30 2780-Space City Iron Lake (044165)-Mind Upgrade (II)

-Flashback-

Aval Zaullen, was a child whose father was never around for him.

The only reason he wondered into building things was that he felt he needed to learn of it....on the concept of how to become a man, and he knew nobody was around teaching him that.

A GENERATION NEVER WOULD REMEMBER THEIR CURRENT LEADERS, BUT ALWAYS WOUlD REMEBER THIER CURRENT CELEBRITIES. WHY WOULDN'T THEY THEN BE AFFECTED BY THEIR CURRENT MOST POPULAR PEERS.

Aval's mind worked like that. He realized that he wasn't being influenced by his current generation peers enough, unlike his friends, and he wanted to be more like them.

At twelve he entered a woodshop class as an elective to learn about building things with his hands, as he learned about being manly. Imagine the concept of a wood shop class in space. Imagine the waste of potential that would be to make a class out of it. When you could literally learn anything else, and wood was so expensive, as to be a commodity in space.

The next time he tried, he chose a career in mechanical engineering, as a low-class mechanics of cars. He could fix a car, but he couldn't build one and wasn't even attempting to learn. it was like filling in puzzle pieces.

He remembered when he built his first gun, it was a hard time in his life, when he had just discovered one of his family's deepest darkest secrets.

It was a crappy gun, packed with several malfunctioning parts, that threatened to blow up in his hand, if he even so much as took a look at it long.

Holding that gun, he felt the biggest thrill of his life.

As he contemplated the suicide of pulling the trigger, it was a proverbial destroying yourself while destroying your enemies situation. If he fired that weapon on that day, he would have been burned mud on the pavement.

But things were not meant to be... As he froze on the trigger, afraid of the weapon that he had built himself.

There was an electrifying chill that crawled through his back, as he was about to fire it. It was like his body was numbing him from the pain that wasn't there yet, the pain that should be felt when you are vaporizing into nothingness.

Only has mercy to himself, or the mercy from his creator. He could see himself scattering into pieces before the flames would then consumed him.

He had built that energy-gun, wanting to blow the head off his teacher, who had managed to lead him astray after being paid to do so by his family.

He was just too weak to do anything about it, " I can't do anything at all," it was just that feeling that made him join an advanced engineering course.

he was way out of his league at first... but he forged documents to fool the government into believing that he had attended a few years of studying and not entered a trade school for a specific career segment.

There were trade schools for all manners of career fields to raise the younger generation faster, but they usually had the side effect of freedom locking and not being flexible towards career building or changes.

fortunately, he was a baby-face.

He learned everything he knows from a place of no foundation. His mind had never thought of science has a possible option, something he would be good at, but that wasn't true at all, it was just a lack of confidence.

He was surprised at the day that he finally caught up with his peer, after a few long months of working his ass off behind their backs; Then he started to feel it was too easy. To the surprise of himself and all his classmates, he surpassed all of them just a few days later, becoming more hardworking, and his mind was boggling.

He was a genius, but no one had ever discovered it throughout his entire life, and he was trying so hard to conform with his peers that he hadn't discovered it himself. He was the weirdest of persons, the one who brought himself up out of the gutter to be something else. A phoenix resurrecting at the age of thirty, an anomaly of science nowadays.

He all of a sudden became minorly famous when it was discovered what he did to get in school by forging his documents.

And then he inherited the Atheneum.

When he entered further classes in, he must not have had a single point of reference from the past, like learning advanced math, without ever learning arithmetic, but he had then gotten the Atheneum.

Plenty of people admired him. He had taken the risk and jumped out of the path nature originally intended for him. Not many people had the guts to do that, not anymore.

When a human being discovered that there was a concept of life potential, they all started freaking the hell out because of it.

Making it so that a sixteen-year-old must already be on the road their future career paths before they even knew about the future.

He got a degree in aerospace engineering, then a degree in physic, and then a degree in electrical and chemical engineering... And a few math degrees because he liked it.

At some point, He could tell he was specifying his attainments of knowledge as he madly went about it. Looking for one specific field of knowledge, that not a lot of people ever learned, even if he had to invent that position himself.

It took him four years.

A weaponsmith of Choas, above all weaponsmiths, in every field he would take form, he would discover his focus, focusing on the word that would mean him blowing up his enemies, doing it with a ruinous bang. And not getting killed in the process. He even altered his body parts just to keep up with it.

He wanted to turn that weaponry on anybody who got in his way.

He didn't realize it back then, that weapons couldn't exceed the limit that a man could evolve, that even a nuclear weapon was only as good enough as if you could aim it.

He watched the woman he loved die...

That is why he respected what Zatland symbolized, the others wanted the boy to use his head and not be a warrior, but Aval was different. He already believed that what his family needed right now, was not a continuation of the same point of reference, but an alternative way of thinking about the situations.

Zatland was different that way...like Aval used to be, so many hidden potentials. He always wondered what he would have done if he had received the Atheneum at sixteen.

and if he knew already what he was doing with his life then.

He was so vicious to himself throughout his life just by being lazy.

Maybe, in the long run, Zatlands knowledge and contributions to the Athenaeum wouldn't be as useful, or as broad as the others might like it to be, but what of the short term, at worst he could fizzle out and die, at best he could explode,

there was a reason Zatland was the atheneum successor. Especially with a family has broad as the Zuallen's.

Family relationships were different. And only the last three generations of the Atheneum were related so closely together. Aval was called a grandparent because of the measure of his importance and not how long he had lived. Dying at the ripe old age of fifty. Aval lived onto mold his future generation yet was foiled in the end.

To acquire knowledge requires a lot of work, and to do it in any capacity worth admiring, you needed to make many sacrifices, but not with the Atheneum. They had wasted five generations acquiring knowledge. It was time to use the bulk of it to blow the head off all their enemies.

He was really hoping Zatland could help him spill some blood.

Spill the blood of many moons and troubled mounds...

Zatland suddenly felt some memories appearing in his mind like a river filling his cranium up with its knowledge of electrical wiring and uses for copper.

Zatland saw a simple process of creating a kind of glove that was only good enough for a few good uses.

then he saw a faster way to rewire a cell phone.

and then he saw how to mathematically always gauge distance and angles. his head was filled with sudden visions of the weird conceptualizations and odd schematic of things he could now build.

He started thinking like his grandfather did, like how an engineer would look at a problem. It came so easily for him that he could almost see the math that went into building the city. Almost like a form of Autism in which he could see the world in a suddenly new light.

Like he knew the recipe to build almost everything around him just by looking at it.

Aval was a genius mind, with a plethora of talent in all sorts of mechanical, chemical, and structural engineering. He didn't specialize because he didn't have to, his mind was a computer, always calmly breaking down the fabric of his reality. Zatland couldn't handle all of it.

P.O.V. Zatlands Mind

When Grandpa Aval had gotten the Atheneum, he had received a boost in his processing speed that was way near unimaginable, and that processing speed worked well with his capabilities. You wouldn't believe how many equations could go into the process of just killing one man.

For some reason, what Grandpa Aval had done was to specify that, for some reason, he had memorized it too. He had designed a mathematical Guideline on how to kill a man with several accommodations.

grandpa Aval might have just been an Evil villain.

It was as if all his knowledge came about because he just wanted to kill somebody. It was kind of scary rushing all into my brain like that. I didn't understand why I felt so scared. It was just my instinct was telling me that by receiving such a boost so suddenly, might be an extremely dangerous occurrence for me.

Narrator

Zatland, all of a sudden, got a 2% percent upload of the content of his grandpa's knowledge, not all of it, but his head was splitting from the seams for a second, as he stood still because of it.

"What the fuck? so that is how it felt," he whimpered to himself, as he realized this was the first time he was receiving knowledge directly from one of his grandpas.

He didn't notice that they were just only enhancing his capabilities to think, learn and memorize all this time, and it was a move they had made too greatly enhance his superficial I.Q, but he had trouble noticing.

all this time and only now were they transferring information from mind to mind with him like an Internal I.Q.

Why didn't they give him any warning before it; telling him that it would be so scary, right now he was seeing through his eyeballs his whole world in a higher spectrum and twisted lighting. It was as if time and space were merging together; he felt his vision would never recover from it. He was wondering if he was having a stroke, his head was so "flushed."

2% that was the limit of the knowledge Aval could share with his grandson for the good of him, So he had cut some corners, to show him how to build some recipes, some advanced geometry, and certain other subjects.

Right now Zatland had gigantic holes in his knowledge that would make other engineers baffled. If a person were really like this, they would be some sort of idiot savant or baka specialist.

Knowing how to build a bunch of sophisticated Gadgets, only through the concept of instinctualization.

He was baffling.

But that was okay for now; he could learn the basics of things later. Aval Just wanted to see him burn things down for now.

Aval was an avid movie goer, and a fan of major action Flicks where things exploded. He remembered the catchphrases of all his favorite action heroes.

Zatland turned a corner towards a coffee shop when everything happened instantly, his perception of time was just skewered, slightly by the mind-melding that was happening, but he opened his eye's soon after like he was just blinking. And now he really needed some gear.

He thought of his original tools for rewiring, they use to be more than enough, but now, he knew something better. his tools couldn't even accomplish a third of the thing he was capable of.

he started to see tools has his new collectibles, could he afford to get them all?

He had lost Isaac's shadow in the crowd earlier, so for now, he had to play this delicately, he figured he couldn't be spotted this time around, at least not for some areas he needed to visit. He couldn't have Isaac seeing through his plans before everything was happening.

oh yeah, and he had just formulated another plan.

Zatland walked through the city like a changed man; he could see every building and felt like he was developing a GPS of the city in his mind just by traveling it.

Through that, he could form a geographic breakdown of every building, every alleyway, every shortcut. A three-dimensional map, formed from his consciousness, just like a video game.