His eyes went bug wide again though as he caressed his healed hand with the other. “That isn’t possible. What did you do?”

  “You know how I told you before that there are some things which I can’t explain, well this is one of them.”

  “But this is amazing. I’m resisting the urge to tell you how much I want to start a complete panel of testing or to ask for samples of your bodily fluids because I don’t want to scare you away, but…”

  Then he seemed to go speechless, and it got awkward as he realized he hadn’t held it in nearly as well as he’d thought. “I’m sorry, I never would force anything upon you. In recent years, we’ve stopped our catch and release programs and it’s been decreed that humans are too advanced for unwilling testing. Thus, we’re limited to observation only. But, you have to tell me what that was.”

  “I didn’t say that I wouldn’t tell you. I said that I couldn’t tell you. There’s a difference and if you’re even half as smart as you’re supposed to be you’ll figure out what that means. Why don’t you examine your hand and let me know what your equipment tells you?”

  “Can you heal the others?” He asked, while moving to the console. I kept my eyes locked on him, waiting for any sign of betrayal or hostility. At the same time, I pushed on my Mage Shield and pushed both Life and Lightning Mana into it. It normally ran on just my bio-electrical energy, but as with most abilities I’d found that with practice I could push extra power into it for a greater effect. Now, I just had to hope that a mana based shield would stop whatever technology they might deploy against me.

  He scanned his hand as the console reshaped into some type of lab. A machine formed around his hand and a series of lights went off inside of it. To my limited understanding it looked like some type of x-ray machine, although I guessed it was far more sophisticated.

  “The implant is still crushed, but even the tissue around it is completely restored to normal. Some of it even seemed to be tougher than usual, as it’s resisting being cut by the fragments in my hand. Here… let me try to remove it.”

  The light flashed brighter and then tiny fragments of something metallic appeared on a flat portion of the console. There was a small amount of what I took to be blue blood covering a few shattered components. Although, by human standards, it was less than what I would have expected for something inside his body.

  “None of this should be possible.” He was mumbling as he worked, clearly speaking to himself rather than me.

  Then I asked, “Can you scan for any irregularity in your hand?”

  He stopped cold and turned to stare at me. Then, without actually saying anything, he made some more adjustments to the console and the machine he was using to examine his hand changed into a flat screen which looked even more like an x-ray machine.

  I could see the outline of his hand through it along with some fairly fragile bones inside. He said, “The tissue is continuing to heal after I removed the implant. Soon it will be as though I never had it in me, despite the fact that it’s been there since I left the incubation tube.”

  I noticed as I looked at the image of his hand that there were a couple of small black spots. I certainly wasn’t an expert, but they looked more like holes in the screen than objects inside his hand and they were tiny. Even as I watched, I started to see the spots start to fill back in, as though the scanner had been glitching but was now coming back online.

  “This isn’t possible.”

  I smiled and withheld my statement about him saying that an awful lot. “What isn’t possible?”

  “There were minute traces of irregularity in my hand. Well, there still are, but they’re shrinking by the moment.”

  “I assume you have something like what we call the scientific process where you postulate a theory and then test it. What are you thinking now, Dan’Or?”

  He didn’t reply for a while, but I’d grown much better at dealing with silence. Eventually, he started speaking again. “You have some connection to what we are calling the irregularity.” He stared at me almost like he was trying to pry my secrets from my brain. “Just as we can only detect it as an absence on many of our scans, so too, you are unable to communicate what you know about it to me.”

  I started to say, “Yes,” but fell to my knees as a stabbing pain went through my head. The pain spread through my entire body and eventually I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I had a flashing notification which was waiting for me and I couldn’t even open my eyes without checking it first.

  Forerunner Warning 1.1 – your current line of conversation is dangerously close to revealing aspects of the system to non-inducted entities. You have been disciplined. Do not test us, as further discipline will be much harsher.

  I’d experienced pain in a hundred different ways since being inducted, but something about this pain lingered with me. I hated myself for it, but I felt a bit like a whipped dog whimpering on the floor. I just wanted that pain to stop. I took a deep breath and sat up.

  There were three Crembori working at different stations inside of what looked like a command deck. Dan’Or turned from whatever he was working on to look at me. “Good, you’re awake. I was beginning to worry. Don’t worry, I won’t ask you any more questions right now about what we were discussing. Also, you can rest assured that we did not take any tissue or fluid samples from you. Only attempted to scan you enough to determine if you had any injuries which we needed to treat.

  “Our scans were inconclusive and unable to get any readings on you. Also, you won’t need to worry about the other Crembori at least for the moment. I’ve had them placed into stasis in medical tubes set at the lowest possible setting. It will be months before they’re fully restored.”

  I looked at him and shook my head, trying to clear the last bit of haze. “Uh, thank you. How long was I out for?”

  He took a few steps closer to me. “I hope you can see this as a gesture of goodwill. You were unconscious for almost one of your days. Gal’Or and I had a chance to talk, and he has again asked that I do whatever is necessary to make you see the Crembori as allies.” My newest skill came into play because I saw the nervousness and uncertainty on a face that didn’t express the way humans did. “I’m going against the council in this matter,” he admitted. “They decreed that we needed to bring back a human test subject. I must respectfully request asylum for me and my crew on planet Earth.”

  That was the last thing I expected. I mean I expected it at some point, just not right now. “I’m not some leader who can grant that to your people.”

  He seemed confused. “The way Gal’Or spoke of you made me believe that you were someone with authority. The misunderstanding is mine. We will return to your capital. What is it that you call it? The White House, I believe.”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t think my people are ready for you yet. If you’re going to come out to them, we need to plan that out ahead of time. It can’t be a spur-of-the-moment decision.”

  “Crembori only make well-reasoned decisions.” He was completely deadpan as he spoke.

  “Fine, you and your crew may stay on my family’s property. We have enough room for you there.”

  He seemed mollified by that. “Excellent, we noted some abnormal flora and fauna near your residence. Now, what do you request in payment for asylum?”

  I began to think this was mistake again, but then let his words sink in. What did I want? There was so much to consider. Would Earth be easier to mobilize if they discovered aliens were real? I didn’t know if it would matter. They might end up distracted with the nice aliens and not prepare for the real threat that was coming.

  For the moment, I pushed those questions aside. They were problems for future Silas. Now, I thought about what I wanted from him. They had technology which was so far beyond Earth that I wouldn’t understand almost any of it, but surely some of it could be useful. I couldn’t take it onto a mission as it would be fried even faster than Earth tech, but maybe I could use it with my crafting class. That seemed to be the point of the class.

  “I’d like a workstation on your ship, some basic instructions in how to use it, and then access to some of that liquid metal stuff.”

  “You are a scientist?”

  “Consider me a tinker of sorts. I want to work on seeing how I can combine your technology with Earth technology. I left off even hinting that I wanted to combine it with the system, as I didn’t want that kind of pain again.

  He didn’t say anything again for a moment and I began to realize that he and the other Crembori had some means of communicating that I couldn’t hear. Maybe the implant that was in his hand, once again enabled it, or maybe it was some type of genetically enabled telepathy.

  “That is acceptable, but what do you mean by liquid metal?”

  I laughed. “That was sort of a joke. I was referring to whatever that console that I melted was made of, but as I think about it, your metal seems to act in ways that aren’t entirely natural.”

  “Ah.” Then he raised his hand, and I felt the air tremble. A slot in the far wall opened about two feet wide and a foot high. Then a sled floated through the air held aloft by some sort of field which I could feel in the air but not see.

  Once it stopped in front of him, He picked up a small block. It was only an inch by an inch. “This is bio-steel. It is organic but also a metal which is significantly more durable than the metal you call titanium. As you said, it would be difficult for me to explain this technology to you, but these building blocks are what we create almost everything out of. Feel free to touch one yourself.”

  I didn’t need another invitation, but stood up from the bed and crossed the space in two quick steps. I grabbed one of the cubes. There were hundreds of them on the sled. As soon as I touched it, I felt it moving in my hand. The sensation was odd, because on one hand it was hard, maybe not like metal, more like plastic, but still rigid. Yet, I could feel tiny sensations inside of it. I smiled. This would work nicely.

  Chapter 47- Magic or Science

  I made sure that the Crembori landed their ship on our property while saying a silent thank you to Uncle Dan for having the forethought or paranoia to have this much land. With a total of twenty acres, there was plenty of room to set down their ship. Dan’Or even assured me that they could set up a field which would keep animals and people away without harming them. It had something to do with a subsonic frequency, which made most organisms uncomfortable. It wouldn’t work on insects, but at least mammals and birds would stay away.

  I grabbed some food at home and got a lecture from Cece. She was convinced that I’d snuck out to hook up with what she referred to as a gym skeeze. I finally convinced her that I just went walking because the entire alien ship had me so freaked out. My story was supported by the fact that my car had been outside when she left the gym.

  I hated lying to them. I hated it even more because it was super easy. My Charisma made it effortless to smooth over her anger and then get them to believe, even what to me, sounded like a far-fetched story. After dinner, I headed back out to the where their ship was. I’d already decided to take a second night off from missions since I was essentially unconscious for the previous one. That would allow me some time to finally start experimenting with this new metal.

  Bio-metal… it wasn’t exactly a catchy name. I chuckled as I thought how it should have been called trillium, but I got the sense that the Crembori were rather matter of fact in their descriptions. From the little bit that I’d learned about the metal so far, it seemed like it was a type of moss. If it was provided with raw materials and energy, it could grow more, but it could also stay in a static state for long periods of time.

  The real question for me was whether I could tinker a way of using it with mana or not. The idea of being able to craft items like armor which could be reshaped to fit whatever the user needed was pretty appealing. My shields had already demonstrated the value of versatility.

  Speaking of my shields, I did make sure to run through my forms and practice all of my abilities and spells a few times while in the radius of increased mana around my portal. Even though I was now running the portals, the surrounding land was still saturated with mana. I didn’t know how that worked, but I wasn’t knocking it since this provided me with a way to train while on Earth.

  I got a faint flicker of perception which said there was something out there watching me, but when I went to look, I couldn’t find anything. If I found out one of the other Forerunners was watching me, I would be pretty pissed. Of course, it might have been nothing or it might have been another mana mutated animal. After a few minutes of looking, though, I gave up and headed for the Crembori ship.

  Dan’Or welcomed me even though the other Crembori never said anything or even looked at me for long. I supposed I probably looked as odd to them as they did to me. I pushed those thoughts aside when I saw my work station. They’d set everything up to be human size so that I didn’t need to stoop over.

  Then I got a crash course in the various tools available at the station. I determined to use as little of the tech as possible, but various types of scanners, cutting tools, and energy fields which could even manipulate small pieces were pretty convenient.

  Then Dan’Or got to the product I’d be working with. He held up a one-inch cube of bio-metal. “This is the base unit we work with, but it is actually made of much finer strands woven together.” As he spoke, the square in his hand floated up into the air and the fibers began to unravel. It was like I was watching a 3D printer in reverse.

  I did my best not to let my mouth hang open. It was just so freaking cool and got my mind spinning again. Basic elements seemed to work with the system. Steel, for example, had no problem existing. I could bring a basic knife on a mission without any problem, but anything with circuitry would be destroyed by exposure to mana.

  “How do you get the metal to be both pliable and yet able to harden?”

  Dan’Or thought about my question for a moment before he replied, “The simplest explanation that I can give you is that a set of commands is hard-wired into the DNA of the metal. Then, as energy is given to the metal, we can cause it to shape itself in different ways. What you see now is the result of centuries of refinement.”

  I grinned. “I don’t have centuries to wait, so I’m hoping to learn as much about how you make it work as possible.”

  Then I picked up one of the cubes and started to gently probe it with life mana. I listened for any type of resonance in the metal. The cube of bio-metal felt alive under my touch, a buzzing sensation that prickled against my skin as if acknowledging my presence. As I infused it with life mana, a gentle flow at first, the sensation intensified—a subtle hum, almost like a whisper, as if the metal itself was eager, waiting for direction.

  For the longest time, nothing happened. Then suddenly, the cube completely liquified in my hand and spread over my flesh. It solidified into a hardened mass as smooth as an insects carapace. That was stupid and the last time I’d keep it in my hand. After all, I’d melted a fricken console made of the stuff yesterday. I needed to be smarter than that. It took Dan’Or half an hour to completely remove the destroyed cube from my hand using a series of lasers to cut away the metal. It had almost fused to my hand. The heat produced had burned my skin, but a quick spell healed that up.

  Dan’Or’s eyes once again went wide with my spell, but he didn’t ask any questions. For now, that was for the best.

  When I started to experiment again, I grabbed a piece of wood from the shed and set the cube on top of that. I didn’t want to touch it, but I also didn’t want it to be held aloft by their technology, as that might mess with my results. The same could be true if the cube I was attempting to manipulate was in physical contact with the work station since it was made of the same substance.

  After six hours and dozens of experiments, I was beginning to think that I’d never get it. A part of me screamed that I was simply being impatient, but so far, the system had made everything so much easier. Maybe that was the point, though. The system made us dependent on it. Samvek’s training had pushed me to work with the system but not to lean on it too much. That was why he’d insisted on so much old-fashioned practice.

  Throughout all of my failed experiments, Dan’Or stood there observing. He never made a comment and didn’t display any reactions whether the cube simply became misshapen and non-responsive or if it imploded. One consistent element was that once a cube reacted negatively to the mana I was trying to push into it, it couldn’t be restored and Dan’Or had it broken down to base elements.

  Maybe I was just stubborn, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I felt like I’d learned a great deal already and not just about the metal. I was developing a better feel for how mana flowed. Whereas before I’d only seen mana as either generic or attuned, now I was beginning to feel like there were frequencies within the mana. The amount that I sent into an object certainly mattered, but as I worked with the alien metal, I tried to vary the amount of vibration that came with the mana. It was difficult to be any more precise than that as I was working blindly, feeling my way through this without any guidance from the system.

  I knew I was on the right track though, because of a notification I gained.

  You have gained sufficient experience and practice with your occupation to gain your next level. Failure often teaches more than success.

  I hadn’t even been tracking the progress on the occupation, but since it was only going from level 2 to level 3, I assumed it wasn’t that big of a jump. Nothing could be further from the truth. As it went, I felt it was suddenly easier to manipulate the mana the way I wanted. I got a more instinctive feel for just what the metal could handle.

  Absently, I wondered if that last line in the notification was a message from the system justifying why it didn’t provide any more clarity. Or perhaps we were all its failures, and the system was telling me that it didn’t care if we failed since it learned more from that.