[Maelstrom - Chapter 02] Redesign

I had been conflicted about whether to make the suit fly, ever since I stopped the kid in his speeding car. It would mean I have to spend more time preparing to fight crime, than fighting crime itself for now. But a more pressing issue was at hand - the suit used up fuel faster than anticipated, a large chunk of it spent to cool my body under the hot exoskeleton. As I held the tiny reactor used to power the suit in my hand, I realized that a subcritical reactor alone, such as this, would not be sufficient. But adding an energy amplifier was out of the question too, it would make the suit too bulky. Unless the cyclotron in the amplifier was reduced in size…

The solution to the cyclotron problem occurred to me when I was walking down the beach. Her memories haunted me, but I needed to get out of the lab to clear my head. I felt her hair on my face, and her skin on my skin. I sat down and ran my hands through the wet sand. There were seashells lying around. And then it struck me - the spirals…

It had been three days since I began work on the new energy amplifier for the suit’s subcritical reactor. I had the working model in front of me. I pulled out the control rods in the reactor and released the particle gates in the cycolotron. The laser lit up, and the reactor core came up to subcritical mass. The power reading showed a four-hundred-fold increase in energy…

I modified the suit to handle the power. The possibilities were tremendous. Wearing the exoskeleton, I could now lift weights equivalent to a 747. Speed was still an issue, I had to tone down the speed to ensure that the motion did not hurt me. Because of the increase in power, I could add more memory and processing capabilities to the suit’s computer. It was only a matter of time before I could fly…

As I became more absorbed in my work, I realized that there was a part of me that did all this not for revenge, or to satisfy an inner urge for justice, but to become invincible. That primal urge to become indestructible fueled me through days and nights on end, as I worked on the suit, redesigning and refining, testing it’s seemingly inexhaustible limits…

Adding turbines to power flight turned out to be easier than I had first thought. The main engine was fixed on the suit’s back. The suit’s outer casing had to undergo significant changes to allow this to happen. The intake for the turbine was on the suit’s shoulder. Additional turbines to stabilize the flight was fixed on the feet and knuckles. The hard part was programming the five turbines to work in tandem…

And then I was done. As I looked at the improved suit, an odd sense of awe came over me. It was like looking at it for the first time. I stepped into it. It was infinitely more confortable than before. I did not feel like I was wearing anything more than the body glove. The additional processors and memory allowed the suit to calculate it’s movements with more precision to mimic my own movements. I could topple concrete walls with the same effort it took to push a stack of dominos. It was heady, and I realized that I could lose my sanity…