“Did you see that kid in the fifth cohort tourney?” said one muffled voice.

“You know I’m not at the Academy. Stop finding reasons to rub it in.” said another.

Magpie could feel the gentle rolling motion of her conveyance stop.

“Sorry, I forgot. Some gob kid chewed them up and spat them out. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

Are they talking about Lily? she wondered. I thought she wasn’t going to do the tournament. Wait, fifth cohort? Must be some other… someone else.

“Okay? I really like it when you tell me about the lower orders who made it into the Academy when I didn’t.”

“Eh, it won’t matter in a few years.”

“Riiight. You ready?”

“Yes. On three.”

The voices counted down, and she felt herself rise, and then drop with a jarring impact.

“Damn thing seemed heavier.”

“Go ahead and keep telling yourself that. If you broke it, you can explain to the boss.”

Magpie readied the tantō she had purchased, waiting for the lid of the pod she was hiding in to fly up.

Why did I think this was a good idea again?

She had been thinking a lot over the past twelve hours. Thinking about what a bad idea it was to make plans that gave you too much time to think about all the flaws in the plan you made after it was too late to change them. She dimly remembered someone, probably Raven since she had blocked it out, telling her that falling in love with a plan was the worst mistake of all. In hindsight, that was exactly what had happened.

It had just seemed so elegant, and the initial stages had unfolded so smoothly, as if destiny was on her side. It had all started with a simple question. How do they service their pods?

She knew that there must be thousands of pods in use inside Kuroudonain, and she had suspected that some portion of them would be repaired or replaced at each stop. Following that thought, it had been simple to discover that there was a facility for exactly that, located in one of the docking ports. From there, it had been one obvious, almost inevitable step after another to exploit the system.

Only after she had closed herself within the pod due to be brought on board had she begun to have second thoughts.

What if they have one last inspection? What if they weigh them?

The ‘what ifs’ had been dominating her thoughts for hours now, along with the realization that she had broken a fundamental precept by trapping herself with no escape route.

The voices receded, and Magpie heard the sound of a door closing. She allowed a minute to pass before easing open the lid of the pod, her heart pounding. Was she in someone’s private quarters? A communal center of some kind?

As it turned out, she was in a room full of inert pods, a storage area. Barely translucent walls, floor and ceiling allowed just enough light through for her to see.

Now what?

***

Breathing is an interesting thing, thought Lilijoy. It’s the one place where conscious will and biological imperative are perfect equals. The bridge to the unconscious. Until the oxygen runs out anyway.

She sat on top of the hovercar in a lotus position, her trip to the spaceport on hold for the moment, her journey through Eskalia’s memories postponed. Instead she meditated, on the Outside, where she could focus inward more easily, without the distractions provided by fields of glowing mana.

She focused on her breathing. Every meditation tradition had its own thoughts on the subject, though it was more central to some. It had intrigued her to learn about some of the more intricate breathing patterns and practices, and she had spent some time contemplating why a person might come to believe that breathing a particular way would impact their internal energies. As with virtually every subject involving humans, there was a great variety of opinion and argument spread out over the centuries, and she had come to conclude that one’s faith in the efficacy of a particular technique played a far greater role than the actual specifics of the technique.

She thought back to her own revelations regarding the power of specificity, how using it as an end unto itself had helped her discover how to perform Qi strikes. It was not a question of true or false, real or fake, but rather a tool for discernment. In the case of breathing techniques it seemed to serve a related function, allowing the conscious mind to expand into the unconscious by inhabiting the selvage where the two met. Specificity harnessed will and faith together, created a self-fulfilling prophecy that led to the technique’s success. Perhaps that had even been in play for her, that the tool not only discerned but created its own reality.

Initially, she had discarded breathing techniques as something redundant to the powers of her system. What was the point of controlling the breath when she could interface with all the systems of her body, when her thoughts could flow to speeds that rendered the change of breath rare? But her experience in the Library had given her an insight. She neglected the original language of her biology at her peril, that shutting it down, closing it away, led to the growth of corruption in her soul vortex.

Henry Choi had his biology forcefully removed, to a large extent anyway, and she could only imagine that his current state must relate to that. Eskallia was another matter entirely. Lilijoy had no idea how the ‘biology’ of the subsets related to their minds, how Guardian chose to thread that particular needle. But from Eskallia she had come to understand that power and intelligence were no defense against the type of corruption she had discovered within herself, to understand how corruption and the growth of intelligence could feed from one another.

The more you know, the less you know, she thought. It’s not that, but it’s like that. Maybe the larger your mind, the more places there are to hide?

It was a slippery subject to be sure. But these thoughts had brought her to where she was now, breathing, feeling, attempting to deepen the connection between her narrative consciousness and the engine that powered it, trying to strengthen the bonds with her deeper self, and so she turned to breath, trying to understand what happened in the moment of each change, to see the difference between her conscious will and her body’s decisions.

She stayed there for several hours doing nothing, doing everything. At last, she felt it was time to stop, and she realized that was a kind of breath too, that the very decision to end her practice was like a change of breath that flowed up from the deeper totality of her mind, that each activity, each impulse within the day was like that, some welling up, others imposed by her conscious narrative's interaction with the external world, and she came away from her practice having learned that to truly understand the decision to change her breath was to understand all the decisions she might make.

She was tempted to look within her soul vortex, to see what impact her meditations had provided, but the decision not to welled up, along with the feeling that to do so was a kind of greed, a neediness that would only be enforced by the act. Patience, she decided, was also like breathing. It was a place where emotion and action met as equals. Instead, she checked to see if Anda, or anyone else had tried to contact her over the past hours.

He had.

Hey Lilijoy. Sepehr told me you were headed out to the old spaceport. Hope you find what you’re looking for! I just wanted to let you know that I’m taking the Fogies on a field trip later today, thought you might want to join us.

The Fogies was the self-adopted name of the group of crafters from Academy Town that Anda was training. Lilijoy was a bit jealous of his role, though she knew there was no way she would have the time to do what he was doing. She assumed that by ‘field trip’ he meant some kind of expedition that would involve danger and excitement, as that had turned out to be a valuable source of experience for the crafters, who were seeking to level up as quickly as they could before the clans caught on to their potential insurgency.

She sent back her reply.

I might try to join you, if you haven’t already left. Or I could try to catch up. Where are you headed?

His answer came immediately.

Already there, haven’t gone in yet. Everyone’s a bit nervous.

We’re at Wirry Woods, a few miles south of Academy Town, just follow the south road.

Lilijoy knew that the Wirry Woods was a popular destination for experience term, but not much more than that. There were many other things she should be doing; training, going back to the library, going to some class or another.

No more ‘shoulds’, she decided. Should is a corrupt word, a word that divides and represses. A word of shame.

Now that she thought of it, she wondered just how much of her joyful anticipation had disappeared down 'should’s' gaping maw. She knew it wasn’t the primary source of corruption; it was more henchman than nemesis. Her true enemy was fear, arriving in the guise of concerned advisor, offering words of caution that bound and paralyzed.

Like Gríma Wormtongue. I haven’t thought about those books for a while now. My own internal 'counselor' that warns me of betrayal, that says there is no such thing as a pleasant surprise. Always so rational, hiding its true nature.

In another moment, she was Inside, running to the Wirry Woods. She stayed Outside as well and resumed her trip to the spaceport. The sensation of being in two places felt surprisingly good, rather like listening to two independent voices in a song might have felt when she first discovered music. Nowadays, the only music that created that sensation for her were the most complicated works by Bach and Charles Ives. There were other, even more mathematically complicated works from the mid-twentieth century, but she found them so unpleasant in every other regard that the charms of their architecture were lost on her.

She arrived at both her destinations at very nearly the same time, and at that point she widened the separation of her mind a bit more and spun up a second narrative. Running and riding in the hovercar was one thing, but she felt that talking and exploring new environments might be a step too far for this new approach.

***

It was soon very clear why Sepehr hadn’t been worried about Lilijoy stumbling on anything Tesla Clan related at the old spaceport. The air was thick with a chemical cocktail of ruptured fuel tanks and the ground covered with sooty scraps of metal. Here and there, she could see wiry cylindrical frameworks of what had once been fuel tanks or rockets, and the foundations and rubble of what had once been buildings. She was only on the outskirts of what had once been one of the largest global centers for launching to orbit, but already she suspected her trip was a waste.

There aren’t even going to be animals here, she realized. She had, perhaps naively, assumed that most of the chemicals associated with spaceflight would have long since dissipated, liquid oxygen and various hydrogen compounds being fairly volatile, but her system readings of chemicals very unfriendly to carbon-based life were high enough that even she felt a bit uncomfortable about venturing further.

On the plus side, it meant that on the off chance there was anything to find after all this time, it might still be undisturbed. She couldn’t imagine anyone bothering to waste med bugs to explore the place, nor could she imagine any clan members donning protective gear, just to explore what appeared to be a scene of utter destruction.

I might owe Sepehr an apology, she realized. He wasn’t being condescending. If anything he trusted that I would have enough common sense to leave as soon as I got here.

She stepped into the wreckage.

Then she turned and sent all her midges back to the hovercar. The winds were mild, but she didn’t want them to be poisoned. While they each had self repair abilities, necessary to keep them from dying like, well, flies, she didn’t want to test them against the toxins, especially if they became more concentrated farther in.

She walked for several minutes, marveling at the extent of the destruction. The ground was flat, its surface so strewn with bits of cement and metal that she had to step carefully to avoid damaging her feet. There were no craters or other signs of bombardment, but clearly there had been multiple waves of destruction over the years. Some fragments were emitting chemicals, even after all this time, and when she examined them, she thought they might be the remnants of the nano-foam solid rocket boosters that had been heavily used in the decades before the tribulation. She could almost imagine the destructive chain reaction that must have swept through the facility.

Why on earth would anyone steer me to come here? There’s nothing. Less than nothing.

She scanned in every direction, wishing there was an ability to telescope with her eyes on the Outside.

Stupid physics. There. Is that something?

The facility had covered several square miles in its heyday, and according to the satellite images from one hundred and sixty years ago, there might have once been several large buildings where she was currently looking. Whatever was there now, it certainly wasn’t rectangular or even roughly building-like, at least not anymore.

Whee! I get to hike a mile across an actively toxic wasteland to a big pile of rubble!

***

On the Inside, everything was much more pleasing. The Wirry Woods were thick with fallen trees strewn with yellow and orange shelf fungus and lit by rays of sun, shaded but not dark. Saplings, shrubs and ivy covered the forest floor in lush shades of green over brown leaves and white toadstools.

This is so much nicer than Averdale, she thought.

The Fogeys and Anda had only just entered the edge of the forest when Lilijoy arrived. After a hearty greeting from Mr. Sennit, and introductions to those she hadn’t met, the little group pushed the rest of the way through the outermost layer of the forest, thick shrubs with only the occasional thorn bush. Lilijoy was happy to see that the old folks had equipped themselves well, each contributing their own crafting skills to outfit the group.

She was particularly interested to see them sporting leather caps, courtesy of Mr. August, who was working as an assistant to the local tanner. Leather working was one of the crafts she wanted to try her hand at, and she resolved to talk to him when she got the chance. They also had some potions on their belts, and an assortment of wooden weapons.

“What are we likely to run into?” she whispered to Anda when they stopped at a small clearing. He had been covering the rear of the group while she scouted ahead.

“Wirries. Nasty spirits that possess animals, sometimes livestock. Not much tougher than whatever they’re in. Usually. I figured we’d take it slow today, get the group used to the woods, so if we don’t find any, I’d be just as happy.”

That made sense to Lilijoy. It also didn’t sound quite as exciting as she had hoped.

“Do you mind if I scout around a bit?” she asked. “If I find one, I can soften it up and try to pull it back to the group.”

Anda nodded. “Sounds good. I’ll message you if there’s any excitement while you’re gone.”

She left it to Anda to explain the plan to the rest of them, and headed off into the woods. Being by herself among the entirely normal-sized trees reminded her of her first forest experience in the Trial. She took a moment to savor the solitude, to enjoy the smells and the faint sounds of creaking trunks and rustling branches. She could feel her Outside self struggling across the toxic plain and mentally renewed her vow to bring forests back to the real world.

If it is real.

Rule Two had been popping into her head off and on since she had read it. It bothered her that she couldn’t understand it, for that implied her basic understanding of how the rules worked was somehow incomplete. When she had first learned of them, Anda had told her that ‘The Rules’ were thought to be a subset of some kind, that each person would see only what they could understand, a version tailored specifically for them.

‘A complex multi-dimensional, self-referring holographic information topology’ were the exact words he had used a bit later. Experiencing the golden glyph Eskallia had used to awaken the Greatwood had given her further insight and helped her to understand that the Rules might possess a similar structure.

Spinning within her, her soul vortex seemed to be something related to the awakening glyph and the Rules, though she had no basis to judge if it was a superficial resemblance or a more profound connection. Her best guess was that the Rules were specially built to be intelligible, or more than that, to communicate. Maybe the notion that they were a subset with their own form of intelligence was correct, though Lilijoy suspected it was more that they somehow borrowed, or reflected the intelligence of the viewer.

Which begs the question. Why can’t I understand Rule Two? By definition, it should be intelligible to me, and yet…

There was another possibility that had occurred to her. Just because she was theoretically able to understand didn’t mean that she was willing to. It could be that her own thoughts were somehow interfering with the process, corrupting it.

Given externally set, relatively deterministic probability distribution fields and the unknown degree of repository detachment, she repeated to herself. Relatively deterministic to what? Whatever probability distribution fields we’re talking about here, they are more deterministic, more constrained than something else. And they’re externally set.

She mulled it over as she walked along fallen trunks, weaving through the sharp stubs of dead branches. Was the answer, the implication, something she didn’t want to face? It could be the opposite of joyful anticipation, fearful dread. Perhaps as she walked her path that would be her one weakness, like kryptonite for Superman.

She jumped over a place where two trunks crossed. It seemed as if there were more and more fallen trees. More than she would expect.

Perhaps there was a high wind a few years ago?

She scanned the live trees around her for signs of disease, and saw that many were missing patches of bark here and there. Something was damaging the trees, killing some of them. She had a feeling she knew what it might be, and where she might find a Wirry.

“Hey!” she called, abandoning her stealth. She pulled her sling out of her inventory, along with a handful of round rocks. The woods were silent for a moment more, and then she heard it, the angry chattering from the tops of the trees around her.

I guess it’s time to see what a possessed squirrel on the Inside looks like, she thought.

***

Trudging across the blighted remains of the spaceport, Lilijoy chuckled.

Possessed squirrels. Nice to face an underpowered enemy for once.

She had almost reached the rather large pile of rubble that was all that remained of several sizable buildings.

I don’t even know what am I looking for, she thought, as she felt her other self try and fail to hit a very oversize squirrel with her sling. Other than being close to three feet in length, it appeared entirely normal. She could feel that her other self was a bit disappointed that it didn’t have glowing red eyes, or some other sign of being a wirry-squirrel, and she couldn’t help but agree.

She pushed aside the temptation to pay more attention to the squirrel battle and approached the pile of broken concrete and rusted metal. She walked alongside it for a while, until she had traced the entire perimeter. There was no sign of any opening or preserved space, nothing to explore that she could see. Meanwhile her Inside self felt exhilarated, as she had finally hit one of the three squirrels she was kiting, somehow finding the space and time to bring her sling up to speed while acrobatically dodging and running from one fallen tree to another.

Oh, I see. She figured out how to use her magi skill to fling the stone with only one twirl. Maybe this whole sling deal isn’t as useless as I thought.

The rubble in front of her provoked somewhat less exhilaration. Nonetheless, she decided she might as well climb it. She didn’t want to go home feeling like she might have missed something, or worse, actually miss something. It was neither hazardous or difficult to make her way over the shattered slabs and twisted beams. The materials had weathered and settled for decades, and while they shifted underfoot once or twice, she never even had to catch her balance. Soon, she was queen of the mountain.

And what a view! Who would have thought-

Her sarcastic inner voice was interrupted. There was something… not exactly a signal, but a presence, an emission, that her system recognized.

Tao System network field detected

Connect?

Yes No