"Welcome everyone, for this first session we're gonna split up into groups. Anyone who's boxed before come stand behind me, everyone else stand with Eveyln." Jason, the captain of the men's boxing team addressed the hundred or so students that had come to the boxing taster session.
A few of the attendants he recognised from the ring. They'd fought at various state tournaments over the years. The majority were fresh faces. A dozen women and men headed over to Jason and stood behind him.
The rest walked over to Evelyn. Alex was among them.
Evelyn smiled, "Don't go thinking boys are better than girls or anything, Jason's only teaching the experienced group because he won a bet. Stick with me ladies I'll show you how to beat anyone."
The gender balance was heavily skewed towards men. Evelyn's comment made the women in the crowd laugh and noticeably relax.
"Okay everyone find a partner, anyone leftover you're with me!" She called out.
People began pairing up, Alex turned to another newcomer with a similar build to his own and asked whether they wanted to pair up.
"Sure thing man, I'm Adrien, good to meet you." Adrien had blonde hair cut short and bright blue eyes.
The two began to practice according to Evelyn's instructions, one held a foam block while the other threw punches. There wasn't much opportunity to chat during the drills, boxing demanded extreme bursts of maximum intensity. Alex's sublimating of his body had progressed steadily since the sports induction two days ago, his lactic acid breakdown was quickening every second, but without active control it was still well within the parameters of a decent athlete.
"Everyone take a break! Have a drink, get to know your sparring partner, ask them their favourite colour if you don't know what to say!" Evelyn called out. During the drills she'd been walking up and down the pairs, pointing out points to improve on and delivering lessons on basic form.
Alex took a long drink from his water bottle. Adrien did the same, gasping for air and grinning after downing almost the entire bottle in one go.
"I'm a blue guy myself, this thing's 80% water isn't it, makes sense really." Adrien said, pointing at the earth.
There was nothing concealed or tricky about the way Adrien spoke. He was straight to the point and unafraid to phrase things the way he liked.
The two hadn't spoken much, but the silence between them whilst training was relaxed and comfortable.
"You got it all wrong, blue's what they want you to think. Go purple, my mum's favourite flower are lilacs." Alex replied, tapping his head knowingly.
The interaction was silly and almost brainless, it could've been had by a pair of children in kindergarten. It made Alex and Adrien laugh until they were short of breath.
Adrien slung an arm over Alex's shoulder, "You're funny kid, every thought of going for the big leagues?"
Alex grinned, "Always fancied my own talk show."
The rest of the session was a mixture of demonstrations and practical exercises. Evelyn was a good teacher and split her attention evenly between the students.
He'd only been practicing for an hour and Alex could already feel how much harder his punches were landing on the foam block. Evelyn's lessons were simple and easy to understand, a few simple changes to his form had massively improved the force behind his punches.
"Big time doctor huh, you'll do me a solid and squeeze me in if I ever need one of those head scans or whatever, the machine that'll rip metal out your skeleton. I saw it on TV." Adrien said as Alex and him walked back to their dorm together. It was a welcome surprise that they were both in the same building. The next practice was on wednesday, they'd agreed to meet in the lobby beforehand and walk over.
Alex laughed, "MRI scan, isn't that your area big time engineer? Magnetic fields and all that. Don't believe everything you see on TV either."
Alex said goodbye to Adrien and returned to his room. Damien was cooking in the kitchen listening to music loud enough that it seeped out his headphones.
Alex grinned and crept up behind Damien, "Boo!"
The tall medicine student leapt out his skin, hitting his head on the ceiling and yelling in pain.
"Very funny, real mature dickhead." Damien cursed, rubbing his head.
Alex waved off his dormates anger, "I'm lovable, you'll forgive me quickly. What's for dinner?"
"Sorry to dissapoint your stomach, but it's soup today." Damien retorted, stirring the reddish liquid in the pan.
Alex opened the fridge and pulled out an orange can of soft drink. He waved it front of Damien's face and said in a singsong voice, "Trade you for some soup?"
Damien gritted his teeth and snatched the can out of Alex's hands, "Deal."
Alex happily spooned out a large bowl of soup and took it back to his room. He ate it while idly creating and dispelling extra fingers on his free hand. He'd managed to get to ten fingers on one hand. It had frightened him at first, but he'd gotten used to it pretty quickly. Growing that much bone and tissue over and over placed an additonal demand on his caloric intake, but lentils and chicken were cheap, it wasn't hard to cover the cost.
Laptops weren't designed for people with fifteen fingers, the mind also wasn't designed to handle coordinating that many digits. The additonal strain on his brain was a good way to improve his multitasking.
Alex opened up some homework from yesterday's lecture. Once the first day was over, they'd dove straight into the content for the first year. For now it didn't require too much effort, the work predominantly drew on knowledge he already had. The professors were using it as a chance for the new students to refresh their memory and fill in a few gaps in their knowledge that they might've missed.
More than a dozen fingers tapped rapidly on the keyboard. Occasionally they'd stop completly and Alex would grit his teeth and keep going. The extra fingers were a stable structure, but enhancing the overall functionality of his brain while coordinating the extra digits was another weight added to his mental load.
He still hadn't yet attempted to manipulate the specific sections of his brain. The different lobes had their own specific purposes. For now he adopted a simple and straightforward approach, relying on the innate biological intuition of his powers to sharpen his thinking and improve his memory and recall. Knowledge learned while in this state was stored away in his long-term memory far more efficiently than under ordinary circumstances.
The promise of a photographic memory was immensely alluring. Once his sublimating was finished, Alex was keen to get started on the dozens of other projects he'd been mulling over.
Refining an individual process wasn't too difficult, switching it over to be passive rather than active got easier every time he did it. He'd already worked out the knack to it. It was only because there were so many different biological processes that optimizing them required an entire month.
Alex regularly found himself thinking about changing his plans and focusing on the larger-scale changes that he daydreamed about. Every time it happened he pinched himself and repeated his mantra.
"Slow is steady and steady is fast." He said quietly to himself.
The rapid thinking speed brought about by his mind-enhancement made studying and homework a breeze. Alex had read about geniuses with photgraphic memories and people with savant syndrom who'd woken up and suddenly understood every mathematical principle they'd heard about since age four. The brain was complicated beyond measure, it was untrue that humans only used 10% of their brains, but there was certainly an ocean of potential to be explored.
His optimization plan was to bring his body and mind to the peak of what was humanly possible. His powers couldn't observe changes on a genetic level, at least not yet, but as the days passed he could feel himself changing in a subtle but miraculous way.
Back at home Jack and Amanda sat down to eat dinner. They still laughed and smiled often, but from time to time their eyes would drift to the empty place at the table.
Amanda's phone buzzed. She glanced over at it casually.
"Alex!"
They were both on their feet in an instant staring at the small screen on maximum brightness.
"Hey mum and dad, I'm sure you're reading this too dad.
Still doing good over here, went to a boxing class today. Thinking that I'll try out for the university team, the captain says they have a bunch of tournaments in Detroit so you guys can come watch my matches and I'll stay with you guys.
Miss you both, been exercising lots. See you once term finishes."
A photo was attached of Alex wearing the boxing gloves the university had given out for the session, he'd taken it quickly in one of the mirrors at the boxing gym. The Michigan logo decorated each wrist.
Alex's parents looked at each other with proud teary-eyes. They held each other tightly.
"That's our boy."
The next day, Alex woke up early. Campus was quiet in the mornings and running helped him think. Some things couldn't be solved by accerlated thinking.
The day after that he went for a run as well. It quickly became his new routine. Two weeks passed by in a blur of activity.
He'd settled nicely into university. Damien and him played pool in the common room most days and Adrien usually wandered in to join.
His grades were strong, he knew that he was studying much less than his classmates, but the memory enhancement of his powers bridged the gap. Things that they needed study a dozen times to remember, he only had to read over a few times.
A little more effort could've pushed him to the very top of his class. He didn't want that, he was content to place in the top twenty. His parents were overjoyed by his academic progress. An aunt on his mum's side had sent him a hundred dollars as a gift for doing so well in his studies. He happily added that money to his food budget.
His grades and social life were firmly progressing in the right direction and so we're his powers. It was getting easier to split his focus and maintain more complex changes.
He still stuck rigidly to his plan to optimise every physical parameter he could, but in his spare time he experimented with adding extra joints to his knees or trying to create a functioning eye in the palm of his hand.
He'd been working on the latter project for almost a week, the complexity was a dozen times anything else he'd tried before. For the eye to transmit information to his brain he'd practically had to create an entirely new mini nervous system.
Often his little projects ended up directing his studies. They weren't set to cover the ocular system for another month, but he'd raced ahead and gone through every powerpoint and lecture he could get his hands on.
It wouldn't be too much longer until his plan to optimize his body was complete. After that he was struggling to decide between a hundred different directions to go in.
'Sometimes thinking isn't the answer.'
The realisation made him smile and see how stubbornly he'd been behaving. He'd spent so many nights laying awake in bed trying to figure out the best course of action that he hadn't listened to music for weeks or watched an episode of the shows he liked.
'There's more to life than superpowers.'
Alex stopped concentrating on speeding up his thinking. His thoughts slowed down.
He'd gone for a morning run, but it had been like he was watching it through a foggy lens. He hadn't heard the birdsong or smelled the fresh air. All of his focus had been on planning for the future and thinking about what to do next, but life wasn't lived in the future.
Time flowed normally, the slowness felt like putting on a warm winter coat. The softness eased the tension he'd been carrying in his brow.
For the first time in what felt like a long time, Alex felt like himself again.
He felt like the boy who sent his parents good night next because he wanted to, not because he felt like he had to.
"I can be such an idiot sometimes." Alex said to himself. He smiled and sped up.