Descend- Seeing Stars

by Sean Oswald

  They had escorted him into one of the labs and Trudi had insisted on riding on his back with her hands over his eyes.

  “You realize, I can just scan everything in here, right?” Jay asked.

  “Yeah, but where’s the fun in that? Don’t you want some wonder and excitement in your life?” ,Trudi replied.

  Huong laughed and said, “Oh he gets plenty of excitement in his life. I make sure of that.”

  He could feel the buzz of communication going between his fuses with that. They all seemed to think that teasing him about sex was still going to make him blush. He was long past that, but it entertained them so he would go along with it at times. Right now, though he simply wanted to see what they were so excited to show him.

  When they got to the lab table, Trudi pulled back her hands and he looked down to see a spill of what looked like a gray metal sludge on the table. It was maybe a four-inch circle. There was nothing else on the table. His confusion must have come through their bond because Nalani laughed and said, “I told you he wouldn’t be impressed. You are gonna have to give him a demonstration.”

  Trying to salvage the day and prevent any hurt feelings Jay said, “Before that why don’t you tell me what I’m looking at.”

  Trudi said, “We have all had a hand in working on this. I’m calling it nanium. It is a new metallic alloy composed of microscopic, little machines called nanites.”

  “I know what nanites are. Remember, I was a nerd back on Earth,” Jay said before asking, “So it can be programmed to take different shapes and things like that right?”

  Trudi said, “Something like that.”

  “Then why have them be just a puddle on the table?”

  “That is just their inert state. We haven’t been able to create very many of them yet, only a few hundred million. There are still some problems with their replication process, and it takes a huge amount of effort from Veronica, Ava, and some of the others to introduce the processing potential into each new batch. Ava is always busy with different projects so this is all we have been able to produce so far,” Huong explained.

  “Just show him, or I will,” Nalani said. She was usually fairly quiet so Jay realized she must be excited to be discussing it that much.

  Trudi just held out her hand and what looked like liquid metal moved in a stream up off the table and onto her hand. There it formed a glove that fit perfectly over her hand and spread all the way up her arm. She looked at him and said, “See.”

  “I do see, but I already know you have metalmancy. Remember I got the skill from you when we fused,” Jay replied.

  “Except she didn’t use metalmancy,” Sofia said from behind.

  Jay must have gotten a confused look on his face because his response elicited smiles from the girls. “How did she make it move then?”

  Trudi said, “That is what is so cool about it. The nanites that make up this nanium have been programmed to obey me. They are responding to my psychic signature. Any of us could do this once we know how to and if we are approved users of the batch of nanium in question. We can set it so that anyone can do it or only a single individual.”

  Nalani added, “It just has to be determined when the batch is made.”

  Jay watched as Trudi reshaped the nanium from a sleeve into a gun on her arm and then watched as she fired a blast of energy out of it straight into the wall. It wasn’t overwhelming but still impressive how it had changed in a second.

  “Nanium is an amazing conductor of PSI. So, with practice you can learn to funnel energy into it. Imagine if we could make body armor out of nanium or ships or buildings, really anything,” Huong said.

  “Okay, I take it all back. This is amazing. How soon can you make more?” Jay asked excitedly.

  “We don’t know yet, but we wanted to show you as soon as we had enough to demonstrate with,” Trudi said.

  After that they had talked about applications for a while but then Jay was called off to yet another one of his many training sessions. His mind however was abuzz with the possibilities for this new creation.

  Despite this development they had not yet managed to create what they were calling fused technology. It was one of those things he wasn’t sure about. He didn’t want to be turned into some kinda cyborg. It was already enough that he had an implant in his head. But then again, he wasn’t going to turn down anything that might make his people safe.

  It was for that reason that he allowed the girls to keep practicing fusion. Pretty much all but the newest of his fuses could do it now, although they still hadn’t been able to get more than three of them at a time. As they gained power from the further fusions, they were able to extend it out to five minutes now.

  He worried that this would cause more of them to be put in harm's way. On the other hand, it did make them stronger even if only for a limited time. He did chuckle though because it wasn’t like he could have actually stopped them from practicing short of locking them in their own little Tempus Fugit fields, and they were part of him. He could sooner cut off his own hand than willingly harm one of them.

  The fusions had caused their own set of problems though. He fused with one more girl each day. Rather than just working down their original list he decided it was too important and he needed to fuse with the right people. CeeCee and Trudi had made sense as the leaders of the other clusters, but now it needed to be about people he liked and powers he needed. It had to be in that order, people over powers though.

  So, while still trying to match them up to stats that would benefit them, he pushed for and got the girls he wanted. Emma was first since Awareness was the next stat. If the training exercise had taught him anything it was that he had the least resistance to psychic attacks. Fortunately, she had a perfect ability for that, Intellect Fortress and passed it on to not only him but everyone else. It was also nice, because Emma had been with them from the very beginning and he felt extremely comfortable with her.

  Next was Trudi, both because of her role as a leader in one of the new clusters that had merged with them and because Kinesis was the next stat up. Her Kinesis swelled from less than a hundred to almost eight thousand just by fusing with him. And her Metalmancy was a unique skill that allowed her to control and manipulate metal in almost any form.

  Unlike pyrokinesis, she couldn’t create metal out of nothing, so that was a limitation, but when surrounded by the nearly indestructible A’snkarnt metals, she was a force to be reckoned with. Previously she didn’t have the raw power to manipulate much of it but that all changed with the fusion. It was definitely an ability that he was glad to add to himself and all the other fuses.

  Next under Durability came Kayla. She had started off on such a rocky footing with him, but he felt very protective of her now. She was always one of the first to throw herself into battle and as a result was always in danger.

  For her part, Kayla had come to worship the ground that Jay walked on. He could see in her something like Meikiyo had felt at first. He was a savior to her, risking himself repeatedly to save her and she would do anything for him. Her fusion to him would change that as she gained almost ten thousand Durability and would be much better able to stand up for herself now.

  Just as with most of the other new fuses, he didn’t feel anything even close to being in love with them, but he liked them all and could see things developing in the future. She didn’t really have any abilities that he needed but she passed on Infravision to him and Combat Reflexes to the rest of fuses. Some already had something like that but for the rest it was an important upgrade that would make him sleep better.

  Following Kayla was Formation and Jay had the perfect girl for this. This was again more about the person than the skill. He might not be in love with Martina with his big head or his heart, but his little head surely was in love with her. She had magical hips and still could drive him crazy just by the way that she walked.

  She passed on to all of them her ability to make illusions. This led to an endless set of game
s over the past couple of days as all of the fuses tried to play tricks on him or on each other. He didn’t mind, much, because it was good practice for a skill and good practice for mental resistance too.

  When Metabolism came back around, he couldn’t think of anyone better than Sora to add to the group. Sure, they already had Huong’s healing ability, but Sora’s was different. Whereas Huong promoted health in the body and caused it to regrow itself, Sora had the ability to manipulate and even grow flesh. There were a few applications to the skill that seemed gruesome but as a healing skill it helped round them all out.

  Each of the fusions had a cumulatively larger impact as his stats kept increasing. By the end all of his fuses had over fifteen thousand in total stats, which would have made them monstrously powerful a few days ago. In fact, compared to the non-fuses they were clearly in a completely different league.

  Yet the changes were even bigger for him. Each of his stats now sat at almost fifteen thousand up to almost twenty thousand. Just as the fuses started to have less and less in common with the rest of Team Jay, so he started to feel less and less in common with the humans around him.

  Jay really tried to fight it, but on the other hand he had to embrace it. He needed to be a veritable god if he were going to win this and so he felt he could be excused for a bit of a god complex. The thing was that it just made him feel isolated and alone. It was a particularly good reason to be thankful for the connection provided through the fusion. Equally, he could always rely upon his wives to burst his bubble if they thought his head was getting too big.

  In all of the practice the one skill that he had not used at all was Scarlett’s Duplication skill. He had asked all the other fuses to refrain from it too, and so far, they had agreed. Jay still had all the same questions about whether a duplicate who split from them would be fused to him. The thing he stressed was that if they could come up with a way to merge the duplicates back together through some type of true and permanent fusion then it would be a boon for them all.

  He was more than a little worried about creating variants of himself. They might develop in a different direction. If they all survived this, he didn’t want to ponder how different they might become over a thousand years. The idea of having to go to war against another version of himself was enough to keep him from exploring this, for now.

  As he thought back over the past few days the other thing that stuck out to him was the self-refining he had done. Jay had reached a point where he wasn’t able to make any further physical changes. He still felt there was a way to convert his body to running solely on PSI. Maybe he could even make it, so he didn’t have internal organs in the same way he did now. That would definitely limit his vulnerabilities.

  However, he had to be honest with himself. He didn’t yet understand how his body worked, at least not well enough to risk trying to replace his organs. It was that very reason that he wasn’t tampering with his brain, but then again that wasn’t entirely true either.

  He didn’t try to alter how it worked but only enhanced how it worked. Normally, new neural pathways didn’t form past childhood, but he had created some. Jay had previously increased the number of neurons in his brain, so he built upon that. He was able to double, quadruple and then finally reach a point where his brain had more than twenty times as many neurons as before.

  Then he worked to create more efficient pathways. The real issue for him was twofold. First, he absolutely needed to be able to react more quickly. His speed was at a point now where when he ran, he was going over one point six million miles per hour at max speed. That number just sounded ridiculous, and it was, but the more significant number to him was that in a single second he could cross more than four hundred and fifty mile now at top speed.

  While his reactions were increased in part by his skills, there was simply no room for error at speeds like that. He could sheer off an arm, splatter another person, or rupture a hole in their ship if he weren’t exactly precise. That of course required more than just reaction time. It also required that he be able to absorb and process all the information that his various senses brought in.

  He now had Life Sense, Telepathic Sense, PSI Sight, Infravision, and Precognitive abilities all feeding him information. It was vital that he make the most of that information. Further, his Hyper Accuracy skill from Charlotte allowed him to make precise movements and refined the information that his senses brought to him, but it was more than that.

  Sometimes the flow of information into his brain was just overwhelming. Since he had combined all the sensory skills into one and their level had been trained up to over fifty-six hundred, he felt like he was constantly detecting everything around him. He knew the location of every living thing around him at all times and had to throttle that flow of energy so that it didn’t drown him.

  His PSI Sight was rolled into there and was always lit up now too. He could see the energy building, cycling, and pouring out of each of the evolved humans. The fuses were almost too bright to look at if he didn’t shade the sense.

  As for himself, he felt waves of unused PSI spread out into the universe from him every second. His reservoir was so large now that he never used it up and the power had to go somewhere. What happened to it out in the universe or what effect it had on other things it encountered he could only wonder at for now.

  The perk he had gotten when he crossed the ninth threshold helped some but the modifications he made with the newly formed neural pathways helped even more. A part of his mind was not partitioned off permanently for processing data from his senses. He needed to work to expand it but wanted to take it slowly. Always a good idea to work slowly when modifying your own brain.

  Eventually, he believed that with enough skill increases and enough processing power his precognitive sense could allow him to see multiple possible timelines around him and weigh the relative probability of various outcomes. He was still not there yet but more fusions were still to come, and they would continue to push him to that point. He just needed time to adjust to the partitioning he had already done.

  Besides tinkering with his brain, he had worked to combine more of his skills. He had rolled Intellect Fortress into his Telepathic Bonding Mastery. Then as he thought about it, he realized that Imposing Will was just another telepathic ability, so why not combine it too. Thus, was born his new skill: Simple Telepathic Mastery.

  He was also able to combine Evolved Kinetic Manipulation and Mass Control into Kinetic Manipulation Mastery. The key there was understanding that in manipulating the way the mass of an object was affected he wasn’t actually adding or subtracting mass, he was increasing or decreasing the way that mass was acted upon by gravity. That was another form of kinetic force as he understood it and so those skills were combined.

  He had already combined Infravision from Kayla into his Sensory Precision Mastery. The illusions he got from Martina combined with Veil from Daphne to create Veil of Illusions. Sora’s Flesh Manipulation simply got rolled into Genesis Modification Mastery, and why not. That skill already combined his Body Modification and Huong’s healing. This would just add more versatility to the skill.

  The final skill combination wasn’t obvious to him at first, but in long periods of refinement he had excess mental space to work on problems like this so he kept looking for more connections that could be made between skills. Eventually he thought about Psionic Teleportation and Phase Burst.

  As he understood it at first Psionic Teleportation was like willing yourself to stop being in one location and instead be in a different one. It was instantaneous yet, there had to be some means of moving from one location to the other. It just didn’t make sense to him that he was warping the entire universe with that one skill, certainly not for a couple hundred PSI points.

  Then he realized that he must be moving through some different plane of existence. Perhaps a plane of thought. Phase Burst also worked in the same way to move him in a way that was out of sync with the physical universe around him
. He wasn’t sure how the new implant named skills, but he felt it probably drew from his subconscious. His game mind became apparent as Psionic Teleportation and Phase Burst merged into Evolved Astral Step.

  All in all, his new stats and skills seemed godlike. They certainly set him apart from the others here. The thing was that he had thought he was godlike when his stats had not been one twentieth of what they were now. As he grew more powerful, his understanding of the universe and his place in it grew. He realized more clearly than ever that for all his power the universe was still a huge place.

  Nonetheless he took one last look at his skill sheet. The first week was almost up and Ava had just sent him a message that she had exciting news. So, he went running. It only took a fraction of a second but longer than if he had used Astral Step to reach her location. It was enough time for his newly partitioned mind to register the changes the sheet showed.