A Matter of Will

[HypoSoc]

It would be a mistake to say that the world is cruel.

Cruelty is an action. It is a desire. It is taking something and breaking it with a smile.

Cruelty is tearing a toy away from a child. It is shoving somebody down the stairs and laughing. It is ruining someone's life because you want to.

Cruelty is the intention. Cruelty is the joy.

But when the world tears you down, when it rips you from your life, when it watches you struggle and cry and scream, begging for an end to your suffering, the world doesn't care one bit.

That's because the world isn't cruel.

It's callous.

---

I wake up in confusion, my mind a daze. My memories are a mess and I can barely even recognize that I was awake.

I'm strapped to some sort of table. Something metallic holds my mouth open. Something is digging into my skin. It's holding me tight and painful, cutting into me.

My eyes won't focus, same as my thoughts. I feel cold.

There's a voice, muffled. Indistinct. Clinical. I can't understand it.

"Resume the operation."

Something whirs. Something stabs into my chest.

I try to scream but I can't.

---

I wake up in confusion. My mind is in a daze.

I'm on a table. I'm in pain. My skin feels too small, my body feels too hot. There is blood in my mouth.

I can't remember but...

There's a voice, muffled. Clinical.

"Resume."

Something sharp cuts into me. My heartbeats slow. I can't think through the pain.

I want to go home.

---

I wake up in confusion. My mind...

Pain jolts through my body. My eyes won't close. Something is holding them open. The world is a blur like my thoughts. There is a needle above me, blurry and sharp and dripping. My head is held in place.

There's a muffled voice. Clinical. I hate the voice.

"Begin."

The needle stabs down. The world is pain. I can feel a burning liquid pulse through my eye into my brain.

I scream.

"Reinforce the muzzle. Don't let him bite his tongue."

I hate that voice. I hate this hell. I hate this world.

---

I wake up in confusion. I'm...

I'm not strapped to a table. I'm lying on a soft bed. I sit up, the first bit of movement I've made that I can remember. I'm wearing some sort of hospital gown. It's tied in the back, but I am naked underneath it.

The room isn't that sterile hell of machines and pain. It's small. Tidy. There's a book shelf. There's a blanket on top of me. It's warm. Comfortable.

My mind is a fog, my memories a mess. All I can think about is that room, those machines, that dull pain. I was... hiking... before that. I think. I was exploring a forest I had never been to before. Then I woke up on that table.

I'm afraid to wake up again. I don't want to wake up in that room again. I don't want to think about the pain.

There's a dull ache through my body. There's a pounding in my mind, a dullness to my memories.

There's a soft knock on the door. I freeze, clutching at the blanket. I don't... I don't know what to think. But I don't want to go back to that room. I can't. I won't.

My heart pounds in my chest. My tongue swells.

A muffled voice is speaking on the other side of the door. It's... it's a different voice. Not the one I heard over and over and over again. It's asking something.

There's another knock.

The door creaks and opens.

I see a girl... her back is to me, as she pulls a big cart into the room. I can't see her face, but I can see her long, pink hair. She's wearing something like a nurse's outfit. Not the real ones they wear nowadays, but like the stylized ones you would see in old cartoons.

The girl maneuvers the heavy cart in, keeping the heavy door open with her shoulder.

"Good morning," her voice sounds kind, cheerful. So different from that hellish clinical misery that echoed through my memories. "I thought you would be hungry so I went and brought you some breakfast."

She turns around. My heart stops.

Ah...

She's cute.

There's a patient smile on her face. A kind smile. She says nothing as I sit there, staring blankly.

"Who..." my voice is raspy, pained, "who are you?"

"Hm? You can call me Knowledge. But you shouldn't worry about that right now. You must be starving, so you should eat. I cooked it myself."

The pink-haired girl removed the cover from the cart, pushing it closer to me. The smell hits me hard.

Food. Eggs, meats of every kind, toast, fruit, waffles, syrup, milk, juice, coffee... it's a breakfast feast for the eyes and nose. It looks like there's enough for twenty people on that cart.

My mouth starts salivating, my stomach rumbles. But my arms are weak. I don't have the strength to move.

"Ah..." Knowledge nods to herself. "Let me help you with that." She takes a plate from the lower part of the cart and fills it was an assortment of food. She takes a seat on the bed next to me and takes a fork to it. "Eat as much as you'd like, at whatever pace you'd like."

She brings the fork to my mouth. I'm too tired and hungry to be embarrassed. It's delicious.

I don't know how long I sit there, eating. At some point I have enough strength back to take the plate for myself. I start eating faster and faster, pouring it all into the gnawing fire that is my stomach. I eat every morsel on that cart, drink every drop. All the while Knowledge looks along from beside me with a simple smile.

"Hm... it's seems you were, indeed hungry."

It's only now that the embarrassment of the situation hits me. The proximity, my state of dress, my gluttony... I scramble back in place. "I'm sorry!" I bow my head. "I ate it all without thinking." Enough food for twenty men and I just ate it all!

"No, no. There's nothing to apologize about. That was all for you. I'm glad I managed to get the portion correct. It's understandable you would be hungry, considering your state."

My state... the torture dredges itself up forefront. "Where am I? What is this place? Did you rescue me from... that?" I swallow. "Can you help me get back home?"

"Ah..." Knowledge frowned. The expression was still soft on her face. "The answers to those questions might not be what you want to hear. But I won't hide the truth from you. You can't go back home. You don't have one."

"You're wrong. I have a home." The memories were fuzzy, but they were there. I had a home. A family. a mother, a father, an annoying little brother. I had a dog I loved playing with. I had gotten into college last year, and I was studying so I could join the family business. I had friends who I hung out with.

I... I had a girlfriend.

"I just need to know where I am so I can get back to my life."

"I understand it is confusing. But none of that is real. Those memories aren't yours. In reality, you were born eight days ago, here in this facility."

"You're lying."

"It's the honest truth. Ah... perhaps this will help." Knowledge shuffles through a drawer in a nightstand beside the bed. She pulls out a small hand mirror. "This might be shocking, but it will help you understand. It's better if you understood without fooling yourself." She hands it to me.

I don't want to look. Something tells me it would be painful. But I want to prove Knowledge wrong. So I look at my reflection.

The face that stares back at me is not my own. Its striking in form, sharp in features. Its skin is a pallid white. Its eyes are a solid silver. It's covered in bloody red markings, and intricate series of geometric tattoos.

I can't remember what I am supposed to look like, but this is not it.

"That's not... what did they do to me?"

Knowledge shakes her head. "The memories in your head are a palimpsest: an echo of an echo that we used as the base of your being. In time, they will fade completely. It's best if you don't dwell on them."

I don't want them to fade. I want to get back to my life.

"If it can be a small comfort, the person you are remembering is happy and free. They won't remember that we scanned them. And their life has continued on as normal. If you were to head there, all you would be doing is disrupting his happy life."

I clench my fist. I want her to be lying. I want her to be some cruel deceiver. But I can hear the honesty in her words.

"My name... why can't I remember my name? Why can't I remember anyone's faces?"

"It's best if you don't dwell on that. Even his name is already fading from your mind, right? Let it go and let him live his life." Her hand gently caresses my cheek.

She pulls away a tear. Ah... I'm crying.

"Don't be afraid to cry. It's okay to be sad. But don't only mourn your old life. Celebrate your new one. You have your own life to live now, your own chance to be happy and free. You'll have all the chances in the world to meet new people and form new memories. You'll have reasons to cry tears of joy and to look towards the future. To start with, you'll need a new name. Tesseris will do nicely, I think."

Tesseris... the name means nothing to me. But it's a distraction. And it's a gift from a girl trying her best to cheer me up. I will take it to mean that.

I take a deep breath. It was too embarrassing to cry anymore. "What am I?"

"The technical term is a homunculus, an artificial human. But I think that is a needless distinction. You are a person, same as me. You were just built fully-formed, skipping past all that growing up time. And you have a few extra features."

Extra features? The tattoos? Or the eyes? How was I even seeing without any pupils? Could anyone tell where I was looking?

I shake my head of those thoughts. "Why was I made? Why was I..." why was I tortured... I couldn't say the words.

"Why the unpleasant experience?" Knowledge understands me despite my failing mouth. I nod. "It's one and the same reason. This facility exists to study. And you were created to be a test subject."

"A test subject? For what?"

"For perhaps the most important question that has plagued mankind since it's birth: the problem of Free Will."

"I don't understand."

"Ah, but if it were easy to understand, it wouldn't be such a tricky problem, now would it?" Knowledge grins, wagging her finger. "What is it that makes a person a person and not a machine? What separates us from simple dominoes falling one after the other in an endless chain of causality back from the Big Bang? What does it mean to freely choose, for ourselves, and the universe? What is the essence of Will? That is what we are studying."

To my shock, Knowledge flipped a whole white board out of the cart and started drawing on it with markers.

"Suppose you put a person in a room with two doors. Both doors lead to different outcomes. Suppose the person in question has free will, but we want to prove it. What would the result look like to us as experimenters?"

It's like one of the classroom lessons, with how enthusiastic Knowledge was acting as a teacher. It doesn't matter that her nurse's outfit is just wrong for a teacher, or that this setting is completely wrong too. I want to match her enthusiasm.

"The person would go through one of the doors?"

Knowledge nods. "Exactly. But how can we see the free will from that? How can we prove the person in question is a person making a choice? All we can see is that the subject went through a door. Now, consider we take that same person, and rewind their memory. We put them back at the start and repeat the experiment. Let's say we do this a hundred times. What would it look like if the person has free will?"

"They might choose the other door? If they are choosing then they have the ability to choose otherwise."

"Ah! That is true. But perhaps they have a reason to choose one door over the other. With their memories reset, thinking the exact same thoughts, with no outside stimulus, what reason would they have to choose otherwise? Random chance? If we, as experimenters, saw the experiment have different results from the exact same starting point, with our subject thinking the exact same thoughts, then wouldn't that appear the same as a flip of a coin? Why would that be the same thing as choosing of one's own free will? Why wouldn't we allow someone to make the exact same choice every time to be free will? These are the questions we are experimenting with. And in our solutions, we will find the ultimate power of the human race: the power to determine the universe as we will it."

Knowledge seems very happy with her lecture. But she didn't explain anything at all. "But what does all that have to do with me?"

"Oh... well the situation has become a lot more urgent in recent years. The facility no longer has the time to take things slow and steady when the answer could be the difference between life and death. The planet is being invaded right now, you know?"

 

[HypoSoc]

My first deployment comes in a rush. Klaxons ring throughout the facility and, before I even have a chance to ask what was happening, I find myself bundled up and tossed in a jet.

The countryside zooms away down below me as the plane shoots through the sky.

"Testing. Testing. One. Two. Three. Tesseris, can you hear me?" Knowledge's voice does not seem to come from anywhere in particular, but I can hear it very clearly.

"Knowledge? I can hear you. Is this some kind of radio?"

"Good. It would be very worrisome if the telepathic repeater failed. Normally we would run through a whole battery of tests in preparation, but it seems we don't have the time this time. And, no. It's not a radio. I'm communicating directly into your mind. Radio signals can be jammed, and equipment can break. This kind of solution ensures that I will be able to support you no matter what. You can even talk back to me without using your mouth, but you might find it helpful to say the words out loud."

I don't want to think about the implications too hard. "Knowledge, what's going on?"

"We are being invaded. The situation is urgent. You are being sent out to fight it off."

"Me? Alone? Why not a whole army?"

"An army wouldn't work, for a variety of reasons. If it were a feasible solution we would be doing so. No… the best way to fight off alien incursions is to send a single homunculus like you. We found this out the hard way."

"I'm not… this is insane."

"Tesseris, don't worry. You were built for this. You have everything you need to handle the fight, and I will be with you every step of the way."

"But I don't know how to fight!"

"You'll have to learn quickly." Knowledge says without a hint of remorse. "This isn't the best, but it isn't the worst either. If an alien had attacked even a few days ago…"

A few days ago? While I was being tortured?

"You are coming up to the incursion site, be prepared." Knowledge says, cutting me from my thoughts.

"The incursion site?" There's a city ahead of me, but I can see what she means immediately. There is a huge tear in the sky ahead of me, like a bolt of lightning made out of darkness. Smoke is rising from the city. I can see buildings shake.

"What is that?"

"That is a tear in reality, an Aeromantic chasm." Knowledge explains. "It's how the aliens force their way into our world. Don't get too close to it, Tesseris. It is very dangerous. We will have a team deployed to sew it back up, but you need to defeat the alien first."

The jet brings me close to the tear, perhaps a block or so away. It lands directly in the street.

The scene around me is a mess. Cars are turned over, burning. Glass is shattered. There's… that's a corpse on the ground. I can see the lifeless eyes torn from their sockets. There is blood and rubble and broken glass and twisted metal.

And around it are people, just walking casually, not paying one bit of attention to the disaster around them.

"What are they doing?" It's insane! How could these people be so callous?

"Normal people are incapable of comprehending the aliens. Something this far out of the norm… the untrained human mind almost shuts off. We can't naturally recognize events that aren't caused by our own reality. For something like this… a normal person might just thoughtlessly walk to their death without ever even seeing the danger in front of them. They can only see the fake world where the attack never happened up until the moment they died. That's why the aliens are so dangerous: imagine how much havoc they could cause if we didn't stop them?"

"We have to do something!"

"We are doing something. At this moment we are calling in a bomb threat in the city. If people evacuate, they will be in less danger. And then we can address the problem. There. They should be getting the alerts now."

True to Knowledge's words, a siren starts to blare through the city. People check their phones and, in a panic, flee. It's only at this moment that they are running from the disaster.

If those corpses had been warned, would they have survived?

"Tesseris, the readings are showing a major concentration of energy two blocks East of you. Can you see it?"

Can I see it? I run forward to get a better view and there it is.

It's like a glitch, a twisted bit of flashing space twice as tall as me. It is long and spindly and jitters in place. A long, thin appendage drags across the glass of a building in front of it. The glass silently shatters, crumbling into a myriad of jagged pieces that litter the street. The thing, unimpeded, walks through the opening.

"That's an alien?!"

"Yes and no. The aliens come from alternate realities. The core of their logic is hostile to ours, completely incompatible. When there is a collision like this, an incursion, it creates something that is foreign to both worlds. If the alien were in its home universe, it would look much different. If you were to fall through the chasm, you would be just as distorted. And it is now your job to defeat that distortion."

"How am I supposed to do that? I don't have any weapons."

"You are the weapon Tesseris. You don't need anything else. Now, inside your torso is a Willpower Catalyst. It will provide you with the energy you need to fight. It is something you should be able to activate instinctively."

Instinctively? I want to argue, but there's a strange feeling in my gut, like an unlit candle. Without thinking I imagine striking a match and setting it ablaze.

Instantly I can feel the energy coursing through my body. I feel awake. I feel alive. My muscles thrum. The tattoos on my body start to glow.

"I feel amazing!"

"Good job, Tesseris. Be careful with that. If you run out of energy you will die. That said, you should have enough willpower to handle this fight three times over and I will be monitoring you at all times. If you ever get too low, I'll have you retreat."

"Retreat? But what about the city?"

"If nobody defeats the alien, the city will be lost. But it is better that you live to fight another day and try again. The alternative is even worse for the world. But if you don't want that to happen you should win here and now."

"Right!" For the first time I feel like this isn't some sort of cruel joke. With all this power, it feels like I actually have a chance.

It all feels so easy. Every part of my body is just working. I kick off the ground and throw myself forward, racing across the street faster than a car.

The alien is in the building ahead of me. I pull back my arm.

"HA!"

My punch goes straight through the alien, as if it isn't even there.

"What?!"

A needle like talon silently stabs straight through my neck. I gurgle, choking on my blood.

I collapse to the ground.

"Engaging regeneration protocol." Knowledge's voice is muted in my ear.

"Hah!" I cough, blood spewing from my mouth.

"Regeneration is expensive, Tesseris." Knowledge comments simply. "You'll be able to survive almost anything, but it will rapidly deplete your stores. Try not to get hurt unless it is necessary."

"That… I couldn't touch it at all! I just went through it like it was air!"

"Indeed, that is the true difficulty of these invaders. The distortion caused by the collision of two realities leads to an unpredictable logic. The simple rules of 'who is stronger' or 'who is tougher' don't matter in these fights. It is only the logic of the distortion that can lead to a result. And every single alien works on different logic. This is why we do not send armies after them. What use are numbers when numbers might not even matter?"

"Seriously?!"

"It is indeed very troublesome. The first alien we encountered could only be harmed by the color red. It is fortunate that human blood counted." Knowledge paused. "I will say it is concerning that you were unable to harm the alien in the slightest. But that is the nature of this fight. You must intuit the nature of the game you are playing, using the evidence of the distortion before you. This is a foe that can only be defeated by human ingenuity. A puzzle boss, if you will."

This whole thing is insane, absolutely crazy! "I have no idea how I'm supposed to beat this thing."

"Nobody does. Try things out and see if something works. Perhaps it cannot be hurt the first time anything attacks it. Perhaps it can't be punched. Don't get too hung up on trying to figure it out perfectly, just try and try and try again until you have an idea. It's the scientific method."

This is very much not "the scientific method." But I can't do anything other than try. If I run away, would anyone stop it at all?

"Right… I'll try again."

The alien has been ignoring me ever since it stabbed me. It's gone further into the building, carving holes wherever it goes. It's hard to keep track of, seeing how eerily quiet it is, but the mess is easy to spot.

I can see it cutting through a desk. It pokes at a pen, shattering it.

"Trying again. Hah!" I go for another mega punch. Once again my hand passes straight through it. This time, I expect it, so I don't lose my balance. Instead I wheel up a big kick. "Hah!"

Again, I pass straight through it. I leave my foot inside it and try wiggling it around, seeing if I can hit something, anything, but the whole thing is like a hologram.

Is it even there? Maybe the alien is like a fish in a pond: off to the side from where you see it.

Its jagged claw snaps towards me, but I am more prepared this time. I throw myself out of the way. The second claw meets me and cuts into my side.

"Gah!"

It burns. I can feel my blood spilling out of me. I take a big handful and throw it at the alien.

The blood falls through it, as if it weren't there. But I can see bits of my blood staining its claws from its own attacks.

I try punching the claw, but my hand goes through it and my own blood too.

This is too damn unfair!

Another claw slams into me. I feel my ribs crack. It feels like there should be an ear-wrenching 'crunch.' But there is nothing. Not one bit of vibration.

"Tesseris, do you need healing? Your injuries are not currently life threatening, but I'll leave the decision to you."

"Heal me! Please!" It hurts so much. I can't really think.

"Engaging regeneration protocol."

It's like a cool rush of energy through my whole body. My bones snap back into place. This time I hear them "creak" as they replace themselves.

Why is my body making noise now? Why didn't it when the alien hit me? This whole damn thing was weird.

"Knowledge… I think it has something to do with sound."

"Sound? A reasonable hypothesis. Why don't you try?"

Right… I'll try to be as quiet as the alien. That makes as much sense as anything.

I rush forward, but my feet clank against the ground, cracking the floor, so I stop myself.

This is harder than I thought…

Tiptoeing… no that still makes noise. The alien is back to ignoring me but…

I take a deep breath and crouch to the ground, like a coiled spring.

Then, pumping my energy to my legs, I release it all in a single motion, to cross the whole distance without taking another step.

My arm is extended in a punch. I hold back a shout.

The tips of my knuckles make contact, the barest bit of pressure. It feels cold, metallic.

My heart beats with a "thunk." Blood rushes to my ears. That little bit of touch evaporates, and I fall through the alien.

Its claw stabs into my spine. I scream in pain.

"Engaging regeneration protocol."

Hah. Hah. I'm panting on the ground in a heap. "I touched it, Knowledge. But then my heart beat... That was enough noise… it stopped working."

"Coming up with a hypothesis so quickly. You truly are exemplary, Tesseris."

"It doesn't matter if I am right if I can't do anything with it. My heartbeat was loud enough to mess it up. I need a weapon of some sort. A silent one. Maybe a laser?"

"I do not believe aliens can be defeated without employing Willpower. Getting a silent weapon to work with that would take days, if not weeks, to develop. No, I believe we should try to solve this another way."

"What, stop my heartbeat?"

"Excellent idea, but I believe we should try a different method first. There are many potential sources for noise in the human body. No, we should attack the other component of sound: not the origin, but the propagation medium. There is no sound in a vacuum, after all."

"I don't think I can trick the alien into following me into space," I say. "Also, I don't think I could survive being in space."

"Nonsense. You could survive perfectly well, so long as your Willpower did not run out. But we actually have a tool for this. A previous alien employed noxious gas in its attack. We have a tool on the ship we can repurpose."

I hear a rocket fire, and a small machine launches towards me. It stops at the entrance of the building. With a beep, a blue force field emerges from it. The blue dome extends around the entire floor of the building with me and the alien in it.

The alien seems to stare at the dome. It moves towards it slowly.

"I recommend you hold your breath, Tesseris."

There is a hiss, and suddenly all the air in the dome poofs away.

I can't hear anything anymore. My ears feel like they are popping, my skin is crawling and cold.

Ah… this is a vacuum. It's insane. But everything about this situation is insane.

I take a stance, ready myself, and throw myself forward.

"Hah!" I scream, but there is no noise in this cold vacuum.

My fist collides with the alien. I can feel a hard crack, even if I can't hear it.

The alien shudders and breaks. It collapses to the ground, lifeless.

What?

The dome fizzles away. There is a great woosh as air returns.

I stare at the broken alien. It's not even twitching.

"Congratulations, Tesseris. Energy readings show that the alien is deceased. You have defeated the invader."

"That's… that's it? Just one single punch?" I look at my fist. "Shouldn't it be more?"

"You are an anti-alien weapon, Tesseris. It's to be expected that you are so effective. Once you figure out their weakness, there really isn't anything the aliens can do to stop you."

I'm starting to understand why Knowledge was so cavalier about sending me out to fight these things. I knew I felt strong when the energy started flowing, but…

This whole thing is crazy!

"Make your way back to the jet, Tesseris. The clean up team will handle everything else. We can have a celebration when you return. You deserve nothing less."

A celebration, huh? "Will there be a cake!"

"Sure! I'll start baking one!"

Ah, that sounds nice.

 

[HypoSoc]

There is cake, and it is good.

The cake Knowledge baked for me is a massive thing, four heavy tiers of rich, fluffy chocolate, covered with an abundance of dark chocolate frosting. It's beautifully decorated with little hints of some deep black, buttercream frosting, and topped with a handful of cherries.

I am astounded by just how quickly Knowledge had been able to put the thing together. Barely thirty minutes after we had returned the whole thing had been assembled. If I had not watched the girl whip it up right in front of me, I would have assumed that she had made it in advance. Instead…

Well, that was clearly not a normal oven in her strange kitchen, given how each layer cooked almost perfectly.

The pink-haired girl in question is just as eye-catching as the cake. Instead of the nurse's outfit I had seen her in before, she had decided to embrace the outfit of a chef. Her outfit is a clean, professional white, topped with a white chef's hat (a 'toque' some strange part of me seemed to know). She is wearing a frilly, pink apron.

Despite the rapid pace of her baking, the woman is absolutely pristine. The only exception is a small speck of chocolate frosting on her cheek. My eyes keep darting to it, despite my intentions.

"Well?" She asks, with a cute tilt of her head. "Aren't you going to dig in? This is your reward, after all."

My stomach growls.

And I eat. And I eat. And I eat.

I can't say I'm fully conscious while I'm eating. I have some vague sense of the taste (which was rich and satisfying and very chocolaty). I have an abstract sense of the texture too (fluffy and creamy with dense layers of frosting between). But my mind isn't focusing on any of that. It isn't focusing on anything, really.

I eat and I eat and then I see that the entire cake is gone and I suddenly feel back in my own head.

Knowledge is watching me with a smile.

"Would you like something more?" She asks, without a hint of disturbance for my gluttony.

Any despite her nonchalance, I feel suddenly self-aware. I know, intellectually, that this strange body of mine eats a lot. I know, intellectually, that I spent a whole lot of energy in that fight against the alien. I couldn't quantify how much energy I used, or how calories translated to that Willpower fuel that Knowledge discussed. But I could estimate that it was a lot.

But I still feel ashamed. I felt out of control with myself. And I felt like I had somehow wasted all of that food. Knowledge had baked that cake just for me, and I didn't even spend a moment savoring it. I had just ripped through the whole thing without a care. And now there's only the faintest lingering taste of that final cherry to mark that the cake ever existed. Not even crumbs remained.

I want to say no I want to insist that the cake was enough. Those fading memories of my life before insist that it is absolute insanity that a single person ate the whole, massive thing.

And yet… my stomach rumbles.

"Yes, please." I say meekly.

"Of course!" Knowledge beams. She presses a button on her collar. "Hermes, if you would?"

"Hermes?"

I'm not confused for long, as the door to the kitchen opens and a young man dressed in a butler's uniform wheels in a cart bearing three more chocolate cakes just as large as the first.

The size is basically the only thing in common. These new chocolate cakes a large, ugly blocks. Very utilitarian.

I find myself disappointed. Both for the visible drop in quality, and for the realization that I wouldn't get to have any more of Knowledge's cooking.

It takes me a second to realize that the butler, Hermes, is the only other person I've seen in the place, besides Knowledge.

"Your cakes," Hermes says, voice completely flat. He doesn't meet my eyes for a second, focused on Knowledge instead.

"Hermes!" Knowledge chastises. "These look awful! I know you are a better baker than this!"

"Hrmph." Hermes grunts, not even acknowledging the correction. He shoves the cart right at me. I scramble to catch the thing to prevent any of the food from making a mess.

"Do you need anything else, madam?" Hermes asks, still refusing to look in my direction.

Knowledge sighs and shakes her head. "No. That will be all. Thank you Hermes. You can return to your duties."

Hermes bows. He turns to leave.

His gaze passes me briefly. His face turns to a hateful glare. I almost stagger from the shock of it. It was that intense and unexpected.

But the man leaves, not sparing a word for myself.

Knowledge sighs. "Please forgive him, Teserris," she says. "Hermes is dealing with a lot right now. He's normally much more professional."

"I'll take your word for it…" I say, not entirely believing her. "So… who was that guy?"

"Hermes, as I've said," she says, unhelpfully. "He's the Facilities Manager for the lab."

Facilities Manager? "He looks like a Butler to me."

Knowledge laughs. "That would be funny. But no. A 'butler' is a head of staff for a household. Hermes is an employee working for the lab. It's completely unrelated."

It doesn't sound unrelated to him. Especially considering the guy is dressing like a stereotypical British manservant. "So what does a Facilities Manager do different from a butler, then."

"Hermes keeps everything in the lab running. So, he does pretty much everything except for the research or people management."

"And that includes baking?"

"You're part of the facility too, Tesseris. So ensuring you are fed falls within his remit," she smiles. "When I 'm not handling it myself, that is."

"Uh huh." I'm suddenly feeling a lot less happy with this whole situation.

"He really is a better chef than me. You'll have to trust me on that. I promise. He is quite good at all parts of his job. As I said, he's just working through some troubles."

"Those 'troubles' being?"

"I don't think I should say. It's not my place. But I can assure you it has nothing to do with you."

Despite Knowledge's words, I am very skeptical. I'm not going to trust a guy who so openly despises me on the first meeting. It's not like I had done anything to this guy. There was no good reason for this attitude. And not unspecified 'troubles' could explain it,

I struggle to imagine just why he is so hostile. I really had done nothing! I woke up, ate some food, fought an alien, and came straight back!

No. Unless this Hermes is a not-so-secret alien sympathizer and is pissed I saved a city (in which case, why the heck would Knowledge trust him?), then the only possible explanation I could figure was that he was jealous of me spending time with Knowledge.

Which… well something like that is almost understandable. Knowledge is very cute and is spending a lot of time with me already. But it's also completely unprofessional.

If anything, the idea that this guy is so self-absorbed to just outright hate any guy spending time with his coworker makes me think even less of him.

And this is the guy in charge of my food most of the time?

Now I'm going to be worried that some weirdo butler with an irrational grudge poisoning me.

"Really, you should eat." Knowledge insists. "You need the calories after that fight. Regeneration doesn't just drain your Willpower, you know? Your body worked its way through its stores."

Right, right. I am ravenous. But am I so ravenous as to eat unappetizing cakes that may or may not be poisoned.

No… whatever this guy's problem is, he's not going to be so obvious as to poison me right in front of Knowledge. Even if he did, Knowledge would just regenerate me or whatever it is. At worst, the cakes would just taste as mediocre as they looked.

With my stomach growling, I start eating.

I want to say that the cakes are terrible. I want to say that the experience is so much worse than the personally-made cake Knowledge baked right in front of me.

But, like before, my body seems to go into autopilot. I just work my way through the new cakes the same as the first one.

The experience is disturbingly identical. Part of me insists that it is obviously worse, but I am so detached from the sensations that it really doesn't matter.

It bothers me. Food made with care should be better to eat than food made out of hateful obligation. But this strange body of mine fails to register the distinction.

Knowledge watches me demolish the cakes. She's completely unperturbed. The smile doesn't leave her face. But that bit of chocolate on her cheeks is missing now.

I don't know when she wiped her face. I didn't notice at all. It's like I couldn't notice anything in that haze of hunger when I consumed and consumed.

"I told you Hermes was a good baker," she says, cutting off my strange chain of thought. "Even if the presentation was lackluster."

I hummed to avoid agreeing or disagreeing.

"How are you feeling now? Still hungry? Want something savory."

The answer to that question is 'yes.' I am still hungry. My stomach feels like a black hole, completely unchanging despite all the sweets I am eating. It feels like I could keep eating forever.

But I don't want to feel that way. I don't want to admit it. I want to pretend that the food was enough and I want to stop thinking about eating. I don't want my brain to keep shutting off again and again.

So, instead I lie. "I'm good for now, thank you."

Knowledge beams. "Excellent. Normally, I would suggest we head straight to training. It was a shame that you had to fight your first alien completely out of nowhere like that. You did quite admirably, as I knew you would, but I imagine it would have been a whole less stressful if you knew what your body was capable of."

She could say that again. "'Stressful' is a word you could use, yes." 'Terrifying' would be a much more accurate one.

"Yep. So, as I said, normally I would want you to jump right into the training you missed. But we did just get back from fighting an alien. So if you wanted to rest instead, that would be acceptable."

Rest sounds nice. The whole thing didn't feel real yet, and I'm worried that it would hit me all at once suddenly. But a thought occurs to me. "How often do aliens invade like that?" I want to make sure that I start my training before the next fight.

"Nobody knows!" Knowledge said, a strange glee in her voice. "If we could predict alien incursions accurately… well, let's just say the Division would be quite happy to with whomever figures out such a thing."

I feel a sudden sense of dread. "Are you saying the next one could happen at any moment?!"

"It certainly could," Knowledge nods without a care for how disturbing her answer is. "It's like being a firefighter. We don't know when the next deployment will be, so we always have to be ready. That's part of what the training will cover: you will need to be efficient enough with your abilities so that you can save your Willpower between incursions. It would be pretty bad if you exhausted yourself fighting an alien and the next one came immediately after."

That's a fear I am suddenly dreading.

"That said… I've never seen two back to back incursions before. The fastest I've ever seen was a week between two, and that was pretty notable. Often it's closer to a month. Once, there was a whole year between aliens! Some of the researchers started wondering if the whole thing had stopped somehow, it was pretty funny."

She couldn't have led with that?!

I sigh. "Honestly, I don't think I'm in a good place to start training right now. I need to process things. Anything you tried to teach me would probably go right over my head right now."

Knowledge smiles. "It's good to be aware of your limitations. Please, rest as long as you like. We have a small library of books if you want to read. And a much larger library of research papers, but I presume you wouldn't find that as relaxing."

Books sound nice, but really I just want to sleep right now.

Knowledge leads me back to my room, and I collapse on the bed.

 

[HypoSoc]

The next alien invasion does not, as I had feared, happen instantly. But it doesn't take a month either, as Knowledge said was the norm.

Instead, three days after punching a mute alien in the face, I find myself back in that plane, shooting off to who knows where.

Knowledge is happily hypothesizing about why an alien incursion could be happening so soon after the last. Me? I just chalk it up to my own bad luck.

I don't know if I've got the crumbiest luck in the world, but it has to be pretty far down there. People with good luck don't wake up to getting tortured on an operating table. People with good luck don't have to deal with such a strange and ugly body. People with good luck don't have to fight aliens at all.

I don't think I have the absolute worst luck in the world though. A guy like that would have had back to back fights without a hint of a break. Or would have had the klaxons go off right when he was trying to sleep instead of when he was in the middle of practicing. That guy wouldn't have even my little amount of training.

Three days doesn't sound like a lot, because it's not. But it was enough time to go over the important things.

Since I'm fighting these aliens alone (which is still a terrifying thought if I ever let myself recognize that fact), I don't have to worry about squad tactics or coordination or fitting into an organization. Ideally, we would have had more time to go over some alien fights from the past, or hypothetical scenarios, but Knowledge kept emphasizing that no two aliens were the same, so that was of limited value.

Instead, Knowledge's crash course for getting me up to speed was all about me and my strange body. That, at least, would be the same each fight. The training had been a mix of explanations and small bits of practice of each of my abilities.

First, and most prominent, is the fact that I'm just naturally better than I would expect. I'm faster. I'm stronger. I have more stamina. I'm more resistant to damage. I'm not going to trip over my own feet or fumble with my hands. Knowledge says that I'm smarter too, but I don't know if I believe that. But all these things are just default parts of my new body, even without thinking or noticing.

But, more than that, I can also channel my Willpower to supercharge myself. And that is definitely noticeable. When I ran around the track Knowledge had set up, I was going closer to car speeds than human speeds. And Knowledge had stated that, if I really pushed myself, I could even go at airplane speeds. But that would exhaust my Willpower way too quickly to be useful, and Knowledge insists I stay topped up at all times, since Willpower only recovers so quickly. Meaning, I didn't get to test those crazy speeds.

Given how I'm flying out to fight an alien right now, it's a smart thing that Knowledge didn't let me try it out. But, honestly, the idea of it all scares me too.

I look out the window of the plane onto the countryside below. Apparently I could survive the fall. That's also something way too scary to test.

The biggest thing Knowledge thinks I should focus on, which I had spent a whole day on (out of three), in my senses. Just like any part of my body, I can enhance my eyes, ears, nose, even my skin and taste buds, with Willpower. Super vision, super hearing, super smelling... I've got all those things available. And I have X-Ray vision too. Which isn't some way to see through clothes. Its not like my eyes shoot out X Rays or anything. I can just supercharge my cones and rods to see X Rays already in the air. Which isn't useful in the slightest. It just looks like a blur. Infrared is way, way more useful. Or so I would assume.

According to Knowledge, because aliens varied so much, it's vital to be able to sense as much as possible, to get as much evidence as possible for their tricks. So, playing with my senses is something that is worth prioritizing when it comes to training. Dealing with all the extra information is hard.

I also have another trick where I can slow my perception of time. It takes a lot of Willpower to use, so Knowledge mentioned that it wasn't really recommended. But she did have me try it out, just so I could have it as an option.

It isn't pleasant. It feels like I am stuck in place, frozen in time. It feels like my heart is completely stopped. My brain insists I need to breathe but my lungs won't respond. I can channel even more Willpower to make my body catch up with my brain, but... yeah...

That's just a loop draining my Willpower.

And that's the other thing Knowledge focused my short lessons on: Willpower. Apparently there are ways to quantify it, but we didn't have time to go over it. Knowledge can just keep track of the energy on my behalf. It recovers on its own over time. Apparently this body generates it faster than most. But if I need it, the ship has a bunch of pills that can refill my stores. It's a backup that I'm supposed to avoid if possible, because the pills themselves were toxic. I'm guessing they taste awful too.

In an emergency, I could also drain Willpower from a donor. We didn't have time to get into how exactly that would work. I also could, apparently, have my body cannibalize myself to recover Willpower if no donors were available. I don't really want to imagine what that involves, but from the little I understood of what Knowledge recounted, it might involve my limbs literally turning into goo. Or something worse than that.

Knowledge spent a lot of time making sure I understood how important it was to keep my Willpower. She's extremely clear that if I ever run out, I would die, no 'if's 'and's, or 'buts'. But anything other than that...

According to the pink-haired girl, as long as there was a tea-spoon of flesh left of me, I could regenerate. Practically speaking, that wouldn't be an option, since it would take more Willpower than I had to accomplish. But if I were somehow hooked up to a massive source of the stuff, my body could make it happen.

I didn't have a core or anything to protect. Not even that 'Willpower Catalyst' Knowledge had mentioned before (which was apparently a special biomechanical organ). Any part of my body was just as good as any other part. And that meant I could regenerate even after losing my brain. I'm not sure how that would work, exactly, and Knowledge admitted she had no idea what it would be like to experience it, but she assumes that, if it were to happen, I probably wouldn't be conscious enough to notice it or feel anything, and I definitely wouldn't have any memories of it all.

Scary stuff.

I also had asked about what happens if I am cut in half, and if there would be two of me, but it doesn't work like that, apparently. One side would regenerate and the other just wouldn't, depending on where the Willpower went first. Which, again, isn't something I really want to think about.

But the time in this jet gives me nothing to do but think. And focusing on that is somewhat nicer than thinking about the alien I'm going to have to fight. I don't want a repeat of getting stabbed like that again. Not if I can help it.

Whatever super abilities my body has do nothing to dull the pain. I think I could increase my sensitivity actually. Which wouldn't help me at all. Not if I get stabbed again.

It actually pointed to a notable lack in my abilities. Sure I could move fast, and sense things, and recover from being injured, but when it comes to attacking? All I really have are my hands and feet. I can punch hard, for sure. That last alien could tell you all about it (or rather, it couldn't because it's dead). But I needed to get up close and personal to fight. And that risks things for me.

"Why don't I have laser eyes?" I ask out loud.

"Laser eyes?" Knowledge's voice echoes through my head, proving she's listening. I didn't fully intend for her to answer my question, but I am feeling curious. "What's this about, Tesseris?"

"I'm just thinking about the alien we need to fight. I've got a lot of abilities, but I don't really have any attacks. I was just thinking it might be useful to fire laser beams from my eyes."

"Perhaps against some aliens, yes." Knowledge agrees. "But it may be completely useless against others. There are only so many things we could include in your body, Tesseris. Adding laser eyes is a little superfluous, don't you think?"

I feel embarrassed at how easily she dismissed the idea. Parsing the words in my head again, I realize just how childish the fixation on laser eyes is. I jump to correct myself. "I didn't mean to ask about laser eyes specifically." I say quickly. "I mean... some weapon to hit aliens with. Especially a ranged one. What if I need to shoot an alien from far away? Nothing I can do would work for that." I feel more confident in myself as I justify my silly outburst.

"You're a human, Tesseris. So, like any other human, if there's a problem you can't solve on your own, you'll go get a tool to rely on. That's why the plane has a mini manufacturing center on it, so we can construct whatever you might need, alongside some other tools we've already made that are larger than what it can produce. If you need to shoot lasers, you can have a laser gun."

"Right." That makes sense. "So... can I have a laser gun? Or... or a sword? A laser sword?"

"There's only so much material the plane has available, Tesseris." Knowledge says. And I feel my embarrassment double up again. "We don't want to use it before we know what you are up against."

"Right... right..." I really should just keep my mouth shut. I blame my jitters.

I don't have anything else I can focus on. And asking how long until we arrive would just make me look more childish...

If I could speed up my time perception, just to avoid the awkward wait, I would. Instead, I'm stuck watching the clouds, and agonizing over what this alien was going to end up being.

 

[HypoSoc]

The plane lands on the outskirts of a small town at the foot of a weathered mountain. As soon as I get off the plane I can feel a soft rumbling. I can hear it too.

It's late into dusk, and place is not well lit, but my eyes have no trouble seeing into the darkness.

"Are you going to call in a bomb threat again?" I ask.

"If necessary," Knowledge says. "A shelter in place warning may be more appropriate, based on the nature of the alien. Either way, we will handle it. You should only concern yourself with the alien."

"Right." I waste no time racing towards the rumbling, which I could hear coming from the town itself.

It doesn't take me long to find evidence of something strange. There's a massive pile of rubble in the middle of the street, surrounded by some crumbled buildings. It's a mess of asphalt, concrete, brick, shattered glass, and outright garbage. I see a mangled streetlight, still flickering somehow, poking out of the pile. There are a few stop signs and traffic lights too. More distressingly, I see a human hand reaching out of the mass, mangled and covered in blood. It looks like it had been crushed.

The pile smells awful. More distressingly, it seems to be moving.

It's like an avalanche, but much slower, and not bound by gravity. The rumbling pile of destroyed things stumbled its way through the street at a snail's pace. Relative to its size at least.

My limited training taught me that the smartest thing to do when encountering alien phenomena is to wait and observe. So, that's what I do. From blocks away I watch the rumbling mass. It seems to slither through the street.

It reaches a parked car and the whole thing stops. Then, in a baffling display of motion, the refuse pile twists towards the car. And it seems to stand up, somehow. The pile pulls in on itself, growing taller, and the part facing the car lifts off the ground. Large chunks of debris fall to the ground of the street, but other parts of it defy gravity, clinging to the mass. And the mass of rubble opens up.

He can't see the inside from this angle, but the rubble pile acts like a strange mouth, pulling the the car in. There is a loud, low crunch as the car gets pulled in and crushed. Bits of metal and plastic fall back to the asphalt, but the bulk of the vehicle is ground up and consumed.

The sight pretty much cinches it for me. The alien is inside the debris, surrounded by its slow destruction. Despite the appearance from the outside, I realize this thing is more like a hermit crab than a living rockslide. It's taking things from the environment to cover itself with.

Rather than a crab, though, I find myself picturing a slug. Or would a snail be more accurate? From how the thing is slithering around, it strikes me as more a ball of mucus than something actually solid at the core. The trail of fallen debri behind me certainly brings a slug's trail to mind. I wonder if the alien inside it all is sticky... like a ball of slime gathering things around itself. I am not really in a hurry to find out.

"I'm pretty sure we found the Alien, Knowledge," I say.

"An astute hypothesis." Knowledge agrees. "I'll defer to your judgement in the field, as you are the one on the ground, but perhaps it would be useful to consider observing. An alien interacting with the environment in this manner is certainly novel."

"That's the plan, yes." I agree quickly. It's not cowardice or fear of pain leading me to the decision. Certainly not. I just understand gathering more information could be vital for victory, as Knowledge seems to agree.

The alien finishes... eating for lack of a better term... the car. It's a messy consumption process dropping most things on the ground, but it seems the most appropriate. And my patience is paid off almost immediately. The whole mass of rubble vibrates, and I can see the car's wheels (and steering wheel even) poke out of the bottom at an awkward angle. The five different wheels press against the ground and start to rotate.

"Fascinating," Knowledge comments. "It seems to be incorporating the vehicle into its amalgamation."

"Not very well though," I say. The wheels are at an awkward angle against the ground. And the mass of rubble isn't able to lift very far. The end result is the wheels spinning mostly in place while the rest of the mass drags along the ground. It's going even more slowly than it had before.

I can imagine the alien getting frustrated with this attempt, as the wheels pop off from the mass soon after, as if it has just given up. They are left behind as the alien continues its slow rumble through the town.

Taking care to keep out of sight of the thing (if it even has eyes), I approach some of the discarded debris. I grab a brick I had seen fall off the thing and examine it. I don't see any sign of anything unusual. And I don't feel any sticky residue.

I channel a smidgen of Willpower into my hand and squeeze. The brick crumbles to dust.

I'm pretty sure that's how a normal brick would react. I don't actually know. I haven't crushed real bricks before. But it does confirm that, even if the debris were made stronger somehow, I'm stronger.

I try again with one of the wheels that the alien had tried to use. The hubcap breaks just as easily. There's nothing special about it, as far as I can tell.

"I'm going to engage," I decide, steeling myself. At a certain point there is only so much you can do just by watching.

"Good hunting, Tesseris."

I took a deep breath and moved, repositioning myself so I had a straight shot for the thing.

I could approach fast running at top speed, or I could do it slowly, trying to be sneaky. The alien was a slow moving thing and going fast would use up Willpower. I could always switch from sneaky to fast if necessary. The reverse isn't true. So, keeping to the thing's back, I walked as quietly as I could to the mass.

It doesn't react. I am as a hair trigger as I get closer and closer, but it still doesn't react. Either it doesn't see me or it doesn't care. I don't know which one I prefer. But I make it all the way to the alien as it is stopping to eat another lamppost for some reason.

I take a deep breath. I channel my willpower into my fist.

"Hah!" I scream and punch with all my might, right into the mass of debris. It cracks and crumbles, shattering under the force of my blow. Asphalt, metal, plastic, and garbage splatter into me.
The alien rumbles. Metal grinds on metal in a piercing screech. I imagine it as a scream. The mass is still there. I jump right onto it and punch again.

"Hah!"

More of the gathered mass is pummeled away, broken. I don't know if I am doing any damage to the alien underneath it all, but I am certainly cracking through the shell. It's slow. The different mess of broken materials have lots of gaps in them, and they fall away or shatter rather than pass the force inwards. But I am making my way through, layer by layer. The entire mass shakes and shudders.

"Hah!"

I punch away another layer. I blink when I see a handgun staring back at me.

It fires, and a bullet slams into my face. I reinforce my skin with Willpower. I can almost hear my skull crack, but it holds. My head stings like hell.

I grab the gun and crush it in my fist. I am unprepared when half a dozen other guns pull out of the mass, all pointed at me.

They fire.

I abandon my attack, using my arms as a makeshift shield, blocking as much as I can. I feel stinging pain all over my body, but my Willpower holds my skin and bones together. My clothes are less fortunate, tearing under the bullet shells.

And they keep firing. And firing. I grab them one by one, crushing them, but more guns take their place.

I can't say I know enough about guns to be sure, but there can't possibly be that many bullets in each.

"Tesseris! Take care for your Willpower!" Knowledge chides.

And I realize I am using too much, hardening myself against the volley. With a frustrated grunt, I disengage, leading from the alien.

All the guns track me, and the bullets keep firing. I retreat behind a building. The firing continues and I run further away, only stopping when I've made sufficient distance and the sound of the attack stops.

"You are suffering from torn ligaments, skeletal fractures, and bruising. Your liver has burst too." Knowledge says idly. I have to trust her on that, because I feel like one massive bruise. "Shall I engage the regeneration protocol?"

"Yes," I hiss through the pain.

I feel that cool wave of energy once again. The pain dulls to nothing and I can think again.

"How did it get so many guns?" I ask. "Did it eat its way through a police station?"

"Satellite imagery indicates its trail of destruction did pass through a law enforcement office, yes." Knowledge confirms, surprising me. I was joking. "Though I suspect it has the capacity to fabricate copies of objects. The mass of its amalgam shifted greatly as you fought. Excess heat was generated, incongruent with your own strikes, according to thermals."

Thermals?

"The better question," Knowledge continues before I can ask, "is how you were damaged at all. Mundane firearms should not be capable of hindering you, especially not when you are reinforcing yourself. Perhaps this alien has its own means of empowering its collected miscellanea."

"It wasn't buffing its own defenses," I say. "But with all that garbage in the way, I don't know if I can actually reach the actual alien inside." Just verbalizing the problem helps to solve it. "I guess I need to hit it when it opens its mouth to eat."

"'Eat,' Tesseris?" Knowledge asks. "I don't believe the amalgamation process you witnessed corresponds with consumption in any traditional sense."

"I don't have a better word," I admit. "Whatever you call it, it comes toward the surface when grabbing something." Even if I couldn't see perfectly, I saw enough.

"Trust your intuition, Tesseris. The human mind is the best weapon against these aliens."

With those words of affirmation, I sneak back to the alien. It's gone back to its behavior from before, rumbling about, crashing into things, sometimes stopping to 'eat'. Or 'amalgamate' as Knowledge insists. Its pattern hasn't changed at all, as if it has forgotten completely about me.

I need to get around to the front of it, to find an opportunity to hit the inside. So, I slowly approach.

Without warning, as I am moving, the alien screeches, metal clawing against itself again. It stops in place. The guns all extend out of its back to point straight at me, even more than there had been before. At this distance I have time to dodge. A hastily grabbed metal sheet from the rubble trail serves as a makeshift shield as bullets rain down on my position. The alien slowly rumbles towards me as it fires. My shield doesn't last long, but I don't have too much difficulty escaping.

The guns stop firing as I take cover, and the alien returns to slithering in its original direction, all sign of aggression lost.

I try again, coming from a different angle. Again, it doesn't react at all, until it suddenly does, firing at me and pursuing me. Again, I escape, and it resumed its strange behavior.

And then I try a third time, just to be be sure. It stops in the middle of eating to instead fire upon me. The number of guns has increased again.

"It keeps getting more guns." I gripe, phantom pains from the previous bullets still stinging inside my head.

"Yes, it seems to be converting the mass of the amalgam to make more, much like our own fabricators. Its sensory abilities are also notable, it seems to have a detection radius of about 16 meters," Knowledge muses. "Entering the radius triggers the aggression, regardless of angle of approach. Or rather, that seems to be a single component in its perception, as it no longer pursues ones you have left a 30 meter radius. Visual occlusion does not seem to be a relevant factor." The numbers are delivered quickly as if I have any intuition for them at all. But even if I can't convert meters in my head practically, I've got a feel for the distances directly, having experienced it twice.

"It let me get all the way to it the first time," I say, frowning.

"You hadn't struck it before. Now it appears to be on guard for you."

"Annoying."

The bigger problem isn't that it attacks me but that it stops eating as soon as I get too close. For all that the mass itself moves slowly, the thing inside could zip around within, it seems. I've yet to catch a sight of anything at all.

Could it be a ghost? No. I don't want to jump down that rabbit hole. The pile of garbage bulges at times, especially as it reacts. There's something there.

More as a form of an experiment rather than out of any expectation that it would work, I grab a mangled bit of scrap metal from the ground. I crush it into a ball, smoothing out the ridges as much as I can to make it more aerodynamic. Then I channel some Willpower and toss it with all my might, right when the alien is about to eat again.

The impromptu projectile soars through the air. As soon as it enters the alien's established detection radius, guns pop out and fire. The wave of bullets slam into my metal ball, but it has momentum on its side. It crashes into the aliens side with a loud thunk, displacing concrete and asphalt.

The guns keep firing in my general direction, but I have already moved. The alien, like before, calms down after a bit and resumes its rumbling and destructive slithering through the city.

My projectile doesn't seem to have done any damage at all. But I didn't expect it to. It does confirm my fear. As soon as an attack (ineffectual or otherwise) enters the alien's detection zone, it stops 'amalgamating' and hides in its shell, firing widely.

I can throw objects fast and hard, but it can retreat inside its shell even faster.

I try again, this time lobbing a rock straight up in the air to fall down on it from above. This attack definitely couldn't do any damage. But it adds more information. I am not particularly shocked when the guns sprout out of its back and shoot straight up, diverging the projectile out of the way.

"So its detection radius extends upwards," Knowledge says, vocalizing my thoughts. "Fascinating. I wonder what sort of mechanism it is detecting. Electromagnetic radiation? Air currents? Ontological inertia? Without visibility into its sensor apparatuses, we have no way to know for sure."

"Who knows?" I say simply, not really engaging with the question. All I know is that my half-considered plan to fall on it from the sky is unlikely to be effective.

I sigh, pondering my options. Perhaps I really would just need to dig away at its shell under constant fire, maybe with a jackhammer or something. Perhaps I could dig through it all before I run out of Willpower. Or perhaps it would run out of bullets.

I really doubt that as a possibility at this point.

"Knowledge, could we make a spear or something? A really long one?"

"A spear? I have to caution you, Tesseris, that no metal we can fabricate is stronger than your own body."

"Yeah. I figured. But I think this is a problem of reach. I don't know if I can get through its shell to the alien inside with just my arms." The alien's mass of debris is about the size of a semi truck. I have no idea how small the actual alien is inside it all, but, pessimistically, it might not be any bigger than the previous alien. For all I know it's even smaller.

"A spear of sufficient length may be snapped." Knowledge cautions. "This alien has demonstrated the ability to exert and unexpected level of force."

"Is there any harm in trying? The fabricator on the plane has the material for it?"

"For a simple metal implement? Yes, the fabricator's supply would barely be impacted. I only wish to warn you of the limitations."

"I think it's worth the attempt." Better than a jackhammer, I think. Ideally, I can manage a good stab and hit the alien directly.

"Then it will be done." Knowledge confirms. "To produce the strongest possible alloy, fabrication will take approximately eleven minutes. Fabrication is online."

"Eleven minutes," I repeat trying to parse out the implications. That felt both really fast and really slow. But, as I watch the alien slowly meander through town, it feels like it will be just fine.

With little to do but wait, I follow along the alien, watching from outside its extended detection radius. It deviates little from its routine. It rumbled its way through the town. The road it is following makes a sharp curve, and I wince as the alien ignore that and just keeps going straight. The building in its path, some medical center or other, crumbles, falling to rumble like the rest of the debris on its path.

I can only hope it is late enough at night that nobody is present. And I really hope it isn't a hospital that has patients inside. I don't see nor hear anything to indicate any issues, but I can't forget the small bits of corpse I had encountered already.

Compared to the first alien, the death toll was extremely light. But I definitely was outpacing the first when it comes to property damage.

Eleven minutes pass and the spear finishes fabrication. I race back to the plane to retrieve it, but I am not really feeling the rush. Despite the ongoing alien incursion, this entire encounter is very slow paced. The alien's slow and methodical rampage does not make for a very urgent threat. And it wasn't reacting to me at all, so long as I stayed outside its radius. It may be making more and more guns, but as long as I had Willpower the damage of bullets wouldn't be lethal, no matter how many there are.

But still, I run as fast as I can (excluding the use of Willpower), for the principle of the matter. The spear is a long, thick pole of solid metal, three times as long as I am tall. I think that would make it a 'pike' instead. Apparently Knowledge had taken my request for reach seriously, even if I doubted I would be able to use the full of it. It's impressive just how much material the fabricator was able to print in the short time. Despite the unwieldy length, it felt light in my hands.

The only part of the weapon that isn't the uniform metal is the sparkling, pointed tip.

"Diamond tipped?" I ask.

"Our material science is more advanced that simple carbon crystal." Knowledge corrects. "That tip is approximately four times harder than synthetic diamond."

"I see." I don't really see, but it certainly sounds impressive. The simple fact is I don't really need to understand the pike to use it. I just need to figure the best way to stab the alien.

Ultimately, I don't really have a better idea that flaring my Willpower, running in as fast as I can, and bracing myself against the hail of gunfire until I can clear enough rubble to stab the whole way through.

So, that's what I set out the do. The alien is in my sights, still slowly destroying the town. I creep around to a side street to start my charge closer to the roaming monster.

I take a breath, spread Willpower through my body, and charge, bracing for the pain of gunfire.

I'm caught off guard when, instead of dozens of guns, a single machine nozzle pops out aiming straight for me.

I gasp in pain as my body seems to explode. I am blinded immediately. Half conscious thought and barely functional legs manage to force me out of harms way behind a building.

"Engaging regeneration protocol." I can barely hear Knowledge's voice inside my head, but I can feel the cool wave of hearing. "You sustained critical damage to all your organ systems, Tesseris."

"What was that?" I gasp. It was like every part of my was on fire. It was like my cells were rupturing. The nausea had been too intense and too sudden. My brain had almost turned off between the pain and whatever that was. "There was no bullets. I didn't see any attack."

"Based on telemetry data and your internal body monitor, a supercharged X-Ray machine. You were hit with about 3.5 Kilosieverts of X-Ray radiation. That's about the kinetic energy of a cannonball in terms of absorbed energy, from pure X-Rays."

"What?!" An X-Ray machine? With half a thought I channeled Willpower to my eyes to see X-Rays, but I saw nothing. I feel foolish, since obviously the alien isn't firing at me right now. "That's... that's a lot of radiation, right?"

"Yes. For context, 20 or so Sieverts is 100% fatal. You were hit with 175 times that." I swallow. "It's a good thing you can't get cancer."

"Right... good thing."

"Still, the regeneration required was extensive. You should avoid getting hit by that again. Your Willpower stores are not up to handling repeated exposures."

I really do not want to experience that again. "I don't think I can dodge X-Rays." I say, in lieu of anything else. Worse, I don't think I can sneak up on the alien. My previous attempts all failed. And I am not confident in my ability to dig through the shell.

I am forcibly reminded that the idea that I would be able to kill it in a single punch like I had with the first alien is also an unfounded hope. I have no idea it I could manage that, even if I get an opportunity. And from how this thing is adapting as it eats... I worry that I could only get the one attempt before it improves itself enough to make that impossible, assuming I somehow get the event.

Really, I am tempted to suggest just giving up. The alien is slow. Even if it's destructive, we could just abandon the town and get people out of the way. We could treat it a natural disaster and learn to deal with the aftermath. But I don't suggest that. Both because I know it's stupid, and also because the idea of this alien having free reign to develop more weapons is terrifying.

"This isn't something I can just fight directly." I say instead. "I need a trap of some kind." I imagine setting out some sort of poison for it to eat... I mean amalgamate... and just letting it die from that. But I can't imagine we would have a poison that could work on an unknown alien biology just sitting around. A different idea comes to mind. "Could we fabricate a bomb?"

It feels like a cartoon idea, but if we could just get this thing to eat a big enough bomb, we could have it explode from the inside.

"Certainly." Knowledge says quickly. "With the plane's onboard fabricator, we could fashion a 20 Megaton explosive, sufficient to destroy the town. If required, we possess a nuclear arsenal as well, which can be brought to the incursion."

Destroy the town? A nuclear arsenal? "We can't destroy the whole town!" I insist.

"Tesseris," Knowledge chides. "Aliens represent a potentially existential threat to humanity. An uncontained alien is certain to cost far more lives that this single town possesses."

"Maybe but it's still jumping to gun way too fast!" I say quickly. "A smaller bomb, big enough to blow up something its size, is what I mean. Er... maybe a bit bigger? Just in case? Destroy the block not the whole town?"

"Are you certain that would not be insufficient? Consider the possibility that the explosive is too weak and the alien not only survives but gains the ability to fabricate bombs."

"That's a better argument for a smaller explosive, not a larger one." Rather than scare me with that idea, Knowledge's hypothetical makes me instead terrified that it would learn to make nukes. "If the explosion doesn't kill it, we can figure that out later, but there is no reason why we should destroy the whole town."

"Very well. You are the authority on the ground, so your judgement will be accepted. The fabricator will produce an explosive appropriate for demolishing a single block. This will take approximately five minutes."

"So quick?"

"An explosive is less complicated than the materials used for the shield, Tesseris. It is simple chemical energy. With such a limited payload, it is not a difficult fabrication"

Nothing about that seems simple. But Knowledge apparently views it as trivial so I have to take her word for it.

Five minutes pass and I am very carefully carrying a bomb through the town. Knowledge insists it is perfectly safe before priming and that, even if it weren't, that I would be able to survive 'such a small explosion.' But that doesn't make me any less terrified.

I set myself in the route of the alien which is still moving forward without a visible care. I make sure I am far outside its detection radius before hiding the bomb in a car and dragging te car straight ahead to its path. And I run away, priming the bomb for remote activation. A quick scan validates that there are no humans in the projected radius.

From a good distance away, I watch as the alien approaches the car. It rises up to eat it. The bomb goes inside.

Knowledge triggers the bomb.

There is a burst. There's a hollow screech. Rubble flies out chaotically, but it also seems to contain the bulk of the explosion, protecting the buildings around.

The rubble and debris and garbage of the alien's shell fall into a pile on the ground.

I hesitantly approach. No guns or X-ray machines emerge to shoot me.

"Congratulations, Tesseris." Knowledge says. "The alien is reading as deceased."

"That..." I don't know what to say. It feels wrong. Hollow. But I don't know how to put it to words. "I didn't need to be the one to do this. That was the plane's fabricator more than me." It feels awful to be complaining about a fight being too easy but the thought is stuck in my head. Anyone could have done this. None of my special abilities mattered in the end.

"Does that truly matter, Tesseris? You created a plan and set the trap. It is human nature to make use of tools in the face of adversity."

"Anyone could have come up with that plan. It was so simple." If someone had thought to do it from the start, the alien wouldn't have done any damage at all.

"And yet, you were the one to do it. More than that, surviving long enough to gather the necessary information should not be discounted. We had no way to know it was the best way forward until that point. You should be proud." So Knowledge says, but I can't say I agree with her. "Return to the plane. We will have another celebration when you return. Perhaps we can make a routine out of the cake, if you continue to be so successful."

I stare at the pile of rubble. I realize that I still never saw the alien's actual body. I turn away. I don't actually want to see it. "Cake is good." I say instead. It was something to look forward to at least.

 

[HypoSoc]

The planned celebration does not happen immediately. Knowledge judges that it is late enough that rest might be preferred to food, and I don't disagree. But, right in the morning we (or rather I) have some chocolate cake. It's otherwise identical to the first one.

Well, it is better in one respect. Hermes doesn't show up. Instead the mass-produced massive chocolate cakes are ready and waiting for me when I wake up. And I can eat those as Knowledge cooks, once again wearing her chef's uniform. Which has the bonus effect of saving the best for last. And it also means I don't have to suffer in hunger while waiting for Knowledge's cooking. Her baking is shockingly fast, objectively, but this body is ravenously hungry when it feels safe enough to eat. I'm glad it's not a problem I run into while fighting aliens. I'm too focused to notice the hunger then.

Knowledge doesn't comment on Hermes's absence. Neither do I. I don't want that jerk around and I strongly suspect he doesn't want to be around either. It's good that we both can get what we want out of this.

After I eat the cake and confirm that I am (temporarily) sated, Knowledge asks if there is anything I want to do.

"You can jump back into training, of course," she says. "But I imagine simply having dessert would be a pretty disappointing celebration. Participating in at least one activity would be closer to standard."

She presents it so clinically. "Don't I need to focus on training just in case another alien strikes unexpectedly?"

"The average interval between incursions is still a month, Tesseris."

"That's what you said last time, but the second alien was only three days after the first."

Knowledge waggles her finger in a chiding manner. "The presence of outlier events does not invalidate statistical models. Events with low probability happen constantly in life. We must avoid letting naive intuitions overwrite rational analysis. Indeed," she smiles, "if such a high sigma event happens once more, that would represent a fascinating development in our understanding of alien incursions. We might even learn more about the mechanisms by which they occur!"

Knowledge is quite excited by the possibility. But I understand this is just a hypothetical. She doesn't actually think an alien will invade again so soon.

"If you are unable to put aside your concern, Tesseris, I can assure you the marginal value of a few hours of training is minimal. There is, of course, a benefit to continued training. Further understanding of your own abilities and an improved capacity to construct strategems are always valuable. But there is no more risk of you being deployed with no guidance at all."

Knowledge is right. Even the short amount of training I got was effective for the second alien. Or rather... I don't think having more training would have made me any more effective in dealing with that thing. It probably is safe to actually relax.

In that case... "Could we go into town?" I ask. "I don't actually know where we are right now, but if there's a town or city nearby, I'd like to check it out. Or if there isn't... could we take the plane and fly there?" I think it would be nice to wander around a town with Knowledge. We could go to a cafe together, maybe watch a movie if anything good is playing. We could check out a bookstore, or maybe get a nice dinner together...

"Hm?" Knowledge seems caught off guard by my request. "Is there anything in particular you would want out of that? If there is something you wish to acquire, we can have it delivered here. Or, if there is an activity in particular you wished to do... the lab facilities likely can accommodate you."

I don't want to admit the date-like activities I was hoping for. "I... er... I just kind of wanted to go out and see a place that wasn't being attacked by aliens, right? Just have a normal day, you know?"

"A normal day?" The pink-haired girl frowns. "Perhaps we can simulate something like that?"

"Simulate?" I feel dread in the pit of my stomach.

"Well, your desired activity isn't otherwise possible, after all. But I believe we can create a faithful emulation. Some virtual reality experience? Perhaps a remote camera drone?" Knowledge nods. "Yes. If a 'normal day' is what you desire, then I believe I can engineer a facsimile."

"Knowledge." I swallow. "Why can't I just go into town?"

"Hm? Nothing prevents you from visiting the nearest city. It would require the plane to reach, given the distances involved, but that is hardly an imposition. We aren't stopping you from leaving. But you wouldn't experience a 'normal day' if you did, presuming I understand your intentions."

"Why not?" I almost put my hands on the girl. "Please, explain exactly why that isn't possible." She keeps dancing around the answer, and I don't think she even realizes.

"Hm?" She seems confused. "Do you really not understand, Tesseris? Between your body and your abilities, the same mechanism that prevents normal people from comprehending aliens prevents them from comprehending you. Really, I had assumed you already realized that. Certainly nobody was reacting to your presence or actions in your first incursion."

That... "I'm an alien."

Knowledge chuckles. "Of course not, silly. You are a human being with an artificial homonculus body. Every part of you, from the matter in your body to the pattern we used as the basis of your mind is native to this reality. Nothing alien about you. It just happens to be that the same cognitive filter afflicting humanity erases you from society's notice just effectively as it does the aliens. Only people like me or Hermes who work for the Division are capable of noticing you."

The weight of the implication strikes me. I almost stagger. Was the sum total of my life limited to this facility? To just Knowledge and Hermes of all people?

But even as that thought strikes me, so too does another.

"Knowledge... where is everyone else?" My days since waking up have been too hectic. But in my short time here I never ran into a single other person, outside of Knowledge and Hermes. Not a single one. The only voices I have heard were theirs, as well as the voice that tortured me on the operating table.

Even when I traveled to the two alien incursions, I hadn't seen anyone, other than ignorant people in the distance. And the corpses.

"Everyone else? The Division has a large number of facilities all over the globe. We are not directly affiliated with any of them, other than a tenuous connection to the Vice Director's central command. But I would very strongly advice against seeking to visit them. They can be particularly hostile."

What? Hostile? But that was a thought for later. "I mean here. At this facility. Where is everyone else?" I frown. "Is it like the cognitive filter thing? Are they ignoring me?"

"Hm? There's nobody else, Tesseris. And nobody incapable of comprehending esoteric phenomena would ever be employed at this facility. That would be a complete waste of time and risk invalidating all our research."

"This facility... with only two other people in it? This very large facility with lots of machines and rooms?"

"Ah!" Knowledge beams. "I understand your confusion now! No, Tesseris, this facility wasn't designed to only host three people. Hermes and myself just happen to be the only survivors of the original contingent. All the other researchers and staff members are deceased. So, we are down to just myself, Hermes, and now you."

Deceased?!

Knowledge doesn't seem to notice my shock. She scratches her chin. "Perhaps I should look into hiring replacements? Everything has been running smoothly, so I haven't prioritized it, but as some point we will need to ramp our research output back up to full capacity."

"Enough about hiring! What do you mean everyone else is dead? Was there some accident? How did people die? When did this happen?"

"Oh, it wasn't an accident. They were all killed. Hermes and I almost died too. It was a very shocking incident." She says the words, but her expression is like someone trying to remember what they had for breakfast yesterday. "As for when... I think it was about a year and a half before you were created? My, time flies quickly, doesn't it?"

"Why would anyone do something like that?"

The pink-haired girl shrugs. "I can't say for certain. But I imagine not everyone is happy with the facility's mission. Not everyone wants us to succeed."

The mission o defeat alien invaders? Were there really alien sympathizers on this planet? "That... you mentioned other facilities were hostile. Is this what you meant?"

"Interdepartmental sabotage? No, we ruled that out."

'Ruled it out' as if it were an option worth considering? What even is this? More than that... it's uncanny how little she seems to react to the words coming out of her mouth. Is Knowledge in shock? Am I just carelessly poking at her trauma again and again like a complete asshole? "Are... are you okay? You said you almost died yourself."

"Oh, I'm fine, thank you for asking. I've long since recovered from my injuries."

"But... even so... I imagine it was frightening. And... all your coworkers were killed too. Wouldn't that be..." I trail off. Whatever superpowers I have, super therapist clearly isn't one of them.

"Traumatic? Perhaps." She agrees with another shrug. "The human brain is well evolved for self-preservation. And in-group socialization is a very important factor for the survival of the species as a whole. For the most part, you can generally expect a trauma response from well-socialized humans. I certainly experienced something to that end, yes." She nods. "But Tesseris, at a certain point, does an evolutionary reaction serve its purpose anymore? Is my life better for being afraid? Or sad? Does my deceased family benefit from displays of mourning? Is the world improved by allowing death and destruction to maintain its impact, to leave a scar beyond the damage it has already done?"

She smiles. It looks like a sad smile. "Really, I realized none of that is the case. The only response to a set back is to get back up again, until you are no longer able. Giving up at all... isn't that just making the set back permanent? Wouldn't that be the same as dying in its own way? This facility has its purpose. The men and women who founded it believed in its mission, and wanted to see where we could take it. Is there any better way to honor them than to follow through on their intentions, to ensure that their life's work persists beyond their lives? I certainly think so."

I swallow.

"So, no, Tesseris. I'm not traumatized. I'm doing my part for this facility, for the Division, and for all humanity, in continuing my research and fighting off alien incursions, just as I was before the staff of the facility was so drastically reduced. And I am happy to do so. I truly am."

Knowledge beams. "Really, I am ecstatic that I can keep working. And I am happy that you can be a part of my life's work, part of all our lives works. And I dearly hope that should I be killed, someone else will continue my mission just as I would."

Knowledge pauses and purses her lips. "Which really does mean I should see about hiring more faculty, just in case. Thanks for reminding me, Tesseris! It's usually Hermes who keeps track of these sorts of operational details."

"Um... don't mention it?" I really don't know what to say. I am overwhelmed by the certainty in Knowledge's proclamations. There is not a single iota of doubt in her.

Unlike me. I'm just a mess of doubt and fear.

"So... back to the previous topic," Knowledge says without missing a beat. "Are there any leisure activities you would like to engage in? I can come up with suggestions if you lack for ideas."

"Ah... suggestions would be nice, yes."