Chapter 201: Putting Down Roots (Patreon)

Learner’s notes: Day 423: on Heartbreak

>>Learner (Human Brain) temporarily banned from the log for multiple subjective, inherently false observations, general moping, and bad poetry: 5 minutes.<<

My brain triggered some kind of cascading, extreme reaction to Calvin’s demonstrated disgust toward me. I’ve heard the term ‘heartbreak’ thrown around, but objectively, it felt more like someone scooped out my body’s internal organs with a dull spoon.

Why isn’t it called emotional evisceration? These humans need more accurate words for these things.

It is fascinating, however, that any form of social interaction between humans can cause this amount of pain. It is also a problem. As she is as close to a well-balanced, ideal human brain as possible, Learner is very sensitive to human social concerns.

This is the first time this fine-tuned brain has had such a glaring weakness exposed.

The experience was so acutely uncomfortable that I wanted to dull Learner’s senses, wipe the brain and start over again. I was stopped by Kala, who informed me that this is a part of ‘Growing Up’, and becoming a more ‘mature’ and ‘resilient’ human.

She also said in no uncertain terms that making a sociopathic brain to avoid heartbreak was unacceptable.

I’ll grudgingly give her the benefit of the doubt.

My brain’s current thoughts seem to be a tangled mess of self-recrimination, disgust with her own body, a desire to numb the pain by any means, and intrusive thoughts about removing me from her body, despite the knowledge that such a thing is impossible*.

*Impossible in that a surgery to do so would be far too invasive to ever consider, although that doesn’t prevent the possibility of some kind of extremely advanced teleportation magic removing my units.

It is interesting, seeing her search herself for any way that she could possibly change so that Calvin might like her better, blaming herself for not being good enough for him rather than blaming Calvin for the social wound he caused.

And that’s the strangest thing about this form of violence, most of the damage seems to be self-inflicted. If Learner (human) didn’t care what Calvin thought at all, this reaction would have done nothing to her.

In fact, it would have been expected. Despite the time they had spent together, Learner did remember the time she’d fought him, and revealed her units on multiple occasions. Of course any human would be wary of something capable of easily killing them.

In this matter, Kala was an outlier, giving her time and companionship generously with no fear of Learner that her advanced brain could perceive, making herself vulnerable to earn my trust in a very human wa-

Big whoop, she can just see the future, so she already knows I’m not gonna do anything to her. She doesn’t actually trust me, she trusts her abilities. Nobody really likes me!

Just like Calvin doesn’t like me. Why am I so awful? If I wasn’t this horrifying creature, he’d like me better.

Gods I’m the lowest form of life in here.

Ow, my guts hurt! I need some ice cream.

Oh gods, but Calvin’s the only one who can make ice cream out in the wilderness! If I see his face again, I will shrivel up and die!

I should wear dark, brooding makeup to show people exactly how much pain my bitter soul is in. I need to express it. Agh, but my skin is too dark to make it work, and my stupid ALIEN BRAIN won’t give me control over my body!

I have a right to control my body! I could be pale as death and they would KNOW how awful I feel!

….I could also get rid of you.

Born a monster: Can’t accept!

Everyone hates me.

Am I Me Or My Mother?

>>Learner (Human Brain) temporarily banned from the log for multiple subjective, inherently false observations, general moping, and bad poetry: 2 Hours<<

….now I have to scrub that out.

From an outside observer’s position, I find it very interesting, the way that human biology places the burden of bearing children primarily on the mother, which contributes to the heavily gender-weighted fetishization of vulnerability.

A female makes herself vulnerable when she trusts a male to breed with her nonviolently, to stay with her and raise their children. Females are also physically weaker than males, making them more vulnerable to attack, disease, accident…pretty much everything.

This weakness gives females a very keen sense for vulnerability and, strangely enough, the benefits it can bring. Being vulnerable inherently means that you are in a position where you could receive damage, but it can be the gateway to a richer reward.

Females are seemingly more willing to extend trust to others and see that vulnerability rewarded with reciprocal favor, understanding that such vulnerability can open potential doors with others that human males mostly miss, due to their slightly different perspective.

This leads me to believe that if females see doors males miss, then the opposite is most likely true. This level of vulnerability is painful. Perhaps I should spend some time as a male?

Learner (Human Brain) is vehemently opposed to being a male, so I’ll let the matter drop for now. I can most likely learn what I need from simple observation.

Now though, on the receiving end of this emotional vulnerability I speak of, I don’t know if I can tolerate it. Being stuck with a moping brain for two days has severely frustrated my –

Calvin just apologized!

He apologized profusely, groveled in the dirt with a long and well-rehearsed speech that really showed he’d put plenty of thought into it.

He thanked us for saving his life, accepted us as people, apologized for hurting our feelings, and admitted that we weren’t the same person he met in the Filter.

When Learner broke down and cried again (from joy?), he gave us a hug and several delicious pats on the head.

If social attacks feel like getting guts scooped out, getting accepted for yourself, hugged, and patted feels like being filled with warm, fuzzy balls of light that send tingles through the entire body.

Many tingles were had, in many places.

Hugs are nice. I may have failed to realize that my own thought processes had been somewhat affected by my human brain, but when he hugged me, my mood improved somewhat, and my thoughts have regained a bit of their…subjectivity.

Apparently, thinking about humans as animals with breeding patterns and mating strategies is my way of moping by distancing myself from emotion. I’m feeling much better now.

We listened to Kala and our vulnerability was rewarded!

…I think I’ll stay a girl. I like this feeling.

And my brain –

I’m walking on sunshine! WOOOOHOOHOOOO

Walking on sunshine! WHooohohohooo!

And don’t it feel –

>>Learner (Human Brain) temporarily banned from the log for multiple subjective, inherently false observations, overly enthusiastic dancing, and bad poetry: 1 day<<

Clean-up was a work-intensive affair, both physically and emotionally.

After the Learner apology, Calvin’s knick-knacks scoured the fungus away from the Siphon, clearing the land several hundred feet in every direction.

A Siphon makes a damn good city center… Calvin thought, reminded of Uleis. There wasn’t as much raw Warp as Uleis, likely because the Uleisan siphon had been bottled up for hundreds of years while simultaneously receiving damage to its filter.

Once he recovered from the battle, he watched as tens of thousands of prospective settlers pushed into the deep jungle, burning the fungus out of the earth wherever they found it.

Watching the process from above was stranger, seeing the tiny line of humans excavating underneath the forest proper before tossing the mined out fungus on top of raging bonfires. They made efforts to preserve what they could, but there was really no way to get the fungus without maiming the jungle horribly.

It was also more expensive to fund this aggressive expansion than Calvin had guessed. Mathematically he could understand having to multiply a hundred stones by tens of thousands, but seeing it wheelbarrowed out of his treasury made him a little misty-eyed.

There wasn’t even as much employee attrition due to death and dismemberment as he’d hoped, it was actually relatively safe once the brain fungus was burned out of the siphon, and that mean he’d have to pay everyone.

There goes the most money I’ve ever seen. Easy come, easy go, I guess.

Ravager, these people will be paying taxes to you. Kurawe said. You should regain all the money spent on this in under ten years, compounding exponentially as more of the land is settled.

Those words eased Calvin’s poor aching farmboy heart.

Calvin spent the next couple months ferrying back and forth between the Siphon and his March, taking the time to both set up a transport system between the two.

The city in the center of the canyon would always be his first settlement, but Calvin could not pass up the opportunity to own a Siphon, so he expanded his march to include the deep jungle, seeding little farming communities along the train tracks as he went.

Once transport between his primary city and the siphon was accomplished, he put a cap on the siphon to concentrate its power.

This had the dual effect of lowering the amount of natural mutations animals experienced in the Deep jungle, and it also allowed Calvin to create a sort of Temple of Awakening.

The temple was a marble hemisphere with an enormous statue of himself on top of it, posed dramatically to stare at the setting sun.

Calvin didn’t really understand why his friends thought it was tacky. The argument about tyrants forcing their serfs to build monuments to their arrogance didn’t hold water at all.

No serfs were used in the making of this megastructure. Calvin had simply used the extra stone he’d shaved off the top of the mountains surrounding his march, distilled it down to undifferentiated matter, then used an army of knick-knacks with pipettes, an abyssal steel flake, and a hunk of flawless marble with gold veins to create a five hundred foot statue of himself visible from every point in the forest.

What’s wrong with that?

If a man wants to raise a five hundred foot statue of himself on his own land, it should be fine as long as it’s not hurting anyone.

Nah, we had that same problem with monuments to men’s hubris on Earth before it got vaporized. Eventually you get a cluttered skyline and lack of natural sunlight. Focus on building down before you build up. Elliot was always willing to add his perspective.

With a relatively airtight building overtop of it, the Warp concentration steadily increased inside, until Calvin was confident that anyone who stepped inside could become a fourth-break veteran just by spending some time inside.

Which suited Calvin just fine.

Outward from his Temple of Awakening, he cleared land to build a gym and a library filled with weights, study material and puzzles. Beyond that he built training yards for more specific disciplines, such as Farming and Cooking, an Arena and training yard for military endeavors.

The plan was to streamline Breaking and training his citizenry so that they could be molded into the most powerful bunch of farmer/warriors on the continent.

Calvin didn’t have any inherently valuable resources on his land, with the exception of the rich jungle soil and the Siphon. With the ability to grant young men and women the ability to get their fourth Break without sacrificing thousands, Calvin could have the largest population of Veteran farmers the world over.

Nobody would fuck with him.

That would give him a real chance at establishing his territory as a true kingdom.

Uleis kept power of the siphon to a bare handful, and while that was a valid strategy, Calvin thought he could do better.

He was already more powerful than the average Legend. He didn’t particularly have any fear of the peasants revolting even if they improved themselves through two extra Breaks.

The first few adventurers to clear out large swaths of land, Calvin rewarded them above and beyond the monetary compensation by allowing them to steep in his Temple of Awakening for a couple hours before mastering whatever Skill or training whatever Attribute they desired.

To Calvins great delight, most of them focused on Farming, Animal Husbandry, and one man even managed to manifest Phytomancy when he tried to curse a seed into growing.

Gonna have to watch out for that guy, Elliot said. Phytomancy is one of those overthrow the government kind of powers. Their users are crazy. It’s so versatile I even wrote a book about it, being a Biomancer and all.

In response, Calvin held the man behind for a week and urged as many new recruits as possible to learn the Skill from the man before he found a better teacher, spreading the spell’s knowledge as far and wide as he could. By the end of the month, the Ability was spread across hundreds of people, and the knowledge to acquire it was spread even further. Calvin couldn’t imagine a better Ability for a homesteader to have.

And by diluting the skill’s rarity, it has become less of a threat. When everyone’s special, no one is.

Goddamn, kid.

Besides, people like to maintain the status quo. If someone has the power to feed and clothe themselves and get a little money on the side, they’re likely to be plenty happy.

Calvin’s plan was going well, the fungus was being driven back, people were settling down, having been granted the strength to fight back the wild monster of the deep jungle.

Then people started disappearing again.

It started when a man named Orfus Mardu fell over a rake leaned up against his house and vanished. His disappearance wasn’t noticed for over an hour, until his wife went looking for him and found his boot beside their log cabin.

It was assumed Orfus had been dragged away by a monster for a good four hours, until the man himself showed up at his cabin’s door, muddy and confused.

They weren’t able to get a cohesive story about what took him. His only tale was how he tripped over a rake and fell into the nearby river. Nearby was relative, as the river was half a mile away.

Since they couldn’t find out what took him, the homesteaders assumed it was a widowmaker, and the man simply didn’t want to admit to being lured away by a pair of tits.

Then a little girl disappeared. She was playing hide and seek in a freshly built barn with her brothers and sisters, but hours later they still couldn’t find her. The family went to Calvin to help find her, and by covering most of the forest in spies, he was able to find her corpse being consumed by an armored scavenger.

Five miles away from her home. It was odd, since a predator normally wouldn’t carry her body that far away before eating it, but he couldn’t exactly ask the girl what happened.

The family was distraught, leaving their homestead and moving back to Gadvera with their remaining children, and Calvin didn’t try to stop them.

He took notice when a second family with half a dozen children moved into the homestead, taking the previous tennant’s place in a matter of days.

When their preteen son went missing, Calvin acted fast, sending his spies where he’d found the girl on a hunch. Sitting in a tree, hiding from the roaming predators of the wilds, was the young boy, a little rattled, but otherwise unharmed.

Calvin asked him what happened, and found his story was eerily similar to Orfus the rake-tripper.

The child had ducked into a shadowy section of the Barn, then he’d noticed a gap in the barn’s wall. the boy had climbed through the gap in the side of the wall concealed by a bush.

When he raised his head again, he was in no longer on the homestead, but in the middle of the jungle, with a nest of Junkya nearby. He’d immediately climbs a tree and hid, sure that the creatures would chase him down and eat him.

When Calvin sent one of his summons through the burrow-hole sized gap in the side of the barn, nothing happened, but when he crawled through it himself, he arrived at the point he’d found the boy, just feet below the tree he’d been hiding in.

Once he got back, Calvin closed off the gap, hoping that would solve the problem for now.

Looks like your forest’s dimensions are all sorts of fucked up. Elliot observed.

Must be a side effect of the fungus, Calvin thought, frowning. He had no idea what the extent of it was, but it didn’t seem to be anything with any kind of organization or plan.

It had already caused one death though, so Calvin had to address it.

He sent around a notice to all the homesteaders pushing their way toward the siphon, describing the possibility of getting warped to another location by accident, and to contact him as soon as possible if a child were to go missing, and upon confirmation of a portal, to bring the information to him for a substantial reward.

Less people left than Calvin was expecting, thankfully. The people who’d signed up to work the land were tougher than he’d given them credit for.

You know a handful of enterprising people are going to keep valuable portals to themselves and start smuggling shit in and out of the city.

Yeah, probably, but that’s not for a few years, and at least my collection will be bigger than any one person’s.

From then on, every time someone vanished, it got directed to Calvin, and he spent the next few months tracking down portals and marking them on a detailed map of the forest.

It wasn’t only portals that disappeared people, though. More often than not it was a drunk who’d wandered into the forest to sleep, and occasionally it was an actual predator attack. Calvin absolutely hated finding the torn-up corpse of a child just outside a farmstead tucked under a log, when their family desperately hoped the boy or girl had simply fallen into a portal and would be recovered safe and sound.

Seeing fathers stare at him accusingly while mothers wept felt like enough to age him a year each time it happened.

The reason children found these portals so much more often than adults was they crawled under beds, up into rafters, and through suspicious holes in the ground with alarming frequency.

It was cold logic that prevented him from scouring the forest of all life. He simply couldn’t afford the Bent to clear the entire forest, even with Nadia picking up the slack, and even if he could, killing a huge niche of the ecosystem was asking for trouble.

According to Elliot’s well-reasoned argument based on historical data.

Still, every time he had to go find a dead child, Calvin had to think long and hard on his decision not to clear the forest personally.

Over time, Calvin’s map of the forest’s portals grew, and it was fascinating to see the pieces begin to fall in place.

Calvin had two different inks for his map, one for the portal, one for the destination, each one with a unique alphanumeric tag.

The two patterns he’d noticed were that the portals seemed to cover longer distances the closer they were to the Siphon, and when they were all strung together, they created a branching, vein-like structure emanating outward from the siphon.

After poking and prodding the phenomena, digging under them to make sure no fungus remained, he came to the conclusion that the portals were some kind of condensation.

Dewdrops of warped space that had occurred from the rapid collapse of the fungus’s bubble.

The original bubble had long since popped, but there were still a few…droplets here and there that had formed portals, making the forest even stranger and more magical than it had been before Calvin had begun settling it.

And around the Siphon…

Calvin mentally drew a wide circle around the siphon. No one had reported any portals within fifty miles of the siphon itself.

But there had been disappearances.

Fross Beene, somewhere around here, Calvin thought, tapping a spot about forty miles away from the siphon. He didn’t know exactly where the man had disappeared, but it had been somewhere around that location.

Cass Desmond, Right there. Calvin thought, pointing to another circle.

If the range of the portal is increased the closer it gets to the siphon, did these men simply get moved so far away that they were unable to get back? Calvin thought.

That seemed to be the operating theory.

There was also the possibility that they were killed by the portal, torn to subatomic shreds, but Calvin was hoping that wouldn’t be the case.

As eager as he was to find some long distance portals near the center of his newest city, he was going to wait for his citizens to go through them first.

Never be the first adopter. Words to live by.

Calvin made sure to stick to places and things he normally went, not interested in finding himself halfway across the globe or drowning in the sea.

He also went out of his way to clear cut many wide fields and the resources to play several different kinds of games, situating them beside the tiny towns that were beginning to spring up as multiple homestead families settled in next to each other.

He made sure to place these fields away from the vein-like paths of portals.

If more kids spent their time kicking balls around and throwing frisbees at each other in a safe place, the less time they’d be crawling through wormholes leading to unknown destinations for fun.

Depends on how much their parents make.

With all of them being Veterans, they should be able to provide for their families, easily.

Even the worst homesteader was superhumanly good at it by this point, which should free their children up to become a more valuable asset than simple extra labor.

And there’s gonna be a lot of them.

Calvin didn’t think he’d seen a single woman between the age of eighteen and forty-five who wasn’t load-bearing at this point. With the exception of Kala, Ella, and Nadia, for various reasons.

Humans were fixing to explode through the forest over the next thirty years.

By the end of that time, Calvin thought glancing down at his map, I’ll have created a city around the Siphon, with mapped out portals leading to…Gods know where.

Calvin was thinking about hiring some of the adventurers whose skillsets were more exploration-oriented to help him map out the more distant portals in a fifty mile radius around the siphon. Since summons seemed to not be able to go through them, Calvin needed to lean on good old-fashioned grunt work to map them out.

Ravager, there’s civil unrest in Juntai, choking off lumber production and copper import. The train can still produce a profit without Juntai as a leg, but I believe fixing the problem to be worth your personal attention. Kurawe’s mind connected to his momentarily, dragging Calvin out of his thoughts.

Calvin folded the map, tucked it in his pocket, then burst into a swarm of high-speed wasps, heading for Juntai, sliding over the canopy fast enough to bring the City of Allast within view in a matter of hours.

Over the horizon, he spotted smoke.