“‘So Intelligence makes you smarter.’ ‘It does not.’‘Then the name—’‘Is wrong. Allocate anyway.’”— Overheard on the Creston Academy
I hovered there over the menu and did the math I was capable of, which the system had already told me wasn’t much.
The plate had nearly folded me in half.
The bar across my shoulders had put me on the floor.
None of that was a mystery, and the cure for it was sitting one column over from where my thumb was hanging, marked Strength and Power to swing it, and I looked at that column for a good second and then left it alone.
My sword cut through everything I’d ever pointed it at. The day I needed bigger arms to do my hitting was a day I’d have already lost.
[Strength + Power (Wallop)] got nothing.
What had actually killed me on that floor wasn’t being weak. It was being behind; the pads lighting and moving before my feet could. So I spent where the gap was.
I dropped two into [Agility + Dexterity (Scuttle)], and watched the bar fill to 2/2 and lock.
The first point went in like a held breath let out slow, a warmth crawling up the backs of my hands and into the long muscles of my forearms, settling there, and the second came in on top of it and the warmth turned to a low tingle that didn’t hurt and didn’t stop.
Two into [Constitution + Endurance (Stubbornness)] next because who would want to fight longer. The tingle went deep this time, down into the bone, into the meat over my ribs where the Reaver had thrown me, and it sat there like a hand pressed flat against a bruise. It almost felt like I was growing a carapace, but I refused that thought, and the tingling stopped.
Then I moved into the second cluster.
I put two into [Perception + Memory (Churn)], the eyes and the part behind them. The moment the points landed the booth came apart into facet, the lights smeared into a hundred small amber lights, the seams of the door suddenly readable as a map of every seam, and under it a hum came up from nowhere I could point to, made of more voices than a room that size could hold.
The hum was reaching for the place I kept me, and it wanted to make my eyes the kind of eyes that saw in facets.
I’m not a bug.
I commanded, refused to be a bug for even a second, and something reacted to my will. It was the same feeling as I had when I refused the blessing; it was what I now recognized as my bloodline coming to the rescue.
It was gone before I finished the thought.
Instantly, the hum cut out mid-note; the facets snapped back into one ordinary frosted booth, and the amber lights were just lights again. My heart was pounding. The status panel sat there, glowing as if nothing had reached out of it.
I sat still for a while and decided, with great maturity, to think about that later.
One into [Awareness + Focus (Lock)], and one, pointedly one, into [Intelligence + Acuity (Snap)], the column the machine had practically laughed at me over not an hour ago. “There,” I told the empty booth. “Happy? One point. We’re geniuses now.”
[IQ is fixed for life; intelligence is a misleading name.]
I caught myself from groaning; I wouldn’t grant that satisfaction to the salty system. “Whatever, show me the result.”
[Attributes] Progress: 31% [SELECTED]LP: 0
[CARAPACE]Strength + Power (Wallop): 0/2Agility + Dexterity (Scuttle): 2/2Constitution + Endurance (Stubbornness): 2/2
[THE CHORUS]Intelligence + Acuity (Snap): 1/2Awareness + Focus (Lock): 1/2Perception + Memory (Churn): 2/2
[ICHOR]Quality + Density (Stuff): 2/4Control + Resonance (Steering): 2/4Efficiency + Regeneration (Stamina): 4/4
“I’m ready!” I yelled.
The little 2/2 caps mocked me a bit. I’d have happily poured more into Agility if the column would take it, but the bars wouldn’t lift past two.
The rig unfolded out of the wall as if it had been waiting. “Hands on the plate,” the attendant’s voice said, in the same even tone as before.
“Same as the start. Push when it pushes.”
I was tested again. I came off the rig, wrung out all over again. “That’s the set.” The attendant was already at the door, and this time there was a thumb-sized shard in his hand. “Your deltas. Start, finish, every axis.”
I took it.
Alice met me halfway across the floor with both hands out, palms up. “Shard. Hand it over. I’ve been patient for a literal eternity and I’m done.”
I stopped further than I really needed to. “You’ve been patient for six minutes.”
“An eternity.” She reached forward, grabbed me, and fell into step backward, towing me to the table by sleeve and sheer willpower since I wasn’t actually giving her anything yet.
The table by the glass had filled in while I bled out in the booth.
Alice’s side was a crime scene of small bright plates, Cecilia’s an arrangement that looked full, and in front of my empty chair sat one shallow bowl I hadn’t paid for, a few spoonfuls of something gold and clear with a sheen on top that moved like pudding.
I looked at it, then at Cecilia.
“You came off an assay,” she said, already turning her tea. “You don’t walk it off on an empty tank. It’s the consommé from earlier, the regen profile. Eat it before you sit down to be stubborn about it.”
“I can buy my own—”
“You can. You didn’t.” She didn’t look up. “It’s getting cold, so eat the soup, Dash.”
The owing thing climbed up my throat the way it always did, and I swallowed it back down with as much grace as I could find, which wasn’t much, and picked up the spoon.
Three spoonfuls.
That was the whole bowl.
The first one hit the back of my throat and unrolled outward, warm and clean, the exact feeling of the four-hundred-credit shake, and by the third the slope in my legs had flattened another notch.
Rich people ate their recovery; I could have wept about it if I wasn’t busy being grateful. “Okay. Now.” I dropped the shard into Alice’s waiting hand before she dislocated something.
She had it in her band’s reader before it stopped moving, and I felt my paranoia stand up.
“You just—plugged that straight in. You don’t know what’s on it.”
Alice gave me a look of such profound pity that I almost apologized for asking. “It’s a Kraftwerkhaus shard. Babe. A place this preem charges what it charges so it can swear on its grandmother, nothing leaves its booths dirty. The day they slip a client a worm is the day every name on that floor lawyers them into a crater.”
She tapped through something. “And my anti would’ve ghosted it before you finished panicking.”
The band chewed without complaint, so I let it go and gave them the short version while it worked, which two of the bug-named pairings I’d maxed and where the singles went, and left out the part where I’d spent one entire point spiting a tooltip.
“Solid,” Cecilia said, and meant it, and then, because she was Cecilia, added, “though I’ll warn you now, the Intelligence axis doesn’t make you smarter. That’s a translation artifact.” She tipped her cup a half-inch toward Alice without otherwise moving. “Exhibit A allocated for it heavily.”
Alice’s mouth opened. “I have a documented A-plus—”
“Yes,” Cecilia sipped. “They’re unrelated, as you demonstrate daily.”
Alice pouted at her curry with the wounded dignity of the genuinely smart and frequently underestimated, which I decided was a category I would not be commenting on out loud.
“How do you feel?” Cecilia asked me, and the teacher was behind it again. “Not the number. You. What changed?”
I thought about the walk across the floor, the room holding still, the hands that felt closer to me. “Faster, I think. Hands work better.” I turned my spoon upside down. “But it’s not—it’s not a lot. I keep waiting to feel like a different person, and I mostly feel like me with the volume turned up a click.”
Alice’s band chimed.
“Yeah, so.” She turned the band so that I couldn’t see it. “Two whole points in the agility one, yeah? With your compatibility so low, and the way each one splits across the pair, you cleared—” she squinted, performing the suspense, “—barely ten percent in agility. Ten in dexterity. For two whole points.”
Cecilia smiled. “Alice is too harsh; that wouldn’t be bad for a solid C-tier single attribute.”
So basically each attribute got five percent per point, because I had two per point?
Ugh.
I’d felt the entire booth try to fold me into a hive for that. I’d refused to be a bug; my great-grandfather’s blood had come up swinging to keep me a person, and the prize on the far side was barely double digits increase.
“That’s—” I set the spoon down. “That’s nothing; barely a rounding error.”
“It’s not nothing.” Cecilia had that flat, certain tone she used right before she was right about something. “Your base is solid, Dash. Better than it has any business being for someone not exercising. That’s what’s carrying the percentage at all.” She studied me like a problem. “What’s your routine?”
I almost laughed. “Routine. I run around the school mines until something tries to eat me, and then I run faster.”
She smiled, and I felt obscurely proud of having earned it. “Then you’ve never trained a day in your life and you’re already where you are. Put you on an actual floor, a real program, structure—” She nodded toward the gym. “You’d climb a lot.”
I followed her gaze toward the exercising people. “You think?”
“Eat your soup,” she said, and turned back to her plate, the verdict delivered.
The math being over, Alice had completely lost interest in me and descended on her curry with both hands and zero restraint, making a sound the rest of the table politely pretended not to hear.
Then a shadow came up, broad-shouldered, dark-coated, and the day was over. He said nothing dramatic. Alice looked up at the bodyguard with a forkful halfway to her mouth and made a noise of pure betrayal. “We’re not done.”
“You are behind schedule, miss.” His chrome jaw caught the daylight. “Your mother would like you collected before the next appointment.”
“Mom caved,“ Alice said to me, like I was a witness. “She specifically caved. This is a coup.”
“It’s a pickup,” the bodyguard said.
Cecilia was already up, smoothing the front of her clothes back into order. “We had the morning. That was the deal.” She glanced at me. “We’ll send you the assay properly worked up when Alice stops hating math.”
“My kind of woman,” I said.
“You both are...” She almost facepalmed. I saw her hand move, but she refused to be caught doing that. “Pulse us. We’ll figure out what you owe us, since you won’t drop it.”
“He won’t,” Alice agreed, mournfully gathering the last of her curry into one final overloaded bite. “He’s proud Sol 15 heir.”
Then the formation closed around them, the constant reasserting itself after one feral morning of pretending it wasn’t there, and the two of them went out through the glass doors trailing argument, Alice’s voice carrying back through the gap, until the doors sealed it off.
I sat another minute with the empty bowl and the warmth still going in my legs, then collected the coilgun and the sword off the biometric rack, paid the rack its insult of a fee, and walked back out into the East Corporate District alone.
My band buzzed.
AliceOnFire_real: ten percent is a LIE btw your base is doing all the work, get a gym membership!AliceOnFire_real: ceci’s words not mine
I pulled my hood up against nothing in particular and started down toward the train, lighter on my feet by a disappointing, refused-a-hive-for-it ten percent.
For now, I’d take it and increase the max later.
When I got home, I needed to relax a bit, so I took my book on guns upstairs, and I was somewhere in the chapter on barrel harmonics, slumped sideways across my bed with it propped on a pillow, when my holoband buzzed.
A contact I’d never made.
Dot’s assistant.
I probably had every corporate contact in the family pre-loaded, whether I’d asked for the directory or not. It knew people you didn’t.
I sat up, swung my feet to the floor, and threw the call to the wall screen.
A woman answered out of the holo, standing in an office with a pale floor, a desk with nothing on it, and behind her a window full of moon scenery.
“Mr. Kallum. I’m Director Dot’s personal assistant.” She didn’t offer her name. “I have five minutes, and I’d rather spend them explaining a situation than convincing you of anything. If you decline at the end of it, that’s fine—I'll move to the next candidate. Acceptable?”
I straightened without deciding to. “...What’s going on?”
“A system call. Kallum received a request for assistance. It originates outside the local cluster, a different galaxy through the RH subsystem.” RH. I’d heard that one before, weeks back, while we fought the park incursion with Erika. She dropped RH like it carried weight, and then sealed up the instant I asked what it meant. She’d never told me.
I nodded as if I’d known for years.
The woman broke her concentration; she clearly didn’t expect me to know about RH. “The summoning party is a church, local to the world in question,” she said, but it felt more as if she read that from somewhere. “They’re conducting a purge—a pagan population, offered conversion or removal, with templars contracted to carry it out. They pull us through in roughly an hour. Most of the roster is filled.”
“...You said purge.”
“I did.” Nothing moved in her face. “There’s one gap. The operation needs a classless templar, under level five, for a sub-level-five sector. The system sets your level to five for the duration and grants a unique scenario class. Candidates that are weak are scarce.” She waited for my reaction, but I just stared back.
I’m weak after all.
When I kept silent, she continued, “Director Dot put your name forward. If you take the contract and the operation succeeds, a share of the proceeds credits toward your reinstatement.”
And there it was.
“You’d be summoned in, issued armor and a melee weapon, and given a quest. Three minutes left.”
“That sounds,” I said slowly, “like we’re the bad guys.”
She shrugged. “The quest classifies them as pagans to be purged. Convert, and they aren’t. If you’re persuasive enough, it’s possible you don’t have to kill anyone.”
“And if public speaking isn’t my gift, I get to be a templar going door to door on a planet I’ve never heard of, putting down whoever didn’t say the right words fast enough.”
“You’d never be able to return to that world afterward,” she said, as if that were the part I’d balk at. “And I’ll note that the RH subsystem isn’t generally available below level thirty. This is unusual access.” She waited again for my reaction.
I kept silent.
“My purpose isn’t to talk you into it, only to set the choice in front of you. If you refuse, someone else takes the slot, and the purge proceeds either way.”
Her wording was unusual. Either nobody had handed her the nice words yet, or there hadn’t been time to run purge past the people whose entire job was turning purge into realignment. The talking points hadn’t reached her, so I was getting the raw feed.
“One minute,” she said.
The pragmatist in me had already run the stupid math.
The only currency I actually wanted, for an hour in someone else’s holy war.
And it wasn’t that my hands were clean. I’d poisoned a Bhavsar floor and slept fine; they could eat the loss and I never lost a minute over it. I’d put a round through anyone who came at me first, or anyone who’d earned it, and not lie awake on that either.
My red line wasn’t blood.
My red line was that I didn’t know these people; not their world, not their church, not what pagan sorted to once it sat in the hands of whoever was doing the sorting, and she’d handed me sixty seconds to decide a street full of strangers had it coming.
I wasn’t going to let a quest log make that call for me. Convert or purge. A checkbox with people behind it. Dad had a thing about Palistra. Great-grandpa said it first, and Dad repeated it frequently.
Palistra cares only about the result. We care how we got there.
It was probably a dumb call. The result didn’t need me; the street burned whether or not my hand was on it, so my ‘no’ saved nobody, maybe cost me the reinstatement, and made me, by every number that counted, an idiot.
The pragmatist was still listing reasons when I answered.
“I refuse.”
She didn’t react, but I heard a voice. “How... disappointing.”
Uncle Dot walked into the frame.
“What—” I looked between them. “What’s going on?”
“A test,” he said. “There’s no quest or purge. The RH subsystem has a hero in the name for a reason; it doesn’t conscript anyone into a slaughter, but the scenario was never the point.” He glared directly into my eyes. “The point is that you’re weak. As my brother and your father were. Weak leadership is the reason we’re on the verge of falling apart.”
I opened mouth to protest, but he raised a fist. “The reason I tested you is because we found out which corporation is draining you.”