Chapter 20

Daniel refocused. He was out of time and thousands of tonnes of building was about to fall on his head. With a thought, he triggered the loose framework he had put in place to make his entire staircase construction collapse around him. With no time to collect any pieces that went wide, he deliberately did not release all the anchors simultaneously. instead, he staged them that the pieces further away from him would swing towards him before the anchor released, guaranteeing more of the wood to crash near him.

In his mind’s eye, he recalled the vision Priscilla had shared with him.

That was its tail. It had reached that high up and had possessed that much power.

A tail that had got deep within the building and while time was stopped, it was a mental thing. In reality, everything kept ticking on as normal. The entire structure would fall on him. Gravity still worked like it always had. He had to construct sufficient barriers from wood to survive the collapse, and that required mass.

Gravity was slow, or at least time was slowed sufficiently to make it seem so from his perspective. He knew that anyone watching would witness the disintegration of his stairs and then the building imploding as almost simultaneous events. There would be no detailed analysis as it would occur almost fast to react, a couple of hasty swear words and that would be it, apart from maybe turning to sprint away from any rocks that would be spat out by the collision. For Daniel, with Priscilla helping him everything was proceeding at a snail pace.

That was slow, except for his plant powers. They acted almost instantaneously.

Large pieces of wood, at least in volume, were beginning to fall around him, but the initial framework of the stairwell remained attached to them. Vines which allowed him to manipulate them as they fell. Of course, they weren’t falling evenly but chaotically instead.

It wasn’t like those tens of seconds before the lizard had crashed the building had been long enough for him to create a more elegant solution. Ideally, he would have created a situation where they would have fallen like a heap of babushka dolls where each piece above fitted perfectly over the top of the one below it and end up encasing in a perfect shell.

No, the collapse was a long way from that level of perfection.

Instead, it was a disorganised mess and with the time that Priscilla was buying him. Daniel strove to unwind that.

Concepts of crumple zones flittered through his mind and he realised that even with Priscilla’s help he lacked the time to construct what he needed to survive the coming collapse.

Not only did he need to produce a defence to weather the falling concrete the wood was not going to land near him. He would have to gather it to him and there wasn’t time for that type of multi-step process. Instead, his requirements were very close to that babushka doll metaphor. He needed the wood to drop into the right location immediately.

His current method was a guaranteed failure.

Desperately, he looked internally to see if he could find a solution. Even if it was a futile endeavour, he reviewed what he knew. The stairwell pieces were falling from above him. They came in a variety of shapes and orientation, and he needed to turn them into a multilayered defensive dome. The problem was that the stone would come down, one, two or maybe if he was very lucky three seconds later. That did not give time for anything more than the most basic of wood manipulation.

What he required was a cheat that would let him complete a hundred three dimensional tetris puzzles simultaneously because that was the challenge that he was facing.

That was not something his mind could do, but as he reviewed his power set, he saw tools that might help.

Algorithmic instructions to provide the backbone.

Intelligence would also work, but would take too long to train.

Priscilla applied her own mind to help him, so in the frozen time with the roof about to come crashing down about them they designed the structure that would save their lives.

A concept of layers and stress points and crumple zones and force redirection.

Priscilla was right there helping him, adding her own unique touch to the rules that he was putting into place.

Daniel knew he was doing this backwards. He had drafted the final result while ignoring the true issue, which was how to get sufficient mass into the right places to implement the plan. Yet it was not something that he could delay. He began the slow task of assessing and then changing the falling trajectory of each of the tumbling chunks of wood to get them to land in the correct positions.

The job was tough. First, he needed to predict how they would fall, which, with them spinning and likely to bump into other pieces was difficult. Then, when the general model was in place, he could tighten or loosen the connecting vine to redirect the piece and move on to the next one.

He knew both how slow and how imprecise his intervention was.

A step change was needed.

But how?

At the edge of his awareness, he noticed information flashing between the remaining pieces from Ivey’s interface. They were mathematical models mimicking what he was doing, but to a far higher precision. Daniel compared the results to his own intuition. According to the new models, the chunk he had just manipulated had been mis-assessed. Daniel had failed to consider the connection between it and another piece. After a further ten metres of falling, that vine would get tension and it would pull the segment away from the trajectory he had altered it to follow and have it landed two metres beyond the spot he was targeting, which for his purposes meant the wood might as well have never existed.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

He corrected the oversight by severing the connection between the two points, thankful that the interface components were double checking his work.

Mentally, he froze.

It was like a lightbulb going off in his head.

The interface pieces had a model doing what he was doing with flawed intuition, working instead with hard numbers.

This was something that he could use. Especially if it could be scaled and linked to everything else, he was doing.

Infused with purpose, he examined the models. The four interface chips were running between them despite their low bandwidth. Numbers flowed, calculations of vectors, the program the chips utilised were mapping everything simultaneously.

The complexity was impressive, and Daniel immediately saw its use.

It was definitely the key.

He released as much of his core processing as the interface chips would accept to supplement their calculation engines and remove the bandwidth issues they were running into.

The model’s accuracy rapidly improved by several orders of magnitude.

Daniel knew deep down that it was no coincidence that these chips had contained the program that he needed. In that brief connection with Ivey, the information must have been shuffled across to him. The issues of privacy, breach of personal space and all that didn’t matter. He was extraordinarily glad the interface had given him the tool.

He slotted the design that he wanted to construct around himself into the model.

Those same super advanced physics programs took his design and changed it.

With a click, an integrated model came into existence.

It told a simple story.

Currently, he was destined to die. Too much of that falling wood fell away from him. He needed to change things up,, so they fell closer to him.

He tried to tweak the model.

If he did x, y and then z in that order did that help?

Every time, his shelter failed to come into existence in time.

He had vague recollections of how business in the old world used to solve this sort of stuff. They didn’t do it by hand. They would get computers to run thousands of simulations. He could do the same thing and then, with algorithmic instruction deliver the changes exactly as specified by the transformation.

Excitement bloomed through him. Along with hope. It was an elegant solution and meant he needed to rely too much on programs he knew nothing about, but if the alternative was death?

He checked the numbers. It would take him fifty percent of his mana to complete the final structure once the wood had landed. He had already used twenty percent to cause the initial collapse. That meant he had thirty percent to assign to reorganising the falling pieces. He would do it with iterations. Fifteen percent, then ten, and then finally five percent.

The calculations hummed, and his core and the interface pieces were no longer running a single scenario it was generating thousands of them and possibly tens of thousands of them and once more the pieces fell but unlike when Daniel had been directly controlling his expenditure magic they fell around him.

The model’s chance of him surviving jumped to over fifty percent.

Daniel felt his mana leave him as trajectories changed. Not all of them and a distressingly large among was still forecast to land beyond where he could make use of them. However, he had another two iterations to fine tune their positions.

The model adjusted.

A secondary wave of changes occurred in the area. Chance of the shelter working increased further.

Then the third iteration and the complex engineering solution focused only on the ultimate designs of the sanctuary. The design included soft fluffy air-filled pockets of leaves on the inside to act like air bags. The plywood sheets would combine in collection of three, then a small space before another set of thin wooden pieces. That was to provide maximum energy absorption.

The algorithmic instructions he had set up would drive the ultimate outcome. All that was left was to see what happened.

His mana flooded out to be used by the rules as they had been defined.

The wood fell around with significant kinetic force. Prepared mechanisms absorbed the collision and prevented the pieces from bouncing away. Sheets fell landing in trios and finding themselves perfectly aligned before they fused to the joints of other bits of wood that had previously clad the stairwell.

His magic created interweaving connections, joints as opposed to fusions, as the bind strength per magic expenditure was superior.

Layer after layer expanding the size of the shelter.

The noise was deafening, and this was just the clatter of the wood falling. None of the solid chunks of the building had landed yet.

It was less than two cat and dogs and a vaguely spherical construct of wood that was five metres tall had formed along with a small passage for Priscilla to retreat to them though.

She had not left her spot yet. She was still observing the aftermath of the lizard’s strike. Casually, like the sky was not falling on her head she look up.

It was happening as clear as day. The broken ceiling of that eighth floor he had been walking upon a few hours earlier was not down at the fifth floor and visibly moving in the mouses perception. Th light from outside was diminishing as the gap in the building’s side was compressed. On the other side, where the lizard’s tail had swept through the glass and reinforced concrete as through a poorly constructed domino tower, Daniel could see thousands of flies streamed through that gap the tail had left. Traversing in a fly line toward their target.

The ceiling narrowed further. Dust was everywhere, and rocks the size of basketball came as precursor. Armageddon itself had arrived.

Priscilla glanced around one last time. Even with the slowed time the ceiling was another metre closer.

She was going to retreat to him.

His connection to her snapped, and he activated his own Speed because it was too terrifying to face what was coming at an unenhanced level. He wanted to see the calamity that was striking him.

The noise!

It was out of the world. A physical crushing presence.

His head ached from mana depletion. There was nothing more to do.

And…

He felt the first chunk of the stone crash into the wood above his head.

The plywood sheets shattered in a cascade of failures leading down towards him.

Daniel covered his head with his hands and hoped the engineering program was as accurate as he hoped.

The entire world was launching back and forth in the small cocoon he had reinforced around him and Carly.

Priscilla joined him, moving too fast for his physical senses to register, but his mental ones had no problem tracking her.

He was launched sideways. Blood filled his mouth as he bit down in shock. For some reason they unexpectedly bounced upward, or at least that’s what it felt like. Priscilla was snuggled into the gap between his arms, torso, legs and head and he focused are not crashing her as he tried to become a smaller ball.

He was launched in the opposite direction and there was a rush of blackness and he knew no more.