“Well, that was dramatic,” the man standing over her said in a deadpan voice. “I knew you never left. Your stink didn’t pool at any doors and your heat signature lit up the ducts real good.”

He bent further and grabbed her by the arm, hauling her up onto a desk top covered in tossed papers and folders.

“Not much to look at, are you?”

Lilijoy made half-breathed wheezes in reply as she cursed herself. So stupid to abandon hours of hiding just as the rescue was near. She could have found another way to the garage if she hadn’t lost her head in the excitement of finally getting out of this awful building and its ducts. Now she had a problem. Another vampire problem from what she could tell.

She was still too stunned by the fall to formulate a plan of action, so she continued to stare at the man who had captured her. Tall, she noted. Almost like Anda. Very short curly brown hair, scarred brown skin, mustache. Earrings. His shirt looked thin and slick under the long black jacket. It might be red; it was hard to tell in such low light. Hood, she noticed. A very short term plan unfurled in her mind.

The man bent down to get an arm under her, probably to haul her onto his shoulder.

I can work with this, she thought.

As he lifted her up, she found the edge of the desk with her feet and pushed off in the direction he was taking her, sliding over his shoulder. Her teeth found his ear as she passed by. She was pleased to note that her remaining teeth felt much more solid than during the fight with the mooster-beast. She kept his earlobe and hooped earring between her teeth as she slipped over his shoulder, twisting around with her hand to grab the hood. She had boosted herself just as this little maneuver started, so her movements were too quick for the complacent vampire, who found his head being twisted down and back by Lilijoy’s weight on his ear.

In response, he spun into the motion, flipping his legs around in a quarter cartwheel to follow her movement and spare his ear. Just as his feet left the ground Lilijoy grabbed his hood and hung with all her weight, pulling his upper body straight down. His head hit the floor with a crack, and she scurried on all threes into a gap under the nearest pile, between the legs of yet another desk heaped with chairs and boxes.

He was up in a second, unfazed by the impact, and his hand slipped from her heel as she reached her little cave under the furniture. He made a little sound, half unbelieving laugh, half snarl, as he leapt to his feet and with one sweep of his arm sent her improvised shelter flying across the room. Lilijoy looked up as he stood over her again, now with a torn earlobe and an expression of anger tinged with respect. He made no move to grab her.

“Not much to look at, but trickier than you look.”

While he said this, Lilijoy consulted her internal clock. Still just over three minutes until the next batch of hovercraft. She had to stall somehow.

“What’s your name?” was the first thing that popped into her head to say.

He froze for a second, head tilted at the incongruous question.

“You don’t need to know that, little gob.”

He kicked her viciously once, knocking her body back against the metal box behind her. It made a noise like a metallic bass drum as the side caved in. He followed up with a stomp to her ribs, which she avoided with a writhing twist. She did not avoid the series of quick jabs to her head as he knelt into the stomp to bring his body and fists over her. Her head was caught between knuckles and floor, there was a dark flash behind her eyes, and she was out.

***

She came back to consciousness with a roaring sound in her ears and a static crackle of light in her head. She could feel a rhythmic bobbing and painful shaking as her brain seemed to bounce within her skull. Soon she was able to resolve her situation, head down draped over a shoulder, hands tied, feet…. yup, feet tied too.

She checked internally. Still boosted, only about ninety seconds had elapsed. As far as she could tell from the ground jumping in her sight, they were just leaving the garage, the vampire warming up into a bounding run through the dark, jumping over the broken remains of a chain link fence as he hit the field.

She heard a whistling noise and a thud, and then she was rolling freely across the dirt field, mouth and nose full of grit.

One star, she thought, would not recommend.

She had found some review sites during her internet archive explorations and had spent a few minutes wrapping her head around the odd practice.

She pushed aside her random thoughts to take in the events around her. The vampire was about ten feet behind her, silhouetted against light from New Manaus, body oddly contorted with several long sticks protruding from legs and torso. He straightened and looked like he was going to bolt, when another stick appeared with a snapping sound on the side of his head and he collapsed.

She heard fast footsteps grow quickly in volume, and the runner appeared, a long curved device in one hand, a familiar toothy smile on his face.

“This is no time to be laying around, Lilijoy, we have a ride to catch!”

He bent down to untie her, then thought better of it and scooped her up.

Here we go again, she thought fluff mode.

She let her head fall against his shoulder and lost consciousness.

***

Emily was furious! Just when she was getting used to the new system in her head, her mother was making her take it out! Well, her father too, but she knew that was just because he was a wimp who did anything Mom told him to.

Mom was the one who was always like “Stage One is bad enough! We’ve never tested Stage Two on someone her age, what if it hurts her ittle wittle brain.”

Okay, she didn’t say the ‘ittle wittle’ part, but Emily was sure that was the thought behind it.

“God damn it, Mom,” she imagined saying, “I’m almost thirteen. I’m not a little kid. Jane Petersen’s little brother has a system, and he’s not even eight.”

She imagined the look on her mother’s face, hearing all her concerns crushed by Emily’s devastating argument. Then she imagined the look on her mother’s face if she ever talked back to her like that and decided her argument was better left internal. For now.

She was hiding in her room, sprawled on the bed’s pink cotton duvet cover. She looked up at the kitten poster on her wall with disgust.

Stupid kitten she thought. No wonder Mom and Dad think I’m still just a little girl.

She contemplated ripping the poster off the wall, but it was so cute she decided to leave it up; ironically of course. Her mind turned back to her system. Well, Dad’s system. It was his life’s work after all.

"Show me my room if it was cool!" she commanded.

Immediately frost began to form on the windows and icicles descended from the ceiling. She felt a breeze carrying a crisp arctic scent flow from the new glacier that descended where a wall used to be, terminating in her lame desk with no drawers or anywhere to keep stuff. No wonder she could never find a pencil. She sighed in exasperation.

“Not that kind of cool!” she yelled out loud.

Leave it to her Dad’s system not to know what ‘cool’ meant.

Throwing herself off the bed, she stalked to her door and threw it open in swirl of light snowflakes.

This time they are going to listen to me! she thought.

As she pounded down the stairs, her consciousness began to fade, and she felt herself falling, as if from a great height. Down, down she went, and at the bottom there was only…Lilijoy dreaming.

Lilijoy regained consciousness in stages. The first stage was sensations from her body, aching, throbbing, abraded, swollen. The next stage was a slow search for any part of her that did not have some kind of ailment. She thought for a moment she had found one in her left calf and foot, then realized that that part of her body had fallen asleep, and was in fact beginning to tingle uncomfortably.

After the bodily evaluation, she took a moment to consider her dream. Except it wasn’t really a dream? She had a feeling that the system logs were much more than dry statistics and warnings, though she would have to ask Jiannu why on earth they were playing when she slept.

Her dreams felt like she was replaying a memory as both participant and observer. She chuckled for a moment, remembering Emily’s room growing glaciers and icicles. She marveled at Emily’s relationship with her parents. It was so different from anything in Lilijoy’s experience. Except for being told what to do. And the fear of talking back.

She wondered if Emily’s parents kicked her like the Bros did. Somehow she doubted it. Lilijoy didn’t quite have the concept of ‘privileged’ as such, but Emily’s life had been really nice, and Lilijoy was sure that she wouldn’t have taken it for granted as Emily seemed to do. However, she was in complete agreement with Emily about her system. If someone tried to take her flowers, Lilijoy was sure she would put up a bigger fight than Emily!

Her environment began to intrude on her musing. Smooth moving sensation, gentle whooshing buzz, faint snores. She didn’t feel up to opening her eyes just yet, though she could see it was light outside through her lids, so she pulled up a quick status.

STATUS: UNRATED

Nanobody count 9,934 [Urgent Action Needed] Power Ratio 87% Stage One Integration 9% 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

It looked like the last of the senescent flowers had finished dying, and her Stage One integration had gone up nicely. With mild curiosity, she selected that to see what more details were available.

STAGE ONE INTEGRATION 9% Nanobody count 9093 Visual System 22% Auditory System 18% Proprioceptive System 8% Motor System 2% Olfactory/Gustatory System .2% Somatosensory System 3% Spatial System 2% Verbal/Linguistic System 21% Logical/Mathematical System 4% Emotional/Hormonal System 3% Myelin Enhancement .1% Options | Logs | Data | Reference | Menu

She resisted the urge to immediately shut the window when confronted with the long column of numbers, and glanced down it looking for any patterns. It seemed clear that the systems she was using most carried the largest percentages. Out of a sense of masochistic fun, she selected ‘Visual System”

VISUAL SYSTEM INTEGRATION 22.1% Nanobody count 1290 Internal 42% Image Generation 53% Image Interpretation 32% Intrasystem Communication 78% External 1% Interpretation 3% Enhancement 3% Optic Nerve Enhancement 0% Retinal Structures Enhancement 0% Options | Logs | Data | Reference | Menu

Her system was overwhelming! It just went on and on, deeper and deeper. She was very glad that it seemed to do just fine without her help. Hopefully any deliberate choices based on details were far, far down the road.

She was distracted by Anda clearing his throat.

“Returning to the land of the living?” he inquired.

Lilijoy groaned and opened her eyes, shielding them against the bright light penetrating the canopy. As she had deduced, they were in a hovercraft, canopy intact this time. Anda was regarding her, the smile that rarely left his face surfacing as he met her eyes.

“Don’t say a word. Before anything else, I must do this…” A window formed

External Message from Anda Kukata Maasai (nr) Mode: Local Radiant Message Content: File, unknown format Title: Anda Kukata Maasai contact information Contact | Delete | Blacklist | Quarantine | Menu

“Did you get something?” he asked.

“Yes. Hold on,” she replied.

She inspected the file, and received a prompt asking “Do you want to analyze this file for content/function?” She assented, and almost instantly received a window saying “Analysis complete. File contains multiple forms of contact information for ID Anda Kukata Maasai. Do you wish to add this contact to your ‘People’?” After that was taken care of, she looked up at Anda.

“I wish I had this last night!”

“Me too, Lilijoy, me too. But hopefully we have put that mess behind us for the moment. Now try to figure out how to send a message to me. Your system will choose the method if you don’t specify.”

This turned out to be very intuitive, no menus required. She just thought Anda’s name and “Hi Anda!” after which she saw ‘Message Sent’ and ‘Message Received’ pop at the bottom of her vision.

Anda gave a sigh of relief.

“Thank goodness, I was afraid that would take us all day! You must have worked miracles with your system while I was detained. I thought you were going to lose it entirely, and when you became ill I was afraid it might be due to your system collapsing. Though I thought it more likely that bacteria from your wound had entered your bloodstream. Now I have good news, good and bad news, and very bad news.” He briefly had a sympathetic look. “Which would you like first?”

“Unless you have to go away again, I’m ready for anything!”

“Okay. Well the really bad news…” He hesitated and began again. “The really bad news is that your arm is now certainly infected. I don’t have much medical experience, but I have access to medical systems that can remotely diagnose, and they are telling me that your arm will need to be removed just after the elbow. If we don’t do this within a few hours, there is a very good chance you will die.”

He looked at her, waiting for a reaction.

Lilijoy wasn’t sure what she felt. She had grown accustomed to life with one arm. She almost felt that past Lilijoy, the one with two arms and no flowers, was a different person. Given a choice, she would choose who she was now, clear thinking and growing every day. Old Lilijoy was fog brained and static. She was pretty sure she would rather lose all her limbs than go back.

So, oddly, her first emotion was almost happiness. Losing the arm would be confirmation of all that had happened to her, a sign that she could never go back to being an ignorant scavenger living next to a toxic waste dump!

“Okay,” she said brightly. “What’s the good news?”

Anda looked as if he wanted to say more on the subject, but he took her lead.

“The good news is that we have two, admittedly very weak, med bug pills. They won’t be able to regenerate an arm. I’m not even sure they could repair a modest injury. But they will certainly help with the amputation. In the future, we could look for med bugs that are specifically designed to help your body regrow lost limbs. It takes months, but such things are possible. Unfortunately, they are extremely costly and difficult to obtain. Most people who lose a limb these days would rather use the credits for something else, especially because prosthetics work quite well.”

As Anda talked, Lilijoy marveled at how adept her system was becoming at integrating meaning into unfamiliar words, both verbal and written. She had never heard the word ‘prosthetic’ before, but she intuitively recognized it. I wonder if this would work for other languages?

“That’s great, Anda! I don’t really care so much about the arm, but it is a pain when I need two hands. Climbing is really hard now, and I used to be the best climber in the territory! What’s the good and bad news?” she remembered to ask.

“We now have a group of people helping us. They are good people, my people, after my clan exiled me. We call ourselves ‘Renaissance’ and we are trying to make the world better for everyone, not just the Clans and the fortunate. The bad news is that now many more people know about you. Even a good person will be tempted to try to take what you have, take you really, because the Corp will pay more credits than most of us will see in a hundred lifetimes. Many members of Renaissance come from wealthy backgrounds, but we are talking about amounts that only the most elite in our society can even conceive. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of credits in my estimation. A normal person might earn fifty thousand credits for a lifetime’s work.

Even the Renaissance leadership will not be immune to that temptation. They could sell you to a clan and have enough credits to fund and grow Renaissance activities for generations. ‘For the greater good’ they would rationalize it. I have tried to keep our secret contained to only a few of my most trusted friends and associates, but it is the nature of information to be free. It is only a matter of time before we have problems that come from my choice to tell the others, and for that, I apologize.”

“That’s silly!” Lilijoy said. “You shouldn’t apologize for saving me. Besides, maybe I can find a way to share my bugs. There's a bunch more now. I call them flowers now, because that’s what they look like. Even the designers thought so, ‘cause they called them ‘Lotuses’."

Anda made a small choking noise as Lilijoy went on.

“If I can cultivate and make enough flowers, why can’t I find a way to give them to other people if they want them so badly?”

Anda was now busy folding his head down to his knees and making whimpering sounds. When he realized Lilijoy was looking at him, he raised his head a bit and asked, “I don’t suppose you have ever run across a name to call your system? You would find it by selecting the word ‘about’ or something like that.”

His eyes were piercing, searching as he waited for her answer. Lilijoy suddenly felt quite nervous as she replied.

“It’s called the Tao System.”