My consciousness swam up from the depths of a chemically-induced ocean, and the first thing my brain registered was that something was very, very wrong. It felt a lot like when I was porting, my consciousness a ghost in a machine that had forgotten my name, or like the one time I’d had to perform a hard reboot after being technically, briefly, and unpleasantly dead. My body was still there, a meat-sack I was apparently renting, but for some reason the tenant was locked out, and the plumbing was on the fritz.
Right. Time for a system diagnostic. I carefully started tracing my own internals, comparing the current sorry state of affairs to my last personal blueprint—a snapshot I’d taken right after my workout and radioactive meditation session in the tunnel. You know, a standard Tuesday.
Nope, I wasn’t asleep. This wasn’t a bad dream, unless my subconscious had suddenly developed a fetish for industrial-grade sedatives. There was something alien flowing through my bloodstream, a chemical party crasher interrupting the delicate symphony of my nervous system.
It wasn't doing any permanent damage—a professional touch, I’ll give them that—but it was a very powerful… My autonomic systems were still chugging along on autopilot; lungs inflating, heart beating, all the basic functions that keep a guy from being a corpse. Yep, I’d been hit with a toxin, probably inside of the last twenty minutes.
My brain, thanks to my usual cocktail of paranoia and self-preservation, was fairly well protected, chemically speaking, but whatever hit me had caught me with my proverbial pants down while I was asleep. It had slowed down my waking process, leaving me hovering in that delightful state of half-asleep paralysis, enhanced by what felt like ACP or possibly an offshoot potent enough to drop an Alpha but unlikely to permanently kill off any nearby humans.
How considerate.
Fortunately, because of the various… unauthorized modifications… I’d made to my own nervous system, resetting this particular bit of biological sabotage was fairly easy. I’d already traced and blueprinted the entire chemical cocktail, and the electrical portion was almost completely unaffected. That was one of the reasons ACP was favored among old-school veterinarians and, apparently, ethically-challenged kidnappers: it only had mild psychotropic effects, leaving the brain’s chemistry only slightly scrambled.
It was what you dosed an Alpha with when you wanted them to wake up docile and ready to answer questions or assist you. For a horrifying second, I wondered if this was actually some kind of batshit-insane teamwork survival training exercise dreamed up by Subvector. It seemed her speed.
My mind, ever the helpful companion, began cycling through the rules of engagement for this sort of unfortunate scenario. Rule one: Don’t ever let a bad guy lead you to a secondary location. That’s Villainy 101. It almost always means he’s trying to take you someplace where he has a bigger advantage, more weapons, and a convenient drain in the floor for the messy bits. Well, based on the vibrations I felt as my nervous system slowly rebelled against its chemical overlords, rule one was already a wash. It felt like I was in some kind of small flying transport. Great.
Rule two: try to notice any landmarks, whether sight, sound, smell, or even taste. I was working on that, though my current sensory input was limited to “smells like oil” and “sounds like regret.” If this were a training scenario, there would have to be an opportunity to escape or communicate at some point. If it wasn’t, well, I was confident that I would think of something brilliantly stupid. I always did.
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Rule three: escape. If this was NOT some kind of demented team-building exercise, it was a kidnapping. And kidnappers were, by definition, a threat to your life. It was a minor philosophical point, but an important one. Kidnappers, if things went even slightly sideways, intended to MURDER you.
Therefore, there is a strong moral argument for doing unto them before they can do unto you. Hell, it’s almost a moral mandate. If they’re willing to kidnap and murder you, they’d be willing to do it to others. My father always said that all it takes for evil to thrive is for good and just men to do nothing.
Of course, he also said that if you cut a board too short, you could always stretch it, but if you cut it too long, there was nothing you could do, and that men’s biggest mistake wasn’t giving women the vote, it was teaching them to speak. So I tended to take his advice with a grain of salt roughly the size of my head.
But the core concept held merit. I was still trying to mentally prepare myself to kill someone if I had to. End a life. Delete a person’s entire history and future potential. Maybe I had a sociopathic streak—a required course for any failed hero, but the idea didn’t bother me that much. Mostly, I was worried about the tired old trope that ‘killing changes a man’ that old Hollywood used to push. I’d already been changed by betrayal, failure, and near-starvation; adding ‘homicide’ to the list seemed almost redundant.
It didn’t help that I felt pretty damned good, all things considered. My mind was clear, sharpened by adrenaline and the lingering high of my earlier breakthrough. I’d memorized the Serenoid pamphlet and disintegrated the storage medium it came on.
I didn’t buy into the idea that people could remember every single moment of their lives perfectly without a superpower—human memory is a suggestible, faulty mess—but blueprinting? That was not the same thing as memory. The Pamphlet was only sixty pages, and even though I couldn't make head or tail of the writing, I had blueprinted every page, including the cover. It was now a permanent, perfect file in the internal library of my mind.
Blueprinting was NOT like recall. I couldn’t just ‘remember’ the information. What I could do was study the blueprint the same way an archivist could study a physical book. It was like a copy of the file was in my head that I could re-read at my leisure. If I wanted to have its facts as part of my own core knowledge, I had to commit it to memory the old-fashioned way.
And boy, were the diagrams on energy flow ever-so-interesting and worth properly memorizing. Rushing wouldn’t help me right here, and obviously, I couldn’t move to meditate and digest this alien knowledge, so I lay there, playing possum, allowing my nerves to slowly reset. Not too quickly, or my body’s jerks would alert my captors, which might mean my adventure would end prematurely with a bullet to the head. A decidedly un-fun finale.
Bob had been right. A lot of the Serenoid diagrams had clearly been designed to invoke energy through dance, and with the distinct advantage of having six arms available. It looked like eight limbs was some sort of magical number that allowed them an unprecedented amount of control over external energy. A lot of the symbols were clearly directly related to the shapes of certain energies themselves.
It was almost as though their multiple limbs allowed their dance to actively manipulate those symbols, like they didn’t have a set one or two affinities the way humans did, but that their movements allowed them to tap into a huge variety of effects. In essence, what they lost in natural ability to connect to a single dao, they gained by an innate connection to a sort of magical programming language that required the use of eight limbs… a divine or profane symmetry that seemed to embrace the very syntax of reality itself.
Okay, points to me for the purple poetic delving. My internal monologue was apparently channeling a bad fantasy novel. Anyway, they appeared to be masters of external energy use, meaning what they lacked in sheer, brute power, they made up for in terrifying versatility.
More importantly, a lot of the diagrams clearly showed their internal energy distribution, and while it was true some of it wouldn’t be applicable to a bipedal mammal with a pathetic two arms, some of it was VERY exciting. It showed concepts, like three-dimensional energy rotation, that I had never even considered. It was like showing a caveman a diagram for a nuclear warhead: he might not understand it, but he could tell it made one hell of a bang.
