“Come on, Chad!” Lucie’s peculiar accent comes from the direction of their boat. “We want you to keep that six-pack. You can’t keep that if you don’t work it.”

She hauls him by the hand across the walkway to the extended deck. Andrea starts the rhythmic percussion. Lisa supplements it with a new sound that I don’t think I’ve ever heard before. It’s ethereal and beautiful and I can’t figure out how she does it at all. The stretching begins as Phil and Stan straggle in, completing the group.

Stretch. Pose. Sweat. Pose. Hold it. On to the next one. Repeat until Andrea is satisfied.

Finally done.

I reach out and help Erik up to his feet. It was his first Andrea workout today, and he looks like he’d rather just lay on the deck for the rest of the day.

“It gets better, I promise,” I tell him.

He nods, still catching his breath, and heads to his boat to shower off the sweat he’s drenched with. From my morning reading, I can only guess that I looked a lot like that when Andrea started with me out on the Pacific.

Back on our boat, I get first shot at the shower as Marc rummages through the fridge and Evan is distracted talking to Valerie. Once I’m clean and dressed, I feel downright fantastic. Even the ever-present humidity doesn’t get me down.

The French left their distinctive culinary mark here in Laos just like they did in Cambodia and Vietnam. One of the breakfast options Simok picked up is a long sandwich on crusty bread. The pork here is a sausage and not the slices like the Vietnamese sandwiches had, but it’s the same principle even if it’s done a little spicier here. It’s good, filling, and looks better than the bowl of sticky rice that Marc is chowing down on.

“You’re still good to keep helping out the Geologists today while the rest of us are clearing mines?” I ask him. “You’ve got all the filter drop locations?”

“Yeah, I got ‘em,” Marc replies.

“Thanks. And good work getting the boys and girls to actually work with each other these last few days, they’re all really hitting their stride now that they’re not acting like their on separate teams.”

He beams at the praise. “I’ll take care of everything. Don’t worry about a thing.”

I retreat to my room and grab the tablet to check email before I go. Alan thinks he’s got the whole list of possible attendees for General Liu’s tech conference. I absently let my text scraper scoop his reports into my index and move onto something more interesting. Lin is doing well, but still hates running. I relate. I’m pretty good at it at this point, but I still hate it. Mrs. Hastings reports a couple of minor disciplinary issues with some of the 10-year-olds getting in fights with each other. That class is oversized anyway. I should talk to Marc and Mrs. Hastings about splitting them into two cohorts when we get back.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Time for bomb and mine duty. Like in Cambodia, it was a request from the Laotian Foreign Minister when I set up the trip. I guess when you drop a couple million tons of bombs on someone, not all of them explode. Since the Butler Institute is based in the US, I guess he figured we owed them one on this issue. I’m fine with that. I can help clean up my country’s mess.

I grab some kips, the colorful local bills, from Simok before I go. He assures me it’ll be plenty to buy any lunch I can find today. Suiting up, I take to the sky.

I spread my cloud wide, first letting it grow to a nice comfortable size, then reaching down to the ground all around me looking for anything that resonates magnetically or feels like metal. I head east towards the Vietnamese border that snakes up north almost parallel to the river. The land below me is a conservation area with almost no people. There’s very little that’s not natural down there, so the metal scraps stand right out. Every time I feel any, I dig it out and pulverize it. With my cloud at capacity like this, I’m able to go pretty near to full speed and wipe a huge swath of the jungle below me as I go.

I know Louise would yell at me for growing the cloud, but I love the feeling of it. I’m so huge, so powerful. The sensations flood in. I can feel everything. It’s like I’m crawling over every tree and leaf, feeling the satisfying disintegration of bomb casings and the occasional landmine left there since the seventies. I close my human eyes and just lose myself to it, floating through a sea of green and brown and hard and soft while my body soars over the treetops.

I brush by a tiger. My index entry tells me those are almost extinct in the wild. I form some eyes and capture some video of it. It’s not doing anything really interesting as I go by, but it’s still really cool to see.

I generally follow an old abandoned road below that I know will get me to somewhere with food by lunchtime. I clear everything dangerous for a couple of kilometers on either side of it.

The edge of my awareness feels a group that’s too well armed to be tourists or foragers but not well armed enough to be military. They could only be poachers. I slag all the metal in their gear into raw materials for making more of me. Good luck hunting with your no guns. Or walking with your pants falling down because your belt buckle just disappeared. I idly wonder how they’ll explain what just happened to each other, but I don’t care enough to slow down and find out.

I finally reach a tiny town not far from the Vietnamese border. I touch down far enough out that I don’t think anyone will have seen me over the treeline and let my flight suit melt away. There’s a small open market with one stall selling something that smells like food. I put all my money on the counter and just look at the cook expectantly. I’m pretty sure I’m overpaying by a lot, but he gets the message and puts together a huge meal of what looks like one of everything he makes. I dig in, enjoying the noodle soup and rice with fried meat the most. Some of it I don’t even get to, but what I eat I like until I’m full.

I give the proprietor a wave, suit up, and lift off. His jaw drops and he starts yelling to the nearby stalls and pointing after me. I’m gone before anyone else reaches him or looks up. Hope they don’t think he’s crazy.

I head a few clicks north so I don’t double cover the swatch I got this morning. I jet due west, letting my bots scour the jungle below. I don’t even need to follow anything other than my in-console compass this time. Eventually, I’ll hit the river again. It’s such a nice way to pass a day: saving lives, extending my consciousness, just knowing that I’m doing good. This is what I’m made for. This is what I should do all the time.

Mom, are you proud of me yet? How many lives do I need to save until I break even for wrecking Jeff and killing Father? I’ll get there eventually, right?