So close! Lilijoy couldn’t believe how quickly her flowers were multiplying. After she logged out, ate, and got some sleep, her most recent cultivation had once again nearly doubled her count.

STATUS: UNRATED Nanobody count 48,237 [Action Needed] Power Ratio 81% Stage One Integration 40% 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 beginning to understand why Guardian would be so worried about exponential growth. Only five sessions, and she was almost to the minimum recommendation, which had seemed so far away so recently. She pulled up the specifics to savor them...

NANOBODY COUNT 48,237 [Action Needed] 48,237 : 50,000 minimum recommended Current Average Attrition 2/hour (stable) Estimated Time to Minimum 80.25 Minutes Cultivation Rate 1,318/hour over 24 hours Cultivate | Differentiate | Assign

Eighty minutes and fifteen seconds. She was torn between waiting and cultivating as soon as she could or logging back Inside. According to Anda, no time passed on the Inside when she logged out of the trial, because she was the only Outside person involved. After the trial, when she was in the Inside with everyone else, time would have to run whether she was in or not. He then mumbled something about different ‘time zones’ for certain types of mental augmentation where subjective time could be more fluid, but she didn’t really follow him and stopped listening.

“Jiannu, how soon can I do my next cultivation?”

“We are so close, aren’t we?” she said. “Unfortunately, we still need to wait for the components to be gathered. I wouldn’t recommend any earlier than six hours, or the system may get cranky.”

“Cranky? What does that even mean?”

“The system relies on stability in cultivation intervals for projections of future activity. If you go around making flowers willy-nilly, allocation of resources and integration projects will be less efficient, and everything will slow down.”

She went on. “Speaking of slowing down, I’m sure you noticed that cultivation sessions are taking longer now? That’s because the number of flowers you can make in a certain time interval has a maximum, to keep the heat waste manageable. It’s about twenty thousand per hour, so all too soon it will become a bottleneck. Especially for stage two. This last session took over an hour, the next would take two and in just five more sessions you won’t have enough hours to fulfill your potential.”

“What can we do about it?” she asked. “Do we even need that many flowers? I’m feeling pretty great already.”

“We would be fine, even if we couldn't get past the bottleneck. Even stage two will take less than a year at that rate, at least by the raw numbers. Along the way we will need to make millions, even billions of smaller nanobodies for supplemental systems, so that will add considerably to the time, even though the heat limit allows us to make as much as a thousand times more of those every hour. Its just something to be aware of. If you can find a supplemental system to increase circulation and more effectively remove waste heat, we can raise the cap much more too.”

“I should keep an eye out for bugs that improve circulation?”

“That’s the basic idea, dear.”

In truth, Jiannu was allowing Lilijoy to oversimplify things. Perhaps she could feel the stew of chemicals and hormones indicating frustration, boredom, and incipient total lack of interest.

Lilijoy loved her flowers, but she was beginning to feel that the system as a whole was kind of a pain to keep track of. Until she remembered echolocation and infrared vision both worked Outside too. That was kind of awesome.

It had turned out that Anda already had both of those abilities, and they enjoyed a lovely meal comparing notes and swapping hints for cool ways to use enhanced senses. Anda had shown her the way that the skin temperature of the face would change when someone was lying, and that she could hear heartbeats from many feet away. With practice she would be able to tell truth from falsehood reliably, he promised. She couldn’t tell him much, because he wouldn’t let her talk about the trials, but she did tell him how it was possible to use echolocation to find foreign objects in the body, which caused him to slap his head and say, “Of course! Why didn’t I ever think of that?” which made her feel really good.

Just about ready to go back inside, she glanced down at her left arm. It was now completely pale, as if it had no blood in it, which was about right. When she lifted it with her other arm it weighed so little that she felt a little shudder run down her spine and take up residence in her stomach. She felt so disturbed that she pulled up one last window to distract herself before logging in.

STAGE ONE INTEGRATION 40% Nanobody count 48,237 Visual System 61% Auditory System 83% Proprioceptive System 51% Motor System 6% Olfactory/Gustatory System 33% Somatosensory System 78% Spatial System 9% Verbal/Linguistic System 50% Logical/Mathematical System 10% Emotional/Hormonal System 5% Myelin Enhancement .2% Options | Logs | Data | Reference | Menu

Everything looked great to her. She felt a little bad about putting off the deeper explorations she should be doing. What was up with ‘Motor System’ anyway? But the children at Fort Groveship were calling to her, so she settled back into her nano-aerogel seat and logged Inside.

***

The Fort was exactly as she left it, children getting to sleep, fire burning down, stinking of goblin blood and death. She walked over to Sar Noda to check up on her. Her heartbeat was very slow, and twitches and tremors ran through her body. Lilijoy was sure these were not signs of imminent recovery.

She sat next to the woman for a while, hoping to discover some kind of miraculous healing ability. She reached out to her with the cultivation technique that had worked for the tiny lizard. This helped Lilijoy to relax but appeared help the Sargent not at all. She just couldn’t find a handle to connect with. It reminded her of the problem connecting to the Golden Flower, only now the goal was not creation, but healing. She didn’t have a good emotional memory to connect to healing, if that was even what she needed anyway. Somehow, standing on Anda’s leg while fighting off a vampire didn’t do it. Nor did using a little spray bottle.

She took some time to closely examine the heat patterns, to listen to the breathing, even to hear the blood flow in different body areas. None of it triggered anything unusual for her. It was mostly just a depressing journey through a human body’s last hours, as the heart beat became weaker, the breathing labored, and the circulatory system collapsed.

After a few hours the watch on the wall changed, and Lilijoy joined the new rotation, enjoying the night air atop the walls, talking to Berthude about her failure at the arrow slit and subsequent redemption and meeting some of the other watchers for the first time.

Toad was an oddly named child who loved fishing. He lived alone with his father, a chandler. His real name was Toddwick, but the other children had called him Toadwick and it stuck. He didn’t seem too upset about it.

She also met Samwell, one of Briegthon’s little crew. He was one of the ones who had a little ‘accident’ in his breeches when Lilijoy appeared, and had been too embarrassed to introduce himself at the time. He turned out to be a nice guy, full of excitement over the battle, and even fuller of excitement over getting home and seeing his large family (four older sisters, four younger brothers) and amazing them with his true tales of adventure and heroics.

“I always kinda thought my sisters were stretching the truth,” he confided. “But after last night, I’ll believe anything!”

Lilijoy was not entirely sure that was the correct take, but he said it with such an earnest look on his face, she decided to let it lie. Or let the sisters lie, anyway.

The rest of the night passed, one more set of watchers, one more set of conversations. It was fascinating to hear them tell about their lives, knowing that it was all simulated. Anda had told her that Guardian could simulate more human minds than there had ever been living humans, and it gave Lilijoy pause to think that a simulation of human thought felt just as human to her as the ‘real’ people she knew.

Sunrise was amazing. An actual sun, not just a hazy blob. It’s so bright that I can see light before it comes over the horizon!

The sun brought with it the songs of birds, varied and spirited. It moved Lilijoy to hear the small animals announce themselves to the new day. She enjoyed finding them in the trees with her expanded senses, pinpointing them with her ears, then seeing their little bodies glowing with just a bit of warmth through their insulating feathers.

The morning brought with it two problems. The first problem was that Sargent Noda breathed her last sometime during the sunrise. This was naturally a tragic event for all the children. Lilijoy wasn’t sure how to feel. Sad of course. Frustrated that her efforts failed. Embarrassed that she let down the children. Relieved that they could now leave with no regrets or encumbrances. Guilty that she felt relief.

The second problem solved several of those issues for Lilijoy, though in a very unfortunate way. The goblins arrived. And arrived. And kept arriving until the road before the gate was full, and three walls of the fort were surrounded. Lilijoy found that a new ability of hers was instant counting, and immediately regretted it. Four hundred and sixty-eight angry goblins. No, Four hundred and sixty-nine.

The light of the morning sun shone on an army.

***

“We’re going to die,” Samwell sobbed. Briegthon sat staring at the ground. Hatha was rocking and wringing her hands. Berthude sat up on the wall away from the goblins, legs dangling over the edge as she looked out over the forest. Andrew was kicking at the ground. All of the children were reacting to the situation in their own way, while Lilijoy looked on, fighting the feeling of betrayal in her gut.

Why betrayal? She felt betrayed by the Inside, by Nandi, even by Anda. These children were people to her. Soon they would be gone. Would they show up somewhere else on the Inside, resurrected with no memories, or in the next trial for the next ‘player’? Or maybe it would be a child who was almost identical but newly created. Were they just subroutines of Guardian, playing pretend suffering and death, only to take on the role of a goblin tomorrow?

What was death anyway, if someone just like you lived on?

When the goblins killed Lilijoy and she respawned, would that be the same Lilijoy? Maybe she was already a subset of Guardian without knowing it, playing a pointless role with the other subsets. What made the Outside more real than the inside anyway? Was it because it was crappier?

So many questions. She had never had so many questions. Why hadn’t anyone told her there would be so many questions? Told her that facing the death of fictional children she had known for just over a day would hurt? That she would want to save them all and would be powerless to save any of them?

She had even thought to bring them down the stairs to hide in the old temple, but the “Door That Must Not Be Opened” was now the “Door That Could Not Be Opened”. She thought of clever plans. They would dress as goblins and sneak through the army. But the bodies and clothes of the dead scouts were outside the walls. Oh well.

Or they would defend the highest tower of the keep, using the spears to drive off the front line of the goblins as they came up the stairs. This would obviously cause the goblins to give up and go away. Because its not like goblins used bows, or could climb, or light fires, or just overwhelm them through sheer numbers. Nope.

She felt betrayed because there was no way out. No plan. No survival. No survival for the children anyway. She wondered if the story would continue to play out in Guardian’s mind somewhere. Would the families grieve? Would Samwell’s brothers and sisters wonder how he died? Even if the story ended today, and all the subsets of Guardian went on to their next task, reshuffled and reconfigured, would the story go on in her own mind? She could imagine Sargent Noda’s empty house, and the aching loneliness of a chandler, fishing without his only child.

Lilijoy felt her emotions spinning out of control. She almost logged out, but then realized she would be trapped in a hovercraft with Anda, unable to even talk about any of this. Cultivating didn’t feel like an option. She was torn and angry and confused. She would probably make nasty tentacle monsters instead of her flower vines. Reading felt too trivial. Then she had it. Probably.

“Jiannu, I need something happy to help me calm down and think this through. Can you play me one of Emily’s happiest memories?”

“Yes. Do you wish to log out of the trial or stay in?”

“I guess I should log out to my mind space. I don’t want any more surprises while I’m distracted.”

“Choose immersion level: submerged, swim, float, hover. The levels indicate your degree of conscious awareness during the memory, from greatest to least.”

That was interesting. Lilijoy figured her first dream was probably at 'swim' and her second at 'submerged'. She looked forward to trying all the levels but thought that she would like to 'swim' for this one.

She made her choice, and then Emily/Lilijoy was sitting in a large room with white walls of a rough material, broad streaks of warmer colors subtly present. All the edges of the room were slightly round, giving it a soft and welcoming presence. She hated this room. She hated being forced to spend hours of her life in here by herself, when a world of plants, animals and people (but mostly plants) was outside to exalt.

She gazed out the huge window in the wall on her left side, looking at the flowers lining the bottom of the view, at the fat slow bees making their living.

A voice came from some distant point of the house.

"I don't hear anything!" The voice was light and pleasant. It made her teeth clench and her shoulders tighten.

"Fine!" she yelled back. "God, Mom, leave me alone. I'm doing what you want!"

Lilijoy turned to consider the area in front of her, where a huge black device crouched. She felt a mixture of regret, guilt and resentment well up into a sharp pang of annoyance, and she reached out and flipped open a wide panel at the front. Revealed were black and white stripes, arrayed in a simple pattern, white swallowing black at the front edge, black protruding upward as if forced to climb by white's encroachment. Why did she have such strong feelings about this huge creature?

And what was with all the negative emotions going on here? This was supposed to be a happy memory!

She reached out to the keys on the piano, words and labels coming to her as she moved. Her hands took up positions and her fingers began to press the keys, enjoying the feeling of the depression, soft and nuanced, with layers of travel under each finger. She played a pattern with her left hand, slowly caressing from pinky to thumb.

The sound! Sound came pouring out from the body of the beast, sound like warm crystal. No, like huge bells whispering softly. Indescribable! As the notes sounded and held and overlapped she could hear patterns in the vibrations; the sounds merged and flowed, each not singular but in tiers of harmony. I'm hearing overtones, she understood, and the harmonics of each note were dancing with each other, some reinforced, some conflicted into gentle oscillations. It was amazing. It was beautiful.

Emily pulled her hands pack from the keyboard quickly, as if it had become too hot. "Whoa," she said under her breath. This must be from her new system. She knew her hearing would be enhanced, but now she was truly experiencing what it meant to appreciate the sheer sonic beauty of the piano in front of her. The understanding that this instrument, so rich and pure, was the culmination of hundreds of years of humans who had learned to listen at the level just gifted to her.

She put her hands up to play again. The music was somber, powerful. It was sparse and simple. It was melancholy and complete. It was, Lilijoy now knew, the first movement of The Moonlight Sonata, and it was by an ancient composer named Beethoven and he was talking to her, whispering across hundreds of years, saying, "I am not okay. I am not fulfilled. Feel with me the fullness of beauty in despair."

Her reverie was destroyed instantly by the voice from the other room.

"Emily, playing is not practicing! Don't practice the stuff you already know! Do the third movement; you've hardly touched it and your lesson is coming up."

Oh yeah, she thought, now I remember why I don't like the piano.

She groaned and grabbed a score from beneath the bench, opening it onto the stand. The music was reluctant to stay open, pages drifting across the spine in succession. She sighed in exasperation and grabbed the score in both hands, bending it open until her hands touched and the inside became the outside. She placed it down like this and pressed it down the spine, forcing the paper into its new configuration. When she placed it back on the stand, its behavior improved, chastised by her rough treatment.

Back to the woodshed, she thought to herself.

She usually had a few minutes of good focus at the beginning of a practice session, before the physical effort of forcing her hands through reluctant steps and the frustrations of failing combined into a toxic stew that invited the demons of thoughtlessness and rage.

She began with the right hand only. Won't teacher be proud. Her hand moved in ascending arpeggios, each higher than the last. The final result was supposed to be a mad cascade of notes ripping up through the keyboard. It wasn't that hard for her at a slow pace, but after a certain tempo, her fingers began to develop their own opinions about where they wanted to go, opinions neither considered nor valid, and the cascades would become a tangled mess. Her teacher called it “getting her fingers twisted” and she very much agreed with that characterization. The answer, the always, only, ever answer was to practice slowly.

"Don't play faster than your fingers know to play, they will find their way in time, every day a little faster. Stop before you tense up. Don't try- do without trying." The memory of her teacher's voice floated in her mind.

"Thanks, Yoda," she grumbled under her breath.

Back to the keyboard. She traced the first line of music slowly with her right hand, slowly flowing through the figure, thumb gracefully repositioning itself under her fingers with each new dip in the contour. It felt terrible! What was with all the tension in her hand today?

She tried again, noticing how many of the movements were using too many muscles, little unnecessary muscles that had no business involving themselves. What the hell have I been doing? she thought to herself. She streamlined the movements, removing the now highlighted sources of extra work and tension. It felt effortless.

Guess that's what teacher's been trying to say all these years. Just never felt it like this before.

It was as if her hand had found an 'easy mode’. She played it again, and the lack of resistance within her hand, the smoothness of the movements ('slow is smooth, smooth is fast' echoed from her last lesson). It felt like the passage was melding into one thing, not letters, not words; a phrase. She could almost feel it floating in her head like a three-dimensional object, this phrase, timeless, tempo-less, just there. Speed was just a concept.

The trees are fast; the forest is slow. All her lessons were coming back to her as they gathered meaning from her new experience.

She put her fingers to the keyboard and let the phrase unfold. She observed as her fingers flew up the keyboard, her mind almost detached from her body. It was perfect. She did it again. Perfect.

Holy crap, she thought, how fast am I even going?

Without the resistance and effort, she wasn't sure whether she was playing fast or not. It certainly seemed fast.

It feels too easy, she decided.

She got out the metronome for a second opinion. She placed it at her weekly goal tempo. Played. Simple. She moved the metronome up to final concert tempo. Played. Simple. Just for kicks, she moved it up to the fastest tempo she had ever heard anyone play the piece, an almost ridiculous machine-like blur of notes from some Russian wunderkind on the net. Played. Simple. Stupidly fast, but simple.

She sat back for a moment. Was this the system? She knew that it helped enhance all the senses. Her earlier experience with hearing the overtones in real time as she played certainly demonstrated that. What was that sense called again?

, the word floated into her mind.

Was that my memory or my system? she wondered.

Proprioception, body awareness... she had gotten better at feeling where her body was in space. But even more importantly, at feeling the relationship between muscles and movement. Now, tension felt crappy, whereas before, she accepted it as the cost of playing. Somehow, she could feel how to remove the tension and leave the essential motion purified, an alchemy of movement.

She added the left hand. She had to walk back the tempo, of course, but she could feel the communication between the hands, the impulses to move one hand that wanted to cross back over and interfere with the other. She wanted to get rid of that! After a few tries, she had found the knack for moving her hands together without accidentally recruiting symmetrical muscles in the other arm. She had never realized the constant presence of stray nerves firing in sympathy, and as she cleaned it out, her hands found the true independence necessary to play together, even to synergize.

She was so immersed in the inner workings of her muscles and coordination, she hardly noticed when she had learned the first page. Perfectly. She owned it.

Except, now that it was so easy to play, she had the mental bandwidth to listen to herself. Why was she accenting random notes? Why was the dynamic contour so flat? Maybe she should try a crescendo up the cascades. Beethoven didn't write one, but what did that guy know anyway?

Okay, he knew way more about music than just about any other human in the history of earth, she thought. But he was dead, and she was here!

She tried the crescendo. Too obvious. It gave away too much of the building pressure in the bubbling notes, like letting off the steam in an autoclave. So if she wanted more pressure…

She played it again, this time getting softer as the manic run reached the peak before crashing over the repeated chords. Damn, that was hard. This was a worthy challenge for her new abilities!

By the time she stopped for the day, she had learned the first six pages. Half the movement! she thought. She gave a little fist pump, closed the lid and turned away from the piano, to see her mother standing in the doorway, an expression of awe across her face.

"Oh, hi Mom," she said. "I think I’ve got this piano thing down. I was thinking maybe I would take up the drums now."

The expression on her mother's face created what might have been the happiest moment Emily could ever remember.

Lilijoy slowly emerged from Emily’s memory. She could still feel the keyboard, hear the music in her mind. She understood what the system could do now. She could learn anything. Do anything. She was pretty sure she would be able to play piano, if she ever ran across one, as long as her hands weren’t too small. She felt Emily’s exhilarated calm flow through her. It didn’t solve her current problem, but now she understood that problems come from inside the mind even more than from outside it.

When you struggle to learn, you learn to struggle. The harder you fight the enemy, the stronger the bond between you.

She knew what to do. She logged in. She stood.

“My friends, I need to talk to you!” she yelled out to the courtyard. Bleary eyes, angry eyes, red eyes turned to her. Other eyes looked at the ground, or the sky.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I can’t save you today. I wanted to save you all. We can’t fight that army. I don’t think it would mean anything to kill a few more goblins before we die. So I have orders for you!” She raised her voice at the end and glared at them, daring any to challenge her.

“We are young. We are smart. And most importantly, we are small"

She looked at Andrew apologetically, "well most of us are.” He looked back at her in confusion.

“You are going to hide. Find the best, most clever hiding place you have ever found in all the games you ever played. Dig a hole and put boards over it. Find an old cistern, a garderobe, a roof top, a crawlspace. Bring some jerky, a waterskin, a bucket and patience. I want you to stay hidden until you are near death of thirst. The goblins can’t stay here; the human army will come if they do. All you have to do is survive!”

She looked back at nineteen faces; thoughtful, vacant, despairing, grinning. Her eyes moved on and then jumped back to the grinning face. Bosta must really like hiding, she thought to herself.

“Now go find your spots. Try not to let others see if you can avoid it; we don’t want the gobs to use you to find each other. If two of you want the same spot, it’s not a good spot in the first place. I’ll be around to help if you need something closed or covered up after you. I'll make sure your scent is covered. I promise the goblins won’t get anything from me if I’m captured.”

She took a deep breath. “Now, I need volunteers. If you don’t like hiding, if you hate small spaces more than dying, we need to talk. If you are willing to lay down your life to give the others a chance, we need to talk. If you think this is a dumb idea, and you would rather die fighting, we need to talk.”

“Now go!”