Apocalypse Parenting

Maffiyir company is still refusing statements, but a ship from Intangible Connections arrived in-system.

The group that designed the Maffiyir overmind? Interesting...

--Radio transmissions from Voices for Non-Citizens

The following day passed quietly. We went out in a large group again, but I negotiated to get my kids an opportunity to tackle a direcat on their own as the rest of us watched from nearby.

Cassie’s Combat Companion proved its worth. It was more than half the direcat’s size, and not far behind it in speed and strength. I’m not sure if it could have done enough damage to take it down, but it was easily able to keep the monster’s attention. Rather than use the pepper spray squirt guns - which weren’t guaranteed to hamper other large monsters - Micah practiced using his other abilities to blind and distract the foe, freezing over its eyeballs and delivering narrow, intense bursts of heat to sections of its fur. He and Cassie left the direcat unable to dodge the blade on Gavin’s tail, leaving my middle child time to experiment and figure out how to finish it off.

As soon as the fight ended, Cassie rushed forward. “Ohhh nooooo! Bigkitty is hurt!”

The oversize summon had done a great job of keeping the enemy occupied, but it hadn’t been without cost: bite marks marred the left side of its face, blinding it in one eye, and it wasn’t putting weight on its right foreleg, which was a mangled mess of blood.

Gavin patted Cassie’s companion gingerly. “I can’t heal it.”

“Maybe it will heal on its own over time?” I asked.

Pointy shook her head. “No. We have data on this ability. The only way to repair it is to dismiss it and resummon, but there’s a wait before you can get it back. For Cassie, I anticipate that will take a bit more than an hour. There’s no need to dismiss it yet, however. Though impaired, it remains combat-capable.”

“But Bigkitty is hurt!” Cassie said, her voice anguished.

Oof, what to do here, I wondered. If I let her dismiss it now, she might always want to do that. On the other hand, if I force her to keep it out, she might be less willing to let it get hurt in the future… and she needs to be willing to put her summons in danger to keep herself safe. Hm… the little seekers she summons just vanish when they take too much damage. This one should do the same, I think.

I squatted down next to my toddler. “Cassie, look at Bigkitty. She’s not crying, is she?”

My daughter shook her head. “But she’s hurt!”

“A little bit, but she is very tough, and very strong. Bigkitty is a big girl, don’t you think?”

Cassie thought about this, then nodded hesitantly, her eyes still locked on Bigkitty’s injuries.

I put a hand on my daughter’s lower back. “Bigkitty wants to stay and help you for as long as she can. When she needs to take a break, she will leave on her own, rest up, and come back strong and healthy. Will you let her stay until she wants to leave?”

Cassie looked uncertain.

“You can walk with me and hold my hand if you want,” I offered.

“Okay.” Cassie’s voice was small. She really didn’t like Bigkitty being hurt, but she wasn’t rejecting my narrative.

The rest of our hunt passed smoothly that day. Bigkitty lasted longer than I expected. Even injured, it was more than capable of quickly dispatching most of the early monsters. It took more injuries from an apep ambush and to a rampaging stabcrab before finally “dying” in a gasbag’s cloud.

Cassie was disconsolate, of course, and I ended up carrying her for the next hour-and-a-half. Fortunately, when she was able to bring her “friend” back unharmed, she cheered up immensely.

Strong ability, I thought. And it’ll get even stronger tomorrow, when we get our Specialties.

I checked in with Colonel Zwerinski. “Have you heard from the Arsenal? Are we still on schedule?”

“Yep. A flight team will be ready to pick you and your daughter up first thing in the morning.”

“Huh. I assumed we’d be picked up by truck.”

Colonel Zwerinski shook his head. “Too inefficient. Ground travel has too many delays, and it leads to a lot of wasted uptime on the Siphons. Ah… you will need to leave your sons here. There are seats only for you and Cassie.”

“Probably for the best,” I muttered. I didn’t like being separated from any of my kids, but Gavin and Micah were jealous already. If they’d been stuck in the car all day just to watch their little sister get the rewards they wanted… Yeah. They’d be in a horrible mood at the end, and I could hardly blame them. “I’m sure Priya and George will be willing to watch them.”

The colonel cleared his throat. “I am supposed to pass along a suggestion to have blindfolds on hand. Some people find the process of the flight quite… intimidating.”

“Not a bad idea,” I said. “Thanks.”

I wasn’t too worried for my own sake - I’d always loved heights - but I had no idea how Cassie would react. If keeping her from seeing what was happening made it easier for her, that was all to the good, since I expected we’d be landing and taking off repeatedly.

…

I shouldn’t have worried.

Cassie’s sense of adventure was far stronger than her sense of self-preservation. When Flip had shown up in an upgraded version of her previous glider, Cassie had literally jumped up and down in excitement.

I pulled at the extra straps criss-crossing the passenger seat, which seemed to have been adapted from a child carrier. “So you want Cassie to sit in my lap? And Pointy to… what, go in this pouch here? You think that’s… safe?”

Flip snorted. “Analyze it yourself. I know you have the ability. But yeah, our Analysts say it’s fine, and it’s actually been tested already when we brought an AI from Walnut Grove down to the base. Something like seven out of ten Information Assistants belong to kids under the age of five.”

“Come on, Mommy!” Cassie said. “Let’s go flying! In the sky like rainbows!”

Reassured, I gave in to my excitement.

We soared with Flip across the landscape. Most often, we traveled in the glider, but occasionally she would carry us to and from a nearby Siphon manually, claiming it was easier than launching the craft for such a small distance. The flight helmets we'd been provided protected us from the stinging wind, which made them well worth it even if they blocked my vision from the eyes on the top and sides of my head. It was surprisingly chilly up high: even with the sun beating down on us, the wind and elevation made it feel more like winter than early fall.

I didn't care. Flying had been a daydream of mine since I was little. I loved the airplane flights I'd been on, but this was on a completely different level, especially when Flip carried us personally. There was no barrier between me and the wind, no glass separating me from my view of the toy-sized houses and trees below.

No mild discomfort or mid-level monster attack could detract from my delight at the magical experience.

Cassie and I swapped back and forth while claiming Siphons, keeping our levels even. The plan was to get us both on the verge of a Specialty right as the Siphons closest to Arsenal HQ became available.

“It’s a bit of a spectacle,” Flip said. “But it’s good for morale to show you off, and then you’re right there to pass all the details about your new Specialty on to the eggheads.”

I had no reason to object to the plan, so Cassie and I swapped back and forth. My daughter picked up her Summon Transport ability and followed it up with two abilities to enhance Pointy’s processing power. After a great deal of debate, we’d settled on Cleanse and an ability called Seek. Cleanse was an energy-intensive skill, but also a computationally-intensive one, and best of all, it was simple to use. If Cassie was poisoned, thinking “remove all the stuff in my body that’s bad for me” might be inefficient, but it would make the ability function. Seek was similar, acting as a sort of compass to steer her toward designated targets. The targets could be as general as “food I can eat” or as specific as “my mommy.”

There were other tempting options with solid synergy, but Pointy and I judged most of them would be difficult for Cassie to use effectively, like Telekinesis. There were also a few options with even higher synergy… but they were mostly sensory biological augments. After the hints Fluffy had dropped, we suspected that biological augments made it difficult for contestant species to have kids. Cassie’s survival was paramount, of course, so we still considered the augments… but none really offered enough utility.

A few points of synergy more, versus a tool that could save her in a sticky situation?

No contest.

I’d chosen my own last three abilities with a similar philosophy. Synergy was good, of course, but it was something that could be made up for later. I planned to directly level Telekinesis moving forward, making it my primary defense and weapon, so I wanted to use my last ability choices to make sure my toolbox was complete enough to bring that weapon to bear.

Earlier, I’d been considering Mental Speech, but I’d discarded that idea in favor of grabbing Announcement. Neither ability synergized well with my other choices. Even though Announcement was ever-so-slightly better, it would still end up under 300%.

The synergy hadn’t been the deciding factor for me. I had realized that I didn’t need the long-range communication that Mental Speech provided, but the ability to quickly and easily communicate with a group of strangers could be life-saving. Even better, if I ever did improve my synergy I’d be able to use Announcement to mimic Mental Speech almost perfectly at short distances.

Information Assistant was another one I would have been pleased to grab for similar reasons. Challenges seemed to be far and away the biggest threat to our continued survival, and having a translator capable of speaking any language always by my side… Yeah, I wanted that.

But I wasn’t taking it.

Beyond the moral ickiness of knowingly creating and enslaving a sapience to enhance my own survival chances, we still didn’t have any information about what would happen to someone who had an Information Assistant when their Novelty went negative. Considering that I expected my Novelty to be negative about half the time… yeah. Not the best investment.

Instead, I was doubling down on Biological Augments, taking one called Expanded Eidetic Memory. There were a few others at the Arsenal who’d tested it out, and apparently it did just what was on the box: provide near-unlimited perfect recall, as long as you focused on committing something to memory. Pointy had agreed to draft a translation of a set speech in every language in her database and project a phonetic version of the translations for me to memorize. It wouldn’t teach me the foreign languages, so I might have a hard time figuring out others’ responses… but one-way communication was far better than nothing.

It didn’t hurt that the ability had solid synergy with my other choices, putting it over 500%, nearly on-par with Assisted Strike and Life Sense.

For my last ability, I was taking Basic Hologram. It would let me create static illusions of limited size. It would give me yet another communication option, while also providing me means to hide from, distract, or trick monsters that relied on sight. While there seemed to be far more monsters who didn’t rely on sight than I’d have expected, at least half of our foes seemed to use it as their primary sense. The synergy on the Basic Hologram was… okay. Not as good as Eidetic Memory, better than Announcement, ending up at an even 400%.

Of course, even my “best” abilities had low synergy compared to what I could have. Micah’s best abilities were still better than mine, even though he’d made three fewer choices. He’d been vocally critical of my plan, worried about my refusal to prioritize high numbers.

“It’s like Heinlein said, kid,” I’d told him. “Specialization is for insects.”

“Mom! It doesn’t matter if you can do lots of things if none of them are strong enough to matter!”

I’d tried to reassure him that it would be that my Telekinesis would be plenty strong moving forward, since I planned to focus on it exclusively, and that a lot of what I’d taken didn’t rely on high numbers to be useful. Announcement and Basic Hologram, in particular, could be lifesavers even with no synergy at all.

I hadn’t been able to dispel his worry.

To be honest, I shared it, at least a little. The gamer in me was a little panicked at my refusal to min-max, but I was resolute. The Maffiyir system seemed set up both to encourage specialization and to punish it.

Challenges were impossible to avoid and impossible to prepare for. This wasn’t a video game, where I could specialize in taking down one type of opponent and focus on them exclusively. I had to be capable of dealing with, well… anything. There was a chance my choices would still drag me down when I came up against something I couldn’t hit hard enough to defeat, but I hoped allies and preparation would see me through such crises.

Hopefully I get something good as my Specialty. I’ve gotten negative Novelty a couple times, but I’ve also gone to three Challenges. That should count for something, right?

It was close to dinnertime when our interminable cycle of landing and taking off finished, Flip coming to a stop in a field at Redstone Arsenal, near the base of an active Points Siphon. I could see the top of the other glimmering over the roofs of some nearby buildings.

These would be the last ones Cassie and I needed.

Finally.

It was time.