It took some time for Lilijoy to realize how distracted she had become by her Inside experience. At some point during the walk with the… whoever, she had lost track of the process of connecting her system to Mo’s internal senses, the portions of various cortices that handled the processing requirements of the imagination. It wasn’t really a clear division, as the brain used many of the same neuronal clusters for both types of activity, and she was a little surprised that whatever Mo was seeing in his head hadn’t bled through more. On the other hand, her earlier infiltration of his perceptions had been shallow, and confined to the topmost level of his cortical hierarchies, so perhaps it wasn’t so odd after all?

It hadn’t helped that the subjective time difference had been so different. While she had fully mastered moving independently in both worlds, being in two completely different frames of reference for time’s flow had been more taxing than she was aware. Her work connecting more deeply to Mo’s internal senses hadn’t suffered too much from her distraction, as most aspects of the process were automated to a certain extent.

It was the case, though, that Mo’s brain was far from typical, ravaged as it was from having his system destroyed and the ensuing waves of chemical and electrical imbalance. This made the process more difficult, as his brain had developed many new pathways around damaged areas, rendering it a tangled knot of unintuitive growth threading through scars and voids. Some of the damage was older still, and she realized that she was looking at a legacy of self abuse, of addiction, and early deprivation. In some ways, it even reminded her of her own brain, early on in her growth with the Tao System, racked with the deficits caused by a hostile environment.

It was almost enough to make her feel bad for him.

While Mo and Maria talked, she sat on the other side of the assault craft and manipulated the flowers within him, thankfully not required to be in close proximity, not when some of her remaining flies were more than adequate to convey her commands to the tiny machines. As she did, she went over her encounter in the instanced travel. There was a lot to think about.

He called it the Abyss, she mused. From her earliest days after her Trial, Lilijoy had learned that the Insiders knew of her world of origin, knew of it and pitied those who came from there. This was the first time she had heard it called by the name Abyss, though. The way the man had spoken the word felt less a label and more a description, as if her world was by its very nature desolation, void, that he saw her existence the same way humans of the past had seen the existence of life clustering around the thermal vents of the deepest ocean, a miraculous accommodation to an environment in which nothing should persist.

It was hard for her to see it that way. After all, hadn’t life proved its remarkable resilience time and again? And if the question was of minds… well, surely the Inside was the exception… wasn’t it? Ultimately, it was just as much part of the Outside as she was. It was only natural that a universe within a mind would be more hospitable for intelligence.

The other thing that really stuck with her, though, was the idea that intelligence, or at least self-reinforcing structures that could achieve intelligence, existed wherever energy flowed,. Her own brain was replete with such structures, loops and whirls, which made sense, as neurons were tied together in a way that made feedback inevitable. At any given moment, she could trace multiple layers of connected hierarchies spinning in glorious emergence; her own self was just such an assemblage.

But did this imply that something similar was happening in, say, the sun? Surely the energy flows there were far more chaotic, more turbulent than would be conducive to coherent structure. And just because the earth’s atmosphere had its own mechanisms of heat transference, the resulting, somewhat stable, formations didn’t indicate some kind of thought was taking place. Did it?

Or perhaps she was thinking about it in the wrong way, isolating systems that were connected. Weather was just part of something much larger that included life itself. And life, of course, included humans and their brains. It was dizzying, trying to imagine just how it all might fit together, and whether intelligence existed that was invisible to human perception simply because it existed on utterly different scales of time and space.

Like Starcoil’s thinking rocks. We would never be aware of each other.

How any of this related to the entity reaching into, or perhaps out of, Mo, was beyond her ability to reckon clearly. She imagined that there was some kind of highly resilient mind structure, robust in the way that a hologram was, if not literally holographic, that could retain its essential qualities no matter how fragmented. Pieces of it could be spread throughout human minds across the globe, planted by language itself, the same tool that facilitated reflective thinking at the individual level. Perhaps it had some kind of non-human component as well, pieces that existed outside of the brain.

At the very least, she thought, it probably persisted within the trappings and artifacts of human culture, books, carvings, monuments and so forth. Perhaps, in a sense, it was culture itself? That culture was an emergent entity larger than any individual, yet also contained within each went without saying. The stumbling block for her was imagining how it might be cohesive in such a way as to process information, to have a concept of self.

The gods used to speak to us in ancient times, she mused, thinking of bicameral minds and collective unconsciousnesses. Perhaps Julian Jaynes had the first part of this right, but he didn’t realize that the portion of the brain playing god was just the smallest tendril of something much larger that never left us. Instead of a Snow Crash, we have a melting pot, a stew of alien awareness simmering and shared, bubbling within our species.

She wondered if this was how a neuron would feel, if it could think. With that thought came another, a variation, or clarification on her earlier theory that Guardian had been used to prune, the clippers for a topiary of human bodies.

What happens, she wondered, what happens when when neurons fire too boldly, when the feedback loops flourish too well, when the storm of signals is unimpeded and spreads unhindered, unfiltered, when information, clamoring to be free, runs amok across the synapses in jubilant riot?

The answer, the diagnosis, made the treatment clear, the brutal repercussions, the purging and paring and the heavy hand of sedation, the removal of the communication channels billions relied upon for survival. Those were the tools to counter status epilepticus, the emergency measures of doctors with no other options.

And with that, she now understood Rule Four in a different way, and words like veneration and gratitude shifted and shimmered and merged, the language no longer adequate to contain the concept. The cycles of ontology, that most primal property of being of becoming, and gratitude, were no longer a static, linear sequence of words, but a dynamic reciprocation of mutual creation, and just for a moment she grasped something about the relationship as a causal loop that reflected existence itself, until the golden glyph before her, within her, grew too painful to perceive and she… averted.

What was that?

It wasn’t the glyph, or the revelation that left her shaken in the aftermath. It was that moment when she looked away with her entire being. Averted. There was something primordial about it, the feeling of a reflex as intuitive to survival as an infant’s startle. Averting one’s gaze was often a social reflex, indeed one of the most ancient, but this was something deeper. She had looked away with her whole being, and she had a suspicion that it had happened before, that what was different this time was that she noticed.

Some things are not meant to be perceived, she thought. Or perhaps, some things are not safe to perceive, and only those who looked away before they understood have passed their genes along.

That thought alone was terrifying, that her system, her growth might have brought her to some kind of self-limiting threshold, like the infant that learned to walk next to a superhighway. It was enough to give her second thoughts about what she was doing in Mo’s brain, that she may, in fact, be meddling with forces she didn’t understand, dangers she couldn’t anticipate. A being, or beings, that might decide to amputate the greater part of humanity and had the power to make it happen… to something like that she was of less concern than an ant.

No, she thought, less concern than one bacteria among the billions destroyed when taking an antibiotic, back when those still worked.

It was sobering. She couldn’t help but wonder how her actions were supposed to flow from her path when the world seemed intent on being dark and oppressive, when joyful anticipation was met time and again with horror. When sometimes, it seemed, it was better not to look.

How much easier it would be, to take a darker path.

As she thought that, the first discernible patterns began to emerge from her connection with Mo, the density of connections having crossed a certain threshold. It was not a simple process, interpreting someone else’s internal sensory world, orders of magnitude more complex than sending signals to be interpreted. If she was hooking into an existing system, it would be a matter of negotiating protocols and data structures, but with Mo there was no prepackaged signal. The data was raw, and it was messy.

In fact, it was almost unintelligible. There were shapes, loops and twists, faces, perhaps something that might have been a hand. All were compressed, compact and distorted, and awash in signals overflowing from whatever it was Mo was looking at. The audio was even worse.

“Mo, can you close your eyes?” she called.

He obliged, but there was no real improvement. She would need some way to orient herself, a frame of reference.

“What are you seeing?” she asked him.

“Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, I closed my eyes. You know, when you asked me to about five seconds ago?” he replied.

She made a sound of exasperation. “You know what I mean. Are your gods there?”

“It’s not quite like that, like they’re somehow separate from what I see,” he explained. “Maybe sometimes, but mostly its like… um...” he fished for a word. “You know, when you see something, and it looks like something else, or you hear a voice in the wind.”

“Pareidolia?”

“Sure, let’s go with that. So it’s like that, only amped up. Sort of like when I used to run LSD simulators when I had a system. Say what you will about Sinaloa, but they have some fine product.”

Lilijoy filed some questions away for later about exactly how the virtual drug trade worked, with the great variety of systems in the world as Mo continued. “Anyway, most often it’s like that, just different degrees of intensity. Then, sometimes, its like they come right off the page, you know?”

You couldn’t have told me this before I wasted hours? she thought with a grimace. Then she felt bad for deflecting responsibility. It was her own assumption that what Mo was seeing was tied directly to his senses, rather than the kind of evocative, ephemeral hallucinations that drew on many parts of the brain. His senses would still be involved, of course, but the real action was happening in the interpretive and memory based regions of the brain, drawing and crossing and stitching together meaning in a fluid conversation with sensory stimuli.

“She’s laughing at you,” he said.

Lilijoy suppressed a feeling of alarm. She could almost hear it, some kind of rhythm within the surf of signals from Mo’s auditory cortex, a choking inhalation repeated, looped.

“Oh my,” said Mo. “She’s trying to show you...”

Lilijoy could see it, the coiled loop, the noose of Ixtab, forever tightening, strangling, tied around itself, the knot another noose within which lay another still, and her brain began evoking, unfolding meaning implicit in the throttled weave, this technology of self destruction, following its nested coils down and down in dark resonance with her own understanding of the death of self.

She saw bees then, the drones, proud princes’ bodies abandoned after mating, and felt millions of cells within her body self-destructing and the noose became the endless cycle of death and life, coiled within each. The coils twisted and she saw a billion people in a noose of their own making, standing upon the precipice and wondering if they could fly, and the noose became technology itself, strangling its creators tighter with every passing moment.

Some part of her seethed and twisted in protest, for there was comfort there, not just the end of burdens and struggle, but of redemption, of sacrifice rewarded. It was sick, and wrong, and it made a horrible sense that seeped around the edges of her world view, connecting with her path, for joyful anticipation had nothing to say on the essential qualities of that which provoked joy. Meaning was within her, and should she decide that there was joy to be found in death, there was nothing to gainsay her new perspective. Pathways long pacified within her body rebelled, sending bile surging through her constricted throat.

The laughter went on without end, pointing to forever, that a small part of her would never stop recycling the imagined sound, that it now lived within her, a new heartbeat of despair.

Even as she shut down the connection, she understood the offer, a new path, dark and glorious. She fought, spinning her diamond energy, all too aware how simple it would be to invert, to accept the good and necessary truth of death that emerged from the perspective of the mighty, to feel compassion for the necessary endings and grant highest honor to those who took the step unforced by fate. How might the mother feel, if the disease ravaging her infant son took this step, releasing its hold on life, or if the cells in cancerous growth came bounding back to the reason of their creation and indulged in the apoptosis they had abandoned in the mad surge for growth. Benevolent in horror, Ixtab offered this path, and comfort for those left behind.

Lilijoy cried out then, a sound of anguish that brought Attaboy from slumber, and Anda to his feet, as she struggled against the silken twists, this flipping of dark and light that seduced and repulsed, creating a channel in which her thoughts could flow from one darkness to the next. What was most terrifying was that the merest brush against Ixtab had wreaked this havoc, only her own thoughts, only the contents of her own mind turned and twisted, not some external entity or cruel compulsion.

Thankfully, there was an incompleteness, a hollowness to Ixtab’s offer that left just enough room for Lilijoy to sustain herself, even as other parts of her mind whispered that perhaps this was simply the center of a noose yet untightened. She found herself half slumped and pulled herself upright, as Anda put his arm around her in support and Attaboy joined him.

“So, yeah,” said Mo. “That’s Ixtab. Some of the others aren’t quite so… intense.”

She shook her head to clear it. “How..?” she managed.

“Girl,” he replied, “I’m small potatoes. I don’t have enough brain cells left to take it too seriously. It does get pretty annoying though.”

She envied him for a moment, envied the smallness of his world view, and thought she understood Nandi’s paradox of abundance a little better. She did wonder if there was more to it than that though, if Mo’s life and character had provided him with a form of armor she had yet to develop.

Regardless, she sent one last message to the flowers in Mo’s brain, those parts of her that had intruded into a realm she was not ready to face. Nearly choking on the irony, she ordered them to self destruct.

***

It took some time to recover, time where she shifted her attention almost entirely to the Inside. There, she could enjoy the walk, the sunshine and birds providing a welcome antidote to resurgent thoughts of death. It was much easier to slow down, to enjoy the way each new hill presented a new landscape, while still entirely comforting and predictable.

Still, there was a deadline encroaching on her thoughts, and a need to make decisions. The assault craft would run out of energy eventually, and eventually was fast approaching. Magpie’s advice had been to go to the arcology, a different leg than before, where she seemed convinced the Josho Clan would take them in, at least temporarily. The only condition was that they would need to be subtle in their movements, to give the clan a certain level of deniability. If it was public knowledge that they were harboring fugitives from Walden, it would put Josho in an untenable position.

It sounded suspicious to Lilijoy, a little too pat, that Magpie just happened to have a solution to their problem. How could she have sufficient sway with a clan, even a lesser one such as Josho, to convince them to go out of their way? She thought she could feel Shadow’s manipulations, behind the scenes. She was beginning to understand, just a bit, how deep the more powerful Insiders’ plans could go.

Of course, even if turning to Josho was their ultimate decision, they wouldn’t be able to drive right up, since there could be eyes following them from just above the clouds. Lilijoy had spent a while looking out one of the assault craft’s doors, scanning the sky above for any sign of the craft she was sure must be up there. When that proved fruitless, she had been tempted to send a few of her remaining flies, but soon realized it would likely be just as futile. She would need a swarm that could darken the air to be sure of finding anything up there, and what she had left from the attrition of their combat was far less than that.

No, if they went to the arcology, it would be by foot, trusting that they could vanish into its depths, that their scent trail could be broken by the mighty power of territorial bureaucracy.

She realized that she had half made the decision, her part of it at least, simply because there were no other good options to consider. Once they were in the arcology, they could make their way to a branch of Sothechrists, make the transaction, and with luck, fly away before Walden, or Doctor Quimea, or whoever, even realized they had been there.

Yeah, right. I’m sure this time, everything will go smoothly. Attaboy won’t find someone to challenge. Mo won’t have some kind of meltdown that unleashes ancient gods upon an unsuspecting world. Anda won’t attract Renaissance operatives, and I won’t run into Antimony. Have I forgotten anything?

Of course she had, but engaging in that kind of magical thinking, that summoning the catastrophes to mind could keep them at bay, was a major cognitive pitfall anyway. Even if it appeared magic was slithering into her Outside existence. Unlike the magic Inside, it was terrifying.

It took only a brief conversation with the others to solidify the plan, as no one had come up with a better idea. Their next best option, Nykka bluffing their way into Sinaloa’s holdings, had all the same drawbacks, and was far riskier. Mo had thought that Kurtz might have a solution for them, but Lilijoy, and Anda too, weren’t going to go near that one. Attaboy suggested hiding in the infrastructure of the vast building, but Mo wasn’t in any shape to be climbing through narrow ductwork, and no one was particularly enthusiastic about the idea regardless.

Josho Clan’s territory was within the North Leg. According to Magpie, it was about halfway up, near the top of the first arch, as befitted a Clan of middling status with its primary power center overseas. To get there, they would first need to walk through the surrounding area, one far different from that which they had traversed on their way to the West Leg. Where that one was mercantile in nature, bustling and busy, the area around the North Leg was poor, largely residential slums for those without systems, those who subsided almost entirely on the free food provided by the Corp, the proximity to feeding stations being the primary draw for the residents.

The arcology itself would help to shelter them from anyone who might be following their progress from above, its oppressive shade one reason the locale was fit only for residence by those with no other options. Lilijoy only hoped that the passage of her little group would not create further burdens to the hopeless inhabitants.

From there, Magpie had promised them access to the vast building through an entrance leading to the garages that occupied the lower levels. After that, they would be in her hands. If Magpie or the Josho clan betrayed them they would have few options. Despite this, Anda and Nykka had both judged the risk worth taking, and Lilijoy reluctantly agreed.

They left the assault craft far from their destination, arming themselves as best they could. Lilijoy’s remaining flies and midges surrounded them, stretching hundreds of meters in every direction but mostly concentrated on their path, scouting the way. The craft was sent on its way, after their brief stop in the shelter of one of the ubiquitous, half-fallen structures, on an autopilot route to nowhere, and Lilijoy began to run a mental clock. How long would it take for the change in their behavior to be noticed? How long would it take before actions were taken against them?

Or, she allowed herself to hope, were her fears no more than justified paranoia? Perhaps they would feel silly, in somewhat less than an hour, having taken a circuitous path to the tower, full of vigilance and precaution, hiding from the sky, only to find there had never been a threat at all?

That question was answered when they were only just halfway to their eventual destination, when Mo made a sound, the kind of noise that Lilijoy had begun to recognize as presaging something dire.

“Umm,” he said. “Guys?”

Before he said another word, Nykka pulled forth her sword, Anda raised his giant, multi-barreled rifle, and Attaboy crouched, scanning for enemies.

Mo looked a little embarrassed. You better not be about to tell us you need to go to the bathroom. Lilijoy thought. On second thought, I really hope he’s about to tell us he needs to go to the bathroom.

“Something’s coming,” he continued. “Something… bad.”

Her flies hadn’t picked up anything, but that didn’t matter. They all knew what to do. Mo and Maria ran into the nearest building, survival their only task. The others took positions that made sense to them, sheltering as best they could when confronted with the possibility of attack from any direction.

And then they waited.

.

.

.