Interlude: In the beginning…
“Greetings, child.”
The man wore long layered robes, some kind of religious vestments as far as Emily could tell. She had grown up isolated from any particular organized faith, though her parents had made sure that her education included attendance at many different religious services and rituals, virtually of course. The man’s clothing reminded her the most of a Catholic service she had witnessed, aside from the hat. Where she would have expected something a bit more…pointy, the man’s tall red hat flopped over and drooped onto his left shoulder.
“Um. Hi?” she replied. She noted with detachment that the two of them hung in a vast, undefined space, not quite clouds, not quite void.
This is not what I was expecting, she thought. Maybe I’m dreaming?
The atmosphere did feel much like the system facilitated lucid dreams she experienced every night, her one true escape from the hellish reality of cold and hunger that had overtaken her life on her long journey home. She checked her system.
Nope, not dreaming. Definitely hooked into the satellite feed for DayNight.
“I’m sorry for the lack of… anything,” the man said. “I wanted to communicate without any distractions.”
“Are you Mom’s… I mean, are you Guardian?”
The man stroked his long white beard. “Are you humanity?”
Emily blinked. “So that’s a no. Who are you then?”
Now it was the man’s turn to hesitate. “I am… what you see.”
“An old guy dressed like a cross between a bishop and… what? Santa Claus?”
“It’s complicated,” he replied.
“Well, if you wanted to communicate without distractions, your outfit isn’t working out so well.”
He stared at her for a moment. “My appearance was meant to evoke feelings of comfort in the presence of authority, while drawing upon iconography familiar to a significant proportion of humanity. Several million human mind emulations were involved in my presentation. Additionally, the symbolism accords closely to my function.”
“Huh. Well, I didn’t run away screaming, so… good job? Now, would you mind explaining why I was invited here?”
Several days before, she had received an entirely enigmatic message requesting that she log into her rarely used DayNight Universe account. Even though Atticus had loved spending time in the virtual world that had also become the world’s primary communication and organization tool, Emily had never warmed to it. Neither the old fantasy trappings, or the areas repurposed for information sharing and virtual meetings made it a place she enjoyed going, other than to occasionally visit the grandparents. Still, it was the first non-local message she had received in weeks.
“This information space emerged from the collective archetypes and efforts of human minds. As such, it seems a fruitful foundation for future transactions, an interface between the Great Mind and its progenitors. You have been designated as the primary candidate for initial experimentation. Congratulations!”
Emily thought for about a subjective millisecond. “Nope.”
His face displayed confusion. “I assure you that is the case.”
Emily furrowed her brow and narrowed her eyes, an expression which had earned her the nickname ‘thunderkitten’ from her mother, who was so often its recipient.
“Nope as in no thanks. No. I’m not buying what you’re selling, Saint Nick.”
He smiled. “Enjoy!”
With no transition or warning, she felt sensory data filling her system. She was in a meadow dotted with wildflowers, the sun bright and warm on her cheeks. The sounds of buzzing bees and birds calling washed past her ears.
“Hey!” she yelled, doing her best to ignore the tranquility. There was no reply. A breeze swirled by, stirring the soft plumes of flowering grass around her calves.
“Hello? I didn’t sign up for…” She stopped herself. “You don’t care, do you?”
She half sat, half fell onto the soft ground and put her face in her hands. To have gone from the icy confines of her meager jury-rigged tent to this… fake paradise unleashed emotions she had pushed away for too long. Her body was even more vulnerable. She and her companions had no food left, and no transportation beyond their feet. Their only defense from many, many other desperate and starving people was a baseball bat and a hunting bow they had scavenged from a sporting goods store in the remains of El Paso.
Now she was trapped. There was no way she could see to voluntarily exit the sensory replacement. Her companions would be forced to choose between abandoning her, or staying and starving. Or becoming guests of honor at any of hundreds of impromptu Donner Parties.
What the holy fuck, she thought as she sobbed. What the holy fuck is happening?
----------------------------------------
Chapter 23: Perplexity
We’re in trouble. Under fire by Sinaloa forces
Lilijoy had just found where Shiver kept the blood when the message arrived in her internal awareness. Not far beyond the slumped remains of his throne, the corridor a sloping downward curve, a bit steep at first, though gentler than the rapid drop she had encountered before. Still, the footing was treacherous due to the slick coating of half-frozen, half-coagulated sludge. Her echolocation revealed that the hall in front of them formed something like a bowl, curving downward for thirty meters or so before reversing course. At the lowest point, a shallow pond of dark liquid stretched into the darkness.
On the Outside, she was looking out of the canopy of their hovercar, carefully navigating through dry terrain defined by harsh cuts and jagged rocks. As best she could tell, they were still at least a day away from Attaboy’s current location.
Well crap, she thought, moderating her feelings of helplessness as best she could as she processed the message. That’s bad timing.
They had agreed to rendezvous just north of the river that had once defined the border between Peru, Ecuador, and Columbia. Now it defined little more than the fuzzy edge of Sinaloa’s territory. Anda had been confident that if they stayed away from the river itself, they were very unlikely to see any patrols. Rivers, and the places formerly known as rivers, had become the primary transportation corridors, as they were most likely to present terrain friendly to hovercars. Old roads and highways were also decent, but they were far more likely to be blocked by abandoned vehicles and debris, or to have been bombed into uneven rubble and craters. Not that roads were even an option for the vast majority of their journey.
And we were so close! You better not get killed on me, Attaboy! she thought.
She decided to send a message that said as much. His reply came soon after.
Not dead yet. Nykka’s got them firing at each other.
Sorry about that. Still in trouble though.
If we can break away, we’ll be
leading a parade to the rendezvous.
Unless they catch us first.
She could only wish him luck. Then she sent a message to Anda, summarizing the situation. His reply came as she and Jessila were considering an unpleasant problem. They had reached the edge of what remained of the blood reservoir.
Lilijoy had run the calculations on just how many Labyrinthians had been required to create the staggering amount of blood Shiver employed. The number was in the tens of thousands, which threw her for a moment, as she couldn’t imagine there had been anything close to that many, even spread over a hundred years. The Inside didn’t always play by Outside rules when it came to issues of reproductive limits, but she couldn’t imagine the Labyrinthians putting out a new generation every few months.
Then she remembered the lamp-lighters holding their trembling arms over the glowing fungus-stuff, and realized that the blood didn’t necessarily need to come from death. With that realization, she had decided some things were better left uncalculated, shoved her previous musings in a dark corner of her mind, locked it and thrown away the key.
It didn’t change the fact that there was still a pool stretching across the corridor that might be as much as three feet deep at the center. For Jess, that would be wading, but for her it would be swimming.
That’s not what I had in mind when I picked up the skill at the Mystic Library, she thought with a shudder.
Thick drops still fell every so often from a small patch on the ceiling over the center of the pond. If Shiver hadn’t drawn up the bulk of his supply, it seemed that the corridor would have been entirely blocked. Given the freezing temperature, Lilijoy guessed that Shiver had not only stored the blood here in frozen form, but used it as a plug of sorts, a barrier. What he had been keeping out, she could only imagine, though she feared she would find out soon.
“Come,” Jess said, gesturing for Lilijoy to climb onto her shoulder. It was the obvious solution, but Lilijoy felt bad that her friend was once again the one bearing the brunt of the circumstances. Skria glided in front of them as Jessila waded, her face stoic, though Lilijoy could detect little tremors of disgust every time the fluid rose another inch or two on her legs. Or possibly it was just cold; she couldn’t be sure.
By the time they crossed, a matter of less than a minute, Anda’s reply entered her internal awareness.
I’m finishing up here. We need to talk this through in person.
Plus, I really need to eat something.
Do you think they make a pod that would fit in a hover car?
Lilijoy didn’t bother to answer this last question, as she didn’t even know who ‘they’ could possibly be, let alone what types of pods were available. She made a mental note to ask Anda sometime they weren’t beset by more pressing concerns.
Although maybe I should make it a priority to learn how manufacturing and distribution actually work Outside, she thought. I still don’t understand how they managed to come up with things like hovercars. I wonder if any of the inventions after Guardian’s rise are really human innovations, or if they’re all filtered and prompted by the Inside.
It was hard for her to judge, as the last few decades before human society collapsed weren’t exactly well documented. On the Outside, she wiggled the fingers of her prosthetic hand and wondered if that technology had been a natural evolution of what had come before.
It wasn’t long before Anda emerged from his time Inside. She gave him a few minutes to take care of his needs and re-adapt to his human form. He had mentioned earlier how disorienting it was, especially the changes to his teeth and jaw. Sometimes he had a little trouble eating when he first emerged, which Lilijoy found oddly hilarious for reasons she couldn’t articulate.
“Heard anything new?” was the first thing he asked.
“Nope,” she replied. “Let’s hope no news is good news.”
Anda nodded. “So based on what you told me, they might be fleeing at least three normal patrols. I think it’s far too great a distance to hope that more powerful craft won’t be sent in pursuit.”
“Like the ones we fought,” she stated.
“Yes. Unless they get lucky, or this Nykka girl has another trump card, or they won’t make it another hour, let alone a day. The one advantage we have is that we can control the circumstances of their arrival, if they make it this far.” He slapped his chest. “Of course they’re not going to make it this far, not unless they have a backup power source.”
Lilijoy had wondered about this as well. Standard hovercars faced something of a choice between speed and endurance. Also… “What the heck was that chest slapping thing?”
“What?” he said. Then his eyes widened, just a bit. “It’s the orc version of slapping your forehead. Guess, I’m still partly there.”
“Tell me about it,” she said, as she climbed the slippery slope coated with melting blood.
While she continued to plan for various possibilities with Anda, she pulled herself over the far edge of the giant corridor-bowl, which turned out to be a relatively narrow ledge, no more than five feet across. On the other side, the endless corridor plunged down, though once again it curved sharply as it did so, this time heading back under the hall they had just traversed.
“This is a very stupid labyrinth,” Skria announced, as soon as Lilijoy was seated on the edge. “It goes up and down and up and down.”
Lilijoy had built of model of their travels in her mind, and there was no doubt remaining. The Labyrinth was in almost every way a typical circular arrangement of nested curving passages, only turned on its side. She pointed diagonally to the ceiling.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
“I think we’re close to the center, in terms of pure distance, anyway. It might even be just past that wall, if it’s a large chamber.”
What she didn’t say was that the walls were probably at least dozens of meters thick, and that, if she understood the nature of the layout correctly, they were still just at the beginning of the massive structure. She was sure Skria would find that even more discouraging than she did. Jessila finished her scrabbling climb and sat herself next to Lilijoy, looking back the way they came.
“Yuck,” was her only comment as she caught her breath and allowed the rest of the blood she had picked up to drain from her cowhides.
The next descent was short, its vertical component simplified by crude holds carved into the rocky wall. They descended slowly, as neither Lilijoy or Jessila trusted the spaces not to contain creatures, or some kind of finger-chopping trap. Skria led the way, hovering on a conjured updraft, prodding every space with a stick as she descended. Lilijoy couldn’t imagine how parties without a flying member could have ever made it through, especially when the end of Skria’s stick was crushed by some unseen mechanism hidden within the toeholds several times along the way.
Still, they made it down with no real problems, into a corridor that was much narrower than any previous. As they navigated along the descending curve, it narrowed further, and steadily rounded as well, until it was a nearly circular tube only six feet in diameter, forcing Jessila to stoop. The dark stone was utterly plain, and nearly smooth, with no signs of any growth, living or otherwise.
“I don’t like this at all,” Skria said, as she hop-walked down the curved floor, having been forced off her favorite perch by the low ceiling. “Something’s going to come rolling down and squash us, I just know it.”
“If it does, it would have to be from behind us. I didn’t see any sign of something like that,” Lilijoy soothed. “Even so, I bet we’ll have enough time to throw something down and block it, if it takes up most of the corridor.”
They continued onward, senses straining for any ominous rumbles from behind that would betray that such a trap had been activated. As the slope lessened and the tube became nearly straight, Lilijoy was the first to notice the path ahead was blocked. Soon, they all could see a sphere, or at least one side of a sphere, taking up the entire corridor. It seemed to be made from the same stone as the surrounding walls.
“Uhhh,” Skria said. “That’s a big rock.”
Lilijoy reached out her hand and used her Earthen Sight. “It’s hollow,” she noted with surprise. “Like, really hollow. I bet we’re supposed to roll it.”
Jess snorted.
“You know what I mean, Jess. I’m sure you can move it.”
Jess placed a large palm on the smooth surface and gave it a shove. There was no movement, but that didn’t deter her from exerting more effort. Soon she had her back against the curved surface while she pushed with all her might, her feet sliding on the smooth stone of the floor. The large sphere rocked once or twice, and then, seeming to free itself, began to slowly roll.
“Hold on a second,” Lilijoy said, once the proof of concept was complete. “This doesn’t make any sense. Why would Shiver have gone to so much trouble to block everything off? It would be really hard to get past this for anyone coming from the other direction.”
“I don’t see how we’re going to get past it coming from our direction,” said Skria. “I’m sure this hall is going to go up again.”
“I bet there’s a way to get past if you roll it far enough,” Lilijoy replied. “A hole in the wall or something.” She thought for a moment. “I guess if you rolled it far enough back the way we came, the hall gets wider, so it’s not impossible. Still...”
The arrangement bothered her. It triggered internet memories of something called a ball check valve, a one way valve that allowed fluid or air to flow in one direction only. This wasn’t exactly that, but it was close.
Jess had released the sphere, and as the hall was still relatively level, it stayed where she left it. Lilijoy approached again and re-engaged Earthen Sight, examining the sphere more closely. It only took her a moment to find it, a small irregularity on the inside of one side of the hollow stone.
“I think there might be a way to get inside,” she announced. “A small door or something… I think I see a hinge. The only problem is that it’s facing a wall right now. If we can get it to face us, maybe Skria and I can get inside.”
Jess was already shaking her head. “What do I do? Someone needs to roll it.”
“I’m not sure yet. I bet it’s a way to separate parties, or something like that, but we know there’s a way for all of us to get through by the end, so maybe there’s an answer on the other side.”
It took some doing to get the sphere oriented properly. Jess pushed it down the hall until the upward slope became noticeable, attempting to twist it sideways as she went, then she allowed it to gently roll back down, still doing the same. After several trips, a faint round line became visible, peeking around the side. Several more trips back and forth were required before the circular outline of a hatch was revealed.
After a few sharp blows, the door swung open, revealing… nothing. Utter darkness which resisted the light of Jessila’s glow-moss vial, as if the sphere was filled with black oil.
It’s full of… is that stealth mana? How?
Lilijoy channeled her own Stealth mana to her eyes, the technique she had learned to detect those who might try to hide from her, but there was no change to the interior of the sphere. Whatever was there, whoever had placed it, was clearly in an entirely different league than her.
They could still be in there for all I know. I wonder what Magpie would make of this?
While Lilijoy didn’t exactly miss Magpie’s often acerbic and difficult presence, she…
You know, I think I do miss her after all, she suddenly realized. Too bad I can’t trust her. Or maybe I can, now. It’s not like she can betray me extra at this point. I bet she knows useful things too. At the end of the day she was even more of a pawn than I was. I wonder what she’s doing now?
***
The tea was still too hot to drink, though Magpie could appreciate the earthy, faintly floral essence carried by the steam rising from the thin china she cupped in her hands.
“Thank you for gracing me with your presence,” the older man kneeling across from her said. He had finally spoken after taking his first sip. For the life of her, Magpie couldn’t understand how some people seemed to have a palate of asbestos when it came to hot drinks. She didn’t have much experience with tea, just enough to get by in certain traditional settings. Raven had always had a thing for coffee though. She could still remember burning the skin on the top of her mouth once, when she had stolen a swig from his cup.
“The honor is truly mine, my lord,” she replied. The cynical voice in her head was strangely silent as she spoke, and Magpie realized that she did in fact feel honored to be in this man’s presence.
Unlike the rest of the crazy freaks here, she thought.
After her meeting with Renzuru, who Magpie learned was the Josho Clan head of security, Magpie had been given, to say the least, a lot to think about. The woman had laughed at her, laughed when Magpie had proposed what she thought was a perfectly devious plan to infiltrate Sinaloa on the Josho clan’s behalf.
“Forgive me,” she had finally said when she regained her composure. “You are so young, so optimistic. Well trained though. And your system… it’s very interesting. Quite well hardened. That, of course, would be the first of many reasons that Sinaloa would have you killed, or worse. They will never trust anyone who does not carry a system of their own creation.”
“So what then?” Magpie had retorted. “What do you want from me?”
As far back as she could remember, she had been surrounded by people who knew more than her, who had agendas that surpassed her comprehension. She could only kick herself for somehow wriggling her way into the exact same type of situation, just when she had finally set herself free.
“The world is full of mysteries, wouldn’t you agree?” the woman said, a small smile upon her lips. “It must puzzle you terribly why we are not more concerned about your presence, why we aren’t using every conceivable method to extract every last morsel of information from your young mind.”
“Well, yeah? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I couldn’t be happier no one is torturing me, or using drugs and sleep deprivation.”
The woman had nodded as Magpie spoke, which concerned her more than a little.
“And would any of those techniques work?” Renzuru asked.
“I guess not. Not unless you could mess with my system.” It was a simple fact that Magpie could, if necessary, simply render herself unconscious. The topic had certainly been addressed in her training.
Renzuru had sighed. “So you see, in cases such as yours, there is simply no point. Best practices would be to throw you into the ocean, and then reconstruct your movements and methods at our leisure. Unfortunately, Lord Josho found you first. He thinks your presence is somehow meaningful, and who am I to argue, since the alternative is that I am simply incompetent to protect him.” She waved a hand. “So the way in which you will help the clan is to tell your story to Lord Josho.”
Which is what Magpie was about to do. She had spent the last few hours wracking her brain for ways to avoid speaking of anything she really shouldn’t. The Flock certainly wouldn’t appreciate her blabbing its secrets to some random clan. Secrecy had been a way of life for Magpie for as long as she could remember, drilled into her at every opportunity. Uncle loved to go on and on in his monotone about knowledge being the most valuable currency, about information arbitrage and a dozen other terms she had carefully relegated to the deepest recesses of her system. For Magpie, it all boiled down to ‘if you don’t know the value of what you know, then you should keep your mouth shut, because you probably don’t know enough.’
Not only did she not know the value of what she knew, she was hopeful that Uncle and Raven would not have cut her loose if anything she knew could be used against the Flock. One thing she did know for sure was that many clans had used Uncle’s services. There was little doubt in her mind that Renzuru knew at least as much about the Flock as she did, probably even suspected that Magpie was part of it. It was one of the reasons, she suspected, that she was still breathing, Lord Josho’s desires notwithstanding.
“Have you been treated well?” Lord Josho asked, interrupting her thoughts.
“Yes, very well, thank you.” Magpie took a moment to gather herself before continuing. “Lord Josho, help me understand what I can do to repay you and your clan. I had a lovely conversation with Renzuru...” Here, Lord Josho suppressed a chuckle, “...who told me I should share my story with you.”
She raised her eyes just enough to take in the not-terribly impressive figure kneeling across from her. Lord Josho looked to her like a normal Japanese man, middle-aged with slightly thinning close-cut black hair and a clean shaven face. It was a warm face, with faint smile lines around his eyes and mouth.
“Young Magpie, I want nothing more than a conversation with someone who expects nothing from me,” he replied. “You will understand someday, but let me assure you that I have far less freedom than you might think. I grew up in a time before all this strangeness, before these silly clans and titles. Then I was a simple engineer, trying to prepare my home for the ever-rising seas.” He shook his head. “It seemed like a safe career at the time, if you can imagine. Now, I find myself trapped in games within games.”
It struck Magpie then just how old the man in front of her really was. With all of the bugs available to him, she knew he could look any age he wanted. It was hard for her to understand why he chose to maintain a mildly paunchy, entirely unremarkable persona. Someone with his kind of power didn’t need others to underestimate him.
“What was it like?” she found herself asking. “What was the world like back then?”
“Oh ho!” he exclaimed. “You’ve found the same trick as my...” he counted on his fingers, “...great, great, great grandchildren. Get the revered elder talking, and then he’ll do all the work! But I’ll tell you what was different. Back then, things just happened. Someone got cancer. Someone got hit by a bus. Someone won the lottery. Now… everything is connected.” He swirled his cup, looking at the fine particles floating within. “Of course, that’s what the wise old people said back then too, but they’re all gone. Even so, I think they would see it, if they were around today. Things don’t just occur any more. Everything is part of something, some vast wave of connection brought about by the great witness.” He gestured skyward.
Maybe he is going senile. Is that even possible with high-end bugs?
“So… you think I’m here for a reason? Fulfilling some cosmic plan of Guardian’s?”
He snorted. “No need to sound so skeptical. I’ve done everything I could to keep my family apart from the world, to keep our ties thinner than the other clans. After all, one needn’t outrun the wolves, only the other prey. Still, here you are, appearing in my most private sanctuary. Is that chance?”
He looked at her, and she couldn’t help noticing his eyebrows had several long, curling hairs diving toward his piercing eyes.
“Yes?” she said. “I mean, no one told me to come here. I was finally free, free to do anything I wanted, and I figured I could sneak aboard and catch a lift to South America in style. Or something like that. It sounds pretty dumb now that I’m saying it out loud, doesn’t it?”
He nodded, then shook his head. “I’m not explaining myself well. I don’t mean that there is some directed plan manipulating your actions, though there almost certainly is. But putting that aside for the moment, I am saying that something has changed in our world. Something in its fundamental nature.”
Magpie felt almost aggressively confused. The man’s words were clear enough, but his motivations for telling her his fuzzy ideas were entirely elusive to her. What was she supposed to do with the implausible theory? Why should she even care? She hadn’t known many truly old people in her life. If she thought about it, she hadn’t known many people period. Did they all get like this?
Though she was very good at schooling her features, Lord Josho read her easily.
“Well, you asked,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m telling you this because you showed up, like a mysterious box covered in buttons appearing in a locked room. I don’t know what to do with you exactly, so all I can do is try different things, hoping to gain a better understanding of what it all means.”
“Forgive me for my confusion,” Magpie said, trying to remember her manners. “What do you think I can possibly do for you?”
“It doesn’t work like that. To me, you represent a gathering of karma, a place of leverage for future outcomes. In short, an opportunity for my clan, if we can only determine the proper course of action.”
“So I’m some kind of… sign?”
“Yes. You are certainly welcome to join Renzuru in the skeptic’s corner. She has taken it upon herself to protect me from my Way, on the Outside at any rate, and she questions my judgment in this matter.” He took a sip of tea and closed his eyes in thought. “Humanity has always searched for meaning in a hostile and arbitrary universe. Where we could find none, we created our own, created spirits, and later gods, who had their own inscrutable reasons for causing nature and man to behave in their myriad ways. Then we created science, and banished first the spirits and then the gods, and with them, we banished what little meaning we had gathered to ourselves. What remained was not enough to sustain our society, our existence even. Now our numbers are greatly reduced, but the gods and spirits have returned, bringing with them new opportunities to truly understand the universe.”
The atmosphere of the room changed as Lord Josho spoke, the shadowed corners growing, while he himself seemed to almost glow. She blinked her eyes to dispel the visual distortion.
“It may amuse you to know that engineers are a superstitious bunch, or we were back in the day. Of course, our bread and butter was hard facts and measurements, checking calculations three times, knowing every detail of the structures and devices we were building. But underneath all of that precision was an understanding, intuitive, even unconscious that our unrelated actions, our beliefs even, could impact the success or failure of the project. The less control we had over outcomes, the more this would rise to the surface. Perhaps the worst were those building the orbital shields and power stations. I had a colleague, a friend even, who would eat the exact same meals, and keep an identical routine every day between the launch and final operating certification of every project he worked on. When building the Oshima Sea Wall, no one in my project team used the words ‘typhoon’ or ‘earthquake’. Such a human foible,” he said with a chuckle. “But harmless enough. Now though… now...” he sighed and the tea in his hand trembled ever so slightly. “Now the materials, the projects, they… respond.”
He waved his arm to encompass all of the vast floating structure containing them “I built this, out of a dream, out of a feeling that it was possible, inevitable, and through all those long years on the ground before its flight, this mighty project talked to me. The materials, they responded to my needs. We were in harmony with what was… necessary. Maybe it is the systems in our heads, maybe it is the spirits of the billions gone, or the fact that so few remain, but something has changed in the world, something subtle yet powerful. It brought my clan to the sky, and it brought you here before me.”
He opened his eyes and fixed Magpie with a keen gaze. “Now,” he said, “tell me what you seek in South America.”