Keech surveyed his little island of black stone and thought that there shouldn’t be room here for Frane, Rimsc, and the rest. He ignored their acid observations, got himself back on his feet and staggered to the back of his scooter. Once away from it again, now with the cleanser clutched to him like a valued child, he went down on his knees again, on the stone. If what he did next finished him here, then it seemed a dramatic enough place for him to exit. He pulled open his burned and soaking overalls to expose the four supposedly killing holes through his body. There was also a deep burn across the metal shell on his side, but luckily the two cleansing sockets were undamaged. He plugged the unit in and was totally unsurprised at the row of red lights that greeted him. Of course, now, they were irrelevant. He offered a half-hearted prayer to Anubis Arisen and pulled the lozenge of metal from the chain around his neck. After detaching the chain from the end of the lozenge, he stared for a long moment at this lump of golden metal.

‘Do I believe in miracles?’ he asked the watching crowd, his mind straying back to Erlin’s derisory comments on such things.

The replies were as varied as he could imagine, and he knew they would only be that - what he could imagine - as he still had enough faculties to distinguish hallucination from reality. Now he had to act quickly before he lost the ability to make that distinction. Now he had to act before he lost what remained of his organic brain. He reached down and affixed the lozenge into the recess made for it in the top of the unit. The lozenge clamped down, then immediately grew thin metal tubes from all round its rim, and these tubes mated with tiny sockets in the cleanser.

INITIATE CHANGER NANOFACTORY UNIT, he sent through his aug, then swayed back and watched the tubes. Black balm flooded out of him, and what came back was completely clear. It would not be empty though, definitely not that. He closed his eye, and waited. He could feel nothing as the cleanser pumped millions of microscopic factories around with the embalming fluid in his vascular system. Inside him he imagined them attaching themselves to the walls of his veins like little volcanoes, little volcanoes that in moments would each be spewing out millions of nanomachines, machines that might eventually enable him to live again.

The warning messages were coming up constantly, until he instructed his aug to turn them off. The system that had been monitoring his body was a system for monitoring the stasis of a dead thing. But now the changer factory program was taking over.