Alex rubbed his eyes and pushed back from his laptop while the system recompiled his latest change. He’d spent the previous day and most of the night playing around with the ANIP chips codebase and could now see ghosts of code, even when he closed his eyes.

  He finished off the last of his energy drink and picked up his phone, scrolling back through the group chat he had with his friends. They had sent a non-stop barrage of photos for a few hours after he had left the other night and it had continued through most of the day yesterday.

  The rest of Tuesday night had been… a lot. Fun. Exciting—talking about Earth3 and the village. But it had also taken a lot of emotional bandwidth.

  After everyone had agreed to come back to Earth3 with him, they’d moved to the couches and Alex and Jay spent another hour going over their first weeks on the other side of the portal—answering questions they’d already answered until Alex had finally grown tired and needed to leave.

  His friends had moved straight to the loot bags after he left of course and the photos had come within minutes. Shirts, hats, a hoodie, stickers and pens and even a Dungeon Inc. logo belt buckle. The shirts had been printed with the Dungeon Inc. logo on the front and Side Quest Heroes across the back, which made Alex wonder if the company had a shirt press in the Undercity somewhere.

  And the money of course. Kira had even called him to make sure it wasn’t a mistake somehow. Afterall, it’s not every day someone hands you an envelope stuffed with cash.

  He’d barely talked to anyone since. He had spent the next day buried in code and everyone else had been busy prepping for a weekend away. Far, far away, he thought.

  Alex closed his eyes. I’m not dragging them into this, he thought. They’re stepping forward willingly. It’s their choice.

  Still, he knew he would feel responsible for them from now on.

  >>> Update complete. Rebooting in 5 seconds…

  Alex sat up.

  >>> Good morning Alex.

  He ignored the AI greeting. He had known the ANIP came with an AI system but hadn’t turned it on before yesterday. He liked his alone time enough that he didn’t love the idea of having to deal with another voice when he was by himself. But the built-in AI had proven to be helpful in understanding the ANIP systems and verifying that he hadn’t messed up anything after each tweak. Hex clearly liked their AI because they had put a lot of work into it. It was almost as advanced as what the system was doing with the nanobots.

  He leaned towards his laptop and looked through the abstraction of his latest changes. He smiled.

  “Reopen the developer interface,” he said to the empty room.

  >>> Done.

  “Thank you.”

  >>> You are welcome, Alex.

  Alex looked up at the wall. This was the sort of thing he hated about AI. Why did it have to keep using his name like that?

  “Look, could you stop using my name… like, maybe only when you have to get my attention. Not just as a general… I don’t know… you use it at the end of sentences all the time and it’s too much.”

  >>> Certainly. Your name will be reserved for vocative use.

  Vocative? Alex thought about it, but didn’t know what the word meant. What was that root? Vocal? So something that is spoken? He had no idea. Didn’t matter as long as it worked.

  “Can you run the latest patch against my test cases? I think we’re stable now.”

  >>> Executing in isolated dev environment.

  >>> …

  >>> All assertions passed. No exceptions thrown.

  >>> Observed behavior matches expected output across all cases.

  “Including the revert sequence?”

  >>> Correct.

  Great. Ready for a live test then. Jay was supposed to be coming by so they could go to the fieldhouse for a workout soon. He was going to be the first guinea pig.

  He turned his heavy wooden chair so he could look out the window. Beyond, the forest stretched away from the residence buildings, a dense wall of green pine. It looked peaceful.

  He stared at it for a long moment, then closed his eyes and reached out. The mana answered. He could feel it around him. Rushing forward from the forest. Coming in through the walls.

  Drawing mana had become an easy step, but he kept practicing. Sometimes drawing trickles, other times trying to pull everything. There wasn’t a lot here on Earth. Even after drawing everything he could from the area the mana in his room was less dense than the ‘normal’ of Earth3.

  He let out a slow breath and then, deliberately, thought of the bear. The memory still felt like a physical thing that sat on his chest when it came. The bear, more so than any of the other animals he had encountered on Earth3, had some unique abilities. It could blink, which was like a short burst teleport. He had no idea how that worked. It just disappeared and a few moments later, reappeared 30 paces ahead.

  He shook his head. Someday he would figure that one out. But for now he was more interested in the bear's other ability. It’s pulse. It had functioned like a proactive, short term counterspell. In the forest, the bear’s first pulse had prevented Alex from drawing any mana. The mana had almost felt slippery. The second pulse had come while Alex was already holding mana and he remembered that terrifying moment when it felt like it was being washed from his grasp anyway.

  The ANIP was making them all stronger. They were training with weapons and learning unarmed combat. Over the coming months they would only get more and more competent martially. But none of that meant anything if they came across somebody, or something in the world that could crush them all with a little magic.

  Alex frowned and opened his eyes.

  “Why had the mana felt slippery?” he muttered again, dissatisfied with the concept but unable to find a better word to describe it.

  >>> Based on the provided search results, the term "slippery" in the context of "mana" refers to the seat of the bike.

  “What?! Wait. Never mind, I don’t want to know.” He just shook his head.

  He flexed his hand, then tried again, drawing mana towards himself slowly, layering the memory of what the bear had done over the act of pulling the mana. During the fight, mana hadn’t vanished when the pulse hit. He’d still felt it everywhere, thick and abundant, saturating the clearing just as it always did. But somehow, it had interfered with the act of control. Nothing he did affected his grasp on mana though.

  Alex leaned back slightly and lifted his head toward the window. Sunlight filtered through the trees, catching on leaves and pine branches that swayed gently in a soft breeze. From this room, the forest was just a backdrop to his room. A painting to look out upon.

  But he remembered standing in that other forest, heart pounding, reaching for the energy he needed and finding his hands empty.

  “Counterspell,” he said quietly.

  >>> A counterspell is a magical, reactive, or strategic action designed to negate, disrupt, or otherwise nullify…

  “Shhhh.” Alex said with a frown. The AI stopped.

  What the bear had done had felt… crude, almost. Powerful, yes. And the first pulse had been effective, especially because Alex hadn’t been expecting it. Then, when the second pulse came, he had to fight through it, but had managed to hold on to the mana. The bear's ability was less a surgical strike and more of a wide, blunt push across whatever layer of reality mana lived in. In the end, maybe saying it was a type of pressure that made fine control difficult, was the best description.

  But how do you make mana hard to grab?

  Everything Alex had done so far with magic had been constructive. Pull mana in. Compress it. Give it structure, direction, purpose. Fire, force, reinforcement—all variations on shaping something abstract into something useful.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  The bear hadn’t shaped anything. It had disrupted the interface somehow.

  Alex steadied his breathing and tried to pay attention to the connection itself—not the mana, but the way his awareness interfaced with it. He could feel something. A sense of tension. The more he focused on it, the more it felt like some kind of invisible structure with edges. It was coming from everywhere around him. His aura maybe. The energy field that every living thing seemed to have.

  That’s what the bear hit, he thought. It didn’t change the mana in any way, it affected my internal energy somehow… or my aura. Which made it difficult to connect with the mana around me. It also explained why it hadn’t affected Alex nearly as much the second time—He had been prepared for it and held on through pure force of will and intent as his control grew shaky.

  He focused on the mana he held again, thinking about what the bear may have done. He didn’t imagine the pulse as a wave this time. The idea that it was a wave had made him think the bear was doing some kind of energy push that forced the mana away. But that’s not what had happened.

  Instead, Alex shifted his focus inward and introduced a deliberate instability into his own control field. It took him a couple of minutes to create and hold but after a time he could feel a controlled wobble at the edge of his internal energy field. Not enough to break his grip, but only because he was focused so hard on maintaining his mana link as well.

  Then he took hold of the instability and pushed it outward in every direction. The result was messy. It was less force and more introduced noise. A low-resolution interference pattern that spread out from his core and away.

  The effect was immediate: The mana in his grasp began to slip. He had to fight to hold on to it. That clean resonance he usually felt when pulling in mana smeared, his mental grip sliding as if the surface beneath it had turned slick.

  His jaw tightened. The connection thinned, stretched to the edge of failure. For a heartbeat, he felt the same sensation as in the forest—that awful moment where mana was everywhere but somehow impossibly out of reach.

  He gritted his teeth and held on, forcing his focus sharper, overpowering the interference with brute force, re-locking the alignment through sheer effort. The instability in his energy field resisted and then finally stabilized.

  The mana stayed.

  He opened his eyes, breathing hard. He was sweating from the effort.

  “Okay,” he said quietly, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. “That’s… very interesting.”

  The bear hadn’t suppressed mana. It hadn’t drained it or destroyed it. It had flooded the local control space with interference like static and noise until fine manipulation became difficult or impossible.

  But he also knew that he could do better. With this test all he had done was blast out the interference. With practice he could refine that control, he was sure. Either increasing the level of energy static, or releasing it in a more directed blast. Preferably in one that didn’t affect himself.

  Alex leaned back again, staring out the window, his thoughts racing ahead. If he could learn to externalize that instability without destabilizing his own control… if he could produce the instability quickly and push it out with more control, then the next step wasn’t hard to imagine.

  Disrupting spells mid-cast.

  It was going to take a lot of practice, but he was pretty sure, based on his experience with the various animals in the forest, that he could see the moments before they used their mana. He could see it in their auras. In theory he could disrupt even powerful uses of magic with a well timed counter. He wondered if it would affect animals and how they used mana to power themselves up internally.

  Must be able to… otherwise why would the bears have evolved the power?

  “This is interference engineering,” he said with a smile just as a knock came at his door.

  >>> Interference engineering involves managing, modeling, and utilizing wave-based or physical interactions to optimize…

  “SHHH!” Alex hissed as he stood up, but even the AI voice wasn’t enough to wipe the smile off his face as he walked to the door.

  If only I had someone to practice with.

  He opened the door to see Jay towering there, waiting patiently.

  “Happy to see me?” the big man asked.

  “What? Oh… no, I mean yes, sure. But I just figured something out.” Alex stood back and waved Jay in. “Come in. I have to test something on you before you go.”

  Jay stopped halfway in the door and looked at Alex.

  “Just come in, I want to show you something.”

  Jay walked over and sat in the chair. Alex sat on the bed, leaning against the wall and crossing his legs in front of himself.

  “Okay… so… I hacked the ANIP.”

  Jay sat up straight in the chair. “What?”

  “Hacked it. It was surprisingly easy. Not only was there only the most basic security, they leave access open all over the code.” Alex waved a hand like he was brushing something away. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, I took control of it. It’s in our heads right? The more I talked to Kira the other night, the more I thought about it and the less I liked the idea of HEX having control over us like this… I can’t stop thinking about what they could do to us if they wanted—and we’d have no control over it.”

  He didn’t need to explain any further. Jay already understood that side of it. They had talked about this before, on Earth3.

  “Aren’t you worried about messing something up? I mean… it’s literally wired through your body by now,” Jay said with a worried look on his face.

  “No, not really. I mean, look… There are layers to the functionality right? And I’m not messing with what the chip is doing with the nanobots. I wouldn’t even know where to start there. I’m only playing with the admin layers. Control, security and HUD stuff for the most part. I made some tweaks to the AI too, mostly playing around so far. But nothing that comes close to the bio side of the system.”

  >>> Any modification of Dungeon Inc. property is a direct violation of…

  “SHHH!”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Jay said, looking confused.

  “What? No, not you. I turned on the AI in my ANIP and it really likes telling me random facts that I don’t care about,” Alex said.

  “You know you can respond in your head?”

  “I… sure, that makes sense. I haven’t really played around with it. It’s just been me and AL in here since yesterday.”

  “AL? You named your 'ai', AL?”

  “Yeah. I needed to call it something, and the capital ‘i’ looks like a small ‘L’… so: AL.”

  “Okay, but what did you want to show me? We have to get going soon, I have a class later.”

  “Right, so, first, I added a new admin layer, so that if anything ever goes wrong, or if the company were to ever push an update we didn’t want, we have superadmin rights to our own system and enough control to say no. But I also did something fun with the minimap…”

  “We?” Jay interrupted. Alex looked at him in confusion. “You said ‘we’ have superadmin rights.”

  “Oh, well, just me so far. But once I’m done, I want to push the changes out to all of you. Whoever wants the update. Give you control over your system,” Alex said as he tapped one finger on the side of his head. Jay just nodded in understanding.

  “Okay, so first, can I push an update to you for your minimap? I just want to test that this works like I think it should.”

  “What’s it going to update?”

  “All it’s going to do is change all the colours on the minimap. That’s it. I just want to make sure I can push the update to you like I think I can.”

  Jay looked at Alex for a long minute. Then said, “Okay. As long as you are going to put it back when you are done. What do I have to do?”

  “Nothing. Just sit there.” Alex pushed the update to Jay via the ANIP connection. He had noticed before how the ANIPs automatically had a handshake connection to every other ANIP within range, so this should work. He held his breath. Unnecessarily. The patch was accepted by Jay’s system. Alex laughed.

  “Oh my god! Change it back! It looks like a hot dog stand exploded on my HUD.”

  “Okay, okay.” Alex pushed another update and watched as Jay relaxed moments later.

  “Why?” Jay started, but just stared at Alex who laughed again.

  “The colour change was just a test to see whether changes were working. I wrote a special update for Connor though. It won’t affect his system colours, but I reversed the Geolocation logic so that instead of directing him with a HUD marker showing the shortest path to his selected destination, it will choose the longest possible route!”

  Jay thought about that for a moment and finally smiled. “Okay, that’s kind of funny. IF he uses the path routing feature. I never do.”

  “He does. I overheard Brandon talking about it. He basically uses it for everything.” Alex didn’t want to admit that he also used it all the time. Not that he needed the directions around the village anymore, but when it was active he could focus more on his thoughts as he just followed the glowing arrow on his HUD.

  “Even better though, I hacked a few alerts into the update. Every couple of hours on Friday, he’ll get an alert to go and talk to a random person in the village. The HUD will then take him on a walking tour of the village and undercity.”

  Jay shook his head as Alex laughed, but he was smiling too.

  “He’s going to be pissed. What about HEX? Connor isn’t going to be shy about complaining that his system is broken. They’re going to know someone was mucking around with it.”

  “Maybe. But I did build in a couple of safeguards too. I Geofenced the HEX offices and if Connor goes within 20 feet of them the entire patch will self-destruct and reload the default code. He'll probably notice the system reboot, but HEX will never find anything. And the whole thing will revert on Saturday morning, making him look a little crazy if he tries to explain it or tell others.”

  Jay laughed. "Well, will serve him right then, although I doubt he'll learn any lessons from it."

  “Maybe,” Alex said, leaning forward and lowering his voice conspiratorially, “but that’s not even the best update he’ll be getting this weekend!”

  ***

  Subject: Augmentation and Human Continuity

  Explanation: Addressing public concerns regarding identity and bodily modification.

  Attribution: Transhuman Integration Review, International Government; 2057

  Throughout history, humanity has adapted itself through tools. Clothing and fire reshaped our environment. Glass extended our sight. Medicine altered our lifespans. Etc. Augmentation is not a departure from this pattern, but rather a continuation.

  Replacing a limb does not replace the person. Enhancing cognition through drugs does not erase identity. Individuals remain defined by their memories, relationships, and values, not by the materials through which those qualities are expressed.

  Modern augmentation systems are designed to support human agency, not supplant it. Adaptive prosthetics respond to user intent and preserve subjective continuity. There is no evidence that responsible integration diminishes personhood or moral responsibility.

  Concerns about “losing humanity” often reflect discomfort with visible change rather than demonstrable harm. But humanity has never been static, and what matters is not how much of the body is replaced, or how visible those replacements are, but whether the individual retains choice, dignity, and meaningful participation in society.

  Augmentation does not make us less human. It reflects a longstanding human desire to survive, to heal, and to improve. And that impulse itself will remain unchanged no matter what the ‘next upgrade’ is.