Chapter 43 - Plumb my Depth

Not for the first time, I jolted awake before my hand could slip off of my new project, the beginnings of a mana headache starting to flare behind my eyes. In fact, that was probably the thing that woke me in the first place. I reached over to the left side of my workbench to my stash of flammable materials and Consumed something.

I shook my head and concentrated. The mana levels were looking pretty good, positively overflowing with me-juice…

I needed to find a better way to think about that. Me-mana? Me-flavored? No, that sounded like a sports drink. Could I sell a me-flavored sports drink back home? Maybe. I really didn’t want to be known as the sports drink Exotic, though.

My mind was wandering.

Stop it. Focus. Just a little longer.

I kept the mana flowing, intent clear in my mind, with an emphasis on what part of ‘me’ to use.

For the thousandth time, I went over the messages again, calling up the section I wanted from last evening.

—----------------------------

You have created: Magazine Fed Auto-Turret.

You have been awarded 2,500 experience points. [2,500 base]

Automate depth increasing [3 of 3]

Automate depth increased.

Automate+: Program your creations with simple instructions and empower them to be extensions of your will. Strength, amount, and complexity of their abilities are dependent on your Spirit.

—----------------------------------

It went without saying that I’d not been blown away by my “Depth” increase when it happened. I’d just put the smart card in my fourth junk turret when the message appeared in my vision in one of the weird pop ups that I thought I’d eliminated a while back. On the surface, the ability looked the same, did the same things, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d missed something.

The feeling lasted until I pulled up the original description of Automate from before. How long had it been? Months?

Not important. Right. Focus time.

The previous description read differently:

—-----------------

Automate: Program your creations with simple instructions and empower them to carry out your orders independently. Strength, amount, and complexity of instructions are dependent on your Spirit.

—-------------------

The difference in verbiage wasn’t huge, but it was different.

Split mind is now level 7.

Thanks, System. I know.

I gave the bowl I was holding another full mana bar, practically having to force my eyes to stay open. I couldn’t afford to have this fail because of a lack of mana. This really, really needed to work. I’d spent too much time on it already, and if I was wrong about this, the cost we would pay would be in time, time we didn’t have.

The four turrets I’d already made over the past couple days stood sentry against the far wall, watching me, judging me and silently saying: ‘You gambled and lost. Move on.’

The new designs looked otherworldly, like predatory insects with their new fan-shaped magazines and wide stanced, segmented legs.

Then again, everything looked otherworldly in here. When I’d told Angol about what I needed to get to work, he’d led me to what was, from how he described it, a practice room for newly minted practitioners.

It was, essentially, a barn-sized cube made of seamless, glossy, white glass(?) or maybe glass’ cousin that had done hard time. It was tough stuff, tougher than anything I could throw at it at least, with steel reinforced barriers set up symmetrically on either side of the room, supposedly to shield from blasts or errant projectiles.

The lighting was what made everything seem weird, though. There was no source. The light simply was. It was everywhere, from every angle. Nothing had a shadow, giving everything a uniformly sinister dose of the uncanny.

Reluctantly, I let go of the metal bowl that had been the source of all my troubles for the past few hours.

There. Screw it. If you don’t have enough mana to do your job now, you’re useless anyway.

You have created: Prototype Casting Bowl

You have been awarded 2,400 experience points. [800 base, +1,600 Doing your Part bonus]

Well, at least the System recognized what I was doing.

I got up from my stool and walked over to the pile of scrap metal my interns had acquired for me. None of them majored in metallurgy, so the pile was generally sorted by color with brass and bronze on one side while darker metals tended to make up the bulk of the middle. Then there was the shiny metals that merited their own pile to the side.

For my experiment, I chose something from the dark metals, taking a loose handful of the smaller bits and walking back over to the workbench from which I selected a furniture nail, smaller than the tip of my finger.

Then, I threw it into the bowl and waited.

Nothing happened.

Yay. Success.

Nothing was supposed to happen, or, at least, nothing visible was supposed to happen, not with that amount of material. Sure, it would have been nice to have some kind of visual indicator on whether or not it was really working, but I was on iteration 0.1 here.

I added a handful of other metal scraps to the bowl, mixing them around with my hand before returning to watching and waiting.

This was the real test, do or die time.

“Come on. Please,” I whispered.

“You’ve been alone too long if you’ve started talking to your dominion, monk,” something behind me said.

My heart seized in my chest, and I immediately went into some kind of fight or flight mode.

I think my lizard brain wanted me to whip around and get into some kind of fighting stance or maybe grab something and beat whatever had startled me over the head, but what actually ended up happening was I did things all out of order. I did the grabbing first. In this case I was grabbing my workbench. Then my body tried to whirl around to do the beating, but I was holding onto the surface of a table heavier than I was. So, given my prosthetic’s grip strength, I had no chance of dislodging it, and I didn’t have the wherewithal to realize that.

The end result was a pathetic flailing of my legs as my upper half jerked the workbench up off the ground and nearly tipped it over, my stool skittered across the floor to crash into the blast barrier behind me, and several loose tools I’d left next to my legs tripped me up and sent me down to the ground.

Sissa was there in the doorway, a plate of food in her hand, a cup of something steaming hot in the other, on her face, the look of someone unsure if they should run in to help or just run away.

The dragonkin Sergeant, brave as she was, chose the former option, but she did it slowly, gingerly stepping around the bits of wood and metal that littered my workshop floor to approach me like I was a wild animal.

She put down the food next to my hitherto unused cot then sat down on the edge, folding her hands to look me up and down appraisingly.

Her frown was not one of approval.

“Am I to assume your work is proceeding apace?” She asked dangerously.

I used my iron grip on the workbench to haul myself up, taking a second to smooth out my sweaty shirt and dress pants, all borrowed.

“Uh. Yes. Kind of. You know how it is, building superweapons in a school basement. It’s got its highs and lows,” I hedged, moving to position myself shamefully in front of the bowl.

“You know it’s morning,” Sissa said, her tone icy.

“I’d guessed something like that,” I replied cautiously. “I’ve made some progress-.”

“The third morning.”

“Oh,” was all I could say.

“Oh is right,” she replied.

That long. Why hadn’t I requested a clock or an hourglass or something?

“I’m sorry. I’m working as fast as I can. The university didn’t have everything I needed in the way of ammo, and I’m having to find a workaround. I’m so close though,” I explained, the words just spilling out of me like liquid as surely as if I’d tipped Sissa’s drink onto the floor.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Then I was babbling. “First, it was about making the turrets. That went fine, but then I was doing the math, and I had the students check for the rotating tables with the ball bearings, but I guess they aren’t as popular in an academic setting with no need for stupid spinning coffee tables, so I had them taking apart anything that moved but all we came up with was nails and hooks, which don’t work worth a damn especially if there’s no manufacturing base on this stupid planet and nothing is the same size unless it’s from the same artisan. Would it kill any of you guys to have a standard set of sizes things come in? It would be so much easier if we had an assembly line or interchangeable parts. We’ll have to invent that later. Whatever. So, here I am, having to skip the whole industrialization part of civilization, so that I can save it, and I’ve got to do it all before zero hour. I don’t know. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe it won’t. I just know this is the way forward, but I don’t know if we have the time for it to begin with.”

I took a breath, ready to go on, but Sissa’s face shut me up. She didn’t look angry anymore. She looked worried. She leaned forward, one hand tentatively reaching out, but she hesitated and, instead, bent down to pick up the cup.

“Ryan,” she began. No title. That was kind of nice. It was nice to be Just Ryan again. Then she went and ruined it. “You need to eat and sleep.”

“Uh. Yeah. Of course,” I said. I did know. Eating and sleeping were both on my list, just not at the top.

She raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “So, you realize how… stretched you seem?”

“Of course. I just have this little problem to solve before I sleep. Please tell me that’s coffee. I’ll run down to the cafeteria and buy them out now if that’s coffee.” I knew I was speaking too fast, probably sounding like I was overcompensating. It didn’t matter though. Was that coffee?

“What is coffee?” Sissa asked.

I let out a long, mournful sigh. “Something I miss. My mom liked it, and I got a taste for it. It’s fine, though. I just have this one thing to do, and then I’ll get some sleep.”

“Your helpers talk, and the stories aren’t flattering. You’re going to fall asleep on your feet or have a heart attack if you continue on like this.”

Could I have a heart attack anymore? Probably not. That part of me was a magical mystery machine now. If anything were to happen to it, I’d probably just explode or catch fire.

My mouth kept moving despite my brain not being fully engaged. “Cool. Cool. Thanks for the concern, but I can sleep when I’m dead. Seriously, I know what this looks like. I just don’t think I could rest until I knew.”

“Knew what?” She asked.

“If I’d made the right decision, Sergeant Sissa.”

She made a placating motion with her hand. “Just Sissa, please.”

No titles for her either. Also nice.

“Sorry- Uh- Sissa. I can’t stop working until I’ve solved a big problem. If I don’t solve it, the plan is scrapped.”

“It also won’t get solved if you work yourself to death, Ryan.” The fire was back in her voice. She wasn’t particularly pleased with how I was treating myself, and on an intellectual level I understood that. I just couldn’t afford to do this any differently. Not with the stakes as they were.

“I’m not sure if that’s possible anymore. I just… need to know this. It’s the only way. If it doesn’t work, it’s going to- I’m going-”

“We’ll be back in the same situation we started in and come up with a new plan,” she said forcefully. “You don’t have to carry the weight of the entire world on your back, Ryan.”

Her face grew pensive, her eyes staring at something far away. “Light and gods of old, listen to me. I sound like my sister. Listen. I get it. You have a part to play, and it’s life or death. You pick up the responsibility and you can’t put it down. Then you pick up more. But soon, if you’re not careful, you’re holding it all, even if it’s not yours to hold.”

To hear someone else describe it like that. To understand. To say I wasn’t alone. It both warmed my heart and saddened me profoundly. It wasn’t lost on me that she offered no advice on how to do it right. Maybe we were both figuring things out as we went.

A wave of exhaustion hit me then.

I took a deep, shuddering breath, closing my eyes deliberately for the first time in recent memory. They almost didn’t open again.

“So,” Sissa began, softening her tone somewhat as she got up and leaned companionably on the table right next to me. “What problem are we solving?”

“The ammunition problem,” I replied with a shake of my head. “You guys have no standardized parts for anything. It’s all hand made. If we’re going to get the most bang for our buck, all the ammunition needs to be alike.”

She bit her lip as she considered the problem I was posing. “I follow you so far. Arrowheads are the same way. The guard tries to have them made uniformly, though they vary slightly depending on where you get them.”

“Exactly,” I said, tilting my head to indicate the bowl on the table. “What I’m trying to do here is making a-”

I spun around to face the bowl and stopped speaking. I even stopped breathing.

Then I started laughing maniacally.

Sissa spun around as well, her hand drifting to her sword, scanning the table for what had upset my sanity. “What? What is it?”

I was still laughing. While I’d been talking to the nice blue girl with the golden eyes and fierce protective instincts, my new creation had been working unobserved.

There, in the bottom of the bowl, two identically shaped conical bullets wobbled against one another while little blobs of excess metal laid off to the side.

My constructs can use my abilities. Hot damn.

The words burst out of me like an alien parasite. “This motherfucker can SHAPE!” I shrieked excitedly.

“I don’t understand. Ryan, are you okay?” She asked, grabbing my shoulders and trying to get me to meet her eyes. My mind was going a mile a minute.

My stuff could make stuff! My stuff could make stuff that could make stuff!

I wasn’t Magneto so much as.... I was… I couldn’t conjure up any supervillains to reference. Dr. Robotnik? No, he put animals in machines. That was a level of weird I wasn’t interested in exploring.

Now it was all about how much I could automate before we needed to move on my plan. The more ammo we had the better, but the people of Eclipse wouldn’t hold out much longer.

I hadn’t overpromised as I’d feared. I could still do this.

Relief washed over me, so intense my eyes stung with tears. I turned away so Sissa couldn’t see.

“Ryan, talk to me. What’s going on?” Sissa asked as she finally caught my eye.

“We just automated ammo production, Sissa,” I said shakily, my excitement bubbling up from within. “The equation just changed again.”

“That’s great, I guess!” She exclaimed, picking up on my feelings but not entirely able to understand.

It was great. Better than great.

I don’t know why I did it. I was feeling giddy and drunk on victory with no sleep or food in however long.

It was stupid and inappropriate, but I wasn’t thinking.

I bent down, grabbed the dragon woman around the waist and spun us both around like I’d seen people do at dances back home. She felt lighter than I expected, delicate. I held her up high and twirled. We went around once, twice before we stopped, her borrowed robes flowing down over my arms and brushing my cheek.

I held her up in the air for a half-second that seemed to stretch on into forever.

She stared down at me, her yellow eyes frighteningly large, her lips slightly parted, her body tensed for… something, like she wasn’t sure if she wanted to claw out my eyes or go around again.

Then my brain caught up with my body and I put her down, remembering to breathe again and meticulously fixing my already fixed shirt. My eyes were drawn to everything in the workshop except for her.

“Yeah. Um. Sorry. Anyway. Now that I know it works, I can make ammo in my sleep. It’s a- uh- it’s kind of a big deal… for me. Maybe for everyone.”

Sissa stood statue still, silent. I could see it from the corner of my eye, sense it somehow: I’d done something wrong.

I did my best to straighten up my work area, getting the alignment of my tin snips exactly right angled to the edge of the table. You’ve got to align your tin snips properly, or the entire setup collapses into chaos. Chaos was a mechanic’s natural enemy.

I didn’t see her leave, but her retreating footsteps sounded stiff and robotic in the echoing practice room.

Once she was gone, I ran my nails roughly through my new hair.

Why did I do that, especially to someone that valued being in control as much as Sissa?

Well, I certainly wasn’t going to sleep now. I grabbed another cooking bowl and began work on Casting Bowl 2.

—----------------------------------------

I woke to the sound of rain. It was a hard rain, intermittent, staccato plops and snaps of fat falling drops slapping metal. It was a familiar sound, almost reminding me of my family’s hab, when the whipping ice and airborne pebbles of Proxis’ winds popped and panged off the walls.

I rolled off of my cot, reaching down to the floor to grab my grimy shirt, but before I could put it on, I realized why I’d awakened.

A blue dragonkin woman was perched atop my stool, but not the one I’d feared it would be.

Samila sat there, a plate of food next to her on my workbench, another one of those steaming cups of tea next to it.

“Good morning!” she shouted over the noise. The rain was way too loud to converse any other way.

I shook my head, pulling myself into an upright position and rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.

No, not rain.

I looked to my left.

Along the wall, on a shelf I’d had brought in last night by my interns sat five Casting Bowls, set snuggly into the wood in freshly cut circular holes. Heaping piles of metal debris from nails to dresser handles to curtain rods were piled on top of the bowls, so much, I worried the shelf might collapse under the weight.

As I watched, one by one, the bottom of each bowl formed an opening through which a newly Shaped bullet fell through to land on a canted sheet of tin with an ear grating *clack.* The bowed tin sheet, angled as it was, funneled the fresh, rolling nubs of metal ammunition downward until they rolled into a wooden rain barrel.

The barrel was full to the brim and then some. The trickle of bullets hit the top of the pile before rolling off and clattering to the floor.

I really needed to empty that out.

Next on the list, get the interns to load the magazines and get a second barrel.

I looked back to Samila, a self-satisfied smile playing across my face. Ralqir just got its first factory.

She didn’t look impressed. She said something, asked a question maybe. It was hard to hear over everything else.

What was on the agenda next? Tightening fittings for the deployable turrets, for sure. Definitely needed to fix the janky tracking on the big guns. Both important. Both dangerous if unaddressed.

Motion. Oh, yes. Samila.

The dragonkin hopped down from the stool and held out the food and drink. The tea smelled like the bitter stuff I’d had yesterday, effective but sad in how far it was from coffee.

She said something else, but I lost it to the combination of white noise and full brain. I tried to smile and nod, but she wasn’t buying it. Instead, she crouched down in front of me, plate and cup in hand, tilting her head as if she expected a real response.

I did have the wherewithal to accept the food and put it down on the cot next to me, finally taking the time to find the correct orientation for my shirt to slip it over my head.

But then my shirt was gone.

Samila, quick as a snake, had snatched it away and was yards from me before I could even react. Reflexively, I tried to dive after her and make a grab for the shirt, but she held it out so that I couldn’t grab it without going through her. My reach was longer than hers though, and I ended up with a hand on the prize, fighting for control.

Then the encounter changed gears. Samila’s posture changed. She leaned in, one hand against my chest, the other behind her, slowly bending her arm to bring my shirt and, through our connection, my hand to the small of her back. Then she was up against me, close, her face nearly touching mine, the contested shirt and my arm firmly affixed to her waist.

I froze. I imagine I was very deerlike in that moment, more so than any Miur I’d met so far.

She was still wearing that little smile she favored, the one that told you she knew something you didn’t.

Samila’s hand slowly slid up from my chest to wrap around the back of my neck. She drew me close and put her lips next to my ear.

“Can you hear me now?” She said in a low voice. My hair, such as it was, stood on end.

I simply nodded, slowly, afraid to move more than that.

“Good,” she purred with some satisfaction. “You look like hell. You need a shower and a change of clothes. Take your food with you.”

And just like that, the room had oxygen again.

I pulled back. I had the shirt now, possession fully established. Samila was already sauntering away, somehow making her oversized robes sway with her hips. It was her turn to have a self-satisfied smile on her face.

Then my train of thought finally pulled into the station. What had she said?

I brought the shirt to my nose for a sniff test and immediately regretted it. My body, I was just noticing, wasn’t much better.

“Monk!” Samila shouted from the doorway.

I looked up. She was leaning on the door jamb. This time, her smile was conspicuously absent.

“Tomorrow morning! Clean and well rested!”

That was it. There was nothing else to be done.

I was out of time.