When Jack checked his output level, it was 27%. He bridged more through himself, affecting a slightly more facilitating resonance. The cloud became strewn with patterns of gossamer as it thickened. It warbled as he worked, forcing him to go through the motions slowly so as not to lose it. When he reached 40%, the strain was discernible but slight simply to maintain it. Louder, and requiring physicality from him, something like a brisk walk. Doable continuously, unlike getting there through the initial ‘summoning,’ which was more like going upstairs while out of shape.
“Okay,” Lindsay continued, “now you should just play with it. Patterns, flows, like moving your hands through liquid. Don’t strain yourself, don’t force concentrated shapes.”
“Huh. Really? That’s supposed to help?”
“Just do it, Jack.” Lindsay walked over to pick up her knife and dusted it off as she returned to her chair, no longer paying attention to him.
Jack shifted his eyes to the great mix, now a thicker cloud of silvery dust with thicker sections, sometimes aggregated blobs, sometimes strands. Threads seemed most natural to form. If he paid close attention, the material sometimes came closer to him, where it would always disintegrate before touching his skin. It was not escaping, however, but breaking down, flowing back out and re-concentrating.
He reached out with his hand and passed it through the cloud. In this case, he could touch the material, feeling it break apart and cascade like dispersed dust. It made his skin tingle on contact. Some part of him had the question intuitively rise: ‘Absorb back?’ It was like water at the back of the throat, ready to swallow. That absorption felt more natural to him. Smoother and more elegant than simply releasing control to make it rubberband.
He utilized his control more directly to create swirls, watching the material form eddies. He focused on making it all into threads, which he managed with relative ease. A haphazard ‘net’ was easy to make, albeit one with shifting connections and continually swaying as if in water.
As long as he didn’t condense too much, he could move the entire mass forward without any additional strain. It was the same for other shifts, but once he got past two meters, it started to cause strain. Despite Lindsay’s warning, he experimented with shapes a bit. Condensing the area down from a relative two-meter radius sphere into one meter was feasible but required some sweat. It certainly changed the sound, too — it buzzed more frenetically.
Shifting the shape of that general zone did not seem to matter except for the distance issue if the shape was elongated. He could make a vague outline of a donut, an arch above him, a wall, whatever.
Catching his breath after a bit of sweating, he thinned the material output and let it rest. He wiped his face with his sleeve and asked, “I’ll be able to concentrate it down and do shapes eventually, though, right?”
“Yep,” Lindsay said without looking up from her phone. She took a sip from a giant cup with a straw. “With ease. I know you’re anxious to get there, but patience, patience. Keep experimenting.” She set down her cup, and her lacquered finger lifted to point over at Jack’s canteen, still without looking up. “Drink.”
“Yes, ma’am, right away, ma’am,” he muttered with flippant sarcasm, then walked over to drink thirstily from the canteen, letting the metallic cloud more or less trail behind him. He eyed her. “You like hearing that, don’t you?”
“Hearing what?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She shifted her eyes over to him and raised her brows with a smile. “Would you like to know why I have you doing this light work?”
“Why?”
Her brows lifted higher as her head twisted slightly. “Guess?”
Jack sighed and took a moment to think. “General endurance and fitness, maybe. Building up that percentage maximum.”
“That’s a given. Specifically, right now, I’m having you do this so you can do safe training on your own at home and such when we aren’t here. Primarily, I want you to monitor your fatigue grade and take advantage of Stable conditions. Training and wearing yourself down to Minor, relaxing back to Stable, rinse and repeat. But it is key that you not attempt dangerous things in those situations, or you’ll get us both in trouble and get that allowance banned until you’re further along. Make sense?”
“Perfect sense. Yes, ma’am.”
“Alright, now get back to it. Remember: safety.”
“Yes, ma’am!” He put exaggerated snappy emphasis on it, and she rolled her eyes at him — in exasperated amusement — before turning back to her phone.
He went through more basic motions, creating waves and spinning torrents, swaying the concentrations from one side to the other. He tried to separate the cloud into two halves, but that never quite worked. At best, he got a thin center and started tiring himself out attempting to close it.
Growing somewhat bored and curious what would happen, he tried condensing down the cloud more and more. Squeezing it from two meters in diameter or so down to one meter was a slight effort that made his heart begin pounding. He started concentrating it more, though, with rapidly intensifying strain. The net-like structure became thicker strands like liquid metal in a web, but unstable and vibrating…
Somehow, he ‘slipped’ as he pushed too hard and his control totally collapsed, the strands more or less jerking apart and exploding before rubberbanding back into him. He had a brief moment of trying to stop it and regain control, but it was no use. He felt a sting all over his skin as the substance absorbed into him, and there was a brief pulse of pain in his head. Overall, the experience was a combination of swallowing too big a gulp of liquid and a super brain freeze. Pain was brief, but he dropped to his knees.
“Uh-huh,” Lindsay called in obvious tones of ‘I told you so.’ She was already out of her seat and a step toward him. “No surprise that you had to learn the hard way, right?” She was definitely upset, despite her attempt at being flippant.
Gasping for breath, Jack managed, “What the hell? Could’ve warned me…”
“I told you exactly what not to do and you did it anyway!”
“Sorry.” Jack stood back up shakily and moved to the chair, dropping into it and panting. He had a bit of a headache. “I’m a jackass. You did, yeah.”
Mini chimed in.
Lindsay, still standing, crossed her arms and shook her head at him. “Hmph! Well. Just some novel peculiarity of your power. Stunning oneself from losing control isn’t at all uncommon, though. Nor damage from pushing yourself. We’ll figure it out. Or you will. I think the trouble was it was too concentrated when it rushed back through you. You’ll need to develop some failsafes.”
Jack nodded without saying anything immediately, using his mouth strictly for more air. Finally, he added, “Slowing it down instead of trying to maintain control. Help it disperse in time.”
His tutor nodded slowly while studying him. “Sounds good to me. We’re done with intensive practice for today. Leave it completely alone for four hours. Understood, Junior Agent Laker?” She waited with her eyebrows raised. At his nod, she continued, “You should practice on your own at slightly less than this output you used. Incremental increase, does that make sense? Add around ten percent of your output as a good rule of thumb. So, if you’re entirely comfortable at thirty percent, add three percent. When you’re comfortable at thirty-three percent, add more.”
“Logical. I take it there’s a maximum output one is comfortable at?”
“It varies. As another rule of thumb, that’s something from around fifty to sixty-five percent. This is your General Indefinite Force Target, or GIFT. Basically, the level you could pour a whole workday into with breaks and not suffer fatigue degradation. You might dip from Stable to Minor here and there between breaks, but no more unless you’re pushing it.
“Seventy-seven to eighty-five percent is considered optimal stress performance, with exactly eighty very common at the peak of conditioning. The goal is to maintain that from Stable fatigue to Minor, with temporary up and down blips, for an hour. You’ll figure it out when you hit your stride and have a Stable Operational Force Target, or SOFT. Technically, your best is through Pressure rather than Force, but the percentage won’t change between the two. Force is simply the more universal yardstick.”
Jack gave a dry chortle. “How I know I’m back in the military is hearing about a new acronym every five minutes.”
“Goes for the whole government, really.”
“What’s the difference? Anyway, SOFT is an especially amusing one, and deliberate. Wouldn’t a ‘P’ be better in there for ‘Percentage,’ after all?”
“Don’t rock the boat, Jack. Besides, easily remembering something is more important than the most suitable long name.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“Alright, then. I’ll do my very best to have a rock-solid SOFT.”
“Cute. But that is the right spirit to have, sans sarcasm.”
“In all seriousness, I’ll do my best. My target is one hundred percent.”
“That’s pretty much impossible. The values at full percentage are like a deadlift you maintain for a second or two. Or, in terms of Force, a charge into a haymaker. You can exceed it at greater strain, but avoiding the strain completely isn’t feasible. Your ability to deal with the drain, your mentality, your willpower, your fitness, these are nebulous human factors that change based on such absurdities as what you ate for breakfast and how your loved ones are treating you. We grade Fitness in vague terms, and there is the special technique, Inner Energy, that indicates improved maximum NP stores. Fitness can help with that.”
<[Fitness: Poor] and [Techniques: Inner Energy -0.6] entries added to your statistical bio after introduction and assessment. Sorry for the suckage. :(>
Shit. Poor? Negative value?!
“As you are noticing from that face you just made,” Lindsay continued, “your current values there aren’t acceptable and a large part of your persistent difficulties.”
Throwing up a hand, Jack replied, “Thank you, Captainess Obvious.”
Lindsay smirked at him, her hands going to her hips. “But you’re going to fix that pronto, right, soldier?”
He saluted. “Yes, ma’am. On the double.” He took up his canteen to have a drink, which got a satisfied nod from Lindsay. When he finished it off and moved to rise and get more, she waved him off and took the canteen herself. He murmured his thanks as he watched her dump another packet in and go fill it up.
As she returned and handed him the canteen, he asked, “Are you headed out, then?”
“We’ll break soon and meet back up for a run. You’ll find that Hardiness is of great benefit for pushing harder when it comes to mundane training, and it isn’t much of a drain on your developing new biology. I’ve also assigned you a more appropriate personal trainer for manly man weight training, beginning tomorrow with an intensive session. Before we run, I’ll use my power on you again. This time, I’ll share the emulation.”
“Ah! I look forward to it.”
“Any additional questions, Jack?”
“Hmm. I notice the way we utilize powers is by these grafted-on constructs kinda… branching through our brains. And Allotment refers to a pool of reality alteration potential? I guess I’m just curious if there’s more explanation for what the frag we’re actually doing.”
“Uh-huh. Did you take Archon Metaphysics in college?”
“Well, obviously not.”
“Exactly. Neither did I. Honestly, I’ve had such questions myself, but that was like almost a decade ago. You’re better off asking a Memorial Daughter instead of second-hand reconstruction from my rustiness. But I’ll give it a go. So we’re all connected to the System by those branches. They interlace through Earth as a hidden construct our distant ancestors fragged up poking at ignorantly while it was in a more, er… primordial state? Default. Maybe dormant. Definitely unobvious. When it was found, it was smooth. What we did made it forever jagged, causing cataclysmic environmental upheaval. The invaders came immediately, rushing into the rich, delicious dips.
“When we figured out what they did, we used what wiggle room was left to us as natives to manipulate the construct correctly, finally, creating Memoria, a personification of a deep dimensional fissure — relatively speaking — that could warp and make a multitude of new shapes. Miraculous shapes that suit our desires of the physical realm. Bend and move matter or energy, play with apparent rules, change biology, tweak brains. Reinforce or rip apart.
“We’re making our marks on a big, beautiful, broken tapestry! It’s all interlaced. The construct touches everything by some route or another. You can’t follow every angle, but you can follow the angles you’re connected to. Those are your powers, and your Allotment is your teensy tiny wriggle room on the map, the pressure you put on the construct, and thus reality. New fingers, or maybe puppet strings. Some go outward, some go inward. And… that’s all I got.” She shrugged.
Jack was fairly awed. He’d certainly never heard it put like that. “Borrowed, right? It’s technically Memoria’s Allotment. Her branches.”
“Sort of. She is Allotment. And yet ours, too, symbiotically. You are utilizing her… whatever — soul, body, structure, matter, which is connected to nature — the physical realm, reality, what have you. We know that we can’t harness the construct without an Archon because we apparently tried that a million different ways and failed. The medium is required. She has all these rules, as you should’ve noticed. Has a pact. I’d say a system of referential limits that can, to some degree, reference other structures from other Archons” — she blew out air as she finished slowly — “Appears. To be. Necessary.”
“Fairness baked in? It suggests intelligent design of some sort.”
“Yes.”
Jack waited for more, blinking, but she was just looking at him blankly. “I take it we don’t know much on that front.”
“Nope. A technology was just sitting there waiting for us. No instruction manual. Not that we have any idea how long it was there. Maybe the manual got lost. But we seemed to poke at it too eagerly and greedily for the desire of power, right? That’s the sad, pessimistic interpretation of things since it suggests we could’ve slowly worked out a more controlled method, and by it obtain the collective potentiality of all these conquerors at our fingertips alone. Eventually. And here we are, instead with the messy bed we made. Who knows, though? Maybe there wasn’t any other way. Maybe it was a trap. Well, you won’t get any concrete answer out of Memoria. She’s roundabout where the maybes come from! Probably gets a kick out of our various philosophical theories.”
“Got any special ones?”
“Lil’ ole me? Psh. There are better targets there. Philosophy is ugly, and I stick to cute things. I don’t think it matters. We have too many tangible goals in front of us. Our distant descendants will have to sort out the big brain stuff if we succeed. I hope they’re eating nothing but steaks, oysters, and caviar, getting all plump and soft as they daydream about bullshit like this.”
Jack laughed. “Hey, fair enough. That’s actually a good philosophy, I think.”
“Cute?”
“Of course.”
“Thanks. If it’s true that I have one, it needs to be. Anyway, you’ll figure one out, too. I bet it’ll be real maudlin and broody.”
“Hey, I’m pretty damn optimistic or I wouldn’t even be here.”
“Well, you do have a point there. But broody isn’t necessarily bad in a guy, you know. Some girls are totally into it.”
“Good to know.”
“If the guy is hot.”
“Right. They’re into hot guys, who might potentially be broody, amongst other quirks not too extreme or off-putting.”
“Exactly! You know your shit, Jack.”
Jack gave her a deadpan gaze for a moment, then took a big swig of oily water. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and said, “Alright, so, power use is various temporary or permanent warping alterations to the material world, direct or indirect, by means of a cosmic technology interlaced within it and connected by a messy, super complex web. Memoria is her own micro-web within the macro, like the other Archons. We bridge through her on our way to fraggin' shit up.”
Lindsay nodded favorably. “Nicely put, yeah. My analogy: she’s always a multitude of gloves. She can fit hands into some, but not all. We’re the rest.”
“Whatever we do still requires resources on our end.”
“Mm-hmm. Like anything humans do. Powers are often intensive in use, and they require fitness to an extreme and exotic degree for peak efficiency. Well. Depending on the power and the domain mod. Anyhow, Memoria is the source of our improvements, working within her own novel limits.”
“Domain mod?”
“The domain modifier. Material This, Metamorphic That? The style of the medium being manipulated. There are only seven known fields, and they’re quite broad. Feel free to check them out through the interface.”
“Hmm. Will do. So, when we reach out and strain ourselves, we’re… flexing new muscles? That branch out.”
“Something like that. Tendrils, muscles, teensy body parts, dendrites, connecto-toys, whatever. Allocated structures that flex and connect to myriad other structures. Some of that unusual substance is additive from our bodies, whether as matter or energy, thus reinforcing. We strain to activate new factories, but we’re also piggybacking, cannibalizing, and synthesizing existing, more familiar vehicles of effort — to humans. Adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, is utilized. Glycogen into glucose is utilized. Calorie consumption is utilized. Adrenaline is utilized. Etcetera, etcetera. Burn, baby, burn!”
“Got it. I guess it’s consistent with there being minimal persistent capability. More of a trickle of our resources poured in at the default, and fatigue comes from pushing it.”
“Exactly. Humanity, with Memoria’s guidance, contoured a system of painstaking extra effort to squeeze out every edge we can. No pain, no gain. I bet some of those demons out there think we’re crazy masochists or something.”
Jack chuckled. “Maybe.” It was nice to hear that it was a group effort. He wondered about that. “So it wasn’t all our Archon, eh?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. Unsung heroes, Jack! People behind the scenes. But Stitcher influenced things without a doubt. I don’t think this well-oiled machine looked anything like it did then. She was smack in the middle of the growing pains era. And-” Lindsay suddenly cut herself off with her cheeks blowing up big and slowly releasing like a disappointed balloon. “Ppptt! Out of your clearance, still. Hurry up and get more, Jack! I need you on my level with this stuff or it's going to drive me crazy.”
Jack was somewhat puzzled, his brow furrowing. “Why?”
Lindsay made an ‘interlacing’ motion, bringing her fingers together and interlocking them. “New things you know, various things I know. Can’t discuss certain crossroads of information yet.”
Jack nodded slowly. “Mmn.” Something was tickling in his head, some mystery he’d forgotten to ask about amidst the whirlwind. A person? “All in good time.”
“Or bad time.”
“Now who’s the pessimist?”
Lindsay blew air through her lips, vibrating them and making a motor sound, while slowly raising her hand in the sad admission of defeat.
Jack grinned. “Cheer up. I’ll get the clearance faster than you can say Farmboy Prodigy.”
“Oh, is that what you are?”
“Damn right.”
“Okay. I’ll believe with you, farmboy, even if I dislike waiting. Any more questions?”
“Not at the moment.”
“We’ll meet at the more mundane park for a run. You should have some generic standard gym outfits somewhere, if you must use them.” Her disapproving tone was crystal clear. “I’d recommend shopping or ordering something else for extracurricular workouts and whatnot.”
“Why? Improved performance?”
“No — because it would be cuter!”
Jack rolled his eyes. “I should’ve known. So, what, am I supposed to pick a designer color or something?”
Lindsay slapped her hands together and smiled in delight. “I’m so glad you asked for my advice! I’ll send you some” — her voice got sing-song — “oooooptions!”
Jack’s interface blipped with multiple requests for information transfer. He sighed and accepted them.
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