Titans of Chaos

When I wasn't performing my own experiments, I would go by to watch Victor. Hisexperimentation area was a little ways offshore in ninety-five fathoms of water. He said hewanted the water to dampen out any escaped high-energy particles, and for coolant mass. Hisunderwater skin was a thick, almost metallic, bluish hide, with goggle-eyes and extra horns andantennae for picking up microwaves and radioactivity.

(He still looked handsome to me. I could still see his unchanged internal nature. There were manyadvantages of possessing a multidimensional girlfriend, if only you would notice them, Victor!)He would just anchor himself, motionless, near his gigantic coral-grown tube-shaped mechanism,which lay stretched along the seabed like a whale made of armor. No bubbles left his body; he hadbuilt some sort of exchange filters between his lungs to circulate carbon dioxide back into oxygen.

Only the azure ray from his brow would dart here and there. His tools, varying in size frominvisible clusters of artificial molecules to metallic caterpillar-shaped manipulators with as manyarms as a Swiss Army knife, swam around him, and drilled, and bit, and severed, and jointed, andglued, and started chemical chain reactions. Around him there were always flares of burningsubstances, kilns and molecular sieves where he made new substances, little underwatervolcanoes that sent columns of steam rushing surfaceward. The fish avoided the place.

The inside of the giant tubelike mechanism was clear enough to me: an amazing labyrinth ofgeometrical shapes, lines of lenses, carbon fiberoptics, energy cells, alternating layers of cathodesand anodes, rings of electromagnets, shells of lead and ribs of titanium-hard ceramic, lumps ofheavy water held in special bladders, webs of controlling and sensory tissue, crystals like a millionsnowflakes interlocked into a dazzling complexity.

"What is it?" I finally asked him.

"My new body," he said. "If it works out. Or rather, a model of the instructions needed to make it.

Get behind that lead shielding."