Chapter 1.2.23 — Bones and Nerves

Emmett couldn’t wait to get to the lab on Monday afternoon.

He managed to make a good dent in his schoolwork and projects over the weekend, which gave his bones a little more time to recover. But classes dragged and by the time they ended, Emmett could’ve sprinted all the way there. The excitement pushed everything else out of his mind, even his concern for his roommate.

Emmett had questions, but he was mostly just ready to get back to training.

Emmett met Dr. Venture in the hub of section 006, the biomedical wing. The doctor had dozens of exosuit schematics spread out over the wall monitors and was looking over them thoughtfully. Even with such a large display, the captions and details were too small for Emmett to see across the room. The only thing he recognized upon walking in was that the pieces were from Clara’s exosuit.

Doctor Venture turned toward Emmett and minimized the displays with a sweep of his hand. For a second, it looked like his glasses were glowing faintly, but it must have been Emmett’s imagination—Emmett blinked and the glow was gone.

“How are you feeling?” Venture asked, his intense focus now aimed at Emmett.

Emmett shrugged and rolled his shoulders. “I feel fine—like I want to get back in the Gray Room.”

Venture smiled. “All things in due time. First, let’s get a scan and see how your bones are taking to the alloy.”

Dr. Venture led Emmett to one of the rooms alongside the surgical suite. This one was currently outfitted with a scanning suite: In the center of the room was a platform encased with glass and flanked by two giant metal pillars. The pillars were filled with scanning tech and would spin around the enclosure, mapping Emmett’s tissue and charting his healing.

But hearing Venture explain it didn’t help Emmett’s unease.

He disrobed to his bodysuit and stepped inside the enclosure.

“Hold your arms up and remain as still as you can,” Venture said as he hunched over the controls.

When Emmett was a kid, he’d broken his arm and gotten an MRI. They’d put him in a similar tube, but he’d been laying down.

“If this is an MRI, shouldn’t I be laying down?”

Venture raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think this is a regular MRI machine?”

Emmett chuckled awkwardly. “It isn’t, right?”

Venture turned back to the controls. “Of course not. An MRI would probably kill you, considering how much metal is now in your body. This is closer to a CT scan. Now, try to relax.”

Emmett swallowed and tried to stand still. The metal pillars lurched and began to swing around the enclosure, gradually picking up speed. As they did, thumps and clicks emanated and also gradually grew in speed and intensity. The spinning of the pillars grew so fast and violent that they became blurs and the roar of wind in the room became deafening.

Through the blur, Dr. Venture looked completely unperturbed by the noise. Soon after, Emmett shut his eyes.

Slowly, the noise faded, and Emmett opened his eyes to see the pillars slowing. Venture nodded from behind the controls for Emmett to relax. It felt like a full minute before the pillars finally slowed to a stop.

“TINA, bring up the scans on the wall display, please,” Venture said.

Emmett watched as cross sections of himself appeared on the screens, almost like the exosuit schematics from a few minutes ago. The two most glaring parts were his skeleton and his prosthetic arm.

His skeleton now had a latticework of metal alloy inside it. Venture had said that it would look like a cross between porous coral and chainmail, and Emmett couldn’t think of a better description. From far away, the lattice looked like chainmail, but the close-up views of his skeleton looked more like coral. Bone was already growing inside the pockets, fusing with the metal.

Venture pointed to the close-up view. “Thanks to the Mutagen-A in your system and the nanites from surgery, you’ve almost completely healed. Maybe one more day. We’ll check back in at the end of the week, but for now though, you can go back to your regular training.”

Emmett let out a sigh of relief that he didn’t know he’d been holding. He trusted the doctor with his life, but Venture had made it clear that there were risks to all of the procedures. So far, Emmett had been lucky.

“Is there any way to test it?”

Venture raised an eyebrow. “TINA’s already simulated stress tests. You should be able to take direct punches from a Class two super without your ribs breaking or your head caving in. However, just because your bones can handle the damage doesn’t mean that your organs can.”

Emmett nodded. “Okay. So, what’s next on the list?”

At that, Venture chuckled. “You’re still not fully recovered. Take the week, examine TINA’s suggestions, and think about it. Carefully.”

“I want to do this,” Emmett said, the words tumbling out as he stared at the screen. “Not everyone gets a chance like this. I need to do something—something good, and I can only do that if I get stronger… I don’t know if I’ll go all the way through TINA’s suggestions, but I want this.”

Venture was looking at him now with an air of satisfaction. Maybe even pride. “I know you do. That’s why I didn’t just save you; I gave you the chance to be a hero.”

“Thanks,” Emmett replied. The word felt pitiful compared to how much he meant it.

Venture waved dismissively. “That’s not why I’m telling you this. It’s not just that you’ve wanted to be a super for so long, how hard you train, or how seriously you take this opportunity. It’s that your heart is in the right place. I saw how you tried to save Porcelain. How you tried to talk to her instead of blindly using violence. Power is not your goal—it’s a means for you to do good. I gave you the chance to be the type of super that you look up to.

“But the world is complicated.” Venture’s face turned somber as he continued. “Most supers start off wanting to change the world, but the truth is that change—real change—is slow. Most supers want to do good, thinking that the world is black and white, but it’s really shades of gray. One day, you’ll be forced to make choices… And you won’t be certain you’ve made the right one.

“That’s why so many capes and masks stick to fighting villains and don’t fight wars, why they take on drug dealers and gangs instead of corporations like Gnosis, and why those like Paragon stick to natural disasters and world-ending threats. Those things are simple—not gray. You should do the good that you can.”

Emmett listened intently. If Venture had meant his speech to dissuade Emmett from setting his sights too high, then it hadn’t worked as intended. In fact, it had done the opposite.

Emmett didn’t want to be relegated to chasing criminals and fighting low-level villains… For a moment, Emmett wanted it all. He didn’t just want to keep the world a decent place—he wanted to make it a better place.

Emmett finally said, “It’s good that we’re a team, then.”

“How so?”

“Maybe together we can do better than just doing good enough.”

There was another flicker of pride across Venture’s face. “That leads me to my next point—we are already doing some good.”

Emmett turned to Venture curiously. “What do you mean?”

Dr. Venture gestured to the screens, focusing on Emmett’s prosthetic arm and its connections to his shoulder and neck. The metal frame extended into his collarbone, shoulder blade, and a portion of his ribs. Those connection points were joined by a combination of screws and porous connections, similar to the rest of his skeleton.

He pointed to the clusters of polymers within the artificial muscles, specifically. “Follow these connections upward.”

Slowly, Emmett followed the polymers up his arm, noting how the smaller ones that allowed his artificial skin to sense pressure and temperature coalesced into bundles. As they moved further up his arm, they joined with larger strands that presumably controlled his artificial muscles.

The polymer nerves didn’t stop at the shoulder joint or even where artificial muscles and real muscles were mixed together in his chest, back, or shoulder. The polymer strands extended down his side and up into his neck—much farther than Emmett would’ve guessed.

Emmett asked TINA to zoom in on the most distant connections and found that his real nerves and his artificial ones also seemed to blend together like his bones had. Not like coral, but like two lengths of rope woven together. At this magnification at least, it was impossible to tell where machine ended and flesh began.

Admittedly though, Emmett wasn’t sure what Dr. Venture wanted to show him. He’d already mentioned that Emmett’s healing and prosthetic integration had gone exceedingly well, but Emmett already knew that.

“Dr. Venture… What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“I told you that your prosthetic arm was one of the most advanced ones I’ve ever designed. Most amputees will never be able to afford one as advanced and as resilient as this one.” This time, Venture pointed to the blending of nerves. “This has never been achieved before. Even for the most expensive current generation prosthetics, simulating the sensation of touch, pressure, and temperature is crude. The polymer nerves in your arm aren’t widely used, but they are fairly easy and cheap to manufacture. As far as the rest of your prosthetic goes, they are by far the cheapest part.

“TINA and I are going to replicate your nerve connections. If we can manage that with just nanomachines and without Mutagen-A, then we could revolutionize prosthetics for millions of people.”

Emmett listened intently, and only now realized that he was smiling. Of all the new things in his short time as a super, the idea was a little hard to process.

“That is pretty awesome.”

Venture crossed his arms. “Yes. Yes, it is. And I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Emmett scoffed. “Alright, now you’re just trying to make me feel better. All I did was almost die.”

“You’d be surprised how many scientific breakthroughs happen that way.”

Emmett chuckled, then remembering his other question, pulled the plastic bag out of his pocket and emptied McGuire’s device onto the table. It had gotten jumbled in his pocket, and Emmett had to peel the dried gum off of the watch batteries again.

“Can you tell me anything about this?”

Dr. Venture poked idly at the device. “This is from your sparring match with McGuire?”

Emmett knew that Dr. Venture had been keeping tabs on him, but so far he’d believed the doctor that he hadn’t been watching too closely. ‘Close’ must be a relative word.

Emmett nodded tentatively, but couldn’t resist calling Venture out. “Passive monitoring, huh?”

Without looking up, Venture replied plainly, “You’d just woken up from major surgery… Did you really think the gum was necessary?”

Emmett sighed at both comments. “I didn’t know what to think about it. He pulled out all these crazy inventions. That electrical jammer, or whatever it is, should not have worked on my arm.”

“You’re right,” Venture continued. “That’s one of the advantages of a power like his… What the Summit calls Artificers, supers that use technology, is actually a very broad category of powers. Most of us have a cognitive enhancement—I have a knack for parsing data. Some have control over magnetism or have limited psychic control over technology. But most of us have simply created a potent technology or cornered the market on something that can be used as a weapon.

“Gadgeteers are a different matter altogether. They can, quite literally, create impossible technology. As far as classifications go, their powers are closer to Reality Warpers than to Artificers.”

Emmett nodded along and saw the tiny batteries in a new light. “That’s why the device doesn’t work anymore. It’s like a temporary warper… Is it based on time or proximity?”

Venture sighed, as if choosing whether or not to give Emmett a long lecture.

“It depends on the individual,” Venture finally said. “We categorize and taxonomize all these things that are as varied as snowflakes or grains of sand—classifying powers only helps so much. So, actually, gadgeteers can be limited by time or proximity, or both.” He punctuated the lesson with a shrug.

Emmett gestured to McGuire’s device. “So there’s no way to figure out his powers from that?”

“I like where your head’s at, but no. Once his power stopped affecting the device, there’s no way to replicate it or trace it.”

A part of Emmett hoped he could have gotten something out of studying it, even if he couldn’t go so far as replicating it. Dejected, Emmett bagged the device and pocketed it again. He’d hold on to it, regardless.

Venture noticed, but instead continued his lecture. “Gadgeteers are very versatile, but their abilities will never beat true, stable technology. Nor will their technology have a chance of affecting others like our nerve polymers.”

Emmett nodded. “Don’t worry. I won’t run away to join the Gadgeteers.”

“Very funny,” Venture replied flatly. “If we’re done here, I have new training for you.”

At that Emmett perked up, forgetting all about the lifeless device in his pocket.

“You once asked me if there was any protection against psychic powers… That’s what we’re going to work on today.”

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