SARAH AVERY VASILIAS, GREAT HOUSE SCION, REBORN LVL 5
CATACLYSM MOUNTAINS, KILDARI FEDERATION
Once, when they were resting in the shade of a large boulder, Kimi-Lim pointed out a faint glimmer toward the middle of the cracked valley. “That’s going to be where we find them if they don’t take us before we ever get there,” Kimi-Lim said. Despite the heat and cold, Kimi-Lim’s appearance was as pristine as ever; Sarah wondered if it had something to do with being a Light Mage.
“What is it?” Sarah asked, squinting her eyes, trying to make out any detail. No luck. They were still too far away.
“Ooze pits,” Kimi-Lim said. “You can see the steam reflecting off the sunlight from here.”
“Why the hell would they care about an ooze pit?” Sarah asked incredulously.
“Ooze is highly nutritious—”
“I refuse to believe that orcs and goblins eat ooze,” Sarah interrupted. “Come on. You’re kidding, right?”
Kimi-Lim laughed, shaking their head, “No! Of course not! But ooze is highly nutritious for these plants. And their utun eat the plants.”
“What are utun?” Sarah asked, kicking at a rock. It clattered and echoed throughout the valley.
“Uh…They’re big, four-footed hairy beasts with slitted eyes and four horns on their heads. Orcwallah toh-yeh use them as mounts in the rugged terrain because they’re more reliable than even enchanted vehicles.” They waved their hand vaguely in the air, “They say the utun can sense the worst chaos energy emanations and avoid them, but only the orcwallah can ride them.”
The image in Sarah’s head of the creature Kimi-Lim was describing was nightmarish, but pretty much everything about this place seemed to be bleak or twisted somehow. “So, we’re headed to the ooze pits in the hopes of getting picked up by one of these toh-yeh because if we don’t, we’ll probably die a hideous death.”
“Not probably,” Kimi-Lim corrected primly, “Definitely. The Cataclysm Mountains are appropriately named now, even if it wasn’t a true Cataclysm that made them the way they are.”
They trudged along for another hour, Sunspot continually trotting ahead and then bounding back. The Sundog never seemed to lose his energy or curiosity, sniffing at each thorny bush or rock with the same enthusiasm as the last one. He left scorch marks on all the rocks he visited.
“Aren’t we kind of… I dunno… monster bait wandering around like this?” Sarah asked at one point.
“Oh, without a doubt,” Kimi-Lim responded. “The Cataclysm Mountains are crawling with monsters. But not this close to an ooze pit. The orcwallah keep them strictly clear.”
“You sound very confident,” Sarah pointed out. “But you also said you’ve never been here. How uh, up to date is your information?”
Kimi-Lim burst out laughing, “Sorry!” They said, unable to stop another outburst of giggles before they were able to speak again. “Sorry! I’ve just never heard a human ask about an elf’s sources before… It’s not your fault! I just wasn’t expecting it.”
“No, if it’s funny, it’s funny,” Sarah said, “I just don’t get the joke.”
“Since you’re an Imperial—and you can say you aren’t until you’re red in the face,” Kimi-Lim pre-empted before Sarah could cut in, “but you have a Great House Scion’s etherheart in you and you don’t get much more Imperial than that. Since you are an Imperial, you’re connected to the System at all times. You have that vast trove of knowledge at your fingertips—especially you, because you have Enhanced Access—and most Imperials think the System is the end-all and be-all of collected knowledge regarding all things of import.” Kimi-Lim snorted derisively, jabbing at a rock with their Silverstaff for emphasis, “They’re idiots! The System is an impressive collection of knowledge, no one denies it. But it’s not objective and it’s not unimpeachable.”
“What, do you mean that it lies?” Sarah asked, feeling more than a little alarmed.
She’d based quite a bit of her fighting style and understanding of her grafts on the descriptions that the System provided. She relied on the maps and the identification subroutines. She even reviewed the combat logs regularly as Gammon had taught her so that she could shave down response time and figure out the best combos she could squeeze out of her skills and abilities.
“Not out-and-out lies,” Kimi-Lim hedged, “but half-truths and misinterpretations. The System doesn’t care about history beyond the impact Reborn have on it and there are millions more non-Reborn than there are Reborn on Nolm. It has an agenda, too. Those Quests it gives out—who decides what’s Quest-worthy and what the rewards are? The only ones who stop to even think about it practically worship the System so it’s not exactly objective thinking.”
Their words picked up speed as they spoke, passion making Kimi-Lim forget their audience, “Most treat the System as this monolithic, unimpeachable arbiter of truth but what they conveniently forget is that it’s an ancient AI system built on truly ancient tech on a moon so far away that the only people who can reach it are the Amethyst-rank Reborn who Ascend! You can’t tell me that the System is a perfect, hermetically sealed computer where nothing breaks, nothing goes wrong, and there’s no bugs or updates required? That’s insanity, that’s—” Kimi-Lim looked over at Sarah and saw a familiar glazed look on her face. The elf blushed furiously, their cheeks turning bright gold instead of red, “Sorry. I get passionate about that topic.”
“I see that,” Sarah said, grinning. Another icy blast of wind howled across the valley, making her squint against the sudden rush. “God, I hate this wind! But if you don’t use the System—and if it lies or has this agenda or whatever, then what do you do? Just not have the information?” Sarah shrugged, “I think I’d rather have the information and then decide how to use it before I just throw it out entirely. Especially if it’s for something practical like a graft description!”
“Most people who rely on it do just fine for themselves,” Kimi-Lim said, “but just remember this: whose agenda are you forwarding by using that information? Whose purpose does it serve for the description of your graft to be written in that way?”
“Whose?!” Sarah asked, feeling both amused and a little frustrated. “No, don’t answer that, I don’t really care. Look, I know there’s some tragic shit that happened in the past, but what does all this conspiracy theory bullshit have to do with how you know what you know about this place?!”
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“Right! I was getting to that!” Kimi-Lim held up their hands in a placating gesture, almost knocking themselves on the head with their Silverstaff, “So you know the System—”
“Kimi-Lim!” Sarah said warningly.
Kimi-Lim rolled their eyes and continued, pushing Sarah playfully on the shoulder, “The System is what the Imperials rely on. But one of the great callings of my people has been Vhen Darrai, the Great Archive. One of the most important duties of an elf in the rest of the world is to collect data for the Archive because it’s the collected and indexed computer records and traffic since computerized record-keeping began. Integration architects, like yours truly,” they said, “are at the forefront of Vhen Darrai research and collection.” Kimi-Lim held their arms out, bowing theatrically, “Whose ranks you have kindly helped me join very recently!
“Anyway, the Great Archive is uncensored, uncorrelated. In the species’ own words and languages. Elves have been developing programs and subroutines of our own as translation and interpretation modules for this huge project, but we always preserve the original record in its original form so that it can be experienced as intended.”
“So…that’s where you were getting your information from?” Sarah asked skeptically. “I’m going to guess you have some kind of implant or something, cuz I’ve never seen you looking this stuff up.
“And what makes your Great Archive any more accurate or trustworthy than the System? What, people don’t lie here? You can’t write a lie down in the elven language or something?”
Kimi-Lim looked at Sarah as if she’d spontaneously grown a second head, “Don’t be an idiot. Of course, you can write a—wait, is all your written material utterly literal on Earth? How intriguing! You’ll hav—”
“No! Just—no.” Sarah groaned exasperatedly, “Stop. Let’s assume both our cultures have active imaginations. My point was this: what makes lies in someone’s own language better than lies by the System?”
“Well, for one thing, at least you’re reading that person’s own lies,” Kimi-Lim pointed out, “and when you have multiple independent sources reporting on all kinds of things at the same time, you tend to get much more accurate corroboration than you would if you trusted the entire process to a malfunctioning AI. Especially one with an agenda.”
Sarah considered for a moment and nodded, conceding the point. “Okay, so you still didn’t answer about how you’re accessing it. I mean, how would I be able to access this Great Archive? All I have to do with the System is think about it and menus and whatnot just pop into existence.”
“That’s not unlike my connection to the Great Archive, but I use an external port that’s paired to my Systablo.”
They fumbled in the BOTI bag at their side for a second or two, then pulled out a small rectangular tablet made of black stone polished to a mirror shine. They tapped the mirror-like surface, and it immediately sprang to life. The surface turned into a psychedelic display of various menus, console text commands, and outrageous data visualizations and models.
“Those are my search demons,” they said, pointing to five odd visualizations that appeared to be continually churning through all different kinds of weird media, “I bound them myself when I was an apprentice at the Academy. My port lets me do searches with my mind and see the results in a holographic display that draws itself on my retinas. So yes, I was reading up all I could about the Cataclysm Mountains while we’ve been walking.”
“And there’s a ton of computerized information from these destroyed people?” Sarah asked, intrigued despite the dry topic. “Did they have an orcish Internet?”
Kimi-Lim grimaced, “No, and that’s been pretty frustrating. It’s difficult to even tell when this war truly happened. Most accounts agree it happened between two hundred and two hundred and fifty years ago.” They balled their fists up and shouted up at the sky in a sudden, dramatic display, “Ugh, I’m so jealous of your culture! It must have been so incredibly freeing to have endless information there whenever you wanted!”
Sarah shrugged but didn’t say anything. There were advantages and disadvantages. The profusion of information made bad data or outright bullshit very difficult for the casual consumer to differentiate. With the advent of AI, the torrent of misinformation and disinformation had become even worse on Earth. But it had to be better than what Kimi-Lim was describing. Right?
“There’s never been anything like the worldwide network you told me existed on Earth,” Kimi-Lim continued, hopping up on a boulder and then with a twirl and complicated bit of footwork, sashayed through the air, all while continuing to talk. “Not here on Nolm. The largest networks we know of now were self-contained and those are usually the most valuable,” Kimi-Lim leaped into a spinning split, Silverstaff held horizontally and then spun to the side, “but always the most difficult to retrieve unscathed.”
They landed on a glowing disc of light and went en pointe and kicked into an acrobatic flip, all the while, their voice remained steady and even, “Data is always heavily guarded, so any information we find is going to be encrypted, secured with enchantments, or could be trapped. Or all three!”
Kimi-Lim’s dance continued as Sarah watched, still walking through the barren wasteland and shivering with every burst of icy wind then boiling in the unrelenting sun when the wind died. Kimi-Lim didn’t seem affected by the heat at all, only energized by the sunlight.
“Why do you dance everywhere like that?” Sarah asked. “Don’t get it twisted, it’s beautiful…but aren’t you exhausted?”
“I dance because it’s in me to dance!” Kimi-Lim laughed, skipping into another series of steps. “And when I’m in the sun, using my gathering technique, I don’t get tired from a little dancing. After all, I’ve absorbed an ethershard of Dance, it’s what gave me my Solar Step graft!”
They twirled around Sarah like a ballerina, keeping their head looking at Sarah despite the speed of their spinning. Their robes flew out, making them look like a red and gold top. Eventually, they twirled away, and into another leap up into the air on golden steps of light.
“So, you have this Archive,” Sarah said, following Kimi-Lim’s leaping progress. What music are they listening to? She wondered. They dance like they’ve got a hell of a playlist going. She shook her head, giggling a little at the thought, and continued, “That you have to constantly add to. Are you like, a writer for this archive? Wait,” Sarah paused and looked seriously at Kimi-Lim, “you’re not going to ask me to down three pints of beer and ask me where my towel is, are you?”
Kimi-Lim laughed as they danced, “You have such funny ideas! I guess I do add to the Archive. When and where I can. But information isn’t just open and out there.” The dance became closed and claustrophobic. “So adding to the Archive requires truly skilled wizards that can break information encryptions and enchantments: hence the need for integration architects. But that process is slow and since their Cataclysm, data’s been sparse from the Kildari Federation.”
Sarah followed the complicated dance through the air as Kimi-Lim danced on platforms of light. It had become much more expressive and open with twirls and arches that flung them all around. The elf’s dance took them up and down and all around, but always toward the ooze pits. When they finally finished, they turned with a graceful sweeping movement and executed a dramatic bow.
Sarah clapped, then ran to catch up. The elf was already lost in something else, their expression gone distant as they stared into space.
“What is it?” Sarah asked.
Kimi-Lim tsked disgustedly, eyes scanning over data Sarah couldn’t see, “I’ve been having to piece together what little real information about the Cataclysm Mountains I can from work orders for mithril cables, an old Imperial documentary on the San Tristobel Mountains that was never released to the public, and some journal entries from travelers over the past two hundred years.”
“Well, at least you’ve been able to piece together what you have. I mean, here we are out in the middle of nowhere. Near the ooze pits, I mean, not nowhere,” Sarah pointed out.
“I’m glad you’re with me, Sarah,” Kimi-Lim said, “and I never thought I’d feel that way about a human.” Sarah smiled but didn’t respond.
They subsided once more into companionable silence, concentrating on the hike. Finally, with the ooze pits appearing no closer to Sarah than they had when they’d started out that day what felt like forever ago, they took a break. It was late in the afternoon and the sun looked to be heading into the west.
A small moon half the size of Earth’s moon was peeking above the northeastern horizon as she watched, a nameless discomfort she was intimately familiar with settled on her. It was the feeling of being under very unfriendly, very close scrutiny. She nervously picked at a hangnail, wondering when the hell things were going to go pear-shaped.