Chapter 123. Fifteen Hours
It was almost midnight. The exclusive private gym was deserted except for Maggie and me. The panoramic tempered-glass windows shut out the noise of never-sleeping Los Angeles, leaving us alone with chrome-plated steel and the smell of fresh rubber. Maggie was working in the corner, pushing herself to the absolute limit. No theatrical grunts or cries, just the steady, dry breathing of someone accustomed to working until she had nothing left. She did not even turn her head toward me. The [Trainer]'s influence had turned a housewife into a professional athlete.
I walked over to the power rack. Time to see what I could lift.
There was more than enough room here. The investors had spared no expense. Nearly a thousand square feet could easily accommodate an entire platoon without anyone bumping elbows. Besides, in hyperfocus, my body operated like a perfectly calibrated machine. I had already tested it in crowded gyms. My subconscious blocked out somatosensory noise and automatically guided me toward an open rack without interfering with anyone around me.
[Special Command: Conduct an efficient full-body workout targeting all muscle groups. Command cancellation: external contact or threat to life.]
A closed club at night, secured by a magnetic keycard. The odds of anyone getting in were practically zero. But the old habit of checking every detail, left over from my days working with financial audits and ingrained even deeper during my time in the Corps, made me spell out exceptions. An emergency call or a fire alarm could always go off.
My consciousness smoothly sank into the familiar, dense shadow of hyperfocus. My field of awareness contracted instantly. It was as though I had found myself in a dark theater, watching my own hands through a camera lens running at twenty times the normal frame rate.
The scene before my eyes became a stuttering kaleidoscope. My hands closed around the bar. Mechanically, without a pause, plates slid onto the sleeves one after another until there was no room left. The heaviest ones, fifty-pound black plates. The collars snapped into place with dry clicks. The high-carbon steel bar groaned under the absurd weight, bowing into an arc, but I simply lifted it from the rack and lowered it onto my chest. Ordinary working weights were a thing of the past. My muscles no longer responded to standard loads. They needed extreme stress.
The scene changed. Treadmill. The five-horsepower motor screamed at its limit, the belt racing at maximum speed while my heels flickered above it, pounding out a dry staccato.
The scene changed again. CrossFit pull-up bar. Every cast-iron weight and plate I could find in the free-weight area hung from the nylon belt and chain around my waist. My joints worked without the slightest sign of fatigue or lactic acid buildup. In hyperfocus, my nervous system simply ignored the pain signals. I was an observer watching the functions of an autonomous avatar.
But the cold calculation never stopped. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the numbers kept ticking away: this gym was not built to handle the kind of force I was putting out. A couple more sessions like this, and I would either cause tens of thousands of dollars in property damage or outgrow this equipment completely. Basic physics was unforgiving. Once your physical capabilities exceeded human limits, standard equipment became useless junk.
I needed to design my own facility. A full-scale bunker with hydraulic systems and custom-built equipment. Logistics, blueprints, structural calculations... There were plenty of tutorials online. If people could build refrigerators and homemade drones in their garages by following videos, I could figure out how to design a reinforced power rack. I could always call Selina. She had connections in industrial supply and an engineering degree, but the price of her help would be a ton of poisonous sarcasm and a mountain of unnecessary questions. Selina was the last resort, someone I would turn to only after every other option had been exhausted.
The exit from hyperfocus slammed into my brain without warning. It was as if an old movie projector had chewed up the film, and a blinding white screen had suddenly exploded into view, searing my retinas. I squeezed my eyes shut, fighting a sudden wave of nausea, then blinked heavily several times.
I had not experienced such a violent emergency shutdown of the protocol in a long time.
Green system notifications flared in my peripheral vision:
[Strength +1]
[Agility +1]
[Endurance +1]
Not mine. I knew my own body too well. Whenever I allocated points, a distinct, deep warmth always spread through my veins, like the effect of a good cup of coffee. Right now, my muscles were silent. This improvement had gone to Maggie.
Except Maggie was nowhere in the gym.
Instead, an entire crowd stood directly in front of me. Eleven guys around twenty years old, all wearing matching tracksuits with the logo of the local university team. They stared at me with the same dumbfounded expression people wore when watching a meteor fall out of the sky. I stood calmly in the middle of the gym, holding a barbell at arm's length, the shaft bent beneath the weight of half a ton of metal. My arms were not even shaking.
Without any unnecessary theatrics, I carefully lowered the barbell onto the platform. The heavy metallic boom made three guys in the front row jump.
“Uh, dude... what the hell is that?” A tall guy in a baseball cap stepped away from the group. And, apparently, he was wearing sunglasses indoors. His situational awareness clearly left something to be desired. “Are you, like, the Terminator or something?”
The rest of the team let out a collective laugh, egging their leader on.
I regarded him with a steady, heavy gaze. No irritation, no aggression. Just an assessment of a potential obstacle.
“I’ve got a similar question for you,” I said. My voice was low and carried easily over the laughter. “Who are you, and what are you doing in a gym I rented?”
“You sure you’ve got the right place, old man?” The guy pushed his sunglasses onto his forehead and pulled a plastic keycard from his pocket, waving it in front of my face. “This is our reservation. We booked the whole gym for a private workout!”
“Then you’ve got a problem with management.” I pulled an identical black rectangle with an electronic chip from my pants pocket and held it up for him to see. “My key works.”
The door to the gym opened with a quiet click, and a young woman in the facility’s branded administrator polo hurried inside. She looked nervous and furious, and for some reason, all of it was directed at me.
“Sir! Who the hell are you?” she snapped, stepping straight into my personal space. “How did you get in here? Where’d you get that card?”
“Thomas Ross,” I said, keeping my tone even. The situation was starting to look like a routine administrative screwup, and I had hated screwups ever since my days dealing with tax returns. “I paid for my session and intended to finish my workout in peace.”
“One second!” She snatched up her work tablet and began tapping her nails against the screen. “Okay... Ross... Yeah, I see the reservation. But you’re not checked in at the front desk! You never checked in!”
“I’m standing right in front of you, and the key in my hand didn’t come out of a 3D printer.” I spoke evenly, leaving deliberate pauses between my words. Picking a fight with the staff was a stupid waste of resources. “Your employee on duty gave me the card. He didn’t give me his name, and he wasn’t wearing a badge. Young guy, long hair, piercing in his left eyebrow. I’m sure you don’t have many people like that on the night shift.”
“Arthur, maybe?” The woman frowned as she pulled her phone from her pocket and quickly scrolled through her contacts. “I think he worked the overnight shift yesterday... Hang on a second.”
She stepped aside, pressing the phone to her ear. Across the gym, the football players had already lost all interest in us. They had gathered around the dumbbell rack, laughing loudly and burning off the last of their youthful hormonal energy. Under normal circumstances, it would have been difficult to make out their words through the bursts of laughter and overlapping voices, but my enhanced sensors easily isolated the relevant frequencies from the acoustic clutter. The rest was simple logic.
The story turned out to be painfully ordinary: the night-shift administrator, Arthur, had given me the key but never logged my visit in the system. He had simply stalled at the point where he was supposed to click the mouse.
I remembered the guy. He had spent a good five minutes staring blankly at the monitor just to perform a one-second operation, and he had still managed to screw it up. It was better not to deal with people who were practically sleepwalking from exhaustion. You only ended up paying for it yourself.
The woman gave her coworker a brief but thorough assessment of his intellectual abilities, then hung up.
“I’m sorry about the mix-up, Mr. Ross.” She turned back to me, her shoulders dropping reflexively as she instantly switched from an aggressive tone to polished, accommodating professionalism. “Stop by the front desk afterward, and I’ll put together a complimentary sports nutrition package for you from our fridge. If there’s anything else I can...”
“It’s fine.” I raised a hand slightly, cutting off the stream of unnecessary courtesies. My desire to end this pointless conversation outweighed everything else. “If the paperwork’s settled, I’d like to get back to my workout.”
“Of course.” She immediately turned toward the group of athletes. “Gentlemen, I’m sorry, but this gym is reserved for a private session. I’ll find another location for you.”
“Hey, why do we have to go anywhere?” The guy in sunglasses peeled himself away from the machine and covered the distance between us in two strides. “Dude, how long have you been in here?”
“None of your business.”
I did not like his tone or the way he was acting. The guy reminded me painfully of an alpha male from a documentary about primates, putting on a classic display of dominance to save face in front of the pack.
“Listen, man, maybe you should just...”
I did not know, and had no desire to know, where he was going with this: a pointless fistfight, a shouting match, or an attempt to establish a pecking order. My tolerance for empty chatter had run out for the day.
“I’m not going anywhere. You are.” I said it in an even, clipped tone and triggered [Demoralization] in my mind.
A palpable pulse of suppressive mental force broke loose. The goon in sunglasses went pale instantly, his face tightening as primal, unconscious terror froze in his eyes. Without saying another word, he spun around and hurried toward the exit with quick, almost shuffling steps. His fellow athletes stared after him for a few seconds, blinking stupidly as they tried to figure out what had gotten into their captain, then instinct took over and they silently followed.
Excellent tool. I had previously considered [Demoralization] purely a practical skill for controlling firefights and neutralizing enemy personnel on the battlefield. As it turned out, it worked just as well in civilian life, eliminating potential everyday conflicts before they could even begin, without spilling a drop of blood.
The administrator apologized once more and quietly pulled the heavy door shut behind her. Finally, silence.
Before getting back to the equipment, I sat down on a bench and pulled my smartphone from my pocket. There was one missed message from Maggie on the screen: “Finished. Feel great. Waiting at the apartment.”
The timestamp was six in the morning. Exactly six hours of uninterrupted training. Interesting. Based on her previous metrics, her muscle fibers had reached their limit after three hours, at which point her biomechanics required recovery. So after her evolution, her physiological limit had doubled. Pleasant math. Her productivity over a twenty-four-hour cycle would increase proportionally.
My own current workout had already been going for ten hours before that ridiculous interruption. Before the evolutionary jump, my ceiling had been twelve hours. Was I really going to have to spend entire days locked in a gym now? The prospect of spending twenty-four hours surrounded by weights was hardly inspiring, but I could not see an alternative. The only consolation was that the process was not infinite. Once my stats reached the next plateau, I could take a break until the next evolutionary shift.
I stood up, steadied my breathing, and formed the command again.
[Special Command: Conduct an efficient full-body workout targeting all muscle groups. Command cancellation: external contact or threat to life.]
Another surge, another plunge into the muffled darkness of hyperfocus, followed by a violent snap back into reality that felt like an electric shock.
My T-shirt was soaked through and clung to my body, my muscles burned with a dense, leaden heat, and my throat felt as if someone had scraped it with sandpaper. But along with the heavy fatigue came a dense rush of endorphins flooding my bloodstream.
The interface showed no increase in my numerical stats, but my biomechanical feedback clearly indicated that the workout had been successful. I glanced at the clock. Fifteen hours. So my personal limit after the evolution had increased not by a multiplier, but by a fixed three-hour increment. And that was actually good news. I had no desire to become a piece of gym equipment that operated around the clock.
The calorie deficit after a fifteen-hour marathon, however, hit my gut like a freight train. Next time, I would have to bring a couple of gallons of concentrated protein so I could refuel on the move without interrupting the session.
“Oh, Mr. Ross! You’ve been here a while.” The woman at the front desk glanced at the clock on the wall. “Working on your endurance?”
“In a manner of speaking. You mentioned a nutrition package.” I put a hand on my stomach and felt it starting to digest itself on an empty tank.
“Yes, one second!” She reached into the glass refrigerator and set two half-liter bottles of mineral water and three standard protein bars on the counter.
I stared at the rations for a long moment, experiencing almost physical pain. That laughable portion would not have covered the energy deficit of an average-sized Doberman, let alone a man of my size and metabolism.
Still, making a scene over the service would have been irrational. I gave her a curt nod of thanks and started tearing the wrapper off the first bar right there at the counter.
“Have a great day, Mr. Ross! Come again!” she called cheerfully after me.
I had barely taken ten steps across the parking lot before all three bars had disappeared down my throat and I had drained the first bottle of water in three gulps. Then another minor inconvenience caught up with me at the bottom of the second bottle: my car was gone. I had forgotten that I had left it at home.
Well, I had no choice but to run. All I could do was hope my endurance would carry me home before the digested protein bars burned through my metabolic furnace and my body started consuming its own muscles.