On Sunday morning, his father was not allowed to walk.
"Not until Tuesday," said his mother, at 7:15 AM, in the kitchen, in her robe, holding her coffee like a gavel. "Not the bridge. Not the hill. Not the mailbox. You can walk from the couch to the bathroom and back, and if you want to do anything more athletic than that, you can call Aimee and explain it to her, Rick."
"I feel fine," said his father.
"You felt fine yesterday on the ninth step."
His father opened his mouth and closed it. Maddie, at the counter, ate a spoonful of cereal very loudly in the silence.
"So it's us," she said to Owen, when their mother had gone upstairs. "You and me. I'm still in the contract. Clause five, amended."
"It's Sunday. The amendment said weekdays."
"I'm extending it." She put her bowl in the sink. "Unilaterally. Get your shoes."
They walked the river path without him, and it was weird.
It was the first walk they'd done without their dad since Monday, and Owen kept turning to say something to someone who wasn't there. Maddie walked very fast, with her hands jammed in the pocket of her hoodie and her earbuds in, but with no music playing. He knew, because he could hear nothing coming out of them.
At the footbridge, she stopped.
"Ninth step," she said.
"Yeah."
She counted up the steps, under her breath, and stood on the ninth one, and stood there for a while, and then she went up the rest and across the bridge and didn't say anything for a quarter mile.
"Owen," she said, finally, at the turnaround. "If you hadn't been there. Yesterday."
"I was there."
"But if you weren't." She pulled one earbud out. "He would've kept going, right? He'd have walked it off. And then on, like, Tuesday, at the shop—"
"I was there," said Owen again, more gently. "That's the whole thing, Mads. I was there. We're going on Tuesday. Mom got the appointment. We're on it."
She looked at him for a long time with their father's eyes.
"You're weird lately," she said. "You know that, right? You're, like, nice. It's freaking me out."
"Sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Just—" She waved a hand. "Be normal sometimes. So I know it's still you."
So he called her a gremlin and she shoved him into a hedge, and they walked home feeling, both of them, a lot better.
He did his pushups when he got back, the way he'd done them every day for a week. Down on the bedroom carpet, between the bed and the desk, hands under shoulders, the way the video had told him on Monday night.
Monday, he'd done six and his arms had shaken like a puppy in the rain.
Tuesday, seven. Wednesday, eight. Thursday, eight, which had been the worst day, because he'd thought he would never get to nine. Friday, nine. Saturday, he hadn't done any, because of the bridge and everything.
This morning he did ten.
And then, because nobody was watching and he was a little bit stupid, he tried for eleven, and his arms gave up at the bottom, and he lay face-down on the carpet breathing in carpet smell and laughing.
Ten, he thought. Ten whole pushups.
It was nothing. Mr. Okafor had done fifty on the first day of gym class in eighth grade, as a demonstration, while talking. Theo could do twenty-five, probably. Most of the guys on the Ironworks Rangers squad Owen had once watched on a stream in his first life could have done ten with a person sitting on their back.
But in his first life, Owen had not done ten pushups since he was fourteen. He'd been thirty-two and couldn't get off the floor without making a noise. And he'd sat in a chair for fourteen years and believed that the sync rate on his headset was a number the universe had given him, like his height.
He got up. He drank a glass of water. He wrote in the notebook:
Sun 3/22. Walk 3.1 mi (Maddie). Pushups 10. Sleep 8h10. Water 6 so far. Dad: no exertion till Tues.
And then, under it:
10.
He underlined it. He felt like a dork. He did it anyway.
[LATTICE OS v1.0.4]
[Calibrating... please lie still and breathe normally.]
[Physical adaptation threshold reached.]
[Neural-motor coherence improved. Baseline adjusted: +1% (permanent).]
Owen opened his eyes.
That had never happened before. Not in either life. In his first life, the Companion app had said "Physical adaptation: logged" on every single summary for fourteen years, and he'd never once asked what it meant, because nobody had, because it sounded like the kind of thing the legal department made them put in. He'd assumed it was tracking how much his body ached, for a lawsuit.
It had been tracking. For a threshold. And he'd never crossed it.
[Baseline synchronization estimate: 54%]
[Base 51% (50 + 1 adaptation) | Modifier active: Hydrated (Clear Draft) +3%, 3h 58m remaining]
Fifty-one base. Fifty-four with the drink.
He lay on his bed with the headset on and just looked at the number for a while, the way you look at a test grade when it's higher than you thought it would be. Ten pushups. Three miles. A week of water. One percent. Permanent.
Eleven more, he thought. Eleven more to sixty-five.
This copy used the author's publication page without permission. Reading the story at its proper page supports the author.
PHYSICAL ADAPTATION = REAL. +1 FROM PUSHUPS/WALKING? CHECK.
He wondered how many people at the very top knew about this. Not the pod guys. The best pod guys, the ones the world thought were naturals. He wondered if their trainers knew. He wondered if Adrian Vey knew, smiling at a camera on Saturday afternoon, saying A world that moves with you.
He went in.
The Harrowgate market on Sunday morning was the busiest Owen had ever seen it in this life, and the shouting started before he even got through the gate.
"Bells! Buying Copper Bells, ten copper each!"
"Twelve! Twelve copper! Paying twelve!"
"WTB bells, WTB bells, whisper Lattebear!"
Owen stopped in the middle of the street.
In his first life, by the Sunday of week one, Copper Bells had been trading at nine copper. He remembered it because it was the price he'd sold at, the twenty he'd farmed, so happy to have nine copper each that he'd bought a sandwich in-game to celebrate. A week later they were thirty. Two weeks later, forty-five. Then, the morning of the 1.1 patch, Cairnfolk vendors in every croft started selling them for a copper, and the price hit the floor and kept going.
Twelve copper. On Sunday.
He walked to the Exchange Board on Market Street. The slate wall was so thick with pinned slips this morning that it looked like it had grown feathers, and the clerk behind the counter, who took two percent of everything, looked happier than Owen had ever seen her.
HARROWGATE EXCHANGE - Copper BellLast sale: 11c | 24h avg: 8c | 7d avg: 4c
Buy orders: 312 | Sell listings: 41
"They're ringing in every pocket, love. You'd think there was a wedding." - the Exchange clerk
Three hundred and twelve buy orders. Forty-one sellers.
He opened zone chat and scrolled.
[Zone] Thraxxis: bell ward confirmed for lv15 btw. someone tested it on PTR. its 6 bells per craft
[Zone] ghostbread: PTR isnt a thing yet dumbass
[Zone] Thraxxis: datamine then whatever
[Zone] VelvetAnvil: bells are going to 1 SILVER mark my words
[Zone] Lattebear: buying all bells 12c whisper me
[Zone] ghostbread: isnt that the rat guy who bought all the bells day 2
[Zone] ghostbread: like the rock throwing guy. the gorse bush guy
[Zone] Thraxxis: gorse bush guy is a different guy i think
[Zone] VelvetAnvil: is the gorse bush guy the bell guy
[Zone] ghostbread: i feel like hes everything
Owen closed the chat.
Okay, he thought. Here's the wrinkle.
The Bell-Ward datamine had dropped on Wednesday in this life, not the following Monday, like he remembered. He'd thought that was weird at the time. Maybe someone had posted it early. Maybe the data miners had been faster because of the hotfix, which had come early too. And now the price was running two days ahead of where it should be, and climbing harder, because everyone had seen it climb once already and wanted in.
Which meant the crash might be early, too.
He sat down on the edge of the fountain, opened his notebook in his head, and did the math he'd been doing since Tuesday.
He had a hundred and sixty-seven bells. He'd paid four silver thirty-one for a hundred and eighteen of them, which meant the whole stack, counting the ones he'd farmed, had cost him under three copper a bell. At eleven copper, the stack was worth eighteen silver. At the peak in his first life, forty-five copper, it would be worth seventy-five silver. And if the crash came early and caught him holding, it would be worth a stack of little brass bells he could hang off his house like Edda.
In my first life, he thought, I lost all my gold to this.
He remembered it exactly. Week three. Tuesday or Wednesday. He'd bought three hundred bells at thirty-eight copper, with everything he had, because the forums said a silver was coming. He'd woken up the next morning to the patch notes, and a hundred messages from guildmates who'd done the same thing, and one message from a girl in Gilded Ledger that just said lol.
He'd sold at a copper each, and quit for a month.
He thought about it for a long time.
Then he stood up, went to the clerk, and listed forty bells.
HARROWGATE EXCHANGE - Sell listingCopper Bell x40 @ 11c each
Exchange fee (2%): -9c
Sold. +4s 31c
It took eleven seconds. He pinned the slip, and before he'd turned around the clerk was sliding it off the slate again. Somebody, probably Lattebear, had been sitting on a buy order the size of a small lake.
Four silver and thirty-one copper. To the copper, exactly what he'd paid for all hundred and eighteen on Monday.
He kept a hundred and twenty-seven.
That was the rule he'd written in the notebook on Tuesday night, in all capitals, in the margin of the page where he'd done the math: SELL INTO STRENGTH. NEVER ALL OF IT. NEVER AFTER WEEK 2 MONDAY. He'd made his money back already. Everything after this was free. He could ride the rest to thirty, or forty, and sell in pieces, and if the crash came early, he'd still be fine. He'd still have Brennick's gate and Edda's bell and a story to tell. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
It was the first piece of real financial planning he'd done in either of his lives, and it had taken him a market crash, a death, and a time machine to do it.
Dad would be proud, he thought, and then thought: Dad's alive. I can tell him. He decided he would, later, at dinner, in a way that made it sound like a stock thing.
Theo logged in at 10:30, at fifty, from the couch, still in pajamas, with a bowl of cereal next to his bed, which he admitted to immediately.
"It's healthy cereal," he said. "My mom bought it. It tastes like a shoe. I'm at fifty, bro. Fifty. I've never been fifty in my life."
"Congratulations."
"I'm going to get a tattoo of it."
They spent the morning on the ridge in daylight, which was quieter and worse XP than night, so mostly they ran laps between the crofts and the shrine while Owen tested the timing on his stagger-step at fifty-four. It felt different. Not a lot. But the input lag was down to about a hundred and thirty-eight milliseconds, and he could feel the gap between thinking left and stepping left get just a little thinner, like a coat of paint coming off a window.
ROOK - Level 10 Vanguard (unclassed)HP 290/290 | Stamina 239/239
STR 11 | AGI 23 | END 24 | FOC 8 | SPI 4 (+1)
SYNC 54% (Drift) - dodge window 108 ms - input lag ~138 ms
Form tolerance: ±56 ms | Crit 4%
Modifiers: Hydrated (Clear Draft) +3% [2h 41m]
Class skill points: 1 (banked)
Copper Bell x127
At 11:00, he logged out for his break, went downstairs, and found his father in the kitchen, standing very still at the counter.
Owen's whole body went cold.
"Dad?"
"Shh." His father didn't turn around. "I'm watching the toast. Your mother said I'm not allowed to do anything strenuous, and I'm taking it very seriously. I've been watching the toast for three minutes. It's the most relaxing thing I've ever done."
Owen stood there with his heart going like a drum.
"Okay," he said, after a second. "Cool. Good toast."
"Good toast," said his father, peacefully.
Owen drank a glass of water at the sink with his hands shaking, and went back upstairs, and lay down, and when the calibration came up it said:
[Baseline synchronization estimate: 49%]
[Base 51% | Modifier active: Hydrated (Clear Draft) +3% | Acute stress -5%]
He lay there for a while, breathing.
Seven, nine, twelve, he thought, remembering Edda's cairns. He breathed in for seven. Held it for nine. Let it out for twelve. It was too long. He ran out of breath halfway through and had to gulp. He tried again with seconds that were a little faster, a little more like heartbeats. Seven, nine, twelve. Seven. Fourteen, nine, seven.
At the end of the seventh cairn, he looked at the calibration screen again.
[Re-calibrating...]
[Baseline synchronization estimate: 52%]
[Acute stress -2% (resolving)]
Owen stared at it.
Resolving.
That had never happened in his first life either. He'd never once tried to fix a stress modifier in the calibration window. You just took the number and went in. Everybody did. It was a machine that read you, and you were what you were.
He did the cairn count one more time, slower.
[Baseline synchronization estimate: 54%]
He lay there with his heart going quietly, and wrote on the inside cover of the notebook, by feel, without looking:
7-9-12-7-14-9-7 → stress -5 → 0 in 2 rounds. EDDA'S COUNT. WHO ELSE KNOWS?
And then he went in, and found Theo standing on top of a cairn yelling at a sheep.
[Session ended. Final SYNC: 53%.]
LATTICE COMPANION - Session SummaryDuration: 2h 18m
Baseline in: 54% | Baseline out: 53%
Breaks: 2 ✓ | Hydration check-ins: 2 ✓
Physical adaptation: +1% (permanent)
Your body's learning, Rook!
At lunch, Owen told his father he'd made four silver on a "stock thing," and his father said, "In the game?" and Owen said yes, and his father said, "What's that in dollars?" and Owen said nothing, it's not real money, and his father said, "Then why are you so happy?"
"Because I didn't sell all of it," said Owen.
His father looked at him for a moment over the healthy toast.
"Huh," he said. "That's the whole trick, kid. Most people never figure that out."