Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

The housing came apart into four pieces and none of them were useful.

Jin had it open on the desk inside three minutes: a ceramic heating element bonded to the base, a battery bay, a control strip with one dial on it, and a set of vents cut into the upper shell that did nothing except let air exist.

There was no fan. There was no second element. There was nothing in the case capable of moving air on purpose.

So I’m the fan.

He put the housing back together, because a disassembled incubator was worse than a limited one, and looked at the clock. 2314.

He could go to sleep and start in the morning with better equipment and a plan.

He looked at the readout.

[Vitality: 11% — declining]

It’s been declining for sixty-three days. Every hour I wait is an hour off the top.

He pulled the desk chair around, sat down, and started.

The first thing he needed was a baseline he trusted, so he spent twenty minutes doing nothing except reading.

Shell temperature: 36.4, held flat. Interior gradient: warm through the chest and wing roots, cooler everywhere else, the difference stable at about 1.1 degrees.

That’s the pocket. That’s sixty-three days of heat with nowhere to go.

He wrote it down. He had a notebook because Orsill had made him carry one in the intake hall, and it turned out that a habit built for grading damaged herbs worked fine for this.

Cycle 1. Element to maximum, which was 39.0. He held it for four minutes and watched the interior gradient.

Nothing moved. The shell warmed. The chest pocket warmed by about the same amount. The gradient stayed at 1.1.

Four minutes isn’t enough to build anything. It’s just following the outside.

Cycle 2. Eleven minutes at 39.0.

That did something. The chest concentration climbed faster than the shell around it, and by minute nine the gradient had opened to 1.6, which meant the fire pathway was doing what a fire pathway does when you give it heat.

Then he had to move it, and he had nothing to move it with.

He cracked the lid two centimeters and fanned across the vents with the flat of his hand, which was pathetic and which he tried anyway because it was there.

The gradient came down by 0.1 over ninety seconds. It might have been drift. It might have been nothing.

Too weak. It’s not reaching the vents at all.

Cycle 3. He found a sheet of stiff packing card in the bottom of his kit bag, cut it down to the width of the case, and used it properly, and immediately overcorrected.

Six firm strokes across the open vents and the shell temperature fell 1.8 degrees in forty seconds.

The readout moved and Jin’s stomach went with it.

[Vitality: 11% — declining]

[Thermal shock indicator: minor]

He closed the lid and put the element back to 36.4 and sat there with his hands flat on the desk until the shell came back up, which took six minutes, and then read everything three times.

No new damage. Minor had turned itself off. But the gradient had collapsed to 0.4, which meant he had blown the whole pocket out in forty seconds instead of circulating it, and whatever the last eleven minutes had built was gone.

Right. So the air isn’t the point. The air is the delivery.

He wrote that down too, and underlined it, because at 0100 he could feel his own thinking starting to slide.

The useful range turned out to be extremely narrow, and he found its edges one at a time.

Heat phase: below eight minutes, nothing accumulated. Above thirteen, the pocket got hot enough that the surrounding tissue readings started looking unhappy, which was presumably what had been slowly killing it for two months.

Air phase: the shell could not fall faster than about 0.6 degrees per minute without the readings going strange. That worked out to slow, steady strokes across the vents rather than anything vigorous, and it took a maddening amount of concentration to keep constant with a piece of card.

Recovery: the element needed about four minutes at baseline afterward for everything to settle before he started again.

By 0230 he had a shape.

Eleven minutes at 38.1. Three minutes of directed air. Four minutes at 36.4.

Eighteen-minute cycles. Three and a bit an hour.

And the whole thing runs on me sitting here waving cardboard at it.

He ran the first four cycles of the real rhythm and the numbers did approximately nothing, and he refused to change anything, because he had learned in a quarry that adjusting two variables at once taught him precisely nothing about either.

Somewhere around 0400 he lost about ninety seconds.

He was not asleep. He was looking at the readout with his hand moving and had stopped processing any of it, and the fact that the heat phase should have ended forty seconds ago went past him entirely.

Then something heavy shoved his elbow.

Jin came back into himself with a jerk and Glitch was standing there with his head under Jin’s arm, pushing, entirely unimpressed.

"Yeah. Yeah, thanks."

He killed the element and got the air phase going, late but not disastrously, and the gradient came down the way it was supposed to.

Glitch went back to the floor beside the desk.

He had been there since the case came out. He had stopped circling hours ago, and had stopped scenting it, and now simply lay with his chin on his forelegs and his eyes on the incubator, and every hour or so he would get up, walk around the desk once, and lie back down on the same spot.

He could not touch the dial. He could not read the display. Jin had tried, once, out of exhaustion, to push the idea of tell me when eleven minutes have passed across the bond and had gotten back a very willing and completely useless enthusiasm.

What he could do was notice when Jin stopped being present, and he did it four more times before dawn.

At 0510, Jin’s own body started genuinely failing him.

His eyes were dry and his hands had a tremor and the card had begun to feel heavy, and it occurred to him that this was more sustained physical effort than he had voluntarily performed in either of his lives.

Sixteen years of aggressive laziness, and it turns out the answer was a life-or-death optimization problem with a visible progress bar.

His wrist hurt. That was the honest diagnosis. He was not being noble. He had spent nine hours mapping a spawn table once and had not noticed the time, and this was the same machinery pointed somewhere useful.

He kept running cycles.

The number moved at 0602.

[Vitality: 11% — stable]

He read it four times before he believed it, and then sat there while the element cycled and watched the word stable fail to change back into declining.

It stopped.

Sixty-three days of a line going one direction and it had stopped, and the only thing that had changed in the room was a boy with a piece of cardboard.

He ran five more cycles.

By 0740, with light coming grey through the window and his hands shaking, the readout said something else.

[Vitality: 13% — stable]

[Terminal maturation: NOT INITIATED]

Two percent. Not development. Not hatching. The chest pocket had been drained and refilled through cycle after cycle, and something in there had stopped burning itself and had started, fractionally, to hold.

Jin opened the Engine.

The avatar space was the same flat grey render, and the chick was lying on its side exactly as it had been, legs folded, chest moving.

Then its eyes opened.

They were dark and unfocused and it did not look at anything. It lay there with its eyes open for perhaps four seconds. Then the head came up off the floor, maybe two centimeters, trembling the entire way.

It held for less than a second.

Then it went back down and the eyes closed and the chest kept moving, and the Engine did not produce a notification of any kind, because a bird lifting its head was not an event.

Jin sat in his chair and did not do anything for a while.

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