Sixty One

In his heart, Fyndraxis felt like Blazer. He was beginning to understand the why of his existence. He wanted to help humanity and give it a leg up in this world. He was sent forward through time to try to bring humanity back from the brink of extinction. In his soul he was Blazer. His body on the other hand, was distictly Action 52.
He spent a couple of minutes trying to get used to his body. This was a frustrating process that involved a fair amount of tripping, stumbling, and falling down. A few times he even managed to pull off a maneuver that used to be called a standing digger in his day. The term was usually applied to drunks who had lost control over their inner ear and fell down for very little to no reason.
What he was facing was a problem of feedback. Humans come equipped with some rather state of the art hardware. They can sense fluctuations in the electromagnetic field, perform chemical analysis on the quantum scale, and sense changes in atmospheric pressure so precisely that your average person can tell if a guitar is a bit out of tune from about a kilometer away. This is all thanks to the biggest open source project of all time. Life.
Life has had almost four billion years of development on this project. There have been many forks and merges along the way. New features are constantly being tried out and bugs are vanquished with brutal efficiency. You, yourself, are the owner of the very latest build available.
At the moment of conception, we all hit the download button on something that is referred to in the open source community as the nightlies. These are bleeding edge untested builds of a piece of software that are released on a nightly basis. In the software community they are typically used for testing purposes, in our case, we are stuck with a nightly build for our entire life and are forced to run what we brung.
One of the greatest features that life has released in the past couple of billion years is something called proprioception. This is a technique that our nervous system applies to let our brain know where our body is in space. It is the reason you can touch your nose when your eyes are closed. Moreover, it is the reason you can touch your nose in the first place.
What Fyndraxis was trying to do was pilot his new body without the benefit of nearly four billion years of software updates. He had only spent a couple of weeks on the project and its shortcomings were woefully apparent. You could get a pretty good idea of what he was dealing with by sitting on your hand for about half an hour and then trying to write your name. His entire body was functionally asleep.
In his pocket universe, the angle at which Fyndraxis’ ankle has to be at at any given time is not something that is given a great deal of importance. He can walk around doing spectacular things and his internal simulation just kind of works it out with methodologies like inverse kinematics. The simulation knows where the ground is and knows where the foot should be and the individual joint angles are inconsequential. In the real world, he has no idea where the ground is, where his foot is in space, the condition of his knees and hips, all the way up to the top of his head. There is a fundamental lack of data.
Nanomancer knows where all of the hunters are that make up his body, but plugging that data into where his central nervous system used to be is a challenge that is orders of magnitude above his pay grade. In other words, his new body is straight hot unusable garbage.
Bird’s armor on the other hand is a thing of beauty. All the hunters need to do is grab on to her and hold on for dear life. The calculus of proprioception is handled by her state of the art bleeding edge central nervous system.
“Man, I’m sorry Fyn,” Bird said in consolation after Fyndraxis tried to pick himself up out of the dirt for the dozenth time, “I know how much you wanted this to work. Don’t worry though, I’ll still lug you around.”
“Well, I do have a backup plan,” He fired up Nanomancer and told the hunters that had been making his body to stop what they were doing and form around him in a sphere instead. Being a sphere was a pretty decent way to get around. In this shape he couldn’t fall down or trip because he didn’t know where his legs were. He could also roll around. He had them make sure that he was always upright, so the sphere always had a sword hilt stick out of the top of it. This made it so that he could tell where he was going, and also Bird could draw him if she chose to.
“What do you think?” He asked.
“Efficient, I like it,” She tried to sound enthusiastic for him.
“Well, it’s what I’ve got,” he sighed, “ listen, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something now that we’re all geared up.”
“Yeah? What’s that?” She asked.
“I think that if we are going to go and kick some Cannibal ass, I would like to take point on the next mission.”
“Oh yeah? What are you going to do, roll them to death?” She raised an eyebrow.
“I have something in mind that might surprise you. I want to give them a taste of their own medicine, and steal their shit.”
“They don’t have all that much,” the formerly raised eyebrow busied itself in a brief furrowing.
“They have everything I need,” he enjoyed a private joke.