Ten hours is how long this took.  Ten hours of work and I have shifted my energy requirements down into the realm of days instead of weeks, months or the years it would have taken with a stick figure.  One point of energy is roughly a minute of time, so 1,440 energy in a day.  Millions would not cut it for getting out of here sane.  Thankfully, hunger is coming on slower than I would have thought.  That or work is a mighty fine distraction.  Not as good as a night of gaming to forget eating, but work and experimentation still works well to curb hunger.

In the course of that ten hours, I learned a whole lot.  How much of this is applicable outside of this specific circumstance, and how much of this is there for the wrong conclusions, I have no idea.  The fact that it has use in getting me back to places with food is the most important part of my learning though.

Lets go over the important parts as I’m waiting so that I can maybe make some use out of them when I get back and/or tell people how to get back from the dead in less than a few years.  First off, the arrow between my name and the stick figure was super important, conceptually.  What it represents is the fact that the rest of these lessons can be linked together if done correctly.  Most of them, really, since some of them are a bit more self-contained than others, but the point still stands.

I say this because the extra fraction of a stable connection as the floating words call it does not directly help me, I think.  It’s more a way to help me work through what works well and what is mediocre at best.  Take, for example, the stick figure: lots of work to make it, especially to draw in the details and make it recognizable as me.  It is certainly not the hardest way to connect, but it isn’t as good as some.  The main draw to it is the fact that it was a concrete representation which helped immensely.  My name, similarly, was relatively poor at providing such a strong link.  By itself, it only gave five tenths of a connection.  My last name only gave one of those points, but only a few people called me “Jackson”.  The fact that two weak connections, my name and a stick figure of myself, were able to overlap to create one connection is important.

The fact that I could get a similar energy requirement by substituting a hand-print for the stick figure speaks to the fact that stick figures are not that great of a connection type.  Even by putting a stick figure attached to hand and foot-prints only took another zero off the number I had to hit.

What I needed were things that were directly connected to myself that were easy to connect together to layer the effects.  Also circles.  The circles were pretty important too.  I figured that out when I was drawing another stick-me for a few tests.  I started the circle and looked up at the floating words and was surprised that a circle by itself was actually better than a regular stick-figure.  That took me down a less-is-more approach to how things should go from then on, or at least an awareness that messing up a symbol was worse than not having one.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Using somebody else’s name would reduce the connection if it were associated with the connection in any way, but without an association it would have no effect.  Using someone else’s name, but contextualizing it in doing so, would increase the connection by a varying amount.  The fact that I was captain McGreggor’s subordinate was less effective than saying that I was Buffy’s friend, but still more effective than writing that I was an acquaintance of Tom, one the biologists on the ship.  Saying that I was the son of Tracy and Kole Jackson was one of the most effective links I could make via names actually.  Beating out all the rest was referring to myself as Mike “Omnoculus” Jackson.  Nicknames have power.  Makes me wish I had a few more that I had gone by, but using Omnoculus as my tag for so long was probably why it held so much weight.  Most of the people I knew called me by that or some slight variation.  The fact that my real name was nearly as potent is a telling factor, especially since it was used so rarely.

The next big breakthrough that helped me shave off a ton of zeros was pretty crude and pretty simple.  Not thinking of the idea of a voodoo doll in my situation would have been stupid.  Names were a good connection, but what about hair, or sweat, or most obviously, blood?  I didn’t have any handy dolls lying around, and I didn’t really have disposable clothes to turn into a doll, especially with my artistic skills, but blood can work fine without any of that.  So I gave myself a really hard scratch on my arm and let a few drops onto one of my better attempts at making a good connection.  It happened to be more effective than anything I had tried so far, with one caveat: it still required a base connection to make it mean anything.  A small patch of bloody sand means approximately nothing, at least to the resurrection committee or whoever is in charge of this sort of thing.  Still, seven zeros is a lot of zeros.

From the original sixteen digits, adding blood to my worst possible attempt put me down to nine digits, and four to five digits would be reasonable to get out of here without going insane over a nagging hunger.  That means I needed to create a symbol that gave me four or five decimal points of connection before blood, if that was how it works additively.  I’m pretty sure that’s how it works, but my calculations haven’t been super exact.

Suffice to say, two circles nested inside each other, my name, nickname, and parentage scribbled in the median, and my hand print in the center, each part with a few painful drops of my blood was enough to drop the energy counter down to around three days at 4800 energy required.  Assuming my math all holds up.  Energy might be coming in faster or slower.  My perception of time in such a realm might even be skewed.  I might emerge into the realm of the living hundreds of years past the point I died at.  Who knows?  All I know is that I now have to wait days before I can get something to eat.  That or keep working on making the requirements come down.  I think my stomach might appreciate that.