They rode south for two days before Benjamin brought up what he wanted to try next with his friends as the grasses kept getting taller, and they slowly approached their destination. He wasn’t the least bit surprised when they hated it.
Matt actually did more than hate it. He forbade it, but Benjamin wasn’t going to let that stop him. He was determined to repair his soul damage by copying sectors from other sources.
He was well aware of the risks that posed, and It was entirely possible that it wouldn’t work and that it was a hardware problem, not a software problem, but near as Benjamin could figure, the soul was all software stacked on top of other software in the Rhulvinarian System.
Even if it wasn’t, though, he had to find a way to do this. He was tired of being useless. He’d let his indecision cause this problem, and he’d let the fae do what they needed to do to keep him breathing, but it was time he made his own decision.
The delay wasn’t because he needed to spend time thinking about it; time to think was the one thing he’d had quite enough of. It wasn’t even that they were skirting the deep valleys that the centaurs had mentioned so long ago or that there were threats that mantis men and elephantine centipedes might attack as they wandered through grasslands so tall that the stalks overshadowed even his war turtle.
It was mostly because he was lost in his own head to some degree. He’d spent far too long locked in a room with nothing but a demon and endless lines of code for company, and the real world was positively dizzying.
Everything was a distraction now, from the buzzing of the insects to the twinkling of the stars. A few days ago, the sound of the army marching had been all but invisible to him. It drowned everything out, making complex thought challenging. Now, he fled to his codex just for the relative peace it provided, even though his backlog of urgent tasks was complete.
In fairness to his friends, Benjamin didn’t think using pieces of other people to patch up his soul was a good idea either, but that didn’t stop it from being necessary. If he wanted to win the coming battle without burning ten thousand people alive, he really didn’t see another way.
“Look, before I try to screw with anything important, I’ll make a backup, okay?” he’d said finally, as a compromise. “I’ll overwrite one of these other medallions like an old VCR tape so you can have a backup, Benjamin, in case anything goes wrong.”
That proved to be harder than he thought, though, and days later, after enduring unexpected attacks by a stampede of locust people and a night raid by angry red ant men, he was still no closer to success. At first, Benjamin thought that was because some vital part of his soul had been changed by the fae tampering.
It would have been ironic if they'd locked him out of saving his life in this instance by saving it for him last time, but that turned out not to be the case. Instead, it was hardware limitations. It seemed like these things were not meant to be wiped and reused in the field.
There wasn’t exactly an owner’s manual on these things, though. Fortunately, as he toyed with the bios of one that had been wiped by battle damage rather than manually by him, he found a plain-looking phylactery of woven silver in an art nouveau style that was ready for input. In the end, after a little prep work, a lot of trial and error, and taking the time to create his very own seal, he was able to make a copy of himself appear on command in front of his friends around the campfire one night.
He’d shown them the Prince before, so it wasn’t a miracle or anything, but it was still a fairly impressive magic trick. He was literally beside himself, in a faded holographic sort of way.
“No way, there’s two of you?” Raja laughed. “Twice the boredom. How will we survive?”
Emma laughed, but Matt just looked at him very seriously and said, “You’re really going to do this then? Even if it lobotomizes you, or worse?”
Benjamin stayed quiet. Instead, he nodded to the ghostly version of him who said, “Well, if that happens, then theoretically, you should be able to restore me from this phylactery and—”
“This is serious, Benjamin,” Matt shot back. “You’re going to change who you are, and if it doesn’t work, you want us to just what, murder you and replace you with a copy?”
“It will still be me,” Benjamin said with a certainty that he didn’t really feel. “Just a different sort of me.”
“But you’ll be dead,” Matt insisted.
“I mean, by the logic, we’re all dead,” Benjamin’s copy said. “If change counts as death, then every one of us died in the last year, and we were replaced by other people already, so there’s no harm in it, is there?” Benjamin had almost said the exact same thing but realized it would be far too creepy for all of them to speak at once like that, so he restrained himself.
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Matt was about to dispute that when Emma piped up. “He’s right. We all know I’m not even similar to the woman I used to be.”
“That’s not true,” Matt said coldly. “We’ve been over this. I can still see the woman that I loved in—”
“Just because you can see her, it doesn’t mean she’s still there,” Emma answered, shaking her head. “I saw it clearly enough in the other Emmas that we killed.”
“But those weren’t you either!” Matt said, starting to get angry. “They were just the parodies that she stole from Benjamin’s phone. That doesn’t mean you were ever like that.”
Benjamin ignored the backhanded insult and let them keep at it. Emma looked from Matt to him and back again before she said, “I don’t know if Benji had a warped view about the person I was before or not, but I’m certain that crazy demon bitch put just as much effort into making accurate representations of me as she did his house, and there was definitely no blood on those girls’ hands.”
Matt opened his mouth to respond, but thinking better of it, he just shut it again, giving Raja the chance to add, “Well, I don’t know if any of you are the real you, but if you’re getting tired of being you you’re always welcome to try being me for a while. Could be a fun change of pace!”
Benjamin smiled at that, and he said, “I was actually thinking I’d borrow a very small piece of—”
“You’re going to use the Prince, aren’t you?” Matt guessed.
Benjamin nodded. He saw no need to deny it. “I’ll put precautions in place and make sure you have the chance to shut it down if anything unexpected happens, but…”
Raja moved to add more dung to the fire they were sitting around, and the storm of sparks swirling in the sky when he disturbed the embers was enough to completely distract him. His words slipped away as part of his mind started to calculate the most likely rune combinations they were forming and the mathematical formula that was governing their path. When he looked back to Matt he’d almost entirely forgotten what it was they’d been discussing.
“Yes, the Prince,” he continued after thinking about it for a moment. “I know it’s not without its risks, but it’s not like a little of him rattling around inside me is going to suddenly turn me into a bad guy or something.”
“Depends on how awful he is,” Emma quipped.
Matt ignored her and said, “A drop of poison is enough to poison a whole barrel… hell, a whole swimming pool if it's potent enough, and that man is toxic.”
“He is,” Benjamin agreed. “But he has the knowledge we need.”
“Then we’ll find another way,” Matt insisted. “We can—”
“Hey, I have a question,” Emma interrupted. “You said that your body almost disintegrated before your little forest friends saved you, right?”
“Yeah…” Benjamin agreed, uncertain of where she was going with this. “I didn’t actually see it or anything, but they said that’s what would happen if they didn’t fix things fast.”
“Okay,” Emma nodded, “So if we take that as true, what stops you from becoming that guy that you turned into paste back in Arden?”
“Well—” Benjamin started to answer. He’d thought about that eventually of course, but it was definitely an unknown unknown.
“Because I was thinking,” she continued, “That you’re playing with something really precarious here, and one wrong move and you might just… Boom!” As she spoke the last word, she gestured widely, to indicate the mess he’d leave behind.
“Yeah,” Raja agreed. “You cut the red wire instead of the blue one, and suddenly, all of us are in the splash zone.”
“It’s a risk,” Benjamin agreed reluctantly. What else could he say? “All I can do is start small and be smart about it. I figure there’s nothing worse I can do to an already corrupted sector, so if I just—”
“Then try it out on me,” Matt said. “Don’t take a piece of that monster. That just adds extra risks to an already dangerous procedure you’re proposing. You can—”
“Matt!” Emma yelled, scandalized. “First you don’t want him to let you do it, then you want to let him fuck you up too? Let Benji make his own mistakes!”
“I don’t think it would be dangerous,” Matt said quickly. “At least not for me. He’d only be copying from me, right?”
“Right,” Benjamin agreed. He couldn’t say more than that because he got a strange sense of Déjà vu about the two of them back in the Arboreal Throne’s carnivorous rose garden so long ago. He’d been screwing around with Matt’s soul then, too. The only difference is that he didn’t know what it was he was doing back then. Now, even if there were still mysteries to explore, he’d done enough navel-gazing to understand how all the systems and subsystems fit together into one incredibly complicated program they called life.
“Hey, if you’re going to take a piece of Matt, I demand equal representation!” Raja added. “The last thing we need is to make you more serious.”
Benjamin smiled at that as his doppelganger added, “Hey - I’m game if you guys are.”
After that, it was decided. Benjamin would go under the knife, so to speak, but he’d use his friends as the initial test subjects.
That made so much sense, he was surprised he hadn’t thought of it before on his own. He’d just been fixated on what he hoped to wring from the Prince’s mind. Still, if he wanted to undo all of the damage he was going to have to graft a third of a soul to his own, and that was a lot more than a drop of poison in a swimming pool. That was inviting a stranger into your inner sanctum to see just how much damage they could do.
“So what’s the next step, man?” Raja asked. “We gotta do a mind meld or a—”
“A what?” blurted it out, looking at his friend in confusion. “No. Nothing fancy, I just have to open your system and copy some files.”
“Well then,” Matt nodded, “We should get started. I seem to remember that it can take a long time, and I want to get some sleep tonight.”