The Mech Touch

Now that Ves had completed his draft design and considered all of its implications, he proceeded to design his biomech.

He aimed to complete the design process in 40 days, which would certainly be a challenge due to all of the added complexities of the Blood Knight Project.

"If I can finish it in 40 days, then the total cost will amount to 100 Ascension Points at most. I will definitely be able to earn a profit given how much potential is contained within my biomech design."

The end result would undoubtedly be sloppy, but Ves wasn't as strict towards his work as his wife.

Gloriana would definitely blow a fuse if she ended up with a mech design that was filled with obvious flaws and imperfections!

This was why she hated design contests and any other events that forced mech designers to rush their work.

"Luckily, I'm the opposite."

He loved design contests. Even if his current status and trajectory had caused him to turn away from them, he still had enough practice to understand what he should do under these circumstances.

Ves drafted a design schedule and tried to account for any delays related to the more difficult and original design elements.

He was fortunate enough that the Unending Regalia's database happened to contain a lot of generic component designs of both metallic and organic mech parts.

He could select what he needed from this component library and fit them together as if he was designing a conventional mech.

Even though this was the first time he designed a biomech from scratch, he possessed enough of an understanding to know how he could fit disparate organic components into a systematic whole.

It just took a lot of time due to the sheer quantity of parts. Designing a biomech was much like designing a complete living organism.

This was why every biomech designer had to be a biotech expert by definition. Without understanding how human bodies and other living organisms worked on a biological level, it was impossible to design a functional biomech!

Ves felt quite strange during the first days of his work. The selection of suitable and compatible bioparts and the initial attempts to fit them together made him feel as if he was creating a new species of organisms.

"It's like creating my own alien race."

That got him thinking. The fish-whale race was undoubtedly the product of a mad phase whale.

There were many other examples of artificial living species in his life.

Clixie was a Rubarthan Sentinel Cat who was anything but the product of natural evolution.

Though he had never studied her species too closely, Ves was generally aware that her species incorporated a lot of powerful genes from many powerful races.

Now that he had become proficient in biotechnology, Ves understood how brilliant it was to pack so many fantastic genes into an organism the size of an ordinary house cat.

Every organic life form possessed a limit. Geneticists had attempted to formulate more powerful artificial species before by blending together as many genes from other races as possible.

Most of those attempts ended up in failure. The monstrosities that managed to gain the breath of life were often so weak and malformed that there was no value in keeping them alive!

"In fact, Clixie isn't the only artificial organism close to me that has been formulated in a biolab."

Ves couldn't help but think about his children.

He used to think that a company like Witshaw & Yeneca engaged in biological sorcery when it formulated the genes of designer babies.

Their work was so opaque and confusing that Ves always found it difficult to follow the explanations of their geneticists and other specialists!

Yet now that he managed to get started in biotechnology as well genetics, he suddenly understood their work a lot more than before!

When he recalled their previous jargon-filled explanations, Ves found himself able to follow the gist of their analysis and intentions.

Sure, the specific science was still far beyond his level, but he no longer became confused at what his children actually represented!

"Each of them are unique alien species." Ves uttered in a tone that conveyed greater comprehension than before. "They have inherited a fair amount of genes from my original baseline human physique, but much of that is either cosmetic or outright junk. My blood relations with my children aren't as strong as I thought. They have more in common with the aliens who donated their best biological traits to their biological makeup than their own parents!"

It was a horrifying realization!

For a moment, Ves felt deceived. Withshaw & Seneca not only hoodwinked him, but every other customer who sought to commission a designer baby!

Ves could understand the movement that advocated for the prohibition of designer babies a lot more.

While they looked human on the outside, in reality they were almost completely alien on the inside!

It couldn't be helped. Human physiology and human genes were simply too weak and useless. Human traits were not competitive at all as there were always better alternatives available in other species!

One of the few major advantages of baseline humans was that it was cheap and easy for them to reproduce.

That was one of the most important reasons why the human race became so dominant, but it was not a strength to the people at the top.

Those with wealth, power and means wanted more from themselves and their families.

They were willing and able to modify their own genes and that of their offspring in order to obtain greater power!

Each parent was willing to forsake the humanity of their children in order to set them up for greater success in human society.

It was ironic how those very same parents lessened the commonality between themselves and their children.

"Well, it's not as if I'm human myself nowadays."

He was human in mind but not in body. The fact that his outward appearance just happened to match the look of a typical human body was merely a smokescreen on how inhuman his physique had become.

The same applied to his children. They all looked and behaved like adorable human kids, but they were actually unique amalgamated aliens that could never reproduce in a natural manner.

The fact that they all needed to be fed by a specially formulated diet during their growing years was an indication of the severity of how far removed they were from humanity!

Even though Ves comprehended the greater truth behind the monstrous genetic makeup of Aurelia, Andraste and Marvaine, his love for them hadn't changed in the slightest.

"They are still my babies." Ves smiled as his heart warmed when he thought of their smiles.

His children were all human in spirit and not entirely in body. Although every designer baby deviated from normal humans in many aspects, that was the point of their existence.

As long as every alteration made a designer baby smarter, stronger, healthier and more talented, then why should he complain?

He and his wife had asked for these improvements as neither of them were content with having 'normal' children.

Right now, Ves felt as if he was in the process of making another 'child'.

He never felt this way whenever he designed his previous mechs. Their metallic and inorganic construction inherently caused all them to be far removed from humanity.

Even when Ves developed living mechs that became increasingly smarter and more self-aware, he never truly treated them as creating a new child.

This was why he felt a bit disturbed during the initial days of the design session.

The flesh, the bones, the organs and other biological elements made it seem as if he was trying to make a particularly larger version of a designer baby!

It didn't help that Ves deliberately chose to design a biomech that adopted as many human traits as possible.

The more human his biomech became, the more Ves developed unwelcome associations with his own children!

Fortunately, Ves soon snapped out of this weird mindset. He was able to pull himself back before he went too deep.

"It helps a lot that it doesn't exactly look like a human."

The bone exoskeleton, the second head and the four tentacles attached to the back added a distinctly inhuman flair to the mech design.

These elements made it a lot harder for Ves to regard his Blood Knight Project as his own child!

Once he got over this unusual hurdle, the design process became a lot smoother.

He encountered relatively few insurmountable design problems, which was exactly what he was going for when he tried to make his biomech as simple as possible.

Although he had to figure out a lot of new design solutions given that this was the first time he was working on a biomech design, most of the instances amounted to textbook problems that he could easily solve by referencing the knowledge that he learned from a textbook.

Even if he didn't know a particular solution to a problem, he could always go back to his library and find the answer in one of the more advanced textbooks that he hadn't read.

"Designing a biomech is not so difficult now that I think about it." Ves muttered as he reached the halfway point. "As long as I understand how a human body works, then it is easy enough to design a mech that is largely based on the human physique."

The same applied to mechs or bioconstructs based on alien physiques.

For example, Ves at his current level would not be able to make any progress if he worked on the Titan-5 Project.

He had no idea how its alien biomatter worked and how to best harness its properties.

All of that would change once he studied the Titania's former astral beast physique.

As long as he understood how the alien flesh worked, he could manipulate the Titan-5 Project with the same ease as he was currently showing at this moment!

Ves realized that this was the essence of biomech design.

"Designing a biomech is nothing but an attempt to reconstitute the biological building blocks of an existing organism."

There was an element of creation to it, but it played much less of a role than he expected.

There weren't many biomech designers that completely invented a new type of body tissue that consisted of a completely original set of genes.

The workload was too great and it would take multiple years if not decades to complete a mech design in this way!

It was much easier for biomech designers to steal nature's homework and quickly finish their own assignments this way.

As the Blood Knight Project increasingly took shape, Ves had the illusion that he was creating a parody of a human body.

Although he had chosen to base it off the human physique for multiple good reasons, the creator side of him felt a little ashamed at how many shortcuts he had taken.

He understood on an intellectual level that mech designers had nothing to be ashamed about when they made use of other people's works.

Ves did it plenty of times whenever he commissioned a powerful transphasic mech system from companies like Morton Tech and Melmen Advanced Systems.

However, he felt that he could do more when he adopted the same approach to biomech design.

The use of human genes and human biomatter in a biomech might facilitate greater integration with a mech pilot, but Ves believed he could produce even stronger synergies if he increased the contrast.

"If the biomech becomes more inhuman, then there are greater contrasts to work with. The point of a mech has always been to combine the strengths of man and machine while covering up for their weaknesses. There isn't much to work with if the man and machine resemble each other too much."

Ves could consider this another time. Right now, he needed to keep his work as simple as possible, so he was content with basing his Blood Knight Project around highly altered human biomatter.

It wasn't until he began to tackle the more original elements of his biomech design that his progress slowed down.

He completed most of the routine design work by this time, but his experimental blood sharing system was anything but standard!

"Try finding something like this in a textbook!"