“My limits used to be very limited.” Jace kept smiling.
It didn’t hurt to talk about the past now, though he still had moments where he feared that everything he’d gained would be washed away. The migraine pain and tinnitus he’d felt in the Khul ship had terrified him.
Maybe if I have to sleep in a tank of blue goo, I’ll be okay with that.
“You always fought through. Pushed yourself beyond pain and exhaustion,” his father mused, sounding rather sad.
“Are you worried that I’ll do that again?” Jace asked as he naturally checked the ship’s fuel.
He didn’t even have to think about where the gauge was. In fact, the image of the fuel indicator had come up almost before he’d interacted with the hologram. He wondered if he needed to touch it at all or if it would have automatically come up. He had a feeling he was thinking in a limited, human way about this, but giving up completely to the abilities he had… Well, it was like what he had said to Gehenna in the dream the night before. He didn’t want to lose himself to just being the Pilot. He wanted to be Jace still who couldn’t quite believe he was flying a spaceship.
His father snorted. “You’ll do it again. That’s your nature. But I would urge you to figure out what you can do before you blow past that end point when things are dire.”
“Hard to know where that is,” Jace admitted. “This body seems to be optimized.” He paused and wrestled with his own feelings about this. “On the one hand, I feel completely normal. Like this has always been my normal, but, obviously, it hasn’t. Maybe the fact that I’ve adjusted so well should bother me. Obviously, I've changed. I don’t know all the stuff the Osiris put in me. Yet I feel like myself.”
Until I decide not to and take the next step. But I don’t know if there's a next step. How much of that interaction with Gehenna last night was a dream and how much was real?
He hadn’t really had a chance to dwell on his body since he’d be transformed. They’d had so much to do. Now, he was curious about it, but also leery. If he’d started wondering with Gehenna actively in his mind, she would have already been showing him a million things about this new form. He could feel the bright spot of Gehenna in mind, but her attention was elsewhere unless he reached out for now. Jace shook his head in amusement. Only his mother could take so much of Gehenna’s attention from him. The Osiris, of course, said nothing. Jace wondered if it was trying to learn the concept of privacy or was just being cagey.
Being cagey, he thought with a mental huff of laughter.
“What sorts of things did the Osiris put in you? What do you know?” His father’s tone was curious but also worried.
Jace couldn’t blame him. If he’d see his father pumped full of glowing, blue liquid and transformed into Captain America, he’d be worried, too. Or at least very curious!
“I don’t know everything. Scratch that. I know very little,” Jace said and his father grinned, but he had that look in his eyes that told Jace he was listening very carefully to what Jace was and wasn’t saying. “I don’t know if I will get any older.”
His father let out a huff of air and his eyes widened. “Immortality?”
“Well, I guess.” Jace shrugged. “I know that I heal incredibly fast, which might be why I don’t age.”
“There are theories that aging is, in fact, not natural.” His father rubbed his face with both hands though as he took in the possibility that Jace would always look as he did now. “What else? Though I don’t know what can top that.”
“I’m stronger than most humans,” Jace said. “Faster too, obviously.”
“You’ve got the best eye I’ve ever seen with that rahir,” his father added.
“Yeah, I can, ah, see all the possibilities before me. Like, if you’re in a room with a door, window and vent and there’s some danger coming, I’ll know which way to go,” Jace explained, which was hardly an explanation. “The AI are clearly generating odds that I don’t see or something. Like when we were on the Hive and it was collapsing, I could see all the paths to escape.”
His father whistled. “Handy and that makes me feel a little better about that escapade.”
His father did not know half of it. Jace’s shoulder blades twitched at the thought of the vats with the softening humans, the horror for their pain, the hideousness of seeing black shapes squirm under flesh. Jace pushed the dark thoughts away. He knew he would be thinking about the Khul enough to not do so right at this moment.
Jace continued, “Let’s see, what else? Oh, I know hundreds of languages.”
His father blinked. “Hundreds–”
“Maybe more. And with the AIs I can decipher almost anything,” Jace answered. He didn’t feel like he was bragging as he hadn’t earned these abilities. He had been programmed with them. It would be what he did with them that would count. “I can take this ship apart and put it back together. While I do still need the hardsuits, my body can adapt to far more adverse environments than a normal human body could.”
“God, Jace.” His father looked rather shellshocked.
Jace shrugged. “That’s not all. I probably could get a list of all of it for you. Gehenna likes lists.”
His father was quiet for long moments then said, “I wouldn’t tell General Intoshkin any of this.”
“No, I was pretty much going to skip all of it with him,” Jace let out an uncomfortable chuckle. “Just one of these abilities would make his doctors drool. But all of them? The immortality thing? That would have them cutting me open in a second.”
“I don’t think it would go that far. The General is a good man. But they would be taking pints of your blood and insisting on you being in their labs. They probably will still do that even without knowing everything,” his father said with a grimace.
