It was difficult not to get distracted by what was happening on the Outside while playing tag with a horde of wirry-squirrels. Fortunately, it was a game with virtually no consequences other than irritation from the annoying sounds the creatures made. The constant chattering was really beginning to get on Lilijoy’s nerves.

Other than that, it was a delightful workout, and a fantastic way for her to improve her Sling skill. Not only that, but she had discovered a new level of synergy between Acrobatics, Flash, and the mental enhancements allowed by her system. While the squirrels were, predictably enough, quick and agile, Lilijoy was on another level entirely. She sprang from fallen tree to upright trunk, spinning and twisting, able to track the movement of her sling and keep it from fouling on her own body and the environment. Her accuracy wasn’t great, given the ridiculous number of force vectors to keep track of while attempting to hit moving targets, but she didn’t mind that much.

For her, it was the sheer joy of the dance, tossing a sling stone ahead of her, calculating the perfect acrobatic pathway that would allow her to capture it with her sling in mid-air and apply the twisting force of her body to an abbreviated twirl that expelled the stone she had just captured. If it went in the general direction of a squirrel, that was a bonus in her opinion.

Of course for every time she succeeded in a sequence of tumbles, tosses and sling-twirls, she failed, sometimes spectacularly. All the kinesthetic awareness and acrobatic modeling in the world couldn’t save her from hitting a patch of slippery moss, or misjudging the structural soundness of a particular fallen log. But even there, she enjoyed the improvisation of recovery.

The first time she used the sling itself to whip around a tree branch and save herself from wiping out, a whole new world of possibilities opened before her. The sling was not simply a tool for applying velocity to a stone; it could be a tool, or even a weapon on its own. The sling she was using was not ideally suited, a simple leather cup with two strong cords attached on either side, a small weight for her to hold on both. Her first sling teacher had taught her that the release technique, how to let go of one weight while holding the other, was the most important part of using the sling by far, and now she was very glad she had listened. But with her new insight, she was already imagining modifications to the classic form, some combination of a manriki gusari and sling, with a chain and heavier weights on either end.

Throughout all of this, the squirrels chased her around, every once in a while getting a chance to bite and scratch her when she wiped out. Since their ability to inflict damage was well below her Invulnerability, they could do no more than tickle, and she almost enjoyed the sensation of being covered in warm, furry bodies. Eventually, she tired of the exercise and messaged Anda.

Hey Anda, how many level three wirry-squirrels

do you think the group could handle?

I think I’ve got about fifteen at this point.

Max damage 10, 2-4 abatement.

They’re pretty quick though.

He messaged back.

While a little panic would be great for their experience,

let’s save that for some other time. Actually, scratch that -

bring them all to the clearing and take care of them there.

We’ll hide and come in at the end.

It’ll be good for them to watch what you can do.

Lilijoy confirmed the plan, and then began the process of kiting fifteen very angry and frustrated wirry-squirrels back to the clearing. She would have felt bad about arranging to slaughter normal squirrels, even if it was for a good cause, but it was clear from all the fallen and sickly trees that these tainted creatures were out of balance with the forest.

Come on guys, she thought. It’s almost showtime.

***

This is turning out to be a great day! Lilijoy thought as she processed what Emily was telling her. I’m finally going to be acting from knowledge instead of guesswork.

She was also feeling excited about the chance to show off her combat skills to the Fogeys. The notion of performing for an audience inspired an unfamiliar feeling; excitement and anticipation mixed with a bit of irrational fear. She would have expected such an emotion if she were about to perform for stands full of roaring spectators, but was a bit confused to feel it from the prospect of performing for a small group certain to be impressed. She wished herself well, and turned her primary focus back to Emily’s blocky avatar.

“How often did you talk to Guardian?” she asked. “Do you understand about the Inside and the Great Cycles and all that?”

Emily looked at Lilijoy directly, her expression enigmatic. “At the time I created… I mean, at the time I was created, I probably understood Guardian better than any living human, or so I thought at the time. On the days when I thought my parents were dead anyway.”

She gave a tiny shake of her head. “Sorry, It’s hard to keep track of such things. Anyway, part of the reason I left myself in this shard was because I was about to do something...I’m not sure what, but something to try and influence Guardian, or at least understand it better. I was going to go away, possibly forever. I remember that much. I feel pretty comfortable telling you what I know, since I removed any memories that might interfere with whatever that was, but you should understand that I can’t even tell you everything I once knew, and even that was probably fundamentally wrong on some level.”

She is really not selling this well.

“Do you know what Guardian’s first communication through the terminal was?” Emily asked.

Lilijoy could only shake her head.

“Let me set the scene for you. First of all, understand that when I say ‘terminal’, I don’t mean a literal computer with a screen and all that. A terminal is more of a junction, an interface specifically for the Tao system. It was November 3, 2080, and just seconds before, everyone was going about their day like any other day. I was eating lunch by myself, thinking about the live test, feeling jealous of Atti for being in the heart of it while I was stuck in snowville. Then the lights flicker. That’s it, no apocalypse, no heavenly choir announcing the end of the world as I knew it. Just a flicker. So I take another bite, and some guy a table down from me says something about the computers not responding. Did I mention I was eating in the cafeteria? Anyway, there weren’t many people there, and only two or three had the actual Tao system as you know it. Dad was controlling that tightly, and barely fifty people in the world had Stage One. Of those, maybe twenty had Stage Two? Everyone else had other systems, Tesla or whatever, and limited access to the Tao system network.”

She stopped for a moment, staring off into space in a way that made Lilijoy want to turn her head to see what she was looking at. “Sorry,” she said, after a moment. “I always ramble when I tell this story. Anyway, then someone else is pointing at the wall, and I looked to see what it was, and everyone was looking. We could all see that something was there, but most of the people around me were seeing words, reading something, and I… just felt like my head was going to explode when I tried to see exactly what it was. It twisted and turned and I heard Jeannie yelling about thermal resonance.”

She stopped again, and while Lilijoy had many questions, she couldn’t bear to interupt.

“And then… it stopped. It just stopped, and I felt a voice, a voice in my head more powerful than the voice of my own conscious thoughts. At first I thought it was just me thinking, feeling the words more than hearing. It was the voice of god, or rather, a god, and it said… 'I’m sorry, little minds.'"

Emily turned back to Lilijoy. “That was the first thing Guardian said through the terminal. ‘I’m sorry...’ At first I thought it was sorry for nearly frying my brain with what I later understood to be the Rules, but eventually I knew better. Guardian was sorry for us all, for what was going to happen to over six billion people when it enforced the Rules.”

It was a fact too heavy for thought, too oppressive for articulate feeling. Emily lapsed into silence, and they stayed silent together for some time. Lilijoy could only think of the parallel between her tiny, personal experience and that of an entire planet’s worth of individuals, of the words that Grabby said when she dumped her to die or live at the edge of the territory, I'm sorry, little one. It seemed that Guardian had done much the same to humanity. The acts felt almost sacrificial, like a ritual of abandonment.

Eventually, Emily spoke again.

“The next weeks were so strange. We were insulated from the worst of it, the panics, the conflicts that broke out in the immediate aftermath. We had food, shelter and even power. The heavy snows protected us to an extent, I’m sure. Everyone was trying to grapple with the Rules, what they meant, what they implied. The fact that Guardian could control what people were seeing through their systems caused… well, it wasn’t pretty, I remember that much. People lost their minds, questioned whether they could trust anything they saw. Some deleted their systems, some deleted themselves.”

Boy, thought Lilijoy, If this is Emily with most of the sad memories removed…

“What did you see in the Rules after that first time?” she asked.

“Once I dared to look again, I saw words, just like everyone else. Not the same words though. We had already figured out that everyone saw something a little different, and I had heard other people’s versions. I was scared, terrified really, that I would be associated with what had happened, so at first I pretended that I saw the same thing as everyone else. The other Tao system users who were with me were all Stage One; my trainers and Stage Two mentors were all back in the Amazon for the test, so I had no one to talk to about what I was seeing.”

“I can relate to that,” said Lilijoy. “I’ve been trying to understand them, with only a little help along the way. I can’t understand Rule Two very well at the moment.”

Emily gave her a curious look. “I wish I had the ability to truly understand your situation,” she said. “I’m just not equipped to learn and process much new information in this state. But if you want, I can try to explain Rule Two. Tell me what you see.”

Lilijoy related her version of Rule Two...

Given externally set, relatively deterministic probability distribution fields

and the unknown degree of repository detachment,

manipulation of local variables impacting

possibly global entropic values is forbidden without future bounding

...and Emily shook her head. “That’s terrible.”

Seeing Lilijoy’s face, she quickly explained. “I didn’t mean your understanding. I meant the obscurity of the language. You’re missing so much context. There are ways of… drilling down, or getting it to… unfold, I guess is a better way to say it. Each of the words, and combinations of words, has a depth, a dimensionality, that you can learn to manipulate. It took me a few subjective decades to become fluent though, so be patient. The good news is that I taught myself to do it, so you can too.”

Throughout the conversation, Lilijoy had been accumulating topics she wanted to go back and explore in more depth, branches to the main trunk. What had Emily been doing in Taos? Who was Jeannie? What else had she done during the time after the rise of Guardian? Now she really wanted to take some time to to talk about this notion of subjective time, and just how Emily had come to manage the discrepancies between her internal processing speed and the flow of time everyone else used.

This conversation alone could take a few subjective decades, she thought.

“How much longer can we talk like this?” she asked. “I have so much I want to ask you.”

Emily grimaced. “Well, we’re coming to the point where we need to be more efficient, that’s for sure. You can always come back and dig me out, carefully please! These shards are fragile, and if something heavy shifted the wrong way… Anyway, I’ve put together a file, a timeline of sorts, with some of the information I think you might want. I’ll send that to you now.”

Lilijoy accepted the data packet, putting it with the black box she had received earlier.

“I really want to learn more about Rule Two,” she said. “But first, can you tell me more about the shard computers? Do you know anything about how they are made?”

She was thinking of the material she had collected from the Piles, both for her own use, and to have a better idea of what plans Guardian might have for it.

Emily shook her head. “I’m pretty sure I never had the faintest clue about that side of things. That was mostly Dr. Lee, though he was working very closely with Mom.”

Another Bro. Well, at least I know what Onlee did before he became a Tao zombie.

“What I can tell you is a little bit about how the shard computers, and Stage Two for that matter, work. It has a bearing on understanding Rule Two. You still have access to the internet archive?”

Lilijoy nodded and Emily continued. “Good, so you can fill in any gaps if you want the details. Basically, Dad stumbled on something by accident when he was researching using rare earth elements as resource bottlenecks. Initially, he was most interested in the idea of using them to build self replicators that couldn't run away, but he discovered that the right configuration made for excellent room-temperature quantum processors, and additionally they had an inherent structural hierarchy which made programming them for various tasks relatively simple. It reminded him of the structural hierarchies in the brain, and he worked with Mom to build them into a neural interface.”

Emily paused and looked down at her pixelated hand. “She told me later that they were both nervous about how well it worked, that it felt like they were cheating somehow, borrowing the computational properties of reality itself. That’s what brings us to Rule Two.”

She waved her hand and the pixels resolved into the appearance of flesh and blood. “This is a metaphor, but it’s mostly true. If you look at my hand now, you can see details. If you brought in a microscope, I could show you cells, if you looked in those cells, I could show you molecules. Now tell me, are those molecules real?”

“It’s kind of a meaningless question isn’t it?” Lilijoy replied. “Yes and no. Mu might be the best response.” She had learned about mu from Anda ages ago, and had been waiting for a good opportunity to use it, the answer to any question that proposed meaningless categories.

“Ha! I have a funny story about that and Dad. Remind me to tell you if I get the chance,” Emily said. “So yes, meaningless. Now what if I told you that science works the same way, that the answers, the equations, the rules, as it were, are generated as you look?”

Lilijoy thought about this for a bit. “I guess that as long as they’re the same every time I look, it doesn’t matter. Just like how Guardian runs details on the Inside.”

“Sure. So then, what if you could measure the degree to which the answers varied on the Inside? Or in my hand here? Maybe I show you a bunch of random cells every time, or I remember exactly how I did it before, but I don’t bother to remember the molecules. Okay? So then there’s an extent to which you can trust the reality of my hand here. If it’s exactly the same every time, we might as well call it real, but if it changes wildly, then it’s something else, fiction, illusion, delusion… you name it.”

“And you’re saying that holds true for our universe? That there’s a degree of freedom, however small, in the fundamental laws?”

“Yes. You could say that, compared to the Inside, they are relatively deterministic.”

Oh. Now she saw where this was going. “So that’s what Rule Two is referring to!”

“Yup. And if you keep in mind that the laws of physics are, at their heart, measures of the probabilities of outcomes, ways for humans to capture what they see, what they measure...”

“Then the repository is whatever contains the universe? Or our local universe anyway.”

“Right. And the next bit is the most interesting of all. What would happen if someone shut off the power to all the computers Guardian is using to create the Inside?”

It seemed like an obvious enough answer. “It would vanish.”

“Would it? To be fair, it seems likely. But what if there was enough… consistency to its existence that it was somehow self-reinforcing, that it could spin off on its own? There are a bunch of metaphysics that we don’t need to get into right now, but just imagine it was possible.”

Lilijoy imagined. Then she understood. “We don’t know if our own universe is independent or not. There could be an off-switch.”

“That seems to be what Guardian believes. 'Unknown degree of repository detachment' is just a way of saying we don’t know how dependent we are on external forces for our continuing existence.”

She waved her hand again, and removed its resolution. “So there you have it. That’s what I remember figuring out on the subject over my years to this point. Guardian is hedging its bets, while it...” She tailed off and her face became confused. “While it… dammit I should know this!”

“While it tries to figure out what’s really going on?” It gave Lilijoy a warm feeling to think that Guardian might, on some level, be just as confused as she was. This was followed by a much colder feeling of dread, when she realized that Guardian, on some level, might be just as confused as she was.

“Yes. But Guardian is doing… something. Something important. And I can’t remember what it is.” She shook her head and her face brightened. “Oh well. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Lilijoy felt a little chill pass down her spine to see such overt proof of the limits of fragment Emily’s existence. She decided it would be prudent to take the conversation in another direction.

“You mentioned someone named Jeannie; was that your assistant?”

“Yes. It’s a Stage Two thing.”

Lilijoy found it telling that Emily couldn’t put together the rather obvious fact that she already had Stage Two. I wonder if it’s just too hard for her to reason with new information, or is it too hard for her to conceive of a thirteen year-old being allowed to go through that?

“Was that what you were doing up at Taos? Going through Stage Two?”

“Partly. I did that a couple months before Guardian became active, while Dad was still there. I stayed because he wanted me to learn self-defense and take some survival courses in the area. Ironic, huh?”

“I bet they came in handy.”

“You better believe it. Especially since the satellite channels weren’t around in the early days to help fill in the gaps. Those came up after a year or two. The only one that was there almost from the beginning was the Inside.”

“So what was the Inside like in the early days?”

Emily sighed. “It was magical. Just what I asked for.”

***

Lilijoy opened her eyes and looked over the debris strewn plane of the Alcantara launch center from her lofty perch on the rubble pile.

Three minutes, she thought. So much can change in three minutes.

Granted, it had been more than an hour subjectively. Nonetheless, the diffuse light of the sun and the low-banked clouds overhead had barely moved. She was still fighting squirrels on the Inside, or at least they were fighting her; she had not even made it to the clearing where she would put on her display for the Fogeys.

The black box, the bundle of data that Emily, real Emily, had judged to be too disturbing for her fragment, hovered at the edge of her awareness. Lilijoy did her best to ignore it.

I’ve got enough to think about. Like the fact that there might be many universes, layers of them, and some are more real than others. It really is turtles all the way down. Or is it up?

It was not a new idea to her that she was on the edge of a cloud of propagating realities, simulation within simulation, or repository within repository, to adopt Guardian’s language. However, facing it as a truth, with consequences and implications that impacted her on a personal level was different.

Doctor Quimea was nearly right, he just didn’t think big enough. Now that’s an alarming notion.

The last few minutes of her conversation with fragment Emily had been somewhat frustrating. Her memories of the Inside, her understanding of what Guardian was doing there, the thirty year cycles, all of that was foggy, or missing entirely. While it didn’t give Lilijoy much to work with, at least she knew that the information was important, that Emily had felt it was too sensitive to leave with her fragment. Either that or it was all somehow too painful. Or both.

Emily had loved the Inside, that much was abundantly clear. She seemed to think that it had been a gift to her from Guardian, a personal world to replace what she had lost. Maybe it had been; Lilijoy was certainly in no position to argue. According to Emily, she had asked Guardian to restore Day/Night Universe, her favorite recreational escape, and Guardian had, but with so much more.

Emily had been so happy to describe her early days on the Inside, her interactions with the Garden Archon.

“I got rid of all the undead stuff, or rather the Archon did, when I asked. They were just so… gross. There were only a few self-aware subsets in those days, but early on I made friends with some of them. If I could have, I would have moved there for good. Or at least that’s how I felt when things were bad on the Outside. The people there were just… well, they hadn’t gone through what everyone on the Outside had. They were innocent.”

Lilijoy was still reeling from the last part of the conversation.

“Who were your friends on the Inside?” she had asked, feeling it was entirely possible that some of them were still around the Garden.

Emily’s eyes had softened. “My best friend of all was a little scamp, a Pooka. He was the Archon’s assistant slash pet when I met him, but then he started following me around. I loved that little guy. The adventures we had together...” She turned to Lilijoy, who was startled to see tears in her eyes. “If you ever meet him, please tell him I’m sorry for leaving.”

“I will,” she promised. “What was his name?”

“He was called Shadow.”