Caliban Strikes

He stood at the distance limit. The path to Victory remained mapped in three dimensions at the edge of his perception. A deep, instinctual routine caught something he didn’t consciously identify until seconds later - the click of a metal blade. That can’t have been all, warning signs must have been building in the background for some time, for that to trigger such a response. No matter. To business.

It started long before these thoughts arose. How fast can a hominid accelerate? A typical Caliban thigh can drive 4800N of force down a shin bone. Among naked broodsibs of his, on hard surfaces, they had found the limits in the shear strength of the skin on the soles of the feet (2.3 MPa), the static friction of skin on soil (0.8 MPa) and the horizontal component of the force - 7.2 m/s² of lateral acceleration before the skin on the feet was expected to shear off entirely. But he was wearing leather boots with wide rubber soles, and the ground was soft beneath his feet. The soil would deform until it matched his force, affording him up to 12 m/s² of acceleration.

His natural gait and crouching position kept 55% of his body mass over his center of gravity, always pointing in the direction of Victory. Deep routines, isomorphic with his higher-level consciousness, triggered rapidly on stripped-back neural pathways - the muscles of his right leg were tensing at maximum capacity within 12ms (3ms to acknowledge the trigger, 9ms to travel the length of his lean body), long before any other parts had started to react. His center of mass started to drop into the first arc of a force-modulated ballistic trajectory.

The secondary commands to manage metabolism would come milliseconds later when he was already underway - for now all energy came from cellular phosphagen, enough to power thirty seconds of full acceleration. His muscle fibers would burn through their local ATP cache in controlled waves, each segment precisely timed to power the next phase of motion. As ATP depletion creates steep electrochemical gradients, oxygen cascades from dense myoglobin reserves into abundant mitochondria, where it drives electrons through the respiratory chain and ATP synthase, replenishing the cache with near-perfect chemiosmotic efficiency. The anaerobic regime will likely not be needed for this sprint, alveoli in the lungs already swelling, the circulatory system ramping up, ready to replace his overabundant blood oxygen as soon as it is depleted.

The muscles of his right leg were tensing at maximum capacity within 12ms, the vast array of mechanoreceptors in his enhanced quadriceps feeding constant position data back to his cerebellum. As the right leg drove into the ground like a piston, waves of compensatory tension rippled outward through his core - first the deep spinal erectors, then spreading laterally through the multifidus and transverse abdominis. Within 20ms his vestibular system had integrated the new body position, and his basal ganglia began orchestrating the precise sequence of trunk adjustments needed to align his mass. The stabilization cascade reached his left hip at 35ms, where proprioceptive feedback loops began fine-tuning ankle and toe position for optimal ground contact. By 50ms, his left leg’s motor units were recruiting in precise sequence, from deep to superficial, preparing for the next phase of acceleration.

As his mass dropped, distinct motor sequences cascaded through his upper body. His trapezius and anterior deltoids contracted asymmetrically, initiating a fluid shrug that would release the backpack’s catch mechanisms. The rod’s presence registered in his somatosensory map, secured against his left flank. His right arm swung as counterweight while his mass dropped to its lowest point in the arc, his fingers touched the ground for an instant, plucked in passing a small sliver of stone. As his center of mass rose smoothly, a wave of sympathetic activation rippled from his frontalis muscles through temporal fascia, from eyebrows and drawn-back lips to ears, down the dorsal neck where his hackles rose, along erector spinae in a continuous band to his sacrum where a tail should be - each fiber rising and singing with that ancient tension that meant death.

Within a quarter of a second, before his backpack had even hit the ground, he was at 60% of striking speed (around 37 kph), his bodyweight now 75% in front of his center of mass, falling like a satellite in low orbit. His hind leg had already delivered its targeting push and was pulling forward to overtake the fore, both hands clasped behind his back in a fluid counterbalance, the stone cold between them. His snarl escaped as his higher consciousness began to surface, face settling into placid calculation. Victory waited 25 meters ahead, just round the corner of a caravan.

His midbrain, without language but trained to mimic the higher orders with high accuracy, started looking for alternatives to the full sprint– possible trajectories under the caravan, between the wheels, whether or not to commit to full acceleration and hope two thrown objects would remedy the situation or to take the corner at cruising speed and interface head-on with the threat. A plan, images only, to take the faster route and bounce off a tree 5 meters past the expected point of visual contact, presented itself entire to the higher consciousness after the full second in which his mind had been absorbed managing the initial response, during which his ego had dissolved entirely in the effort of the entire sensorium to organize itself around acceleration.

“Okay,” the mind thought, or thought it thought, or was given the indulgence of being allowed to think after the impulse had been sent into the brainstem for processing, or (more likely than not), had been told to think after the lower orders had decided for it that the plan was a good one– in any case, as the word was taking its casual and totally superfluous journey through the auditory pathways, the body carefully pruned its trajectory. His peripheral vision, tuned for motion detection, tracked surface irregularities underfoot while his fovea locked onto the tree’s mass. The lower orders had deemed the threat subcritical, allowing his legs to cap at 80% of maximum sprint speed (47kph), just within the threshold of structural integrity. His mass beginning to shift from the knife-edge of falling into the gathering crouch that would control his rotation.

As he neared the edge of the caravan, he pulled the rod from his flank and his body began organizing the complex interplay of forces that would control his rotation in the air. His stone arm was already initiating its throw sequence, powered by pure spatial prediction. A small jump brought his lead foot and head forward together - when his right foot struck the ground, his shin flexed like a spring, loading energy for launch. His foot appeared around the edge first, striking precisely as his eyes cleared the caravan’s side. His body rotated horizontally around his momentarily fixed head position, most of the stone’s momentum already committed through his trunk rotation before his visual cortex had even registered the scene. The brief milliseconds between sight and release would allow only the finest targeting adjustments. His rod arm followed more conservatively, ready for contingencies. By the time his eyes resolved the situation, the stone was already whistling past his ear, his arm approaching maximum extension.

§

Meanwhile back at the ranch, the director pulled out his knife to cut angrily into a grapefruit after a particularly bitter argument with Victory, who was sitting across from him with the wide-eyed, presumptuous stare that a parrot might reserve for a beetle who crawled unannounced into her breakfast.

He was just reaching to pick up the grapefruit and raise his eyes to attempt another withering scowl when a foot appeared with a thump on the ground behind Victory and her pet beast cartwheeled through the air to land feet first with another godawful thump on the tree in front of the toilets. Somehow it hung there, both hands behind its back on the trunk, and glared with an ancient evil up at him. He suddenly reached behind his head and felt a small cut on the back of his neck, his fingers red with blood.

He stood up in outrage and started yelling about wild beasts at Victory who simply said “I recommend you drop the knife.” He looked stunned at his hand and threw it down on the table as if it burned him, at which point Hartcrane stepped down from the tree and pulled the steel rod out of the bark behind his back. The Caliban turned and walked back the way he came, while the director yelled “That fucking ape threw something at me! It threw a fucking razorblade at me or something, it cut my neck, I’m lucky that fucking gorilla didn’t decapitate me.” He said and then the shock of the fact of what he just said and how cooly Victory confirmed it with her small smile struck him in the belly, it was all he could do not to void his bowls as his legs collapsed from under him and he dropped back into his seat.

“That fucking ape would have decapitated me over a grapefruit,” he said in a small voice to himself as he stared into the beyond, heart hammering, while Caliban stood listening a few paces behind the caravan, composing himself, head bowed as he replayed the sequence.