Prelude:

In her home under a mile of ice, an old woman listened to a report from an old… companion. The word minion had come to mind initially, but she didn’t really like the way that felt, like she was some kind of arch-villain, manipulating the fate of the world from her volcano lair.

For one, I’m about as far from any active volcanoes as someone could possibly be, she noted.

As was typical of her long-time associate, there was no visual component to the report, and the voice was genderless and uninflected. It was not a scintillating listening experience, but the content more than made up for it.

So, little Lilijoy and Attaboy are reunited. How sweet. I love it when the universe delivers on the long odds. Even if it probably is just Guardian maximizing narrative interest.

It was a consequence of living in a simulation, when so little was known about the repository that housed it. One had to constantly wonder exactly why the simulation existed in the first place, or whether it had a purpose at all. She knew that Guardian pursued multiple strategies to maximize simulation self-preservation, and among those was maintaining a certain level of entertainment.

Just in case someone was watching.

Of course, Guardian characterized it in terms of entropic balance, and Guardian's accumulation of meaning broadly overlaid the issue. She was sure that she could refine her understanding, if she cared to spend a few hundred years of subjective time investigating the subject, but she trusted Guardian enough to leave the subject in its capable hands.

That’s what machines were for, after all. She had her own, more personal goals, and several thousand subjective years of life had taught her to focus on the smaller things, at least if she wished to remain human. Since Guardian was, more or less, never human in the first place, it didn’t have that concern.

You did good, Mom. Too bad things worked out the way they did, she thought. Your creation still lives on, carrying a little bit of you with it.

She sighed and paused the recording when she realized she hadn’t listened to a word of it for the last minute. Gone were the days when she would have simply absorbed it, understanding and processing its contents in a fraction of a second. These days she preferred a more sedate pace, where the flow of her existence was in harmony with her origins. Though in the face of another hour of Shadow’s monotone, even that resolution wavered.

The report can wait, she decided. I can feel my flowers calling me.

She walked down a long corridor, the airlock doors opening and closing as she passed, to emerge in a vast enclosed space. A warm breeze caressed her face as she entered, and she quickly removed her shoes so that she could feel the lush earth between her toes. As always, the years dropped away, subjective centuries of struggle and sorrow absorbed by the verdant life around her.

Walking to a colorful bank of tall, waving blooms, Emily Choi began to tend to her Lilies.

Chapter 1: Postshadowing

A towering cliff loomed over the dark, windswept waters of the Atlantic Ocean. North and south, it swept into infinity, a dark dripping monolithic mass of encrusted protrusions and hanging fronds, a bastion to mark the edge of a continent, now laid bare to the light.

Atop a pillar of revealed stone stood a small girl, her hair, what there was of it, fluttering in the stiff coastal wind. Hundreds of meters below, waves crashed against the rock, beginning the process that would humble the mighty sea wall over thousands of years, but for now, the geology was young. In a blink of an eye, the receding waters had unveiled the naked break of a virgin coast, and the maps and territory no longer coincided.

L’appel du vid, the call of the void, thought Lilijoy. That urge to jump from a high place, just… because. What is it called when an entire species feels that?

She took a deep breath, inhaling the unfamiliar scents from the wind. At least I’ve seen the ocean now.

She had not expected it to be so powerful, but the raw scope of the changes to the earth could not be escaped in such a place. To get to the continent’s new edge, she had piloted the hovercar for nearly one hundred miles under a dull brown sky. The new lands behind her were a dark rippled clay, punctuated by shallow salt lakes, where no new life had begun. On her way, she had seen a few other craft, scavengers, searching for the treasures claimed by the sea, but no other signs of movement, no animals, no birds. There was nothing for them here.

Humanity did this, she thought as she pivoted to take in the view on all sides. But what would it feel like to know that I was personally responsible? Everything, he said. Everything.

In the days since her encounter with Henry Choi, she had wondered which was more responsible for his broken state, the events that had damaged his body and brain, or the responsibility he felt for all that had happened since. She wondered if she would ever know exactly what had transpired at the Amazon testing facility she called Night’s Safety.

Over the past couple days, she had learned many things, information that had reshaped her early understanding of the Tao System and its origins. Attaboy had memories that extended well past the vague awareness of a thirteen year-old Emily Choi, both in time and detail. Lilijoy was still reeling from their most recent conversation, unmoored by new context for so many of her old mysteries, and utterly overwhelmed by histories she thought forever lost.

Global Unification Authority.

Now she had a context for what Gabrielle Choi had been doing during the time of Emily’s memories. She even knew where she had been doing it.

Alcantara Launch Center near São Luís.

The very city she and Anda had arrived in the day before. She knew it could not be a coincidence, and she remembered Henry’s advice, that she wipe her memories of a Tao Systems facility near Taos, New Mexico, and substitute a different, plausible justification for traveling to the location. Something like that had to have occurred to her and Anda. It made her feel uneasy about what else might have happened in those missing hours, though she was intrigued by the concept.

Oh the pranks I could play on my future self! If I knew when my birthday was, I could even throw a surprise party for myself. Then she considered the implications of even having such a thought and shuddered. On the other hand, let’s just agree to never, ever do this for any reason, okay, me?

She dragged her thoughts back to the next stop on her travels for the day, Emily’s home. She had no idea what she might find, or if such a structure still existed. Attaboy had been able to give her a street address, but she couldn’t be sure there would still be a street. She wasn’t expecting much, but she had to see it for herself, wanted to know that the memories she had experienced were real. As much as she could know anything was real.

Like talking with Attaboy.

It was still surreal to her that such a thing was possible. As far as she could tell, he was still himself, in all the ways that mattered. There were times when his voice changed, and he sounded older, or when he used words or said things in ways that could never have come from her Attaboy, and she suspected that he was deliberately downplaying the differences for her benefit. But then, so was she. Neither of them were what they had been, but that was life. People changed, and they stayed the same, all at once. That both of them felt more comfortable pretending to be who they were growing up only meant that they both still cared, and she could only hope, believe that it was that caring that mattered at least as much as small details like identity itself.

His appearance was still a bit shocking though. More than anything, that clued her into the real changes going on inside his mind, that he was more comfortable in a bigger body, that his physical self image was not the gnome-like child of her memories, but a full sized, normally proportioned human. On the Inside, he could manifest his true self over time. It had only been a week since he finished his Trial, but already his Inside body was almost five feet tall, and his face resembled her memories of Atticus.

So it’s complicated, she thought. What else is new? Attaboy said he was almost four and a half feet on the Outside, and that his voice had gotten lower too. This is just like extreme puberty. Except he’s gotten the advantage of remembering what it was like once already.

That was pretty much Attaboy’s take on the whole thing. He believed that he was a reincarnation of Atticus, and that his memories returned to him after his second death. Lilijoy wasn’t entirely sure how he reconciled this with his system, but it seemed to her that he didn’t consider it an either/or type proposition.

A strong gust made her take a step back on her high perch. There was a line of dark clouds on the horizon, heralding one of the rainless thunder storms that arrived almost daily this time of year. With a thought, she summoned the hovercar and jumped into it as soon as it arrived. She had no desire to be carried off by the wind.

***

The arrival of Kuraudonain was a momentous occasion for the inhabitants of the Josho clan’s stronghold on Mount Halcon. Magpie had only seen it from a distance, several years ago, from her home on the repurposed drilling platform. The night was vivid in her memory, and with time she had come to doubt the accuracy of her memories, thinking that time had caused her to exaggerate the size and majesty of the spherical sky-city, a glowing orb the size of the sun from her perspective, but drifting silently across the backdrop of dark, curled clouds. At the time, she had imagined it must be what the moon had looked like in the days before the sky had thickened.

Cloud Nine. That was the literal translation. When she had seen it that night, she had learned everything she could about the impossible, enchanted city. How it had come to be in the modern world, she had not the faintest clue, but the basics of its design went back to the old times, the twentieth century. She couldn’t remember much more than triangles were involved, that somehow the structure was so large that its density became comparable to air.

That night, she had promised herself that someday, somehow, she would visit the floating city in the sky and float above the clouds, escaping her duties and burdens.

It hadn’t been difficult for Magpie to enter Mount Halcon. Though access was restricted to the Josho clan and its affiliates, her system was particularly good at spoofing credentials, and with the appropriate authorization no one looked at her twice. She had a feeling that entry to Kuraudonain would not be nearly so simple, but she wasn’t worried either. What was all her training good for if not something like this? Her Japanese was only so-so, even aided by her system, but she wasn’t going to pretend to be a clan member, so she thought she could get by.

Evidently, the sky-city was running several days late. This was nothing unusual, as it relied on prevailing winds for a great deal of its propulsion, its vast surface area capturing their steady energy. In the meantime, life went on as usual at Mount Halcon, and Magpie was grateful to have more time for her battered feet to recover. She kept herself busy, learning about the resupply process and attempting to gauge her best bet for gaining access.

She was drinking tea at an outdoor cafe when she heard the pealing bells heralding its arrival, and it wasn’t long after that that the sky began to fill. The shadow fell across her first, and then the leading edge of the mile-diameter sphere appeared through the transparent panels of the dome she was in. On and on it came, casting an eclipse upon the mountain. Torches were lit up and down the street in honor of the arrival, a custom that Magpie couldn’t quite wrap her head around; why revert to the most primitive source of light in the face of the most advanced human achievement?

Still, she had to admit that the way the flickering flames pushed back the artificial night felt right, and spoke to the deep part of her that was awed and even a little cowed by the sheer scope of the object floating overhead.

I wonder how they make it stop?

She didn’t know, and she relegated the question to the long list of imponderables she had set aside over her existence. What was more important was that she move quickly. Already porters were bustling to the loading spires, their backs laden with supplies. The heavy crates of feedstock and raw materials were loaded by towering cranes, but there were always personal deliveries and supplies more easily delivered by hand. Wagons containing fresh produce filled the streets in a long line, awaiting an exodus of stewards and servants tasked with obtaining only the best for their wealthy patrons. Kuraudonain only made port a few times each year, so much business would be transacted over the next several days.

What would it be like to live in such a way? she wondered. Always floating between the same places, year after year.

Not that different, she decided, than any life. She took one last sip from her tea and got to her feet. The next few days would be challenging, and already she felt her senses wakening and her body responding. This was what she lived for, this challenge that was true living, relying only on her training and her wits.

She saw a porter stumble past struggling with a load too great for his diminutive frame. There.

“I’ve always wanted to see it up close,” she said moving onto the street and alongside the boy, who was only a bit older than her. “Let me help.”

***

If she squinted, she could almost see where the lilies had grown. All that remained of the dome was a fence like a ring, the skeleton of the lowest few feet, tension rods still anchored here and there, but no panes between them. The house was nothing but a foundation of molded cement. Lilijoy felt a sense of awe despite the decrepitude of the Choi residence.

There. That was where she, or rather Emily, lay on the grass in that first dream-like memory. And over there was where a screen door had once swung. Her feet took her through the memories, entering the house while stepping over broken blocks, tracing the edges of the kitchen where she had first seen Atticus on the crumbled ground.

And there. That was where Gabriella’s office had been, off the main living space. Much of it must have happened there.

Technically, it happened in some virtual space, she thought. Why it had been Gabriella, and who else was involved, Lilijoy did not know. Were there governments backing her? Other corporations? That information was still lost to time. But what she did know was enough.

G.U.A. Global Unification Authority.

A project to rescue a war-torn planet. A desperate bid to reunify humanity and stop the madness. It was its own kind of madness, of course, but Lilijoy could imagine the desperation that drove it, drove Gabriella, the desire to see a future for her children. All that was needed was the computer virus to end all computer viruses, the AI to end all AIs, to achieve a global computer network unified under one authority. All the controls for advanced weapons of war, for research, for communication, controlled by one thing. GUArdian.

I wonder what Henry thought of it? Was there some disagreement, some conflict that led to everything else? Guardian rose in the year 2080. When was the testing facility destroyed?

According to Attaboy, the conversation that Lilijoy remembered in the kitchen that night had taken place in 2074. He was pretty sure that Gabriella had been working on Guardian by that time, though he wasn’t privy to much as an eighteen year-old. Over the next two years Atticus had mostly worked with his father, testing and learning about the strange new world of the true cognitive enhancement enabled by the Tao System, a quantum leap beyond all the other systems in use at the time. Or so they had assumed, anyway.

He did know that Henry and Gabriella continued to work together during that time as well, and didn’t remember any particular fighting or conflicts beyond the norm for his parents. His memories cut off around the end of 2076, and were, in Lilijoy’s opinion, suspiciously foggy on certain topics. She assumed that the system, the legacy bequeathed to Attaboy had been specifically tailored at some point, edited to remove the most sensitive or dangerous information. That didn’t bother her at this point, since she had already learned more about her system from him than she had ever hoped possible.

For one, and this came as no particular surprise, her system was sadly out of date compared to Attaboy’s. His had medical abilities from the start, something she had, somewhat clumsily it now appeared, added on her own. It made his treatment at the hands of Mooster and ‘Gabriella’ a bit more humane, as the damage to his lungs and other organs would have been repaired as his system grew. That still didn’t account for why he had been abandoned, exiled at the edge of the tribe’s territory, but it did mean that he had been expected to survive all along.

She still couldn’t understand why she had been treated the same way, and for the time being she had decided to regard her treatment as some kind of echo of Attaboy’s, her injuries from the dog some kind of stimulus that produced a similar response.

That wasn’t the most interesting thing she had learned on the subject though. ‘Gabriella’ had actually talked to Attaboy. He had relayed her speech to him verbatim.

Don’t be scared little one, you will be reborn, and everything will change. You have died before, so don’t worry. There is nothing for you here anymore. Someday you will understand, and when the time comes, you might return. But that will be many years from now. Now you have a very important job, which we call a quest. Your quest is to follow the star you will see in your eye. Don’t worry, you’ll understand soon enough. Along the way, you must be very careful and avoid people as much as possible. You will learn, and grow, and when you finally arrive, you will understand what you need to do.

Boy, thought Lilijoy at the time Attaboy relayed those words, all she said to me is ‘Sorry, little one’. I got gypped.

The ‘little one,’ part rang true though, which led Lilijoy to believe that it was probably the same person pulling the strings. That Attaboy had been told to avoid people and proceeded to do exactly the opposite rang true as well. And now she had a better idea of what ‘join Atticus’ had meant in Henry’s note to her. His ‘star’ was a simple compass overlay, always pointing to his goal. Lilijoy had asked him to create a similar overlay for Taos, New Mexico, and the stars aligned perfectly.

What are we meant to find there? And Tao Systems in Taos? Really? Maybe it was originally Taos Systems and they just lost the ‘S’. Or more likely, Henry just couldn’t help himself.

Dread and curiosity warred within her, but she knew that the answers, if they came at all, were a long way off. Before anything, Attaboy needed to complete his escape from Sinaloa territory. Just about the last thing Lilijoy wanted to do was make her way back across the continent, well over two thousand miles this time, but it was going to be necessary. The trip even went through New Manaus again.

Sorry Anda, she thought. So much for slowing down.

She knew he would insist on coming with her, even though they had just arrived. He was spending the day catching up with his friends from the Tesla Clan, which, from her brief acquaintance, might just qualify for the strangest clan yet. She had met the small group yesterday, four people dressed like they had just popped out of the twenty-first century. They were the first people she had met who didn’t seem to take the whole ‘clan’ thing seriously. One of them had even used air quotes when talking about it.

Anda had warned her that they would be a little different. Tesla clan had taken the name of a famous company, who had in turn taken the name of a famous inventor, and while they did not claim a direct association with the corporate dynasty of cars, space vehicles and neural interfaces, no one who knew anything about the subject doubted that that was exactly what they were. It was this company that employed a young Gabriella Choi, then Gabriella Wilson, that used her breakthroughs to create the first self-assembling sensory replacement neural interfaces.

They were the pioneers, and with the rise of Guardian, there was no other population with a greater density of individuals equipped with systems. While most clans had a handful of ‘originals’ who had lived from before the tribulation, Tesla had thousands. Despite this, they kept to themselves, never seeking power over the other clans, and participating in the Corp as minimally as they could. As far as Lilijoy could tell, Tesla clan was a sleeping dragon that nobody dared to wake, and its members knew it.

Anda had regaled her with rumors of secret Tesla bases under the ocean, secret Tesla bases under the ice caps, even secret bases on the moon. From those conversations, it was clear that everyone thought that Tesla had secrets, but no one could agree on what they might be. Evidently, Anda’s friends weren’t telling.

I bet I have them beat in the secrets department, she thought. Honestly, the whole topic just made her tired. She had no more mental or emotional space for mysterious groups acting mysteriously. She still didn’t have a good handle on Renaissance; if Tesla left her alone, she would happily reserve her bandwidth for Anda's secrective organization.

The storm she had seen coming over the Atlantic was just reaching her current location, swirling dust and debris across the remnants of the Choi’s property. The hardened grasses buzzed, a low brassy sound that would rise with the winds. She took a last look at the historic site, the birthplace of Guardian, where the world for better or worse had been irrevocably changed.

Why send me here? What possible impact can I have when everything that mattered happened a century and a half ago?

She didn’t know the answer to that, and it bothered her. Perhaps it was a coincidence after all, her presence in São Luís, or perhaps she was looking in the wrong place. She shivered, suddenly haunted by the desolation of her memory. There was one other place to go, the reason for Gabriella’s residence in this part of the world. Only twenty miles or so north was the Alcântara Launch Center, the Brazilian space port. Guardian’s components must have launched from there.

Tomorrow, she told herself. The storm is almost here.