0.8
It’s been about half a month since Shira’s birth. It’s getting harder to time these updates now since I really want update 1.0 to be about the day of the awakening. Anyway, here's the update.
Shira’s really big compared to before now, about the size of a house cat if you've ever seen one of those. Her wings are absolutely enormous now; her wingspan alone is near twice her entire body length. She needs a lot of space, especially to stretch her wings and get exercise. That means I can’t just keep her cooped up in the garden anymore. I eventually gave in and talked to my parents so I could bring her outside freely.
They ended up being less of a problem than I thought, I just didn’t expect them to be so ignorant about how Shira’s species breeds. They just assumed she was created spontaneously like the males, and I didn’t correct them. Still, disappointing parents aside, I was able to take Shira outside for the first time a few days ago. She loves playing in the bushes and trees, she likes to swim in the creek nearby and glide from tree to tree. I believe I’ve firmly slotted into the parental role of Shira, and I’m starting to think of her as my daughter. There’ll be quite a few legal hurdles to jump through for her to legally be recognized as such, but it’ll be worth it.
Shira turned out to be more like a kitten than a toddler. Don’t get me wrong, she’s really smart, she isn’t an animal at all. She just doesn’t do some of the things toddlers do, and she does some things toddlers don’t do. Like change colour to hide from you. That one was a surprise. So was finding out that she could read, as long as I was nearby. Same with understanding speech. She seems to just send out what she’s perceiving and listen for my thoughts on it. If I understand it then she does too.
This made teaching her easier, as I could just give her all my old school books and she would read them as if it were religious scripture. There were a few minor problems when she asked me for more books on stuff that I had simply never thought to research further, I hadn’t even known there was anything more to know about those things. I ended up just buying her a bunch of books about weird and obscure things like the aether and hiveminds, things I had just dismissed as irrelevant when I learned about it in school. She seems to have rather strange interests, but then again so do all kids.
In the end, though, buying books wasn’t much of a problem. It just cost way too much money. What was a problem was the amount of food Shira ate. She needs at least a full meal every two or three hours, meaning she eats five or six meals a day. Not much of a problem now, since her portion sizes are so small, but when she gets bigger it will only get worse. I’ve started looking at ways to get more money, maybe even getting a permanent job to help support Shira. At this rate, I won't be able to afford to feed her.
I started to take training courses and simulations so I can learn all the various skills needed for many of the potential jobs I’d found. They were difficult and new, requiring me to think and move my body in ways I’d never done before. It was also fun, as I was learning new and interesting things every day. I involved or otherwise had Shira join me in most of the courses too, and it seemed to increase her learning speed by a lot. It increased my learning speed as well, as I had a second head to think the problems through.
Some of the courses were stupidly easy, while others were so convoluted or poorly constructed that I couldn’t finish them at all. Fortunately, the mutagen seems to have improved my body to the point of absurdity. Many of the tasks that should have been hard were made easy and the easy ones were made simple. My increased height and mass made physical labour trivial, and my near-perfect memory made most puzzles and quizzes a breeze. I still struggled with dexterity and critical thinking- like always -but that’s fine since I don’t need those much anyway.
Of the potential jobs that I qualified for, designing a species or ecosystems for a videogame seemed like the most intriguing. Not because I would be particularly good at it or because I wanted to do it, but because that’s exactly the kind of job that led to the creation of Shira. Apparently, it’s actually a pretty common activity for people in college. It encourages curiosity and exploration, it teaches biology and ecology, and it pays really well. Of course, those poor fools that actually go to college would at least attempt something like that. I don’t think I’ll actually do it, but I’ll at least train in the necessary skills just in case I run out of funds.
Of the more long term jobs, there were always the frontier colonists, the vanguard of humanity if you believe the propaganda. It pays really well and you get access to all the latest tech. The downside is it’s near completely permanent, if I left for the frontier I wouldn’t be coming back except in extreme circumstances. I didn’t want to do this, but it would be a good backup if I suddenly need to leave my hometown. I’ll be training in some skills I’ve heard come in handy over there, just in case.
Those were just the two most interesting, though. There were loads of others like; I could be an author, an engineer, a nurse, an electrician, a plumber, a janitor, a librarian, a programmer, an artist, or many others. I was spoiled for selections; the list of jobs I was qualified for was multiple pages long. Unfortunately, not many of them were actually very good jobs.
I’d somehow made the mistake of putting my profile on public mode and saying I was looking for a job. Now I’ve been constantly bombarded with job offers from companies everywhere, their terrible promotional garbage included. It’ll take days to sort through them all, and that’s if I didn’t have better stuff to do. Like taking care of Shira.
Oh, when I say qualified, I don’t mean I have the necessary qualifications to work that job. I mean I have all the prerequisites I need to get those qualifications. I’m not a trained nurse, for example, but I do have everything I need to access the training courses.
Um, what else is here to talk about? How about mutagen, since I talked a lot about it last time. Not much has changed, though the improvements continued. The little bumps on my shoulders and ass have grown into full-fledged lumps. I can even twitch them a little. Either I’m getting my wish about having wings and a tail, or I have cancer. I don’t think it’s the latter, though. The mutagen would have dealt with that.
My general body shape has gotten more androgynous, which is strange because I was already a pretty feminine guy. My facial features have gotten softer too, I look way younger than I am now. I could pass for an 11-year-old girl now.
Of all the other things mutagen has improved, which is a lot, it seems to be focusing on my mental abilities far more than I ever expected. All the physical improvements have slowed down, at least a little bit. Not the mental side of things though, if anything they sped up. My memory is just stupid at this point, it’s so good I can’t even compare it to anything. Before the mutagen, I had an eidetic memory. I was clinically diagnosed with it so you can’t call me a liar. If this continues, however, I’m pretty sure I’ll have true photographic memory at some point. Maybe even better, if I’m lucky.
Yes, there's a difference, for those of you who’ve never searched it up. Eidetic memory is when you can still see an image for a short while even after it’s left your vision. You may remember me describing something similar a while ago. That was before I learned I had an eidetic memory, I had just thought everyone could do that. Sorry if I sounded condescending, though I should continue my explanation.
Photographic memory is different from eidetic memory, it doesn’t just apply to your vision and it doesn’t fade away so quickly. It’s like a super-powered version, everything is remembered and it’s impossible to forget anything. It’s like your life is a movie you can watch over and over again, details never fading as time passes. It’s also stupidly rare and only really seen in fiction. I’m not there yet… but if my memory keeps getting better I’ll get there eventually.
Enough about memories, let’s talk more about improvements. My implant has been ripped apart and rebuilt from biological materials, or at least that’s my best guess of what happened. There were even a few days where I couldn’t use it at all, which I’m guessing the mutagen used to analyze my destroyed implant or something. It still works the same, it just feels closer, if you know what I mean.
Before, it just did as it was told, regardless of the intent of the user. Now, rather than it being a separate thing that only follows orders, I’m just doing directly the things my implant did. There's no middleman anymore. Since doing everything myself would probably be taxing- and it’s not -I’m assuming the mutagen built some new structures in my brain that handles the increased load.
It’s like moving an arm or a leg. Do you feel exactly which nerves are firing and when? The individual muscles? No, you just have intent and response. But you can still tell that it was you that did it and not some other entity. Most of the time at least, I’m pretty sure. Or at least I can.
