STATUS: UNRATED, FAILING

Nanobody count 2,967 [Urgent Action Needed] Power Ratio 7% Stage One Integration 4% Stage Two Integration .02% Secondary/Support 2 detected, 0 identified Communications Stealth Mode Sensors Passive Active Interventions 2 Personal Quantification None Options | Logs | Data | Reference | Menu

Lilijoy sat on the chair and consulted her status, exhausted and elated. Yes, the numbers were still bad. Really bad. Still, she had done what she could for the moment.

The new batch of flowers, all stage one devices, had been tasked to gather more raw materials to bring back to the golden flower. She was a little fuzzy on the details, but it seemed that each new flower she built used a small amount of substances called rare earth elements. According to Jiannu, her body contained these in abundance, and she would be able to resume cultivation soon.

Which was a good thing, looking at the specifics of the nanobody count.

NANOBODY COUNT 2,967 [Urgent Action Needed] 2,967 : 50,000 minimum recommended Current Average Attrition 160/hour (stable) Estimated Time to Failure 18.5 hours Cultivation Rate 32.5/hour over 24 hours

ATTENTION! A cultivation rate of 160/hour is necessary to sustain current levels. Begin cultivation process to avoid system failure.

Cultivate | Differentiate | Assign

Anda was nowhere to be seen. He was either out and about or sleeping in one of the bedrooms attached to the former bomb shelter. She hoped he hadn’t been too worried by her illness. He must have been taking care of her while her system was starting stage two, since she had somehow ended up in a bed.

Jiannu had explained that stage two had provoked an ‘immune response’ that led to a fever and ‘swelling of the meninges’, which was evidently a very bad thing. There had been a pitched battle between her body’s defenses and the new type of bug, the flowers, as the flowers co-opted parts of the brain for their own purposes. Thankfully (or she never would have woken) the flowers had been able to find the correct codes to make peace with the attacking cells and live in harmony.

Lilijoy was overwhelmed by how much she had to learn about her brain, her body, the system, science, history and the way the world worked. And it was urgent that she learn as much as she could, quickly! She had almost killed herself with one uninformed, impulsive decision, and if she wanted to be more than cattail fluff, she had to do better.

Jiannu had suggested she look at the logs her system kept as a next step. Lilijoy was still pretty confused about exactly who or what Jiannu was. She seemed to have her own knowledge and personality, but was insistent that all decisions and actions come from Lilijoy. While Lilijoy certainly didn’t want to be cattail fluff in her own mind, it seemed weird that the entity who actually knew stuff couldn’t play a bigger role in deciding what to do.

She had even asked that Lilijoy avoid communicating with her unless in cultivation mode, and Lilijoy couldn’t quite see the point in that. Jiannu said it was because ‘manifesting’ used too many resources. Discarding the train of thought, she decided to peruse the ‘Main Menu’ (and what the heck was a ‘menu’ anyway?), and then look over the logs.

MAIN MENU

Status

Communications

Interface

Subsystems

Options | Logs | Data | Reference | About

Well, that seemed pretty useless.

She could access all the same stuff from the ‘Status’ window. She wondered who had created all these screens, anyway. Someone had needed to actually decide how all the menus looked, and what words went where. She just hoped they were better at science stuff than making menus.

On impulse, she skipped over the ‘Logs’ option, and selected ‘About’.

TAO SYSTEM v. 2.3.3

Created by Dr. Henry M. Choi and Dr. Gabriel R. Choi

2060-2074

“To retreat after a work well done is Heaven's Way”

Options | Logs | Data | Reference |

Well now she knew who to blame for the bad menus!

They sure had worked on it for a long time. The concept of dates was a new one to Lilijoy, but she was pretty sure that the current year was 2230-something and that the bad times before Guardian had begun sometime before 2100.

She wondered what the world had been like for Henry and Gabriel Choi. What had driven them to build their system? Were they trying to make better people who wouldn’t fight over food and water? It didn’t seem to her that the system would make her a nicer person. Maybe it was supposed to make people tougher, so they could survive in hard times? That seemed to be a possibility. It sure was nice that she didn’t have to feel her arm. She hated to think what was going on under the bandages, but she trusted that Anda had been keeping an eye on things. Some things were just better left to other people, she decided, cattail fluff or not.

Okay, she thought, time to look at the logs.

SYSTEM LOG

Current Instance

Previous Instances

Options | Data | Reference | About

She selected ‘Current Instance’.

SYSTEM LOG: Current Instance: Lilijoy &var_ln

Initialized 2237.06.28.1114.55.03

List Events

Priority

Timestamp

Search

Options | Data | Reference | About

She selected ‘Priority’ and was overwhelmed by a screen full of ‘URGENT’s and ‘CRITICAL’s and ‘ATTENTION!’. She quickly closed it out and went to ‘Timestamp’, which delivered a long, long list of events going all the way back to initialization.

She scrolled around, finding it mildly interesting to see how the system’s timeline matched with her recall of events. All her flailing attempts at communicating with the system were well documented, and she could tell where she had fought the vampire and when she initialized Stage Two, among other milestones. She winced as she read through the Stage Two play-by-play of near-death experiences and other calamities, thankful to have been unconscious for the ordeal. It was nice to know, but she couldn’t understand why Jiannu had suggested this as a next step. She was about to close out the log and go find something to eat, when she looked in the ‘Previous Instances’ section on a whim.

SYSTEM LOG: Previous Instance: Emily Choi

Initialized 2074.01.22.0901.14.56

List Events: Recovering

Priority

Timestamp

Search

Options | Data | Reference | About

Lilijoy felt a shock run through her body. Did this mean her flowers had been in someone else’s head, over one hundred years ago? How did they get out of Emily Choi’s head and into hers? She noted the last name Choi turning up again. Was this a relative of the creators of the system? And what did it mean that it was ‘recovering’ the events? So many questions! She would certainly need to ask Jiannu about this.

She had a bite to eat, and settled down on the floor to look at pictures of long extinct plants and animals on the tablet. She had been in the middle of reading about polar bears and felt the irony of an animal adapted for cold being wiped out just as ice covered seventy percent of the Earth’s surface. When she picked it up, she noticed a small text box had appeared on the display. She stared at it for a moment, trying to make sense of it. It was very short and the words were truncated.

LJOY DNGR RUN NOW A.

She stared at it blankly for a minute. Was that first part her name? She hadn’t been reading long, but she was pretty sure that most words had vowels. She had to sound it out to realize what it said.

“Lilijoy, danger run now. A.”

A panicked feeling washed over her. When had the message showed up? It had been days since she had been in any state to look at the tablet. Clicking on the message showed it had arrived about six hours ago, sender unknown. Could be worse, she thought. Now, what should she do?

She ran around gathering anything she might need, while thinking it over. Anda, and it could only be from Anda, wouldn’t have sent such a strange message unless he was in trouble. And why so short and strange? As she understood it, messages could be sent via his bugs. Even if he was in a hurry, he wouldn’t remove the vowels from ‘danger’, which would take even longer. This made no sense!

She continued to think it through as she left the bomb shelter, propping the heavy doors open lightly so she could re-enter. Anda told her to run, which meant that someone else knew where she was. It seemed likely that they must have a way in past the heavy doors she had just left behind her, so the owner, or someone who knew the owner. Which meant it might be their tablet. They could have even sent the message, trying to flush her out.

Except that didn’t make sense, because they could just get her in the bomb shelter; much easier for them. So the odds were, it was someone with access to the shelter, who didn’t know Anda had sent the message. That might explain why it had been more than six hours; they were in no hurry. Might it even be that they didn’t know about her at all? If Anda knew someone dangerous was coming and would stumble upon her, he would want to warn her.

She also needed to consider how to make a clean escape. Vampires could track by scent, and probably others as well. It was very likely that the tablet, which she had brought with her, could be tracked as well.

Despite her fear, Lilijoy felt a rush of exhilaration. Her thoughts were fast and clear, her mind weaving together facts and possibilities in a manner utterly new. A fog over her mind was lifted, and now she could see to run.

In less than a minute, she had a plan. She just hoped she had enough time to pull it off.