Turing felt his world utterly crushed in an instant.
As his consciousness barely struggled back to the surface through the indescribable agony and shock that had sent him flying, his remaining senses delivered a cold fact.
Just now, it had felt as though a miniature, savage planet had struck him head-on along a trajectory of destruction.
Every inch of bone, whether naturally resilient or reinforced and replaced later, groaned in protest. More than half had suffered unmistakable, shattering fractures.
His organs churned and compressed within his chest. Scalding, salty blood poured from his biological mouth and nose, while coolant mixed with lubricant hissed from ruptured lines in his mechanical parts.
Most of the systems inside his body were offline. Only the most basic life-support units still clung to operation.
He lay among the cold soil and gravel of what seemed to be a garden. His vision swam with blurred double images, and a piercing whine filled his ears, as though it came from the distant void.
Every attempt to breathe felt like countless red-hot, blunt knives scraping his lungs.
Yet something fiercer and more destructive than the agony of his body on the verge of disintegration erupted from the deepest reaches of his consciousness—a torrent bursting from beneath the ruins of memories sealed behind layer upon layer of locks, meticulously altered, or even completely overwritten.
An infant...
Falling...
Cold, smooth silver tentacles, bearing the temperature of something lifeless, surged from every direction like living metal pythons, wrapping around him, coiling about him, dragging him into absolute darkness and silence...
Shadowless surgical lights so dazzling they seared his soul...
His body strapped to a cold platform from which he could not escape...
Precise, utterly emotionless mechanical arms, equipped with high-frequency cutting blades and energy probes, carefully and methodically dissected his young