Spider facts!

  Category: Anatomy/Physiology

  Subcategory: Vasculature/Hematology

  We ‘higher level’ creatures often take for granted our many advantages, such as our closed circulatory system and highly efficient hemoglobin. These factors greatly enhance the transport of oxygen and to a lesser extent carbon dioxide, increasing our endurance. Spiders do have a limited number of major blood vessels, but much of the distribution of hemolymph (the blood) flows in an open circulatory system with direct exposure to the organs. The hemolymph contains hemocyanin, a somewhat less efficient corollary for human hemoglobin which gives spider blood a blue color when exposed to air.

  The rat hesitated, then continued its meal. Jon politely waited for it to finish eating. He listened to Zach rattling on about the spider’s circulatory system to pass the time. He kept waiting for it to finally admit defeat, and grew increasingly impressed as the rat managed to scrape the whole limb clean over the next several minutes.

  If someone had asked, Jon would have guessed the forearm had weighed twenty or thirty kilograms. Admittedly, some of that was bone, but still. The rat in front of him was maybe half a kilogram from its appearance.

  Jon had asked himself where the rat was putting it all earlier, but now he pondered the question more seriously. It wasn’t like the rat was deceptively dense, he had felt its weight when he picked it up. He found himself wondering if the rat had a spacial storage ability; maybe the rat somehow converted the mass directly to energy as it ate?

  For that matter, Jon wondered what had happened to the bunnies he had eaten. It wasn’t like he could expect this new body to have normal physiology, he was way too large to be plausible back on Earth, and he still felt empty, hungry. He had felt that way even as he finished the fourth bunny.

  The rat paused again, and looked up at him. Its little whiskers twitched, and its tail whipped back and forth in an agitated manner. It hopped down, then scurried over, stopping just in front of Jon. It closed its eyes, concentrating.

  The thoughts from the rat were not easily interpreted. The emotions were plain, with the rat’s irritation evident both from its body language and its message. The closest Jon could come to explaining it was he “vibed” what the rat meant. It was similar to the feeling you had when you realized someone was in complete agreement with you, like you could finish their next sentence.

  The first bit of its message was a demand that he stop being so loud while it was trying to eat. It was apparently getting some of Zach’s lecture over the mental link.

  The second component of its message was tinged with a bit of envy, or jealousy, but also curiosity. The rat was wondering why he was letting all the perfectly good-tasty energy leak out of him like that. He briefly saw a picture of himself outlined in faint white light, wisps slowly escaping from his lower abdomen. The feelings communicated were like the rat was watching him buy a Rolex, then smash it with a hammer. Jealousy, mild outrage, puzzlement.

  Jon was confused, and the rat gave him an exasperated look. The look was followed by the telepathic equivalent of a point. The rat supplied an image along with the prompt, and Jon began to visualize his internal organs and blood flow.

  As Jon followed the rat’s direction, he noticed a well of energy radiating from his abdomen in this new inner sight. It pulsed with his heart beat, steady and strong, and was suffusing the blood vessels throughout his body. Jon supposed he should refer to the blood as hemolymph, the term Jon had just learned from one of Zach’s little lectures.

  Zach’s description of spider blood vessels from earth made them sound fairly primitive. Assuming Jon’s internal vision was accurate, it appeared that held true here as well. He noticed that with each breath he took, the energy seemed to diffuse slightly from each of the orifices leading to his respiratory tract.

  As he felt the energy, Jon had a vague sense that he could guide it to do a number of things.

  He could use it to heal defects in his body, as he had done subconsciously while he ate. Jon could also use it to restore the mental energy he expended in his pulses, which he had done as he slept; in fact, his well of mental energy felt deeper than it had when he first noticed it in the caverns.

  Jon also felt he could use this new energy to modify his body.

  He felt a sense of warning from this last option: the changes he made to his body would take at least as much energy to undo as they took to create. There was no guarantee that modifying himself would make him more effective. Given Jon had already restored himself as much as he could, the options boiled down to modifying himself or letting the energy go to waste.

  Jon made a decision, and began reaching out to the energy. It was time to make some improvements.

  There was a buzz in Jon’s mind. It was as though something had been waiting for his decision, and it had sensed his resolve. The energy began pushing against his mind, and he felt flashes of inspiration beginning to coalesce. When he focused, Jon could see three distinct routes he could take, and two others that flickered and faded.

  Concentrating on the three steady routes was easy to do, and when Jon focused on the first he received a clear image of spider silk. Turning to the second route, he saw an image of himself jumping. Looking at the third, he felt the psychic waves pushing back from a spot at the back of his brain, waiting for him to improve it. If he concentrated longer on any one of the routes, he felt like he was passing some point of no return, inspiration rushing to him and leaving him feeling like understanding was just out of reach. It was the same sensation as having something on the tip of your tongue, or almost recalling a lyric but not quite managing it.

  When Jon really tried, he could get the two flickering routes to hold for a few moments. After several attempts, he received the image from each: the first of the flickering options was to modify his venom glands, and the second was to modify his sensory organs. At first he couldn’t quite tell which sense would be changed, then he finally got a picture of an eyeball, so he assumed it was vision. This assumption was challenged a second later though, when the image changed to zoom in on one of the hairs coating his body.

  Jon knew some video games had challenges which unlocked hidden features. This place obviously wasn’t a video game, but he wondered if the flickering paths were the ‘hard’ upgrades, and would yield better results. He focused as hard as he could on the venom option, since it seemed slightly more attainable than the sensory one.

  Jon knew a fair amount about poisons and venom. He had been a physician, which gave him a leg up over most people. Even among physicians he felt like he was very well informed. The qualifying exams in his specialty had focused on emergency management of many different toxins, which required a good understanding of how the poisons worked and how to counteract them. He was especially proficient in dealing with opioid overdoses, since his area had been in an addiction crisis for the better part of three decades. The sub-specialty palliative training had only added to this expertise.

  As Jon had these thoughts, his brain began moving into overdrive, and the flickering path with the venom gland on it came into clearer focus. It began giving him options: add a methyl group here, modify this aromatic ring’s conformation...it went on and on. There were a dizzying number of physical modifications he could make to the venom, and then magical options began appearing too. Jon couldn’t make sense of them, and he felt his head beginning to ache as he processed all the information.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Jon abandoned the venom path. He knew just enough to be dangerous here. A small change might feel innocuous, but even changing the conformation of a single component of a compound could have massive implications on its effectiveness. He knew the structural differences between morphine, fentanyl and carfentanyl looked unimpressive at first glance, but very minor modifications caused several thousand fold differences in potency by weight. A tiny change to a drug could render it unable to cross the blood-brain barrier, which might make his venom useless.

  No, better not to touch that stuff. Jon briefly considered trying to make a custom modification of his own, perhaps to his neurons or his carapace, and got struck with a blinding headache a moment later.

  That pain was a warning: don’t fuck with this unless you know what you’re doing. Jon decided to give up on the challenge mode. Even if there was some sort of reward, it wasn’t worth the risk.

  He moved back to the three easy routes: he could improve his silk, jumps, or psychic attacks.

  The silk path gave him a sense of two options. The first was to increase the quantity of silk he could make in a short period of time. The second was to modify the types of silk he could produce.

  Jon only had a basic understanding of how spider silk worked. It had come up during a biochemistry lesson he had as a sophomore in college. From that lesson, he knew spiders could store a lot more silk than you would think.

  They had evolved specialized proteins and sugars which made up the silk. This protein mix could be stored in a liquid form that looked like a little helix under powerful microscopes. Jon had been greatly amused to learn this liquid was called ‘dope,’ and that little factoid was half the reason he remembered any of this. When the spiders spun the dope out, it turned into rigid sheets and became the threads that bothered you when you hiked in the morning. Jon didn’t really understand how this conversion from liquid to solid worked, but gathered it was something triggered by pulling on the threads and exposing the silk to water in the air. He was actively suppressing a relevant spiderfact as he had these thoughts, and decided to listen to it later.

  The option for quantity of silk seemed to optimize the way the silk was stored in the liquid dope, tightening the helices and allowing more silk to be stored and deposited in short order. If he went this route, he might be able to modify his silk for combat, lassoing opponents or tangling them up on the fly. Some spiders did just this, spitting silk onto their opponents until they fell down then biting them.

  The option for different silk types took a slightly different approach, and would let him modify the types and quantities of different proteins and carbohydrates that made up the silk. He would get more options for different elasticity, stickiness, and visibility of the silk. Jon was somewhat at a loss of how to use this to help him survive, but he had a feeling he might get a haptic buzz to explain things if he pursued the different silk types.

  The second route, his jumps, seemed a little more straight forward than the silk. It would let him choose to jump faster and further, or more to jump more accurately. The accuracy modification came down to optimizing the connections between the nerves in charge of his vision and the nerves that coordinated his movements. By smoothing out these connections, there would be a shorter lag time, and he could hit more accurately.

  The power option felt significantly more complicated than the timing option. It would reinforce his muscles, but it mostly optimized a hydraulic pump to his legs. Zach had just started talking about this when the rat finished eating, which was fortunate. The gist was that when jumping spiders leapt, they actually squeezed hemolymph from their body into their legs. This stiffened the legs like little pistons and fired the spider at its prey.

  The modification would empower the musculature of his legs, but it really focused on the muscles in his blood vessels and chest. Squeezing these muscles would drive the hemolymph into his legs. The modification would also make the openings the hemolymph traveled through slightly wider as well. More hemolymph in a shorter period of time meant more acceleration, which meant more power and speed in the jumps.

  The last route he could take, improving the psionic powers, felt the most alien to Jon. There were earthly correlates for the other abilities, but as far as Jon knew, spiders on earth couldn’t perform psychic attacks. Well, besides being fucking horrifying.

  The psychic powers were strange. Ever since the first attack on the bunnies, Jon felt like a new sense had arisen. He could feel the minds around him. It was what put him so on edge back on the first plateau. He hadn’t sensed the clawed predator that hit the rock mimic and the cherub from the bushes, but he had noticed the chipmunk’s presence. That wasn’t quite right: he had known something was there, but he had no idea what it was until he saw it from the cliff face.

  Between the mind sense, his tremor sense, his near panoptic vision, and the sensitive hairs all over his body, Jon had a lot of tools to detect his surroundings. It was probably the main reason he was still alive. If that cherub had impaled him, he would have been done.

  There was also the feeling he got when he actually made an attack with the psychic energy. He got some sort of feedback from all the minds he contacted. It wasn’t quite mind reading, it was more like brief impressions of the thoughts, feelings and immediate actions the creature was planning to take. Jon was not going to get childhood memories from his targets, but he had noticed the grief from the bunnies for their fallen companions. He had also felt their movements like they were his own. He could tell exactly what they were about to do. Well, what they were about to do before he flooded their nerves with psychic energy and caused the seizures.

  The attack itself was also a bit of a mystery. Jon couldn’t tell why it was so effective on the bunnies, but comparatively weak against the cherub. He had hit the cherub harder with less results.

  Jon shook off these tangential thoughts, concentrating again on the possible upgrades to his psychic energy.

  Again, there were two options. He could either increase the power of the pulses, or he could enhance his control of the brain region that commanded them. The increase in power felt like it also came with an increase in his reserves, allowing more attacks between rests. The increased control felt like it came with improved sensitivity to psychic energy. This might let him read his opponents better.

  Jon very much wished he knew what went into making the pulses, as understanding how things worked seemed to influence his options. He supposed that was too much to ask from a spiderfact.

  When Jon traced the energy with his inner sight, he felt it gathering in a set of nerves behind his eyes. There was another bundle of nerves just below his esophagus, but it had little of the psychic energy. He guessed that bundle was more for the legs, as it had been part of the option to upgrade his jumping.

  For lack of a better term, Jon decided he was going to call the region in charge of his psionic attacks the psionic pulse generator. The area within the pulse generator that gathered his psychic energy could be called the reservoir.

  As Jon pondered all these things for a few more minutes, his rodent friend had gone back to gnawing the bear limb. It had separated the remaining pieces of bone and started working on the cartilage after it grew bored of staring at Jon. The rat would pause now and again and stare at Jon with its beady eyes before turning back to devour some other remaining morsel.

  Jon had given thought to all his possible options at this point, and he decided to eliminate silk production. It was very versatile, but he felt like it would take time and stability he didn’t have to use it properly. The new silk types would be a gamble, and might be useless to him without making some sort of lair.

  He had not forgotten he still had the equipment from the I.O.U. to find, and Jon knew he had to do some more wandering before he could even consider settling down. Higher quantities of silk would be nice, and might allow him new strategies for attacking enemies or surprising them. However, Jon seriously doubted something like the cherub would be slowed down by any webbing he could currently produce.

  When he weighed upgrading his jumps versus his psionic abilities, he realized both had likely saved his life twice so far. Jon had killed one bunny and dodged multiple attacks with his jumps, and he would never have survived the cherub’s ambush without the jumps either. The psionic ability had stunned his final two rabbit opponents, and the psychic attack against the cherub had been the only reason he ultimately escaped its assault.

  Thinking through both options though, Jon thought he saw a clear winner for his immediate needs. He wanted better psionics. His jump would ultimately have failed him against both groups if he had not had the surprise psionic assault. Jumping was clearly critical for him in the long run, it was a core function of a jumping spider, but right now his priority was the attack his enemies seemed most vulnerable to. Beyond this, Jon also sensed the magical ability could do more than simple stunning attacks.

  With this in mind, he made his choice, and went to work with the energy still circulating brightly in his arteries. Having more power or a deeper pool would be great, but having more uses a day did not feel like it would make such a huge difference. Even if it caused a seizure in a creature like the cherub, he had no means of taking advantage of this. The creatures were too tough. He needed new tricks, and better use of the existing power. He needed to sense his opponents before they ever knew he was there. He would be going for the control option.