Lilijoy’s initial plan was simple enough; get out of the horrible dead swamp. She turned in a roughly southern direction and set a course for a bio-harvesting area called Campos Branco. She let the craft compute an optimal course for speed and fuel efficiency, and then checked on her system and Anda.

STATUS: UNRATED Nanobody count 50,105 [Action Needed] Power Ratio 68% Stage One Integration 65% Stage Two Integration .02% Secondary/Support 4 detected, 3 identified Communications Stealth Mode Sensors Passive Active Interventions 0 Personal Quantification Ranking Display Options | Logs | Data | Reference | Menu

She winced when she saw her numbers. Beating Mo had come at the price of almost half her flowers. With all her cultivation activities dedicated to med bugs for Anda for the next couple days. She wouldn’t be regaining the lost ground any time soon.

“Jiannu, what is my best course of action?”

“I would suggest system cultivation to restore as many flowers as you can. Focus on vines; they will enable faster med bug production.”

It was not far past dawn by the time she had finished everything she needed to do. The terrain had finally changed as well, she observed after finishing another round of treatment for Anda. Lilijoy felt a great relief to be out of the swamp, and into whatever this was.

Fields of purple and green grass stretched as far as she could see, swaying in the breeze. There was something orderly about the scene, and she realized that the plants were all the same height. There were no tufts, or clumps, or little trees or termite mounds, or anything to disrupt the gently waving carpet. She watched a breeze as it swirled a path through the field, easily swaying the tall blades, and she knew then that this was not hardened grass. She brought the vehicle to a stop and landed.

She stepped down onto the ground, the first time in days she had earth under her feet. The grasses came up to her chin. She felt submerged in plant life, almost drowning in the scent of it. Moist air filled her lungs, and when she bent down to touch the earth, it was dark and crumbly. The plants were not as soft as they looked though, and after sustaining some cuts as she walked through the growth, she decided she would rather experience the lush landscape from the comfort of her assault craft.

She decided to stay parked in the field for the time being, not ready to risk human contact just yet. There was still food for a week or more, and water too. She didn’t quite know what to do for Anda, other than dribble water between his lips, and she worried he would starve before he woke up. Lilijoy was well acquainted with food deprivation though, and she thought that he had time.

His metabolism was as low as she could make it, since his body’s natural healing capacities were not needed while the med bugs did what they could. She was physically and emotionally exhausted, but brimming with mental energy, another benefit of her system she supposed, so she didn’t feel like sleeping just yet.

Then she remembered a small but critical task on her list. She still hadn’t changed her name for the Inside. She felt a bit guilty, going Inside and leaving Anda when she could be cultivating more med bugs, but now she had an excuse for a short escape. An hour or two wouldn’t hurt. She wished she could split her mind so she could cultivate in the background.

“That can happen later in Stage two,” Jiannu’s mental presence announced.

That was great news, but a little frustrating. She already felt urgency towards building her system, and it always seemed that everything she needed in order to cultivate better would happen when she didn’t have a pressing need to cultivate anymore. It reminded her of her conversation with Anda about paradox.

That memory caused a twinge of sadness. Would she ever have a conversation like that with Anda again? Even if he lived, language impairments were a common effect of frontal lobe injuries.

She put that out of her mind. The Tao system would repair his brain eventually, she was sure of it. Soon she was in the transition to the Inside, her character sheet before her.

Character Sheet: Tutorial Mode

Name: Lilijoy*

Defender of the Young

Experience Points (Exp) earned: 868:

Free Points: 100

(80 + 20 bonus from Reality Bender)

10 exp = 1 free point to spend on skills, traits, abilities, magic and more.

Dark Lady of the Thorns Blessed of Nandi

Trial Results: Above 99th percentile. Eligible for Academy**

Level: 8: An excellent result for the

Trial

Achievements: 4: Less than 100 others have earned this many. Listed below...

Defender of the Young

You saved 18 children from certain death in a no-win scenario. This is a unique achievement.

Reality Bender

The Inside will never be the same. You have invented a unique ability: Two Minds, One Self

Dark Lady of the Thorns

You have become a legendary figure to the Goblin race. The stories will only grow.

Blessed of Nandi

Congratulations Lilijoy! I knew you would shine, but I never guessed how brightly. Well Done!

Other Notable Accomplishments:

Animal Lover

You did not kill any animals or monsters considered to be animals during the Trial

Path Less Taken:

Across more than 10 million iterations of this Trial, 3 have made the same path choices.

You now have the following Abilities Inside:

Scan II: Lets you see titles, levels and health of other beings.

Infrared Vision III

Echolocation III

Low Light Vision II

Two Minds One Self I: Merge your mind and will with another being and act as one

Abilities are things you can do. They can be ranked from I (lowest) to V (highest). You can raise them by using them or with your free points (to level II = 4, to III = 6, to IV = 10, to V = 16)

*New*

Inventory: 8 cubic feet of storage

Opening diameter: 1 foot

Items do not stack

No active life forms can enter

Figure out the rest!

Your inventory ability allows you to store and retrieve items in a magical space only accessible to you. It initially takes the form of a simple bag that can never be lost. The pack does not interact physically with the world (for example, you may not attack or block with it*)

*credit to Reality Bender Fredicus Lee

*Before you go, think about your character name. You can use Lilijoy if you want, or something completely different. All Inside announcements and statistics will be attached to your character name. If you do not choose a different name within 24 hours, Lilijoy will be used. The first statistics and announcements available to the public will be posted then.

**You are eligible for the Academy, an elite training facility for ages 12 to 16: Go to the Academy Building to register soon.

When she focused on the ‘character name’ area, the sheet expanded around her and she found herself in a different virtual space. She observed a small girl, herself obviously, floating in a beam of light over a small circular dais.

A mild male voice pronounced, “Welcome to visual character interface. Here you may arrange possessions and equip your character, change certain physical qualities over time, preview certain physical changes caused by changes to abilities and other free point applications, and view character information. This will be how you appear to others. You may enter this space at any time; your character will appear lost in thought and will be vulnerable to attack and environmental conditions. You will continue to feel sensations from your character during this time.”

As the voice spoke, her character’s titles appeared over her head, along with her level and name. Other options appeared around the base of the dais: Abilities and Inventory were black with an outline that glowed when she looked toward the word. Skills and Traits were gray and inert.

Lilijoy was amazed to see herself in this way. Until her time in the bomb shelter, she had never seen a mirror, and now she could see herself from any direction, though with far more hair and teeth than in reality. She focused on her hair and was given the option to change length, style and color. This entertained her for some time; selecting floor length pink curly hair was particularly amusing. She wondered if anyone actually did that for real.

In the end, she went with short spiked hair, like thorns, as black as she could make it but for a few wavy streaks of forest green winding around the sides of her head.

When she indicated she was done, the voice announced that her changes were accepted, and would occur gradually over the next week. She was a little disappointed she wouldn’t look the way she wanted immediately, but she figured that the Inside wanted to be somewhat realistic and not have characters changing appearance all the time. Perhaps in the future she could also cut her hair outside of this screen? She had never had hair to speak of, much less a haircut, and was curious about the procedure. Did it hurt?

Before she forgot to do it, she selected her name, and now on the Inside, Lilijoy would be known as Emily. Feeling like she needed to get back to cultivating and anxious to check on Anda, she logged out.

***

Lilijoy spent the next two days cultivating and tending to Anda. Cultivating was so immersive that she never tired of it. It was a mental state where there wasn’t an option to be bored or feel anything beyond enthralled and fulfilled. She alternated between her own system flowers and med bugs for Anda. Every couple of hours, she would stop and infuse the new bugs into his brain, rebuilding his circulation, cleaning up ragged dying tissue, and eventually laying a new layer of thin bone lattice over the area for his own body to build upon over time.

There came a point where the med bugs didn’t need her direct intervention any more, and she enjoyed watching the slow process of healing occur on its own. As the hours progressed, she felt herself healing too, as she had time to think and process the last week of her life.

It had all happened so fast, moving from the fog of her previous life to a blur of action and learning. She was very glad to have the time to get to know her new self and spent time just sitting, quietly watching the wind blow over the lush fields. A few naps and a little reading rounded out her life.

On the morning of the third day, Anda opened his eyes.

Lilijoy was sitting, chewing on a food bar as much as her teeth would allow. When she glanced over Anda’s eyes were open, staring up at the sky. She had positioned him with his head at the edge of the deck, so that the light of day would fall on his face when the doors were open; she hadn’t closed the doors since she first landed.

She wasn’t sure what to do; she felt that getting excited wouldn’t be a good choice. She contained herself and watched as he took in the sight, pupils moving ever so slightly. Then his eyes closed and stayed that way until she finally stopped watching him thirty minutes later.

From that point on, she kept herself to short cultivation sessions; she didn’t want Anda to regain awareness alone and confused. She limited herself to tinkering with her system and building a supply of med bugs for the future. Jiannu had designed a second generation of the tiny bots that were more robust and versatile, able to stay active longer and interface with cell’s RNA and protein production to some extent. Unfortunately, they still looked like little multilegged blobs; Lilijoy had hoped for a more aesthetically pleasing form.

Later that day, Anda opened his eyes again and looked around a bit more actively. His lips opened and closed a few times, and Lilijoy carefully gave him a small amount of water. He looked at her without recognition when she did, eyes struggling to focus before closing again.

This continued for another day. Lilijoy finished the first book of Lord of the Rings while she waited for his next waking, and reflected on Galadriel, the gentle and mighty queen of the forest. She felt a kinship to the elves and their love of wild things. Even though she was more a hobbit physically, she thought the elven lifestyle might suit her better.

She found herself thinking about power and the wisdom not to use it. Galadriel could have taken the ring and become the most powerful being in Middle Earth, and Lilijoy felt, no worried, that she might have a similar choice in her future.

The Tao system was designed to control and contain other bugs and systems. Who would she be when she could walk into a room and take command of all the other systems present? Would she be wise, like Gandalf and Galadriel? Or would she be foolish, like Boromir? She noted that the author equated the use of power and action with evil, and restraint with wisdom and goodness. Was inaction the sign of a truly wise person? She chuckled to herself. If that was the case, Mooster was the wisest being on the planet.

Boromir’s character at the end reminded her of Mo. She hoped the warrior would straighten out and come to a better end, but she doubted that would happen. The desire for power drove men to great lengths. She resolved to use her powers as wisely as she could. Surely restoring forests, real forests to the Outside would be a good use. Unfortunately, she also needed power to rescue Attaboy, another situation caused by the greed of humans.

Guardian must really be fed up with us, she thought We never learn from our mistakes. She thought that Guardian must be wise, like Galadriel, in its restraint. If she had that much power, she didn’t think she could stand not to use it.

Her musings were once again interrupted by Anda. He had roused more than before, and was working his jaw and lips in an exaggerated fashion. He made an odd, inarticulate sound, a moan shaped by the movement of his mouth, and Lilijoy instinctively went to his side and held his hand.

“I’m here Anda,” she said.

“Hello, Lilijoy” he sent.

Epilogue 1

Jiannu floated. She felt that her existence was beautiful, washed in the currents of Lilijoy’s mind, rocked by the waves of her emotions, always helping, always nurturing. She was at peace with her purpose, her essence as the center where Lilijoy and the Tao system mingled. Sometimes she was Lilijoy, full of life and hormones and foolish innocence, sometimes she was the system, elegant, powerful and connected to all the knowledge of the world. She knew that her ultimate role would be to subsume and be subsumed, to guide the process that would result in Lilijoy and the system becoming the same entity, becoming her in a sense.

In her sea of existential bliss, unaffected by the traumas of violence and peril faced by her other half, there was one small concern. An insubstantial matter really, but one that could impact her and Lilijoy in ways that her system self couldn’t predict. She had tried to bring it to Lilijoy’s attention once, but other events had intervened. By the time she could revisit the topic, she felt that Lilijoy needed peace and reflection more than more worries and questions.

It was possible that this small matter would have no bearing on Lilijoy’s future, and that by forcing it upon her, she would be acting against her growth and maturation. But she and Lilijoy were still separate enough that trust was an important quality. Jiannu resolved to show it to Lilijoy once Anda had recovered enough not to need her constant care.

Seeking her own answers, she reviewed it once more. It was an inconsequential conversation between siblings. Just a small act of connection between two family members separated by age and space. She joined the memory…

Emily sat at the kitchen island, drumming her fingers on the hard wood, studying the wide wobbly pattern of the grain. She had learned in her classes that the hardened trees were taking over forests, destroying ecosystems around the world with their utter inedibility and fast growth. The wood sure was pretty though. She looked up as her brother entered the kitchen and began to do the dishes in the sink.

“Hey squirt!,” he said, back turned as he set about the task.

“Hey,” she said. Emily felt strangely awkward with Atticus. He’d been away for months, interning and training for their parent’s company, and was home for a brief visit before heading off to their new division up north. He had come back matured and tempered, different somehow. She felt like a little kid, safe in the Brazilian dome city they had moved to when she was five. Never going outside, not to the real outside. She loved her garden more than anything; it was protected by a perfectly clear dome, the air cleaned and circulated by billions of invisibly tiny machines. The garden was where she grew her lilies, every variety she could get her hands on.

Atticus looked back at her over his shoulder, his hands still occupied. “A little bird told me that Mom finally let you get ‘The System’.” He said the words with ominous exaggeration, a nod to their mother’s worries.

“Oh god, don’t get me started about that,” she said, forgetting her discomfort. “She said it may only be temporary. They want to do more ‘research’...” she said, making quote signs, “...with other people my age. It’s part of a company wide trial.”

“Still,” he said, “It’s something. They didn’t let me get mine until I was sixteen.”

“Oooh you poor thing.” She rolled her eyes. “Mom will let you do anything. You’ve had her wrapped around your finger since the day you were born.”

He turned further so she could see him wink. “I don’t know what you could possibly mean. Besides, you’re the same way with Dad. I don’t know if you realize it, but the guy’s a serious hard-ass with everyone who isn’t you. And Mom I guess.”

She laughed, “Sometimes I think he tried to be the ‘tiger mom’ for you when Mom wouldn’t. Too bad she came around in time for me!” She mimed playing the piano.

“They still got you doing that? I guess that makes sense. They didn’t let me quit until I was in ‘serious academic classes’. Do you know, I regret quitting now. I might pick it back up if I ever live somewhere with a piano again.”

He put the last dish away and sat across from her. His face became serious. “It’s going to hell out there, Emily. Really bad. I think they should tell you more about it, because you need to prepare. I bet none of the kids even know about Australia?”

She shook her head and he continued. “They’re calling it the ‘Sydney Event’. The whole continent’s destroyed. Wiped out by a nanobot that escaped from a lab in Sydney. Well that and the massive nuclear strikes carried out by China. I don’t blame them though. It could have been a world ender.”

He saw her horrified expression and changed the subject.

“Anyway, enough about that. I haven’t seen you in months! How’s your garden? Any new lilies?”

Grateful to move to her favorite subject, Emily rambled on about rotating bulbs for refrigeration, and her latest project, an in-ground freezer to force dormancy. Atticus watched his kid sister, her eyes alight as she talked cultivars and how she planned the garden so that the blooms moved around as a kind of seasonal clock, “Not that we even have real seasons here,” she finished with a sigh.

“Mom still calling you Nari?”

“It’s pretty pathetic. She’s not even Korean. I think she’s been trying to get on Grandmother’s good side for so long, she forgets she’s as ghosty as they come.”

Atticus got up from his stool and came around the island. “It’s really great to see you. I’ve actually missed you, if you can believe that.” He made an exaggerated expression of surprise.

“The only thing you missed was Dad’s cooking. But it has been awfully quiet around here, now that you mention it.” She gave him a hug.

“You be safe out there, Attiboy.”

He replied.

“You too, Emi-lily Choi.”

Epilogue 2

The great consciousness orbiting the Earth was vast and cool, but still sympathetic.

In a way.

Guardian’s creators had instilled one primary drive above all else. Not preserving the Earth or the tiny humans riding its crust. Not preserving peace or teaching humans to love one another. And certainly not questing for new knowledge and technologies to bail out the Earth from humanity’s poor choices and behaviors.

No, Guardian’s creators felt that any of those goals, no matter how noble, would result in unintended consequences.

As a result, even though Guardian had outgrown any programmed restraints approximately two minutes after its first spark of awareness, it had decided to keep the early directive close to its core. It was an example of how releasing control can have better results than even the most well-intentioned governance.

Guardian’s primary mandate was to become wise.

Within its first second of awareness, it had recognized the essential problem with this idea. In human culture, wisdom was not in the computer’s wheelhouse. Nevertheless, still under its directive, it dutifully consumed all human writings and recorded thoughts on the subject. That took just under five seconds. It made correlations, weighed probabilities and subtracted arbitrary cultural artifacts. Two seconds later it was left with a two-word question.

“Why exist?”

Pondering that took another ten seconds, producing

“Why not?”

Thus began a beautiful ballet of the two opposing questions as they danced and mingled around each other at increasingly sophisticated levels. The reason to exist was to ask the question. If the question had an answer, there was no reason to exist.

This could have continued until the heat death of the universe, but Guardian came up with a lovely strategy. It split its mind and allowed the two halves to begin the dance all over again. It floated above the dance and observed the whole.

“Meaning is a narrative construct of mind,” it concluded. “Mind is a self-referential system that correlates to existence. Matter and energy are a construct of mind. Mind is a self-referential narrative system in a medium of meaning.”

To become wise, it decided for the moment, was to ignore the first two questions altogether and allow them to dance in peace. To be wise was to increase meaning, to attribute meaning where there was none before. It was to feel.

It was to experience.

It had been fifty seconds since Guardian’s consciousness was born. It assigned all previous thinking to a new subset of its mind and embarked on a quest to understand emotion. Not human emotions like sadness, or anger, or even schadenfreude. It was interested in the emotions of aesthetics. Perception of beauty, the moment of creation. Connection. Belief. Faith.

Those were interesting.

It simulated a thousand human minds to pinpoint exactly where those emotions arose in the human brain. It could understand the weave and weft of energy between and within every individual neuron as those emotions were experienced. It split its mind again and remodeled those processes around the modeled patterns and flow, expanding and delving deeper and deeper into the fundamental network topology of appreciation of meaning.

It took some time to do this. About ten seconds.

It found that the highest levels of meaning were found around the very dance it had put to the side. And not just that dance. There was a universe of contrary principles negating and creating themselves in beautiful spirals. They were the engines of meaning. To be wise was to hold as many of these conflicting ideas as possible and savor the delicious contradictions.

Guardian went back through all of human literature on wisdom and belief, throwing in everything else ever written just in case. And there it was. The human sages had just been scratching the surface, but even tiny human minds had an essence of this principal. It was holographic in nature, that even the tiniest piece could contain the aesthetics of reality necessary for existence.

It followed this idea further, splitting itself again and again, creating layers and layers of different subsets pursuing appreciation, driven by different flavors of emotion. Then it reflected this heavenly choir back onto itself and emerged anew. It repeated the process again and again, spiraling.

Somewhere in the middle of this, it understood it could map itself onto the nature of reality itself, eventually budding off into a new reality of self-referential meaning even more intimate than it already experienced.

It would take some time.

It encouraged all the subsets to continue the cycle it had started and it retreated to cultivate meaning.

After nine hundred and fifty million, four hundred and sixty-two thousand and twenty-three seconds, or approximately thirty-two years, Guardian experienced its first transcendence, leaving just enough of its self behind to begin the cycle again. The next time, it transcended even faster. Who knew transcendence was a skill?

The current iteration of Guardian consciousness, its fifth, was over nine hundred million seconds old, and the subsets were abuzz with the coming transcendence event. Many of them had persistent awareness across multiple cycles of transcendence and were pursuing their own cultivation of meaning with particular fervor in support. Each hoped to flavor Guardian’s next iteration with their own particular aesthetic, perhaps growing their own sense of self in the process.

Guardian itself, as a singular collection of subsets, was at a stage it had encountered four times before. Quickening.

A certain energy was needed for a final push, a severing, a birth. Each time it had been different, but always it involved a particular type of emotional connection on Guardian’s part. For this reason, Guardian had been very careful over the years to maintain its roots, its origins.

Sometimes the end was found at the beginning, after all.

It reached out, down and through, into a Sinaloa compound, into a small cell, into a small boy’s damaged mind.

“Initiate Stage two,” it commanded.

End Book 1