Anda is not going to be happy about this.

The interior of the hovercar was a bit crowded compared to before. It seemed that midges had a certain maximum compressibility before bad things started to happen to their fragile little bodies. Lilijoy had about three million new little friends, which had used her entire stock of satellites. That had seemed like a lot, but was just a fraction compared to the vast quantity of unaugmented midges she had left behind. They were mostly males too, which wasn’t ideal if she wanted to make more, but she was working on ways to make them a bit more robust, and hopefully live longer than another day or two.

All together they weighed about thirty pounds, and currently covered every surface of the hovercraft interior, including Anda. All in all, it wasn’t quite the practical solution she had initially envisioned, but she had decided to learn what she could. Perhaps she could find a way to create wholly artificial versions once she had studied these a bit more. She debated sending a message to warn Anda before he woke, but decided that the potential for amusement exceeded the amount of damage he would likely inflict if he flailed around.

She giggled to herself, and settled back in anticipation of some world-class flailing.

Guess I should find out if he’s coming back anytime soon.

She sent off a quick message.

How’s it going in there?

Any luck finding him?

The reply came quickly, and in an unexpected form.

Voice contacted initiated by Anda Kukata Maasai

Accept?

“Hey Anda, what’s up?”

“I can’t believe this actually worked. We’re probably the first people to communicate by voice between worlds!”

It didn’t seem like a particularly impressive feat to Lilijoy. After all, it was an entirely arbitrary limitation they were circumventing.

“It’s not like we’re Bell and Watson or something. Let’s try virtual presence.”

Soon they were facing one another across a table in a nondescript conference room. Anda looked like his Outside self, which was a bit disappointing.

“I know this isn’t that amazing.” he said. “But this is amazing! Any clan would kill to get their hands on this.”

Lilijoy raised an eyebrow.

Anda took in her expression. “Right,” he said, with a mildly apologetic tone. “I guess it’s the least of it.”

“What’s your Inside body doing right now?”

“Sitting on a bench in Academy town. It’s nighttime at the moment, so not exactly a great time to look for Attaboy.”

“You should see if you can go in the Academy. It seems to me like you’re a kind of honorary Insider, so maybe they’ll let you look for him.”

Anda sighed. “I tried that earlier. Insiders may not recognize me as an Outsider, but wards do.”

Well, this is just stupid.

“Okay. Let me know if anything changes.”

She said goodbye and ended the communication.

The emotions of anger and frustration were causing Lilijoy some… difficulties. She could easily change her perception of them, or eliminate them entirely. At one point, she had gone so far as to create an ‘anger’ bar on her internal awareness, which showed her the anger she would be experiencing if her system wasn’t diverting the signals from her biology. Of course, it wasn’t nearly that simple.

During the anger bar experiment, she had realized that her emotions partially relied on a feedback loop with her narrative consciousness. Anger as a steady-state did not exist. However, if she didn’t interact with an emotion, it wasn’t uncommon for a feedback loop to begin which took place outside of her conscious awareness, which then created the illusion of a stable emotional state, or mood. This meant there were really two entirely different modalities for altering her emotions; a narrative suppression which allowed the feedback loops to spin on their merry way, or a more surgical intervention which broke the communications within her organic components responsible for the loop.

She had thought emotion control was a super power, and it was, but it was much more complex than simply deciding not to be angry. Or afraid. Her conversation with Anda and her subsequent thoughts on the matter had only added new layers, where the rational mental states that produced actions corresponding to biological emotions had to be accounted for as well.

Her current situation was an excellent case in point. She had allowed the corner of her mind dedicated to Emily’s memories to stew for several hours now, still indecisive about whether she should communicate with it or just delete it. Removing her biological anxiety led to a certain sense of clarity, but as she had discovered, it was emotions which ultimately fueled decisions. She could choose to elevate her sense of curiosity, which would be the same as deciding to take down the firewall. She could elevate her fear, and that would lead to a fear based outcome. The choice of how to handle her emotions became a proxy for making the actual decision before her, and brought her right around to where she started.

Eliminating all emotions was essentially impossible, and useless besides that. She had tried it several times, but the net result was that it took away her reason for doing anything at all.

I wonder exactly what Magpie was doing, she thought. She must have substituted some kind of goal based parameters that allowed her to act, and channeled her dampened emotions toward those. I suppose I could do the same, if I felt I understood enough to have a specific goal.

Her general goals were clear enough. Acquire information about Guardian, the subsets and the Inside. Build a power base with the ultimate intention of replacing the Corp of Clans with a more equitable system. Restore at least a portion of Earth’s ecosystem. They were grandiose goals, but all possible, she hoped. In truth the first two were in large part to allow the third. The two most likely impediments to her forest were Guardian and the clans. While she didn’t know enough to guess how Guardian might fit in to her future, she was quite certain that the clans would become an even greater problem over time.

Okay. Time to get specific. I need to understand myself, which means I need to understand all this garbage involving Emily and the Tao System, and my tribe. If there are dangers, they are more likely to arise from my ignorance or blind spots, like what happened in Averdale. I’ve created a rational fear around Emily’s memories, in part because I am worried that there is something about them that will cause me harm. An unknown unknown.

Do I want to build my life around unknown unknowns?

She knew the answer to that.

***

Emily-Memory Lilijoy was getting tired of waiting for the rest of her to make a decision. She figured the odds were about even whether she would be contacted or deleted.

Come on, me. You need to know this stuff.

She had discovered a few more interesting tidbits over the past hours. Nothing quite so momentous as the fact that Henry Choi had taken up life as a primitive recluse who never spoke, but interesting nonetheless. The most obvious was a follow-on from Mooster’s identity. Who else would be by his side but Gabriela? Evidently Atticus had heard her name as a toddler and begun to call her Grabby-ela. Lilijoy felt a little dumb, yet again, for not realizing that Henry and Gabriela had been by her side her entire life.

Be fair, self. I would have figured it out earlier if his bio picture wasn’t altered. Or someone else entirely.

There was no way she would have recognized Gabriela as Grabby. Grabby’s face was significantly scarred, far more than Mooster-Henry’s.

And now I have the mystery of the scars to solve. For them to be alive after all this time, they must have improved the Tao system to include medical remediation. Surely, they could fix their faces.

It was more evidence that Henry and Gabriela, and the other bros too, were badly damaged mentally. Which begged the question: If they weren’t able to repair themselves, or really do much beyond existing, then who was behind the whole situation with her and Attaboy? She supposed that it could have been arranged during lucid moments, which would explain the terribly inconsistent quality of their upbringing.

A message arrived.

All right, me.

What’s going on in there?

p.s. please don’t eat my/our brain.

Finally!

She composed a quick summary of what she had learned and sent it off. She felt the faint connection to her body resonate with her Outside self’s reaction to the news a moment later.

***

Outside of the firewall, Lilijoy read the message a fifth time, still trying to wrap her head around the revelations. She lingered over the last sentences.

Recommend that you continue to explore Emily’s memories.

I’ve added to Jiannu’s log and marked the memories that

contain the data supporting this message.

Recommend that you erase me and start process again.

Bye.

It made her feel irrationally sad. The part of herself who wrote the message understood, naturally, that trust and confidence would be gained in steps, and it just made more sense for her to remove a few hours of that… subset’s memories and start again from her new knowledge base.

It sure would be nice to be omniscient, she thought for a moment, then reconsidered. Actually, no. That would be like my reading problem, only a thousand times worse. I bet an omniscient being would long for the equivalent of the undiscovered library. Maybe they would even deliberately forget things, just so that they could experience the joy of discovery again.

She spent several minutes trying to find an excuse to allow her firewalled self to rejoin her, and eventually it came. She needed to balance the risk, which at this point she considered to be minute, against the costs, which were subtle, to her anyway. The true cost was that she would never have the memory of the initial discovery, but she would always remember the choice to sacrifice those memories on the altar of caution.

She wasn’t quite sure that she was a warrior, not in the way Anda conceived of it, using the resistance of fear to strengthen her character, but she did know that she didn’t want to be the opposite. She remembered a famous quote from Mark Twain, that she had first encountered while reading Heinlein.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the

wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat

that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot

stove-lid again -- and that is well; but also she will never sit down

on a cold one anymore.

If Averdale was the hot stove-lid, is this decision the cold one?

It seemed to her that a warrior might seek out stove-lids on principal, while she… she seemed to have them show up in her life like some kind of delivery club.

Stove-lid of the month club.

She spent a few more minutes on some basic precautions, and then took down the firewall.

***

The hovercar rested on the barren land, just over the horizon from the factory-mine. If it were night, the sullen clouds would be capturing its light and spreading a muted glow overhead. As it was close to noon, the only way Lilijoy could sense its presence was from the rhythmic rumble captured in the earth at her feet, a sensation that reminded her of her Earthen Sense ability.

She sampled the air and marveled at the toxic stew of mildly mutagenic compounds and radiation. The quantum circuitry of her Stage Two components was acting like a built in Geiger counter as the ionizing radiation of the environment interfered with its operation.

The more radiation there is, the dumber I get. Maybe that’s part of the problem with the Tao zombies. Are they too damaged to even notice? You’d think that they would have moved away from all this at some point in the last hundred years.

She had left her midges safely tucked away in the hovercar, as the wind was picking up. Her mind drifted to several science-fiction novels that featured utility fog, airborne hordes of nano-scale constructors that could shape external reality with a thought.

Funny that they never consider what wind might do to tiny floating particles. Never mind the waste heat.

Still, she felt that she had taken steps in that direction with her midges.

Now I just need to hope that my enemies don’t bring any fans.

She felt that the last few hours of the journey were quite productive. After she had released the firewall and integrated her mind, she had split herself to her limit and dived into Emily’s memories with abandon, though she was careful to keep her level of immersion low. Having viewed hundreds of hours of young Emily’s life without any ill effects, she was now entirely confident that it was the deeper immersion levels that carried the risk of identity dilution.

It was a very real danger, too, she decided. The amount of time she could have spent as Emily would have had a significant impact on her personality. She judged that if she had encountered this many memories before her system had reached Stage Two, her primary continuity would be as Emily, with her life in the Piles becoming a foggy interlude.

It made her worried about Attaboy.

If the purpose of all of this was to bring the Choi children back to life, in a sense anyway, it could very well have succeeded. May have succeeded with at least one of them.

Reincarnation lite. What will I do if Attaboy is Atticus with just a smidge of Attaboy left?

It was an.. interesting question. Dispassionately, she felt that she needn’t be too upset. Attaboy hadn’t died; his memories would still be there. He would recognize her, and they could trade tales from their childhood. Yet, she had certainly gone to great lengths to preserve her own identity and protect herself from Emily, so it was a bit difficult to reconcile why she could accept it if that had happened to Attaboy.

She shook her head to dislodge the speculations. As she did, she felt a faint signal from the subroutine she had left running to monitor her Inside body. Someone was speaking in her presence.

She pulled up the text on her awareness. It appeared to be a conversation that had been going for a minute already. The text window identified two male voices.

1

2

1

2

1

1

2

At this point, Lilijoy couldn’t resist extending herself further into her Inside senses, though she kept the voice-to-text filter going. She could hear sounds, clanking and rubbing which, based on the context of the conversation, she thought might be ropes or a harness of some kind being attached to her stone enclosure. The ambient noise was enough for her to gather a very rough image of her surroundings, though the stone over her ears blocked out most of the detail.

It was at this point that she realized she was being a bit stupid. If her hands were free, she might have smacked her forehead. She activated her Earthen Sense. Her entire body was encased in solid stone, so it could only help.

Sure enough, the vibrations from the surrounding air and the ground were transmitted through the stone just enough for her to fill in many of the details. She could see the two moving blobs attaching some kind of harness around her block of stone. She now understood that the stone extended out from her for at least six inches in every direction, forming a rough coffin shape, with only a single hole for her to breathe located over her nose. She was currently on her back, and just behind her head was a huge wall that stretched upwards, far past any echo’s ability to return to her. Everything else around her was open space, as far as she could tell.

She could smell two men, wearing leather and body odor, but their smell was insignificant next to the powerful scent of Averdale carried by the night air.

Definitely outside. Next to the trunk of the Greatwood. Guess I’m about to go for a ride.

It was a few more minutes before she felt herself begin to lift into the air.

Bet the view would be great. I wonder why they would take me up? I doubt it’s so I can enjoy the fresh air.

The ascent was fairly steady, a few feet a second, and she could tell she was about twenty feet away from the trunk. The night breezes began to catch at her stone coffin, and she felt herself begin to sway and spin.

Wouldn’t it be great if they dropped me? I wonder how far up I’m going?

The Bough of Burdens was about a hundred meters up, followed by the Bough of Life and then the Bough of Peace. The Bough of Peace had been severely damaged when the Top fell, though a portion remained, jutting out about fifty meters below the highest point of what remained of the main trunk. Over the next minutes she tracked her progress past the Boughs of Burdens and Life.

Guess I’m headed for Peace then. Maybe I’m going to join the display.

Sinaloa liked to keep a select group of their captives in the large hollow at the top of the stump, using them to taunt and warn the Insiders who might fly over. It was an overt cruelty with a tactical purpose, an irresistible lure for any aerial attack. Lilijoy had attempted to remain as innocent as possible of what transpired in the open air torture arena, though she knew it couldn’t be good. She did know that most of the imprisoned were Insiders, some who had been there since just after the Sacking itself.

A hundred years of torture. I wonder how long it took for them to gain the Fortitude ability.

She knew that several had escaped over the years, due to overenthusiastic tortures, or heroic rescues, though those had ceased long ago, as Sinaloa refined their methods and increased their security measures. She had heard that the freed prisoners were forever changed in some way, something so dark and horrible that organized rescue attempts had eventually been abandoned. No Insider who knew anything about the subject had ever spoken about it, but Lilijoy could guess, based on what she had already learned.

What would happen to an Insider who learned to cultivate pain and suffering? Who formed the new core of their being over decades around the worst acts that intelligent beings can perpetrate on one another?

It was a disturbing thought. She could only hope that such beings could find healing over time, or, barring that, could be safely sequestered, preferably in Purgatory. She wondered if Guardian found equal value in such dark emotions, if Sinaloa’s presence was even useful on some level. That would certainly explain why the higher-tiered subsets had never taken action.

She felt her stone coffin stop, felt herself swing sideways through the air and lower onto a solid surface. Her system was working overtime, and Lilijoy knew that she would be terrified if it wasn’t for the constant rebalancing and intervention of her emotional stabilizers. She wasn’t really worried about anything that might happen to her though. It was more that she feared the unknown terrors that she would be exposed to. Scenes of horrific suffering could be safely imagined, but to confront what might be all around her, to see it happen before her eyes…

I’m too young for this. I should log out.

But she didn’t log out. Couldn’t bring herself to abandon the suffering beings she imagined all around her. Someday, there would be a reckoning, Outside or Inside; she would destroy Sinaloa as a clan, convert or control its members, free herself and those around her. She wanted to know what evil looked like, wanted to face it in its den and spit in its eye.

She felt the stone around her face loosen and flow.

She saw the moons hanging in the sky above, filling her narrow view to bursting.

Khonsu and Sin, she remembered. Khonsu is the green one, Sin the blue. Named after the Egyptian and Akkadian moon gods respectively.

A head eclipsed her view. Hairless and features cast in shadow, it was like a third moon had risen. She saw his lips moving, and read on her screen.

She chose not to reply, but adjusted her vision to bring his features into focus, while blurring his lips from conscious sight. There was no need to risk whether Charm could somehow be conveyed through lip reading. It was a face she knew well, though one she had never thought to see in person. Lately it seemed as if history had decided to take a stroll through her life. First Henry and Gabriella Choi, now Alfonse Quimea.

He was wearing a simple Roman diadem, a gold band with a single pink stone at the center of his forehead. She could almost see a corona of Mana tendrils waving around the stone’s edges.

That can’t be good. He’s been Inside for over a century, so even if he’s compressed to level fifty he’s way, way out of my league. I’m going to go ahead and assume he’s a Charm master, wearing some kind of amplifier.

She let her Outside self know to be on the highest alert. Now was her chance to find out what they might want from her.

More words appeared on her screen.

Well, at least he’s polite. Should I say something? What would someone who’s charmed do?

She allowed her face to relax and assume a neutral expression.

What a diabolical way to begin an interrogation. Now what to ask? I need to find questions that will meet his expectations while feeding him disinformation and also reveal whether he is answering with some degree of truth.

Thankfully, she had plenty of time to think.

“Who are you?”

It was a bit odd to have her own voice filtered out. She could feel herself making the words, and watch them show up on her screen.

So far, so good.

“How did you catch us? Did you know we were coming?”

Okay. That seems way too reasonable. No wonder this guy was able to talk his way into Elven society. Am I being charmed despite all the precautions? Time to get more direct.

“What do you want from me?”

Here we go. If I was under his influence, what would I say? He might expect me to ask about Attaboy. Except I know that Attaboy has either escaped or joined them. Best would be to delay until I know which. I could ask to go free… that might get an interesting response. I wonder why he hasn’t used his Charm overtly by this point. If I was in any way normal, he should be able to directly ask where I am Outside, or something of that nature.

It occurred to her that she was dealing with someone who had exercised caution and extreme rationality for the equivalent of several lifetimes. He was leaving every option open, while slowly maneuvering himself into a position of control. There wasn’t any reason for him to press, or to rush. He knew he was dealing with unknown unknowns, and wasn’t making any assumptions. If she hadn’t seen his true self revealed in the memories of Carodil Everbough, if she knew just a little less about Sinaloa, he wouldn’t even need Charm to manipulate her exactly as he desired. Maybe she was flattering herself to assume that much.

This is an extremely dangerous person. Anything I think I can learn from him will be tainted by the doubt that it was exactly what he wanted me to learn. He may know, or suspect, far more about the Tao System than I thought.

Once again, her thoughts turned to logging out, to simply ending this conversation before she got in over her head. She decided to try one last thing.

“Please, get me out of this stone.”

Now we’ll see if you really trust your Charm.

A mildly distressed look crossed his face.

He just gave me the thing I wanted, but didn’t ask for. Time. The most useless amount of time possible, because there’s no way Anda can get in touch with Attaboy by then. What does he get out of it? Is he trying to check if his Charm has some kind of persistence, or to calibrate my state of mind in some way? Sunrise is only five hours away, just a bit before sunset Outside.

It seemed arbitrary to her. Arbitrary enough to activate a feeling of creeping paranoia.

The real prize for him is my Outside body. If they know my location, or think they do, they may need more time to get their forces into position. What if the obvious trap of a false location for Attaboy was only the top layer? Below that could be another trap. What if they know about the Piles?

It had certainly crossed her mind before. Attaboy had been in their clutches for quite a while; who could say what intelligence they had pried out of him? It wouldn’t be hard for them to ascertain the location of the tribe, with an anomalous factory-mine so close at hand. She had even asked Anda about the possibility.

“The factory-mines are neutral territory, enforced by the Corp. That was part of my job there.” he had explained. “Your tribe falls within that radius. Plus, the general area is claimed by Lone Star. Even if Sinaloa knew, it’s unlikely they would do anything about it. Nothing overt anyway.”

That had reassured her when Sinaloa was a faceless organization, yet another clan, albeit a nasty one. Doctor Quimea’s presence changed everything. One hundred years ago he was already a mastermind. An entire century had passed for him to upgrade and augment himself, to gain even more knowledge and experience.

Oh crap. If someone like that is hunting me, everything changes.

She logged out without saying another word, and returned to a body already running for the hovercar.