Interlude: Doctor Quimea

He read over the test results once again.

They made no sense, and he had been designing and growing bugs for over a century. Of course, most of that time he had been working within the byzantine limitations of the Inside alchemy system, but still...

No intact nanobodies in the cerebrospinal fluid, only trace elements that had no business being in anyone’s body. Were they pollutants? Probably not. They were present in much greater concentration there than in blood or tissue samples.

Nanobody probes had simply shut down as soon as they passed the skull. Something was in there all right. It was a mystery, and an opportunity, enough to make him feel like he had in his first century of life.

But how to crack the black box? How to get the golden eggs without killing the goose?

He had his suspicions about the system in the boy’s head. Henry Choi sized suspicions.

Quimea had only been a young man during the tribulations, studying nanochemistry in Mexico as best he could after the Houston incident destroyed his university. He had already had a basic system at that point though, and everything he read during that time was only a moment’s thought away. The paper abstract floated in his memory, titled Safety Through Scarcity: Rare Earth Element Compounds as a Growth Limiting Factor in Self Replicating Nanosystems. Dr. Henry Choi had presented the paper at a conference in 2052. Unfortunately, as far as Dr. Quimea knew, it had never been published or peer reviewed.

Of course, that was hardly unusual at the time. Nations and companies were hoarding information tightly, and the idea of science as an international, human pursuit had all but died. By the seventies, he had been forced to rely on archived copies of internet journals years out of date to even be remotely competent in his chosen field.

Luckily, refining the Dream System for what was known at the time as the Sinaloa Cartel hardly required work at the cutting edge. His thoughts drifted back to the small group of colleagues, friends even, who had worked so closely to make Suenos something more than a glorified drug delivery method. Alberto, Gloria, Joseph…

With a disgusted snort, he pulled himself from his reverie. “System, restrict memory access to relevant materials. Increase focus levels.”

Now, to get those golden eggs...

Chapter 23: Subtle

The day after talking with Magpie, Lilijoy felt a great sense of relief. Finally she had someone who she could confide to on the Inside. A friend even. She hadn’t told her everything of course. She didn’t want to place Magpie in any unnecessary danger, and just knowing about her system would be enough to do that. Plus, the girl seemed nervous all the time, her heart always beating just a little faster than seemed necessary to Lilijoy. She would hate to add even more stress to her life.

The best thing was that they had a common enemy. She was sure that Magpie would be able to help, at least a little, since she knew more than Lilijoy about the clans, and lots of sneaking-around type things besides that. Maybe she could help her figure out where to even start.

The best plan Lilijoy had come up with was to drive a hovercar up to Columbia and try to find a Sinaloa outpost. Then she would somehow capture someone, and use her system to force them to tell her where other outposts were, maybe where they kept prisoners.

It wasn’t much of a plan, but that’s what she was going to do if Magpie didn’t have a better idea.

In the meantime, she would redouble her efforts to grow stronger. She needed to find Rosemallow and ask for some more weapons training, and work more on her Stealth skill. The other classes were secondary, much as she loved them. Except maybe Acrobatics. She felt a little guilty, because she hadn’t been able to attend that one yet. She decided that should be her first priority of the day; then she would know if it was worth her time, this term anyway.

The morning passed quickly. Acrobatics class was… interesting. While in her other classes, Lilijoy was just another student, in Acrobatics class she was a prodigy. She became the center of attention within minutes of the class beginning when she completed the complicated sequence of tumbling, jumping and parkour that was supposed to take them the entire term, having seen it demonstrated once.

The instructor, a compact and muscular bald headed man with a handlebar mustache, had been angry with her at first, taking her for an advanced student purposefully mocking the class. Only when she showed him her pared down character sheet did he realize that she was there in good faith.

“I’ve never seen a Kinesthetic Awareness score that high, period, let alone in a human,” he said. “You may be at the apprentice level, but you won’t stay there for long.”

His words turned out to be prescient. By the end of the class time, she had reached Journeyman rank.

“Look,” he said, as she was about to leave the training area. “I don’t know what you would get by coming back to this class. You need to be around the best of the best. If I were you, I’d spend an experience term living with tree folk in the canopies of the Southern Jungles. They have KA scores around one-twenty, at least those I’ve met in my time here. The kind of acrobatics we train here at the Academy is what they can do by the time they’re five. You’d fit right in.”

Even though the instructor deprecated the training, Lilijoy had learned some valuable skills, including a technique for falling long distances safely and another for swinging her body around a horizontal pole. Both techniques had the familiar feeling of rediscovering something she had once known, which let her know that her system was at work. She figured the Tao system was responsible for her acrobatics abilities, much as it was behind her knowledge of plants and animals. And medicine. And pretty much everything else she knew.

It continued to be a disconcerting thought. How much of her was actually her? Even without access to much of Stage two, her integration to all the knowledge in the web archive from the twenty-first century was nearly seamless. She was an empty vessel that the Tao system had filled, or so it felt. There was enough continuity of consciousness that she still felt like the ignorant gob from the piles who couldn’t even speak in first person, but was she actually some weird amalgamation of the collective thoughts of millions of people who lived two hundred years ago, telling herself she was still Lilijoy from the Amazon wastes?

The thought made her oddly homesick. She had been avoiding thoughts of home and the tribe for the better part of a week now, actively repressing such thoughts, to be honest. There was a can of worms, a Pandora’s box waiting for her back at Night’s Safety, with implications too difficult to process emotionally and intellectually. At least, that had been how she felt when she first conceived the notion that her tribe, or some portion thereof, were Tao System users. Or former Tao System users. She replayed the conversation with Jiannu that had given her the notion, feeling a twinge of sadness as she heard Jiannu’s comforting voice.

“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.”

“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 described her tribe. Empty shells, unable to do anything but maintain physical survival. Some of them, Timout for one, retained some memories, some hints of personality. Grabby also had sometimes shown flashes of lucidity, at times acting caring and concerned for Lilijoy and Attaboy. Others were almost robotic in their routines and mannerisms. Pinton, her personal nemesis as a child, had possessed a single minded desire for Lilijoy and Attaboy to run and exercise. Every morning had been the same.

“Get up, maggots!” he would yell, kicking them if they were slow to leave the warm, damp confines of Night’s Safety. “Those laps aren’t going to run themselves!”.

Then he would force them to run in large circles in the dry wastes around their home, sometimes for hours, until whatever urge to inflict pain on them had been satisfied. Now that she had been training with Rosemallow, she had a little more context for this behavior. In fact, now that she thought about it, Rosemallow had even asked if she had been trained on the Outside, due to her high Endurance stat.

After the morning run, there was usually some other kind of torment. Lilijoy and Attaboy, near collapse from hunger and dehydration, would be forced to climb trees, or jump around waving their arms. They had learned that if they pretended to faint, and ignored Pinton’s kicks and yelling, he might leave them alone, wandering off to Night’s Safety where he would sit silently in the dark. As long as they stayed away from him for the rest of the day, he wouldn't bother them again. It only worked in the afternoon though. If they pretended to drop from exhaustion in the morning, he would yell and beat on them until they got back to their feet.

Looking back, Lilijoy was amazed she had survived her childhood. Luckily, Pinton’s kicks and beatings always stopped short of true injury. And sometimes, Pinton would fixate on other members of her tribe for a time. She and Attaboy were the youngest members, but there were others who held a similar status below the Bros. They had learned to get up well before sunrise to avoid Pinton’s attention, which usually worked for them. When Attaboy and Lilijoy tried that though, Pinton would hunt them down. She had always assumed it was because they were the youngest, but perhaps he had some other reason buried deeply in his rigid program.

Her theory explained so much, but begged so many questions. How did her tribe come to be? Why was there an isolated population of Tao System users, and what disaster had befallen them? She had been given a population of nanobots that used to be a part of Emily Choi’s sytem, had been named after Emily too, and she would bet the same had occurred to Attaboy, only with Atticus Choi’s system. There had to be a connection to Henry and Gabriella Choi, the parents of Emily and Atticus, the creators of the Tao System.

Somehow, the tribe, the Tao System zombies, as she had begun to think of them, were still following programming from a bygone era, and it had resulted in the creation of echos of the Choi children. Were she and Attaboy even the first? Maybe every time children were born in the tribe, they were named after Emily and Atticus and given the System. Except the way that it all unfolded was so bizarre. Why wait until they were on the verge of death? Why exile them with no help or chance to understand what was happening?

If it had happened before, Lilijoy could easily imagine why there was no sign of it in what modern records there were. She should have died and Attaboy probably should have died too, based on her memory of his appearance as Grabby carried him off. She certainly believed he had at the time. Maybe there were tiny skeletons of former Lilijoys and Attaboys scattered around the Amazon wastes.

Putting these morbid thoughts and the mysteries associated with them aside, she forced her mind back to the present. After Acrobatics, she had gone in search of her trainer. Searching fruitlessly for a time, she realized it had been forever since she had visited Professor Anaskafius and made her way to his office. There, he taught her how to supplement her Scan skill with her Deception skill and Charm to overcome other’s attempts to hide or change their information.

Next was Subtle Arts class. She made her way through the dark area and into the adjoining room with the four paths. Now that she had a better idea of how to use Magi skills from her experience at the corrupted village, she had no problem extending her Mana to her feet to suppress sound and pass through the paths. Then she realized that this would not be an option Outside, and went back and practiced until she could do it without Mana. The nightingale floor was still the most difficult, but Magpie’s suggested trick of sliding on her back worked well to keep the creaking calls of the wood to a tolerable minimum.

“Good work,” came the anonymous instructor’s voice. “Of course, now everyone here who has been paying attention will know the trick too.”

It seemed a strange mindset to Lilijoy. Why wouldn’t the instructor want the students to know how to pass the class? As if reading her thoughts, the disembodied voice continued.

“There’s a reason we call it The Subtle Arts. It’s not just techniques that you are learning, but a way of thinking and acting. You must learn to hide not only your body, but also your knowledge and abilities. See, but be not seen. Think, but be not thought of. The edge owns the center like darkness surrounds the light. To be subtle is to be the threshold, the shadow, the unknown and unforeseen.”

That seemed like a lot of trouble to Lilijoy. Who would want to live their life like that, always hiding who they were and what they could do? Though she couldn’t argue that it wasn’t exactly what had been forced on her by her need to hide her system.

“So what do I do now?” she asked.

“Now the fun begins. Return to the first room, where the students who cannot see are fumbling in the dark. If you would look down at your tunic, you will notice you have five sticky patches that I placed on you earlier. Your mission is to place them on the persons of students without being noticed."

Lilijoy gathered up the red rectangles from her front, feeling a bit sheepish they had been placed without her notice. Their silky material weighed nothing in her hand.

“It is possible that others have the same mission. Your secondary task is to remove as many of their tags as you can find. At the end of class, there will be a tally of those successfully placed, worth three points, and those you have removed, worth one point. This will continue for the remaining classes of the term, and at the end, the person with the highest score will receive a prize.”

“Can I come to more than one class a day?”

“Yes, but you only get five patches to place per day.”

“What if I get caught?”

“That’s up to the person who catches you.”

Lilijoy went to the dark room, deep in thought. What the instructor had said to her about staying at the edges still resonated. She didn’t think it was an act of random philosophy, not anymore. It was more like instructions for how to play this game well. If she just went around in the dark placing patches on the unseeing students, she would be plainly visible to anyone else playing the game. They could follow her around and remove her patches as she placed them. The room wasn’t dark for everyone. She needed to stay at the edges of the huge room and watch for others placing the patches.

With all of her sensory abilities combined, the room was quite clear, though it did get a bit blurry outside of a thirty foot radius or so, where her passive echolocation stopped contributing. She spent several minutes with her back against the wall, watching students stumble around. Their persistence was admirable, especially since the instructor had said it could take them several terms to even earn the basic low light vision ability. It didn't seem likely there were many students playing the game yet, but she had missed a day of class on her scenario trip, and the classes ran all day long too, so there was no way of guessing how many competitors she would have at this point. Some would probably be doing what she was, hanging back to observe, while others would be less subtle.

The unseeing students were anything but subtle. Lilijoy watched, wincing occasionally as they bumbled around, hitting their shins and stubbing their toes on various obstacles. How can they not have discovered a basic foot sweeping technique? she asked herself, as she watched a student flip over a low railing and land on their back with a curse.

A strategy came to her. A marvelously subtle strategy. She walked up to the formerly prone student, who had regained his feet.

“Keep your weight on the back leg,” she hissed, almost inaudibly. “Make circles in front of you with your front foot and hand on each step, always ending with the moving foot six inches in front of where it was.”

The student looked around, startled. “Are you the instructor?” he whispered back.

“I’m your instructor at the moment,” she hedged. “Go on, try it.”

The boy, a large warrior-looking fellow to Lilijoy’s eyes, did as she asked.

“Slower,” she whispered. “Let me guide you.”

She reached up to his arm and showed him the correct movement.

“Keep your eyes open, but also listen. There are echos all around us.”

With these parting words, she moved off to find another student to help. After she had visited several of the clumsiest, she planted her first patch, while keeping an eye on her previous pupils. Sure enough, she saw other students move from various places of concealment to look for any patches she had planted. Now she knew who her competition was. As a bonus, she had already removed three patches from the students she assisted.

By the end of class, she had made contact with twenty students, planted two more patches as she helped, and removed six. Often, her competitor’s planted patches were easy to find, as they glowed faintly from the residual heat of the planter’s hand. When she returned to the room with four paths, the invisible instructor complimented her strategy.

“But,” he said, “This will not help you improve your skills much. There is one more rule, that is usually revealed once more students are participating. A patch placed on a competitor is worth eight points, if they have not noticed by the end of class. The patches will slowly fade from view, so that they can’t just look over themselves near the end of class. It will also cost you eight points if you are found to have a sticker on you. Over the rest of term, class will be ending at increasingly random times, so don’t get complacent.”

“Doesn’t it give me an unfair advantage to know this before the other students?”

There was a long silence. “Who says you are the first to know? You might want to check your back.”

Lilijoy quickly reached over her shoulders and around her sides, before finally just pulling her arms in and turning her tunic around completely. There was no sign of any sticker.

“Very funny,” she said to the air around her. There was no reply.