Interlude: Markus/Anda
“Do you remember when you were a teenager and you thought you knew everything?”
Two men were conversing in a virtual instance. One was tall with dark skin, his bald scalp nearly as reflective as his white teeth. The other had enough hair for the both of them. Gray, white and wavy, it stuck out at every angle. Though his face showed the tracks of many years his skin was unblemished and healthy, age and youth residing in harmony on his features.
“Anda, I can only imagine what it’s like as she gains confidence.” Marcus smiled with a hint of sympathy.
“That’s just it. She actually knows everything. Or close enough. But it’s not close enough, really.” He rubbed his forehead with long fingers. “I’m worried about her.”
Marcus raised a bushy eyebrow. “And what else is new? The two of you have stumbled from one crisis to another since day one. You thought she might die from the over-heating incident just last week.”
“That was two weeks ago.”
Marcus waved his hand. “My apologies. Time blurs at my age, you know.” He settled back in his chair. “Tea?”
Their setting was idyllic, a table with two chairs set in an English country garden. Anda allowed his cup to be refreshed and took a moment to enjoy the rising fragrance.
“I’m only thirty,” he said, after collecting his thoughts. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Am I… raising her? Does that even make sense?”
Markus huffed, a sound that was almost a laugh. “I raised two children to adulthood, and one… nearly so. Even with one’s own children, there is a point where you can only watch them from the shore, as it were, yelling instructions sure to be lost in the wind as they drift farther away. Our Lilijoy, well, she is headed to a shore neither of us knows, and we arrived as she was setting off.”
“Nice metaphor.”
“Thank you.”
“But I need her to listen.” Anda said. “We’re heading to Sinaloa territory and… well you know what she can do. She’s planning on using her system to carve into their forces, to liberate the serfs there.”
“And you’ve explained why this is a bad idea?”
“Not entirely. Not yet. We still have a ways to go, and she’s… well she’s better now, but there was a while there...”
“You told me last time. It’s entirely normal that a person would change after everything she’s gone through, especially a near death experience.”
Anda sighed. “We don’t have a baseline for what ‘normal’ is with her. It’s certainly nothing typically…” he let his voice tail off.
“Human?” Marcus filled in. “Anda, you have the same system in your head. Are you no longer yourself?”
“It’s different, Marcus. You know it. She’s already far past what I can do, maybe what I will ever be able to do, and this whole business with the Tier Five...”
“Do you think she’s overreaching?”
Anda took a moment to think before answering. “I don’t know. That’s the problem. She’s picked my brain for everything I know about Sinaloa, their numbers, armaments and so forth. It’s obvious we wouldn’t stand a chance if they mobilized even a tiny portion of their capacity. She knows what I know, but I don’t understand enough about her abilities to evaluate our chances.” He frowned. “There’s much that she’s not telling me about the Tao System. I get little hints, glimmers when I see her in action. Why is she keeping this from me, Marcus?”
Marcus shook his head, his expression sympathetic. “Perhaps you are looking at it the wrong way, Anda. We all have our secrets. After all, don’t we keep vast secrets from her? Secrets that might change her opinion about the course of action she is presently considering?”
“That is entirely different!” Anda complained. “Those secrets are not ours to tell. She’ll come to them naturally enough in time.”
“But will she? She doesn’t understand the true nature of the clans, of their... backers, and without that knowledge, she can’t properly assess the risks.”
“So what do you suggest I do then? Do you think she’ll listen to me if I tell her to stop without explaining why?”
Marcus snorted. “Who can say? She’s extremely smart. Perhaps you just need to find the right words.”
Chapter 12: Motivation
It was the time of mists in the heart of the gardens of Kuroudonain, the time when the vapors that fed the roots of the luscious green rose from the porous floor, spilling over and filling the gentle contours of the terrain. Clusters of ferns and forest grass nestled amid the dwarf plum and cherry trees surrounding the cluster of evergreen shrubs in which Magpie had found shelter.
As far as she could tell, she was located just off the center of the circular plane that formed the top level of Kuroudonain, above her was only sky, some of it even approaching a blue color.
No wonder they wanted to live above the clouds, she thought to herself. It’s the only place on the Outside they can pretend things are the way they used to be.
Even that much required a bit of imagination, that or augsight, she decided. Compared to the vibrant blue sky and white clouds of the Inside, the view from Kuroudonain was washed with sepia hues, the sun more orange than yellow. Still, she was very thankful to have found a peaceful respite from the first few days of thirst and adrenaline. Past the secure lower areas of the vast floating sphere, most of the restrictions were cultural, it seemed. It was simply unthinkable that servants and clan associates, aside from gardeners and technicians, would dare to intrude on the placid retreat belonging to the core members of the clan. No one guarded the entrances, or patrolled the grounds, for why would anyone stray from their appointed place and risk exile or worse?
It was amazing to her that an entire landscape could be lifted above the Earth. Magpie had never been one to think much about engineering, beyond what she needed for a given mission, but with days and weeks ahead of her, she had to occupy her mind somehow. So far, she had determined that the plants were embedded in a thin layer of aerogel, rather than dirt, which gave the ground beneath her a pleasant resilience underfoot. The mists rose several times a day, and she imagined that their dangling roots were carefully maintained in this way. The bubbling stream that passed a few dozen feet from her hideaway was less than a half an inch deep, though it had been cleverly designed to look much deeper with the use of transparent materials supporting the water.
It was enough for her to drink her fill when she needed, which was all she could ask for. Disposing of her bodily wastes was a little trickier, as there was no way to bury them. Fortunately, the landscape was dotted with large aerogel ‘stones’, easy for her to lift and then replace.
If they ever remodel, someone’s going to get a nasty surprise.
The time of the mists, especially at night, was when she dared to emerge from hiding. Throughout the day, she had to be alert for the gardeners, and sometimes clan members, wandering through the gardens, but they tended to concentrate near the edges, closer to the clan’s residences. These lined the outside of the lower levels, the outward facing surface of the sphere, where they could have an entire wall in their quarters as a window that allowed them to overlook the world.
Or so she assumed. She hadn’t come up with any other reason for the upper echelons to reside where they did. The innermost portion of the gardens seemed reserved for those seeking solitude and romantic couples. The mists usually drove those types of visitors away.
She took advantage of the mists this time to stretch her legs and get a drink from the stream before returning to her shelter. She was eating a food bar, crafted into a delight of chocolate and fruit by her augsenses, when she heard the voices. At first they were distant, covered by the calls of birds, the artificial breezes rustling the leaves and the babbling stream, but soon she could hear them more clearly.
“But Your Excellency! The others--” a nasal male voice complained.
A different man's voice responded, deep and resonant. “Not another word! Our position is tenuous enough without engaging in unnecessary conflict. Sam Gor is no better than the wicked clan, and our tensions with Wareta have not abated enough to fight by their side. The Galapagos are too close to Sinaloa territory to risk their displeasure.”
“Surely they would not take the conflict Outside!”
The voices were now close enough for Magpie to hear feet falling on the soft ground and the gentle swish of silk robes. The lord’s voice was calm and quiet when he replied, but Magpie could hear a dangerous edge within his gentle tone.
“Our clan prospers in peace, Chancellor. Do not let your ear be swayed by the impatient youth of our family. Let the other clans jockey and clash over scraps in that fantasy. We are above it.” The footsteps stopped. “Now, please leave me. I wish for solitude.”
“Yes, Your Excellency,” came a chastened reply.
Magpie heard the rustle of silk and swiftly departing footsteps. There was silence for several minutes. Then the lord’s voice sounded again, breaking the serenity of the garden.
“Visitor! What brings you to the home of my clan?”
***
Lilijoy made a sound of disgust as she abandoned her model. Her intuition about driving through Sinaloa territory in a blaze of glory and liberation was correct, in a way. Just not in a way compatible with her immediate goal of reaching the abandoned Tao Systems facility anytime soon. If she moved hastily, Sinaloa would respond with overwhelming force, and even if the clan limited themselves to conventional weapons, she, Anda and Attaboy would be wiped out in a matter of days.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Her models told her that twelve Tao System users with capabilities roughly equivalent to her own were necessary to neutralize the numbers that would be arrayed against her, and that was with the highly optimistic assumption that Sinaloa had no trump cards. The more she thought about it, the more her plans seemed naive, or at least wildly optimistic.
At the heart of it was the problem that she couldn’t give the Tao System to just anyone. The system didn’t turn people into saints after all. It helped steer their neurochemistry in healthy directions, gave them better tools for recognizing their own cognitive bias and developing a more informed and enlightened perspective. But once she bestowed it, there was no way to take it back, and no way to control the recipient if they abused it, or began to give it out themselves.
Or rather, there was a way, but she didn’t possess it. Henry Choi had played her system like a fiddle, and Anda’s too. He had clearly built in safeguards against other’s abuse of the system.
She pulled up her status
STATUS: Disciple, First Circle
----------------------------------------
Stage One
Nanobody count: 109,346,734
Integration: 100%
Stage Two
Replication Units: 1302
FLOPS Equivalent: 10^17.3
Integration: 81%
Secondary/Support: 3/4 implemented
Communications: Internal network
Sensors: Passive
RE Reserves: 1.22 kg mixed
Personal Quantification: Ranking Display
Options | Logs | Data | Reference | Menu
The status ranking must be the key. Disciple, First Circle. I wonder if that’s the best circle or the worst circle? I wish Emily had been able to tell me.
Toward the end of her conversation with Emily, Lilijoy had asked several questions about the Tao System, including about the ranking. Unfortunately, that seemed to be knowledge that ‘real’ Emily had deemed too sensitive to leave in her fragment. All she learned was that there was a method for assigning the ranks, and that it was part of the external support structure. Since that support structure, if it still existed, was housed in the Taos facility, there was a bit of a catch-22, where Lilijoy needed a higher rank before she could give the systems to others freely, but the best way for her to get to Taos safely was if she could do just that.
Well, lets be honest here. The best way to get to Taos would be on one of those airships that Anda told me about. Like using the Eagles in Lord of the Rings.
For some reason, huge zeppelins of various kinds were quite a common sight over parts of Asia and Africa, but were quite rare in the South American continent. Anda had described lifting vessels as much as a kilometer in length, and even mentioned floating cities miles in diameter, technologies enabled by the near ubiquitous use of nano-aerogel composites. According to him, the methods for creating such huge structures were the closely guarded secrets of a handful of clans, none of which had a large foothold in South America where relatively smaller hovercars were common.
The only other strategy for bypassing Sinaloa’s holdings was to journey by water, an ocean voyage from the former territory of Ecuador up to Northern Mexico. This was… not feasible, as far as Lilijoy could tell. The receding oceans had left coastlines bereft of ports and created miles of impassible terrain around each continent. Not only would they need to find a boat from the one available port on the west coast, but it would need to be large enough to carry the hovercar, for there would certainly be no way to disembark at the end of the voyage. Humanity had turned away from large oceangoing vessels; according to Anda, there were simply no ships of the size they would need remaining.
She glanced at her prosthetic arm, at the black gem she had formed on her palm over the previous days, a reflection of Nandi’s Boon on her Inside body. While she didn’t know how Tao Systems had built their massive computers out of the material, it hadn’t been hard for her to duplicate some of her own neurocircuitry and house it in her prosthetic arm. The gem was mostly for cosmetic purposes, though it had a secondary functions as antenna and energy storage. She had moved a good portion of the structures for transmitting and receiving external data to her arm, resolving never to risk another brain-melting event. This also allowed her to extend the signal she used to control her fleet of flies, and since the majority of the Tao System elements in her arm were secondary processing units devoted to the purpose of satellite control, it only made sense to keep them close together.
Her thoughts were interrupted when Anda took the seat across from her.
“I need to ask about your plans.” he said.
I guess I’m not the only one with concerns.
She felt torn every time she and Anda approached the topic. It was difficult to imagine how she could explain what she wanted to do in any detail without talking about Stage Two capabilities she wasn’t ready to share with Anda. She had embarked on Stage Two development with no concept of the dangers, but her subsequent conversations with Attaboy and Emily had convinced her that that she had been extremely fortunate to survive the process with her mind intact. She was extremely reluctant to talk about the subject with Anda, afraid she might irrevocably corrupt his mindset in some way. She couldn’t help but think it was her very ignorance which allowed her to make it through, that and her youthful neuroplasticity.
Yet another thing I’m hoping we can resolve in Taos. They must have figured out some techniques that make the process safe. Safer anyway.
She didn’t think it was unreasonable to try to hold off until they made it. Except then she had to keep things from Anda, which was starting to look like an impossible task.
I’m going about this the wrong way, she realized. If my motivations result in feeling trapped or indecisive, the mistake is to engage at the point of struggle. The problem isn’t what I can or can’t do in this situation, what I can or can’t say. The motivations are the problem.
Motivations. I wonder if…
Her soul vortex was a record, a repository of meaningful experience built into the Tao System. Surely it had uses on the Outside? The Inside hadn’t existed in its current form when the Tao System was designed, so what was the point of collecting it all otherwise?
She didn’t know what the creators had in mind, but she had an idea of her own.
She pulled on the diamond color, her system’s shorthand for the flavor of experience she associated with the path of joyful anticipation, and filled her narrative self with the condensed wisdom, the essential meaning of dozens of moments where she had truly grasped the deeper meaning of the emotions. Her mind filled with memories. Not so much the specifics, though they were present; the moment when she realized her body was intact on the Inside and the vistas of potential that feeling had created within her, the instant she realized that Nandi’s Boon accessed the Trial, the first time her Qi and Flash worked together. These moments were there, but the specifics were secondary.
Instead, she was filled with the essence, the deeper meaning, the sense of forward motion towards, the satisfaction of seeing the horizon approach and knowing, just knowing that it represented her heart’s desire. She took the experience of these past moments and refined it, passed it back to her soul vortex as a new experience, her present moment, creating a virtuous cycle, for her present moment became the latest experience, and the latest experience in turn became her present moment.
The cycle filled her with light, and her narrative self expanded to take it all in and then contracted into blissful awareness, a breath that pushed her sensations back to her soul vortex. Time was only measured in these internal breaths.
To step forward is to allow this cycle to be my motivation, so that every action feeds it further.
She allowed the cycle to recede, to allow other thoughts to enter her mind, thoughts she could test for their compatibility with her path. She looked up into Anda’s dark eyes, saw the concern there.
“Thank you,” she said.
He looked surprised. “For what?”
“You’ve been there from the beginning. You saved me when I was dying in the wastes. You fought for me. You’ve helped me over and over again.”
Anda looked mildly embarrassed.
“Without you, I’d be lost,” she continued, not giving him a chance to reply. “And yet, here I am, dragging you into some plan that I haven’t even really shared with you, mostly because I don’t know enough about our systems to know what I should share. So… thank you.”
Anda smiled. “How could I not? Don’t forget all that you have done for me. We have become… family, have we not?”
Lilijoy could only nod, as a rush of warmth filled her, intertwining and reinforcing the emotion she was cycling.
“And so I thank you in turn,” he said. “For caring enough to try and protect me. Despite all you have been through, you are trying to do what seems right to you. I… understand. It is something people do, protect those they care about by withholding painful or dangerous truths.”
He laughed. “Of course, usually, it is the elder, ostensibly wiser members of the family trying to spare the young. Although, as I think of it, there were times in my youth where I was careful not to let my Aunt know what I was up to, for her sake at least as much as mine, to spare her needless worry. I must admit, it hurts my pride a little though.” He made an exaggerated face of despair and Lilijoy couldn’t help but smile.
“I wanted to wait until we made it to Taos,” she explained. “Hoping to find safer methods, or at least some kind of support structure for Stage Two.”
“Well, I have a good sense of just how dangerous building Stage Two can be from watching you. Truly, I haven’t decided if it makes sense for me to try. What I have now already surpasses my old abilities, and, as my people say, a man who has everything is impossible to find, but it is possible to find one who enjoys the things he has. That is a piece of wisdom I find more apt with every passing year.”
He gave Lilijoy a gentle look, as if inviting her to consider whether his words might apply to her. “You should talk to Marcus about these issues. He would be an effective way to escrow information. As an additional benefit he gives pretty good advice.”
Marcus. What a simple solution.
She knew immediately why she hadn’t thought of it, could trace the habitual constraints on her narrative thought process. Other people, Outsiders in particular, were not really included in her problem solving toolkit. Self-reliance had become an unquestioned core value of hers to the extent that she didn’t even consider them as possible resources.
It was a blind spot in her cognition that reeked of corruption now that it was exposed. She could track the way it had developed with each successive experience of people abandoning her, chasing her, using her and betraying her. She cycled her diamond energy in the background as she reformulated her thinking.
“So here’s what I’m thinking now,” she said. “My most optimistic forecast for going by ground has us there within eighteen months, but I don’t think that’s realistic. There are too many unknowns about Sinaloa’s resistance if the conflict becomes open.”
Anda jumped in. “That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. I find myself in a similar situation to yours in terms of sharing information. Similar, but not the same.” He paused for a moment to collect his thoughts, and Lilijoy could see he was undergoing some kind of internal struggle.
Finally he said, “I have more limited options, so allow me to ask you a question. Have you ever wondered why every group across the entire world has adopted approximately the same social structure?”
The question settled across Lilijoy’s mind like rain on a parched field. What struck her was not the question itself, which was something she had indeed wondered about on many occasions, but the context. Connections began to form as she pulled on that context; Anda wouldn’t ask her the question if the answer wasn’t relevant to their current conversation. Asking the question implied there was an answer. Anda was constrained in delivering that answer, perhaps literally unable to tell her for some reason.
She decided to confirm this line of thought. “I’m guessing you can’t tell me the answer to the question you are implying?”
He nodded.
Oaths. I knew it. Oh crap.
She pieced together a rough outline of the situation instantly. If oaths were involved, then the Inside was involved. The social structure of clans wasn’t a natural evolution of human society, it was an external imposition of some kind.
The Outside leaders bring the Inside back with them. But why would they agree to such a structure?
It wasn’t difficult for her to arrive at several plausible motives. The Inside was where virtually every system originated. Inside alchemy had become the stand-in for the computer-aided design necessary for most kinds of molecular construction. Different clans had different technologies unique to them. Clans were given access to the resources of the factory-mines.
These incentives would be more than enough to convince the most powerful Outsiders to do whatever they were asked, or may even be the source of their power, which only begged the question.
Why would Guardian want this? No, that’s the wrong question. Guardian as a whole could probably care less. This is like what Shadow is doing, but on an entirely different scale. This is a Tier Four, or even a Tier Three subset pulling strings. But why?
She didn’t know enough about the high level subsets to do more than speculate, but one thing was all too clear. The clans were being manipulated, used as pieces.
The Outside was the game now.