I doubted I’d be getting sleep that night when the reality of the situation sunk in. I didn’t have nowhere to turn not when I was being monitored. I could get a lawyer and pay a fine but explaining my peculiar source of income would also land me in trouble.

I knew there was some way I could send an Eth-Message via the account receiving the crypto to the account that traded it. That had been the idea after realizing they were being transacted from another node on the blockchain, at least that is what I understood. I was still trying to wrap my head around it.

Later on, Nurse Lea happened to come by. There was none of the cheer from earlier in the day on her. She brought me food and changed my dressing without saying a word; thereafter one of my wardens came and released my hand cuff so that I could use the washroom.

The guard wore a balaclava, bullet proof vest and helmet. He also had a rifle; I realized that he did in fact have lethal munitions. Also they changed shifts with a fresher pair of their colleagues before securing me to the bed.

I spent the earlier part of the night browsing over games and game systems like I’d planned to get a decent grasp of game mechanics and how they worked. Most followed a triple stat bar format of Health, Stamina and Mana depending on the build. Others had only two bars for Health and Mana; which was a good enough parallel for whatever mechanics dwelled in my mind.

There were Classes and their affiliated Skills and Spells, and I delved into the different systems that tried to explain how they worked. Before I knew it I’d found myself in a rabbit hole, barely looking up when my wardens mentioned lights out and switched off my lights.

Nonetheless, they didn’t seem to be bothered with my phone so I continued browsing. I looked up the meaning of the elements making up the stat bar and their close equivalents. Ultimately, grouped them into physiological and psychological attributes. I wished I had my laptop so I could make notes because I'd finally stumbled upon a lead;

…a very rarefied and highly elastic substance formerly believed to permeate all space, including the interstices between the particles of matter, and to be the medium whose vibrations constituted light and other electromagnetic radiation…

Which when I stopped to think about it was related to the interstitial buffer that the gestalt insertion had been responsible for. I was on the verge of an epiphany—

Æ ////////// ( +1 )

I supposed I’d take that,

Æ ∆

Acuity: 6

Affinity: 6

Insight: 6

Fortitude : 5

Did that mean my intellect had improved?

I think I slept somewhere past midnight, lulled to sleep by the drone of rain and exhaustion steeped throughout the day. Forced to sleep on my side because of the handcuff and my healing back, lightning would occasionally flash through the spaces in the curtain blinds and sear its way past my eyelids. The retinal afterimages kept distracting me from getting some much needed rest; and my preternaturally acute hearing was doing me a disfavor. Either way, I didn't get much in the way of sleep.

Instead of staring at a nondescript ceiling, I went over the incident from earlier in the evening―the alien glyphs or now that I’d unlocked a new level of understanding the aetheroglyphs, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs? Unbidden, I beheld them in my mind. Even without closing my eyes, I could visualize them as if they were being held somewhere in my consciousness.

The most complex of them was an icosahedron, concentrating on it hurt. Every time I tried to parse a character it slipped on my mind, and every slip earned me an increase in pressure somewhere at the front of my skull. The aliens had put those glyphs in my head for a reason, but since I didn’t want to have to chuck gray matter through my nose, I mentally scrolled until I reached the simplest of shapes.

The tetrahedron had four equilateral faces, or rather illusions of them. You could only tell what shape they were because of the way the words were arranged. You could say the shape was an invisible framework that held the positions of the letters like the force that held an electron orbiting an atom. In every observable moment, one of the letters, runes if I wasn’t mistaken, would shift primacy like the tiles on a rubik’s cube.

I observed a pattern in the order of presentation; if the glyph represented a single word then the runes spelled. Rather than sounding them out with a metaphorical inner reading voice, spelling them out was by feeling them out.

Æ ////////// ( +1 )

Another point for Insight. Thus, I felt out the runes, and built the word. Something changed, like a feeling at the tip of my tongue as my core grew warm. I didn’t feel like my insides were under an imminent chance of melting―

‘Phase―’ I spelled. I felt the sensation blossom, as if seeking an outlet through my extremities. I had a morbid curiosity to see what that would do if say… I concentrated on certain plastic handcuffs.

‘―shift’

Needless to say, the handcuffs did not like existing in two places at once. One half was visible, while the other appeared to blur so fast It started cracking as though being shorn through by a finely toothed saw.

I caught the loose half before it fell. I shivered to think what would happen if it were metal superheated by the vibrational displacement of its atoms. I was free―thunder boomed and lightning flashed through the blinds.

My heart thudded; my sense of urgency was heightened. I took stock of my surroundings as I reached for my clothing by the drawer. There was no camera blinking in the corner, the machinery that had been monitoring my vitals had already been carted out and the door was barred.

The only window on the door had blinds from the inside and those two were closed. I panned my hearing trying to feel if someone had heard or if someone was walking down the hallway―nothing squeaked.

I chanced a glimpse at my stat bars as soon as the familiar weight of clothes settled on my shoulders. As expected, I had expended some aether. One stroke was down and refilling a pixel a second. I could bar the door from outside then Phase Shift the windows using the sound of rain to mask any commotion that might arise. I had an inkling of what Phase Shift did as if I’d known it for years but then was not the time to dwell on the hows.

As I was getting lacing my boots, I saw a silhouette move from the edge of my eyes and froze. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me since the only light I could see was from the lights bleeding through the blinds . It was only because of my improved Acuity that I was even able to see where my things were at all. A momentary flash of lightning confirmed it; there was a shadow advancing on me―

A silhouette faded into existence as diamond shaped tiles rippled shedding adaptive camouflage. Everything about it screamed alien. Its shape eerily resembled an unbroken chrysalis without the defining outlines marking immature wings or segments.

The only breaks in its form were the boundary separating its head from the rest of its body. Two backlit rings glowed on a surface the color of burnished bronze as it ever so slowly, hovered around me as if appraising me.

From the moment it had appeared it inspired in me equal measures of visceral awe and trepidation. Thoughts run through my mind a mile a dozen as I tried to gauge how exactly I could respond to it.

I dredged up my memories of every fiction I’d ever come across about first contact but none of them could have prepared me for this moment. The only thoughts I had in my mind was that they’d come to retrieve their dues and cut their losses.

With their level of technology I am very sure they could make it look like I’d finally succumbed to something that should have killed me one month ago. They could make the miracle seem like a fluke.

I swallowed; my mouth and throat were dry. If they were here to tie up loose ends I hoped they made this painless. Two sides of the alien entity detached from the main body, revealing disproportionate articulated limbs. Its forearms were slightly thicker than its upper arms. They swiveled, extending towards me while unfurling digits in the same motion. The middle of its palm glowed and hummed―I closed my eyes waiting for the inevitable. A weight settled on my chest.

The inevitable was mistaken or rather, I was mistaken. It did not come. My stat bar did not suddenly wink out of existence nor did I feel my limbs grow heavy and cold. My heart was most definitely still hammering away in my chest.

What I did feel was something cold and metallic nudging me on the forehead. My eyes snapped wide open as I drew a sharp breath. I could barely stop myself from flinching away as I came face to face with its glowing rings that I'd come to think of as eyes.

The two circles fragmented into motes that trickled around the articulation of the scales giving them a backlit glow. I easily caught up that it was trying to communicate as the backlight resolved into rough albeit legible characters.

⟪Greetings!⟫

⟪ Designation; Extra Vehicular Augment 1, EVA ⟫

⟪Observation; current situation deemed inexpendient ⟫

⟪ Recommendation; follow instructions ⟫

⟪ Objective primary; extraction of subject Ryan Z. O’ciaran ⟫

⟪ Objective secondary; extraction of subject Cassandra A. Harper ⟫

Catharsis rolled over me like a wave.

V ∆

Dexterity: 5

Endurance: 6

Energy : 7

Vitality : 5

Æ ∆

Acuity: 6

Affinity: 6

Insight: 7

Fortitude : 5