Chương 2: Thirty-Seven and Learning to Drink

Calder Tannerson · Age newborn Cal's mouth was working the milk down his throat in slow draws, and blue light was standing a foot from his face where nobody else could see it. I am drinking? When did I decide to drink? The pane hung at reading distance, close as a held book. It carried the same patient attention that had stepped through him in the fall. The woman who smelled of milk never broke her rhythm. His eyes unfocused and found the blue. An instructor's voice, second person, pitched at a recruit.

It named him by a name he did not have yet. I should not be able to read this. But I am. ～～～～～ THE ADMINISTRATOR ～～～～～ Calder Tannerson, you have made your first kill in BIFROST. The monster you faced was beyond you, and you eliminated it anyway. That is where heroes begin. Achievement...... First Kill, White Wyrm Experience Points Awarded...... +600, 000 Deduction, Off-World Weapon Used...... (150, 000) Experience Points Total...... 450, 000 ～～ THIS IS HOW HEROES ARE CREATED. ～～ He read it twice.

The second time the wrong things caught, and neither was the number. Calder Tannerson. Not a name my mother gave me. A name I was issued, like a rifle and a rank. Nobody Fucken asked. Bishop is my name. It will be on my headstone. Then the word under it. The ledger had a name for what he'd carried out the door, and it was not M9, not pistol, nothing from any armory he'd ever drawn from. Off-world. A quarter struck off for it. The pane did not move.

She shifted him against her shoulder, and it stayed exactly where it was, a foot from his face, patient. It comes when it has something to say. It stays until I am done with it. That is a notification, not a window. The kill itself read true. The last round had gone where he aimed it. Into the back of the dragon's mouth. Then the chewing… Is somebody, something keeping a ledger? Okay. Back up. Run it clean. I went out the door of a Herc over ice.

Somewhere between the jump and the ground the world quit making sense, and now there is text in my skull keeping score. Causes. He took hypoxia first and put it down. Oxygen starvation made the brain write a nice story to die inside. But it did not hand a man a working body from the inside out, and it did not last days. The drugs failed the same test, everyone he could name. None of it explained the woman holding him. He ran the whole system. Hands, spine, the small muscles that aimed an eye.

Every line came back dead, and the checking cost him what little he had. Light came through skin too thin to stop it. He could not turn his head out of it. Somebody built this. Some MK-Ultra bastard program the government swore it shut down twenty years back. Or did they? In the middle of that the memory arrived, no mercy in it. The white and the cold folding over him and through him, and not stopping where a man was supposed to stop. Every theory fails the same place. The math will not balance, same as the tank.

Which leaves the one door I will not walk through sober. That this is real. A grown fucking man in a body that cannot hold up its own head, on a world that keeps a ledger, and the ledger has my name. He lay with the facts not fitting and did not try to make them fit. Set it down. Don't solve it. You don't have the inputs. Something in here is watching, and it is taking notes too. He let the box go and dropped back into the body. Am I still drinking? Why…

His mouth was latched and pulling in slow steady draws, and it had been doing it the whole time he lay there arguing. Milk. I am an infant at a breast, why is my mouth doing this without my input. Something else came down with it. Thin as silt in river water, riding under the milk where the flow slowed, and it did not taste like anything. He set it aside. A mouth he did not control was the larger problem. A sudden chill ran through his unresponsive body, worse than the aurora. He did not thrash.

There was nothing to thrash with. A body this small. A mouth that feeds on its own. I cannot lift my own head. Whatever I am now, I am the thing that gets carried and fed and cannot say no. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. Heat climbed his face. His breath went ragged. His fists closed on nothing, shook, and held nothing, because there was nothing in a body this size to hold. He meant to roar. What came out was a wail. High, wet, breaking…

a newborn's whole vocabulary, and it went on without him.

"Shh, shh. I have you, love." Her hand spread across his whole back, and it covered most of him.

"That's a mad cry, that one, little one. Not a hungry one. You have opinions already." She is not wrong. The body went up. Not his doing. Two hands took him under the arms and lifted, and he came to rest against a shoulder that smelled of milk and woodsmoke. A wide hand settled on his back and patted, slow and certain. Burping him. The pull at his mouth was gone. What he had instead was the shoulder, the steady palm, and a heartbeat the size of the room, thudding through everything.

Then she shifted him, and her face came into the one distance his new eyes could hold. He had spent a career reading faces for the truth under them. Hazel-green, and the outer corners of them lifted, a half-degree off true. Dark hair half over the points of her ears, and the points were small enough that a man could talk himself out of them. That is close to a human face. But, It's not. Pointy ears… and, beautiful… The burp came up on its own, and it brought the taste with it.

Curdled milk, sour and turned, sitting at the back of a throat he did not command. Under the sour was the other thing again, the one that was not milk. I need a whiskey. A thirty-seven-year-old man's answer to a problem no whiskey on any world was going to reach. Then the body let go at the other end. Warm, sudden, entirely without him. He did not decide it any more than he had decided to drink. The plumbing ran on its own schedule and the schedule was now.

Twenty years of holding a face under fire, and the body voided when the body was ready and asked him nothing.

"Oh, sugar." No dismay in it at all, just a small laugh somewhere above him. The sound of a woman who had done this a thousand times and would do it a thousand more. Hands moved him, competent and quick, a cloth and warm water and no hurry in any of it.

"There. Better out than in. You and me both, most days."

"Your father held you for the first time and just stood there, sweetheart. Didn't move. I said sit down before you drop him and he said he was fine. He was not fine. He was sweating." She laughed at the memory of it, out loud, alone in the room, and did not seem to need anyone to laugh with her.

"Are you going to do that to somebody one day? Stand there sweating?" She kept talking the whole while, low and constant, telling him what she was doing as though he could follow it. He went looking for the other thing while she worked, the one that was not milk, and found it pooled where it had settled. He could not move it. He could feel it, and feeling it was the only thing in the room that belonged to him. She has no idea I can.

She set his mouth to the breast again, and the slow draws started up on somebody else's decision. Thirty-seven years old, and I just learned to fucking drink. Outstanding. Two tabs, three combat rotations, a degree in how dirt fails, and the headline accomplishment of the day is latching on like a goddamn lamprey. Somebody pin a medal on the spit-up. Put it in the after-action. Subject located the tit, mission complete, all objectives green. Then the other thing did something he had not ordered and did not expect.

The milk stopped where milk was supposed to stop. This did not. It went past the throat, past the stomach, into a place he had no name for and felt anyway, and pooled there. Two different things are coming down this pipe. One of them is food. The other was not food. He had felt this before. Once standing next to a woman and a chaplain. And once with his hand flat on her belly, waiting on someone who never arrived. It found the place where that feeling used to sit and pressed.

Pressure climbed against the seat, slow. The seat gave. Closed vessel. Pressure built. The seal was going to give. He could feel it going, and he had a choice about one thing only, whether to brace against it or open to it. He opened. The seal popped. On the far side sat a reservoir he could feel the brim of, banked. The milk fed the body. The other thing fed this. He could not lift a hand. But he turned inward toward the valve, and the valve turned with him. Something had taken his order.

And something answered back. The instant the valve turned, the same voice returned, warm where the room was cold. ～～～～～ THE ADMINISTRATOR ～～～～～ You found your first dantian on your own, before you can hold up your head. Good. What flows in has somewhere to go now. Heart Dantian...... opened (First of Seven) Capacity...... 1 of 25 ～～ THIS IS HOW HEROES ARE CREATED. ～～ Mana. A word for the thing that was not milk, handed over by whatever had renamed him. The well was where it went. And something watched me find it.

Two seconds, maybe less. The watching never stops. The talking does. Here it comes. Lower gut this time, the whole length of it tightening down. I have shit myself exactly zero times since I was two years old and I am about to break the streak. No. Not this one. He clamped down on it, everything below the belt, breath held. The body overran him in about four seconds. Motherfucker. The rage came up clean and useless.

A field-grade officer, and he had just lost a stand-up fight to his own bowels, and he could not so much as reach down and fix it. He could not do one fucking thing but lie in it and wait to be carried. The bitter laugh came up behind the rage. The body had one sound for all of it and it made that one, and he rode it out with his contempt intact underneath. When the crying wore itself out he went looking for the one thing in this body that was not the body.

A system he could not read was a system that could kill him. He pushed the current and read the shape of it. A holding tank at the chest, and set into the wall of it, a shut valve. He worked at it with what he had and it did not so much as shift. Fine. So that's the job. Something to open, and no idea yet what would open it. The whole layout stood plain in his mind, drawn and labeled. He set that beside the other things he could not explain and went back to the plumbing.

There was almost nothing in the tank to work with. One bead of the current, the whole of what he had. He moved it anyway. He walked it up the inside of the tank to the shut valve and held it there, drew it back down to the floor, ran it a slow circuit. It cost him twice. The bead came back thinner than it left. And his own body went heavy behind it. He was breathing like he'd run a mile, the small chest going quick and shallow. Wrung out by an effort that had not moved a muscle in him.

Then he checked the tank, because a man who spends something checks what is left. It read higher than before he started. I spent it. There is more of it. He lay against her in the dark with an accounting that would not close. Somebody is paying into this account, and it is not me. Above him, the humming he had not noticed until it stopped. Her hand came off his back and went to the back of her ear, and she went still.

Then it came back down and settled flat on his chest, her hand arriving first, ahead of anything that mattered.

"Something just shifted," she said to nobody. Then she looked down at him and stayed there. Eyes loose. Face slack. He went stupid as fast as he had ever done anything. He did not know yet whether it had been fast enough, or what she had just felt him do.