Emily, in a virtual god-created place

"All you need is the cylinder, a needle, and a diaphragm sensitive to acoustical waves. You can crank the cylinder by hand."

Giltak and I were at my old assay lab at the Grendal Gulch Mine outside of Elko, Nevada.

"Giltak, I already figured that out so why are we here?”

"Oh silly Emily, a threaded shaft is the easiest way but you could use the motion of the hand crank to both rotate the shaft and to transfer some of the motion through gears to a drive chain or a belt that pulls the cylinder in one direction. Weren't you paying attention when you took mechanical engineering?"

"Giltak-kami, did you hear what I just said?”

“Wait. What?”

“Did I just throw off your script? I know you folks can manage many parallel streams of consciousness. Are you on autopilot or something?”

"But you made a Gramme generator," Giltak protested in a tailored lab coat with paisley collar and cuffs. The socks matched too. Even Giltak's lab wear was flashy. I had to admit that if I wasn't so disgusted, I would consider getting a lab coat like that for myself.

"You're just jealous," Giltak grinned. "since you have utterly no panache when it comes to dressing yourself. Have you...” Giltak blinked. “That’s not right,” Giltak looked disturbed. “This timepath is unglued. Galt, I need help here.”

*Hello, kitten,* a person-sized Galt walked up on all fours and rubbed the side of his head on my knee. *Scratch?*

I scratched but I also gave these two goofball gods a grumpy eyeball. “You are trying to distract me from what you said the night I won your bet for you, Galt. You said you asked Mugash if I could heal faster and she said no.”

Tiki appeared and put a pina colada in front of me. Then he sat down, “this isn’t working. This is why I wanted to avoid negotiating. Galt. Let’s stop for now.”

"I am sick and tired of ineffable," I said, sipping the divine pina colada. I studied the tiki mask, wondering how in the world Tiki managed to get a wooden mask to radiate defeat and disappointment without a change of expression. "So, even gods can screw up. Forget ineffable for the moment. What happened to infallible?"

*Powerful, mostly omniscient, beyond your current comprehension,* Galt sighed, *but not infallible. Remember Jehovah and Noah’s flood? One of the morals of that story is that deities can make mistakes of judgment. It's also a cautionary tale of what can happen if a deity intervenes incorrectly or too closely in making adjustments to reality. Jehovah wanted a soft reboot on the direction society was going, but what he got was the death of almost all biological life in the fertile crescent. He was always meddlesome that way---still is, but he’s not involved in this reality.*

"I don't get it. If you are omniscient, then you know things that people don't or can't know and given that universal knowledge, you should be able to choose the correct boundary conditions to avoid unintended consequences like slavery. How can you screw up so badly?"

Tiki sighed. Giltak looked depressed.

Galt studied me: "Kitten, chattel slavery is the worst extreme on the continuum of relative servitude. Not all servitude is evil and the original servitude of the Coyn in Foskos was not chattel servitude. It's nature changed over time. Landa's revelation for you will prohibit chattel slavery. Since Cosm are engineered to fear the gods, if you will give them a scripture to abolish slavery, it will happen."

I took another sip of Tiki’s creation, wanting a decent buzz right now because I knew something unpleasant was coming my way.

"Galt, why can't you just pop into every Cosm mind and tell them to stop it?"

Galt groaned. *You don't have a complete understanding yet of the physics of souls or magic. Once a reality is set-up, even we are subject to the rules we built into it. It's effective and energy-efficient to send a prophet to change a society. But souls are like an electron cloud. At the quantum level, we can't determine the magical position of each Cosm soul at every dt of time. You as a prophet are the right tool. Divine brute force is not. Don't give me that look, kitten. I know you understood that analogy.*

"So, if revelation is a tool for changing Cosm society, where do we fit the Revelation of Tiki to Yud?"

The wooden tiki mask looked annoyed while Giltac and Galt laughed

“Tiki, you said something wasn’t working and that you folks should stop. I believe you've been trying to get around my realization that Mugash deliberately slowed my recovery, multiple times. Have you been running me through a time loop, hoping that on one of those loops, I would not realize Mugash set me up to suffer longer than I should have?”

The red lights behind the eye holes of the Tiki mask flickered for a moment, "yes, that's what we've tried to do. We've erased your memory every time, and every time you still come to the same realization."

“Mugash, show yourself,” I said to the air. “I know you’re watching.”

Suddenly the rest of the eleven gods appeared, already sitting in chairs that appeared with them.

I looked at the beautiful woman with the long wavy black hair and the golden eyes in the white chiton. “So, you’re Erhonsay, also called Sophia, and perhaps Athena, goddess of war and wisdom?”

“That’s right, Emily,” she smiled at me with an appraising look.

“Are you satisfied that Aylem didn’t run away from Black Falls, as you requested?” I inquired.

“It was an excellent outcome, thank you---though there was more help than I expected from the god committee to ensure that Aylem stayed put for now. She really does need fixing and by the right people."

“What would have happened if she had run away for a second time?" I was curious. A huge effort went into keeping her in Black Falls. I wanted to know if the result was worth all the trouble.

*If Aylem had fled from her problems a second time, analysis of the set of possible timelines suggests she would go insane,* Galt said in a rather grim voice. *If that happened, we would terminate her current existence. Given her power, it would be too dangerous to leave her alive. The stakes were that high.*

“Oh,” I didn’t know what to say. It made sense but it still felt like it was way over the top to me. It was time to change the subject back to what I wanted from Mugash.

“So, Mugash,” I hoped I looked disappointed because I was, “why? And don’t leave anything out.”

Mugash started explaining herself: “Aylem is a nexus of power with the ability to adjust reality back onto the path we want it to travel, one which maximizes the creative potential for all the self-conscious races while mitigating the worst tendencies for destruction by the Coyn. But Aylem is a soul which dislikes war and is reluctant to act. Despite all her power, she is timid when it comes to using it to its full potential. That’s why we wanted you because you have all the qualities to be a catalyst for Aylem, to keep her moving. But Aylem, in her desire to keep you near and make you a friend, managed to do the opposite and drove you away. We chose her for her superb capacity to host power but we did not look deeply enough into how the retention of her memories would effect her behavior in this life.”

“And?” I prodded when she paused for too long.

“A slow recovery would maximize the time you would spend with her between now and the time when she must destroy the crystal at the Shrine of Landa. You were correct, by the way, in your assessment that the Battle of Yant was not the correct time to receive your fourth revelation. A direct attack on our oldest shrines was not on the planned timeline but your death at Aylem's hands introduced multiple aberrations in the current system. This is a time for system corrections. We need Aylem to adjust the system but we need you so we can both guide and fix Aylem.”

“A time for system corrections? Might it otherwise be known as the third age of divine interventions and miracles?” I just wanted to hear it confirmed.

“Yes,” Mugush admitted.

“And the prophesy of the great breaking is the same as the event in Aylem’s revelation from Tiki and the same as the one precipitated by Landa’s future revelation for me, yes?”

“Yes,” Landa said in his voice like scraping desert varnish.

"Will Kamagishi show me the actual prophecy of the great breaking?"

“No, she won’t,” Galt said from where he had curled up next to me, with his paws tucked under and his head resting on my thigh, "but your friend Usruldes will. The Convocation is deliberately hiding it from you. They're afraid it will scare you back into the forest."

“Mugash, instead of prolonging my pain and frustration and tricking me, did you never consider just asking me to stick around?" I admit, I was past being annoyed and was now working on anger.

Tiki sighed, “as I told you at the Crystal Shrine the other day, the current you can not understand why this was a logical choice for Mugash, Emily. You are a very young soul and need time to evolve before you can comprehend.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I snapped, “and that did not answer my question. I asked about the courtesy of being asked to do something. What does the ineffability of your motives have to do with that? Mugash could have asked me or she could have commanded me or even bribed me to put up with Aylem for the sake of your inscrutable grand plan, but instead, she chose to inflict needless pain and frustration on me to achieve her ends.”

Tiki would have been better off keeping his mouth shut. It began to make more sense to me how they screwed up with Aylem. These folks were so far removed from the experience of mortal suffering that they were out of touch with what it did to a person---which explained how Mugash could craft a punishment for Aylem that broke her mentally. Did she not understand this?

“I’m glad you have such confidence in my ability to handle knowledge. I’m good enough to figure out that magic is a force that affects the space-time continuum; however, I’m not worthy enough for Mugash to simply ask that I stay by Aylem and motivate her. Your stick and carrot incentives seem a bit flawed from my perspective. I think I’m done here for now,” and I closed my mind in disgust.

I opened my eyes to the real world, in a room I did not recognize. It wasn’t what I expected after arguing with those damn gods. I almost expected the gods to grab my consciousness and drag me back to that place built out of my memories where we talk.

The place where I just woke up wasn't my bedroom at the Shrine of Mugash or the room Foyuna set up for me at the Crystal Shrine. From the sheer height of the ceiling, I was definitely in a room comfortable for silverhair to work in, with at least two tall windows letting daylight stream in. From what I could see, I was in a Cosm-sized bed. But where? I couldn't lift my head because it was strapped down, as was my upper torso, my pelvis, and my knees. My left arm was splinted and in a sling. There was a feeding tube down my throat and a catheter for my bladder.

Just how badly did that Priestess of Sassoo injure me?

A strange pair of thumping noises approached. It turned out to be Kayseo on crutches. She was all smiles, “you’re finally awake. You’ve been out of it for a whole rotation. There's been so much to do that Lisaykos opted to let you sleep through most of your recovery. She transitioned you to normal sleep yesterday. I was thinking you might wake this morning. Your sleep was very restless last night. The healers who set your bones are on their way. You're ready to be unrestrained and unsplinted, but it’s a shrine policy is not to release restraints for a broken back without a final review of how the spine has recovered.”

“I really did break my back? It felt like it before I passed out,” I said around the dryness in my mouth.

“You’ve broken your back before?” Kayseo looked shocked.

“When I was 64,” I clarified. “Car accident.”

“What’s a car?” Kayseo asked.

“It’s a self-propelled enclosed cart made of metal that uses devices like the ones Emily creates to make it work,” Aylem’s new soft and tentative voice said. I could see her now as she sat down next to Kayseo.

“Emily, you were a mess,” Aylem said with a sympathetic smile. “It was quite a mystery at first how you survived being kicked almost 100 handwidths by someone much bigger than you.”

“I’d say,” Lisaykos’ voice added. “Then Ud told us about the shirt she made you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about Ud’s shirt?” Aylem asked quietly, sounding a little hurt. “I certainly would have worried less about you on Asgotl, especially when you and that fool griffin buzzed the tent city at Black Falls.”

“You were asleep,” I accused.

“I wasn’t,” Lisaykos stepped up to the bed, “in case you had forgotten that I was waiting for you when you landed.” She did a very good job of looming at me in disapproval.

“Yes, you looked like you were about to have kittens,” I chuckled.

“Kittens? What?” Lisaylos wasn’t familiar with expression but Aylem broke up laughing. Kayseo and Lisaykos traded a look which set me off laughing.

“It should have been a cow,” Aylem remarked and we both laughed some more. It was welcome catharsis after arguing with the gods.

“Alright,” Aylem pulled herself back together, “let’s confirm that we can free you from broken-back prison.” She used Lisaykos’ trick of reaching past my range of vision to touch the top of my head. That was a new move for her. She still gave me the willies. Despite that, her probe was a comfortable warmth spreading down my back.

“I believe everything is fine,” Aylem withdrew her hand. She looked up at Lisaykos, “do you want to check?”

Lisaykos deployed one raised eyebrow, “since when do I need to check your work, of all people?”

“Just asking, in case you did," Aylem said a little defensively. She started undoing the straps holding me down. "Lisaykos, can you be ready with some pillows? I'm going to sit her up." They soon had me in a sitting position against the headboard.

“How do you feel?” Aylem asked.

I tried to move my right arm, the one not in the sling and managed to lift it. I was feeling feeble after a rotation of atrophying in bed, which was to be expected. Then I took my forefinger and poked my splinted hand.

“What are you doing, Emily?” Aylem asked, befuddled.

“You asked me how I feel,” I replied. “I feel solid at the moment, so it’s safe to say I haven’t evaporated yet.” I gave her a perfectly serious look.

I was rewarded with a facepalm. It was a small triumph after the earlier fiasco with the god committee.