She had been digging for an eternity. Though who knew how the mind ran. The feeling of time wasn’t necessarily the passage of time. But what was felt was real. Lyssa had come realize what she had been digging through. It gave her the resilience to keep going. And once one became used to ordeal, one more or one thousand more, blended together.

The fog obscured. The fog slowed. And if one let it, the fog stopped you entirely. The fog was dread. Every better choice you could have made. Every regret. The fear of making the wrong choice. The fear of the future. She plowed through, uncaring, desensitized. Until rays of light peered through one final layer of that dark curtain, and Lyssa poured onto rapture.

She stood on her feet, mentally drained. She did not celebrate. She had relived her life in the fog, moving through every ‘what if’ and ignoring it. Victory would be self-serving. Above the floor of fog, the sky shone bright. A single figure hovered in the air. Eury of the Liberation. The freedom. The exaltation.

“Hello, Primum,” the Self said.

“You moved through all this every time you surface?”

“It is my nature. Just as it is your nature to want the impossible.”

“What is that?”

“Do you think there is a human alive who is in control of all their faculties? Even neurotypicals face dissonance and dissent in their thoughts. You can bring us closer, but you won’t unify all of us.”

“That’ll have to do.”

Eury fell from the sky, landing with one knee bent. The force-fire expanded, blowing away waves of fog. Lyssa didn’t feel its heavy touch anymore. She knew it was not necessarily a good thing.

Eury assumed a combative stance.

“I value my individuality more than Sethlana, you should know,” she said.

“I won’t fight you,” Lyssa said.

“Then how will you make me walk alongside you?”

“By understanding you.”

True liberation came from moving forward despite all possibilities. To not be slowed by a multitude of choices. To not be cowed by the chance for failure. To know no fear. Eury was as powerful as she was dangerous, not just to others, but to herself. Healthy mindsets were not entirely free.

But Lyssa had learned what that felt like. The sky brightened. Her thoughts became muddled and her perspective blurred. Without fanfare or the climax of claws impaling her chest, two Selves became one. Her fingers spilled with the wavering flames of force-fire. A flippant smirk crossed her face. She felt giddy, elated.

“Stop,” she said, gathering herself. In one great thrust she went back the way she came, carving a tunnel of light all the way to the mansion antechamber. She crashed into the room in a blast of light, and without ado moved towards the painted hall, where the next Self waited, still weeping in the oily canvas among her oldest memories.

--

The machines had an immersive day cycle, like some character from an open world game. They woke up, they went to work, they took leisurely activities, and they went home. Lyssa had been navigating the simulation for the past few days. The vast majority of people had patterns from which they rarely deviated. Routine was its own comfort. It made people feel safer, even if there was no demonstrable increase in actual safety.

Crime nowadays was rarely something simple such as a bank robbery. Crime was passionate, illogical. Villainy was the danger. Villainy was the charismatic speaker, who acted through a thousand passionate, useful idiots.

So Lyssa watched for breaches of pattern. She watched a drone in a business suit take the long way round to work, to drop off a briefcase it never opened, in an alleyway no one would ever look. Lyssa made a note on a piece of paper.

With a start the lights snapped back on and the simulation began to fold back into the floor and walls. Jackson approached from behind in a slow walk, as if he had always been there.

“We’ll save your progress here for the day,” he said. “You’re doing fine. Not particularly quick, but satisfactory.”

“What is this scenario based on?” Lyssa asked.

“A real incident,” Jackson said. “If I tell you any more it will make it too easy. The most dangerous supervillains would never be as obvious as the one in this case.”

“Fine.” Lyssa prepared to leave for her core classes.

“You’re awfully obedient,” Jackson said.

“I’m a student of a hero academy,” she said. “Isn’t this what I’m supposed to do?”

“Hm.” Jackson rubbed his chin. “Whitworth over-prepared, as ever.”

“What do you mean?”

“Get to class,” Jackson said with a smile.

Lyssa did so. Let the Primum deal with this when she returned.

Contrary to the projections of the students, the period of unrest in New Langshir did not abate. Matters only worsened. The news flooded with diametric views on the relations between gifted and ungifted. Pro-gifted sources victimized heroes and gifted citizens, citing the other side as ungrateful and violent. Ungifted sources wrote as if they were living in a dystopian hellhole, where one in two neighbors could be harboring a dangerous gift.

“When has that not been the case,” Amelia was saying when Lyssa returned home for the day. “The media here is out for profit, not truth.”

“Don’t the noble families in the Divide own the biggest news purveyors?” Carrie countered.

“Better to have one unifying truth than let a corporation stir the flock for clicks, do you think not?” Amelia said with a pout. “Besides, independents are not harassed or discouraged on my land.”

“Wow, you’re more considerate than the Red Parliament,” Carrie quipped.

“Unity can only be approximated, Carrie. It cannot be forced, and it can never happen naturally, not while humans are individuals, and- ah, Lyssa.”

“I’m home,” Lyssa said.

“You look exhausted,” Amelia said.

“Really?” Lyssa thought she looked normal.

“You took an early morning elective, didn’t you?” Carrie asked.

“Yes.”

“You wanted to, right?”

Lyssa managed a sincere smile. “Why would I take a course I did not want to take? You worry too much, Carrie.” She glanced around. “Penny isn’t here.”

“She is in her room,” Amelia said. “Catching up on homework she neglected. It is due tomorrow.”

That sounded about right. Lyssa had caught up, finishing anything the Primum had left incomplete. It wasn’t laziness that had stopped her before. The Selves were cantankerous, all the more so as the Primum tried to isolate them.

Lyssa moved towards her room to rest.

“Wait, you haven’t been hanging out with us a lot these days,” Carrie said. “Come for a bit.”

Lyssa paused for a moment. The girls weren’t exactly her friends. She was only filling a spot until the Primum returned.

“I…” She began. “Sure.”