As I didn’t manage to get in any exercise, I decided to walk to work, leaving an hour early so that I could still get there in time. I managed to arrive about five minutes before my shift began and bought and chugged a soda, clocking in a minute early.
Today I would be working at the front of the store, restocking the Thanksgiving seasonal items they were sold out on, as it was only two days before the holiday, all the while knowing that in three days I would be marking half of these things down to half price so we could get rid of them.
About two hours into my shift I heard shouting and looked up to see a man yelling at the woman in customer service, demanding a refund for a TV that anyone could see was damaged. I looked closer at the TV, looking for see how bad the damage was despite being thirty or so feet from it.
‘I’ve never got that message before.’ I thought. ‘Hey Vera, what’s with the “Decision Required” thing?’
‘Many skills aren’t possible with your body the way it currently is, but can be given to you through modification to your body. These are called Modifying skills. They use nanites and take a bit of time for the changes to be complete, possibly causing pain and other issues in the process. For Eagle Eyes in particular, it will alter the lenses in your eyes to allow for magnification, disrupting your vision and causing you pain. If you would like...’
As Vera went into her explanation about when, where, and how I should gain the skill I noticed the irate man pull something out of his pocket. It was roughly ‘L’ shaped with one section of the L being metal and the other being covered in wood.
Realizing it was a pistol, I ran over to try and stop a shooting. As I got there I saw him turn towards me, raising the hand holding the weapon when I was just feet away. I jumped forward, tackling him as best my Martial Arts skill would allow me to, when I heard a loud “bang”.
We hit the ground and a flash of pain went through my side. I winced and rolled off of him, only to notice that something wet was on me. I touched it, feeling more pain, and something warm and red went through my fingers.
I awoke in a bed, with something stuck in the back of my hand. Reaching over I hit my knuckles on something metallic. ‘This is a hospital bed.’ I realized. ‘Vera, what happened?’
‘I don’t know much, as I can only experience things through your senses and electronics, but when you passed out I started listening through your phone. As best I can tell, they called an ambulance and rushed you to surgery. You’ve been out for about 29 hours.’
‘I don’t feel like I’ve been shot.’ I thought.
‘That’s because they sutured the wound and your HP recovery skill fixed most of the damage. It also went up to level 3, by the way.’
‘The wound?’ I asked, still a bit out of it.
‘No, the skill. Also your Physical Pain resist got a lot of experience, but not quite enough to level up.’
‘Oh.’ I responded. ‘In that case, I’m going to go back to sleep. For some reason I’m really tired.’
‘That would be the blood loss. Don’t worry, I’ll keep watch.’ with that, I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.
The next time I woke up it was because someone was knocking on my door. I tried to get up to answer the door but realized that I didn’t have the strength to do so. “Come in.” I called out.
The door opened and someone I’d seen several times before was standing there. “I don’t know if you remember me, but...”
“Yeah, you’re the paramedic that I keep running into. I take it you are also the one who brought me here?”
Closing the door behind him, he walked over to my bed. “Yep. I’m Tim, by the way.” He held out his hand and I shook it.
“Greg,” I said. “So, do you visit all the people you bring in, or...”
He looked a bit embarrassed. “No, but there was something special about your case. I hate to mention it, as your private medical information isn’t my business unless I need it to save your life, but, well...” He paused for a few seconds before continuing. “I noticed that your wound was healing faster than normal. At least several times faster. It even stopped bleeding by the time we got here, even though I was sure it wouldn’t stop without surgery. So, I was curious if maybe there was some secret to that. Like, maybe you were eating some special food, or your family just naturally healed faster, or something.”
I knew exactly why that had happened, and Vera had already told me why, but I wasn’t sure if I should tell him. I sighed, thinking about it, and he took that as a bad sign.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry, it’s just that I became a paramedic in order to save lives, and now I found out that there are people out there that can recover from injuries super quickly. If I could figure out how, I could use such a thing to save a lot of lives, so...”
“Can you keep a secret?” I asked him. “And will you swear to do so if I tell you how I did that?” He was right. This could save millions if not more, and I wanted to do the same back when I first discovered the System.
“Yes, of course. I swear I won’t give your medical secrets to anyone. If I need to spread this information you will remain anonymous. I’ll even claim it’s from some medical research paper I read if I have to.”
I couldn’t tell him the full truth, as that would open both of us up to threats from multiple dangerous societies, but the man had saved my life. Besides, he and I both wanted to just save lives. I couldn’t NOT tell him. There had to be some sort of middle ground. I was too tired to come up with something at the moment, though. While I had healed, it seemed that the nanites had trouble regenerating lost blood. Or maybe the fact that my stomach was growling just meant that it didn’t have the material to make more. Either way I had to let him know without telling him. Maybe a half truth would put him on the right track?
“It started a few months ago. I was meditating and afterwards I noticed that I felt really good. So I kept doing it every night. And my health just kept improving. Now, I seem to recover way faster than normal, including from physical exhaustion, and my pain tolerance has shot way up.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Very strange. You said you unlocked this from meditation?” I nodded. “And you are sure you hadn’t changed anything else that day? Diet? Exercise? Quit smoking? New vitamin? Anything?”
“Nope, same as always. As was my work that day. Stressful as ever.”
Tim scratched his head. “Could be some sort of epigenetic thing, I suppose, as a result of stress, or maybe even the meditation? Not sure. That’s not really my area of expertise.” After he mumbled to himself for a while I interrupted him.
“Look, I’m tired and hungry. I just want to eat something and get some more sleep, but I’ll make you a deal. Bring me something to eat and I’ll let you take a blood sample. Run tests on it. Maybe you can figure out something by testing it.” I wasn’t sure if the nanites would show up or not, but even if someone else figured it out, he probably wouldn’t tell them about me. And if they did and some other System person finds out, I could just play the role of a naive man who happened to connect to the system, someone who isn’t a threat in any way. That, at least in my drug and blood-loss addled brain, was a decent compromise between telling him and not telling him. And if he proved himself trustworthy, maybe I could come clean some day.
The next day, I was rested up and released from the hospital. Tim had help me cover up how quickly I healed, as the wound being nothing more than a sore spot two days after a severe GSW would draw too much attention, and wheeled me to a waiting taxi so that I could return home. Thanks to Vera both of our phones had the other’s numbers programmed into them, so we could keep in touch about all of ‘meditation health stuff’ as Tim put it.
Upon returning home, I made a show of using my cane to stand up and paid the taxi driver. Normally I would take the stairs for that little bit of extra exercise, but this time I used the elevator. Once I was back inside my apartment, I locked the door, propped my cane against the wall, and checked the former GSW in my abdomen. I was supposed to go in in two weeks to have the stitches removed, but as it was already recovered Tim had already removed them. When the time came to have them removed I would just lie and tell them that I had another doctor remove them. Which was only a lie because Tim was just an EMT, not a doctor.
Seeing that the wound was just a slightly sore spot, and that my HP had fully recovered, I decided to catch up on my exercise. I stretched, and, after remembering the smoothies and downing a double, cast ‘align nanites’ on myself instead of meditating and started doing pushups. I wouldn’t be able to leave my apartment to go on runs for several days, else I would raise suspicion, so the inside exercises were all I could do. Between sets of exercise I binged various shows and YourTube videos, getting three levels of theoretical experience in Smithing from watching Forged With Fire, and two more in cooking by watching various cooking shows. I briefly considered trying to learn other skills this way, but I was getting bored of them so I wasted much of my time on shows with no value outside of entertainment.
I did take an hour, at Vera’s insistence, to look into this “Cedar Park Pharmaceuticals” company, but only got as far as their employee page and a few news articles before I was bored. As far as I could tell, they were just a normal medical research firm.
Three days later, and after leveling up my SP recovery twice, not to mention Strength and Endurance, I was ready to go outside. I had even noticed that my max HP and SP had significantly increased. After another smoothie/align break, I decided to call into work so I could figure out when I needed to return.
I didn’t get good news. Once the General Manager got on the line I knew something was up. “Listen, Greg. We appreciate what you did, trying to protect us against that nutjob, but corporate has asked me to let you go.”
“But I saved people’s lives.” I responded in shock.
“Probably, but you also broke policy by doing that, and they can’t risk encouraging people to do that in the future. You almost died, and they can’t risk employees getting killed by being heroes. I’m sorry.”
After another minute of back and forth, in which he promised to mail me my last pay check and not cancel my insurance until the end of December, we hung up. Now what was I supposed to do? My finances were bad enough as they were. Trying to live on Unemployment would just make it worse.
After a few minutes I remembered something. Opening my wallet, I found the card for that assassin PI. “Well, it’s not like he is going to kill me. If he wanted me dead, my time in the hospital would have been the perfect opportunity.” Before I could convince myself that the card was a trap, I grabbed my coat and left. His office was too far away to walk, but for some reason I didn’t want to use my car to go there. I had seen too many mafia movies where cars were blown up to risk it.
As I walked to the bus stop I thought over past events. I had almost died in real life, and now I was worrying about hypothetical assassination attempts and imagined car bombs. Realizing that I should worry about real threats instead of possible ones. I could prepare for snipers and car bombs later. ‘Hey, Vera, you mentioned that the system could make me bulletproof, right?’
‘I think I said that a gun wouldn’t be enough to take down most system users. It would be difficult to make you completely bullet proof, though.”
‘Even shrugging off or weakening a single shot would be good at this point.’ I responded.
‘In that case,’ she displayed a window in front of me.
‘And it will be safe for me to download this? Last time you almost killed me by downloading something.’
‘Most of your skills are fully adapted to you, with several others only needing one more level. At worst you’ll get a slight headache.’
I nodded. ‘Sure, let’s do it, then.’ A few seconds later I got a brief stabbing pain in my head, like a spotlight was shined into my eyes after I had been in a pitch black room, but it quickly went away.
‘Too bad I can’t train it now,’ I thought. ‘Remind me to do that tonight.’
An hour later I was standing in front of the address on the card. I pushed the door buzzer and ten seconds later a tired voice answered. “Hello, Can I help you?”
I recognized the voice from a few days ago. “My name is Greg Summers. You asked me to come by?”
“Right, that was almost a week ago. Come up.” A buzzer sounded and I heard the door unlock.
I made my way up the steps in front of the door to the door at the top. When I got there, before I could knock, a voice told me to come inside, so I entered. The man from before sat behind a desk and motioned for me to take a seat, which I did.
“So, I heard you had some recent trouble.” he said. “Something about an armed robber?”
“Pretty much. And to make things worse, I got fired for violating the Employee Handbook.”
“So, you are hoping that I can help you out financially?”
“Well, you did seem like you needed my help. There’s no reason I should help you for free, is there?”
The man stared at me for a few seconds. “You seem to have recovered from your injury rather quickly. Too quickly, in fact. Tell me something. Have you ever heard of the Sapient Empowerment System?”
I did my best to wipe the expression of surprise off of my face. “What is that? Some self-help guru thing? I’ve never really been into that.”
“Not exactly. It’s a computer system some aliens dropped off on Earth a couple of million years ago. Gives people superhuman abilities.”
“Interesting premise.” I said, trying to stay neutral. “Quite original. I assume it is from some book you are writing?”
The man smirked at me. “You know, you aren’t bad at hiding your emotions. But I’m better at reading them. I know you’ve heard of it, and are trying to cover that up. The question is ‘Why?’”
I exhaled. “In that case, maybe you can answer a question for me. Have you ever heard of the White Lotus Society?”
He may have been good at reading emotions, but he was terrible at hiding them. After a few seconds of stunned silence he responded. “So you can read factions? That, at least, confirms my suspicions. As for your suspicions, no, I don’t want to kill you. In fact, I think you can help me uncover information that’s worth several times any hit. Whatever my past might be, I am now merely a private investigator looking into the criminal acts of people who are far worse than I ever was.”
“Worse than an assassin?” I responded and he nodded. Maybe he was going after rapists and mass murderers, but it would be tough to get worse than a contract killer.
“I was more of a vigilante. I only took contracts on people that deserved death, or worse. Sure, I made money off of it, but I had to pay the bills somehow.”
“So, are you being a vigilante here too?”
“I’m not sure. The people I’m investigating may deserve death, and they might not. I do have some pretty strong evidence of criminal activity, but not enough for a solid case.”
“And would this investigation have anything to do with a Doctor Lee?” I asked. I had seen that name while looking over the Pharmaceutical company’s website and a press release, a name that shared a family with the man before me.
Wan nodded. “That would be my Uncle. And while his disappearance was what originally caught my interest, it’s gone much deeper than a single missing person.”
“He’s missing?” I asked in surprise.
“He hasn’t contacted his family for the last 7 months. He also used to post regularly on a social media platform in China. He stopped posting there around the same time.” Wan reached into his desk drawer and pulled something out, sliding it across the desk to me. “But until I am sure that you can help me I can’t tell you anything more.”
To be honest, I wasn’t sure I could trust him, but he could have the resources I needed to look into this pharmaceutical company. And for the moment, he was also investigating them. I would have to keep an eye out for any indication of betrayal.
I unrolled the set of tools and immediately recognized them from all of the TV shows and movies that used them as props. “A lockpick set?”
Wan nodded. “I need someone who can pass as a security specialist for a special investigation job. Come back here Sunday at noon, three days from now. I’ll have four locks here, a mechanical push button, an electronic door lock, a physical door lock, and a combination padlock. For every one of those you can open in a fifteen minute period, I will give you $500. Does that sound good?”
“It pays well enough, but only three days?” Normally learning a skill like that would take much longer.
“We both know that you have System assistance, so that should be enough. Besides, I’m on a strict time table here, so that is all I can spare before I have to start looking for someone else to fill the roll.”
I nodded, pocketed the set of tools, and left. I would just have to come back then if I wanted more out of him.