Through the glass wall of Conference Room B, Maxwell watched Sarah present Meridian's Cold Chain Analysis to Hartwell at 3 p.m. with the clear, measured confidence of someone who had created something real and knew it.
Hartwell sat across from him, reading glasses in hand, printed sheets in front of him. His expression was the same as always: nodding attentively, pausing thoughtfully at the numbers, leaning slightly forward, indicating that he had found something he wanted to rewrite as his own within 48 hours.
Maxwell peered from his angled desk, as if consulting a routing file. And he was consulting the routing file, too. He was doing both. The 328i had two mirrors, and he was using them simultaneously. That's just how it was.
At 3:34 p.m., Hartwell stood up, shook Sarah's hand, and said something that calmed her, just as he often did when he received information that his face contradicted. He left the conference room at 3:37 p.m., went to his desk, sat down, opened his laptop, and began typing with the speed of someone transforming their emotions into action before they lost their productivity.
Maxwell looked at her from the other end of the line. She looked up. Their eyes met for three seconds.
She held up two fingers.
Two thousand. Bonus for a correct answer. Same as last time.
She didn't show anything because there was nothing appropriate to show in that situation, and she had learned years ago that inadequate answers are worse than no answer at all. Instead, she nodded slightly, a gesture that said: I understand. I know. You've created something original. What she said doesn't change that.
She resumed typing.
Greg Paulson entered Hartwell's office at 3:52 p.m., carrying a coffee from Maxwell's desk. He knocked twice, entered, and closed the door.
Maxwell noted this in the private section of his phone. GP + JH Door closed. 3:52 p.m., Monday, March 12.
It was probably nothing. Almost everything was nothing. But nothing has a particular texture, and this had a different texture. He filed it away and went back to work.
He was crossing the parking lot toward the BMW at 5:48 p.m. when the system detected something he hadn't seen before.
He didn't receive a reward notification. Something else.
[Promotion Protocol Upgrade Cycle Available]
[Skills Acquisition Module: Enabled]
[Installation Package Level 1]
[Estimated Time: 4 hours]
[Requirement: The host must be in one place. Safe. Private.]
[Skills Ready for Installation:]
[→ Culinary Arts: Beginner, Level 1]
[→ Defensive Driving: Beginner, Level 1]
[→ Firearms Handling and Safety: Beginner, Level 1]
[→ Trauma First Aid: Beginner, Level 1]
[→ Situational Awareness and Threat Assessment: Beginner, Level 1]
[Warning: Do not drive or operate machinery during installation.] ]
[Hosts must use their own resources.]
[Start?]
Maxwell stood in the parking lot, keys in hand.
He read them twice. He saw the warning: Do not drive or operate machinery during installation. He glanced at the BMW. He thought of his 680-square-foot apartment in Logan Square, with its incredibly thin walls that allowed him to hear, if Marcus from 3C had had a typical Tuesday, at least two different TV shows and a heated argument about pasta.
He had a 1,840-square-foot lake-view condo twelve minutes away, with two reserved parking spaces, a doorman, a manager who knew him, and four hours of uninterrupted privacy available immediately.
He typed one word into the interface.
Yes.
[Starting. Please move to a safe location before installation begins.] Timer: 47 minutes.] He drove along Lake Shore Drive at the speed limit, headlights on, both hands on the wheel, the 47-minute countdown on the system flashing like an airport departure board in the corner of his eye.
As he pulled out of the lobby, Mrs. Pardo, sitting at the reception desk, looked up. "Good evening, Mr. Dragoski."
"Good evening." He continued toward the elevator, since stopping to talk would mess up the timer, which already read 31 minutes. "Any packages?"
"Nothing yet, sir."
She nodded and stepped into the elevator. The doors closed. She went up to 14C. 14C was exactly as she'd left it Saturday: uncluttered, decorated, with the glass east wall overlooking Lake Michigan darkening on that March afternoon, the city lights reflecting on the water's surface. She'd accidentally left a lamp on. It made the apartment look habitable, even though it wasn't.
She checked: 19 minutes on the countdown.
She changed out of her work clothes and into the gym clothes she'd stuffed in a bag before leaving Logan Square that morning, because she had a vague idea she'd be there that night and had packed her bag without really deciding. She ate a granola bar. She drank a glass of water. She sat in the chair closest to the east window, a good chair, with a view of the lake, and clasped her hands in her lap.
[3 minutes.] She stared at the lake. [Installation begins.] Stay calm. Don't resist.] Then it began.
It didn't hurt. He wanted to prove it to himself clearly, in real time, because the first fifteen seconds had been like a harbinger of pain: a pressure behind his eyes, a heat in his arms, in his hands, radiating from his spine. He had to consciously resist, something the system had specifically recommended and which turned out to be the most difficult instruction so far.
His hands moved.
Not of his own volition. His right hand moved to his side, sliding slightly forward, index finger extended and thumb pointing up; a grip he had never used, for a weapon he had never held, and which he handled with the precise muscle memory of someone who had been doing this for five years. He looked at his hands as if they belonged to someone else. He raised his left hand for support. He adjusted his stance. He lowered the weight about seven centimeters, settled in the center, feet shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent. He leaned back in the chair, and everything stopped.
Then his hands moved into the kitchen position: the correct knife grip, a pincer grip on the spine, three fingers curled downward. A shaky slicing motion began and stopped before it finished. He could feel the tendons in his right hand moving exactly as they should. He hadn't felt that an hour earlier.
This continued for four hours.
His eyes changed. Not their color, but their behavior. He became aware of his peripheral vision like never before, like when you become aware of a sound the moment someone names it and can't stop hearing it. The lamp in the corner. Its shadow, and how it swayed when a car passed fourteen floors below. The gap between the door and the frame. The shadow in the dark east-facing window of the room behind him. He was reading it all at once, automatically, without even trying.
His body covered 320 kilometers in 40 minutes. The defensive driving module had been installed in the kinesthetic intelligence of his legs, arms, and spinal cord: the muscular language to read the car's behavior in advance, to understand the difference between traction and slippage, to process the road four cars ahead instead of the one directly in front.
By the third hour, he was completely immobile in his chair, hands in his lap, staring at the lake, while four years of contradictory information was written inside him at a biological level, information the system didn't bother to explain, and which Maxwell didn't need to.
11:03 PM. The heat subsided. The pressure disappeared. The panel appeared.
[Upgrade Cycle Completed]
[Installed Skills: Level 1, Beginner Level 1:]
[✓ Culinary Arts] [✓ Defensive Driving] [✓ Firearms Handling]
[✓ Trauma First Aid] [✓ Situational Awareness]
[Next Upgrade Cycle: Available in 21 days]
[Level 2: Beginner Level 2: Same skills, increased parameters] Maxwell stood up. His legs felt normal. He went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator still empty since Saturday, except for a carton of eggs he'd thoughtlessly put away, took out three eggs, found the frying pan in the cupboard he'd checked on Saturday, and made scrambled eggs.
He didn't think about technique. The technique was simple: medium heat, butter, turn off the heat before they were fully set, mix, don't stir, serve on a plate in thirty-seven seconds.
She stood by the kitchen counter and began to eat, gazing at the lake.
They were the best scrambled eggs she'd ever had. She had basic cooking skills (beginner level 1), she'd made scrambled eggs before, and these were the best she'd ever tasted.
She wondered what professional-level scrambled eggs tasted like.
She washed the pan. She made the bed in the master bedroom; she hadn't done it that Saturday, there was nothing to do, but someone had left clean sheets in the closet, which she assumed was Mrs. Pardo's doing, and she thought it was something to believe. She turned off the lamp. She lay down on the bed. The lake was right outside the window, which she could see through her pillow.
She fell asleep in six minutes.
�� Power Stones: The improvement is real.
Maxwell Dragowski just spent four hours installing cooking, defensive driving, firearms handling, trauma first aid, and situational awareness skills into his nervous system like a software update.
He's currently at Beginner Level 1.
He made scrambled eggs, and they were the best scrambled eggs of his life.