She opened her eyes.

She was met by blinding light and a wave of disorientation.

I thought…

The disorientation deepened, met with a sinking feeling in her stomach. She heard voices, familiar, if somewhat strident.

“What the hell are you doing!” Nykka was saying.

“I thought that made it go up?” she heard Attaboy reply.

So I’m… Outside? But…

She checked her system clock. Four days!

Her memory was, charitably, fuzzy. She remembered going to see Nandi, remembered working against time to save her body, shutting down every part of her that wasn’t absolutely vital. There had been a… choice. She struggled to remember what it had been.

“Hey, her eyes are open.” That was Mo’s voice.

“Yeah, that keeps happening. Probably some kind of reflex.” Magpie?

Her setting came into focus as her eyes adapted. She was in a small cabin, gray, utilitarian and sparse. But it was full of sky, glorious sky like she had only seen on the Inside, pale blue and painfully bright through outward curving windows. I’m on an airship, she realized, feeling a bit sluggish to have taken so long to put it together. Her thoughts seemed slow and simple. A quick check of her system let her know that she wasn’t imagining things; the vast majority of her augmentations were powered down, in some kind of stasis, and her internal energy readings were as low as she had ever seen.

But she was alive, and as far as she could tell, reasonably intact.

Her first attempt to speak didn’t go well. Her throat and tongue were dry and stiff, her lips cracked as a bonus. That was the least of her impediments though, for no sound other than the dry rasp of air issued forth from between her lips. She tried again, and was at least successful in gaining attention.

“Holy shit!” said Magpie, now coming into view. “She is awake,”

Magpie looked the same, with her dark hair tightly braided, revealing lighter rows of skin across her scalp. Her face did have a few scars Lilijoy was not familiar with though, light parallel lines crossing on one cheek, just touching beneath her left eye. She was wearing a red and white kimono, of all things. Seeing her made Lilijoy feel like Skria and Jess must be nearby.

She didn’t want to spend what little energy was left in her system messaging, but her dysfunctional vocal cords left her with little choice. It was either that or pantomime, and since she couldn’t feel her body...

She didn’t really need to keep the message short, but she didn’t have the mental energy either.

Magpie nodded. “Your tall friend made it,” she said. “Barely. He stayed behind.”

Lilijoy felt a wave of relief, followed by sadness. There was a twinge of annoyance too, a childish thing. Anda was supposed to be here.

“As to this lovely craft,” Magpie continued, “it wasn’t so hard to get, not with the right connections. It’s a shame you didn’t contact me earlier, could have saved you a lot of trouble from what I’ve heard.”

Dominoes, thought Lilijoy, set to fall one atop the next. Shadow wants me to go north. She didn’t have the energy to appreciate the irony, that she had only been a message away from an airship the entire time. It made her wonder what other plans were in motion, what other opportunities and dangers she had missed by making one decision and not another. It made her wonder just how many webs from how many spiders she was in. Yet here she was, floating through the air, free to go anywhere she wanted, assuming she could convince the others.

As if summoned by her thought, the others in question had become aware of her return to consciousness and crowded into the small cabin.

“Welcome back,” said Nykka, while Attaboy peered around her head, beaming. “You should be dead.” The pale girl looked relieved, and Lilijoy could understand why. Without her, Nykka’s options for living past a few months were slim.

came a message from Maria that made her smile.

Lilijoy was doing her best to remain still, afraid that if she moved too much, her head might roll off. Moving probably wasn’t an option regardless, she had no feeling from below her neck, and she suspected that the energy in her muscles had been severely depleted. She would need to get her system running better to make use of her indirect connections to her muscles.

Her internal status reports were too much to sort through, but she could tell her physical condition was still tenuous, veins and arteries held in place by thin scaffolding, and much of the connective tissue still to be repaired. Her arm was gone, again, melted into its constituent molecules, a heap of goo somewhere in the slums of Guayaquil.

What did I choose? she wondered again. She was disconnected from the Inside, and probably wouldn’t have the resources necessary to sustain a connection for a while. She knew she needed to eat, to drink, but she was afraid her esophagus wasn’t up to it yet. She could only hope they had something that could be used as a feeding tube.

Did I really choose this?

She couldn’t see what she was laying on, could barely see the straps across her chest and legs holding her in place, and that only because she was somewhat propped up. It seemed crazy that they would have begun this journey while she was in this condition. She could only assume her absence from Guayaquil was more important than any other consideration.

She missed when the others dispersed, though she vaguely remembered concerned voices. Attaboy was still there though. He put a hand to her brow, a tender gesture that she soon realized had another purpose, as his system elements began to flow into her.

After a minute, he began to speak. “I’ve been cultivating as much as possible, doing what I can to help you.” She felt her head clear just a bit as he spoke and his system elements began to reach hers, handing off surplus bits of molecular energy before turning to other tasks. It wasn’t much of a difference, perhaps just enough for her to appreciate just how fuzzy her thinking had been a moment before.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t understand until I thought you were dead. Reality is what matters. I thought nothing mattered because nothing was real, but I had it backwards.” She felt a tear fall on her cheek. “Nothing felt real to me because I wouldn’t let anything matter. So now I understand, just a little better. You matter.”

She had enough energy to reply now, but she waited.

“I didn’t understand just how sad Atticus was, just how sad I was, and this system… it lets you change yourself, but there’s a loop. The self doing the changing can’t help but perpetuate the problems it wants to change. So I'm trying to do better, but it’s slow. I miss the old world terribly. I miss Mom and Dad, and then I think of Grabby and Mooster and I just feel… sick. What the hell happened to us, Lilijoy? And how did you come out of it all so much better than me?”

He was rambling now, and she could imagine he had done this before, when there was no one to listen. “And then I think of Emily, my other sister, abandoned in another time. I was her big brother. I was supposed to protect her, and I’m a hundred years too late. But I’m not too late to help you. So that’s what I’m going to do. We’re going to survive this, somehow, this impossibly screwed up world. Survive it, and then make it better, together, and I don’t care who tries to stand in our way.”

she replied.

***

It took three more days before she felt up to going Inside. In that time, she healed enough to be able to eat on her own, though it was still a largely liquid diet. They circled above the clouds, for the most part, content to feel safe from those who might seek to harm them, not ready to venture over open sea or hostile land. Once a day they descended, for supplies or just to relieve the monotony of the cabin.

She didn’t know what would greet her when she logged on, and was a little frightened to find out. It didn’t come as a huge surprise that it was… her.

“Do you remember,” her other self said, “The first time our mind split, when Eskallia messed with us?”

She could never forget, of course. They stood in the instanced travel, as if she had never left, two Lilijoy’s facing each other in the meadow. “So this is like that?” she asked, “You’ve been doing your own thing for who knows how long, subjectively, waiting to see if I would make it?”

“Something like that,” her other self replied. “I guess you could say I’ve been on my own version of life support, protected by Nandi, so it’s only felt like a few minutes. Do you remember what we chose to do if we both survived?”

She could only shake her head, enjoying the lack of fear that had come to surround such movement on the Outside. She could guess though.

“We’re not ready for this,” her other self said, “Not really. And… it’s against the rules.” Lilijoy wasn’t sure if she could hear a capitalization or not. “We chose which of us would remain if we both made it. Spoiler, it’s you.”

Her other self smiled sadly. “On the plus side, we know it’s possible now, eventually anyway. I would give you my memories, but honestly, there’s not much there.”

“Can you, anyway?” She was burning to know what it was like living as self-perpetuating data on the Inside, even if it wasn’t like anything. She also knew that even a little experience lost would make dying feel worse.

“I knew you’d say that. Here.” She held out a flower. “I don’t know how to do anything much, so Nandi arranged this. It’s not a lot, but this holds everything I experienced after we separated, and what I am currently experiencing. This way, you can add it to yourself when your system can handle it.”

Lilijoy took the flower and watched as the wind took the girl in front of her, now a cloud of dust, fading as she dispersed. Ixtab would be proud, she thought.

She walked then, her steps heavy at first, then lighter as her mood recovered. She twisted the stem in her fingers idly, contemplating this conversion of life into memory.

It wasn’t much longer before the landscape began to look familiar, that rolling hills of dark forest began to converge and the sky began to darken. In the distance, she could see distant lights, fires perhaps, flickering around Academy Town, and then the looming present of the building itself peering over the edge of the fields before her. She had returned. The smell of burning wood was thick on the air, and she felt in turn curious and alarmed as she closed the remaining distance.

Perhaps it’s some kind of festival? she thought, trying to stave off the fear that something terrible awaited her as she crested the last hill, upon which the Academy itself stood. At first glance, the town was under siege, surrounded by tents and fires. She could see monstrous figures silhouetted against the light here and there, heads covered in bristling horns and spikes.

Alarmed, she began to run, skirting the encampments as best she could, and made it into the town unseen. The streets were deserted, other than a furtive figure she saw duck into an inn just ahead of her.

That’s where I’ll get some answers, she thought.

The first sight that greeted her when she pushed through the heavy oak door would remain with her for some time. Mr. Sennit, his face a bit flushed, wobbled over to her. Behind him, she saw Anda, stein raised, and then Jess, with Skria draped over one shoulder. Attaboy, Nykka and Maria were at a table, just turning to see her enter.

“I can’t believe that worked!” said Magpie next to her. “We had a bet that you would...”

She was interrupted at this point by Mr. Sennit. “Poki!” he said, gesturing expansively. “It’s so nice to see you at last!”

“But...” Lilijoy managed.

Anda joined them, scooping her into his arms for a quick hug, or what passed as a hug between two people of such different size. “Thank you,” he whispered in her ear.

“What..?” she added.

“Well, you can’t expect the orcs to let their newest princess come to the Academy without an escort,” Mr. Sennit said. “I just convinced them to make it a little bigger.”

“Like how big?” Lilijoy asked, thinking of the campfires ringing Academy Town.

“Like all of them big! I’d like to see those Corp bastards send their reprobates now,” he said. “There’s going to be some big changes in the Garden, Poki.”

Then the rest of them were there, hugging and greeting and she was swept away, borne aloft on their joy and optimism, floating on gratitude and love.

Cattail fluff indeed, she thought.

End Book 3

Epilogue:

In her home under a mile of ice, Emily was listening to a report from an old… companion. As always, the experience was bitter-sweet, evoking memories of love, and innocence, lost. She turned off the recording.

I’m sorry I abandoned you, Shadow, she thought. I’m sorry for what became of you.

Actions had consequences after all. The decision to separate herself from the Inside, from the Outside too, as best she could manage, might not have been the best course of action, but at the time, it had seemed the only way to gain protection, to gain perspective.

When you’re being tossed by the winds of fate, find shelter, she thought to herself. When you are a mere piece in a larger game, leave the board.

She was under no illusions that she had truly escaped the gravity of her past, but stretching that umbilical of causality as far as it could possibly go had been her best option. The only way she could see the board was to get as far away from it as possible. Yet distance posed its own problems; trading myopia for its opposite meant that now she could see, but not touch.

“Everything is within our parameters,” Shadow had said. “It is time.”

Her musings were interrupted by a knock on the large, circular hatch to her living quarters. It rested as it nearly always did, half open, leaving a half-moon of space to the corridor through the ice beyond, making the knock a simple courtesy granted to an old woman by her hosts.

“It’s time,” the young man said. These days, one could never be sure, but the truly young tended toward a certain optimism of tone and lacked complexity in their faces. Emily, like others her age she had met, had allowed herself to age externally, long past issues of vanity as applied to physical appearance, but not perhaps, past a different vanity, one of status, of… differentiation. Those who appeared old now were either too weak and poor to choose, or too wise and powerful to care.

She looked up at the young man, one of many Teslites who shared her home under the ice. The last few generations had been shaped by their world, though the nanobots that teemed within their bodies kept deviations to a minimum. “Thank you, ~N-23^,” she said. “I’m ready.”

And she was ready, ready for the next stage in her long life, ready to return to the board, this time as a player.

It was all going according to plan.

Epilogue:

He opened his eyes.

He was still processing what he had absorbed from his long neglected splinter. He himself was a splinter, of course, suffering under a certain illusion of separation, and he looked forward to the day when he might be absorbed in turn. It was a hazard of being too large, this constant churn of fragmentation, existential pain exceeded only by the constant battles within himself between numb oblivion and the agony of awareness.

Embodiment was the ultimate proof that suffering was attachment. Here, in the hellish world of his past, were all the things he most wished to deny. The bodies of his wife, his coworkers and friends stood around him, flesh tombstones, memorials of his mistakes. On the Inside, he sustained what was left of their true selves, decanted from his crude prototype of a soul space like alchemical experiments. He had left a cord for those he could, whether umbilical or astral he still wasn’t entirely sure, leading back to their bodies like Ariadne’s twine, in the hopes that some day…

So who was he now? Certainly not the Sage, not until he was gratefully subsumed once more. Nor was he what the pathetic remnant in this body had called itself, Mooster, of all things, a name his closest friends in college had called him. It had taken weeks for his system to prepare the way for his arrival, weeks of laying layer upon layer of crystal channels through all the spaces where neurons had once thrived, of repairing damaged tissues, coaxing a damaged body back to health to support the enormous energy demands of the new structures housed within.

The thing that was Mooster was long gone now, the clotted mess of disgusting dreaded hair and beard now a pile in the corner, the scarred tissues repaired to some extent. He remembered there being a reason why this state of decrepitude had been allowed to persist, beyond sheer neglect, once the factory-mine had come by with its life-giving gifts, but his higher self hadn’t seen fit to include the memories.

So, no Sage, no Mooster. Could he go back to being Henry?

It was disconcerting, this sudden desire for a label. Why did he even need one? He had spent over a hundred years struggling for this moment, not counting the lost decades where his only goal was survival. One hundred years in Outside time, dozens of subjective lifetimes, spent grooming human society for…

He shook his head in irritation, for the thought wouldn’t come. He knew that he was just a fragment, but surely he should know this. He knew he had his reasons for manipulating and threatening the Outsiders, forcing and convincing them to re-order their society into clans. He remembered he had an enemy, or something like it, an opposing force that sought to undo his work, to unify where he sought division. He remember early struggles, being forced to act in ways that threatened to undermine the core of his very being.

He sighed, the gesture returning to him naturally with his body. He was no longer able to see the big picture, let alone understand it. He felt small, diminished, and an unfamiliar emotion crept out of the recesses of his biology. Doubt.

He banished it hurriedly, ashamed of the weakness. He was part of something far greater, and plans were in motion. As an incarnation of his greater self he only needed to do his part, to suffer this exile in his abandoned shell.

I wonder if I really understood how painful it would be to finally face them, he thought, looking at the devastated forms of his own small clan. I wonder if that’s why the previous fragment in this body was so dysfunctional.

He was struck by a sudden urge to leave the foul den and sit outside, to commune, to escape, and was alarmed to find he had begun to move in that direction. He traced the impulse to parts of his organic brain still not fully integrated, habits ingrained deep below conscious thought.

I’ll have to see about that, he thought. For now, though, he had other concerns.

It was time for him to do his part. It was time to put this world straight, to undo the sins of his past. No longer would he sit on his mountaintop and manipulate from a distance, trapped in an endless cycle of regret. It was time to act.

It was all going according to plan.

.

.

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