[Terminal maturation: ACTIVE — 81%]
[Vitality: 21% — stable]
[Heat pulse: 2:00 @ 37.2° | Airflow: 10:00 | Baseline: 35.6°]
Jin logged it, adjusted the pulse down another fifteen seconds, and did not think about it much, because the case had settled into something close to routine and the interesting thing was happening on the screen.
Flicker had been trying to walk for three days.
She got up on her own now, reliably, after enough rest. Standing had gone from an event to a thing she did. She could hold it for ten or eleven seconds before her legs went, and she had learned — Jin was fairly sure she had actually learned this, from a lizard — to lower her chest slightly when she wobbled instead of stiffening up.
Walking was different.
Glitch ran the demonstration again that evening, with the same terrible patience. Foot. Weight. Foot. He did a slow four-step walk across the grey space and turned around and looked at her.
Then he did something he had not done before.
He went about two meters away and lay down.
He did not go far. He did not hide, or move so she could not see him, or do any of the things that would have made it cruel. He simply picked a point at the edge of what she might manage and settled onto his forelegs and waited there, watching her, and became a place.
The chick looked at him.
Oh, Jin thought. All right, that’s clever. Did you work that out yourself?
Glitch conveyed, with total confidence, that he had.
On the first attempt, she got up in about six seconds, which was fast for her, and put her right foot forward too far. Her weight went with it, and she came down on her chest before the foot had finished landing.
She lay there breathing for a while with her eyes open.
Too far. She’s reaching for him instead of walking to him.
The second attempt had better foot placement. She transferred her weight and brought the left foot up, briefly standing on one leg, but her wings opened half a second too late. The correction overshot, and she went sideways.
Glitch’s head came up. He did not move.
On the third, she managed the first shift cleanly and then simply ran out. Her legs stopped answering, and she folded straight down where she stood, lying there with her beak open.
Jin let her rest for eleven minutes and did nothing during it except watch the shell temperature come off a pulse.
She’d keep going. That’s the whole problem with her.
He had noticed it over the last few days and had found it uncomfortable to look at directly. The chick did not stop. She stopped when her body stopped, and then as soon as it started again she went back to the same thing, and there was nothing joyful or determined-looking about it. It was flat and stubborn and entirely without drama.
She’s been doing that for sixty-three days in the dark. Nobody was watching then either.
On the fourth attempt, she got up. Right foot out, correct distance. Weight forward. Left foot up and through.
One step.
Her wings came out early this time, half-open, trembling, and they did something — Jin could not tell whether it was lift or just balance, and it did not matter.
Right foot again.
Two.
The third step was ugly. Her right leg buckled halfway through it and she caught herself on the wing and dragged the foot the rest of the way, and it was barely a step at all except that she moved forward and stayed up.
Three.
Then she was out, completely, and she went down hard and fast about half a meter short of Glitch.
She did not hit the floor.
He had come up onto his feet during the second step, without Jin seeing him do it, and had closed the distance while she was on the third, and his foreleg was under her chest when she folded.
He lowered her the rest of the way, slowly.
Then he lay back down beside her with his chin on his forelegs and looked pointedly across the render space at nothing at all, as if the entire thing had been beneath his notice.
He did not move away.
Flicker lay against his foreleg with her chest heaving and her eyes open.
[Baseline improvement recorded — avatar.]
[Entity may achieve limited unsupported movement following adequate rest.]
[Status: Cannot run. Cannot fly. Cannot engage. Cannot enter instanced areas.]
Jin sat back in his chair and let out a long breath.
The Sync panel did not open, and he did not go looking for it. He had used the one limited transfer the provisional bond allowed him and the Engine had been clear that it was one. Whatever came next had to come out of the case on his desk and out of her.
He ran a deep structural scan on the real egg instead. The avatar’s improvement could not cross without Sync, but he still wanted to know what physical maturation had done for the chick inside the shell.
[Muscle response: improved]
[Internal movement: present, increased]
[Position: shifted from baseline]
He read the third line twice.
She had moved. Not visibly—the shell sat in its cradle exactly as it had for two weeks—but something inside had changed position since the morning scan. The better muscle response belonged to her physical maturation, just as the avatar’s steps belonged to practice. Without another Sync, neither improvement could cross between them.
What the readings did show was the same pattern on both sides of the screen: the chick in the shell had begun moving too. The body was different, but the stubbornness was not.
He looked at the screen, where a chick that could take three steps was lying against a lizard who was pretending not to be propping her up.
Somewhere in her file was a line that said [Hidden Potential: SS], and it was a ceiling, and a ceiling was a promise about a building that did not exist.
Three steps, Jin thought. That’s a thing she has.
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