Chapter 15: Ah, I Can See My Own Spine
They’re so small. They’re sitting there in the hologram with the energy of someone who showed up to a job interview twenty years early and is very confident about this. They do absolutely nothing yet. They’re decorative at best. They’re a promissory note written on the back of a napkin that says Trust me, eventually, you will be a god,but I really don’t want to just turn into another baby.
I want the dragon one. I can feel the part of me that wants it. It’s the part that read too many fantasy novels and thought that being the one who becomes the exception is what the whole thing is about. Ceiling removed. Wings. Legs. Size of a train. Actual divinity. Forever, but that doesn’t sound very logical, old mate says above the sewer is the modern world, yeah? So that can’t work.
That word keeps doing something to me. But forever is a long time to spend being a very confident radiator.
What’s the realistic timeline on the dragon one, old mate?
[System: For what part, dickhead.]
Any part. Wings. Legs. Something that isn’t two useless horn nubs.
[System: Mate bugger off.]
That’s not an answer.
[System: It’s an honest one. You’re asking me to give you a timeline on something that has no ceiling. It could be fast if you’re a lunatic about it. Could be slow if you’re the kind of bloke who takes twenty-minute breaks between tunnel fights to contemplate his feelings.Roughly.]
Don’t.
[System: and you’re the second type.]
I coil tighter and say nothing because that’s fair.
The Glass Phantom preview is still floating there. See-through me, one meter, every bone visible, every organ doing its little organ thing in plain sight. Undignified, honestly. There’s something deeply undignified about having your lunch visible from the outside. But the System said I can turn that off eventually, which means right now I’m basically a walking anatomy poster, and one day I’m simply not there at all.
It would give me no heat signature. No reflection. No sound, I don’t choose to make Free kills. Forever. Every time, well, till I evolve again, system, do I keep the skills I get from evolving along the way or?
[System: Bloody hell, honestly not a clue, it’s my first time doing all this shit.]
Huh, what do you mean? Aren’t you the god system of indulgence?
[System: Fuck do I know cunt? I was balls deep in some Sheila, then poof, I was this koala deity, now we’re here.]
Oh, okay then. Well, I think about how many things down here have better senses than I do, better size than I do, better everything than I do, and how the only real currency I have is that I’m small and fast and willing to be patient.
The Glass Phantom takes that and turns it into a weapon.
The dragon takes that and says Yeah. But eventually you won’t need patience because you’ll be a god, and that’s a lovely thought, and I genuinely appreciate the sentiment, but eventually it doesn’t help me in the next tunnel.
So it’s the glass one, make me into a clear pool noodle.
[System: Yeah sure.]
That’s it? Just yeah?
[System: What did you want, confetti?]
Some acknowledgment that this was a real decision.
[System: It was a real decision. You spent six minutes staring at a pug face. Very real. Very genuine process. Deeply moved.]
I’m going with the Glass Phantom.
[System: Good choice, mate.]
The confirmation screen appears, and I press it with the same energy I’d use to sign a lease I’ve already read three times and am still slightly suspicious of, and then the world goes.
Wrong.
Not dark. Not painful. More like when you go to scratch your nose and miss. Except instead of your nose, it’s every single part of you, and instead of missing, it’s more like your whole body has been briefly submitted as evidence in a court case and then returned. Something has changed. Several somethings. I don’t have a word for it, and I don’t think the word exists.
Four seconds, roughly.
Then it’s done, I uncurl slowly and when I look down at where my body should be.
There’s a faint shimmer. Like heat rising off summer asphalt, but shaped like me, moving like me, coiled on the dark wood and taking up the same space I was taking up before. My scales catch the ambient light wrong, not reflecting it, not absorbing it, just bending it slightly to the side and letting it continue on without me.
Ahhhh, I can see my own spine. That’s sort of disgusting but cool, damn I’m not red anymore. That feels wrong. Should I be red somewhere?
I flick my tongue, and it appears for half a second, translucent pink, and disappears again when I pull it back.
[System: One meter. Thermal Camouflage is locked behind a quest, but even without it, you’re already most of the way to invisible in low light. Congratulations. You are now a ghost with teeth.]
I am a glass dildo,
[System: You’re a Glass Phantom Rank E with full see-through morphology and a passive light-bend that makes you effectively invisible in anything less than direct overhead lighting. But sure. Glass dildo. If that helps.]
It does help, a little.
I slither forward two feet just to see what it looks like from the outside, and the answer is: nothing. Less than nothing. A suggestion that something might have moved if you were already looking. I do it again. Same answer. I do it a third time.
Something in my chest, or the chest-shaped zone where feelings apparently live now, does a thing I don’t have a name for. Like a sigh but internal. Like a sigh that never left.
I have spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of my life being perceived. Clocked. Noted. Taking up space in rooms and still somehow being the last thing anyone looked at. And the solution, it turns out. The actual solution. It was to become a one-meter refractive index problem that looks like a heat shimmer with ambitions.
I do it a fourth time.
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