“It means fiend,” Mo said. “I picked it up from the gang I hung out with after...” he hesitated, “after my parents died. You know the story there. Anyway, we were living up north, me and a bunch of Chinese guys hung out to dry when Samgor and Sinaloa had their little falling out. It’s what they kept calling the pictures on the walls at the place we were living, some old temple where the jungle used to be.”

Lilijoy listened while Mo and Maria talked, not exactly eavesdropping, since they were all crammed into the assault vehicle on their way to... nowhere in particular. Hopefully they would think of something, but since there was no way to know if they were being tracked from above, the plan was to keep moving.

“What was so bad about Tony? I think it’s a very nice name,” Maria asked while she sprayed another of his wounds. The air filtration in the craft was working overtime to remove the fumes, but Lilijoy could still feel the inside of her nose growing numb from the chemicals. At least her system had finished purging what was left of the capsaicin gas.

She allowed Mo and Maria’s voices to fade into the background and thought about what to do next. It had taken them far too long to get moving after the last of the attackers fled. She had dragged Attaboy, still stunned, into the assault vehicle, retrieved a mask for Maria, and with her help, been able to get the others. It had been a near thing, and she was still reeling, still attempting to understand how she could have been so confident. If the enemy had even one additional squad, or even better weapons, Nykka and Attaboy would have been captured, the rest of them likely killed.

Anda would never have had a chance. Even now he was, somewhat voluntarily, stuck on the Inside. Neither of them had any idea what would happen if he logged out, due to the odd circumstances. In all likelihood, the Maasai revenants, or the Etalaki, as she had learned to call them, would have free run of his avatar. Anda was less concerned about that than what they might do if they felt abandoned.

“They’re contained at the moment,” he had rationalized. “I don’t think that would last for long at all if I logged out. At best they would return to what they were doing before.”

“And that was what, exactly?”

“Trying to make themselves real, I think. To the extent there was any thought at all, they were, are, I guess, looking for connection. Ultimately, they were searching for what they had when they were embodied on the Outside.”

“Seems like they got the opposite.”

“Yes. That happens a lot in life.” Anda hadn’t elaborated, but the look on his face, his now entirely non-orc, human face told her plenty. It had been a bit of a surprise for both of them, when Lilijoy realized Anda’s features were his own again. Neither of them knew why, but it seemed likely that the Etalaki had somehow reset his avatar. Either that, or the need for his half-orc form had run its course.

Regardless, it was clear that Anda’s trial, quest, or whatever it was, had yet to finish.

“Well, that sucked,” Nykka said from behind her, stirring for the first time. “I guess we made it, somehow?”

Lilijoy nodded. “It was a close call. I’m sorry.”

Nykka sighed. “Yeah. Well.” She shook her head. “Sorry. I’m still out of it. Did we find out who those guy were?”

“Mercenaries. Probably hired by Walden? They wanted you and Attaboy.”

“Huh. Explains the electric shock thing. Quimea always told me that was most systems’ Achilles heel. He’s been working forever to harden Suenos.”

“Attaboy is still out. He got tagged about thirty minutes ago.”

“Guess your system isn’t all-powerful either, huh?”

Lilijoy wasn’t sure how Stage Two would react to a strong current, but she wasn’t in a hurry to find out. “Sure seems that way. Nice sword by the way.”

Nykka’s looked around for the weapon in momentary panic, before finding it at her feet. “Saw that, did you?” She kicked the hilt up to her hand. “I try to keep what it can do a secret, just so you know.”

“Makes for a hell of a surprise. I thought you were in trouble.”

“Nah.” Nykka tilted her head, considering. “Or yeah. But only because of that zapper.”

“Is that what those are called?”

Nykka shrugged. “Seems as good a name as any. I’ve never come across that particular variant. The ones I’ve trained against were different. Way easier to avoid, for one.” She peered out the window. “Where are we headed?”

“Nowhere. Just stalling.”

“Hmm. You really think they’d come back for more?”

“I have no idea. If Anda weren’t stuck Inside, I might feel more confident.”

Nykka wasn’t up on the whole Etalaki situation, so Lilijoy filled her in.

“That’s crazy,” she said, when Lilijoy had finished explaining. Fiddling with her sword, she went on. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. Quimea visited me on the Inside. He wanted you to know that he can find me in there whenever he wants. At least, that's what I extrapolated from him telling me a random anecdote from childhood.”

Lilijoy felt a wave of fatigue pass through her. “Great. Good to know,” she replied. “Do you think he could be behind this?”

Nykka grimaced. “He’s behind everything he isn’t in front of. Once you have his attention, the guessing never stops. So, yes, this could have been him rather than Walden. Or it could have been him manipulating Walden. They are Sinaloa’s dearest enemies, after all. He’s been playing them like a fiddle for over a century.”

Lilijoy tucked that bit of information away. Her fondest wish was never to need to learn more about Corp politics than the absolute minimum, but there was no avoiding it. “How did he find you?” she asked. “I thought you had hidden from Sinaloa on the Inside too.”

“I wish I knew. The fact is, he’s probably more dangerous on the Inside. He’s from the first generation, and they’ve had over a century to learn how things work. He’s been actively experimenting the entire time, gathering resources. He was the one, you know, who cracked the whole alchemy thing.”

Lilijoy, in fact, did not know that. “He figured out how to use the Inside to build things Outside?”

“Yup. To hear him talk about it, he single-handedly saved humanity from reverting to savagery. Of course, other clans have their own heroes, their own versions of those early times. My guess is that more than one of them figured it out. Otherwise, Sinaloa would be ruling the world.”

Lilijoy couldn’t help but be struck by how levelheaded Nykka was. She had a sense of perspective, a detachment about her background that was admirable.

“You’ve been with him since you were a child. How is it that you seem so… normal?” she asked.

“The key word there is ‘seem’.” Nykka bit her lip. “It’s what humans do, you know. We seem. We reflect the signals others send to us, some better than others. We are social beings, and the essence of who we are is absorbed and then retransmitted. Quimea thinks of individuals as little more than conduits, circuits in a vast machine processing… something.”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Lilijoy let that thought roll around in her head for a moment. It was disturbing, on a certain level, how parallel the idea was to what she had been considering since reading Sarah’s letter. The main issue she had with the notion of a… not collective consciousness, exactly, but some kind of emergent mental entity riding on millions of brains, was how irrational large-scale human behavior seemed to be, how self-sabotaging, even suicidal it was.

Uncontrolled, sprawling growth is hardly the signature of rationality. It’s the slime mold problem again. Except, that’s not what we have now, is it. How convenient to have an external entity to control, shape and prune the growth.

The unsettling thought that Guardian could be, in essence, a tool generated purposefully for self-control made a little chill run down her spine.

What was it that shard-Emily said?

She replayed the words from her memory.

“...Dad stumbled on something by accident when he was researching using rare earth elements as resource bottlenecks. Initially, he was most interested in the idea of using them to build self replicators that couldn't run away, but he discovered that the right configuration made for excellent room-temperature quantum processors, and additionally they had an inherent structural hierarchy which made programming them for various tasks relatively simple. It reminded him of the structural hierarchies in the brain, and he worked with Mom to build them into a neural interface. She told me later that they were both nervous about how well it worked, that it felt like they were cheating somehow, borrowing the computational properties of reality itself.”

Serendipity is an interesting thing, she mused. ‘“A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.” What time is it now, social growth?

She looked back at Nykka, watched her caress the hilt of her sword with a distant look in her eyes. “How does it work?” she asked, pointing at the blade.

Nykka gave a little start. “I don’t really want to talk about it in front of the others. It’s just another example of sufficiently advanced technology. It’s a one of a kind Quimea made for me.”

Lilijoy could respect that, but she hoped Nykka would let her study the weapon at some point. She thought it must be made of micro, or nanomachines. If she could duplicate them… it would take a lot of work, but she could imagine amazing possibilities for mobile metallic structures. She glanced over at the EBO box, which thankfully had been stored in the assault craft.

I really need to get that working, she thought. All I need is the right power source.

“You had it pretty good, in some ways,” she said. “Why leave?”

She knew Nykka’s professed reason, to free herself from Doctor Quimea’s control, to replace her system, or at least find a workaround for the fact that it would be degrading. She was still struggling to trust it, however, and every time she was reminded of Doctor Quimea’s penchant for plotting, for weaving patient webs that stretched over lifetimes, she felt less comfortable still. She felt bad for this, because Nykka hadn’t given her a single reason to be mistrustful. If anything, she had proved herself several times over. And yet.

“I get it,” Nykka said. “I can imagine what this looks like from your perspective. I’m sure you remember what I said when we first met. Well, the first time we talked anyway. He makes people doubt everything. Reality itself. He’s been studying how to get inside peoples heads both literally and figuratively since before the Rise.”

Lilijoy could only nod.

“The thing is,” Nykka continued, “I’m terrified. I’m crushed with doubt.” Her voice was matter of fact, but Lilijoy could see her vital signs and could tell that Nykka’s system was going full out to help modulate her emotions. There was a level of control missing that was usually present, which Lilijoy thought might be due to the electric shock she had received not long before. “If you can’t help me, I...”

She stopped speaking for a moment, and Lilijoy saw just a hint of struggle around her white eyes.

“I think I can help you,” she said, “but not by giving you my system.”

Nykka’s shoulders stiffened. “How?” she squeezed out.

“I can make more Suenos system. I’m sure of it. Hopefully enough so that you won’t be dependent on me,” she rushed to say, before Nykka thought she would just be trading manacles for handcuffs. “Maybe I can even make it more stable, fix it.”

Nykka looked down. “I can accept that.” She looked back up. “I’m not a good person, you know.”

Lilijoy wasn’t sure how to reply to that. Platitudes didn’t seem in order. “Why would you be?” was what she finally settled on.

“Exactly.” She nodded. “I’m a true product of Sinaloa, of the Doctor. I ‘saved’ Attaboy because I saw a remote chance his system could help me. Well, that’s why I let him live anyway. I saved him to avoid becoming obsolete, to keep what was in his head away from the Doctor.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Nykka’s candor unsettled her, reminded her a bit of Quimea, who used the truth as a weapon.

“I don’t know. I’m tired, alright? But I like you. God help me, I even like Attaboy. When you took us down in Averdale, I saw a possibility that I hadn’t seen before. I already knew that Doctor Quimea wasn’t infallible, but you did something he had never anticipated. And there were other… things, that happened. I’d already taught myself to think in a new way, and it put me over the edge.”

“What do you mean, think in a new way?” Lilijoy asked.

“It’s a long story.”

Lilijoy made a point of looking around the dark interior of the assault vehicle.

“Fine,” Nykka said. “It’s not like there’s anything else going on. The short version is that someone within Sinaloa sent me a document. It wasn’t much, just a list of cognitive biases. You know what those are, right?”

Lilijoy nodded, smiling inwardly.

“All it did was suggest I tailor my own system to filter and eliminate them, to compensate for my biology. That was way harder than it sounds, by the way. But, I fooled around with it, more out of boredom than anything. Once I did what I could, I started seeing how influenced I had been in a hundred subtle ways. I began to notice the… machinery behind the scenery.”

“That sounds a lot like something from Renaissance.”

“Yeah. I realized that at some point. I don’t know much about that, except it doesn’t seem like they… do much.”

“You’d be surprised.” She left it there, but couldn’t help wondering exactly what it was that Renaissance did. That they were doing something was not in doubt; Nykka’s story attested to that. It didn’t help that Anda was so reticent to talk. “You should talk to Anda. He’s pretty high up in their organization.”

Nykka looked surprised. “That’s a coincidence.”

“He’s said that most of the people in Renaissance don’t know they’re members. Honestly, if you can pry out of him what he actually does, I’d love to know.”

After that, Nykka decided to sleep a bit, tired from being knocked out, and Lilijoy focused her attention on the Inside. Anda was still working on how to relate to the Etalaki, which limited his and her mobility substantially. With more confidence in his ability to keep them contained, she would have considered bringing him to her Trial Space, but between that and the fact that she hadn’t ever brought another Outsider there, she couldn’t consider it an option.

The reason for her growing insecurity was the raging combat coming ever closer. It was no longer distant rumbles and flares of light. No, now the cries of the human combatants were audible, and several times great gusts of hot wind had blown the ashes of the Rotted Lands into dust devils that spun and cavorted on all sides. There had even been a shower of hot pebbles that looked suspiciously as if they had started life as lava, forming small craters in the soft earth for as far as the eye could see.

The difficulty was that the Etalaki had a strong opinion about the direction they wished to go, answering Lilijoy’s earlier question about who had been steering when Anda was in abomination form. When Anda tried to move back into the Rotted Lands they would become agitated, even aggressive in their protests.

She passed a few moments going over notifications accumulated during her earlier experimentation with earth magic meta-spells. Evidently she had stumbled on a new skill, Formations and Arrays, and the Inside had decided she was a Natural Initiate. She had wondered if she was doing something that already existed, and now she knew. Sort of. It was another question to ask Professor Anaskafius, if she ever got back to the Academy.

Out of curiosity, she tried to raise her Barrier spell up to Apprentice, and was pleased to see that she could. On the heels of that success, she also found she could bring the spell class Shape up a level too. By the time she was done, she only had three free points left, but since that was what she had been saving them for, she didn’t feel too bad. There weren’t enough left over, though, to raise the Clade or Source, since those were already higher.

I can make quite a volume of wall now, she thought. Over a thousand cubic feet, unless there are diminishing returns somewhere along the line. But since I can multitask and cast the spell more than once, I could build a small fort. Probably couldn’t hold it very long though. And there’s the whole roof problem.

Such musings kept her occupied for several seconds, until a plume of molten rock far bigger than any hypothetical fort lit the sky on fire. The explosion was located less than a kilometer away, and already Lilijoy could feel the ground shaking.

Was that an actual volcano? she wondered briefly. I don’t remember seeing any…

She took a split second to check her internet memory.

“Hey Anda,” she said. “What do you think would happen if you died?”

“I have no idea,” he replied. “Hopefully the Etalaki wouldn’t be freed to start all over again. Why do you ask?”

“Because I think the Boiling Plains is a supervolcano. And I think it’s erupting.”

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