Dragging the heavy battery pack the last few feet to the cave felt like climbing a mountain. Tristan collapsed just inside the entrance, his body screaming in protest, chest heaving as he gasped for air. The short journey back had drained nearly every last reserve of his strength. His vision swam, dark spots dancing before his eyes. For several minutes, he could only lie there, curled on his good side, trying to ride out the waves of pain and dizziness.
He pulled aside the stiff, blood-soaked bandages on his side. The skin beneath wasn't just red; it was dark and ugly, with blackened veins spider webbing out from the wound. The smell rising from it made his stomach churn violently. He collapsed back against the concrete, gasping, shivering uncontrollably. Clinical terms surfaced through the haze, but it was too late. Infection had taken hold, spreading through his system. No amount of mechanical bracing could stop it now. Building an exoskeleton, replacing limbs – it would take days, weeks, time he no longer had.
He was dying.
The sight of the heavy battery pack, and the small emergency toolkit kept pulling him back from the brink of giving up. The cave was a pathetic excuse for a workshop, even more so when compared to the labs he'd dreamed of working in, the gleaming facilities of Atlas Corp, but he was the happiest when he was working and tinkering, so that's what he chose to do with his last moments.
Slowly, forcing movement through sheer willpower, Tristan pushed himself into a sitting position, leaning his back against the cold concrete wall. He carefully laid out the toolkit. Then he positioned the heavy battery nearby and dragged the opened server casing closer.
His first task was to establish power. He needed to connect the battery pack to the server's power regulation unit, assuming he could safely extract it and figure out the connections without frying everything. His left hand trembled violently, holding the tool steady enough to perform the delicate work needed seemed almost impossible. He took several deep, ragged breaths, trying to calm the shaking.
"Focus."
He braced his wrist against the edge of the server casing and carefully brought the screwdriver bit towards a screw head. The tip skittered across the metal twice before he managed to seat it. Turning it required immense concentration, his muscles protesting every tiny movement. Sweat beaded on his forehead, stinging his eyes.
-
Time seemed to blur into a cycle of painful effort and feverish rest. He worked tirelessly, using the tools, he managed to extract the power regulation module and wrestled with connecting it to the salvaged battery, sparks flying more than once from clumsy connections made by his trembling hand.
His focus narrowed to the task, the world shrinking to the components before him and the insistent throb of pain throughout his body. The heat radiating from his side felt like a furnace, and waves of shivering wracked him unpredictably. His thoughts grew increasingly fragmented, disjointed. One moment he'd be visualizing the intricate joints of a robotic arm, recalling designs from his figurines; the next, his mind would drift, lost in fever dreams or sudden, sharp memories of the city falling apart, the green fire consuming everything.
After what felt like days a final spark signalled the connecting of the power core to the server, the server cooling system buzzed to life and blue neon backlights highlighted the high-tech internals of the server. With power flowing, the next hurdle was communication.
How could he input commands or write code? His eyes scanned the Atlas hardware again. Tucked near the main processor was a small, dark rectangle, likely an integrated diagnostic touchscreen, standard for high-end maintenance.
He used the toolkit's cutters to snip a connection wire to bypass the standard boot sequencer. It flickered to life, displaying a low-pixel Atlas Corp diagnostic menu, locked behind security protocols.
Getting past Atlas security, even on a damaged, isolated unit, would be difficult. Just as frustration reached its peak, he remembered a rumour, a whisper on fringe tech boards about a universal hardware-level backdoor Atlas supposedly built into their enterprise systems for 'emergency recovery'.
With painstaking effort, using wires from his scavenged pile to short specific pins identified on the motherboard while simultaneously inputting commands on the touchscreen, he attempted the sequence. Sparks flew near the processor. The screen flickered violently, displayed a cascade of error messages, then went blank before finally settling on a simple command prompt.
He was in.
He continued to assemble the pieces of the brace, using the composite plating for structure, attempting to wire up the power module and connect it to the server. But his hands wouldn't obey. Tools slipped from numb fingers. Tiny screws were dropped and lost in the dirt.
Yet the more he worked the more he questioned exactly what it was he was building. Was he meticulously trying to build a support for his broken arm? But what was the point? Even if, by some miracle, he finished this brace, what then?
He tried to dismiss such hazy thoughts and focus his attention forward, the Atlas server casing, the gleaming processors and memory modules within. Built to last. That stupid slogan. His body was failing, irretrievably. But his mind... his consciousness, his thoughts, his self...
"Wait".
Wasn't that just electrochemical signals? Could that be saved? Backed up? Transferred?
The idea exploded in his mind, born not of logic or careful planning, but of sheer, animalistic need for survival. Forget fixing the body. Forget replacing parts. Upload the mind, his entire consciousness, into a machine. Store it on the server, run it like a program, power it with the mag-lev battery.
It was insane. Impossible, maybe. The stuff of mad science fiction. But as another wave of nausea and dizziness washed over him, leaving him weaker than before, it felt like the only option left.
He needed a way to capture the mind, digitize it at the moment of... transition. A device. Something that could interface directly with the brain, read its state, convert it into code. Something direct, something that could be driven into the core of his consciousness and pull it out. A concept for a device, raw and terrifying, began to take shape in his mind..
Time had run out. There was only one path left, what was one last throw of the dice against the encroaching darkness.
With renewed energy, he pushed aside the metal plating and composite materials he'd gathered for the brace, leaving only a few pieces that might serve a different purpose now. His focus narrowed with laser intensity.
He wasn't building a body anymore; he was building an interface, a bridge for a human mind to cross into a digital computer. He needed sensors – maybe repurpose the diodes and optical readers from the server? He needed a data buffer – the salvaged processor was perfect. He needed space to handle the sheer volume of data – the Atlas Corp memory modules would have to do. And finally he needed a delivery mechanism.
He found a long, thin heat sink strut made of hardened metal. Using the sharp rock and the concrete floor as grinding stones, he began painstakingly sharpening one end into a wicked point. Shivers wracked his body, sweat dripped onto the components, but he didn't stop. He soldered connections crudely using the salvaged wire.
He worked against the clock of his own dying body. The world outside, the rain, the green sky, ceased to exist. There was only the task, the frantic assembly of components into the insane device taking shape in his hands: a four-inch metal spike bristling with sensor nodes.
After a moment, the final connection sparked, sending a jolt through Tristan's already frayed nerves. The device lay finished on the dirty concrete floor – a crude sharpened metal spike Indicator lights on the server flickered, suggesting it was detecting input correctly.
Tristan stared at his creation, his breathing shallow and ragged. His vision was blurring badly now, the edges darkening. The heat consuming his body felt like molten lead in his veins, and the shivering had become almost constant, uncontrollable shaking. He knew, with chilling certainty, that he didn't have much time left. Minutes, maybe.
With the last of his reserves of strength, he positioned the device against his temple. He checked the server one last time, ensuring the connections to the battery were stable. It felt cold and heavy.
"Now or never. Please let this work."