Chapter 62

Daniel took a deep breath. It was time to do this. His experiments were finished, and the healers were waiting for him.

He refocused on the animal.

Fine tendrils grew up over the belly of the beast and they found the injury almost immediately. The glass and the wound were extremely obvious in his senses. The fragment had not been shoved in evenly. In places, the glass was at skin level and then at its most extreme it jutted half a centimetre out from the skin. He wondered briefly what his own back looked like, then discarded the thought. This injury was made to mirror his own, so of course there would be a resemblance. He was sure the healers would re-create his situation as close as possible.

Tom’s mind examined the problem from another angle. If he was using pincers or a similar physical method, the profile of the glass left very little room to get a grip on. They knew this, and it was why Ivey had suggested that surgery was the only option.

Daniel carefully prepared the starting positions. Individually, he set up thin tendrils. He placed them up tight next to each other ready to grow and cut into the animal. All four sides of the glass were addressed, front back and the two ends, because the window had been half a centimetre thick and his plants had to expand along that edge too.

Then, with the growth lines produced and the potential energy infused into the nearby plant matter he linked in his newly created Intelligence.

He was going to see if his idea could work.

Only a small amount of power was drained as the intelligence activated and Daniel monitored without interfering with the progress.

There was an explosion of growth.

His mouth almost dropped at the results he was seeing.

It had failed.

Stop. He mentally cried out while using his mind to halt the process. It was a disaster; the orderly creeping growth he had imagined had not occurred. Instead, there had been a chaotic expansion. The majority of the individual shoots had worked, but that was the best thing he could say about it. The growing vines mostly had grown straight, but the property that was supposed to keep them stuck to the glass failed. Somehow, a quarter of the vines deviated from the glass and then grew in a straight line, but in completely inappropriate directions.

His reactions had also been way too slow. By the time he had noticed the problem and froze the magic the damage had done. A series of wires radiated out from the glass. Some as long as twenty centimetres. That was not long enough to go through the animal and out through the skin because it had a thick torso, but on Daniel some of them would have gone straight through him.

With its insides torn to shreds it knew it was death to remain where it was where something was attacking it. The monster thrashed in its bonds, exhibiting a level of strength it had failed to exhibit until now. Daniel felt the restraint vines breaking. Just a couple and absently he tightened the others and thickened them. It was probably unnecessary, as they had already had a significant amount of redundancy.

Daniel considered whether he could save the creature. His mind assessed the plants within the animal. Nope. He doubted even Cindy could correct that disaster. It was almost like a bomb had gone off inside it and filled it with shrapnel.

He grew a red flower to signify failure.

Humans immediately reacted.

With plant sense, he noticed someone lunge at the animal.

A trickle of experience hit him.

Then another group moved forward, standing on the vegetation presumably planning on processing the corpse. With a thought, he made all the vines restricting it, coil away to release it. While the humans worked, Daniel considered the issues.

There were two immediate problems that sprang to mind.

First, the Intelligence had not been set up correctly. The programming was off, particularly the point when the vines entered the body. There had been problems with some vines being stymied from the skin that should never have happened, and Daniel corrected that immediately. The bigger problem was that a small deviation at the start apparently had a significant flow on consequences. He had failed to build sufficient automatic corrections into it.

The second issue was how badly he had lost control. Everything had occurred at once. Between one moment and the next, the animal had been mortally wounded. He needed to slow everything down so he could adjust the process. There was a lack of check points. The smart choice would be to let it grow within the flesh for half a centimetre. Confirm that the vines hadn’t been sent haywire by the entry. Then correct them as required. Do another centimetre, review once more, and so on.

Daniel started making the changes while he waited for the next flower to be cut and inform him that the next creature was ready to be experimented on. As he waited, he hoped his adjustments would be sufficient. After all, there were only five animals to experiment on currently and if he was going to fix himself today, he couldn’t waste the opportunity each one represented.

Another flower was cut, and Daniel instantly focused on the new animal. This one was smaller and felt powerful than the boar. From what he could feel it was a at and when he found the glass sheet, he was surprised by where it had been inserted. If its anatomy matched terrestrial animals, then they had probably put the glass through the heart. If they had managed that, at least it would be a good test.

As before, he prepared the outside, gathering both the power near the glass and checking the placement of each of the threads he was sending into the creature. Daniel engaged the newly altered Intelligence. Then, across all the exposed glass, the vines inched forward. They stopped after half a centimetre and the cat thrashed violently. He measured progress. It was better than the first attempt, but ten percent of the thin strips he was growing were off target. Methodically, he corrected them. Then he pushed more power into the attempt and they surged ahead another centimetre. This time, five percent wandered away from their correct spots.

It was too much.

Why?

He did a census of those that had worked and those that had not. Randomly choosing samples and activating plant sense to see what happened. Maybe there was a chip in the glass or bone pressing against that spot or scar tissue or anything.

There were no patterns that he could find.

Internally, he screamed in frustration.

Again.

The vines grew.

That cat tried to throw its weight sideways. A key restraint broke. Extra vines like ropes lashed out and tied it down harder.

He would increase the restraints before the next experiment. His mind went over the glass to make sure the unexpected movement had not pulled the foci of his experiment off target.

Nothing.

He was sure his physical body was sweating in response to the stress.

The third growth spurt had only a couple deviating. He fixed them.

Again.

Three percent.

Again.

Two percent.

Each time he checked why and couldn’t find anything common between. If his method was this bad, there was no way he operate on himself. The algorithms the Intelligence was using needed to be improved.

Again

Five percent

He began to see patterns. It was not one thing causing the issues it was many. Sometimes it was as simple as the orientation of the vines creating the problem. One side growing slightly faster than another sufficed to destroy the alignment. Other times, it was a rough patch in the glass or external pressure like where bone pressed against the glass and his threads squeezed between them. That played mayhem on the ordered growth.

Daniel made a mental note of each of the issues and suggestions on how to change the algorithm to correct the problem. They were all things that he could fix later, but not for this run. Centimetre by centimetre he grew the vines the full fifteen centimetres. While the proof of the automated solution had failed, he was determined to see the process through to the end and prove the concept. That was worthwhile even if it was a slow manual approach.

The slab of glass was finally fully encased with his plant matter.

It was time.

Mentally he double checked the stored energy, confirmed that the individuals vines within the cat had been given the energy they needed.

He grew a flower. A bright yellow one to give the healers warning.

Then he unleashed the last phase of queued magic. Each of the thin vines a millimetre across rotated savagely. An artificial cutting edge leading the rotation to hopefully cut any blood clots or connections that had been made to the vines. Then the vines released the prepared lubricant. Then the final bit, the extraction. This was something he had a lot of experience with. The spring traps were released, and they yanked the piece of glass out.

The entire section came free, encased in his pouch of vines. It was clear the internal glass had shattered but with the pouch intact he had got all of it out of the body, which was the only thing that mattered.

He couldn’t see, but he imagined that healing was flooding the animal to keep it alive. Instead, Daniel concentrated on the cat.

Monitoring its heartbeat and breathing.

An entire minute passed, and that heart was still going.

It was going to survive.

Three minutes.

That was enough for him, at least at a proof-of-concept level everything worked.

Satisfied that the approach was viable, he needed to get rid of the gremlins in the Intelligence. He went back and started rebuilding it with all the issues that he had learnt. Even more of the tiny native bits of interfaces were embedded in the intelligence to give it the grunt for the calculations that were required. There was an entire networked created with all of them linked with the advanced method he had taught Derick to use. He didn’t want any surprises where the brain that operating on him vanished mid operation because it was secretly being cannibalised without realising it.

There were literally tens of thousands of the microscopic computational chips incorporated and all of them required. Daniel kept working and was amazed by the continual interplay between a large chunk of his own core and the programming he was doing. Problems were identified. Extra checks to occur automatically to confirm whether there was a scruff on the glass and if there is how to ensure it went straight as opposed to deviating at an angle, which would mean it might never reconnect. Then he worked on ensuring that each of the tendrils would always finish a growth cycle, with the downside oriented in the correct way. Finally, he opened an up communication with the neighbouring spines. That way, if one was going off in the direction the whole framework could realign.

Daniel hadn’t realised it but as he worked the solution just appeared. At the tip of each of the stalks, which were not wider than two millimetres he concentrated nine of the tiny processing grains to run the multitude of checks needed to ensure the tip was oriented correctly. Somehow he had gone from a centralised solution to a decentralised where each individual stalk drove the decision making.

When he finished the programming. Daniel was surprised to discover that another two flowers have been cut off.

With his changes made, he grew a flower over his next test subject to show that he was back in business. This time it took longer to create the starting position, and it was not just because there’s no nice edge on the outside of the animal as a glass have been inserted in too far and the skin had grown over the top. The main issue was that he needed to make sure each stalk had enough processing chips.

Once everything was ready. Daniel released the power.

Unlike with the cat, he did not actively seek to control what was happening. He was merely monitoring, or at least that was his plan. The Intelligence ran with the pattern he had designed. A spurt of growth followed by an assessment taken by each stalk of its position relative to those around it and the glass. The tips communicated with each other. Corrections were made. It took a second and then there was another spurt. A few millimetres more of growth and the process continued. Half a minute later, the strands of vines had encased the shard of window fully.

Then Daniel paused everything.

The automated process was not perfect, and he needed to understand where it had gone wrong. The results were noticeably worse than when he had manually controlled the growth between each step. All the little deviations and the not quite exact corrections added up. An isolated pocket that fully contained the glass had been created, which was the primary result they were after, but it was fifteen percent bigger than it was required to be. There was wasted space in the pocket, but it was usable and a better outcome than he had hoped.

A flower grew to show the watches he was about to do the final extraction. It probably wasn’t required, as Daniel doubted the yanking out of a chunk of glass would occur silently, but he had promised, so he told them.

Satisfied, he triggered the next phase. Without breaking the bag that had been created, the individual threads spun and cut anything that touched them to paste. Then lubricant was pumped out before the spring engaged.

There was a wrench, and the plant material and glass were spat out. This time, the glass didn’t even break into fragments.

So far, it was a success.

Daniel monitored the animal.

Then frowned.

It wasn’t breathing.

What?

Was it dead?

He focused plant sense; he used a vine like you would when checking someone’s pulse with your finger.

Then he used the same method on the other trapped beasts. Their heartbeats were strong and vivid. It meant.

The test subject had died.

The reason was difficult to understand. From his perspective, it had felt like everything had gone better than with the cat. Why had it failed when it had all seemed to be working? It couldn’t be the slight amount of extra volume that had to be immaterial. What had he missed? There was no way he could continue the experiment till he resolved that fact. His attention turned to the flower board he had set up.

Why did it die?

Send someone up.

He hoped they would get the message quickly, and he wished he could pace the room. Instead, he had to lie in bed looking up at the roof. His mind replayed the events and he couldn’t see why that attempt had failed so horribly. In fact, although he had carefully tracked progress the whole time He could see nothing but he wanted to change.

There was no one in eyeline, just the roof of the toilet to look at. Beige, boring paint work and a stain of unknown origins. Ivey was probably in the room, but his neck brace stopped him from looking over toward the couch. Because of his injury he might as well have been alone.

Over an hour had passed while he experimented, and Ivey should have made progress to distract his churning mind. He focused internally, and the structure of his core appeared. The vision was hardly perfect, but he could use the flow of energies to see some of the glass that pressed against his core.

It had changed significantly. Ivey had been hard at work and much have improved her technique because eighty percent of the required cuts had been made. She was going to be ready before the time she had nominated. The question was whether he would be happy with releasing the Intelligence to operate on himself. He had just killed his patient so clearly not.

There was more work to be done.

“Daniel?”

He opened his eyes and an Asian woman he had not seen before came into view. “You asked for an explanation of how the wolf died.”

Yes

Daniel let his eyes flick to the flower board, and she followed his gaze and nodded.

“Yes, I was told you weren’t allowed to move or talk. We did an autopsy of the body and there are two events we think that are responsible for the untimely death. First, the insertion occurred too quickly. That created internal bleeding that was not fixed when you pulled the glass out. That made the healer’s job harder when the glass came out. It’s not necessarily a problem because the cat survived with similar injuries. The second issue with a wolf was that the glass was piercing both the heart and lungs and when it pulled from the body, it did lots of damaged to both. Unfortunately, we couldn’t fix the organs fast enough.”

Mine is through my heart.

She laughed uneasily. “My understanding is that Cindy will be here. That can’t be underestimated. As good as the rest of us are, her being available with the hundred volunteers you have will triple our healing capability. What killed the wolf wouldn’t kill you? Basically, we’re not sure there is anything to learn from the wolf dying.”

That first point you raised.

Does that mean I should go slower?

She nodded vigorously. “If pain isn’t an issue, then yes. Doing it all in half a minute will not reduce your complications. Even with the new elevated speed of healing, connective tissue does not form that quickly. The sweet spot is probably something like two minutes. Anymore and internal healing might make things harder.”

Thank you.

She nodded, and then Daniel’s mind went downstairs and he assessed the fourth animal. It was another boar and almost as twice as large as the first.

Daniel made changes to let the process occur slower and then prepared everything else. He completed the flower dance with the humans and then allow the magic progress without his direct assistance. The growth occurred slower. The boar twisted and tried to escape, but his extra bindings held it securely.

The glass was encased in plants, and then with an explosion of power yanked out of the animal.

The poor animal’s breathing slowed to almost non-existent. But it kept shallow labouring panting.

He monitored expecting the worst, but steadily the signs of life strengthened.

Success!

Daniel was smiling on his bed. It was working.

He went to work on the fifth and it’s strong breathing seemed to reinstate itself almost immediately. He didn’t know if the intelligence was getting better or if had just been luck. Not that it mattered. It was working!!!

He returned to his body, and Ivey was in the room.

It works!!!

She saw the message and smiled. “I knew it would and I’m almost done here. So the money question. Are you happy to do the surgery? My model is giving you a ninety percent survival chance.”

That high?

Ivey shrugged. “Its improved.”

Daniel really didn’t want to know the details.

“Well?”

Yes. I want to walk outside.