Chương 16: More questions than answers

We've decided to adopt a standard universal currency - credits, accessible through any interface, usable for any purchase, anywhere. The simplest solutions are usually the ones that last. - From the memoirs of Tuktuk Hansel, First Bank Premier The interface woke him an hour before his first class, which was enough time to do everything he needed and a little more.

His roommate was still asleep - different schedules, they had established last night - so Kara moved quietly through his morning routine and sat on his bed afterward ordering a T-shirt and jeans from the store, which arrived promptly and fit well enough. He was getting used to the drone delivery speed. Almost. He checked the map and headed for the School of Thermodynamics.

Up close in the morning light, the pyramid was different from the night version - less dramatic, the orange coral catching the ambient glow of the light streaming in from above. He went in, found the second floor, found the classroom, and chose a bench near the window farthest from the other students, who looked at him all at once, curious, trying to calibrate a masked face they had not seen before. He settled in and waited. More students filed in over the next few minutes.

The bench filled to two - the student beside him giving no indication of wanting conversation, which made two of them. The professor arrived. Middle-aged, dark-skinned, she moved like she had all the time in the world. Her voice, when she spoke, had a depth that produced attention without demanding it.

"Good morning. Last week was revision - focusing on foundations you already have from school. So." Her eyes found Kara directly, which was the kind of thing that happened when you arrived a week late and hoped it wouldn't.

"You haven't missed anything that matters. First semester is theory. If you need help, I'm in the faculty room on the fourth floor until six, most days. I'm Professor Troy." Every head in the room turned toward him. He nodded and said thank you and gave the window his full attention until the moment passed.

"Now." Professor Troy moved to the front of the room.

"Some of you may have wondered why this building is called the School of Thermodynamics rather than something more general. The short answer is that thermodynamics has become the most relevant lens through which we understand energy - and energy is what everything here runs on. Starting with the obvious: what powers the lights in this room? What's our primary energy source?"

"Geothermal, Professor Troy." A student near the front, confident, clearly having done this before.

"That's right, Krysta. Heat from within the Earth, extracted and converted. That's one of our focus areas this semester - how we get it, how we use it." She paused.

"The other focus area is one I expect most of you will find considerably more interesting. The energy we use to tier up. Where does it come from, how does the body process it, and why does it behave the way it does. Someone tell me what you know." Another student: "It's solar energy combined with other elements that the nanomachines use to help us break through our limits."

"That's the public version, yes. The other elements are planet-specific. On Earth: nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, compounds from the organisms around us and within us. The food we eat and the air we breathe sustain the nanobots - that's their baseline function, keeping the interface running. Tiering up requires something excess. Energy the nanobots don't have an existing use for. When you kill or absorb a mutated organism, you take in the converted energy it has accumulated.

This energy is called essence, and is unique to each planet. You can also accumulate this essence passively from the environment over time, but it would take pretty much an entire lifetime for a single tier up. There are other methods and nuances, but we won't go into that right now. The nanobots store this essence. You direct it through exercise - whichever attribute you train while the essence is stored, that's where the breakthrough occurs." She let this settle.

"Now. Some of you will have noticed that certain attributes are harder to advance than others. Why?" A beat of silence. Then: "Our traits?"

"Exactly. Odom, yes. Traits determine how efficiently certain attributes use the stored essence to break through. A trait oriented toward intelligence will find strength progression slower - the body isn't optimised for that conversion. The reverse is equally true. This is why knowing which attributes align with your trait is not optional - it's the difference between efficient progression and fighting your own biology." The room broke into conversation.

Kara could hear the energy in it - recognition, recalibration, the noise of people fitting something they had experienced to a framework they now had for it. He sat with the information quietly. Attributes were harder to advance depending on trait alignment. He turned this over and checked it against his own experience, which was the most direct data set available.

While he had chosen to focus on Dexterity and IQ, it was simply because he had been told it was better to focus on two attributes and not more than that. He had never had a problem advancing the others, as the first week on the island had proven. He had assumed that was normal. He had assumed everyone found it roughly equivalent. He looked at the window. Apparently not. He did not say anything to the student beside him, who sat frowning slightly, running some private calculation of his own.

He simply noted it and set it aside with the other things that told him something about himself, to be returned to later, when he had more of the picture. Professor Troy brought the room back to order and spent the rest of the class mapping the semester - the topics, the sequence, the way each piece connected to the ones before and after it. She taught the way people teach when they find the subject inexhaustibly interesting, which made it easy to pay attention.

By the end, Kara was looking forward to the rest of the course, which he had not expected to. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. He checked the map and headed for the School of Arts. Most people took Ghilim for a fool. He had understood this early and had spent considerable effort ensuring it remained the case.

A speech disability and apparent dyslexia were, in the right hands, a remarkably effective set of tools - people saw what they expected to see, filled in the gaps with the explanations most convenient to them, and stopped looking. He had learned this about human perception before he had the vocabulary for it, and had been applying it ever since. Three people had seen through it, to varying degrees.

The leader of the Freeks - who did an adequate job of pretending he hadn't, which meant Ghilim needed to be careful there. The man with the bull in the swamp, who had known his language without explanation. And his brother, who had seen through it inevitably, the way his brother saw through most things - less through dramatic insight than through a slow accumulation of evidence until the picture became undeniable. He thought about his brother often these days.

He thought about him the way you thought about a debt that had not been repaid and could not be until you found the person you owed it to. He had been seven years old when the ship came down. He remembered fire first. The scorching heat. He remembered the sounds of things breaking, the sequence of impacts that meant the ship was no longer a ship in any functional sense. And then stillness, the stillness that follows catastrophic noise. His father was on top of him.

He remembered this clearly, the way you remembered things that your body had processed before your mind caught up - the weight of him, deliberate and total, shielding his only son as much as he could. His face, when Ghilim turned to see it, was settled. He had done the one thing he needed to do, and it showed. His mother was a few metres away. He did not let himself look at that for too long, even now, years distant from the memory.

What he retained was her arms - the direction of them, reaching toward him across the distance she had not been able to close, and the fact that she had been reaching rather than shielding herself, which told him everything about the choice she had made in the moment she had it. He carried this. He would always carry it. People had come. Not long after - too soon, he would think later, replaying his memories.

He had heard them talking, had understood pieces of it from the human tongue his parents had taught him, which he had thought was an odd thing to teach a child on a ship that was not going to Earth. His father's last words: Hide yourself. They will come. He had hidden. Hours that felt a lot longer, the smell from the smoke, and the sounds of the people outside moving through it.

When they had gone and night had come, he had tried to hold himself still and found his body had other ideas about what stillness was possible after what had happened. He had tried to hide his scent, had tricks for hiding himself from eyes, but the hyenas that found him were not using their eyes and his tricks had limits. He had heard them. The hyena laughter, the sound they made as they moved - it had always struck him as a creature privately amused by the world's difficulties.

They were circling the tree he had pressed himself against, and he could measure the distance between them and him by sound alone, and the distance was closing. Then a boy had dropped from the tree above him. He had landed on the roots to add height, which had not added much, raised his hands to make himself look bigger, and had made sounds - loud, sudden, the sounds of something larger than it was. The boy had decided confidence was his only available tool, and was using all of it. The hyenas had startled.

Had looked. Had considered the calculation of a potentially dangerous unknown versus the certainty of easier meals nearby. They had gone. Even in death, his parents helped save his life. That was a morbid thought. The primary person responsible for saving him though was the young boy.

He and the boy had looked at each other in the dark, and the boy had said something in the human tongue that Ghilim had not fully understood but which had conveyed, through tone and expression and the fact of the boy still being there, that he was not alone. That was what he had understood. That was what had mattered. That boy had been four years old. He had been seven. That boy was the bravest person Ghilim had ever come across. He had watched, over the years that followed, as people underestimated his brother.

It had made him angry. Kara gave way to aggressors out of a disinclination to cause trouble for others, Ghilim knew, rather than out of fear - a quality that looked like weakness from the outside and was in fact a choice, which was different. He had used illusions to chase away the ones who pushed too hard, and later to cover the physical changes that drew unwanted attention, and had considered this a partial repayment of a debt that had not diminished. He had pushed Kara to train.

He had been certain of it - had seen the potential in his brother's trait clearly, having watched it operate for years at a fraction of its capacity, and had known that all it needed was the right pressure applied at the right time. Their parents had worried. Ghilim had reassured them, with the confidence that came from being certain and the culpability that came from being certain and wrong. Three years of silence.

The interface showed Kara alive, but unreachable, and no explanation he could find through any channel he had access to. He had tried. He had used the connections the University provided and had found nothing, and had sat with the guilt of having set something in motion and being unable to see where it had landed.

Then his own situation had collapsed, and the chase had begun, and somewhere in the chaos of the last several months the worry about Kara had compressed into something he carried underneath everything else - present, constant, waiting for the moment he had enough stability to address it properly. The Freeks had the best information network among organizations that would take him in, which were in limited supply at the moment. That was why he was here, association with criminals notwithstanding.

He was not naive about what it meant to be here, what it would mean to others if they knew. He had made the calculation and accepted the terms. If Kara was on Earth, he would find him, no matter what. He thought about his brother's face - the four-year-old version, standing on tree roots in the dark, making himself as large as possible, committed to it completely because he had decided the situation demanded it.

He thought about the person that face had grown into, whom he knew and loved and had sent into the ocean alone because he had been so certain of the outcome. He hoped Kara understood. He thought he probably would. His brother, whatever else he was, had never been someone who held things against the people he loved. That was either his greatest quality or his greatest vulnerability, and Ghilim had spent years being grateful for it while worrying it would someday cost him something he couldn't afford.

He supposed he would find out which, when he found him.