Interlude: Attaboy

The boy sneered confidently, but Attaboy could smell his fear.

“Go!” barked the trainer.

The boy slid his front foot forward and lowered his wooden sword. Attaboy could see his balance shifting, preparing a lunge.

He moved, flowing into the path of the boy’s blade, gently guiding it with his own. Then he was past, the boy behind him doubled over.

“Stop! What the hell was that, Manuel? My eighty-year-old grandmother could have used the opening you left.”

Attaboy agreed, though he was impressed by the instructor’s grandmother.

Dijiann spoke to him. Remember, you must conceal what you can do.

That was nothing, replied Attaboy. This boy is slow.

Then adjust your speed to his. Doctor Quimea will understand we are deceiving him if you advance too quickly.

Attaboy sighed. It was hard not to show what he could do to these tall, sneering people. In his dreams, he was tall, like them. His dreams were teaching him to be strong, giving him skills and abilities he had possessed in his earlier life.

That was how he had finally learned to cultivate a few days past.

Dijiann had explained it all to him.

His real name was Atticus.

Chapter 28: Petrified

Her stomach itched. It was an almost fiery sensation, a storm of nerve endings blasting their irritation to her brain. Then she realized her face and scalp were itching too. The skin under her frantically scratching hand felt oddly stiff and lumpy, and Lilijoy felt a moment of panic before she realized it must be the new skin bugs at work. In addition to the itch, she felt stiff, sore, hungry, and her mouth felt mossy.

Might have overdone it in the pod this time, she thought.

The pods weren’t really designed for seven days of continuous immersion, but she had pushed it that far in her desire to maximize her training time Inside.

Maybe I should log out to cultivate, at least every other time.

It was a bit weird coming back to a body so full of uncomfortable sensations. Her teeth were still coming in, and her bones ached with what she hoped were growing pains. Her muscles were sore from the stimulation her system provided in accordance with her Inside activities. Never mind the odd sensations from the top layer of her skin being pushed apart to make room for the skin bug’s armor.

Perhaps it was due to the lack of aches and pains, but her new hand was the last thing she noticed. She had been using it without thought, still accustomed to her Inside body. It felt almost like her real hand, just a bit numb or cold, the fingers stiff with a tiny lag between impulse and action. Her grip was strong though, at least as strong as her real hand.

I wonder if it will keep improving, she thought. A powerful wave of gratitude to Savitri swept over her.

She found a ration bar that she had put aside, and a container of stale water. A quick adjustment of her augsenses made the bar taste like chocolate, and the water cold and fresh. “Thanks flowers,” she murmured as she ate on her cot, thinking on what to do next. Her fingers rubbed the palm of her right hand, and she felt a brief panic before she realized that, of course, Nandi's boon wouldn't be there.

A run around the abandoned city would be just the thing for a body restless from a week of confinement, she decided.

She made her way out of the monastery and down the hill to the city below, savoring the chill as her muscles warmed to the activity. The difference between her Inside and Outside bodies continued to grow, she noted, despite the efforts of her system. Isometric stimulation and med bugs could only do so much.

It was late afternoon, and the dark red sky cast a pink glow upon the ice and snow. The only sound was the wind pushing icy crystals through the broken windows of the buildings all around. Despite her exertion, the cold nipped her fingers and toes, and she expanded her peripheral blood vessels a bit, sacrificing some core temperature.

As she ran, her thoughts kept bouncing between her concerns over Attaboy, Anda and her divided mind. She increased her pace to escape her troubles, leaping over drifts and dodging fallen rubble. Her body warmed and her muscles burned, but still her breath came without effort. Focusing on the distant glacier covered mountains rising over the city, she pushed herself fast and then faster, until she felt the beginnings of oxygen deprivation force her breath to catch at the cold air.

Abruptly, her new stamina collapsed, and so did she. She stumbled into a frozen drift she had meant to hurdle and landed on her side, lungs heaving to capture the air her body suddenly craved.

Guess the blood bugs just ran out of oxygen, she thought as she stared at the side of an apartment building. I need a better way to monitor what’s happening with them.

After another minute, she recovered enough to drag herself out of the biting breeze and into the lobby level of the apartment building. Fake palm trees coated with a thin layer of frost stood proudly among the discarded belongings of the former inhabitants and lobby furniture. She collapsed onto a frozen couch cushion, and wondered how many bodies were in the apartments above her. Unlike most major cities, Cochabamba’s collapse had been slow and somewhat orderly, but she had no doubt that some percentage of the inhabitants remained in the city to this day, their bodies frozen where they lay.

Putting such morbid thoughts from her mind, she raised her core temperature and circulated her blood vigorously before descending to her soul space.

Might as well see about a blood bug monitor while I recover.

There stood the Tree of Thorns, surrounded by the statues she had created to memorialize her experiences. She wondered what the soul space was actually for. Surely it had a use beyond a gallery for her memories and a foyer to her mind space.

The Tao System’s creator, Dr. Henry Choi, had built in many parallels from Taoist mysticism, both high and lowbrow. The process of cultivation in the Korean and Chinese fantasy novels he must have enjoyed as a youth had influenced many little details of the nanotechnological system he built, and she was sure there were many Easter eggs scattered throughout that she might never discover.

At some point a week ago, she had realized that the entire approach to growing the system was built on a pun between agricultural cultivation and mystical cultivation. She mentally bumped up the priority of reading some classic wuxia novels from the early twenty-first century. Maybe she would even find a clue or two.

She pulled up Henry Choi’s biography from the web archive. There were several biographies from various times and locations up to the last year the archive was updated, 2069. The latest, and most comprehensive was from the Tao Systems Technology website, archived in 2062. When she had first found the site, she had been disappointed to find that it was a compilation of platitudes and slogans like “Finding a brighter future, together!” It contained almost no information about what the company actually did, and hosted only a few old papers by its founders, Henry and Gabrielle Choi, along with their biographies. She read through Henry Choi's bio for the umpteenth time, skipping the boring sections.

Born in 2020, Gwangju, Korea, moved to Connecticut, went to MIT, blah, blah, blah, patents nano this, patents nano that.

The bulk of his patents were for obscure nanotechnology quantum computing manufacturing techniques that Lilijoy was sure were very important. She had found his name on a list of “wealthiest Korean-American immigrants,” at some point, so he obviously made some good money along the way.

Met and married his wife Gabrielle in 2053, founded Tao Systems Technology with her in 2060 to make the world a better place for their children. Guess that didn’t work out did it?

Gabrielle’s bio was much the same. She was born Gabrielle Wilson in 2024 in Elyria, Ohio, did a bunch of science stuff and ended up the chief technology officer for a startup that built the first nanoscale integrated neurological interfaces, before they were bought out by Tesla. As far as Lilijoy could tell, Wilson and Choi were both billionaires when they met in 2053.

It was odd that two brilliant and wealthy individuals left such a relatively small footprint in the web archive. All mention of their joint company disappeared around 2062, well before the events that finally destroyed the internet completely. Lilijoy was sure that if she wanted to spend a month or two researching the geopolitics and technological history of the twenty-first century, she might have a better idea of exactly what had happened, but her other concerns were far more pressing.

She remained there for several minutes, looking at the small picture of Henry Choi next to the biography. He was wearing a bike helmet and sunglasses, looking over his shoulder at the camera. The picture had obviously been taken on a bike ride, and it surprised Lilijoy to see that he was a large man, with broad shoulders and a thick neck. He hadn’t shown up in any of Emily’s memories that Lilijoy had experienced, and she added that to her list of things to get around to. If she was honest with herself, she was still afraid of Emily’s memories, afraid that they would become her memories. It would be all too easy for Emily’s family to become her family.

Would that really be so bad?

She wasn’t sure anymore.

“Who were you, and why did you put a soul space in your rational twenty-first century technology?” she asked the picture.

The feeling that it was an important, even vital mystery to solve only grew, and it occurred to her that perhaps she was asking the wrong picture. Perhaps the other Choi parent, Gabrielle had been responsible.

She suspected it was her memories from Emily that were biasing her. To Emily, Gabrielle was the white-tiger mom who made her daughter practice piano and worried about what the in-laws thought, not the brilliant scientist and engineer she was to the rest of the world.

What was your role in all of this? she thought, looking at the picture next to Gabrielle’s bio, blond and immaculate in her business attire.

Gabrielle was the one with the background in neural interfaces. As far as Lilijoy could determine, it was her inventions that enabled Tesla to be the first to release a full spectrum sensory replacement system. More than any other person, Gabrielle was responsible for the technology included in every modern Rank One system.

With a sigh, Lilijoy closed the virtual screen and looked around at her statue garden. Her best theory about the function of the soul space was that it served as a kind of continuity bank. Tao System users would inevitably change and grow at a pace far beyond what the evolved human brain was prepared for. Perhaps the soul space was a place where they could reinforce their sense of self, meant to be filled with the memories and meaning that defined them as individuals. It was certainly how she had been using it.

She cast her mind back to her earliest encounters with the soul space. Jiannu had been typically vague about its purpose, mostly just talking about how fun it would be to decorate.

Did she say it like that because that was all I could understand at the time?

She had meant to continue on to her mind space and create a better interface for her blood bugs, but she decided that could wait while she spent some time developing her soul space instead.

I’ve never tested the limits of what I can do here, she thought. Lets see if I can build some better defenses for my self.

As if in response to her thought, wind swept through the leaves of the Tree of Thorns, bending and twisting the eighteen branches.

Did I do that?

She willed it to stop, and the rustling leaves stilled. The darkness pressed in on her from all sides, and her small grove felt like a flickering candle in a sea of black.

No.

She pushed against the dark, breaking through the thin barrier between imagination and creation with a push of will. Her soul space grew brighter, radiant white streaming out from the space itself, pushing back the night. The blacks and grays of the rocky statues deepened, the tree’s silver and deep green intensified, and the ground surface manifested as a flat, dark nothing.

Well, that won’t do.

With another thought and push, the ground sprouted, soft grass, violets and clover hit the center of the space and spread like the ripples of a fallen drop, pushing past the stones to the edge of the light and beyond. In response, the wind returned, stronger than before, curling around the grove, whipping at her hair. A single leaf ripped from the tree and whisked away into the dark.

I definitely didn’t do that. An uneasy feeling swept through her. This was her space.

Wasn’t it?

She willed the wind to stop, and it receded, briefly, before returning even stronger, formed into a howling vortex that overtook the grove. The light, her light, dimmed and shrank, as more leaves were ripped from the twisting branches. The statues all around seemed to writhe and stretch in the flickering light, and she felt herself growing solid, manifesting a body where before was just awareness.

The wind howled, and she could hear voices whispering in it, under it, formless sibilants that coalesced into words.

The Self is not the Soul.

Her new body stiffened as she brought her arm up to shelter from the swirling leaves, and she saw streaks of gray on her forearm. She tried to leave, tried to return to the waking world, but she was held, rooted in place. Her legs were too heavy to lift as she panicked and tried to run, and she saw the stone traveling across her body, crystallizing, setting.

She joined her statues.

For seconds or an eternity she stood as her vision faded, and then with a sharp cracking sensation, she split, and she was looking at a small girl with spiked hair, holding her arm in front of her face to fend off a hostile universe. Heart pounding and hands shaking, she inspected the statue of herself as the wind continued to howl and lights dimmed further. The branches of the tree were whipping, twisting and coiling, and she heard a loud snap as one of them splintered into the air. She ducked as it hurtled overhead, lashing her with trailing thorns.

“Why is this happening!” she wailed, turning to find shelter behind Anda's statue. As she moved, she felt something grab her arm, pulling her around face to face with the stone Lilijoy. Its eyes were open and stared blankly, mouth agape.

She pulled free from her statue's rough grasp and fell on to her back and elbows. Its mouth slowly opened and closed, its hands groped the air where she had been. She felt her body becoming heavy again, and in a moment, stone rushed across her, encasing her in darkness and silence.

Another snap, and she was standing next to two statues of herself, one reaching out, almost pleading, another sprawled on her back, propped up on bent arms with a look of horror on her face.

As she took this in, a heavy branch came tearing free from the Tree of Thorns and smashed into Anda’s statue, breaking its arm and part of the face off. Thorny branches and pieces of stone whirled around her as her mementos destroyed each other in the whirlwind. She collapsed to her knees, sobbing into her hands, ignoring the blows and lacerations from the flying debris.

Her soul space was destroying itself.