Pain in the frontal lobe had a very specific signed name. It wasn’t the dull, muscular ache of an over-taxed shoulder, nor was it the sharp, electric needle of a torn tendon. It felt like hot solder poured directly into the groove between the two brain hemispheres, with the distinct taste of copper pennies at the back of the palate.
Arthur Vance blinked hard, his right hand coming up to wipe his upper lip. He drew his glove away. Then, the dark brown leather was slick with a smear of bright blood crimson.
“Eighty-two percent,” he whispered. His teeth felt loose in their gums, an illusion caused by the sympathetic dilation of the trigeminal artery. “Hold steady, Vance. You’ve operated under worse.”
He raised his left hand to touch the side of his neck, pressing two gloved fingers into the neck-artery triangle. His heart was hammering at one hundred and forty beats per minute—not from physical hard effort, but from the huge body-energy demand of hosting five divine consciousnesses within a single human main spine nerve. At the neck-chest junction between his C7 and T1 spine bones, the soul-palace nexus felt like a blazing bright coal pressed between his shoulder blades. Subjecting a human central nervous system to four thousand units of raw aetheric flux was classified as an end-post acute encephalopathy. Brain cells began to suffer from calcium-ion cascade failures within minutes unless the body-energy waste heat was vented.
