“So then I used Scan, and guess what it was?” Lilijoy couldn’t contain the excitement in her voice.

“I couldn’t begin to imagine,” Anda replied. His tone was dry, but she could hear his interest.

After a few more casts of her crude mana loop came up empty, she couldn’t resist contacting him as he drove to the factory-mine.

“It was a goblin bone necklace. But that’s not the important thing.”

There was silence on the other end. Eventually he gave in.

“Do tell.”

“It was the one I was wearing at the end of my Trial! Do you know what this could mean?”

“A lifetime supply of goblin bone jewelry?”

“Very funny. It means that my hand went to the Trial space. It makes perfect sense if you think about it. Nandi is the gatekeeper, so his boon connects me to his realm. Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

“Not even remotely. Do you think you can bring things back?”

“I sure hope so. It would be pretty silly if it was just a gauntlet of inter-dimensional fondling.”

There was a choking sound on the other end of the communication.

“Uh… never mind,” Anda managed. “I guess I should have asked, what happened when you tried to bring it back?”

“I couldn’t. It slipped out of my fingers when I released the mana. I’m pretty sure that ‘encased in stone’ isn’t a standard use case though.”

She had been hoping for some explosion-type excitement when two objects tried to occupy the same space, but it seemed that finding a way to respawn with the boon was a dead end.

“What else have you tried?”

“I spent a few more minutes throwing my loop around. I thought I might have snagged on something once or twice, but I never caught anything.”

“Hmm. So do you think that your hand is somehow rejoining the Trial as you left it? Or is it more like an inventory, with all the items you gathered lying around in empty space?”

“I don’t know what I think. It’s really frustrating not to be able to see anything, or move any other parts of my body. When my Trial ended, I was under a thorn bush, so that could have been what I kept snagging on. I can’t wait until I can actually experiment!”

“And I can’t wait to hear what you do next. I’ve got eyes on the factory-mine, so I should pay attention. Do you want me to patch you in?”

“Yes! That’s a great idea.”

Soon, a new signal came to her, a feed from Anda’s visual cortex. He had rendered the hovercar canopy clear, and was looking out over the wastes at the front side of the factory-mine, where its widest edge chewed and broke the earth before it, a vast band of consumption hundreds of meters across. There were no obvious moving parts to the enormous maw; Anda had explained that the factory-mine used a combination of vibration and massive weights that slowly raised and then slammed down to force its way through rock and soil a millimeter at a time. It was, evidently, amazingly efficient, and also agonizingly slow, the kind of process that would never have been designed by a being with a human sense of time. A race between a glacier and a factory-mine would be neck and neck.

What happened once the material passed beyond the metal threshold was entirely unknown to her, but what came out the other end was all too familiar. She could see the line of waste stretching to the horizon. Except it wasn’t entirely waste. In fact, Lilijoy suspected it was the reason for the giant crawler’s existence. Millions of tons of feedstock for Tao System elements.

Someday, Guardian is going to use all that for something, and I’m guessing it’s not paperclips. It’s way more than a million, a billion Tao Systems would use.

She had kept that particular theory to herself. Perhaps someday she would find out if the other factory-mines were doing the same. Then she would know if it was related to her tribe, the small group of Tao System users that conveniently happened to be next to this particular stream of waste. Either way, it was ridiculously disproportionate to their needs. Like tossing a thousand silos worth of grain in front of the local chicken coop. It spoke to the connection between Guardian and the Tao System. Between Guardian and the Chois. Between Guardian and her.

She had hoped to find some kind of clue in Emily’s memories, some reference to what Henry Choi was doing all those months he spent away from home. So far there was nothing. But she was so close to answers, real answers, that she could taste it. If she didn’t get the information from her tribe, she was almost certain that Attaboy could fill in many of the blanks in her understanding. Or would it be Atticus?

Either way, the answers were coming.

She watched as Anda looped around the factory-mine and pulled up alongside the Piles just a few hundred meters behind it. The columns of vitrified material were still fresh this close to the sprawling mechanical beast, closely packed dull-black columns that had yet to be broken down by the elements. They weren’t completely regular in size and shape, trending toward dull octagonal pillars roughly ten feet in height, though the columns at the edges were somewhat shorter and already showing signs of cracks and wear. They reminded Lilijoy more than anything of columnar basalt, albeit much more glassy and brittle. She knew that over the coming years, the columns would crack and fall upon one another, eventually becoming mounds of black glassy shards spread over a much wider area, like the area of the Piles she had grown up with.

The Piles at this point were by no means pure however. The organic waste and sewage of those who lived within the factory-mine was liberally strewn among the columns.

Guess they don’t see a problem adding garbage to garbage. But they didn’t have to live down-wind from it.

She watched as Anda broke off a few good -sized chunks from the outer columns and carefully placed them into the hovercar.

“I’m already getting some notifications about environmental resources being detected,” he said. “I just hope we don’t have to ingest this stuff.”

“I bet that powdering it and snorting would be the most efficient,” she replied.

She thought she heard him gag a little. “You’re not smelling what I am. Would you like me to patch that through too?”

“That’s all right. Just hurry back.”

“Do you want me to swing by your tribe?”

She was tempted by the offer. It would be good to know what was happening at Night’s Safety before she went there in person. She said as much.

“Tempting. But I have another idea for scouting that out, once I’ve refueled. I’d rather not deal with any complications before then.”

Such as you being attacked, if Sinaloa is waiting in ambush, she thought. Or me being distracted by who-knows-what piece of additional knowledge. I don’t need more thoughts and experiences I can’t do anything about whirling around in my head right before I go back in to Averdale.

For some reason, this made her think of the spinning core in her soul space. It was another of the persistent mystery-projects in her life, one which she had kept at arms length, mentally speaking. In her mind, there was an unspoken agreement between her and her soul space. She would leave it alone for a good long while to spin in peace, doing its thing, whatever that was. In turn, it wouldn’t rend, blend, or otherwise disarticulate her very being in an overtly traumatic manner.

It seemed reasonable to her.

Still, the image of new concepts, problems and experiences whirling around her mind in a destructive tornado of distraction was evocative, and created a bit of an itch for her to see if she could figure out what her soul space was up to. She pushed it aside for the moment, wondering if her system’s ability to augment focus would always be canceled out by the proportional amount of opportunities for distraction that same system offered.

She spent the next hour or so learning to use her midge’s senses. Trying to learn. Vision turned out to be the least of the problems; the tiny flies had tiny eyes which didn’t convey much information. They were more like short range motion detectors than cameras, motion detectors that were brilliant at detecting very small, fast moving objects within a few feet.

Midges are really, really good at seeing other midges. Who would have guessed?

Still, by weaving together the signals from multiple members of her swarm, she was able to gain a very fine grained picture of the movements of anything larger than a speck of dust or pollen within the radius of the swarm. It didn’t seem like a particularly useful ability, but who knew? Maybe she would be attacked by flying microbots or something similar in the future.

The sense that was the most daunting, verging on overwhelming, was the vast array of chemosensory organs in the male’s plumose antennae. Lilijoy went in to her exploration of this particular sense with the assumption that it would be analogous to smell, and experienced several subjective hours of confusion in her attempts to find parallels with her own sense.

It wasn’t until she factored in the additional signals conveyed by the neurons which detected vibrations and movement from the hundreds of feathery strands in the antennae that she began to realize that the sense was more like very slow hearing crossed with the visual experience of floating through a rainbow with a thousand colors, a spectrum of atmospheric gradients that formed the backdrop for more discrete swells of chemical timbre.

Her initial contact with this completely alien perception created a wave of aesthetic saturation unlike anything she had experienced before. It was such a sublime and powerful feeling that she was forced to disengage entirely from her senses to contemplate and integrate what she had learned.

Is this what Rule Four meant by ‘fruitful alien awareness’? Probably not, since the interpretation of the experience was all mine. But still…

Emotions provided the impetus for decisions and a context for understanding existence. The emotion, the experience she had just received felt like a great knocking on the door of her soul. Her mind was flooding with connections and memories, not her own, but belonging to the writings of those from earlier ages who had persisted in the foolish attempt to inscribe their gleanings of the truth that could be found in beauty.

If the doors of perception were cleansed

every thing would appear to man as it is,

Infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees

all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern

Blake, Coleridge and the romantic poets blended and churned into Buddhist and Taoist scriptures, inverted into Heisenberg and Poincaré. A feeling of fundamental insight, another emotion, she noted, hovered over her thoughts. Her spectrum of emotion, from the biological imperative to their rational descendants, aligned itself with perception, and she realized that the senses and emotions were inseparable entities, that enlightenment was not a state of knowing but a state of feeling, that the aesthetic of revelation was at its heart a recognition of a fundamental meaning contained in the very structure of reality.

This is what Guardian is seeking, she realized. Something like this, of which I tasted but a drop, is the nectar which flows within its veins.

Also, I seem to be thinking in romantic poetry. Huh.

She took several subjective hours to process what she had learned. Like many of her ideas, it was slippery ground on which to tread, an ice-covered hill at whose base was the banal. There was gravity present in the contemplation of her life’s mysteries, always pulling her back to the mundane and obvious earth.

Nonetheless, she felt satisfied that she had paved the way for better understanding in the future as she returned to her midges.

***

It wasn’t long before she sensed that Anda was near. At this point, she had been able to construct a chain of midges relaying their sensory information along the ravine all the way back past where she expected Anda would arrive. While three million midges wasn’t many when it came to surface area or volume, it was a huge number when formed into a line. The biggest difficulty was overcoming the midge’s own swarming instincts of self assembly, which required a certain compromise as to the smallest possible cluster. Still, several thousand groups of about a thousand midges each could cover quite a distance, even with the very limited communication range of each individual.

She began to jog back to meet him, gathering her midges as she went, and was pleased to see the hovercar’s door just in the process of opening as she came into range of her own senses. She still had Anda’s feed from his own vision, so it wasn’t a surprise, but it was nice to know that her midges might have some value as scouts or an early warning system after all.

Of course, once I have rare earths again, I can redesign their sensory systems to be more compatible with my needs anyway, she realized.

Soon, she had a sharp shard of glossy black in her hands, a little piece of home.

“I tried to break them off from the interior of a column,” Anda told her. “So they should be reasonably free from filth.”

A quick sniff test told her that he was correct, though her lungs didn’t appreciate the fumes arising from the freshly fractured material. Her system, however, flooded her with notifications as the first chemical signatures entered her awareness. Lilijoy realized, for the first time in her short existence, that she was rich, wealthy beyond imagining in the only way that mattered to her. A host of new ideas came to her, ways she could use this new abundance.

If I ever get the entanglement communications working, there’s no reason I even need to carry these structures around inside my skull. Even now, I could carry external units on my person. I could magnify my processing capabilities a hundredfold. I could make an amulet. No, even better, I could make a diadem like Quimea had. Then someday I can loom over him on the Outside with my own magic Charm amplifier!

She cackled out loud, which prompted a look from Anda.

Oops. Was than an evil laugh? It’s just too bad that this stuff is so brittle, or I could recreate my evil knife.

The thought was just an idle fancy, but it caused a little shiver to run down her spine. Was it just a coincidence that the first real weapon she found Inside was made of black glass? That it seemed to have some level of awareness, or at least instinct? She decided it probably was chance, though if it wasn’t…

I could be in communication, or rather some part of Guardian could be in communication with me, on an abstract, symbolic level. To a higher intelligence, it might even be the equivalent of speaking slowly and using small words… to a dog. Like I need even more things to think about.

She decided that the best way to deal with question like these was to do what she planned anyway; continue to grow until she could wrap her head around all the factors that were currently beyond her grasp. Her thoughts returned to the evil knife.

I wonder if I can combine the toughness of Maasai skin structures with a sharp edge. Once I’ve built up the crystals from the molecular level, I’m sure that I can make them much more durable and resilient.

She was beginning to appreciate the Outside culture she had seen in New Manaus, this tendency to want to have the same things Inside and Outside, to achieve a certain continuity and simplicity between the two existences. It seemed to be a brand of enclothed cognition that extended to possessions and even architecture. Or maybe she was looking at it backwards; it might be more of a cultural phenomenon caused by multiple generations no longer drawing such a clear distinction between two formerly separate modalities for their consciousness. She could only imagine the extent to which the two worlds might have blended without the arbitrary communication barrier.

Is that what that’s for? I was thinking it was to be fair to the Insiders, but maybe keeping some degree of separation between the worlds is a factor as well. Maybe it’s Guardian trying to preserve some of that juicy alien fruitfulness.

She filed away her thoughts for later and split her mind to begin cultivating, finally able to return to the important business of finishing the integration between her brain and Stage Two. It was clear that the most important priority was to integrate her motor pathways and create the redundancies necessary for simultaneity Outside and Inside. Her Jiannu portion took that responsibility, while Lilijoy began preparations for her coming visit with Doctor Quimea.

She and Anda agreed that it was better to be mobile during the appointed time; he would pilot the hovercar away from the Piles in a more or less random fashion and be ready to fend off any attacks, should Sinaloa somehow find their location. They had decided this was a better strategy than remaining within the neutral zone around the factory-mine, which would entail making assumptions about Sinaloa’s capabilities that neither of them were comfortable with, though it had taken Lilijoy a few minutes to argue Anda around to her point of view.

And then it was time to return to Averdale.