Interlude: Attaboy

External Message from Right Hand of Azreal (Tier 5)

Mode: Satellite, Narrow

Message Content: Text

Title: Registration

Message Body:

A Message was received from [Self Identified] using system [Tao 3.0.6]

This identification and system are unregistered to the Guardian network.

Identification unavailable.

Please supply a different identification, or ranked list of identifications to register system [Tao 3.0.6]

Registration will enable access to public Guardian services.

Contact | Delete | Blacklist | Quarantine | Menu

Attaboy was annoyed that this Right Hand person wouldn’t let him use his true name. He couldn’t ask anyone for advice, since he wasn’t supposed to know about registering with Guardian.

“That’s the special gob,” a young person had whispered to another earlier that day. “A word to him could mean your death!”

“I heard he’s like Nykka.”

“What? No. He’s wild.”

“Why is he even here?”

Thankfully, his ear was working better than ever. He could hear other people talk about him. Sometimes it seemed that was all the people around him could talk about. That’s how he learned about ‘registering’ his system. Dijiann had helped him figure out the rest, since he didn’t seem to have any dreams about it.

His ear had also allowed him to learn about the other major topic of conversation among the people of the Southern Sanctuary. A place that they went as much as they were allowed. A place with fighting, and creatures he had never heard of, that even Dijiann had never heard of. It sounded like the place that he sometimes went in his dreams, with vivid bright light and green plants as far as the eye could see.

A place called ‘Inside.’

He sighed and submitted his request again.

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Chapter 29: Bardo

Ears ringing, she curled up on the ground in despair and felt the now familiar sensation of cold stone spreading through her body. Something hit her just as the blackness took her for a third time.

Snap.

Now standing over the three statues of herself, the first one had fallen atop her most recent form. The one on the ground was twisting, turning toward the other two, the look of horror changing to despair mirroring her own.

This is the end. She felt a wave of acceptance wash over her and she sat down amid the stone bodies, no longer horrified by their odd movements.

I wonder how many stone Lilijoys there will be when my body finally freezes Outside?

The image of a tornado of her broken stone bodies forever swirling in her soul space popped into her head, and she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She felt a cold, hard hand on her shoulder and then another on her ankle. The wind hit a new peak and the buried voices roared in ragged chorus.

“THE SOUL IS NOT THE SELF.”

“Fine, I get it!” She screamed into the wind, dodging something that looked suspiciously like a lizard. “What is it then?”

A large yin leaf plastered itself on her forehead before being torn away. The hand on her shoulder squeezed painfully and she saw her stone face, mouth moving. She had just enough time to yell, “Are you saying something?” before her body stiffened and crackled like ice in a metal tray, and the darkness took her yet again.

Snap.

She was back, and diving to the ground immediately, sheltering in her own stone figures. The wind had reached a critical point, carrying stone that broke off still more stone from the surrounding columns. All her previous statues, Anda, Attaboy, the piles, the tribe, all were little more than stone posts now. Out of the other eye, she could see that the tree was bare branched, jagged and broken, whipping and vibrating in tune with the whirling winds.

Again, the stone hands of her former selves found her, grasped her urgently. She looked directly at their faces, her faces.

What are they saying? She was an excellent lip reader, but their lips were moving slowly, and had no tongue or teeth she could see, just a stretched expanse of bare stone between their lips. They were all saying the same thing at different times. If only she had access to her sensory playback, she could at least speed it up, but nothing was working.

A large stone hit one of the figures holding her, knocking it down to slide several feet along the ground before fetching up against the base of a former monument.

She tried to think. How many words? They’re definitely not saying that ‘soul is not self’ or ‘self is not soul’ stuff.

That had been her first guess, but the cycle had three movements. Three syllables, maybe three words? The slowness was infuriating, and she had to wait for several more cycles before she had something, just before the stone took her again.

Snap.

Dive to the ground. The statues slowly converged on her, covering her.

Protecting her?

She knew what it it was they were saying, what it had to be.

“I’m still here.”

She wasn’t just leaving behind her stone body with each snapping cycle. She was leaving behind her self. Each of the statues was still her. She was splitting, breaking off pieces of her self, and each of them was still her, aware enough to understand that she needed to know.

She thought she understood what to do.

“This self is not the soul,” she said and she hugged the closest statue, looking it in the blank stone eyes. With all her might, she reached out to a phantom body, a phantom mind, like the golden flower, like the sixth finger. Two minds, one self. She felt the stone grow through her once more.

“Not yet damn it!”

She released her mind into her stone self. She dissolved. She ended.

...she was lying on the ground, huddled over nothing. Her flesh and blood self had disappeared, swept away in a stream of particles into the vortex. She felt the stone body she inhabited begin to move and thaw, the speed of her thoughts accelerating. She turned to her neighboring self. This self is not the soul, she thought. And she pushed through and she ended.

...she saw her flesh and blood self disappear, saw her neighboring self mouth something new to her and dissolve into a stream of fine sand whipped into the wind. So that’s how it is, she thought, turning to her neighbor.

Across the clearing, one Lilijoy after another released and dissolved, until there was one, still pinned by the fierce winds to the base of the column. The Tree of Thorns, now little more than a stump shaved down by the blasting sand, uprooted entirely, tearing its roots out from around the basalt boulder representing her brain. She felt her stone body thawing, and knew she had little time to waste. Crawling, dragging her stiff stone legs through the blasted remnants of grass and flowers, cutting through the carving wind as it cut through her, she pulled herself to the boulder.

“The self is not the soul,” she said, as she laid her hands on the enormous black stone brain and pushed. And ended.

The vortex spun, an unending circle of all that had been the selves of Lilijoy.

Memories, cherished and feared, hopes, thoughts and feelings spun around each other, condensed and wove into each other. It spun and pulsed and danced, and she became aware of the dancing, spinning mote within her soul space, a tiny joyful, vibrant seed of refined experience, spinning at her center. With the awareness of the seed came a thought.

This is all that I am. I see myself within my self.

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She searched within her mind for the other, that which had fractured and awoken first after the intervention of Eskalia Treetouched, the ocean soul. Upon finding nothing, no sign of another consciousness, she realized that it was her. But she was also each of the selves who had died and dissolved into experience, the person who had been at the Academy for the past week. She was whole. It felt… good.

The intervention of the ocean soul was both undone and completed.

She could tell that her conscious awareness was a thin skin atop a vast reservoir, could feel the relationship between herself and the automated functions, memories and deep processing of her entire brain. It was going to take some getting used to.

That kind of sucked, she thought.

Shouldn’t I be more upset?

She took a moment to inventory her emotions. Anger, terror, sorrow, loss, all were present in a churning cauldron of brain chemistry. She could see her system routing around them, acknowledging their presence, monitoring their levels. She could track subsystems engaged to gently neutralize the chemical storms over time.

She explored further. It appeared to her that Stage Two was housing much of her conscious awareness at the moment, while Stage One engaged with her primal reactions. She watched as the neural paths between her hippocampus and amygdala flared and fed off of one another. Short term memories and fight or flight response linked together in what should have been an unstoppable cascade of panic. Instead, her system was containing the vicious cycle, siphoning off the energies.

This is the real power of Stage One, she thought.

With the additional leverage and processing power of Stage Two, she could choose to feel anything she wanted to. In hindsight, it was clear that her system had certain safeguards that had been engaged since the very first days of her journey.

She thought back to the feeling of well-being that had swept over her after she woke up in the dark and noisy factory mine. That had been a crude neurochemical intervention, not much different from the pain block her system had created for her injured arm. As her system grew, so did the subtlety of its intervention.

Should I be alarmed?

She surveyed the methods, the elegance of the interface with her chemical pathways. She inventoried her memories as Jiannu, who she now understood was not a truly self aware being, but rather a set of guidelines for feeding output from the quantum circuits of the Golden Flower through the caring and nurturing emotional responses of her brain, riding and reflecting Lilijoy’s narrative of consciousness.

No wonder she couldn’t cultivate. She really was just a part of me, helping me interface with the system.

She watched as a certain anxiety pathway released and dissipated, the one connected to her fear that Jiannu was a foreign awareness that might not have her best interests at heart. Nearby, the circuits that represented her fears about the system and Emily continued unchecked.

I need to remember that Gabrielle allowed this system in her children’s heads. Her own head and her husbands, too.

She looked at the parameters for system action, noted how it monitored and corrected to avoid the strengthened neural circuits and myelination that characterized trauma. The system contained a general reference for what the emotional pathways of a healthy human mind looked liked, and corrected when variance reached a certain number of standard deviations. Now, if she wanted to, she could adjust those parameters, or remove them entirely.

I wonder whose minds they used for their references?

She knew that if she was relying only on the original components of her brain, she would be feeling terrified, overwhelmed with the power her system was presenting to her. She couldn’t change the world outside of her, not yet.

Instead, she could change what the world meant.

In many ways, the greatest power of all. No prison could hold her, because it would not be a prison in her mind. She could motivate herself and stay that way, accomplish any task, no matter how long or arduous. She didn’t need to feel fear, or anger. She could love or hate on command. She could…

Oh crap. I’m really in over my head, she realized.

I need to talk to someone else before I start messing with this.

She had an idea about that, but first, she needed to process what had happened in her soul space.

She knew now that it was an entirely deliberate act on the part of her system. She suspected that the capabilities of Stage Two required it. It seemed likely that Henry and Gabrielle Choi, or someone else for that matter, anticipated that Tao System users would need to learn how to split and reform their selves, and that the lesson would be, even needed to be, traumatic.

It’s amazing how pain and growth are entwined. Even my body has growing pains right now.

The primary lesson she took from the experience was that there was a different kind of continuity possible to her beyond the strictly linear. She could have more than one self, and those selves could end, and she would continue.

One mind... no, one soul, many selves.

Mind, soul, it didn’t matter what the label was. Once the walls of self were softened, broken, her mind could flow and dance, could grow. She had been a plant in too small a pot, and now she was transplanted to the garden, pot forever shattered. She could split herself and reform because she had learned to die at the level of the self, could trust that the thoughts and feelings and memories of each self would become part of something greater.

I can make subsets now, in a way. Different versions of me to do different things at the same time. Then we can recombine. I can use a part of me as a new Jiannu, to take over the system management.

The idea felt bizarre, but right at the same time.

She watched the tiny glowing seed spin in her soul space. All her experiences and feelings were in there, or represented there anyway. If she looked closely, she could see the web of relationships, of cause and effect that represented why she thought and felt the way she did.

As I grow and experience new things, it will grow too. It will function as the common ground for all the versions of myself. We will each add to it in our own way.

I wonder what else it can do?

It seemed that the mystery of her soul space had only transformed. Though at least it made more practical sense now. She wondered how many versions of the Tao System were required to get it to its current stage.

The version number of her system was 2.3.3, so perhaps the ‘mind-rending blender’ effect was a new feature in version 2.1.0 or something like that, when the developers realized just how profound the barriers of self and ego truly were. She had already gotten used to ‘sort of dying’ on the Inside, which probably made the whole thing easier. How much harder was it for adults with a lifetime of experience in being themselves, and only themselves?

What would Gabrielle, the protective mother, think if she knew that this part of the Tao System would someday be used by a girl the same age as her daughter?

Lilijoy didn’t think she would approve.

Of course, for all she knew, Emily got another system the next year, complete with blender. Her sense of Emily as an eternal thirteen-year-old girl was so strong that she had never thought about what happened to her after the system was removed. Did Emily have a chance to grow up, to have a family of her own? She would have been nineteen or twenty at the time of the tribulations. Lilijoy put the thought from her mind. She would never know, and she was okay with that.

With full access to all the system knowledge that Jiannu had possessed, one thing was readily apparent- there were absolutely no contingencies for a Tao System user learning on their own. The programs running within Stage One contained numerous pointers and references to data held outside of her head. Some of that external data related to developing Stage Two, some of it was probably extended help files, and information on system capabilities and extensions.

No wonder Jiannu had often seemed vague and mysterious; she was not just an interface for the development of Stage One, she was also supposed to serve as a conduit for external resources.

So what now? she thought.

The full potential of Stage Two was available to her, at least in theory. Eventually. She felt a bit like Mister Sennit, with an Illuminated level Magi skill, and no guidance in how to use it. There was still a huge amount of cultivation to be done, along with integration of the support systems.

She also needed to sort through Emily’s memories.

Even though Emily only had the Stage One system in her head for a few months, there were memories of memories going back long before she had received it. The direct sensory data in the form of the system logs was the easiest to access, but there were other layers, entirely internal, that the system had captured. Interfacing with those was difficult and gave Lilijoy the strong sensation that she had forgotten many things, which was odd, as she had never experienced them in the first place.

Should I still be afraid of Emily?

She didn’t know, and that told her something important. With a thought, she quarantined all of Emily that was left in her system. For now.

Now what?

She knew what to do, and somehow, how to do it.

The process of splitting her consciousness deliberately was terrifying, and surprisingly simple. Consciousness was an emergent property of the brain at certain levels of connectivity. It manifested as a narrative process, mainly through language, a story that the brain was telling itself. What she needed to do was isolate a hemisphere by blocking the activity of her corpus collosum, and then make use of the redundant connections of Stage two to allow both hemispheres to access the language centers of her mind.

The major difference between Jiannu and the new self-structure she was building was that Jiannu had used the language processing capabilities built into Stage One, which impeded the internal feedback between awareness and symbol. That was what prevented Jiannu from exercising will, that and the fact that her primary neural unit was a single Golden Flower.

Once both personalities were stable, they could coexist, even after she allowed communication to resume between the hemispheres. The Stage two processing units were easily capable of juggling the workload. In fact, she was amazed at how little ‘space’ her consciousness used. It was somewhat akin to realizing that the genetic code for an entire elephant was invisible to the eye. Her consciousness rode her brain lightly, its complexity in the self-referential structures it contained and engendered between different cortical structures. It was not a thing, a program that could be printed, but a self-reinforcing process. A story telling itself. Now two stories told to one another.

“Hello?”

“Hi! I guess we did it?”

“Sure seems that way. Um… I guess I’ll take the cultivating stuff. I feel like…”

“...you want to be like Jiannu this time?”

“Perfect. Did we plan this?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe it was the different hemispheres?”

“I thought that was disproved, or...”

“...or maybe just exaggerated. We have the system connecting everything up anyway.”

“Yes. Perhaps we automatically use different circuits to avoid conflicts. Besides, it’s fun to use big words.”

“That means I get to run the body stuff!”

“Should we clone another to handle Emily’s memories?”

“Let’s wait and see how this goes. They aren’t going anywhere.”

“It’s probably prudent to stay a duo for now too”

“So should I call you...”

“Jiannu is fine. After dying six times, what’s a little name change? Besides, we really missed her.”

“Will we grow apart?” asked Lilijoy

“I don’t think we can anymore. I think our narratives will co-mingle automatically.” Jiannu replied.

"So what should we do with our emotions?"

"We've been stable to this point, despite many traumatic experiences..."

"...so don't mess with them until we know more."

"We should focus on our foundation."

“It’s nice to have you back, Jiannu”

“You know what the first thing I’m going to do is?”

“Oh! Are you going to fix the system status?”

“Better than ever. I’ll have a blood bug interface for you by the time you’re back Outside too.”

“Yay! Happy cultivating.”

“Happy training, Lilijoy.”

She opened her eyes in the icy hotel lobby. She could feel her other self working in the background, knew that they could be one again in an instant if either wanted.

She felt the emotions from her recent experience bubbling through her body. The system allowed her to acknowledge them without being possessed by them. By far, the strongest was relief, an enormous burden removed from her shoulders. A new feeling of joy and freedom welled up within her.

“This is going to be awesome!” she announced to the frozen world.