> day.44
Hard Mode. Alex glazes in her white huntress armor. The hot sun beats down on the steamy desert dunes, sparkles on her brilliant blue visor. Iridescent rainbows glare upon her blade as she pulls it from the screeching giant scorpion, its harrowing tail going limp and rotten as its last bit of health bleeds from its body. Alex raises her proud blade into the light as the message she craves pops into view:
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Aeschylus grants her the reward, her bloodstream bursting with a fine-tuned cocktail of dopamine, oxycodone, special steroids and hormones, so many well-crafted chemicals that her mind goes beautifully numb, her spirit goes free, her body goes to heaven, even if only for an instant before Aeschylus pulls her back down to earth.
“One minute?!” Murphy cackles in delight. “You destroyed the Scorpion King in one bloody minute?! How?!”
“Guess I’m getting too good for Hard Mode,” Alex shrugs. “What’s next in your training module for today?”
Murphy tilts his head, analyzing the monotone in her voice. “Alex, you feelin’ okay? Seem a bit more glum than usual.”
Alex shrugs again. “Yeah, I’m good. I guess.”
“Hmm, could be we’re getting diminishing returns on your reward function,” Murphy strokes his peppery red beard. He hasn’t shaved in weeks—far too excited about Alex’s progress to put down his work.
“What’s that mean?” Alex drones. “Diminishing returns?”
“The high—I mean, the rush—the rush you’re getting after you win a fight.” Murphy scans through some tables and graphs on the surface of his glasses. “Does it feel less intense than it used to? All the numbers on my end say it should feel the same, but you’re the best judge of your own experience.”
“I mean, I guess.” Alex shrugs. “I still like fighting. Feels good getting stronger. Still feels good when I win. But not the same kind of good as a few weeks ago.”
“Hm. Interesting.” Murphy keeps stroking his scraggly beard. Data feeds keep scrolling through his glasses. “How about you relax for a minute. I need to make notes about some of these numbers for the Sector 2 lads.”
“Sure.” Alex peels her white helmet off, fluffs out her white sweatsuit, sits cross-legged on the cold white Training Chamber floor.
“You cut your hair?” Murphy raises an eyebrow.
“A little,” Alex shrugs. Her dull platinum hair bobs gently above her shoulders. “Easier to fit it all in the helmet this way. Better signal strength.”
“Clever.” Murphy nods. He gazes through clips of Alex’s combat logs, starts recording a voice memo. “Agent Aidan Murphy, Special Projects Sector 0, ad-hoc report for Sector 2B, 2EC, 2IO, and 2PE. Title: Perseus Reward Anoms. Object Perseus continues to perform well above all predictions and standards issued under devlog 2B-292b7. All system deviations and psych distortion remain within expected ranges. Nominally, Object Perseus is extraordinarily performant.”
Alex stares up at Murphy from the floor, tilting her head, trying to decipher all his sneaky codewords.
“Object Perseus is experiencing some limited decay of resolution effects within a highly localized set of cognitive clusters, but those DoRs do not account for the reward anoms that may be transpropagating between Sub Drive 2.32 and Ob Func 8.174.”
“Hey Murphy?”
Murphy smiles and raises a finger, holding off her question as he continues his memo. “If those DoRs continue to trans- and para-propagate, Object Perseus could experience diminishing returns in hyperperformance. Investigation needed to determine if hyperperformant behavior could be more sustainably maintained if new masculine geno-pheno entity-relations are brought online in Cluster 02.2 and force-integrated into the object’s core identity schema.”
“Murphy?”
Murphy nods and raises his finger to her again. “Please also investigate viability of Prediction 2IO-OBP-13.587. Hypothesis: Musculature could be optimized by up to an additional 350% from baseline at this stage of the object’s growth cycle alone. Brain volume by up to 15%. Bone density by up to 580%. Energy output by up to 600%. Object Perseus at peak growth would then have hyperperformant upper bounds on all g-factor, strength, and mobility indexes in ranges—”
“Murphy, why do you keep calling me that?”
Murphy gazes down. Alex sits perfectly still, legs crossed, palms together, eyes leering up in suspicion. Murphy pauses his memo. “Keep calling you what?”
“Object Perseus.”
“Oh, that’s just a technicality,” Murphy chuckles. “Every person or thing that we have any sort of data on has a unique object identifier we assign to it.”
“But—”
“You just happen to be a badass,” Murphy grins down at her. “So you were given a badass object ID.”
Alex scowls up at him. “I don’t like being called an object.”
“Again, it’s purely just for technical purposes,” Murphy shrugs. “Don’t take it personally, Alex.”