Joe and I made our way to Medical in silence. Now that I wasn’t running my emergency flag, it took a bit more of my attention to navigate the increasing flow of foot traffic through the hallways, now filled with people heading to some office or another.

I drank in the sight of the river of arcology dwellers, the density of people living here dwarfed even the older style urban development in the rest of the city. And yet, somehow, things were so orderly. People respected the foot traffic regulations, and any sort of vehicle that might hamper the flow was routed through a different hallway. All of this had been foreseen by people and AI long before the first worker was onsite to begin the construction. Even the styles were similar, everyone in some form of the ubiquitous arcology wear, with only small variations in cut or color. This, too, had probably been foreseen, if maybe by a different set of people and AI.

On my first day here, I had been dazzled by how modern and efficient everything was. How clean cut and proper everyone looked. I had spent most of my life trying to get out from under the thumb of an endless train of petty tyrant managers, trying to do something more with my life than work the same office job, never being able to afford more for myself than the occasional bit of impressive hardware which would ultimately just end up folding back into the cycle of endless work. Couldn’t even afford to have a family…

Except for that last thing, I now had everything I had ever wished for. Didn’t I? Who would have imagined that succeeding at your life-changing gambit could feel so… I didn’t even know exactly what I was feeling. But as I looked around, only a few days later, I was finding myself slightly unnerved by the clean and orderly halls. If I stayed here, if we managed to save the Testing branch for the Dreamshards project, would I become just another drone in the DA hive in order to have that better life? Did I want that?

I let out a sigh, the continuous trickle of alien sunshine eroding away my melancholy and transforming it into something more like resolve. If nothing else, I certainly wouldn’t mind slimming down a bit to fit in better. I glanced down and, to my surprise, I found that I was already visibly slimmer. It was nothing like the total transformation of my avatar in game into something that could easily be described as slim and fit, but I certainly looked like I had lost weight.

A trick of perception? A better diet since moving? Alien nanotechnology reshaping me? We were on our way to Medical already, so it couldn’t hurt to bring it up.

“So I hear you were attacked by alien brain magic!”

Dr. Perez was grinning at me, wiggling his fingertips as if to somehow demonstrate or indicate ‘alien brain magic’. Joe had been called in first and apparently said something silly. Or this was all on the good doctor.

“What, exactly, did Joe tell you?” I asked.

“That you were confronted with a beast so terrible to look upon that you were rendered insensate with just a glance!”

Well, at least that was mostly accurate.

“I think it would be better characterized as encountering an entity within the game that was flagged as something player’s can’t look at,” I said, “and then the hardware running the game simulated the effect. I am not really sold on the idea that there are actually things out there that would knock you out for just looking at them.”

“Ah, probably true, probably true! A functional basilisk attack, and by extension the means to defend against one, are among the holy grails of neurological research. Let’s get some scans from you and see what we are dealing with here.”

The scans themselves were not too different from the ones I had been subjected to just the other day. More were centered around my head, for obvious reasons. Between scans, I did remember to bring up my potentially alien weight loss, but Dr. Perez brushed away my concerns. He figured that minor, easily explainable, and generally positive effects should probably be investigated during our regularly scheduled checkups. I suppose that made sense. As far as I knew, Dr. Perez was the only doctor currently working with the Dreamshards project, so he was likely already cutting into his normal schedule to deal with our recent emergencies.

After a nurse ran me through a final scan, using a machine which took up most of a small room, she led me to the same exam room where I had first met Dr. Perez. Joe was seated in the examination chair, and an extra chair had been brought in, probably for me. The doctor motioned for me to sit.

“I’ll need a moment to check over some of these images, you boys sit tight.”

I looked over at Joe, who just shrugged. I narrowed my eyes. Nope, I couldn’t help myself.

“Joe, did you tell the doctor that we were attacked with alien brain magic?”

“What?!” he spat, the look of utter shock in his face was pretty much exactly what I had been expecting. The doctor’s small smirk which I briefly caught out of the corner of my eye was also well within my expectations. Seems like I was getting better at this.

“No!” Joe said, “I just told him about the thing below the clouds!”

“Sounds like someone is just having a little fun at our expense,” I said to him, nodding my head in the direction of the doctor.

“I’m certain that I don’t know what you boys are talking about,” our mischievous physician said, turning towards us, “but I do think I have a handle on what seems to have happened to you.”

His eyes darted around, and a moment later images bloomed into the AR space around us. Each image was a collection of two dimensional slices of my brain, rendered in greyscale. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it.

“Ah, doc, isn’t there supposed to be some kind of medical privacy?” asked Joe.

Dr. Perez regarded him gravely.

“Don’t worry Mr. Rodriguez, I won’t tell him about all the syphilis.”

Joe sputtered and spat denials, as the smile crept back onto the doctor’s face. He spread his arms wide.

“I kid, I kid. But no, Mr. Rodriguez, your age is showing. I remember those days as well. Today though, medical privacy is a courtesy, one you have probably been afforded throughout your life because that is still the custom. It is not, however, the law. You boys are here for roughly the same thing, and under the auspices of a secret project, so I am required to use this room only, so I am going to deal with you both at once to reduce how much of a pain in my schedule this is. Any objections?”

We both shook our heads. Though he wore his smile throughout, I detected a hint of ice in his words near the end. I certainly didn’t want to impose on this man’s time more than was strictly necessary. Beyond the scope of the secrecy involved in a project, I hadn’t ever considered medical privacy as its own thing. The world definitely used to be… different.

“Right, so it looks like there was some sort of event which stressed both of your bodies pretty badly. Hence the nosebleeds.” He paused for a moment to walk over and point out something on Joe’s chart. “You, Mr. Rodriguez, seem to have suffered a very minor brain bleed, though it is very small and should cause no significant issues.”

He stepped back and addressed us both once more. “You both have a small area of the neocortex, specifically in the area largely responsible for storing memory, that has significant scarring. Small areas which are nearly identical between the two of you.”

That didn’t sound good.

“Fortunately, the damage seems to be very minor. Should be no noticeable effects.”

He seemed pensive for a moment, then smiled again.

“Also, there was some interesting artifacting in the images. Exciting stuff! Had to go back and reprocess them twice! I get the feeling that we’ll be getting more and more interesting data. Mr. Rodriguez, you will be scheduled for further checkups.”

He waved away the floating images, patted me on the back, and started toward the door.

“This particular damage probably won’t kill either of you,” he said at the threshold, “See you tomorrow for your surgery, Mr. Bekker.”

And with that, he was gone. As I moved to leave as well, I bumped into a nurse who was on her way in. She nearly stumbled, but I placed a stabilizing hand on her upper arm. She just glared and brushed past me, delivering a small bag to Joe.

“Nothing for me?” I asked, but didn’t get an answer as she edged past me to get out the door, practically fleeing.

“Wow, rude.”

“Or maybe just nervous?” I speculated, “We’re almost certainly flagged as VIPs of some sort here.”

[Definitely nervous] Nico contributed.

I nodded to myself. It made sense. Big things were happening, people could be excused for being a little jittery.

Joe and I appeared within a few minutes of one another. We had waited for Joe’s login timer to run out, as I wasn’t terribly interested in running around on my own. Maybe if we still hadn’t found anything over the next few days, I’d be willing to explore on my own. I had gone back over the sections of corporate law I thought might be relevant, but I still wasn’t entirely clear why we needed to record everything we did here, so that was another limiting factor. I suspected that whatever legal compliance was the root of that would be discreetly forgotten as that deadline loomed closer. There would be a reckoning for that, I was sure, but for a once-in-a-civilization event like first contact, no amount of corruption and mandated rule breaking would shock me.

“So,” I said, shaking off my gloomy thoughts, “can you read out your options?”

“Sure,” Joe said, his eyes growing unfocused.

“Grants passive control and perception over essence within your chosen domain. This choice cannot be revoked.”

“Whoa, that sounds like you might end up locked into your character, like I am.”

“Will, I can’t imagine anything more awesome than what I’ve already picked.”

“Alright, let’s hear your options then.”

“First one is ‘Fire Elemental’, says I’ll have dominion over Conceptual Fire, capital C and F, that I will be able to empower instances of fire or flame, and influence their expression.”

Whoa. That wasn’t just a power boost.

“Second is ‘Pyrokinetic’,” he continued before I could say anything, “which says I will have fine control over the physical expression of fire and combustion, with limited ability to sense them all around. The last one is weird.”

“How so?” I asked.

“The wording on it keeps shifting in subtle ways as I look at it, sometimes entire sections just jump and become something else. Do you think that the aliens expected us to have some fundamental understanding of time, which we don’t actually have, and the interface is struggling to cope?”

I nodded, “Either that, or it is a personal problem, unless you’ve got a physics degree that you never told me about.”

“Oh, ha ha. Funny guy. Anyway, the name doesn’t shift around as much, it’s always either ‘Flame Oracle’ or ‘Oracle of the Flame’. Let me see if I can read you some of the lines, without it shifting out from under me.”

He squinted, focusing hard on whatever his interface was doing. I could practically feel the headache he was courting with how hard he was focusing.

“It’ll let me… let’s see… guide the twists of fate which lead to flame, reach… damn it… touch the flames which are yet to be, know the… no, wade through echoes and not lose sight of my own flame.”

He leaned back against the wall, eyes closed, and rubbed the top of his elongated snout with the flat sides of his claws.

“There are a few other lines, but one is just flatly incomprehensible, and two others jump around so much and so quickly that I can’t get anything from them.”

“Well, that one definitely has the longest description, counting the bits you can’t read out. Probably just a matter of the interface struggling to convey its message. In any case, I still think the first one is the best choice.”

“I just feel like it would be a waste, with the other options I have.”

“Hold on, Joe. Read back through the option. It gives you power over fire, as a concept. What concepts do you think of when you think of fire?”

“Ah… Oh! I see what you mean. All three are options which will give me more flexibility. The first one might give something like cleansing fire, or rebirth or tempering.”

I nodded, “And it is also the most power focused. You’d get flexibility and also power.”

“I can see where you’re coming from, but let me tell you about some of the other stuff I got when I was leveling in that last fight, and explain what I’m thinking.”

I motioned for him to go on.

“Well, I picked up an augment for Stoke Flames at four, which gave me more range. And it turns out all those augments are orders of magnitude. It was like seven or eight times more range.”

“Yeah,” I said, “you picked up another one for power, and it seemed to double your output.”

“Right, but I got the option to pick up a second range augment at seven. It feels like it reaches for… maybe a mile or more. It’s hard to tell. So I am not really looking for the ability to make my fire do different things, I’m looking to be able to potentially broaden what counts as fire for the purposes of Stoke Flames.”

“Ah, you’re intending on specializing in mobility? In the confines of floors of a bunch of towers?”

“A bunch of stuffy office floors can’t possibly be all this game has to offer. We’ve already seen that creepy area around the town. I’m thinking proactively. You’ve got absurd utility since you can just steal parts of the game and repurpose them, and Lindsey is nearly on my level for power but with better precision. Plus, it isn’t like I’ll lose any power.”

“Ok, so the second one then? I could see that getting really broad, it sounds like it might extend to cover everything which has the chemical capability of burning, which would give you a lot of potential destinations.”

“I don’t know. It sounds like that one focuses more on fine control, and less on perception. That might limit the range at which I can actually use my power.”

I narrowed my eyes.

“You are just rationalizing. You’re planning to take the third one, just because it’s weird and different.”

“Come on Will, this is obviously my cheat power that will let me surpass you and Lindsey and make me into the main character!”

“Joe, you’ve been reading too much bad fiction. It’s probably just that either humans, or you personally don’t have the knowledge about time to understand the description. Do you really want to get powers that you don’t really understand?”

“I don’t exactly remember any chemistry either. I probably haven’t been in a chemistry class since before you were born.”

“That’s fair. It’s your character. Just make sure you pick something you can live with, because you’ll be stuck with it.”

With a nod, Joe’s eyes went unfocused again. A moment later, there was a rush of gleaming essence, precipitating out of the space around us and rushing into Joe. He didn’t visibly react, but I had to look away from the glare. I knew the glow was purely within my mystic senses, but that somehow didn’t stop my eyes from stinging. A couple of seconds later, the light and magic was gone as if it had never been.

Joe was looking at his hand, a tiny point of light and heat between his claws. Next he turned his hand palm down, and a set of claws appeared in the air, appearing to be made from wispy white fire. He let his arm drop to his side, the claws fading away as he did.

“I can use weaker forms of my powers without actually invoking them now. And I can sense something, but I have no idea what it is. I don’t think it’s time, or anything straightforward.”

“Well, you’ll just have to do like Lindsey and I, and explore your new powers as we go.”

I paused for a moment, receiving an unexpected signal.

“Speaking of Lindsey, it seems she’s about to join us.”