Chapter 34: Racing to Gains

  “Anyway,” Jack continued, clearing his throat, “I’m here because I belong here.” He tapped his patch on the right shoulder. “I’m sure you understand what me wearing this uniform and symbol means.” When he glanced at hers, it was a simple ‘X’ symbol.

  Lighthouse took another bite of her burger as she stared at his patch. “Yeah, but I’m having a tougher time believing it. I guess you were deep undercover? But you probably can’t say.”

  Jack did a long ‘pffft’ and laughed. “Ha! That might’ve been the sort of spin Memoria would use if she wanted to lie. But no — amazingly, I am allowed to say that I am new, sans the details. New and unfamiliar with powers and the whole nine yards.”

  A french fry froze with her teeth around it, not quite bitten into. Her eyes widened as she put things together, and she pointed the french fry at him. “You mean the-!” She stopped short, pulling the fry back and blinking. Her eyes shifted around, and she leaned forward to whisper, “The classified stuff… involved… this?”

  Jack shrugged and smiled politely. “Can’t say, of course.”

  Lighthouse leaned back, huffed the ghost of a laugh, then popped the fry in her mouth, eyes shifting thoughtfully as she chewed and nodded. “Like there wasn’t reason enough to have a hardcore gag order on that business.” She noticed Jack eyeing her fries and promptly picked up the little basket they were in to offer him some.

  He took a few, muttering his thanks and quickly devouring them. He could tell they had the ‘good stuff’ fried into them. “A peace offering, eh? I’m honored.”

  “Don’t go that far. You’re still with that crazy bitch. And if you think you aren’t with her, you’re just friends? Dude, you’re already falling into her big, wide” — she bit into another fry for special emphasis” — “rabbit hole.”

  Jack had to smirk at this. “Uh-huh. Well, she wanted me to stay, but I told her no and walked off.”

  Lighthouse’s eyebrows rose, and her eyes widened as far as they could go. “You? You told her no? Right to her face?”

  “That’s right. She looked at me like I grew tentacles out of my eyes.”

  Lighthouse’s face became comically incredulous. Then it broke and she burst into deep, satisfied laughter.

  It went on and on, and soon she soon doubled over. She winced and held her stomach as it finally died down. “Ahhh… I think that laugh just gave me a muscle strain. Hnk! Damn. I wish I could’ve seen the look on her face.”

  Jack nodded along. “It was indeed priceless.” In truth, Jack didn’t particularly relish it due to the fear he saw in her eyes. But there was no point in bringing that up. “Can I ask what it is with you two?”

  Lighthouse blinked, and her eyes went down to her plate. She picked her burger back up and said, “No.” She then took a bite.

  “Okay, then.” A sore spot for sure.

  After eating silently in contemplation, Lighthouse dropped the sparse remains of the burger, sighed, and wiped her hands with a napkin. Eyes shifting off to the side, she said, “She’s a stuck-up princess and always has been. We never got along. Let’s leave it at that.”

  There was hidden gravitas in the words, possibly a lie, but Jack just shrugged with his hands and smiled politely. “Understood.” After a pause, he changed the subject. “So, you earned your coat, but you’re here. Why’s that?”

  She gestured at her plate. “Tony’s makes the best burgers anywhere. Aren’t many that can use beef. Costs a fortune, but it’s worth it. And…” She shrugged. “I’m a creature of habit. No luck today, but usually that includes hanging out with the few friends I have.”

  “Who haven’t earned their coats.”

  Lighthouse shook her head with a frown. “Me and one other from the team made it. No clue why the other two didn’t. Should have. I thought we did great in the PACCs. Toward the end. Guess we struggled for a while. Frag, I dunno.” Her eyes were on the table, flickering as if seeking answers. “They say Blasters are always in demand, usually earn their coat early. Needed firepower with a high mortality rate. But it’s dumb. I wasn’t the leader. I was probably the least of everyone. They deserved it more than some girl who brainlessly zaps shit.”

  “I’m sure you’re underselling yourself, Lighthouse.”

  “Mmph.” She munched on her fries silently.

  “Was the other to make it Agent Girdle?”

  Her eyes came up in surprise. “Huh? Oh, hell no! Nah, I know him, but we aren’t super close. Definitely not the same graduating class. I’m learning under him as a rookie as they shift us around. He’s got a couple of sterling years under him or whatever the hell. A veteran. Gravy-ass job peacekeeping with the likes of Ooze. He’s a bit of a hardass but he knows his shit. Yeah, they’ll probably just send me off to die in the next invasion. If so, it was nice knowing ya, Jack.” She grinned around a chewed fry.

  Jack couldn’t return it. “You’re not going to die in the next invasion, Lighthouse. Even if there is one, they won’t send you before you’re ready. You’ll get placed with a team. And make new friends.”

  Lighthouse met his gaze with a mild, incredulous expression. She crammed the last of her burger in her mouth and stood, while putting the fry basket down in front of him. Around a half-full mouth, she said, “Gotta go. Get yourself a burger before you start drooling, would you? Made me feel like an ass eating in front of you this whole time. Not cool.”

  Jack grinned up at her. “Will do. And thanks.” He began eating the fries immediately.

  She nodded and picked up her tray as she turned away.

  “Hey, Lighthouse,” Jack called.

  She paused and turned back around. “Yeah?”

  “See you around. Maybe we’ll talk powers one day.”

  “Maybe. And call me Light.” With that, she turned and departed.

  Interesting gal. A light-based Blaster? But there has to be something unique to her powerset with the name she got. She said it was because others could ‘see her coming from a mile away.’

  Jack tried to order a beef burger, but they were out of their limited stock, which apparently happened every day. First come, first served, and he was advised to order ahead of time if he wanted one — or spaghetti and meatballs with beef — in the future. He ordered a couple of imitation bean burgers instead, and they were pretty damned good, so he also got some spaghetti after, and it was fantastic. He had a new favorite.

  Something Lighthouse said bugged him a bit. Wall-of-Ooze was a ‘peacekeeper?’ But he was a known, public Champion, with footage from the frontlines, fighting monsters.

  Maybe it isn’t the frontlines, then. Propaganda is propaganda. It might all be fake.

  Jack finished up his food and headed back to his room to change. Workout time again, and then more training.

  The PACCs, eh? A ways away, I’m sure, but it seems that’s my target to complete my orders from Memoria. Catch up with my brothers and sisters and excel. Earn my coat. Conquer.

  ?? ?? ?? ?? ??

  The next clutch of days were a blur of training exercises, workouts, classes, mounds of study material and homework, and, of course, a lot of eating. He had very little free time to speak of as Lindsay squeezed the dial of intensity — directly and indirectly — more and more. He skipped his breakfast routine to shave time, cramming leftover food from the fridge or from delivery in the wee hours. He wanted to try and bump into Lighthouse again, but he never managed it. He debated on just using his Mem-interface to contact her, but ultimately blew it off. It would happen when it happened.

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  He saw Délight once during lunch, but she either failed to look his way or avoided it deliberately. He still saw through her visual illusions, or whatever they were, and she was totally different without it. Figuring she was likely uncomfortable with the matter, Jack didn’t press the issue and stayed away. He really didn’t have time for it, after all.

  Augur was a little bummed out by his schedule, he could tell, so Jack arranged lunch with him once — just him. He nattered on about random things as Jack tried not to zone out. But Augur was satisfied enough with a listener, it seemed.

  Usually, Jack was analyzing study material for his law class as he ate, dreading his next quiz. He’d been taking them at least once a day, recalling or refreshing crap from the aether to pass or fail the tutor’s grading. He was ‘off-schedule’ for catching up with his eventual classmate in three days, so ‘Professor Petahi’ was driving him hard to get there. The professor was an old, retired Agent who’d been a member of most law teams that arranged community treaties. He was admittedly a good teacher, if stern and humorless.

  Most of what Jack had to know well was the intermediary knowledge of a Memorial peacekeeper. It was fairly bewildering, his bootcamp-like primers clearly lacking years of needed time and study. Criminal law on crimes and offenses, procedural law on such things as search and seizure and evidence collection/handling, report writing, use of force, liability, the rights of various independents… cram, cram, cram. He was suddenly thankful for the benefit of being a Non: super-AI available in his head, and even if he fragged up, it wasn’t like he’d lose his job. Discipline was always internal.

  Despite that reality, he didn’t relish messing up, so he put his all into absorbing and taking it seriously.

  His ‘temporary’ tutor for the Special Operations primer was ‘Agent Marrakesh,’ who’d been pulled from other duties similar to Lindsay, but his general demeanor said he didn’t like it one bit. He was all business and even colder than the professor, while constantly rushing through things. Fortunately, Jack had been a gung-ho military boy from a young age, and most of the stuff, while not what he already knew, was stuff he ‘knew of’ and was simply stacking on an existing foundation. The process of orders and protocols was more similar between groups than any of the brass would choose to believe, from his perspective. He took notes, sure.

  Mixed with this boring stuff, he trained his ass off physically and ‘dimensionally.’ Physical training became more like stress relief compared to the rest — he had to stick to strict scheduling and flagrant alarms or he would’ve kept doing ‘it,’ whatever it happened to be, lifting, running, or ‘flexing’ with his powers. He quickly got stronger, faster, and healthier as he added bulk and burned fat. He shed more ‘inferior’ flesh in the night and washed it down the drain.

  He ate to fuel it all. He ate garbage trucks full of food, it seemed. It was amazing how much time eating wasted! He started scarfing stuff down as he was doing other things, cramming in high-energy snacks, and usually Infused varieties. He drank his favorite jet fuels constantly — maybe a little more than recommended at times. He learned when to slow down by the burp frequency. Just about everyone frowned on burping the byproducts, too, so the social pressure was enough to tone it down.

  The Fitness boost was quick in the process, as were modest gains in Inner Energy.

  Hitting the weights hard to finish his trainer Mike’s ‘cement’ stage saw accelerating results. Muscle definition showed visible gains all over. Biceps almost as big as in his fittest state of young adulthood, the ‘extra’ of his ‘solid medium build’ in the torso turning into muscle. No showpiece abs yet, but the hint of them was there! If he flexed and squinted. And there was no skipping leg day, since it was every day: he saw muscles there, too.

  He ran his ass off, cramming in extra time all the time. He got up early and ran, he ran midday, and he ran in the evening. He gained a few ‘wave’ acquaintances in his routines, smiling and waving at familiar faces as he ran by. One was the speedster girl in the evening in her fast lane, slowing just enough to say stuff like, ‘Looking good!’ or ‘Keep at it!’ as she waved. He knew it was because he was a damned Non, but he loved it. Loved running, amazingly.

  The only running he did not like was the sprints versus Lindsay. She kept beating him and rubbing it in every time in her teasing way, just enough to annoy but too adorable to hate. And she always had sweetness ready, after, to soothe his ‘wounds.’ Encouragement during the marathon runs, compliments on progress and physique, and otherwise just leaving it in the dirt until the next time.

  He noticed it was the particular culture of the ‘forever a jock’ Nons to both notice and mention physical improvements of another one of theirs. On top of this, he was pretty uncommon in being so unfit at his first public appearances. The differences were quite noticeable. Random ‘I see those guns loading up!’ and ‘Hell yeah, keep hitting those weights, son!’ at any given location. He was mostly perplexed and subdued at first, but by the third day, he was throwing ‘hell yeahs’ back or flexing in response.

  Frag it. I’m just gonna own the fruit of my labors! They’ve adopted this Body of Steel, and I’ll be a worthy son!

  He did get closer to catching up to Lindsay, too, even with her going all-out and sweating buckets. So close! If she ever tripped, she was done — done! But that wouldn’t be enough for him. He’d beat her for real! One day. One. Day.

  In addition to his hard work, the replacement materials themselves aided him, making what muscles he did have stronger than if they were gained as an ordinary human. Superior flesh was superior flesh. He also very slowly got better oxygen absorption, because he noticed he was breathing less at rest, and needed less huffing and puffing while exerting himself. That was apparently a big deal and accelerated his health gains even more.

  He gained a new stat grade, as well: G.P.E., or General Performance Enhancement, which was the thing first mentioned at Level 0 as ‘an enhanced interface with reality.’ Moving faster and so forth. It started at 13% with him, and slowly ticked upward.

  The combination of physical improvements and practice continued to ramp up his GIFT (General Indefinite Force Target) percentage until he hit a sticky 41%, and soon the System reported a SOFT (Stable Operational Force Target) value of 67%. They weren’t exactly ‘stats,’ being simply the percentage of his total power he could use at gradients of strain. One more thing to become second nature to him eventually. He was told everything was going to get harder from there, just like with physical training, but he was performing above expectations.

  He went through the memorite channeling exercises day after day, working with Lindsay in her continually improving specialized tutorship and then sneaking in solo practice in between his other duties. Gains were quite rapid, the baseline intensity improving in tandem with his Inner Energy and Force Target improvements. Every little nudge upward was something Lindsay took advantage of, squeezing the will out of him to reach the things he was tantalized with and denied in her Performance Center realm.

  They would sometimes pop into it, and she would restrain his capability to what he had in the real world, and then walk him through the progression she had mapped out. She’d match his precise skill levels and ‘duel’ him, like wrestling with powers. He’d stumble into an epiphany in the midst of it, and they’d bounce back out in excitement to test the real-world reflection. Lindsay added as many tricks of advancement as he did — more, but he was not always able to figure it out her way. Still, it was like having a twin with the same power, learning it faster, and bridging the gap. Session after session, there was less wasted effort as her mimicry tuned into him.

  Lindsay said it was more like rapid evolution in a lab by a mad scientist — she’d figured out all the blueprints and a clear realization of the base lifeform to birth and let loose. It was just a matter of getting the stubborn fleshy materials in the dish to cooperate. He did, in fact. He both cooperated and branched in his own unique directions, destined to make his way out of the dish entirely.

  Most of his initial mastery was with the raw memorite, condensing the aggregate cloud into smaller and smaller areas. At first, shapes remained within a thinner gradient, but the precision of his control caught up quickly to confine the hardline borders. The first big accomplishment was a glittering silver, spherical cloud less than a meter in diameter, like a condensation of fluid, liquid metal, more than gas. A thick fog. At the time, he was straining for about 50% of his Allotment, which was almost a kilogram of memorite. From this, he could pool sections of it, though the effort turned it more blob-like and irregular.

  If he ‘gripped’ it differently, he could make the cloud behave more like solid particulates. Chrome dust.

  He worked a lot on range with the memorite zone, too, which took painstaking strain to ‘push out,’ though there were always gains when he spent himself on it. Operating at three and four meters distance turned to five and six, and soon he was at a dozen meters. He fought toward operation at fifteen and stalled at thirteen and fourteen, with heavy precision losses. Lindsay called it off ‘for a while’ at that point as they shifted to something else. She was ever mindful of what was determined to be diminished returns on time investment.

  Hard work. Hard work. Hard work. He condensed the control area more and more with each fatiguing session. Thanks to his health gains, he rebounded quicker and quicker, too.

  With time, he finally obtained his goal of a sphere floating over his palm, about the size of a basketball, swirling and rippling with movement but apparently smooth. Motion was the trick. He started with condensing through swirling the mass in rotation, in which he could condense a spinning liquid donut and then gradually slow it down while extending the shape out up and down. By the time the ends were ready to meet, it was slowed… and then he had a relatively calm, semi-liquid layer wrapped around itself with a hollowed-out core.

  They hooped and hollered in celebration when he did it — it was a convergence of many inspirations from both of them. The artistry motivated him to the goal — something Lindsay encouraged. It reflected his overall control and cemented a baseline shortcut. From the collapsed sphere, he could work outward into other shapes, albeit with a semi-liquid form.

  It was surprisingly easy to segue from this to solidity, no different than what he’d done with the particulates. A phase shift, a different ‘connection’ of the aggregate. From the sphere, he’d made a warped, irregular ‘bubble’ of sorts. From this, he could fold it up into a small amount of solid metal… gunk. A ‘block’ was generous. It was more like a paste. At best, it was soft clay, with his dreams of a little memorite club or sharp shiv dashed. Temporarily, that is.

  And Lindsay suddenly declared, “Alright, that’s enough of that! Diminishing returns to play with your dough right now. Time to move back to the much-maligned art of possession, hot shot.”

  Sweating buckets, feeling the exhaustion gripping him, Jack still smiled at that. “Good. That’s where the real power is, after all.”

  It's a helpful reminder, not to play with your dough too much.

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