Chapter 16
Going to class, coming home, doing homework… and working, whether on new writing projects or with Al on potential assets for the future, quickly became Seb’s daily grind.
That was fine. A daily grind was just part of whatever you wanted to get up, at some point or another. What was getting to him was the banality of it all. School was such a… cliche. Bored teachers, bored students, actually useless classes, bullies, nerds… him being one of the latter, of course.
It was all so damned cliche!
It honestly made him want to throw up a couple times, mentally at least, if not physically.
However, he got some things done.
Another rejection letter, another manuscript repackaged and sent out to the next publisher in line.
It would be much easier if they accepted simultaneous submissions, but no one did that of course.
It would be too easy on writers to allow something that logical.
And he was too much of a rule follower in the basic sense to just flip them off and send out the books shotgun style on the off chance that he got two acceptance letters and had to burn some small part of his non-existent reputation.
Seb just told himself to ride it out, it wasn’t a sprint. There were limits to what he could do with a book contract at eleven anyway.
He did sell another couple short stories, which was actually rather pleasing the more he considered it.
He’d never been great at short stories in the past, his head seemed to want to write epics, and he had a bit of an obsessive compulsive thing with layering story elements for payoffs that would take millions of words to pay off.
Nothing got wrapped up clean in the real world, after all, and he’d always seen his stories as… windows into other, very real, worlds. A bizarre affectation, perhaps, but considering his current situation… Seb wasn’t willing to discount the idea as overly fantastical anymore.
Still, getting some real world experience writing short stories felt like he was growing his skill as a writer again, a feeling that had fallen by the wayside during the war.
It only really amounted to pocket change, however, which would have been amazing if he were actually eleven… but when it came to needing the money to setup a CRISPR lab among other equipment?
Suffice to say, he was running a little light.
A lot light, let’s be real.
Still, the money had bought him a few more parts from his collection of catalogs… once they arrived, at least, and he would soon be a slight fraction of a step closer to whatever end goal he managed to finagle out of this whole process.
Not that he was all that eager to be turning himself into a gene edited lab rat, but Seb didn’t see a lot of options and he at least had research from people a hell of a lot smarter than he was to help guide him.
CRISPR, or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats…
Yeah, whoever named that one… was actually on point in his opinion.
Seb had a serious hatred for acronyms that were clearly back filled from something some idiot thought sounded cool.
That might be the case here, but both the name and the expanded version were so awkward that he didn’t think that was the case…
and Seb refused to ask, he preferred his mental version.
CRISPR was a natural bacterial process, essentially one of the weapons bacteria used in its endless war with virii. Bacterial immune systems would use the process to snip out pieces of the viral DNA for later reference to guide destruction efforts.
Seb had been treated several times with CRISPR techniques throughout his life, isolating certain genes for removal, and adding new ones in. In his case, he’d had some longevity treatments designed to increase telomere life cycles and the production of stem cells, among other little tweaks.
Suppose I’ll have to see if those can be replicated now, since I doubt any of that came back with me…
For all that it was a natural bacterial process, however, the technology was incredibly powerful, however, and could be leveraged with relatively little in the way of professional equipment.
The more high end gear the better, as a general rule, of course, but in a pinch he could start in his garage.
If I had a garage.
A secure place to setup a lab like that might be a bit difficult for an eleven year old, but Seb would figure out how to make it work.
With CRISPR, however, he could make self propagating genetic changes to organisms, including himself.
Not the most alluring thought, since his mind kept filling in all the blanks that came after the question; “what could go wrong?”, but regardless, Seb fully intended to do what he had to.
Thankfully, most of the basic soldier boosts weren’t particularly complicated. Certain genes were known to provide specific advantages, and he had a directory of those thanks to Al.
Enhanced muscle development, improved lung capacity, reduced neural delay, and even increased regeneration were all known genes that had been isolated and had solidly mapped out CRISPR solutions available.
Seb still wished he had someone who knew what the hell they were doing, though, because he chafed against his every sensibility to just ‘follow directions’ when it came to things of this nature. He’d never been a risk taker in his… his first life.
Was that what that was? First life? Seb wondered, more than a little disturbed by the thought. Do I only live twice?
He shoved that fully aside.
It didn’t matter yet, he didn’t have the materials, and he didn’t have lab… home or otherwise.
How the hell does a kid get himself a private lab anyway?
*****
“A what?”
“I want to make a club house, Mom,” Sebastian said eagerly, his tone and expression drawing a smile to Eve’s face.
Eve didn’t know quite what to say, if she were being honest about it, but the more she thought about it the more it felt like a good idea.
“Going to build it yourself?” She asked, testing the waters.
Sebastian nodded, “It’ll be fun, right?”
She smiled a little wider, Oh you poor boy. Still it’ll teach him some carpentry at least.
“Ok,” Eve said finally, “But you have to build it to be safe, and I will be checking.”
“Of course.”
Normally Eve would have expected this idea to die quickly when the work started, but lately her son was acting quite a bit different than she’d been used to.
Who knows? He might actually manage it.
“Alright, but first you need to clean up and organize the tools.” She said firmly. “We’re not buying stuff we already have, so it’s important to know what you’re working with.”
Sebastian nodded, “That’s a great point, Mom. I’ll get on that, and I’ll start making a wishlist for the project.”
Eve Parker watched her son run off to start making his plans and shook her head fondly.
At least that hasn’t changed. Still in love with planning things out.
*****
Planning a ‘clubhouse’ for his young self to use for experiments that were most certainly on the side of abominations against the natural orders was… well, Seb had to just admit it, even if only to himself… it was a childhood dream come true.
He’d done this exact same thing so many times when growing up that he honestly couldn’t remember more than a fraction of them.
Usually treehouses, as I recall.
He wasn’t going to worry about a tree house this time, though. He just wanted something sheltered, private, and… well, insulated. It was Canada, after all.
Power would be provided via an extension cord, so he would have to be careful about drawing too much, it was still years before affordable LEDs would make lighting more power efficient, and heat would be an issue as well once winter arrived.
It wasn’t a problem he needed to stress over, though, since a lot of people had already solved the issue long before he’d come around.
A camp stove, or even a rocket stove if he could get one built, would serve well enough for heat.
Most of the stuff he needed to power was fairly low draw, especially with Al to handle the computing side.
I can do this.
What was more, it was bringing back memories of other projects that had fallen along the wayside in his future life.
Ideas that he just didn't have the money or connections to pull off, and eventually had to forget about entirely thanks to the war, were now back on the table and he was actually pretty excited about it… even if some of the technology was a couple decades away.
Building a small camp in his backyard was a small first step, but it was a step nonetheless.
He didn’t need a lot, so he drew up basic plans for a twenty by twenty shed, basically. That size would make it easier to build, since plywood and chipboard came in four foot widths, so he tried to keep everything divisible by four or eight.
He doubted it would stay that way, but he was going to try.
After getting the tools all organized and back into one spot, he made up a shopping list for the hardware store and then, since that was about all he could do for the time being, he set about completing his daily ‘quests’ as part of the gamification application he’d put together with Al.
He was young yet for proper strength building, and that would get a lot easier once he had the soldier boosts completed anyway. For now, he was focusing mostly on endurance, something he’d never really developed correctly the last time around and wanted to see too properly this time.
The beach was perfect for that, soft sand needing a little extra effort as he jogged along the shore in the cooling days of September.
Winter will be along soon enough, Seb thought as he ran.
He wasn’t sure if that was going to amount to a lot in terms of problems for him. Realistically, he wasn’t likely to be able to do much… but that had little to do with the winter and more to do with his apparent age and general lack of resources.
It’s a grind game…
And that was true, but the more Seb thought about it the more he realized that he didn’t have to live for the grind.
A lot of it was just waiting for the results from various projects and, while he knew it was important to keep up the pressure, the truth was that doing other things than your main project often led to better productivity in the end.
He just had to deal with the guilt of not doing whatever it was his brain thought he should be doing.
A lifelong failing on his part was the inability to internalize that simple truth.
It’s 1986, and I’ve got a lot of years ahead of me… ideally… most of which will be epitomized by the phrase ‘hurry up and wait’. I need to find some other things to keep it all interesting.
He paused on the beach, checking his heart rate and taking long slow breaths as he considered it.
What did I really want to do as a kid, and never got the chance? Or what would I have loved to do, but never realized it was an option back in the day?
Seb was certain he could come up with some things to break up the tension and potential monotony while he was working on the big goal. The one thing he knew was a certain recipe for disaster was letting himself get obsessive. Nothing good came of that to his experience.
Not a damned thing.
*****
Eve was surprised, but only a little, when she was presented with a list of materials and some fairly detailed plans for using them.
He’s really gone all out. I wonder where he learned about some of this? She wondered, looking over the list.
As best she could tell it looked like a workable plan. She had no doubt it would go sideways on Sebastian, probably more than once and in multiple different ways, but that was all educational… and the one thing she never wanted to deny Sebastian was an education.
It’ll be a little costly, but I can supplement what he puts into the project.
She nodded to herself, it was worth trying.
She looked over to where Sebastian was waiting and set the plans and shopping list down.
“Alright, I think this is worth trying, but there’s some ground rules.” She said warningly.
The following list of rules was almost entirely safety oriented, mostly because she did not want him playing with power tools unsupervised. She also wanted the hard work of leveling and preparing the base for the building done before she spent more than the bare minimum.
Anything to keep him from getting bored and wandering off to some other project mid build.
Sebastian agreed to everything, because of course he did. The faster he agreed, the more she reminded herself to keep an eye on him.
She’d learned that lesson the hard way when he was eight and he tried to cook Mac and Cheese.
That mess did not want to come out of… anything.
Eve was already imagining all the ways this was going to go wrong, but as long as he had all his fingers and toes when it was over, she figured it would still be worth the costs.
Sebastian, though, it seemed was already planning out every last detail in his head.
He has such a good imagination. I wonder if his writing will actually amount to anything?
She didn’t know a lot about the writing industry, but Eve was aware that breaking into it was far from easy. She didn’t think Sebastian knew that she’d been counting his rejection letters as they came in. He didn’t seem phased by them, but they all hurt her every time she saw them.
She hoped he’d get some interest soon, if only because she didn’t want to see his interest in writing die slowly from disappointment.
*****