Mod Superhero (Book 6 STUBBING on Oct 27th)

Chapter 6.32 - Jailbreak

As it turned out, Emmett could control a lot of nanites.

When Emmett received his nanite canister, Dr. Venture had put limitations on the amount that Emmett could control. Just a month after the war, Emmett had figured out how to bypass the restriction. It wound up being easier to do than expected—so much so that Emmett sometimes wondered if Dr. Venture meant for him to do it all along.

Emmett was a general on a battlefield, and the different types of nanites were lower officers and soldiers. There was a limit to how many soldiers fit in a squad, and how many squads fit in a platoon.

But that wasn't quite right—it wasn't that there was a limit on numbers. Emmett was limited on the number of commands he could give.

If he tried to issue too many commands—tried to control too many nanites—Emmett could hurt himself.

But Emmett had grown since then. He'd been practicing nanite control. His brain had gotten more efficient, and now he had the brain implant.

Even without access to his HUD, he could estimate the amount of nanites he was controlling... at least for a while. His normal nanite canister was the benchmark of one hundred percent, and the most he'd ever had at one time was when he'd broken Lock out of Gnosis. That day, they'd had two thousand percent spread out across Emmett's body and three suitcases. Emmett had only controlled a small part of that swarm. TINA had controlled the bulk of it.

His current swarm was going to crush that record.

The larger the swarm grew, the faster it siphoned power and nanites out of the lake. Now that the swarm was focused on growth again, that growth became exponential. Emmett felt the numbers break the one thousand percent mark. A few minutes later, the numbers were growing by one thousand percent.

The influx of nanites felt like a mental and physical weight pressing down on Emmett. It was hard enough keeping up with the strain, but Emmett was also trying to keep his body still. He pushed away and partitioned everything—

And Emmett found a new well of strength to draw on.

Each thought he partitioned freed up mental resources to control the swarm. He silenced his pain and his fear, partitioned all his worries about the plan and his curiosity about the lab, and the swarm grew in their place—oozing into the gaps like mortar in a crumbling house. He kept almost nothing except his desperate need to escape and a rough blueprint of his route to freedom.

The swarm's saturation numbers grew into the ten thousand percent mark, then blew past the one hundred thousand percent mark.

Emmett had spread the increased mass across the swarm, and the roots had grown too thick. Eventually they'd trip a sensor. So Emmett redoubled his efforts and pulled everything toward him. Nanites sloshed through the walls like floodwater, bringing a dozen fusion batteries and many more cells toward him.

The swarm flowed along the walls of the biolab and then down the chains to Emmett. These nanites couldn't cloak, so it wasn't long before there were enough nanites that the streams were visible to the naked eye. Seconds later, the walls were completely covered; the surfaces churning like black water.

They covered Emmett too. The new nanites were cool to the touch and so thick it felt like he'd fallen into deep water. Into a whirlpool.

Again, he resisted the urge to react—partitioned away his discomfort. He rearranged the nanites around his face so that there were air holes, then rearranged them again—turning them into air channels as the nanites thickened around his body.

As the swarm grew exponentially, so did Emmett's connection to it. It felt like discovering the backup lab all over again—when his mind fell into cyberspace and expanded through the lab. A process both mechanical and organic. Except instead of crawling through circuits and systems, he was flowing through black sand.