Maria Elde Sezakuin swiped through several pages of experiment notes on a glosspad. She glanced up at Dr. Prophin, her eyes steely, but she remained quiet. She could tell the man was sweating, rightfully intimidated by being alone with the Eldemari.

She’d already read through all of the Infinity Loop experiment’s notes and write-ups, but they were mostly filled with conjectures and flowery language. She wanted to hear about the loop–and its breakout successful trial–from the experiment’s director, the acclaimed Prophet.

Maria set down the glosspad, then uncrossed her legs and stood up, running a hand over her dress to smooth down the form-fitting cloth. She walked over to the window in the office, a massive pane of glass in the shape of an oval, protruding slightly outward.

Beyond lay the skyline of Cunabulus, its scarlet buildings stretching toward the sun. Despite being made of baked clay, the buildings were uniformly smooth and covered in shining windows. Many curved gracefully into domes from square bases; still others spiraled as they tapered to points; while a few older, boxy slabs of window-studded red stood erect against the skyline.

She still thought of it as her mother’s city. The Eldemari’s hands were unable to carve a city from the earth, unable to move an entire settlement from the center of the Vermuthi Desert to the rim of lake Sheira. Maria was certainly thankful to inherit her father’s End affinity, but as she gazed upon the almost-alien magnificence of Cunabulus, she couldn’t help but yearn for the power to shape something more concrete than fate.

Maria shook her head slightly, settling her mind. Hands clasped behind her back, legs firm on the ground, she began to speak: “Tell me how the Infinity Loop actually works.”

“Eldemari...have you not already read the original experiment proposal?”

Maria narrowed her eyes at the window. She’d read the proposal all right, though didn’t think it was particularly well-written; her impression was that only the clout of Eustatius Prophin had been enough to secure investment.

Both that, and wishful thinking: if successful, what the proposal promised was incredible. But of course, there was no guarantee the experiment would be successful...and fifty million auris per trial was a grievous cost. Her government had only provided a line of two-hundred million auris initially, though upon the second trial’s lukewarm but promising success, they’d guaranteed fifty billion.

According to Maria’s advisers, the success of the last trial served to justify the outlandish cost, though she wasn’t convinced: the decemancer might just be a fluke.

In the proposal, the most critical bit of the theory pertaining to the Infinity Loop was proprietary, sourced from a private corporation she had never heard of, and thus not actually discussed. It skirted over the technical details of a dilation loop capable of “layered near-life simulations populated by people who acted just like their real selves,” focusing instead on the science behind affinity inheritance.

Mentions of the Infinity Loop came across a bit like an advertisement for the loop’s maker, a corporation called Viscero. Unfortunately, Viscero wasn’t a Selejan company. It was located in the southern Illuet province, and thus solidly under the protection of the Sere Consortium. The Eldemari could certainly invite someone from the corporation to come to Selejo, but there would be numerous hoops to hop through, and she figured whatever representative they’d send would talk in circles.

“Your proposal spoke very little about how the loop actually functions,” Maria said coolly. “I find it interesting considering the proposal’s success hinged on the loop being as realistic as possible.”

Dr. Prophin gave her a cornered look, his eyes darting to the door.

“For instance,” Maria continued, “the proposal discusses the necessity of replicating the body and the soul. I, for one, wished you’d spoken a bit more on what such a cryptic sentence means. Mentioning the soul sounds eerily close to necromancy, wouldn’t you say?”

“I can assure you, no necromancy was involved,” Dr. Prophin murmured, recoiling. “It’s referring to the high-fidelity of the simulation.”

“I’d like to believe you, but I need concrete information about the loop technology.”

“Unfortunately, I’m not at leisure to share very much,” Dr. Prophin said, tugging at his collar.

Maria narrowed her eyes. Prophin had a whole host of oaths shackling his person–unsurprising for someone with a history in the medical profession–but something about the gesture suggested that he was currently speaking around an oath.

Maria wasn’t about to go breaking an oath this instance without fully understanding who the binding party was. Instead, she would compensate by being a bit more deliberate in her questioning.

“This loop seemed to recreate the SPU quite accurately,” Maria said. “I was hard pressed to find any discrepancy.”

Dr. Prophin nodded his head. “It’s quite excellent, isn’t it? Though it is a bit limited in its applications.”

The Eldemari raised an eyebrow. “Pray tell.”

“For one, it’s still bound by the same constraints as any other dilation loop. Namely, End practitioners of reasonable strength in the simulation immediately know that they’re outside of reality.”

Maria crossed her arms. “I assumed as much. It’s a shame.” She’d love to trust what she saw in the loop, but clearly anything viewed through the decemancer’s eyes when he was in Zukal’iss was suspect, carefully shaped by the hand of the Crowned Prime.

“Additionally, unlike other loops that are fully simulated at any one time, the Infinity Loop is what Viscero calls an ‘emergent loop.’ That is to say, the world is simulated only as needed, in a radius of space around the actor. It wouldn’t be possible to keep the energy costs down, otherwise.”

Maria snorted incredulously. As though the energy costs weren’t high enough.

Dr. Prophin continued: “Since the perspective of the loop is narrowed to the actor, it’s difficult to justify using the loop for activities such as gathering intelligence.”

“So there’s no way to just use the Infinity Loop to see all of Zukal’iss?”

“No, not all at once.”

“What about Ichormai?”

“As I said before, the loop’s perspective is tethered to that of an actor.”

“But what if there is no actor?” the Eldemari asked. “Why bother with an actor at all?”

The Prophet opened his mouth, then paused. “It’s to do with the energy costs and the emergent tech. I believe Viscero described it to me like a flower opening its petals around a tightly-wound bud: The further the petals extend, the more broad and thin they become. Staying near the center of the flower is the key to keeping the simulation steady, the actor serving as an anchor point.”

“So if an actor is moving through the world, how is the world formed, exactly? It seemed like it was consistent and logical.”

“I’m no expert on the Infinity Loop’s intricacies, but I can tell you how we designed our trials. When we formed loop layers, we could define rough parameters for the world, as well as provide specific scenarios–plots, so to speak.”

“Can you provide an example?”

“Certainly. In the decemancer’s trial, the first loop layer was designed with a specific plot in mind: the actor would awaken on a spawn point–the dinghy–in the Illyrian Ocean. Soon after, a cruise ship full of captives and skeletons would pass him by.”

“Was that cruise ship real, or was it somehow a figment of your researchers’ imagination?”

“Most things in the Infinity Loop are based in reality,” Dr. Prophin mused. “Though they might have occurred in the past, or somewhere else. The ship in this case was completely real: a few months ago, it really was cruising through the Illyrian ocean with a pool full of emaciated captives. Of course, in the real world, it never landed in Menocht Bay, and all the onboard captives died.”

“What of ginger?”

“Excellent question; that’s another example of a specific scenario. Ginger, too, is real: It popped up in Flatochre several years ago, though the province was able to neutralize it quickly.”

The Eldemari nodded: Though Flatochre was a middling province in the East, it outshone most provinces in the West. Something like ginger would be detected early and dealt with immediately.

“Can you provide an example of using rough parameters, rather than a specific scenario?”

Dr. Prophin seemed to consider for a moment. “We used numerous rough parameters...in the layer where the Decemancer visited the SPU, the trial specified that the Crowned Prime and many other politicians would be embroiled with a terrorist organization. We didn’t provide any specifics, allowing the Infinity Loop to form the world coherently to meet the criterion.”

That makes much more sense, Maria thought to herself. She had wondered what dark corner of the world Hashat had crawled out of, but it seemed like it had been organically generated by the loop.

Dr. Prophin continued: “In the wedding layer, my researchers specified that a person or organization would target the decemancer’s family. To meet these requirements, the Infinity Loop conjured up both a wedding scenario with the decemancer’s relatives and a lone necromancer to attack them.”

“The necromancer didn’t feel...fake,” Maria murmured. Her mind wandered to the memory of the necromancer strapping a woman to the table and flaying her alive.

“That’s the power of the loop,” Dr. Prophin reiterated. “You can give it any parameters you’d like and it’ll find a way to twist them into reality–rather, simulated reality.”

The Eldemari rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I’d like to speak a bit more directly about the decemancer from the last trial.”

“Of course.”

“You never received the final diagnostics after releasing him from the hospital,” she pointed out, her tone passive-aggressive. “A true tragedy for science.” And a tragedy for the state, losing a peak practitioner to the SPU. As much as Maria wished she could go back in time and bring the decemancer over to the side of Selejo, she recognized the futility in trying to bring the practitioner back against his will.

Dr. Prophin breathed in deeply through his nose before replying. “It was unfortunate, though there’s nothing much I can do about it.”

“We’ll see. In the loop video, there were only seven layers, but in the patient’s experiment configuration, there were supposed to be eight. Did he leave early, satisfying one of the conditions for early extraction?”

The Eldemari was fishing with a question she already knew the answer to.

“He left early, though we’re not sure why,” Dr. Prophin admitted. “Based on the length of the video and the time the patient supposedly exited the loop, there is less than a second of time unaccounted for.”

Maria hummed in consideration. “Less than a second is still at least a few hours.”

“Exactly. We think that he spent more time in the seventh layer, and perhaps even time in the eighth layer, though we’re not sure why that footage is missing.”

“It did seem to cut out rather roughly,” Maria said. “One moment the decemancer is walking with his sister and aunt in the loop, the next the video feed goes dark, and he’s waking up in the real world.”

She turned around and placed a hand on the curved window. “I need to know why.”

“You’ve already read our notes and conjectures. We are dealing with new technology, there’s hundreds of reasons why it may have malfunctioned.”

She shook her head slowly. She knew Prophin was a powerful End practitioner in his own right, that the man wouldn’t hesitate to trust his own instincts in the face of missing information.

“You suspect something.”

Prophin chuckled nervously. “Please don’t insinuate I’m hiding information from you. I assure you that’s not the case; I’m just as in the dark as yourself.”

“There was one conclusion that was conspicuously missing from all of the possibilities you and your researchers presented,” Maria stated softly. “The possibility that the decemancer’s power exceeded what the loop could sustain.”

“Eldemari...you know that’s impossible.”

She nodded slowly. It did seem impossible, but even so...

“You don’t think you might have created not just a peak practitioner, but an ascendant?”

Prophin shook his head decisively. “He’s too young. Any of the other possibilities in the report we gave you are much more likely.”

Maria had seen a returned ascendant before, had witnessed first-hand how strangely energy could behave around them. She would not be surprised if the Infinity Loop would struggle to contain such a person.

She could see why Dr. Prophin might feel compelled to hide the truth–if a descendant came crashing down on Pardin, he might prefer to have never been born–but she also recognized that the man might be right: The real explanation for the loop’s early termination might simply be due to a minor malfunction in the Infinity Loop itself. Perhaps a bug in the mechanism that returned the consciousness of the actor back to their body, or even a random glitch.

Unfortunately, she would need to engage with Viscero, and by extension the Sere Consortium, to find out more. She could probably make some inroads with the consortium during the Fassari Summit; meanwhile, even if she promised Euryphel that she’d leave the decemancer alone, that didn’t prevent her from doing as much external research as possible. It was her initial research on the decemancer, after all, that prompted her to call Prophin.

Ignatius Julian Dunai...just who was he to appear out of nowhere? A Dunai, certainly, but none of their clan displayed power on his level. Part of her was almost swayed by the idea that his power came not from his practitioner father, but his regular mother. The proposal certainly seemed smitten with the conception of a reality where affinity lay dormant in every boy and girl.

Selejo was a nation birthed from fiery revolution, shaking off the yoke of bloodline nobility and stagnation. Her mother had been at the center of it all, and Maria knew that the Sezakuin had truly believed in a society for the people, where everyone was valued.

But Maria knew that reality was a bit harsher than her mother’s idealism.

The Eldemari clasped her hands. “I’ve decided: We’re moving the experiment to Cunabulus.”

Dr. Prophin’s eyes widened. “You can’t...” he trailed off, as though remembering who he was talking to. “The experiment is run by the University. How are we supposed to continue to conduct the experimental trials when our staff and infrastructure are already set up in Pardin?”

Maria thought the question small-minded and distasteful. “You can spend fifty-million on a single trial, and yet worry about sending your researchers to Cunabulus via transport array?”

Prophin looked as though he really wanted to say something, but held his tongue, taking a deep breath. “We can collaborate with the Cunabulus campus, if that’s what you would desire.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary. I’ll be sending some of my own officials to assist with your relocation, as well as with running future trials; you can think of them as complimentary labor. We should continue our meetings going forward, especially now that you’ll be working so close to the Cuna.”

Dr. Prophin bowed his head, his face ashen. “Are there any more questions?”

“None for now,” Maria replied. She gestured to the door and smiled. “Have an excellent day, Eustatius.”