The first Monday after his awakening began like any other. Grey sky, lukewarm cereal, and the low murmur of his foster parents in the kitchen.
Yet something had shifted.
For Aarav, the world no longer felt random. There was rhythm in it now. Patterns in sound, structure in movement, small details that linked together if he paid enough attention.
Whatever had happened to him had not simply moved him. It had changed how he functioned.
At school, while others crowded around phones and argued over football clips, Aarav sat in the computer room. He kept it simple. A stopwatch. A few coloured cards. A spreadsheet.
Nothing complicated. That was the point.
He tested how long it took to memorise combinations of colour and number. Then he repeated it. Again and again, adjusting small variables each time.
The difference showed quickly.
Each attempt took less time than the last. Not by chance, but by pattern. His brain was not just fast. It was adapting. Learning how to improve its own process.
By the afternoon he had written a small script to track the results. The graph rose sharply. Too sharply.
He stopped before it went too far.
There was a limit. He could feel it now. A faint pressure behind his eyes, a slight dip in focus. Thinking harder came at a cost. Not dramatic, but real.
It was not something abstract. It felt physical.
Walking home through damp streets, he used the small change from his bus fare to buy a bar of dark chocolate. He ate it slowly, paying attention to the shift in clarity.
It helped. Not instantly, but enough to confirm what he suspected.
Energy mattered.
That night, he opened his notebook and wrote a heading across a fresh page.
Cognitive Efficiency and Energy Use
He paused, then added a line beneath it.
Every system has input and output. Even the mind.
He closed the notebook after that.
Sleep came easily, though his thoughts did not fully settle. Patterns still drifted at the edge of awareness, waiting for him to return to them.