Beryl wipes her hands on her sleeves, before walking on.

“Why’re we walking?”

“To walk. Come along.” I reluctantly break into a short jog, to catch up.

“Everything I’ve taught you so far is extrinsic magic, as compared to intrinsic magic. Basically, magic made outside the body with mana and mandala compared to inside, with… well, it’s a bit of a black box. Call it whatever you want. There’s like some dichotomies of semantics but it’s all the same-ish to me. I fucking hate how so much of philosophy is arguing over the specific flavours of words, like, what the fuck? There’s clear differences between them all. You can’t just lump top and down quarks together as the same thing just cus they’re quarks. Same gripe I have with the miscellaneous scalar fields, though it’s a bit different since it’s math.”

“I- humans can internally make magic like you?”

“Actualise. Are you mocking me? Nevermind. Still, mo. Not really. Humans have innate channels. I have innate channels, and… it’s complicated. Definitely not the same. Innate channels are in the brain. I don’t just actualise my spells in my brain. Halton’s tube in your head can use your body as a conductor. It gives energy to your, uh, wire, for spells. There’s no maximum wattage per se but there’s a weird thing with like exponential costs for how much wattage you use at a time since they’ve got to negotiate some magic with some mages Halton has in their employ to magic your wire to fry literally everything by working with resistance.”

“How does the tube… work, again?” My thoughts go back to the first moments in this world.

“Slams into your head and integrates itself into your skull. Very cool tech. Works with the suit. I wouldn’t say smart metal, it’s complicated, but mostly technological. Different tech to me.”

“Huh… where does the energy come from? Is there some sort of battery? You mentioned an allowance. Is it microwaves?”

“Portal… stuff. Halton has their own mages. Way less than at Nemo, but they’re… well, in an entirely different system to Nemo’s ecosystem. Different doctrine, different education, entirely different scale of resources. Essentially, they’ve a sort of massive seven-or-eight tiered energy storage system that all the mages are wired into. From flywheels to synthetic natural gases and… well, nuclear stuff. It’s very secret. And the portals are one-way, space-time tunnels with non-orientable topology. There’s three main reinforcing mechanisms, with an energy gradient, geometric structures to make it like an electronic diode for spacetime, and causal asymmetry via a time-like vector with a local increase of entropy along the pathway. And, well, then, there’s a few more designs like the hole being absolutely tiny, they’re quantum fields preventing particles going in the opposite way, and a localised event horizon-like effect without the singularity. You’d need to figure out Halton’s equations- which I’ve told you, after a fashion, and you’d need at least the shitload of power they’re using to negate their effect, and once they figure out what you’re doing, they’ll reactively ramp it up or just cut off the portal.”

“Oh. Does information from the suit..?”

“No. The suit was designed five hundred years ago. Halton didn’t have electronics back then. “

“Cool. And what’re internal channels, really? Are they like mana injections?”

“No. Why would you need that? It’s not physical, not in the brain, or we’d have taken them apart, already, and we wouldn’t have clans around them. It’s like… consciousness. Not to be mystical. But… you wouldn’t have heard of this, there was an old theory about consciousness called… Buckton-Kinsing.’s Temporally, it came around a hundred years after your present. Six core tenets. One. Consciousness comes from several levels of interacting perception, from stuff like sight and touch to concepts like time, empathy, morality. Then, there’s an element of interpersonality. There is no self without another self. Rather than being just a one mind one body thing, consciousness exists naturally as a distributed network. Each individual mind is a node within this web, which draws upon and contributes to collective knowledge, experience, and patterns. Web ain’t static; it evolves with interaction creating conscious experience. Hive minds necessitated a whole school of study on Old Earth. Three, non-local information processing. It’s more an element of the web, though it ties in higher abstractions. That’s a messy result of sciencing making money, and people needing to make money, so people formalising their contribution becomes more important than a simpler theory. Funny, I can’t even remember the formal name of three. Alright. So, four’s a mechanism. Consciousness is a loop. Mind shapes reality by interpreting stimuli and doing stuff about it, but reality also shapes the mind by feedback. Basically the fluidity and temporality of consciousness. Then there was a higher-dimensional consciousness thing. This is third-hand information I’m giving you, but something about fairies in the brain. That’s the main deviation we have from modern consciousness theories; because Halton doesn’t want mages creating sentient intelligence, with the exception of me. Fifth, connected and shared information across a system makes consciousness. There was a… variable, for it. Opened the door with four to panpsychism, which is always fun to think about. Thus, sixthly, consciousness isn’t just one thing. It’s a bunch of different weird things weirding together, and I don’t know how it works. Maybe with time. But there is a way. Probably. When Halton introduced the laws of physics, if there wasn’t accounting for consciousness, there shouldn’t be. Then again, there seems to be some sort of normalisation action. Old chemistry shouldn’t work, with the unification of gravitation and electromagnetism, but again, normalisation action. Maybe consciousness wasn’t accounted for, and it’s a holdover, or maybe it’s in one of the scalar fields, and we need to test spells to see what’s closest. In this way, science is still alive.”

“Right. Cool.” I’m growing impatient, all of a sudden. I want to be off this topic. It feels like something is looming, larger than Beryl, on the horizon. Like a great beast coming, that will bear down upon us if we talk any more on this. A great presence. Perhaps it’s the gods? Should I ask Beryl? Nah. Seem silly. “I asked about… innate channels?”

“Ah. Sorry. It’s a massive personal thing, for me, as a created conscious being. Am I even conscious? Could you tell? I could just be very good at pretending.”

Beryl doesn’t seem to notice my discomfort, and I grow irritated.

“You seem conscious enough to me, and that’s what matters, since it feels like I’m the only person you’ve ever talked to. Could you get back to innate channels.”

Beryl scowls down at me, but goes on, nevertheless. “Alright. So. Yes. Consciousness is a fucking mess. And innate channels are… like… higher-dimensional mandala constructs, spells, really, that we can’t properly access but are way more efficient than our normal spells. We’re still stuck on trying to make three dimensional spells, so four dimensional, or even weirder stuff is kind of beyond people. Personally, you’ll need years of study to pull off creating an innate channel of magic. And you’ll either need to learn advanced bioengineering or naturally get used to the sensation of getting shocked, since it’s accessed through your brain. The human body isn’t a great conductor, it’s just good enough that it can handle some levels of charge. Don’t be too ambitious too early on, or you’ll fuck up your organs or get internal burns. Innate channels of magic are the main way magic’s used, since they’re a lot more efficient and they’re pretty dynamic, since they’re more quantum-mental phenomena than physical. Last part’s pretty important, since you can get really complicated complex spells with sequences of runes, or even dynamic runes, which- well, secret for you, they’re feasibly possible outside the body, but mechanically extremely complicated and just not that worth it.”

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“Cool. I understood half of that.”

“Half is enough. Passing mark is 50. I’ve got a few innate channels, currently. They work differently to your flesh ones, but the effect’s the same. You know, that’s part of how I’m slightly in favour of Halton having worked out a working consciousness thing. Could be a combo of something that barely works and the normalising factor, but matter neutrality was a big sticking point of old consciousness theories. Sorry. Sorry. I see your face. Pissed. Right. Back. Innate Channels. I’ve named them after religious scriptures. I’ve also an internal computer for manual spells, like how you need to draw your own, but innate channels basically have higher efficiency at higher levels. That’s how the levelling system works. Partially.”

“Why?”

“Why I’ve named them so? Cus it’s cool. And I like having stories as a basis to structure spells, cus I can do anything, so I might as well satisfy the pattern-recognition part of my brain and give me the happy feels. There’s the Right Eye of Ra, Left Eye of Horus, and Matthew 6:23. RER is technically a set of stylised attack spells that I’ve made look cool, LER’s my self-defense systems, and Matthew 6:23 is mental… attacks. RER is probably the most basic of the lot, and Matthew’s the most complex. If I were to make them manually, I suppose. You never know with a blackbox.”

“Noted.”

Short answers. I’m… having trouble, even with all this space. Too many fish in the bathtub. It’s uncomfortable. I need a break. Not going to ask for one. I have no idea what sort of boundaries Beryl has. It’s her mood. It fluctuates like a child’s. I’m a child. Eh. Feels more approachable, rather than earlier, when she was just… reading my mind, or something. Is she putting on an act? I don’t know.

An awkward silence, as we walk. Is she mad? Should I try to engage? I don’t have the energy. She’s talked so much, already. I work on storing what I’ve learnt, spacing out. Beryl seems to appreciate this, leaving me a silence to think. I’ve just about finished organising everything thus far when she talks again. Maybe her Matthew thing lets her ready my mind? That needs more thought.

“You’re going to have a problem, when you get to where we’re going.” Beryl breaks the silence.

“Where’s that?”

“Cities Nemo. You read the welcome.”

“Thought… you said we’re not able to go to urban centres.”

“We’re not. Point Nemo isn’t. I thought you were smart. Urban centre’s just a designation by Halton, not neccessarily all urban centres are urban centres. Obviously. Not obviously, kidding. I hate bureacracy. Too much of a fluid human element. It’s why I like mechanical automata and magic. Well, partly, I am a magical mechanical automata, but I like human systems that don’t change as some little human whims change. The problem for you there will be that you’re bankrupt. I’m not giving you cash, so I’ve been running you through the basics of magecraft so you can complete some comissions off the free energy budget Halton allocates us.”

“Alright. That’s the end of our… class, I guess? And in exchange you want?”

Beryl raises an eyebrow facetiously. “The natural world’s already so transactional. Why would the lord want to stoop to emulate the peasant? Have some faith in generosity.”

“Sure. So we’re just going to walk there?” I pull up the map, piecing it together for a few minutes. Lots of… new things. There’s a north, east, south, west, so that’s nice. Kilometres, as well. A glowing mark represents me. Another, Nemo. At the west edge, Halton. “It’s like a couple thousand kilometres. I think I’d die trying to go on foot.”

“Idiot. I’m a mage. We’re teleporting there.”

She grabs me by the scruff of the neck and we fall backwards into a dark and darker pit, reality becoming more and more stretched and faded until it’s all black. Then it’s all white again, and I’m thrown onto the sand. Beryl walks elegantly behind me.

“Ow.”

“I haven’t told you my name, have I?”

“No- but-”

“You know.” She observes me idly.

“Take the scanner. Keep it safe. It’s valuable shit, way ahead of the other scanners folk have and their simulation reference system. You might want to take it apart. I’ve taught you everything I give enough a shit about to know that you’d understand at your level. There’s a bunch of other stuff you’ll figure out for yourself in Nemo, cus I’m above that. Might visit you sometime.”

She drops the scanner into my lap, and walks a few steps forward, before turning around. “You did well, I think. I won’t test you, won’t flay you. Nothing like that. I’ve exhausted my social battery. Bye.”

She smiles, a last time, genuinely, I think, with a realer face than ever, and then she teleports away, again. I get to my feet. Something’s definitely changed. But I can’t tell. But it’s definitely slipping.

The City of Nemo rises ahead. A premodern city style, it seems, steel and glass and concrete boxes instead of the semiorganic arcological style of the following era. I walk towards the nearest road, and I begin to collect my thoughts, albeit slowly. I’m not exactly fit, and this suit isn’t exactly the most mobile thing. It’s really good, by bomb suit standards. I break into a freezing sweat. My forehead breaks apart into a pool of hot coals.

No, wait. I need to make notes, get my short-term memory out before I forget all of what Beryl’s taught me. I start thinkin, really. There’s been so much. But then my mind begins to give out. Too much. Multiple warnings begin flashing before my eyes.

[SUBCONSCIOUS SUPPRESSION DISABLED]

[MENTAL AID PRESENCE REMOVED]

[oh no]

Sanity Drop - 50 -> 4

HP Drop - 33 -> 2

DISABLING GASTROINTESTINAL FUNCTIONS

DISABLING ADVANCED MENTAL PROCESSES

ATTEMPTING TO BACK UP MEMORY

SYSTEM FAILURE

SYSTEM FAILURE

SYSTEM CUT

DISABLING HP MEASURES BEYOND VITALS

REINFORCING FOR IMPACT

PREPARING FOR COMATOSITY

ALERTING NEARBY HEALTH SERVICES

My brain explodes within the confines of my skull, I feel flesh pattering around the insides of my soul. My lungs collapse, my heart gives way. Too much. Too overwhelming. My blood vessels simply stop motion, I feel the liquid grow turgid and still. I am become mud, a melting statuette, and I tumble face first into the sand as the world grows dark.