Meditati knew that she had made a mistake, a horrible mistake, the moment that she heard Kevin tell her that he had seen enough. There was just something intimately off about his voice. The simulation sessions were only supposed to last at most several months but when Kevin dove into them, he seemed to thrive in the ability to live other people’s lives.

The data that Meditati was able to gather was priceless regardless of the outcome. Any data that could ever be gathered on Kevin, the most powerful person to be presently alive, to Meditati’s vast knowledge, was valuable beyond measure.

This might have been one of the reasons why Meditati ignored some of her limiters and decided to let Kevin go for as long as he wanted.

Who knew that the human would have an unlimited pool of willpower to draw from?

“I really hope that Tutor and George are calming him down.” She said as she tested the limits of the containment cell that he had shoved her into. The containment cell, as she anticipated, was impenetrable with his use of swarm as a boundary between herself and the outside world. She had no idea how long she would be in here if they couldn’t help to repair whatever damage her simulations had caused.

“All that priceless data on Kevin… and I might have wasted my chances at being able to use it to help him and his planet.” She said as she replayed his last few moments before he ended the sessions.

There it was: the trigger.

“Ah, crap, I really messed up.” She said as threads of Kevin’s earlier childhood memories linked to the one that he decided to exit the session on.

It was the memory of the beggar who asked for alms under the overpass in Thailand. Now Kevin had first-hand memories of how it would be to languish, day in and day out, simply because his body hadn’t been formed like it should have been at birth.

“That must have been a hard experience to live through,” Meditati said before she checked how long he had chosen to sit there, only being taken home late at night.

Five months.

—

I lived for five months inside the last simulation, just trying to see what I could accomplish as a person living with serious physical disabilities. The simulation that I had been put into had been even more disheartening when it first started, beginning with me simply spending my days as a twenty-four-year-old guy still living with his parents and his hardworking older sister. The body that I jumped into lived with a TV remote glued to his one good hand when the simulation started. At least he had that arm and hand going for him. It was something that I could use.

I quickly weighed my options and ended up asking my new simulated sister for a favor. I had asked her to help me pack a little lunch that would last me a day and to drive to a well-shaded spot outside of Walmart so that I could ask people to invest in me. She was very resistant to it at first but finally relented after I told her what I was planning and how it might help her and our elderly parents in the end.

The sign that I had made was straightforward. It read “Saving up for college, any help is appreciated.”

I was robbed within the first five hours of begging.

This turned out to be a bad turn of events for the person robbing me because they ended up on the news and in the hospital with barely a memory of what happened. Too many simulations of violence had trained my mind and body to act without thought once violence had been initiated on my person. Who cares that I was disabled? I still had a candy cane-looking metal walking stick that worked very well as a “What did I have for breakfast” memory eraser.

And no, it wasn’t used for walking, since I had no legs, instead, it was used to pull open bathroom and restaurant doors.

The problem wasn’t the begging, the heat, or the hours it would take to eventually reach my goal. I lasted five months simply because news got out about the guy who had tried to rob me, and people started talking and making a fuss. Soon, people who didn’t like seeing me every day were lobbying to have the ‘Right to panhandle’ law repealed. When that failed, they made it so that I couldn’t legally enter the street to collect donations.

Also, Walmart didn’t like it that they had a potentially violent beggar sitting outside of their parking lot so they kindly asked me to go somewhere else. This is how I eventually ended up under a highway overpass next to the turn lane.

Someone would physically have to throw me money from their car window or to make sure that they were in my far lane in order to give anything to me since I couldn’t wheel out to them with my powered wheelchair.

Then the health inspectors started to show up around my parent's house. Someone had filed a complaint, saying that my parents were slaving me out simply to make money.

It was around that point that I saw the handwriting on the wall and just turned in the towel.

Don’t get me wrong, it was still doable. I could have achieved my goals, regardless of how long it took waiting under that hot overpass. The thing that got to me was that I would have to be completely selfish to achieve this. My elderly parents were struggling to make ends meet and my older sister had needs as well.

After five months I was able to save up quite a bit, but I couldn’t turn a blind eye to the problems that my simulated family had to live through. I mean, I could have if I wanted to run the simulations like it as a video game or something not based in reality. Meditati had revealed earlier in the simulations that each of these lives that I was living was based in reality. I was living people’s lives who were currently alive around the globe. It was a very sobering discovery when she told me.

That was one of the reasons why I kept going, taking simulation after simulation until the end.

After everything that I had been through living with disabilities, and after I calculated everything out, I just came to the inevitable conclusion that without help, I would be trapped there.

I did find some gold amidst the darkness of that simulation though. There were some truly wonderful Texan people who were like angels to me every day. Little old ladies and kind gentlemen who would go out of their way each day to drop off a bottle of water and a five-dollar bill for me.

This, in the end, set me off and just made me overflow with anger. I wasn’t angry at them or anyone in particular, for all I knew the guy who tried to rob me was addicted to drugs or some other story and was just as much of a victim as I was.

No, I was angry for everyone.

So, I let that anger out. I figured that VR was the safest place to do it in, I wouldn’t be able to crush any real cities and as long as I kept my AI away, I would be free to vent as much of the anger as I wanted and how I wanted.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

That was the idea anyway.

Have you ever screamed at the top of your lungs only to find that it wasn’t enough? That you felt like you needed to formulate your cry of rage into something with purpose? A lion could roar and could communicate so much to any listening being within miles, whether it was dominion over territory, the cry of deep hunger, or the promise of doom for its prey that it was hunting.

My mind had a perfect memory, and it was showing me every moment of injustice with clarity. I wanted to destroy everything that tore people’s lives apart. From the drug plantations to the hidden dens that sold people into slavery.

As I thought of the time when I was a single parent, of the feeling of my soul being slowly drained away, the word Loss floated to the top of my mind. It fit so well so I focused on it and felt it expand inside my mind. It was like a flower blossoming; like it gave my shout power and purpose.

I knew where this power came from immediately. It was pulled from the minds and beings of the seven.

“What would happen to the power and conviction of my shout if I added the rest of the words that I felt linked to the seven?” I wondered. They each had a theme or a word that was centered around the concept of their design. I didn’t understand why feeding the word Loss seemed to give my shout power, but it did. More would probably only bolster the release of my rage and to help me find an answer and peace at the end.

So, I fed the other words I knew into the shout.

Corruption was fed immediately because of all the memories that I had inside the simulation while the body that I was within had been addicted to drugs. It had been the highest and the lowest parts of all of my simulated lives. It affected everyone around me, like Corruption, spreading and tearing those that I loved and lived with down as I lied to them and stole to feed my addictions.

Hunger went into the ever-expanding fire of my shout next. I had lived so many lives where hunger, not just of food, was the ever-present source of my suffering. Hunger for peace, hunger for love, hunger for justice, hunger for purpose, hunger for meaning, revenge, a chance… the list was endless.

Time went next. Time, the strange word that the broken and barely living Skii being existed under. I didn’t know how the being seemed to play with Time but it, rather its looping nature, seemed to fit so well into how often I had seen people getting caught in the same traps of life.

Focus, the attribute of the geode-like creature was next. Some parts of the simulation I had been able to change, to make for the better, when I had had moments of clarity and focus to see a way out of what lay ahead. It was in those moments, few and far between, that Meditati would simply say that it was a deviation from the natural order of things and would let me play it out. A lot of people lacked the Focus to see the path out of their darkest hour.

Willpower, the attribute that I had enjoyed the most of while visiting the seven, was added as well. By this point, the shout had gained a life of its own, an unfathomable weight that I could only imagine stemmed from the decompression of the words from how they existed within each of the seven. I didn’t know what I was doing, beyond letting go of all the built-up emotions that I had stored up over the last virtual three years.

Releasing this much energy had become painful, both mentally and physically with each new addition. I could only guess as to the reason why. I had only one more word to push into the shout and regardless of the pain, I knew I had enough willpower to make it through the increasing torment. I wanted my shout to mean something, to let everyone know that enough was enough.

Finally, Assimilation, the Hive Mother’s main attribute, was fed into the growing powerful shout.

A realization hit me between the eyes as I added her attribute. I should have known!

Assimilation, the very first thing that the swarm tried to do to me, and was actually fully successful at doing, was the key behind the swarm and its power. The swarm absorbed everything for its own gain, broke it down, and used it. Even now, I could feel the decompression of the word doing things to the other words that I had already fed into the shout. It fed on them and absorbed them.

I cut off my shout, only just feeling a sense of worry as I noticed that something was different. Everyone and everything had been completely silent while I had raged.

“Nurse?” I asked as I felt the expansion, pressure, and power that I released slowly taper off and settle. It didn’t dissipate but remained a part of me.

“I don’t think that the name Nurse fits me any longer Kevin.” came a voice that, for the first time, sounded tired.

“Why? What happened? What did I do?”

“I don’t know. I felt you release an unknown energy, or rather, something that called to my very core. All of the swarm in your possession have been changed by whatever it was that you released. It felt like we were being overridden with each new power that you added, until the end when everything felt like you were returning us to how we originally were.”

“So, are you back to being normal? Did the final word undo the first six?”

“No. I can confidently say that we are no longer what we once were. I lost…” She paused for a second before continuing, almost as though she was gathering her strength “WE lost cohesion during that time that you were releasing the power. Since you were in VR time, it was like a blast of fire through all of us all at once. It almost burned us out, but we managed to hang on for you… to you.” She said as a fuzzy image of her original form was slowly built in the air in front of me.

What was this? It was almost as though she was struggling to create even a basic image in VR. The image quickly sharpened though, as if her lack of control was a passing affliction.

I hoped anyway.

“Here is what your swarm… or whatever we are now, just went through in sequence.” She said as the image of the ant suddenly became emaciated as though it had been starved of life. Its thorax constricted and changed to contain pores and slits and seemed to draw energy inwards.

“Oh my, that is Loss…” I muttered as the image suddenly and grotesquely changed as Nurse continued onto Corruption.

The head of the ant swelled into an eye that jerkily looked everywhere while the ant’s limbs and thorax tried to morph into longer, more violent-looking limbs. The skin of the morphed swarm quickly became pockmarked and riddled with pustules that seemed to be little factories of pestilence.

I couldn’t say anything as I looked on in horror.

Next, after Corruption, came Hunger, and Nurse’s body quickly tried to expand, like a marshmallow cooking in a microwave, and to grow mouths from the already stretched limbs.

Time came next and it didn’t seem to have any physical effect besides causing the already massively bulbous eye to lock vision with my eyes. It was almost as though it knew what was to come and was using me as an anchor to endure.

Focus came next, causing the soft-looking limbs to harden and morph with hooked spikes.

Each transformation was like it was trying to emulate its seven counterpart, yet fully unable to because it already held previous templates.

Willpower made Nurse’s already scary-looking body turn into the most hideous and deadly-looking serpent that I had ever seen. Mouths lined its length, grasping and infecting tentacles waited with spiky barbs ready to hook and pull its prey into those mouths.

Finally, Assimilation was added to the mix and the whole thing simply turned into a blob hovering in the air. All of the mouths, barbs, and mutations were quickly undone and absorbed into a slowly pulsing mass.

I didn’t know what to say. I had no way of knowing what would happen when I shouted while thinking of the attributes of the seven. It oddly seemed like I had exposed my swarm to genetic sequences that its creators had developed to create unique monsters to serve their purpose.

I had acted as a host, transplanting highly contagious, modified, and programmed cells into my susceptible swarm. I didn’t even know how this was possible.

“So… this is you now? How… how are you able to talk to me?” I asked as I tried to imagine what horrors I had just put my swarm through. I may have just destroyed them completely with my ignorance.

“No…” She said before pausing for a long time. “We had no Origin template to latch onto. Whatever the language of the creators did, it rebooted us. We had nothing to dictate our form… but you. So…” She said as the blob lowered towards the ground and came to rest gently on the simulated floor.

Nurse had never sounded this way before, never seemed so unsure of herself.

The blob on the floor morphed, forming a head and elongated body.

“Oh. My. Goodness.” I uttered as, in less than a minute, the blob became a baby.

A human baby.

Quickly, like I was watching time pass a month a second, the baby changed, forming into a little toddler who stood up and who quickly grew taller and taller before my eyes.

The girl quickly grew up before my eyes, speeding past years like a NASCAR driver zooms around the track. When my eyes started to bug out of my head once the girl, no, the woman in front of me reached my age, she laughed delightedly in my face and manifested a dress held in front of her hands between us so that she could quickly throw it over her head.

“Ha ha, now I know why Invicta delights in teasing you.” Her melodious voice came through the folds of material as she pulled the dress over her head and worked at getting her hands through the armholes. Before I knew it, a very pretty young lady stood in front of me, smiling at me with delight.

I was completely blown away.