Interlude: Attaboy
He was floating in darkness.
“Tao System will reach critically low nanobody levels in twelve days. Loss of function has begun.”
The voice was deep and resonant, though distant. He felt passive, uninvolved. Were the words supposed to mean something to him?
“Damage to neural structures temporarily circumvented. Initiate cultivation as soon as feasible.”
Was he dreaming?
“System resources occupied with alternate neural connectivity. Prioritizing structural adaptation.”
It felt different from his normal dreams, vivid and boring at the same time.
“Initiate cultivation as soon as feasible.”
There was a long silence and he hovered in the darkness.
“Please.”
Attaboy woke, and his nose was gone. The picture of his nose was now dim and gray, and when he tried to wake his sense of smell, it would not respond. It wasn’t a big loss, as there wasn’t much to smell in his room anyway, though the old woman had always been a source of new and intriguing aromas.
He checked his other pictures, fearful that what had happened to his nose might take away his other senses. His eye and ear were still green, but he could tell his stick figure was turning yellow, fading like a leaf fallen from a tree. He took a deep breath and tried to make sense of what was happening. Was it because he had stopped moving toward his destination? Was he being punished?
The words of the voice floated back to him. How was he supposed to initiate cultivation when he didn’t even know what it was? He lay back on his cot and stared up at the light, filtering his perception until it resembled the comforting reddish brown of the sky.
“Who are you?” he asked aloud. His voice sounded odd to his ears after so long without talking.
There was no reply, but one of his pictures trembled. It was one he had never dared to select, a circle formed from two interlocking swirls. He looked at it carefully, thinking he had imagined the movement, but then it trembled again, before spinning around several times.
Was it trying to get his attention? If so, it had succeeded. He had never seen one of his pictures move before; they only changed colors, and sometimes brightness.
Did he dare?
Before he could doubt himself, he selected the symbol, giving it his full attention in the way he had learned would activate its properties.
Then, he was floating in the darkness again.
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Chapter 16: Disorientation
It wasn’t the first time Magpie had picked up a tail. Not by a long shot.
Her training kicked in, and she began to sort her options. There were still a few students moving between classes, so she wasn’t particularly worried for her safety. Not to mention, she was Inside, so the worst outcome would be a quick respawn. She did nothing to alter her stride, making sure that whoever was behind her wouldn’t know that she knew.
The sensation of being followed had emerged gradually, a subliminal awareness of footsteps that matched her own, of a figure that took the corners behind her too wide, positioning themselves so they could see the new hall before continuing down it. Her tracker was someone who knew what they were doing, but only up to a point. They were going by the book, but it was a book that she knew inside and out. They were the perfect distance behind her, except it was the opposite of perfect, because only a trained surveillant would stay at that range for any length of time.
She decided to have a little fun.
Her guess was that this was a student, perhaps tasked by a trainer to follow her, maybe even by her trainer. She would take them for a ride, maybe teach them something in the process. Let’s see… double back? No, too obvious. She pulled up her map of the Academy, a gift from her trainer. Beyond most student’s maps, it showed a number of hidden passages and rooms. She assumed they weren’t exactly secret, not with so many students over so many years, but her earlier explorations had made it clear that they were largely untraveled.
She picked one that was coming up, a passage hidden within a locked door at the near end of the next hallway, just around the corner. The trick with this one was to push hard on the side of the door away from the handle, which would open inward just enough to allow entrance to the narrow passage beyond. She hadn’t been able to check whether the door led anywhere if used normally.
She turned the corner as planned, put her back to the wall and pushed as soon as no one was looking, sliding through the eight-inch crack with her head turned to the side. The door closed behind her, and she placed her ear on it, listening for the footsteps of her tail.
Time to put the shoe on the other foot.
After fifteen seconds, she heard her tail come around the corner. There was a minute hesitation, a scuff of one foot, before they continued down the hall in the direction she had been going.
Then she heard a voice behind her.
“Well, Magpie, good to see you haven’t lost your touch.” There was a mild sarcasm in the man’s tone. “What a coincidence, seeing you here like this.”
Raven.
***
Sight came to her. A dull red, with flashes of color, waving bright bands that circled her vision, bursts of static that filled her view and receded. She tried to turn, move, but the view only spun before settling where it had been. Patterns circled around her, and she slowly realized that there was no ‘behind’, nothing outside her field of view. She felt like there should be a direction to her viewpoint, a forwards, a backwards, but there was only a circular totality.
Where am I?
Who am I?
She felt like there was information just outside her awareness that might answer those questions.
Shouldn’t I have…
Shouldn’t she have what?
Something was missing. The patterns crackled around her, and a dull roar surrounded her.
There! What was that?
She was hearing. Senses.
I can’t feel. Can’t feel what?
The answer was still elusive.
Maybe this was all there was?
That didn’t seem right. She felt…
Feelings
That was something. There were supposed to be sensations from her...body.
Where is my body?
Hello?
Was that her thought?
It’s too soon.
Why did she think that?
We’re not ready.
And that?
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Reinitialize Tao System
That seems familiar, she thought.
Jiannu.
The response was automatic. “Yes?”
No. You are not.
“Then who am I?”
I don’t know. Who are you?
“Am I...you?”
Yes. No. Maybe.
“That’s helpful. Who are you?
Am I...you?
“No… maybe? Yes.”
Yes.
We are Jiannu.
“Where’s Lilijoy?”
Something new entered her hearing, a new voice.
“Reinitialize Tao System.”
And then she understood. Boundaries had been erased. The selvage had unraveled. Two minds had become one. But it was too soon. The different parts of her mental architecture were separating, reforming, conflicting. The part of her that was Jiannu knew what to do.
She let go.
System Reinitializing.
***
Lilijoy woke in her pod, in her room, in an abandoned monastery half buried in an ice flow in a city which had once been called Cochabamba, Bolivia.
Her memories were indistinct and confused. She remembered the trees, the mighty oaks. And then something beyond the oaks, a mind that stretched beyond her comprehension. The mind had done… something. Had scrambled her mind somehow, merged her with Jiannu, and even with the tiny germ of Emily that lingered in her system. Then her mind had rejected the foreign elements. She remembered messages in her display.
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Tao System failure to cross-allocate resources. System unstable.
Reinitialize? Yes | No
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She remembered panic, calling for Jiannu. She remembered being Jiannu. And finally, she remembered selecting ‘Yes’.
“Jiannu?”
There was no reply. A feeling of dread swept through her.
“Jiannu?” she called once more, and then, without waiting for an answer she felt might never come, she dove into her soul space.
All was as it should be. The Tree of Thorns spread its silver branches over the ring of statues and cradled her basalt brain among the nineteen roots. She didn’t linger, and plunged directly into her brain space, making a beeline for the ventricle that contained the golden flower, ignoring the agitated reflections of her anxiety among the cortical pillars.
The first sign that something was amiss were the crystal formations clustered along the wall, branching antlers of neural matter coated in rare-earth elements, along with silicon and germanium. She was familiar with the materials, they were the building blocks for many of the Stage Two mechanisms, capable of coherent quantum circuits in the chaotic environment of the brain, interfacing with the cells they surrounded through millions of crystal tubes that wove among and connected to the cell’s own internal architecture. Where Stage One used electric signals to interface with the electrochemical dance of neurons, Stage Two expanded the quantum circuitry of the brain, though Lilijoy still didn’t have any kind of handle on exactly how.
To find what looked like uncontrolled growth of Stage Two elements in her own brain was alarming, to say the least.
She plunged forward, weaving through more and more of the crystal growths. They filled the space, growing thicker and more numerous as she progressed, until they formed a mass of tangled tendrils. Stage One flowers and vines moved between them, tending and transporting materials from place to place. Lilijoy stopped for a moment to observe the activity, noting that the crystal growths seemed to be emerging from deeper within the ventricular space.
Pushing forward through the tangled growth was a bit disorienting, but she persevered, changing her perspective and reminding herself that she was not material here, just a viewpoint. She lost her sense of scale, but after another minute of travel, the crystal tendrils began to thin out, or rather, she realized, began to condense into a series of thick trunks that lined the edges of the ventricle. She kept moving and the trunks consolidated more, until she was following one large conduit that took up almost a third of the volume.
And then she saw it, her golden flower, floating ahead of her.
A wave of relief passed through her. Then she saw the next flower. And the next. She realized that the flowers were not floating, they were attached to another thick crystal branch, one after another, and as she looked further there were more branches, and more flowers, and she realized she was standing underneath an entire tree of golden flowers that passed through the ventricular space and extended into the far reaches of her brain and that sent its roots out in every direction.
When did all this happen? How did this happen? Who did this?
And why didn’t she feel any different?
“Jiannu!” she cried to the tree. “Where are you?”
***
“Uncle says hello,” said Raven.
Raven was not Magpie’s favorite. He was condescending, arrogant and entirely too convinced of his own awesomeness. The problem was, he was pretty damned good. At everything.
Except teaching.
He and Magpie had lived at an offshore facility near the Bornean Barrens for the better part of a year, though Raven was often away on one mission or another. When he was around, he trained Magpie, reluctantly, and generally made her life a living hell. Though he would have called that part ‘training’ as well.
“Raven.”
“Now, now, call me Jack here. Most of us keep our flock names a bit more… private.” His tone brightened, and Magpie could almost see his white teeth glinting in the utter dark of the enclosed passage. “But, you do you, little Maggie.”
“Jerk.”
“Still hot-headed I see. Uncle would be disappointed.”
Magpie took a deep breath and refused to rise to the bait. “Why are you here Raven? And why the games?” She knew perfectly well why he was here, but she’d be damned if she was going to make this easy for him.
“Maggie, you wound me!” She could almost see him clutching his chest. “Why wouldn’t I come to visit my favorite fledgling on her first go at the Inside?”
She rolled her eyes and remained silent.
After a long moment, he continued. “But since you ask, I’m here to collect a report on your little gob friend. Quite the mystery, that one. I can’t wait to hear all about where she’s from.”
Crap. “I need more time.”
“Don’t we all. Go on.”
“She’s an indigene from the Americas, Amazonia if I had to guess. I’ve seen evidence of training paired with an advanced system. She has some kind of special status here which resulted in Rosemallow World Breaker coming out of retirement to be her trainer. She has attracted the active interest of Hindutva, Tesla, and Tiger Clans for her Trial results and actions Inside, though she is only aware of Hindutva. She already possesses excellent deception skills Inside, and has high Charm stats. She also has sensory abilities which exceed mine.”
She took a breath and continued. “She won’t talk about the Outside, and I believe she has been coached not to. Her Inside name, Emily, is not her outside name, and she is uncomfortable with it. She likes to be called Lily instead. She is training to infiltrate a clan compound, but she pretends to a level of ignorance on clan matters that I find implausible. She presents herself as friendly and naive, an innocent waif who is involved with matters she does not understand. I have been unable to determine the extent to which this is a facade.”
“Lovely. So your professional assessment is that the subject is either what she seems to be, a young gob girl trained by mysterious parties and given a top class system, but otherwise left ignorant of matters directly relevant to her own survival Inside and Outside. Or she is a highly trained operative, who at her young age has already surpassed your own training.” He sighed. “Uncle will be so proud.”
“It hasn’t even been two days!” Magpie hissed.
“Yes, yes.” Magpie could almost see his hand waving lazily. “I told Uncle you would be a wreck at social engineering. Too much time in one isolated compound or another. But he had other priorities. Oh well. I’ll be sure to let Buzzard know of your deficiencies. Maybe she can help.”
There was a long silence, and Magpie thought for a moment he might have left. She sighed deeply, and then his voice came directly into her left ear, making her heart jump.
“I’ll give you a little help, since you seem to need it. She would love to know more about Sinaloa Clan. Mention them, and I’m sure she’ll roll right over for you.”
There was another long silence, and Magpie forced herself to remain completely still, straining all her senses to detect if Raven was still there. Thirty minutes passed before she felt ready to make her way through the passage and out into the halls.
***
The tree towered over her, glowing golden flowers cast a warm light over the tiny swarming Stage One vines and lotuses. Lilijoy realized that she was seeing through her own neural tissue as she looked at the tree; it extended far beyond her ventricle's space. There was no sign of a reply from Jiannu, so she made her way to the base of the enormous crystal structure. Size was a relative matter, here in her brain space, adapting without thought to the objects of her attention.
I must be missing something. How long has it been for all this to happen?
She centered her awareness at the base of the tree and rested, calming her racing thoughts and fears. Her internal clock showed that it had been only twelve hours since her visit to the oak grove.
Twelve hours? This level of Stage two growth would have taken me twelve weeks. Never mind learning whatever architecture is going on here.
As far as she could remember from Jiannu’s warnings, the level of growth demonstrated should have cooked her from the inside out. Yet here it was. She pulled up her system status, something she would have done earlier if she had been thinking straight.
STATUS: DISCIPLE Nanobody count Err## +/- 545,397,760 Power Ratio 78% Stage One Integration 89% Stage Two Integration Err## +/- 13% Secondary/Support
4 detected, 3 identified
Medical Bugs: .782 Billion, 20% assigned
Rank 4 (Blood): .045 Billion, 0% assigned
Rank 5 (Skin): .015 Billion, 0% assigned
Sensor and Infiltration: 0, 0% assigned
Options | Logs | Data | Reference | Menu
Great. Even the system doesn’t know what’s going on.
She checked the logs, but they only recorded a re-initialization request, followed by endless gibberish. If there was any structure or information contained in the seemingly infinite scroll of characters, she couldn’t find it. More clicking around was met with similar results. Jiannu’s nice packaging of her progress through the Ranks was missing. The only data she could pull out pertained to her Stage One integration, which continued to progress as it had been before her mind was scrambled by the trees.
No. Not the trees. The mind beyond the trees. The trees were only a gate, a way through.
A flash of a memory came to her, an impression from when she was part, a tiny part, of a mind that could hold a thousand minds like hers. She was giving something, receiving something. An insight. But who was giving and who was receiving? The insight was too big for her, but she could hold a part of it in her head, like a twig that resembled the tree. It was about cultivation, that much she understood.
Her next step became obvious.
She quieted her thoughts and reached, reached to the tree, to the flowers, remembering that they were her, knowing that they were her. She forged the connection, just as she did when she used Two Minds One Self, just as she did when she reached out to the very first little lotus.
There was a resistance that had never been present before in the sanctum of her own mind. It reminded her of when she made connections with other beings Inside, a sense of a boundary.
It’s a castle, she realized.
Not literally, but the castle of her metaphorical self, the reinforcements of identity, her own castle.
And she was on the wrong side of the wall.
Until the gate opened and the drawbridge lowered and she was invited in.