Back in my Pocket Dimension it was dark. There was some light coming through the doorway from the oil lamps in my shelter, but with the vacuum tubes off and the fire out I couldn't really see. I had electricity now, and the vacuum tubes were part of the way to being an incandescent globe, I just had to refine how it worked.

Some clear glass, a carbon filament, and then running electricity through it, and I had a light. I set a few lights on stands and made myself a worktable and chair out of stone. Much better. I knew there was a more efficient way of lighting, with diodes, but I only knew of them generally, I had no idea how they actually worked.

Which brought me to a problem. The first power I chose in setting up gave me a broad view of a lot of concepts, but didn't give me the specifics. I knew about nuclear fusion and fission reactors, for example, but I couldn't just make one. Even if I did have the ability to manufacture things to an atom perfect degree, I had no idea where to start on designing a machine to do it.

The duplication aspect of my power is a shortcut to something I should be able to achieve manually now. I wrote a dedicated program that could manipulate things subatomically, and then used it to record what was happening at a fine level when I duplicated something.

Playing it back slowed down, I focused on a very narrow area, a few dozen atoms. I created a visual representation of what was happening and suddenly there were orbs everywhere varying in size from five centimeters to fifty centimeters wide, some of their edges touching to form chains of atoms.

I stepped through the recording slowly. First the orbs separated, breaking the chains. Then they dissolved into smaller orbs about one centimeter wide, atoms splitting into subatomic parts. I couldn't make much sense of it, as I was standing in the middle of a sea of mostly uniform orbs.

Playing it forward the small orbs started clustering together and then reformed into larger orbs. The larger orbs reformed into chains, and that was it, the recording finished.

I played it backwards, paying close attention to when the orbs formed from the smaller orbs. There. One of the smaller orbs appeared from nowhere. Playing it forward again, slower, I watched the smaller orb split into even smaller parts and then explode into energy which was redirected by my power to form the bonds in the larger orb.

My power was splitting atoms into pieces, and then splitting those pieces directly into energy to form the rest of the pieces back into atoms. It used a lot of energy from me, but it was still getting most of its energy from eating a small amount of the matter of the material it was duplicating from.

Being able to see what was happening, at human scale, was very helpful. I got a grain of sand and made a virtual copy of it, syncing the two together so that anything that happened to the real one showed on the virtual copy. I then zoomed in with the virtual sand. It went from being a speck, to a boulder, to a wall. The wall grew and grew until I couldn't see the edges of it.

I kept zooming in until I could see gaps in the wall. Finally I could see the lattice structure and individual atoms. I made an enquiry of the program I was using of how many atoms were in the grain of sand. Fifty quintillion or fifty million million million. Way too many to do anything manually that would have any noticeable affect. But I just wanted to test some things, I would write a program that did it at a mass scale automatically for any practical use.

I singled out a single atom and disconnected it from the lattice, zooming in on just it. I let go of it with my power and it got sucked back in to the lattice. Interesting.

Pulling it back out I forced my power into it and split it apart. I now had twenty eight little pieces and fourteen little zippy things that I hadn't noticed when the duplication was doing it automatically.

I let go of one of the little pieces to see what it would do, and all hell broke loose. It shot off and slammed into another atom. The half disintegrated little piece shot out an explosion of random energy in all directions. And several pieces shot out of the hit atom. Those pieces hit still more atoms. I locked my power down on the whole mess before it could explode and took a deep breath. That could have been bad.

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I collected all of the atoms that had been affected, disconnecting them from the lattice where they were still connected. I broke them down into their smaller pieces and ended up with hundreds of them in two types, and about half of that in zippy things.

I singled out a single piece and wrapped my power more firmly around it. I was pulling the energy hard from it as I increased the pressure. In a flash it turned into energy. I pushed the energy into my orb, gaining about a tenth of a unit of energy.

So I could get about five units of energy per atom in the atoms that made up the grain of sand. I converted the rest of the pieces I had, and ended up with an extra sixty thousand units of energy. The equivalent of three bonfires.

I still had a lot of whatever the zippy things were, and I carefully let one go. It flew into the lattice of the sand but didn't seem to do anything else. I released a few more and the same thing happened. Ah, these must be electrons. They wouldn't cause any havoc, so I let the rest of them go and dismissed the virtual copy of the grain of sand.

Energy problems solved, at least for me. I would need to come up with something to power the things in my Pocket Dimension more reliably. I had only lost power twice, when the flywheel spun all the way down, but I had to rewrite my programs from memory both times it happened. All of the memory chips I were using were fast, but they also required power to maintain their state.

While I was thinking I made myself a staff of a mix of polished black and grey stone, iron, and copper. I fused my orb to the top of it. I didn't need the orb anymore, as I could write a program that converted matter to energy as I needed it, but if my enemies thought I needed it I would have an advantage. And most of the other people I'd seen used them.

What I really needed for my Pocket Dimension were batteries. I made two small blocks of copper and fused them on either side of a strip of glass. Zooming back in to the atomic scale I pushed an electron from one copper block across the glass to the other copper block. That should give it a voltage.

I wrote a quick program that would do the same thing but to a lot of electrons at once and hooked up a light to the potential battery cell. No light, so no flow of electrons. I pushed all of the electrons I could manage across the glass gap, and the light lit up. Good enough.

Now I just had to make batteries, and then battery banks, and I could drop how often I needed to recharge my Pocket Dimension as much as I liked. A week should do to begin with.

I had just gotten started on that when my adaptive fighting program sent me a ping, requesting access to the program I was using to play with atoms.

I had left the program running in the background to learn more about how I moved and how the world reacted. It isn't an AI in the proper sense of the word, that would require it to have behavioural and personality code, which would lead to self-awareness. It did have the potential to get there, if I left it alone and gave it enough processing time, but I had other plans.

I was interested in what it wanted to do, though, as it was unusual for it to initiate an interaction. I gave it permission to act on the atom program, rendering what it was doing so that I could see it. It jumped directly to a close zoom inside my body. Not to the intense zoom of atoms, but enough to see my cells.

There were multiple paths of dead cells in straight lines through my body. And they were slowly growing outwards. Some of the cells were mutating. The program sent me another ping, this time requesting access to initiate collaborative planning. I accepted and saw what it wanted to do. It could heal the damage by reverting the cells to the way they had been, using other cells as templates. It wasn't something I could do manually, but that was the reason I was writing programs.

I gave the program my permission and immediately felt as though I had razor wire, dipped in acid, stabbing through me all over. I collapsed to the ground and curled into a ball, twitching. A subjective eternity later the pain stopped, disappearing as though it had never happened. Modifying my cells just made the top of the list of things I never wanted to do ever again.

I was just getting back to my feet when Chantelle came running through the doorway and tackled me back to the ground.

"What did you do? Are you okay? What happened? Don't do it again. Are you okay?" She said in rapid fire, hugging me tightly and not giving me a chance to answer.

"I'm fine." I said. "I had a small accident, and it was a bit painful to fix it, but I'm okay now. You felt it?"

She nodded. "It felt like you were dying." She said.

"It's okay, I'm here, I'm fine." I said, stroking her hair.

I used my new energy source to duplicate cloth into a soft mattress and some pillows. I picked her up and laid us both down on it. Tomorrow would be soon enough to think about building up our defences. I held her close as we both drifted off to sleep.