All that being said, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to live forever. After all, things had gone to near complete shit, and I’d nearly died at least three times in about as many days. Now, were I less of a trainwreck, I’d take being forcibly confronted by my own mortality with some grace and put some serious thought into what I wanted to do with what little time I had, but. . .
Instead I immediately sought means to distract myself and avoid thinking about it. I burned straight through one of my light novels, and immediately got to reading the other one after checking to see if my ATP had refreshed. It had, but only partially. I decided that assigning my points could wait until I had access to the full lot of them.
At some point Madeline had pulled a large disc weight out of her closet. She was clutching it to her chest while leaning her torso forward in her chair, before straightening back out. She altered her form occasionally as she did so, presumably to exercise different muscle groups.
She’d invited me to work out with her, but I refused. I already knew how much I disliked exercise. Plus, no matter how physically strenuous the activity, I know it would not stop me from thinking.
Having time with my thoughts was the last thing I wanted now.
So I went back to reading, and only stopped once I saw that Fry and Mick-chicken had ceased their movements.
The dagger that had once been a miniature model sword also shrank down to its normal size, which was a little disappointing, but not unexpected.
After putting it and my mechas safely back in my inventory I got to debating how to spend my points. I had nine of the suckers to work with now, the ordeal of the day before had given me substantial gains in the stats department as well as probably a whole load of barely compartmentalized trauma.
Thinking back, there were certain parts of yesterday that I was definitely blocking out. Not the first time in my life that my brain had deliberately fenced in certain memories to protect itself, unfortunately, but I didn’t want to think any more about that than I had to. So I got back to my points.
First things first, I needed to stock up on healing items. I navigated over to the shop and noticed that the usual percentage-price labels were missing. In their place, the little ticket thing that had shown up in my inventory yesterday was displayed.
Apparently I could use it in place of my ATP for a shop Item. Or rather I had to. There wasn’t any way for me to pay with my ATP even if I wanted to, which seemed a little odd. I guess they didn’t want me stockpiling my coupons, for whatever reason.
So I tapped on the potions and bought two immediately, the second one draining three pips off of my bar.
Six points left. What to do. . .
Well, I supposed that depended entirely on what we were going to do today.
“Madeline?” I turned to look down the hall as I called out, and saw that the person in question was chugging from her giant metal flask with vigor, having apparently worked up a bit of a sweat. She had pulled a box fan out from somewhere and had pointed it directly at her face.
“Yeah?” She replied, now sufficiently rehydrated.
“What are we doing today?” I asked.
“Staying inside and waiting until all this blows over or we get nuked.”
“If nukes were gonna fly, I think it’d have already happened. More likely, we’ll get stepped on by some sort of kaiju, what with all the monsters running around.”
“Possibly. Either way I’m not leaving this apartment.” She stated flatly, drinking again from her flask.
“Really? You don’t want to find out what’s up with the game exchange across the street?”
“Leo, every time we’ve so much as stepped out my front door, something terrible has happened. It’s to the point that I’m pretty sure if we attempted to actually leave the building, we’d just die instantly.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but found that I mostly agreed. Maybe going on another excursion was a bad Idea.
Which meant we were staying inside all day. That answered my initial question, at least.
If I was gonna live like a shut in, then all I really needed ability wise was the bare amount for self defense. I figured Four-Arms would be up for the task. He only took a point to get back up and running so now I had five left to play with.
I had so many new abilities to play with too. That being said I couldn’t really test the effectiveness of anything I used Animate weapon or Scale weapon on. I’d have to shoot any guns to see what they were like, for instance. Melee weapons I could sort of get away with, but even then the ones that ejected plasma instead of having any sort of normal cutting edge were too risky. I could blind myself or seriously burn my hand just turning them on.
That being said, I could preview the point cost for everything and write down the data. That seemed like it would be a great thing to do, in fact, but only after I spent all my points.
The simplest option then was just to blow the rest of my ATP on Repairing my destroyed models. Tommy was first, obviously. The little guy had been instrumental in saving my hide yesterday.
I pulled his scraps out of my inventory, and Madeline let out a whistle as she watched the thundercloud sweep the little pieces together and then flash before spitting out Tommy, looking good as new. He was immobile, however, and I’d have to Animate him if I wanted to see him walking about.
That wasn’t in the cards today though. I needed to pick who to Repair next.
***
In the end I Repaired four others. Repairing them was cheap after all, even if animating them wasn’t. One of the newly fixed up fellows cost four whole points to bring to life, but honestly that just made me all the more excited to try him out.
Another day.
Currently I was sorting through all the miniature polymer weapons in my collection and writing down their point cost for scaling and animation. I could only preview the point cost for weapons and models that didn’t need to be Repaired first, but usually the weapons were more intact then their wielders.
Still, a lot of them were just untenably expensive. All the laser guns were right out, as well as any non bladed melee armaments. That still gave me access to any ballistic projectile launchers and a couple explosives, though the explosives would take the entirety of my ATP for a single use. Still, it was something to keep under consideration.
Madeline had elected to only get a couple charges on her Strike ability, spending the rest of her allowance on healing items. She got three of them in total.
I spent the rest of the day dinking around, not doing anything particularly important, aside from repressing my freshly acquired traumas.
Madeline mostly worked out. According to her, she needed to make up for the unhealthy eating habits she’d been endorsing for the last couple days.
Four-arms even got it into his little head to imitate her, so he spent a fair amount of time struggling with a five pound weight. Even that was a good deal heavier than he was, so the fact that he did eventually manage to lift it over his head was quite impressive.
I made dinner, just a quick pesto and pasta dish with some fried slices of sausage mixed in. Madeline complained briefly that it was pure carbs, but if she wanted something different she could always use a ration. I pointed that out to her, in fact, but she said that a ration would probably just produce something that would be even more calorically intensive.
And for all her whining she certainly didn’t hold back on the pasta. I made an entire box of fettuccine noodles, combined with a whole jar of pesto and no small amount of parmesan, plus a pound of black pepper sausage. She ate two thirds of it in a single sitting.
She was usually a pretty big eater, her athletic endeavors burning a substantial amount of calories. But usually she didn’t eat quite that much. I also ate a fair bit; while Madeline ate the majority of the pasta I finished off the rest just as easily.
Come to think of it, we’d both been eating a bit more than was normal for us over the past couple days. I’d chalked it up previously to monster slaying just being particularly hungry work, but now I was starting to think differently. After all, I didn’t do jack shit all day, and I was still ravenous. We ended up indulging in a fair amount of desert after dinner too.
“Madeline, do you think the displays are making us consume extra calories?” I asked, sipping on some freshly brewed tea I’d made for us to go with our snack cake deserts. Madeline blew on her tea for a moment before tasting it. She grinned, clearly happy with the flavor. It was peppermint tea. I brewed it at double strength, and with some milk and honey the stuff was divine.
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“That’s a good question. I’m inclined to agree, if only because I’m not generally such a pig. But other than that I have no real evidence. We could just be eating more because we’re stressed out and don’t have anything else to do.”
She had a point. We were cooped up and without internet access, so we could just be using food to take our minds off of things. That being said, normally I’d have felt absolutely stuffed after eating as much as I’d just had, and honestly it still felt like I had a bit of room left in my stomach.
“I think it's definitely the displays.” I said.
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“ATP.” I answered.
“Our magic bullshit points?”
“Yeah, those.”
“Aside from magic bullshit, I don’t have any actual Idea what it is. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts though.”
“I think the name is the most important thing here. What does ATP actually stand for?”
“No clue, and why are we even sure it stands for something any way?” She asked.
“Because it’s written in all caps, and it doesn’t make any sense phonetically. You don’t do that in English without it being an acronym. Plus I’m pretty sure I know the acronym in question .”
“Well, elucidate the audience then. I’ve got nowhere else to be.” She ended that statement with a yawn. The tea was non caffeinated, so I needed to state my case before she fell asleep on me.
“Adenosine triphosphate. It's the energy currency cells use. I’m pretty sure that's what the displays are referring to, and if they are literally drawing energy from our bodies, that might explain why we’ve been so hungry.”
“Oh, that does make a certain amount of sense.” I had her attention now, though one of her eyebrows furrowed inwards.
“But wait,” she continued, “isn’t the energy density of Adenosine supposed to be pretty low? I’m not sure it’s got enough oomph to be allowing you to shoot lasers.”
“Right, ATP is actually pretty garbage from an energy density standpoint, but that’s not its purpose. Our cells don’t use it for storage, we have fat and glycogen and creatine for all that. ATP is just the primary currency cells actually use to make stuff happen.”
“And I think I understand that, what I don’t understand is why our displays would use that instead of fat or glycogen or whatever.”
“Yeah I. . . haven’t worked that part out yet.” I admitted. “I’ll get back to you on that one.”
“Fair enough.” Madeline downed the rest of her tea before speaking again: “Hey, I’m gonna head to bed instead of passing out in my recliner again, are we good barrier-wise?”
I’d been the last one to put up a barrier, so my display was the one with the timer on it. Checking it I saw it had plenty of time left. “We’re good. Is it alright if I mess with your game console?”
I wasn’t tired yet, and a video game would be just the thing to keep my brain busy enough to stay out of trouble.
“So long as you make a new profile, you're welcome to do whatever.”
“Allright, good night.”
“Good night.”
***
One terrible, terrifying, trembling night's worth of sleep later, it was the next day. My nightmares this time had primarily been themed around my experiences in middle school. I started the dream out as an adult, attempting to explain to a child why something they’d done had been shitty. Midway through my explanation though, a teacher started repeatedly slamming my head into a desk. Each time they did, I got younger until I was reduced to being a small child.
Eventually I was even younger even than all the tweens around me, and entirely powerless.
After that, I was tortured and humiliated in a number of ways that I will not repeat here. Frankly it was so bad that I woke up in tears. At least the only one who saw me like that was Four-Arms.
I needed to get my act together before Madeline woke up.
Four-Arms had been the only one to keep watch last night, but it didn’t seem like we had any problems. I’d been a little worried about that actually, and it was a relief to see nothing went wrong.
Honestly I’d been having issues with nightmares before all this went down, and the current circumstances were just making it worse. I knew why too, but I didn’t really want to think about it. Maybe I could get back to resolving my personal traumas once the world went back to something resembling something normal.
Or I’d just die and then I wouldn’t have to worry about it, or anything else ever again.
***
I managed to put it out of my head by turning my attention to the matter of breakfast. First order of business, I thought, would be to check the little science experiment in my inventory. I pulled out the portion of biscuits and gravy I’d set aside yesterday.
Examining it closely I saw that gravy was uncurdled, and was still steaming. I grabbed a fork and a knife to cut out a bite of gravy covered biscuit. I couldn’t tell if it was poisonous with my eyes alone, so I popped it in my mouth, and finding nothing wrong with the flavor I swallowed it. If it gave me food poisoning or worse, I was just going to hope my potions could fix it.
It really tasted exactly as good as it did yesterday. Just like it was fresh, in fact. I’d still have to wait a day to see if it was going to make me sick, but this seemed like a positive result. That being said, I didn’t finish it off. If there was even a chance it was going to make me ill, I wasn’t going to push it. I stretched the display out and shoved the plate back into it with the food unfinished.
When Madeline got up I started making our actual breakfast. She’d been promised hashbrowns and I’d deliver. She got out of her shower just as I’d finished cooking.
I’d made a hearty portion of hashbrowns and eggs, and reheated the leftover sausage gravy I’d refrigerated to serve with it.
It was pretty great.
After breakfast Madeline played some video games on her console and I whipped out an old biology textbook from a course I took last term. I hadn’t known when I first got it that I could pirate textbooks, so I had the physical book instead of some pdfs on my computer for this one. Which was a godsend in this case, as my computer was completely destroyed.
My plan for the day was to review the chapters on cell metabolism. I knew from looking in the index which page ATP was first mentioned on, and I was going to start from there and read onwards.
Thankfully I’d already read it once, so digesting it wasn’t too difficult. It wasn’t exactly easy though, either. This was college level coursework.
Most of what I read went along with what I’d spouted the day before, thankfully. My main problem was still that I couldn’t figure out why the display or our abilities would use ATP as an energy source.
As far as I could tell, cells only used the stuff because it was nice and reversible. Once the reaction finished, you’d have all the constituent components you needed to start it all over again, just like with most hydrolysis reactions.
Then again that might be exactly why it was being used by our displays. The fact that it was a reversible reaction could explain why ours seemed to regenerate every day. That thought felt important, so I got out the same sketchbook I’d been using to take notes with yesterday in order to write it down.
I jotted off some of my other thoughts while I was at it. After that and much hemming and hawing, the only conclusion I reached was that there was no real reason for a device like the display to use Adenosine Triphosphate as any sort of energy currency unless it itself operated using the same biological principles as living cells.
Wait a second!
***
“Madeline, I know what the display is!” I shouted triumphantly.
“A completely unknowable mystery of the cosmos?” She offered, unhelpfully. Madeline had removed a couple of her dumbbells from her inventory and was in the middle of curling a particularly hefty looking one. I saw the number 45 stamped on its side.
“No, and I know for a fact that you don’t think it is either.” I shot back.
“Maybe. Anyway, you were saying?”
“Nanomachines! It’s all nanomachines!”
“Leo, Nanomachines doesn’t sound a whole lot different than ‘magic bullshit’ from my perspective.”
“I think it sounds a whole lot less like that if you consider nanomachines in this case to just be artificial cells. Because if they’re just like, man made stem cells or whatever then using ATP makes a whole lot more sense.”
“I don’t think stem cells are usually capable of shooting lasers, Leo.”
“No, but they don’t have to be, I’m using stem cells more as an analogy. I’m just saying that whatever those little black specks that we keep seeing are, nanomachines make as much sense as anything else, and there’s no reason nanomachines wouldn’t work like living cells, I mean people make all sorts of cool technology by mimicking nature. Biomimicry, I think it's called.” I finished.
Madeline looked upwards, examining a stain on the ceiling as she thought. After a while she turned her gaze downwards toward me.
“You know what, I don’t hate that theory,” she said, “but it does have a problem. A couple problems, actually, but let me start with my first one.”
“Which is?”
“Near complete lack of evidence.”
“Ok, sure, but we had an entire conversation the other day about nations and independent organizations, and you made several speculations that had just as much backing evidence.”
“True, I just felt like I should point it out here. The second thing I wanted to mention had to do with the size of these ‘nanomachines’. I feel like actual nanomachines would be too small to see with the naked eye, but we can obviously see the black dots.”
“That’s just a density thing.” I replied, waving a hand.
“How so?”
“Well like, we can’t normally see mold spores when they’re just floating around, but once they develop a culture we can see them because then there's a moldy spot on your cheddar.”
“Oh so each particle we see might be a colony of nanobots. I’m half willing to buy that, but I still have one more question here.” She pointed a finger at me, particularly my right hand. “Have you fact checked this with the hint button?”
“No. I totally forgot that was an option. God that makes me feel dumb.” I hadn’t pressed the help button ever since that first day, and since it was on a twenty four hour timer I’d effectively missed three opportunities to use it.
“Oh. I assumed you were saving them like I was.” She cocked her head slightly to the side, a peculiar expression on her face.
“No,” I said, “and why would you save them?”
“Well if I hadn’t you’d have died.” she replied flatly
“Touché.” I shot back. squinting suspiciously at her. “Are you sure that you didn’t just forget, though?”
“Okay I might have forgotten the first couple days, but after that, I was definitely saving them.”
“Whatever. I’m gonna press the help button and prove that I’m right.”
Hint: As your abilities increase, so will the amount of kilocalories you need to survive.
Be sure to get plenty of food!