I was stood there pumping iron while panting, well pumping iron is a bit much for the weight I was using, when a big bear of a man turned up behind me in the greasy barely usable mirror.

“Kid you’re wasting your time there if you’re thinking of that’ll pack muscle on those arms of yours. You’re too young to build mass yet, come back when you’ve got some hair on your chin yeah?” Said the very hairy man wearing a gray vest and loose cargo trousers standing behind me. He smelled of deodorant and ozone and was about seven foot tall, he towered over me.

I stopped lifting the weights and let them hang by my sides as I turned to him.

“I’m not trying to get huge here, I’m just trying to get my arms to work properly.” I said trying to to sound too annoyed, didn’t want to make enemies in a gang gym.

“What? You get yourself crippled for a while? Recovering from something?” He asked with his eyes screwing up as he looked me over. His big eye brows started to threaten to swallow his eye sockets entirely, could he even see me?

“What? No, I’ve just always been scrawny and I’m trying to get a bit stronger. I’ve seen other kids move things I can’t. Moved a bed earlier and it was harder than I thought it should be, figure I need some time down here in the gym.” I said, gesturing with the weight in my hand at the end.

“Well, you’re basically a twig right now. I don’t see that changing until you start shaving so I’d just get yourself on the floor and do push ups for now, then try other body weight stuff to get your blood moving about. Try to get the different muscles toned and your joints limber. You won’t be getting a lot of out getting stronger until you’re bigger.” He said rubbing his thumb along his gigantic black beard. I noticed two of his fingers were cyberware, odd he didn’t get the whole hand swapped out.

Thinking he was likely right I walked over to the bench and placed the weights back and returned to the mat but this time I got down on the floor and started a push up. It seemed easy enough and my arms felt awake from the weights.

“You’re not finishing your push ups, get down to the floor and then all the way up. Make sure your chest gets in line with your elbows.” The man, who was still there, said while gesturing with his hands.

“I got it.” I said from the floor, at least the mat wasn’t too squishy so I could get some good stability to work with.

I did a few more push ups when the man spoke again, I tried not to let it annoy me. The guy didn’t seem like a gonk, just a guy trying to help.

“You’re doing much better but you’re starting to lose your form as you get tired. Keep your back straight and your feet in line.” The man said. I hadn’t even noticed I was losing my form so that was quite helpful.

After a whole load more push ups I fell to the mat. I couldn’t do another one, my arms didn’t have it in them.

“Hey, you pushed all the way. Good job kid. I noticed you pushing through the hard part at the end when you reached your limit. That’s the kind of drive that’ll see you a lot of gains when your older you know.” The man said while lightly clapping. He’d dragged a folding chair over from somewhere while I was working.

“Urgh… So what now? Do you think I should do some leg stuff? My stomach kind of feels weird.” I said getting up off the mat and stretching my hurting arms.

“That’s your core muscles likely getting their first proper stretch. You’ll want to get some core work and leg work in and then wrap up for the day. You being so small, you shouldn’t put too much strain on your body. You can only heal so much after all.” Said the hairy guy.

“Okay, so what should I do? Maybe leg lifts? Or squats?” I said, basically reading the suggestions on the display.

“Get some squats done. Try to go for sets of three. I’d say more for an adult but I’m not sure about a kid your size.” The guy said.

Lowering myself into the squat and back up was quite easy to start.

“A bit lower kid, you need to get a right angle on your knees and then lift back up smoothly.” The big guy said while drawing a right angle in the air with his hand.

Getting a bit lower this time I realized it was much harder this time to get back up from the lowest point even though it was only a tiny bit lower. I could feel my back tightening as I lifted myself up to standing.

A dozen squats later and my legs and body was on fire. I could barely stand still even. I really hoped I’d made good progress towards hitting zero endurance because it was hard work.

“Preem work, kid. I see you didn’t bring a towel so I grabbed one from the wash pile. We get a few dozen of these back and forth from the cleaners a day so feel free to use it, just try to bring one next time. Don’t want to get here and find out all the spares have got used up already.” He said handing me a white and threadbare but usable towel.

Wiping myself over with the towel and drying my hair I realized I must have pushed myself more this last hour and bit than I ever really had done. I’d done a lot of running away in the past but never had to push my body to the point of collapse before. It hurt but it still felt pretty good.

I wondered how much progress I’d made with endurance.

[User progress towards 0 Endurance cannot be computed until the recovery process is completed to allow for efficiency values.]

Tired from the workout I staggered towards the folding chairs against the wall, grabbing one and unfolding it to sit down. I finished toweling myself and just held onto it as I didn’t know what to do with it. The big guy was over at the desk doing something but upon seeing me sitting down he wandered over with a steel bottle and handed it towards me.

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“Get some water down you kid. I’ll take the towel and throw it into the laundry box.” He said passing along the bottle and taking the towel off me. He turned a little and launched the towel in a throw across the hall into a big plastic box with wheels, it was a pretty good shot as it landed right into the top of the box without hitting the sides.

I took a sip of the water and it felt great, I didn’t realize how thirsty I’d been. The big hairy guy wandered off happy with his job done, even though he’d give himself the work but it was fine.

Hey Sanctum how else can I get those attributes up? Anything I can do without more exercise would be great. I’m pretty much out of steam here.

[User can increase their Endurance through strength and flexibility exercise.]

[User can increase their Reflexes through drilling actions and reaction testing.]

[User can increase their Perception through orientation training and sensory deprivation.]

[User can increase their Insight through technical study and practical experimentation.]

[User can increase their Presence through conversation and protocol study.]

[Improving these Attributes is quicker when the User is engaging in a new or high risk activity as this stimulates the mind far more effectively.]

So I need to get all this stuff done hanging off the side on a balcony or something. Or maybe just push it to the limit kind of thing.

[The User can combine different training together to get best returns and all efforts to find new limits of User capability should be prioritized to see quicker gains.]

That really did give me some ideas to work with.

Getting up and heading out of the gym I checked the time and saw I still had a few hours before it would be worth heading back to the big tent for the night, I could spend some time talking with mom then. As for right now with my shaky limbs I didn’t like the idea of looking for scrap so I thought it would be a good idea to try some different training, something less physical.

I headed to my home street and stepped onto the lifting platform going up but instead of getting off at the third floor where I lived I rode it up to the sixth floor. This was the top floor of our street due to the underground highway for the city being above our street. There were streets down here in the district that went all the way up to floor nineteen as far as I’d heard about.

Up here on the higher floor among the PLED lighting and away from the street itself the noise was quite muted. I wandered along the walkway until I got to a part where the handrail ended so maintenance workers could access an overhang that was meant to allow for hanging advertising signs to be hung, but they were long gone and there were no maintenance workers really. It was just a blank overhang now and likely a falling hazard but no ones cares so here we are.

I sat down on the edge and hung my legs over the side and closed my eyes and focused on the noise below. The footsteps, the voices both talking and shouting, the bits of music fighting through each other only to get lost in the buzz of all the other noises.

I tried to pick out different noises and guessing what they could be.

The sound of a street food stall opening the big bags of ingredients to pour into their pot.

The noisy clatter of a trolley being pushed through the street by someone, it had a broken or stuck wheel because it would shiver itself with every little movement.

I wondered if this was the kind of thing that would improve my perception, it was quite soothing at least.

[User’s chosen activity will generate gradual improvements to the Perception attribute as gains are made in attention to detail, isolation of specific sounds and sensitivity.]

[User would find this kind of activity greatly improved by installing cyberears of at least medical grade or an electronic warfare detection suite as either would allow Sanctum to aid in management of several functions relevant to the Perception Attribute. The EW suite would allow the User to detect IR signals, electromagnetic fields emitted by electronic devices and heat signatures all of which are effected by and can be used to train Perception.]

Sanctum you keep telling me to chip in cyberware but you need to understand that I dug my bed out of the trash this morning. I don’t have a mattress. I can’t afford cyberware let alone electronic warfare suites.

Spending another hour sitting there and letting the sounds near and far wash around me among the lights above the street was very nice. Especially for my now aching body. But I wanted to gather some food take back to the beds for the night so I got up and headed down to street level and grabbed a few freshly baked carbocrunches from the food cart that had caught my nose a few times while I was sitting above.

Turning processed and packaged food into freshly served fresh food by doing some cooking magic to it, heating and mixing in new ingredients was a classic city practice. Unless you were quite rich you weren’t likely to find actual fresh ingredients like mammal or fish meat or vegetables and fruit.

There weren’t many kinds of any of those that survived the nuclear war way back more than two hundred years ago but people didn’t sit on their hands. A lot of effort and bioengineering and genetics later and a lot of Earth ended up with a pretty good spread of somewhat similar life made up of a bunch of cloned and altered version of a few dozen creatures and plants.

That would have been fine then there was the lunar bombardment war and the tattered animal and plant life took another hit. The viral and kinetic bombs left a lot of dead patches around Earth to this day and quite a few countries were left with a handful of types of lifeforms. There are probably the same number of trees on Earth that there are humans, if it weren’t for the super algae filter farms out in the Pacific ocean the air would probably be toxic by now.

Proper reliance on animals and plants for food never really recovered after that and here we were a hundred and twenty years later and we’re eating bacteria grown protein and mass synthesized carbohydrates. Not that any of it was made in the city itself, there were entire factory sprawls to the west of the city near the nearest bombardment zone where huge vats of bacteria did whatever it was they did to make little strings of protein all day every day and it was constantly harvested by robots.

All I knew was that it tasted great most of the time.

I filled a big with two meals worth of steaming hot street food and a bunch of little bottles of sauces and sprinkles for extra flavor because I know mom loves to mix a whole bunch of extreme flavors.

She’s basically a trash chute given human form when we eat street food as long as there’s enough sauces.

I paid the eight aura for the lot of it. I tried to haggle it down but the vendor just swore at me in a language I didn’t know and I just tapped it and walked off, letting him rant away behind me.

I wish I had my jacket on me and not just a ratty vest and a pair of cargo shorts but it was likely torn apart by Sanctum back in the apartment, maybe bits of it were still with me glued to the insides of my cerebral implant or something.

Reaching the big green tent and noticed one of the many poles holding it up was bent badly, different from earlier. I guess someone tripped or maybe got thrown into it? Either way I was happy me and mom were getting out of here tomorrow, put a bunch of unhappy people in a strange place together for too long and people are going to start stabbing after too long.

I pushed through the busy entrance into the walkway on the inside while keeping a tight grip on my bag of hot food.