The USB drive from Mrs. Shirogane was not just a database. It was a key. As its data unpacked into Hive's growing architecture, Dave felt the internal landscape of his quirk shift. It was no longer just about optimizing his own body or predicting a ball's bounce. Now, it had the language of girders, load-bearing walls, and stress fractures. It could model the world as a structure, and by extension, model itself.
This new depth prompted a phase of internal experimentation. If Hive was a distributed network, what were the limits of its distribution?
The first test was simple, conducted in the sanctuary of his room. He opened Principles of Neural Science to a dense chapter on parallel processing. At the same time, he set a mechanical puzzle on the floor—a complex, interlocking ring of steel that required precise, tactile manipulation to solve.
Protocol: Read one page with full comprehension while simultaneously solving the puzzle with his hands, sight unseen.
He began. His eyes tracked the text, the concepts of synaptic plasticity and neural pathways flowing into his mind. A separate, semi-autonomous module of Hive directed his hands. His fingers, resting on the cool metal, began to move, feeling for tensions and releases. The puzzle clicked and shifted in his lap.
For three minutes, it worked. He absorbed a page on cortical reorganization while his hands solved a third of the puzzle. Then, a critical paragraph on inhibitory neurons demanded deeper integration. His conscious focus dipped toward the text. The flow of his hands stuttered. The module handling the puzzle, lacking a novel solution for a sudden snag, requested more resources.
A subtle, internal friction arose—not pain, but a feeling of cognitive strain, like a single processor being asked to render two complex videos at once. He wasn't just multitasking; he was attempting a deliberate, controlled schism of attention.
He stopped. The puzzle remained half-solved. He had read the page, but the final synthesis of its concepts felt delayed, queued for later processing.
Parallel processing efficiency: 67%, Hive reported. Conscious override remains primary bottleneck. Full autonomy of sub-modules not yet achieved without significant performance decay in primary focus task.
It was a limit, but a quantified one. He hadn't split his consciousness, but he had successfully delegated a complex motor task to run in the background with minimal oversight. It was a step. The takeaway was clear: Hive could handle the how of an action, but the why—the purpose and the integration of new knowledge—still required the core of him, the quiet observer at the center.
The second exploration was more insidious, born from a moment of mundane frustration.
A screw rolled off the workbench in the small storage locker Kenji called his 'hobby graveyard.' Dave watched it fall, bounce once, and disappear into a shadowy gap beneath a shelf. A flicker of irritation arose—a wasted moment, an inefficient disruption to his task of fetching a spare fuse.
Hive reacted instantly to the emotional spike.
*Inefficiency detected: Negative emotional response to minor physical setback. Optimization available: Suppress frustration response (dopaminergic dampening). Re-route focus to task completion. Probability of retrieval via kneeling and visual search: 92%. Suggested action: Execute.*
The logic was flawless. The frustration was inefficient. It served no purpose. For a fraction of a second, Dave considered it. To let Hive smooth the edge off his humanity, to become a being of pure, rational process.
He saw the screw in his mind's eye, lying in the dust. Instead of kneeling, he focused. He extended his awareness, not with his eyes, but with the subtle, telekinetic sense that was becoming as familiar as proprioception. He felt for it—a tiny, metallic irregularity in the dark. With a thought as light as breath, he coaxed it upward, guiding it along the floor, up the leg of the workbench, and onto the flat surface where it rolled once and stopped.
He picked it up, the cool metal against his fingers. The frustration was gone, but not because Hive had suppressed it. It was gone because he had solved the problem with a new tool, and the satisfaction of that was a deeper, more human reward.
"No," he said quietly, to himself and to Hive. "Do not optimize emotions. Observe them. They are system diagnostics. Frustration signals an obstacle. The solution is to remove the obstacle, not the signal."
Acknowledged, Hive responded. Emotional data will be categorized as environmental feedback, not system noise. Suppression protocols shelved.
The efficiency paradox was thus answered, not with a yes or no, but with a directive: emotions were part of the data stream, not a flaw in it.
Precision became his meditation. His telekinesis was not a muscle to be bulked, but a hand to be steadied.
He sat at his desk with a child's top, a simple, weighted wooden thing. He set it spinning with a flick of his fingers. As it began to wobble, the inevitable decay of its motion setting in, he extended his will. He didn't try to spin it faster. He applied counter-pressure, minute and exact, to the specific points of the wobble. He wasn't pushing the top; he was editing its rotation, smoothing the imperfections.
The top hummed, its spin becoming preternaturally steady, a perfect, silent gyroscope. He held it there for a full minute, his entire world narrowed to the feedback loop between the spinning wood and his kinetic touch. The energy expenditure was negligible, but the focus was total.
Next, a book. He lay on his bed, a heavy textbook on structural engineering open on his chest. He focused on a single page. With a thought, he lifted the corner. Not enough to turn it, just enough to break its contact with the page beneath. Then, with excruciating care, he guided it through a slow, graceful arc until it lay flat on the other side. The page turned without a sound, without a breath of air.
It was control so fine it bordered on the absurd. But to Dave, it was foundational. If he could turn a page without touching it, he could someday turn a falling person without grabbing them. He could adjust the trajectory of debris, redirect a flow of water, or steady a trembling hand.
The dream was not a dream.
It began with the familiar sensation of sleep, but the moment his conscious mind relinquished control, Hive initiated a defragmentation and diagnostic sequence. His awareness did not fall into nonsense. It was translated.
He found himself standing in a non-space that was also his own mind. He was a constellation of points of light, each node representing a cognitive or somatic module: Motor Control Alpha, Sensory Integration, Predictive Modeling, Telekinetic Coordination, Autonomic Regulation. They were connected by shimmering lines of data, a vast, three-dimensional neural network.
Before him floated a simplified, schematic version of his own body, transparent and glowing. Areas pulsed with soft, gold light—optimized pathways, well-developed skills. His fine motor control was a sunburst of gold. His analytical processing nodes shone brightly.
But other areas were cooler, tinged with blue or static gray. Parallel Processing Core was a nexus of potential, but its connections were faint, underutilized. Macro-Telekinetic Output was a small, dim sphere—a capability identified but scarcely developed. A faint red pulse highlighted his Emotional Integration Gateway, the newly established and still-raw protocol for handling emotional data without suppression.
A calm, non-voice, the voice of his own system self-aware, echoed around him.
Diagnostic running. Primary inefficiency identified: Integration Lag between higher cognitive analysis and physical instinct. Suggestion: Establish dedicated cross-talk protocol between Predictive Modeling and Spinal Reflex Clusters.
Secondary development priority: Telekinetic vector calculation speed. Currently bottlenecked by conscious oversight. Recommend: Calibration drills under sensory deprivation to force module autonomy.
He watched as the schematic body moved through a simulated rescue scenario, lifting a beam. Gold lines representing muscle fibers fired, but a red warning flare appeared at the shoulder joint—a predicted stress point based on today's quarry drill data he hadn't consciously reviewed yet. It was Hive, working while he slept, showing him his own blind spots.
He wasn't dreaming of falling or flying. He was dreaming of updates.
He awoke not with a start, but with a seamless transition. Morning light. The smell of breakfast. The dream's insights were already integrated, waiting in his awareness like facts he'd always known. There was no disorientation, only a profound sense of having been serviced. It was efficient. It was useful.
And it was deeply, quietly alien.
At breakfast, the alien feeling receded, burned away by the ordinary warmth of the kitchen.
"You were muttering last night," Kenji said over his coffee, his tone light but his eyes watchful. "Sounded pretty technical. Something about load vectors?"
Dave paused, a piece of egg halfway to his mouth. He put his chopsticks down. "Was I? Sorry, Dad. I didn't mean to keep anyone up." He glanced at Aiko. "I was reading some of that engineering material before bed. The structural stress stuff. I guess it got stuck in my head."
Aiko smiled, passing him the miso soup. "It's okay, sweetie. You didn't wake us. I just happened to hear you when I was getting water. You sounded… very focused, even in your sleep."
"Yeah," Dave said, softening his tone. He took the soup bowl with both hands, a small gesture of thanks. "It's interesting, but I guess my brain doesn't know when to quit sometimes. I'll try to wind down better before bed."
Kenji nodded, looking reassured by the normalcy of the response. "Just make sure you're actually resting, Dave. Not just… processing in the background."
"I am," Dave said. "It's just… I'm figuring out how this all works." He gestured vaguely, not at the room, but at himself. "My quirk, I mean. It feels like I'm learning the rules for a new tool. I want to understand it properly before I try to use it for anything big."
"That's very responsible," Aiko said, her voice full of gentle pride. "Just remember, you don't have to master it all at once. Some things you learn by feel, not just by manual."
Dave nodded, taking her words in. "I know, Mom. I'm trying to find the balance. Sorry if I seem distracted lately."
"Don't be sorry for being focused," Kenji said, reaching over to ruffle his hair affectionately, breaking the serious mood. "Just remember to come up for air. And maybe keep the sleep-time lectures to a whisper, yeah?"
A small, genuine smile touched Dave's lips. "Yeah. I'll try."
The conversation shifted to plans for the weekend, the ordinary rhythm of family life reasserting itself. Dave finished his breakfast, the knot of intense self-analysis from the night before loosening in the warm, undemanding space of the kitchen. He hadn't lied. He was figuring it out. And part of that was remembering that the most important system he interacted with wasn't Hive, or his telekinesis, but this—the quiet, stable network of care he called home.
He left for school, the ghost of the diagnostic dream a blueprint in the back of his mind, and the feel of a perfectly spun top still humming in his nerves. The shape of his power was becoming clear: not a weapon, not armor, but a calibrator's lens, a surgeon's touch, and an architect's plan, all integrated into a mind that chose to move through the world with calm, relentless intention—and a heart that remembered to come home.