Chapter 305: Working on Dual Sight Blobs

Sunday, May 7 to Wednesday, May 31, 2006

I rode my bike around to Ava's fairly early. I didn't want to disturb her if she was sleeping, so I stopped a street away to send a sight blob to check on her. I did need to stop, as riding my bike was not a good time to shut my eyes or to experiment with my inability to handle superimposed sight. Ava was snoozing, so I ended up spending half an hour riding around town before a check showed her to be out of bed. She was in the shower, so I let her know I was in the area (you can imagine for yourself how I did that), let myself into the house - unlocking doors from the inside is SO easy - then joined her in the shower.

We did the dirty deed and washed ourselves clean at the same time. Then we decided to do them separately because that's even more fun.

After we'd changed the sheets, had another shower and breakfast, it was 10:30. I hadn't wanted to appear too eager to visit the mansion, and I hadn't been too eager to stop what I was doing with Ava either, especially because she needed some happiness in her life. Ava called Julia, who said it was fine for us to come over.

While we drove through a press pack that was triple yesterday's peak size, I tried to spot Grace, Dallas or their van. There was no sign of them, which made me smile. No doubt I wasn't the only one smiling about their adventure; it'd be a journalistic legend by now.

Prof's debuggers were all over the place, and had found nothing so far. [Finding more nothing all day long.] I got Prof to bring the debuggers' boss to the noisy living room. I waited at the far end, away from everyone else. Prof introduced me, then I asked the boss to confirm, "Are you REALLY sure this room is clean, even against CIA-level bugs?"

"We're sure. Most of our work is commercial, but we've uncovered bugs planted by government agencies many times before. Detecting electronic devices is intrinsically easier than hiding them."

"Okay. Do the press outside know what your team is doing in here?" The debuggers' vehicle was unmarked, so the press probably didn't know.

"Not from us, they don't."

"In that case, on your way out please stop to tell them who you are and that no bugs were found." Prof looked interested, so I explained, "There was a little excitement among the press last night, and I want them to think it was probably caused by the CIA coming to retrieve their bugs in advance of these guys arriving. Is that okay with you?"

"What was the excitement?" asked Prof, more out of curiosity than any doubt that it was okay to blame the CIA for anything.

"A couple of the press were standing on a ladder behind the south wall and using a parabolic microphone to listen to what was being said in the two master bedrooms. They were interrupted and lost all their gear. I'm sure every press-person out there knows about it by now, so it'd be good if they thought it was the CIA's doing." To the debuggers' boss, I said, "If you could mention that your visit was booked a few days ago and imply that there were bugs until recently, that'd work very nicely."

"There's no indication of that, but I can imply something similar, if Prof agrees?"

"Fine by me," agreed Prof.

^

I later gave the four parents more details, apologizing for having listened to the recording, saying, "I had to know what the guy heard before I decided what to do with him. It was lucky for him and his loved ones that none of you said anything you shouldn't." I waited until I saw that they all understood the implication of that, then continued, "My only worry was that none of you sounded sufficiently worried. You were lighthearted, which would've come across as strange. Please sound more sober for a while."

Prof added, "We should turn our radios on while we're talking too."

"That'd be good too. On a lighthearted note, let me tell you what happened to the snoops..." I gave them a short, but nonetheless very explicit description.

"Oh dear," said Mom, confused whether to be sympathetic or amused. Dad was neither confused nor sympathetic. He was regretful that he hadn't been there to see it though. Mom was sufficiently amused not to take umbrage at that. Prof and Vanessa were also amused, but concerned that I might've brought suspicion down on us.

I answered, "Possibly, but I had to listen to that tape and I had to keep the two of them on ice until I had listened to it. Once I knew they hadn't heard anything that screwed us, I didn't want to kill them, so I had to choose how to let them go. What I did seemed to be the work of at least two people and seemed very professional, because they never had a clue anyone was near them. Stealing every single thing they had on them was better than my just stealing their sound gear and tapes, because doing that might've indicated that you guys were behind the theft and that you had something you feared being heard. And it also slowed them down for hours, which might imply that whoever did it needed them out of the way for hours. Someone inside our families didn't need any time, so that implies outsiders did it. What I did was so embarrassing that I don't think it'll be reported on the news or to the police, which they probably would have done if I'd just robbed them and left them to wake up. I can't keep doing that sort of thing, so you need to hire some security to patrol the walls. The media circus is even bigger now, so they're likely to act even more crazy and intrusive."

Dad acted on that immediately, looking up the number for and calling the same company that'd done a good job of guarding our two houses after our casino win. Dad requesting, "Starting as soon as you can get here, please."

I also told the story to Julia and Carol, who weren't the least bit sympathetic. I described the mistake the parents had made by being too lighthearted, what would've had to happen had any of the parents made an even bigger mistake, and cautioned the girls to mind what they said even after the debuggers had gone.

On the topic of speaking cautiously, people did occasionally call me Mark by mistake. We covered it up by occasionally calling Andrew or Robert "Mark", or "Ron", or each other's names. Similarly Donna sometimes got called "Carol", vice versa, and other combination of mistaken names. We tried not to overdo it suspiciously.

Otherwise it was a fairly uneventful day. TV made for interesting watching as many more facts had been confirmed by now, including many that the Government had been trying to keep unconfirmed. Blood was in the water, and the press sharks were going for the kill. With the ship so clearly sinking, people were leaking information in self-righteous self-defense.

Bush (to use the name Dad uses when he's trying to restrain himself), had yet to make an appearance. A spokesperson had promised the President would make a statement, "Probably tomorrow afternoon. It is the weekend, you know?"

Pretty much every other government in the world had managed to make a statement or three, regardless of it being the weekend. CNN played that for laughs (very unusually for CNN), by having their talking-head call their reporter in London to confirm it was the weekend over there too, then shake his head in dismay that the English government was able to respond to an American crisis on a weekend, but the American government could not.

For the next couple of weeks, my life was uncomplicated. Interesting, but uncomplicated. There were really only four things happening:

• My job as a mechanic reached its two-week point in the middle of the week and I declined to continue the trial, deciding instead to work full-time in Vanessa's garden. The boss was unhappy, demanding that I work out my notice. Once I got over the surprise, I told him, "Take it out of my pay," and walked out. For the purposes of maintaining my cover, I'd already gotten a good reference from BB, so the boss didn't matter. He was only trying it on anyway.

• Toward the end of the two weeks, I started publicly trying to seduce Carol. VERY publicly, including meeting her outside school every day with flowers taken from her own home's garden and made into bouquets for me by Vanessa. Everyone was being very helpful, including giving me time off work.

• "Dodge-Gate" became a major international and national disgrace. An international disgrace because America had breached what should've been a sacrosanct treaty and had put the whole world at risk by creating uncontrollable weapons of mass destruction. A national disgrace because tens of millions of American lives had knowingly been put at risk from an accident. The fact that a catastrophic accident HAD occurred - destroying the lab and presumably hundreds of millions of dollars of investment - hadn't engendered confidence in the ability of the Government to avoid accidents. (When the media had started chasing down the emails I'd leaked, they'd been delighted to find that the Fort Dodge lab had very recently suffered some kind of major disaster. The Government wasn't saying what or how.)

• I continued to spend a lot of hours working on the subconscious/conscious integration of something that might eventually get me to the point where I can operate a sight blob while my eyes are open, or two sight blobs when my eyes are closed.

I'll discuss each of these in more detail below.

I'll assume you're not particularly interested in Vanessa's gardening plan, so I'll skip going into any details about my job.

I will mention one initially very scary point. An occupational hazard to being a garden laborer is getting scratched and bleeding. The first time that happened, the cut was a surprise as sudden cuts always are, but FAR more surprising was when my blood came out GRAY! It had a pinkish tinge, but was a LONG way from being red. Other than the shocking change of color, it behaved much like ordinary blood. It was a little runnier than normal, but that was the least of my concerns!

The fact that I wasn't already dead through a "blood malfunction"(!) was good news, and I did feel perfectly healthy - which for me means VERY healthy - but nonetheless, my blood was GRAY!

The cut stopped bleeding very quickly, leaving me nothing to do but scratch my head, make a mental note not to let doctors get a blood sample from me EVER again, then get back to work.

^

[[I did correctly guess the reason for my blood's color. All of my body's energy needs were now being supplied by the Universe, so my cells needed very little oxygen delivered to them. It wasn't as simple as my body no longer producing red blood cells because that would've had other affects, such as my blood losing a very unhealthy proportion of its volume and viscosity. Quite a few changes had been made, which had taken several weeks. Bodies contain a huge number of biofeedback mechanisms that can subconsciously or chemically adapt to handle many strange circumstances, especially to do with processing oxygen, as the demand for and supply of that can be highly variable. It's important that our bodies handle oxygen correctly since it's both essential to our life and poisonous to it.

It wasn't just my blood that'd changed. The blood production process obviously changed too, producing far fewer red cells. To keep the blood volume up, my body produced more infection-fighting white cells, more repair-making stem cells, and other useful components. The other end of the process changed too: at the cellular level there was a greatly reduced delivery of oxygen and the need to remove of carbon dioxide, and an almost total elimination of the need to recharge ATP molecules (think of them as the cells' internal batteries). Recharging ATP is a phenomenally major cellular activity, as every day a body recharges a total of half of its body weight in ATP molecules, so its now being unnecessary for me greatly reduced my intracellular activity. Several other intracellular changes occurred too, either as a result of the new energy delivery system, or as second-level effects.

Some of the cells' activities are hard-coded and unable to adapt, but many of them are driven by cycles that contained feedback loops, so when their activity levels reduced, other intra- and inter-cellular activities became more effective. Repairing DNA is a good example. The DNA in each cell is damaged about ten thousand times a day, so cells put a lot of effort into repairing their DNA. It's an important job, so my cells being able to perform it much more efficiently - as their other workloads had reduced dramatically - was a long-term good thing for me.]]

^

My gardening cut healed very quickly, which made me curious about what my healing rate compared to other people was now. I didn't inflict my scientific curiosity on Julia and Carol this time, experimenting only on myself.

It took a couple of days, but I learned that my body now naturally healed about 12 times faster than what I estimated ordinary people did. Three merges ago it'd healed 3 times faster, so if my healing rate had doubled each time it should've been 24 times faster now, but I guess limiting factors were slowing down the doubling process. [[That logic was mostly wrong. From 3 times faster three merges ago, my natural healing rate after the subsequent merges was respectively: 4 times, 6 times and now 12 times faster, mostly determined by how much of my blood volume could be occupied by stem cells, which was determined by the amount of my energy I could get from the Universe instead of from food. However, I was right that twelve times faster was about the top end of my body's natural healing speed.]]

I was continually radiating ki as part of my training to increase my conscious ki tapping, so it'd been easy to redirect that to one of two similar cuts. Kiatsu seemed to double my healing rate while it was being supplied, which would give me a healing rate 24 times faster than normal people.

Presuming the kiatsu healing bonus fully applied to broken bones, a broken arm that might take other people two months (60 days) to heal, I could heal in 2.5 days. Not as good as Hollywood's special effects, but still pretty damned miraculous as far as I was concerned. Plus my body could also regenerate fingers, grow shorter or taller, change color, change the type of hair it grew, etc. Those abilities might turn out to be far more important to me in the long term than faster healing, because if I live an extraordinarily long time it will almost certainly be better for me to change identities several times than persist with one identity.

Another experiment I did get my girls to help me with was repeating my hot tub test for how long I could hold my breath underwater. My result had been quite ordinary last time, but I had a suspicion that it wouldn't be now, and that the girls would enjoy it.

I sat on the bottom for one minute, two, three, four, five, ... No discomfit at all. I even got bored, but fortunately there were a couple of interesting things to play with, which also entertained the girls.

I came up after fifteen minutes just because there didn't seem to be any point to staying down there any longer. The girls were even more amazed when I told them, "I suspect I could've stayed down there all night. I don't think I need to breathe any longer."

They thought I was very impressive in a weird sort of way, but I insisted I was just very weird in an impressive way. They suggested that the lack of oxygen had damaged my sense of humor.

I didn't want to do a longer test because I was worried that something might go wrong. I was pretty sure I didn't need oxygen as part of the energy supply process, but maybe human bodies need oxygen, nitrogen or one of the other components of air for another reason, without which bad things would happen. I googled "lungs" to see if they had any function beyond getting oxygen into the body and the consequent carbon dioxide out of it. They do have half a dozen other functions, but they would all continue to work fine regardless of whether I was breathing or not. As best I could tell from my rudimentary research, it appeared that I could hold my breath forever or until I wanted to talk. Despite my casual research's findings, being able to hold my breath for long periods wasn't sufficiently useful for me to take the risk of suddenly dying or suffering more subtle damage. Breathing was too much of a habit and it required conscious effort not to breathe. It was merely interesting to confirm that my body was getting all its energy from the Universe, rather than from food.