The problem with posing as a servant was that at some point, someone was going to make you do servant things. Magpie’s feet, still raw and wounded from her journey through the recovered lands, were suffering the most, though her hands had also acquired a host of splinters and blisters from various crates and heavy hemp sacks she had been hauling.
Over the past eight hours, Magpie had worked her way up from uninvited porter’s assistant to the ranks of those storing and securing the supplies in carefully balanced storage chambers located on the lowest level of Kuroudonain, using all her social engineering skills coupled with her ability to intercept and change the poorly encrypted signals used by the low-skill laborers.
She had yet to determine how she could join those who would remain on Kuroudonain, as almost all the labor for stocking the great sky city’s larders was sourced from the domed city on Mount Halcon. They were closely supervised by an assortment of guards and overseers native to Kuroudonain, and there was a clear division of authority and responsibility that she hadn’t cracked just yet.
“What are you doing girl?” barked a middle aged woman wearing the tan robes of a high-level Josho clan associate. “Those sacks must be tied down on both ends or they could twist and split.”
Magpie bowed her head in acknowledgment and moved to redress her error.
These people are so fussy, she thought, way too worried about details. Anything that could move the cargo around like that would cause a far bigger disaster than a few torn bags.
The biggest difficulty so far was the higher security on the communication systems of the Kuroudonain residents. The labor-class Halcon City dwellers had virtually no encryption, not to a system like hers anyway. It seemed that higher ranks had more, and she could only imagine that the actual clan members were locked up beyond anything she could hope to crack in her lifetime.
It was an interesting way to enforce the social hierarchy, she thought. You could only hope to keep communications secret from your peers and below. It also meant that an outsider like herself could move easily through the lower rungs of society, gathering the names and information she needed from the messages of those around her. The same went for her ability to spoof credentials. There were no time rotating quantum encrypted keys for the lower classes, just static identification and simple day codes.
Thus, it had been relatively easy for her to occupy a position of transient labor and board the vast sky-city, but it was looking grim for her next step.
Unless she was willing to use her trump card. Which would defeat the whole point of her journey. If she chose to, she could call upon the decryption and penetration tools available to the Flock, housed in some vast processing network at an extremely undisclosed location. It was a temptation that she had been fighting ever since the new skin on her right heel had begun to tear. If she couldn’t get access to the general Kuroudonain network, then all her efforts would be for nothing.
And I thought I could just sneak away and hide somewhere. I’ve seen clan headquarters with worse security than this damn storage system. Although I guess this whole thing is their clan headquarters.
She had pictured an enormous, dark cavern of a hold, like that from a sailing ship of old made large. Instead the vast network of small cargo holds was distributed, fastidiously clean and sparsely filled. She could feel the signals of ubiquitous inventory control cameras tickling at the edges of her system, though the cameras themselves were invisible. Worst of all, the access to the cargo holds from the populated portions of the city were closed tight, a measure she assumed must be specifically in place to prevent stowaways and other infiltrators during the loading process.
She sighed as she walked back down a long access tunnel to fetch another load.
This isn’t going to work. What would Uncle say?
It felt like cheating, but she could almost hear the uninflected voice chiding her.
Humans protect their homes from enemies they understand. They use the door, so they guard the door. They hide their valuables where they wouldn’t look for them. They use themselves as the model for their adversary.
I’ve been going about this all wrong, she realized. I’ve let myself be the enemy they expect. I’ve always relied on the Flock to give me what I needed to get a job done.
It would take another day or two for the supplies to be loaded, the waste to be removed and the air within the great sphere to be heated sufficiently to lift back into the sky. Magpie forced her aching feet faster down the narrow access way, forced her thoughts away from the obvious solutions. While awaiting Kuroudonain’s arrival, she had learned as much as she could about the sky city; were there air ducts? No one knew. Sewer lines? Uggh. And also, no one knew.
What everyone knew was how you got chosen to work in Kuroudonain. That was simple enough, just be born into the right family, and maybe your kids would be chosen.
I need to figure out what they don’t worry about. What they don’t even think about.
For most residences, that was the roof. When said roof was miles of clear nano-aerogel composite however, Magpie could only image that it received more thought than average. No, the dome structure itself was a distant plan C.
To get inside, I need to understand how these people live. There are at least a thousand clan members, maybe ten times that many associates. What do they do all day? What do they bring directly in to their living spaces and how does it get there? To get inside…
An insight came to her. A possibility.
How do they get Inside?
***
Lilijoy paused in front of the unassuming door. Like most doors in the Academy it was a dark wood, heavy and fine grained, the handle a long black metal rod running nearly from top to bottom, no doubt to accommodate the wide variety of heights present within the Academy.
There was no sign, no label identifying the door as one of the many identical entrances to the mystic library, something that made no sense to her. She had long since given up trying to understand exactly why things were done a certain way at the Academy. Often the answers were long forgotten, or possibly never known in the first place, at least by anyone other than the architect of the massive structure. Fittingly, the identity of that person was also unknown, though most assumed it was the Garden Archon.
She thought it was interesting how an overabundance of mysteries could actually lead to less curiosity, rather than more. There had arisen a general consensus that any unanswered questions about the Academy were probably never going to be answered, and thus not worth anyone’s time or energy to pursue. This seemed a shame to Lilijoy, as it meant that most of the Academy’s inhabitants simply placed any new mystery into that same comfortable category, creating a culture of complacency antithetical to the spirit of inquiry a place of learning should possess.
She had paused because the sun was rising Outside and she still needed to decide whether to split herself now, or wait until after her visit to the library. She had a feeling that the part of her on the Outside would feel a little sad to miss out on the direct experience of stepping into the archived memories she wanted to find today. Since she was going to be that part too, she wanted to sort out her feelings in advance.
I guess I could just arrange for my Outside half to be perfectly happy. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a wasted trip to a long abandoned launch facility. Maybe I can try to find some animals to work with out there, if nothing else.
That plan gave her something to look forward to, even it it was merely a consolation prize for her Outside self. With that taken care of, she split her mind and opened her eyes on the Outside.
She was lying on a cot in the dome covered portion of São Luís. Unlike New Manaus, the city had been largely abandoned for several decades after the Tribulation, a victim to armed conflicts between forces that probably didn’t even exist in the modern world.
Dying for survival. I wonder if they ever guessed that the reasons for all the fighting and destruction would be utterly lost to history? It must have seemed important at the time.
What was left of the city had succumbed to fire and storms in large part, before being reclaimed by the Tesla Clan. As far as Lilijoy could tell, the old spaceport was the reason for their ongoing presence in the region, though she had no inkling why.
I suppose if any clan could find a way to return to space it would be them. Why else would they be interested in a spaceport?
It was one of several reasons she had no particular expectations of finding anything new at the place where Guardian’s components had been launched into space. Not only had Tesla Clan been poking around out there for decades, but they might not even allow her to look.
I suppose I should ask Vaughn. He seemed vaguely in charge.
Lilijoy’s interactions with Anda’s friends had been… strange so far. She supposed it was due in large part to the fact that she was a tiny thirteen year-old, and that the older men weren’t entirely sure just what to make of her. She had noticed them giving Anda some very strange looks during the mercifully brief conversation where she had been introduced. Vaughn, John, Juan and Sepehr were their names, and they had been friendly enough, if a little condescending. Anda had joined them in some augsight activity involving alcohol after Lilijoy excused herself to drive to the coast.
By the time she returned, all five were passed out in a variety of uncomfortable looking poses in the main room of the house where she and Anda were staying. She had tiptoed through the debris of their celebration and found a small room with a cot that looked unoccupied to lie down and join the Inside.
When she emerged into the common space, it was much the same as when she passed through the night before, littered with mostly empty flasks and bottles. Molecules of ethanol still filled the air, about fifty parts per million, which caused her to wrinkle her nose before filtering it from her sensory stream. Her system could easily replicate the specific effects of alcohol, or indeed any psychoactive compound capable of impacting traditional human biology, and part of her wondered why Anda had even bothered ingesting such an unpleasant smelling substance.
Anda, and his fellow imbibers were no longer present, and she could only assume they had emerged from catatonia and dragged their bodies to more comfortable surroundings. She walked to the door and noticed the Rules were displayed prominently across its surface. If she wanted, she could easily override them, but she was so rarely in public spaces she hadn’t bothered for some time. A quick scan told her that Rules One, Three and Four were more or less the same as the last time she had bothered to look, but Rule Two had changed substantially.
----------------------------------------
Rule Two: Given externally set,
relatively deterministic probability distribution fields
and an unknown degree of repository detachment,
manipulation of local variables impacting
possibly global entropic values is forbidden,
absent future bounding
----------------------------------------
Ooookay. That makes… my head hurt a little… and no sense.
The past few times Lilijoy had encountered the Rules, she had been able to decipher them, albeit with some difficulty. This was not like those times. She could see the general gist of her previous version, could see the way that the language of Rule Two was converging with Rule One. At some level she could tell that the two rules weren’t truly separate.
Let’s see, this is the ‘don’t mess with Mother Nature’ one. No nukes, no fossil fuels et cetera. I can see that in the ‘manipulating local variables to impact global entropy’ part. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that ‘future bounding’ doesn’t mean hopping about vigorously. But that first part…
It felt like Guardian was somehow trying to communicate to her, perhaps the way people used to talk to their pets, using its version of small words and speaking slowly. And just like those ancient domestic animals, all she could do was tilt her head and try to take in the one syllable she might recognize from the stream of information posing as nonsense. In this case, the ‘syllable’ was the word ‘given’. It was as if Guardian was somehow justifying the parts of the rule she could understand. The string of words, externally set, relatively deterministic probability distribution fields had a mystic mumbo-jumbo physics quality to them, almost like a word salad generated by a decidedly unintelligent neural net. Never mind the ‘unknown degree of repository detachment’.
A repository holds something. Is ‘repository detachment’ the degree to which something is held? But what is being contained in the repository? And how would humans using fossil fuels relate to it?
She opened the door and stepped forth into the dim morning allowed by the clear panes of the dome. A few dusty chickens pecked halfheartedly among the scrubby shoots of hardened grass and bugelweed covering the flat area around the building, scattering fragmented asphalt pebbles. Already, the first memories from her Inside self were rolling in, beckoning for her attention.
My brain is a repository for my two selves, but I wouldn’t say there’s any particular detachment. Maybe if one of them was firewalled? She shook her head. No, that’s not quite right. The Inside is held within Guardian’s distributed network… what would it mean for it to be detached? Wouldn’t that be the same as disconnected?
She heard footsteps from within the house she had just left, someone stirring, not Anda, and decided to stay where she was for a few minutes. While she waited, she thought about the rest of her conversation with Professor Anaskafius.
“Who was Shadow?”
When she had asked the question, Anaskafius had… flinched, she thought. It was a brief expression, subliminal even to her discerning gaze. She almost thought it was her imagination furnishing a reaction she had been expecting, even wanted to see.
“That’s another story,” he had said. “More complicated than I can possibly explain without compromising both my… obligations and your understanding.” He took off his spectacles and pretended to clean them. “All I can say is that I can say nothing, a veritable purgatory for one such as myself.” He perched his glasses back on his snout and looked away from her. “Now is there anything else you would like to discuss today?”
Thinking back on it was almost as annoying as experiencing it the first time. Her frustration stemmed less from the lack of an answer than from the obscurity of his hint. Was he implying that she would need to reach Purgatory in order for him to tell her? That didn’t seem right, as his earlier story had taken place within the Garden. The very fact that he could say nothing was extremely telling. She could only imagine it was an oath of some kind, secrecy enforced by a penalty he was not willing to bear. That seemed to be the connection to Purgatory, which required a similar oath.
The only other time she had run across an enforced oath was that between Anda and Nandi, regarding his return to the Inside as an Orc. One of the goals of her Inside self’s visit to the mystic library was to research such oaths, to determine if their use was more widespread than she was aware. The ability to bind someone to their word, she thought, was dangerously powerful, so powerful in fact, that she thought it must be exceedingly rare, or it would have shaped the entirety of Inside culture. She was almost okay with Nandi, or the Purgatory Archon having such power, but she felt strongly alarmed that it might be available to lesser beings.
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For one, it means that I can never fully trust anyone who is involved with the Inside, unless I were to gain such a power myself, she mused. If it were me, the first rule of taking oaths would be that there are no oaths. Which would explain Professor Anaskafius’ answer.
The more she thought about it the more it bothered her. In so many of the stories she had read, enforced oaths were tossed around without a second thought to the long term ramifications, or only available to the forces of good and the protagonist. The thought of secret networks of people bound by enforced oath, growing ever larger as more and more were recruited, developing better and better techniques for putting people into positions where they were willing to take such oaths… that was a little terrifying to her.
Hopefully I’ll find out I’m worrying about this for nothing. Surely there would be rules and restrictions limiting the possibilities for abuse. Maybe he just wanted to shut down the conversation. Maybe that was why he got so annoyed afterwards.
She let her mind relax and watched the chickens for a while. Something about the way they looked, maybe the beady eyes on the sides of their heads or the jerky way they moved, made them intrinsically amusing to her. She resisted the urge to capture one with her system, at least temporarily, by reminding herself that she had other things on her agenda. Plus, whoever was up and about inside the house was walking toward the door.
“Good morning!” she called as the door opened. She turned from the chickens to see Sepehr emerge from the house. He looked a little startled to be greeted.
“Good morning to you,” he replied. He was a slight man with dark wavy hair and dusky skin. A faint rime of stubble covered his jaw. He wore what Lilijoy would swear was a black cotton t-shirt with the words, ‘Don’t Worry… It’s too late anyway,” across the front.
“I like your shirt,” she said. “Where on earth did you get it?”
“Cargo ship,” he replied. “It’s amazing how many metric tons of crap people used to send across the oceans. Some of it’s held up pretty well.”
“Certainly the sentiment did,”
He smiled. “You wouldn’t believe how many shirts I had to look through to find this one.”
“When I first saw you guys, I thought you might be time travelers.”
Now he laughed, and his brown eyes fixed on Lilijoy as if seeing her for the first time. “You’re pretty observant.”
For a gob kid, she filled in on his behalf, perhaps uncharitably.
“Anda warned us you were smart,” he continued. “Said he’d never met anyone like you before. How’d you two end up traveling together?”
She resisted the urge to channel Professor Anaskafius’ words about Shadow at him. “Long story. He helped me out of a really bad situation, and then I helped him out of all the problems he caused for himself by helping me.” She shrugged. “Basically, there was a lot of helping. How about you? What’s your connection with our resident Maasai refugee?”
Sepehr cracked a knuckle. Then another. “Huh. The opposite, I guess. He screwed us out of a good situation, and then we screwed him right back. Metaphorically speaking. Nonetheless, a lot of screwing. All good fun, water under the bridge and all that. But the end result was him getting kicked from his clan, more or less on our behalf, so we kind of feel responsible for the big lunk.”
“So is ‘we’ the four of you?”
“Yup. Well, there’s one more, but she’s stuck up north. Just as well, would have put a damper on the fun last night.”
Lilijoy was pretty sure she didn’t want to know what the ‘fun’ was.
“I was thinking of going up to the old space port today… do you think that would be alright?” she asked.
He moved his hand to his chin and pretended to think. “Hmmm. Well, if you promise not to tell anyone about the super secret spaceship we’re building out of unicorns and old shoes.”
She couldn’t tell if he was being condescending or if he was just strange, so she played along.
“Get me a unicorn and it’s a deal. But really, I don’t want to step on any toes.”
“No problem. If you can find anything that you aren’t supposed to, then we’re in real trouble.”
Now that’s condescension. And a challenge.
***
Lilijoy opened the door to the Mystic Library. The room that greeted her was the same as always, a simple, windowless stone cube with a plain octagonal table in the center. One tall-backed armless chair sat on the opposite side of the table from her, facing the door. The room always had the correct number of chairs for the number of people entering, and once she took her seat, no one could enter. She assumed that the library instanced rooms as needed, as she had never needed to wait for one.
Seated at the table, she felt a now familiar twinge of excitement. There were answers in front of her, she knew it, if she could just come up with the right questions.
Who was Shadow?
That, obviously, had not been the right question, though it had certainly opened new paths of inquiry for her. The new problem of oaths, and what they might imply for her future endeavors, was deeply troubling. As troubling as that was, the new information she had learned about her skills balanced it out, even if the end of the lesson hadn’t been ideal.
Professor Anaskafius had seemed almost grateful when she had turned their conversation to the topic of skills. He had also been very pleased with her motivation.
“The chance to study directly with Arpentra is even more valuable than you realize, my dear,” he had said when he learned of her conversation with the Haneupali. “It will offer untold advantages in the future if you obtain her approval. Now as to understanding your skills, well, that is a journey all by itself. I know you have already learned how the magi portion of a skill must be learned and trained to make use of its potential, so I’ll simply urge you to continue your explorations in that area. It is in the other half of your skills where you can improve your understanding. Tell me what you have learned so far.”
“The natural portion of the skill reflects our concrete knowledge,” Lilijoy recited. “It can only be raised by study or practice.”
He nodded. “Precisely. Now let us examine your Nature: Plants skill. It is a top-level skill that you have understood to the Journeyman level. Do you imagine it is harder or easier to raise than, say, the Herbalism skill?”
She didn’t have to think. “Harder.”
“Naturally. It encompasses a significantly greater body of knowledge that happens to include all of Herbalism. One could imagine a situation where your knowledge of magic and potent herbs, their life cycles, gathering and storage was vast, and yet your knowledge of some other aspect of plants was limited. Were you strictly an Herbalist, this would be of no great moment. You might be at a Master level, and have raised your magi skill accordingly. But as your skill is Nature: Plants, perhaps you would still be at the Expert level, or even still at Journeyman.” He paused and looked at her over his spectacles.
“I’ve thought about that,” she replied to his unasked question. “I know someone with the top-level Weapons skill. Surely she is far better with some weapons than others though. It seems like more like a penalty in the long term, as wouldn’t she need to raise them all to advance her skill level?”
“Yes,” he replied. “It is a curse as well as a blessing. On the one hand, your friend might be able to pick up a strange weapon and apply her full magi skill, even if her wielding was sub-par. But as you noted, she might be at a disadvantage against a swordsman who was no better than she, simply because her magi skill was limited by her top-level skill.”
Lilijoy considered this for a moment. “I’m guessing there’s some way around it, or you wouldn’t be telling me all this.”
Anaskafius winked at her. “More than one, in fact. What most discover, or are taught when the time is right, is that high-domain skills, that is to say, those which include or subsume other skills, offer the option to specialize once the Expert level is reached.” He held up a finger to forestall her questions. “This allows a sub-skill to reach a higher level, both in the magi and natural portions. As you might imagine, it is somewhat rare for a student at the Academy to attain Expert in a high-domain skill, and also reach the Master level at a sub-skill, so most remain unaware of the possibility until much later in their personal journey.”
“But...”
“But you want to reach Expert in a skill where you are only at Apprentice level, so how does this help you, you are about to ask?”
She nodded.
“Well, as you may have guessed, the high-domain skill subsumes the sub-skills, but they do not vanish completely. With effort, you should be able to examine your Medical: Healing skill and see precisely which aspects you need to address. It is even possible that Arpentra would be satisfied if one of those sub-skills reached the equivalent of Expert. Though she may need you to raise the magi portion as well, so it would be best to seek clarification next time you can talk to her.”
“So I can raise a sub-skill, but I wouldn’t be able to use the magi part of it until reaching Expert in the whole thing?”
“Yes. I have even heard of those who sacrificed the high-domain skill to gain full advantage of a sub-skill, though I would very much advise against following that path.”
“You can do that? How?”
He smiled. “Manipulating skills, wisely or unwisely, is something that must be discovered on an individual level. If I-”
“If you told me how you do it, it might interfere with my own progress,” she broke in, frustrated to add another task to her ever-growing list of things to learn.
He blinked a few times and she felt a pang of regret for interrupting.
“The fact that you find it cause for resentment is a sign of how much you have to learn, my dear,” he said, his tone unusually stern. “Be grateful for the framework we provide in which you can make your own discoveries. It is no small feat to teach no more and no less than what a student needs to rise to their fullest potential in the future. Be thankful we do not spoon knowledge down your throat and cripple you by so doing!”
For a moment, he sounded like the character he had assumed the very first time they met.
Where did that come from? She replayed the conversation in her mind. Oh. I sounded like an entitled snot. Huh.
“Sorry, Professor,” she said. “I just...”
He gave her a look and she stopped herself.
After a moment he spoke again, sounding more like his typical, jovial self.
“Bit of a sore spot for me, I’m afraid. It’s worth thinking about though, especially as you have already gained the Teaching skill. Some students, the least able, I’m afraid, require a great deal of knowledge, explained ever so clearly so that they might, just might, gain the lowest level of understanding. Others are talented, but have been corrupted by indulgent teachers, who reward even partial comprehension. They become dependent, and their learning stops the moment they leave the system providing the rewards and the pre-chewed knowledge. Most of the Outsiders here fall into this category, in my opinion.”
He got to his feet and walked her to the door, still talking. “Teaching that destroys curiosity is an abomination. If you leave my study today more ignorant than you would like, but hungry for answers, then I have done my best.”
Sitting at the octagonal table of the mystic library, Lilijoy still felt a little embarrassed she had riled up the genial Professor. A part of her wondered if, perhaps, his anger had been another act, a way to drive home a point that he clearly thought valuable for her to learn. She decided that it didn’t really matter though. Act or not, his words resonated with her own sense of self-reliance, validated it in some ways.
She placed her hands on the table, prompting the now familiar plumes of white smoke to bellow forth.
Pay the Price for Knowledge
Time or Experience?
Oaths or Echelon?
“Library, show me what memories you have about Echelon, possibly known as The Master of Five Eyes.”
She knew she could just think it, but she had gotten in the habit of speaking aloud while she and Magpie were working together. Plus, it just felt more fun that way.
What happened next was new. A single word appeared in the smoke, in two red letters.
No
Previously, if the library didn’t have information or a memory on a certain subject, the response would be ‘not available’. They had been unable to determine if that meant unavailable to them, or unavailable in general.
“Library, please explain your answer.”
Insufficient Credit
and/or
Lack of Permission
The words appeared two or three at a time, each group fading into the next.
“Library, please explain insufficient credit.”
Requested Memories
Require a Deposit
Of Equal Value
Or More
“Library, please explain lack of permission”
Permission of
Original Depositor
Required
Lilijoy rolled her eyes. “Library, identify original depositor.”
Head of School
Eskallia Treetouched
She sat still for a moment, fighting the urge to scream in frustration. The memories were there, just out of her reach. She could only imagine what she would learn from Eskallia’s memories of Echelon.
And that’s all I’m going to do, imagine. Ain’t no one getting permission from Eskallia any time soon.
“Library, original depositor unavailable, possibly permanently. Is there any alternative source of permission?”
Nothing happened for several seconds. Then…
What do you know?
The words looked different, and it took her a moment to realize that they were not all capitalized.
“About what? Head Treetouched?”
Yes
“Quite a bit, actually. At least about what really happened to Head Treetouched.”
Reeeally?
Lilijoy wasn’t sure how a word in smoke conveyed such a high degree of skepticism, with a little sarcasm thrown in for good measure. Perhaps it was the extra ‘e’s.
“Who am I talking to?” she asked. “This doesn’t seem like the normal library routine.”
Mystic
Right. Mystic Library. Is a being. Of course it is.
“And you run the library?”
Only when I have to.
“So.. do you have a body, or some other way to talk? This whole smoke routine is getting old.”
It’s not smoke.
It’s mist.
Get it?
Mist-ic.
Did I fall into a Piers Anthony novel? Ew.
“That’s.. funny?” She didn’t want to insult the library. Or was it librarian? Either way, she wanted them nice and happy. “But is this the only way we can talk?”
Yes.
Sorry.
“That’s fine. I’m used to it by now. So what if I traded some of my memories for the memory I want?”
Maybe…
I like knowing things.
What do you know?
And we’re back to that.
“I was the one who Eskallia used to engineer the second fall of Averdale. I talked with Doctor Quimea, I helped awaken the Greatwood. I planted what was left of Eskallia at the top of the Greatwood to keep it company.”
And?
“What that’s not enough?”
There’s always more.
Always.
Tell me.
Lilijoy was beginning to get a bit of a creepy vibe from the words in the smoke.
“The rest is things I want to keep private. For now anyway.”
I won’t tell.
I’ll pay you.
“In credits for other memories? Like the one I want?”
Yes.
“So if I’ve got this right, this is how you get the memories in the first place. You convince people who come in here to trade their memories.”
Just copies.
They’re delicious.
Lilijoy felt her jaw drop. “Delicious? Are you some kind of memory vampire?”
Did I say
that out loud?
Oops.
It’s got to be pulling my leg. Right?
“So why is this the first time we’re talking like this? I’ve been in here dozens of times.”
Please, girl.
First year
Outsider
Sooo boring.
“Have you ever heard of emojis? I think they could really help you communicate more clearly.”
Outside stuff
forbidden
(sad face)
I suppose that makes sense. The clans would totally freak out if their memories could be traded around.
“That’s a shame. I’ve got some good Outside stuff too.”
“How does this all work? How do I choose what to give you, and how do I know what it’s worth? How do I know it will be a fair trade?”
Interesting now,
interesting later.
“You want repeat customers. Got it.” She hated to ask, for fear of ruining her opportunity, but she didn’t have much choice. “If you are willing to show me Eskallia’s memory without her permission, why wouldn’t you do the same for my secrets?”
Levels:
1. Everybody
2. Faculty
3. Permission
4. Only me
“So the memories of Averdale I accessed...”
Level one.
Duh.
“And that’s how someone could experience my memories? I’m not sure I want someone knowing what I was thinking.”
More Levels:
1. Senses
2. Thoughts also
Thoughts better
more credits
“You never really answered me about Eskallia’s memory. If it’s a level three, how can I access it?”
Extenuating
circumstances.
Also
more credits.
“So you have some discretion.”
Shhhh.
“Especially if someone will pay.”
Why I never...
Yes.
Lilijoy didn’t know quite what to make of the being on the other side of the conversation. They seemed… morally flexible, and she wasn’t so sure about entrusting her own memories. They haggled back and forth for ages. She managed to negotiate the trade of a highly edited version of her adventures in Averdale, senses only, in return for the memory she wanted. For another hundred credits, which the library assured her was quite generous, she recorded a more complete version, with her thoughts included. That one was to stay at level four, only to be moved to level two in the event of her documented, permanent death, or fifty years, whichever came first.
Trusting the library was a risk, but not a huge one she felt. It had sworn to her that level four was utterly inviolable, unlike level three, where it might be able to apply discretion if the permission granter was unavailable or dead. The very first memory she had shared was the one which proved that Eskallia was out of the picture for a long time, if not forever, and after that, everything had gone smoothly.
She was tempted to spend some time browsing, to see what kind of things she could learn with her newly earned credits, but the memory she had just purchased was calling.
“Library, show me the conversation between Eskallia Treetouched, at the time known as Eskallia Everbough, and Echelon.”
The mists took her back in time, to the meeting that changed everything.