April 15th

Overnight, the blackberry canes had bloomed out of the root system, curling three feet up the makeshift trellis we'd created out of PVC yesterday. Green berries peeked around leaves, some already hinting at darker color. The lower vines that had already existed yesterday held berries ripe and ready.

"Seriously, can I get a clipping and bring it over to the college?" Karen asked from where we both stood under the stretched painter's tarp, keeping us mostly dry and the full sized berry bush from being over watered and drowned. "It's fruiting out of season and is growing like it's on steroids. We don't have anyone that's a gardener or botanist or anything. Hell, I'm only a second-year biology major."

I shrugged. "Sure. Not like it wasn't tore up even worse yesterday when Ash brought it in." I cycled in, noticing the plant was actually giving off more wood energy now that it wasn't half eaten. "Something to document. Wonder how large it'll grow?"

"We'd eventually get sick of eating blackberries," Karen noted as she bent down, leaning in to the bush. A quick snap and one of the vines broke free near the top of the soil. She pulled away with a good chunk of plant vine with ripe and unripe berries on it. "Cool, thanks."

"Can you get them into the Seeker app? I've been dumping my research notes and random stuff into the wiki there, but not many others have."

"I can." Karen paused. "Can you find out if it's still requiring joining the Seekers directly to do so? Did Danny ever get the paperwork updated? I don't think teachers are going to want to sign a five year contract thing for a school club."

I rubbed my eyes against the onset of a headache and sighed, "He would miss something like that, wouldn't he?" I looked up to the gray sky and shook my head. "Alright, I'll go check with Danny and probably Brent."

I grabbed my raincoat and headed down the fire escape, not wanting just yet to test Melissa's no impact technique from several stories up into the mud. I'd explained yesterday how the difference felt before and after the alien had congratulated me on my Art of Awakening and Melissa had agreed it still felt like she was brute forcing it.

Danny wasn't at his office, but I did find him on the gym mats with a few other people. Danny and another were carefully going through a karate spar, which I thought was kind of odd to watch happen in basically slow motion. I stood off to the side watching with the three others that were nursing bruises.

Danny was squared off against someone I didn't recognize, a dark haired guy with glasses. He and Danny would take turns throwing a kick or a punch and blocking against it. I wasn't super familiar with martial arts, but I was fairly certain spars were supposed to be faster.

"What's up?"

Danny and the other guy backed off of each other once they noticed me. "We're testing sparring capabilities." I tilted my head in question. "So far, we've figured out just in regular contact it feels more like light contact sparring if you're at the same level. Regular contact against someone with less breakthroughs than you and that person feels the hits a lot harder than regular contact." He motioned to the other people near me. "Cycling with them attacking? They might as well be wearing gloves.

"Cycling against someone at your level, it basically becomes full contact sparring again." Danny looked at me. "Want to test what it's like with multiple breakthroughs between us?"

"Actually, I need to talk to you about the Seekers app and giving people access to it," I disagreed.

"Damn, work calls." Danny looked back to the others, "Sorry guys. Nicole, give me a second to get changed?" He asked.

"Yeah, I'll be in your office."

I only had to wait a few minutes before Danny got back, changed out of his gi and into normal clothes. "Alright, what's up with the Seeker app?"

"Do you still have to be a full member of the Seekers to get into it?" I asked and Danny nodded. "So, do you still have to sign the five year contract thing?"

"Oh. Yeah. Probably need to get rid of that." Danny looked chagrined at the callout. "Probably should cancel it for anyone still on it too, huh?"

"That'd be helpful. Karen's going to try to get some of the professors at the school to look at the blackberry bush on the roof, see what's up with it. I wanted them to put their notes into the Seeker wiki." I paused. "Speaking of which, you are putting things like what you were talking about earlier with sparring in, right?"

"I write up notes and send them to you?" Danny hesitantly replied.

I sighed, "Send them where?"

"Oh, you probably don't check your school account regularly anymore, do you? It's still the address tied to your Seeker account."

"Jesus Christ, Danny," I palmed my face. "I haven't been back to class in weeks. We've been a little busy. And the Seeker app system has a wiki setup of its own. Alright, first thing's first. Get rid of the requirement for the contract to join the Seekers. That way Karen can hopefully get others into the damn thing. While you do that, I'm grabbing Brent and the IT guy."

I left Danny typing away at his computer while I headed to Brent's office who thankfully was there. "Brent, do you know where the IT guy is?"

"Seth?" Brent asked. "He's probably in the medical area, tying the equipment into the network here."

"We're having to fix the Seeker app because Danny still had a stupid school contract as required to join and use the system. We've got a wiki system in it and I've basically been the only one using it. Once Danny does that, can Seth make the wiki part of the seeker app public? Is it already?" I asked. "I just found out Danny's been sending me notes, but it's hitting my school account because that's what's registered in the Seekers app. I need to get my account fixed and then start moving all his stuff over. And hopefully getting others to use it."

"Wait, what?" Brent stopped me. "I think I'm missing something here. I've been spending the past week trying to get some sort of documentation system together and we've already had one?" At least I wasn't the only one getting headaches from this mess as Brent rubbed his temples. "I should have looked deeper into what resources you all had been hooked into before I came out here."

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"What, have you been sending me stuff too?" This was rapidly becoming a mess.

"No, I got notice from DARPA a little over a week ago that Goodfellow has some initial results from their officer and enlisted training, in the realm of half a terabyte of raw imagery and annotations so I've been trying to finesse somewhere to receive it all. I thought you all had just been connected to a scraper, not a storage and wiki solution. Must be something Danny set up with the funding." Brent chuckled. "So let's get Seth and see what we can do with this."

Twenty minutes in the conference room, it turned out it was easy enough for Danny to remove the contract from access to the Seeker app.

"I strongly suggest you keep the search system locked behind a different permission set however. I recognize the system being used and it's not really well designed to have untrained users running massive queries against it." Brent noted.

"You picked a decent system for the backend on the wiki though." Seth added, looking over that portion. "Petabyte storage and front end on the same datacenter satellite, so there's no link latency there. Looks like I can toggle read access to the public and it has account identity management already configured through whatever the Seeker app is using. If you want someone to maintain this though, you're going to need more people."

"I know a few people for that." Brent distractedly replied, now manipulating something else. I had a feeling he was already starting to move data.

"More out of town hires?" I gave Brent a look.

He shook his head while still focused. "They've been here a few weeks already, so no."

"Are you staging people here just waiting on us to ask?" Danny frowned. "I'd rather you just tell me what I need instead of waiting for us to run against problems."

"No, they've been here for other reasons, but they can do basic IT work." Brent finally looked up from his computer. "Probably unneeded reasons at this point, but it never hurts."

"I get my own IT shop then?" Seth broke in.

"Sure, convert over one of the back storage areas." Danny answered. "It's going to continue to be hell to get office supplies though. And are we going to learn what those unneeded reasons are, Brent?"

"They're here for you guys and Rolla in general in case of emergencies," is all Brent would answer. "Nicole, I've got the documentation uploaded to this wiki database, it does thankfully let me lock stuff to certain accounts until it's been reviewed. You'll probably want to just parcel it out into more useful pieces than just unlocking for public the raw data anyways."

I nodded. "Fun, alright. You were saying something about images too?"

Brent gave me my own nod. "That's the bulk of the transfer, and that'll take at least overnight. Just don't click any links in the source documents at the moment."

"Cool. I'm going back to my office unless anyone's got anything for me?" No one disagreed, so I got up.

"Danny, can we talk about this contract and how unenforceable it was?" Brent asked as I grabbed my bag. I slowed to listen to the answer.

"It was knee-jerk reaction to theft." Was his only defense.

~~~

The wiki suddenly had a single extra link titled Goodfellow results that I followed, bringing up a table of contents and about sixty pages below that. I started at the top with the generalized results.

Number of airmen in training group: 873

Number of airmen with power for external dantian testing: 67

Final number of airmen with dantian: 871

Internal: 51

External: 820

Final number of airmen with first breakthrough

Internal: 49

External: 707

Huh, did they run into the same issues as Fort Leonard Wood? Was this getting shared to them and the other bases?

The first ten pages were fairly detailed information on every one of the initial sixty seven people that were on the false path with power ahead of time. Number of blocks they'd gone through, how long they'd had power, how often they used it. It even went into things I wouldn't have wondered about, all the way down to blood type and questions about pregnancy and periods.

I felt better about someone running another testing site, at least. It felt like Colonel Williams had been thrown in the deep end, but these guys at least knew how to swim.

The next section worried me a little though.

Failures

Two airmen (Subjects 118 and 704) reported previous power with breakthroughs at 5th and 4th stage, respectively. Upon utilizing Internal Dantian Firen Method, both subjects collapsed and continue to be on medical treatment for coma. No other airmen at 5th stage in training group. Three other airmen at 4th stage prior to Subject 704 successfully completed Internal generation.

Two other airmen at 4th stage were pulled from program for further study.

Sixteen (2 first, 6 second, 8 third prior breakthrough) airmen with Internal Dantian Firen Method creation chose to participate in rapid push for first breakthrough without following caveated healing notes. Authorized by base commander after full review with airmen. Internal Dantian recognized as full collapse without any results in subsequent CAT, MRI, PET, or ultrasound scans.

Addendum: All sixteen airmen successfully followed secondary attempt at External Dantian Firen Method creation. Subsequent scans showed normal External Dantian, no signs of Internal Dantian. Damage previously seen in Internal Dantian not reflected on external.

Yeah, I definitely needed to ask Brent if this was getting forwarded to others.