It pressed on him. The need to return to memories, refining them to perfection when the agent in his head would never provide a perfectly clear image. He knew from those memories that he’d intentionally designed the system so he could only break the loop when he was ‘himself’ enough to figure out an escape.

Until then, a kind of torture.

He had other projects in the works, cobbled together from pieces of confiscated PRT tech in this emergency bunker. As he succumbed to the imperative, dropping what he was doing to head to the station, to inject the needle and set up the emotional state that put him closest to his agent, he left a burner on. A chemical burned.

Cortisol steadily cranked up, and his knowledge of what was coming made the stress worse. Even the limiters that were supposed to adapt the incoming dosage to his current stress levels weren’t doing a lot to help.

He was mainlining stress while watching bubbles rise to the surface with an increasing intensity.

The glass detonated, and the contents sprayed across the room. It aerosolized, and he inhaled it.

Twenty breaths.

The drug found its way into his system. His cells multiplied, and they multiplied with a design in mind. Other DNA took over his DNA, and with the change, the tinker knowledge dropped away.

He’d needed to make himself strong, and he’d needed to make himself angry. Angry enough that it overrode the lesser imperatives. Not so angry that it overrode the first imperative.

Muscles expanded, and skin stretched. His hands became more like hooves as the fingers cloyed together. His face, too, changed.

With fists, he destroyed. His face was a blunt object as much as his hands were, and his body was simply muscle, and a vehicle for allowing him to smash.

Computer screens, the looped recordings. Terminals. Armor that he’d repurposed to scan body parts. He destroyed, changed further as he drew in breath, panting, and destroyed more.

It was meditative, even freeing.

It was even more freeing as the effect faded, roughly twenty minutes in. He gradually took his juvenile form again. The machine was broken, the equipment lost, and even with his memories mostly intact, he’d had no idea if the imperative would still be in effect. Would he be forced to build and rebuild endlessly?

He felt for it, and he felt nothing. The only feeling was the pain from the spots all across his body where glass had dug in. The change had helped to heal, but only partially.

Maybe when he was looking for artistic inspiration, he would do something similar to this form. No need to tie things down, but if he was going to pretend to be a changer, it would be best to appear like someone who didn’t have all of the choices in the world.