Jord felt the familiar horror.
When you were fitted with the conduits for optics and audios, you lost all contact with reality. You became a consciousness in nothing. His great fear at this time was of falling. He seemed to fall for eons until the mechanics with steel hands slid him into his machine and, bit by bit, his body returned.
Fingers, hands, wrists, arms, feet, legs, shoulders, back, neck, jaw, cheeks, nose, eyes—
His cranial optics slid from their sockets within the blue steel skin of his head, and he looked down to the floor of the cavern, seventy feet below.
"Check motion!"
He moved in the ritual ballet. Seventy feet and 140 tons of steel and glass, copper and nickel, silver and plastic, and a man buried deep inside.
The ultimate machine. The ultimate extension of a man.
A ton of fist opened and closed, moved with effortless grace and fell to his side with enough power to crush a block of granite. His atomic muscles turned silently when he walked. His legs of flesh commanding legs of steel. He could walk two hundred miles an hour or run five times that fast. He could thread a needle with his fingers, or rip through a mountain.
"Check respirators."
"Check."