“Hi, can you connect me to the main office for the Halnya Times? Yes, the main one is Jewel City.”
…
“Hi, I’m trying to reach Sky Mishram. I realize it’s late, but is there any chance he’s in?”
…
“My name’s Myrabella Prua-Kent. No, he’s not expecting me.”
…
“Hello?” It was a deep, handsome voice. “This is Sky Mishram.”
“Hi! Sorry for calling out of the blue. My name’s Myrabelle—I’m a classmate of Aurora Ferara’s.”
“Aurora? Is she all right?”
“Yes, sorry, my call is about business. She referred me to you. I’m actually calling about recent news events.”
“I see. Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for information about the death of Emmett Massiel.”
A long sigh carried over the phone. “You learned about it from Aurora,” he deduced.
“Y-yeah. I was hoping you could tell me more information about it.”
“I’m not sure why you’re asking, but I’m afraid we don’t provide information except through our publications.”
Myra had expected this, but she had a plan.
“I understand your policy,” Myra said carefully. “But what if we exchanged? I have some information that I think your publication would be very interested in. If I could exchange that for whatever you know…”
Sky Mishram was silent for a while. Myra faintly heard what might have been the clicking of a tongue.
“This is something we can discuss,” He finally said. “To be upfront, I should say I don’t know if the information I have will be particularly satisfying to you. But if you have an interesting lead, I will share what I know.”
“Thanks.” Myra plowed ahead before he could change his mind. “The lead is this: On December 3, there’s going to be a peace meeting between the Imperial Prince and the King of Unkmire in Ralkenon. Ralkenon University will be hosting.”
More silence.
“That’s quite a tip.”
“Do you believe me?”
“It checks out with some of what I know. There has been speculation around recent travel arrangements they have made—how do you know this?”
“That’s really complicated. I… I can’t tell you. But I can tell you most of the individuals who will be there. The prince; the princess; six imperial sages, Hazel Ornobis, Marcus Bora, Elwyn—”
“Wait, wait, wait—sorry, I need to get my quill ready. Okay.”
“Prince Humperton, Princess Malazhonerra, Hazel Ornobis, Marcus Bora, Elwyn Senserenasia, Linda Zeawak, Aiko Ueno, Theodore Kettle, and an arbiter, Judge Philium Krasus.”
“Philium… Krasus…” Myra heard muttering over the phone. “Okay.”
“And I don’t know anything on the Unkmire side, other than the king.”
“Hrm. All right, I need to poke around about this to see if I can confirm some of it. But I’ll answer your question now as a sign of good faith. If your information checks out, I’ll continue to keep you updated.”
“Thanks.”
“I suppose you know the basics. Emmett Massiel went to sleep around 9 and died at around 1 A.M. by a laser—”
“Hold on, could you give me the exact time?”
“It was 1:09.”
“Do you have it to the exact second?”
“You… want his time of death to the exact second?”
“Yeah, sorry, it’s fine if you don’t have the information.”
“I could get it. I need to go check the report.”
It took Sky about five minutes to come back with the report.
“It’s 1:09:23.” Well, the reset was at 22 seconds. Close enough. “So, the laser appeared near the ceiling of his bedroom, and it was focused directly downwards, into his chest. He died instantly. That’s well outside his personal domain, assuming his domain wasn’t more than a meter off his chest. The detective on scene noted this as significant because it means that the beam could have been created by another mage. However, the manor’s security system records that the spell was cast by Emmett Massiel himself.”
“How does the security system determine this? Anything or anyone trying to sense something like that would just be blocked by the man’s domain defense. It shouldn’t be possible to detect him casting anything.”
“... Sorry, this isn’t an area I know anything about. I understand the security system was designed by Massiel himself."
“All right… thanks. Is that all you have?”
“There is something else interesting. From 1:20 to 2:30, his telephone rang six times. This was also recorded by the system. The sixth time, it was picked up by the detective, who had just arrived. The detective informed the caller that Massiel had died, but the caller hung up without identifying himself.”
“Huh.”
“That really is all the information I have.”
“You don’t know where the call came from?”
“No, there’s no way of tracing that information.”
“Damn it, okay. Oh, one more thing—do you know about the crater that occurred in Ralkenon this morning?”
“I heard of it. We discussed whether to make space for it in the evening edition. Why? Do you think it’s related?”
“It’s just a hunch. But the crater occurred very close to the hotel where the princess is staying…”
“That’s very interesting. If all of this is connected, it sounds like something very big could be going on.” Oh, you have no idea.
◆
Iz was in the library (the normal book library, not the one in Abstract Space), absorbed as usual in some text that had caught her eye. This one was a book on game game theory, about a legendary hunter who had beaten the Elusive Elk in a game of nim. Funnily enough, Myra hadn’t yet seen her read the same thing twice, even across loops, though it wasn’t like Myra tracked everything she read. Myra wasn’t sure how Iz chose what to read at a given time, but it was apparently subject to the small perturbations that Myra injected into her life.
Maybe I should go play more board games and see what happens. I wonder, if I played a board game with Tazhin at the very beginning of the loop, would he make the same moves each time…? What if someone other than me played him? (Of her friend group, Tazhin was the one she was least close to since she mostly knew him through Nathan. They had started spending some time together through a board game they both liked, but neither of them were talkative when they concentrated, and it had been an extremely low priority since the looping started. She hadn’t played any games with him since the first month.)
Anyway. She was here for Iz.
“Izzzz, I need your help.”
“Hey, Myra, what is it?” she said softly.
Myra took a deep breath. “Okay, so there’s this project I’m trying to do. The idea is you have a small bubble of space that’s cut off and isolated, so no aura can get in or out. Once it’s reconnected, I want to measure the elemental composition of the aura in the room’s atmosphere in order to guess what was cast inside the room while it was isolated. The room’s small, so casting inside the room should deplete the usable aura density by a measurable degree, I think. As far as I can tell, there’s no reason this shouldn’t work, and a few people I talked to all say it’s definitely doable, but I don’t think anybody’s actually done this, so there are no instructions for it.”
Iz put a bookmark in her textbook and closed her book to indicate her attention. “It sounds like a fairly narrow application. What’s this for?”
“It’s a, uh, personal project.”
Iz narrowed her eyes. “Okay. Well, do you have a certain room in mind?”
“Something the size of say… the event hall.”
“You’re trying to figure out what they’re doing in the event hall while it’s cut off?”
“No, that was just an example!”
“Come on, Myra.” She crossed her arms and tapped her foot. “Do you want my help or not?”
“S-sorry.” I’m being evasive again, aren’t I? “Yeah, I wanna know what’s going on in the event hall.”
“Is everything okay? You’ve been acting odd, dragging me into that self-defense class, making that outburst at lunch, and now this.
“I, uh… it’s hard to explain. You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
I’m in a time loop, Myra imagined herself saying.
Oh, you were right, I don’t believe you.
“It’s-It’ll be easier to explain later in the month. If you help me out then I’ll show you what it’s about when the room opens up.”
She sighed and stood up, taking her book with her. She contemplated it for a moment, then pulled out her bookmark.
“Don’t like your book?”
“Too much animal cruelty. The Elusive Elk was just trying to protect her children.” She went to put the book back, and Myra followed. “About your project, did you measure the elemental composition of the interior before it closed up?”
“No, I don’t even know how.” I figured after getting your help, I could do all this next loop.
“Do you know what time it closed? When the interior was spatially severed, I mean.”
“Yeah. It was around 8:45 P.M.” 8:44:52 to be exact. Thanks, Shera.
“The aura density inside the building should be the same as in the ambient atmosphere inside it. We’ll measure the atmosphere outside the building at the same time tonight. We’ll need to correct for the changing phase of the moon, but that shouldn’t be too hard.”
Well, it sounded hard to Myra. The phase of the moon determined the strength of the lunar channel, so naturally, the aura composition in the atmosphere today wouldn’t be the same as it had been yesterday. Theoretically, they just needed to figure out the right amount to offset, but Myra didn’t even know where to begin looking up the relevant information.
Luckily, Iz did. She also knew how to measure the atmospheric aura density, which could be done with a strange staff with a large diamond at the end that seemed to shine a different color every time Myra looked at it.
The value they needed to measure, the aura density, could be measured in different ways, but the most common was as a value of a very high-dimensional tensor, the product of many lower-dimensional spaces that each represented one of the elements. It was an extremely large amount of information, which they would be storing in Abstract Space so they could retrieve it later.
The actual process was uneventful, though. They went to the appropriate place at the appropriate time, activated the staff and that was pretty much it.
“So… now we just wait until it opens, measure it again, subtract, and that’ll be it?”
“Oh, no.” Iz shook her head. “We have an enormous amount of math to do before then.”
◆
Though Aurora had agreed to help them analyze the event hall’s security, she preferred to wait a few days. When the night finally came (for she wanted to do it in the middle of the night) she showed up dressed entirely in dark clothes and a ski mask.
“You all really just want to go like that?” she asked them.
Myra and Shera, of course, had just dressed like they usually did.
“Dressing like a thief is just going to make us look more suspicious,” Myra said. “It’s much easier to play it off as innocent curiosity if we look normal.”
“Be that as it may, I have a rule: I don’t expose my face doing something illegal. I’ve followed this my entire life, and I won’t stop now.”
Truthfully, Myra wasn’t that worried about getting caught. Part of that was the time loop, certainly, but also, the stakes just weren’t that high yet. The university hadn’t yet announced the actual event, so the students weren’t expected to know how seriously they needed to take the event. If they were caught, playing it off as curiosity would be pretty easy. If Aurora wanted to keep her face hidden… well, that could be explained away too.
Besides, they weren’t planning to break into the building anyway. They were just going to look at the security panel Iwasaki used from the outside.
They approached the building, ready to study it. There was no doubt that the security system was enabled: They could sense, geometrically, topologically, and algebraically that the inside of the building was gone. Myra never had any doubt about this. She had never sensed anything other than total spatial detachment, not before Iwasaki opened the whole thing up.
“How d-do we get to the c-c-control panel?”
“I think it’s… in this wall?” Myra walked to one of the side walls. It was just a normal stone wall. “Oh, here.” There was a latch. It opened up so they were looking at a metal panel. “It’s locked.”
“H-how are we going to open it?”
“First, we need to check if it’s rigged up to some alarm.” Aurora closed her eyes, presumably sensing around the inside. Myra did the same. On the inside, she could sense a bunch of switches and a giant orb. She couldn’t sense anything attached to the door, though.
“Yeah, there’s nothing. I’m gonna pick it.”
Aurora picked it. When they got the panel open, she saw the control panel she had previously felt.
“That orb thing is definitely rigged,” Aurora said. “Don’t touch it. Don’t even psychically reach out to it or anything.”
They looked at the panel for a while.
“All right, never mind, we need to learn what this thing does if we’re going to get anywhere.” Aurora went silent again, psychically reaching out in direct defiance of her original instructions. “Yeah. This thing is the tether.”
“It connects the inside to the outside?” Myra asked.
“Yes. And it needs a cryptographic code to enter through it.”
“Is there any way to get in other than the orb?”
“No way. Zilch.”
“You can’t teleport?”
“The space inside isn’t connected to the outside except through the tether. How else would you teleport inside? You can’t teleport through nothing.”
“Is it possible to subvert the orb?”
“Not without the code. Or being the greatest mathematician alive, I guess.”
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“What if there was a secret second tether? Is there a way to confirm there isn’t one?”
“Why would there be another tether?”
“Just humor me.”
“Well… if there was one, we wouldn’t be tell from out here, unless we found the anchor point. But it could be anywhere, technically. Of course, any tether needs an orb on the inside as well, so the easiest way to check would be to search inside—if we had a way in, I mean.”
Myra knew that there was, in fact, an orb on the inside near the door. Presumably, it was the main one that was supposed to be there, though it would probably be worth confirming that at some point… As for the possibility of a second orb, she’d just have to keep an eye out for the trace of one during her searches.
“Sh-should we figure out what other functionality is here?” Shera asked. “I think there are rune sheets behind the panel.”
“Yeah, there’s another lock to get back there,” Aurora said. This one is rigged to the alarm. Myra, you’re our rune expert, why don’t you just sense around the inscriptions and see what’s there?”
“I don’t think I can do that…” She tried anyway. “I can never read runes with the extrasenses. They’re carved in the silver, so I need to feel the silver and then kind of understand the negative space in the material—”
“Don’t sense the silver then? Just sense the air.”
Myra blinked. “Huh, oh. I’ve never tried that.” She switched from feeling the silver to the air around it. Now rather than feeling the indents in the silver, she could feel the outdents of the air in the same place. “It’s a little better…”
“Here.” Aurora plunged her knife into the back door of the panel that led to the silver rune sheets.
“Wait—”
She thought Aurora was about to pry the door off, but she did no such thing. Instead, she pried the door just enough to open a little gap, then pushed air into the tight gap. Myra sensed the pressure increase immediately, and it made her task earlier. “Woah! This really works!”
“What do you see?” Shera asked.
“Give me a minute to look this over…”
It took more than a minute. Even able to glance over the dense rune sheets semi-quickly, it wasn’t exactly easy to interpret a rune script written in an unfamiliar style.
“Okay… there’s a bunch of alarms. Most of them come from the orb. I can’t verify what they actually do, since the signal comes from inside the building, but they have messages associated with them—There’s a sound detector, a motion detector, domain detector, spatial anomaly detector, structural integrity failure detector…”
“Those all sound standard,” Aurora said.
“Even the d-domain d-detector? How is that even p-p-possible? You can’t sense someone’s domain.”
“There are some tricks,” Aurora explained. “Since a person’s domain prevents the sensors from detecting anything inside it, you can build a sensor to detect the spaces that are undetectable. But, they’re fallible. If someone knows what they’re doing, they can fool that one.”
Eugh, this doesn’t really matter. Iwasaki should have checked the room was empty before closing it. I already have a plan to see if anybody’s hiding in the armor statues. The fact is that nobody can get in or out in the first place, so it doesn’t matter if they would be detected once they got inside. And after the event starts, the sensors won’t be able to distinguish between the people who are supposed to be there and those who aren’t…
“Okay,” Myra said. “I’m going to move on to the parts that rely on definitions in the Common Library.”
It was easy to find what she was looking for. Rune scripts that relied on the Common Library were easy to identify because of the diagrams they used to identify the relevant mathematical objects. Myra quickly found a major component that relied on the Common Library, and it even seemed to be active, based on the way air was heating up near it.
“There’s a huge component that is doing some kinda spatial distortion stuff.”
That’s probably to keep the severed spatial bubble in place. Don’t want it drifting off and going kaput.”
“What would happen if this failed? Would it be unsafe to keep the thing running?”
“Unsafe is one way to put it. It would be unspeakably dangerous. You’d need to reattach the bubble immediately.”
Huh, so it sounds like Shera was right about me being right: Iwasaki really did have no choice but to reattach the bubble after the Common Library failed. It’s good to get that question checked off, at the very least.
“If the thing’s designed right,” Aurora went on. “I’d expect there to be a failsafe that initiates the process automatically. Probably an alarm on the inside, too, informing people to evacuate.”
Wait, no that doesn’t make sense! After the Common Library failed, Iwasaki had to manually reattach the bubble! Or at least, that’s what he said he was doing…
I guess I have to un-check this after all.
Maybe this failsafe… also relies on the Common Library…?
Myra looked at Shera, but the girl didn’t seem confused. Of course, Shera was probably missing all the context regarding the subtleties of Iwasaki’s behavior. Myra kept forgetting that she didn’t remember everything they’d seen in the last loop.
“Okay, I’m going to look at this failsafe,” Myra announced. It wasn’t hard to find—it was right below the stabilization module.
“D-does it look fine?”
“I mean guess so. It’s pretty straightforward. The stabilizer sends its status to the failsafe. If the failsafe detects anything unusual it sends a signal to the shutdown module. The status line also forks off like there’s supposed to be some other input.”
“Like an override line?” Aurora asked. “That’s really dangerous—”
“No, I mean, it just goes off into nothing. I guess it could be used that way, but it shouldn’t have any effect.”
A rune sheet. At the top is an “Alarms” module, with an arrow going off the top labeled “To radio”. Below the “Alarms” module is the “Stabilization module”, which inside it contains a circle labeled “Common Library Connection.” Below the “Stabilization module” are two modules, which together are slightly wider than the above modules. The “Shutdown” module is on the left, and it extends slightly to the left. The “Failsafe” module is on the right. An arrow points from the Failsafe module to the Shutdown module. Two arrows lead into the Failsafe module, one from the Stabilization module, and one from the empty space above the Shutdown module. The second arrow is labeled, “Override?”. Finally, several arrows go off to the bottom of the runesheet, which go to the control orb. The “Shutdown” module has an outward arrow. The “Alarms” module has an inward arrow. The “Stabilization” module has a bidirectional arrow. [https://i.imgur.com/GgLeQeY.png]
I should check back on it later. Maybe Iwasaki or somebody else activates it so he can delay opening up the building for some reason. There’s no switch for it, though, which is weird because it means he would have to carve extra runes on the spot. I guess that makes sense, though, if it’s meant to be maliciously subvert of the failsafe.
In the end, Aurora didn’t think much of the weird nothing-line, but she didn’t have the context of knowing that the failsafe apparently didn’t work. (Shera, at least, seemed to have inferred what Myra was thinking, since she looked deep in thought about it.) Eventually they parted ways, Aurora seemingly happy to have helped, while Myra was more confused than before.
◆
Myra was able to get an apprenticeship with Professor Bandine without too much trouble. She didn’t have as many apprentices as Snailsworth, which meant her lab was a bit less ‘hierarchical.’ She would be mentoring Myra personally, rather than foisting her off on one of her senior apprentices, which was a bit of a double-edged sword.
Well, actually, it was just objectively good. Professor Bandine was fussy and old-fashioned, and Myra didn’t really want to work with her, but she had to begrudgingly acknowledge that it was objectively good in every way that mattered right now.
So Myra dressed her best and arrived punctually at the appointed time for the introduction to her biomechanical workshop.
“Since time immemorial, mages have used telekinesis and other magic to accommodate for their injuries and disabilities,” the elderly woman explained.
The main wall of the floor showcased a number of exhibits to illustrate the point. There was a wheelchair that was powered by the mind of the occupant, glasses that could project the spoken word into text, a wrist splint with an extra claw attached, small matchstick-sized instruments that could be manipulated in the air to spell things out, a tentacle suit, and an illustration of an individual who simply used telekinesis in lieu of arms. It was all arranged as a timeline, from thousands of years ago up to the present day.
“I believe this is important to keep in mind. We may be on the cutting edge, but what we do, fundamentally, is as old as dirt. There is nothing new under the sun.”
Despite her humility, she was happy to put her own inventions on display towards the end of the wall. The professor stopped before a cabinet, ten years ago on the timeline, which displayed a transparent arm. It might have been plastic. Inside the arm were synthetic muscles, from the biceps down to the hand muscles, all held in place with string.
“Have you ever tried to move your own limbs using telekinesis?” the professor asked. “Say, tried to walk or pick something up?”
“Sorta.” She’d done it recently in fact. Once when she was running from Ben, and the one time she had punched him, she had put extra force behind her arm.
“Purely with telekinesis?”
“No, not like that. But when I was having trouble standing up, I used telekinesis to stabilize myself, but I still walked normally, or mostly normally.”
“I see.” She narrowed her eyes. “Were you intoxicated?”
“Uh, no, that’s not what I meant.”
“Hmph. Good. Many young women your age spend too much time in debauchery.” Wow, okay. Better not tell her ‘I had my drink spiked,’ then.
She went on with her lecture. “It is much harder to move your limbs entirely using telekinesis. In fact, why don’t you try it now? Be careful about it.”
Myra tried. Specifically, she tried to take a step forward by telekinetically pushing her own leg. It was no different than having her leg kicked from the back. She almost fell over.
“You see what I’m saying. As you can imagine, there are many uses for moving your own limbs telekinetically. Those who have been paralyzed, for example. However, it is an incredibly difficult skill to learn. The reason is that people always try to do it by pushing or pulling their limbs like you just did. They need to go to the source.”
“Our muscles,” Myra concluded.
“Good. The first recorded mage to master this skill was the Archmage Arlinta of Puro, three thousand years ago. The archmage was paralyzed from the neck down, but through telekinesis, they walked about nearly indistinguishable from a healthy, motortypical human, without any other aid.”
“Oh, wow.” That must have taken an enormous amount of skill. Doing it 24/7 and most of all without any aids.
Magic was, in the strictest sense, directed by pure mental control. However, there were a number of aids that most mages used one or more of. When Myra had started out, she had used incantations, as was common for beginners. However, incantations were widely considered unwieldy, time-consuming, and too much of a crutch for mastering fine-grained control, so mages at Myra’s level were expected to forego incantations. Instead, they used staves, which worked by amplifying imperceptible hand movements. An even more advanced mage would forego their staff as well, casting spells purely mentally. Myra was poor at this, though she could do some small things.
There were other aids too; in some countries, they used hand movements to control spellwork, but it was very uncommon in the empire. There were also ‘bottled’ spells, like scrolls or the teleport sticks Myra used, though those weren’t really aids at all; they just did the casting for you. There were some that occupied a middle ground, though.
Anyway, the skill that Professor Bandine was describing required extremely fine-grained control, and you couldn’t use any crutches, since incantations would be impractical, and anything that required motor control was obviously out.
“They were called an archmage for a reason. As I said, the skill is quite difficult to learn, in part because people don’t know how their own bodies work. Almost nobody even knows how to isolate their attention to individual organs in their body. This device you’re looking at—” She gestured to the model arm with the synthetic muscle. “—is my invention, which I originally built to help train this skill.”
“It teaches you how the muscle feels on its own?” Myra asked. The professor nodded. “But how does it even work? Without a bone in it, or—or fat, or any other tissue—”
“The whole point is to not have those things,” she explained. “It removes distraction. But yes, it is challenging to have the arm function without them. These runes on the inside of the skin observe the way the muscle moves and adjust the shape of the arm accordingly.”
“You mean it simulates an arm and replicates it totally—wow. The calculations on that… Where can I get one of these? I kinda wanna learn this skill…”
The professor nodded approvingly. “You can purchase them from my company,” she explained. “Though they are quite expensive.” Damn.
She moved to the next display, this one from only six years ago. This display only had a poster showing a diagram of a human body, but the arms and legs looked like the same type of device as in the previous case. The torso was almost entirely empty, save for a self-sufficient artificial heart that Myra recognized from her first month in Professor Bandine’s class, which worked by transmuting chemicals in the bloodstream. “As I said, I originally developed this as a training device.”
“This is…” Myra tried to think through the implications of this arrangement. “This is a full-body prosthetic, isn’t it?”
“A full-body prosthetic is impossible. There is no replacement for a human brain. This is a neck-down prosthetic.”
“That’s, uh, what I meant.”
“Then you should have said it,” she chided. “Regardless, yes, this is a neck-down prosthetic. The first neck-down prosthetic, which I transplanted personally while I was Director of Surgery at Halibar Hospital. Because it is possible to control the limbs using telekinesis, and because the surface mimics human skin precisely, it is suitable to replace your limbs and torso. Of course, the modern ones have bones, and stomachs, and all that unnecessary nonsense. So much wasted space—my patients really have no imagination. You could keep anything in there.”
They were done with the timeline tour, apparently, as the professor was ready to head into the next room.
“It’s really amazing, though,” Myra commented, “that someone can learn that kind of control.”
“It is not so amazing,” she said. “It is already what we do. The human brain is astonishingly plastic—with the right training, the neural pathways that control our motor function can be rewired to the same telekinetic control.”
Well, it still sounded pretty amazing to Myra.
“And now,” the old woman’s voice took on a bit of a dramatic flair. “For our latest and greatest—” She swung open the door to the next room.
“Woah!” There was an intriguing full-body mirror on the wall, engraved with runes along the border. As one does in the presence of a mirror, Myra instinctively slid halfway into a pose.
“Ahem.”
“Oh, sorry.” Myra turned back to the professor who was standing by what was presumably the main attraction of the room: a large, iron-plated figure in the shape of the upper body, including the chest, arms, and head, about 20x the size of an ordinary human. A large, cylindrical object was fitted on its arm. Its back was open, and a massive power core in its chest was hooked up to a thick aura tube that ran out of a room. Above the power core, there was a place for a person to sit. “I was just curious what the mirror was for.”
“That mirror is a reflector-fabricator,” she explained. “It helps us reflect objects, so they only need to be designed once. For example, after creating a right arm, we can immediately reflect it into a left arm.”
“Wow. Even the rune inscription?”
“Yes.”
“Wait, but how’s that work?”
“We use a typeface whose behavior is invariant under reflection—or chiral symmetry, as it’s called.”
Myra’s jaw dropped. A runic typeface that would still work if you reflected it all backward? Which not only still worked, but actually had the opposite, reflected behavior? “So like, if I had a rune script that made an object go clockwise, and I reflected it, it would make the object go counter-clockwise?”
“That’s correct. You should study rune symmetries if you’re so interested in it.”
I can’t believe fucking Benkoten! He said there wouldn’t be exciting runework in this field, and I’ve already seen a ton of cool runecrafting, and it’s only been twenty minutes!
“This,” Professor Bandine tried to center her attention once again, “is our latest attempt to apply our methods to build a human-pilotable mega-golem.” Previous attempts always run into the difficulty of control. I am sure you can see why my prosthetic technology is relevant.”
Come to think of it, symmetry was the default situation for physical phenomena, wasn’t it? Translational invariance, Lorentz invariance… Maybe a better question was why ordinary rune scripts didn’t obey symmetries? In the alphabet-based scripts, for example, a backward ‘d’ was a ‘b’, which was totally different.
Myra realized the professor was waiting for her to answer. “Oh, yeah! The pilot can control the golem’s limbs the same way they would control the prosthetic.”
“Yes. In fact, since the synthetic muscles are decoupled from the actual limbs and bridged via magic, we can leave the synthetic muscles as normal-sized. However, it turns out that adapting the rune scripts to make the golem respond to the control-muscles has proved fairly challenging, due to the size difference. Originally, it was feasible to do because it was based on simulating the way real humans move—”
◆
Myra was tasked with improving the control runes that the professor had talked about. Unfortunately, this workload turned out to be fairly demanding, far more demanding than the aura frequency detector she’d built for Rose Tara. Frankly, the task was just hard.
On top of that, she had to commit a lot of time to her project with Iz. Myra had to follow everything Iz was doing since she was planning for the possibility that they’d have to start over the next loop. She also annoyed Iz by insisting they not rely on the useful calculation tools in the Common Library, though she waved it away by insisting that she just wanted to understand everything deeply.
Of course, this meant that all the extra work it entailed was on her.
Furthermore, the whole process was a lot more complicated than Myra originally planned. The primary difficulty Iz had seen, which Myra had not accounted for, was that the aura would start equilibrating immediately after the space was reconnected, reducing the differential between the outside and inside. This complicated the procedure immensely. Iz had a plan that involved taking multiple measurements outside the area as soon as it opened and then extrapolating, but this process had a number of unknown variables that could only be determined empirically.
So Iz reserved an empty classroom one night and…
“Iz, where the hell did you learn how to cast spatial severing?”
“From a book…?”
“I mean, I knew you always liked spatial magic, but this spell is ridiculously advanced.”
“The instructions are all in here.”
“This book is for runecrafters! You’re supposed to do it with scrolls or rune sheets, you just cast the whole fucking thing in your head!”
“What difference does that make?”
“It doesn’t make a difference, it’s just—it’s just you’re fucking amazing at this sometimes.”
“Okay…” Iz squirmed. “Let’s get on with the measurements,” she said.
Sigh, this girl… Iz was really bad at taking praise for her skill, sometimes.
◆
Despite all the work she was putting into the work for Professor Bandine, Myra wasn’t getting nearly as much out of it as she hoped. She looked into buying one of the telekinesis training devices that the professor had shown her, but they really were far too expensive for her, even with the time loop that permitted free spending.
She had hoped to learn something about Ben’s motives, but she had not yet found any reason why Ben would want to push her away from this apprenticeship specifically. Maybe it really was as simple as trying to insert himself so she would be grateful to him.
She had hoped the biomechanical professor or one of her students might have connections to the pharmaceutical industry so she could learn something about whatever Mirkas-Ballam was up to, but she had no luck there either.
About two weeks into the loop, when the rumors about the peace talks were starting to heat up, Myra finally got a message she had been waiting for, a memo from the campus telephone hub letting her know she had a call from Sky Mishram.
Sky had information.
First, Sky had contacted Ralkenon’s police and learned a bit about the dead cyclist. He was a man in his late 60s, but healthy, probably a frequent cyclist. He still hadn’t been identified, though. Sky was intrigued by the possibility that the cyclist was the person who had called Emmett’s manor, but he hadn’t found a way to act on that hunch.
Sky also had information that Emmett’s security system was based on some anomalous artifact. That explained how it could do the apparent impossibility, though not in a helpful way. What Myra really needed was to know how it inferred information so she could determine if there was a way to subvert it.
“Would it be possible for you to get me into his house? If I came to Jewel City personally?”
“Ahh… I’m actually on my way to Ralkenon. I have to report on the summit.” Ah, damn.
“What if that weren’t the case?”
“Mm… maybe. It is the case, though, so it doesn’t matter.” Well…
“Okay, I guess we’ll get to meet in a few days.”
Before the call ended, she also asked about Mirkas-Ballam, but Sky knew even less about it than she did. She was starting to get frustrated at the lack of a break there.
She finally hung up and turned to Shera, who had listened in this time.
“Any thoughts?”
“Not really. Are we g-going to go to Jewel City?”
“Sounds like we’ll have to wait for the next loop if we wanna get anywhere.”
“O-oh.” She turned away, downcast.
“Shera?” She put a hand on her shoulder.
Oh.
“Sorry. I should be more considerate with my word choice, I guess.”
She pulled her into a hug and waited for her to relax.