The first psionic that he’d discovered was telepathy, which he’d received after the first stage. Each psionic had a name that Axull Darr had provided from his records, but Adrian had decided to call them by their human names. Humanity already had knowledge of such, or similar, abilities, whether from fiction or examples from nature.
Telepathy, as it appeared, wasn’t as easy to use as he’d thought it would be. The beacon he’d heard had been specifically designed to reach past a person’s innate defenses, and he’d answered it instinctually. Trying to enter someone else’s mind was another story. No matter how much he tried, he couldn’t make it work. Occasionally, he could reach the point where he was almost there, when it felt like he was listening to a conversation but was just a step outside of the hearing range. In those instances, he could hear a kind of noise, and every now and then he could make out a word, but nothing more. Telepathy was like another sense, only no one around him could emit anything that he could pick up. But always when he tried to reach someone’s mind, when he opened himself up, he could feel a kind of noise that his mind usually filtered out. He’d learned from the data in the sphere that that was actually called a telepathic echo. Noise of the galaxy—supernovas, black holes, and other events all created noise similar to radio noise. But thankfully he didn’t need to hear it all the time.
Telepathy wasn’t like some invisible mystical power. The People had had devices that could detect it, measure it, and even boost it.
The second was telekinesis, which had come to him after stage three. Only, it too was not what he’d expected. He couldn’t use it to lift heavy objects and throw them around as he’d hoped; at most, he could lift a few rocks. But according to Axull Darr, every psionic was like a muscle and could be strengthened through training, meaning he could theoretically train his telekinesis to the heights where he could do that, which was why he was starting with ‘lifting’ the heavy lead ball with his mind. He didn’t really need to use his arm, but it made the exercise easier, as his mind associated the ability with the movement of his arm.
But the third was the one that Adrian liked the most, an ability to expel a kinetic blast—or kinetikinesis. That was the only psionic that he could use fairly well, probably because it was very simple. He now had microscopic emitters on the palms of his hands, which he could use to expel kinetic force directly, using the energy stored in his body. The problem was that the more energy he used, the greater the feedback, as he’d learned two years ago when he, along with the researchers who had been helping him develop the psionics, had tried to see how strong of a blast he could fire off.
Up until that point, he had been trying out small blasts, barely using any of the energy that his newly formed organ stored. The strongest one he’d used had had the equivalent kinetic power of a very strong punch. The feedback from those was not all that bad; his arms would usually feel as if he had punched something relatively hard, the bones and muscles in his arms would vibrate a bit, and his palms would go numb for a moment. So naturally they’d wanted to see what would happen if he tried to use as much energy as he could. That, as it turned out, had been a very bad idea.
They’d been inside the testing room that was some five meters across, with Adrian standing on the one side of the room and the pressure machine placed on the other. Adrian had braced himself, pulled as much energy as he could, and then let it go through his right arm. Immediately, he’d known that something was wrong as he emptied all of the energy his body had stored. As the energy traveled through the channels in his arm, he’d felt pain that lasted for only a moment as the energy reached the emitters on his palms. Already, he could feel the vibrations in his bones, and then as the blast left his arm, the feedback started.
His fingers had bent backwards, and every bone in his hand had broken as the cascading effect traveled from the emitters backwards. Then the vibrations had torn through his arm, shattering the bones of his forearm, then his elbow. The feedback had been so powerful that his arm had been slung backwards; the force of it had ripped his arm out of the shoulder socket with such strength that it had broken his right collarbone. The feedback had then moved further, now diminished, but still powerful enough to crack the top of his ribcage and send small bone fragments to pierce his lungs.
The violent feedback had thrown him spinning to the floor in agony, which he’d hit with his back. He’d had the strength to look at his mangled arm before he blacked out—there had been bones sticking out of it and blood flowing freely through the punctures in his skin. Fortunately for him, the Empire’s medical technology had advanced far enough that he hadn’t needed to spend the rest of his life with one arm. He’d spent the next six months unconscious in a healing tank, as medical nanites worked tirelessly to regrow and rebuild his arm. This was aided by another psionic that he’d gotten access to unconsciously, as his body had tried to heal itself: vitakinesis—the ability to accelerate and guide his body’s healing processes. But even with that, it hadn’t been an easy endeavor. On the upside, his blast had cracked the pressure plate and sent the measuring device smashing into the wall, which he’d found out six months later when he’d finally awoken.
Thankfully, the time he’d spent in the tank hadn’t been wasted. Long before he’d gained psionics, he had developed another ability, what he called mind space. It was born from the unique interactions between his brain and his implant, which had at the time been experimental. The ability allowed him to retreat inside his own mind, where time moved at a different pace than that outside, which gave him the chance to shadow train his martial arts well ahead of anyone else in the Empire. What he learned and trained inside transferred over into the waking world, because Adrian had complete control over his body. There was very little that his mind did that he was not aware of or able to control in some way. He could use the full strength of his body without the limits that the brain unconsciously put on it. He didn’t need muscle memory when he could execute any movement exactly as he imagined it.
His hospitalization had given him years of training and self-reflection. There was more to it than just the ability to shadow train. He could relive old memories, refresh pathways in his brain leading to memories long forgotten. Although, ever since his brain had been altered and he’d gained psionics, the memories were easier to reach, and didn’t fade away as quickly as they once had once he left mind space. And no longer did he need to have his implant and Iris, his AI, take control of his body’s functions when he was inside. His mind now had the capacity to do both.
After they’d gained access to the sphere and the knowledge of the People, Adrian had lost days trying to find any information on his ability. But in the end, he couldn’t find anything; the People had had nothing like mind space, which to Adrian suggested that it was an ability that was born out of the human evolutionary path. There was a lot of evidence in the data that suggested that human imagination was more developed than that of the People. Mind space might just be the next evolutionary step from that.