Chapter 3: I Choose Violence

The thing about being a heterotroph was that the world suddenly had texture.

Before the evolution, Andy’s perception of the pond had been a chemical smear: “food over there” and “not food over there” and, occasionally, the more urgent “something large over there, move.” Navigating a city by smell alone, except the city was an ocean and he was a grain of sand.

After the evolution, the smear sharpened.

[Active Hunting] had upgraded his senses from “blunt instrument” to “something almost precise.” He could differentiate between types of organic compounds now: sugars here, proteins there, lipids in a cluster to what his internal orientation insisted was “north.” More importantly, he could detect other living cells, their metabolic exhaust trailing behind them like footprints in snow.

He could track things.

Andrew Snodgrass, veterinary technician, animal lover, the kind of man who carried beetles out of his apartment in cupped hands, could now hunt living organisms with directed, intentional, predatory focus for the express purpose of stabbing them with his horn and eating whatever came out.

The cognitive dissonance was manageable because the things he was hunting did not possess consciousness or the ability to suffer. They were cells. Biological machinery on chemical autopilot, no more aware of their existence than a thermostat was aware of temperature. He was eating thermostats. Thermostats with cell membranes.

This was fine.

“And here,” Andy narrated to absolutely no one, in the private theater of his own mind, “we observe the heterotrophic prokaryote in its natural habitat, fresh from evolution and positively bristling with new abilities. Note the enhanced chemoreception, the pseudopod extensions, the general air of menace that it wears like a very small, very pointy hat.”

David Attenborough, or the memory of David Attenborough filtered through the neural patterns of a dead veterinary technician now piloting a microscopic predator, provided the narration with a gravitas that the subject matter absolutely did not warrant.

“The predator has identified a cluster of unsuspecting prokaryotes gathered near a thermal gradient. They are fat. They are slow. They have made the critical evolutionary error of not developing a horn, which, as we have established, is the single most important thing any organism in this pond can grow.”

He paused. Even in his own head, that one had layers.

He extended a pseudopod, the new ability manifesting as a temporary bulge of cytoplasm he could push outward like an arm made of jelly, and used it to stabilize his approach. The pseudopod was weird. Not unpleasant, just weird, like discovering he could wiggle a muscle he hadn’t known existed. He could anchor himself, change direction, or grab onto things, all of which made him a significantly more effective predator than the free-floating blob he’d been before.

Or twelve days ago. Time. Still unclear. Moving on.

He crept (drifted with hostile intent) toward the cluster of cells, horn-first, pseudopod braced against a grain of sediment, and picked his target: the largest of the group, a plump cell radiating the chemical equivalent of “I have recently eaten very well and am too full to move quickly.”

“The horny prokaryote,” he narrated, because the pun sustained him even without an audience, “stalks its prey. Note the horn, extended at the leading edge of the cellular body. One-tenth the length of its total body. In human terms, this would be equivalent to a man carrying a sword roughly the length of his forearm. In prokaryotic terms, it is devastating. In phallic terms, it is… well. Moving on.”

He struck.

Pop.

That sound. That perfect, satisfying little pop of membrane giving way. He’d felt it during his first kill and it hadn’t gotten old. The cell burst open, its contents rushing out in a warm gush of proteins and nutrients that his enhanced absorption processed with fifty percent greater efficiency than before. More nutrients per kill. Faster energy. More hunting. More XP. Andy was becoming a perpetual motion machine of consumption and violence, a feedback loop that would have horrified his human self and delighted his gamer self. At this point, those were the same person.

[ORGANISM DEFEATED: PROKARYOTE (NUTRIENT-RICH)]

[XP GAINED: +4]

Four XP. One more than the standard kill reward. The nutrient-rich tag must have contributed a bonus, which meant that targets varied in value, which meant that Andy needed to start categorizing his prey by XP yield, which meant he was, god help him, developing a loot table for pond organisms.

He moved to the next target. Pop. Then the next. Pop. Each kill was faster than the last, not because the targets were getting easier but because Andy was getting better at the sequence: approach, stabilize, thrust, absorb, move on. He was developing technique. He was developing style.

He named the moves.

This was perhaps the most telling sign that Andrew Snodgrass remained fundamentally, incurably, a nerd. He named his combat techniques the way a kid names backyard attacks, except the backyard was a pond and the stick was a horn and the imaginary enemies were real organisms that went splorch when punctured.

The basic frontal thrust, horn leading, maximum velocity, was “The Snodgrass Special.” (He was aware of how that sounded. He did not care.) The angled approach, coming at a target from above to pierce the thinner dorsal membrane, was “Death From A Vaguely Upward Direction.” The pseudopod-anchor-and-pivot, where he braced against a surface and drove the horn in with extra force, was “The Fulcrum,” which was the only one with a name that sounded even remotely cool, and he was proportionally proud of it. The surprise attack from behind was “The Proctologist,” which he immediately renamed “The Ambush” because even alone in a pond, a man has limits.

[XP: 23/100]

He hunted. He ate. He grew.

* * *

The pond, Andy was learning, was not a static environment.

He had assumed that the warm water would stay warm, that the nutrients would keep flowing, that the chemical gradients would continue pointing him toward food like a GPS recalculating after a wrong turn. He had assumed, essentially, that the tutorial zone would stay tutorial-zone-shaped until he was ready for the next area.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

The pond did not agree.

The temperature shift started as a subtle cooling at the edges of his awareness, the way a room grows darker before someone notices and turns on a light. The warm water began to cool from the surface downward, and with the cooling came consequences.

Everything slowed. Active predators became sluggish. Sluggish cells became inert. Inert cells began to die, their membranes losing integrity, spilling their contents into the water in a slow, cold hemorrhage. Not with a pop, like when Andy killed them. More of a sad little pfsssh, like a balloon three days after the party.

Mass extinction event. Happening all around him. Very casual Tuesday in the primordial pond.

[ENVIRONMENTAL EVENT: THERMAL SHIFT (COOLING)]

[AMBIENT TEMPERATURE DECREASING]

[WARNING: METABOLIC EFFICIENCY REDUCED AT LOWER TEMPERATURES]

[SURVIVAL ADVISORY: SEEK THERMAL REFUGE]

The cold reached for him, his metabolism beginning to lag, and for a panicked moment he was back in the amoeba encounter, that same full-body alarm screaming move, move, move.

Thermal refuge. The System had said to seek thermal refuge. The surface was cooling first, which meant deeper was warmer, which meant down, toward the thermal vents at the bottom he’d noticed during early hunting but ignored because why commute when the office was right here?

He dove. Or rather, he sank with intention, dragging himself downward with pseudopods (he had chosen spike over speed, and for the first time, the cost of that choice hit him), past the dying cells, past the slowing predators, past the layer where the temperature dropped from “comfortable” to “uncomfortable” to “your metabolism is going to shut down in ninety seconds.”

The sediment was warmer. The thermal vents radiated a steady heat that felt, against his cooling membrane, like climbing into a bath after being caught in the rain. He nestled into the soft silt between two mineral deposits, horn pointed outward (defensively, habitually, the way a person sleeps with a baseball bat by the bed after watching a horror movie), and waited.

[THERMAL REFUGE: LOCATED]