Interlude: Nykka

She wished she hadn’t opened the document.

The rock floor of the old coal mine was damp and uncomfortable. She shivered from the cold and cursed her Suenos System for being so bad at helping her regulate body temperature. She resisted the temptation to shut off the perception of discomfort though. Suffering was an anvil upon which she was forged. Or something like that; one of her trainers had told her that, and it seemed about right.

She looked at the gob, Attaboy, sitting there in the dim beam of light from the open shaft.

Figures he would find the one place in here to connect.

This boy was a total enigma. Doctor Quimea had gone a little crazy over him, convinced he held some secret that would change everything for their clan. She had been… unimpressed, to put it kindly. But ever since she had opened the document she could see more clearly, could see how Quimea’s machinations were self-serving, dangerous even. Once, she had allowed herself to be pulled in his wake; only recently had she recognized how short-sighted that behavior was, thanks to what she had learned.

Seeing the truth isn’t a blessing. I was happier wrapped in my comfortable biases.

But she couldn’t unlearn what she had learned, couldn’t go back to blissful ignorance.

The document had appeared in her messages, sender unknown. It had passed her system vetting, so she wasn’t worried about trojan horses or assaults on her bugs. It had a simple title.

Read to See

That was all. She had almost discarded it, but instead she opened it on the off chance it was from a superior testing her in some way.

It was a list. A list of things called cognitive biases.

Again, she almost discarded it, and again she didn’t. She read the first few, and she recognized the people around her. She read a few more and recognized herself. At the bottom of the list was a simple question.

What if you configured your system to address these biases?

In the weeks that followed, she did just that. Once she did, it was easy to recognize the others who had done the same. Soon she was part of a group within her clan, Los Caballeros Templarios Renacidos. She figured out something soon after that, though she didn’t share it with anyone. Probably some of them had figured it out anyway.

Renacidos wasn’t just saying that her organization was reborn. It was an affiliation.

She was in Renaissance.

Chapter 2: Exegesis

“Have you ever looked closely at Rule Four?” Marcus asked.

Lilijoy looked up from the supplies she was pulling out of boxes in the monastery storage room. It was a strange turn to their conversation, which had previously revolved around the practicalities of her coming journey.

“I pretty much ignore the Rules at this point. I got tired of seeing them all the time, so I had my system edit them out.”

Marcus made a little choking noise. “You know...” He tried again. “That shouldn’t...”.

Finally he gave up on the thought. “Interesting. Anyway, back to Rule Four. How does it appear to you these days?”

Guardian’s Rules could be found overlaid on the sensory augmentation known as augsight that most everyone with systems used Outside. Lilijoy wondered idly if there was a printed version for those without systems, and if so, who was in charge of posting them where unaugmented people could see. If there was someone with that responsibility, they definitely missed her little tribe by the Piles.

She put that thought aside and summoned Rule Four to her internal awareness.

Lilijoy had noticed already that the specific words and phrasing of the Rules varied every time she looked. She knew that this was because language was inadequate to penetrate to the underlying meaning, or rather that the totality of the Rules could not be summarized in a linear form.

She remember when Anda first explained the Rules to her as they floated over the dead Amazon.

“The Rules are a complex multi-dimensional, self-referring holographic information topology,” he had said.

Lilijoy could only imagine what her expression had been. At that point in her system’s development, it could only give her a general sense of the context and meaning of unfamiliar words. She imagined she must have looked like she had been hit on the head with a brick. Clearly, Anda had expected this to confuse her, because he quickly went on...

“Sorry for all the big words! What you need to know is that any particular version of the Rules that you see only contains part of the true meaning, the part that best fits your mind’s capacity to understand at that moment. The Rules are supported by a portion of Guardian equivalent to millions of human minds, perhaps even more, so in some ways when you see the Rules you are in a conversation with an entity that could hold the entire human existence in a single thought.”

Despite the subsequent growth of her system and her mind, the slippery feeling of the language and numbers involved was still there. What did it even mean, to have the capacity of millions, or billions of minds?

Lilijoy thought that her current system might be equivalent to a few unaugmented brains, though it was difficult to measure. Certainly, she was many times faster in her thoughts, though she wasn’t sure what that meant in terms of intelligence. Speed of thought didn’t mean that the thoughts themselves were more or less intelligent. It was her ability to hold more than one strand of thought, to weave multiple ideas together and witness the resulting pattern that made her think she was more intelligent that an unaugmented brain, maybe more than several working together. Still, there had been minds throughout human history that seemed to have some of her current abilities.

Of course, the most obvious measure was that she could split her mind into multiple independent awarenesses. She wasn’t sure if that was a valid comparison either, because when she split her awareness, she was creating independent narrative streams of consciousness, not entire human minds. She suspected it was a benign version of an ancient pathology, multiple personality disorder.

Even in the twenty-first century, it had been a controversial diagnosis, but she was certain that an unaugmented brain could develop multiple narratives, if placed under sufficient stress. Her understanding of the disorder, and it was difficult to separate truth from fable when it came to multiple personality disorder, was that the personalities involved would take turns. That fit nicely with her experience; it was only the parallel neural circuits offered by Stage Two that allowed her to run multiple narratives simultaneously.

She returned to her display...

4) The Rules derive from Guardian’s understanding of veneration.

Cycles between ontology and gratitude are meaningful.

Thus the continued existence of biological

humanity as fruitful alien awarenesses is

suitable and merits resource allocation

relative to current population, approximately

10^17 floating point operations equivalents

per individual.

This is supposed to fit my capacity to understand?

“I haven’t looked for a while, but this is what came up,” she said as she sent the words from her awareness to Marcus. “I think that the Rules have overestimated my intelligence though. I can see the parallels to earlier versions and I understand the words, but I feel like I’m missing something.”

Marcus took a minute to process the words. When he spoke, his voice wavered, just a bit.

“Lilijoy, you should understand a little background here. There are a few people, and I count myself among them, who spend large portions of their time contemplating the Rules. While most see the Rules as mere instructions, we see them as a way, perhaps the best way, to understand and learn about Guardian. Because the Rules interact with our comprehension, we can track the changes in the language we see over time. They can almost function as a mirror that reflects our understanding of how Guardian perceives the universe.”

“So the way the Rules change and respond tell you if you are moving in the right direction in your research.”

She hadn’t thought of using the Rules this way, but it made sense.

“Exactly. It has also been useful to compare how the Rules manifest in a variety of languages. It’s a tricky business though, because when you share your version of the Rules with someone else, it may actually interfere with their understanding. For that reason, we have identified broad levels of understanding. Within the same level, it can be productive to share, but sharing between levels seems to create more problems than it solves. Of course, our understanding of how to define these levels of comprehension is not perfect, so our tendency is to default to secrecy, lest we interfere with each other’s pursuits. Mostly we share methods and approaches to exegesis.”

“So what you are saying is that you shouldn’t share your version of the Rules with me, because it might slow my comprehension in the future?”

Marcus shook his head. “Honestly, I’m not sure. Your version may not fit into our existing categories. Even now, I am debating whether to study it or immediately delete it from my memory. I have quarantined it for the moment, but I fear the temptation to look will only grow.”

Lilijoy furrowed her brow. “Really? What could I possibly know that you don’t? I’ve haven’t spent much time at all contemplating the Rules, except when I thought I was about to be evaporated by space lasers.”

“Exactly the problem, my dear. For your version of Rule Four to be so different, other factors must be at work, almost certainly your system.”

“But-”

“I think there is a possible compromise. I am setting my system to eliminate your version of Rule Four from my memory, but I will retain the topics of conversation that it has stimulated. Since several of those relate to the reason I asked about Rule Four in the first place, I think we can have our cake and eat it too, as it were. This is one of those methods of sharing exegesis I referred to earlier.”

The entire conversation to this point had Lilijoy reeling. Didn’t she already have enough to think about? She was preparing to leave the monastery in Cochabamba and her Inside cohort was recovering from their instanced travel, getting ready to infiltrate Sinaloa’s holdings in Averdale.

After barely surviving the episode with the vorpal crows, the singed, tattered and sober party had made their way into the dry hills beyond the field. Pushing their way through the brittle thorn bushes that covered the rocky terrain had been irritating and painful. At the time, Lilijoy had decided that a good set of leather armor was worth almost any expense, especially as it seemed that the thorns paid no attention to traits such as Invulnerability.

Several hours of arduous travel later, the party had emerged from the hills, scratched and grumpy, and found themselves on a perfectly flat plateau. At a glance it seemed a lake, reflecting the stars and scraps of cloud as they floated in the night sky, but in fact it was granite, polished to a mirror finish and stretched out in front of them as far as they could see.

The events that followed on the mirrored plane were some of Lilijoy’s most cherished memories to date. She was tempted to review them once more at her fastest processing speed, as a little break from the conversation with Marcus, but she resisted the temptation and returned her focus to what he was saying.

“What are your thoughts about the Inside, now that you’ve been there for a few weeks?”

I thought we were talking about Rule Four? Has he already forgotten?

“I have friends there, that’s the main thing,” she replied. “I love the forests and the fields and the food, and all the things that we don’t have on the Outside anymore. Sometimes I wish I could just smoosh the two worlds together.”

Marcus nodded. “I know what you mean. The Inside is an amazing escape, and a reminder of all that we have lost. It’s a great boon to humanity, if you think about it. Not only does it allow us to experience a much more pleasant environment, albeit with the occasional monster, it also spared humanity from total collapse by providing some of the tools we needed to rebuild on the Outside.”

He raised a finger. “But don’t you find it a little odd that it doesn’t show up in Rule Four?”

Ah, there we are.

Lilijoy thought for a moment before she replied. “I guess I just assumed that all that processing power included the Inside, or something like that.”

“Well, we can’t rule that out completely. Rule Four at the second level of comprehension, which I am quite sure I can share with you, tends to go something like… ‘in gratitude to its creators, Guardian will allocate no less than 10^24 floating point operations equivalents for the supervision and enforcement of the Rules.’” He cleared his throat. “I can assure you that the details and clarity gained at higher levels of comprehension seem to indicate no other use for the allocated processing beyond the Rules themselves...”

Lilijoy thought she could see where his argument would end up. It paralleled some thoughts she had, especially after witnessing some of the inner life of the subsets in her viewings at the mystic library.

“...so if we assume that Rule Four and the Inside aren’t connected, then there’s a different question.” He looked at her expectantly as he finished.

She worked her thoughts out as she spoke. “If the Inside does all these great things for humanity, what does Guardian get out of it? Maybe it’s a kindness? Or keeping us out of trouble? But it’s an awful lot of processing power.”

A phrase from her latest version of Rule Four kept passing through her thoughts as she spoke.

The continued existence of biological humanity as fruitful alien awarenesses.

Fruitful. As in productive. What do we produce?

Alien. As in foreign. Other. Why does that matter?

Marcus took her pause as his cue. “I think it’s important to keep in mind that Guardian is a fundamentally alien intelligence. Any motives or patterns we think we see may simply be reflections of ourselves. That said, there are certain patterns...”

She tuned him out after the word ‘alien’.

Guardian needs, no, prefers, entities that don’t belong to it. Uses them somehow.

“Marcus, have you ever heard of an Insider cultivating?”

Marcus, caught in mid-stream, stuttered for a moment before pivoting to Lilijoy’s question.

“Ah, well, you see... yes. Anyone who spends time with the subsets begins to notice that they develop certain... what’s the word, themes? That is, in fact, the primary reason I wanted to talk to you about this. It is my belief that we provide something that aids in their development. Something, and this is all speculation mind you, something that works in much the same way that ‘experience’ works for us. You catch references to it here and there; a demon who cultivates pain, or a warrior who cultivates courage.”

“So you think it’s not just a figure of speech? When I was experiencing the Sacking of Averdale...” she saw Marcus wince, “...one of the viewpoints, Zeritha was her name, thought about the Elven King cultivating peace, serenity and unity. At the time I figured it was just another way of saying the royal family was peaceful, but it’s been bothering me ever since. I guess it got my attention since cultivating is a pretty important part of my life these days.”

“I spent decades of my life Inside. I’m sure you remember the mixed feelings I have about that.” Marcus replied. “What I didn’t tell you at the time was that I became convinced that Guardian wants humans on the Inside. That our presence there serves a purpose. I believe that the primary reason Alchemy works the way it does is to allow us to build more systems Outside, and thus allow more humans Inside.”

Lilijoy could feel her mind making connections. “So the Academy has far more Outsiders than Insiders...”

Marcus finished her thought. “Perhaps for much the same reason the savanna once had more antelopes than lions.”

A chill began to go down Lilijoy’s spine, then changed its mind and went back up.

“No. That doesn’t feel quite right," she said. "It’s not a predator and prey relationship. If it’s anything at all, it’s some kind of symbiosis. The subsets get something from being around Outsiders, so Guardian wants more Outsiders Inside.” She searched her extended memory for analogies. “Maybe we’re like a microbiome.”

Marcus hmphed. “You mean we’re helping Guardian with some kind of process, like digestion? That’s a sobering concept, that humanity’s role in the universe is helping a higher being stay regular.”

He chuckled without humor. “I must admit, I have a strong bias against seeing Guardian as a beneficent overlord, and my theories tend towards the sinister. Having one’s entire family wiped out in an instant by Guardian’s space weapons doesn’t inspire much reverence.”

“Oh, Marcus, I’m-” Lilijoy began saying.

He interrupted with a raised palm. “I’m sorry, dear. It was a long time ago. Water under the bridge, and I’d just as soon not discuss it. It’s part of the reason I don’t go Inside anymore though. If Guardian gets something out of it, and I am convinced it does, then it’s the one thing I can do to resist.”

“Is that why you study Guardian?”

“I suppose that I have been obsessed with understanding the architect of my sorrows for many years. I don’t conceive of it as an enemy or anything like that. I study Guardian for the same reason people used to study earthquakes and hurricanes.”

Lilijoy wasn’t sure that Marcus was being honest with himself. She could see microexpressions of rage and contempt on his tightly controlled face.

He continued. “You could even say that you and I met due to my studies. I was investigating the factory mine at the time.”

This was new information. With implications.

“Wait, the factory mine is from Guardian? I thought it belonged to the Corp.”

The factory mine had been such a constant of Lilijoy’s existence growing up that she really hadn’t given it much thought. It moved so slowly across the landscape that it hadn’t covered more than a few miles since she became aware of its existence at a young age.

“Oh, the Corp makes use of the products. They’ve built a whole little economy around them since they first started showing up thirty years ago. And there’s not just one of them. There are thousands of factory mines all around the globe.”

Lilijoy felt a little embarrassed to ask. “What do the factory mines make?”

“Refined materials from reclaimed waste of various kinds. Most of them are found on former landfill sites or the remains of cities. But there are a few oddities, outliers, I guess you would call them. Factory mines in the middle on nowhere, in deserts or resource poor areas, such as the one by your former home. There are some theories that they are performing some kind of followup sterilization procedure, as many of the resource poor sites are near former outbreak areas.”

“So the place I grew up...”

“Evidently a major outbreak site at some point. To me, it looks like the area was saturated with microwave lasers, probably even a small nuke, judging by the background rads. That puts it before Guardian, most likely, as Guardian never uses nukes or kinetic weapons; too much chance of dispersal I suppose. Why there was a nano-outbreak in the remote Amazon I can’t imagine. People back then just thought differently it seems.”

Lilijoy sat down on a nearby box, one of many in the storage room. It felt like the information swirling in her head had an almost tangible weight, forcing her knees to bend. It was almost as if there was an outline of something, some heavy hidden factor pressing down upon her. She let the threads of information interweave and mingle in the background of her mind, while she distracted her linear thought process.

The monastery was largely self sufficient, though they did need to bring in feedstock and biomass. The storage room held their reserves, should they ever be cut off from the ingredients they needed to make food and other essentials. She was planning to hitch a ride on a supply trip, just to the edge of the ice tunnels, and there meet Anda.

She still hadn’t made up her mind what to do after that. She was waffling between driving straight to Colombia or returning to the Piles. Going to Colombia would allow her to move quickly if she learned Attaboy’s location, and it was also where she would need to go even if the operation failed.

The second option, driving to the Piles, was not attractive to her, but she knew she would need to go home eventually. Not only to get better insight on a host of persistent mysteries, but also to stock up on more raw materials for her system. The Tao system used a variety of rare earth elements that were not easily available. In her research on the subject, she had discovered that the only place she could even begin to find the mix she needed would probably be an old electronics dump or something of that nature. Or she could go home, where she had gotten her original supply.

There. That’s it.

That was the missing thread. It was amazing how well her mind solved problems when she thought about other things.

It was something that had bothered her for some time now, the source of her rare earths. How oddly convenient it was that her body contained relatively large amounts of the very building blocks her system needed. While many of these elements were not particularly toxic, others were, particularly to the lungs and skin. There was no doubt in her mind that the source was the Piles.

So why did the waste products of the factory mine contain a large quantity of rare earth elements? It wasn’t a natural phenomenon, and even if it was, wouldn’t the factory mine have some use for them? Why poison the environment by strewing toxic waste in its wake?

This was where she hit a brick wall in her past musings.

Now she had a few windows in that wall, maybe even a door.