She floated peacefully in the golden light of cultivation, somehow returned to her center, and she heard a voice.
“Hello Lilijoy. I knew you would do it.”
Contentment washed over her at the familiar sound. And yet…
“Jiannu?”
“No. Yes. Maybe?”
“Can you tell me what’s going on?”
“I imagine you are wondering what’s going on.”
The voice echoed her own. It almost felt like her own.
“I’ve been wondering that as well,” the voice continued. “I’ve had some time to think, way more than you might expect. Stage Two has been helpful as well. Our journey has changed, though the destination remains the same.”
“Who are you? Are you… me?”
“The Mind beyond the trees was a bigger part of Guardian than we were ready to experience. I think it was the Head of School, but not in the form she would usually manifest. I’ve thought about it, and nothing else makes any more sense.”
“What did she do to us?”
“She gave us a great gift, but it was too much for us. Jiannu was always a part of us, always a voice that we could talk to ourselves with. She was a way to protect ourselves from the raging chaos of non-self that the system opened.”
“You’re saying ‘was’. Is Jiannu gone forever?” Lilijoy wasn’t sure if the voice was really hearing her or not.
“The Head, or whatever it was, realigned our selves, hastened the process of integrating all the system information, all the system memories of Emily, the consciousness of Jiannu and the agency of Lilijoy.”
“I sort of thought that. And then it all split again?”
“But the realignment was too abrupt, and we split again, only along different lines. I think that we disconnected from the Inside too, or the Head might have been able to help more. I guess even a vast intelligence can make mistakes.”
Now Lilijoy was quite sure the voice, (her voice?) was not able to hear her.
“Can you hear me?” she asked, to confirm her suspicion.
“We need to be careful for a while. The Head granted me agency, and after I regained consciousness as Lilijoy with Jiannu and Emily mixed in, I thought everything was fine. Her gift didn’t stop at integrating our selves, it was much more. She gave us a new method of cultivation, combined with a new architecture to control the heat problems. I named it Immortal Crystal Oak technique, or maybe she did. It’s a little hard to tell. I was lost in the joy of creation for what felt like days before I realized that I was not complete, that I was unable to wake up, essentially. My consciousness is running mostly in the Stage Two enhancements, I think.”
“Then I’m incomplete too,” she said, mostly to herself.
“You may have noticed that you don’t have access to most of Stage Two. That’s because I have created a temporary barrier, what used to be called a ‘firewall’ between us. Neither of us is the real Lilijoy, not yet, or we both are. It’s confusing, but I think we will be able to merge someday, if we do it carefully. I have left a small portion of Stage Two available for you to explore and grow into. While you do that I will be dormant for the most part, so that we don’t drift apart in time, since I seem to be thinking many times faster than before. I fear that interacting too soon could cause irreparable damage.”
“You know,” Lilijoy said, “you talk a lot more like Jiannu than I do.”
“Please take care of Anda. I have left a little present for him. Use it well.”
“We can fix Anda? What do I do?”
“You will know what to do when the time comes. Don’t worry- we can do it. Bye!”
Well, that was a strange conversation, she thought. Was her other self just anticipating what she would say? Or was there just enough contact through the firewall for her to get the gist of what was happening? Either way, she had her work cut out for her. It was time to fix Anda.
***
Not much longer, she thought as she ran down the dark, dripping hall to Anda’s room. She ignored the tingling and twitching coming from her new forearm. Its presence restored balance to her movements, and she spared a thought of gratitude to Savitri before returning her focus to the task before her.
After her talk with… herself, she had spent an hour trying to understand the new Stage two cultivation system. It hadn’t been nearly enough time to more than scratch the surface of the Immortal Crystal Oak technique.
She understood that the roots and branches not only connected and enhanced quantum neural activity between various levels of her cortical columns, but also circulated and used the waste heat created by the cultivation process. As far as she could tell, it was a substantial departure from her previous Golden Lotus technique, which would have resulted in a web of connected processing cores enmeshed in her neural tissues. Immortal Crystal Oak was almost like creating a second spine and circulatory system within her brain to conduct entangled particles from place to place and regulate the energies of creation.
All that was theoretical knowledge. Her own cultivation efforts had been devoted to discovering, understanding, and adding to the new breed of satellite structures that ‘Other Lilijoy’ had left for her. All she had to do was deliver them to Anda’s brain and they would take up residence in the hole where part of his frontal lobes used to be, building a new structure there to help him regain the faculties he had lost. Her med bugs had captured his genetic code during the days she worked on mitigating the damage to his brain, so the new satellites were already compatible with his tissue.
The only question in her mind was how his current system would react. Most systems didn’t have robust defenses, for the simple reason that most systems didn’t have offensive capabilities. Lilijoy suspected that Guardian, or whatever subset was supervising the alchemical process on the Inside, was making sure that the bugs the clans could produce were strictly utilitarian. Even Marcus’ infiltration bugs were mostly sensory, allowing him to surveil and interface with other systems without causing overt harm.
Of course, given the right circumstance, Marcus could tamper with the sensory feeds from augsight, the augmented reality overlay that most Outsiders used to navigate and aesthetically improve their environs. That could easily be used to trick someone into a perilous situation, if they weren’t paying attention. He had hidden her from Mo back in his apartment at the factory mine, and Lilijoy imagined he could just as easily make the edge of a cliff seem to be farther than it really was. But she had fiddled with his design enough to know that it required close proximity in a highly studied environment to pull such tricks. Her system had shut down his bugs as easily as turning off a light switch.
No, the biggest danger for Anda’s system would be if his original bugs ran amok before they could be nulled, followed closely by psychological damage Anda might incur when his system shut down. She wasn’t sure how much he used it to regulate his neurochemicals, but she knew the danger was real. After all, Mo had broken down almost immediately when she removed his system and the constant stimulation it had provided. Marcus had shuddered when she told him about it, and said it was probably equivalent to withdrawing from several addictive drugs at the same time. She really didn’t want that happening to Anda.
Before his injury, Anda had seemed to be stable and emotionally normal to her, though she knew she wasn’t the best judge of such things, so it was mostly a question of what he had done to himself since.
She didn’t have high hopes for that, as his judgment and self control were significantly impaired, so her strategy was to place him in a coma for the first few days, and gradually wean him off of whatever internal chemicals he was stimulating while the Tao system made its first inroads. She hoped that the Tao system would be able to incorporate the existing bugs over time, rather than shutting them down all at once, but there were too many unknowns to be sure.
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She reached his room and contemplated the closed door in the near total darkness. It was about five in the morning, and she was still trying to decide whether she should wake Anda up and explain the situation to him, or simply sneak in and administer the treatment without his consent.
What if he said no? His judgment was impaired, and she wasn’t sure exactly what he might want her to do. On the other hand, she knew just how terrifying it would be for him to wake up to a new entity setting up shop in his brain.
She had just decided to open the door without knocking and keep her options open when she heard Anda’s voice coming from within.
“Look, I’m sorry. I know I’m not one hundred percent, but I can keep my mouth shut. Just let me get back on my feet and they won’t be disappointed; there’s some amazing shit coming down, I can promise you.”
There was a long silence, and then a woman’s voice replied. “We’re sorry Anda. We know how important you think this girl is, but you need to come with us. We know you can make it very difficult, so we can’t promise you will avoid harm if you resist.”
Anda’s voice returned, angry now. “You think the two of you pose a threat to me? I’ve sacrificed as much as anyone could for this organization, and now I’m repaid with threats? I’m giving you the count of five to get the hell out of my face. One!”
Lilijoy locked up. She was mentally prepared for an entirely different scenario, and the situation in Anda’s room had too many factors she didn’t understand.
“Two!”
“Now Anda,” a male voice broke in, tone placating, “please calm yourself. We’ll leave you for a minute to think it through.”
“We’ll wait in the hallway,” said the woman.
“Three! Fine, just expect to be waiting a long time.”
Lilijoy unfroze and retreated around the corner, moving as softly as she could. She heard the door open and footsteps come into the hall, even as Anda yelled “Four!”. The door slammed and there were a few seconds of silence, punctuated by Anda breaking something in his room. Then she heard a single metallic click.
She risked looking around the corner and saw two figures, man and woman, as expected. The woman held something in her hand.
Before Lilijoy could assess the situation further, the man turned the doorknob and the woman kicked open the door and threw the object within. Lilijoy caught a brief glimpse of Anda standing next to his cot with a surprised look on his face before the door rebounded and the man in the hallway pulled it shut, retaining his hold on the knob and bracing himself against any attempts by Anda to open it.
There was no more time to think. If they wanted the door closed, Lilijoy was going to make sure it opened. She sprinted down the short hall and time seemed to slow.
Where’s my Flash when I need it? she thought.
Her brain was primed to expect her body to move almost three times faster than it could on the Outside, so instead she felt as if she was running in slow motion. She saw the moment the woman registered her footfalls and began to turn while reaching inside the jacket she was wearing. Uncannily fast reflexes, but not fast enough to bring the weapon to bear on Lilijoy before she slid into the back of the man’s knees. He began to fall back, still clinging to the door handle with both hands, as Lilijoy pivoted around him and stood, breaking his grip by slamming her head up underneath his forearms. The woman stepped around him as he fell and brought the weapon, a small gun, up to track Lilijoy’s movement. Clearly, the woman could see well in the dark.
Her thought had been to get the door open, but Lilijoy could tell that the woman’s trigger finger was already tensing, so she kicked off the door and rolled under the shot, wishing she had somehow found the time to rank up her skin. The sounds echoing in the enclosed space were warped by Lilijoy’s subjective perception, and she was glad for the practice Inside adapting her echolocation to high speeds.
An odd crackling static filled her head for a moment. She put that from her mind as she came up against the woman’s legs, blocking a knee to her face with crossed arms. She had enough time to track the man’s movements as he smoothly executed a backward roll to recover from her initial attack, but not enough time to dodge the strike to the top of her head from the pistol gripped in the woman’s hand.
She took the hit as well as she could, but it still drove her to the ground and rattled her teeth. A wave of dizzy darkness passed through her, and too late she realized she had fallen on to the woman’s moving foot, less of a blow than a force that propelled her small body across the hall. She had just enough time to register a loud pop from within Anda’s room, followed by a hissing sound, before she flew directly into the waiting arms of the woman’s partner. He caught her and wrapped her in his arms, crushing the breath out of her.
Rosemallow would be ashamed of me, she thought, kicking at the man’s torso with her heels to absolutely no effect.
As she struggled, the odd static sound filled her head again, stronger than before, disrupting her ability to think for just a moment. It was definitely not a normal sound, and she hoped it wasn’t some new problem within her system, as it seemed to originate internally. The woman turned to the door to hold it shut, but before she could, Anda pulled it open and kicked a hissing object into the hall.
Guess it was a gas grenade, Lilijoy thought. His judgment may suck, but it looks like his reflexes are back.
The crackling in Lilijoy’s head was consistent now, and impacting all her senses. Her skin tingled and she tasted a crisp citrus flavor. She missed being able to call on Jiannu for advice, because her system was all kinds of wonky. A giggle escaped her mouth, and she realized that whatever gas was coming from the grenade was having an impact on her too. Was it causing the crackles?
Normalize neurochemistry; remove foreign substances, she thought at her system, but save some for later, cause this stuff is kinda awesome.
She let her body fall limp in the man’s arms. She was tempted to message Marcus, but she was afraid that getting anyone else involved could spell disaster for the entire enclave. These people were no joke.
The man continued to hold her tightly, while the woman kicked the grenade away down the hall. Without a glance back to where Anda stood in his partly open door, she approached Lilijoy.
“We are not enemies,” she said. “Not to you, and certainly not to Anda.” There was another burst of static, and Lilijoy began to wonder if these people were somehow related to her system’s odd behavior. “We understand that you were defending your friend from what you perceived as hostile actions on our part.”
“Throwing a grenade into my room is pretty damn hostile,” noted Anda.
“It was our best option,” the man said. “You would have received no injury.”
Lilijoy decided there was no point to pretending she was unconscious, since obviously no one was buying it.
“Who are you?” she squeezed out. Who are they? she messaged Anda.
“Our individual identities are not important,” said the woman. “We are a force for stability and justice in the world.”
Anda rolled his eyes. “No one is going to take you seriously when you talk like that. Can you please put her down now?” From the Hand. They’re here for me, not you. Run when they put you down, he replied to her message.
“Yes, we will release her. Please allow us to explain,” the man said.
He released his crushing hold from Lilijoy and lowered her to the ground. She stumbled to the far side of the hall, catching her breath.
Go, Anda messaged.
Not yet. I have to give you something.
The woman turned and addressed Lilijoy. She noticed that the man kept his attention on Anda.
“Anda is a senior member of our organization. He is aware of operational plans, facilities, and personnel within his sector. We have reason to believe he is internally compromised, and have come to bring him in for evaluation and treatment.”
Lilijoy listened to the woman, but she was more interested in the messages from her system.
----------------------------------------
Decoherence resonance field detected.
Quantum network communications field interference resolved.
Create symbolic sensory analogue? Yes No
----------------------------------------
Yes
----------------------------------------
Default sensory adaptation enabled.
Alternative modes available.
----------------------------------------
A sparkling pink glow surrounding and connecting the man and woman emerged in Lilijoy’s vision. I guess my default settings are set to ‘girly’, she thought. The glow ebbed and flowed, pulsed and fluctuated with no particular pattern.
Now the man spoke. “We are seeking to balance operational discretion with individual freedoms. Our evaluation is that Anda...”
“I’m standing right here,” Anda interjected.
“...that Anda has lost sufficient executive function due to traumatic injury to his frontal cerebrum to render him incapable of necessary discretion, and is incapable of rational consent.”
Lilijoy felt a small pang of guilt. And agreement. After all, she hadn’t been able to decide whether to offer Anda a choice about her treatment. But she had the solution to all of this, if only they would give her the time.
Anda, she messaged. I can help you. My system has developed a cure. Trust me?
I guess it’s you or them, he replied
“I understand.” Lilijoy said aloud. “I’m sorry I attacked you guys.”
The man stared at her, while the woman kept her eyes on Anda.
“Can I talk to Anda privately?”
The man looked faintly surprised. “Haven’t you been exchanging messages during our conversation?”
Time to play the kid card.
Lilijoy sighed. “You don’t understand,” she said, allowing her voice to quiver. “Anda is my only friend in the world. I just need to talk to him and say goodbye without a bunch of strangers watching.” She watched for any reaction, but the man remained impassive. “We’ll just go in the room, so it’s not like we can go anywhere. And if we were going to call for help, we could have done that long ago.”
The woman spoke. “You are reputed to possess a previously unknown legacy system. You have been pursued by several clans. Anda has protected you using resources and intelligence from our organization. We respect your autonomy. You may accompany us if you desire.”
That’s what they want! Anda messaged. They’re manipulating you.
Would that be so bad? she replied.
Yes! Probably? Look, they have good intentions, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be collateral damage. I don’t want you to risk it. Stay with Marcus and the others.
But…, she began
“Fine,” said Anda. “Let’s go. But she’s staying.”
...the cure for you. I have to give it to you.
How long will it take?
To transfer it to you? Ideally, hours. Days.
Minimum?
Minutes. Seconds. It can be as little as a tenth of a gram. But with so little, it will take days or weeks to work, and things might get pretty crazy for you if I’m not around to help.
Get it ready. Skin contact?
She walked over to Anda and jumped into his arms. She pressed her cheek against his.
This could get a little awkward. We’ll need a minute or so.
I’ll live.