#Beep-Bop-Beep—Bee-ee-eeep!

That was the sound Luke woke up to. It rang loud and clear in his head, even to his unconscious self, as if it’d bypassed his hearing and directly hit the comprehending part of his noggin. Though it had sounded only once, that was all that was needed to rouse him from his slumber of unknown length.

He gingerly got up, wiping his eyes and the telltales of drool from one side of his face, before righting the clothes he’d slept in. Bits and pieces of last night’s events trickled in as his mind caught up with his present circumstances, initially invoking panic when he’d remembered his flight from Rammztonn, a heightening of it when he remembered how close he still was to the town, and a gradually rising relief at the nature of his place of refuge, and the measures he’d taken to cordon it off.

He would be safe here, at least for the time it would take to prepare for his departure. If Johnny had been one of the people in pursuit still, he didn’t think he would still be unscathed at this point. He would’ve already been hauled off for processing, and his bounty already collected. Unless…, he thought, considering some sick stories he’d overheard about certain mercs and their habits of pursuit.

He'd heard tale of individuals who were more like animals in their hunting habits, choosing to wear down their prey, savoring every moment of torment till their prey succumbed to the pressure. A code of the wild, so-to-speak, brutal in its nature but not without its own rules.

For instance, certain mercs would choose to offer respite in pursuit if they ever came across what they perceived as an unfair advantage, stalking and waiting until that advantage lapsed before retaking the assault.

If Johnny had been one of them, and come upon his prone form in the cave, he might have chosen to wait and observe from the shadows nearby, ready to pounce the moment Luke came out of his own accord. Or, even if he’s not like that, he might be too cautious to breach the entrance, lest he fall into a deliberate trap, or walk onto prey more prepared than he, in its own domain.

An appraisal of the entrance did not turn up any signs of external activity, but he couldn’t be sure if this had been by design, to lull him into false assurances. Whatever it was, he’d figure it out when the time came to leave. For now, he’d focus on the incubator, whose light still flared and dampened rhythmically, as if in the mimicry of a heartbeat.

◆◆◆

The incubator’s subdued lightshow continued as Luke watched on, the radius of its fullest glow decreasing with each beat until that light had all but retreated into the center of the egg. These changes made it so that the egg’s colors and structure could now be viewed and described with a high degree of certainty, and he was certain the egg was no longer calcified, the rigid, greyish shell now replaced by a flexible, see-through film.

So thin was this film that Luke couldn’t tell whether the white speckles rested only on the inside, or on it as well. A thick, see-through fluid occupied the interior, its density only made apparent by the occasional airgap that was slow to fill over, the folded appearance of that fluid that resulted from the activity inside, all echoes of the movements of the two nucleic orbs that occupied the egg’s center. One darkest black, the other palest white.

As the light continued to dim, the movements of the nuclei slowed until they stood fixed, vibrating in place. Occasional ‘yips’ could be felt from the egg, a direct imprinting of sound to his noggin, as was with the signal that had roused him from his slumber, and though he chose to call them ‘yips’ because of their volume and the juvenile sense they gave him, they’d been a totally different sound in his mind. Beeps.

Over time, the speckles coalesced into off-white clusters around the egg, slowly turning red as he watched, before changing even further. The clusters had initially taken ovoid forms, but as time passed, six distinct sides developed in each as some of the material extended outward, first as thin, straight lines that eventually branched at points along their length to form a web-like network.

The web-like structures spread from each cluster, the centers now reminiscent of dendrites, albeit lacking a distinguishable cell body in the center; and as they continued propagating, they intermingled, some forming vein-like bands reminiscent of the circulatory systems he’d seen in books.

The changes gradually stopped, and at this point the radial glow had been transformed, settling into a fixed rhythm that traced the lines the system of connections charted.

Now it felt like the source of the light was flowing through the network, a low hum accompanying their passage through, as well as low heat that caught Luke’s fingertips, giving him a familiar feeling, as if an echo of a presence he’d come to know so well over their short acquaintance. Gertie.

As if prompted by that thought, the light visibly bent from the node closest to him, forming an unbroken string of glowing thread that quickly snaked its way towards the Necklace of Gertie’s Soul.

The egg’s hum quieted upon the thread’s contact with the Soul stone, and Gertie’s presence flared from the necklace instead, initially evoking ecstatic emotions in Luke. He called out excitedly to Gertie, but when no response was forthcoming, his elation quickly dampened, but the hope things could get better kept him afloat, just over the border of sorrow.

The hum returned as the flare dissipated, and though still there, Gertie’s presence was so low Luke feared it would disappear any moment. With no other recourse, he fell back onto his go-to for the unknown, taking the necklace in hand for a close examination.

[Advanced Appraisal] has been invoked on target, . Soul Glow has diminished by 85%. has been registered between and . Calibrating… Soul Glow has diminished by 87.5%... and climbing.

The diminishing glow was alarming, and though the tether gave him the feeling of a conduit for the soul, it didn’t give him much of an assurance seeing as he couldn’t tell the nature of it; whether it considered Gertie’s feelings in the matter, or it was a unilateral decision on the part of the egg.

A point toward the former was the fact that the necklace had voluntarily offered a piece of itself in the beginning, or some of its energy, and a point for the latter was the reality the conduit had originated from the egg, without an equal effort from the necklace to meet it halfway.

This would all amount to just conjecture though, so a second appraisal was in order, with the egg as the target this time.

[Advanced Appraisal] has been invoked on target, . Species: Unknown. Guestimated Classifiers: Dragonoid; Amphibian. Time-to-hatch: Not Applicable Unmet conditions: Binary Knowledge Threshold. Analysing … 92.5% occupation of by .

Luke blew a heavy sigh of relief at that last line, seeing as Gertie’s soul had occupied that funky network, instead of being absorbed and subsumed by the egg as he’d feared. While answering Gertie’s questions, the appraisal unexpectedly opened a few more with regards to the egg’s incubation status.

◆◆◆

It seemed it wasn’t even time to start asking about the Time-To-Hatch yet, given he hadn’t even met all the pre-conditions for that. The unmet condition was a big question mark to him, given how the threshold had been left unquantified, meaning it would be hard to estimate how far he was from meeting it.

Considering he would best be saved by staying indoors this close to the town before nightfall, he would just get as far as he could with acquiring the requisite knowledge during the day.

He could jump straight into one of his rewards, the GATTACA manual, since it seemed related to Zuck and his field of study, but he chose to play with the condition in his own head a bit longer in hopes of an inspired discovery from his own knowledge. These are what constituted Wisdom, and a point in that direction would probably go a long way towards meeting the threshold than simply amassing new knowledge.

Binary… binary, he played with the word, looking for a thread to unravel in his ruminations. To him, all the word had meant till now could be summarized in two words, “two states”. One or the other. If he applied it to the creature that had dropped the GATTACA manual as a reward, there would only be a direct connection to two states when he considered that shadow blink skill.

Johnny’s presence in the Gob Smacker’s shadow could be seen as a binary state, being that he was absent pre-blink, and present post. This seemed more of a reach to Luke when he instead considered the nature of his own blink, with in- and out-of-phase being the binary states his skill allowed him to toggle between.

He carried absence and presence as his binary states for his next consideration, whilst replacing ‘a being’ with ‘a feature of it’ instead, and just like that, he’d found the link to genetic expression. The presence or absence of certain blocks at certain positions are what determined gene expressions, and he was sure the GATTACA manual would posit this somewhere, if it really was the bridge to the knowledge gap he was facing.

Unfortunately, that supposition was never accompanied by a notification confirming he’d understood a concept in the manual, so he’d only know for a fact after diving into it. A few more rounds of ‘thinking binary’ could not trigger the effect he’d been looking for, so he threw in the towel and turned to the manual instead.

“Chonk Logic – Enough bits can express any number of bytes.“

That was the uncredited quote that opened up the first chapter, which, as he’d suspected, was linked to the precondition he wanted to address. ‘Binary Logic for Sequencing’, it read, promising to deliver exactly what he needed.

It began with explaining what a bit was, beginning with the only available numbers in such a system, ones, and zeroes. Next, it put byte into context, providing the number of bits that culminated in a byte. After that, it returned to bits, dubbing the bit as ‘the unit of predicates’, and thus introducing him to the true-or-false of binary logic. The reading material eventually led into his own ruminations from before, beginning with a refresher on blocks, sequences, and positioning, and ending with expression and suppression to tie it all into binary.

…and there’s that validation I was expecting, thought Luke, happy he hadn’t been wasting time with his own guesses. Educated guesses, he’d amended, before continuing with the material.

The next few pages were a deep dive into known expressions in plants and reptilians, how to artificially model those sequences, as well as how short-lived actualizations of structures expressing all these qualities could be brought to life.

Most of it went over his head, but he chose to focus his interests on plant matter and grasped at as much knowledge as he could, aiming to get as close to the threshold as possible in this one session.

He'd been so engrossed in the sequencing content that he hadn’t noticed the lack of obvious references to binary concepts, only noticing when the explicit mentions had resurfaced in the ‘Alternate Representations’ section.

He’d been making the conversions mentally, imagining all the possible blocks at each position in a sequence, and only assigning a ‘1’ to the one at that position, whilst the rest remained ‘0’s; but this seemed cumbersome and inefficient the longer the sequence got.

The alternatives section presented more of the same, with tips on remembering the sequences, as well as tricks on shortening representations. The latter consisted of dashes and the decimal values in place of binary for each sub-chain, which led straight into a lesson in binary arithmetic.

Although condensing the 4- or 5-character values to one or two digits made for shorter representations as a whole, he still needed to get used to performing the binary-decimal conversions on the fly.

Next came some tricks like masking, which allowed for quick and deterministic changes in expression when applied to the same targets every time, and for these, a whole suite of operators was introduced.

The NOT operator was mentioned in passing, given how it wouldn’t be useful when applied to his current problem, whilst the bulk of the focus was on applications of OR and AND operators, which allowed for two layers at a turn to be combined to produce a third.

He remembered all 3 operators from his own full status, where they had been called modifiers instead, under the logical class. That connection was the last bit of insight needed to go over the threshold, as a thrumming followed in its wake, the notification popping up soon after.

◆◆◆

+--------------+

|Personal Alert|

+--------------+-+

|“The Hatchening”|

+----------------+--------+

|Class: Event Notification|

+-----------------+-------+

|ETA: T-20 seconds|

+-----------------+---------------+

|“A familial entity is about to - |

|- - - - - - hatch” - - - - - - - |

+---------------------------------+

The notification was a welcome sight, and Luke couldn’t help counting down mentally, preferring this to repeated status checks that were sure to waste time in the invoking. As the timer ticked down to 9 seconds, the glow intensified to blinding levels, assailing his retinas even from the comfort of his eyelids, which were now squinted shut.

He lost count paying attention to that instead, only remembering a few seconds later, which had been enough to tick the time down to zero. He thanked his stars as he opened his eyes to witness this hatchening, glad the event had taken place during the day, since he was sure such an intense light would’ve garnered attention under the veil of the night.

The glow was now concentrated at the center, and though white in its hue, he could still clearly see the two dots that stood in the center-most area. One black, and one white, offbeat to each other’s thumps. They circled each other, growing closer with each turn until they were in contact, melding into a single ovoid mass of black and white, no grey in sight.

The mass begun elongating, initially morphing into a koi-like form whose head gradually took on more of the mass as the tail took less, resulting in the tadpole-like, eyeless creature that circled just below his chin’s height.

The creature grew eyes which stayed hidden below overlarge eyelids that promised quite the prodigious gawkers as their charges. The tail gained freedom, wriggling with new life as Luke looked on in anticipation. The eyes followed, the eyelids initially stuttering with the effort before the large flaps managed to overcome the material that had kept them shut.

The organism remained blind with its eyes filmed over, but Luke was sure it would be able to see soon from the way that milky appearance was fast disappearing with each blink. As it blinked away the last remains of the film, all the essence in and around the shell was called toward it, the conduit shrinking into it, and bringing with it the Necklace of Gertie’s Soul on the ride.

Forgetting the soul had already been on its way over that conduit, and should’ve vacated the necklace by now, he reached out to catch the necklace before it could contact the eggshell-slash-membrane. His extended hand preceded the necklace’s flight, finding air briefly before the necklace finally ran into his open palm, at the same time as the shell met the back of his hand.

Nothing came of the former, but the latter triggered a meeting of 2 pairs of eyes to his 3rd. The most recent pair he’d laid eyes on, and Gertie’s. That internal convening was for but a moment, but the external changes continued. The shell melded into the back of his hand as Luke watched, the material melting into threads that snaked across his forearm, all the way to his upper-arm’s sleeve, where they continued dancing, albeit with decreasing visibility unto their disappearance.

Worried he might’ve messed up Gertie’s transference in his haste, he performed a series of appraisals to ease the concerns. He started with the necklace, confirming it was now free for occupation, before turning to the juvenile familiar, whose notifications were all unrelated. He ignored these and moved onto his upper arm.

in progress. Stage: Inscription. Time-To-Completion: T-36 hours.

He wasn’t sure what limitations or benefits a Soul Sigil entailed, but from the extra detail he knew that’s where Gertie’s soul currently resided. He just hoped it would be stable and robust enough to withstand damage on the inscriptions if they were to be registered as physical upon completion.