I sighed in disappointment. That sucked. Ghix touched my shoulder. “But we can give basic commands to our nanos with our minds in certain areas. Maybe you can try that? But wait so I can hook you up to a scan,” he said, and he hurried to a desk and pulled out a small box and returned to my side. “I want to watch to see if they react.” He pulled small glass circles out of the box and looked at me for permission. “May I?” he asked and I nodded my head.
He placed four circles on my face. Two at my temples and two on the center of my forehead, two went behind my ears at the base of my skull. He put two on my chest under my collar bone over my shirt and the rest went along my spine, also over my shirt. He pulled up the hologram screen along the entire wall to our left and I watched as my body was scanned and put on the display.
My nervous system lit up with electric pulses. Ghix clicked his tablet a few times, and then the display showed a countless number of little dots all over my body. It looked like I had a galaxy inside me. They swirled through my bloodstream and throughout my nerves. Saturated my muscles and bones. They were everywhere.
“Now try to give them a command,” Ohem said. I looked at both males in exasperation.
“How? I’ve lived with them my whole life and they’ve never given me super powers before now.”
Dr. Ghix laughed, wagging his finger at me. “It’s because you’ve lived with them your entire life that they’ve never been further activated. You never knew to try! They have only been performing base functions. Now think of a command, anything! We don’t know what they can do, so we should try as many things as we can to get a working idea of what they are capable of,” he said, his tablet at the ready. He pressed something on his tablet and the lights dimmed in the room. The girls came over and I filled them in on what was going on.
“Why don’t you tell them something simple? Like, umm,” Patty said and tapped her finger against her chin. She snapped her fingers and pointed at me. “Like tell them to give you x-ray vision!”
“That’s not simple!” I said, dryly.
She shrugged and turned to watch the monitor. “Worth a shot.”
Alright. A command. I can do that. I closed my eyes and concentrated on something simple. Maybe just telling them to wake up would work? I mean, Ghix said they were dormant.
Wake up. I waited for a few breaths, but nothing happened.
Dr. Ghix’s gasp had my eyes flying open. On the screen, the nanos had exploded into action. Before they’d been passively floating along inside my body. Now they were swirling in complicated geometric patterns. I couldn’t feel anything. I hadn’t ever noticed them before, so it made sense that I wouldn’t now. Still, it was kind of anticlimactic.
After about a minute, the nanos settled back into the passive state.
I looked at Dr. Ghix. “Well now—” Pain flared from the ear that held the translating marble, so hot that I started screaming and tried to claw it out. There was a terrible rushing sound all around me, drowning me in sensory overload that blended with the molten agony.
“Get it off! Get it off! Get it off!” I was screaming. Someone pinned me to the floor. Hands gripped my head to hold me still. Cool fingers touched my ear and then the pain was gone. I stayed on the floor, panting and covered in sweat.
“Well, that sucked,” I said. Someone huffed out a relieved laugh, and I was pulled to my feet by Ohem. I shook my head and sat down hard on the desk behind me. Ohem’s Mordor speech caught my attention.
I looked at him and shook my head. “I can’t understand you,” I said in frustration. Just great. I was going to have to learn a whole new language never meant for human mouths. Ohem looked at the doctor, who glanced up and down from his tablet and nodded at my mate, who then continued to speak to me.
I looked at Patty. “What is he saying?”
She scowled at them. “He's saying random words to you. Like up, down, red, white. That kind of shit. The Doc says your nanos are in learning mode.”
I looked up at the screen and they were still passive. I didn’t know what Dr. Ghix was seeing, but it looked to be like my nanos were just doing their normal thing. Whatever that was.
“Water, Earth, Child, Ship, Soldier, Love, Hate,” Ohem said.
I jerked my head towards him. “Hey! I understood that!” I said in relief. Ohem’s Izi flared briefly and settled into a steady glow.
“Thank the gods,” he said, his shoulders dropping. He touched my cheek with two fingers, “It would seem your nano translator was activated, it learned my language in under thirty seconds, Jack. That’s unimaginable.”
Weird that the one thing I was really worried about was what the nano’s picked up on. I didn’t know how I should feel about that. Maybe they’d solve the whole ‘my mate was an immortal’ thing for me too.
“Yeah well, they really don’t like inferior technology.” I was a fast healer and all that, but the pain still sucked. “Maybe we skip trying any armor? I don’t feel like my skin trying to burn right off my bones,” I said, rubbing my ear.
Dr. Ghix moved to stand on the other side of me and started in with his pretty bird song. I started counting and almost exactly thirty seconds later, I could understand his words.
“I can understand, Doctor.” I told him to get him to stop with the random colors he was throwing out. It was like I had learned their language the old-fashioned way. I understood what they were saying rather than a translator just turning it into English for me. I wonder if I could read their languages too? I asked the doctor, and he handed me his tablet. Sure enough, I could read the strange symbols on the screen.
I handed him his tablet back. “Yeah. I can read it.”
His eyes widened, and he shook his head. “The Rijitera were technological geniuses. This is astounding! It takes many days to install languages directly to the mind and not always will the recipient be able to read. The process is usually painful and the side effects are high in probability. I am going to be studying these samples for years!” He said, shuffling his many legs in his enthusiasm.
He clicked on his tablet and then looked up at the screen to zoom in on my brain. There were nanos clustered in sections of my brain that probably controlled language processing and speech. “You can probably write as well! Here, try on this,” he said and handed me another larger tablet.
