We begin now.

Sara’s not-words echo through me, and the pain hits a couple of moments later. Despite everything, despite my best efforts, my reaction is… not great. I clamp down, which I think might be the source of the sudden wicked headache high and to both sides above my eyes, and I reflexively try to shove Sara out of me. There’s a coppery taste in my mouth and a cramp in what feels like every muscle at the same time, and a feeling of pressure in my sinuses, up and in where it feels like it’s filling my nose and my throat at the same time.

Calm. You must return to calmness, or risk injury. I will be affecting your body and mind, for your own safety, and so that we can proceed.

I can feel the difference pretty much immediately. The catecholamine levels drop like someone’s opened the seacocks, which I know is a funny metaphor given that you wouldn’t expect someone who isn’t a grounder to be a sailor. I’m not one, to be clear, but I am an aficionado of historical fiction that has sailing in it. So I know at least of tacking and seacocks and rigging and jibs and jibes, even if I’ve never been on a ship or a boat, and I know the difference between those, too.

Right, rambling. I’m a cloud and a puddle; there’s no tension anywhere in me, as I float in contented… well, just in contentment. This is much better.

I am severing connections that the restless spirit has corrupted or occupied. You have already adapted to the absence of their function, but each of them was an interface to the Worldspirit, and so each of them is vast. I can deaden your sensorium so that you do not receive the input that you would interpret as soul-rending pain.

I would definitely like that. I would like that very much, because I do not like soul-rending pain.

The feeling shifts. It’s now a tugging, like someone pulling a bit too hard when helping me braid my hair. There’s an edge to it, something sticky and vile, like when sweat-soaked clothes have dried and have to be peeled off of my skin, and this is definitely better than the pain but it’s still revolting. I would very much like it if this could be abstracted away and turned into numbers channeled through my Visor, just as my mana perception was, and there’s a pause. Knowledge seeps into my brain somehow, a certainty that that’s possible but a little bit complicated, and there are more urgent things to take care of.

So be it.

I concentrate, instead, on the floating feeling and the feeling of openness and vulnerability. There’s something vaguely analogous to a muscle, something that twitches when I think about it, though since it’s not a literal muscle there’s no literal twitching involved. It’s a representation of an urge to kick Sara out of my… my soul, I suppose, to squeeze her out or push her out or sever her connection. Instead of those, I focus on trying to perceive things. I want to be able to see, for literally any value of metaphorical seeing, what Sara is doing and what she’s doing it with, or at a minimum what is holding open her path through the vaguely cell-wall-like protections of my soul.

I’m not having any success. Well, I’m distracting myself from some really unpleasant sensations, which is a success on one of the two critical measures, but I can’t hang on to any of the concepts or look at anything involved. I know I was able to do more than I can in the moment, so I focus on relaxing and on letting my emotions unclench further.

It’s not that I’m tense. My body is more relaxed than it was when I pulled off that trick of convolution that let Sara in, and inasmuch as my emotions are a product of neurochemicals, that’s got to be much the same. There’s a serenity in me, so what’s the problem?

Serenity isn’t vulnerability. I reach for understanding, fighting against the quicksand of the somewhat artificial serenity to grasp the fact that I’ve let Sara in my literal soul, into a place that I cannot see to do things I cannot evaluate. There’s a spike of something vaguely like panic, but it is subsumed under a rising feeling of comfort and affection. I do my best to wrench my mind away from the tracks of desire, and eventually I settle into a new mood, soaring and exultant.

I can feel the threshold of my soul.

My Visor unfolds itself out of the earpiece. The artifact is present in my mental conception of myself, and even with my eyes closed, I can see the stream of letters and numbers, black text on a green background, which flow past and around me in a layered ribbon-tornado of data encoded into readable form. I can shift the threshold a little here and there, thickening and thinning, and as I do I cause utility functions and analyzers to come into being, along with diagrams and graphs and readouts. I don’t have any context for the numbers, I have no idea what any of it means, but it might be useful in the future to have these functions and these representations.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Actually, I do have some context for the numbers. There’s the convolution of the membrane and the wall, the thin barrier that I act through and the thick one that blocks external actors. I can rotate them in the something-like-higher-dimensional-space equivalent and watch as the readouts show avenues of greater protection and less protection, avenues that are easier for me to act through and avenues less so. I can channel mana through Imbue Mote and watch as the membrane aligns itself in particular ways without my doing anything, giving me a looks-like-optimal path to manifest my will into the world with the minimum amount of vulnerability in my defenses. And speaking of vulnerability, don’t I need to make sure that the things I’m doing aren’t getting in Sara’s way?

That need suffuses me quietly. I become, momentarily, a soft shining beacon of needing to know.

There’s a wiggling in the numbers in response. There are so many irregularities and odd little patterns that are drawing my eye, easily a thousand different imperfections in my data representation and the model for behavior of my soul-wall, my Self-wall, but this one in particular, okay, these three probably independent ones in particular, those came right after I sort of asked Sara a question. It’s not particularly hard to get the Visor to categorize the three of them, hard would be getting the Visor to categorize all of them and that’s something I can absolutely do and need to do when I have some time to figure out exactly how the learning algorithm is going to have to look, which requires, conveniently, categorizing a few of them first. Like these three.

Categorize. It takes a bit, a long bit given that I can output blocks of functioning software into the Visor’s libraries at the speed of the software should do the following in the following way, but most of that is because it’s not trivial to figure out how the software will recognize the three as distinct patterns, distinct both from each other and from the rest of the noise. I’m not even sure how they popped out so firmly to me, but intuitive pattern matching on harder datasets than this had been my life-or-death job, life or death for a million people, for well over thirty years.

One pattern, now. I tell the algorithm that the Self-wall itself is vaguely a spherical thing in a weightless vacuum, except not this piece, this piece is something else, spin up a categorizer and tell me what this other piece looks like, compared to everything else we’ve seen.

A pipe. Rigid, slid in and through the wall. I watch the numbers, fascinated, as the surface of my soul churns and flails, trying to crush it, trying to push it out, trying to pull it in to be consumed.

Well, that’s not all that disturbing. Actually, it’s perfect; a path for Sara’s will that allows her to… hm. Why does she even need to be inside?

The thought is as to the action. I’m fully immersed in the visualization now, and there’s no intermediate step between formulating the desire for the Visor to present me a piece of information and seeing it, no need to translate a string of values and variables and data flows into a comparable visual stimulus. I still can’t see inside my Self, there’s no data coming into the Visor from in there, but there in the soup of the data is the answer to my question.

There’s a connection gone. Not a pipe, like what she has; an infinitely thin strand that contains an infinite capacity for transmission, but which was dead silent. No, not dead silent; it contained a scream of silence, the loudest stop talking, shut up I’ve ever, well, I’m not hearing or seeing it, not really, but loud. I even recognize the voice, or rather, my categorizer twigs to it.

It’s that fucking dybbuck.

Digging into it, I guess it had lived and died, inasmuch as a ghost can even be said to die, inside those connections, spitefully leaving its scream of silence saturating them as much as it could, shouting louder than the magics of the world, the System I was trying to interact with. There are thousands of those connections in total, and most of them are affected in some way or another; not entirely ruined, not all of them, though some of them are, and then another connection full of nothing but a demand for silence drops out. There’s nothing listening to the demand, either; I can see that all of the plumbing present in the non-dead connections is missing. No receiver, no transmitter, like there’s been some equivalent to neuroplasticity at work.

It’s not that hard to set my Visor to diagnostic work, and now I have a dictionary or a hash or some sort of data object, here in the midst of the visualization I’m not really interacting with the data on that level, with all of the really dead connections.

Another connection drops. I don’t know how long we’ve been in here and I don’t know how long it’s taking, but this is deliberate action, conscious decision-making.

I have a pattern of what it looks like when a connection drops. I have a data object with a bunch of connections that need to die. I have a frankly bullshit computational environment that can walk it backwards, derive what Sara is doing from a combination of first principles and defined outputs with a learning algorithm.

Well, the next thing to do is obvious, when I put it that way.