NEFERUATEN

You know what? Since I'm not aware of exactly how much you know - I assume this is coming from some combination of whatever I told you in the reenactment you recall, alongside whatever you managed to learn since coming here a few days ago, unless I'm radically misinformed - it feels as though it would be simplest to just explain the whole story from the beginning. It hardly matters much at this point, after all. It's not even especially important why you want to know.

Where to begin...? I suppose it would be reasonable to start with how I became part of the Order and met your grandfather.

Unlike some of his other allies - Zeno, for example - I was actually already a member before he even became a part of the organization. The details of the story are a little tangential, but to sum it up, I sort of tripped into becoming a member over some time without it ever being a completely conscious choice. That's how I often am, you know. I was the sort of child who never did her homework until the very last moment.

Did I ever tell you the story of what happened to my husband and children?

You did, in my loop.

I see.

Well, this all started about... I want to say fifty, perhaps sixty years after that. After abandoning my career in journalism, I moved from Mekhi to eastern Ysara - Nad-Ilad eventually, Adarebi at first - to study physics and some adjacent topics, since at the time it was quite difficult to persuade the Paritist government of my homeland that one required a second full education. Due to the difference in economic systems, I arrived with essentially nothing; A few books, some trinkets I pawned off to make rent for the first few months, and the clothes on my back. I'm sure it sounds rather pitiful, but that was how I wanted it-- A fresh start, where I could do my best to forget my old life.

Looking back, I'm not sure what it was that attracted me to the field. My eventual study of Thanatomancy makes sense; ever since what happened, I suppose I was always somewhat obsessed with death, as much as I tried to deny it. But physics...

I suppose the appeal was less in the thing itself, and more in how much of a departure it was from what I'd been doing before. Something we have in common, Utsushikome, is that I also spent my school days being known as something of a math savant. Likely not quite on the same level as you - your talent really is uncanny - but I always placed top of my class, got invited to competitions, the whole rigmarole. The difference between us, though, is that I always hated the stuff. I was never a particularly amazing journalist in terms of prose, but there was an innate passion for it in me; I loved people, their stories, the sense of cathartic connection one feels when you really get to the bottom of something. All the shifting, wriggling manifestations of the human condition. In another life, I probably could have been an anthropologist.

Physics is the opposite of that. Cold, predictable, unchangingly indifferent. A place for everything and everything in its place. Study it long enough and life itself begins to disappear, replaced by a more predictable system of particles and quantum fluctuations among many. You couldn't contrive a conceptualization of the world more opposed to the one I'd fixated on previously - and that was just what I was keen on.

For a while I didn't even really know where I was going with it. I worked odd-jobs to finance my education for a time. I had a stint as a waitress, worked the counter at a book store, even a few years at a local factory. Eventually I settled into an editing position for a while, then once I'd graduated, attained a meager tenure at some now-closed minor university, establishing myself as a minor academic. And, after quite a while, decided to try arcane aptitude testing. A slow, unglamorous early career.

At some point, the Order began to take notice of my research. For a while, I worked as something of a consultant without being aware of the true nature or mission of the organization, but eventually Hamilcar's precursor reached out to me, and I became a full member. Because my expertise oriented around entropic phenomena, I was assigned to study the Ironworker's facility in the Nekrokos, which had recently come under their occupation. (This was, of course, some time before the sanctuary itself would be constructed.) Under the oversight of Anna - already a member of the council - we constructed a rudimentary observation interface.

It was around this time that I met your grandfather, and a few years later became aware of the aforementioned conspiracy. But focusing on the Apega project--

Hold on. You can't treat this all as some kind of afterthought, even laying all this out. You said a conspiracy of... people with assimilation failure?

Yes, that's right. I hope you won't take this the wrong way, Utsushikome, but I'm rather surprised you don't seem to know about it. Even if he was on strained terms with them by the end, your grandfather was rather heavily involved for many years, and frankly was rather bad when it came to being subtle regarding the affair.

You surely must have heard or seen things that seemed circumspect, over the years? References to a past that didn't line up with the facts as you know them? Strange behaviour?

I suppose. There was one conversation I overheard between him and Samium...

I was never a member, so I'm afraid that there's not all that much I can tell you about them. I understand they were divided into a number of groups, though they largely shared the same goals and differed only on nuances of belief, much like any other political or religious movement. The two largest were known as the Crossed and the Brotherhood of the Scorned. Or at least I think they were the largest? But perhaps I just always remember those two because the names fit together so well - 'crossed and scorned'. You couldn't write this stuff, I swear.

Anyway, the latter group was the one we were involved with. Their goals were relatively straightforward - to dominate arcanist culture in secret and accrue power and influence. To that end, they had long desired to control the Order, which had access to a great deal of resources and research that might serve their goals.

Why would they be trying to do that? What did they want?

Do you know anyone who suffers from serious assimilation failure, Utsushikome?

I... no.

I was fortunate enough not to suffer from it, but I'm told it's a very isolating experience. Your identity is thrown into chaos, and you cannot express your true history and selfhood sincerely without falling afoul of the law. You are feared and loathed, seen as a murderous usurper despite having done nothing of your own will; there's a reason the label of 'witch' stuck. It must feel suffocating, unjust. As if the entire world is your enemy.

And of course, these are arcanists we're talking about. When you combine such oppression on one side with social and literal power on the other... well, it doesn't seem so unlikely, surely.

In any event. For years, they had been sending their agents to infiltrate the organization, but their efforts had mostly been stymied under Ubar of Kane's leadership and that of his immediate successors. One would think that an organization devoted to conducting research that over the years was socially taboo at best and outright illegal at worst might take something of a dim view of the powers-that-be in the Remaining World, but for whatever reason they were always quite devoted to the hegemony of the Eight Parties and the structures of power established by the Ironworkers after the Exodus. Perhaps they regarded it is a 'me against my brother, my brother and I against a stranger' situation, where disagreements over transhumanism paled in comparison to a conflict that threatened the very stability of the culture itself. Or maybe it was a simple matter of tradition - following Ubar of Kane, who to the best of my understanding was about as close to the Ironworkers as one could get.

Your grandfather, though, had quickly risen through the ranks to become a very popular member of the Order. The Brotherhood of the Scorned recruited him early in life, soon after his Induction, but he was never particularly passionate about their agenda. Instead, he saw them as a vehicle through which his own goals could be realized.

I've restrained myself from too much criticism of them thus far - I don't want to sound overly enthusiastic about what was essentially a massacre that I wasn't even exactly complicit in - but it must be said that the Order, at the time, was effectively a failed organization that often more resembled a cross between an organized crime racket and a violent cult than anything with an actually scientific character. Very little research was done, and most of the organization's resources were spent on vanity projects for the leadership, militant defense of their assets and secrecy (up to and including the occasional murder), and outright political and economic interventions unrelated to its mission for its members and benefactors. I remember you commenting that the Order seemed nepotistic, Utsushikome, but the state we left it in was nothing on those days. The character was downright medieval at times.

Matters came to a head after a younger member without any particular connections to the inner circle was effectively executed over a relatively minor breach of security, sending much of the general membership into an uproar. Your grandfather took advantage of that, using the resources provided by the Brotherhood to orchestrate an assault by the Oathguard during a meeting of the leadership. Hamilcar, who was a Kane but also a member of the Brotherhood himself, was primed to take over.

So Mehit really was almost completely right... It feels strange to say it, but despite everything, I still can't believe my grandfather would effectively kill so many people.

He was certainly a man with a ruthless streak, that's for certain. Willing to do almost anything to accomplish his goals - a state of mind we had in common. Though I was always a little more squeamish.

What do you mean about Mehit, by the way?

Nothing. So, to be clear, you're saying that Hamilcar suffered from assimilation failure, himself?

That's correct. I believe he was a Type-IV sufferer, even. A dramatic case.

But you supported this faction even though you weren't one yourself.

Yes.

I appreciate that it may be uncomfortable for you to hear this, and it's not my intention to sway your opinion of him--

You don't need to make all these qualifications. Just get on with it.

Your grandfather was a visionary, Utsushikome, and I mean that more in the sense that he was inspiring as a person and a leader than per-se a scientific genius. Much of the concepts that would ultimately become the Apega were based on theories which I had already drawn up from my earlier work both within the Order and prior to my membership, but he was the one who made it cohere into an actual plan.

Speaking of which, now we can start to get into the Apega itself. Before the takeover even happened, your grandfather - following a discussion the two of us had about the viability of the project - approached the Brotherhood with a proposal. It's a bit of a crude summary of their agenda, but for a long time, their organization has been fixated on attaining a sort of 'promised land', where they could revive their world as it was before the calamity which befell it following the Ironworker's 'betrayal'-- A place at its best far more prosperous than the lives we enjoyed in the Remaining World, constrained by the tenants of the Covenant and the imperfections of reality itself in elevating our condition.

What if it were possible to overcome that? Saddiah ibnat Adad's theories aside - I assume you know about that, if you're throwing around terms of like 'proxy' - we've known since the Imperial Era that it was theoretically possible for life, even human life, to exist on the Higher Planes. In fact, in some regards it's simpler for that to happen than to re-create the conditions of the original universe from scratch as the Ironworkers did, since it becomes a matter of merely limiting physics rather than emulating it altogether-- Well, I won't bore you with the technical details. The issue, of course, is in getting there.

But what if there were something that already existed which could, well, offer a measure of aid from the other side? I'm sure you see where I'm going with this.

You're talking about-- About this world. The Stage, or whatever.

Well, not exactly. This isn't quite what we had in mind in those days-- it was hoped that we might discover a means to bring all of humanity with us, for one thing, and envisioned a world that worked quite differently... but a similar sort of concept, in some regards.

But we're only copies of the versions of us in the Remaining World. Why would that satisfy them?

Think about the group we're talking about here, Utsushikome. People who have already died and been reborn from what amounts to an imprint of their consciousness. Do you really think they'd be most inclined to think about the continuation of their identity in absolute terms? Faith in the linear self is rather like a diet, I think. Once the rules have been broken once, one tends to feel somewhat more fluid about the issue.

Not that they knew the exact details of how it would all work-- Even we didn't, at that point. It was naught but a hypothesis. And that could have been all it ever remained, had things turned out just a little differently.

The first stage of the experiment, as I suspect you know if you're aware of this much already, centered around fostering a connection with a living human. You presumably heard the version that Linos planned to give as part of the council's plan, which adds a somewhat mystical component to the scenario by suggesting that we hoped for the entity to empathize with human beings. Suffice it to say, this would not be particularly scientific. No; rather, our hope was to use a human's pneuma as something of a grounding agent. The fundamental problem we encountered in communing with the intelligence was that, due to its situation in the Timeless Realm, our relationship to it was in a constant state of flux as a result of our plane moving through time. It was like trying to catch a fish while riding a horse. What parts of its body were even available to us were constantly changing, making any attempt at understanding or interface impossible.

The thought was that, even if we couldn't stop the horse, we could at least tie the fishing rod down - use the naturally extra-dimensional properties of the pneuma to connect consistently with some part of the entity, even if the exact nature of that connection was a bit of a crapshoot.

All things considered, it worked out better than I expected. Just through performing routine pneuma scans, we gained a bounty of valuable data, and the child possessed an almost preternatural understanding of entropic phenomena themselves, albeit one that ultimately ended in tragedy. But the issue was that it still failed to respond in any sort of consistent way to our attempts at communication; data could come out but not go in, so to speak.

We tried the same experiment again, using different parts of the entity, but increasingly it began to feel as though our initial success had been a matter of pure luck. So we instead moved to trying to develop means of interfacing with it that didn't involve a human. This process took was a lengthy one - Egomancy had recently been banned outright, and with it one of the only promising vectors for research into extra-planar structures. Our research turned, then, towards creating and transporting pneuma wholly artificially. These were efforts that eventually bore fruit, depending on your perspective, but that's a whole other story.

...what do you mean?

Mm, we'll put a pin in that one, I think.

It was around this time that things began to get a little tense between your grandfather and the Brotherhood, but things didn't come to a head initially. However, at the same time, support for him began to diminish within the organization itself. The project had come to be seen as something of a resource sink, a dead weight that overreached and failed to produce practical results-- I'm sure you've heard a lot of this already. Anna had always been quietly opposed, but Durvasa had a falling out with your grandfather and became the first vocal opponent, swaying Zeno, though the latter still held enthusiasm for the concept itself, merely doubting the viability. Hamilcar was next, then even Linos, leaving only the two of us.

We continued working on it all the same, however, and eventually began to contrive a solution. There were two problems to resolve: First, that we had no means to compel the entity to behave as we wished. This we solved completely. By drawing the consciousness of the being forward and using its omniscience to perform precise physical assessments of the environment that would otherwise not be possible, we were able to predict the progression of entropic forces within a constrained space without any margin of error, and so cancel it out completely: Essentially just the Entropy-Denying Arcana I developed hundreds of years prior, just without any of the messy cut corners usually inherent to the Power. Through a series of experiments, we discovered the entity experienced something we could analogize to 'discomfort' through this process, behaving anomalously and violating some of its own rules in an attempt to resist this intervention. By then giving it various means to resist - triggers that would cause the process to shut down at the passing of certain entropic and negenthropic thresholds - we were able to assess its decision-making logic and, ultimately, control its actions.

I have to confess, of the accomplishments of my life in the Remaining World, that might be the one of which I'm most proud. Treating an elementary force like a rat in a maze! Let it never be said we wanted for ambition.

However, this approach was still crude; we certainly couldn't convince it to anything complex. That leads to the second problem, that we still lacked a means of direct communication. However, we had succeeded in identifying the issue in the original experiment. The problem, in short, was consistency. The human mind, even directly anchored and with the message properly 'translated' to the best of our ability, was simply too inconstant to convey its desires to such a timeless intelligence. Tying the rod, in short, was simply not enough; the horse had to be shot. But how to shoot the horse?

We were approaching a breakthrough, but there was one last spanner to be thrown in the works. It was at this point that he himself, much to my surprise, started to lose faith in the project. He discussed his perception that humanity was 'unready' for eternal life, that we needed to undergo some sort of spiritual transformation. Whether this represented his true feelings or was merely a side effect of his emerging dementia I couldn't say, but either way it took what little wind remained out of the sails of the operation. He was sidelined and effectively ousted from the organization, and ultimately, the whole thing was abandoned.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

Well, more accurately I should say ostensibly abandoned. After all, if there's one negative quality of mine I occasionally take some pride in, it's that I can be extraordinarily stubborn. So, even alone - without any of our assistants or his talents as an engineer - I forged ahead on pure theory. I chipped away at the issue, returning to the fundamentals; isolated the rare instances in which we had received some degree of feedback from the entity, if only momentarily. I experimented. And, eventually, I came to the answer-- So simple it was almost absurd.

How do you stop the horse? How do you become the kind of static being that can communicate with another.

It's easy.

You just have to be dead!

𒀭

"Dead," I repeated, somewhere between deadpan and incredulous. Though more than 20 minutes had to have passed, they still hadn't called us up to the front desk.

"Indeed," she affirmed. "Though I suppose that's a bit of a theatrical way to put it. More accurately, you need to be 'presented' to the entity at the moment you cease to exist as a being." She held up a finger. "When I say 'cease to exist' - and trust me when I say this, the process of learning it was quite an ordeal - I really mean that in the most absolute terms possible. You can't cheat it through some trick, such as Egomancy or dying on a physical level before being resuscitated, or anything that might otherwise muddy the waters. The information which comprises 'you', as a concept, has to be absent from reality." There was a hint of frustration on her features, like this was still something that bothered her even now. "My hypothesis as to why has to do with how the entity perceives objects-- Or rather doesn't. To a being outside of time, our existences probably appear as something akin to stalks of wheat, stretching upwards from the moment of our birth to our eventual death." She glanced to me. "What part of a wheat field is the most distinct, Utsushikome?"

I gave her the answer she obviously wanted. "The ear."

"Exactly!" She gave me the sort of smile you gave to a pet performing a trick on demand, which instantly made me regret the response. "Whether you're talking about plants, mountains, or the words of a sentence, the eye always lingers on the terminus." She gestured outwardly. "But if you're a being that sees everything, then the idea of 'terminus' naturally becomes far more absolute. Mere change or temporary disruption might appear as no break in the stalk at all. Even a gap of billions of years, such as the gulf between someone's pneuma being stored in the outside world before eventually being used in an induction within the Remaining World, might appear as a mere blip to an infinite being."

I bit my lip. Honestly, having met her, it was difficult to imagine the Lady's cognition operating on such an esoteric level. As much as she'd tried to emphasize how alien and all-knowing she was in a way my mind simply couldn't comprehend, I'd seen little to suggest she would be incapable of understanding object permanence in human terms. The way she'd talked about the Order and their history had seemed quite banal, even.

Whatever. Trying to reconcile that nonsense with this more grounded ('grounded'), technical explanation would have to wait.

Neferuaten turned her head back towards the wider room. "In fact, since those of us in this world are infinite beings, that's not even a supposition. Time and space are completely irrelevant to following a series of events while Spectating. The only thing that is truly definitive is an end-point." She chuckled. "There's a poetry to it, even if the fact all this applies to a being that itself embodies endings appears to ultimately be a coincidence."

"You said that it was an 'ordeal' to learn this," I mentioned, too morbidly curious about that little line to let it slip by despite feeling mostly irrelevant to what I wanted to know. "What exactly did you mean by that...? Were you still doing experiments on people at this point? Half-killing them in different ways to determine what worked and what didn't?"

Neferuaten chuckled. "I really do wonder what happened to give you this impression of me-- No, nothing of the sort. As I said, at this point, I had to rely on pure theory. Well, mostly."

"Mostly."

"During the early experiments, when we were getting a lot of data, we built something of a model for the entropic intelligence and integrated it in the sanctuary's administrative intelligence," she explained. "Not a comprehensive one, but one that reliably responded to stimuli with relative fidelity. I made use of that to estimate an outcome."

"The administrative intelligence," I repeated. "You mean, the same intelligence as Aruru?"

Neferuaten blinked, seeming thrown off by this connection slightly. "The golem? Well, yes, but that was only one of the many things within the sanctuary it managed."

I frowned, wondering if this explained anything about the strange connection between it and the Lady, although I'd been assuming that was just because it'd been the thing's role as the 'herald of the gods' in the Order's fiction, which she'd been continuing just to fuck with me.

"Anyway, between what we both experienced during the original weekend and whatever happened in your loop, I'm sure you can piece together the remainder of the story after that," Neferuaten continued, her tone growing more laid back as she rounded off the story. "Though I had a theoretical solution, I had not the skills of putting it into practice myself, so I sent the information to your grandfather and gambled on the hope that, recent misgivings aside, his sheer academic curiosity would be enough to get him to fire the rocket if I presented the ignition to him in a pretty enough bow. Well, either that or he'd have simply forgotten on account of his condition." She laughed with a note of sardonic self-loathing. "And of course I was right-- He couldn't resist. Ultimately, his rather sudden decline and death came about before he was finished, but after poking my nose around a bit I discovered that the work was still mostly done, which actually ended up presenting an opportunity."

She paused; another instance of annoying expectation. It took me a moment to understand. "You're talking about Fang."

"Mmhmm," she hummed with a smile. "Mx. Jia--" she attempted to pronounce the X with a sort of nasal, buzzing sound, "--had spent a little time working alongside your grandfather as he was completing some of his last work, and wouldn't you know it, they also happened to be at the head of your class. The perfect person to recruit for the finishing touches, and to deliver it to the sanctuary at the moment that would put the rest of the council under the most pressure to rethink their plans and look again at a more, shall we say, comprehensive route to their personal salvation."

"It seems a little too perfect, now that you say it like that," I spoke suspiciously. "That Fang would just happen to have worked with my grandfather, and just happen to be in our class."

Neferuaten cracked a smile. "It is odd, isn't it?"

"I thought about all this over the years," I continued, staring at the elevator again. "Whether Theo, Lilith and I all being in the class together could have somehow been a part of the Order's plan-- Arranged from the start, even though I have no idea how you'd pull something like that off." Or why, for that matter - surely there'd be a less convoluted way to get a bunch of specific people in their sanctuary at the same time, assuming the plan wasn't looser than that and we'd just been the right people chosen from a much larger pool somehow - but I didn't want to throw off the line of inquiry. "But what you were doing with Fang wasn't connected to all that. So did you get them in the class, or what?"

Neferuaten scoffed. "Goodness, Utsushikome. Do you really think someone like Fang would need my help, just to get into a prestigious academic program?"

"You know what I mean," I said. "They clearly never wanted to be in the class otherwise. Barely even showed up. So did you put them up to it?"

She shook her head. "Not at all. Still, though..." She clicked her tongue a few times. "I did always get the impression they could be up to something that went even over my head. That perhaps I wasn't wholly the mastermind I thought I was, but still playing into your grandfather's hands, even when I thought I'd finally taken the reins from him." She shrugged. "Well, it's ultimately inconsequential. Either way, you know the rest first hand. The council shot me down despite my theatrics, so I went rogue and stuck the damn part in myself during the middle of the night and turned the thing on. And that's the story."

"No it's not," I protested. "You skipped the most important part. What even is the device that Fang brought? How does it work? Who was the proxy?"

"Oh, right! Forgive me-- It really is difficult to talk about all this while having no solid idea what you actually know." She laughed again, this time with more whimsy. "It's very simple. The device, which resembles a symmetrical knife physically, was based on some of the Order's other innovations in pneumenology that grew out of the original experiment. It uses a mix of Chronomancy and Egomancy to act as a metaphysical pin, so to speak." She pointed at the back of her head. "You insert it through the back of the neck, bisecting the cerebellum, cerebrum and of course the pneumaic nexus."

"'Insert' feels like a really banal way to put that," I said flatly.

"Pardon me. To be clear, you stab it. Through the brain." She lowered her hand. "Obviously this is fatal, which is actually a little inconvenient if done sloppily; the device needs to be fully in position at the point of total brain death to function. At said moment, it creates an imprint of the entire mind - mundane and transmundane - comprehensible to the entity. Thus, assuming the subject is holding it firmly in mind, a complex directive may be passed along for it to follow."

I was at a loss for words for a moment. She called this a 'solution', but the whole concept felt deranged. Dying for no other purpose than to maybe, hypothetically get a godlike entity that only tenuously followed instructions to listen to you.

"So who was... in it?" I asked.

"That's where things get a little complicated," she explained. "Originally, I'd planned to be in it."

I thought of the bell tower. "You mean, you were going to kill yourself."

"I suppose, but it wasn't as if I thought of it that way at the time. It was merely putting my research to the ultimate test." She folded her arms. "My thinking was that, since it was likely the council was going to attempt to kill me regardless - and definitely destroy my life's work at the conclusion of their little plan, along with the rest of the sanctuary - I ought to just, well, take matters into my own hands. If everything went as I intended, I could compel the entity to reanimate me regardless, along with anything else I wished. It would have been a tremendous gamble, of course, but when the stakes are taking command of a god and uplifting humanity to the realms of the divine, there's very little in the way of means that do not justify the end."

"But that isn't what happened."

"Not exactly," she said with a shake of her head. "The issue, of course, was that installing the component into the Apega properly - so as to make sure we weren't simply giving the entity leave to do whatever it wanted with an absolute surfeit of eris - was rather complicated, and I couldn't exactly do that after I became, well, mortality-impaired. So my intention was to get everything set up, then have one of the golems perform the surgery on-site. More than a little slapdash, I'll admit, but as I said, I'm a ride-or-die sort of person." She made a furtive hum. "It all seemed to be going well, at first. I affixed the thing to the base of the Apega using the crane. I made the changes to the scripting at the terminal, then activated each component manually with the Power to bypass the administrative core and avoid alerting that boy we had running security. I made a test of the connection, and then..."

She trailed off for dramatic effect. Why was she like this? Was it about power? "...and then?"

"And then nothing. My memories of the outside world end there." She chuckled. "I can only presume someone beat me to the punch. Used the device first."

I wanted to scream a little. It was consistently striking how, the more I learned about how this had all come about, the more it felt futile to try and discern any sort of concrete explanation at all. Before I'd presumed I was looking for a living culprit, one who had probably both caused the loop and been the mastermind behind the murders - someone who had such a huge grudge against the Order and the rest of us that they wanted to subject us to an eternity of suffering for some stupid reason.

But if they were dead from the start, then by definition they couldn't be the same person-- No, that wasn't even the issue!

Before, the potential culprits had been fundamentally limited to the people in the sanctuary on the weekend of April the 28th; whoever was in a position to physically interact with the Apega. But with this revelation, all bets were off. It could have been anyone. Someone who'd worked with my grandfather, or Fang, or even some random opportunist wrapped up in all this from an angle I wasn't even aware of. The potential suspects were practically endless! Anyone who had died in the Remaining World within some ambiguous window of time prior to the conclave.

"Like who?" I asked, despite knowing it was probably futile.

"I've no idea," she said predictably. "And believe me, I've spent a great deal of time considering it. But I'll tell you what-- It's probably even worse than you're thinking." She smiled. "Right now, you're probably thinking that it could have been anyone, aren't you?"

I frowned silently.

"I'm no fool, Utsushikome." The smile became a smirk. "Even if we weren't talking about something that could determine the future of all humankind, I wouldn't simply plug a modular artifice built by a man on the threshold of senility into a device with enough eris flowing through it to blow up a modestly-sized island lightly. Naturally, I inspected the finished device after it arrived with Fang at the sanctuary to ensure it complied with my specifications. And of course, that extended to making sure it hadn't been used." A red-haired man in uniform passed by carrying a surfeit of folders, glancing curiously at us as Neferuaten said the phrase 'blow up a modestly-sized island'. "Unfortunately, on the night itself, time was of the essence. So I didn't think to repeat myself."

I processed this. "So it had to have been someone at the sanctuary after all."

"Yes," she said.

"...but in the real world," I said, "no one died that weekend. Right?"

"Absolutely correct!" She looked thrilled to deliver the news, almost manic. "And in fact - just to be thorough - I'll say that as one of the people most cognizant of what went on in that place, there was not a single person who could have died, at least on the surface of it. There were no secret residents of the sanctuary, or even semi-secret ones aside from Samium." She chuckled. "It's not it could have been anyone, but rather that it couldn't! I was sabotaged, simply speaking, by a ghost!"

I stared into the middle distance. Someone called something out from the front desk.

"Oh," Neferuaten spoke. "I think we're up."

𒀭

Neferuaten collected her book from the desk and we left in silence. Or, no-- I left in silence. She continued talking. She always continued talking.

"Just got to shop for a few groceries now," she explained as she led us down the main road, away from the capitol area into the fringe where gravity bent and it met the downtown section. "There's a place I like to stop in at whenever I visit the Domain, does some wonderful specialty products-- an assembler just can't compete. The Keep is pleasant enough, but I must admit amenities are not the strong point. They don't have a real baseball court over there; parliament refuses to expend the prop they'd need for the purification towers." She shook her head. "I'll tell you, even after all these years as an academic, I still find it shocking just how many are just interminable nerds. Maybe that's a case of me going to the zoo and complaining about the lions, but I'll never stop wishing for a humanity where a strong intellectual curiosity didn't overwhelmingly correlate with being a stuffed shirt."

I said nothing, not just because I had no idea what she was talking about and didn't care, but because it felt pointless. I was doomed. This mystery was unsolvable. Ptolema was right; it was a mistake to waste any amount of time even having thought about it.

She gave me a knowing look. "Now, as a guest, I'm not sure I'm technically sure I'm allowed to make use of this service, but they haven't caught me the last few dozen times I've been here." She tilted her head. "You won't snitch on me, will you, Utsushikome?"

"...what were you going to do, if your plan had worked?"

"Hm?" She raised her brow in confusion.

"If you'd managed to put yourself in that sword," I clarified. "What kind of world would you have had entropy make for you?"

"Oh." She considered for a moment, glancing up at the orange sky just as we passed under the crystal-glass that overlaid the majority of the City. "I would have thought that would have been rather obvious. I would have asked for a paradise, Where humans could do as we liked for an eternity, without the possibility of suffering."

I looked at her skeptically. "That seems kind of childish."

"Happiness for everybody, free of charge, and may no one be left behind!" Neferuaten declared melodramatically and with obvious amusement, practically giggling to herself. "Human beings only want one thing, and it's disgusting!"

I stared at her, baffled by this response. Two catgirls passed us. (Nora had been right-- There really were a lot of catgirls.)

Neferuaten sighed softly, shrugging her shoulders. "You're not wrong, but the idea of escaping the hardship inherent to the human condition only feels that way because we culturally conceptualize it as escapist. Which in fairness, it is." She raised her long, slender arms into the air, stretching as she walked. "All philosophy across history can be more or less boiled down to the simple truth that no one likes a complainer. That there's nothing to be gained from dwelling onthe fact that an unpleasant reality is unpleasant, and so it's more mature to simply pretend things are different."

"I suppose," I said mutely. I hated how much she sounded like my internal monologue at certain moments. Had she influenced me, when I'd been young? Or was I always like this, and had just been drawn to her like a borderline-nihilist fly to honey? "It feels like there ought to be a higher purpose to life than just being happy, though."

"A higher purpose?" she asked curiously. "Did you have something in mind?"

I was quiet for several moments. "I suppose I don't," I said. "At least nothing that isn't circular."

She hummed thoughtfully. Spiraling towers began to appear at our flanks, even grander than the ones Ptolema had taken me to the other day, and the crowd thickened. "Ultimately, the desire for concrete goals to overcome is just another psychological need to be met; an itch to be scratched that emerged as a result of our evolutionary past. Even if we tend to put it on top of the hierarchy of needs - something that feels distinctly special, exceptional - there's still nothing about it that has inherent meaning. Just a fancier tune for biology to play on its little fiddle while it's doing its dopamine gatekeeping."

"If that's what you believe," I began, believing it myself, "then why did you bother asking?"

"No reason in particular," she replied. "I was just curious what you'd say when put on the spot."

I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

"Anyway," Neferuaten continued, "if a situation arises in which there's a chance - even just the smallest, infinitesimal sliver of one - to escape that, to really escape, don't we have an obligation to drop that pretense?" She asked. "To try and seize that unmarred world that lies within all of our mind's eye, yet is denied from the moment we are born?"

"I don't know why you're saying this all like it's some hypothetical." I stuck my hands in my pocket. "I mean, it seems like your wish basically came true, even if you weren't the one to make it."

"With this place, you mean?"

"Yeah."

Her smile faded slightly. "When was the last time we met, Utsushikome? From your perspective."

I was thrown off a little by the sudden digression, but I supposed there was no reason not to answer, since continuing my questioning felt at least temporarily pointless. "You were visiting the academy with the rest of the council in the middle of the winter, close to the new year, and ducked away from the others to strike up a conversation with me. You said that Samium had left me a letter before he died and then gave it to me, along with one from yourself." I found myself frowning deeply. "Then I said that I hoped we'd get a chance to talk later, and you said we should 'cross our fingers.'"

She winced. "That was a little irresponsible of me," she said. "I assume this was right before I died."

"Yeah," I said, and then added, "but don't you know this already? You said you Spectated your own death, didn't you?."

"Well, yes, but I only roughly recall the circumstances. I don't even remember precisely when I did it." She clicked her tongue. "To be honest, I try to avoid preoccupying myself with 'my' life after I came here. I find it a little disturbing, not to mention pointless."

I squinted. Could I even believe that? Even if there was no real basis for it, it felt like a pre-emptive attempt to squirm out of accountability for the stunt she'd pulled with the aforementioned note, still fresh in my mind from the events of a 'week' ago. Would she even have answers if I asked for them? It was annoying.

She turned, the two of us walking sideways along the City tower, breaking away from the central spiral down a side path towards one of the towers, though this one was kind of squat compared to the others and covered in vegetation. That had to be our destination.

"The fact that it's your last memory of me makes me wonder, though. I'd been assuming your dreaming only went up until around the time of the conclave or a little afterward - that's what's most common, generally - and that's why you're so concerned about what happened back then. But between that, and how much you seem to have changed..." She looked to me. "How long has it been for you, Utsushikome?"

I thought about making up an absurd number. What would she think if I declared myself to be Anna's age, or something? Older even than her in terms of actual life experience, at least outside of Dilmun. But then I remembered the world ended and that wasn't plausible.

"Two hundred," I told her.

Her eyes widened. "Goodness," she said. "That certainly explains how different you seem."

"Does it."

"Two centuries-- You must have built an entire life for yourself, by now. I can only imagine how strange it must be to have that suddenly stripped away. It's no small wonder that you'd be curious how all this came about, which I suppose - in tandem with whatever memories have returned to you from your reenactment - would naturally lead you to using the faculties of this plane to determine the truth of what happened to the Order, and your grandfather and I's work." She smiled. "Of course, I'm happy to answer any further questions."

I knew this tactic. Neferuaten wanted to know the motivation for approaching her like this, but because it was paramount that she maintain her perpetually-wise-and-aloof persona, didn't want to ask explicitly. So instead, she was deliberately making a wrong assumption about my thinking, making it impossible for me to continue the conversation in the way I wanted without correcting her. It was a cheap trick, and exhaustingly transparent for anyone who wasn't a schoolgirl. Did other people notice when I did this kind of shit? What was I saying; of course they did.

The better question was whether I ought to go along with it. If I was still going to forge ahead on this futile endeavor, it was obvious she'd have a lot more useful information. I hadn't even had time to get her to elaborate on the Order's death-faking plan yet, let alone more adjacent topics like the contents of her letter that had nevertheless bothered me for years. Still, though, maybe I could just keep plowing ahead with the inquiries without even bothering to justify myself. Knowing her, she was probably desperate for attention-- Wait a minute, did she just say 'reenactment'?