Chapter 372: Super-Aikido Invented

Sunday, June 10, 2007

TV didn't show any progress being made until Washington DC started waking up. It was Sunday, so not much progress was made even then. Some important people were chased down by reporters - the DC media people being even less concerned about politeness than normal. The interviewees' most conservative comment was, "For goodness sake, let's pull back and consider the situation. We've got agencies tripping over each other with seemingly conflicting objectives and they're dealing with something that is very dangerous and important. The situation is clearly out of control. This country desperately needs is a capable leader..." (that interviewee was a Democrat).

More outspoken critics were demanding a Senate Investigation, and, "If anyone is found to have criminally imperiled millions of Americans, then MORE heads should roll."

There were also calls for "A full investigation into the exact nature of the so-called Guardian Angel and the entire God situation," (good luck on them getting that to fly), and opposing calls that the country should throw open its arms and welcome the angel. Probably with a parade. I thought that was a wonderful idea. They could have it in Washington and I'm sure the invisible angel would attend.

There were suggestions flying in all directions. The indecisive Decider (President Bush) had been saying nothing useful, and certainly hadn't been leading, but it was now obvious to everybody that the situation was heading toward a massive clusterfuck - if not a nuclear clusterfuck - unless someone did something. Everyone had ideas about what that something should be. Bush's advisors got him to pull his head out of his ass, so a couple of hours into the day he publicly ordered every agency to "Pull back until I decide what needs to be done." He sounded very decisive about the need to make a decision. He also said, "I'll pray for guidance when I go to church this morning." I somehow doubted Bush and God were on speaking terms, for a variety of reasons. Judging by his ineffectualness, he definitely needed to get advice from somewhere because the situation appeared to be something he was incapable of getting his head around. I guess it was just too weird for him.

I was hoping to see something that I could twist into a plan that included a highly embarrassing exposure of the crap that the FBI had left installed in our home, but nothing Machiavellian enough came to any of my minds.

Watching TV got repetitive - although I enjoyed the repetition of the 'highlights' of the original, nightie-clad interview - so my thoughts drifted. Ever since I'd been resurrected there'd been a considerable amount of verbal animosity directed at me, and not only verbal, as Ava's injury proved. My resurrection, Ava's being shot beside me, the UAV attack on my parents, the nuclear almost-war, the deaths of the neo-nazis and FBI bosses, plus all the religious crap that had been going on, had got many people VERY worked up. They were worked up in all sorts of different ways: some sympathetic to me, and others very much not. They were often busy arguing with each other, but I certainly couldn't assume that they'd cancel each other out and never directly affect me.

I'd thought about the self- and family-defense issues a great deal before mentioning the Angel Plan to my families and we'd discussed safety many times since. Nothing had happened which made me regret our decision to proceed - although what had happened to Ava had come close to making me regret it very much indeed - but the aggressiveness of some of the interviewees over the last ten days made self-defense natural to think about. I was otherwise bored and had to stay awake to guard my sleeping families, so most of my minds started thinking about how I could improve Aikido to defend myself better. The more I thought about it, the more impressed with my ideas I became. I hadn't thought about Aikido much while I'd been Ron because I couldn't practice it then, but now that I was Mark and approaching the time when I could use my abilities more openly, thinking about how I could combine them with Aikido was quite a lot of fun.

I had many scattered thoughts, most of which were very silly - inspired by some of the nonsense you see in martial arts movies, like combatants running around on treetops, most of which I could actually reproduce now but would be too embarrassed to. After enjoying the silly thoughts for a while, I decided to take this seriously and be more disciplined. I would restrict myself to thinking about techniques that I could use which looked plausible. Perhaps incredibly impressive, but obvious unrealism wasn't allowed. Even with that constraint, the abilities I had now should permit the creation of some very effective martial art moves.

This was a real exercise even though having the Guardian Angel should mean I never need to fight to protect myself, but maybe something might happen in the future which forces me to do without the angel's protection for a while or permanently. I couldn't imagine what might force me to do that, but I could imagine that I might have to do some fighting soon after that, so I'd better get ready in case it takes me some time to improve my fighting ability. That's why I was restricting myself by the requirement that the techniques had to look reasonably realistic. It was also an interesting way of passing the time even if I never needed it.

There was another small advantage in developing some impressive fighting techniques: When I'd asked Paul for some of his guys to take me to the hospital for Ava, Paul had looked to Dad for his consent. That'd been normal behavior back when I was Ron, as Ron was merely a lucky outsider with no authority over anyone other than the gardeners, and them only because the Andersons and Williams had given him that authority. But as Mark, I wanted to be able to order the security staff around because I could easily imagine all sorts of future troubles where I knew better what to do than the security staff, thanks to sight blobs or other reasons. I would get the parents to tell Paul that he and his staff should take my orders, but an impressive martial arts demonstration would help my authority by making the security staff respect me, something they didn't do at all at the moment. Getting instant cooperation from them might save their, my families and/or my asses one day. My ass will be getting slowly cuter over the next few months, so at some stage it's going to become worth saving.

Aikido would be my basic fighting style, of course. I like it, it's the only one I know, and it's ki-based. The last time I'd trained with Sensei, my maximum ki force had been 74 kg. It was now 7,540 kg! (two merges to get out of the CIA lab, each giving an eightfold improvement, plus seventeen more months of mental training to increase the amount of ki I could consciously project). I had so much ki and ki force that I'd be AWESOME at ordinary Aikido techniques now. Plus I was about to add new techniques to my version of Aikido.

• The use of proximity was already obvious and I couldn't think of any ways to get more benefit out of it.

• External Ki Projection was in a similar boat. Its uses weren't as obvious, but there wasn't much I could think of for EKP that needed practicing now. It'd be interesting to see what new techniques or modifications Sensei was teaching these days, after the chaos outside our property died down enough for me to resume going to his classes or having him come here to teach me in our small dojo (part of the Adults' House Activity Level is fitted out as a dojo. Donna and Ava use it sometimes).

• NP, however, offered several interesting possibilities for enhancing a martial art.

The first of my thoughts was to use NP to add force to my punches and pushes. To punch someone hard normally requires a big swing to get a fist moving fast enough. Not in my new martial art. I could start with my fist stationary an inch in front of my opponent's face, and then I could push my forearm forward with seven tons of force. My arm not weighing very much, that much force would accelerate it to a significant speed even in just an inch, hitting my target's face shockingly hard, and the follow through would be pretty impressive too. More realistically, I'd use an amount of force that made my punch seem as hard as if I'd swung a haymaker.

To avoid damaging my hand, I'd have an NP-plate on the front of my fist, shaped to fit over its contours perfectly to spread the impact over my whole hand. I could even create a boxing glove out of NP plates, not to cushion the impacts but to transfer the impact force to my forearms. That could be done by having a thin plate in front of my fist supported by plates tightly wrapped around my hand and forearm. That would permit injury-free punches several times harder than other people could deliver.

Pushing an opponent would be even easier, as I'd simply put extra force on the back of my hand as I pushed with it. An extra 50 kg (110 pounds) or so would make a highly effective difference. If I acted as if I'd pushed hard, then I could semi-realistically add a momentary extra 100 or even 200 kg of NP force, which would send people flying backward.

I could push incredibly easily, but people would find it extremely difficult to push me, as I could create an equal and opposite force to their push, canceling it. If someone pushed on my chest, I could use NP to push on my back just as hard. Not that I expect it to happen again, but if I was walking down a corridor at school and some approaching jock crashed his shoulder into mine as we passed, then my shoulder would plow straight ahead and his shoulder would bounce backward. No one was going to win a shoving contest with me ever again. Similarly if someone tries to throw me. Unless he can lift seven tons, it ain't gonna happen.

Nor could individual parts of me be pushed unless I chose to allow it. If someone tried to twist my arm up my back, for example (it's a classic "Come Along Hold"), I could push down on my arm so he couldn't raise it above my waist - ignoring the issue of how he survived long enough to get a grip on my arm.

A more subtle and very useful improvement would be moving faster than everyone else, as if I was running while everyone else was walking. This was the first technique I wanted to work on, as it seemed the most fun.

Aikidoka don't step during techniques. Stepping is a leaning forward motion, resulting in an overbalancing and having to move the rear foot forward to recover balance, whereupon the process is repeated for the other foot. It's a series of controlled mini-falls, which you most definitely don't want to be doing in a fight. So instead of stepping, aikidoka slide our feet along the mat. Necessarily one foot at a time, while most of our weight is on the other foot. Both feet are always in contact with the floor, and we're never catching our balance. I had occurred to me that I might be able to NP-push my feet much faster than manually sliding them, and it should look realistic-ish. I was eager to find out for sure.

I stood up to experiment in the living room. I could've easily created an NP-plate for me to stand on and flown around the room half an inch above floor level, but that would look totally unrealistic. The next option was to create an NP-shoe for each foot with very little friction on its bottom surface. Moving them alternately would look a lot more realistic than the previous option, but probably not realistic enough. I'd return to it if nothing better worked, but it wasn't my first choice because I wanted my new technique as close to reality as possible, only faster. To take sliding steps in reality requires a cycle of:

1. Shifting my weight off the foot I intend to move (not a minor task considering it requires moving the bulk of my weight).

2. Ordering the foot to start moving in the desired direction (i.e., sending the nerve impulses to starting the muscles working).

3. Moving the foot in the desired direction (a step usually takes about half a second, I guess, so a significant amount of time).

4. Ordering the foot to stop.

I created an NP-'clamp' on both ankles (two half-circle NP shapes facing each other, fitted snugly around each ankle). With a very high friction setting on all their surfaces, the clamps served as a good location for other NP-fingertips to push against.

The most obvious approach to speeding up my sliding movement was to get rid of wasted time. Shifting my weight was an entirely unproductive 'step', in that it didn't step (move) me anywhere, so it was my first target for improvement. I could've simply pushed a foot horizontally forcefully enough that it moved no matter how much of my weight was on it. I didn't want to do that though. It'd have trouble with different ground surfaces, and it'd look very unnatural as my upper-body would be sliding sideways smoothly, which isn't what normally happens. Bodies sway back and forth as weight is transferred from foot to foot. We may look smooth when we walk, but compare it to a guy who truly is smooth, such as someone rolling along on a skateboard.

What worked well was not pushing the moving foot directly horizontally, but pushing it forward and upward. The upward angle varied mainly depending on how much weight I had put on that leg, how much friction the floor had, and how much total force I was using. I didn't want the foot to rise off the floor, only slide along it, so the angle off the floor would normally be quite small, much less than forty five degrees. By pushing upward on one leg I automatically tilted my body, which transferred my weight on to the other leg, resulting in a natural look. The push's horizontal vector got the foot accelerating in the desired direction.

I accelerated the foot for about three-quarters of the distance I wanted, then decelerated it to a stop, friction helping with that. To decelerate the moving foot the actions required of my NP-pushers are: stop pushing up and forward, disconnect, fly around the outside of the leg, connect to the front of the clamp, push backward to slow the leg down, and stop pushing when the foot stops moving. It sounds tedious, but isn't in reality. When I'd first discovered TK and had flown things around my room, it had been a very tedious process, but I'm HUGELY practiced at it now and don't think about it, just like you don't think about the individual finger motions when you type on your keyboard. The pushers could relocate so fast that I used the same stack for both legs, moving them back and forth alternately. That guaranteed that only one leg moved as a time, which was nicely realistic.

It felt weird though, like someone was kneeling at my feet, grabbing hold of one ankle, lifting and pushing it forward, putting it down, then swapping to the other ankle, repeatedly. As fast as another person could do it to me, was about the speed I was doing it to myself with NP. Very slowly and deliberately, to confirm the process worked. After some practice, I found that I could stand with my leg muscles relaxed while I slid across the room at a very slow walking pace.

I had effectively removed the entire "Shift weight" stage (bullet point #1 above) because it happened automatically as part of moving the foot. The "Ordering foot to start" and "stop" processes (points #2 & #4 above) virtually disappeared as it was FAR faster to move NP-points with my mind than to send nerve impulses all the way down to my legs, and for the right muscles to start contracting, although the time saved wasn't as much as that implies because the entire physical stepping process does overlap its stages somewhat. The "Moving foot" stage (point #3) would speed up when I got confident enough to use more NP force.

It needed practice. For example, the amount of weight each foot had on it differed by quite a lot, depending on how far the previous step had been as that controlled my weight distribution. I had to develop the mental reflexes so that when the previous sliding push had gone a different distance than normal, I automatically and quickly adjusted the force and angle of the next foot's push. It had to become a reflex because I wanted to be able to do this at high speed. I probably had over eight hours before anyone woke up, and at the rate my mind and body learns new skills, that should be plenty.

It took only a little practice to learn to keep my leg muscles relaxed. Even though there's a lifetime of habit behind manually stepping, I knew I was in a weird mode so staying relaxed was easy. When you're using a skateboard, you don't keep trying to walk - same with me now. I knew I'd still have trouble with reflexes though. For example, if I was sliding forward to cross a room and someone pushed me to the side, my unconscious reflex would be to muscle-move one leg to regain balance. When I was in "Sliding Mode" I wanted no such muscle-moves, only NP-powered foot slides. Relying on my mind to move my leg to catch my balance would take a lot of practice. Fortunately I would be able to practice that easily too: once I felt ready for that complication, I'd task one of my minds with giving me surprise sideways pushes.

Once I had the NP-sliding process working slowly, I sped it up, to cross the room faster and faster. Now that I had the basic process working, I was fairly quickly able to increase my speed. Some learning was required because as I increased the force, I had to decrease the angle to avoid lifting my foot off the floor.

Pushing a leg with two, three or four times as much force significantly reduced how long each sliding step took, and I learned the additional lesson that after speeding across the room and stopping at the other end, the top half of my body didn't want to stop. I had to quickly use NP to push my body back upright before I fell on my face. I made a mental note to stop with one foot placed to look like it could realistically brace me, and to use NP on my upper-body to negate its inertia.

Adding surprise sideways pushes on my upper body didn't even take ten minutes to get expert at countering.

I stopped my speeding up development when I was using four times more force than was required for slow slides. That gave me faster slides than you might expect because if the original amount of force was half lifting/half pushing (say), then the fourfold increased force had just over seven times more sideways effect, as the force needed to lift my weight actually reduced a little. A sevenfold increase in the rate my feet accelerated horizontally sped me across the room more than seven times faster because acceleration compounds.

I could go faster still, and I wanted to, but not in the presence of the bugs. So far my movements were within human ability ranges so I didn't mind the bugs hearing me. In case the bugs could be used to triangulate my position I had to avoid crossing the long room at an impossible speed. Nor did I want to cover the living room's bugs with soundproof NP-caps in case that alerted the Fibbies that we knew about the bugs. I'd practice in the unbugged Staff Quarters' gym/dojo later, when the families were awake.

That was the easy part done: going forward in a straight line. Now I wanted to learn how to go in any direction, to change directions, etc. To be able to 'run' around my opponents, to dodge, and to dart in and out. As Mom would say, that was a whole new kettle of fish.

I moved through Ikkyo - the first Aikido technique - using NP-slides for all my foot movements, even when I twisted on a foot to turn my body to face in a new direction. I was slow and unsteady, and even stopped several times when I had trouble, but it was a great learning exercise. Aikido techniques are like complicated dances, so I was forced to learn how to do virtually every possible type of foot slide. When I got to the end, I did it again, and then again. The first few trials improved rapidly, from "comically ridiculous" to "successful but painfully slow". Further improvement took much longer. Straight line walking had been very easy to get good at, but it was much harder to attain the precise control necessary to move through a complicated dance properly.

While I was improving my ability to move my feet, I was thinking about where this could ultimately go. What would my "Super-Aikido" be like? I couldn't fully use my NP-foot-sliding process during an Aikido technique against a real opponent because moving my legs four times faster through techniques than my upper-body could do its parts of the techniques would be a ridiculous mess. If you can't see that, just imagine darting in to punch someone then darting out again: my darting would be so fast that I'd be in and out before my punch had even started, so it'd end up missing because I'd be too far away. To speed up a technique, I'd have to use NP to speed up all of my body's movements, and that was FAR more complicated. It wasn't just "a new kettle of fish," it was at least "a new lake of fish." Sliding is effectively an alternating series of one-dimensional actions, but hand and body motions are HIGHLY varied, multi-dimensional actions, many of which are occurring at the same time. My feet just slide over the floor; my hands can do all sorts of grabs, twists, pulls and pushes. Not to mention the movement of individual fingers, my hips, shoulders, etc.

To train myself to be able to make all of those movements without using ANY muscles, using NP as the motive force instead, was going to take a great deal of training. When I pick up a glass of water, my conscious mind doesn't have to think about the individual movements - thank God, as there must be hundreds of decisions involved. My subconscious takes care of all that detail. What I was intending to do - eventually - was to move my arm to pick up a glass of water without using a single muscle. NP would push my arm, open my fingers, stop my arm in the right place, close my fingers with the right pressure, lift my forearm and upper-arm toward my mouth, allowing the relaxed elbow to bend correctly, etc. And I wanted to get so good at it, that I could do it several times faster than a normal person. Not with a glass of water though, as that'd result in my tossing water into my face when the glass braked to a sudden stop at my mouth.

It was going to take some SERIOUS practice to get all my body's movements into high-speed mode, to still have precise control over them, and for the process to be programmed into my subconscious. And when it came time to try applying high-speed body movements to Aikido techniques, I was going to need some very capable training partners. I would be bending and twisting parts of their bodies so rapidly that they could get injured if they reacted badly. Luckily, I had more than a dozen suitable training partners among our security guards.

Once I had the Ikkyo foot movements flowing pretty well, I repeated the learning exercise with the next technique, and eventually through all the Aikido techniques I knew that involved a significant amount of footwork. Then I went to the kitchen and did it all again on a non-carpeted floor, as that changed the upward angles I had to push at. I also repeated the exercise on the mat in Donna's Dojo, then outside on a path then the grass, and again on the edge between the last two just to keep me on my toes.

It took me several hours to get to a skill level where I thought I could move through the footwork for all the techniques as smoothly and correctly as I could with muscle-driven leg movements. I had a sight blob watching myself from the side, and my movements looked fast, smooth and realistic. I could be exceptionally fast in some of the simpler moves, but it wasn't blatantly unrealistic.

I'd gotten to the stage where I was moving my feet subconsciously; no longer having to think about what I was doing, which was great. I also had control over what I was doing, which was important. If I was rapidly going in one direction and something unexpected happened, I needed to be able to react in mid-step, not carry on straight ahead for another step or two.

It was already light when I went back inside to do some more practice in the living room. I didn't mind that I'd been seen rehearsing the Aikido techniques on the lawn, as nothing I'd done looked inhuman. There was no secret about Mark having taken Aikido, and it was even good that I was seen putting effort into it again, as that reinforced that Ron had been replaced by Mark. Some of our patrolling security teams had seen me from a distance (we don't let them routinely patrol near the houses for privacy reasons), so they might ask about it soon. I would be bringing it up if they didn't.

I went back inside the house using NP-slides. I'd 'walk' that way quite often from now on, until the subconscious routines were second-nature to me.

Back inside, and while I remembered, I got out the borrowed TV camera, stripped myself down to my underwear, and did a twirl in front of it to show my body off. Then I redressed and put it away in the out-of-the-way cupboard we keep it in.

I thought it was time to work on other ways of improving my martial arts skill. I'd thought of punching, pushing and negating someone trying to push or throw me. Pushing was so obvious there was nothing to practice, as was negating opponents' trying to push or throw me. The latter was easy because I'd be able to sense my opponents' intention before the push started, giving me time to counter it. Only punching needed a little practice.

I positioned some of the sofa cushions in a row as a punching bag, while the mothers were safely asleep. I punched them as hard as I could using unaided muscle power, to give me the sight and feel for how hard "as hard as I could" was. Then I set about reproducing it using Super-Aikido. To take the extreme example, if my fist started one inch from its target, I worked out how much force I needed to push with so my fist hit with an impact equivalent to "as hard as I could". It turned out that an inch was too close, but you get the idea.

I learned the force required from every likely distance, all without using any muscles, other than to close my fingers into a fist. Not using muscles was consistent with my ideal of getting my whole body moving quickly with Super-Aikido, which in this case meant I could react faster and get the punch in sooner. If I'm boxing with a guy and I see him let his guard down for a moment, it'd take an appreciable amount of time for me to physically order my arm muscles to start a punch into the opening. I could get my fist moving much faster by mentally grabbing my wrist with NP and pushing it toward the target. Cutting even a quarter second off the time required to impact on my target should allow many more punches to get through.

Once I had that going well, I added muscles. Not because I needed the extra strength - I could've added more NP force if that'd been the reason - but because I believed that when I punched someone, the ki of my punch had an internal effect on them. Just pushing my fist forward with NP didn't project any ki, so I added the physical aspect. Because my muscles were slower to act, that meant they were assisting NP rather than the other way around, so it didn't really invalidate the main strategy of Super-Aikido. Adding muscle power would result in my punching someone harder than "as hard as I could", but I could live with that. In practice, I'd adjust the amount of my NP-push as the circumstances required.

I also practiced quickly creating the protective NP-pad over the front of my fist, to make sure I could spread the impact over all of my hand and forearm. That was easy, as the size and shape of NP-plates are flexible enough now that one of them could mold itself to the shape of my fist.

One thing that I had no trouble with was in deciding which mind provided the shield. In an emergency I wouldn't want every mind to think some other mind was going to do it, and nor would be want every mind to do it themselves. The mind that did do it ideally should be one that wasn't creating any other ki-effects, that way its plate would have the maximum strength, currently about 230 kg theoretically, although they've gotten three times more 'squash resistant' for a reason that isn't apparent to me. [[Using a material with a breaking strain of "x", you can construct a brace - triangles work well - that can withstand more than "x". Because having NP-points collapse on me was a nuisance, something similar to a braced internal structure had developed. The development was NOT done by the Universe because it doesn't cooperate intelligently, but by my own deep subconsciouses. They understood enough about braces to include them in NP-points. Getting a threefold improvement in squash resistance was the best they could do.]]

My minds had become very good at working together. In the early days, with two or four minds, we had to discuss who did what. Even in an emergency, that dialogue had been necessary back in those days. Nowadays, we seemed to cooperate instinctively, so we don't get ourselves tangled up like baseball players do sometimes, when zero or several of them try to catch a high ball.

With the protective cover over my fist, I lightly punched myself a few times to see what it felt like. It felt like I was glad I'd done it lightly. In other words, the new punching method worked very well.