HIs ability selection screen (If you could call it a screen when it existed solely as information pressed into the awareness of something without eyes) presented three options completely without emotion.
[FLAGELLUM] - Develop a whip-like appendage for directed locomotion. Increases movement speed by 200%. Enables current resistance and active pursuit of nutrient sources.
[MEMBRANE HARDENING] - Reinforce cellular membrane with additional protein layers. Increases damage resistance by 150%. Reduces absorption rate by 10%.
[CALCIUM SPIKE] - Develop a rigid protrusion on the cellular surface. Enables piercing attacks against other organisms. Damage output: Moderate. Unlocks offensive combat capability.
Andy considered his options. It reminded him of choosing his starter pokemon, which, in a very deeply real and or stupid way, he was becoming his own pokemon. Three paths. Speed, defense or offense. The holy trinity of character creation.
Flagellum was the support pick. Nimble, quick, it had the potential to really become a fun utility class. And as a prior vet tech, he was used to being utility.
Membrane hardening, the tank build. More defense equals harder to kill. As someone who recently (probably) died, dying again wasn’t really on Andy’s todo list. This appealed to the part of him that always played things cautiously. The part that brushed his teeth twice a day, that buckled up even when going only across a parking lot, the part that looked both ways at crosswalks. He pushed that last thought away.
Calcium Spike. Develop a rigid protrusion. A built in sword. A hard stiff appendage that he could use to penetrate other organisms. The universe was really leaning into this innuendo. Or, Andy reasoned with himself, it was simply his interpretation colored by the very traumatizing event of his untimely demise.
He considered the options, he really did.
System, he commanded, I have a question.
[YES?]
Startled at the response Andy momentarily forgot his question. He blamed his lack of a brain.
Which option is the best option?
[THE SYSTEM CANNOT CHOOSE YOUR PATH]
Okay, then. Can you tell me where the paths lead?
[THE PATHS WILL LEAD TO WHERE YOU TAKE THEM]
What does that mean?
[THE SYSTEM DOES NOT DETERMINE YOUR PATH]
Can I become human again?
Several long, anxiety-inducing moments passed before the system responded. [HUMANS DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO THE SYSTEM]
What does that mean?
This time the System did not respond. Andy tried various ways of getting it to respond: “Hey System. Okay System. System, I have a question. Hello?” After quite some time (he supposed) had passed he decided he’d gotten all of the information the System was willing to divulge today.
Andy knew what he was going to pick, the very moment he saw it. Something inside of him resonated with the choice. He picked the spike.
Strategy had very little to do with it. If he was being strategic he should’ve picked the utility skill. Although, that very same gamer brain was calculating and concluding that offense would certainly translate more quickly to larger XP gains. Anger had nothing to do with it either, in fact Andy felt no anger at all. In the tiny little compartments of his being there was really one thing on his mind. Andy Snodgrass spent 24-years being cautious, being safe, and he still died.
He often picked the DPS class. And that he reasoned with himself was why he’d picked it. From Baulder’s Gate to WoW he was a damage dealer. But, lying to oneself was like cheating at solitaire, it may feel like winning in the moment, but thinking back you realize that you never truly won at all.
[CALCIUM SPIKE: SELECTED]
[DEVELOPING…]
Nothing in his human frame of reference covered what happened next, which was saying something considering his frame of reference now included ‘bipedal mammal with a Sam’s Club membership’ to ‘microscopic blob’ Calcium gathered at a single point of his surface. His atoms rearranging as if his blood (if he had blood) was being drawn to that area. The point stiffened, elongated outward.
It was, by almost any measurement, incredibly small. A tiny protrusion jutting from the membrane of a tiny bacteria. But it was his. And if the universe was going to make jokes about a virgin growing his first stiff protrusion in his second life, well, Andy was choosing to be the bigger man. Figuratively of course as he was neither big, nor a man.
[CALCIUM SPIKE: ACQUIRED]
[HORN MORPHOLOGY: INITIATED]
He took a second to register the second notification. Horn morphology. What is horn morphology? It sounded like a subsystem tag. Some kind of metadata tracked in the background. But he had other things on his mind, and so he pushed the notification away.
He should have read it.
For now he and his horn had a date. As he drifted in the current of the pond, slowly, but with minor direction he came across a smaller cell. He positioned himself in the path of that cell and as they passed through the same space he slid his point into the cell. It gave way with a satisfying lack of resistance. The cell’s contents spilled into the surrounding water like a pinata made of amino acids. His first real penetration. Not how he’d imagined it, but honestly? Pretty satisfying.
[ORGANISM DEFEATED: PROKARYOTE (BASIC)]
[XP GAINED: +3]
[XP: 3/50]
[NEXT MILESTONE: TIER EVOLUTION]
Three XP. From one kill! Absorbing those nutrients from the water had given him between ⅓ to 1 XP per absorption. The math was clear. Violence in every species was apparently more efficient than foraging. This lesson was ancient in humanity and applied in almost every video game ever made (there certainly were exceptions) and apparently also in microbiology.
Andy Snodgrass who had never thrown a punch in his entire life, but had once apologized to a chair for bumping into it discovered that he had a talent for single-celled combat. And as it turned out, the pond was full of things to stab.
Over the next span of time (hours? days? years?) Andy settled into a routine which he referred to as “The Loop”. Naming things to him made them feel manageable and if there was any semblance of control of this life, Andy was going to hold onto it for dear life. Otherwise, the alternative was confronting the yawning existential void that was his current existence.
The Loop went like this: drift through water sensing for nutrient gradients. When a concentration appeared, move toward it. If the concentration was dissolved organic matter, absorb it. If the concentration was another living cell, stab it and then absorb the result. Gain XP. Repeat.
It was, he reflected, not dissimilar from the gameplay loop of a survival crafting game. Except there was no crafting, and survival was a constant. It could definitely use a graphic upgrade. It’d be nice to actually see and not just rely on vague impressions of stuff nearby, which was interpreted by his entire body.
The horn made everything easier. Other cells had to engulf their prey by slowly wrapping around it, the cellular equivalent of trying to eat a burrito by hugging it. Andy got to poke things. One quick thrust, or sometimes slow and deliberate thrusts and they popped open with the satisfying release of a loot drop. This was faster, cleaner, and if he were being honest with himself, satisfying in a way he was trying not to examine. He was getting good at thrusting. That’s what she–no. No, he was not going to make that joke. He was a single-celled organism with dignity.
[XP: 24/50]
Fifty XP for his first tier evolution. He was halfway there. The spike was earning its keep. Once again the returns had diminished and he wasn’t able to calculate only x more kills to go, but the kills were getting easier. He was learning to read the chemical signatures of nearby organisms to distinguish between ones worth stabbing (fat, slow nutrient dense) and the ones worth avoiding (too large, too fast, or surrounded by chemical markers that his biology told him ‘bad idea, don’t mess with that guy.)
He was becoming a predator. A microscopic apex predator in some warm infinite body of water with a single spike. The irony was not lost on him. Andrew Snodgrass let spiders outside rather than killing them. He helped every animal and human that he came across, and now he was surviving by stabbing other organisms with his horn.
A very, very small horn. He reminded himself. But, if his senses were to be believed. It was growing.
He chose to focus instead on XP. And the XP was good. What did evolution mean? New abilities, new forms? He didn’t let himself get too hopeful, instead he continued to think about forward. One (figurative) step at a time.
The first time Andy used [DIVIDE] he did so by accident.
His energy reserves had been climbing steadily as he ate, a second bar he noticed filling beneath the XP counter, labeled [ENERGY]. Focusing on it gave no additional information. But when it hit capacity a system message appeared.
[MAXIMUM ENERGY. BINARY FISSION AVAILABLE. WOULD YOU LIKE TO PROCEED?]
[YES] [NO]
He said yes out of a bad habit honed by years of clicking through dialogue boxes without reading them. For the most part the easiest way to get through to the end was to say “yes.” By the time he processed ‘binary fission’ the process had already begun.
It was weird.
His body elongated. The membrane stretched. Everything inside of him replicated and migrated to opposite ends of his stretching form. A pinch formed in the middle, deepening like someone cinching a belt around a water balloon. He was getting longer, and thinner. The pressure built at his center, while the two halves were slowly pulling apart. A rhythmic pulsing began at his core and traveled through his entire being. He could not stress this enough, it was freaky. The most bizarre thing he had ever been conscious for. His spike remained on his end, which he noted with relief. The spike he also noted, hadn't been duplicated to his copy. Losing it as such, to the clone would have been on brand for the universe and deeply unfair.
And then with a tiny bwt there were two. His clone. His offspring, his… son? Daughter? Whatever it was, drifted away from him with passive indifference. That, in of itself, was disappointing to Andy. Even though he created a duplicate of himself–he still didn’t have anyone to talk to. The clone, he reasoned, was missing consciousness in addition to the horn.
Andy ‘watched’ it drift until it was too far from his structure to track.
He had just reproduced. Andrew Snodgrass, first of his name, virgin, penetrator of microbes had finally done the deed. Alone, as fate would have it. In a warm body of water, by ripping himself in half.
He wanted it on the record. Whatever cosmic system record that the universe was keeping of his increasingly absurd existence that this–this did not count. This was cellular Xeroxing. This was the biological equivalent of copying your own homework and turning in both versions. He had not ‘lost’ anything. Well, he had lost half his body mass and the entire experience had lasted about forty-five seconds. Which, to be fair, was probably how any first times would have gone too, but that was not the point.
[BINARY FISSION COMPLETE]
[OFFSPRING: 1]
[XP GAINED: +2]
Two experience for reproducing. Less than his first kill (3) but more than his first meal (1). The System had, through XP allocation alone seemed to create an implicit hierarchy of activities ranked by value: violence, reproduction, consumption. Andy decided before he examined the moral framework of whomever had designed this world’s operating system that he needed more data.
After his clone was gone, he did not mourn it. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was just hard to mourn something that had never really been a someone. This was just a cell doing cellular things. It more than likely did not have the burden of a human consciousness rattling around inside of it like a lone marble in a tin can.
He briefly wondered if that meant that the clone was the lucky one.
Then he stabbed another cell and the thought dissolved into gathered XP.
A predator arrived without fanfare. No trumpets. No ominous musical cues (or if there were, none that he could hear without ears). Just chemical gradients shifting. A sudden change in the local profile that translated roughly to, ‘big’ and ‘not a friend’.
He registered it before he truly understood it. Something was moving toward him with the same directed purpose that he had been using on his own prey. Now, he was half the size he had been and something was hunting him.
What emerged from the murky water was, relative to Andy, enormous. If Andy were a marble, this thing was a basketball. A bloated mass of predatory intent moved toward him with the confidence of an organism that had never met something it couldn’t swallow. It was an amoeba, or something like an amoeba. It hunted by engulfing its prey. It’d give that burrito a hug and dissolve it alive. A beanbag chair full of digestive acid.
Andy’s calcium spike, his pride and joy, his chosen ability. Looked very small, and very outmatched.
A pseudopod extended toward him. A thick arm of cytoplasm reaching through the water with leisurely malice of a hand reaching into a bag of chips. There was no urgency, the chips had nowhere to go. He was food. The only remaining step in this process was the eating part.
Andy did something that should be impossible as a cell, given his lack of adrenal glands. He panicked.
Panic, when your entire body is a cell, is deeply unpleasant. Every chemical alarm in Andy’s body fired at once. His entire being clenched and what little control he had of his movement was frozen and his entire body ached. He aimed his spike at the approaching pseudopod like a porcupine with a single quill. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had.
He ran (floated in the pond) at the predator. He thrust deep into the pseudopods membrane with a soft pop that he felt through his entire body. The predator recoiled. The damaged arm snapped back like a hand that had just touched a stovetop.
Andy had hurt it. A little. Barely. He’d given a giant papercut with his tiny, rigid, protrusion. Phrasing. He really needed someone to appreciate the phrasing.
A second pseudopod extended. This time from the other side. And then a third, from below. It was surrounding him. An organism with no brain, no nervous system, was enveloping a dumb marble with a pointy stick and a human consciousness. The human who thought himself so smart was being consumed by a bag of digestive enzymes.
He stabbed the second pseudopod. It recoiled, but the third kept coming. There were no good options. The spike could only point in one direction at a time. The predator was coming at him from three. In a moment, the pseudopods were going to close around him. His entire second life wasted inside the belly of an amoeba in the world's worst fever dream.
Andy did the only thing he could think of. Project Hail Mary. The “there is no way this will ever work” play that you could only pull off once in a million attempts and talk about for years. The one that only was deployed when all other options were spent, all hope lost.
He charged.
Horn forward, straight through. At full speed( which was the speed of a motivated bacterium, so “full speed” was generous) he drove himself deep into the approaching amoeba and punched through the membrane before it could reseal. He was inside its mouth. If felt thick, warm and coated him in a dense moisture. Digestive juices began eating at his outer membrane, and then he was out the other side, trailing debris. His whole body burned. It ached. Being his whole body was his entire self, it was a pain that he really could only relate to a migraine. Complete, engulfing. A throbbing that made it impossible to think let alone do much else.
[NARROW ESCAPE!]
[EXISTING: +5 XP]
[DAMAGE TAKEN: MEMBRANE INTEGRITY 74%]
He was alive. Damaged, and leaking. His own juices mixing with the predator’s, but by the System he was alive. His attacker, who he was now nicknaming Bob (after Bob’s Big Boy) drifted away, maybe to die, maybe to find easier prey. At this moment Andy didn’t care.
Andy floated in the water, and let his membrane heal.
He had nearly died (for the second time) and would have if it had not been for his horn.
[XP: 31/50]
Five XP for existing? System, Hey what did I get XP for?
[CONTINUING TO EXIST]
So, not dying.
[WELL, IF YOU HAD DIED YOU WOULD NO LONGER EXIST]
Was the system taking a tone? It felt as though it were taking a tone with him.
[THE SYSTEM DOES NOT TAKE A TONE.]
If Andy could breathe he would have taken a deep breath and centered himself. Instead he focused on being alive. On the horn that saved him. The pointy option. DPS. He had chosen correctly. Although, somewhere in the back of his mind, he felt as though it really had chosen him.
Andy resumed The Loop with new caution and a fresh appreciation for [EXIST]. As he drifted through the water penetrating anything that moved and absorbing their juicy innards he noticed something. The spike was definitely larger than it was before.
Not dramatically, but the structure had thickened. The calcium lattice was denser on the shaft and seemed to be more organized than before the fight. His spike, his first and only weapon, was growing. Getting longer, harder, and girthier.
Horny, he thought.
He would have giggled to himself in the silence of his single-celled existence, but he could not laugh. And as no one could hear him, no one else laughed either. He was alone and he was moist and hard and he couldn’t make anyone laugh with the jokes that were writing themselves.
He was the loneliest comedian in history.
He found a cluster of cells huddled in a thermal vent, fat and slow and warm, living their best prokaryotic lives in blissful ignorance of the spike wielding maniac drifting toward them. Guilt twinged the back of his mind, reminding him of Andrew Snodgrass, who took in an abandoned baby squirrel. And he pushed it down and pierced the lot before guilt could turn into hesitation.
[XP: 50/50]
[TIER EVOLUTION AVAILABLE!]
[CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE REACHED THE THRESHOLD FOR TIER 1 EVOLUTION.]
[YOU WILL NOW CHOOSE YOUR EVOLUTIONARY PATH.]
[THIS CHOICE IS PERMANENT AND WILL DETERMINE YOUR ORGANISM TYPE FOR TIER 2.]
[CHOOSE WISELY.]
Choose Wisely is a nice touch Andy projected at the System. It’s very ominous. Very RPG. He half expected a dramatic musical number to follow, but from what he could tell the System did not do music. What he wouldn’t give for some singing, or humming. He could do neither, as he currently had no mouth.
[EVOLUTIONARY PATHS:]
[1. AUTOTROPH] - The path of self-sustenance. Begin to diverge onto the path of photosynthesis. Unlocks paths such as algae, phytoplankton which can lead to larger and larger plant lifeforms both in and out of water. Note: Not compatible with horn–will remove.
[2. HETEROTROPH] - The path of consumption. This is the path from which animal life comes. As a heterotroph you still will be unable to produce your own food and must rely on consuming organic carbon as energy. There will be paths forward as an herbivore, carnivore, omnivore or decomposer. Here you could continue down the path of a bacteria, become a fungi, or even move into an animal path. Note: Compatible with horn morphology.
[3. MIXOTROPH] - The path of flexibility. Develop both autotrophic and heterotrophic capabilities. You will have the ability to both use photosynthesis and absorb organic carbon. This path includes phytoplankton, carnivorous plants, or marine invertebrates. Note: This path is uncommon and may limit ability selection of tier-specific bonuses.
Andy read through the options three times. And then he sat (floated) with the decision for awhile, turning it over in whatever passed for his mind these days.
Autotroph would be a pacifist build. He would no longer have to stab things to survive, no killing required. He could be zen, caring only for himself and existence. Contributing to the environment rather than taking from it.
This was the choice of an Andy who saved spiders, who cried at Pixar films, who saved squirrels and would likely have given anything to see those around him happy with very little regard for himself.
This Andy, the Andy of today did not even consider it for a full second.
Mixotroph was interesting. A hybrid build. The uncommon tag was intriguing and Andy imagined a walking piranha plant in his future life. This was the Andy who was angry at dying, who wanted to be chill but also get revenge on those who bothered his peaceful existence. The Andy who he was not, not even for a second going to be.
Which left heterotrophs. The path of consumption. Opening up toward animal-type organisms. Creatures that moved, that could see, taste, hear, feel. It seemed like the obvious choice, and Andy who had become quite attached(literally and figuratively) to his rigid growing horn was not quite ready to give it up.
That’s what led Andy to choosing to become a heterotroph. He tried to tell himself it was to work toward becoming a primate, or maybe something awesome like a dragon, but really something else was keeping him on this path that he wasn’t ready yet to admit.
Besides, he thought, he’d already grown a horn, honed his thrusting, and reproduced. If anyone was on a roll in this lifetime–it was horny Andy. A deeply weird, biologically confusing roll, but a roll none the less.
[HETEROTROPH: SELECTED]
[TIER 1 EVOLUTION COMPLETE]
[SPECIES: RADIOLARIA]
[EUKARYOTE]
[NEW ABILITIES UNLOCKED:]
[ACTIVE HUNTING] - Detect and pursue prey organisms using enhanced chemoreception. Tracking range: Short.
[PSEUDOPOD FORMATION] - Temporarily extend cytoplasmic protrusions for grasping, manipulation, or additional movement.
[ENHANCED ABSORPTION] - Increased efficiency when absorbing nutrients from defeated organisms. +50% nutrient yield from kills.
[CALCIUM SPIKE: RETAINED AND ENHANCED] - Spike damage increased. Piercing efficiency improved. Horn morphology: Active.
The last line had Andy breathing a sigh of relief, it carried through. Not only that but his horn was now more efficient and better than ever. There it was again “horn morphology”. That same tag as before, and from the note. During evolution selection. Andy considered examining it further when the change happened. He felt himself growing. His entire being stretching, becoming more.
He was still unicellular but the amoeba he’d charged through would certainly meet its match if they were to have another encounter. He could stretch his membrane out and use form long slender stiff extensions that could help him locomote and would be useful in that engulfing your prey to consume it kind of way. He still did not possess eyes, and a mouth through which he could scream, but he was on his way to having a skeleton, and that was moving somewhere.
[XP: 0/100]
[NEXT MILESTONE: ABILITY SELECTION]
One hundred XP to the next milestone. The numbers were getting bigger, the stakes were getting higher. And the body of water, with its chemical gradients, thermal vents, predatory amoebas and billions of other cells soon would no longer be a prison. It was about to become a leveling zone.