Interlude: Nykka

“Mumo!”

Attaboy’s voice interrupted Nykka’s kata. She turned to glare at him, bokken still over her head.

“You look just like him. Aside from the tails and the whole dog face thing.”

She sighed. “He’s not a dog. He’s a kitsune, a fox.”

Attaboy stood there for a moment with a blank look on his face. She could only assume he was researching the topic.

“Umm, I think kitsune are kind of supposed to be furry. And, well, you know. Foxes.”

“He got stuck. Tried to advance his bloodline with a spell or something. Anyway, did you just come here to yell his name at me?”

“I guess I did. I’ve been trying to figure out why you made your eyes white like that, and then I met Mumo, and it all clicked. He says hello by the way.”

She felt her face soften, just a bit. It had been a year since she last talked to Mumo, and she missed him.

“Please say hello back.” She lowered the bokken. “Be nice to him. He can help you more than you might think.”

“Yeah, he was sort of a jerk to me, until I told him about you. Then it was smooth sailing.”

“So you made it through the Trial. How’d it go?”

He shook his head. “What a mindfuck. Those poor kids. Still, I did well enough I guess.”

Guess I’m talking to grown-up Attaboy.

She had come to realize that Attaboy had two different faces he showed to the world. One was an innocent, if not ignorant gob boy, while the other… well, among other things, the other swore a lot more.

“Already learned to keep your results close to your chest, eh?”

“Seems like a good idea. You think it’ll get back to the good doctor that I’m at the Academy?”

“Sooner or later. Please tell me you used a different name Inside.”

“Of course. I called myself ‘Finch’.”

Chapter 3: Plane

The ice tunnels were more impressive the second time around, certainly less horrible. The lights of the craft reflected from every surface, a display of dazzling sparks flashing off of the blurring walls.

It was a terrible place for satellite reception, but an excellent place for reflection.

Lilijoy was glad she had the opportunity to slow down, to turn off the racing circuits of her brain and experience life at the pace nature intended. She imagined it was familiar to the way the people of earlier times deliberately consumed ethyl alcohol to interfere with their neural function.

Sometimes it just felt right to turn off your brain.

She had spent the last day preparing to leave, saying goodbye to Savitri and her room, saying goodbye to the monastery and Cochabamba.

And of course to Marcus.

Her thoughts drifted over their last conversation again, so full of new information, new pieces to the puzzles that surrounded her. She still couldn’t decide if it meant that she should return to the Piles or run away from them. She didn’t feel like there was a great risk of somehow losing her identity at this point, but there were still many unknowns; venturing back there could expose her to unpredictable dangers.

She was much more worried about Attaboy, assuming he was even alive. She could only guess that his system had far more extensive memories and experiences belonging to Atticus Choi. She had been fortunate, in a way, to receive a cast-off hand-me-down of a system.

It was frustrating to work from so many assumptions. Maybe Attaboy didn’t have Atticus’ system at all. For all she knew, he had the same thing she did, with memories from Emily. It was just…

It’s like what Rosemallow said, that I never did anything or had an original thought in my life before I got the system.

She knew that wasn’t really true, but it certainly wasn’t completely false either. It was as if she had been raised to have as little in her mind as possible, not even words for gender for goodness sake, while her body was trained to be strong.

I didn’t even speak in the first person. There was no ‘I’.

Except the whole thing was twisted somehow. She also grew up in a harsh environment full of toxins and mutagens, with inadequate nutrition. It was as if someone was following a plan to replace Emily blindly, with no acknowledgment of the current realities. Of course, that someone would have to be working with or through Mooster and Grabby.

She decided to pull up her new system status, hoping that looking at it would help her decide what to do next, to see if she was ready. Plus, it was still fun to see it all laid out.

STATUS: Disciple

Stage One:

Nanobody count: 2,672,891

Integration: 96%

Stage Two:

Replication Units: 382

FLOPS Equivalent: 10^17

Integration: 68%

Secondary/Support: 4 identified

Communications: Stealth Mode

Sensors: Passive

RE Reserves: 0

Personal Quantification: Ranking Display

Options | Logs | Data | Reference | Menu

She hadn’t changed the status screen much at all from the original system, mostly because she liked the reminder of how far she had come. She could still remember the days of “URGENT ATTENTION NEEDED” and it felt great to see the huge numbers she had achieved.

Similarly, the ranking display...

Tao System Ranking Display

Rank 1 (Senses): 10

Can advance with physical augmentation

Sight: 10

Hearing: 10

Smell/Taste: 8

Expand molecular database

Touch: 10

Proprioception: 9

Improve fine motor skills

Synergy: No longer defined

Rank 2 (Brain): 10

Rank 3 (Reflexes): 9/10

Myelin enhancement in progress (83%)

Unconscious response to stimuli ~7x

(Biological/Redundant)

Rank 4 (Blood): 2/2

Oxygen carrying capacity ~ 30x

Rapid clotting for injuries ~ 10x

Limited independent motility

Rank 5 (Skin): 4/10

Vital areas fully protected

Abdominal coverage 50%

Work on :

Flexibility for legs, arms and face

Chemical synthesis and secretion

Rank 6-10

Requires secondary system

Rank 11 Brain II:

Internal subjective time: ~x30

External subjective time: ~x10

Parallel Narrative Consciousness: 2+

External data accessible at speeds comparable to memory

Work on

Background anticipatory modeling

Dedicated sub-processing units

Connections, dependencies and meaning in external data sets

Rank 12 Medical/Tissue:

Current repository 872 Billion Grade 4 equivalent

Precancerous cells eliminated

Environmental effects mitigated

Genetic damage inventoried

Up to moderate tissue damage repaired ~x20

Work on rapid skin pigment control

Rank 13 External

Satellite storage system

Work on:

Improve external viability

Purposeful mobility and projection

Entangled particle communication system

These days, it served as a combination of trophy shelf and to-do list. She was especially enjoying her work on the med bugs. They weren’t incredibly sophisticated, compared to the Tao system flowers, and for that reason, she was able to understand them and tinker with them more easily. She was fairly sure that she would be able to duplicate their core functions with Tao system units, once she understood them better. In fact, she was so close that she wondered why Henry or Gabrielle hadn’t done it already.

Unfortunately, after the review of her status she still didn’t know where to go first.

Maybe it’s anxiety about Averdale.

She knew she could easily turn off her fears about the coming infiltration attempt. In fact, it was tempting to do so. However, she also knew that those fears were grounded in reality, and she was reluctant to disable a legitimate warning process from her deeper mind.

Her ability to split her consciousness had given her a great appreciation of the unconscious processes in her brain. There were still many times each day when she relied on intuition to aid her thought process, and intuition, after all, was just another word for the work the brain does when it isn’t telling itself stories.

It fascinated her that agency and creativity didn’t always come from the same place, and that she seemed to solve many of her most difficult problems when she wasn’t thinking about them, even as more and more processing power came under her deliberate control. Consciousness, as far as she could tell, was inherently linear, and the real trick was deciding how that linear strand could weave in and out of the greater pool of time-independent associations her mind was still forming.

As far as her feelings about Averdale, well, those seemed entirely reasonable. The events of the instanced travel were encouraging, everything after the vorpal crows anyway. Her little band had faced their challenges, and for the most part they had done well. It didn’t change the fact that they were vastly underpowered and underinformed.

Though to hear Magpie talk about it, they knew everything, or rather, she knew everything they needed in order to succeed. That didn’t give Lilijoy any confidence at all, of course. If she examined the ebb and flow of her neurochemicals in response to various thought stimuli, it wasn’t hard to see the real source of her anxiety.

She needed to confront Magpie.

Turning off her anxiety helped, but it was only a temporary measure. There was a real injury there, and turning off the resulting pain didn’t make it go away. It needed to be addressed, should have been addressed before they even left on the journey.

No, that’s not fair. I decided to raise her sunk costs on this expedition, make it a greater crisis for her. She needs to have met with her connections and made the final arrangements. If she is planning a betrayal, she needs to feel like she is on the cusp of success. It’s the best leverage I have.

She still had at least twelve hours remaining of her ice tunnel journey, so she pulled up the scenes from the granite-topped peak, the mirrored plane, eager for the chance to re-experience them at her leisure and forget her troubles. Soon she was standing at the edge of sparkling black that stretched to the horizon and joined the sky. At her side stood Jessila, with Skria perched on one broad shoulder, and Magpie, who crouched to test the surface with outstretched hand.

The stillness of the moment felt like frozen time, but all too soon, Magpie’s hand knocked upon the solid surface.

“It’s really stone.” she whispered.

Lilijoy had to test it for herself. She reached out with her foot and took a first step onto the surface, still not quite believing she wouldn’t fall through to the sky below.

“Is it slippery?” asked Skria, also in a whisper. It seemed none of them dared to break the quiet, to challenge the soft hiss of the wind with their coarse voices.

“Not really,” replied Lilijoy as she committed the other foot. “I bet it would be if it were wet though.”

“Has anyone heard of anything like this?” asked Magpie.

No one responded, and by silent consensus, the party walked out over the stars.

They hadn’t walked for long before Skria called out softly.

“Lights ahead.”

Lilijoy couldn’t see what she meant, being much closer to the stone. She froze, as did they all.

“It’s coming this way, on the ground.”

It almost felt like sacrilege to Lilijoy, calling this pristine expanse ‘ground’.

She saw the light a few moments later, a dim pool of radiance just above the surface. It meandered slowly in their direction.

“Should we run?” hissed Magpie, backing away.

Skria gasped, and Lilijoy nearly bolted before she realized it was wonder and not fear she heard in her friends voice.

She stood on her toes and craned her neck, to see a circle of light several feet across... no a wheel of pale green luminescence with dozens of spokes, gently turning. While the light was visible just above the surface, the wheel itself was just under the stone, drifting toward their feet.

“Don’t touch it!” This was Magpie too, of course.

It wasn’t hard to avoid the wheel as it drifted lazily in their direction. It moved no more than half a foot every second. Though it did seem to be following them.

“I think it likes you, Jess.” Lilijoy heard Skria whisper.

It was true. The wheel had adjusted its course several times to stay close to Jessila, ignoring Magpie and Lilijoy.

“Here comes another,” Magpie whispered.

The second glowing creature to arrive was also radial in shape, a nine pointed star only a bit smaller than their first visitor. The party kept walking at a slow pace, and the two beings did their best to follow, quickly falling behind. It was no matter though, for soon another arrived, and then several more, in a variety of symmetrical shapes, all glowing just a bit brighter than the reflection of the night sky above. Soon the girls were stepping over and around dozens of them.

Later, she would feel silly for taking so long to realize, though it was entirely understandable, due to her limited height and the scale of the whole thing.

“These are plankton! Really, really huge phytoplankton.”

And well, phytoplanton were plants, more or less, and Lilijoy was Lilijoy, so the next step was pretty much inevitable.

She reached out.

There was contact. Just a flash of the simplest organism she had yet to contact. There was no other mind, only a single drive to absorb, feed from the ambient resource. It wasn’t even hunger, just an impulse to move to where the flowing source was strongest.

And then it was over.

“Lily! What are you doing,” Skria yelled.

Each one of the glowing beings moved toward Lilijoy where she stood, clustering around her feet. She stood at the center of a swarm of living mandalas, their light cast upwards onto her small form.

It was glorious.

“It’s okay, everyone.” she said. “They’re harmless. They feed on ambient Mana, probably from the starlight. They aren’t nearly strong enough to take any from us. But watch this!”

She sent a trickle of prana into the stone around her feet. The mandalas shook and danced, jostling to get closer to the rich source of nutrients. Their glow brightened and several began to divide on the spot. Lilijoy began to dance in a circle and the bright wheels and stars traced her feet, spinning and vibrating in response to her movement.

“Um, Lily, I hate to be the downer here,” said Magpie, interrupting the moment. “But aren’t plankton kind of at the base of the food chain?”

As if summoned by her words, dozens of new creatures appeared out of the night, just at the edge of Lilijoy’s senses. She immediately moved into flash and sped her thoughts to assess the latest threat, focusing on the closest. It slid over the stone, exactly how she couldn’t tell, a carpet of waving spikes as tall as her. A faint susurration accompanied its movement, movement, she came to realize, that was not very much faster than that of the giant plankton, a slow walk at the fastest.

Still, those spikes looked nasty. Thin and long, they looked like something that might break off in a wound. They rippled down the creature’s back in waves, reminding her of Professor Anaskafius’ quills writ large.

She split off a small part of her mind to translate her thoughts into intelligible speech for the slow people around her.

“Let’s withdraw from the plankton.” Mentally, she was already calling them mandalas. “We don’t want to get surrounded by these new things.”

She began to follow her own plan, and the others stood and stared at her for an eternity.

I never knew that thinking fast would make everyone around me so annoying! I’ve got to figure out how I can communicate more efficiently.

It occurred to her that they might not even be aware of the new arrivals. Still, they slowly turned and began to follow her. She had plenty of time to think since even her own movements were molasses.

Maybe we can work out some codes in advance. Like if I make a certain sound, it means retreat. Then another for drop to the ground and so forth. Then we can drill to get their reaction times faster.

She knew that she was always going to be the quickest to react, and she had the most effective senses as well. It only made sense for her to take on the role of the early warning system for the group.

Lets see, she thought as her leg rose through space to take another step. How much would I need to raise my Flash so that this wasn’t so annoying? Every twenty points adds another hundred percent. I guess I’d need Flash of about eighty to even get halfway. That’s forty-three more points, so if I’m efficient, I won’t get there until level fifty-three. I wonder if I could use my direct points all at once? That’s probably what they do, ignore the leveling restriction. I wonder if they raise the trait by twenty, or if they’re divided by the starting point cost?

By this point, her knee was beginning to descend.

Still, there’s probably something better I could do with them. If they raise the trait directly, it would make more sense to use them on something expensive, like Charm: Sentients.

Jiannu, what do you think? she asked.

I think you need to figure out a better way to handle the extra time than working on your character sheet or talking to me during combat situations, Jiannu replied.

What about boosting our patience?

Patience is a tricky quality, not so much an emotion on its own. Its more like a specific range of several overlapping emotions combined with flow, focus and a rich internal life.

Well that’s the problem. I have so much time that I don’t need focus, and the task environment is chaotic and not conducive to flow.

I think you should practice anticipatory modeling.

Anticipatory modeling was a major item on the list of Stage Two abilities she wanted to develop.

Perfect.

She captured her current external sensory data and created an internal space for her model. All of the mandalas and the new creatures appeared, along with Bayesian projections of their current path based on their past movements. Her internal sense of time lurched forward as her new model consumed her processing capabilities.

It's a good thing those creatures are slow.

She estimated that if she wanted to predict more than a couple seconds of future events with so many variables, she would end up thinking too slowly to react to her prediction. In this case it didn’t matter. The new creatures were converging on the mandalas and seemed to be ignoring her party.

I really need a name for these things. Spiky slug urchins? Splurchins?

She used Scan, but nothing came to her.

Huh. Splurchins it is, I guess.

She pulled herself out of her enhanced state and communicated the new information to the others as they all continued to retreat. When they had reached a good distance, they turned to watch the newly christened splurchins begin to feed on the mandalas. At least that’s what seemed to be happening; the creatures worked almost like giant erasers as they passed over the glowing circles, leaving only darkness in their wake. That and a trail of brilliant, gleaming granite from thousands of cilia that polished and cleaned the granite underneath them.

What an amazing ecosystem. These creatures must be responsible for shaping this entire area. I wonder if they do it to attract their food source?

She was a little worried about the impressive spikes though. Clearly, there were predators that threatened the splurchins.

This is the Inside, and instanced travel after all. It’s only a matter of time before there’s something that will threaten us.

***

After several hours of walking across the starry plane, the group was still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“It’s not that I want to be attacked,” Magpie was saying. “But I can’t help feeling that the longer it takes, the worse it’s going to be.”

“It’s still just the first day,” said Skria.

“I like this place.” added Jessila.

Lilijoy wasn’t sure if the comment or its content were more surprising. Jessila hadn’t been speaking much since their travels started.

“What do you mean, Jess?” she asked.

She shrugged. “It’s calm. Deep.”

Lilijoy felt it too. “Do you think it’s our high earth affinity?”

“Don’t know. Maybe.”

Their conversation, such as it was, was interrupted by a new sound, a growing drum roll of clicks.

“Here we go,” Magpie said. “It’s about time.”