My name is Pelayo. I am around thirty years old, MIT educated and my face is horribly mutilated from a crash that cause my awakening. its amazing what burning fuel can do for your mind... I have been on fire ever since.

 And i haven't left this lab for the last six months. In my private experiment chamber, usually behind locked doors i have been working away like a madman. If you enter you first catch the smell of rotting meat. Which is what i grow my flies on. The cages in the center of the chamber are full of insects. Flies, dragonflies, bees, everything imaginable.

But every single one of them looks painted... the bees are wearing bikinis, the flies have large eyes on their back, the dragonflies have extra wings and change colors. Along one wall is a fish tank full of color changing octopuses and another wall has a few chameleons. A bank of computers tracks the evolution of my insects.

You see i'm a skinner. Not in the prison sense of the world, or even really the windows tweak form... All my insects are altered with a layer of biometric, nanoskin so they can display whatever image they want. Why would i create such a thing?

Well... the human sized tub, nano surgery instruments and strange machines in the corner seem to indicate i intend to wear such a skin myself...

This is the first day in the last month my door has been unlocked. I am preparing for the final step of my experiment. The computers are running the final tests and the machines are cooking up what looks like a vast amount of soupy petroleum jelly for the tub. Surgical gel of some sort...

I am in the labs locker room in the process of shaving my mutilated face.. head.. chest, in fact every hair from my body is getting the razor.

I often wonder who works in the other labs but im not really the outgoing type. I wander the main chamber in bare feet and scrub pants. I am in excellent shape minus the batman villan scarring of half my face.

No matter... I dont need an audience to complete my experiment.

I wander back to my lab and make the final adjustments to the buzzing machines. I attach small sensors to my head and chest as a safety precaution. If something goes wrong and i pass out i wont be drowning in surgical gel. The computer knows to flush the liquid and shock the fuck out of me until i stand up.

I start my own drip IV of painkillers. The nanoskinning process will imbed thousands and thousands of sensors directly into my nervous system as well as graft a layer of nanoskin to my flesh.

Its not exactly painless.

So it begins. I slip out of the scrub pants and climb into the tub. I press the start process button on the rim and lay back. The painkillers take effect fast and i begin to fade as the tub begins to fill with surgical gel and the machine above me begins its laser scans... There will be a power surge as a billion nanobots are activated and released into the gel, and my body will begin an odd twitching as they graft into my nervous system and scrape away my skin so it can be replaced...

Lucky for me, im a million miles away.

Its been days since my process began. I have been lost in my own head, a seeking. A dream within the grand machines around me... but something is wrong. A glitch, an error, an intrusion.

The process does not end painlessly for me. I am not reborn with my new skin and a repaired face. I am torn from my slumber. Pulses of electricity force my body to convulse, i spit the regulator and choke on blood filled surgical gel.

I thrash in the tub as the computer screens flash errors and emergency protocols are started...

I am flushed onto the floor in a wave of thick red. I hack and cough at the gel in my lungs, finally catching enough air to scream, and scream and scream... My new skin goes from its neutral, smooth grey to a panicked red, veins pulsing under invisible skin, flames and bloody boils... its not real.

The outside manifestations are just nueral impulses, my skin reacting to the pain in my body and mind.

This is the quiet. Temporary, quick. I drop as if back in coma.. flat on my face in the red gel, naked ass in the air. The skin calms, settling from pulsing red viens back to a smooth nuetral, almost metallic grey... the only break in the grey is my eyes, which are now a colorless white, staring blank ahead as i drool into the gel...

Pelayos lab is not the only one affected. Every lab in the power plant gets the same problem. All computers flash about errors and intruders. Something terrible happened and whoever is concious in the lab might recieve the message in the main room... flashing on the holoprojector screen.

Urgent. Urgent. Urgent.  

--Last edited by Radiationjunkie on 2008-03-22 11:46:04 --