Don’t ask me why I was born with telerium-laced bones, skin the consistency of synthetic cloth, or bundles of polymer fibers for muscles. My veins are like fish tank tubing, my tendons and cartilage like hard rubber. Any given part of my body is twice as sturdy as a human’s. Yet somehow it all works. I think and breathe and eat and crap and sleep like a human. Only I’m not human. Not as far as humans are concerned. Even though I grew up the son of a mechanic, I’ve always felt like I’ve had an intimate knowledge of machinery in my blood. If something has moving parts, I can figure out how to fix it with the right tools. It’s just hard to fix your own arm when the job takes two hands. So I’d offered myself to the study of E. Chester Wheatley not because I needed his expertise, but because I needed his hardware and a pair of skilled hands. Techsouls are the unluckiest people in the world; we’re also the most plentiful, by far. I’ve undergone more surgeries than I can count; most of the later ones I performed on myself.
