Darklight: The New World

Part 16: Unforeseen Complications

Draz was sitting beside Ana’s hospital bed with his tablet computer looking over her vital signs and the designs that the R & D Team had drawn up for the next stage of her treatment. He had sat at her side for hours a day for the entire two weeks it had been since her... ‘episode’. The transport crash that Soran was involved with went somewhat unnoticed by Draz and the rest of Utopia who put it down to simple engine failure - they had no idea that it was a sign of things to come.

Draz sat by Ana’s bed because at times she showed signs of waking up and could hear his voice. She stirred in her sleep and sometimes cried out a little in her unsettled dream state. The rig that she had been placed in was the main part of her treatment. The coils that had been grafted to her body to create the magnetic fields reacted differently than expected to the high levels of bioelectricity that her body had been biologically modified to create naturally. The coils created electricity which she could manipulate, yes - but they also superheated to a much greater extent than expected, severely burning Ana from the inside out. Luckily Draz had got her into a stasis pod and suspended all of Ana’s biological processes pretty quickly as she began to burn. 

Following experimentation the medical team came to realize that the genetic modification wasn't reversible and the coils had fused directly onto her bone structure thanks to their superheating. Basically Ana was stuck like this, the bioelectromagnet rig was now as much a part of Ana as her hair and nails. So they had to come up with a different solution to keep her stable out of stasis. Her entire body was placed within a cucoon which had liquid nitrogen pumped through a system of pipes built into it. Small pipes from this rig penetrated into her skin and ran along her coil-grafted skeleton to carry the heat away from her body and through a series of small radiators. Although her internal body temperature was much higher than a usual human, it was in tolerable limits. Draz’s R & D Team were working on a portable system and a more effective coolant medium to allow Ana to lead a relatively normal life as long as she continued to wear it.

Ana’s eyes began to flicker and open and Draz slammed on the ‘Call’ button to summon the doctors.