Nico smirked when Max mentioned his genome but shrugged.
"My knowledge in the field isn't all that great. I only learned the parts that were relevant to modifying myself."
That was clearly obfuscation and not even a good attempt at it, but Max was too engrossed in what he had found to call her out on her lies right now.
"Well, from what I see here, the basic human genome is all still there, but it has been augmented with samples from what looks like another species. It's not one that I am familiar with, but it looks like the Demon Droids that you made in our last lifetime, those modified sex bots that could procreate with nearly anything that walked and assimilated the best of their genetic material.
This modification is a rapidly adaptive one, designed to help the body adapt to new conditions, much like your Demon Droids or the early human settlers who hadn't mastered terraforming used on themselves.
It's fascinating, and it looks like it has picked up some sort of biomechanical coding that caused the major changes in my body as soon as the System realized that they would be an improvement." Max explained.
Nico didn't look even a little bit shocked as she pulled up more data on his genome, then brought out an unfamiliar data set, and a standard human set, then hundreds of smaller screens of data that appeared to be other species.
"These are you, the baseline human genome, my Droids, and a collection of species that we have met along the way.
By looking through these, we can see what your body has picked up and isolate the various genes that have been changed, what their impact on your body has been, and what you can expect in the future." Nico explained.
The news that Nico had the code for her Demon Droids was very concerning. She had created an army of android pilots who weren't truly sentient, but if the coding for the Demon Droids was introduced, they very quickly would be.
The code was adaptive, so they would change with everything they touched until they were fully optimized and could be considered proper living beings. That was what had happened to the original group, and it had been chaos across a hundred galaxies as the sex bots rose up to demand sentient rights and began killing their former owners.
"You had the code for your Droids?" He asked.
"Yeah, I remembered it a while back. I just didn't think it was a good idea to introduce it to the Android pilots and especially not to Felicity. Can you imagine what a traumatized research station AI would do with the ability to adapt itself and become a fully living being? She already likes creating monsters for entertainment and learning."
Well, at least Nico had some sort of moral compass about how she distributed her knowledge.
"I'm glad to see that you learned something from your past life that wasn't killing-related." Max joked.
"Oh, this was killing-related. They were really hard to put down when they got out of hand and started to turn against all other living things. I ended up having to introduce new genetic coding to reduce their aggression." Nico laughed.
Go figure.
Max looked over the changes to his genome for a while, making sure that they should be stable and not lead him to some dead end of evolution or a misshapen monstrosity of conflicting codes, but it seemed that the introduced elements were all being compared against the existing elements by the System's Nanobots and could only take root if the System deemed that they were essential to improving Max's capabilities as a human soldier.
Because when he looked over the samples from the other species they met, he found bits and pieces through his own genetic code, but it had all been altered with segments of his original genetic code to make the new parts more compatible with humanity.
"You know, your body really is interesting. I've never even considered some of these changes, but if we could isolate them and give them as a vaccine-type injection to new Pilots, I think that we could rapidly increase the capabilities of the entire Reaver Fleet."
Max shook his head at Nico's suggestion.
"Do you really think that the System would approve of you trying to make the Reavers less human? It has allowed it for us because it was deemed necessary at the time, and no other option was available, but for young Pilots, the System would wipe it out before it ever took hold, and who knows what it would do to Pilots without the System's Nanobots to regulate it." Max chastised her.
"You really do eliminate all the fun options first, don't you? But I have some good news after reviewing all this data. I have a theoretical performance chart for your physical body, and there are some unexpected results."
Nico sent the data to Max, and he compiled it using her skill, then compared it to where he knew that he was before the upgrade. It looked like his bone strength had increased by nearly triple, while his skin had become over twenty times harder to damage. His muscles and blood veins had received a similar increase, so even if the gravity control failed in the Mecha, he shouldn't have a problem sustaining G forces upwards of thirty times standard without ruptures or passing out.
It was when he got to the final segment of the data that Max had to stop and read the heading twice.
[Predicted Future Upgrades to Allow Procreation]
"Nico, are you saying that I have become infertile due to the changes to my body?" He asked before diving into those three hundred pages of information.
"Well, yes and no. Technically you are perfectly capable of procreating with a human female and creating superhuman children."
"There is a caveat in there. Go ahead and spit it out." Max sighed.
"Well, if you try, I will definitely make you infertile. Preferably using brute force. So I included a list of future upgrades that will be necessary on both of our parts to make my mother's dreams come true."
Max quickly read through the data and did his best not to laugh when he found that Nico's stated optimal method for reproduction was a fertilized hard-shell egg that could be gestated remotely. She really did plan to lay an egg and give it to her mother to hatch as a grandchild, as far as Max could tell.
"Superhuman children, with biomechanical bodies perfectly tuned to rapid adaptation and survival in the most extreme of environments? Yeah, that actually does sound like what she is after in a grandchild."
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