Chapter 7 : Seventy-Two Hours
Sixty-eight hours. I was standing in the shower block running numbers that wouldn't cooperate, hot water hammering shoulders built for a species that evolved under different gravity, and every calculation ended the same way: not enough time.
The quest timer pulsed in the upper corner of my vision — a red numeral ticking down with the mechanical patience of something that didn't care about schedules, cover stories, or the fact that the person it was counting down for had lab obligations in eleven hours.
[QUEST: ESTABLISH SANCTUARY NODE]
[TIME REMAINING: 67:42:18]
[LOCATION REQUIREMENTS: NEURAL DENSITY ≥ 500/cm³, MINIMUM 50m² UNCONTESTED AREA]
[COST: 50 NE, 4 HOURS CONTINUOUS PRESENCE]
[FAILURE: SYSTEM ACCESS REVOKED]
Four hours. The node claim required four hours of unbroken contact with the grotto's root network. The hike to Sector 7 was three hours each way. That was ten hours minimum — and that assumed no complications, no patrols, no comms checks, no Grace Augustine appearing with her datapad and her questions.
The water turned cold. I'd been standing here long enough for the compound's rationing system to cycle to its conservation protocol. The avatar body barely registered the temperature change — Na'vi thermoregulation was absurdly efficient compared to human biology — but the shock broke my arithmetic spiral.
"Stop panicking. You managed project timelines for seven years. This is logistics. Treat it like logistics."
I killed the water. Grabbed a towel that was comically undersized for this body — more washcloth than towel — and dried what I could reach. The dried blood from my nose had already been cleaned, but the neural strain lingered as a dull ache behind my eyes, a reminder of what full bandwidth contact with a planetary consciousness felt like from the inside.
The interface floated in my peripheral vision. I'd spent the walk back from the grotto learning to navigate it — mental commands, like thinking about opening a folder on a desktop computer. The system responded to intention rather than gesture, which meant I could browse menus without anyone noticing unusual hand movements.
[TERRITORY NODES] opened into a submenu. Most options were grayed out — locked behind level requirements or resource costs I couldn't meet. But [CLAIM SANCTUARY NODE] glowed active. I expanded it.
[SANCTUARY NODE — CORE ABILITY]
[FUNCTION: HOME BASE, RESPAWN POINT, CORE NETWORK HUB]
[REQUIREMENTS: NEURAL-DENSE LOCATION (≥500/cm³), 50 NE, 4 HOURS CONTINUOUS TSAHEYLU]
[BENEFITS: TERRITORY (5km RADIUS), REGENERATIVE FIELD, HOSTILE DETECTION, TERRITORIAL AWARENESS]
[UPGRADES: AVAILABLE AFTER ESTABLISHMENT]
The grotto qualified. Neural density over 800 per cubic centimeter — well above the threshold. The location was remote enough that RDA patrols wouldn't stumble across it, and close enough to Hell's Gate that I could reach it within a standard expedition window.
The problem was the four hours.
Standard solo expeditions were capped at six hours including transit. I'd used five hours today — three walking, two at the grotto. To claim the node, I'd need at least ten hours in the field. Maybe twelve, accounting for the neural strain that would hit during the claiming process. No standard expedition authorization covered that kind of duration.
[CITIZEN REGISTRY] — grayed out.
[EVOLUTION TREES] — grayed out.
[BLUEPRINTS] — grayed out.
Everything locked behind the sanctuary. The system was designed to funnel me toward this single objective: claim territory first, then build. Without the node, I was a Level 1 Administrator with an interface and nothing to administrate.
"Extended expedition. That's the play. Request an overnight field study — some researchers do them. Grace mentioned neural mapping in James Chen's publication record. An overnight observation of bioluminescent circadian patterns would justify twelve hours in-sector."
The plan had a problem. Grace had already flagged my behavior as borderline. Requesting an overnight expedition four days into my tenure — with a grief assessment on my record and Selfridge's new policy about psychological instability — would either look ambitious or unhinged. The line between those two interpretations was Grace's judgment call.
I dressed and headed for the mess hall, pulling up the expedition request interface on my wrist display. The overnight slot was open. Weather forecast: clear. No scheduled patrols in Sector 7.
"Submit the request. Worst case, she says no and I'm back to calculating impossible timelines."
I submitted it. The confirmation pinged: Request pending — Dr. G. Augustine, approving authority.
---
The mess hall was half-empty at 1930 hours — most personnel ate between 1700 and 1830, which meant the late crowd was a mix of night-shift workers and people who didn't like company. I qualified as both.
The protein loaf had been replaced by something the kitchen called "stir-fry," which was generous terminology for reconstituted vegetables swimming in brown sauce over nutrient rice. I piled a tray and found a corner table where my height didn't force other diners to crane their necks.
The food was terrible. I ate it anyway. The avatar body burned through calories at a rate that would bankrupt a small restaurant, and skipping meals was a luxury I couldn't afford with neural strain still thinning my reserves. Each bite was a transaction — energy in, function maintained, one less variable to worry about.
"Hey — Chen, right? James Chen?"
A tray clattered onto the table across from me. The man holding it was human-sized, mid-thirties, with the kind of face that couldn't hide a single emotion it experienced. Brown eyes wide behind corrective lenses. Hair that suggested a losing war with Pandora's humidity. Lab coat over a t-shirt advertising a band I'd never heard of — or rather, a band Chase Sinclair had never heard of, because this was 2152 and popular culture had moved on.
"Norm Spellman." He stuck out his hand, then pulled it back when he registered the scale difference between his fingers and mine. "We, uh — we shared lab space. Briefly. During orientation week. Before your..." He gestured vaguely. "I heard about the cryo thing. Really sorry."
"Norm Spellman. Xenolinguist. Avatar driver. In the movie, he was Jake Sully's earnest sidekick — prepared for everything, skilled at nothing practical, desperate to connect with the Na'vi and constantly tripping over his own enthusiasm."
"Thanks," I said. "Orientation week's a blur, honestly."
"Oh, totally. Cryo-sleep recovery plus first link disorientation — I was a mess for days." He sat without being invited, which was either rude or lonely. Probably lonely. "I'm in xenolinguistics. We're down the hall from Dr. Augustine's lab. I see you in the corridor sometimes — the avatar body's kind of, you know, noticeable."
"Hard to miss at nine feet."
Norm laughed. It was the laugh of a man who hadn't had someone respond to his conversation starters in a while. Bright, too loud, cut short by self-awareness.
"So how's the field work going? I heard you got solo expedition approval already — that's fast for a new driver."
"Grace wants results. I'm producing results."
"She's intense, right? First week, she quizzed me on tonal variations in the Omaticaya dialect for two hours straight. I got one phoneme wrong and she made me redo the entire analysis." He said it with admiration, not resentment. A student who loved the harshest teacher.
I let him talk. Norm Spellman was a river of information that required almost no prompting — lab schedules, staff dynamics, which corridors had security cameras and which didn't, whose avatar was in maintenance rotation, when the link bay was empty. All of it flowing out in a conversational torrent that he probably couldn't have stopped if he tried.
"This man is a walking intelligence briefing. And he doesn't even know it."
Not an ally. Not yet. An asset. Someone to file away and understand — his schedule, his vulnerabilities, his need for connection in a compound full of people who found him exhausting. If I needed help down the line — a distraction, a cover story, a set of human-sized hands in the link bay — Norm Spellman would say yes before the question finished leaving my mouth.
The realization tasted worse than the stir-fry. Here I was, cataloguing a lonely man's weaknesses over dinner, measuring his value as a resource. Something James Chen might never have done. Something Chase Sinclair — the project manager, the normal guy, the man who died on a highway — would have recognized as manipulative.
"Except Chase Sinclair has sixty-three hours to claim a patch of alien jungle or lose the only thing keeping him alive. Morality is a luxury. Survival isn't."
Norm was saying something about Na'vi verb conjugation. I tuned back in, nodded at the right moments, asked a question about clan dialects that made his face light up. By the time the meal ended, he'd given me his shift schedule, his comm frequency, and an open invitation to stop by the linguistics lab any time.
I thanked him. Meant it, partially. Hated myself, partially.
The quest timer ticked: 53:14:07.
The expedition request sat in my inbox, unanswered. Grace's approval light was dark.
I lay in the avatar barracks with the lights off, staring at a ceiling that was too close and a countdown that was too fast, running routes in my head. Three hours to the grotto. Four hours for the claim. Three hours back. Ten hours. The overnight slot, if approved, gave me fourteen. Enough margin for complications. Enough time to become something more than a dead man borrowing someone else's face.
The approval notification pinged at 2247. Grace's note was two words: Be careful.
I closed my eyes. The status screen dimmed to standby. The timer kept counting.
Forty-four hours to go. And in the morning, I was walking into the jungle to claim a piece of it as mine.
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