Lilijoy considered the experiences of her Inside self as she watched over the hovercar’s progress through the amazon wastes. She looked over at Anda’s quiet form and sighed, still feeling a little annoyed at his advice. Then a bit more annoyed that, somehow, his advice hadn’t been quite as bad as it had seemed to her at first.

I wonder where my hand went, she thought. I wonder if Anda has found Attaboy. I wonder what will happen if I walk into Night’s Safety. A life full of wonder, that’s what I’ve got.

I wonder how much of what I’m feeling right now is me.

She didn’t need to wonder about that last one for long. Her system’s automated regulators were doing their job, reducing stress, providing a low level of comfort and well-being. With well over half of her brain’s processing taking place within system elements, it didn’t seem correct to draw a distinction between her with and her without it.

I am it. It is me. Will there be a time when I don’t need any organic parts to my brain? Is that why the subsets like me? Dean Reunification said that my connection to the Inside was deep, that my attachment to the Outside was light. Is that because of what my system can do, or is that because of my system’s identity?

She had been mulling this question for some time now, maybe even since she registered herself with Guardian, at least to some extent. Each new piece of information, each trickle of experience had only deepened the mystery. She knew what she had to do, and knew she had to do it before she walked up to Night’s Safety.

It’s time to really examine Emily.

Emily’s memories, direct and indirect, had been safely bundled away for weeks now. Lilijoy would have preferred to leave them that way for much longer, at least several more months if not years. She knew that she couldn’t help but be influenced by the girl’s personality and experiences, and she hadn’t been able to rule out more subtle dangers embedded in her system.

After dividing herself strictly and setting up a firewall, the new part of Lilijoy behind the firewall decided to take a page from her Inside precautions against Charm, and began the process of running an analysis across the entire block of sensory data, seeking out auditory and visual linguistic elements. She figured that a searchable text database would be a great way to keep herself at arm’s length from Emily’s persona.

Immediately, she hit a major roadblock. The data wasn’t exactly encrypted, but the only way to assemble it into a readable form was to reverse the method of its creation. It would require a substantial portion of her system to either simulate the biological components of a human brain, or significantly less if she went ahead and used her own neurons. In short, there was no way to analyze the data without some portion of her experiencing it.

If she used her system to sandbox the memories and avoid most of her biological structures, she could decide how much of herself to use. Simulating neurons wasn’t particularly efficient, which would impair her speed. Of course, her biological systems were already far slower than the Stage Two elements. It was an interesting problem, in theory. In practice, it was extremely frustrating. Unless she abandoned most of her safety protocols, it would take her over a week for any kind of thorough exploration of months of Emily’s experiences. Without the protocols, it would still take several days.

The one saving grace in the whole situation was that the memories were time-stamped, which would allow her to skip ahead, say, if Emily was asleep or watching a video. Except dreams could contain information from her waking life, and who knew if an important conversation between Emily’s parents might take place in the background, while they assumed she was otherwise occupied.

She berated her poor planning for a moment, before accepting the obvious fact that even a mind with super powers could only do so much. If she had realized how long it would take, it probably wouldn’t have affected her past actions, other than changing the timing of her journey back to the wastes.

Now I’m almost here. There. Whatever. Should I skip around at random and hope to find something good? Didn’t Jiannu have some kind of index that she was building?

She could only assume that she had bundled up the index along with everything else Emily. She hadn’t spent much time considering what was safe and what wasn’t at the time of the decision. Now that she had access to all the materials, it only took a moment to find it and restore the knowledge to her working consciousness.

Immediately, she had a rough overview of Emily's history with the Tao System. She knew that it had been in Emily for five months, that the first month was controlled from the outside, a closely monitored, step-by-step integration of the little lotuses and her sensory nervous system. The memories from that time were highly episodic, and took place in a clinical setting. Lilijoy assumed they must be times when Emily was answering questions about her experience while the system was prompted to do one thing or another.

Over the following month, the system was gradually released into Emily’s control and became a part of her daily life. From there the sensory stream was close to continuous, although it seemed that there were a number of gaps. Lilijoy figured it was because Emily could erase or pause the recording if she was sufficiently motivated. She could only imagine what it might be like as a teenager, knowing your parents, or even strangers might have access to your experiences and inner thoughts.

Guess the pros must have outweighed the cons, since she wanted to keep it, after all. Or she didn’t really think it through. Maybe they told her it would all be deleted or something.

It seemed as if Jiannu had been able to sort through almost a third of Emily’s waking memories, prioritizing those that had strong emotional content, and she had indexed those by location and the people present. Lilijoy decided it was better than nothing, though she suspected that the type of information she really wanted might be found in less obvious places. She didn’t want more teen drama; she wanted to use Emily’s eyes to see her parents, to spy on them across time and space. An overheard conversation, a paper on a desk; that was where the interesting bits would lie, not in mother-daughter conflict.

Or so she hoped.

Still, there was one big character who had been absent from the family drama to this point.

All right, Henry Choi. I guess it’s time to finally meet you.

***

Emily pumped her arm in victory.

“In your face, old man!”

The face in question had an expression of benign indifference, combined with tolerant affection.

Henry shrugged, “Nothing makes me happier than seeing you improve, Dot.”

How many nicknames did these people need, anyway? Lilijoy wondered.

The memory she chose turned out to be Henry and Emily playing a virtual wizard-dueling game, set in a court of glowing white. She was viewing it at the lowest level of immersion, which had some definite drawbacks. For one, she wasn’t privy to Emily’s thoughts and feelings. For another, it had the strange quality of viewing the scene through a constantly moving field of focus. If she didn’t look where Emily was looking in the scene, her view would be through the sensory information captured in Emily’s peripheral vision.

Lilijoy knew quite well that the Tao system could allow the user to achieve clarity throughout their visual field, but that didn’t seem to have been one of Emily’s priorities, if she was even aware it was possible. The memory was from the third month, so she'd certainly had time.

“When are you coming home?” Emily asked.

The question came out of the blue, both to Lilijoy and to Henry, it seemed. Emily was watching his face carefully, and Lilijoy could trace a series of expressions. Surprise, concern, and guilt followed one another in quick succession, ending in a position of harmless cheer.

“What, your mom driving you up the wall? Looking for a second opinion?”

Lilijoy felt her face muscles pout.

“Can’t I miss my dad? Besides, it’s dangerous up there. Mom worries about you.”

“Being here isn’t dangerous at all.”

“Liar.”

“You know I never lie. Besides, your mom wouldn’t have let Atticus tag along if there was any real danger.”

The scene briefly shot skyward, in what Lilijoy could only assume was an eye roll.

“How is Attiboy anyway?”

“He’s doing great. I’m sure he would be up for a couple rounds once he gets done with training.”

Lilijoy paused the memory. There was something bothering her about Henry Choi’s appearance, beyond the fact that he was currently wearing a floppy wizard’s hat with a gray sweatsuit. She pulled up some of the photos she had from the internet archive for comparison.

It wasn’t the same man.

There were definitely similarities. Both Korean, both muscular. Similar round face and tapered jaw. But Emily’s father had more deeply set eyes, slightly closer together, and more arching brows. There were other small differences too, ears at slightly different heights, nose slightly less turned up.

Well, well. Guess you liked your privacy.

She could only assume that the internet pictures were there to defeat the use of facial recognition software. It was probably part of the same mindset that led to such a small internet footprint in general.

She looked into Henry Choi’s eyes, dark brown, almost black, but present, warm and radiating laugh lines. He was fifty-five at the time of the memory.

This is the face that almost changed the world. I wonder what went wrong.

Something tickled at the back of her mind. Her unconscious processes were trying to send a spike of adrenaline, which her system kindly intercepted, but not before just enough got through to make her heart speed up. She had seen this face before, seen these eyes, surrounded not by laugh lines but by dirt and scars. She resisted the dawning awareness. It was impossible.

Take this face, cover it with dirt, scars and unkempt beard, Take that hair and grow it for decades, until it is heavy with mats and tangles. Take that broad body and humble it with neglect and damage over decades.

Henry Choi was Mooster.

***

Magpie restrained herself. “You motherfucking son of a bitch!”

Raven raised an eyebrow. “I’ve always enjoyed how that insult sneaks bestiality around the back, as it were. In other news, you should be thanking me for saving you from your own poor planning.”

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I refuse to be speechless. I refuse to be speechless, Magpie thought, as her mouth attempted to formulate an appropriate response. Shit.

“Let me tell you a story,” Raven continued. “It’s about a handsome young lad - “

Magpie walked away.

“Hey...” Raven’s voice followed her. “I haven’t gotten to the surprising part yet.”

Do not engage with the asshole. Do not engage… screw it.

“My god, what is wrong with you!?” she said, turning back to him.

“I blame my parents.”

She rolled her eyes. “You don’t have parents.”

“Society then?” he said in a plaintive voice. “Anyway, about this lad -”

“You, you mean.”

“ - he was raised in a creche, along with other handsome lads and lasses, though none so handsome as he.”

Magpie turned off her external hearing and pulled up a saved video on her internal awareness, a period drama from the twenty-first century, set in nineteenth century Russia. She nodded once in a while in Raven’s direction to encourage him. Periodically she checked to see if his lips were still moving.

After ten minutes or so, he made a particularly emphatic gesture and stopped talking. She paused the video and turned her hearing back on.

“That was very interesting,” she said.

“I’d like to think so,” he said. “But getting back to our handsome lad in the creche...”

Oh crap.

“… he and the others were raised by a series of people. Mostly older women at first. Everything about their upbringing was meticulously planned. The amount of skin contact when they were young, the degree to which they were allowed to form bonds with their caregiver and each other. The ways they were encouraged to cooperate and the ways they were encouraged to compete. All watched, monitored, assessed, and corrected when necessary. There was one lesson that was stressed more than any other. Would you like to know what it was?”

I really should just log out. Still, I’ve never heard this about Raven’s generation before.

“Always wash your hands after -”

“It was to have one unbreakable connection. One true loyalty outside of one’s self.”

“To the flock.” she deadpanned.

“You would think so, wouldn’t you? But no. The voice that spoke to our lads and lasses from on high never specified. As the children in the creche matured, the lesson became more… nuanced. ‘Only you can know,’ the voice would say, ‘where you assign your bond. Keep it hidden from all others, perhaps especially its subject.’

Magpie shook her head. “So, Uncle, I mean ‘the voice’ was running an experiment of some kind on you, just like he did with me.”

“I never said this was about me,” Raven said. “For all you know, I was raised in the ‘trust no one’ creche. Or maybe I was a singleton like you. But it’s interesting advice, don’t you think? By having one bond, one unshakeable anchor, you gain power over all other connections in your life. Every question has a frame of reference, every dilemma has a context. Without such grounding, we are buffeted by the winds of human frailty and indecision, or we become self-obsessed and shallow.”

Um… maybe the story really isn’t about him.

“And if your bond's subject dies, or betrays you?”

“Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it? The voice told them they can’t go around assigning their one true bond willy-nilly. You need to find a person or an organization that is worthy. Whose legacy can overcome death or dissolution, whose betrayal you can accept as fulfilling a greater purpose.”

Got it. “So, he was manipulating them back to the flock.” she said.

Raven looked genuinely thoughtful for a moment. “Possibly. There might have been a certain confidence that the freed birds would come back to the hand. But that’s not the important part. I wanted to tell you this little story to give you some context for a question.”

She thought she knew where this was going. “And that is?”

“If you had been one of these children, raised with this lesson central in your life, would you already know where your true loyalty lies?” His eyes challenged her.

No, of course not... she thought. Wait. This is a test isn’t it?

He stared at her, watching her face as if he was trying to peer into her mind. It was the most uncomfortable she had felt around Raven, which was… astounding.

She returned his stare, not challenging him, but trying to read him as he was reading her.

Who are you? What are you beyond a source of irritation and torment in my life? What drives you to work for Uncle?

A minute passed, and his features blurred, like when she stared at herself in the mirror for too long. Another minute passed, and she became aware of the blood pulsing through the veins of his eyes.

His question kept passing through her thoughts. True loyalty. What does that even mean? There has only been the flock and everyone else. Am I supposed to say that I’m loyal to them, to Uncle? Or am I supposed to know better than to reveal my loyalty? But it wouldn’t really be my true loyalty, since I don’t have one.

Not even to myself. I would have to know who I am for that to be the case.

After another minute, Raven broke the standoff. “Alright then. Good. You pass.”

Magpie opened her mouth without knowing what to say, but Raven preempted her.

“Go. Live your life. Come back when you’ve figured it out.”

What?

“I can tell by the look on your face that you’re confused. That’s normal. This wasn’t just a test of your planning skills, or your subterfuge techniques, or your fighting ability. This was a test to confirm your capacity for loyalty. Loyal to the flock, loyal to your friends, it doesn’t matter. You passed, so go, live your life. Come back to us if you want answers about who we are and what we do.”

“So, I’m a freed bird?”

Raven laughed. “That’s up to you.”

“You’re still an asshole.”

He gave her a wink and faded away, smirking.

She took a deep breath and logged out.

***

Outside-Lilijoy became aware that something momentous had happened within the firewalled portion of her mind. The firewall kept her from knowing any specifics, but there was a certain amount of leakage in the area of unconscious processes and physical effects.

She realized that her firewall was actually somewhat awful, and if not completely useless, certainly wouldn’t have protected her against anyone who knew how her system worked. It was great at stopping information transfer between narrative streams of consciousness, but it had a fundamental flaw; her mind was not truly split. The various parts of her shared or alternated in using various parts of her neuroanatomy, and all of them drew on a shared pool of deeper processing. At the end of the day, her unconscious brain connected everything in a way she couldn’t completely circumvent.

She quickly gathered the part of her that had been running her Inside explorations. Mysterious ghost hands could wait while they sorted out what was going on. Once she focused her attention on Firewalled-Emily-memory-Lilijoy, she realized two things.

First, that she was going to need a better way of referring to the different parts of her mind if things got any more complicated, and second, she needed better ways to communicate while firewalled. If some part of her was truly corrupted, and who knew, maybe it was, then it would be very easy for the corrupt version to talk her way out of any restraints.

I can’t protect myself perfectly from threats contained within the system. Not unless I develop the ability to create a perfectly isolated consciousness. And there wouldn’t be any point in doing that. Where does prudence end and paranoia begin?

It was the same hard question that seemed to plague her at every turn. At one end of a continuum was risk-avoidance and information gathering, while at the other end was bold action and ignorance. She had built elaborate risk matrices, beautiful multidimensional arenas where she could examine outcomes and occurrence probabilities weighed by estimated certainty, but still run into the same problem; such tools required a well-studied frame of reference. How could she assign a probability to the possibility she would lose her continuity of identity, passively or actively, by encountering more of Emily’s memories?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

This was that higher-level fear Anda was talking about. And it was a mind-killer, a system of paralyzing self-reference that Shakespeare had understood so well when he wrote Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. But it was the second soliloquy that spoke to her, warned her across time

Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat

In this distracted globe. Remember thee!

Yea, from the table of my memory

I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,

That youth and observation copied there;

And thy commandment all alone shall live

Within the book and volume of my brain,

She now had no doubt that the memories of Emily’s ghost were every bit as dangerous to her future.

Lesson number one from Hamlet: Don’t listen to ghosts.

To delete or not to delete?

She could easily wipe away her firewalled self, safely reinter whatever it was that had caused the disturbance across her multiple minds. Behind that door was knowledge that would force her to redefine herself and question everything she thought she knew. That much she could tell from the leakage of emotion around her blockade. Whether there was any further danger, she couldn’t tell.

What if Hamlet had walked away? Bluebeard’s wife could have called it a night. Eve could have had a banana.

She considered the problem, and one last verse floated up to her.

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action

She remembered her thoughts upon reading Anda’s advice while she was talking to Jack...

Imagine if I had thousands or even millions of perspectives to combine with all the knowledge I already possess. Is that what Guardian is doing?

...and realized that she did have thousands, millions of perspectives at her beck and call. The recorded wisdom of centuries of brilliant minds lurked in her memories. And it hardly mattered. Just as with both of her recent decisions to follow Anda’s advice, it was up to her to sort the good counsel from the ill and make a decision. To make the cut through time and space that forever severed the other choices, to collapse the state vector of the arrayed possibilities.

The highest level of fear came from that awareness.

This thought led her to a new realization, one of those that was obvious from a certain perspective, but gained value with each higher level of discernment.

Decisions come from emotion.

A purely rational mind could never make a decision, would be trapped in inaction by unknown futures. In fact Lilijoy wasn’t sure it was possible for a conscious mind to exist at all without emotion, now that she considered it. Certainly one could construct the necessary feedback loops to create self awareness and narrative, but if such a construct had no drives or directives, why would it persist?

Turns out that the semantics of emotion is kind of important. Drive, impulse, feeling, sentiment, mood; there seems to be a continuum between survival instincts and what Anda called logical emotions.

She knew that categorizing and dissecting emotions and their associated biological states was well-traveled ground, though it reminded her a bit of physics and cosmology as a field. Many, many excellent theories, all grasping at some kind of underlying truth which no one could agree on. She didn’t need to solve all the problems the great minds of the past had foundered upon at this moment though. She just needed to arrive at a better way to make decisions.

On impulse, she brought the hovercar to a halt. They had just left the old rivercourse, so the ground was moist but not muddy when she hopped out. The sun was beginning to reveal itself on the horizon, a familiar blob of distorted red and brown bands. She took a deep breath and cleared her mind, finding peace in the exercise of her senses.

The air was still and empty of the sounds of life. It almost smelled of home during the rainy season, when the molds and microorganisms were exalting in their simple appetites. The earth was partly covered in a pale carpet of some lowly plant she did not recognize from her internet memory.

What I need is meaning, she thought. I need to know what I really want from all of this.

Her mind was carried back to the Inside, to the Trial and her forest vow. Her surroundings couldn’t be more different, but they contained wonders of their own. Even as she thought that, the air began to fill with tiny flying midges, first a few, then all at once, thousands of the little dipterans.

Lilijoy pulled her shirt over her nose and mouth and watched as the swarm thickened. Swirls of emergent motion permeated the air as individual midges followed their own programs of sociability and isolation. All residual thoughts of existential crisis were driven from Lilijoy’s head as she witnessed the spectacle of what was now millions of life forms dancing and weaving around each other. They were self-assembling into columns and when she looked up, she realized that she herself had become the focus for a dense cluster that extended far above her head.

I’m a landmark for mating midges!

She moved slowly along the ground, to see how it would affect her new companions, and marveled at the way the nearly tornadic pillar traced her movement against the drab sky. It was amazing to her how such a large and coherent formation could emerge from simple behaviors.

Simple behaviors. Emergent structure.

She reached her left arm, her prosthetic, above her head and gently swept it through the dancing bodies until hundreds coated her palm. Then she released her Tao System satellites. The microscopic dust, almost like pollen, drifted around and onto the insects, and she sped her processing to follow the process of her flowers and vines connecting to dozens of minute nervous systems.

I don’t need to make my flowers fly on their own. I don’t need to communicate with them from a distance. I only need to take what has been provided by millions of years of evolution and adapt it to my needs. And hope that it’s not too windy.

Within ten minutes, she had learned how to interface with the fly’s neuroanatomy, thanks in part to some amazingly exhaustive work on fruit fly brains that had been posted online in the first half of the twenty-first century. After a few more minutes, she had learned how to program and expand the limited repertoire of swarming behaviors, and equipped each fly with a tiny antenna unit for propagating commands through the swarm.

After an hour, the amazon wastes witnessed a scene new to the world, outside of some forgotten age of magic and miracles. A giant human figure danced slowly upon the landscape, its outline hazy, its, limbs churning, dissolving and reforming, trailing wisps like smoke as the farthest flung members of the new collective struggled and failed to keep up with the movements. Rippling signals propagated upward from the figure at it base, imitating her movement on a vastly larger scale.

Who’s the tiny dancer now, Nandi? Lilijoy thought.

She looked over at the hovercar.

I wonder how I’m going to fit?