mry writes

*a story fragment*

In the first millisecond after the blade penetrated, the body of John Woodworm began to respond.

Myriad electrical impulses raced along diverse axons, crossed ganglia, converged at the spinal nerves, and carried the stimulus upward. Faster than conscious thought, impulses reached his brain. Something was terribly wrong, they said. His abdomen was receiving untoward stimuli. His heart raced and his mind auto-focused.

His brain decided to register pain, and his system began to react. He tried to dodge the slicing blade, but it was too late. Blood began to escape as a burning sensation followed the inward path of the blade. He flinched, trying to draw his stomach away from the point of impact. The thrusting blade maintained its forward momentum, but John’s recoil slowed the progress of the blade.

“You’re gonna be worm food, Woodworm,” a hoarse voice spat out. “Shouldn’a done that.”

“Done what?” Woodworm wanted to say, and tried to say. All he managed to say, though, was “Done…”

And he was. So was his attacker, the moment the slicing blade hit the neutron regulator embedded near his spinal column. A massive surge of subatomic particles surged along the blade, through the hand holding the blade, up the arm, and into the body of the miscalculating attacker.

Unfortunately, the attacker did not learn a lesson from his miscalculation. Learning was, in fact, not possible, because he ceased to exist as a corporeal being in an instant. John, on the other hand, freed of his regulator function, became supercharged; an unconstrained and unstable particle mass in the shape and form of a humanoid, but now lacking attenuation.

They had not planned for disregulation when designing and building John. All modelling and simulation indicated any interference with the neutron regulator would lead to the instantaneous annihilation of both the regulator and the carrier. I.e., John Woodworm.

Models are built, shaped, formed, by fallible beings based on assumptions which in turn are based on biases and viewpoints peculiar to each modeller. Simulations, likewise, but with the added joy of discrepancies and coding errors due to one too many jolts, or one too few jolts, and to minds wandering back to what should have been said to her, or what should not have been said to her, to prevent yet another night of lonely self-fulfillment.

In the case of John Woodworm, a critical flaw was introduced in the design of his neutron regulator shutdown/override controller when the coder, eager to try again with her, rushed through a checkpoint function, neglecting to test a crucial lookback parameter and thereby negating most of the function.

The functional-review model in turn failed to confirm the lookback parameter values because the modeller decided he would rather replay in his head the last, and only, time she had grudgingly consented to a night in his bed, instead of tracing the functions and their outputs one last time before the regulator was accepted as ready for service.

And so, with the unwitting aid of an assassin bearing a grudge and a blade, John Woodworm became a literal Free Radical. Not what he signed up for; he was told his Radical past would be forgiven and forgotten if he consented to be Subject A1 of the Neutron Regulator trials. What he was not told, when he signed up, was the confidence level for a successful outcome was somewhat low, if by somewhat low one meant between O and 5%.

After all, experimental subatomic regulation of humanoids was considered a crackpot science and, therefore, devoid of acceptability, it was driven underground. Between 0 and 5% in the early iterations was quite acceptable to crackpots whose own lives were not directly on the line. And so the first unkillable Free Radical was birthed.

–NOT THE END–