved. That's the quickest, maybe the only way they get what they want. You need to be alert to them, and do what you have to do to avoid giving them what they want."

I stopped talking, waiting for Oliver to process what I'd said, the danger that my visit and my words represented, the threat that my captors posed. Eventually, he nodded.

"Now I need to try and find the others, but I have no idea where to start. If I knew where there was a server, I could query it for data on the whereabouts of the volunteers at the time the experiment took place, maybe see where they might have gone."

"I don't see how," Oliver retorted slowly, as if still digesting the fact that now his own life was in danger. "It's been forty-three years. Everyone's going to have spread out quite a bit."

"True," I admitted. "I do have a list of volunteers for the project that I'd downloaded when I'd stopped by the Synergy offices back in Milton Keynes. I'm surprised no-one had picked up on that in the last forty-three years. All it took was some brute force to open the safe and get to the drive."

Oliver's eyes widened. "You opened the safe with your bare hands?"

I nodded. "Isn't that common, to possess the ability to apply tension of close to three hundred kilos?"

"Not that I know of," he told me. "What about your healing factor? It's far more advanced than my own has been. Can it be duplicated?"

I prompted my nanocloud for the specifics and whether it would be possible to do as Oliver was asking.

Host can transmit data on the formation of nanocloud units containing directives identical to host into another host.

The operation is non-destructive if carried out by touch, but the propagation of the new directives will take time for the new units to replicate.

Estimated time using this method is approximately fourteen days for the recipient.

I very briefly considered asking for something in trade, but Oliver really didn't have much that my own nanocloud couldn't already provide me with. Other than the repair ability, which I currently didn't have a use for, I needed nothing else he had. My healing factor was far quicker than his, I already had a trade interface, and my strength and speed were already augmented. Besides, I wasn't a mercenary-minded person, and while barter was apparently the norm in this era, I wasn't prepared to hold a man's ability to survive hostage in such a manner...

Not when granting him a copy of my nanites to give him the functionality I now had was at no cost to myself. Dani had taught me that as we grew up, and it was a little piece of her that I kept close to my heart...

And fuck anybody who thought I was being an idiot or a fool.

"I can transfer a small portion of nanocloud drones to you." I relayed to Oliver. "My healing factor is a directive that's been hard coded and isn't present as a function. It'll take almost two weeks before the capability is fully embedded in your system by doing it this way."

"But it leaves you completely unharmed?" Oliver asked, his tone hopeful.

I nodded. "Yes."

"Good," he exclaimed, happier. "Let's get started. How long will it take?"

I held out my hand, and Oliver took it.

Nanocloud transfer initiated. Waiting for acceptance from co-host.

Co-host has accepted the transfer.

Sending 10,000 units.

Task complete.

The whole process took only a second as Oliver responded to my request, and the transfer of nanobots took a millisecond at most. 10,000 nanomachines was a trace amount to my bloodstream, I had so many floating around at the moment.

"Thanks," Oliver told me, shaking my hand before letting go.

"Anytime," I replied. "They'll be coming after you, so be careful."

"I will."

I left shortly after that, hopeful that Oliver would be able to get to ground and avoid those who would no doubt be coming after us both.