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SNAPCRAFT | BONUS CHAPTER 23.5 - The Allsee
🕑 Added 2023-12-11 16:06:10 +0000 UTCHey, everyone!
This is a bonus chapter to thank you all for your fantastic support!
Enjoy.
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“Why don't I just read it?” Jurgen asked his teacher.
“I know it doesn't make sense to you right now, but trust me. It will be enough.”
Sighing, Jurgen picked up the book and leafed through it briefly. He could make out some illustrations through the flapping pages, but none of the words. How was this supposed to help him learn? “Like this?”
“That's right. Make sure you’re looking at the book.”
“And I'll be able to remember everything the book said.”
The teacher looked up to check for a good amount of smoke. Jurgen knew the school grounds always kept a good amount of the chemical mist that made Daisy’s cybermonkeys blind, but teachers always did this before speaking of the secret. They were supposed to set an example for them. As he saw his teacher look all around him, he couldn’t help but hear the nursing rhyme he’d learned when he was a small toddler.
Before you speak of the secret,
Look left, right, above and behind.
If there’s no smoke, zip it.
Silence is the only way to hide.
The teacher interrupted the nursing rhyme Jurgen played in his mind. He had finished checking if the coast was clear. “After taking the secret, you will. Yes.”
“Teacher, have you ever tried the secret?”
“Once. Long ago.”
“What is it like?”
“Like dreaming,” came the simple natural answer. “Like now.”
“Now?” he asked, confused. What did the teacher mean?
“Yes, Jurgen. You’re dreaming. Wake up. WAKE UP!”
Jurgen gasped and opened his eyes, trying to understand where he was. There was the familiar softness of a woolen blanket over him and the smoky smell of fire. He was in bed. He was home. Had it all been just a dream?
He tried to move, but his body failed to obey him. The lack of mobility, coupled with the heightened mental clarity he felt, told him it hadn’t been a dream. He had taken the allsee and participated in the trial.
As the confusion of sleep passed and coherent thinking returned, Jurgen’s training kicked in. He tried to summon the future, but all he got in return was a piercing headache and a fuzzy haze. The fuzzy haze showed that the allsee's effect was wearing off. The pain was a sign he was back in the real world.
The backlash of straining his brain and the resulting moan of pain caught the attention of the guard.
"Jurgen? You up?" he heard someone call. It was Jasper, his cousin, he realized.
"Aye. Future's gone already. Get the chief.” Jurgen rolled his eyes and saw there was smoke all around them. The coast was clear. “Allsee's hangover is starting to kick in."
Even as his cousin left, Jurgen had already summoned the present and felt that the chief was near. There were slight traces of his presence in the tent. Hidden under the scents of burnt wood and smoke he detected the smell of the chemicals the chief always left in his wake. He had been here, not twenty minutes ago.
Jurgen heard Jasper speak in the next room, and the chief chemist stormed in, hair disheveled and clothes wrinkled. It seemed that Jurgen had woken up just as the man had gone out to nap.
“Jurgen, how much time do you have left?” he asked, urgency in his voice.
Jurgen looked inward, summoned the present, and ascertained how long the allsee would linger in his system. “We’ve got nine minutes and forty-eight seconds.”
The chief pulled a recorder from his lab coat pocket and pushed a button, “No time to waste, then. Tell me all you remember. Leave nothing out.”
Jurgen summoned the past. His brain activity, enhanced by the powerful drug, made him perfectly recall all the events from the past two days. “After my name was picked, and I took the allsee, I was taken to a pod and plugged in. Test time took four and a half seconds. Daisy failed to detect the drug.”
“Good. Good,” the chief commented, nodding. “Weak traits of last year?”
“Creativity and logical thinking.”
“Solo or team competition?”
“Solo, in a knock-out tournament format.”
“Carry on, Jurgen.”
“I was first transported to a sterile room, like your lab, chief. Nothing but white. Then, after thirty seconds, Daisy transported me to a pine woodland and gave me a camera, a polaroid spectra, a 1986 model. The idea of the trial was to take photographs of objects, which were then converted into cards. Each card had two values: hit points and victory points.
“After two hours, we were transported back to the white room, where we had to merge cards into logical combinations, generating more cards and points. Whoever gained more victory points each round won and moved on to the next.”
Jurgen tried to keep things as succinct as possible. Time was of the essence, and he had to pass as much information as possible to the chief before allsee’s effect completely wore off. The edges of his vision were already beginning to darken.
“Now, walk me through each step you took.”
“In the first arena, I experimented with the camera to determine the rules. I discovered I had twenty shots and could get two cards of each: Two pine trees, hp one, vp two, common. Daisy included an inventory feature in this year’s exams.
“Then, I summoned the present and found all objects in the arena were intangible. My vision pierced through the trees as if they were made of thin air. Stretching my mind, I felt an invisible circular wall surrounding me. I headed straight toward the middle of the circle, where I felt more ones and zeros than anywhere else in the arena, and found a dead tree with mushrooms. I took pictures of all the mushrooms I could find.
“Two dead trees, hp four, vp three, rare;
Two fly agaric, hp one, vp three, uncommon;
Two yellow-honey agaric, hp two, vp two, uncommon;
Chicken heart mushroom; hp one, vp three, uncommon;
Bear bread, hp two, vp two, uncommon.”
Jurgen wasn’t sure how useful knowing the individual stats of each card would be to the chief, but he had to use the eidetic memory allsee provided while it lasted.
“The dead tree, like everything else, was an illusion. Inside the dead tree, I found one termite nest, hp seven, vp one, legendary. From there on, finding nothing else noteworthy, I took photographs of whatever else I could find.
“Two dry pine needles, hp one, vp two, common;
two pine bark, hp two, vp one, common;
two moss, hp one, vp two, common;
two lichen, hp zero, vp three, common.”
Jurgen kept dumping all the information he had collected from the exams. It all felt strange as he heard himself go through all the recipes he had tried and how he went about the quarry arena. It felt like hearing someone else recite everything he had gone through. From his training, he knew that this feeling of distance was common as allsee’s effect started wearing off.
As he recited the recipes he had attempted in the quarry arena and how he had unlocked the [Stun Bomb] upgrade, he used his last few seconds of vision to study the chief’s facial expression. The chemist regarded him stoically, patiently waiting for his hyped mind to finish his report.
Once upon a time, he had dreamed of having his job. What was it like to champion the battle against Daisy? To live in constant fear of being found out for stacking the deck? To see people around you die of blight, but keeping the sector’s stock of allcure under lock and key, so that they could make allsee, and then, in turn, gain more allcure?
As the residual healing agent of allcure passed, and only the mental accelerator remained, the distance between what he said and what he thought grew. Jurgen hadn’t been able to compute the future from the moment he’d woken up, but now, deprived of his senses, he was losing his grip on the present.
After losing his vision, his sense of smell started disappearing. The strong smell of smoke had already become a faint wisp. It almost felt like he had just developed strong flu symptoms in seconds. Nevertheless, he pressed on, regurgitating all the information he’d collected for the chief to analyze later.
“I was knocked out in the third stage,” he heard himself say. His voice sounded dragged and tired. “It was a desert, and it was nighttime. When the round began, I had already started to lose clarity. I could barely stretch my mind enough to locate the walls and the center and realized I had the bad luck of being transported to the farthest point of the arena. I used my two bomb upgrades to delay my opponent in case they had been transported closer to the arena.
“Reaching the part of the arena with the biggest concentration of ones and zeros, I photographed all the elements I found there. Acacia tree, hp three, vp one, uncommon; acacia bark, hp three, vp one, uncommon; acacia leaf, hp one, vp two, common; acacia tree branch, hp four, vp zero, uncommon; acacia trunk, hp three, vp one, uncommon…”
“He’s almost out,” he heard his cousin whisper.
“Silence, Jasper. Don’t distract him.”
“By then, I could barely pierce through the data, and my present had a shorter range. Still, I was able to find a cave hidden under a pit of quicksand. Quicksand, hp zero, vp four, uncommon. There was something written on the walls of the cave. It was a recipe. Sand plus glass equals an hourglass. Just that.
“I arrived at the crafting…” Jurgen lost his train of thought. What was he talking about? Where was he? Why couldn't he move? Why couldn't he see?
“The crafting stage, Jurgen?” prompted the chief.
“Oh, yes. The crafting stage. I followed the recipe in the crafting stage: sand plus glass equals hourglass, hp zero, vp seven, rare. My mind had slowed down immensely by then. I couldn’t compute. I… I couldn’t…”
Jurgen felt as if he were in a quagmire. His forehead was burning up, and his thoughts felt sluggish and foggy. He couldn’t feel the softness of wool nor smell the smokiness of fire. He couldn’t see the chief nor taste the medicine they had given him. All he could do was listen. He heard himself go on.
“Stone plus stone equals mortar and pestle. Mortar and pestle, hp four, vp zero, uncommon. Mortar and pestle plus acacia bark equals acacia medicine. Acacia medicine, hp two, vp two, uncommon.”
Jurgen heard his voice become slower and fainter until only loose words came out.
“Two hundred and four points. Lost. I…”
And then he heard himself let out a deep sigh.
“He’s gone, chief.”
“Thank you for captioning the obvious, Jasper,” answered the chief. He didn’t sound angry at Jasper nor disappointed at Jurgen; he just sounded tired.
“Did you hear what he said? The way Daisy put up walls? Do you think Daisy knows?”
“No. Relax, Jasper. The walls were just a boundary for the test. Didn’t you hear him talking about seeing the zeros and ones? Allsee did its job, unbeknownst to Daisy. She doesn’t know.”
“I can’t believe he didn’t do better!” he heard his cousin say in his hoarse voice.
“It was just a long exam, and he couldn’t fully use allsee. Had it been a five-hour-long exam like two years ago, we would have won.”
“What now?”
“We still have enough allcure to keep us going for a few years if need be. It’s not a problem. Even though he was knocked out in the third stage, he still brought home tier-two medicine and tier-three rationing. It’s all good. We’ll do better next year.”
“If you say so. How long will he be like this? A week?”
“He pushed himself to the limit. It wouldn’t be unusual for him to stay in a coma for a month. Don’t worry, though, Jasper. The vestiges of allcure in his bloodstream will aid in his healing process.”
Jurgen heard the chief chemist stand up and then his distant voice, “Watch over him. I’ll be back later.”
“Sure thing, sir.”
After a few moments of silence, he heard his cousin eat something crunchy. His cousin had always chewed with his mouth open. He couldn’t help feeling annoyed at his cousin’s bad manners, even in his feeble state. The sound became fainter and fainter, and Jurgen realized he was losing his audition, too.
Finally, all became silent.
