He goes to his lab on schedule. Everything there is normal, and he's pretty much forgotten his weird dream by the time he gets down to business.

His lab work is, as always, awesome. He zones way out, and it's like he stops being a conscious mind, and whatever he is instead is having a lot of fun. All that exists is him and the apparatus and his biology experiment, and the hours glide by like the guardrails on a highway when you're doing seventy and there's no traffic in sight.

Eventually he's done for the day. When he peels off the disposable gloves and drops them in the trash bin he … feels the gloves land? Some sort of unusual sensation happened anyway.

Wow, he just parsed some combination of sight and sound data as proprioceptive data. Brains: super weird. He picks up his pen and drops it on the table to see if it happens again.

All of Bruce's sensory information agrees the pen is hitting the table in an entirely normal fashion. Or is it? It's really hard to tell when you're suddenly focusing on something you've ignored, whether it's exactly the way it usually is or not.

Well, it isn't blatant enough to be worrying, anyway. He probably needs food or sleep or something, just on priors. He goes home and makes a sandwich and reads his journal subscriptions on his laptop for a while.

His sandwich is tasty in an entirely normal fashion and his journal reading is not suddenly synesthetic.

Probably for the best, cool though it would have been to suddenly come down with synaesthesia.

The next day sees him back in the lab again, portioning out marker antibodies by the microliter using one of those pipettes with the disposable tips. Assembling a tray of dozens of identical fiddly mixtures is half extremely boring, half relaxing.

When he goes to put the pipette down after the fiftieth little vial is done it sticks to his open hand, instead.

. . . ew? He didn't get anything on it, though. He tries grabbing it with his other glove and pulling it off.

It comes free readily enough, but feels more like magnetism than adhesion. Like his skin turned into a refrigerator magnet, and the pipette turned ferromagnetic.

Well that's neat. And confusing. He wonders if it happens every time. Can he stick the pipette to his hand and pull it off a few more times? Does it only stick to that hand, or to both? 

It sticks again to the same hand, maybe not as strongly. While he's paying attention to that process he can notice that there is a sensation that seems to change with the distance the pipette is from his hand.

The other hand does not do the same thing but there's something else when the pipette touches it, a feeling a little like the one when you touch a part of yourself that's numb, but not all that much so.

That sensation is probably imaginary; he sets the pipette on the table and tests whether he can tell, with his eyes shut, when his hand is directly over it. Also, can he make it jump to his hand from the table like a real magnet?

With his eyes shut he can feel something that definitely varies with which direction the pipette is from his hand, regardless of whether it's nearby. When he gets closer to it he can also feel the attractive force, which seems to be acting on his skin.

Studying this sensation makes it clearer, more than just attention but like there's more of the things that make it up to be available. It's on his skin, and his skin is attached in an entirely natural way to muscles and blood vessels and fat. It's on these parts of the surface of the pipette, and those are of a very tidily uniform substance, and now he can not-see the entire shape of that part of the assembly…

Moving his hand near the pipette makes it wiggle on the table; it's not a very strong not-magnet. But something very mentally close to the sensation that is not the force affords manipulation, and there is something natural and obvious that is pulling that makes it jump solidly into his hand (and tug firmly against his skin and muscle like suction).

Did . . . he just do a telekinesis? That's so nuts. Or he's convincing himself it was more impressive than it actually was. He takes out his phone and tries to get a video of himself doing it a couple times from a couple different angles.

He can repeat these actions and capture them on video!

Insofar as he pays attention to it, the direct comprehension of the anatomy of his hand (and to a lesser extent, the pipette) spreads to a larger volume.

Being aware of his own anatomy is really cool. He can feel his tendons pulling on his fingers and it's intuitively obvious why making a fist causes his fingers to curl at the angle they do! He can feel all his tiny bones and how well they fit together and move smoothly past each other! He can also feel how his fingernails extend farther under the skin of his fingers than it looks like they really ought to and that's kind of fucked up but still really neat. Even if he's just vividly imagining all of this because of his mental model of anatomy, and at this point it's super unclear what he is and isn't imagining.

Can he use this awareness to do anything, he wonders. What if he tries to mentally push some blood out of this one fingertip, while filming it as a check on his eyes. Can he make it get paler? 

He can easily squish around coarse volumes of his fingertip and cause all sorts of pressure gradients, some of which have that visible effect! Trying to single out the blood in particular is more elusive, diving into fine details of strange new sensory data, like he can see the wind but he's trying to catch debris flung about in a hurricane and he hasn't learned how to predict the gusts or grown enough arms yet.

Maybe it will get easier with practice! (And maybe if he accumulates enough data he'll find a hypothesis hidden in the packaging.) He keeps introspecting on his hand the whole walk back to his dorm, navigating by habit and putting his actual attention towards the unexplained phenomenon. He starts trying to make his left middle fingernail grow faster than all the others; he's not expecting results there on the scale of today but it's worth starting now. He also focuses on just perceiving, trying to predict how it will feel to turn his hand this way or that way.

There is not an obvious way to make his fingernail grow. Tug it outward, sure, but not grow.

If he's paying attention at all to things other than his hand then it makes the awareness spread further up his arm, faster with more attention. If he tried he might be able to spread it to his entire body before he reaches his room. If he wants that to happen and can avoid colliding with any lampposts or fellow students while he's busy thinking.

He totally wants to spread it to his whole body!

His heartbeat is incredibly distracting, he hopes he can either turn this off and back on or get used to it or it's going to keep him awake tonight.

He has an entire skeleton inside him!

He totally just walked into a lamppost but in his new ability's defense that wasn't the first time.

It doesn't really give him any senses for what the various parts are doing except on a purely mechanical level — he can't detect nerves firing or what his less muscular organs are doing, but he can pick out every single one of his muscles and the forces they exert on his skin and his joints, and his heartbeats send waves of pressure through his blood vessels. He can vaguely detect the new bruise he just got — bit redundant with the pain, though.

At some point he should go to that distant foreign land, the fitness center, and see what happens when he exerts his muscles. Actually, he can do that with pushups when he gets home.

It's kind of too bad he can't feel his neurons firing, though given that presumably this sense is made of neurons firing that would be messily recursive.

He manages to make it home without any further lamppost encounters because you always get one random encounter per trip regardless of travel time, and when he gets there he tries some pushups in the just-barely-large-enough space between the bookshelf under his bed and the bookshelf under his desk.

He can learn more about his anatomy! And the floor material under his hands!

Woah! He picked up a sense of the floor way faster than he did with the pipette, or else noticed it faster because he accepts that it's happening now. He still doesn't have anything shaped like an explanation, but now he wants to try more things. What does he have at a convenient-seeming level of complexity? His laptop is probably hard-mode and also he'd be too scared to poke at it, but how about his desk chair? Can he feel the wheels and their mechanism if he sits in it long enough and concentrates?

Proper focus and directing his attention to his fundament can reveal to him the massive complexities of — the fibers that make up his jeans where they're between his skin and the chair! He can't exactly sense the individual fibers and how they are woven together but there's something like that in the way they feel to him.

Accidentally perceiving things with his ass is not the kind of problem he was expecting to have yesterday! Can he do it via his hands on the chair arms?

Foam rubber padding is also pretty complicated. But the steel structure just under the paint is simple, with only a grain structure, and it just feels easy; the volume he — senses, has-in-his-mental-grasp, whatever — grows much faster than with anything else he's tried on purpose so far. He can apprehend the structural parts of the chair in a few minutes.

Okay he was going to try to scoot the chair around with his mind Professor X style but actually now that he has a metaphorical hold of this steel he has a different cool idea. He grabs a steel key off his carabiner and brain-acquires that too and tries to make it a magnet.

Doing the thing he did before makes it want to stick to his hand like the thing he did before.

It sure does and that's also great, but can he make it a literal magnet and pick up a paperclip with it?

Not by thinking 'magnet' at it. He will have to figure out what he can do with these unlabeled high-dimensional mental controls.

He does some internet research on what exactly being a magnet means on the subatomic level, then tries to get his perception as small-scale as possible.

The crystal structure of the metal is obvious, but only as a sort of texture; individual atoms, and magnetic domains, elude him.

Yeah, that was a long shot. Back to trying to scoot the chair around with him on it?

He can make the chair make creaking noises as its structure is stressed. He can push himself off the chair. If there's a “reactionless drive” mode, he hasn't found it.

He messes around with the key some more, trying to get a feel for all the things he can do on an object it's probably safe to do them on (he has a copy of the key). He can still do the thing where it sticks to his hand, so what if he tries to do the same thing backwards? He aims his hand at the wall with the key stuck to it and tries to stop doing the sticky thing all of a sudden and deliberately overcorrect. Can he yeet the key away from his hand?

The key is firmly yote! It leaves a tiny dent in the wall and falls to the floor.

Also it's still being pushed away; he can feel a force on his hand and feel it in his sense of what the key's touching, too.

Oh, that's neat, he's still interacting with it at this distance! He keeps doing the thing he's doing, or trying to anyway, and examines the sensation. How much pressure is there? Is the direction of the pressure on his hand at all related to the angle he holds it at or have Newton's laws just totally gone out to lunch?

It's not a pressure against his skin; it wants to move his entire hand like gravity, and it's directly away from wherever the key is (which correspondingly shifts against the floor a bit as he moves it around).

There is definitely some way to turn this setup into a cool-ass spaceship, assuming it's replicable and persistent and not an artifact of his having gone completely fucking bananacrackers. He needs to get a Newton meter.

What happens if he pushes gently but steadily against the pressure, trying to bring his hand closer to the key?

It increases as he gets closer to the key, but not all that much for a force that can be felt that far away, though it's enough to make the key skid along some more as he gets in arm's reach of it. Also there's maybe another sensation.

He stops to check out the new sensation. Where is it in space? Is it coming through any of his preexisting senses, or is it another new form of qualia? Is it constant with time or is it moving or changing at all?

It is broadly in his hand — and the key. It kind of feels like pressure or like warmth but not actually either of those. It seems to increase the closer his hand is to the key, and decrease away from it, and stay the same if nothing is moving.

He should make up names for all these qualia and phenomena, and write down everything he's been doing so far. Turn his screwing around into science, and whatnot. He tries to stop doing what he's been doing, in the hope that that will detach the key from his hand so he can write without dragging it around under his desk.

The thing that pulls or pushes the key is readily — erased, returned to its natural, or at least previous, state.

The pressure-warmth-sensation stops changing with distance.

Then he can take some notes, extremely detailed ones, with everything he remembers and notes on where he's more or less confident in the accuracy of his memory, the predictions he's made and how they've turned out, and made-up words for all the new sensations he can feel and actions he can take.

Then he goes back to playing with the key. Can he get it directly back into the state it was in before releasing it without picking it up first, or does he need to stick it to his hand and fling it again?

Combining what it was like to fling the key with how it felt at a distance, yes, but it's just as easy to give it a shove while it's far away, too. Apparently there is a part of the thing he is directing to happen that directly corresponds to distance.

During these attempts the unexplained additional sensation lessens somewhat.

Can the thing that directly corresponds to distance be used to get the key to hold still, say, about 20 cm from his hand in mid-air?

After some practicing he can make that happen. Setting up something that spatially precise takes a lot of care with visualizing-but-not-really the exact shape of it, the precise bend in the response curve.

This also makes it obvious that the force is not with respect to “his hand” but every part of his hand, separately — restricting the distance also fixes the key into a specific position with respect to his hand, like he replaced “key on the end of a string” with “key on the end of a beam”. Also he can't move his fingers very much now, because that would change their distance to the key.