My nightmares had petered out by the first week’s end. Nightmares of stepping on the brakes and having them fail, or nightmares of being crushed under trailers. Admittedly, that should have made me wary of ever driving another vehicle.
But for some reason I couldn't fathom, I had gotten over that every fast. None of the boys would have made a good getaway driver like I did with several years worth of driving experience under my belt. By the second week, the accident was just another bad memory.
Perhaps it was a side effect of the Gestalt Insertion. Ryan mentioned that the first week had him possessing moments of uncanny clarity and calmness. I didn't mind it, otherwise I would have been drinking myself under just to get away from traumatic dreams. In time, they would pass so there was no use fretting over them—not when I had a hundred things to do like having a drill on a spaceship!
Also, it might have been just me but Ryan seemed less cynical of things and warmer than his previous demeanor. At first I’d thought that his moment of near death had changed him, perhaps in a way it did. He seemed to smile more often and was always thoughtful about his unfiltered opinions. Something must have happened in his past that he didn’t want to talk about; I could swear that a smile belonged on his face more than not.
Regardless, each day began with a klaxon sounding and it would happen at any time regardless of how long we'd slept. The one person exempted was whoever that had bridge duty that day and for that they'd sit out the simulations. In a way it felt like bootcamp.
While we always had our undersuits, at the first sounding of the alarm we were all required to be in exosuit in the shortest time possible. Exosuits were armor and armor was the difference between life and death. Irina would often tell how our blood would boil during decompression or something other to spook us into remembering.
Some days had hostile boarding actions where we had to fight against hostile and randomly generated holographic projections to secure the bridge. Anything was fair game as long as we subdued them but, since we were all new to this thing, the space elf recommended guns. It was all about alertness and reflexes. It trained both Acuity and Dexterity .
The holograms were almost realistic with blood and gore and everything. Irina seemed to find amusement in torturing us with goblins, ogres and other creatures of lore. It left me sick more times than I cared to count but the simulations were meant to inure us to a life that had changed.
Other days involved loss of gravity and timed how fast we would take to restore normalcy—those days were the hardest. Maneuvering in zero g was a novel thing and no amount of allusion could describe the freedom of 360 degrees of movement.
It took some skill to move from flailing and overcorrecting and some of us took to it faster than others. I was in my element, and all that time I’d invested into gymnastics as a teen was coming to fruition. I was always the first to the bridge, Ryan was second. I needed not say who was last—we were only three after all.
G-force training was the contrasting side of the coin. Having the weight of several atmospheres pressing against you was frightening, like drowning or being smothered. The SI would dial up gravity in increments of one till we passed out over and over again.
Limbs became too heavy to lift, my head sagged as though it weighed a tonne and then there was the tunnel vision. Then before I knew it, my eyelids were literally lead and blackout would pervade. With our Gestalt insertion, some of us could hold 5Gs for a couple minutes and I got some points in Endurance for it. That 10 was not looking too far off now.
When it came to combat training, of the three of us, I was probably the only person who'd taken self defense classes. Ryan was not close behind and was improving at a palpable rate. I could not help but feel jealous that he’d started on a clean slate and therefore didn’t have to unlearn some things like I did.
Ryan's progress was explosive enough that he could fight me to a standstill after one week. I would have been the first to admit that more than my pride was bruised when he’d learnt how to use throws and grapples.
Outer space training was…scary. The simulation of weightlessness and the boundless infinite depths of outer space often made my stomach do flips. The disconnect between what my mind thought and what my perception felt was so jarring I could not help but feel helpless for it. Apeirophobia, I think it was.
Space was both beautiful as it was scary and I was not so sure I was cut out for that. All the SI had to do was kill the lights and gravity and project pin pricks of illumination for the stars and I would find myself hyperventilating.
More than that, was the fear of the unknown of aliens and everything foreign. The friendly hologram SI was relatable. I mean, they were a well endowed space elf who might have passed for a middle eastern woman with blue eyes and olive skin that looked tanned all the time.
They were agendered too—even that was relatable. And pink hair? That was okay, even I couldn't help but be jealous despite my improved copperish hair. The Gestalt Insertion did more than just fix me after all.
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Despite their attempts at being something or someone we had rapport with, I could not help but think what they were hiding. I wasn't one to be cynical but, I knew there was something more to this. Ryan knew that too but he did not voice it.
I guess, he had no choice in the matter and chose to just exist with it because after all this was done he had nowhere to go. Maybe he would be on the run or maybe he had something up his sleeve.
I would have been lying if I said I wasn't in the same position as him—the horror of being hunted and potentially vivisected like an alien was enough motivation to stick with the SI.
Still, if they wanted us to help they owed us the decency of trusting us as we trusted them with our lives. Well, maybe not entirely because I still had some unanswered questions like why us? It seemed like we just fit the roles just right and that was way too fishy.
I could see Ryan becoming some sort of captain even with that degree in commerce; I knew there was leadership and management somewhere in there. He might have acted aloof all the time but his skills were just a rough diamond waiting to be polished.
Me, well I did International Relations. Maybe I could handle communications? It was not far off from public relations. In fact, some modules leaned that way. Some ambassador of Earth perhaps, at least that too was good for something.
Lucas could put his mechatronics engineering to use if he applied himself to it. I know he was not just a musclehead; maybe he was a bonehead for keeping things for me and not apologizing for it.
I was also training the gang’s medic as well even though the medpods made everything superfluous. We would not always have a medpod at hand and most definitely not in the field. Therefore, I had to learn how to use a med scanner, hyposhot and learn the alien drugs we would use. It was easy to memorize them as they were color coded, stims were lava orange while meds were blue. I didn't even have to fear needles because hyposhot had none.
When all was said and done the question that remained on my mind was how far the artificial intelligence known as Irina had planned things. I should have been confident that we would pull off our heist of sorts but I was not. Alien technology and meta abilities or not I still thought going into the powder keg that was the face off between world powers was suicide.
Also I just hoped that none of us would become megalomaniacs or get power tripped after the ship was secure. At two weeks of training, everything had jumped by twos and threes for me and progress was tangible enough that I found it addictive to just have the numbers tick up. Besides the cosmetic improvements like my hair and my eyes, I could bench press something twice my weight without getting winded and that was in two weeks.
Of the three of us, my psychological stats were closer to 10. I was also the first to discover how mutable the Psychoneural Interface was to a point depending on the preferences. What we had was actually a template that was created from Ryan’s first encounter using him as a baseline. I could now track the progress from my initial stats or even alter the interface to only show the additions so far.
> Æ ∆
>
> Acuity: (6) 9
>
> Affinity: (5) 9
>
> Insight: (5) 8
>
> Fortitude : (6) 9
One of my physiological stats had also hit 10 and it was not surprising that Dexterity had been the first to reach that milestone.
> V ∆
>
> Endurance : (6) 8
>
> Energy: (5) 8
>
> Dexterity (6) 10
>
> Vitality: (5) 8
I could feel myself on the verge of a breakthrough like having a fundamental understanding of metaphysics or something. And that was from meditating on the esoteric alien symbols called glyphs curved on poly-sided shapes. I had been skeptical of it until Ryan had shown me how he could break a spoon by vibrating two different parts of what he said was Phase Shift; something about altering the gravity or kinetic energy at one part of it.
He could also rejoin them but the joints always broke afterwards. Sometimes during sparring Ryan seemed to move faster than he seemed, or made feints that blurred into blows after I’d committed. That put him firmly as an Augmenter.
As for me? I found myself with an extrasensory perception of sorts, a sixth sense.. To get my Affinity past 5 , I'd gotten one of those glyphs about Psychokinesis since it seemed like a harmless Arcana.
I could almost read energy and mood—and slightly nudge it where I wanted it to go. It was unnerving and invasive that I could sometimes catch when the energy changed while talking to Ryan. The SI was nothing but a bundle of unchanging light even while we conversed. That's when I confirmed I was not just imagining things.
It even began to show in our spars when I could almost predict where the next blow was coming from like some sort of precognition. When the next week rolled by, depending on what we trained on, some of us would have their first Schema or Arts crystallize. I was already dreading what would come—mind reading was not something I was going to find pleasant. I didn’t have much time to dwell on that because, as our collective progression plateaued, mine being 37.5 percent of the way to the next Gestalt Quotient, the day arrived.