“What do you mean, who?” Myra cried resisting the urge to rip the annoying fucker’s face out. “I’m talking about the guy your soldiers nearly bashed my head in tossing out his bed last night!”
Geel winced when she mentioned her injury. “You get hit a little too hard?” Oh, very funny. “Way I heard it, you were rolling around on the floor and went a little too hard into the bed frame. If you need to take a few days off for your injury, Myrabelle, you know we are a very reasonable organization—”
“I don’t care about that! I’m talking about the, fucking, you all threw his whole fucking shed off the building after getting high from the ‘well’ or whatever the fuck—”
He shook his head. “The well? We never use that old thing.”
“—after Nesr Wald shot himself.”
“Nesra-wa-who-now?”
“I was here, Geel Hattuck! I saw it!” His eyes flickered at the use of his full name. “What do you think you’re trying to do, hiding it now?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Myra hissed in frustration and stormed off.
“Roc!” She practically grabbed the old man by the shoulders. “What the fuck happened last night after Nesr Wald died?”
“Who?”
“Obyl! What’s going on? What happened last night?”
“I heard you hit your head…”
“Chrysji! Why’d you all toss that whole building over the edge?”
“What building?”
“Aaaaauuuhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”
She ran back outside to where her friends were sitting, grabbed each one by the shoulder, and started speaking breathlessly, far too wound up for someone who had fainted several hours ago.
“They forgot it all! All the shit they tossed off the platform, they forgot it ever existed! The bed, all those papers, the building—even Nesr Wald himself! They tossed it into the abyss, and now it’s vanished from their minds!”
◆
She had to sit down and catch her breath. She wasn’t quite ready to be running around, and Iz seemed to regret sending her off on her own. Once she recovered, though, she launched straight back into it.
“Let me get this straight…” Iz said slowly, piecing together Myra’s ramblings. “You think the fog at the ground of the forest is some kind of SAP that makes people forget anything that falls into it.”
“Yeah!”
“But we didn’t forget, because…”
“We didn’t smoke the… gross fog stuff, whatever that was! That must be how it works! You throw something into the fog, smoke the fog, and then poof! It’s gone out of your mind!” Myra could hardly believe what she was saying, but she couldn’t not believe it, everything added up. It all clicked together. “And they did the same thing with Lukai, that’s why they’re so weird about it! They don’t even remember they used to have a runecrafter before they hired us. They literally think they just woke up one day and decided to hire a rune expert!”
“Oh. Huh.” Iz didn’t look halfway as convinced as she should have. “I guess that does explain some things.”
“Some things? SOME things? Iz, what does it not fucking explain?”
“Ehh… if ‘the well’ is just a bucket they use to scoop the weird fog off the Unkmirean ground, why would they dismantle the whole pulley system and take it to Ralkenon?”
“I don’t know, but—”
“And memory magic is really rare. And the fog is massive, it spans the entire country. It would be the largest anomaly to ever exist, and yet, it’s completely unknown? There’ve been a million expeditions down there. Why hasn’t anybody found this effect before?”
Shera gasped, putting her hand over her mouth. “They d-don’t know about it,” she said, eyes widening as the truth unfurled before her, “because they always forget.”
“That’s it!” Myra cried. Shera got it. She understood. “Of course, we’ve never heard of the anomaly that makes people forget about it! It’s the ultimate mechanism of secrecy! Utterly impenetrable by definition! Nobody could ever find it!”
“We found it,” Iz pointed out.
“We didn’t breathe it in!”
“Unlike everyone who ever went on an expedition to the Unkirean ground,” she said flatly.
“Oh, come on, Iz. You can’t deny this is what’s going on.”
Iz looked to the side. “I’m just saying there are some unanswered questions.” She bit her lip.
“Well, sure.”
“Anyway, I realize this has all been very exciting, but we have a bit of a problem,” Iz continued, changing the subject. “Geel Hattuck, who claims to have never heard of a person named ‘Nesr Wald’ in his life, has spontaneously determined that the organization is desperately short on firearms expertise, endangering the big important mission in Ralkenon.”
Myra’s stomach twisted. “Wait, you’re not saying he’s calling it off?” If this loop is all for naught—
“Oh, no. The mission’s on, but he’s doing a bunch of emergency training or something. That ‘crypto-cracker’ team has to put the vault project on pause.” She cracked her knuckles. “If we want to get past that lock, we’re on our own.”
◆
The train ride to the tree vault was weirdly tense. Shera kept giving Iz nasty looks which she seemed not to notice, but she’d always look the other way when Myra caught her. Myra knew she ought to say something, but she didn’t.
Also not serving the mood was the fact that all of them agreed the trip would largely be pointless.
The combination lock consisted of 99 concentric rings that could rotate in place. The larger rings had more notches—the innermost ring had 2 possible positions, while the outermost one had 100.
The result was 93,326,215,443,944,152,681,699,238,856,266,700,490,715,968,264,381,621,468,592,963,895,217,599,993,229,915,608,941,463,976,156,518,286,253,697,920,827,223,758,251,185,210,916,864,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations.
On one hand, the cracking team had already made a lot of progress. They’d learned the correct numbers for rings 2–90. That just left 91–100, leaving only…
62,815,650,955,529,472,000 possible combinations.
Myra felt stupid as she floated in front of the fuck-off giant lock. Staring it dead in the center, she rotated around in the zero-G to get a good look at it from all angles, as if that would give her a different perspective on the thing. But it was just a big wheel—it didn’t look any different upside-down. And the number of combinations was still intractably large.
They really hadn’t needed to come all the way out here just to multiply some numbers together and determine how screwed they were. How were they going to laterally think their way through this?
“So… can we turn the rings really fast? Try every combination?”
“No,” Iz said.
“Maybe th-there’s a pattern,” Shera said. “In the code we have so far, we can extrapolate…”
“I looked, but I didn’t find anything,” Iz said. “And also, that would be incredibly stupid. It’s obviously going to be a random code.”
“What if we used the Klein bottle portal thing? Could we modify it to put a portal on the other side of the lock and just, y’know…?” She looked to Iz, the resident space magic expert.
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She looked skeptical, but thoughtful. “I don’t think you could move the portal through the door… you’d need to conjure it on the other side of the door ex nihilo. Can you modify the runes to do that?”
“Eh…” She had to think about it a bit, but the answer was probably no. “The whole point of the object is that it’s self-stable. I don’t even know how they made it in the first place. It’s only stable in zero-G anyway—the ends just shatter when the space bubble reconnects to normal space.”
Iz scratched her head. “Yeah, okay, I guess the bottle probably isn’t going to help.”
There was another bout of silence.
“Okay, look,” Myra said. “Can we just break this thing down?”
“Like with a bomb? Sure. I sort of assumed there was a reason not to do that.”
“Sh-she already explained this,” Shera said.
“It’s fine,” Myra said quickly. “There are some alarms that we haven’t been able to disable, mostly the ones that react when the structural integrity of the building fails. It causes the entire space bubble to reattach itself, and then the police show up immediately.”
Iz looked thoughtful. “Is that a problem, though? We just need to see what’s behind the lock. Is secrecy a parameter of the mission?”
“… No, it’s not,” Myra said. “But secrecy isn’t the problem. We still have to get away clean. The last time I was here, I had to commit suicide to escape.”
“You could do that again.”
Myra considered it for a moment. “I dunno. I could learn what’s on the other side of this door, maybe. But what would I do with that? The whole reason we’re doing this is to pass Geel’s test. It doesn’t matter if I know what’s there, if—”
“Yeah, okay.”
“H-hey,” Shera spoke up. “Umm… what if we don’t have to get away?”
◆
Shera described the vague shape of a plan, and it didn’t take much more discussion before the three agreed it was probably the only way they were going to get into this vault by the end of the loop. Shera’s plan was somewhat conceptual, though, and it fell to Iz to work out a lot of the execution.
The biggest problem was getting all the materials they would need. Iz told Myra that the only way to get what they needed in both quality and abundance on such short notice was to steal it from a certain greenhouse in Miirun.
Myra was sent, since she was the best at teleportation and thus more capable than anyone of actually breaking into the building and evading searches at the borders. According to Iz, their target was “only circumstantially valuable, not objectively valuable” or something, so it shouldn’t be that bad.
Sometimes, you have to do a small heist to do a big heist, Myra thought to herself. That should be a quote.
Shera—despite originating the plan—was really upset about the whole idea, and she repeatedly pointed out that Myra had a concussion. She shouldn’t be doing stressful teleportation on a concussion, she insisted. Iz retorted that Myra was the only one who could do it, so it was either that or abandon the plan. Shera then said she wanted to come with, but Iz pointed out, in a tone that indicated she thought she was the only person who wanted the plan to succeed, that the majority of work would need to be done in Unkmirean, and they couldn’t spare the labor.
And it was a pain in the ass, to go all the way to Miirun and back, though not quite as much of a pain as the time she went all the way to Tzurigad, so she just sucked it up and did it. She felt fine, after all, and the medical officer said she was fine.
Teleporting in and out of the greenhouse was fine. Teleporting past the border was—
It was mostly fine, but it did make her rather dizzy and she needed to sit down for a while.
An uncomfortable thought came to her as she was resting. What if the loop doesn’t fix the concussion? Obviously, it had fixed worse injuries before, but she didn’t know anything about the mechanism of a concussion on a cellular level, and she certainly didn’t know what mechanism the time loop was using to transport her memories back in time. At the very least, it must have been rerouting her synaptic connections, but at the same time, it seemingly wasn’t messing with her ‘brain chemistry.’ She knew that from her earlier experiments taking stimulants. How did the loop even draw the line between those? And which bucket did a concussion fall into?
The idea that she could sustain a permanent brain injury across loops really wasn’t a worry she needed right now.
While Myra was off on her field trip, Iz had been hard at work setting up the bulk of the actual plan, and when she returned, the entire entrance had been transformed by the addition of a complex artifice pumping aura across the spatial boundary, from the outside into the interior of the vault, which would be needed to power the numerous artifices they had planned.
“You’ve got everything I asked for?” She eyed the pitch-black sack that Myra had brought all the way from Miirun. “And didn’t expose it to the sunlight?” she said.
“I never exposed it to the sunlight,” Myra said. (Iz had repeated the instruction to her around half a dozen times before she left.)
Iz took the goods to ‘take them off her hands,’ though it was fairly transparent that she didn’t quite trust it in anyone’s hands other than her own. Apparently, the contents were so sensitive that they could be completely ruined if they didn’t fix the aura balance inside the vault before bringing them inside.
“Y-you know so much about this,” Shera observed. “You must have a lot of experience.”
“No,” Iz said. “I just read.”
The second part of the plan was being constructed inside the vault. Though more elaborate by far, it was substantially less mysterious in its operation. There were really three things: a timing mechanism, an extraction mechanism, and of course: the bomb.
The timing mechanism was more elaborate than Myra had expected. It was doubly-impossible to use the Common Library clock because they were both in Unkmire and in an isolated space bubble. There were many common workarounds, but many of those were unavailable due to the second point.
Shera had gone to an arcane supplies store and bought what the clerk recommended for amateur projects—a grandfather clock with a built-in runic interface and a large slate for custom carvings. She had lugged it all the way to the vault only to realize that a grandfather clock wouldn’t work without gravity.
Finally, Iz rigged up her wristwatch to some kind of detector (again using a store-bought part out of haste, together with some handmade adjustments). Then she hooked that up to the bomb.
And for the bomb—
Well, you couldn’t just walk in and buy a bomb from an arcane supplies store. You needed an appointment, and those were booked for weeks out. The murk bogs, naturally, had all kinds of bombs, but Iz and Shera hadn’t been able to determine if anything had both the raw power and precision they needed to cleanly break open the wall. Even Iz, who was usually content to read a book and then run with the theory, said she was completely out of her depth in the subject of controlled demolitions.
As a last resort, Iz had called the Briktonese agency for help.
Comparing notes, it sounded like the person she had spoken to was similar to the one Myra had spoken to. But Iz had not just asked for permission to blow the place up; she had explained the whole plan, insisting that it was the only way they were going to get into the vault ‘by December 3rd’ (intuiting that the agency would find the date as significant as they did). Less than twenty-four hours later, the agency delivered a trunk full of explosives by dead drop, together with a diagram explaining how to place and time their detonation.
◆
Loop 14
Day 26
“Well, it’s now or never,” Myra said.
“It’s in t-ten minutes,” Shera corrected, looking at her watch.
It was 7:50 PM. The entire contraption was rigged to activate every hour, on the hour, as long as they left the runes hooked up. They had attempted the operation twice already, each time getting cold feet as Iz decided at the last minute that she needed to double-check something.
“What I meant,” Myra said, “is that we’re running out of time. We’ve just gotta rip the bandage off. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t work, then so be it.”
“It’ll work,” Iz said. “I’ve checked everything I needed to check.”
“Right.”
The ten minutes were tense. And when the appointed time finally arrived, it was anticlimactic. They were stationed far, far away from the vault, so they just had to imagine what was happening.
In their imagination, what happened was this:
The watch strikes the hour, and it triggers the bombs to go off. The entire combination lock door falls to pieces, revealing whatever is behind it.
Next, a secondary device unveils the camera-leaves from Miirun.
These camera-leaves are of a particularly rare strain, specially bred to be hypersensitive. Within seconds of exposure, they are imprinted with the photomemory of whatever was beyond that door… and hopefully, that doesn’t turn out to just be ‘another security layer.’
Then, the alarms sound, and the vault reconnects to the rest of the universe, and the police arrive.
As before, the Klein bottle breaks from the spatial perturbations and the added stress of gravity.
The group had decided that this would be a convenient, if baroque, way to detect when the spatial reconnection was complete. Myra had managed to squeeze in some extra runes that would activate the instant the topological structure of the glass medium was subverted. These runes trigger the last step: extraction.
The bottle (now just a regular bottle, shattered on both ends) accelerates, breaks through the wall of the vault, and crashes into a nearby tree. The police detect that an object has escaped, but they still think a person must be inside, so they don’t pay it much attention. And if they do, all their attention is on the shattered glass of the bottle, and not on what was inside it, the tree branch that had grown the camera-leaves, which now stored their photomemories.
Myra’s imagination was optimistic. The tree branch fades into the environment, not at all out-of-place in the dense wooded area. As a result, the police ignore it.
Shera’s imagination was pessimistic. “Do we really th-think they’re not noticing that the branch came out with the bottle?”
“It’s no use wringing our hands over it now,” Iz said. “As Myra said earlier, it either works or it doesn’t work.”
◆
Day 27
For the first time, Myra was able to confidently approach Geel Hattuck with a smirk behind her lips and a subtle swagger in her step. It was down to the wire—the evening of December 2, ‘Day 27,’ the penultimate day of the loop. But nonetheless, it was done. Interrupting his meal, she dumped the photographs on the table in front of him.
“This,” she said, “is what they were keeping in that tree vault. I think Briktone will be very interested.”
Geel gaped at her for a moment, then peered over the photographs. “What am I looking at?”
The photographs were pretty hard to make out. The supersensitive camera-leaves were experimental, and they had rushed the pulping process, breaking down the branch and reconstituting it into thin sheets of paper. Still, they were clear enough to make out the basic shape.
“These are topological weapons,” Myra explained. “They can wreck spatial havoc on the scale of a country.”
Geel covered his mouth with his hand. He looked, for once, nonplussed. “This is what Briktone was after?”
“There’s something else about these weapons,” Myra said, “and I’d guess this is what Briktone was really trying to confirm.” She pointed to one of the runic diagrams visible in the photograph. It was impossible to make out the individual runes, but the overall shape was very distinctive. Myra had seen this configuration a million times. “These are very odd devices for Unkmire to have, see, because these all rely on the Common Library.”