Bob sat in his chair. He was focused. He was in the zone. He knew what to do. He knew when to do it. George lay at the entrance. George was focused. He was in the zone. He knew what to do. He knew when to do it. The two of them worked in perfect synchronization. The inhale and exhale of the same breath. The right and left hand of the same body. They weren't a team; they were a machine, a well-oiled, brutally efficient, fear-for-your-jobs-petty-mortals machine.
A demonstration: beetle challenger enters funnel. Mud slides beetle to designated spot. Voice from beyond the gap mutters two words, "mud, dart", and then brown spear pitches out of the darkness and buries itself in beetle brains. Beetle dies and, pop, beetle disappears.
The new pace had a hypnotic efficiency to it. There's something oddly mesmerising about a good assembly line. You can't look away. The challengers, waiting outside, seemed to have been stripped of any ability to think or experience fear. It was that distinctive popping sound. Pop, that single note had acquired an insidious Pavlovian association to it. As soon as the pop rang out, the whole queue of beetles stepped forward in sequence. Their movements were mechanized, bundled into the workings of the grand machine, each of them transformed into mindless cogs in the great experience factory.
Bob's mind was empty. He was without thought. He was without distraction. He had achieved a kind of purity of concentration. It was the deep zen of meditation on the mountains. It was the death of the thinking-self, the perspective-less vision of the sky as it gazes over the whole world. The sequence of required actions was without pause; it was a flow, a dance of movement and images, one melting into the next and beyond and beyond and then repeating and circling. He was sitting at the very edge of consciousness. It was a paradoxical state, a mind-death merged into the purest expression of mindfulness. Was this enlightenment?
He'd arrived at this place by stages, by slow degrees of introspection, through many subjective mind-ages all squashed into the progression of cycles. In the beginning, the machine had ground against itself. It would gutter and catch. One cog would drift a fraction of an inch out of place and another would grind past it, spin loose, and the whole mechanism would sputter out. Bob had been slow, his magic awkward and brittle. He was a novice, an apprentice. He focused on the wrong things and ignored the right ones.
Bob had needed to picture out every little detail in his mind: the oncoming beetle, its relative size and position, the mud surface, the angle of the mud dart, on and on... For a while, he'd actually gotten worse with each iteration. The memories of earlier actions blurred over what he was currently seeing and distracted him. Sometimes he would straight up miss the beetle. Or his mud conveyor belt would run too fast or too slow and the beetle would be all out of position.
But the mind is lazy. It's a profound truth, but simplicity is a kind of laziness, not to achieve, but to possess. And every rotation of the machine gave Bob another chance to iterate, another chance at feedback and learning. He experimented. What did it matter if he missed? There was always another beetle, always another attempt. It was like he was inside a time-loop, reliving the same fifteen seconds over and over, one endless exercise in deliberate learning, in self-improvement.
Why was he imaging the whole scene? Ninety-five percent of it was irrelevant, unchanging. He didn't need to paint the context, the walls of the funnel, the color of the beetle, the breeze in the air. The mud wasn't his servant, but his tool, his hands and feet. The mud only needed to understand its own part. He was the brain, the operator.
Do you describe the shape of the clouds to your car? No, but even further, do you tell the car where the road is, where to turn, how close the car behind you is? No, no, you don't, you strip away all context and give only the simplest, relative instructions. Turn front wheels thirty degrees to the left. Increase motor rotation. Activate headlight switch.
Bob started simplifying his magical formulas. He condensed down his instructions into simple, atomic movements. He conveyed them in terms relative to the mud's current position. His actions grew sharper, quicker. The conveyor belt sped up. The experience factory churned.
Why was he using his eyes? His eyes were distracting him. His mud couldn't see, couldn't parse visual information. There was a translation lag, a mental processing cost as he converted that visual data into mud terms, and there were minor deviations, tiny mistranslations that cost a few millimeters this way or that.
Bob closed his eyes. His magic ought to be framed in the language of mud. He started to feel for beetle's first step into the funnel, instead of looking for it. There, that was the cue: a ripple of energy spreading through the mud as the beetle stepped inside the funnel. He would seize the animal in his mud hand and slide him to the execution block. His precision increased. He handled noise better, when a beetle entered by a slightly different angle or was particularly large or small. The conveyor belt sped up. The experience factory churned.
Why was he repeating himself? Weren't his actions almost identical rotation after rotation? Yes there were the smallest, slightest deviations, one foot to the left, or two inches higher, or a split-second delay as the sound wave propagated down the beetle ranks. But the majority of each action was identical. Why did he have to keep repeating himself to the mud? He should only have to send those final, precise adjustments. Everything else, the basic movements, the mud ought to remember.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Bob tried to prune back his instructions, giving only the first step with the bare minimum context as a cue for the sequence. It didn't work or only partially... The dumb mud of the funnel floor wouldn't, couldn't learn. It did exactly what he sent it, nothing more or less. He couldn't communicate that the signal was supposed to be a trigger for a specific set of actions. But Harry, Harry was not just dumb mud.
The cloak struggled for a few iterations, but he seemed to latch onto the verbal command, "mud dart." After half a dozen more cycles, the cloak needed no explicit instructions, Bob could just say the words and provide minimal context on ending position, and Harry would snap into action. The conveyor belt sped up. The experience factory churned.
Yes, yes, Bob was making progress, he was growing. More, more, he needed more beetles, there was so much yet to refine, so many little adjustments, the small things you couldn't even notice unless you single-mindedly repeated an action over and over. But it wasn't enough. He was starting to grow tired. Each beetle consumed only a sliver of his mana, but every cycle shaved away a few more mana points and the faster he went the faster his mana depleted.
No, he couldn't stop. He didn't know if he could get back to this mental place, this room of clarity and insight. He had to be better, more efficient, more creative. Why was he completely resetting the mud dart each time? There was no need. Why pay back gravity each time?
He positioned the mud dart like a stake at the front of the tunnel, bracing Harry into the ground and then started to slide the beetles straight into the pike. Yes, good, good, no, it's not enough, it's not enough Bob. He was still using too much mana. He wouldn't last. He'd run out. Why was he transporting a whole column of mud? It was wasteful, inelegant, sub-optimal, and it meant he had to occasionally re-level the funnel floor to prevent an uphill slope forming.
Gravity should work for him. He refashioned the passageway so that it formed a gentle downwards slope. When the beetle stepped inside, Bob would nudge the tiniest slice of mud, sliding it down the slope and towards the stake. It was a goldilocks-class problem. Too little and it wasn't enough to carry the beetle. Too much and he was burning mana.
He iterated and iterated, pinpointing the necessary speed, thickness and optimal gradient. His mana output plummeted. Each beetle cost Bob practically nothing. No Bob was actually gaining mana. His natural mana regeneration had overtaken the minuscule outputs and was refilling his reserves.
He could keep going. He could keep going. He would go forever. He couldn't be stopped. The experience factory was churning and churning. A beetle stepped into the funnel, a beetle slid down and impacted the mud dart, pop, a beetle disappeared, a beetle stepped into the funnel, a beetle slide down and impact the mud dart—Bob waited. One moment, two moments. Had time frozen? Had he reached some secret space inside the intervals that defined time's progress? Another moment, another. Where was the pop? Without the pop no new beetle stepped into the room. Without the pop the beetle on the stake didn't disappear. The pop completed the circle, connecting beginning and end into an undying cycle.
Bob looked dreamily down at George. George was crumbled on the ground. The dog seemed to be trying to focus, his head swaying left and right. He looked bone-tired.
"George," Bob crouched down, "poor boy, why didn't you say something?"
Bob stroked the dog's head. "You did good, boy. You fought the good fight. I'm sorry I didn't notice sooner."
There must be some cost associated with storing a body. Of course there was some cost. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Bob should have paid better attention. The dog hadn't let out a peep of complaint. He'd put up with the relentless pace until he collapsed at his station.
"We'll just rest a little now." Bob lifted up the dog and carried him over to his bed.
The beetles outside were still waiting for the signal to enter. The bunker was silent and still. Bob pulled up his status. Truth be told, he only had a vague idea how long they'd been at the activity and how many beetles he'd killed. Had it been enough?
> Name: Robert Brown
>
> Race: Human (lesser)
>
> Class: Heaven's Fool
>
> Level: 9 (99%)
>
> Rank: E
>
> Wealth: 4,876,100 credits
So close... But it couldn't be a coincidence right? Somehow his experience had capped here. The system wouldn't let him reach level ten just by killing beetles. Was there some kind of advancement quest? He had at least half-a-dozen notification to go through. He pulled up number one:
> Congratulations: Level up 6 7
>
>
> Major bonus to luck assigned
>
>
> Rolling for random stats...
>
> Random stats determined.
>
>
> Major bonus to strength assigned
>
> Minor bonus to dexterity assigned
>
> Token bonus to wisdom assigned
>
> Minor decrease to vitality assigned
Now number two—what was that? The beetles outside had started drumming their horns. Dum, dum, dum. Bob squinted through the gap to try and see what was happening. It was too far and the angle was bad. Bob looked nervously at the sleeping dog. Now was not a good time for the beetles to be unveiling some kind of secret weapon.
"Calm down, Bob. Look at these thick mud-brick walls. You're standing in the greatest fortress ever constructed. A castle for the ages. Armies have washed against your walls like water against the cliffs. But just in case, why don't you take a peek with your mud sense?"
"Good idea."
Bob gulped and stepped back from the funnel mouth. There was something big coming. Very big. These were strong walls. Bob tapped the mud-brick. He'd be okay. Something of the confidence had slipped out of his voice. They'd be okay, right, right? The room was plunged into darkness as a giant figure shrouded the entranceway. Harry Mud Dart clattered to the ground. Bob staggered back, eyes widening.