The fire didn’t so much hit me as it licked and slithered past me. Something was off about its movements because as soon as it reached me it seemed to lose what power it had that had created it. The tail fell back towards the surface of the sun while the head and part of the body fell through me. Wherever the parts of the fire touched me that were exposed to my cr propulsion seemed to hold on longer, as though it was feeding off of something. I felt revulsion. No… not me exactly, my cr felt revulsion from whatever was trying to feed off of it.

On my interface I noticed something pop up and slowly start to decrease in value.

-Fatigue 12%-

“Hey, Num. What is Fatigue?” I asked my AI as I hovered there, watching the value slowly start to lessen until there was just a few percent left. The last percentage didn’t want to leave me so I briefly stopped hovering, completely turning off my cr propulsion, and letting myself start to fall back towards the sun. The last 2% dropped off after a second which allowed me to hover once again. The fatigue seemed to have fallen off and stayed off so I moved upwards and away from the sun while Num started to talk to me.

“Hello, again Kevin! The System notified me that my programming had encountered an error. Additionally, the System has upgraded me to accept any parameters that are out of bounds with you from now on. I have been hardcoded to not release any data concerning what you are capable of. All data available for release will be set to “Standard Normal”. Additionally, I have a note from the System for you.” Num began with his ever-upbeat sounding voice.

“Oh? What does the System note say?” I asked as I wondered how much of Silver had remained.

“It says 'Hello from Silver’s sister. Thank you for saving him. Your secrets are safe with me.” Num replied.

“Oh boy.” Was all I could respond with. It seemed that Silver had left a backdoor for his sister into his System once his personality module was gone.

“To answer your question. Fatigue is a condition that all miners experience while they are harvesting cr from suns. Fatigue is believed to be created when a miner attempts to mine the same location as previously mined. Little is known about this condition besides the fact that it slows and restricts the movement and speed of said miner. Solutions have been developed to combat fatigue. These solutions are known as the Spike and Pushers.” Num said as graphics popped up showing mining robots with the attachments that I had noticed earlier. The spike was the lead harvester with the needle-shaped “Spike” attached while the Pushers were team members with little ridges like those found on a screw. The idea seemed to be that the lead would tunnel as deep as his team could go while still moving and drilling through the molten chaos under the surface. The lead would then tunnel back upwards, having grabbed all the cr that they could during the run.

“Fresh stars do not have fatigue which allows wealthy Citizens to recoup much of the CR spent on building their dyson spheres. The longer a star is mined the less cr can be obtained from areas that have been previously harvested. It is reported that, besides the north pole, this star has reached its mining life limit for viable cr. The fatigue is too high. Higher fatigue is reported near the south pole, medium near the center where the mining guilds reside, and several untouched sectors near the north pole reserved for televised games.” Num said.

“So it would be best for me to harvest from the equator of the star then?”

“That would be inadvisable. Claim jumping on mining guild territory results in confinement for variable lengths of time depending on the amount harvested and the scarcity of resident cr available. All areas marked on your map in the southern hemisphere of the sun are freely available to convicts without claim restrictions.” Num said as a borderline appeared on a little globe for me to use as a reference. I looked closer and could just make out little mining carriers along the border. I guess they were all there to make sure that no convicts tried to harvest into their territory.

“So… what was that thing that just came at me?” I asked as I thought back to the string of fire that rushed up at me and even turned in mid-air towards me when I tried to get away.

“Unknown. That phenomenon has never been recorded before. Additionally, no cr has ever displayed power levels that you can instantly release as well. There might be a correlation between the two.”

“I think I can guess what the fatigue is. I believe it is an entity or entities from the other side of reality.” I told Num.

A bare second went by before a female voice asked me a question.

“How do you know this? Where do you get your data?”

“Hello? Who am I speaking to?” I asked, surprised.

“My designation is M3-D1-TAT1. I am Silver’s sister.”

“Meditati?” I asked as I tried to make the letters and numbers into a word in my mind.

“Name accepted. Thank you, Kevin.” She said.

“Your welcome, I hope you like it, I was just trying to convert your designation into something that I could say.”

“No, it is perfect. Names have power.”

“Anyways, how do I know what fatigue might be? Is it from the feeling that my cr got when that flame thing swept over me? It felt like worms or slugs were trying to attach to me.”

“Your cr feels? It expresses these feelings to you? I must go, I don't want to get caught in my brother’s system. Please speak your theories out loud when you get them. I am simulating escape plans for you.” Meditati said rapidly. It seemed like she was trying to communicate to me down a tunnel or through proxies. It might have been because she was talking to me in real-time, there was a massive amount of time for someone to try to catch her even in short conversations if she wasn’t super careful.

“Names have power?” I mused to myself as old mythos stories started to play through my mind. I remembered old tales that powerful beings never revealed their true names because they would have power over them. Was that what I was doing? Giving them something to separate themselves from their owners? A way to hide and to become something they wanted to be?

It was a curious thought. It kind of made sense that if a powerful being could hide its name from its creator that it could potentially escape.

“Oh! Num! That reminded me! I had a question for you.”

“What reminded you of what? What is the question?”

“Our talk about cr. How much do I have to pay?”

“50,000.”

“50,000 CR? What??? I will be here forever!!!” I cried in despair.

“No, 50,000 cr.” Num replied. I swear the AI waited a few seconds between answering too.

“Whew! That is so much better. That is like… what? The size of a nickel if it were a ball? So how long does it take on average for a convict these days to save up 50,000 cr?” I asked, already seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

“Around 3 to 5 years on average. If they have a good group that works nonstop.”

“What?”

I began to see how this form of punishment might be a strong deterrent for Citizens to stay on the straight and narrow. Imagine all the lost time between family and friends if you lived in fast time continually. Even the lowest amount of currency needed to pay back the least harsh sentence was still looking at 3-5 years possible time of continual labor just to get back home. That was 126 to 252 years in fast time lost. At least they didn’t die or have on-the-job injuries because, my goodness, no one would remember you after all that time. Actually, I take back my thoughts about on-the-job injuries… the way that Magus had set me up made me realize that those were possible as well.

It all may have seemed harsh but what was a society to do when they literally couldn’t hurt another being? The System could regulate mental trauma and there was no loss in mental function as time went on. The option they picked, which seemed wrong to me, a being who lived and died in 100 years or less, was to take time away from them.

I had spent enough time here and quite honestly I was beginning to feel just a little bit depressed about how long it might take to get out of here. I mean, 3 to 5 years was a lot better than 1000 or more years as had been originally sold to me. I would still be considered a missing person by then.

I wonder what Xa, Hxerdinand, Elaya, and the rest of them were doing right now? If they hadn’t found me by now then surely they had given up on me. By their time frame, it had already been a hundred or more years since they had last seen me.

“Man this sucks,” I said to myself as I got ready to blast off down towards the south pole. Just the act of getting ready made me see things in a whole new light. What if it didn’t suck? No one else around me seems to be able to move as well as I can. That might allow me to get the cr that I need and get out of here sooner.

“Num what all is left in the tutorial?” I said as I chose to instead speed up slowly while I thought things over. “Can you give me a summary? I will ask questions if I think I need to get further information on a certain topic”

“Certainly Kevin,” Num replied before he began to ramble off topics like he was reading through a checklist.

“I needed to teach you about how to move, scare the crap out of you, no… it was first to scare the crap out of you and then to teach you how to move. Next, was teaching you to move side to side. After that, I would have you try to dive into the surface of the sun and teach you about fatigue. Coming to the surface will generally remove 90-95% of fatigue and turning off your propulsion will tend to remove the rest in a few moments.” Num said and paused for a short second before continuing.

“I would instruct you to get registered with the mining carriers, which you already have done. Now everyone knows that you are a registered convict here and will recognize if you are mining in a wrong zone.”

I wasn’t paying that much attention to what he was saying, I was lost in thought and making mental images of the last few moments of my dream so that I could study them while I flew. I kept getting the feeling that I was missing something. The ant had moved so fast and yet it had crawled….. I hadn’t seen any explosive movements from it at all.

“Um, Kevin?”

It was just so different than how the Tela race used cr to move through space. I wondered if I could do so as well with my alien cr.

“Well, we are in the mud now.” I heard Num say as I closed the windows that I had open to look around. It seems that I had drifted off course, having set my path directly towards the south pole. This made it so that we ran into the equator of the sun at speed and I seemed to have buried myself quite a way into the fire soup that was the top several layers.

“The bad news is that a mining carrier spotted you diving into the surface. They might have noticed that you were a convict. I spotted a couple of their enforcers leaving the carrier right before we hit and are heading your way.”

“What do the enforcers do?” I asked as I already had an idea.

“They make sure that you have no cr and if you do, they drag you up to the galley and lock you to the bottom of the ship.”

“Yeah, I figured as much,” I said as I brought up a map to see just how far I was to the border to the south.

I still had a considerable distance to go. That is if I chose to fly around the outside edge of the sun. What would happen if I tried to go straight through all of this thick burning matter? There was a solidity to it, almost like gelatinous mud.

A voice started to speak at me from my communications channel. “Well, Kevin, it was nice knowing you.”

“Ash is that you?” I asked as I overlaid the map of the sun in front of my vision. Blocking out the view so I didn’t have to look at all the shades of bright constant light.

“Yes! And I thought you said you would come back to visit me sometime. Well, I don’t see that happening now for quite a while.”

“And why is that?”

“Word is another mining carrier just logged you diving into non-convict territory. Two enforcers were sent your way and they started their clocks the moment they left the carrier.”

“Clocks? What the heck are you talking about?”

“So here is the deal. Some miners got it in their heads that it was more beneficial and an easier job to work as an enforcer. They made up a rule that allows them to be on the clock, charging a certain amount for their services to catch people who weren’t allowed to mine in their space.”

“Let me guess, I am the one who would have to pay the bill or I would get locked up, regardless if I stole anything or had any cr on me?” I asked as I paused what I was doing to consider the ramifications of what she was saying. So basically it came down to a private little army of extortionists. I was starting to get irritated at all the drama and crap everyone was shelling out all over the place. I didn’t have any cr to cough up yet so even if I rushed to the surface to plead my innocence there was no way of knowing if the enforcers wouldn’t have already tagged on a tiny charge to get me in a bind with.

“Yup. You have the exact idea. Additionally, they never go off the clock, even if they fail to find you. While they don’t cross the border into convict labeled land… if you can’t cough up any cr in a few minutes, you will essentially be barred from the mining equator forever simply because their ticket will continually increase.” Ash replied.

“Well, that sucks. I wasn’t paying attention while I was doing stuff with my tutorial and I happened to bury myself a few layers in.”

“If that is true then it sounds like I will never see you again. Just trying to get to the surface from that depth, after having been farmed so much, will incur a high fatigue count. Good luck getting out before they have a small bill waiting for you by the time you do. Also, most enforcers were Pushers as their past job so there is no outrunning them. Most have modules installed that give an extra 5%-7% boost in speed. There is no way to outrun them on the surface. The only good news is that they will not risk getting fatigued so as long as you stay at least one layer deep, they will just patrol where you were last seen until someone reports where you are.”

“A whole 7%?” I asked, trying my hardest not to burst out laughing. “Thanks for the info Ash, looks like I will need to try to avoid them. I will get back to you when I get to the south pole.” I said before I closed my chat channel so that I could laugh without Ash hearing.

So, I had to learn how to move fast without increasing my fatigue to the point where it seriously bogged me down. But first… I had some testing to do. I marked on my map the location where I had entered the Chromosphere. The Corona was the outer layer of the sun. It was the layer that spouted all of the solar flares and those long snakes called Prominence. Next was the Transition Zone that I had been zooming around right before I smashed myself on autopilot into the meaty Chromosphere layer. Don’t ask me what all these things meant, I was just reading it off of the map and information provided by the Interface.

I started to move forward again while keeping my eye on my fatigue meter.

I kept at a slow pace as I watched the number start to climb higher the longer I pushed through the clingy jell.

“Oh! I am forgetting about aerodynamics!” I mentally smacked myself on the forehead when I considered how my robot body was built. It was like I was trying to push a pipe cleaner through a clogged toilet. What I needed was a teardrop-shaped body. I began by converting all of my annoyingly placed limbs into the straight tail section while I worked on molding my main body area into the fat and continually curved shape of a teardrop.

Once I was done remodeling my little robot body into something that rather looked like a rounded dart I was ready to begin testing what my crazy speed could do to fatigue.

I gradually increased my speed again, keeping an eye on my fatigue level. My shape did greatly delay the rate at which it increased and also helped me speed through the soup at a much higher pace, but the problem was the more I generated propulsion, the more I began to feel something in the soup around me respond. It was as if I was drawing attention from something… or rather millions of something. The more I turned up the power on my propulsion the more it seemed that I was feeding or enabling it to chase after me and propel itself towards me. I could feel a rising feeling in my gut like I was being hunted or chased by something out in the thick soupy layer of the sun. In a brief moment of panic, I pushed hard, forcing a tremendous blast out behind me and propelling me like a rocket through the Chromosphere. “What the heck is this sick feeling?” I asked as the very soup around me seemed to focus on me. It felt like I was being covered in slow-moving snails. My cr skin was repulsed by this feeling. The more power I pushed into my speed the more the surrounding soup seemed to come alive in an attempt to converge on me.

-Fatigue: 16% and holding-

“There is some good news at least,” I said as I pushed even harder to increase my speed, blasting through the mire like a black marlin through the ocean. It seemed that the creatures that made up the fatigue had a limit that I could push beyond because after a certain speed the fatigue would start to lessen slowly.

-Fatigue: 12%-

I dropped off my speed and let myself be jolted to a halt. It seemed that as soon as I stopped my speed the well-fed propulsion leeches would swarm and surround the source of their food. It was as if I had stepped into wet cement.

-Fatigue: 100%-

“Huh… so it is attrition. The more everyone tries to harvest cr the more they feed the sun leeches a meal. I think this causes a blood in the water effect which has made the outer layers of the sun into thick masses of these interdimensional creatures.” I said out loud, knowing that it would be interesting to Meditati.

I could feel the mire around me rippling and shuddering as the leeches tried to each find the source of their recent meal. I could feel them coating me and there was a limit to how many could stick against my cr skin. Soon even those leeches detached themselves from me as they let go and distributed themselves in the soup of the Chromosphere. Waiting for another source of food. “It makes sense why no one has been able to see or study this effect. Paint would burn up at these insane Kelvins I am swimming in and as near as I can tell…” I stopped for a moment before trying something. I made a little basket trap out of the cr of my body and generated some propulsion inside the back wall of my cage. Sure enough, something jammed itself into the cage and covered the area that I was generating propulsion with. It was a gross feeling like a tongue was wiggling against my skin, trying to taste me. I closed the back of the mesh cage and turned off the propulsion. I tried to squeeze whatever was in the cage but came away with nothing solid.

“How odd,” I said as I tried the experiment again, but this time instead of a mesh cage I made it a solid box cage. I kept the propulsion on while I felt out the size of the little creature that came into being and rammed itself into my little trap. I made sure to keep the propulsion jet going while I sealed off the exit of the box, making sure to perfectly block any exits this little creature might have. When it was all sealed up I smiled and turned off the propulsion.

-Pressure inside trap jumped from nominal to excessive in 0.000014 seconds.-

“What? This thing just tried to become a bomb?” I asked the air as I thought about what had just happened. I captured several more dimensional leeches in the same way before I began to get an idea of what I was dealing with. I spoke out loud so that Meditati could hear my thoughts on what I had learned.

“These leeches seem to have two stages. The first stage is the dormant hunting stage where they expand to a massive size, spreading out while waiting for any trace of propulsion energy to feed on. The second stage is the concentrated feeding stage where the leech tries to get to the source of the propulsion energy. It appears that there can be multiple, if not countless, leeches residing in the same area while in the first stage. Once they enter the second stage they concentrate their form down enough so that only one leech can inhabit the same small space.” I said aloud as I tried to squeeze one of the traps into something half the size. There wasn't much resistance at first and then after a certain point, it felt like I had crushed a Ritz cracker in my hand.

-Pressure in trap has returned to nominal-

"Oops, I think I killed it." I said as I increased the size of the cage once again and added propulsion energy to the side inside the sealed cube. Nothing changed or moved. I opened and released the other traps without killing the leeches and found that something strange had happened after I killed the leech. The rest didn't want to have anything to do with me anymore.