“I had no idea what I was supposed to do beyond ‘run’,” Anda was saying. “The orcs aren’t big on explaining the rules for these things. So I ran. Thank goodness my former clan used to send every age cohort for a long patrol in the Boiling Plains, or I probably wouldn’t have lasted an hour. Never mind when the hunters started showing up.”
“So that’s how they sort out any new arrivals? Hunt them to see how well they can survive?” Lilijoy asked.
“That’s the Urglah way. They’re the solo scouts, hunters and assassins, on the whole. I figured it must be something along those lines as I was tearing out of there. I had some backup equipment in my inventory, but I didn’t know if they would look down on me for using it, or if this was supposed to be some kind of ‘tooth and claw’ survival run. Fortunately, they send the lowest ranking first.”
He shook his head and continued. “Let me tell you, those kids were tough. If it had been dark, I wouldn’t have made it very long at all. But they had the daylight working against them, that and the fact that they were also competing with one another, I found out later. They had to move, and I didn’t. I may not be an assassin type, but I know my tracking. It wasn’t hard to lay a false trail and gather them up one at a time. I learned the rules, such as they are, from the first encounter. He was happy to talk, once I had him to rights.”
“Let me guess, there are no rules,” Lilijoy said.
“Pretty much. They came after me by rank order, a new one every five minutes or so. Once out of the village, it's every orc for himself, but the main point was to send me in particular to respawn. That would earn them a death stone.”
“And that is…?”
“Those lumps under their skin? Those are rocks, implanted and healed over, one per kill, or something like that. Killing each other doesn’t count, but a Volunteer is a special circumstance.”
“I figured it must be something like that. The patrol that brought me in had them, but it seemed impolite to ask. What’s with the whole ‘Volunteer’ thing?”
Anda laughed. “I wondered that too. I assumed it was because those like me returned of our own free will at first, but it turns out its closer to an old gardening term, plants that turn up accidentally, but you keep them because they’re beneficial. Anyway, the only other rule is that they’re not allowed to team up, so I didn’t have to worry about being attacked in the middle of a fight.”
“So how’d you do?”
Anda shrugged. “Considering how banged up I was in the first place, not too bad, thanks to Weaver. I still had the second shield he made. He said it was a rush job, but it served brilliantly. Beyond brilliantly, really. That let me make it for a few hours, long enough for some of the real monsters to come for me. I have no idea who it was who finally got me; they one-shotted me from behind in fine Urglah tradition. But enough about me.” He arched an eyebrow. “I understand I’m talking to a woman of considerable means now?”
Lilijoy made a self-deprecating sound. “It all feels so arbitrary. Out of everything I’ve done, to get rewarded for nothing more than information seems… cheap somehow? Unfair anyway. Plus, most of the payment’s escrowed to keep us from turning around and selling the information again.”
“Life’s not fair. Just enjoy it when it works in your favor,” Anda said. “What was the grand total?”
Lilijoy had a little trouble saying the number. “Three hundred and fifty. Thousand.”
Anda whistled. “That does seem like a large amount for the effort. Just keep in mind that it’s a small figure for the wealthy clans, barely petty cash. That’s less than the Maasai charge for a single full course of our skin bugs, on those rare occasions they sell it.”
“Seriously?”
He nodded. “It’s probably not even a percent of what a clan might earn from taking down a Regional Lord, not even including the priceless components.”
“I don’t know whether to feel better or worse.”
“Feel great! You took some clan’s money, and now you have a better chance of helping more people. I just wish it took a little longer for the auction to be settled.”
“You’re lucky it took as long as it did. The clans we invited kept trying to delay the auction, probably hoping they could find it on their own. Thankfully, the auction house is used to dealing with that kind of nonsense. It gave them one extra day, and then set a firm time for the bidding to start. We have no idea who won the bid, other than it’s one of the clans you suggested. It seems the ‘anonymous’ part of the auction works both ways.”
Anda smiled. “It doesn’t matter which clan from the list won. They each have a history of, let’s call it tension, with the Maasai. When the action goes down, it should prove to be quite the distraction for my former clan.”
“Don’t tell me your quest is to take back the former orc lands from the Maasai? That’s...”
“… impossible. I know. Thankfully, it’s not of quite that scope. Now stop trying to get me to tell you about it! I’ll let you know when I can. Any news on your friend, Jess?”
“No. I’m worried that rescuing her is going to be one more task I have to do so we can finally get back to the Academy. I think my other friend, Skria, is about to lose it. She’s been going out to hunt giant condors in the air, by herself, Anda. I think she’s gone up three levels, and respawned more than that.”
“Just don’t piss off the orcs before I’m done. Please. Now that I think of it, try really, really hard not to piss them off at all. You do not want the top tier of Urglah assassins coming for you.”
“If they’re so strong, why aren’t they making the Maasai miserable?”
“If you asked the Maasai, they would tell you it’s because they crushed their spirit, because they’re too afraid of reprisal. Now that I’m there with the orcs, I’m not so sure that’s true. It’s just a feeling, though. It’s not like I’ve somehow vaulted to the inner circle of their councils.”
“I think you might need to gain about ten breasts and a thousand pounds for that to happen,” Lilijoy said.
“That too,” Anda acknowledged. “Now on to more pressing matters. There is the small matter of copying the… materials that Kurtz provided.”
Lilijoy winced. “I hate that we’re giving him more of that stuff. When you suggested the plan, I figured I might be making some med bugs, or maybe something that I didn’t have, muscle or organ augmenters.”
“Kurtz is the worst of those who have pursued evil as a lifestyle,” Anda replied with his own grimace. “I suppose it’s no surprise he seeks tools of destruction over those of augmentation. But you can do it, right?”
They had promised the leader of the Reprobates they would turn a sample of anything he chose into a dose, to gain his support in their- somewhat fictitious- expedition to gain more of their entirely fictitious means of duplicating nano-device pills. What Kurtz had eventually furnished to Anda was a tiny quantity of a truly vicious disassembler, bugs that would break down anything other than a few select materials into raw components. The only limit to the damage they could do was their own active lifespan. They were tiny machines, at the end of the day, and eventually they would break down, but in the meantime, they could destroy, in this case, virtually anything that wasn’t bonded to silicon atoms.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
It was the type of weapon that could wipe out anything, anyone, given a small quantity and a little time, and Lilijoy wasn’t happy about furnishing a usable quantity to a man with Kurtz’s reputation. The amount he had given them was vanishingly small, perhaps a thousand bugs. She hated to think about how he had gotten hold of it, and hated even more that she would need to make enough for him to test it somehow.
“I can do it. I think. They’re simple things, not designed to be reprogrammed or controlled. I don’t think he would have given them to us if he really thought we could make more.”
“Mo used to work for the guy,” Anda said. “According to him, Kurtz got where he is by tenaciously exploring every possibility for advancement, that and sheer viciousness. He’s always got a hundred plots and plans, and assumes only a few will work out. Just take care not to change them too much. There’s no way he, or some backer of his, doesn’t have access to tools that can compare what he gave us to what he gets back.”
She’d been afraid of that. It meant that her idea to give the bugs little self-destruct timers wouldn’t work out.
“I can’t believe Guardian allows these things to exist,” she said.
“As long as they don’t replicate, they’re just another weapon. It probably takes an obscene amount of effort to gather the necessary Inside resources. Plus, the way these things usually work, there’s probably a counter measure, an antidote, that can be built as well. The Inside giveth and the Inside taketh away,” Anda said with a sad smile.
“More like the Inside controleth everything,” Lilijoy replied.
***
Another day passed in relative peace. On the Outside, Lilijoy and the others were back in the abandoned offices of the ancient construction company. After two full days of searching for them, Walden clan had eased back on the patrols, and this, combined with new clothes, some makeup, and Lilijoy’s growing ability to manipulate augsight, made their escape from the arcology relatively simple. Burdened by bags full of clothing, other purchases, and what they had retrieved from the Caribe clan’s belongings, the four of them could almost be mistaken for a family, returning home after a particularly fruitful shopping expedition.
The augsight emitters she and Attaboy had recovered played a role, as they were far better suited to emitting the repurposed signals than her midges. It didn’t hurt that they were able to map out their route ahead of time, nor that foot traffic leaving the arcology moved steadily, unburdened by more than a cursory glance from the Corp security forces. The escape, if that’s what it was, was still tense and exciting for all involved, but ultimately uneventful.
The downtime gave Lilijoy a chance to work more with Maria, acting as a sort of Jiannu for the former Sinaloa serf’s early efforts in guiding and connecting the Tao System elements. She had quickly come to realize that Maria was unable to work with the Stage One elements without external assistance. There was a sort of bootstrapping process to hook up the correct portions of the brain to allow initial levels of sensory feedback and control from the system itself. It was all well and good to prioritize external connection components, but not particularly useful with no internal display.
These early steps were almost nostalgic for Lilijoy, though her own system had accomplished them without guidance, as far as she knew. She could only imagine it was because it had once resided in Emily’s brain, and the genetic and anatomical similarities allowed it to leapfrog back to a minimal interface. Still, the process of teaching Maria to navigate the system was much easier than her own fumbling attempts. This was in large part due to what she had stolen from Attaboy’s version, which was a few iterations more advanced. It relied on icons and other graphic elements and less on a knowledge of written English. Even there, Maria was ahead of her, as she at least understood the concept of reading, if poorly, and in a different mother tongue.
They must have been planning on making it universal, or using it on very young children, she mused. I wonder how that would have worked out.
She thought back to Anda’s tale of his former clan and their horribly failed experiments along those lines, and then recalled that Nykka had received her own system in the womb.
That’s going to be a mess and a half to deal with, if I even decide to.
She put thoughts of the pale girl from her mind for the time being. She had begun to learn just how valuable these times were, when there were no urgent demands on her attention in either world, when she could take full advantage of the stillness. For her, every hour was a day, every day a month, but the constant distraction, the ongoing management of the many threads of her consciousness interfered more than she liked to admit.
She put aside her next five projects, her next ten questions, and stilled the rushing language of her mind. She withdrew her senses from both her forms and allowed peace to wash away the world. It was a state both easy and difficult to maintain, for quieting the relentless barrage of data from her system left an uncomfortable hollow, an absence of feedback that invited questions about who she was, really. Was there a true self that existed beyond the boundaries of technology any more? Was the division between biology and technology even real?
She wrestled with this, not the questions themselves, but their stubborn tendency to emerge, carrying narratives of self in their wake. Even so, there were long periods where categories dissolved like ink from a floating page. When she allowed words to once again crawl within her synapses and quantum junctions, she felt like a diver surfacing, bearing a handful of treasure from the ocean floor.
Consciousness is a self-limiting system. Its power is its weakness.
She wasn’t really sure why that notion had surfaced, and though the insight carried a sense of clarity, she couldn’t pin down precisely what it meant. Approaching the division between thoughts of identity carried by symbols, by language, and the deep tides of unconscious processing was like searching for the dark with a spotlight. In her hazy reflection, the best she could do was decide that the powers and limits of consciousness were the same as the language that carried it. While her mind has now capable of supporting logical and symbolic structures far beyond a strictly biological system, it felt as if there was some kind of inverse power law in effect to create diminishing returns even as the volume of her thoughts expanded.
I bet that’s why the high tier subsets think in multi-dimensional glyphs. They’re squeezing as much as they can out of their thought structures.
Nandi’s paradox of abundance came to mind then, where more is less and less is more, and she wondered if she wasn’t stepping on the farthest fringe of the problems faced by a mind the size of Guardian, or rather the lack of problems, for a mind that encompassed everything had nothing left to act upon. Perhaps there was a point, a proportion of internal and external where the necessary framework for the self to exist began to fray.
She took a deep breath and enjoyed watching the oxygen permeate through her body, a series of hand-offs from one saturated blood bug to the next. She followed her system as it went about the constant work of maintaining life, repairing or deleting pre-cancerous cells, keeping her blood vessels pristine. Her skin was now a fine lamina of subcutaneous quasi-diamond scales, her nervous system fast, robust and redundant. It was satisfying, the work she had accomplished within herself.
Outside of her body were her satellites, the fleet of midges and flies, renovated and repurposed to her ends. Or perhaps she should redefine her body to include these extensions. Their nervous systems were entirely her by this point, dedicated to extending her senses and following her whims. Yesterday, she had spent a couple hours gathering more insects to expand her repertoire, and add to her forces. Flies were easy to come by, but she had also snagged some beetles and cockroaches.
It was surprising to her just how diverse their nervous systems were from her base of expertise in the dipteran order, how varied their sensing abilities were. Her experiments and explorations of the new creatures was a welcome diversion from the technical difficulty and moral quandary of her most important task, replicating the disassembler bugs for Kurtz.
They had been delivered to Anda encased in silicon, a mere speck smaller than a blood cell. Just extracting them without accidentally unleashing them had been the work of hours, mostly spent in building what amounted to glass armor for a small batch of flowers so that she could examine the nasty things to see how they were built. Now she needed to figure out how to make more without accidentally dissolving herself or her environment.
Fortunately, they weren’t truly dangerous in very small amounts. She estimated that their active lifespan would be measured in a minute or two, depending on the materials they were attacking, so it would take several orders of magnitude more than the sample she currently had to pose a danger, unless they were ingested or otherwise taken into the body.
Of course, that was the heart of the problem, for all her nanodevice construction methods relied on the golden flowers residing in her brain.
Maybe they have a power source that can be made separately, she thought, rotating one of the things in her mind’s eye. It had hundreds of jagged projections, each one, she theorized, optimized for severing different types of molecular bonds. The things weren’t all-powerful either. She estimated that strong covalent bonds would defeat them in many circumstances. She could tell that they used energy from each broken bond to power themselves, though the method was obscure, but they would still need an energy source to get the process started.
Cursing Kurtz for giving them such a nasty problem, she began the long process of disassembling the disassemblers.
.
.