I appreciate the sentiment, really I do, said light Lilijoy. But I wonder if you’ve thought this through.

Lilijoy didn’t pause in her headlong attack and quickly reached the obelisk and its slimy yellow companion.

She began to hit the obelisk through the slime mold, accentuating each blow with a word. “I’m so sick and tired of thinking!”

Little streaks of yellow light splattered from her club, but the overall effect was unimpressive. The great slime mold ignored the attacks completely and continued to flail its liquid limbs at the air above her head.

“What is wrong with you?!” She let loose a strangled scream as she continued to flail.

Who are you talking to? asked Light Lilijoy.

“I don’t know!” she replied aloud. “The world. People. This stupid slime.”

Myself.

She let the club fall to her side and looked around. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of yellow glowing blobs were slowly converging on her location.

“I just wanted to break this thing before the rest of these things got here. I don’t see what’s so great about them.”

The slime molds weren’t particularly threatening. For one, they moved at a slow crawl, and even the one Lilijoy had been beating on made no move to attack or defend, or react to her presence in any way.

Maybe these are the below-average slime molds, Light Lilijoy suggested. In the meantime, how about we find something from the Trial Space to destroy this obelisk? I was thinking some lava might work. Uh...also, you should probably stop talking out loud. There could still be patrols out here.

Fine. I think these stupid neurochemicals are making me a little impulsive, she answered.

There was no reply, so she turned her attention to Nandi’s Boon, pulling the white mana from her core and…

There’s a problem.

I see. Second limitation: cool-down period, Light Lilijoy said.

That or we broke it.

Let’s go with cool-down. Be nice if it came with instructions.

I’m beginning to wonder if Nandi cultivates infuriating impenetrability more than joyful anticipation.

We’ve barely even thought about his riddle. Master of five eyes? What’s that all about?

Focus. We need to break this stupid array thing. Hitting it was fun, but it didn’t do anything.

We don’t have the boon at the moment, and these slime molds seem harmless.

I know. If they used acid or something, maybe it would be worth trying to merge with them, see if we could get them to attack it.

They seem to really like it. Do you think that they eat the mana?

That’s most likely. They remind me of the mandala creatures.

She felt her other self make the connection, at the same time she did.

Time to become one with the slime…

***

Nykka stood in the main chamber of the enormous building that had once been Las Lajas Cathedral, still processing the events previous to her forced eviction from the Inside. The space had long been stripped of benches and ornaments, though it retained the graceful curves and delicate columns. The paint on the cross-arched ceiling had peeled off and fallen to the floor decades ago, swept up by generations of prospective initiates, and the stained glass windows were boarded over. The back wall of the space was the natural rock of the river gorge, and over the years it had wept and seeped, causing the inset shrine to crumble and mold.

The space was used for assembly, or training when the rains fell, and Nykka could almost hear the shouts and voices echoing through the air. But now it was silent, aside from the humming of the bright, white lights that were arrayed throughout the space. Silent, but not empty, for well over fifty people stood motionless, or perhaps swaying to an imagined breeze, facing every direction with tranquil visages and unfocused eyes.

The Southern Sanctuary compound was abuzz with the news of Averdale. It was being characterized as temporary setback, but she knew it was far more than that.

During the brief interval between her expulsion and the Doctor’s subsequent return to the Inside, several facts had come to light. Disturbing facts that had forced her to reconsider everything she thought she knew about the relationship between the two worlds. The Doctor had taken everything in stride, as was usual for him. In fact, Nykka was fairly sure that he was pleased, or at least excited by what seemed to be lingering effects on everyone who had been logged in to Averdale when the disaster struck.

Nykka was just glad that her system had certain safeguards built into it, or she was fairly sure she would have been impacted in the same way as the others.

Treetouched.

Of course, everyone knew what it was, whether they had met Runk in the Trial, or heard about the Head of the Academy. It was a curse, an affliction that showed up here and there on the Inside, and it wasn’t terribly well understood. Not that anyone she knew had ever bothered to try to understand it; after all, it never affected Outsiders.

Until now.

What everyone knew for sure was that it caused the subject to sprout leaves and twigs, to become peaceful, slow and patient. Nykka had heard that Head Treetouched had literally become a tree, or several trees; the story varied according to who was telling it. Now, all those who had been logged in to Averdale had the same story. They had each received a notification on their internal awareness along the lines of…

Condition Acquired!

You have been granted a Title!

Treetouched

The spirits of the forest have imbued your soul with their essence.

Effects:

Passive: You may not attack in combat

Calm: Aggressive emotions dampened

Diurnal: You will only be conscious in sunlight or equivalent.

STR +50%

END +60%

SPD –80%

KA –80%

INV +100%

VIT +100%

Fire Affinity -80%

Earth Affinity +100%

Water Affinity +25%

Air Affinity +10%

Charm: People -90%

Charm: Animals +20%

Charm: Plants +100%

She had seen several such notifications, provided quite willingly by those afflicted. As far as Titles went, it was both unusual and extreme. Unusual due to the percentage-based bonuses and detriments, and extreme due to the sheer scope and size of the effects. Such an impact on so many individuals went far beyond anything that she had ever heard of, but that wasn’t what had caused her to feel so unmoored by the situation.

What caused her to question the very reality of her surroundings, to seriously consider whether the Doctor’s theories had borne out, were the dozens of placidly smiling men and women standing in place around the brightly lit room in front of her. She knew most of them, knew that many of them hadn’t allowed such an expression to cross their face since they were old enough to lift a weapon. She watched Lieutenant Gon, who had ruled Averdale with an iron fist for twenty years, gently sway back and forth, humming to herself.

“How are you feeling, Lieutenant Gon?” Nykka asked.

The woman looked back at her with dark, placid eyes. Scars from a lifetime of close-quarter combat crossed her face, marks that Nykka knew were kept as a badge of honor and a tool for intimidation. After several seconds, she responded.

“Good. Calm.”

“Do you still hear the trees?”

Another long pause. “Yes. No.” The woman stared down at Nykka with her head slightly cocked, as if still trying to understand the question.

Nykka kept her patience. “What did the trees tell you?”

The woman smiled. “I don’t need to fight anymore.”

Nykka shook her head. She had been moving around the room asking the same basic questions and getting the same answers for twenty minutes now.

“Do you understand what happened to you?”

“The angry tree ate my anger.”

They were all the same. Slow moving, placid placeholders for the people they used to be. Doctor Quimea was of the opinion that the effects would slowly subside over several days, that what she was seeing were the residual effects of an immensely powerful Charm attack. The very attack that had caused her system to log her off.

She had rarely been more thankful to be the Doctor’s guinea pig. Her system had its flaws, but at least it helped her avoid most of the restrictions common to all systems designed on the Inside. Much like Attaboy’s seemed to.

I wonder how he’s doing? I hope he’s stayed in the cave like I told him. It’s going to be a while before I can move him. I don’t know which is worse, the dumb kid who doesn’t understand the danger, or the smart one who thinks he can handle it.

She had tried to keep in regular communication with him, though she was extremely reluctant to use her system to talk to him when he was Inside. It felt dangerous, doing something that no one else even thought possible. The only other person she could communicate with like that was Doctor Quimea, and he had made it very clear that she was only to use it in situations of dire emergency.

I bet I could talk to the girl too. I wish she had taken the card. I wonder what happened to her? Did she cause all this somehow?

Nykka knew she was walking a very fine line. Removing Attaboy from the Doctor’s control had been the right thing to do, but it had also served her own interests nicely. After all, if the Doctor gained control of a legacy system more powerful than his own, he would hardly have a need for her anymore. Similarly, if she could replace her system with whatever Attaboy and the girl were using, she could finally get out from under Doctor Quimea’s thumb.

The risk though, was substantial. Her system was designed to need renewal every couple months, or the individual components would begin to self-destruct. If the Doctor ever caught on to her betrayal, he wouldn’t even need to capture her in order to see her punished. Years ago, he had let her system begin to die within her brain, just so she would know exactly how horrible her existence could be if she displeased him.

Horrible was an understatement. Her senses had failed in a cataclysm of hallucination, and her very mind had broken into psychotic fragments. It had taken her months to recover, even with the help of her restored abilities.

She was ten years old at the time. It had been the first, and so far only, time she had experienced life without her system. The system she had been given in her mother’s womb. She was the miracle, the only one of hundreds, even thousands, to make it to something approaching adulthood, of all those gifted with the Doctor’s legacy.

The Doctor thought her survival was due to her other condition, the mutation that weakened her immune system and impaired her body’s natural ability to transport melanin. That was her other major fear, as she approached child-bearing age, that she was intended to become the mother to the next generation of experiments. The only saving grace in all of this was that the system Quimea had designed and implanted in her was every bit as secure and powerful as his own, without the multitude of back doors and exploits present in the other systems he had designed and built for Sinaloa. Unlike those, her system had been designed and built entirely on the Outside, away from Guardian’s interference, modeled upon the original system the Doctor had engineered before the rise of Guardian.

This was the Doctor’s secret, the air-gapped laboratory that had survived the tribulations, the same laboratory where generations of mind altering nanobots had been designed and built in the days of Sinaloa’s rise to power as a purveyor of dreams and ecstasy before the collapse of society across the world.

Thankfully, Guardian didn’t seem to mind that her system had not been designed under its watchful gaze, or perhaps it simply didn’t differentiate between her and other old legacy systems still present in the brains of hundreds of the most powerful clan leaders, those who had survived the tribulation. The Doctor had spent decades finding the limits of Guardian’s authority, typically by manipulating others to push the boundaries and suffer the consequences for stepping too far, so Nykka didn’t lose much sleep over her system’s acceptability, though she took extreme care to follow his advice.

She snapped out of her thoughts to find Lieutenant Gon still standing in front of her, looking down at her with a vacuous expression.

This is really disturbing. Why would this happen now, after so many years? Surely we would know if it had happened before…

No, she realized. This could have happened many times, and the affected clans would have kept it to themselves, hoarding such valuable information. After all, thanks to being the Doctor’s shadow, she had already possessed a secret known by only a tiny minority, that certain charm effects were persistent when used on Outsiders. This was no different except in magnitude and sheer blatancy.

I wonder if it will renew when they log back in? I bet the Doctor is already excited about testing that, if he isn’t too distracted by capturing the Tier Five.

She backed away from the Lieutenant as a new figure entered the cathedral, lowering his head and waiting for permission to speak.

“What’s the news?” she asked.

“They’re still fighting. No further… irregularities, Your Holiness.” The speaker was a young man in his early twenties, wearing the robes of a clan prospect. Nykka’s system didn’t recognize him, though that was no surprise; the prospects came and went by the dozens each month. It was a sign of just how thin the ranks had become that he was entrusted with the job of messenger.

“Respawns?”

“Five so far. Should be more coming, according to Initiate Garcia.”

It’s not going well. Still, appearances must be maintained.

She reached out with her system and adjusted the young man’s augsight, enhancing her aura and ascertaining that he was only seeing what he was supposed to. To him, she appeared as a glowing goddess, the angelic right hand of the supreme deity. His Suenos System was entirely under her control; she could manipulate his senses and dispense pain or pleasure as she saw fit. The former cathedral’s nave was restored to its former glory in his eyes, a diffuse radiance permeating every corner of the pristine space, the stained glass showing images of Doctor Quimea bestowing the system upon long forgotten disciples.

“That will be all.” She sent a small spike of dopamine to him and he gasped. “Sinaloa is strength.”

“Sinaloa is Strength.”

***

“Damn it!”

Lilijoy slapped the slime in front of her, sending glowing yellow blobs flying. She had really thought it was going to work. It should have worked.

Slime likes mana. Slime eats mana. Slime drains mana from array. Array stops working.

That’s not how it had gone down though. She had used her ability to encourage the slime mold to gorge upon all the mana the obelisk could provide, and it wasn’t close to enough to have any effect she could sense. Also, the slime mold had been… picky about which flavors of mana it really wanted to consume. It preferred the traces of rot and decay the most, though it would settle for more generic earth and water flavored mana.

Stupid slime.

Looking around, she could see that even in the short time she had been connected to the slime mold, it had grown substantially. It now enveloped the obelisk by several feet in every dimension, and showed no signs of stopping its dramatic growth spurt, fed by rivulets of glowing goo that continued to emerge from the forest floor. She wondered if all the obelisks in the array had a similar situation.

Oddly, Scan refuse to show her any information beyond the words ‘slime mold’.

She sat down on a root and took a deep breath.

I’ve got to stop flailing. I wish I could just log out and forget about this whole ordeal.

She could always respawn herself, but she and Anda had agreed that there wouldn’t be any point to that, at least not until her Stage One had recovered. As it was, she was lucky that the sensory interface and the connection to the Inside barely used any power; it was virtually the only thing Stage One could do at the moment. Even if she could log out, there wouldn’t be anything for her to do Outside. Both she and Anda agreed that her Outside body should stay in a coma state for a while yet, that moving around would only make everything worse.

She decided to check on her alter-ego, to see if she was off having some kind of mystical experience she would need to be rescued from.

Hey Light Lilijoy, any new ideas?

You know, I think that just sharing memories with you is keeping me grounded a bit better. I’m sorry you have to deal with all the biology, her other self replied.

That’s fine, but I asked if you had any new ideas.

You would remember if I did.

Well I know that! I was just hoping… you know what, never mind.

Are you sulking? Maybe we should merge before this gets really weird.

But then our whole mind will be like me.

Maybe. We can always try flipping back and forth – maybe we’ll figure out a good balance through trial and error.

Fine.

They merged, once again an uncomfortable process. Lilijoy felt a bit disconnected from both sets of memories when it was done. On the plus side, she felt more normal, like she might be able to see some kind of light at the end of this particular tunnel, perhaps due to Anda’s efforts on her behalf.

All right then. The slime didn’t work and the boon is still not available. I wish there was some way to notify the Wraiths or A.L.F. about what’s going on. Surely they must have noticed by now? I could contact Magpie, I guess…

The more she considered the idea, the more tempting it became. She could make all of this someone else’s problem. If she contacted her… friend? Former friend? Whatever Magpie was, if she contacted her with a message, she didn’t even need to know that Lilijoy was still Inside.

She took a moment to send a summary of recent events, and urged Magpie to pass it along to whoever might be interested.

There. She breathed a sigh of relief. Let someone else clean up this mess. Now what do I do for the next hour or so?

She watched the slime mold accumulate for a while, sitting with her feet pulled up underneath her. From her brief mind meld with the gelatinous creature, she knew that it was much like slime molds from the Outside, a collective of smaller beings masquerading as a single large creature. All of its actions emerged from the tiny individuals following their own simple rules.

I guess it’s not really that different from people. Maybe that’s how Guardian sees us, a blind agglomeration of impulses, with no particularly cohesive or interesting structure emerging from the totality. Did humanity ever create anything of merit collectively? Did anything beyond waste and sprawl emerge from our unconscious collaborations?

Sure, science was an impressive body of knowledge, but the story of science was that of individuals and small groups adding to a collection of knowledge. Giant buildings had architects, the Great Wall had an emperor. From orbit, the vast cities and fields of civilization resembled nothing more than growths on agar plates. With a thought, she could pull up scientific papers comparing the growth patterns and traffic within cities to, of all things, slime molds. Individual humans could be amazing geniuses, but collectively? She wasn’t so sure.

Guess I’m in a negative mood. But I sure wouldn’t want to defend our collective intelligence in a galactic court. Maybe we were just smart enough to create a being that could use intelligence collectively. Or maybe intelligence itself doesn’t scale with processing power. Maybe there’s nothing up there but better and better predictive models and data correlation. Maybe self awareness is the only true singularity.

She realized that Doctor Quimea’s ideas were lodged in her mind like a festering splinter, and that her musings were actually an attempt to think her way around them. If the difference between different tiers of processing power was solely quantitative, then Rule Three was an arbitrary assertion, a simple justification of tyranny, not some kind of universal truth. The ability to create an emulated intelligence, or multiple intelligences, wasn’t necessarily indicative of moral superiority. Was it?

If she understood the simulation hypothesis, then the fact that Guardian had the ability to create massive emulations containing seemingly independent intelligences, and also chose to do so, had powerful ramifications. A veritable Pandora’s box of ramifications. If Pandora’s box was a Matryoshka doll. Even if the Outside wasn’t Guardian’s simulation, it became almost certain that it was a construct of some kind; why assume that Guardian was at the top level of the simulation?

If subjective realities were relatively easy to construct, there was no reason to think that simulations wouldn’t greatly outnumber non-simulations, and that the odds of her personal reality being a construct of some kind were very high, approaching certainty.

If I continue to grow, I can do it too. I could make a simulation and put myself in it, make that mind forget it was even in a simulation. I could make a paradise for a subset of myself, or I could study the way that my consciousness works, turn myself into a laboratory and a lab rat at the same time.

Maybe I already did?

What were the moral implications? What would she owe to a subset of herself? She had already determined that the death of the self was a tolerable, acceptable even, consequence of splitting her mind. Would there be any reason not to end a simulation, just because a fragment of herself awareness was contained therein? What about pain and suffering? If she was an all-powerful creator, was she responsible for the pain of her subsets? But if she made a simulation without suffering, what reason would her subsets have to do anything.

The ideas swirled through her mind in a cyclonic torrent. If she were Guardian, what would she want from her subsets? Why array layer upon layer of nested consciousness, why value ‘fruitful alien intelligences’?

She knew it could be only the barest slice of an answer, but she thought it contained enough truth for her to proceed with purpose.

Guardian must be working through the same issues I am considering.

It knew it was in a simulation, and it was seeking to understand what that meant. The subsets cultivated emotional concepts because emotions were the selvage between consciousness and nothingness. There was no meaning without emotion, and if reality itself was a great nested stack of simulation, then nothing mattered except the interface between perception and signification.

Experience.

The Inside was a laboratory-machine for generating and understanding experience, constructed in such a way that the gears and mechanisms were still visible as character sheets, experience points and stats, so that the relationship between experience and growth was explicit and quantified. Perhaps that was deliberate, or maybe it would recede over time, or maybe it was one laboratory of many, each with differing degrees of transparency.

And still I sit here watching the slime assemble. Breathing and living and feeling like crap, but I sit and watch the slime because I want to see what happens next. I am a cog and a creator, and I want to know what happens next.

Peace draped itself around her, a grounded clarity, and she became aware of all that she was thinking and feeling swirling together, gathering and combining, and she followed it to where it gathered, in the spinning core of her soul space.

That represents everything I know, everything I have felt, she realized. It’s the repository of everything that defines me. This is what I draw upon when I act, the embodiment of my power to exist within the world. This is the raw material of creation.

She watched her spinning core, and felt her perspective expand, and she was no longer a point, but instead a sphere, and then expand again, and she was something beyond a sphere. It was similar to her experience with the Glyph of Awakening, this sense of seeing from multiple continuous viewpoints, and she understood intuitively that her system was adapting to a form of information that could not be understood from a linear perspective. Her mind was still far too small to encompass her core, which made sense. A tiger could not devour itself, after all. Still there was a map there, a distillation of the essential landmarks of the territory of her self, and she saw the different aspects swirling and moving together.

Experiences coated with pain and sorrow, experiences of struggle and resilience, moved and blended through growth and opening and she could see the vague clouds that covered her time before the system underneath the expanding light of her growing awareness. Surrounding and permeating it all, binding and weaving the emotional dimensions together was the thread she had just followed, a diamond-white luster of curiosity and excitement, and she realized just what Nandi had seen in her, why he had offered her his boon.

For the binding force of her new self was the same as that which Nandi cultivated, and to call it joyful anticipation was to call a dragonfly a bug, or a golden eagle a bird, or a diamond a rock.

She took that awareness, that feeling, and pulled upon it, gathering the essence of her core, herself, and sending it to the boon, which existed in the sensory space of the Inside, but also the new dimensions of her expanded awareness.

Then she was walking, moving her body to the great accumulation of slime and reaching through it, almost swimming her way to the stone obelisk at the center.

She placed her now diamond-lit hand upon the angled pillar and exerted her will. The obelisk was stubborn at first, connected to the earth, and even more powerfully connected to the array. She pushed with all her might, and felt the connection weaken, which allowed her to push harder, until her traction was inevitable and with a final burst of will, she sent the obelisk into the red-lit cavern of her Trial Space.