The laptop was a sturdy thing, with a case made of grey plastic. I unwrapped the charging cable that came with it and plugged it into the wall and skimmed over the startup instructions. I'd never had a new computer before, and I didn't want to screw it up. Carefully, I went through the stages the manual described, letting the operating system load up and then setting up my account. I didn't add the glow until the laptop had popped up a dialog box saying that the initial setup was complete. I didn't want to risk screwing it up. I didn't have the money for another laptop.

Once I was sure that the computer had settled, I called up the glow and sent it streaming into the circuits. There was the same rush of connection as before, but this computer felt… different to the one in the study. Smaller, but… cleaner. Younger. It made sense, I guessed. The home computer had had years of stuff piling up, whereas this one was a clean slate.

The first thing I did was set up a password, and find a free antivirus and firewall which didn't have too many bad reviews. Once the programs were downloaded, I took a peek through the code - it was easy to find, thanks to the glow feeding me any information I asked for - and what I saw disgusted me. They were like swiss cheese! How did they get off marketing these pieces of garbage? I knew next to nothing about programming, but with my power doing the interpretation I could see the holes. I could probably get through this in seconds if I wanted to.

I grimaced. I couldn't leave what would soon be a vital piece of equipment this vulnerable. I didn't know how to patch up the holes, though. It was the difference between seeing that a wall had been knocked down and how to lay new bricks.

So I hit the internet.

Mr. Gladly had spent a lesson a while back talking about the impact of contact with Earth discussion had been as sparse and fantastically unproductive as ever, but one thing that had come out of it was the fact that on Aleph the internet was much more developed and used for far more things than here on Earth Bet. Bet's internet wasn't nearly as all-encompassing as Aleph's, and in particular it tended to be used less for leisure and entertainment and more for professional or academic reasons or discussion. An upshot of this was that it was actually quite easy to get my hands on a set of PDFs on programming for free off of a university website.

Their size was intimidating at first, but as I sat back on my bed and started reading through them, the concepts they were explaining just seemed to click. It wasn't that I just absorbed the knowledge somehow, but rather that they just made sense. I could see what the writer was talking about and understood, and with understanding what would have been a dry and difficult read became far easier and actually quite engaging. By the time I'd got halfway through, I was beginning to see some nice ways I could apply what I was reading about. By the time I was finished I was sketching out mindmaps in the air.

I finished, then glanced up at the spidery scrawls floating above my bed. I hadn't been able to do that before. I hadn't really been able to do more than make vague shapes. On the other hand, it wasn't like I had really tried to write with the glow either. I chewed my lip, calling out a little ball of the glow and trying to form it into words. It did so easily, spelling out Hello World in my own handwriting.

My own… handwriting.

Could that be it? The rest of the mindmap was the same. If it wasn't for it being floating and written in the glow, I could have scribbled it down with a pen. Maybe it took its cues from me, like it took them from the computer when it was linked to it, which raised a question. The glow could change colour, and it could evidently do small details….

I opened up a second window in my PDF reader, then moved the window outside of the screen, imagining it shifting onto another screen next to the laptop's. Motes of light flowed out of my hands and gathered into a flat plane. It shimmered with colour, then the PDF slipped onto it.

I held out a hand and mentally linked the 'screen' to it, then moved it. The screen followed the motion. I grinned. This was cool.

In another minute I had half a dozen documents open, and another set to scribble down ideas. Links and connections just came. It was actually kinda fun, and when I heard the car pulling into the drive it came as a shock that the afternoon had vanished so quickly. Pages upon pages of ideas, concepts and partially-completed programs hung in the air like a frozen whirlwind.

Quickly, I saved them to the laptop and disconnected it from the internet. I left some of the glow in it, though. I wanted to see how long the enhancement would last. I stowed the computer under my bed and went out to the top of the stairs to say hello to Dad. He looked exhausted, and when I greeted him he didn't have much to say beyond an anaemic 'Hi, Taylor, how was your day?'I left him to brew his coffee and went back upstairs.

XxXxX

It was three weeks until Christmas came but to me, they felt like months. There was just so much going on and that I had to do.

Firstly, there were my studies. With my powers' help I was a better student than I had ever been, but there was something to be said for having an actual teacher there in front of you. Even teachers as shitty as those at Winslow had something that instructional videos and online textbooks and papers didn't.

Something I'd found as I diversified from studying programming into other subjects was that not everything was equally easy. Programming and maths were the easiest, to the point that I could practically do them in my head. I could finally understand what mathematicians meant when they talked about the beauty of numbers or how mathematics was the 'handwriting of God'. Programming was more a case of thinking of clever ways to apply simple concepts, and the complexity I could handle in that respect, along with the ability to make use of a dedicated supercomputer meant that I advanced quickly.

The more distant the subject was from those 'hard' ones, though, the slower the going. Engineering and physics were easier than chemistry, which was easier than biology. By the time I got to the social sciences, there were just so many different variables that I simply couldn't model it mentally the way I could the harder sciences. I could still learn, though, so I persevered.

I did have a life outside of my studies, though. A week and a half before Christmas I set up a website with free download links a few miscellaneous programs I'd cooked up. There wasn't anything groundbreaking there – a streamlined word processor with a few nice features, a spreadsheet-maker and version 0.5 of my antivirus, which lacked the adaptive software – but there didn't need to be. The site was meant as a proof-of-concept more than anything. I'd advertised informally on a few forums, including the 'Corporate' board of Parahumans Online and I'd had a couple hundred downloads by the end of the second week. I'd had no real negative comments, and there were more than a few good reviews that people had made. I was rather pleased with the whole thing.

I'd taken up running in the mornings as well, and I was immeasurably glad for the part of my power that allowed me to ignore the cold of winter in the Bay. We almost never had snow or even really frost in Brockton, but that didn't mean it wasn't cold enough in the mornings for breath to mist in the air and to nip at fingers, ears and noses. It did me good. I was pretty sure that I shouldn't have been getting rid of my pot-belly and building muscle at the rate I was, but that's powers for you. I even started to flesh out a little - just a little - in other areas. I was more than a little happy with that.

Christmas itself was a quiet affair, as the previous one had been. Mom used to make a massive thing out of the holiday, but Dad and I didn't really seem to have the will without her. Still, we both made an effort, dragging the plastic tree out of the attic and buying each other a few small presents. I got Dad a nice notebook and an aftershave set, while he bought me a small camera, a cheap cellphone - he'd got one for himself as well, as he didn't want something like the Cave to ever happen again (I didn't point out that I almost certainly wouldn't get any signal if it did) - and a ticket for a four-session self-defense course.

"You've been out and about recently," he said when I asked him why he got it "And if you're going to be wandering around the city I thought it'd be a good idea for you to know how to defend yourself."

And so it was that on January 3rd I headed into town, armed with a ticket and determined to test how far my learning-abilities extended into the physical side of things.

A/N: So, readers who came to this story before the 22nd of March 2018 may remember a character named Adrian. These memories are false. He does not exist and never did. The author did not retcon him out of existence because he had a better idea and Adrian annoyed him.

Also, because it's been pointed out to me that I just keep unveiling more things that Taylor's capable of, I'm going to address that. It's a part of one of the main themes which I want to explore in this fic, that of transhumanism. Dust is, fundamentally, a tool created to transcend the boundaries of what one is capable of, physically and mentally. It's a substance which uplifted a civilization to near-gods, and while Taylor certainly won't be omnipotent, a part of the drama of Samyaza is going to be to do with her dealing with the separation from other people that her abilities engender. Most parahumans are separated in one specific area - they're physically superior, can figure things out that others can't, they can shoot laser beams etc. In almost all cases, however, these differences are, for lack of a better word, discrete. They're this thing and nothing else. That's not so much the case for this Taylor. Pretty much everything that she does will eventually be touched by her Dust-given arete. On one hand, that's awesome. She'll be able to do better than almost anyone if she really tries. On the other hand, that's isolating. The push-and-pull between humanity and transhumanity is going to be a major element of the story, and Adrian's character is going to be a part of that.