Leo and Otto pull up at the Quill Foundation, freshly minted and now mostly street legal. Leo has been reviewing car insurance prices on his phone, and they all suck hard for this age bracket. Maybe we can just skip this part. He hops out and goes to the trunk. A heavy suitcase is waiting inside, one of those over-large frequent-flyer deals you see businessmen at airports pulling impatiently behind them. The thing weighs a ton, and Leo grunts with the effort of hauling it out. Fortunately it has casters, so he can wheel it inside. They may not survive the whole trip. He leaves a note on the thing, asks curious staff to deliver it to Numina or Jason Quill when they return, and hops back in Otto. ---- This is the third time Leo has built a generation-two shell for one of his robots. The first time, he had weeks of time and assistance from AEGIS personnel. This time, all he's got is one molecular lathe, a handful of Maxwell Daemons, and the assistance of whatever speedsters he can con into helping him who aren't otherwise occupied. Harry, his teammate; Comet, the Gale uncle who perhaps dislikes the Menagerie slightly less than before; or even Streak, who Leo privately wants to shout at for his role in the cover-up, but whose help and support he still needs. Nine months. That's how long it takes from conception to birth to produce a human infant. Leo is going to make this happen in 29 hours. He's been spending the last several days methodically harvesting carbon from anywhere he can get it - compost, recyclables, broken pencils from Halcyon High South. Now is the final push. For the Gales, it's a simple task: "look at these blueprints, take these pieces, and plug a whole lot of them together really fast." The hard part is the core, the internal engineering. The digestive system is the second most complicated system in the human body, next to the brain itself. Evolution has left human beings with twin engines - figure out where to go get fed, and then do so. Leo dredges the local junkyards, grabs a welding torch, and starts smelting. Mouth - tongue - taste buds - really a lab on a chip. The molecular lathe can produce VLSI circuits in minutes, so Leo concentrates on the brute mechanical parts. A hydrophobic tract, despite Pneuma's complaints, is still the best way he knows to build an alimentary canal. Stomach, digestive enzymes, a series of Casimir fractals for power, nano-yarn for core muscles, a spine could support the weight of a T-72 tank even without reinforcement - everything has to fit together just so, so there's no reason not to assemble it now. Carbon tetrahedra surround the core, packed into a pattern that makes no sense outside of Leo's head, yet makes the whole an unbreakable colossus. Leo left a gap in Pneuma's shell where humans have their digestive tract. He thinks of it as an expansion slot, or an after-market modification opportunity, and he still to this day doesn't know quite what she did with it. This shell is going to need every cubic centimeter of that space, and a few other things might have to go too. He'll figure it out. He welds a superstructure together out of scrap metal, starts hanging pieces off of it, and lets the integrative carbon buckytubes heal together naturally when it's all ready to go. It's like building a 1:1 scale SpruKit, but far more advanced. The limbs are just muscle, skeleton, and flexible conduits for coolant, ionized neural fluid, and power distribution, so he saves them for later, when he's slightly less awake and can afford to mess up and redo some work. The final product is a carbon skeleton, like a T-800, with layers and layers of programmable epidermis modules. The recipient will be able to adjust the shell's height, build, posture, and other parameters, then apply the skin and pigment it as desired. On some hypothetical scale of feminine attractiveness, Pneuma sits at "eye-catching", somewhere between "pretty" and" beautiful". She achieves this through subtraction. Human skin is shaded organically, with variations and imperfections; her's isn't the bland sameness of a mannequin, but a smoothly hypnotic gradient. Her eyes, ears, nose, and other features are symmetrical, but not mirror-same. There's a soft-focus, unfinished quality that lets the viewer project their ideal of beauty. Like the girl herself, the face is on a journey of self-discovery. Leo is sort of curious what similar novelty Numina will bring to her shell when it comes time to assemble it. The whole thing should take her less than 90 minutes, and Leo has built enough spare parts and extra modules that she can play around more if desired. It should be mostly familiar to her - Pneuma built her own body, and Numina remembers that experience too. There's one big difference. At the core of this shell, with a hatch built for easy access, is a recessed chamber where a levitating egg-shaped pod can dock or detach. There's power leads to recharge the pod, connectors for the nervous system, and more. The carbon-allotrope shell isn't a replacement for the body Numina has now. It's an accessory. And it's a statement. It's your body. I just equip it. If you and Jason want to keep working on this new thing, I won't stop you. I don't agree with it, but that's not my business. This is the only way I know to support you. And there are no strings attached.
