Half The Man I Once Was

The human body is a miracle of nature as any scientist can attest, yet to John's dismay this miracle was working against him. Electrical signals bombarded his brain, constantly being interrupted and restarted, causing their numbers to multiply. Naturally these signals were pain dragging John, kicking and screaming, from the bliss of unconscious to the present nightmare as his body broke down one cell at a time like a lit fuse burning out.

The scientists looked on with grim complexions as they ignored his heart wrenching screams as best they could by relying on the fact, that the second the cube touched him he was already assuredly dead. A perhaps fitting twist was that they were forced to listen to his dying screams, as the audio was potentially just as important for discovery as the gruesome scene, allowing John some form of payback to them, though he was in no shape to notice this fact, let alone revel in it.

Slowly the audiences faces changed from distaste to shock and horror as John's form changed, not the brutal reduction into oblivion they had come to expect, but what truly shocked them was that something of John was still there.

John had official become a freak of nature, a scientific anomaly, an outlier but fortunately not a corpse. He lay there separated from the cube by the space where his foot used to be, from the ankle up was where science left the room and took a long vacation.

Particles of flesh, bones and other anatomy were like grain of sand, floating in space where his leg was, it was like a picture of John had been destroyed and flecks of him were left as they should have been. As their gaze traveled up his leg, the grains turned into patches of porous flesh where most of John could be made out, by the waist and above his body looked like a photograph dirtied with red sand showing where skin had disappeared and muscle was showing through.

His other leg strangely acted in opposition to the first, rather than disintegrating, it became more complete the further it developed from the waist, remaining perfectly natural and seemingly untouched from the ankle down.

While the scientists remained in a stupor or state of awe, the gurney retracted away from the cube as the infinity stone was sealed away. This small change caused even more shock to the room as the particles of John floating freely in space acted like they were still attached and moved with the gurney and the rest of John, staying perfectly in place of where they anatomically should be regardless of the laws of gravity and physics they were defying.

Sadly for John although he remained unconscious after the transformation ended, scientific discovery was an unstoppable force and those in attendance had no thoughts of dragging their feet in front of this miracle. After checking the patient's condition and making sure he remained stable and sedated the group focused on the initial contact point, his foot. Naturally the scientists had their initial thoughts with invisibility and optical camouflage being the most common as it would explain the floating particles being normal cells, still supported by other flesh that they just couldn't see, but as their instruments reached where his invisible foot should be they met no resistance. Moving up as they assumed the foot had been destroyed they again felt nothing all the way up till the first flesh particle where they met major resistance, even for pencil pushers they should be effortlessly able to move anything the size of a grain of sand but apart from some slight give the particle remained steady, even returning to its original position once the force was removed, like skin bending to the touch yet springing back into place. Further examination proved that the particles truly were fixed in space with no support even moving in sync with John's whole body and moving his body in turn from contact with the particles themselves, even developing bruising just as normal skin would.

Many hours of research went on as John faded from torturous existence to chemically induced sleep, even under heavy anesthesia John's waking moments were filled with pain, leaving him uncooperative and better left quiet as the scientists had their hands full studying his body alone.

The largest breakthrough was in fact the cure to John's agony. It was discovered that John wasn't missing any parts of himself, as strange as that is to say about a man with more holes in him than swiss cheese. He still had all his body parts, they simply weren't in one place. The missing pieces were God knows where, from what they could gather they were experiencing horrible conditions by judging from the samples they recovered, and the cube somehow created a connection across space between them. It seems John would subconsciously move particles of his body between the mass of his body in the lab and the 'other mass' whos location was unknown for now. These shifting atoms were the scientists' clues to his other mass, showing it came from an arid, cold and slightly toxic environment, also showing abrasions on all samples which all pointed towards a hostile environment.

John was both treated like a lab rat and a treasure as the scientist of S.H.I.E.L.D spent months pouring over every aspect of his body, history, ancestry and more to find out why he was so different to all the subjects before and after him, that John could have every aspect of his new body explained to him in the finest detail once he woke up, sane and long enough to hear it that is.