Curious, Oscar groped my new “skin” with four of his suckers.

“It’s for warmth, pal. Sort of like your hair, only with a fashion statement.”

We continued down the corridor, arriving at the cryogenic chamber, the only suite whose doors remained sealed. The override switch was located inside a master control panel on an adjacent wall. Suctioning the locked security cover, Oscar tore it from its hinges, allowing me to access the override.

With a squeal of rubber the seal parted, Oscar wrenching open the double doors.

Unlike the rest of Oceanus, the interior was well ventilated and chilled. I advanced slowly through the darkened chamber, my eyes unable to pick a trail through the unrecognizable shadows.

ABE, guide me to the emergency lights.

Feeling my way to an interior panel, I flipped a series of circuit breakers, igniting sparks. Above my head, two crimson emergency lights flickered to life from a row of ten—revealing a dramatically altered interior.

“GOLEM … what have you done?”

To describe the chamber and adjoining surgical suite as having been “transformed” would be an understatement, for the surroundings I stood in now had been rendered unrecognizable by its creator, who was nowhere in sight.

The ceiling that had separated the mid-deck from the upper level had been torn out and gutted in order to fabricate a new appendage—a monstrous multi-metal and graphite five-fingered extremity, each four-jointed digit in excess of fifteen feet long. The artificial hand hung inverted and limp from the upper deck’s steel support beams, its tendons composed of pistons, its blood vessels aero gel flex tubing filled with hydraulic fluid and sintered tungsten carbide balls. As fluid pushed the weighted balls through different sections of the arm’s tubing, the redistribution of weight and pressure allowed GOLEM to open and close the massive claw.

Judging from the cobwebs and layers of dust, it had been eons since the appendage had been operational. The source of the hydraulic fluid had been GOLEM’s vertical shaft, and the shaft now stood before me, drained of its fluid. Perhaps a leak had sprouted from one of the claw’s major arteries, bleeding its master to death; perhaps GOLEM had simply suffered a major systems failure. Either way, some time after completing the abomination of technology before me, my creation had been condemned to its final resting place at the bottom of the shaft.

Curious, I pressed my face to the tube and looked down, but it was far too dark and there was no angle to see anything.