CVU1

Chapter 34: My Summer Vacation

While the map gave me the right sense of distance it didn't have the detail for any of these hundreds of little lakes to have a name, and I decided that I didn't need to find out this lake's name - any name in English would be a very recent thing.

When day came, I slept. I needed to do that more often, for even after dosing myself with the blood diamond or an animal and getting myself regenerated I still ached, tired in a way that drinking wouldn't address. I had discovered leaving Trois-Rivieres that I could walk continuously for three days and nights, but it might be a good idea to wait a fortnight before trying that again.

Portions of the map that I had already traveled through became the space for my exercise notes, written in an old golf pencil. My scale of hardness was just the beginning - I might no longer be human, but I was still a bit of an engineer. What came next was some light biomechanics.

TTG stood for 'Time to glow', a metric I would collect after every sunset before feeding. I needed one consistent exercise to repeat at max speed until I got through the surface body of blood and stressed the 'true' form, extracting that St. Elmo's fire as an unambiguous indicator. Burpees were supposed to give the whole body some fun, they seemed to be popular with prisoners and I was a member of a similarly untrustworthy community, so I tried some of those. Progress or the lack thereof would show up in this diagnostic number. Maybe.

First night of recording: TTG of 214. Dracula had had the strength of twenty men, but I flatter my human self as being capable of more than 10 burpees before gasping, heart-pounding, let-me-die exhaustion. Maybe I had the strength of about five men right now.

After the first feeding to recover myself I jogged to collect my L score, which came from looping around the lake and was more about endurance than intensity, which I thought the TTG with burpees might catch. I had this one lake as my yard-stick deep in the unmarked country without human smell or sound or footprint. My L score was counted in loops, stopping when I got the glow. But after the fifth night I decided to add one more loop after the glow first showed up. It felt awful - but my run-ins with the birds and beasts had proved that I could do it, so it felt disappointing to just stop when I got the first glow. This wasn't all about collecting a scientific measurement.

First night: L score of 16, with each loop being a few kilometers. I could still be embarrassed by a few Kenyans.

***

This was, somehow, becoming fun. Or maybe moping around doing nothing had felt bad enough to demand this distraction. I liked tracking the numbers, trying to make sense of them.

I discovered that I could improve my TTG number by about 7 to 10 per night. Ten days in I bumped it up by an extra 15, finally getting past 300. Had I gotten up to the strength of six men?

Well, that would require assessment of my baseline human ability. Burpees and jogging at dawn then, finishing before noon. In those hours I was sweating and panting like anyone working out.

But I discovered that when you know that you will recover from anything - or just about anything that a human can do to themselves while exercising, when you know that sprains and tears and cramps and stitches on the side that rip deep will start to fade away at the strike of the noon - the pain is a lot more manageable. And it was harder to get 'up to' that level of pain as the days and nights passed. The daytime exercise was addressing the base level, in video game terms, while the night exercise would perhaps improve the unholy multipliers.

I also discovered that with no job, no school, and no Internet, a 24-hour day is actually a heck of a long time. You can do a lot of burpees in that time. Just like in prison.

This is some sort of ultimate condemnation on our whole fucking system. I've been turned into a monster and ostracized to the wilderness with minimal possessions ... and I don't think I've ever been happier. No meetings, no appointments, no commute. All I have to do is to get a little harder to kill, each day.