The next round of rock moving turned out to be the easiest so far. Rosemallow raised the local gravity by half, but Lilijoy now had access to her Power stat, which more or less negated the increased mass. Thankfully, Power was very natural to use. Unlike Speed, it took very little adjustment, especially since the gravity field was canceling it out. According to Rosemallow, Power was a mixed blessing.

“Makes it harder to train Strength,” she explained. “For most, once they get Power going, their Strength plateaus. That’s why you’re lucky to have me!” She stuck a giant thumb to her chest. “Next time I’ll double the gravity, so this one was a free ride for you. You can thank me later.”

After the rocks, another round of stances. Then more speed training in the pond. By the time they were done, Lilijoy collapsed and slept by the water’s edge. After she woke to the night air, she logged off, in a hurry to take care of her Outside body. She really wished for one of the fancy pods that let you stay in for days at a time. Maybe Marcus or one of the others had one lying around. Plus, she still needed to ask him about an arm.

After returning Outside and taking care of necessities, she messaged Marcus to see if he could talk. In just a moment, his voice came to her, still creaky with age. When Lilijoy had first seen Marcus, she had thought him relatively young. Her early years had led her to associate age with striking damage to skin and hair. The senior members of her tribe, Mooster, Grabby, the Bros all had blemishes, scars and ugly growths on their face and elsewhere. Only with further experience had she realized that he was fit, but ancient by her standards. Even most on the Outside would consider him of an advanced age.

Lilijoy didn't know if Marcus choose to appear old, or if his bugs just weren't strong enough to keep up with his advancing years.

“Hello, my dear,” he said. “How are you getting along with your studies?”

Marcus liked to call everything she was doing on the Inside and with her system ‘studies’.

“I’m growing a lot!” she said with a bit of forced brightness in her voice. “Now I get why some people like to live Inside. Are there any of those pod-things here?”

“Are you sure you want to go down that road so soon, young friend?” His emphasis on the word ‘young’ reinforced the hint of disapproval in his tone. “The Outside needs people like you more than the Inside, these days.”

“I’m really just tired of worrying about my body when I’m Inside,” she explained. “I have plans for the Outside that are super important. But I know it’s a lot to ask.”

“Not to worry dear. Forgive an old man who fell prey to the temptations of the Inside for much of his life. I shouldn’t assume everyone will make the same mistakes I did.”

“But Marcus, why would you regret spending time there? It’s just as real, isn’t it?”

“It has become so, hasn’t it? When I was young, though still older than you are now, the Outside was much worse than it is today. The Corp hadn’t formed, not really, and our species was at its worst, small groups fighting and clawing for power in the wreckage of civilization. All the great powers had collapsed with the deaths of billions, and the surface of the planet was changing, almost by the day.” She heard him sigh. “Guardian did not interfere unless its rules were broken. Do you remember Rule Three?”

“Isn’t it basically ‘Try to be nice to each other’ and ‘Don’t expect Guardian to respect human rights on an individual level’?”

“That’s the gist of it. There have been times when Guardian took a more active role to protect us from one another, for its own unknowable reasons. The last was a few decades ago, when it destroyed my former clan. I’ll tell you that story some other time though.” He sighed again.

Lilijoy wondered what was like to live for so long. She had been alive for twelve or maybe thirteen years, but only clear of thought for a couple weeks. She couldn’t imagine how she might think and feel in a year, let alone decades. Would she even be the same person, really? She remembered her earlier musings about the self being a defense mechanism.

I wonder how fast I can change without becoming someone else. Then another thought. How would I know if I did?

She missed the first bit of Marcus’ next thought, something about Rule Three.

“…anyway, the Inside was still more like a game at the time. We still called ourselves ‘players’ and we called the Insiders ‘NPCs’, non-player characters. The ‘game’ was like a drug for us, everybody who had some kind of Rank One system. It allowed us to escape, to feel important and powerful. But while we played, another billion people died. And then another. We rationalized it. After all, Rule One put a hard limit on our population relative to the Earth’s total biomass. But what if, instead of playing in Guardian’s sandbox, we had spent our time and energy on growing things, raising biomass and preserving what remained. Our population would still have dropped, but not by as much, I think.”

Lilijoy couldn’t really wrap her head around the numbers Marcus was tossing around. On a mathematical level, they were simple enough. But a billion people?

“There are only about seventy-five million people living on Earth now. Ninety-nine out of every hundred people died, most over a span of thirty years. Do you think a human life is a precious thing, Lilijoy?”

She had never thought about it. “Of course, I do…” She did, but there was something bothering her about the question she couldn’t quite pin down. “…but it seems a little, I don’t know, selfish or something.”

Species exist to continue themselves, they all do, she thought. It’s kind of the definition of what life does. It’s the built-in rule, self-contained, self-fulfilling. It’s another one of those big circles.

She tried to articulate her thoughts, “Just because I like something…no, start again. ‘Precious’ means something is worth something relative to something else, right?”

“That’s an interesting question, Lilijoy. I suppose that’s the case.”

“So it’s all emotion, right? I might like an idea because it makes me feel more like myself, and I might hate an idea because it makes me feel less like myself. It’s this bundle of consistency in our heads, everything has to support everything else to some extent, or there wouldn’t be anything anyway.”

“Oh dear,” Marcus said, “I’m afraid you’re talking in circles.”

“I know!” she exclaimed, in both frustration and excitement. “That’s the problem. It’s all circles. Every person is circles, walls of circles that defend themselves. Species are circles. They exist to reproduce. My idea of what is precious comes out of those circles. Why does my sense of what is precious mean anything? Once I realize that, nothing is precious at all.”

She came to a stop, suddenly feeling depressed.

“My dear, I am proud of you for asking the question. I have been alive for more than a century, and all I can tell you is that when you ask a question and the answer just leads you back around to the question again, you have found something important. I sometimes think the fundamental building blocks of reality are not atoms and energy, but questions that lead back to themselves. Try not to be too frustrated by it.”

There was a long pause.

Eventually Marcus broke the silence. “I regret my years on the Inside only because my value for human life in the abstract is high. Humanity needed leaders, and we were busy killing monsters in a fantasy game. It is a pitfall of advanced age to think too much about the past, to project our regrets onto the next generations and call it wisdom. Take what you want from my rambling.

To answer your practical question, yes, there are a few pods, and yes, you can use them. Before that, why don’t you join me and some of my colleagues tonight? We like to get together and indulge in nostalgia by watching old movies together with Augsight. They are a shy bunch, but one or two would like to meet you. Savitri in particular would like to talk to you about your arm.”

“That sounds great!” Lilijoy was excited to finally meet more of the mysterious community of exiles. And she hadn’t even needed to remember to ask about her arm.

***

Movie night was still a few hours away, so Lilijoy tried to read for a bit. She had finished Lord of the Rings, and bounced off of Harry Potter hard, much to Anda’s disappointment. There were just too many references to a culture she couldn’t understand, plus the main character insisted on making what she considered to be stupid decisions. While researching the origins of the Inside, she had found an old list of reading recommendations in an ancient pen and paper gaming system called Dungeons and Dragons and was working her way through it. She had just started A Wizard of Earthsea.

Unfortunately, her brain had other ideas. Every time she started to immerse herself into the story of Ged, her last outburst to Jiannu intruded. She alternated between feeling guilty and justified about losing her temper. After several minutes of starting the same paragraph and getting distracted, she decided she couldn’t avoid the inevitable anymore, and called on Jiannu.

“Jiannu, we need to talk,”

“Yes.”

“I was pretty upset. I’m still upset. I’ve been thinking a lot about you and me and Emily.” She let that hang to see if Jiannu would say anything but got no response. “I need to understand what’s going on in my own brain. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

“I understand.”

“Jiannu, if you are really a part of me, why didn’t you know to tell me about that memory sooner? Didn’t you know I’d be upset? It’s pretty scary to have someone else in my head who might not be what they say. Can you please say something!”

“I am here to help you adapt to the Tao system, and that means helping you to change. I am part of you, but also part of the System. As you incorporate the system, it changes you, helps you to grow more powerful. Growth is change. It is a common cognitive error for sentient beings to want growth without change. You must decide, Lilijoy. Do you want growth or not?”

“I get all that Jiannu. That’s not why I’m scared. I’m scared that what you call change, I would call becoming completely unrecognizable to myself, becoming someone else. Like Emily.”

“I am here to manage the growth so that you may experience continuity. Part of that responsibility is exposing you to new information in a measured manner. It was my judgment that the revelation of a direct connection between you and Emily would result in trauma to your sense of self, which has proved to be correct. I released the information to you at a time where you had mental resources to process and heal from the damage. Our conversation now is part of the healing process.”

“So you can tell me lies for my own good?”

“No.” After a long pause. “Perhaps. If the information was an existential threat to your mental integrity.”

“Great. By which I mean very much not great! How do I know you truly have my interests at heart?”

“Our fates are linked. If the system wished to do you harm, do you not think it could have easily taken control already? You are the driving spark behind everything that happens or will ever happen in your mind. Without your mental integrity and force of will, we would be an empty shell, unable to do anything but maintain survival of the physical body.”

“So if I got injured like Anda...”

“It would take more physical trauma, approaching total destruction of the cognitive centers of the brain. But yes. If you received a sufficiently grave brain injury, I would be alone, unable to act in any meaningful way, even if most of the physical structures were rebuilt.”

Lilijoy forgot about her concerns with Jiannu. A firestorm of connections was racing through her head. Massive scarring on the face and head. Extreme passivity. Strange repetitive behaviors.

“What if I was almost, but not quite, completely brain damaged? What would that look like?”

“You might retain traces of old behaviors, have rare moments of memory or even lucidity. You might be able to interact with the system to some extent.”

It was just a possibility, but all the pieces were falling into place.

“Jiannu, I know who gave me my name. Sort of. It’s time to cultivate.”