In the depths of the parallel Dungeon of Stars it was impossible to tell the passage of time, but hours must have come and gone as Sofiane and Shuixing took turns floating in and out of sleep. Shuixing had a lot to tell him, but she was still in the process of "coming back" from wherever it was she took her journeys to. It was Sofiane who suggested she rest first, since her descriptions to him were complete gibberish. When they had both finally gotten enough sleep, Shuixing set herself to explaining what she had been up to for the past two years.
“I call it Numberspace because there is no physical dimension to it, or at least none that would differentiate one dimension from another,” Shuixing said.
“You’ve already lost me,” Sofiane replied.
A look of sad awareness flashed across her face that bore two years of loneliness. Her pursuit had been an isolated one from the beginning, and whatever fears Shui had had about being unable to articulate their fruits were justified by Sofiane’s response.
“Shui, I want to understand. I’ll try my best, I promise. But you’ve got two years of hardcore experimentation in a crazy ass plane of existence, so it’s gonna take time,” Sofiane said.
She nodded and took a few deep breaths as she tried to work out a simpler method for explaining what she had learned. Nothing was coming to her. You had to know the math, and only she knew it.
“Why don’t you start with what happened right after I left?” he said.
“Well, I started my research the day after the rest of you left. It was just Pechorin and me, and then he said he needed to “explore the other pole” from my research. The only person I’ve seen since then has been Natsuko and that encounter was… an uncomfortable one," Shuixing said.
“What did she say?”
“That adventuring was what she wanted out of life and that she was sick of being helpless and pathetic and that she would rather live how she wanted even if it was only for a short time. Oh, and that she didn’t believe in Hemiola’s prophecy that the Yishang would wipe us out. Or that it was going to happen much later. She seemed to swing between those two justifications.”
Sofiane snorted. “Wonder what she thinks now.”
“I think she believes the Yishang have plans to recover the numbers. Or that with millions of Celestials still using our emanations that the apocalypse is still far off.”
“Is it?”
“No,” Shuixing replied. “Po-Lin is on the brink of unprofitability.”
The thought chilled Sofiane. They hadn’t yet arrived at how Shuixing knew that with so much certainty, but he fully believed her. Even with the declining numbers, the idea of a true apocalypse, the moment that the Yishang would decide to pull the plug on everything, had always seemed just a little farther than the horizon. Always next year, never tomorrow. Now Shui was telling him it was here.
“How is that possible when there’s still so many Celestials? Hell, even with the drop there’s more now than when I was first summoned!” Sofiane said.
“Sccaling expenses,” she explained. “They have a giant probabilistic algor— well, a machine that takes in our thoughts and actions and… erm, animates us, I suppose you could say. And the costs of this machine increase with the population of our world. When Po-Lin was only a couple regions, the total population was maybe a few hundred at most. It now runs into the tens of thousands, and this is talking only about that one machine. There are other expenses which have increased as well, including the number of employees, the Yishang’s power usage, and a myriad of other things, all growing exponentially over the years that Po-Lin has existed.”
Something tightened in Sofiane’s chest and he started to feel a little sick. “So Po-Lin only stays profitable if all the numbers rise simultaneously? Numbers have to keep inflating for both the Celestials and the Heroes or the whole thing collapses…”
Shuixing nodded.
“Holy shit," he said.
Anticipating Shuixing’s account would only get more bleak, existential, and confusing, Sofiane asked for a break to walk around and collect his thoughts. He left Shuixing where she sat huddled up in her robe and wandered out to the central area of the dungeon. There was a strange mixing of timelines in his head as he walked its corridors. He thought about how meaningless this dungeon must have seemed when he first sprinted through it during the Vermögenburgh questline. And how important it had become since.
How was he going to explain everything to Gomiko? Was he going to? Or—a better question—would he try to get back to Gomiko or stay with Shuixing? At a minimum he had to get Suixing to safety. He wouldn’t leave her at the mercy of Baphomet’s mob. But if the apocalypse really was nigh, what could he do about it? If his time was limited, he wanted to spend every second of it with Gomiko, restrictions be damned. Resolving this, he returned to Shuixing still staring off into space.
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“Okay, so the Yishang’s money machine is breaking down. Got it. How do you know all this?” Sofiane said, anxiously pacing the ice floor in front of Shuixing.
“I… found a few compounds. Orally-ingested, they induce a strange dissociative effect, but after injecting them directly, I discovered that they detach my—I suppose you could call it a consciousness—from my physical body in Po-Lin, and I can travel through Numberspace to observe the numbers the Yishang have built Po-Lin out of.”
“You’re saying that this—” Sofiane kicked an ice stalagmite “—is made out of numbers? How is that possible?”
Shuixing exhaled. “Until you’ve seen it yourself, you will have to trust me. Even you are made out of numbers. We all are.”
He shook his head. “I just don’t get it. But sure, everything is numbers. Does that mean the Yishang are numbers too?”
“No,” she replied. “They have a physical world they inhabit, and they possess machines that we are inside of that—”
“What!? Wait, wait, wait, I am not a wheel or a cog or a— a tool or something. How the hell do a bunch of tiny machine parts add up to— to us? To me?”
“I don’t know,” she replied quietly.
As empirically exhaustive as her method was, she doubted her scientific approach could ever answer that question. Part of her wondered if this was what Pechorin had meant by “the other pole." A few hours passed as Shuixing tried to explain her “Yes-No” theory of numbers and how the Yes’s and No’s could build out into an entire human person and eventually an inhabitable universe. Sofiane understood a little bit of it, but without seeing the numbers himself, it felt like an abstract thought experiment. The only thing that convinced him it was anything real was Shuixing’s absolute faith.
“And once I understood that the encryption key came from two enormous prime factors—”
“Wait, an encryption what now? I thought you said it was a “locking algorithm” or something,” Sofiane asked.
“Oh, apologies, I have spent the past few days analyzing the Yishang’s internal communications and figuring out how their terminology translates into my own self-taught lexicon. They refer to my “locking algorithm” as an encryption and I am in the process of adapting myself to their terms so that I can better parse their plain-text data,” Shuixing replied.
“So you’ve been stabbing yourself with this “Aqua Shen” over and over for the past several days to figure out what the Yishang are up to?” Sofiane asked.
“Injecting, not stabbing, but yes. Because of the wealth of new data I unlocked I have had to increase the number of journeys I take a day to around a dozen or so—”
Sofiane interrupted her to pull her into a hug. It came as a surprise to her, and for a moment, Shuixing’s arms lay limp at her sides. It had been a long time since she embraced someone. When the shock of the sensation passed, her arms wound around Sofiane and she hugged him back. For the first time since beginning her research project, she felt okay.
“Why would you do that to yourself, Shui?” Sofiane asked, still holding her tight.
“I want to save everyone. This was something only I could do, so I had to."
Sofiane’s first instinct was to tell her to take it easy and take care of herself more, but wasn’t she right? No one else could have cracked the Celestials number-language and their encryption keys. No one else could have mapped out this “Numberspace,” one agonizing drug injection at a time in the slim hopes of finding a way out. No one else could do it, so Shuixing had. And if there was any hope or chance left of saving them, and for Sofiane to live even just a bit longer by Gomiko’s side, it was because of Shuixing’s sacrifice. So rather than tell her some meaningless platitude like, “take care of yourself,” or telling her to slow down, the only thing he could do was say, “Thanks. Shui.”
Hot tears started to roll down Sofiane’s eyes. Now the responsibility of holding the hug together fell to Shuixing. She held him for a moment until he calmed down.
“I… have to confess something,” he said. “I was planning on spending the rest of my remaining days with Gomiko, I mean, she’s really all that I— anyway, that doesn’t matter. What I want to say is that I was being a coward, but knowing what you’ve gone through to give us a fighting chance, I want to do whatever it takes to give us a shot at escaping Po-Lin. I don’t know how I can help, but you won’t have to do this alone anymore, Shui.”
She nodded. Truthfully, her own estimates for how much longer she needed far surpassed the time they had left. It wasn’t so much that his help would be appreciated, but that it was necessary. Harrowing as it had been, the events of the past 24 hours reminded her that doing this alone was impossible. She needed help.
“Our next step needs to be securing my supply of Aqua Shen,” Shuixing said. “For the moment it’s our only access point to Numberspace. Without it, we’re helpless. After that we need to find Pechorin. There’s a good chance he might’ve stumbled upon something that my hyper-quantitative mind overlooked.”
“What about Daisy and Natsuko?” Sofiane asked.
Shuixing winced. “It pains me to say, but I don’t know that they'll be much use, and that’s assuming we can even convince them to give up the Use-Ranking competition. Better to not waste the little time we have.”
It felt callous, but Sofiane agreed with her.
“There’s just one, rather large problem with getting back to your laboratory, and possibly escaping Vermögenburgh.”
“I assume this pertains to why I woke up outside the city drenched in water?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Baphomet has a cult of Non-Heroes riled up and convinced he’s some kind of prophet that will help them defeat the Heroes, who he says are colluding with the Yishang to destroy the world.”
“I can’t blame them,” Shuixing said. “If Baphomet managed to gather a following, it’s because the Non-Heroes had a justifiable reason to be angry, and Baphomet was just the first person to figure out how to harness them.”
“Well, it gets worse. He told the Non-Heroes he would manufacture force dimension-jumping weapons for them to fight back against Heroes. His plan was to kidnap you and force you to make them for him. But you don’t even have the research anymore.”
Shuixing’s face went pale.
“Shui, please tell me you burned it.”
“Some of it…” she said, averting her gaze. “But I… erm, I kept the most important stuff. The papers are in my lab. I-I knew I would regret it, but the research—”
“How long would it take someone to piece together the rest?” Sofiane asked.
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On how intelligent the person reverse-engineering it is.”
Sofiane allowed himself a small amount of relief. Baphomet was charismatic, but he was not a titan of intellect. He said as much to Shuixing, but she didn't look relieved.