The Chronicles of Inthandonia, Part 4: The Wizard Wars Corpuscles of War Smeckter believed the Skrell ship was fighting back on the psychic and the physical level - in fact the apparent psychic attack was not focussed at him at all - it was simply the depth of madness to which the vast Artificial Intelligences had descended.  The result was a continual tempest of mad thoughts, giggling loops of insanity and crazy strings of inference and twisted meaning.  This hurricane of horror was just a normal day about the Skrell ship. Unknown to Smeckter however, with the crazy cunning of madness and unhinged genius, the Skrellian ship was covertly counter-attacking him at the cellular level. Every breath he took imported yet more swarms of airborne nanocites.  Soon his bloodstream was teeming with millions of tiny nano-machines - each housing a ranked series of tiny quantum computing processing cores.  The potential computing power and memory of any single one of these nanobots was comparable to the mind and memory of the wizard himself - his body was riddled with millions of microscopic machine intelligences that analysed the organic makeup of Smeckter's physical body. Networked together these millions of self aware nanites soon figured out Smeckters biological make-up down to the genetic level. It was as if he carried the combined minds of every man woman and child, and the knowledge of every book in every library on Inthandonia within the confines of his own body. He experienced a brief moment of incandescent awareness, of almost god-like knowing and supreme consciousness as the nano-net came online and effortlessly breached his mind's defences. Then, without warning the nano network simply took over all of his bodily functions. All voluntary and autonomic physical processes were disconnected from Smeckter's control - his awareness retreated to an inner redoubt in his mind as his body was simply taken away from him. The nano-net told his body what to do - when to breathe, how to walk, where to go.  With his inner self hiding behind his last walls of self defence, Smeckter watched from within himself in rising horror as his body, trailing a retinue of mechanoid creatures behind him, was effortlessly compelled to move deeper into the bowels of the Skrellian ship. ()()()()()()()()() All my own work here. For more of the story please visit www.wizitch.com