Lilijoy opened her eyes. One eye, anyway. At first, she thought the other was gunked shut, after spending well over eight hours in what was effectively a coma. Soon though she realized that her right eyelid just wasn’t working, at least not very well.

Great. I had a stroke or something.

Most of the damage to her brain that could be repaired had been, and her Stage One system was fully recovered. There were still a few areas that would need help for weeks to months, but it was hard to know just how much help until she tried to use them. She easily switched over to the alternate circuits she’d been using Inside, and her eyelid popped open to join its neighbor.

Otherwise, she felt about the way she had after a week in the pod. Really crappy.

She and Anda had agreed that eight hours of immobility would be enough for the med bugs and her recovered system to finish patching her up, and she had used those hours well. She had left a small part of herself on the Inside, just enough to follow the others on their return to the Academy. They had all agreed that a nice slow stroll through sunny meadows would be just perfect, and elected to spend four days on their instanced travel, so she wasn’t worried that she would need to fight. She figured Jessila could always carry her if absolutely necessary, though she hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Of course, the main drawback was the extra time before she could see Attaboy, but her system was easily able to dial back her sense of urgency, plus she had decided that an extended stay on the Outside would be a good idea.

After her return, the first urgent task was to take care of her midges. They weren’t doing well. Many of them had already died of old age, and the majority that were left were approaching senescence.

Sorry, little guys. I was busy frying my brain.

Fortunately, her flowers were doing just fine, even the ones currently housed in dead flies. After an unpleasant couple of hours gathering up close to a million tiny bodies, she was able to reclaim most of her satellites. Once that was finished, she spent the rest of the day remodeling a smaller group of a few thousand, replacing their neural tissue with Stage One, extending their lifespans, and improving their range for sending and receiving signals. By the time she was done, most of her original batch had moved on to midge heaven.

Even though she only had about a tenth of a percent of her swarm left, her effective range for scouting and surveillance remained about the same, as the improved midges could send a signal about five feet, and no longer insisted on clustering together. She was pleased to note that developing her mana sense on the Inside had crossed back over to working with the midges, and she was able to use their senses much better than before.

During the night, she rested her body and cultivated. The collapse of her Stage One units due to Eskallia’s plot inspired her to work toward having a significantly more robust network of redundancies and backups, and she went about creating a system of reserves and storage for redundant units throughout her body. In hindsight, it was clear to her that she had spread her resources too thin in her desire to capture so many midges; had she kept half of her satellites within her prosthetic arm, she could have called them back to her brain when disaster struck.

Never again, she thought.I have a virtually unlimited amount of feedstock, and as much time as I need. The Piles can wait. The Master of Five Eyes can wait.

A new idea struck as she seeded Stage One flowers throughout her body.

I coordinate my swarm of midges through radio frequency signals, for now anyway. What if I built an internal network to convey signals to my muscles the same way? At the very least, it could be used in emergencies, like if my spine was damaged.

She spent the next day, other than some breaks for food and other necessities, continuing to churn out vast numbers of Stage One flowers and simultaneously building her new fly-by-wireless nervous system. The latter was very slow going, but by the end of the day, she had achieved something like ten percent redundancy by focusing on the major muscle groups, enough, in theory, to enable her to move around and perform simple tasks if something should damage her original nerves.

When it was time, she tested the new system, careful to keep the timing of the impulses in line with the conduction speed of her biological components. She started by contracting her bicep.

Okay. Arm moving… feels right, like I’m the one doing it. Proprioception seems good. I wonder what it’s going to be like to integrate balance when I try to walk?

She tinkered with the system for several more hours, capturing the firing patterns for various motions and replicating them, learning the feedback loops between proprioception, balance and nerve impulse and recreating them over her internal wireless network. By the time the sun was down, she could walk and use her arms without any use of her spinal cord.

There’s one major weakness addressed. Now if I could just study some bone bugs…

She had many ideas about ways to strengthen her skeletal system, from increasing the density of calcium deposits to incorporating weaves of diamond nanofibers, like those found in her Rank Five skin. She was reluctant to embark on her own experimentation though, because she knew from talking with Anda that it was a well studied problem within the clans who specialized in bone augmentation. It wouldn’t be easy for her test for brittleness, or to find the ideal ratios of strength and flexibility, or to find which substrates worked best with her own biology on her own.

Bones were living organs, not simple sticks that could be arbitrarily replaced, and evolution had been solving these problems for millions of years. She needed something tried and true to study before she started replacing things willy-nilly.

What she did instead was greatly reinforce the skin covering her skull; her face would still be vulnerable, but now she suspected it would take something truly substantial to penetrate her cranium. That wouldn’t protect her from concussion, or the underlying bone fragmenting the way it did with Anda’s injury, but it was better than nothing.

She continued to cultivate through the night, allowing one hemisphere of her brain to sleep at a time, a trick inspired by learning how whales and dolphins managed to sleep without drowning. She could, if she wanted, allow her entire brain to sleep while she kept her consciousness in Stage Two, but she was reluctant to revisit the perils of a mind disconnected from biology, not unless there was a pressing need.

For the most part Anda stayed Inside, working with Mr. Sennit and the other crafters of Academy Town to solidify their position against an inevitable clan crackdown. Attaboy had yet to emerge from the Academy, and they had decided that Anda should simply wait for him to make an appearance, rather than try to pass messages through random students. It was only a matter of time; either Lilijoy would arrive, or Attaboy would come to town.

As the sun rose on the next day, Lilijoy pulled up her system status.

STATUS: Disciple, First Circle

Stage One

Nanobody count: 39,467,004

Integration: 99%

Stage Two

Replication Units: 417

FLOPS Equivalent: 10^17.1

Integration: 79%

Secondary/Support: 3/4 implemented

Communications: Internal network

Sensors: Passive

RE Reserves: 1.23 kg mixed

Personal Quantification: Ranking Display

Options | Logs | Data | Reference | Menu

Due to her current lack of trust for Immortal Crystal Oak, she had decided not to develop Stage Two for the time being. but she was very pleased to see that her integration percentage had risen by five points, probably because of the necessity to develop parallel motor circuits. Her Stage One numbers looked great, and they didn’t even include the external satellite units she was storing in her prosthetic arm.

She advanced to the personal quantification.

Tao System Ranking Display

Rank 1 (Senses): 10

Can advance with physical augmentation

Sight: 10

Hearing: 10

Internal Chemical Analysis: 10

Expand molecular database

Atmospheric Chemical Analysis: 4

Touch: 10

Proprioception: 9

Synergy: Not defined

Rank 2 (Brain): 10

Rank 3 (Reflexes): 9/10

Myelin enhancement in progress (86%)

Unconscious response to stimuli ~5x

(Biological/Redundant)

Rank 4 (Blood): 2/2

Oxygen carrying capacity ~ 30x

Rapid clotting for injuries ~ 10x

Limited independent motility

Rank 5 (Skin): 8/10

Vital areas fully protected

Abdominal coverage 100%

Extremities 100%

Work on:

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: 10,000,000 units

Work on:

entangled particle communication system

offensive capabilities

external processing units

She felt great about her satellite units. Each one was a cluster of fifty flowers, just enough to form its own distributed antenna. Next time she wanted to capture a midge cloud, or a human being for that matter, she would be able to do it with ease, as long as she was close enough to touch them. Though if she wanted to attack from a distance, she was still going to need to weaponize her midges or find some other type of delivery system.

She wasn’t sure how to categorize her new, parallel nervous system. In the future, she thought it would serve in place of Rank Nine, since it had the potential to deliver signals from her muscles to her brain and back at light speed. The problem was, at the moment it could only mimic her existing nerve impulses, as slow as they were. She would need to complete the project and then learn an entirely new form of muscle control and coordination to make use of the faster signal propagation. Not only that, but she feared that it would be distinctly vulnerable to outside interference, aggressive signal blockers and EMPs in particular, as well as possibly leaking and giving away her position. She would need some way to protect her internal radio frequencies.

You know, maybe I could turn most of my skin into a Faraday cage? Potentially all of it, if I built an external antenna.

She added the idea to her to do list for Rank Five, which she had completed the day before. It was a little mysterious why it was only rated an eight out of ten, since her skin's entire surface area had been reinforced. She figured it was another Maasai trick she was missing and made a mental note to ask Anda about it.

Beyond that, there were only a few changes. At first she was pleased when she saw that the conversion of myelin had progressed so quickly, leaping to eighty-five percent. She sobered up quickly when she realized that it was due to the overall reduction of places in her brain with unconverted myelin, due to the areas in her brain that had sustained damage.

That’s one way to get to total coverage. Just remove all the parts I haven’t gotten to yet and voila!

She left her internal awareness and sat back, taking a moment to savor the crazy notion that she could do anything she pleased with her day. If she wanted, she could jump back in to action and visit the Piles, or take a few more days and work with her midges.

Or just sit and watch the sun rise. That sounds about right.

After a while, sitting on top of the canopy of the hovercar and enjoying what passed for a nice day in the Amazon wastes, her thoughts returned to the Inside, to a silver seed, not quite an acorn, that fit easily in the palm of her hand with her fingers closed around it.

Who’s going to run the Academy now? she remembered thinking. Would anyone notice a difference if no one did? It can’t have been very practical, having a grove of trees in charge. I hope that Dean Reunification doesn’t take over.

She was still processing the notion that the Dean was Attaboy’s advisor.

The Academy is such a strange place. I’m pretty sure its primary purpose is to provide drama and conflict, rather than educate. Although my perspective may be a bit skewed.

She wondered what the experience of a normal Outsider was like, what it would be like to stay there for years, slowly learning and leveling. She knew that there were classes specifically for Outsiders as well, where they learned to make use of their personal databases of math and science. What the rare student with no clan connections did to learn those things she couldn’t say.

Probably they get adopted by a clan. That’s certainly what would have happened with me if circumstances were different. I wonder why on earth everyone organized into clans anyway. It seems so strange that all these different groups just decided to adopt similar systems. It can’t be a coincidence. I guess when in doubt, blame Guardian.

She let her thoughts drift for a while as the breeze picked up, carrying with it small grains of mildly radioactive sand. The decaying particles sent a gentle crackling through her system that was strangely soothing.

I should probably go back in the craft. But I’m tired of turning off my smell.

After all the happenings and over a week of close living, the interior of the craft had picked up a distinct aroma.

It’s a good thing there aren’t great slime molds out here. They’d be coming from miles around. On the other hand, the Outside could do with a good cleaning. Maybe they’d be just the thing. I’m sure they would love the great swamp.

She spent a few seconds calculating whether something like the great slime molds could feasibly exist on the Outside.

Only in water I guess. It’s probably for the best anyway; Guardian would get annoyed if I tried to make something like that. It would violate Rule One I suppose.

She thought back to her earlier idea about the relationship between evil and Rule One, and pulled up her latest version to follow the notion further.

Rule One: Maintaining an optimized entropic balance is valuable. State shifts in bounded negatively entropic regions caused by asymptotic growth curves threaten system stability.

Resource concentrating processes on such a curve may not proceed past an upper limit defined by individual or collective simulation capacity. Avoiding phase changes in entropic distribution permits intervention in accordance with simulation capabilities.

Well, that’s pithy, she noted.

It took her some thought to parse the meaning of the new version. As usual, it wasn’t hard for her to see how her earlier version of the rule was related, though the language had changed considerably.

I can’t wait until I’m smart enough to just understand the glyph, she thought. But I’m guessing that’s a long way away.

It was interesting to see that Guardian’s primary concern was maintaining a certain range or state of entropy within the system. Since 'system' was left undefined, she assumed that it could refer to anything from a single computer to the Earth as a whole. She knew that life could be considered as a form of negative entropy, and figured that a being or an ecosystem could be called a ‘bounded negatively entropic region’. At least, that’s what she thought was going on.

What was of particular interest was Guardian’s talk of ‘state shifts’ and ‘phase changes’. It seemed to her that death could be considered a state shift, for the region of bounded negative entropy that defined a human being, for example. The second paragraph seemed to overlap with Rule Three to some extent, limiting the use of growth processes than might proceed exponentially to those with the capacity to simulate them. Only a being that could hold an outcome entirely within its mind would be allowed to tinker with such things, and only such a being was allowed to intervene in order to prevent an undesired state shift.

Which in Guardian’s case means blasting it with space lasers. I wonder if Guardian follows its own rules, if these rules are primarily its own code of conduct?

Naturally, there was no mention of ‘evil’ per se, no surprise there, but Lilijoy found that the new Rule One dovetailed well with her own musings on the subject. Evil would be unbalanced growth, whether it manifested externally or internally. Thoughts or emotions propagating rampantly within the mind could violate this rule just as easily as a plague of demon nanobots. To a being like Guardian, who held entire worlds within, such a distinction might be entirely meaningless.

So was what Eskallia did evil? I guess if I follow Rule One, then I’m not fit to judge.

Rosemallow had told Lilijoy Eskallia’s story, her despair and growing obsession with avenging Averdale, followed by the years of peace after she allowed herself to become treetouched.

“For the longest time I thought she had used treetouched as a kind of medicine, as a way to overcome her rage,” Rosemallow had confided. “And maybe she was, for a while. Or maybe she intended something like this all along. After all, for someone like her, treetouched was the barest restraint. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she formed the rough outline of her plan a couple cycles ago, that she was just waiting for the right opportunity. Maybe someday I will ask her.”

Rosemallow had looked over at the small sapling, growing within the Greatwood’s mighty caldera. The seed had sprouted and grown to about a foot in height as soon as Lilijoy planted it, after the Greatwood agreed to her proposal.

“Do you think she will remember?” Lilijoy asked.

“I don’t know for sure,” Rosemallow replied. “Last time, she abandoned her body willingly and formed the beginnings of the grove that you entered. This time, she’s just so… small.” She sighed.

“Well, that should be great for someone who cultivates growth,” said Lilijoy in an attempt to cheer up her trainer. “Maybe someday she’ll be as big as the fallen part of the Greatwood.”

Rosemallow had snorted. “She’d like that.”

The rest of their conversation, before Lilijoy was pulled away by her friends to begin the journey back to the Academy, had been about her role as a Child of Guardian. Rosemallow had explained that prior to each previous cycle, an unusually talented Outsider had arrived, one who would exceed the limitations of the Garden within a year.

“I don’t know what it is, but Insiders could always tell that they were different from the other Outsiders, more like us in many ways. Some of them have had a profound impact in their short time here. I suspect Eskallia’s course was profoundly altered by two of them, though I couldn’t tell you whether it was for the better. It was after she met the second, more than sixty years ago, that she became treetouched.”

“Do you know anything else about them? Did you meet any of them?”

Rosemallow shook her head. “No. I’ve only heard the stories, been at the Academy since just after the second cycle.”

Guess the last two or three didn’t come to the Academy. I wonder why?”

“So I’m the first to come to the Academy?”

Rosemallow nodded. “It’s not impossible that the very first was around for the Academy’s earliest days, but not much is known of that one, not even a name.”

“But you do know the names of the others?”

Lilijoy felt a tinge of excitement. A name wasn’t much, unless it was everything.

“Yes. After Nameless came Atticusp, then Echelon, then Sarahfly,” Rosemallow said.

Lilijoy’s brain exploded a little. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the second shared a similar name to Atticus Choi.

Adding a p on the end seems like something an Outsider choosing their Inside name might do. Makes a nice pun.

While she was still trying to figure out what to make of another Atticus showing up, her brain was tickling. There was some connection, some bit of trivia in her internet memory trying to emerge. But it wasn’t about the second name.

Echelon. Where have I…

The connection formed, solidified, and she knew.

Project Echelon. Code name for a covert surveillance system in the twentieth century. Run by the Five Eyes alliance. He named himself Echelon. It's a direct connection.

She knew the identity of the Master of Five Eyes. Probably.

If it wasn’t Echelon, it was someone who knew him. If it was Echelon, then the Master of Five Eyes and the one who remained were one and the same.

Perched on the hovercar overlooking the Amazon waste, Lilijoy felt a warm surge of accomplishment at the memory of the revelation. She had tried to avoid thinking of it over the past few days, tucked it away so she could enjoy the past few days of growth and development without urgency. But perhaps it was time to start moving again.

She hopped off the car while messaging Anda to return from the Inside. It was time for her to visit the Piles. After that, she would return to the Academy and reunite with Attaboy. Then, all she needed to do was find Echelon.

How hard could it be? she thought.