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?