Surfacing in the Outside, Lilijoy took a few minutes to readjust to her ‘real’ body. The Inside had felt every bit as real as the Outside, and it sure had been nice having arms, hair and teeth again. It was dark outside the hovercraft, and Lilijoy was momentarily captivated by blooms of color floating eerily over the marsh in every direction.

“Swamp gas,” said Anda, who had noticed her stirring. “At least this horrible place has one redeeming quality.”

It truly was a beautiful sight, mostly wispy blue patches, with a few greens and reds thrown in, extending as far as her eyes could see, ghosts from the long dead jungle. Which reminded her…

“Anda, are there any real forests left in the world?”

“Yes and no,” he replied. “More no than yes, I guess. The climate changed so rapidly that almost no large tree species were able to adapt. Some pacific island climates were less impacted, and I believe you can find a forest or two on those. In Asia, some wealthy clans put up enormous domes and tried to recover some of the old ecosystems, with mixed results. Classic old growth forests, like you must have encountered on the Inside, are completely gone, consumed by ice or another calamity. We are left with the bio-engineered trees that grow slowly and sequester carbon in huge amounts, making their wood extremely dense, the so called ‘hard trees’.”

Lilijoy nodded. So that’s why there are hard grass and hard trees. “I did find a forest on the Inside. Do you think they were really like that?”

“I can’t say for sure, but you can call up archived video from before Guardian to compare for yourself.”

He changed the topic. “How was your first day Inside?”

“Amazing! Nandi says hello. He says he would let you in the gate, if you ever despaired. I hope you know what that means, ‘cause I have no idea.”

Anda looked a little surprised. Then very thoughtful. “I hadn’t considered that,” he murmured. “If Nandi allows me, I could complete the trials again for a completely fresh start. New character, new name, new stats. New everything. Of course, I would have a much better idea of what the trials are all about...” he raised a finger as he saw Lilijoy about to jump in. “I won’t talk to you about the trials until you have finished. Nandi would know, and it would only hurt the outcome.”

“That’s what Jiannu said,” Lilijoy said with a pout. “I have so much to tell you!”

“I’ll look forward to the whole story. Maybe I’ll even join you on the Inside. It’s no small decision to give up the ten years of my life invested in my Inside self.”

Lilijoy could see that Anda was troubled by the decision she tossed into his lap, but it sounded great to her.

“We could start together!” she exclaimed, trying to clasp her hands. When only one hand showed up to the party, she did a quick double take. “I’d better get used to the difference,” she said, looking downcast. She glanced at her left arm; nothing had changed on the surface.

“The Inside is a magical and seductive place,” said Anda. “Many would choose to live there all the time, finding even eating and going to the bathroom too much of a burden. There are pods that take care of bodily functions, you might have noticed some at the bomb shelter. Those will allow up to a week of uninterrupted Inside time. I’ve missed it dearly, though the Outside should not be ignored.”

“Will the Outside ever get better?” asked Lilijoy.

“So we are told. If you and I live for ten thousand years, we may see the ice begin to recede as the climate warms and stabilizes. Guardian believes in taking things slow, by human standards. I think the current projection for anything like return to the Holocene...”

“...is about one hundred thousand years.”

“But I can’t wait that long!” cried Lilijoy. “I made a promise to the forest. I’m going to bring it back to the outside no matter what!”

Anda smiled sadly and shook his head. “Well little one, we’ll just have to see what we can do about then.”

***

After some small talk, food and a brief, restless sleep, Lilijoy decided to cultivate. I bet there’s a ton of resources by now, she thought.

It turned out she was correct. Afterwards, she looked at her 'Status' with satisfaction.

STATUS: UNRATED

Nanobody count 28,111 [Action Needed] Power Ratio 87% Stage One Integration 26% Stage Two Integration .02% Secondary/Support 3 detected, 1 identified Communications Stealth Mode Sensors Passive Active Interventions 3 Personal Quantification None Options | Logs | Data | Reference | Menu

She was particularly pleased with the progress of her integration

STAGE ONE INTEGRATION 26% Nanobody count 28,111 Visual System 48% Auditory System 72% Proprioceptive System 38% Motor System 3% Olfactory/Gustatory System 16% Somatosensory System 57% Spatial System 4% Verbal/Linguistic System 31% Logical/Mathematical System 8% Emotional/Hormonal System 4% Myelin Enhancement .2% Options | Logs | Data | Reference | Menu

Some of the sense categories had jumped huge amounts, no doubt due to the need to convey and model all the data from the Inside. She had noticed that even small amounts of integration could have striking effects, and she couldn’t wait to figure out what she was capable of now. Her senses were constantly bombarding her with information, which fortunately she could ignore if she needed to. She also found that terms and identifications were coming more naturally to her, even when she didn’t pay attention.

She looked around the hovercraft to practice. The seat was a micro-structure cross-bonded aerogel material, with excellent insulating properties and incredibly low density. The canopy was layers of clay nanosheets and polymer, first discovered in the twenty first century. She was able to easily pull up the original scientific paper from the web archive.

Web. Like a spider web! she noticed.

As her system was trying to introduce her to the history of the World Wide Web of the twentieth century, she happily ignored it to focus on the lowest category of her Stage one integration, myelin enhancement.

Instantly she knew that myelin was a brain component that wrapped nerves and caused them to conduct faster. Almost all long-term learning involved slowly depositing myelin on the correct neural circuits to make them more efficient. The integration simply took all the myelinated circuits and made them even faster, but at an extremely slow rate so the brain could adapt. It would be the last part of stage one to finish, lasting around five weeks with consistent cultivation, but as it improved, her speed of thought and reaction to stimuli would double or better.

Pretty cool, she thought.

After another meal and a short nap, she was ready.

***

She shut her eyes and logged back Inside. The sound of the water picked back up where it had left off, hard rounded pebbles lay under her back. Reaching up, she could feel the sharp ends of stalactites, just a foot over her face.

Now what to do?

She decided to listen carefully for a while, in the hopes that she could get a better sense of her surroundings. She didn’t want to drown.

“Ugh!” she groaned. Thinking of drowning reminded her that she forgot to ask Anda what would happen if she died. Well, maybe Jiannu would know.

“Jiannu?”

“If you die during the trials, you will respawn at a random, environmentally safe point within one hundred meters of your death. The repercussions of dying once or multiple times in the trials are unknown but assumed to have a negative impact on character generation. Checking on the public statistics, apparently 99.98 percent die at least once, five percent die once only, and forty percent experience ten deaths or more.”

“Thanks!”

One possibility would be to throw herself in the river and hope to be carried somewhere she could see, or die and achieve the same result. She decided to wait on that.

As she lay listening, she noticed an odd phenomenon. Every time she heard a particular high-pitched drip, a field of greenish light ran across her vision. At first, she assumed it was her eyes creating lights and patterns, as they sometimes did in total darkness. But when it came again, she paid close attention. The next drip created a field of green outlined, narrow saw-tooth spikes. The same pattern occurred the next time, slightly more vivid.

Lilijoy wasn’t sure exactly what could be going on here, but it seemed to be related to the sound of the water droplet. She did her best to duplicate the sound by clicking her tongue. The spikes emerged again, fading slowly. She turned her head and clicked again, and a large opening appeared, framed by the spikes. With more clicking she came to understand that her mind was converting the echoes of the sounds into a visual simulation of the space.

She stopped clicking and focused on the background noises, trying to connect them to her fuzzy green image. After a minute, there was a change, as if her system had learned the new ability. Her sense of the space around her expanded to a radius of about twenty feet, after which it became very indistinct. If she clicked her tongue loudly she could ‘see’ farther in the direction she was focused on.

She played around with this new ability for quite a while, ‘looking’ at the movement of the water (it was very shimmery and confusing), and making different sounds to see what new details would be revealed. It turned out that low pitched sounds didn’t work very well, although she could somewhat see around corners and into the water just a bit. High pitched clicks provided the best detail and spatial map. After many minutes of clicking, yelping, yelling and yodeling, she knew that her best bet was an opening in the wall across the water. The water was only about ten feet across, but it moved fast enough to sweep her away.

She took a deep breath and put her head into the water past her ears, listening for the bottom. It wasn’t as deep as she thought, only a couple of feet. Her first attempt to wade across almost ended in disaster when she lost her footing and was nearly swept away by the rushing water. The bottom was smooth and slippery under her feet, polished by centuries of flow, though there were large stones here and there. She put her head back under the water, looking with her ears for boulders that could serve as an underwater path of sorts. She saw several promising candidates, though they were too far apart to walk on, or even jump to with any surety. She sat back down to think. If only she had a wooden branch or two, she could use it as a stabilizer, or wedge it between the boulders to help her feet from sliding.

She reached up and felt for a stalactite. The ceiling across the caves had stalactites, so maybe she could go hand over hand, if they weren’t too slippery. When her hand grabbed on, she found that it was grainy and smooth, but the end snapped off before she could put any real weight on it. She was left holding a pointed stick of brittle stone, about an inch across at its widest. The tip was sharp.

I wish I had this when that stupid spider was grabbing me, she thought.

With a new idea, she cast around for larger stalactites, and soon had broken off several ranging from two to three feet long. She used those to hammer on the base of still larger stalactites. About one hundred stalactites turned into a thousand fragments later, she finally got a big one to fall without breaking. Her shoulders ached from working over her head, and she had several bumps on her skull and bruises on her face from falling hunks of calcite, but she had avoided impalement (always a good thing) and achieved her goal.

Reserving a three-foot-long spike as a walking stick, she rolled her largest stalactite into the water, where it became surprisingly light. She pushed it out until the far end reached a boulder close to her goal and placed the narrow end next to a boulder she could reach. The current pushed the stalactite up against both boulders, holding it in place. Then she waded across, using her walking stick as she leaned into the water, feet up against the side of her underwater ‘bridge’. Only a few steps, and she was across, now looking up at the opening where it sat a few feet above the water.

Somehow, it hadn’t seemed quite so high from the other side. Undaunted, she retrieved her 'footbridge' and propped it against the side of the cliff. It was wobbly, but she was able to scamper up and grab the floor of the raised cave. She knew it went back at least twenty feet, and she was prepared to have a crying fit if it was a dead end.

Thankfully, the cave turned out to be a corridor that receded farther than her strongest click could penetrate. She walked back to the entrance over the river and pulled up her new best friend. Which she proceeded to break into a few manageable pieces, the pointy end about eighteen inches, and another two feet from the big end. Now she had a dagger and a walking stick club.

Another twenty minutes of clambering forward on the uneven floor of the corridor found her approaching a fork. There was an odd howling noise and her hearing started to work strangely, shifting and distorting. Once she got to the fork, she found the origin of the noise. One passage sloped downward. She could feel a warm breeze rising from its depths, carrying a smell of...sulfur. That warm breeze met cold air flowing downward from the other passage, generating a windy howl among the pillars and stalactites of the small room where she stood.

Another choice. Warm versus cold. More caves versus fresh air and light. It was a tough call.

What finally decided it for her was the prospect of warmth. She was still wet from her wade in the water, and the idea of getting even colder was not compelling. She sighed and began to make her way downward, planning on a quick retreat if she heard any drums.

The corridor did not descend evenly; it twisted and dropped, narrowed to a slit and then fell away beyond. The rock was irregular and sharp in places, even for her tough feet. She was grateful for her walking stick, walking stone? It was heavy, to be sure, but felt solid in her hand, and kept her from several nasty falls. Drier air and increasing warmth dried her out, went full circle, and made her wet again from sweat.

After a while of climbing down on increasingly jagged and fragmented rock , Lilijoy became aware of a strange phenomenon with her echolocation. Her sense of the terrain ahead was somehow rippling; not only that, she was often misjudging the slope of the passage. It ‘looked’ much flatter than it really was, and closer too. When she faced back down the corridor, the opposite was true; it appeared steeper and somehow stretched. After some thought, she decided it must be due to the hot air blowing through the narrow cave, somehow causing her signal to rise as it traveled. She sat down and focused on the echoes from her tongue clicks, trying to get the hang of correcting for this effect, and realized that she didn’t need to be facing a particular direction to ‘see’ it. Her new sense wrapped around her totally <360 degrees>.

Once she focused on this, her system began to process the information differently, as if she was simultaneously looking down from above over her entire sensing radius, yet still firmly in her body at the same time. It was disconcerting while she was sitting, and downright disorienting when she began to move again, but she could feel herself slowly adapting.

Soon it was actively enjoyable, watching the air currents flow past her. Her system had begun to paint different air densities and speeds in a variety of colors, so that she perceived the breeze coming toward her as a translucent red; where it passed her, it became a lighter purple, moving toward diffuse blue as it receded up the slope. Within the general colors were darker and lighter swirls of subtly varying shades. It was gorgeous. She could even blow air from her mouth and watch the stream of breath as it flowed into or against the outside air. Interestingly, her breath was just a slightly lower temperature than the air around her, or so she guessed from the subtly different hue.

When she wasn’t actively clicking, the ambient sounds of the cave and her footfalls painted a more diffuse picture, though she could still get along pretty well. She soon realized, in a painful way, that without clicking her tongue, she couldn’t sense the sharp rocks at her feet well enough. Her cry of pain when she stepped on a particularly sharp edge lit the corridor like a little burst of light. Despite that, Lilijoy was enjoying the entire experience immensely. Her spirits were high as she sweated her way down into the increasing heat.

After a while, she reached a place where her echolocation showed her a wall of orange and yellow swirling upward, about twenty feet in front of her. No matter how she clicked, she couldn’t get a sense of anything beyond, though she thought that the floor dropped away sharply just before the barrier. At this point she noticed a dim red glow from a different sense, and realized she had light to see by.

She had become so used to echo-locating her way down the cave, she hadn’t noticed the new red light until she was at the edge a very large cavern. She stood about twenty feet back from a cliff overlooking a plane dotted with spots of glowing rock, and as her eyes got used to gathering light once more, she could make out a few more details in the vast space laid out before her.

Jagged stalactites far larger than her little dagger covered the ceiling of the cavern. Huge clusters of vines dangled between the stalactites here and there, some almost reaching the floor of the cavern. The sense of scale was difficult to wrap her head around. Was she looking at a large cavern, or a mindbogglingly enormous one? All the features she could see came in a continuous variety of sizes, and it was hard to tell from where she stood if a jagged boulder on the cavern floor was the size of a hovercraft or the size of a house.

After gazing over the scene for a while, she saw movement, small forms scurrying among the rock formations. She moved closer to the edge for a better view, hitting the wall of hot air her echolocation could already see. Her eyes watered and burned as she looked over the edge. Far below was a lake of glowing, bubbling .

There was no way down. After minutes of looking until her eyes dried out, recovering, and then looking more, Lilijoy was sure of that. The cliff looked fine for climbing, but the magma pool at the bottom made that futile. She could try to make her way sideways along the cliff, and hope to find a lava-free area, but the cliff leaned out over the lava on both sides of her current location.

Lilijoy had the sense that the problems she faced were not entirely arbitrary or environmental; this was a trial in a former ‘game world’ after all. There was probably a trick to it. She doubted that she was supposed to make her way back up the corridor, though she was seriously considering it as the more appealing choice anyway.

Her sense proved out when she turned to retreat from the burning air close to the edge. The cave entrance she had passed through on her way to the plateau over the fire lake had vanished. Uninterrupted rock walls sealed her in in every direction but the cliff edge.

Am I supposed to jump and die in the lava, so I can respawn down there?

She was prowling around the perimeter of her prison, hoping for an idea, when she stumbled upon something odd using her echolocation. The enclosure was almost u-shaped, with thirty to forty-foot-tall walls and irregular stalactites coming down from the sloped ceiling. About fifteen feet up one of the sides was a large triangular patch of material that bounced echoes differently than rock. It appeared as a dark patch to her echolocation, but her eyes could only see a faint outline once she knew exactly where to look.

Hoping it was an exit, she threw a small piece of stone at the shape. It hit with a dull thud and dropped straight down, and she could see the sound spread out through the material horizontally from the point of impact. Throwing several more stones produced the same results, so she decided to climb up and see for herself.

Lilijoy was an excellent climber of trees, but she was less familiar with stone. This stone was crumbly and fragile, and she was forced to proceed very slowly up the wall, being very careful with the amount and direction of force she put on each hand and foothold. After a few mishaps, torn hands and feet and new bruises on her hip and butt from a ten-foot fall back down the wall, she was able to reach a hand up and touch the material. It moved under her hand, and this close to it, she could see that the entire triangular shape was actually mounted on the wall.

It was made of some kind of tightly woven and stretched fabric . She pushed it off the wall with her free hand, hoping to discover an alcove or passage behind it, but there was nothing but solid stone. It was attached somewhere near the top, but as she tugged at it, whatever mounting there was came loose, and the whole object tumbled to the floor, nearly bringing Lilijoy with it. She scampered back down the wall and inspected it.

Okay, system, she thought. Now would be a great time for you to do your thing.

After a few moments, she knew it was a .

You have got to be kidding me.