"What do you mean, that's it?" I asked, flabbergasted as we read the last lines of the pixels. "What happened next? He made Cer and then?"

> Apologetic admission. After finishing his work, he went insane, and died. The constant visions of the end of the world, it was our fault, our first victim. THE YAAN was intimate to us, and we killed him.

> Optimistic suggestion. However, we have gotten much better at interfacing with human-host since. THE YAAN taught us much. We believe that to be our best-feature, and so far as we know, we are the only muse who learns, which is an accomplishment.

"Accomplishment?" I echoed, moving from flabbergasted to dumbfounded. "How the hell can you say you've learned? I have no idea how many fucking Exhumans you burned through in the last two-hundred years, but I do know that both Mage and Soran ended up dead under your accomplishments."

She almost seemed to sigh at me.

> Final word. THE SORAN is not deceased, please check your facts.

> Exposition concludes.

"Wait, no it most certainly does not! What about the rest of it! What about Ramanathan trying to save another world. What part of what he did here has anything to do with Justice?"

> Aggravated reiteration. We informed you that preceding-exposition was nonconsequential. We urged you to accompany THE CERBERUS to other-instruments within the lab.

> Unsubtle hint. Perhaps it is with those, the other-instruments, that THE YAAN produced before expiring, that you will find the answers you seek.

"That is a pretty unsubtle hint," AEGIS commented.

"Why won't she just tell us?"

"Probably because doing so is nonconsequential," she mused.

"Okay, what does that even mean?"

"It means...imagine you're talking to Mage, not Aoede. She can see the future, right? She's also kind of a...if you remember...sort of a surly little girl."

"You think Mage acting like that was because that's how Aoede acted through her?"

"That's...a theory, but maybe. Or maybe she just hated having someone control her all the time. Either way, if she sees the future and knows that whether she tells you something or not, it makes no difference, and also that you were just wasting her time, and doing it in a way she already completely predicts...I guess you could hopefully imagine why she'd basically be so dismissive?"

"Well maybe she'd get better results out of me if she fucking said that instead of just saying nonconsequential a bunch of times."

> Rebuttal. No, we would not. Telling you that is nonconsequential.

"Okay, I'm turning her off, where's the switch…"

AEGIS stopped me, even if I wasn't really going for the switch. "Aoede, you said you're the only muse who learns? Because you're the muse of thought, I assume?"

> Speculative agreement. Yes…?

"Why...don't the others learn? There's nothing saying like, a muse of fire can't learn, right?"

> Wary conjecture. We are not able to see into the actions of other muses. Unlike single-dimension-humans, they exist as we do, cross causality as you know it as we do, are of us, and not of this-dimension. They create the imperfect-sight with their unpredictability.

"Interesting," AEGIS mused, turning to explain to me, even if I didn't ask for it. "Kinda like how we can predict the movement of like, simple organisms, entirely, based on environmental conditions and pheromones and the like, but can't accurately predict something another human would do, necessarily."

"Lia could."

"Makes me wonder if there's a muse of muses, who is only good at knowing what other muses do," she said, scratching at her chin. "But you dodged the question, Aoede. Just because you can't predict them doesn't mean you can't speculate on why you learn and they don't."

> Belabored explanation. We consider it poor-taste to ill-speak of other muses, even should they not understand the concept of speech. Regardless, if you must insist, we presume they do not learn because they have no need of it. They drift and devour, and are concerned with nothing but.

"What about bonding?" I asked, suddenly interested. "If they don't want anything but our ideas, why do you form Exhumans in the first place?"

> Continued belabored explanation. It is a matter of temptation. A certain concentration of THE CONCEPT will attract a muse, even to exist within a human-mind, like a mouse drawn to a trap. It is difficult for us to enter, so it is not done often. When bonding occurs, the muse finds itself overwhelmed, in monogamy, but also cut-off. It exists within one mind now, but also has a dedicated-sustenance. There is an adjustment period for both parties.

"The Ramanathan Window," AEGIS gaped.

> Agreement. THE YAAN named it such in your dimension. A time when the muse has spent great effort to bond with a human, and is invested in seeing its harvest bear. If the host should expire prematurely, the muse faces potential-starvation, and so it uses its capabilities to ensure the host survives until it has fed sufficiently.

"Meanwhile, the host is learning their new powers, and their mind is completely consumed by thoughts about them, I'm sure," AEGIS muttered, sounding a little like an insane Ramanathan herself. "This is a huge feast for the muse. And once it's stuffed, the window closes, the muse content to let the host live or die from that point on."

"This is so fucked up," I commented.

"This is so exciting!" she squealed.

"Exciting!" Cer echoed.

"So powers, Exhuman powers, they're nothing but like...manifestations of the muse's ability to affect our dimension...and they only do it so that we'll keep thinking about their favorite food?" I asked. "That's just sick."

"That's also why Justice is so wrong in the head," AEGIS agreed. "He's got so many muses packed inside of him, they must all be starving, and they're each trying to twist his brain to use their powers so that he and others will see 'em and think of them. Too many powers, too small a space, not enough of an audience--"

"No," I said, staggering at the weight of her phrasing. "New Eden."

"What about it?"

"Everyone in there is pissy all the time. The sickness."

She stared at me. And then frowned. "There really was an underground fighting ring, wasn't there? You lied to me!"

"But AEGIS, Jesus Christ, do you have any idea what all this means? With all this new information we could like...I don't know...fix Exhumanity or something. If the general public knew all of this…"

I paused, thinking about how that sentence was going to end.

I kind of already knew. All this did was poke more weaknesses in Exhumanity. It didn't make them any more sympathetic or relatable, certainly not anything less to fear. All that would happen is a lot more experimentation to see how far they could go in starving a muse to death, torturing the Exhuman host the entire time. Every one of them would wind up as aggressive and insane as Justice, the sickness of New Eden, weaponized.

I looked at AEGIS, her eyes shining with excitement at all the new things she was learning, all the knowledge she was putting away inside herself, keeping it just for the sake of knowing things, and I wished the world was more like her.

Because people only ever seemed to want to know more when they could use it. I thought of all the briefings I'd sat through as an XPCA, and never were we told about some Exhuman's motivation for knocking over a city, just what their powers were and how we could exploit them to stop 'em.

Not for the first time, I felt gross and ashamed of being human, even if they didn't consider me such. Maybe I wasn't exactly forced into killing people, but they had certainly paved the world in such a way that doing so was often the easiest, best option. Which was an entirely different kind of fucked up.

"Let's just follow Cer and see where this winds up," I muttered. AEGIS' sparkle seemed to wear off as she realized I was pissed about something, but just nodded and fell in silently behind me, shooting me sideways glances at times.

"Cer, let's finish this tour and get back to my sister," I sighed.

The pixels blinked at me.

> Final farewell. THE ATHAN, please forgive what we have done. We understand that harming or killing those close to you is undesirable, but we retain confidence that we have chosen best-path. Though it may not seem so to you, we are certain.

"Yeah, well," I said. "I mean, I hurt people too, and I'm not even sure how things will turn out. I might be a big dumb hypocrite, but I'm trying."

> Vague assurance. We can confirm that in the near future, you will improve in your big-dumb-hypocrisy.

> Farewell concludes.

I barely finished reading when Cer switched the device off, and the pixels went black. I had an ominous feeling about shutting her off, the fact that I would apparently change in the near future, the fact that she'd unknowingly phrased it as final farewell, these were not lost on me.

But y'know, I bet if I asked, she'd just tell me that knowing was fucking nonconsequential. Because what did it matter if I knew I was going to die or not? As long as I did what she wanted, to get to her fucking goal, she could throw me away, like Mage, Soran, or even Ramanathan.

"This way!" Cer bubbled, apparently not programmed to read the mood, even a little bit. "Cer, so excited to show you Dr. Ramanathan's other projects. This, the very monitor used to first witness muses. And here, the instrument with which Dr. Ramanathan accidentally bonded himself with Aoede, the first beacon."

"First...beacon?" I asked.

"First beacon. Apologies. Cer, did misspeak?"

"The beacon. The beacon. That's what Aoede told us to come here for. The beacon."

"The beacon, well, honored guest has found it!"

"This is a beacon?" AEGIS asked, looking up and down the simple-looking device. "Beacon, how?"

"Honored guest, as just heard from Aoede's recitation, the device, synthesizes brain-wave patterns to the allure of muses. Brilliant! Muses, lured by perception of ideal concepts, make the jump to become bonded to new host."

"A machine that makes Exhumans," I spat my disdain. "Why the hell would anyone ever want one?"

"Exciting salvation!"

"Salvation of what? Not our souls, that's for fucking sure."

Cer laughed, but AEGIS was studying him carefully. "Cer, you said this was the first beacon?"

"Yes! Second beacon, more powerful, much more refined. Follow!"

He began to bob out of the room, but as he went, my stomach dropped. I was afraid of what we were going to find wherever he led us.

But what other choice did I have? Just sit here and pretend none of this existed?

It wouldn't be that hard, I thought. So many bombs had been dropped on my understanding of the world tonight, all wrapped up in a narrative of jumping dimensions, of so much implausibility, of so many good intentions going fucked.

If I could just convince myself that the Ramanathan of this world had found something else to focus on, somewhere else. Or that this was all just a dream, everything from stepping in front of Aesa's device had all just been some effect of being in the void. When she turned the machine on, I'd fallen and hit my head, and all of this was just a fever dream.

I took a deep, steadying breath, and resolved to believe whatever Cer showed me. It wasn't in me to look away when faced with a reality I couldn't stand. Maybe that was why I hated reality so much.

Cer wound up taking us down another elevator, to another floor, deeper and more massive. I could feel the power thrumming around here, and even before we arrived at the large impressively-elaborate thing dominating the otherwise-empty chamber, I knew I hated it.

It was the same ornate decoration as Cer, white, shining gold, and glowing blue. Except instead of a bounding, bouncing sphere, this was a towering machine, fifteen feet tall, framed with golden, arching rings, topped with glowing blue orbs, as though designed to impress foremost, and give the appearance of a deliberately futuristic device.

"Ramanathan built this? After the hackjobs he made upstairs?" AEGIS asked.

"No. Cer, built this, at Dr. Ramanathan's specifications and orders. Do you like it?"

"It's...nice," AEGIS smiled. Cer bounced giddily.

In the very front of the device was a large display, a real one, not a pixels, and two seats, thoughtfully placed at the panel.

"Cer, most proud of this, fulfilled Ramanathan's final work in its building. Salvation!"

"What Aoede said, about Ramanathan trying to save a parallel Earth...that was our Earth, and it was...through this machine?"

"Yes. And yes!"

"Athan," AEGIS warned, "this machine is on. I can feel it."

"Me too. I have the lightning powers, remember?"

"Ah, yeah. But Athan, if it's a beacon…"

She let the statement hang. I swallowed hard.

"Um, Cer, what does this beacon do?"

"Cer, glad you asked! Dr. Ramanathan, realizing in his wisdom that in all worlds, two superpowers, always clashing, always end in cataclysm! Another threat, needed, external to both. The beacon, the muses, the 'Exhumans', an external threat. Cer, programmed to send muses to your world, bond them. Salvation!"

His words echoed weirdly in my head as he managed to bubble with such cheer about something so utterly fucked.

"Cer, what the hell have you done?" I asked. "You...you created Exhumans just to stop humanity from killing itself, at the cost of what? Humanity killing itself over something completely different? Why the fuck didn't you stop when China was obliterated, how was that a better option than America getting wiped out?"

He paused. "Cer...programmed to send muses to your world, bond them?"

I put my face in my hands and my brain seemed to hitch. My resolution to accept whatever Cer showed me struggled with the enormity of what'd been dropped here.

All the suffering I thought I'd endured at the hands of Dragon, the fact that we'd fought over some stupid trinket he was trying to destroy in the first place. The fact that we could put aside our differences and fucking talk things out if we had to. All the people who'd died or been hurt, because of his shortcomings and fucking misunderstandings. Hundreds of killings, a dozen of which were personal to me, and one intimate.

It paled in comparison to this. To this defective fucking piece of shit AI who was filling our world with Exhumans, because that's what Ramanathan programmed him to do, to avert a catastrophe that hadn't even been averted.

The world was a mistake. And the fact that this stupid fucking orb was running so much of it, and was an ignorant, defective, floating garbage pile just confirmed it.

"You just...filled up...the world with Exhumans? Because...you were told to?" I seethed. I felt lightning coursing inside me, felt my hair standing on end as blades began to crackle in the air.

"No!" he belted.

"No?"

"At first, yes. Cer, then, considering, it is very much effort to find new humans across dimensional space, would be easier, perhaps better, if just reused same humans."

AEGIS' face was in her hands. I was trying very hard not to rip him in half.

"So you just created Justice, is what you're saying. You pumped all the muses in the world into one fucking human?"

"No!"

"No?" I echoed again.

"No! That proposal, hugely irresponsible. Cer, never do such a thing as that."

"Then what did you do, Cer?" I growled.

"Experiment!" he bubbled, seemingly unaware of my blades creeping in around him. "Cer, unsure of what multiple muses in one human would do, came up with experiment, tested carefully, monitored closely. Huge success!"

"What did you do?"

"Erm." The blue irises floating in the blackness of his sensors flicked back and forth between AEGIS and my faces. "You. Massive success. Monumental!"

AEGIS cut in. "What the fuck did you do to Athan, Cer?"

"Tiny...experiment? First time. Cer, uncertain what would happen, put only two muses in. Honored guest, survived, thrived! Greatest success."

"I...I have two powers?" I asked.

"Confirmed!" Cer bubbled happily as he swam through the sea of my blades over to the beacon, and at his presence, the display lit up, flickering through what looked like thousands of Exhuman profiles, until I found myself staring at my own face.

Other than that, it didn't have any information about me. I guess all they could see of us from here was just...us. But it did have a shitton of information. Just...about the things inside me.

I swallowed hard as my eyes crept down the page, in spite of myself. I felt AEGIS' eyes turn from the screen to stare at me, her mouth agape, the gears in her head turning as she scrutinized me with a sudden caution I hadn't seen on her since back when she was in the box.

After all the information about my first muse, my electric muse, was the second. The muse I didn't know I had, the one that made me realize just how much of my life...how much of me, wasn't really me at all. How everything I had, and was, and am...it was all my powers, all along.

Muse Name: 0002 Zeus

Bond Date: 6/18/2251 (local)

Concept: ELECTRICITY

...

Muse Name: 1071 Aphrodite

Bond Date: 6/18/2251 (local)

Concept: SEDUCTION