Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

The controller board had a data pin Jin had ignored since installing it because he had not needed it. Forty minutes before his 0800 shift, he worked out what it did, which turned out to be very little and exactly enough.

[INCUBATOR — REMOTE FEED]

[Shell temperature: 37.9°]

[Element: ON — phase 4:12 elapsed]

[Fan: OFF]

[Cycle: 6 of session]

That was all of it. Four numbers and two states, pushed to his phone every fifteen seconds by a forty-Credit board doing the only clever thing it was capable of.

This was not the kind of incubator Arthur had bought for Glitch. That had been a subsidized government unit—cheap, sealed, and openly connected to the Association’s safety network; he probably had gotten along with the egg purchase for free, as he was pretty sure the government made them at a loss to collect data; it was helping but predatory at the same time.

Jin’s machine was little more than a transport shell, a heating element, a fan, and ordinary components he had wired together himself. It had cost more than relying on another subsidized unit and performed only the few functions Flicker needed, but the feed ended at his phone. There was no registered unit number, no mandatory reporting seal, and no external anomaly flag for anyone else to receive.

It tells me what the machine is doing. It doesn’t tell me anything about her.

He made himself say the distinction aloud once, because at some point in the next week he would be tired enough to forget it. The feed reported the incubator; Appraisal read the embryo, and that required him to be in the room with his hand on the case.

The Engine was different again. He could open it anywhere, in a lecture hall or a warehouse or the middle of a training field, because it was his soul projecting onto a screen and had never once cared where his body was.

One channel told him the shell was at 37.9 degrees. The other let him see a chick lying on a grey floor. Neither told him whether anything inside the egg had changed what it needed.

Supply went fine. Bellek put him on the manifest desk, which involved sitting, and Jin was so grateful he almost said something. He checked the feed eleven times across four hours, and everything held.

Applied Beast Physiology at 1300 was mandatory after his placement change: ninety minutes in a hall with a hundred and forty Fourth Class students. Given what sat on his desk at home, Jin found the subject almost unbearably funny.

He sat near the back and put his phone flat on the bench.

[Shell: 38.0°]

[Element: ON]

[Fan: OFF]

[Cycle: 3]

Normal.

Instructor Ferren spent twenty minutes on thermoregulation in mixed-aspect species, which Jin listened to properly for the first time in his academic career.

[Shell: 38.1°]

[Element: OFF]

[Fan: ON — burst 2 of 6]

Normal.

At 1341 the bond went off like a struck bell.

It was not a warning in words. Glitch had never produced anything in words.

It was a spike of hard, focused alarm aimed back at the room. Beneath it lay a sensation Jin’s brain translated as heat, though he knew that was interpretation rather than information.

He looked at the phone.

[Shell: 38.1°]

[Element: OFF]

[Fan: ON — burst 4 of 6]

[Cycle: 5]

Everything on the feed was correct. The machine was executing the sequence he had calibrated at 1215, on schedule, at the right temperature, in the right phase.

The machine is fine. So it’s not the machine.

He opened the Engine under the bench.

The chick was awake, head up and moving sluggishly, but it looked no different from breakfast. A pre-hatching avatar reflected a baseline, not the real body’s current condition.

Useless. I can’t see it from here. I can’t scan her from here.

The alarm came again, sharper.

Jin was already working out how to leave — whether to just walk out, what that would cost, whether he could say something about a medical issue without inviting questions — when the hall’s side door opened.

Glitch came in at a run, then stopped, which was the part Jin thought about afterward. He did not charge through the hall. He checked the room in one sweep, then crossed at a fast walk with his head low and his eyes fixed on the third row from the back, threading between benches without touching one.

A hundred and forty students turned around.

Somebody near the front made a noise. A girl two seats from Jin pulled her feet up onto her bench.

Glitch reached him, shoved his head against Jin’s knee, then backed up two steps and looked from Jin to the door.

Instructor Ferren had stopped mid-sentence.

Jin stood up. "I’m sorry—"

"Go."

"He’s not—"

"I’ve been teaching for nineteen years, Astor." Ferren’s voice carried without effort. "That is a contracted beast reporting an emergency and I would rather you were already out of the room. Go."

Jin went.

Glitch was through the door first and waiting in the corridor. They both ran, and behind them Ferren told the hall that what they had just watched was worth more than the next hour of the lesson.

Fine, Jin thought, taking the stairs three at a time. Fine, that’s fine, that’s a good outcome, stop thinking about it.

He had the case open and Appraisal running within eight seconds of the door.

[Shell temperature: 38.1°]

[Interior: 40.6°]

[Chest concentration: 41.9°]

[Thermal strain indicator: MINOR]

[Vitality: 18% — stable]

He killed the element, ran the fan manually, and brought the interior down at a controlled rate. Over four minutes, the strain indicator cleared, and Jin sat back on his heels with his heart pounding.

No vitality loss. Nothing structural. It hadn’t got there yet.

He read the numbers again and understood what had happened. It was not what he had assumed on the stairs.

The shell was at 38.1. The element had done exactly what it was told. The fan had run exactly when it was told.

The interior was two and a half degrees above the shell.

That’s not the element. The element can’t do that. The element only heats from outside.

He ran the metabolic read and found it.

The chest pocket was producing heat rather than merely accumulating it, at a measurably higher rate than two days ago. Her fire pathway had strengthened as maturation advanced and crossed a line sometime in the last twelve hours.

The eleven-minute heat phase had been correct for an embryo generating almost nothing on its own. It was too much for an embryo that had started generating its own.

The treatment didn’t fail. She outgrew it.

He sat with that for a second. And it’ll happen again. Every time she gets stronger, yesterday’s number gets more wrong.

Rebuilding it took the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening, and he did it the way he had done the first night: one variable, then a scan, then the next.

What came out was not another formula. The temptation to write down a new eleven-three-four and stop thinking was enormous, but what he had now was only a shape.

Heat pulses became shorter: four minutes instead of eleven, and only to 37.6 rather than 38.1. The point was no longer to supply warmth, only to nudge a pathway already producing its own.

Airflow ran longer—six minutes, low and steady—because the pocket filled faster and needed more time to clear. The baseline fell from 36.4 to 35.8 whenever Jin was away. That was slightly below what she probably needed, but slightly cold meant slower; slightly hot meant what he had just run home to stop.

In his notebook, he wrote APPRAISAL BEFORE EVERY MEANINGFUL CHANGE and underlined it twice. Beneath that went the real rule: RECALIBRATE WHENEVER THE BIOLOGY MOVES. He could not be more than three hours from the desk again.

He ran the new pattern under observation for two hours and scanned after every cycle.

[Thermal strain indicator: none]

[Vitality: 18% — stable]

[Terminal maturation: ACTIVE — 32%]

Thirty-two percent.

Jin looked at the number for a long moment. It was the first time Appraisal had measured terminal maturation with a figure instead of a word. Four days ago, the process had not started; now it was nearly a third complete.

He wrote it down.

Then he turned around and looked at Glitch, who had gone back to his spot at the corner of the desk and put his chin on his forelegs as though the last two hours had not happened.

"You left the room."

Glitch conveyed that he had.

"You crossed campus and walked into a lecture hall with a hundred and forty people in it."

Glitch conveyed that the people had not been relevant.

Jin sat down on the floor next to him.

"The sensors said everything was fine," he said. "They were right. The machine did exactly what I set it to do, and it would have kept hurting her. Nothing on that feed could have told me."

Glitch’s tail moved once against the floor.

He felt it before there was a number, Jin thought. He’s the only part of this system that can do that.

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