Rosemallow excused Lilijoy from further training for the day after that.

“Decent effort,” she concluded, “Godawful results. Where did you go wrong?”

Lilijoy had many answers to that, all of which involved ever listening to Rosemallow, or coming to the courtyard, the Academy, and even the Inside itself, but she wisely kept them to herself.

“I should have started with the Green, Master. They were the easiest to carry.”

“And...”

“The gray one was a mistake, Master.”

“And...”

Lilijoy had to think a bit longer. “Maybe I got too caught up in the white stones,” she started to talk faster, “if I was going to do all the rocks, Master, I should do the whites second to last and use the black rocks as steps. They would be the last ones.”

“Not bad. At least you can think. So what did you learn?”

“Thinking the problem through before starting is good. Not getting caught up in a small problem and forgetting the big one too. Master”

“Wrong!” Rosemallow roared. “You should have learned that you need to be stronger! Then you can save your thinking for more important things.”

She slapped her fist into her palm. “Tomorrow, we will do it again. Use your new strategy and see if it helps. If you don’t have at least one rock of each color on a platform in less time than you spent today, I will lock you in a closet with Sweetums and her friends.” Lilijoy really hoped she wasn’t serious.

“Oh, one other thing. Stop with all the ‘Master’ this and ‘Master’ that. It’s driving me up the wall.”

With that parting thought, she turned abruptly and marched back into the building

***

Lilijoy logged out and returned to her room. I have a room, she thought to herself, as she had many times for the last few days. A room all to myself. No one trying to catch me or kill me. Just my very own space.

It was the most amazing thing. She looked around the tiny windowless space, at the narrow cot, the rough floor and walls. It was the most luxurious space she had ever imagined, because it was hers.

Soon after Anda had recovered enough to message her, they contacted Marcus and explained the situation. Upon hearing that Lilijoy had registered her system successfully, he was willing to guide them to the remote enclave where he had fled, a cold mountain valley surrounded by glaciers in the part of the continent that had once been Bolivia.

The city of Cochabambo was almost entirely deserted. Largely untouched by the Great Warming Wars, the population was still subject to massive starvation and encroaching ice from the surrounding mountains. The area was now cut off entirely by massive ice flows and compressed snow. Lilijoy had met a hovercraft driven by Marcus and followed him through a long chain of passes and tunnels in the ice.

By the time they emerged, both Lilijoy and Anda were frozen half to death. The assault craft had no heating system, other than excellent environmental seals for insulation.

Anda had not been shy in expressing his unhappiness. At all. His constant complaining and frustration with physical impairments related to his brain injury had worn on Lilijoy, even as she recognized he really had no control over his behavior. After the first day, she had been forced to quarantine the constant flow of messages raging at her, the cold, the boredom, his mental sluggishness and any other topic that passed a certain threshold of irritation.

Which was nearly everything. He itched. He felt strange. He was tired of being hungry. He was tired of eating.

It was too much for her to handle. Anda wasn’t Anda.

It was with tremendous guilt and great relief that she had handed him off to Marcus and the handful of the other refugees from various clan's retribution huddling in the deserted city. All scientists and intellectuals, they were in a far better position to help Anda at the moment. Being trapped in a small space for three days straight, barely able to cultivate or retreat from the situation had worn her nerves to the last thread. She still visited him several times a day, which was a mixed bag. At times, he was exuberant and upbeat, laughing loudly and waving his arms. His large motor skills had largely returned, and his fine control was improving daily.

It was the bad visits which made her grateful to escape to the Inside. He would lash out at her. Blame her for his injury, for everything that he had been through. She knew it was the brain trauma speaking when he was like that, but it was impossible not to feel hurt and angry herself. She forced herself to keep visiting anyway, using the experience as fuel for her determination to become strong enough to help him.

She was also troubled by her inability to help Attaboy. Every passing day meant a greater chance of his death. She feared that even if he was alive, he would be nothing more than a mindless body when she found him.

The anxiety of inaction was a constant companion when she was on the Outside.

Cultivating and going Inside made her feel like she was doing something, anything to advance her mission, but eating, sleeping, reading; all these felt like wastes of time, no matter how much she rationally knew they weren’t. It was unbearable at times. If she needed more than a few hours sleep, she would have been in real trouble.

Now that she was Outside again, she needed to decide. Visit Anda, or cultivate?

Definitely cultivate.

She sank into her soul space. The Tree of Thorns greeted her, cradling the sparkling black basalt model of her brain between its roots. The evil blade inscribed on its trunk wriggled without moving, as if happy to see her. She hadn’t changed any of the details from her initial design, but around the periphery of the space she had created standing stones and statues. The stones were somewhat cylindrical, dark glossy stone interwoven with rougher flint. Some of the columns had been chipped away from the top down, turned into statues, figures emerging from the stone.

Anda was there, his torso projected out as if in motion, back arched and chest thrust out. His arms bent at the elbows and his hands met in the space just above his eyes, fingertips grazing the site of his injury. There were no details on his face; only an open mouth and blank unseeing eyes could be seen.

She had been feeling pretty dark when she made that one.

Attaboy was there too, just his head and arms reaching out of the column, either sinking or surfacing from the stone. She hadn’t decided which. These statues were her reminders, her motivators. She hoped they would never be memorials.

Some of the other columns had hints of form, a folded arm, a flattened face. One was a pile of shards, slumped over and scattered along the ground. Almost subliminally hidden among the sharp edges and points was the figure of a dog, curled up as if sleeping.

All mementos of her time before the Tao system came into her life.

She moved past her creations and placed her palm on the top middle of her brain, moving into her mind space via the motor cortex. She had discovered this area of her brain only recently and had fallen in love with the experience of dancing through a field of lights that registered her every move. She had discovered how to manifest a dream body in this space, weaving in and out of the lights that reflected its motion and had spent hours dancing within her own mind in a sea of color that she shaped.

If only there was sound, she thought.

She reached out and expanded her awareness, reached and stretched and slid until she was connected with her auditory cortex as well as the visual and motor areas. At first her movements caused bursts of white noise, spikes and pops and deep buzzes to manifest as she waved her arms. Soon though, she had figured out the trick of accessing her memory’s library of sounds, and the pops became bells, the hum became a horn and the crackling became the twittering of birds from the forest of her Trial.

Lost in the bliss of the light and sound and movement, she sculpted and carved a choreography of her own mind, feeling her way to ever more compelling combinations, synesthetic interpretations with no sensory boundary, just blissful wholeness.

When she came to a pause, Jiannu spoke gently to her.

“That was beautiful Lilijoy. I am so proud and happy to be a part of you. It has been seven hours, so you might want to cultivate now.”

Lilijoy awoke from her trance. Seven hours! So little time had passed for her subjectively, it felt like minutes at the most. Her mind felt better. Different.

“Jiannu, has anything changed while I was dancing?” she asked.

There was a pause. “You have achieved complete synergy between sight and hearing, with far greater integration of your sense of movement as well. Let me show you.

Rank 1: Sense Details (7/10) Vision 9 Work on: Integrated visual information (targeting), peripheral awareness, telescoping, expanded wavelengths Hearing 9 Work on improving spatial mapping, widening audible spectrum Smell/Taste 4

Develop spatial sense, better chemical and gradient analysis, larger library of identifications. Suggest training with no sight or hearing.

Touch 4 Train greater sensitivity in detail, air currents, focus on hair follicles Proprioception 4 Take what you learned from Emily’s piano and apply it to many movement-based skills, particularly acrobatics and martial arts. Practice mirroring – translating sight to movement Synergy 7 With experience, begin using senses together much more. Spatial map can be based on all senses simultaneously and can contain near complete information about your local environment.

Lilijoy was happy to see that her sight and proprioception had improved, as well as the jump in her synergy levels. Imagine what my dance would have been like with smells and tastes added in, she thought. Maybe next time.

It was a wonderful feeling, not approaching cultivation with desperation and urgency. She was still far behind where she wanted to be though, still recovering from making the med bugs for Anda and using her own flowers to defeat Mo. When she was done she pulled up her status.

STATUS: UNRATED Nanobody count 131,266 [Action Needed] Power Ratio 81% Stage One Integration 71% 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 NANOBODY COUNT 131,266 [Action Needed] 131,266/150,000 for secondary/support integration Current Average Attrition 9/hour (stable) Estimated Time to Goal 16.62 hours Cultivation Rate 1,127/hour over 72 hours Cultivate | Differentiate | Assign

Now that’s more like it! she thought.

“Jiannu, I keep meaning to ask. Did we get another support bug from somewhere?”

“Yes. I believe that a small sample of Anda’s skin improving bugs entered our system during your surgical intervention.”

“When I was sucking on his brain, you mean.”

“Yes. That is the most likely scenario. The sample size is inadequate for cultivation at our current levels. It is possible that...”

“Yes, yes, it is possible when I’ve developed Stage two.” Lilijoy interrupted.

She was tired, so very tired of everything depending on Stage two. The way the system worked was strange. You needed Stage one to get to Stage two, but then you needed to go back and finish Stage one, which you could only do with Stage two. It seemed unnecessarily complicated to her. Not that she could come up with a better way.

She prepared to withdraw back to the Outside.

“Lilijoy, there is something from the logs I’ve wanted to show you. Do you have another minute?” Jiannu asked.

“Sure?” said Lilijoy. She really wanted to make sure her body’s bladder didn’t explode. It had been at least nine hours.

“There is a portion of one of Emily’s memories that contains information you should know. I don’t understand it well enough to give you any answers, so I’ll just play it for you and let you draw your own conclusions. I’ve set it at the ‘hover’ level so that you can be as detached as possible”

The familiar feeling of dropping into one of Emily’s archived memories came over Lilijoy, though it felt less personal than before, more like watching a movie in her mind. She watched the conversation between the two siblings with interest.

I don’t see anything particularly earth-shaking here, Lilijoy thought. But it sure is nice to see that she liked her brother so much.

Then she reached their farewells.

Emily said, “You be safe out there, Attiboy.”

Atticus replied, “You too, Emi-lily Choi.”

At first her mind bounced off it. That’s cute! They had little pet names for each other.

Then she processed. Attiboy. Attaboy. Lily Choi. Lilijoy.

No... What?

It didn’t make any kind of sense. How could she and Attaboy be named after the two Choi children? She frantically paged back through her memories, looking for connections. She had Emily’s system, removed from her over one hundred and fifty year before. It wasn’t a random accident. Someone had named her. Someone had named Attaboy for that matter. Strange names, she had come to learn. Unique even. Who had given them those names? Where had she gotten her system? She had been leaning toward the poodle that she fought in the Piles, but that didn’t make any sense at all, considering the new information.

She thought back to her tribe, her enigmatic band of ‘indigenes’. Who were almost certainly not indigenous to the Amazon area, at least most of them. Emily lived in Brazil. Atticus too, before he went off to work for his parent’s company. The company that made the system.

It was all too much.

“Jiannu. What’s going on?” she begged. “Who am I? Who are you? What’s going on!” Her mental voice rose in force as she talked. “Someone did this! Someone knows what's going on. Is it you?”

Jiannu tried to say something, but Lilijoy cut her off. “You just ‘coincidentally’ found this memory now? After I changed my name on the inside to Emily and everything. That’s not creepy at all! How many more memories do you have like this? Is the system turning me into someone else? Into Her?”

If there had been a door to slam, Lilijoy would undoubtedly have made her mind shake with the force of its closure. As it was, she abruptly logged herself Inside. She had some rocks to move.