It took a count of three for the situation to register in Hector's brain. "You're obviously not a vehicle," Hector observed.

"Philosophically, every human body is just a vehicle for us to experience the world," the Jinn replied. "More practically, though, I'm Rover Fred. At oh eight hundred hours tomorrow, I will become your direct superior in the chain of command. Welcome to Misfit Squad, Xian Hector."

Hector stood awkwardly beside the Jinn. "So… permission to come aboard?"

"Sleeping with the boss as soon as you meet him? I like the way you think, soldier."

A smile wormed its way onto Hector's face. The Jinn's sense of humor was reminiscent of his late father's. He jumped on top of the Rover and watched as an antenna popped up dramatically to quiver in the air above the frontal portion of Fred's frame.

"Easy does it, buddy, I barely touched you," Hector joked.

"It's just that you have such soft hands," Fred shot back.

"And you have buns of steel."

Fred cackled at the banter. "Here I worried a Xian might be the stuffy sort."

"I'm a dreamer."

"Same here," Fred confided. "I inherited a deep understanding of the nuclear decay process and experience turning that into a conceptual realm. War barges and gunboats typically have a couple guys with that background on board in case the fusion generators need maintenance. I'm powered by a whole bunch of plutonium two-thirty-eight divided among several different radioisotope thermoelectric generators. I tweak the decay rate with my realm to match generation and consumption rates as close as possible. Not bad for a fake Jinn, eh?"

Hector settled down on top of the Jinn Rover, using his pack as his pillow. "I think you get to call yourself a real Jinn if you upload into a computer."

"That's not how my friends born on Terra see it." Fred made a noise that sounded like he was clearing a non-existent throat. "The story is, I had a degenerative disease wasting my muscles away. The options were to pay for gene editing or pay for an electronic cognition unit. The price wasn't much different and my daddy had some money. Given a choice like that, why not pick the cool option, right? That's my thought, at least. So I uploaded.

"What I hadn't anticipated was a cognition unit didn't let you do much more than think and browse the internet. That led to me assembling a body out of local technology. Which is fine, I guess. Way below the standard of my dreams, of course. Still better than being a brain in a jar. To get the good stuff, though, I had to sign up with Promise City as a soldier. Now I've got my plutonium and guns and some serious armor. It's certainly more fun than wasting away in a hospital bed."

As he lay there, a number of possibly inappropriate questions came to mind. Hector hesitated only briefly before diving in. The only uploaded entity he'd ever met had been War Barge Kevin and the two of them were barely acquaintances. "Fred? What's it like having a mechanical body?"

A facsimile of laughter graced the night. "I imagine it would feel quite strange if I had a biological brain. The big difference isn't the physical form, believe it or not, but the mental hardware. Neural tissue can't compare to a cognition unit in terms of memory size, processing speed, mental focus, and recall accuracy. Adapting to new circumstances is as simple as thinking through it a couple of times. They added my sword arms a couple months back and five minutes later it was like they were always there."

Hector studied the side of the Rover, trying to spot the mentioned sword arms. There were several closed compartments that could potentially hide something of that sort. "Do you need sleep?"

"Oh, you're a twenty questions type of guy. Yeah, I sleep. Not as often or as long as a baseline human. If I had crazy money, I could set myself up to run on a cluster of cognition units. Then I could run memory consolidation operations on one while the rest stayed awake. Now let me satisfy my curiosity. What's your externality do? Is it a chaos bolt?"

"Transit sphere."

"No shit. Your choice or did you inherit that from the dreams?"

"It was from my dreams," Hector said. He had chosen it, but for reasons he didn't care to share with everyone he met.

"I'm a little jelly here, to be honest. You can hop around worlds all by yourself. In a body with a flesh antenna. I'd chase so much skirt they'd give me an honorary degree in clothing fashion."

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Hector scratched his head. "You know I've got to ask a follow-up question to that."

"Buddy, you better believe I still think about that stuff. There's no body function associated with the build up and release of urges, so my mental energy has nothing to fixate on but the idea of doing stuff. My disease started when I was in my awkward teen years, so I never got to have as much sex as I wanted. Well, I imagine no man ever truly has as much sex as he wants, but it was extra true for me. Good heavens did I try to make the most of what time I had, but the ladies aren't all that receptive to advances from a young man who already needs a walker to get around."

"You should have tried playing on their sympathies," Hector said.

"No shit, genius, that's the only reason I'm not a virgin." Fred's voice remained warm even as he made sarcastic digs. "Anyway, my turn to ask a question. What's your insight?"

"Chaotic emergence."

"Dude. Come on. Them are just words. Elaborate."

"I can pull cosmic energy out of chaos."

"Does that do any good? Where are you even going to find chaos?"

Hector laughed. "I pull it right through my externality."

"Aw, damn. That makes sense. Then the higher density from the primordial creates a nice gradient to push the energy to you. None of that silly aura flapping your kind does. Are you shooting up in levels like a rocket?"

"I have been a Xian for less than three years and I'm close to level six."

"Nice. I think. Is that good for your kind? It would be good for a Jinn."

"Very good for a Xian," Hector answered.

"Do you want the dirt on the rest of the team?" Fred didn't wait for an answer before continuing. "Other than us, we have two Titans and two Arahants. Six people makes a small squad, but we're Misfit Squad. Basically the people command didn't know what to do with. My wheels make me fast but I might struggle on a world that is mostly forested. A Xian could be a discipline nightmare. Titans eat too much. Our Arahants are listed as Savants."

"Titans eat too much?"

"Feeding them is a logistical problem," Fred clarified. "My logistical problem. Thank you, Central Command! I was worried that when I wasn't fighting against monsters that I might get bored. Fortunately now I can spend my downtime hunting for meat I can't eat."

"Misfit Squad." Hector tried out the name of their team. Despite the negative connotations inherent in the term, he liked it. They were an irregular military outfit. "What are Savants?"

"As I understand it, they're lame Sages."

"Lame Sages," he echoed. They started calling Evelyn a Sage when she was only level five, so it couldn't be as simple as the power of a soul. "Do they have weak insights?"

"The way I understand it, they have insights with unimpressive applications. I don't know that 'strong' or 'weak' applies to insights. Jinn don't do those. That's something I've always wanted to know, actually. What does it feel like to get an insight? Is it just an 'aha' moment or is it spiritual?"

Hector considered that for a little bit. He remembered the experience of Volithur's revelation quite well, how the blossoming knowledge had pushed everything out of his brain, leaving room only for the spectacularly beautiful insight. He also remembered the aftermath of that revelation when he woke up from the dream, how he felt such unassailable certainty in the truth of what he'd learned.

"Did you ever try mushrooms when you had a human body?"

"I'm still human, thank you very much, so my current form is a human body."

"Sorry."

"It's fine. Just know that the Jinn consider a comment like that hugely offensive. I'm not sure I get your point about mushrooms, though. I think my grandma used to make a soup that had them."

"I'm talking about psychedelics," Hector said.

"Guys with failing bodies don't typically take street drugs, buddy."

"Fair enough. Let's just say… when my insight arrived, the understanding came with an absolute conviction that it was right. I lost track of normal reality for a bit while I contemplated my own little corner of ultimate reality. It was awe inspiring."

"Interesting. Cognitive realms aren't anything like that. We study until we're experts in a very specific phenomenon, then learn a slight shift to the laws of physics that would be more favorable for certain applications. We push those understandings into our realm, layering the way things are and the way we wish things were on top of each other. Because our realm is detached from reality, we can make the rules be whatever we want."

"And you have the laws of radioactive decay in your realm."

"I have two overlapping models of physical interactions," Fred corrected. "It's, like, the easiest cognitive realm you can build. They used to train millions of people to do it before the days of big fusion. Now it's a niche application. Works out for a Rover built on an unempowered world, though."

Hector's attention snapped to a hefty woman trudging in their direction, doing her best to avoid stepping in the worst patches of mud. Her eyes met his the moment he turned her way, though they were two hundred meters apart.

"One of our two Arahants, I believe," Fred said.

"I am," she responded, almost shouting to be heard over the distance.

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