Trace was left with a lot to think about when the two menders finally left the warehouse, granting him and Deckard some peace. He was sure there was more they weren’t telling him —or rather, that Sevorah wasn’t telling him. At the moment, he just didn’t have the mental capacity to care.

  The entire session had been dropped on him out of the blue and had been profoundly mentally draining. All he wanted to do was forget the last couple of hours had even happened and head back down to the basement to start working on the present Sevorah had left for them. Which was somewhat of an oxymoron if he thought about it too hard, so he wasn’t going to.

  A while back, he had given her a couple of samples of the things they had encountered living in the underfloors of the city. Namely, a claw and some hair, both of which had special properties.

  She had spent her off-time researching the material and watching as it weakened and became brittle. That seemingly innocuous act had been what set her on the path to discovering how to make more of the material. She still had no real idea why it worked the way it did, but once she figured out the first -rather glaringly obvious- step, the others began to fall into place.

  The hair and nails were alive. She had been treating them as a dead material, like actual metal or synthetic-skin. Even though they exhibited the traits of metal or incredibly dense materials, they were still just hair and fingernails, or rather, claws. Once you removed them from the body, the nutrients would naturally begin to seep out of them.

  In other words, these weren’t made; they were grown. All you needed was the knowledge and some material to start everything; well, and the proper material to feed their growth. Both of which Sevorah either had or had access to.

  From there, she had spent some time tweaking and playing around with it. Just seeing what could be changed through environmental factors or material changes. She wasn’t a proper researcher, but this project that had fallen into her lap had ended up providing hours of entertainment in its own way.

  Even now that she had given Trace the information on how to grow it himself, along with a starter sample, she wasn’t done. There were so many possible applications for it that she was incredibly interested in learning more about. Just thinking about the idea of living cyberware was revolutionary; not cloned parts, but cyberware encased in actual living material. Would people still reject it just because it looked different when it was literally a living part of their body?

  The possibilities were there, but she had to be careful. The corporations had wiped out people, shizz, entire neighborhoods for attempting to do less, let alone actually having the capacity to accomplish it. At the moment, there were only five people who knew about what she was working on.

  She, Devko, Trace, Deckard, and Stick-Point. Not even her current mentee, Anna, knew about it, and that was the way it was going to stay for the safety of everyone involved. The fewer who knew, the better.

  Deckard followed him down into the basement and placed the box of materials onto a nearby table. “What are you thinking?”

  “That I’ve been going about building the second stealth suit all wrong,” Trace replied, eyeing the suit in question. “To begin with, the electrical connection substrate would be far more effective if we used graphene instead of copper. If we kept it thin enough, we could even coat most of the suit in a layer of graphene and completely erase any possible response time lag.”

  The android came up beside him and joined him, looking down at the suit. “That… is actually a very good idea. Have you ever heard of powder-coating?”

  Trace shook his head.

  “I don’t believe it is used very much anymore, or at least I wasn’t able to find any mentions of the method when I looked it up just now. Regardless, it involves electrostatically spraying the graphene or other material onto whatever you want to coat, typically a piece of metal, though that isn’t required. The static helps the powder cling to the surface of the item. After it is thoroughly coated, it is stuck in an oven and baked until hard,” Deckard explained, giving him the quick version that skipped all the hard details.

  “If it’s only sprayed on in a powder form, then it certainly would be thin,” Trace muttered, intrigued by the idea. “How hard would it be to implement and set this thing up, including all the details you skipped over?”

  “Most of it will be incredibly easy to procure from the black market and get delivered,” Deckard hedged. “There is one item that might be a problem though. When it is sprayed, it needs to be accompanied by a resin or curing agent of some kind. I’ll have to see what else I can use or substitute it with. There is one other thing you might be interested to know. Graphene has superior heat transfer capability compared to other materials.”

  Trace groaned. That meant his cooling system would automatically become more effective, which was fine. It could be adjusted in the software. The larger issue was how he would appear on any heat sensor.

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  “Thanks, I’ll keep it in mind,” He mumbled, dispirited.

  He really hoped the other modification he had in mind wasn’t going to make things even worse. Sensors of any sort had always been the suit’s weakness, and to be truthful, he hadn’t spent too much time thinking about them either. That didn’t mean he wanted to make the problem worse though.

  Trace wanted to incorporate the dense, mostly bulletproof hair into the suit as well. Really, it was too bad that he didn’t know how to weave.

  Then again, since it was a living material, perhaps he didn’t actually need to go through that sort of effort. Maybe there was another way he could get this to work. If this somewhat bizarre idea worked, then he would need to thank Deckard for getting him that cyberware learning module, yet again.

  Trace moved over to the worktable, pushing aside the few random items lying on it. He needed to make room for the contents of the box Sevorah had given them. Inside were several containers filled with either the hair-like material or a small claw; each was suspended in a nutrient bath. The containers were meticulously labeled with their current variation and growth parameters.

  Deckard watched him through the cameras, already sitting at his own worktable occupied with his project. “What are you thinking now?” He asked, not bothering to look away from what he was doing.

  “Synth-skin integration,” Trace told him. “Sevorah says that this stuff is alive, and considering it has to be grown using nutrients, I was thinking of adding a layer of fine downy-like hair to the suit. It needs to be functional, conductive, but still thin enough for everything else we have going on the suit.”

  "Yeah, synth-skin integration," Trace confirmed. "If this stuff is alive, and Sevorah's notes suggest it continues to grow when provided with the right nutrients, then maybe we could use the same connection methods as cyberware."

  He pulled out the container labeled ‘Sample A3 - High Density / Low Flexibility’ and held it up to the light. The strands inside were darker than the others, almost metallic in appearance despite their organic nature.

  It would give them a starting point to work from. Unsurprisingly, Sevorah hadn’t been worried about or even testing for conductivity during her own experiments.

  "The synth-skin is already designed to connect with living tissue," Trace continued, his mind racing with possibilities. "What if, instead of weaving the hair into a sort of living fabric, we grow it directly onto the framework of the suit? The synth-skin would serve as both a prime nutrient delivery system and a connection network, assuming we can make a version that is properly conductive."

  Deckard finally turned to face him, nodding the entire time. "That's actually rather innovative. Essentially, you'd be creating a hybrid between traditional armor and a living organism."

  "Exactly. The hair's natural properties make it resistant to bullets and impacts, and if we can get it to also be sufficiently conductive, then it can also serve as a functional substrate for the suit proper, which will get painted. If I thought I could paint the hair and just leave it at that, I would, but the camera system would overload trying to accommodate for all those angles.”

  Of course, depending on everything, the suit would probably lose whatever gains it had gotten from the graphene powder-coating, but that was life. It shouldn’t be too bad, and really, this way, the suit would have far more armor than it would have otherwise. That was a good thing. A very good thing.

  Trace set the container down and grabbed a nearby ink-sheet, quickly sketching out a rough diagram before he forgot the overall idea in his head. It was a task made harder by the need to use his left hand instead of his normal right, which was still not responding quite fast enough for such a delicate task.

  “If you’re thinking about introducing graphene into the growth formula, I should warn you that it won’t work. Graphene, even to this day, is still a synthetic material, as it has never been successfully formed through natural means. They are missing the required enzymes that would allow the end product to form a biomolecular corona.”

  “You’ve been reading up on the material?” Trace joked, looking over at him.

  The android nodded. “It seemed prudent, considering the DMLS now lets us use the material. It has some incredibly useful properties. I’m surprised that it isn’t being used for the construction of more items. The cost of producing the powder is relatively cheap.” Deckard sighed. “However, it is still a synthetic material, so it will always be more expensive than other materials. No matter how good the process becomes.”

  Trace spun the pen for the ink-sheet in his hand, thinking. “You said that introducing the material to the growth formula wouldn’t work because it’s never been naturally formed. However, in this case, that doesn’t matter, since the graphene is already here; we just need it to integrate with the existing biological component. Would that work?”

  Deckard hesitated and then agreed. “That is possible, though it is impossible to say how strong the final product would be until we attempt it. Such things have been done before, with limited success. The hair would gain some conductivity from the material, but it won’t be creating nanotubes,” He clarified, making sure to temper Trace’s expectations.

  “Alright, well, we haven’t committed to anything yet, so let’s just do our own experiments. We can include the powder, silver, and some copper as well in different formulas.” Trace sighed. “I’ll create some spacers and work around it for now so the new suit can be used in the meantime.”

  Trace tapped the edge of the ink-sheet thoughtfully. “Let me take a few minutes to go over Sevorah's notes before we start messing with any of this. There is a difference between theoretical and what someone else has already covered, after all.”

  He pulled up Sevorah's research and began scrolling through it, looking for anything that might help. Most of it was beyond his understanding—detailed biochemical analyses and growth medium formulations—but he found what he was looking for near the end.

  "Here," He said, highlighting a section. "She already tried doing some of what we want to do by growing it on various substrates. Her notes mention that the synthetic-skin worked best, which makes sense since, as I already said, they're designed to bond with organic tissue."

  This was getting a lot more complex than either of them had initially thought a relatively simple upgrade would be.

  Trace rubbed his temple. The upgrade to his NetConnect was still in progress, and the slight warmth at the base of his skull was gradually increasing. What had begun as a mild discomfort was now a persistent reminder of the revelations about his past and the experiments that had been conducted on him.

  Thank you to all the people who have taken the time to rate the story and to my latest Patrons! I have other stories up on my Patreon, including my current WIPs. Which are now Created G.H.O.S.T. System(My Cyberpunk story), WetWorks2, plus The Restaurateur and His Daughter and DungeonFall. :)

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