“Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.”

—Neal Stephenson

==Caden==

Delving into my soul had always had a timeless quality, but before I had always felt a faint need to rush. After all, being here meant I wasn’t able to watch over the rest of the dungeon.

Now, that feeling was gone.

There was no difference between being here and waiting above. Either way, I had no access to the world.

My soul was the same as before: incomprehensible.

I understood some of what it showed me, but it was as vast and overwhelming as ever.

I let myself drift through it, allowing the images and sensations to wash over me like waves.

For a moment I was in a floating fractal tree; a single point branched off into multiple straight trunks, with no roots and no ground. From there more branches sprung off every trunk, becoming more twigs, and stems, and finally giving way to endless bismuth leaves. Each was a rainbow starting their own inward spiraling fractal.

My previous experience allowed me to sense where my human form was. It was a single line on a rainbow leaf, a mirror in a laser labyrinth, the taste of a raindrop in a hurricane.

I did nothing with that knowledge, save try to understand.

Whether I accomplished anything or not, I started to sink deeper.

I wasn’t even aware that there were greater depths until I began to pass beneath the current layer.

The next layer was more of the same, as far as I could understand, and in time I sank further still.

At first, the next layer gave the same impression. However, as I drifted, I began to feel that something was out of place.

A single discordant note screeched in a symphony the length of the universe. A dying tree stretched out barren branches in an endless forest. A crack marred the beauty of a perfect sphere. Lightning struck in the void of space.

I was drawn to it, and it came ever more into focus. It wasn’t a single flaw, but a thousand, a million.

And then it was in front of me, and I knew what it was.

Swirling lines of runes carved themselves out with unspeakable elegance upon a slate in the Akashic library… except that even the smallest symbol from another slate made the elegance look like a child’s first crude crayon drawings.

A sculptor made a statue to make Michelangelo and Leonardo weep in inadequacy, but compared to the surrounding gallery, it was a pale shadow, for those statues moved and lived. Their every line and gesture burned with their thoughts, and their voices were a choir of perfect harmony.

Slowly, as I watched, new terribly flawed beauty was laid down. And, even slower, it was healed. The complexity grew to match the rest; the dance’s steps moved from a single dancer to be a part of the performance as a whole; the sapling grew to tower toward the sky like its brethren.

And, I gradually began to understand what this was.

It was the system.

This was the system writing the knowledge of language, inscribing it into my very soul.

Though its capacity was so far beyond mortal limits, it could not match whatever governed the perfection of my soul.

Instead, my soul healed the flaw, restoring itself to how it was meant to be.

Like so much here in my soul, the knowledge was strange. I simply knew, without context or reason.

This flaw was why I was unconscious. This flaw was why gaining new abilities and powers from the system was often jarring. It wasn’t able to do so seamlessly enough. My soul had to heal the inserted knowledge and abilities so they were incorporated properly.

Most of the time, it was only a brief issue, but languages were far more vast than almost any other change. A language, by its definition, changed both how you thought, and what you were even capable of thinking.

Language was the problem the system was having, too. It understood the language of the soul better than I would expect any mortal to ever manage. However, what it was writing was still only a crude facsimile.

In comparison it was… soulless.

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I chuckled at my own pun more than was probably appropriate.

I continued to watch the system’s efforts, but eventually I drifted away from them. I could feel something else now brushing against my perceptions.

At the edges of the constant communication and communion with my own soul, I could feel more traces of that other. A feeling I was beginning to recognize as the system.

It was more subtle than what I had seen before, but its purpose was also far more subtle.

The system was woven all around and through my soul.

These didn’t register as imperfections marring the harmony of the rest of my soul, because they were still separate from my soul. Instead, I could feel the faint echoes of the system’s own communications. This was how the system interacted with me. This was how the system monitored my progress and knowledge.

It didn’t bother touching my mind directly, at least not for this. Why would it, when my soul was a perfect and far more accurate representation of myself?

Perhaps it should have bothered me that the system was so entwined with my very soul, but it didn’t. It wasn’t like I hadn’t already dealt with its ability to change me on a fundamental level. It made my human soul into a dungeon, shoved a bunch of knowledge and abilities into my mind, and had generally been able to do whatever it wanted to me.

The revelation that it was here in my soul was less of a revelation in the scope of its intrusion, and more a revelation into how it operated on that scale at all.

It was also both vaguely comforting, and terrifying, that my soul was more complex than the system could manage. If my soul wasn’t repairing the unintentional damage from its clumsiness, it would just be terrifying. As it was, the implication that I, my soul, was on some fundamental level vaster than a system that was potentially running this universe was… complicated.

Simply having a soul that survived after death was enough for me to start wondering exactly where it came from in the first place.

For now, just like I had before, I was shelving that because there was nothing I could do with that knowledge.

The system might be a god, or it might be some artificial creation. Though apparently, even if it was a god, it was less (skilled, powerful, old, knowledgeable?) than whatever had created my soul.

Yeah…

What would I even do with that knowledge?

It wasn’t like there was a customer service line I could call up and complain to because a less skilled technician was working on my soul.

Honestly, with its errors, the system felt more like a computer system. The creation of some god that fobbed off its job onto a computer so they didn’t need to deal with it anymore.

Which… I mean. I could understand.

No one wants to work in customer service unless they have to.

Did having a system taking care of everything make this hypothetical god more or less lazy than whoever was in charge of my home universe?

At least the system was actually running and present.

If there was a god in charge of running Earth, they were either absent, or incredibly subtle…

I traced what I could of the systems connections.

Past a certain point, the web was too ephemeral for me to notice. Either that, or it didn’t actually observe all the areas of my soul.

For all I knew there were static areas that only needed to be read once. Areas like the form of my previous body, which obviously wasn’t changing anymore.

I traced what I could, but eventually started to drift again.

I wasn’t certain what caused me to drift. It could be unconscious, my position responding to my desires, my soul could be actively guiding me, knowledge and understanding could control distance here; it could be anything.

Down, deeper, I went once again.

The strands of the system were more intricate here, and I could see a small artificial structure attached to part of my soul.

In a way that was now becoming familiar, I grew closer to the structure as I concentrated on it. Slowly, its function became clear, as did the part it was attached to.

This governed the production of my mana, except…

The part that created mana was natural.

That part could be turned off, or dialed down, but it was a natural part of the soul. I was meant to be able to produce mana. The fact that it could be switched off suggested that it had simply never been on while human, but…

What does it mean if mana production is a natural part of the soul?

Honestly, I had no idea.

It might be some kind of divine soul energy, or it might just be one more function of the soul. This area was still a tiny piece of even just this layer of my soul. Who knew what all the other pieces could do. For all I knew each piece of this layer was a hypothetical energy type that I could interact with in different lives.

The more practical part, for the moment, was if I could alter the artificial structure.

Producing mana was dependent on a skill, Soul Mana.

At least I knew exactly why soul was in the name now.

The system could reach out and manipulate my soul. It is my soul… could I do that same?

The initial answer was… no.

I tried to reach out to the construct and there was nothing there. Or, more precisely, I tried to reach out and felt like I had no body, let alone arms or fingers.

I didn’t let that stop me.

Instead, I concentrated on the structure, trying to understand exactly what it was for.

Gradually, some pieces of it began to come into better focus, though most of it remained inscrutable.

The device was controlling far more than merely the amount of mana created. There was a sense of tuning, as well, to allow for different… flavors of mana. I didn’t actually know what any of that was for, so I left it alone. The last thing I needed was to start producing mana that was incompatible with all my other skills, corrosive, or had some other side effect.

Even beyond that, other settings controlled aspects of mana that I didn’t even know existed. I couldn’t understand exactly what they were for, however. I only received vague impressions of power, rigidity, time, sharpness, shining, and so on.

Except for mana production, which was what I had wanted to change in the first place, almost all the settings were at minimum or maximum. Mana production was at the lower end of the settings, though there seemed to be an odd amplification happening as mana was produced.

I kept reaching out as best I could, imagining manipulating the controls. I imagined hands, other digits, and tendrils of stone moving it. I imagining it moving on its own. None of these, or the other methods I tried, seemed to help, and I didn’t feel like I was even starting to make progress.

I went back to observing, trying to understand how this structure connected to my soul. How exactly it was interacting with it.

Except… as I studied it more, I realized that the structure wasn’t actually connected for more than an instant at any location. It would touch to make a change and immediately withdraw. The system’s web kept the device in place with regard to my own soul, and, though it kept very close, it wasn’t actually touching continuously. For a moment I considered why, before I thought back to my soul’s previous reaction to foreign elements being directly added.

Hmm… that might offer an additional way to make changes.

Ultimately, the structure was an artifact of the system, and my attempts to manipulate it had failed. However, I was literally inside a manifestation of my own soul.

I focused on my soul, watching the places where the system was almost touching. I could see the sudden flickering touches it made as it bridged the gap, before it pulled away.

I urged my soul to action, to motion, to hold onto the system and make its creation my own.

My soul shivered, the faintest hint of motion rippling through where I was concentrating. And then, when one of the touches reached out, it was unable to pull away. Then another piece stuck, and then another, and slowly change began to creep outward from where it was now joined fast with my soul.