Wow, instant claustrophobia, just add me. The ceiling was as low as ever, and as I rolled over I realized that, once again, I was naked except for the white bracer.

“Were you successful?” The doctor asked.

“Yes, I was,” I replied. “Made level one and everything.”

“Have you chosen a class yet?”

I shook my head, even though I realized they probably had no idea what the gesture meant. “No. I was going to look through them and find something close enough to what I am good at and want to be. I should be delving in a day or so, but I want to take my time and come to a good decision.”

“You need to pick treasure hunter, or horde thief, or even scavenger or scrounger would be good. We have a lot of money riding on you, and you owe us enormously for your regeneration. Anything you pick has to have enhanced resources, it is necessary!”

I sighed. The Governor was, of course, making his opinion felt. “What will happen to your investment if I choose a class that won’t help me fight the Chaos spawns inside the rift?”

“You are a humanoid. You automatically have a huge advantage against everything a category one rift can create. You don’t need a combat class to survive and win. Everyone knows that humanoids are dangerous savages that can kill as easily as breathing. But if you insist on being uncooperative, I am certain that removing your habitat would encourage compliance. Few species can survive in a vacuum for any length of time.”

The doctor’s dry, dusty voice interrupted the governor. “You hired me for my expertise. No, everyone does not know that. Humanoid rifts are gross times more deadly than anything our governments have ever dealt with. Even humanoids generally clear rifts in teams of four or five.”

“That’s why the rifts in human systems are also a gross times more productive. If you want him dead, just say so… then your investment will be lost. But if he chooses a more combat-focused class, every trip, between his resource gathering and his energy credits, will still be vastly more productive than even a looting class could produce.”

“No,” I responded.

“What?” both voices replied.

“No. I will run your rifts for you. Any resources I gather that I don’t require for my own advancement and health are yours. But my energy credits? Those are mine. I need them for my own growth, and the more I grow, the stronger the rifts I can challenge and the more valuable rewards you will get. You can’t have them.”

“Why, you ungrateful monster. We saved your life. Gave you a new start, and now you start dictating terms to me? I should cut your enviro-pod loose.” the Governor ranted, although the synthesizer still delivered everything in a calm, even tone.

“Go ahead,” I replied.

“What?”

“I said do it. The tutorial told me that I can still use my transtator to visit rifts and possibly to seek a different safe haven with an equitable environment. It’s tied into my nervous system, and even if you had some way of knocking me unconscious, removing it would kill me.” I was sort of making things up out of my ass right now, but it sounded right. I was still having trouble thinking, but just blandly going along with their plans was bothering me, for some reason.

“If I buy whatever you want with my energy credits, I get behind in what I need to progress, and die, and you lose your investment. If you cut me loose and I can still delve, you get nothing, all gratitude is gone, and you lose your investment. If you try to remove my transtator and ability to do so, I die, and you lose your investment.”

The doctor’s dusty voice stated. “I warned you that humans were intelligent. I hadn’t considered that angle, but he is correct. Confiscating his e-credits would tie him more closely to us, but it would also stifle his development as a resource gatherer, and possibly cost him his life. Your short-term gains would mean nothing compared to the long-term expenses of mounting this expedition.”

“Fine. Then… I will agree, but I want a guarantee. You need to agree to delve for us until at least… level five.”

The doctor’s spidery voice rang out, “Level five? are you unstable? That could take a hundred years. No one would agree to that, not out of gratitude, not out of obligation, not even out of fear.”

“I agree.”

“You… agree?” the doctor’s harsh voice was moderated, but I was starting to be able to get an emotional read off of him. He was shocked.

I made level one from five goblins. Even if the amount of...whatever, advancement, doubled each time, level five should be a breeze. The goblins were kind of pathetic to someone who was trained to fight, even someone fifteen years out of practice with absolutely average abilities. Sure, they killed two of the wagon people, but I remembered their bodies… unarmored, unfit, and not a weapon between them, caught by an ambush.

I kinda wish I could have brought that girl with me, though. It was crowded here, but another human to talk to would help, even if she was just a simulation.

I rolled over and started doing push-ups. “Yes, I agree. I don’t know how often I can run a delve, but if I can find fresh ones, fully loaded, I should be able to help you return your investment and a whole lot more. According to the tutorial, you can always trade resources that you can't use for energy credits if you need those more.”

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

The push-ups were harder than I remembered, but not as hard as they had become when I started getting sick. I was working up a pretty decent sweat, which I was glad of… I wondered if I could use energy credits to purchase amenities like a bathroom.

“What are you doing?” the spindafor's voice questioned.

I had originally thought… you know… aliens, space travel, genius. But now I was wondering exactly how smart these creatures were. So far, the doctor seemed to be well-read and educated, if a little simple, but the governor was damned close to being flat-out stupid. And they had accepted my agreement no question… Didn’t their species have any liars or barter? I was not about to ask about it and put ideas in their head.

“Push-ups.”

“What are you pushing up, yourself? Why? Isn’t that an irretrievable waste of energy?” the doctor asked.

“No. Push-ups are exercise. They help build up my energy, my stamina, my health, my willpower, and my strength, all of which can help me in the long run with delving, I imagine.”

After a moment of muttering, the doctor asked, “Is this a common behavior for endoskeletal creatures?”

I nodded, “Probably. If you want to improve your physical body, you have to put forth the physical effort necessary to stress it. If this room were bigger, I could stand up and do a lot more exercises to help my flexibility, dexterity, and reaction speed. Can’t you?”

“No. I am a crystalline matrix. We do not move under our own power, except through breeding. We do not have dexterity or strength. We tend to be highly durable within limits,” the doctor replied.

Oh great, now my mental image changed from him being a spidery old man to a lump of rock salt. Yeah, I couldn’t see his ‘species’ being particularly good at fighting monsters without a self-propelled tank around them.

I finished three sets of fifty push-ups, and my arms were definitely trembling in the last set, so I switched to sit-ups. They were not the best exercise, but I hadn’t even been able to do them for fifteen years, and they felt GOOD. “Now, I need you guys to leave me alone for a while. I have some energy credits to spend on fighting gear.”

“You received energy credits? During the tutorial?”

I nodded, “Yes, I did. I strongly recommend trying it.”

***

Ugh. The lists. Even after restricting the list to EXACTLY what I wanted, like body armor, human, and under five credits, I still was faced with hundreds of descriptions. Starter rifts were supposed to be very simple, so I automatically started ignoring stuff like laser-reflective, gravitic stealth, and microporous. I also rejected the stuff that looked like cosplay animal costumes or looked like they were designed for some sort of sex game I simply had no interest in.

I finally settled on something that looked like a light pair of flight coveralls, with some kind of plates called ‘polycarbon’ inserts, for four e-credits. It was lightweight, and the blurb said it could breathe, turn aside high-g impacts, and was twice as cut and stab-resistant as boiled leather. A very human description.

For weapons, I chose a slightly longer version of a bayonet. It was almost the size of a gladius, I already knew its utility, and it was strong enough to slash a man open while slender enough to penetrate through the weak spots in armor. Never needs sharpened, guaranteed unbreakable up to level five. Five credits.

The cheapest PSA, though, was two hundred and fifty credits, and that was for just the basic package… when I started to check out the adapter kits for humanoids alone, I was staggered. There were personalities of every type, from combat assistants to snack-munching nerdy ‘chair guys’ to pornographic ones. There were also skins of about a million different kinds, to the point where if I wanted a different appearance and didn’t want to program it myself, I’d have to put in dozens of terms just to narrow the list down to something I could look over in a week.

The shop interface itself was very straightforward. Apparently, the PDA wrist thing could expand out to a visual rectangle the same as it could in watch form, and only the person whose neural system was connected to the transtator could view it. No glowing screens to give me away if I was sneaking. It made viewing thousands of options much more tolerable when the entire screen looked like it was the size of the room.

After looking for a ‘personal recycler’, I immediately purchased it. Apparently, it slightly altered your waste system so that you lost very little water through urination or bowel movements and made you more efficient at digesting, building, and waste removal in human bodies. That meant that I would, maybe, have to go to the bathroom twice a week, and I had yet to see how these guys dealt with human waste.

It took a few moments to install and was a biochemical modification, not a technological one. I felt much better afterward and even seemed to sweat a little less. I still needed a bathroom, though.

“Is anyone there?” I asked after a little while.

“Yes, I am always monitoring you. I do not require frequent unconsciousness to re-balance an unbalanced mind or refresh an inefficient body,” replied the doctor. “However, the Governor simply asked to be appraised of your status when it changes. He is a very busy being.”

“How am I supposed to handle things like self-cleaning, hygiene, eating, drinking, and waste disposal?”

“I… don’t know. My kind doesn’t often deal with any waste disposal outside of industrial projects. Our energy needs are taken care of by radiation, and when we absorb minerals, we grow until we reproduce. The Spindafor, I believe, consume needed nutrients from the plant proteins that grow in their environment, and their waste removal is handled by their environmental systems.”

I nodded, “Well, we humans have a much messier system. We regularly have to deal with hygiene issues. We need to occasionally bathe in water to remove filth and to keep our skin healthy, and that water needs to be cleaned or disposed of. In addition, we don’t have the most efficient digestion, the inedible remains of our foods pass out of our bodies and need to be removed and disposed of hygienically, and a lot of our leftovers are also washed out via water. A toilet would help. I was looking into it, and the basic human environmental module has accessories that could suit when I earn enough e-credits.”

“The thing is, how am I attached to whatever ship you are on? Can I expand this place safely, or is this module inside some kind of hold? Or is it tacked onto the outside of a spaceship, and making it more comfortable would make it screw up the spacecraft’s handling characteristics?”

“We ahh… excuse me, I need to speak with the governor about how much information you may be given.”

I nodded. The tutorial was right. One day of survival rations and water for a human up to two hundred pounds, One e-credit. Food must be expensive, but as he suggested, I purchased five. the last credit I used to buy a pack of sundries including underclothing, socks, and a minor hygiene kit including a toothbrush and a comb. I had hair now, just long enough to get into my eyes, of an average-looking brownish-black color. The knife was supposed to be sharp enough that I bet it could double as a razor, and the sundry pack also included a flexible roll-up mirror, which I used after I had emptied and refilled one of the water bottles included with the rations.