Chương 3: I Choose You, Violence

Being a heterotroph meant the world suddenly had texture. Before the evolution, Andy's perception of the surrounding water had been a chemical smear: "food over this way" and "no food over there" and occasionally, the more urgent, "Danger. Large danger. Move." It was the equivalent to navigating an entire city by smell alone–except he was the size of a grain of sand in a vast ocean. After his evolution, that smear sharpened.

[ACTIVE HUNTING] upgraded his senses from navigating through pitch blackness to a pale light beginning to illuminate his surroundings. He still couldn't 'see' per se but he could now differentiate between types of organic compounds. He now sensed: "sugars this way"; "lipids over here in a cluster." And more importantly, he could detect other living cells, their metabolic exhaust trailing behind them like footprints in the snow. And for the first time in his life (this or the last) he could track things.

Andrew Snodgrass, veterinary technician, animal lover, the kind of man who once wrecked his car rather than hit a frog could now hunt organisms. His directed, intentional, predatory focus existed for the sole purpose of stabbing things with his horn and eating whatever leaked out. He seemed to be able to maintain cognitive dissonance because the things he was hunting certainly didn't possess consciousness or the ability to suffer. They were cells. Biological machinery operating on auto pilot.

And Andy did everything he could to ignore the fact that he too, was one of those cells. And so, like a famous coffee drinking dog in a fire, "This is fine" became Andy's motto.

"And here," Andy narrated to absolutely no one, in the private theatre of his own mind, "we observe the heterotrophic eukaryote in its natural habitat. Fresh from evolution he bristles with new abilities. Note the enhanced chemoreception, the pseudopods, and the air of menace resonating from a cell with a very pointy hat." David Attenborough, or the memory of David Attenborough filtered through what remained of the neural pathways of a deceased veterinary technician now piloting a microscopic predator.

The narration provided a gravitas that the subject matter absolutely did not warrant.

"The predator has identified a cluster of unsuspecting prokaryotes gathered near a thermal vent. They are fat, and slow. They have made the critical error of not developing a horn, which, as we have now established, is the single most important thing a cell can grow." He paused, because even in his own head that sounded cringe-worthy. He extended a pseudopod, which he could push outward giving the appearance of some kind of snowflake or spiky ball. The pseudopods were weird.

Not unpleasant, just completely different sensationally than anything he'd previously had experienced, and had no frame of reference to which he could compare. With them he could anchor himself, change direction, and grab onto things (mostly food) which made him a significantly more efficient predator than the blob he had been previously. He crept (drifted slowly but internally channeling a slasher from 90s movies) toward a cluster of cells, horn-first.

While he was now covered in hard pseudopod extensions his horn was still the largest of these by quite a margin.

"The horny eukaryote," he narrated, because the jokes sustained him even without an audience, "stalks its prey. Note the horn, extended at the leading edge of the cellular body. One-tenth the length of its total body. In human terms, this would be the equivalent to a man wielding a horn roughly the length and girth of his forearm. In eukaryotic terms, it is devastating. In phallic terms, it is… well… moving on." He struck. Pop That sound. That perfect, satisfying little pop of membrane giving way.

He'd been feeling it since his first kill and it hadn't gotten old. The cell burst open, its contents rushing out in a warm gush of proteins and nutrients that enhanced absorption processed with fifty percent greater efficiency than before. More nutrients per kill. Faster energy. More hunting. More XP. Andy was becoming a perpetual motion machine of consumption and violence, a feedback loop that would have horrified his human self and delighted his gamer self. At this point, those were the same person.

[ORGANISM DEFEATED: PROKARYOTE (NUTRIENT-RICH)] [XP GAINED: +4] Four XP. One more than the standard kill reward. The nutrient-rich tag must have contributed a bonus, which meant the targets varied in value, which meant that Andy needed to start categorizing his prey by XP yield, which meant he was, god help him, developing a loot table for pond organisms. He moved to the next target. Pop. Then the next. Pop. Each kill was taking less time than the last.

Not because the targets were getting easier, but because Andy was getting better at the sequence of it: approach, stabilize, thrust, absorb, locate next target. He was doing more than developing technique, he was developing style. He'd begun naming the moves. This was perhaps the most telling sign that Andrew Snodgrass remained fundamentally, incurably, a nerd. He named his combat techniques the way a kid names backyard attacks.

Except, Andy wasn't beating up imaginary bad guys and the backyard was really an infinitely large body of warm water. They also went splorch pop when he punctured them. The basic frontal thrust, horn leading, maximum velocity, was "The Snodgrass Special" (He was aware of how it sounded, and since no one else was around, he did not care.) The angled approach, coming at a target from above to pierce the thinner dorsal membrane was "They'll Never See It Coming" The pseudopod achor and pivot, where he changed directions last minute was called, "The Fulcrum," which was probably the coolest of his moves names. The last was the attack from behind which Andy named "The Proctologist," which he then immediately felt guilty about and renamed "The Ambush" because even alone with nothing but his horn to keep him company, a man has his limits.

[XP: 23/100] He hunted. He ate. He grew. Andy was learning that the water where he lived was not a static environment. He'd assumed warm water would always be warm, the nutrients would keep flowing, the chemical gradients would continue to point him toward food. He had assumed, essentially, that this tutorial zone would stay tutorial-shaped until he'd grown strong enough to move onto the next area. He was wrong.

It started as a subtle cooling at the edges of his awareness, the way a room grows darker in the evening until finally someone notices and turns on the light. Warm water began to cool from the surface downward, and that cooling came with consequences. Everything slowed. Active predators became sluggish, sluggish cells became inert and previously inert cells died. Membranes losing integrity, and spilling their contents into the water in a slow cold hemorrhage.

Not with a pop like when Andy killed them but more of a sad pfsssh, like a balloon three days after the party was over. There was a mass extinction event happening all around him, and not a single scream to be heard. [ENVIRONMENTAL EVENT: THERMAL SHIFT (COOLING)] [AMBIENT TEMPERATURE DECREASING] [WARNING: METABOLIC EFFICIENCY REDUCED AT LOWER TEMPERATURES] [SURVIVAL ADVISORY: SEEK THERMAL REFUGE]"What?!" Andy shouted (figuratively as he still didn't have a mouth) at the System.

"What does that mean?" [RUN.] Cold reached for him, his metabolism indeed beginning to lag, and for a panicked moment he froze. He was back in the amoeba encounter, the same full-bodied alarm screaming move, move, move and the overwhelming urge to freeze. Thermal refuge. The System had told him to seek thermal refuge. The surface was cooling which meant it was going to be warmer deeper. Down toward the thermal vents.

He'd hunted near them before, but had gone after larger prey closer to the surface as of late, and why commute when the larger gains were right here? He broke out of his paralyzing fear and dove. Or rather, sank with intention, dragging himself downward with his pseudopods. He went past the dead and dying cells, past the slowing predators, past the layer where the temperature went from comfortable to uncomfortable. Sediment was warmer down here.

Heat radiated from the thermal vents that felt, against his cooled membrane like climbing into a warm tub after getting caught in a spring rain. He nestled into the soft silt between two mineral deposits. He kept his horn pointed outward (defensively, the way he'd slept with the lights on after watching a scary movie,) and waited. [THERMAL REFUGE: LOCATED] Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

[METABOLIC EFFICIENCY: STABILIZING] The cold continued above him distantly. It reminded him of winter coming in through a window. Up there, everything was dying. Millions of cells bursting in the cold. A vast, silent catastrophe. Pfsssh. Pfsssh. Pfsssh. This had to be the saddest sound Andy had never actually heard, happening everywhere at once. He stayed there for what felt like a long time, telling himself stories, remembering what his first life had been.

The thermal vents pulsed, The sediment was gritty but warm. Occasionally a dead or dying cell would drift down from above and Andy absorbed it, because waste not want not, and because the XP still counted. [SURVIVAL BONUS: +8 XP] [XP: 58/100] [ENVIRONMENTAL EVENT SURVIVED: THERMAL SHIFT] [NOTE: ORGANISMS THAT SURVIVE ENVIRONMENTAL EVENTS GAIN ENHANCED ADAPTABILITY. YOUR THERMAL TOLERANCE HAS INCREASED.] Eight XP for existing. It felt generous.

The system was rewarding him not just for killing but still for existing. A game that paid you for not dying was a game worth playing and Andy was, in spite of everything, still very interested in living.

"Hey System." Andy began. He waited for a response and continued anyway when one didn't come.

"How long have I been down here?" [NaN]"What does that mean?" [UNKNOWN]"How is that unknown?" [UNKNOWN]"Helpful." [THE SYSTEM DOESN'T EXIST TO BE HELPFUL]"Well then why does the system exist?" [WHY DO YOU EXIST?] Andy considered this. It felt like an attack. Why were his feelings hurt? Either way, he had had enough of talking to the system today. When the cold receded (slowly, so very slowly) Andy emerged from the sediment and found a changed home. Everything had been pruned. Life was sparse.

Survivors were scattered and disoriented. Chemical signatures of the dead were forming a nutrient haze that would feed a new generation who would never know they were floating in the graves of billions. The great circle of microscopic life. In the quiet that followed the extinction event, the eerie chemical stillness, Andy thought about Megan. The thought arrived uninvited. Like suddenly thinking about your late grandma when eating a cookie. Seemingly random and without warning.

He pictured Megan standing in her apartment, checking her phone. That fire emoji sent, without a door being knocked on. Her evening unfolding wildly differently than she'd planned. She would have called (the phone ringing right next to the condom, both equally useless). At some point someone would have told her: Andy Snodgrass, the guy she'd been seeing for three months, the careful, sweet, very awkward guy, who always showed up exactly when he said he would, was dead. Hit by a truck. Everhard and Tenth.

It had run the red. Had she cried? Had she been angry? He wondered how long she stood by her window and thought, "where are you?" and been completely unaware that the answer was 'dying' and 'dead' and then somehow 'a single-celled organism somewhere far from home who'd grown a horn to survive.' It pulled at him. Sadness, grief and anger flooded through in waves making it almost impossible to stay adrift. So, he let himself feel it.

He acknowledged the loss was real and that the person he had been was gone in every way that mattered. Then he stopped. Not because it didn't matter anymore. Not because he wasn't still sad. He stopped because an amoeba was taking advantage of his flittering around and it was time to pull 'The Fulcrum' and surprise turn the tables. Pop Andrew Snodgrass would not die of self-pity. He'd already died to a truck and that was plenty of dying.

He absorbed the nutrients, turned his spike to the nearest living cell and resumed The Loop. [XP: 71/100] Hunting was good in the aftermath. Fewer predators meant less competition, and the nutrient haze from the dead had created a microscopic buffet attracting survivors. The things that had survived, however, were the things worthy of having survived. Which meant: tough and smart. Andy was one of those things, but then again so was his prey. Kills got harder. Less pop and more crunch.

And still, everything was going well, right up until the moment it wasn't. He sensed it at the edge of his perception and classified it as irrelevant. A plant on the basalt shard near the sediment floor, pale and feathery. Dead matter, maybe. Either way, not food. He was moving parallel to it tracking a prokaryote in the periphery when something changed. The water which was steady now had a directional shift coming from and pulling toward the plant. The prokaryote he had been hunting vanished from his senses.

Whisked away in the current of the plant, along with everything else in Andy's immediate vicinity. He was getting pulled in closer, and so he directed his attention to the structure. It had arms. Quite a lot of arms, all fanned out in a circle, and horrifyingly each arm was fringed with more arms on its entire outer edge. Each of those arms too were fringed with what Andy could only describe as fingers. The whole arrangement was fractal, enormous and ever so slowly flexing each arm rhythmically around the circle.

The current wasn't coming from the creature, it was the creature drawing water toward itself from all directions through the concerted motion of tens of thousands of tiny, mucus coated fingers. Andy's [Active Hunting] catalogued what the fingers were doing. They were grabbing dead cells, dissolved organic material, prokaryotes, and very soon Andy himself. He was drifting straight at the arm at a rate he didn't care for one bit. He planted a pseudopod in the sediment and tried to move backwards.

The current pulled harder.

"This," he narrated, rather calmly (he hadn't quite grasped the severity of his situation), "is a new thing." He anchored another pseudopod and attempted to stop his momentum altogether. The current matched his strength. He was now only a dozen or so body lengths from the reaching arms. As Andy realized he was losing the running battle, he decided that violence was once again best suited for this job.

Without taking too much time to talk himself out of it Andy dove at the organism directly under its arm and wedged himself down into the silt with his pseudopods. The arm tip arrived.

"And here," Andy narrated, "we see the horny eukaryote attempting to take on some kind of giant monster." The arm didn't grab him. That had been what he was expecting, instead it passed through the water and around him. The outmost arms and fingers brushed against him. They were coated, he noticed, now that he was closer (and stuck in them) with countless fine hairs that were coated in some kind of biological adhesive. The hairs stuck to Andy, who dug his pseudopods as deep into the silt as he could.

If he had a heart it would be bursting out of his chest with the dread he was feeling. Instead chemical signatures throughout his entire being were sending alarm bells. Danger danger danger.

"The heterotrophic organism doesn't appear to be able to win this one. It appears as though it'd made the critical strategic error of getting caught in the biological glue trap of a filter feeder approximately eight hundred times larger than itself. Notice however the filter feeders lack of malice, lack of awareness. Note that this is not a hunting predator, it is simply licking the water and the heterotroph is now a part of that water." He drove his horn into the arm that was holding him. Crunch.

This wasn't the clean pop of a cell membrane giving way. It felt like he would expect driving his horn through a wet rope would feel like something thick, and fibrous. The being, to Andy's disappointment, did not die or pop open, He did manage to tear through the hairs that were holding him. Six other hairs attached to Andy and he tore through those too, one at a time, horn punching in and twisting. The arm lifted him up out of the sediment, carrying him inward.

The arm had an ambulacral groove, which essentially was a channel running along it's underside, and he was now in it. The groove had created it's own current like kids making a whirlpool in a swimming pool, and Andy was now the forgotten pool toy being sucked into the center. Only this center had a mouth, and Andy was about to be the food. Andy turned, he stopped trying to get out and instead planted his horn deep into the groove and held tight.

"The predator," He continued narrating, "has made a miscalculation." The current pushed at him but he held steady in place in a moving river. His entire cellular structure was vibrating in the strain of it. [CELLULAR WALL INTEGRITY 95%] He thrust in deeper all the way to the base of his horn, he twisted, and pulled. The thin groove tissue tearing. Distress chemicals flooded the local area, a biological alarm that the creature had no brain to receive but that its distributed nervous system absolutely noticed.

[CELLULAR WALL INTEGRITY 90%] The arm twitched and Andy used that momentum along with his pseudopods to anchor and push. He repeated this attack over and over until he'd moved almost seven times his own length. He was shaking with exertion and exhaustion but he couldn't give up now. The arm settled down on the sediment with a thud. Andy used the opportunity to jam his horn in again even lower this time, tear, twist, push. He was closer now to the mouth. Lodged in the center disc.

The tissue was different here: thicker, denser, a lot of metabolic signatures. He drove in again as deep as he could go. Pseudopods pulling him in deeper and for a moment, Andy was too afraid to move. He'd gotten it wrong. This wasn't where the central nervous system was, he was going to die. Again. Then the organism discovered it had a problem. Every arm snapped inward simultaneously, a full body contraction so fast that Andy had zero time to do anything but experience it.

[CELLULAR WALL INTEGRITY 60%] What happened next Andy would later name the eukary-a-pult. He was being compressed from all directions and then when he thought he was going to burst the arms flung open shooting every foreign object in every groove outward in a chemical laced microbiology sized tsunami. He flew further than he'd ever travelled, spinning and bumping off of other cells and particles as he went, some bursting on impact.

When he finally stopped moving and reoriented himself he didn't even have the stamina left to continue his one man monologue of his own nature documentary. [CELLULAR WALL INTEGRITY 30%] [ORGANISM DAMAGED: CRINOID. MEMBRANE BREACH: CENTRAL DISC. COMBAT STATUS: FORCED RETREAT.] [XP GAINED: +30] [PROKARYOTE DEFEATED] [XP GAINED: +1] [AMOEBA DEFEATED] [XP GAINED: + 2] [PROKARYOTE DEFEATED] [XP GAINED: +1] [EUKARYOTE DEFEATED] [XP GAINED: +2] [SURVIVAL BONUS: +5 XP] [XP: 113/100] [ABILITY SELECTION AVAILABLE] [PLEASE CHOOSE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING:] [SILICA REINFORCEMENT: SILICA LATTICES FORTIFY YOUR MEMBRANE AND PSEUDOPODS] [ELECTRORECEPTION: YOU CAN SENSE THE BIOELECTRICAL IMPULSES OF NEARBY LIFEFORMS] [RAPID PSEUDOPOD EXTENSION: YOUR PSEUDOPODS CAN STRIKE OUTWARD WITH EXPLOSIVE SPEED AND ADHESIVE FORCE–BASICALLY STICKY TENTACLES] Andy imagined himself blinking several times in surprise at his ability selection.

Was The System really giving him the option of sticky tentacles?! Andy chose the sticky tentacles… because of course he did. [XP: 13/200] [NEXT MILESTONE: TIER EVOLUTION]"Hey System," Andy started after beginning to get used to his new ability.

"Did we just switch genres into a Hentai?" After realizing the System wasn't going to respond to this question Andy gave up and prepared for the long grind ahead of him. But first, he needed some rest and to heal. His cellular wall integrity was at 30% and he was unfamiliar with this part of the water. He buried himself down into the sediment horn out and defensive and decided to have himself a nice, long nap.