Nat felt pressure on his head, warm, but cool and — was that a hand? Were those fingers? What was …

  “… was performing a measurement, there was no active field in place, and it should not have caused any adverse …”

  Great. Just great. Nat thought for the second time today. Sound is back, vision's still out. But seriously? Another episode so soon?

  “… could be an epileptic seizure, but I agree that the strength of the rigor is highly suggestive …”

  Great. Just great. Well, sound is mostly back. Strange. How does a voice sound thin?

  “… cause no pulse, breathing, or electrical activity? He's not brain-dead, that's obvious, it's more like suspended — Oh, hey he's animated again. Hello? Do you understand me? Please say 'yes', or blink your eyes twice if you are unable to …”

  Great. Again? Huh, that voice sounds really strange. Metallic? I wonder …

  “… well, they clearly have directed eye motion when not frozen — is this a talent? He's back again. I'm going to unmanifest you a moment — I need both hands to check for pupillary …”

  Is this an episode? Is that Lyn? It sounds like someone else must have come out …

  “… it's obviously talent related, but agreement is required to access system capabilities, unless the event is a life-threatening medical emergency, which I am not sure …”

  What? Am I having an episode? What's with the bizarre sounding voice? That's …

  “… have already asked AMA to grant temporary access, but no response yet. You know how they are. He's moving again! Hey, Nat! If you can hear us, I need you to request assistance. I am unable to assist you without prior agreement, so please …”

  Ugh, everything feels distant and small; I'm having an episode and someone is talking to me. No idea where I am yet, vision is still out.

  “I'll be fine. I don't need help,” Nat thought he said.

  “…mumble need help,” is what he actually said, if one was generous about their interpretation of the noises coming out of his mouth.

  “Eh, close enough. Lyn, full cranial aetheric suppression field, please.”

  Nat felt a strengthening of the pressure on his head, warm and cool and… flowing? The dizziness and nausea receded almost immediately and vision started to return — Lyn's pale white arm occupied most of his view, and it was their long fingers wrapped around his forehead and front of his skull. He tried to ask a question, but his mouth was not currently taking orders, apparently.

  “Done — no, there's still activity, I'd like to avoid anything stronger until I have a better idea of what's going on. Did you get emergency diagnostic access?” That was clearly Lyn.

  “Keep firm hold of his head — I can't see his system ID to request remote access so we're going with a local connection. Okay, handshake, and … okay, local access is granted. Keep his talent from activating again! That could be very, very bad!” instructed the tinny, unknown speaker.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Nat was fading out slowly, almost comfortably, for a change. Was this something Lyn was doing? Or a really weird start to an episode? Curiosity was certainly one of his defining features, and he wanted to understand what was going on, but he was not being given the opportunity to ask and a spark of frustrated determination ignited long enough for him to manage a final recognizable word, “Wait!” — but his loss of consciousness was already in progress, and would not be stopped.

  The interjection was forceful enough, however, that a fragmented, broken tool — one that watched dutifully over the various inputs it had been grafted onto, a half century prior — took notice. It was an interface overlaid on an alien framework, designed to help children and adolescents of numerous species, intellects, and body plans survive harsh environments that they had never been meant to endure. It was a poor copy of the original, bonded to a species that had not been prepared to accept it, and redesigned by committee, but it was doing its best.

  The tool — a biological interface — measured sensory inputs and nerve impulses looking for signals via methods that were, while advanced, relatively mundane — if such a word had meaning in a vast multiverse. But it also had one capability that made it stand out, even in a multitude of universes, due to a particular quirk of this one where thought tangibly excited fields of energy. That capability provided the ability to detect and, in a limited way, comprehend particular intents; the tool worked now to analyze this cosmic vibration, as it had done for a million others before.

  While that was processing, it looked at the activation counters that would track and inform educational routines and noted that there had never been a recorded intent-based talent activation. This caused an exception in the processing, and it halted to activate a secondary analysis, which queried the number of prompted activations recorded; those being very low power activations of a talent designed to teach an adolescent how to use the capabilities it granted safely — for instance a burst of warmth, rather than temperatures suitable for ignition or a mere spark of electricity instead of an arc for welding. The prompted activation counter was in the hundreds of thousands — the system had been trying to show the user how to use an ability for a very long time, after all.

  The ratio suggested to the tool that the user was not responding to being prompted, and the algorithm did its job and sent off a notification to the controlling entity via aetheric channels as it had done each and every time beforehand. This was, of course, in no way the first time this specific analysis and the resultant conclusion had been made. Each time the system looked at the ratio, decided that clearly it wasn't teaching intent properly, and queued up a demonstration to the presumed adolescent, to hint at how to activate their talent and how it might be used. Just as it had hundreds of thousands of times already, before activating the talent and then immediately crashing due to some undetected error.

  But by sheer chance the stabilizing influence kept the system online a fraction of a second longer than usual before it still, inevitably, crashed. The monitors that measured intent had time to register the aetheric flux — the raw power that cognition exerted upon the dimensional substrate. Willpower alone could never manifest capabilities that seemed to defy the very tenets of physics and understanding. But this system had been originally been designed by those who toyed with physics the same way that most races meddled with their own biology as soon as they were able.

  And so the system flipped a value over from 0 to 1 in the intent activation counter, activated a routine defined more than mere aeons in the past, then essentially told the laws of thermodynamics to take five and check back later.

  It was a complex system, not an intelligent one; but before the corruption that had rendered it ineffective so very long ago caused it to crash yet again, the barest glimmer, the tiniest flicker of satisfaction for completion of a purpose so long denied could be felt to vibrate the nearby aether, by any sensitive enough to feel it.

  The user had wished to have time to think, and so it made sure they did.

  [Slip]