June 5, 2008

I was Peter Mills, a 15-year-old boy. I was an honor student, but above all I excelled at math. That is, until one morning when I didn’t get up. My mother arrived in my room when I didn’t come downstairs and found something weird in my bed. She screamed.

I heard her scream, which made me realize I was still in the world I grew up in. I had thought I was in some kind of dream, or worse. It seemed like I’d gone into the Matrix. I couldn’t see my room, my bed, or anything I knew. I couldn’t feel my body. What I could see was a row of computer screens, full of gibberish or static.

I wondered if I could control what was on the screens. I didn’t have a keyboard, nor hands to use one. I thought to clear one of the screens, and it cleared. I proceeded to clear the other screens one by one.

After they cleared, they reset to different things. The screen at the left had a message: Missing geometry. Below this was a > and a blinking cursor. The second screen had a similar cursor but no message. On the third screen was a picture, some sort of blob shape. The fourth screen was the most exciting, because I could see my room. Mom was there, crying.

I needed to do something. But what could I do? I was able, by thinking to aim the focus for the image on the right screen, see other parts of my room. Maybe this whole system worked on thought?

The left screen wanted me to enter some geometry. I thought to add to the screen: x^2 + y^2 + z^2 < 1, an inequality representing a solid sphere.

This text appeared, and on the third screen, I saw the blob turn into a sphere.

Was my body was this blob, and now a sphere? Mom had her head in her arms and was not looking at me. I needed to get her attention.

I assumed, based on the perspective of my view of the room and because of where I last remembered myself being, that I was in my bed. Could I bounce my ball body up and down on the bed?

I changed the equation to x^2 + y^2 + (z-4)^2 < 1, which should put me two diameters above the bed. Well, I moved all right, but I was just floating there. I didn’t fall to the bed, and Mom still didn’t notice.

Could I access a time variable? I hadn’t yet taken trigonometry, but I understood the basic trig functions. A sine or cosine would vary between 1 and -1. I wrote x^2 + y^2 + (z-1-cos(t))^2 < 1, which did move me up and down, but didn’t really hit the bed. I was just grazing against it.

x^2 + y^2 + (z-0.5-cos(t))^2 < 1 would attempt to push against the bed by 1/4 of my diameter, whatever that was. And that worked! I could hear the noise as I hit the bed every several seconds, and Mom noticed it too, and looked up.

“Oh, you’re alive!”

Then, as I continued bouncing the same way, she asked, “Are you alive?”

Now that I no longer needed to make noise to get her attention, I switched to x^2 + y^2 + (z-3-2cos(t))^2 < 1, which continued the bouncing movement higher in the air, no longer touching the bed at all.

After a bit, I stopped, as if to say I was done answering the question, by changing the equation to x^2 + y^2 + (z-3)^2 < 1.

“Are you Peter?”

I did the previous bounce equation for about 5 bounces and then stopped.

“Do you know what happened?”

An up and down motion was a nod, which meant yes. Now I wanted to say no. I wasn’t sure which direction was x and which was y, but I figured I’d try one.

(x-cos(t))^2 + y^2 + (z-3)^2 < 1

Oops. I could tell by the way Mom got closer and farther away in the last screen that this was the wrong way.

I quickly changed the equation to x^2 + (y-cos(t))^2 + (z-3)^2 < 1

Better. After about 5 swings I shut the motion off.

“Can you speak?”

I signaled no again.

Mom stopped to think for a moment, while I also thought about the functions. What other functions did I have available?

Wait, what if the blank screen was a help screen?

I typed help there, and it responded Enter help subject for help on subject.

So I typed help functions, and got a full screen of function names in five columns. In fact, it had scrolled off the screen, but when I thought about scrolling the screen back to see what I’d missed, I was able to do that.

help max

max(a, b, ...) returns the maximum of the arguments.

Sometime when I was alone I was going to have to read through all of the functions available. For now, though, I tried setting my equation to max(x,y,z-2,-x,-y,-(z-2))<1.

Yep, I was a cube.

I shortened this to max(|x|,|y|,|z-2|)<1 and confirmed that the absolute value function could be called like this.

Looking back at the list of functions, another one caught my eye.

help union

union(rel1, rel2, ...) returns the set of all points which satisfy any of the relations specified.

Ooh.

I set the equation to union(max(|x|,|y|,|z-2|)<1,max(|x|,|y|,|z-4|)<1). And now I was two cubes sitting atop one another. I could have made this as a single box by multiplying z by a factor. But this would let me do more complicated shapes.

I added three more cubes on top of those, and more to the side to make a crude letter P. Then, another stack of cubes not attached to the first, so for a moment I made the word PI. But I added more boxes to the right of the second stack, and turned it into an E. Continuing in this way, after about a minute I had assembled boxes spelling PETER.

I thought it would fill the whole bed, but it seemed that the cubes got smaller when I specified more pieces. Maybe I only had so much matter and the coordinates scaled to whatever I entered.

I redid the blocks so they spelled MEASURE ME. This time I was quite long, and extended beyond the length of the bed. Mom left and came back with a measuring tape of the sort used for woodworking, and held it across the length of all the letters. I had written each letter five cubes tall and three cubes wide, except the Ms were five cubes wide, and with a one-cube space between letters, and three cubes between the words. This meant that the whole thing was 41 cubes long, 5 high, and 1 thick. The way I had written them, each M contained 14 cubes, each E 10, A 10, S 11, U 9, and R 10, for a total of 98 cubes. She read the measurements to me as 106 1/2 inches long, 13 inches high, and a bit over 2 1/2 inches thick. Hmm, I needed a calculator. Could I use that help screen like one? It kind of made sense.

I typed 106.5/41 and it replied 2.597 and a bunch more digits I was ignoring. Then I typed 13/5 and it replied 2.6. Well yes, that one was exact. I could see that. If I assumed the thickness was actually 2.6 this was very close to matching the equal proportions of the cubes I know I was made out of.

Then I made one cube again, and Mom figured out I wanted that measured too. It came out to almost exactly 12 inches.

98*2.6^3 gave me 1722.448 and 12^3 gave me 1728. So volume was conserved. And I was only about one cubic foot in size, which seemed small. I guess this meant no matter how good I got working with the equations, I was never going to have a “normal” body.

I did one more check, making three cubes in a line with a space between each equal to the size of a cube, so I was 1x1x5. Mom measured this as 8 1/4 by 8 1/4 by 41 1/2. If I take the 8 1/4 as 8.3 so that the proportions are right, this is 1715.361, which agrees with the other measurements saying my body volume is being preserved.

“I’ll be back, son.

---

Mom left the room, and I was left to think.

Cylinders were better for making bodies, but when I set the geometry to x^2 + y^2 < 1 I turned into the blob. Because it was infinite in the z direction, I supposed. But intersection(x^2+y^2<1,|z|<2) worked.

Suppose I made a child body. 24 inch waist, which was the circumference, so a quick calculation on the help screen told me that was about 7.6 inches in diameter. I rounded it down to 7 for computing the volume because people are not quite round. Let’s say 4.5 feet of body including the head and legs, roughly at that size. Some parts will be a bit wider, some narrower, and this doesn’t count the arms, but the legs are narrower so that should roughly match. The head and neck, however, is significantly smaller, so I’ll add another 4 inches to the final height, making a person 4’10” tall. This all worked out to 2077 cubic inches, a bit too much, but pretty close. Let’s try 4 feet of body and a 23-inch waist. Perfect. So if I could figure out the shapes, I could make a 4’4” body corresponding to an 8 or 9 year old child.

For now, until I learned better how to make the shape of a body, I was simulating this with basic shapes. I had a sphere for a head, a flattened cylinder about 2/3 as deep as it was wide and slightly wider than the head as a torso, two legs and two arms each as narrower cylinders. For now, I had set the radius of the head at 0.8, the torso to be 4/3 unit deep and 2 units wide and 2 units tall, the arms and legs to be 0.4 units in radius and 2.4 units long for the arms, 3 for the legs. This was pretty chunky, but it was a start. This came out to a volume of about 2.1 units for the head, 4.2 for the torso, 1.2 for each arm, and 1.5 for each leg, or 11.7 cubic units in total, so each unit came out to be about 0.44 feet or about 5 and 1/4 inches, and the entire body of 6.6 units tall came out to only 2.9 feet. But it seemed reasonable that when I trimmed off all those blocky corners and made the torso a proper shape, and added a neck, that I might have saved enough volume to get almost 50% taller. Where I’d figured a 23 inch waist, right now, it was about 27. But I thought it wasn’t bad for something I put together in only a few minutes. I imagined that in a day I could get something the right proportions, and over months or a couple years working at it, I could get the detailed shape to actually look like a small human being.

Mom came back in with Dad at this point.

“Hello, son,” Dad said. “Mom explained to me that you developed some strange powers and she was right that I just had to see for myself.”

I erased that body and started drawing cubes. I was going to try something different. Instead of having them change size as I added more cubes, I made a several rows of dozens of cubes and then started replacing some of them with ones in the area for the letter shapes I wanted to draw, leaving the excess as lines above and below the letters. It was still pretty tedious writing this way, but it was easier just going in and changing the numbers, and I spelled out:

HELLO DAD
YES POWERS

Whew! That took over 170 little cubes. I was pretty fast but I think it took about 5 minutes to write those words. I gotta find a better way. After a bit I rewrote it into:

COMPUTERS
IN MY MIND

And then in 3 more rounds:

I DEFINE MY
SHAPE WITH

MATH
FUNCTIONS

WANT TO MAKE
NORMAL BODY

“I’ve never heard of anybody getting powers like this, but I can understand how it is going to take some practice, and maybe you can make more body-like shapes eventually.”

I went back to the set of cylinders making a body, and then Dad asked, “Can you leave the bed?”

That was a good question. I didn’t want to be here forever.

I adjusted the y coordinate to move forward off the bed, the way I momentarily had done with Mom, and then lowered my z coordinate to the floor. Approximately. He turned to leave the room and Mom followed him, and I followed the best I could, teleporting in little hops as I updated my coordinates. This was tedious writing each one six times, so I reduced my body to just a single sphere to continue the movement.

Once I got into the living room, I reformed the body and I tested using parameters. I wrote my location as a set of parameters x0,y0,z0 at the top, and then everywhere I’d been using x plus whatever I put in x + x0 plus just the offset within my body. This worked! Now I only had to update one set of values to change my position, and I could do that very quickly. And if I wrote formulas in time into these parameters, I could generate smooth motion. This was actually pretty good. I could move about the world and see the world on a screen.

I wanted to also try rotations. The one other thing I’d learned about sine and cosine was you could use them to draw a circle. If you made x equal to cosine, and y equal to sine of the same angle, you could draw a circle using the mathematical convention that the angle started at the positive X axis and turned counterclockwise. So I added a rotation angle, and intermediate parameters to calculate the X and Y coordinates for the centers of my arms and legs, and after a little experimentation, the formula for the flattened cylinder that made my torso. Then I could rotate as well as move my body around, and my view of the world rotated with my body.

But as I noticed this, I wondered why that was. It was fine that it moved with my body, if we assumed the view was generated from within my body, but why the rotation? What about my body made one spot the front? When I focused on rotating the view in that last screen without moving my body, I found I could do it. But the moment I stopped mentally aiming that view, the view went in the direction I thought of as the “front” of my body, even though nobody could tell it apart from the back right now - the direction that represented the positive X axis, when the rotation was 0. When I ran some experiments, including setting my body spinning by making the rotation angle vary with time, I realized it was because I was subconsciously aiming the view in the direction I’d set the rotation to when I stopped actively aiming it. When I focused only on the room view while my body spun, my view did not spin.

Getting Tested

It was clear I was not going to go to school today. Mom called me in sick while Dad continued getting ready for work. Normally I’d be getting dressed and getting some breakfast in the morning, but I wasn’t sure there were any clothes in the house that would fit me, I wasn’t sure I needed any, and I wasn’t sure how or if I could eat now, either. In any case I did not feel hungry.

After Dad left for work, Mom made another call, to NANA. I’d learned about the powers people get in Normal after some of my classmates got them. Now it was my turn.

“Hello. My son developed powers overnight, and should probably get tested.”

A pause, about 30 seconds.

“Yes. He seems to be some kind of shapeshifter, but right now he seems to only be able to make simple geometric shapes and collections of them. That and a kind of a blob shape.”

A shorter pause.

“Yes, he flies. Or floats, I suppose.”

Brief pause.

“Yes, some of the time. I believe he does obey the law of gravity as the blob shape. And he was a bouncing ball at one point, but the ball also floated at other times, so I’m not sure that was gravity. The other shapes mostly float all the time.”

Another brief pause.

“No, I have not observed any other powers.”

A much longer pause, longer than the first one.

“I’ll check. He doesn’t seem to be able to speak now, but he has spelled out words in the air.” Then to me, she asked, “Are you ready to go get tested?”

I wanted to make a shrug, but I hadn’t made a body yet with enough features to make that possible. Instead I formed YES out of blocks until it was clear Mom saw it, then returned to the body-like shape. At this point I realized I had an innate memory for the formulas I was writing. I was able to restore the entire body I had constructed just by thinking to do so, even though the rotations had made the geometry pretty complicated.

“Yes, I can bring him in now. See you soon.”

And after another brief pause she hung up.

“You understood what that call was about, I hope.”

I formed the word TESTING. Then after a pause. READY.

Mom grabbed her purse, and after resuming my body shape, I followed her as she walked out to the car. I thought for a moment I should put on some clothes, but why? I didn’t have any of the bits society expects to be covered up. I didn’t even really look like a person. I looked mostly like the man who stands on the restroom sign. Nobody ever told him to wear clothes! So I followed as I was.

After Mom used the key fob to unlock all the doors, she opened the passenger door and let me in, and I moved into the car. I hadn’t tried to sit with this body yet, but I bent the leg-cylinders forward instead of down, and floated into the car, getting as close to the seat as I could.

Mom closed the door, went around to the driver’s side, and got in and started the car. She started to back out of the driveway, and I was thrust against and then through the windshield!

I rotated to look behind me, and to my surprise it did not appear the windshield was broken. My legs were inside the engine compartment and my torso was sticking through the hood. Mom was staring, and then she got out of the car and spoke to me.

“Um, you can phase through things. OK. Can you sit and stay motionless relative to the car?”

I formed DUNNO in the air and then, with less force this time, phased back through the windshield, and let my body assume the blob shape inside the car, since that form seemed to be affected by gravity and I hope also didn’t phase through things. I fell to the seat without going through it.

Mom started driving again, and this time I stayed put. This was going to be bad if I could only interact normally with things in the blob form. But we arrived at NANA without further incident.

Once the car stopped moving, I reformed my crude body in the sitting position, and then rather than sliding it smoothly, jumped it several units to the right, which had the effect of teleporting me outside the car. I then moved my legs into the standing position and lowered myself to just barely above the ground so it didn’t look quite so much like I was flying.

Mom clearly saw what I did and glared at me a moment, but then quickly smiled, I guess realizing that I was just trying to figure out how to live in my new situation. She walked up to the door and I floated behind her. She entered and held the door open for me to enter behind her, so I didn’t have to phase through it.

Mom went up to the registration desk or whatever it was, and I followed.

“Yes, I called this morning about my son’s new powers.”

The woman there called somebody, and told us, “Your tester will arrive in a moment. Have a seat.”

After about 5 minutes, a man came into the room and the woman at the desk directed him to us. Mom stood up and followed him through the doorway he entered through, and I floated behind her, figuring out what angle from the previous spot took me down the hall. We all went down a long hallway, and finally into a room with a table and chairs. I couldn’t use the chairs, but floated a bit lower than I had been to match their sitting height.

“My name’s Greg. I’ll be your tester today.”

Mom replied, “This is Peter, and I’m his mother Hannah.”

“So, Peter, tell me what happened in your own words.”

Mom responded, “He doesn’t talk now except by spelling words in the air, so I will tell the story and he can interject with words if needed.”

I spelled TALKING/IS HARD on two lines above the surface of the table, which helped corroborate Mom’s story and also showed what my words might look like. As Mom continued, I shifted back to the body I had been using.

“Sometime last night, my son here transformed. He had been a normal-looking 15-year-old honor student, but when he did not come down for breakfast, I went up to find out why, and he looked like... well, not like this. Show Greg what you looked like then.”

I moved myself over the table and changed the equation by making an intersection of the whole thing with a shape it did not intersect with, and the null shape caused me to revert to the blob, which plopped down gently on the table.

“He soon figured out how to control his shape, but only by making simple shapes or combinations of them, like the body you saw him use earlier made of a sphere and a few cylinders. He said in his terse manner something about seeing a computer in his mind where he can write equations for these shapes, or something like that.”

“So perhaps with practice he might learn more complex shapes and something more like a human body?”

I spelled out YES in response to this.

“What else have you noticed about his powers?”

“In the blob form he doesn’t do it, but when he is shapes, he floats all the time, he can phase through other matter, and and he can teleport himself.”

I made the blob again, and then the body shape, to demonstrate.

“Interesting. Peter, is the teleportation caused by you changing the position of your body in your equations?”

YES

“What about the phasing?”

INTERSECT
MATTER

“You phase through an object simply by writing your equations so that you intersect the object?”

YES

“Anything more?”

“No,” Mom said.

I WANT TO
TELL STORY
TOO LONG

“Your story is too long to tell by spelling out word shapes in this way?”

YES

“During our testing today, we will try to find another way for you to communicate that makes it easier for you to send longer messages.”

GREAT!

“OK, I am going to take this information back to the staff, and while we figure out what tests to run on you, a nurse will come here to administer the physical tests, to the extent we can, anyway.”

I changed back to the body form, and Greg left. A couple minutes later a short, stout nurse came in. She was only about 4 feet tall, but was almost as wide as the doorway. But she wasn’t fat. It was just like her whole body was wider and shorter than it should be.

“Are you Peter?”

YES

“Oh, OK. Follow me. Your mom can come along too.”

We went to one of those scales you see in the doctor’s office, with the weights on a beam to balance against the weight of the person on the scale.

“I see you’re a shapeshifter, and a levitator in some forms. Can you step onto the scale in the form that is not a levitator?”

I hovered over the scale, and forced my body to assume the blob shape, which then landed on the scale.

The nurse fiddled with the weights until she determined my weight as 90 pounds.

Then she knelt down and placed a ruler horizontally on top of my blob form to read its height on the pole of the scale which, surprisingly, did go all the way down to 0 at the top of the scale itself.

“9 inches. Not sure how useful this particular height is. Can you go back to the other form?”

I did so.

“Now lower yourself until you just touch the platform.”

I did that as well as I could, and she measured my height at 2’11”, which is what I thought it should be.

“Any other forms I should check?”

I turned into the cube shape, which she measured with the ruler in her hand.

“Hmm, a cube almost exactly 12 inches on a side.”

Then I was a sphere. After some difficulty she proclaimed my height as 14 and 7/8 inches.

“Any more forms?”

I turned into the letters SHAPES/ALL SAME on two lines, and for a moment as I started to spell the words she started to measure them, then decided against it as I continued writing the words.

“The geometric shapes you make are all the same ... volume? Probably mass too?”

I wrote YES.

Next she led me to one of those standard doctor’s office rooms with the weird raised bed. I had been in such a room enough to know what to expect in it, but at the same time I also thought few of those tests made sense with me the way I was. Still, after swapping some coordinates I made the body shape so it was lying down over the bed.

Fortunately, this nurse was prepared. She recorded the color of my body, as well as the amount of resistance it gave before I phased through something. She also used some kind of device to measure the smoothness of the curves of my body. Or tried to. She wasn’t able to detect any irregularities from perfect smoothness.

Finally, she said, “I want to take a sample of ... whatever it is you are made of ... to send to the lab.”

She retrieved a scalpel from a drawer, and tried to scrape my body with it, but it phased through.

I switched into the blob form, and waited until she tried again. This time it worked, and I could see she managed to remove a tiny bit of the pink-colored stuff my body was made of, and placed it in a small glass jar which she sealed with a cap.

She led me to two more rooms after this. In one, they took an x-ray of my entire body, which was fast, and in the other they did a CAT scan. This involved me lying on a bed that went into a narrow tube that scanned me. It was loud and took half an hour. They usually provide earplugs, but they didn’t have any way to use them on me. Fortunately, I was able to tune out the noise after a bit and I spent the time studying my functions.

Done with all the tests she could figure out to perform on me, she led me back to the waiting room where Greg had had the conversation with me and Mom and asked us to wait for Greg to return. He did, a few minutes later, and led us to a large room.

I finished these thoughts as Greg figured out where we were supposed to go and led us there. And finally he explained what was about to happen: “You are kind of an enigma to us, so we are going to run the full battery of tests of you, to the extent possible. Some of the physical tests don’t make any sense for a being who phases through other matter and only obeys gravity in a form which is a shapeless blob that can’t move, so we’ll skip those. There are some physical tests we can still do and others that only make sense for someone like you, and we will do those first. Then we will move on to the tests of other possible abilities you might have, which really covers the entire gamut of non-physical powers.”

He looked at a clipboard he had been carrying. “I’m going to stay here and observe the entire experience, and Hannah you can watch too, but each expert in the respective fields will lead their sections of the testing. First is Dr. Springfield, who is going to test how you interact with normal matter when you are in one of your equation-designed forms.”

He indicated a man nearby, who at the mention of his name turned up from what he had been doing and came over to greet us.

“Yes, I am Dr. Springfield. It was indicated that your body deforms somewhat under pressure before it phases through matter. I want to first test how much force you have to exert against matter, or how much it exerts against you, before you phase through it. Can you make a hand?”

Rather than telling them I could only make a crude hand, I started building shapes, not bothering for now to connect them to my body. I made a wide, flat cylinder as the palm, then added a thumb and two more fingers each made of three short cylinders. Then I quickly rewrote their equations to use a parameter which represented how much they were open or closed. It needed some adjustments to make the parts move together correctly, as well as to make the three fingers come together properly in a pincer grip. I used more parameters to make this work. Basically, instead of just having one starting point x0,y0,z0 which everything was relative to, I calculated the positions of points on other shapes to use as the starting points for other shapes, and more parameters defined the rotation of each part relative to the previous one. This was a useful idea, and one that would help me develop more involved bodies later on. But for now it helped me get the hand made quickly.

Finally, I moved it so it connected to my arm. I needed to be able to rotate the hand relative to the arm, and rotate the arm relative to my shoulder. This took two more parameters and some redefinitions of the previous ones. In about ten minutes from the request, I had my crude arm programmed.

“Good,” Dr. Springfield commented. “Now try to pick up this weight.”

He pointed to a weight that looked like one of the ones Wile E. Coyote always tried to drop on Road Runner only to have it backfire and land on him instead, but a lot smaller. It had 4 LB inscribed on the side I was looking at.

I aligned my new hand with the loop on the top of the weight, closed it around the loop, and raised the arm. But the weight phased through.

He produced a smaller weight, but that one phased through as well.

“Come over here to this machine and lift this bar.”

Apparently this was some kind of machine that simulated more weight the more I pulled the bar. So when I phased through, he read off “4.1 pounds.”

“Can you make a second hand and try with both?”

I duplicated the mechanism I had for one arm and hand for the other, mirroring the instructions in one dimension, and using a different set of parameters. Then I placed both hands on the bar and pulled.

“8.1 pounds.”

THIRD HAND? I wrote in the air.

“How about you just make them wider? I have a theory.”

I made the hands again, both hands and fingers horizontally stretched by a factor of 3, and lifted again. I clearly got a lot further.

“23.8 pounds.”

“Try making a hand that runs the length of the bar with a groove in it the same shape as the bar.”

That took a bit of experimentation to get it right, but I did. It didn’t look much like a hand in the normal sense, except that it was at the end of my arm. And I was able to lift more this way.

“64 pounds. Good. Now make both hands like that.” He showed me there was a second bar I could lift.

I’d only made one hand the shape of the bar before. Now I did both. Duplicating it didn’t quite work, because it added more volume. Rather than fiddle with it, I made my legs slightly narrower to restore the right size.

“128 pounds. OK, I think the weight you can lift is proportional to the part of your body in contact with it. With the small weights, you were trying to lift them using a thin ring so the area of contact was small. Your secret to power is spreading out the contact over a large area.”

USEFUL, I wrote. Then IDEA.

The doctor chuckled. “Go ahead and show your idea.”

I made myself into a big rug laid out on the floor. It wasn’t very colorful, but I made something that looked like the tassels I had seen on other rugs and put a few dozen copies of that all along two ends, leaving the rest completely flat. He clearly understood my idea and sat down on the rug and invited Greg and Mom to get on too.

“Flying carpet, up,” Dr. Springfield directed, and I lifted a few feet off the floor, not letting any of my passengers fall through.

“Fly over there near the guy with the goggles.”

I found the guy he was referring to and flew near him.

“Hey, Stan, look!”

“Frank! Um, what is that?”

“The person I’m testing.”

“Huh! Never know what I am going to see here.”

“Hop on if you have time, but climb on board gently. This shapeshifter can go anywhere, but phases through the load if too much weight is put on him in one place. He holds about 400 pounds per square foot.”

“Well that’s a good amount!” Stan said. “I’m just finishing up with another powers test here, but I’d love a ride over to Alma for the both of us.”

I lowered to the ground and let them both get situated, and then took off again and flew where they pointed out Alma to me, and my latest two passengers climbed off.

Then Dr. Springfield said, “OK. I have another idea. We’ll have to get off the carpet for a bit, though, because you won’t fit down some of the hallways and you shouldn’t phase through some of our walls here.”

I let them all off, and turned back into the body form.

“Everybody, follow me.”

We went quite a ways and finally into a large attached garage-like area.

“The vehicle pool? You want him to carry a car?” Greg asked.

“No, that wasn’t actually what I was thinking. The tires probably have too little area of contact anyway.”

Then, to me, he continued, “Come over here and form your rug again.”

I went and did that where he directed. Then he went over and climbed into what I soon realized was the cab of a small crane. Along the wall was a stack of large steel plates.

“Greg, if you could, please help guide the claw into place for me.”

There was a hole in the center of each plate with a metal bar running across it, and the end of the crane had a claw that fit into the hole and around this bar. With Greg’s help, he lifted one of the plates and set it down on top of me.

“Try to lift up now.”

I lifted up carrying the plate, and set back down when he indicated.

They repeated this with a second plate, and a third, and a fourth, and more and more. It didn’t hurt me any, though, nor was it in any way strenuous; I could lift the stack of ten plates as easily as I could lift the first one alone. Finally, I lifted up a huge stack of plates, and I thought it was all collapsing, but instead, what happened was that just one plate fell through me.

Dr. Springfield came down from the crane and counted the plates personally, determining I was carrying a stack of 19 of the plates.

“This confirms my theory. These plates are 4 feet by 8 feet, and half an inch thick. They weigh about 670 pounds each, and 19 of them weigh 12,730 pounds, which is slightly below the limit of 400 pounds per square foot spread evenly over 32 square feet. Twenty plates are above that limit, which caused the plate to phase through. I am a bit surprised that the phasing through shut itself off so immediately that only one plate fell through.”

I could have made a wider sheet and held a second stack of these plates, or more, but Dr. Springfield had proven his point. I could lift amazing amounts if I was spread out like a thin sheet. I lowered the stack of plates to the ground, and transformed myself out of the stack, and the two doctors put the plates back where they came from one by one.

Next, he led me to another large open space to test my flight. He tested how fast I could fly (as fast as I wanted), how well I could stop (as long as I had a good estimate of where I was supposed to stop, essentially instantaneously), my ability to navigate obstacles (excellent), etc. I passed all the flying tests with flying colors (Dr. Springfield’s pun).

Greg left us some time during this test, and when we were done, Dr. Springfield said, “That’s it for the physical tests. Greg is reviewing your lab results and will join us for lunch in the cafeteria shortly.”

Then, remembering my body was made of a uniform goo with no internal organs, he asked me, “Do you eat?”

PROBABLY NOT

“Well, your mother will want something.”

We went back up to the ground level, and he led us to the cafeteria. I went through the line with them, looking at all the food and drink and seeing if I felt a craving for anything. Maybe if I saw something I really wanted, I’d figure out how this body could consume it. But that did not happen and I went to the table without food.

Within a few minutes, Greg found us and sat with us at our table.

“The lab tests gave some interesting results. It appears you are made of a non-cellular material, or actually three of them, woven together. One of them appears photosynthetic, the other appears to spend the energy from photosynthesis somehow, and the third defies the laws of physics so much we can’t explain it.”

While he finished his statement, I spelled out, I EAT LIGHT?

“Yes, essentially. We think your body is powered by light you absorb. You will need to be exposed to a certain amount of light to survive, but we will need to run more tests to figure out how much.”

HANDY, I wrote, before returning to the body-like form.

“Doesn’t photosynthesis require that green pigment, what’s it called?” Mom asked.

“Chlorophyll, and no. While most plants use chlorophyll for photosynthesis, there are other plants and fungi that use other light-absorbing compounds which aren’t green. Peter uses one of those other ones; his is actually colorless, absorbing all colors of light well, and it’s the other compounds in his body that give it the pink color.”

Greg continued, “And you don’t really appear to have any internal organs whatsoever. It looks like you are made of the same uniform material throughout your body.”

When everybody was done eating and turned in their trays, Dr. Springfield said goodbye and Greg took us back downstairs to a different area, where a woman named Stephanie tested me for psychic powers, then a guy who introduced himself as Ed checked me for magic abilities. None in both cases.

Next Greg brought me to a table where a variety of parts and tools were spread around, and he told me I could do whatever I wanted with them. With that kind of introduction it was obvious I was expected to do something. I made my body with hands again and examined the parts, sorting some of them into different types. What we’d discovered earlier was it took 2.8 pounds per square inch of surface for something to phase through me. When I held something in my hand, I had a couple inches of area of contact or the cross-section of the object itself if it was smaller. This allowed me to pick up all of the items present, even the fairly heavy magnet. Really the only reason I had trouble was because I was trying to lift a heavy object by a small handle. Handles are going to make trouble for me. It did, however, take some time for me to do the manipulations. I was still quite a ways from being able to operate a standard body, and sometimes I made nonstandard fingers to pick up some of the things more easily.

Somehow, I figured out that some of the objects present made a radio, including a large speaker, and I set about putting them together. It didn’t look pretty, but I flipped the switch and it made noise. I turned a dial and it was able to pick up a weak signal.

Greg said, “That’s good. You can stop now. We’re underground, so none of the signals are great, so the fact that you hear anything but static indicates you’ve assembled it well. How did you figure out to make a radio?”

MEMORY, I wrote. HAD KIT.

Mom explained, “We got him one of those kits that lets you learn how to build simple circuits when he showed interest in those things. He must have remembered the circuitry for a radio and a speaker from that.”

Greg took note of it and led me to the next station.

There were parts here again, but this time I was given a specific goal.

“Inside this shaft,” Greg said, pointing to a vertical square tube about a foot wide that ran to the ceiling, “there is a bag of gold suspended from a hook on a rope. At the end of this shaft,” this time he indicated a 2 inch round hole in the wall, “there is a glass capsule in a circuit. If the capsule shatters, the hook will release the bag. We aren’t actually going to give you the bag of gold if you retrieve it, but we will give you something, and you should behave as if you are retrieving the gold for yourself and your allies. One more special rule for you: No part of your body may enter either shaft. This is to be a test of your ability to make something with these parts, and not to simply personally navigate the space. Treat it as being filled with poison gas, or something else that will kill you.”

I looked at the parts, and thought of multiple strategies. Clearly some of these parts were designed to let me make a gun, and shoot the capsule. Another set of parts looked like they might allow me to make a drone that could fly up into the shaft with the bag and cut the rope. Still another set looked like they might let me make a laser that could melt the glass capsule.

I spent a while working on each of these strategies, but there was something wrong with each of them that made them just not quite work. The drone didn’t quite fly, the gun only fired a couple feet and not all the way down the shaft, and the laser only made a diffuse light which wasn’t focused enough to melt the capsule way down the shaft. After an hour here, Greg had me stop and move on. As we moved to the next station, he explained, “That test was designed to determine whether the physics-defying ability of your body extends to things you make. It contains parts which almost make functional examples of each of the things you were trying to make, but each invention is missing something which makes it only work marginally, while the tests require one that works well. If you could extend the ability beyond your body, you might make one of them work anyway.”

The next set of tests were sensory related. First, they tested what I could see. If I was in a space that was entirely dark, I could see nothing, but with even the tiniest light, I could see the space around my body. If I was phased through a wall, I could see on either side, but only one side at a time. There was no particular part of my body that was the eyes. Likewise, I could hear what went on around my body even though there was no obvious hearing organ. It seems I did not have a sense of taste or smell, even when they placed food inside my body - nor did I digest the food they put there. My sense of feel was well developed, and even though I might have different body shapes at any given time, somehow I knew which parts were making contact with another surface (or phasing through it), and I could tell hot and cold, light and heavy pressure, and multiple touches at once.

Another set of tests they had for me related to my phasing. They tested my ability to phase through objects on demand, which was easy for me; the farther I tried to push myself through, the greater the pressure resisting it, until it reached my threshold and I phased through. But pushing farther just meant changing a number; it was easy.

When I was done with that, they had brought in a desk with a computer on it.

“We think you should be able to use a standard computer keyboard, as long as it’s not the mechanical spring type. The keys have about a quarter inch of surface area, but it doesn’t require much force to press them.”

I made a vertical square column as a finger, which I rounded the tip of by taking its intersection with a sphere, and moved it about over the keyboard, using a quadratic function of time in the Z coordinate to quickly press and release a key I was over. I had just made one, so I wasn’t able to use the shift key, but still, I wrote out, typing whole words in the time it took me to construct one letter in the air from cubes.

yay i can type. this is much faster. thanks.

“To finish up your registration, you should pick a code name. If you are ever involved with official NANA activities, you’ll use the code name when doing so. It has to be unique.”

I thought, if I was going to be doing geometry, who were the most famous mathematicians for geometry?

I typed out pythagoras.

“Taken.”

euclid

“Taken.”

Hmm. Let me see.

descartes

“Taken. It’s kind of sad; I understand why you want those names, but those people all developed powers that made them especially good at math, and they became skilled engineers or architects. They didn’t have to describe their body in precise mathematical detail just to have a body!”

At this point I was out of names. I am sure there are more, but those were all the ones I knew.

the geometer

“Available. OK, you’re The Geometer.”

yay

Greg added, “If you have the time, we’d appreciate you coming back for some extended testing. There is still a lot we don’t understand about you that will help our understanding of the kinds of powers that are possible, and will help you learn to use your body better, too.”

“How about it, son? Would you like to come back for more testing?”

yes

“That settles it. We’ll be back. When will you be ready for us?”

“We want to do some more in-depth lab study of your sample and other results from today, but maybe Tuesday will be good.”

“OK. Tuesday it is. What time is good?”

“Any time after about 8:30 AM we can get you started immediately on one test or another.”

---

I went home with Mom in time for dinner. Well, her dinner and Dad’s. I wasn’t eating anymore.

“No eating?” my Dad asked.

“Yes. They say he now gets energy through photosynthesis like plants do.”

“Did he get any time outside in the sun today?”

“Not much.”

“Well, son, the sun is still shining. How about you go out, find a sunny spot nearby, and soak up some sun?”

WILL DO, I wrote in my manner of communication, then turned into the body form and headed outside, not bothering to open the door into the back yard but just phasing through it.

I saw a sunny spot along the fence on one side of the yard, so I went over there, and figuring more area was better, formed myself into a flat sheet covering the entire sunny area, the 6-foot height of the fence and about 12 feet long.

The way my body positioned itself, I knew I wasn’t going to blow away or anything. So, just checking every 15 minutes or so and adjusting my position to stay in the sun, I spent time reading through the function list, describing the built-in functions available which I could use in describing my body’s shape.

It was about an hour before the sun was so low in the sky there wasn’t much sunlight remaining and what was left wasn’t very bright, so when I went back inside, my parents were done with dinner and even done cleaning up afterward.

“Thanks, Dad. That was a great idea and I feel like I have a bunch more energy now.”

“So what are you going to do now, Son?”

LEARN FUNCTIONS
BUILD BETTER BODY

“That sounds like a good idea. Any chance you can learn to make something like a voicebox or speaker so you can talk normally?”

GOOD IDEA
NEED TO RESEARCH

“Oh, speaking of research, you might be wanting to research details about the shape of the human body. We put that parental block on your computer which keeps you from visiting web sites with porn, but it might also block sites describing the shape of the body in detail, since that might involve images of nude bodies. So I’m going to go remove that block right now. I am not even sure porn will even do anything for you now, but promise me, Son, that you will use the Internet responsibly.”

I PROMISE

It was an easy promise for me to make. I wasn’t sure there was any way for me to have a sexual response now. I certainly didn’t have the parts, and even if I wanted to make them now, I would only be able to make crude models.

He went up, with me following, and entered the parental block password while selecting the option to completely and permanently remove the parental block.

“Enjoy your search, Son,” he said as he left me there.

I definitely needed to research the shape of the human body. My estimate of the body that could fill 1 cubic foot came out to 4’4” tall, while the body I actually made was horribly blocky and only 2’11”. And I weigh 90 pounds now, about what I weighed two years ago when I was 4’11”. Some of my proportions were definitely off.

I did some research and quickly found a few sources defining the proper proportions of the human body. These included Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the drawing of a man in a circle and square, which was indeed part of a text about the proportions of the body. I found a translated version of the text to go along with it, in addition to other sources.

The arms were definitely too thick. They should only be 0.3 units in radius up by the shoulder, and get narrower, probably to around 0.18 units down by the hand. While converting these units, I realized how silly this was. I could just write all the dimensions in inches. My body would proportion itself to fit.

Aiming for a 5-foot-tall body, I decided the head should be about 7 inches in diameter, but a little taller than it was wide. Let’s say 8 inches tall. There should be a neck under it, 3 inches in diameter and 3 inches tall, extending up a bit further at the top so it met the head all the way around.

The rest of the body, then, was 49 inches tall. The legs (up to the crotch) should be a little over half the remaining length, approximately 25 inches, while the torso is the remainder, or 24 inches. The arms, down to the end of the outstretched hand, should be as long as the legs, and two arms raised to the sides plus the torso between them should be as tall as the whole body, to the top of the head. That means the torso, around the armpits, should be about 10 inches wide. It should be only 60% as thick as it is wide, or 6 inches. That meant about 25 inches around at that point. It could narrow down to a 22.5 inch waist, represented by narrowing both dimensions 10 percent. The arms should be 3 inches in diameter at the top and 1.8 inches at the wrist. The legs were complicated, but for now, assume they were 4 inches in diameter at the top and 2.5 at the ankle.

What volume did all this add up to?

The head was about 205 cubic inches. Everything else was now part of a cone, and the calculations included subtracting the part that was not there, but I quickly got 894 cubic inches for the torso, each arm was 115, and each leg was 211, and the neck was 21 plus the tiny bit connecting it to the head, which I ignored for now as it was probably less than one cubic inch. The whole thing was 1772 cubic inches, which was only about 3% over my target, which roughly translated to me being 1 inch too short. That was much better!

This was more like it! With this body people could at least see me as the teenager I actually am, and not the little kid the other body looked like. And once I had more time to add facial features, hands and feet, and round off the rough bits, people might actually see me as a person and not a mannequin.

With this much done, and leaving the lights in my room on all night, I got into (well, over) my bed, stretched out as a sheet covering the whole bed, and continued studying those functions.

Friday

June 6, 2008

My powers showed up Thursday morning, and I ended up studying and sometimes practicing some of the function forms all through the night. I don’t know if I just couldn’t get to sleep, or if this body simply didn’t sleep at all. But I learned a lot and experimented several times throughout the night.

There were two important new keywords I learned. The first, file, let me import the contents of a file into my body geometry. I could use this alone if I wrote an entire body definition into a file and just put the file command on the geometry screen. The second screen which provided access to the help and an immediate-mode calculator could also serve as an editor. There weren’t any menus, but if I thought about doing the things you’d expect to find in menus it just did it, like saving and opening files, undo/redo, cut/copy/paste, etc. So I wrote a bunch of files: One with the the first restroom-icon body, one with hands, one with my current body, and ones with words spelling out YES, NO, MAYBE, and some other phrases. Now I could use the files to swap them in and out, and not have to simply remember things. Though I could still remember what I did recently, I had to reconstruct my first body; clearly there are limits on my memory.

But the other thing I could do is define functions: define, followed by a function name and an argument list in parentheses, let me define a function that could define any element of my geometry. So instead of writing out the formula for a sphere every time I wanted to use one, I could define a sphere based on the center and a radius, and reference that in my geometry instead of the formula for the sphere. That isn’t a great example - it’s better with more complex shapes - but those shapes also start to require more parameters. For a cylinder, the center of an end and a radius and height isn’t enough. You won’t know what direction it is oriented in. Both end centers and a radius works, and there are other ways to do it. I figured these things out as I went along.

In addition to the basic box I used for drawing letters, I made a whole alphabet and common punctuation. I was still referencing them as letter_a(row,column) and the like, but once I find the string-manipulating functions I should be able to write one that takes in some text and writes it out as letter shapes. Those letters were all defined in a file, but putting file(letters) in my geometry made all those functions available.

Before I knew it, it was morning, and Mom came up to see how I was doing. Although I had made many shapes during the night, I always went back to the sheet when I was done, and that is how she found me. But when I saw her, I immediately switched to the new body I was using, still without hands since I had been studying other things during the night.

“Wow, you got taller!”

With my new pre-configured letters, which I had set up to all be the same width and height to make it easy to slot them into place, I started “typing” out a response:

YES, MOM. I STILL HAVE MORE TO LEARN,
BUT I HAVE THE RIGHT PROPORTIONS NOW
FOR A PERSON MY SIZE. I LEARNED HOW
TO SAVE FORMS AND SWITCH BETWEEN THEM
MUCH MORE EASILY. I HAVE SAVED EACH
LETTER FORM SO I CAN TYPE MESSAGES
FASTER TOO.

“Well, it will be better when you can speak, but this is much improved since yesterday. You can type fast enough now to have a conversation.”

YES. SO WHAT DO
WE DO TODAY?

“Your dad’s already gone to work. I want to let you keep studying and practicing, but come downstairs so I can watch as you go and maybe give advice.”

OK, BUT I MIGHT
NEED TO LOOK
STUFF UP.

“That’s fine. Nobody will be using the computer in the family room. You can look it up there. And I should disable the porn lock on that one too.”

Mom was always a little more direct in the way she described things. To her, it was explicitly a porn lock. Nothing else mattered. In any case, within 10 minutes that was done, and I was able to look up information about the human body there, while I worked on building a more realistic one.

For typing, I now made three of the fingers I made yesterday, with a set of parameters defined for every key that gave their relative locations based on other parameters that I set to the boundaries of the keyboard, including rest positions with them off the keyboard. Again, when I figured out strings, I could probably write out a function to simply type out something I could write in my mind all at once. I made three fingers so I could use combinations with keys like shift and control when needed.

This allowed my new body to type even faster than I could have typed in my old body, though I think not faster than really skilled typists. I also used the mouse, with another finger over any mouse button on in a rest position, and a frame around it to move it with; the mouse button positions were then relative to the frame.

I started working on smoothing out the figure. Atop the torso, I added a small cone only 1 inch tall, with a base 16 inches wide (covering all of the top of my arms and torso) and 6 inches front to back. I added another inverted cone below this, with the same dimensions except 6 inches tall, to smooth out the connection between my arms and the shoulders.

I needed a similar thing for the pelvis, but it should be a distorted sphere. I shortened the actual torso unit 5 inches at the bottom, in the area representing the pelvis, while the legs got 5 inches longer. Centered at the bottom of the new torso was a sphere, with axes distorted to match the base of the pelvis and extending 5 inches vertically below the new torso. Also, I realized I made a mistake with the legs, which was more obvious now that I had a pelvis. They were only 8 inches across at the top, but the torso was 9. The solution here was simple - there should be a little space between the legs, so make that space 1 inch. But that turned out to make a seam at the top of the legs. Because they curved out more than the pelvis, this caused little ridges to stick out where they met the torso. Reducing the space between the legs to 0.8 inches fixed this.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the shoulders yet, but I had eliminated the worst of the blockiness. The volume removed in the pelvis area made up for the volume added at the shoulders, approximately - the overlaps in the new figure made it very hard to calculate an exact volume.

Something was still wrong with this. I figured out this shape for the shoulders was not really right. It was right that the sides of the body are fairly straight all the way up to the armpits, but the shoulder joint was entirely wrong. It’s a ball-and-socket joint, and there should be a ball there.

I played with various ways of putting spheres and spheroids there, including ones that were cut off beyond a certain point, and the whole thing just did not work. I finally realized my entire approach to modeling the entire shoulder blade was wrong.

The top of the shoulders was basically a sideways half-cylinder, and the rounded part of the shoulders above the arms was a quarter-sphere aligned with the end of that half-cylinder. This extended below where I was putting the shoulder piece, about as tall as the top of the arms are wide, and the top of the arms should be at this level, too. The chest (even on a guy) pokes out below this, and I can make the transition by putting in a half-spheroid on top of the lowered torso piece. This was still not quite 100% right, but it looked a lot better, with approximately the right amount of roundedness, and it partially captured the way the chest got flatter close to the shoulders.

Also, I figured I should put the hands back on and add some feet. Feet were complicated; I made a ball heel, a box with rounded sides for the blade of the foot, and cylinder toes. Fingers were delicate things, and this time I made full five-fingered hands. Lots of little cylinders, rotating around spheres at the joints, small spheres on the ends, and I haven’t yet figured out how to do the nails properly. They wouldn’t work anyway, since nails are supposed to be harder than the skin but my flesh is all uniform. Maybe I could get some of those fake nails women wear, cut them to not be too long, and stick them on. Assuming they would stick on me, and assuming that I could put them back on after the first time I changed into any other form.

I still need to figure out how to make a face, but I am making progress on the rest of the body. Another thing I just noticed is that the back is all wrong. I centered everything but the feet within the y=0 plane, but this made my back side look just like my front. The top of the back should be different, flatter. The head and neck should be centered slightly behind this plane. When I figure out how to make knees and elbows, they will be different on the backs. And most importantly, I should have a butt! I made comments in my program for drawing in these features later.

I was getting tired, though, and that meant I needed to eat, which meant getting some sun. So I put away the file for the body I had been working on, found Mom and told her what I was doing, then went out into the back yard, found a sunny side of the house, and turned myself into a sheet covering a good portion of the house between windows.

While I soaked in the sunlight, I looked out at the neighborhood and spotted some details I had never noticed before. For instance, the little birdhouse next to the bird feeder next door has a little name plate above the door, reading “Tweety.” There had never been an actual bird living in that house that I could remember, despite the fact that birds come to the feeder; maybe we just didn’t have the right kind of birds around here. I noticed a couple dozen things like this by the time I felt full. Not in the same sense that you feel after eating a big meal, but in my own way, I felt like I was not able to absorb any more energy. I went back inside using the latest form of my body, and found Mom eating lunch. It was 12:30, so I’d been out there a little over 2 hours.

In the afternoon I got to researching those string functions. I also read about arrays, program loops, and other such constructs, but in the end, I had a function I could send a position, direction, and string of text to and it would write those words there.

Tuesday

June 10, 2008

Mom had confirmed my appointment for further testing yesterday afternoon, and we got there bright and early after she’d had breakfast and I’d had an early morning dose of sun. When we checked in, the woman at the desk paged Greg, who came to meet us and take us down to testing only a few minutes later. We went directly down to the testing floor, but Greg led me and Mom into a little office first.

“First off, Peter,” Greg began, “I want to commend you on how much more human-looking your body is. It’s still not nearly good enough to fool anybody into thinking you are a normal human, except maybe in a very dark place where they can only see a vague outline of your shape, but you’re making great progress, and someday you might make a body with enough detail to make people believe you’re a normal human.”

THANK YOU.

“There are a few areas we want to experiment in today. We want to try to understand your photosynthesis and its limits. And because you are making more humanoid bodies, we want you to try to wear a bodysuit that we usually equip with a bunch of sensors to check people’s vital signs while they perform athletic tests. In your case, we’re going to remove almost all the sensors because we don’t think they’ll help, but we want to see how this affects your phasing ability.”

I’M WILLING TO TRY THAT
AS LONG AS YOU THINK
IT’S SAFE FOR ME.

“Oh, yes, we will stop any test at the first sign of any danger to you.”

He led me to a part of the testing area where several people were assembled. The group seemed excited by this and looked eager to run or perhaps to participate in experiments with me in this form.

“Peter, let me introduce you to Diane, Nick, Tracy, Mel, and Vladimir. You met Stephanie and Ed last time. They’ve all agreed to help in your testing today in their own ways.”

As their names were called, each one of them waved, bowed, curtsied, flew up into the air, or, in Vladimir’s case, a giant neon arrow appeared in the air pointing to him. I guess his power let him make stuff, though whether it was real or an illusion I wasn’t sure of. Would my sight show me magical illusions?

“For our first test, we want you to phase through Diane.”

She stepped forward and said, “I’m ready.” The girl couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20, and was dressed in clingy athletic clothes which showed her shape. I wasn’t sure what was special about her.

READY, I wrote in the air briefly before returning to a body shape and heading toward Diane. I went straight through without any real issue.

Greg had me make various shapes, phase through matter, lift the entire group of them while in the form of a large sheet, etc. A lot of the same stuff I did last time, but clearly to show this group what I do.

Next, they brought out the bodysuit they mentioned, which had about a dozen sensor patches on it, but marks suggesting they sometimes had four times that many on it. Within the bodysuit, I had none of the problems I’d had lifting weights by small handles and the like. The group agreed this was probably because in order to phase through it, my whole body would have to phase through the bodysuit. As a result, instead of an effective area of one or two square inches, the effective area was about half the surface area of my body, about 4 or 5 square feet, and as a result, I could lift, push, or pull almost a ton before I pushed myself completely out of the suit. Likewise, if I intentionally pushed myself through a wall, the suit stayed behind.

Finally, he had me explain how I thought my powers worked. I was glad to have the faster text writing routine here.

I HAVE TWO DIFFERENT KINDS OF SIGHT.
I CAN SEE THE REAL WORLD, BUT I
ALSO SEE MY OWN INNER SPACE.
THIS SPACE CONTAINS FOUR COMPUTER
SCREENS, EACH FOR A DIFFERENT
PURPOSE. THERE ARE NO OTHER THINGS
THAT I CAN SEE IN HERE. THE FIRST
SCREEN CONTAINS THE GEOMETRIC
DEFINITION OF MY CURRENT BODY. IF
IT IS EMPTY, INFINITE, OR HAS
ERRORS, I TURN INTO THE BLOB BODY.

I gave them a moment to read all that, and then I replaced that with my next wall of text.

THE SECOND SCREEN LETS ME DO
CALCULATIONS, READ HELP ABOUT THE
FUNCTIONS I CAN USE, AND EDIT FILES.
THE THIRD SCREEN SHOWS AN IMAGE OF
MY BODY, AS YOU MIGHT SEE IT. THE
FOURTH SCREEN SHOWS A VIEW OF THE
WORLD FROM THE POSITION OF MY BODY.
I CAN AIM THAT VIEW IN ANY DIRECTION.
I CAN FOCUS ON ANY SCREEN OR ALL OF
THEM. I ALSO HEAR WHAT IS HAPPENING
IN THE WORLD NEAR MY BODY. DONE.

“Thank you, Peter. Now that he has shown us all what he can do, I’d like each of you to explain your powers to him.”

“I’m Nick. I have the ability to see streams of light or electrons that vary in artificial ways. Effectively, I can see when anybody is using such methods for communication.”

“I’m Tracy. I see through things.”

“I’m Mel. I can become intangible, a bit like one aspect of your power.” I assumed this was short for Melanie or something, since Mel was clearly female.

“I’m Vladimir. I manifest living matter. Everything I make, no matter how weird it looks, is alive, and typically has tiny analogues of your major internal organs keeping it alive.

“I am Stephanie. I have the ability to peer into the psychic world.”

“Ed. I do magic, and I can see magic when other people do it.”

“I’m Diane. I have the ability to feel precisely what is happening to every millimeter of my body at any moment, and down to the level of individual cells when I focus. I don’t have any powers that let me do anything special, though. This makes me sort of the ultimate test subject for certain things.”

Greg spoke next. “Now, Peter, you should be aware that I asked all this crew to observe you during all of what you do here today, including the parts you just did. So, crew, tell me what you saw.”

Ed went first. “I saw absolutely no magic during any of that.”

Stephanie stated, “When Peter was changing form and merging, I saw the faintest glimmer of psychic activity. There is something psychic about the ability, but either it’s not the main driver for the changes or the power has built-in shielding. I didn’t see psychic communication between his body and the place where he sees the screens, wherever that is.”

Nick said, “I did not see any communication coming from nor going into Geometer’s body during any of that. If Peter really is in a place with four computer screens, it doesn’t communicate with his body in a natural way within our world.”

Diane added, “I felt you push against me when we first came into contact, and up until a certain point when you were starting to push through me. That all stopped at once, shortly before you went all the way through. I didn’t feel any strange effects; there was no apparent interaction between your body and the insides of my body.”

Tracy now spoke up. “Peter’s shaped bodies have a bit of a skin to them. The skin seems to be made of the same substance as the rest of his body but is a little denser. When he goes through a solid object, the part that overlaps with the object is very, very thin, while the other parts get denser, and once he’s through to the other side, the density sort of flows across to the other side.”

Mel said, “My power is a bit different from yours, Peter, in that I can control whether or not I am tangible at any moment. But I don’t have much in the way of observational powers, and I think I’m mainly here as an advisor. I’m going to keep watching and suggesting stuff, but I don’t have anything to really add right now.”

Vladimir shrugged, “None of my powers apply to anything you did there. I think my part is still coming.”

Now Greg said, “It’s Mel’s turn now. She is going to lead you through a set of exercises designed to test the limits of your phasing.

And this she did. First off, she had me phase through a series of ever-thicker walls until I came to one I could not phase through. I went part way in and then bounced back out.

Tracy spoke up, “This is where my observation can probably help you. When you are trying to go through a wall, most of your material does not enter the wall at all; it passes directly across once part of you reaches the other side. So if you reach out for the far wall, you may be able to get through thicker walls.”

This advice got me through walls much thicker than the previous one I got stuck at.

“If you stretch out horizontally like one of the traditional flying heroes, you can go through more. And you can probably get through anything as long as you have the room outside the wall to make a needle long enough to go all the way through.”

This ultimately got me up to flying through 20 feet of solid lead with success. They didn’t have more. I’m not sure why they even had a solid lead wall 20 feet thick, but it was the thickest thing they had.

To everybody, Greg said, “I’m going to call a lunch break, but Peter doesn’t eat like we do. His lunch is going to be another experiment. Peter’s body is solar powered, and we’ve got what is effectively a high-intensity sun lamp. Unfortunately, I don’t think we have a quantitative way of measuring Peter’s energy level, but I want to do a couple things. First off, we’re going to have Tracy study Peter and see if she can see anything different about him when he’s full of energy versus whatever state he’s in now. Also, Peter, I want you to try to judge the rate you are getting power as compared with a sunny day. I’m not sure there’s really anything for the rest of you; we know this function is a known method of photosynthesis some natural beings use, so you can all run off to the cafeteria.”

So they left, and Greg and Tracy and I went to a room where I found their sun lamp was just a tanning bed. Somebody had set up an off switch I could press with a small bit of my body outside the bed, and it would also stop a timer that kept track of how long I was in there. After I confirmed that I could press the button rather than phase through it, I made myself into a big rectangular slab to fill the bed and Greg turned it on.

So that I was never left completely alone, Tracy went and got lunch and ate it in the room with me, and only when she came back did Greg leave. I felt like I was in an energy state where I would have needed one and a half or two hours to fill up under the sun, which had become my regular single daily meal by now, but the bed filled me up in 40 minutes.

Tracy was done eating by then, so after I turned it off, she opened the bed up and studied me again, and when she was done she led me to the cafeteria where everybody else was finishing up.

“I couldn’t see any difference before and after,” Tracy told Greg.

THE TANNING BED FED ME FASTER
THAN THE SUN. WHAT I GOT IN
FORTY MINUTES WOULD HAVE TAKEN
ALMOST TWO HOURS WITH THE SUN.

Greg replied, “Good to know, and probably good for you to know as well.”

Stephanie spoke up, “One other thing I neglected to mention earlier is that I can see your soul, or whatever it is. Your essence. With a few rare exceptions I can see this for everybody, and yours occupies your body fully, whether it’s a blob or a collection of geometric shapes. Even when it’s passing through another person. Because it’s so normal, I didn’t think to report the observation, but conversation over lunch made me think it is relevant. So I think you are in there, and the computer screen interface is probably your mind’s way of coping with what your powers have done. I’m not saying it’s not real, but just that it’s your mind’s interpretation of what’s there, which is actually too complex for you to understand.”

SO MAYBE I HAVE
FOUR DIFFERENT WAYS
OF INTERFACING
WITH MY POWERS?

“Maybe something like that. You have one interface that lets you change your body, one that lets you explore the other abilities granted by your powers, one that lets you see what body you have made with your powers, and one that lets you see the world, which is in some powers-related way, not with eyes.”

In the afternoon, they tried (in various rooms - no one place was set up to test all these things) having me pass through magnetic fields, live wires with electricity running through them, fiber-optic cables, spaces with intense light rays, electron beams, and other things I didn’t even understand the names for. None of this stuff really affected me. Vladimir finally got into the game and created various configurations of living matter, none of which affected me in the least. They had me pass through a sheet of multi-layered kevlar - much like a bulletproof vest except it was a doorway-sized sheet of the stuff - and that took some effort. I had to push through each layer like it was a new wall.

But I could also teleport my body when I knew how far it was to the other side. And indeed I could teleport across all the obstacles they had presented. The phasing was more useful to understand in terms of how I interacted with things. And I knew the solution for that now; I had to put my whole body in a bodysuit and then I’d have to experience enough force to phase me out of the whole suit before I’d phase through anything unintentionally.

I discussed it with Mom afterward, and she agreed. The problem was the sizing. I was still undersized; in fact, the volume added for the details I’d added to my body while smoothing it out had cost me another 3 inches in height, so now I was only 4-foot-8. And it was awfully skinny. It was fine as a child’s body but even if I could scale it up to an adult size at the same proportions I’d look skinny for a woman and impossibly thin for a man. But it got me thinking: Should I try to design myself as a woman?

Subsequent Days

Mom took some measurements and we went out and she got me a bodysuit that fit. But it was a child’s size intended for about a 10-year-old. She helped me put it on; I didn’t think I was dexterous enough yet to do it myself.

But it worked, for the things that I could do now, like open and close doors. Though if I wasn’t wearing the bodysuit, I might not really need to, as I could phase through it or teleport past it, both of which would cause me to lose the bodysuit if I did it while I was wearing it.

And it let me wear clothes. Sort of, anyway. Some of my clothes from a few years ago were still in storage and Mom was able to help me put some of those on over the bodysuit. Even then, they didn’t fit me well; I’d made myself considerably skinnier in an attempt to add height. If I developed a more realistic looking body and wanted to interact with people in the world normally, I’d want clothes.

I spent the rest of the week practicing on making the shape of my body more realistic and in particular working on body motions. Even if I wasn’t really walking, it would seem less disconcerting to people if I moved my legs like I was walking when I moved.

And I finished my school year from home, with my exams carried out over the computer.

But I felt like I needed some other ideas on how to improve the body, and Mom contacted NANA and put me in touch with some other young people with, well, not really similar powers, but at least shapeshifters who had needed to design their own bodies. And I made separate appointments to have them visit me at the house in July.

The first one who came in was actually two bodies. Teddy explained that his power lets him animate extra bodies, and he’d brought a female animated body named Trixie with him. At first I thought it was weird he had a separate name for his other body, but when I thought about it, it made sense. Most people, even ones who knew Trixie was his other body, wouldn’t be thinking about it all the time, and it would make interactions with other people smoother if they could call the girl body by a girl’s name.

But when he told me about how his power worked, I realized he was of no real help for my problems. He made some sort of sculpture, stuffy doll, or anything of that sort and brought it to life, and as long as it was reasonably realistic, it came to life as a complete normal body. He’d never had to design feet beyond stuffing a sock with something. One good thing came out of it: He gave me the idea of making multiple bodies. It was no different from making multiple letters. I just made another copy of the body shape at another location. And of course, they got even smaller than the undersized body I already had. I’m sure this was of some use. I could focus my vision and hearing on either body.

The second one was George, and he had other names, too. He’d had two problems: A shapeshifting power he couldn’t control and a ghost who was possessing his body in his sleep and forming it into a girl body. I didn’t realize ghost possession was real, but he explained to me it was, and the other names he used belonged to the ghost and other people she had possessed in the past.

He’d eventually gotten this under control, keeping the ghost but working with her cooperatively. She showed him how to use his power, and the differences between male and female bodies. There were far more than I’d thought of! And it was his description of the differences that helped me solve one of my own problems.

I HAVEN’T MADE
A VOICE BOX YET.

I told him in my way, after he described his voice box, and the differences there, including the Adam’s apple that protrudes at men’s necks.

“Did you make any internal organs?”

NO, MY BODIES ARE COMPLETELY
SOLID UNDER THE SKIN.

“That’s your problem. Human bodies are mostly water, and having about the same density allows people to swim, but it’s not that simple. Humans have air spaces inside them, especially the lungs, which balance out the tissues and blood, which are heavier than water.”

Together we looked up some information about the capacity of the lungs online. This was complicated, but we found the following statistics: The total lung capacity of an adult human being is about 5.5 to 6 liters. This is the amount of air in the lungs when you take a full deep breath. The minimum volume is about 1.2 liters. When you exhale as much air as possible, there’s still that much air left over in the lungs. The normal amount of air while breathing at rest is 2.5 to 3 liters; you only actually breathe in and out half a liter per breath when you are just casually breathing and not exercising or trying to take big breaths on purpose.

But the topic of density got me thinking. I should put enough empty space in my body to give it the density of water. The density of water varies with temperature, but of course it should be at human body temperature, where it is very close to 62 pounds per cubic foot. I weigh 90 pounds. At that density, my 90 pounds would fill 2508 cubic inches, 46% more than my measured 1712 cubic inches. If I spread that out evenly over 3 dimensions, I’d be 13.6% larger in each dimension. That would bring me up to 5’3.5”, which is about what I was before my powers came in.

THANKS, GEORGE. THAT IS
GOING TO HELP A LOT.

The 6 liters of lungs at maximum inflation, not to mention the 3 liters at rest, was a lot less than the extra 800 cubic inches of hole I had to put inside myself to match the density, in part because the lungs weren’t the only hole, and in part because the density of my material didn’t match the density of flesh. I didn’t have the water; I only had the denser components. Well, at least something that was denser than water.

And then I figured out how to put a big hollow inside my torso and smaller ones in my head and legs. It was pretty simple. For the torso, I just had to specify a smaller cone with a smaller radius and the same slope and axis, and cut shorter on both ends, and invert the inequalities so it matched everything outside the shape, and take the intersection of that with the rest of my body. Naturally, it didn’t match the hollows inside a person, but maybe that was OK, as long as I made the outside look right.

George and I went to show my mom, who was surprised by the bigger me until I explained in another wall of text. Then George had to go, but I asked him to come back to explain to me the shape of the voice box and vocal cords, and, I realized, the entire throat and mouth which I would need to speak like a person.

I needed a larger size of the bodysuit, and I could wear the clothes I wore a couple weeks ago before this started, though I needed to use the smallest notch on my belt to fit my 27 inch waist to hold my pants up. I still looked like a string bean.

George came back a few days later and helped me work on the voice box. This went in stages. First I made just the vocal cords, with no body around it, and then put in half the larynx, which is the actual “box”, and the neck around it so he could still see what I was doing. And when he was satisfied, I enclosed it all and added a torso with some semblance of lungs. At this point, I thought that I should be able to tense the vocal cords and blow air through them from the lungs and make a steady sound, but it didn’t work.

At first we thought I’d done something wrong, but we couldn’t see anything wrong. What we noticed was that the vocal cords didn’t flap. We looked this up online and confirmed voice worked by air being pushed through the vocal cords causing them to open and close repeatedly, which caused pressure waves that echoed at certain resonant frequencies within the voice box to make the audible sound. What my body was made out of didn’t react the way a flap of human flesh did to air passed over it.

I did eventually make it work, by inducing the vibrations myself with math. Forcing air over already vibrating flaps of my body-stuff made the expected sound, which I could change in pitch by altering the size of the opening for the air above the vocal cords. To make many of the sounds for speech, I needed to put a mouth and nose over it, and a tongue, and lips, which took a bunch more direction from George. It took a whole day for me to build. At least these parts worked; they just provided different kinds of restrictions on the air passages.

But I had to learn how to speak all over again. At least I knew what I was supposed to be doing; it was a matter of translating it all into math. I worked on one sound at a time, tried different formulas, and when I had something that worked well I saved it as a function. I had figured out how to make time-varying functions before, and these were no different, except that they were very short and I would call many of them in succession.

Each sound required exhaling a certain amount of air, some less and some more. I basically had an air counter that tracked how much air was in my lungs. One function expelled it when I needed it to speak, and another function would take a breath during the pauses between words when I needed to refill that air, while opening up the channel fully so as not to make sound. On top of that, each sound required one or more movements of the mouth or tongue, opening or closing the nasal passages, and activating or deactivating my artificial voice box waves. Finally, I needed to put in transitions. There was a transition from each sound to the neutral position, and special transitions directly from one sound to another when going through the neutral position created an unnatural pause. The transitions were important; though I could instantaneously change my mouth from one position into another, doing that interrupted the sound in a noticeably unnatural way.

It took me a week to make the initial function for each sound, and after that I could speak, sometimes badly. I wrote a function that let me string together a bunch of sounds and say them just like I could write the words in the air. It took several more weeks to get all the transitions to work. By the time school started in the fall I could speak intelligibly. It still wasn’t perfect, and I started writing another level of functions for syllables and whole words, so that I didn’t have to think so hard about all the little nuances.

But this meant I wasn’t working on my body. I had put eyes and ears on the head just so it didn’t look so weird with only a nose and mouth, but I hadn’t done any more work to make it look like a more convincing human being. And my parents knew I wasn’t really ready to try to do all the school stuff yet, so they’d arranged for me to get my assignments emailed. I could use the computer both to read them and write responses. I hadn’t actually worked on the detailed hand movements necessary to write on paper, so it was better this way anyway.

I also had a tutor come out once a week who I could work directly with on anything where I had trouble. This gave me practice speaking with someone other than my parents, and on a variety of subjects.

Having to do schoolwork slowed down my work on my speech, so it wasn’t until November that I finally got around to testing every sequence of two sounds that could occur in an English word and making sure I had a proper transition and could call that work completed, and adding the pronunciations for words in my vocabulary was an ongoing thing. And it slowed down my work on my body even more, but once in a while I got the chance to tweak something.

So it was Christmas break when I got around to working on my body again. And the first thing I noticed was that I hadn’t grown. My cube shape was still 12 inches to the best that it could be measured by a ruler and my blob shape still weighed 90 pounds.

Christmas morning for the first time I showed my parents my new shape. A little narrower at the waist, small boobs protruding, and otherwise the same body I’d been using the past few months. “Merry Christmas. You have a daughter.”