The alien mass shifted inside your body with every step, changing the rhythm of your pace. The standard sine waves of force on your body from you walking shifting into a complex wave. Uneven weight distribution and force exerted, center of mass no longer stable. Unacceptable.
Unacceptable.
Unacceptable.
Unaccepta- wait. You correct your Impeller slightly, change the activation thresholds for the layers cradling your Internal organs and then take another step. Your Impeller holds your stomach firm and you twist your torso around and back to test some more. Not optimal, even though your organs no longer shifted against each other, the food was still compressible and would change in properties under high pressure, shifting in phase and thus volume. However, as you could ingest around three kilograms of extra mass at maximum, the disturbance should be only moderate at worst.
Even then however, you need to find some way of ridding yourself this encumbrance over time. Your digestive system still worked. You think so anyway, it had been awhile since you last used it. It is slower than just shifting the mass into storage and stripping away all the necessary nutrients manually, but it's a natural function of your body that wouldn't take any concentration to run.
…Now how do you turn it on? Maybe-
Ba-bump
You twitch.
Ba-bump
An itch builds up in your throat and a pressure in your chest.
Ba-bump
Your mouth opens involuntarily and sucks in a huge breath of air.
Ba-bump
Muscles all over your body twitch minutely as blood vessels expand under pressure, before contracting again as the pressure relents. You can feel the pressure wave of blood moving through your body along arteries and flooding into smaller vessels.
Heart- heartbeat and breathing. Cardiovascular and respiratory systems. This isn't an intended effect of activating your digestive system.
Exhale. Your chest deflates and air rushes out, up your trachea and into your mouth and nose, whistling over your tongue and past your teeth. Inhale. The same but in reverse. This is nothing like talking, not measured or voluntary-
Compared to circulating and oxygenating your blood with your Impeller, this is loud and irregular. You try to isolate the two systems and shut them down but find the involuntary systems of your body annoying interconnected.
…
Normal people live like this. You should be able to adapt but…
You extend a heavy particle projector and aim it at an arbitrary point, extending your arm parallel to it.
Breath in. Heartbeat. Heartbeat. Breath out. Heartbeat. Heartbeat. Breath in. Heartbeat. Heartbeat. Breath out. Heartbeat. Heartbeat. Breath in. Heartbeat. Heartbeat. Breath out.
Your neck muscles twitch minutely every single heartbeat. Your arms tremble as muscles quiver, shifting then overcompensating to return to their previous positions thanks to the irregular supply of oxygenated blood. Every breath distorted the shape of your torso, widening your shoulders and lifting them, changing the arch of your spine. Your Impeller shifts along with your body, conforming with its changing shape. You could compensate but that would defeat the purpose of this test.
One respiratory cycle every three seconds, one heartbeat every three quarters a second. Sample size over three seconds.
Mean deviation from intended bearing for your arm is nineteen arc seconds. For a target at one thousand kilometers, you would miss by ninety two meters on average. Heavy Particle Projector in independent configuration, zero point one five arc seconds, average deviation from target at one thousand kilometers is seventy three centimeters. An uncertainty area almost ten times greater than what you could achieve without your involuntary functions.
Change test goal, 3 arbitrary bearings selected.
You bring your arm to bear on each target in turn and shift your projector to do the same.
Time taken to focus on targets until deviation reaches mean for arm; one hundred and fourteen milliseconds. Heavy Particle Projector, six milliseconds. Average time taken to acquire target increased by a factor of eight.
You shake your head in dismay at the news. In addition to the changes to your acceleration profile with the food in your stomach…
This is-
Unacceptable.
-still alright isn't it? You do not fight alone anymore and, with a nuclear reactor, the accuracy that was absolutely necessary for your energy budget is no longer one of your greatest priorities. Additionally, with the amazing breadth of data provided through the UN combat networks, the accuracy loss could be compensated if you expressed Durga to full.
A strange impression echoes from the corner of your mind that you recognised as Durga; confidence, reassurance and trust.
Don't lie to me you-
…Which is well and good speaking in terms of mitigating the downsides of activating your involuntary functions, but what benefits do they bring you?
You are not actually sure, you had initialised your digestive system to rid yourself of, or at least, more evenly distribute the weight of the food in your stomach. These additional involuntary functions, all of which can be better fulfilled through the use of your Impeller, are completely unintended side effects.
-Do other normal things-
Hm. Did this count as normal? Should you even be listening to those messages?
…
-!!
Well for the moment, you shut down all these unnecessary functions and eject the food to your storage space after a moment of concentration. You make a note to consider the issue in further detail later and turn to meet Instructor Meyer.
