Metamorphosis Read online

  “One way to find out. I’ll forge, you engineer. Plan wisely. I can’t make this go any faster,” he said, starting to create another dirty white-colored brick slightly lighter in shade than the sand itself.

  “Challenge accepted,” Cal-com echoed as he began reviewing possible structural designs to find one strong enough but with the least building material needed.

  3

  April 24, 154930

  Solar System (Home One Kingdom)

  Earth

  Wilson stood in one of the many control centers for the training courses in Atlantis, linked into the biomonitors that all the trailblazers were wearing. When they weren’t going at it in team matches, he had them doing work on obstacles courses, mostly solo runs. The difference now was their Essence use. He had them split into groups, with one using Essence as normal. Another only using their own Essence and forgoing the Uriti-charged Magicite rings, with a third using no rings and pulling only from what was in their body currently.

  The fourth and final group were forbidden from using Essence at all, and they hadn’t been thrilled about it. Every time a person used Essence it increased their total personal reservoir a tiny bit, and the trailblazers had gotten in the habit of using it all the time to take advantage of this aspect, but Wilson wanted to see what happened when they avoided it. He’d done similar experiments with lower ranking Archons, but none of them had the size of Essence wells as the trailblazers did, so he was hoping he’d get some useful results. All the other experiments seemed to reflect the same basic truth.

  Essence use had no negative effects on the body or training unless you went so low to risk death.

  Wilson crossed his arms over his chest as he watched Greg-073 jumping through a series of hoops spaced 16 meters apart and elevated 3 meters in the air. This course was a ‘no fly’ course, and the trailblazers didn’t have a problem restricting themselves from using certain psionics on the obstacle courses. It was in combat when they had an opponent that adjusted to them that they found it hard to hold back.

  Greg leapt easily from floor to hoop to floor over and over again, making his way to a slide that carried him up via a reversed gravity column, then he was swinging from monkey bars across a disqualification chasm that didn’t prove any real threat to him. This run was about speed, for the course was familiar, and unless he really screwed up there was no chance of not making it to the finish.

  They’d gone over this course hundreds of times each in the past, with dozens more on this group arrival to Atlantis, and as always they were trying to improve their times. That meant their marks were already pretty high to begin with, but they were chipping away here and there without any significant improvement. Without being able to use Essence or their Saiyan modes to boost their speed, all they had was their psionics, muscle, and rhythm to work with. And once you’d hammered that out, squeezing every advantage out of the course that you could, what did that leave?

  No room for accidental advancement. If they were going to adapt and grow to it, it would show. If they did not, they would plateau at or near their current level. Wilson needed a wall like this to hammer them on in order to analyze the more subtle aspects of their fitness, and the results he was getting so far were not useful.

  Not if his gut feeling that Essence use held a disadvantage was true.

  He was watching more than just Greg at the moment, with monitors on Kerrie-057, Ace-095, and Logan-036 off to the side, but they were all behind pace. Greg was flickering with a new record, so he’d brought him and his stats up center screen to see if there was anything different going on with him…especially since he was in the ‘no essence use’ group.

  Many people mistook the trailblazers for slightly different looking clones of one another, but each of them had their own peculiarities and strengths, and Wilson had split the teams up as evenly as he could, with Kara and Davis thrown in as extras. Both broke the mold in different directions, but at this point he needed any and all data he could get, and so far he was totally dry in that regard. At least as far as any data suggesting his gut feeling was accurate.

  Greg had no visual timer, which was meant to focus them on the feel of the run rather than let them calibrate to the clock. Normally that’s not how you worked a timed course, because you needed to see where you were gaining and losing in order to adapt, but Wilson wanted them blind on this, hoping that they’d stumble on something he’d missed. They were good at that, and throwing them at this was his last hope at the moment. He didn’t know where else to look, but he was sure there was something wrong with Essence use. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, his instincts told him to stay on this.

  A barely audible ping sounded, but in the silence of the control room it was loud. Wilson’s eyes went to Greg’s biomonitor data, seeing the source of the notification. He raised an eyebrow, then focused on Greg’s motions as he moved with liquid grace through a series of tiny pillars that he had to step on very carefully to avoid falling…all below a short ceiling that kept him from jumping across them.

  His coordination was impressive, but the ping was the result of something Wilson had discovered long before Essence. It was a state of concentration where one stopped thinking about past or future and became one with the moment. All movements were intuitive, almost as if you were not in control of yourself and moving so fast you didn’t know how you were doing what you were doing, but you just ran with it.

  Some called it ‘in the zone,’ others had given it the moniker ‘liquid gold,’ but there was one type of phenomenon within the category that he had labeled ‘Ultra Instinct,’ and Greg had just slipped into it.

  And as a result, his speed had increased ever so slightly…not due to his muscles pushing harder, but to his coordination and course chosen being smoothed out and more accurate, with less wasted movement. Wilson had felt this a number of times in his life, but could never do so on command. It just manifested at odd times, and he knew that when it did you just went with it. Thinking would undo it, for it was experience without planning, and often happened in new situations.

  Doing so in familiar ones was very rare, but it did happen. And this was usually when records were broken that could never be gotten back to later…at least not without a lot of training advancement to close the gap.

  Greg finished out the course within the next few minutes, all the while staying in ‘Ultra Instinct’ through the finish line. Then he took a few extra breathes and tilted his chin up slightly to address the monitoring equipment he knew was on.

  “Sorry, Wilson. Took that one a little easier. Didn’t feel right pressing too hard, so I tried to smooth things out a bit. I’ll hit the next one harder.”

  Wilson triggered the mic with a thought. “You just shaved 1.46 seconds off your record.”

  Greg frowned. “No. There’s no way.”

  “You did. And your biomonitor said you slipped into Ultra Instinct. How long has it been since you’ve done that?”

  “Longer than I can remember,” Greg said, putting his hands on his hips as he paced around the finish area thinking. “Are you sure? I didn’t feel any different.”

  “You can review the data later. Go through again, immediately. I need a comparison.”

  “How hard?”

  “Same effort. I want to see how much decline you get off fatigue.”

  “Will do,” Greg said, hopping over a low barrier to the nearby start line, then he slapped the start button and took off as soon as it depressed.

  “Could it be…” Wilson whispered to himself as several ideas hit him simultaneously as Greg again slipped into Ultra Instinct a few moments after he got into the obstacle course. Doing it twice in a row was unheard of, and while he didn’t stay in it constantly, he flickered in and out over the next few minutes.

  Wilson suddenly smacked his hand against his forehead and groaned. “How could I be so stupid?” he said, knowing he’d have to get a lot more data to be sure, but he now had a working theory. After all this time,
nobody had really asked what Essence was supposed to do. It was always what it could be used for. Connecting the Core to the Body was what was assumed, but Wilson never really explored that line of thought, probably because it couldn’t be seen or tested in any way other than going too far to the point of death, and Star Force would never do that kind of sick research.

  “Fatigue from Essence use,” he mumbled to himself. “Why did I never see it? It’s not a control exertion, it’s coordination…or, actually, that is a control exertion, just of a different sort. And you guys are such beasts that you haven’t shown the diminishment. No, not just that. Your Essence reserve is never the same twice. That’s why I couldn’t find it. No replicability.”

  Wilson was feeling very good…and very stupid…right now, but he was going to need data before he went to Davis and the trailblazers. He wouldn’t tell him his theory. It might bias their actions and throw off the analysis, because if he was right, it was going to be a very minimal difference that would require multiple attempts under the same conditions. Many attempts. Hopefully the numbers would bear him out, but he now had a lead to go on.

  And once again, he owed the trailblazers for stumbling onto something without even trying. Their instincts were better than his own, but they needed him to figure it out and codify a training procedure to probe it. They were better in the field, he was better in analysis, but both were best when overlapping their specialties, and having them all here was now beginning to pay off, as rare as it was.

  All except Paul. Wilson wondered what he was up to, for he hadn’t gotten any updates from him. Maybe he was stumped, or maybe he was on the track of the same thing he was…

  Paul tossed another brick to Cal-com, with him placing it on the last ring on the top of the dome he’d been building as the wind was already throwing so much sand between them that Paul had a hard time seeing him.

  “That’s the last one. Build the cap,” Cal-com yelled over the storm rather than using telepathy as he stood next to the slightly shorter shelter…or rather the taller one, but he was standing on a dune that was already a third of the way up the windward side of the curved brick wall.

  Paul gathered more material this time, and rather than creating the slightly curved rectangular bricks, he started pulling sand together and reorganizing it on a molecular and sometimes atomic level to create a mostly flat plug that was a little less than a meter wide and narrower on the bottom than the top rim. It ended up being about 3 inches thick, and when he tossed it to Cal-com the Voku stepped up and placed it on the last hole on top of the dome, with him having to brush some sand off the edge to make it slide in evenly.

  When it did, the interior that held the tent was now protected from the wind, with the arch-like construction reinforcing itself against its own weight, but Paul wasn’t going to leave it at that. As Cal-com came down from the dune and around to the short entrance tunnel on the leeward side, Paul placed a hand on the exterior sidewall and swiped away some of the clinging sand. It appeared as if wet, but there was no moisture here, rather static cling to the odd alloy he’d created.

  He got a section clear of the dry ‘snow’ and pressed his palm against it, then used his alchemy psionic, Dogorat’nah, to weld the bricks together…at least partially…making the dome one solid structure, then he followed his friend inside, crawling over an angular dune that was quickly building in front of their exit tunnel.

  They’d taken the time to build it out two meters from the tent, which was sitting just inside the dome and occupying almost all the interior space. The armor coating they’d made would keep the wind off it, but they hadn’t built any type of door on the entrance. Paul stood up inside and walked through the tent door behind Cal-com, then sealed it as the bit of wind getting through the tunnel vibrated it in and out while the rest of their purchased structure remained stable.

  “You handled that faster than I thought possible,” Cal-com congratulated, “but the storm was the faster.”

  “Still, it beats having to take a nap in armor until it passes,” Paul said, laying down on his lounging pile of packs and taking a very long breath.

  “How tired are you?”

  “Little and much,” Paul said with a smirk. “I don’t know. I’m all over the place.”

  “Better or worse?”

  “I feel better in the storm, though that may be mental.”

  “You prefer a challenge,” Cal-com said, sitting down on the other side of the small tent, with his legs stretching out next to Paul’s right side.

  “Stagnation really is the enemy. Rest is useful, but when you’re done with it, not having anything to do takes you off the path, because the path is forever in motion. I can see that now in a way I couldn’t before.”

  “And the storm?”

  “Even though we’re sitting here we have to deal with it. Mentally it’s a fight even if physically it isn’t. The environment is the challenge.”

  “Then peace is not the path?”

  “Not for me. But peace gives us the opportunity to craft our own training. Without it we are forever at the mercy of the storm, and can only adapt as it allows us. We have to create peace to forge our own path, but we cannot linger in it. Peace is not the objective, it is a prerequisite to higher level abilities.”

  “Abilities that can only be truly mastered in the storm?”

  “There is a duality there that is problematic.”

  “If the storm goes away, where does that leave you?”

  “Exactly. Though it looks like it’s a forever storm.”

  “Is ending it the objective, or surviving it?”

  “I don’t know, but I think I’ve been suspecting the former, and that’s caused me to lock up. As if winning takes away all victories. But letting everything go to shit just so I can put it back together is a betrayal in a different manner. I couldn’t see another option before, and while I can’t name it now, I can sense it. Fortunately life isn’t a game where we have to know the objective to play it. We just take it one level at a time trying to figure it out as we go along.”

  “But ultimately you need to figure it out?”

  “I don’t see how we can’t if we keep moving forward.”

  “Then your objective isn’t truly to understand the nature of the universe. That is a side effect. Your objective is to continue moving forward.”

  “And we can’t do that standing still.”

  “So how do you keep moving forward?”

  Paul put his hands behind his head. “Right now I’ve got plenty to chew on. But later…it’s not going backwards. Not to the fleet. Not to the Empire. Building it is a challenge already completed. Upgrading it may be another one, but maintaining it is not. We’ve got plenty of others for that anyway. You included. Is that where your path travels?”

  “For now. Nothing ever stays the same, and what you built could be lost if not adjusted over time. There is significant importance and challenge in that for someone like me, but it would be repetitive for you. You are a storm, never staying in the same place. Always moving. Always in action. If you stop, you cease to exist. You are transition incarnate.”

  “I can’t argue with that. And I kinda like it,” Paul said, closing his eyes and beginning to drift off to sleep as he listened to the rain-like sound of the sand hitting the inside wall of the tunnel and bouncing onto the tent door in repetitive spurts that continued to get louder and more intense. But the more intense it got the more Paul relaxed, and Cal-com noticed as he continued to monitor his friend’s condition with his Regenerator.

  “You truly are a creature of action,” he whispered after Paul was out hard.

  The temperature was dropping fast, so Cal-com turned up the rooftop heater a bit more while laying a blanket over Paul, careful to not wake him, but the Archon didn’t even notice. Whatever changes were taking place inside him were occupying his attention, and Cal-com was concerned with how vulnerable Paul was. As strong and wise as he was, in this state the weakest of enemies co
uld walk up on him and kill him with a single shot to the head.

  That wasn’t going to happen with Cal-com here, though he had no idea who or what this vision was. And if it was an enemy, how would he defend his friend against it?

  4

  Paul woke again before the storm had passed, sitting up and rubbing his forehead as he tried to wash the sleepiness out of his senses. Ever since his transformation into a Saiyan, sleepiness was something he’d had very little experience with, but it was slamming him now, and in a way that was refreshing…despite the fact he felt like going back to sleep immediately after waking.

  “Any new dreams or revelations?” Cal-com asked as the tent door continued to vibrate in the wind coming through the short tunnel.

  “Just wondering why I wake up more tired than before I went to sleep,” he said, sitting up and scooting back against the pile of packs so he had something to lean on as he tried to relax the sleepiness out of his head.

  “Why not try and sleep more?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was getting too shallow.”

  “So now as you get more active the sensation deepens. It suggests your rest state isn’t very efficient. Perhaps a side effect of continued effort.”

  Paul frowned. “So my body has to relearn how to fully rest?”

  “Possibly. Or it may be additional changes,” Cal-com suggested, crawling over on his knees until he got within range to attach his armor’s probe to his friend’s arm so he could scan his genetic code.

  “Odd. I’m not seeing any change this time.”

  “None?”

  “Not genetically. I expected a gradual decline, not a sudden stop.”

  “Stupid,” Paul cursed at himself. “This didn’t all start because I took a break and started to relax. I also stopped using Essence…until now.”

  “You think it interferes in the adaptation process somehow?”