His dreams were a case in point. Every single night he had to recharge himself, involuntarily yielding to the mercies of sleep and his subconscious. Kyle wanted to be able to shut his body down himself, as a computer does, or go to standby mode like a TV. Re-energise his body and mind without completely going under. Sure, he’d practised entering a coma-like state by reducing his heartbeat—virtually dead to the casual observer—but it was hardly the same thing. It took all of his energy to perform, to dig himself out of the blackness and wake again. He usually needed a good night’s sleep just to get over it.
By his account this was systematic of the same problem. His body was doing things like this all the time without his permission, without his cognisance or authority. Each time he drank his water or ate his chemical-less food, his body took over. He could do things to help the digestion processes along—stimulating the major reflex points for one—but in the end it passed through him without so much as a by your leave. A please or thank you. The same was true of electrical impulses from his brain. He could tell his hand or his arm or his leg to move, and this would happen almost instantaneously, a fraction of a second between thought and action. But this still made him a puppet, working his own body with strings. He wanted to be those strings. To have direct access to the puppet; and not have to communicate through a third party.
It was a ridiculous idea, he told himself. No one in the history of all creation had ever achieved anything like it. But isn’t that what people had said about flight? Couldn’t be done, no way. If man had been meant to fly, he would have been born with wings. Kyle had already come so far, already achieved so much. To a Stone Age man crawling around in the dirt, the feats he could perform might seem like magic. Jesus, it seemed like magic to most people he knew today.
But that would be nothing compared to holding total sway over his substance. Matter and spirit in absolute unison: there was no telling where it would end. He could even be the next stage in human evolution. Just imagine it! Imagine what he could accomplish ...
With this in mind he determined to at least try. His businesses were being run by competent managers, his stocks and shares in capable hands. His girlfriends would be left disappointed for a while—however long it took—but that couldn’t be helped. His parents hardly saw him these days anyway, now he’d tucked them away in a nice “little” naturist complex, and wouldn’t miss him all that much.
So, a few weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday, in the middle of August, Kyle set off on his journey of discovery without telling a soul where he was going. He knew of the perfect place. A retreat he’d used before when he’d needed to get away from it all. Quiet, tranquil, miles from any hint of civilisation. The best way to concentrate. He took with him no supplies. There was a clear spring that ran nearby and as far as victuals went, he intended to live off the land as much as was humanly possible: just as the primitives had done—he was conscious of the irony. Fruit from the trees, animal meat in the traps he laid; it would suffice at the rate he consumed food.
His birthday came and went. Kyle barely noted the date (soon he would be born again anyway). Time seemed to stand still for him out here as he laboured day in, day out. Attempting to wrestle control of his body from nature itself. He wanted out of the loop, to be completely autonomous. An arbitrary entity disconnected from the rest of his race, from the rest of his world.
Kyle thought about none of this, though. Not the past, not the future. Not even who he was. His mind was engaged in a battle for supremacy.
And today he was about to win.
It happened so quickly, it took Kyle a little by surprise. One second everything was how it had been since his birth, the next it was as if nature had suddenly said: “Okay, you want it so badly, you got it!” and given up the ghost. Just like that.
A good thing Kyle was ready. Prepared. How could he not have been after all this waiting, all this fighting? He took on the mantle with glee, filling the emptiness practically straight away.
He was in total control now, and it was fantastic. He could feel the rhythms of his body like never before. He could do anything he wanted. Could be anything he wanted ...
But wait, he had items to attend to first. Using the information he’d picked up about his body from textbooks and encyclopaedias, he began to take over the many necessary functions he must perform in order to survive. First he had to tap into the labyrinthine network that sent messages to his brain—take stock of the hundred million neurones in there, the branches of each one connecting to thousands of others in kind. Like an old-fashioned telephone operator, he must plug in lines here, then switch to there. Kyle had to get the nervous system up and running again in order to receive messages from around the body and dish out his own instructions manually, firing electrical pulses along the neurones at four-hundred kilometres an hour. Within seconds he was getting reports from a multitude of different locations at once. Kyle had to deal with them all, and fast.
Best to start with the heart and lungs initially. Keep the heart beating to stay alive and the lungs pumping air in and out. Kyle had to maintain a rhythm of at least sixty to eighty beats of his heart muscle a minute whilst in this state (the figure would go up eventually when he moved). Each beat had to start off in a small knot of tissue—the sinoatrial node—in the rear wall of the upper-right atrium, which generated low-intensity electrical signals that passed along nerve-like tracts, stimulating muscle fibres as they went, to end up at the bottom of the right atrium—the atrioventricular node, located between the atria and ventricles. After delaying the impulse slightly, Kyle then had to relay the signals along a bulky conducting tract, the bundle of His, and through its left and right branches to splinter again into a tangle of fibres in the walls of the ventricles. Once each surge of electrical energy from the sinoatrial node arrived at these muscle fibres they contracted, causing the heart to pump blood—through hundreds of miles of linked arteries, veins and capillaries, eight to nine pints shunted around the body each minute, seventy-five millilitres a beat, carrying oxygen and nutrients to Kyle’s tissues and removing any waste products. Kyle had to keep the blood flowing to his heart to supply the cardiac muscle with the oxygen and glucose needed to remove waste products from there. In addition, he had to constantly create new blood cells to replace those that were dying off (on average two hundred billion each day). No blood, no blood flow to the heart.
At the same time it was necessary to supervise the extraction of oxygen from the air, sucked in through his nose and mouth. Inside his ribcage, he had to direct his sponge-like lungs to remove the oxygen so it could be transferred into his blood supply, the superfluous carbon dioxide taken from the blood to be expelled when he breathed out again: a process usually handled automatically by his nervous system. Each time he inhaled, Kyle followed the air down the trachea, kept open by cartilage rings, heating it as it went. He then ushered it down either the left or right bronchus, before pushing it into one of his lungs. And, of course, he had to keep the inner lining of his pulmonary system moistened with secretions of mucus from epithelial cells, and make certain the cilia moved the said mucus along so it could remove any unwanted dust particles that had accidentally found their way into his lungs when he took a breath. But that wasn’t all. Each time he did take in air, Kyle was obliged to work the muscles in his chest to elevate and distend the ribcage and contract the diaphragm to increase the pleural cavity, so his lungs could work properly in the first place.
Now what? Oh yes, more major work to be done with his digestive system. Although he hadn’t eaten for a few hours or so, his body was still processing the fuel. He had to finish breaking it down using a mixture of enzymes and hydrochloric acid (gastric juice), then the partially digested food (now technically known as chyme) had to be passed carefully through the pylorus sphincter into the upper-portion of the small intestine, the duodenum, where secretions from the pancreas neutralised the acid and bile was added to break down fats. From here the digestion process must continue on into the small and large intestine proper, and nutrients absorbed into the body, the unusable residue being fed into the colon (where most of the water was absorbed into the bloodstream) before passing into the rectum just prior to excretion.
Meanwhile,