Ruvle strained to score the tip of the triangular blade across the film, carving out a single letter to add to the crossword puzzle. She’d been avoiding this one; the very sharp angles of a W were so hard to get right without overlapping strokes. In the wake of the knifepoint, the transparent film grew white scratches, like sand piling around a finger dragged along a beach. Ruvle gritted her teeth. She couldn’t blink or lose total focus. She had to be one with her hands in a way that the uninitiated couldn’t imagine…
“...That’s an X,” she said mostly to herself, and sighed. Her eyestrain relieved as her vision changed focus back to the written instructions behind the film. The crossword clue was ‘crater rim common decoration’, and while she hadn’t personally been to the wide pass where the crater’s ring of outer mountains had a break, she’d seen the pictures of windchimes everywhere that caught the ever-blowing breeze. The answer was Windchimes and she’d messed up the letter…
“You can salvage it,” came a dispassionate, monotone woman’s voice from behind her.
Ruvle held back from sighing too hard, or she’d break the film. “I can.” Her stabilizing muscles were tiring; the mistakes were piling up…
“Remember why you do this. You have it in you.”
She thought back to the lab, the sabotage those years ago, her misfortune at the turn of adulthood. She still remembered the bubbling floor-to-ceiling chambers of glowing green-and-blue liquids, the thunder sparking between toroidal coils and giant floor-mounted electrodes, the nest of supercomputer cables carpeting the entire ceiling, the shark pit she’d ran past, the monorail car used to get around from floor to floor. Every M.A.D. lab that made real, tangible advancements to science looked like those; the boring ‘practical’ labs never explored the nature of reality enough and didn’t have enthusiastic enough workers. Not all of them were used for good, though, and the one she’d been kidnapped into for several days...it was why Nerso had to burn. True citizens always had their weird projects, vile as they might be. Having ultra-wealth to the point of controlling industry and the shape of society destroyed the mind, perhaps. She never learned exactly why the scientist, nearly as much a prisoner as she was, chose to pour the molten wax. He’d been apologizing before, during, and after.
He’d been intentionally negligent to let her escape, for certain, and probably set the killer robot defense force to low-power maintenance mode himself, rather than that coming as a random stroke of luck during her escape. If he hadn’t done that, she’d want revenge against him, not just his patron and his sick true citizen boredom to see what would happen.
It still didn’t feel good to ruminate, but it drove her. Ruvle poured her willpower into her tired hands, forcing the jittering to stop. Two more careful cuts across the film, larger, bolder, turned the barely-crossed X into what visually scanned as a W—just one that had been corrected. The film remained unpunctured.
“Good,” the voice from behind told her. “Take a rest.”
Ruvle’s brow unfurrowed, and she let her arms drop, letting go of the needle and the knife cutting it. She pulled her face away from the microscope and jumped off of the balance ball.
Around her, fellow initiates of the old art of Exaction were hard at work or hard at play; the central ground floor of the old monastery had plenty of space for those working in parallel—even those who merely witnessed hyperdexterity, those who could not yet effortlessly climb the woven indigo netting along the walls. It was the only way to isolated platforms above on the walls, like a hundred balconies overlooking an indoor courtyard of initiates. Indigo saturated Ruvle’s vision now that she didn’t have her face to the microscope and the needle she’d been sculpting in the eye of—the platform undersides were of dark purple wood, the floor tilings used bright blue-to-indigo stone, and the ceiling above was a floral mosaic of indigo stained glass that cast filtered sunlight down into the interior. Ruvle never knew where they’d gotten this striking color of stone for the floor tiles–the monastery was built into an out-of-the-way mountainside at the crater’s edge, and all of these mountains took on a neutral gray. Perhaps when Exaction was not so niche, they found it somewhere far away–back when the skill was to be reckoned with, before Consolidation or wealth were the true names of power, or even niche modern tislets. Ruvle took tired breaths as she rested, upright, her arms dangling down and her fingers twitching in the purple light. “Why are my hands getting tired so much faster? It wasn’t like this last month...”
“Higher precision uses more energy,” her new teacher answered. The woman didn’t match the hyperdexterity color, her skin being faded to washed-out gray, her eyes not quite lifeless, but apathetic, her body intensely lean. The headband she wore, at least, had ornate zigzag patterns of indigo on gold, its edges pinning back her raven hair. “At the same time, you lose muscle mass to grow more nerves. Fewer muscle cells are taking on more work.”
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Ruvle shook her hands as if flinging away drops of water. “I thought nerves were helping me use all my body resources. Is it not working on me?”
“Remember that you’re still Coarse,” her teacher added, her voice monotone—interested, but barely, holding onto that wisp of emotion. “Trainees closer to Fine have more endurance. You will find more to give when your body is better at looking.”
“Can I speed this up any?” Ruvle asked, pulling on the neckline of her bodysuit. The historical indigo hyperdexterity outfit was skin-tight and would not shift with movements, preventing a settling shirt sleeve from interfering with delicate precision. It covered her from neck to wrists to ankles, with hands and feet bare; others wore similar. “I want to be powerful.”
“Unless you can buy a case of Dye, the method is to train,” her teacher said.
“Then I’ll train.” The former was not a serious alternative, akin to liquidating a career’s worth of savings.
As the two walked to the other side of the ground floor, they passed by fellow trainees, mostly Coarse-level and a few tentatively-interested folk of only Gross dexterity, not even wearing the indigo bodysuits. Three other trainees–a rare day, a rare level of activity, where Ruvle could often arrive to the monastery and stand under the stained moonlight all to herself. One trainee stood on a suspended wire on one foot, another intensely focused on balancing an inverted double pendulum in his hand, and still another practiced contortionism to fit through a freestanding maze of welded iron, with passages small enough that squirrels would better pass. No skill promoted Exaction on its own; a varied diet of practices mattered. They passed under one of the lowermost balconies, under which hung a banner that Ruvle had seen a hundred times, its faded print on indigo vellum outlining the grades of skill.
“I’m going to throw darts at you,” her teacher explained, picking some out of a wooden box on the floor; she idly flicked four towards the dartboard—the same model as in Ruvle’s notary office. They struck the triple-score band of the 20 sector of the board, hitting each corner exactly.
“And I have to dodge them? That doesn’t even sound like hydex training.”
Her trainer paused, and then sighed. “You don’t have to call it Exaction. I know it’s a dying art. No one truly cares anymore. But can you at least call it hyperdexterity?”
Ruvle pushed aside her shy thoughts. Stand firm. “I do care. It’s what I want to do with my body; that’s why I want to go all the way to Ultrafine.” Among other reasons.
“That will be a major sacrifice. Even I haven’t taken it.” A twinge of regret entered her teacher’s voice.
“I’m honored to keep your tradition alive, though.”
Her teacher smiled. Ruvle looked up at the banner.
The degrees of hyperdexterity on it were easy to understand: Coarse, Fine, and Ultrafine, all three beyond what humans could achieve with normal genetic gifts or practice—and each level was to the previous what Coarse was to the common bystander. Coordination, balance, grace, precision of movement, tactile perception, even some physical speed were all raised to heights that excelled beyond gymnasts and accomplished sport archers. The dartboard was boring, normally. Ruvle could hit a bullseye from several buildings away. But her Fine-level teacher could hold a laser pointer trained at the tip of a spire from the street outside, be buffeted by the crowd from all directions, while reading a book in her free hand, and no one would notice the dot so much as twitch. It had taken much time and training just for Ruvle to reach Coarse, and she could now study under someone beyond it–the only someone beyond it who regularly visited, whom Ruvle had been avoidant enough about that she still didn’t know her new teacher’s name. There were two people at Ultrafine-level who rarely visited the monastery, neither of them present today—those who had to sacrifice so much of themselves became reclusive, several of their bodily organs replaced with M.A.D. science so that the natural workings of the human body didn’t cause vibrations large enough to drown out their precision. Their incredible self-control scrubbed their minds to tabula rasa. A Point-Perfect level existed beyond even Ultrafine, strictly speaking, but it destroyed all three of its historical practitioners beyond salvation.
Even her Fine teacher had that apathy setting in from controlling herself to perfection at all times, plus, perhaps, the lack of a pulse anymore. The heart was the first organ that had to go.
“Pick up that broomstick there,” her teacher told her, “and deflect my darts. They should hit only the sector I tell you to.”
Ruvle’s face paled, but she picked up the broomstick anyway. “That sounds hard.”
“It’s supposed to be.”
“Is it weird that that makes me feel a lot better?” Ruvle detached the head from the broomstick and spun the stick.
“Sector 16,” came the response, along with a dart.