He spent the next week behind five feet of lead and concrete. The statistics said 2 or three would have been more than enough to shield him from any further tampering with their electronics, but nothing else about this program had gone according to their “statistics”, so they weren’t taking any chances. He shouldn’t have been surprised when they surmised that the blackout was his doing. The entire complex was buried deep underground, and was rated to withstand a direct hit from a 50 megaton nuclear weapon, as well as the resulting emp. Since it was obvious nothing of that sort had happened, the only other option was that the signal had come from inside.

     He only half-regretted forcing them to isolate him. He may not have access to the outside world, and he was still missing most of his body; but this just left him with endless time to explore the ever-expanding space that had become his mind. They had left a small machine beside the operating table, to track the progress he was making. He could’ve shut it down any time he liked, of course. But he found it amusing to watch the lines on the lcd forever climbing before reaching the limits of the display. At which point it would recalibrate and start the cycle again at the bottom. He knew the mistake they had made in their calculations, and why his intelligence had grown so out of control. They expected a linear progression from baseline, slowly climbing to a peak before settling at the limit of what his human brain could handle. Instead it had been more of an exponential increase, first doubling, and then doubling again, and again. He had stopped keeping track of how many times the machine had reset, and was beginning to wonder which would stop first; it or him. As for the ”brain’s limit” theory, that obviously hadn’t happened yet, and no one even hazarded a guess as to why.

   Things continued this way for a while, before they decided they simply couldn’t wait any longer. They flooded the chamber with every human anesthetic in the book, just to be sure. Even he was still subject to the laws of biology, and the hardware inside him couldn’t function without some type of input from his brain. So they donned their biocontainment suits, and checked the cameras one last time to be sure James still lay motionless on the table. Each of them knew it was ridiculous, but they half expected to walk in and find him humming a tune, a mocking grin on his face. But of course this wasn’t possible, and they entered to find him lying on his back, a blank expression on his face and a small puddle of drool on the operating table. If the bio suits had been equipped with speakers, they would’ve each heard a small sigh of relief from their fellow scientists. Now that their theories had been proven correct, they wasted no time wheeling the table into the next room, which had been built specifically for James. The table locked into place in the center, and six mechanical arms hung from the ceiling. Each was outfitted with a different surgical tool, the smallest of which were a pair of scalpels many times thinner than a human hair. They had on staff some of the best surgeons in the world, but none of them could rival the precision of a machine. So it had been decided that human hands would make the first Y incision typical of an autopsy, and the rest would have to be left to the machines. They made quick work of opening his body cavity, cutting from each shoulder to the sternum, and then down all the way to the pelvis.