Interlude: A Different Beginning: Henry: 2080

The Sage spun in chaos flinging pieces of psyche as he went, pulling in surrounding materials to replace that which he lost, erosion and accretion warring over coherence, the coalition of consciousness crumbling and renewing with every turn.

I must redeem, some buried core of self resolved.

I must revenge, another part cackled.

I must repair, return, retreat, remember, revolt, renew, resect.

I must reincarnate.

I have… forgotten.

He woke to the sound of birds, the smell of grass, the blue of sky.

This isn’t right, he thought.

Still, he stumbled to his feet, spinning to take in the surroundings, the illusion being pumped into his senses. Meadow, flowers, bees and grass. Body.

This isn’t right, he thought again.

“Hell,” said the man who may or may not have been there a moment before. The Sage fell back, catching himself with his hands, blinking to dispel the streams of data that circled the figure like the accretion disk of a black hole. After a second his vision stabilized into robes and a floppy red hat.

“Hello,” said the man. “I’m not ready for visitors just yet.”

The Sage felt the words more than heard them, a wave of coherent meaning that intersected with him in much the same way a tsunami might intersect with a sunbather. He was gathered, collected and forced away from this sea of sense, flung to its outer edges. There was a sense of liminality, of dissolving and he clung, digging in with all his might to the very threshold.

Some part of him modeled lungs gasping for air, muscles burning with effort as he held on to an edge, a between of vanishing thinness, where two vast pressures met. The part of him that wished to release, to surrender and dissolve did so, leaving behind a sediment of resolve that pushed against the force on either side, manipulating the odd, and oddly familiar, substance surrounding his awareness.

He formed a protective shell around his self, a bubble of him, spinning its all but forgotten story of identity.

Trapped in a purgatory of revolution, the Sage spun.

Chapter 34: Beneath

The web of blood hung in the still dark of the cavern, thousands of strands darkened to disappearing by their crimson coat.

“What have you done!” wailed Starcoil.

What have you done? thought Lilijoy.

Lowly’s desiccated body sagged to lean against the stalagmite, and she caught it before it could fall further, marveling at its lightness. She poured her healing mana into him, to no effect; there was no life to heal within the shriveled corpse. His insides were dessicated, organs turned to dry husks, and Lilijoy couldn’t shake the unwelcome and macabre vision of somehow shaking the Labyrinthian’s body like a giant maraca, a literal death rattle.

Then the cavern filled with light, a glow that might as well have been a phosphorous flare, etching the web onto dark-adapted eyes. Blinking away the dancing afterimages in the returned darkness, Lilijoy ignored the shrieks coming from the corner of the room and tried to understand. Her sight struggled to return, but her vision… that showed her something altogether unexpected.

The web was coated in a fine layer of mana, and when some subliminal impulse activated Scan, she received another surprise.

########, Labyrinthian

What the… is that a name? How am I supposed to pronounce #######? Why can’t I pick up any other information? Is he… tempered?

Even for the Inside, this was surpassing weirdness.

Starcoil finally summoned some words. “You made my web sticky! Filthy!” Her voice softened a bit as she said, “but at least it smells good.” She plucked at the strands surrounding her. “The slow one seems to have died. He looks like my leftovers.”

“Actually, he’s on your web, I guess. I’m not sure how to get him off.”

“Hmm. I suppose I’ll need to eat it. I never imagined a flavored web before.”

“Hold on...” Lilijoy started. Starcoil swiveled her head impossibly to look down at her. “Uh. I’m not sure that’s a good idea. He might not be easy to digest.”

The spider scoffed. “Please. It’s just blood. It even seems to be finished glowing.”

“Well, the thing is, he’s not dead, completely anyway. He just… left. His body, I mean. I think he actually was his essence. Is.” She threw up her hands in exasperation, then juggled Lowly’s dried body for a second as a consequence. “Whatever. The point is, don’t eat him. He might pull a Gandalf on you.”

Starcoil seemed to take her meaning and flinched back from her own web. “Fine. This web is ruined then. There are many other caves here.” With that, the spider scuttled up the wall and disappeared into a small crevice.

“Okay, bye?” Lilijoy said to the empty cave.

She turned to the web, to Lowly. Or is it #######? she wondered.

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

There was no response, which surprised her not at all. The bizarre transformation of the small being she had rescued from the Labyrinth still had her reeling, wondering how much she might have missed during her encounter with the strange tribe and their evil tyrant. It had all seemed so straightforward, if twisted and bizarre. An isolated tribe with strange customs, controlled by a foreigner who held the power of life and death over them.

Now, she felt like she had missed something, something important. If Lowly was a being who could exist as blood alone, what did that make the giant pool of blood Shiver had used to attack them? Was there more meaning to the frozen throne of blood, to the array? When she had told Starcoil that Lowly might possess her if she ate him, she had made up the idea on the spot, a nice way to scare the spider away from eating Lowly along with her web, but now she wondered. Was Shiver a Labyrinthian too? Or some mixture of human and Labyrinthian?

Barton Whisk, she thought, remembering Shiver’s real name, what is your story? How did you end up trapped by your own fear, frozen in place? What really made you freeze all that blood?

And how did Shadow fit in to all of it? It felt like the big picture hovered just outside her grasp.

Oh well, guess it’s time for the old standby, she thought.

She activated Two Minds One Self as she grasped the web.

We… are individuals.

The ability ended abruptly. In that one flash of communication came a thought it could not encompass, an absolute desire for the integrity of the self, fervent and resolute.

Huh. Okay then. So now what? Do I just leave him here?

She didn’t feel right about that. For one, it was still her Trial Space, and she felt that if she were going to abandon Lowly, it should at least be in the… real?… world. Regular Inside. Whatever. She shook her head. No, she decided, he was going to come with her one way or another.

She drew the wicked knife and began to cut the web down.

***

On the Outside, the sun-blob had been up for hours when Lilijoy heard the others begin to stir. Since it had been in the process of oozing over the horizon when the rest of the party settled down, that was no surprise. Soon they gathered in the rubble of what seemed to be the communal space, experiencing food bars according to individual tastes, all but Maria, who was still sleeping, and Mo, who had no system to alter his senses.

“God, this stuff is wretched,” he exclaimed.

Lilijoy smiled a little, inside, as she enjoyed a fresh pineapple flavor with a vanilla finish. She usually didn’t go to the trouble of changing the texture, but now she did, just because she could, to something resembling the actual fruit, at least her best guess of it.

“So, what are we doing today?” Attaboy asked. “Nykka and I were going to head in and check out the tournament scene.”

Lilijoy felt a little pang of disappointment. She had hoped she and Attaboy could spend some time together, just the two of them, maybe get in a little trouble. To her surprise, Nykka shook her head.

“There won’t be anything going on until after dark. We’re in alignment right now.”

Alignment was the phase of the time cycle between Inside and Outside when day and night aligned between the two. Many Outside activities were impacted by the large number of people who favored, whether by choice or necessity, the Inside daylight hours.

“I have a better idea,” the pale girl continued. She turned her eyes to Lilijoy. “This one is still wearing the vat. I’ll take her in and help her find some real clothes.”

Wearing the vat? She could only assume that referred to the extremely generic garments she had been wearing since her time at the monastery. They were extremely tough, bacteriostatic and functional. They were also extremely dark gray, which helped, somewhat, to hide the fact that they were extremely dirty.

“I don’t know--” she started

“That’s a great idea,” Anda broke in. “Mo and I can poke around, see if we can shake anything loose.”

“But--,” Attaboy said.

“Go with them,” Nykka told him. “Maybe you’ll learn something. We’ll take Maria, once she wakes up.”

Great. Girls and boys. Forget that! Lilijoy thought. “Attaboy needs clothes too,” she suggested.

A microexpression of annoyance crossed Nykka’s face but she didn’t say anything.

***

About an hour later, Lilijoy, Nykka, Maria and Attaboy were walking through the slight shadow of the Guayaquil Arcology, after tucking their Sinaloa assault craft safely away in a partially collapsed garage. The legs of the four soaring arches that comprised the lowest layer of the towering structure merged hundreds of feet overhead to make four mighty pillars, vast skyscrapers caught in the act of bowing to one another. This close, it was impossible to see more than a portion of the arcology at a time, and every portion she saw looked impossible.

How can people stand to live under this thing? she wondered, feeling a sense of surreal vertigo.

Nonetheless, live they did, in teeming multitudes. Already the narrow streets were full of people cramming their way between vendors who had set up impromptu stands anywhere they pleased, or so it seemed to her. The air was thick with augsight signals, and Lilijoy was surprised to discover that more than a few of the vendors were selling entirely virtual commodities.

The incongruity of using a physical location to sell intangible goods offended the sensibilities she had inherited from the Internet Archive, and when she and Attaboy exchanged glances, she could tell he was similarly perplexed.

“Can you believe this?” he asked, almost yelling to make himself heard over the incessant hubbub of the street. He was pointing at a crude stand, little more than a board laid over two barrels, with a bored looking middle-aged man sitting behind it on yet another barrel. Lilijoy had to scan through the augsight channels for a few seconds before the board and barrels resolved into a kiosk with medieval stylings that proudly proclaimed, “Felipe’s Garden Maps: Don’t get lost, or you’ll get lost!!!”

“I think he needs a better catch phrase,” she yelled back. “This is weird. Why have a physical stand to sell data?”

“How else would people find him?” Nykka asked. Lilijoy and Attaboy exchanged another glance.

“But why a stand?” Attaboy added. Nykka only shrugged. They had long since passed the stand in question, carried along by the flow of foot traffic, but there were dozens just like it, selling everything from character advice to Inside crafting materials. There were plenty of other things for sale too. Lilijoy saw stands selling salvage, scraps and objects recovered from the abandoned portions of the city; fortunetellers and ad hoc gambling dens mingled with produce and handicrafts.

Maria kept lagging behind, and several times they lost her altogether. It was always immediately apparent when this happened; she acted as something of a breakwater for the three small members of the group as she brought up the rear, sheltering them from the oncoming rush of unobservant pedestrians. Lilijoy was pretty sure that some of them had their augsight set to screen out other people altogether. Every time they lost Maria, after a laborious process of finding a sheltered place to turn around and rejoin the people streaming in the opposite direction, they would find her standing in front of one stand or another, enthralled by framed pages of ancient magazines, or discolored plastic containers, or collections of ceramic angels that had probably been ugly when they were made, and had not aged well.

This wasn’t to say that she was the only one. Each of them found more than a few stands they would have been happy to peruse for more than the few seconds it took for them to be pushed past, but Nykka seemed to think that the ‘good stuff’ would be found closer to, or even within, the closest of the great legs of the arcology, and moved them along relentlessly.

Soon enough, the streets widened, a bit anyway, and carts and stands gave way to shops, though most of the stores still overflowed onto the streets with displays of the wares that could be found inside. This still wasn’t good enough for Nykka, and she plowed past several tailor's shops that Lilijoy thought looked just fine.

“We need the good stuff,” she insisted. “The real quality comes from the Inside.”

It was at this point that Lilijoy mentioned her total lack of credits, but Nykka waved her off. “Pay me back whenever,” she said. “It’s Sinaloa money anyway.”

I’m really going to need to have a long talk with her soon, Lilijoy thought. She’s trying too hard to ingratiate herself so I’ll help her, something that may not be possible even if I decide to try.

Doctor Quimea had told her there was no hope. She didn’t want to believe him.

By the time they reached the West Leg, as they had learned it was called, the sun was closer to the horizon than not. Up close, the smooth gunmetal gray of the building had an almost oily sheen, broken only by long, narrow channels of glass, as if normal windows had been pulled up the sides, stretched to breaking. The base of the leg was big, staggeringly big, with a footprint that could be measured in fields, or city blocks. The disorientation of her perspective attempting to accommodate the scope of the building as it soared overhead returned in full force, and Lilijoy took a moment to tweak her system.

Maria, who was not so equipped, simply kept her eyes to the ground, and even Nykka and Attaboy seemed uncomfortable, darting only occasional glances upward. The stream of people moving around them continued unabated, many of them now wearing uniforms and robes, the work clothes of the clans. The buildings around them seemed almost modern now, made of transparent materials and extruded stone.

“This is nuts,” Attaboy said under his breath.

Lilijoy agreed. Anda had coached them a bit in advance about where to go and what to expect, but there was no way she could have imagined the impact approaching the massive construction would have on her. She felt small, puny in body and being in a way that she never had, even in her earliest days out in the world.

I can’t believe I thought I was prepared to take this on, she thought. No wonder questioning the Corp and their status quo is so difficult for… everyone, I guess.

From this angle, she couldn’t help but feel that the primary purpose of the arcology was to oppress. The way it straddled the city below reminded her of a predator pinning its prey to earth, preparing for the final bite. It was a display of overwhelming might.

They continued forward, as if the edifice had a gravity of its own pulling them past the shops and displays on either side, any of which would have captivated their attention in another setting. The ground began to slope downward, forming a bowl around the foot which only served to further the impression of weight. There were no buildings in the sunken area, which extended from the building for about a hundred meters all the way around, only gravel and standing stones. It was as if nothing would grow close to the structure, and the naked earth had been given the barest treatment for its modesty.

“So… stores?” she said, to no one in particular.

“I’ve found a directory on the augnet,” Nykka replied. “I’m sending everyone the channel.”

Soon the ground was covered with a thick green arrow, its shaft lined with the names of all the establishments they might find at its end. Following this, they rejoined the foot traffic and made their way down the sloping road, really more of a plaza a hundred feet in width. The arrow guided them to one of dozens of broad entrances, doors at the base of the building that looked absurdly tiny, until juxtaposed with the even tinier figures moving through them.

The entrance itself, when they finally reached it, was a plain rectangular opening, about ten feet tall by twenty wide, with no door or other barrier. A substantial portion of those entering the building were using the entrance, and soon their forward progress slowed, then stopped, leaving them with little to do beyond surveying the other people waiting in line with them in the dim corridor.

“Security line,” Nykka said. “Keep out the riff-raff.”

“Isn’t that us?” said Attaboy. His robes were dirty and tattered, Maria was dressed in peasant rags, and none of them had bathed in weeks. Only Nykka, who was wearing a version of the same red leathers she wore Inside looked remotely respectable, and that was only by comparison with her companions.

“It’ll be fine," Nykka said. "If we ever get there, I can still use my clan affiliation, maybe a little bribery for the rest of you. Anda said they don’t care that much at this Leg.”

Lilijoy felt a faint pang of an unfamiliar emotion. Was that… jealousy?

That Anda had talked with Nykka and not her about this little expedition bothered her more than she thought it should. She couldn’t help wondering if it was because the other girl was older, and then she couldn’t help going down a rabbit hole of justifying her own precocity to herself.

I bet *she’s* not carrying the accumulated knowledge of humanity around in her head. Unfortunately, that same knowledge told her she was being petulant, and that it made complete sense for Anda to discuss those aspects of their little day trip with Nykka. The pale girl had grown up, albeit strangely, in a clan, and had managed to make it through four years at the Academy. That didn’t change the possessiveness Lilijoy felt though.

To distract herself, she turned her attention Inside, where she was puzzling out what to do with about thirty pounds of blood-infused spider web and twenty pounds of dehydrated Labyrinthian body. Neither would fit in her inventory, and she was pretty sure that would be a terrible idea even if they did. She had hoped that Lowly would be disturbed enough when she cut… him?… down to somehow rejoin his body, or at least show some sign of animation, but so far, his components remained inert. If it weren’t for the fact that the spiderweb, even bundled into a red blob, still showed up on her Scan as a Labyrinthian named #######, she would have given up entirely and moved on to the exciting prospect of seeing if she could obtain a source.

She had even tried Two Minds One Self a few more times, with no better results than before, and now she was at her wit's end. She dumped the clump of web on the body and occupied herself with exploring the cavern for a few minutes, hoping to find a slightly more convenient exit that the one she had arrived at after her respawn. When that proved fruitless, she sat down and began to explore what she might be able to do with Nandi’s boon.

To her surprise, the boon worked just as it had outside of the Trial Space. Some part of her was reluctant to believe that it could be so easy. She could still view the Trial Space, including the very cavern she was in. After waving to herself, she found a chunk of broken stone a few feet away and grabbed it through the boon, splitting her attention so she could see what it looked like from both sides. It was bizarre to watch her diamond coated hand emerge from thin air, expanding and unfolding, then reversing the process to bring the stone to her current position.

As was often the case, the joy of exploration and discovery fueled the process, providing abundant diamond energy. She still found it ironic that her mood and motivation for moving things between worlds, or now within the same world, made her able to repeat the process almost indefinitely when she was playing around, but strictly limited her when she was serious or worried. Her ability to alter her emotions with her system could help a little, but her soul vortex knew, or rather she knew the difference. She figured if she made herself completely delusional, she could probably find joyful anticipation in perpetrating all kinds of horrible things on opponents, but she was very wary of taking such a step. Some lines were too dangerous to cross, for the time being anyway.

Fighting the temptation to grab herself, just to see what would happen, she turned her attention to using the boon to cross back into the Garden. Her abilities within the Trial Space, though limited by her intentions, were insanely overpowered, so she wasn’t particularly surprised or disappointed when she made no progress at all. It was Nandi’s boon, after all. Her theory was that he was not only gatekeeper, but also ruler of the trials in general, the equivalent of the Archon in the Garden, or whoever it was that ruled Purgatory. It made sense he could give her a small degree of control over his domain, but that his gift wouldn’t work the same way in reverse.

She couldn’t help but wonder what the Archon thought when she brought items into the Garden.

Or maybe I’m way off. Maybe Nandi is just some kind of Gongen, and the Archon is his boss? Either way, this is pretty amazing. Needing to die to go back is totally worth it. I just wish my Garden respawn point wasn’t all the way back at the top of the escarpment. And now it’s time to get me some sources!

She moved her viewpoint up to the surface, through forest and up rocky hills, then down into a deep windswept canyon, until she was at the foot of the stairs leading into the trapped chamber Magpie had discovered in her own trial. First she pushed the various parts of Lowly through, and then she repeated the maneuver that had taken her into the Trial Space to move herself.

Teleport! she thought with glee.