She woke from a dream of blue sky. Unlike most dreams she had experienced, this one felt wonderfully concrete, with senses as vivid as waking reality. The warmth of the exposed sun trickled through closed eyelids as she faced the sky, a gentle breeze stirring sweet fragrances of plant life and moist earth. Her body felt heavy on the soft grass where she lay, different and fitting at the same time. In the dream she had opened her eyes to track soft white lumps of cloud hovering far above her, and yet still below other wispy tracks of vapor.

There were sounds all around her, buzzing, humming, chirping and she somehow knew that each sound was an animal calling to the blue sky and the sun and to her. Framing her view were tall flowering plants in orange and yellow; her breath caught at the sense of presence, of importance and meaning in the large blooms. Six petals framed a burst of capped tendrils which reached out to the world, offering, presenting. She loved them, and she had always loved them.

“Nari!” a woman’s voice called out. “Nari! Get out of the lilies and get inside! It’s time to practice. Your father just left work, and you have an hour. We are going as soon as he gets home.”

She didn’t reply, just grabbed the book lying on the grass and got to her feet, brushing aside the long black hair that fell across her face. She crossed an area of short green grasses and reached a door of mesh and wood that pulled open with a pleasant twanging sound. She heard the voice again, kind but exasperated.

“Honestly, Emily Choi, we should just plant you in the garden and save the money on food and clothes.”

Waking to the enclosed space of the ventilation duct, her own mustiness blending with decades of dust and mold and the smell of metal, seemed momentarily less real than the vibrant colors and sounds of her dream. Lilijoy stretched in the confined space as best she could, which was hardly at all, and was briefly tempted to go back to sleep, to return to a much more pleasant setting. She shook off the feeling, in large part due to the urgent need of her bladder. It would be less than ideal hiding technique, she thought, to pee in the tube.

A quick scan with her ears picked up no sounds beyond the soft background of enclosed air, and another scan with her mind found no new signals. She had discovered that each of the three men emitted a faint signal from his active network, and though she was ages away from intercepting their messages or sneaking into their bugs, she could use the information to get a sense of where they were if they were nearby.

Feeling reasonably safe, she carefully made her way to the roof of the building and to the far corner where a standing pool of murky water had accumulated. The building had a raised edge, and several pipes and other structures protruding, so she felt good about staying out of view from any eyes below. After increasing the pool’s volume slightly, she moved to a different spot within the ventilation ducts and spent a moment taking stock.

She couldn’t sense the signal from the tablet she was waiting for, so she turned her attention inward.

STATUS: UNRATED

Nanobody count 3014 [Urgent Action Needed] Power Ratio 19% Stage One Integration 4% Stage Two Integration .02% Secondary/Support 2 detected, 0 identified Communications Stealth Mode Sensors Passive Active Interventions 2 Personal Quantification None Options | Logs | Data | Reference | Menu

The number of nanobodies remaining told her she had slept for around six hours. It was depressing to see half her progress gone, just like that, but she took comfort from the knowledge that she had now turned the corner. It was all upwards from here!

She noticed ‘FAILING’ was gone from the status, and did a little shimmy jig in the tight tube. She decided it was time to explore something new in celebration, and selected ‘Secondary/Support’ to see what that was all about.

SECONDARY/SUPPORT SYSTEMS Nanoscale Body Types 2 Unidentified 1 8,000,000 – 12,000,000 Unidentified 2 1,000 - Unknown Macroscale 0 Options | Logs | Data | Reference | Menu

Lilijoy looked at the numbers next to ‘Unidentified 1’. Then she looked again. After a third time the numbers still remained stubbornly the same, and her brain began the process of wrapping itself around the data. She remembered that Anda had said a typical system used ‘several orders of magnitude’ more bugs than hers did. Her new intuition for math and numbers told her that was probably about a thousand times more.

Thanks Flowers!

If this was a normal bug system, then the numbers shown were probably on the low side. After all, her flower system wanted a minimum of fifty thousand, which would translate to fifty million regular bugs.

I bet those are Marcus’ special bugs, she thought. I vampired him!

She wondered if there was some way to give them back. She could still remember the look on his face when he realized he was losing his precious bugs! She wondered how Marcus was doing, and if she would ever see him again.

The other unidentified bug was a mystery. Perhaps she could ask Jiannu to identify it? She focused on ‘Unidentified 2’ and received the message “Insufficient resources to begin identification.”

Oh well, she thought, yet another thing on the ‘I can’t do yet’ list.

What she could do was cultivate some more. Soon she was in her mind space.

“Hey Jiannu!” she addressed the disembodied voice. “I just realized my mind space is in an actual space…in my mind! Get it? Ventricles are empty spaces in my brain, and my mind space is in a ventricle!”

Lilijoy was very proud of herself for this realization.

Jiannu was silent for a moment. “…yes…” she finally started. She regained her momentum and went on, “Ultimately you will have a much greater area to work with that includes your ‘mind space.’ Typically we refer to that as your ‘soul space’.” Her voice became more excited. “You will have so much fun creating your soul space, Lilijoy! Once your nanobodies have reached…”

Lilijoy interrupted, “Let me guess, once I have reached the minimum number of fifty thousand.” She sighed. Another for the list.

“Oh, I would recommend at least one hundred thousand for that!” Jiannu replied. “You will want to have close to full integration of Stage one too. But don’t worry! That’s only a few weeks away.”

“A few weeks!”

The surge of annoyance and impatience she felt caught Lilijoy off guard. After all, it wasn’t that much time. Still she would have stamped her foot if she was currently connected to it!

“I’d best get started then,” she said, resigned. Then she remembered something else. Two somethings else!

“Jiannu, what can you tell me about the other bugs floating in my system?”

“When you have some extra flower bots, say a hundred fifty thousand…” Lilijoy’s eyes, somewhere back on the Outside, were undoubtedly rolling “…we can begin to study and incorporate the foreigners into our system, and build them for ourselves. Possibly upgrade them, too.”

Okay, that’s pretty good, she thought, even if it won’t happen for a million years.

Jiannu was still talking. “I can already tell you that the first batch tried to invade and were suppressed a few days ago. They seem to be some kind of stealth and mobility-based sensor bugs. Not stealthy enough though!” An almost satisfied edge tinged her voice. “The other bugs are primarily hemoglobin carriers, and are already active in your body, though there aren’t enough to make a difference. I have sequestered some for later study and possible replication.”

“Hemoglobin?”

“Carries oxygen in your blood. If there were enough of these, you could go without breathing for a long time. Only about a thousand have made their way into your cerebrospinal fluid, so there is no way of knowing how many there are in your body.”

Now that made Lilijoy happy- she had vampired the vampire!

“The other thing,” she said, “was about the flowers. Can I make some like the first ones I saw?”

“Well, the first ones you saw around the Golden Flower were Stage Two, which means they had incorporated your own neural tissue. We really shouldn’t make more of those for now. But the Stage One bots can be fairly similar. I suggest you drill down a bit farther in your ‘nanobody count’ menu. Try focusing on the very top of the window, where it says ‘nanobody count.’

Lilijoy had to bite her (imaginary) tongue. How could advice be simultaneously helpful and annoying!

“Thanks,” she said, probably unaware of the faint sarcasm to her tone. She did as Jiannu suggested and sure enough, new information popped up.

Nanobody count: 3,003 [Urgent Action Needed] 3003:50,000 minimum recommended Stage One 2161 Little Lotus Family 352 Little Lotus Unspecialized 31 Little Lotus Vision 107 Little Lotus Auditory 52 Little Lotus Proprioception 0 Little Lotus Touch 0 Little Lotus Olfactory 0 Little Lotus Comms 122 Little Lotus Surveillance/Suppression 40 Flower Vine 1809 Stage Two 842 Flower 841 Golden Flower 1 Current Average Attrition 68/hour (Select Bot type for details) Estimated Time to Failure 0 hours Cultivation Rate: 73/hour over 24 hours Cultivate | Differentiate | Assign

Now that was interesting! What was with all the ‘little lotus’ flowers? Those must be the first bugs in her system, now almost completely gone.

“Hey Jiannu, where did the little lotuses come from? Why all the different kinds? What’s a lotus anyway?” she asked.

“A lotus is a flower with many petals that floats on the water. The name came with the system, and I don’t know more than that. I think the Stage Two flowers used to be called ‘Double Lotus’ and got renamed by the system when you discovered them. Each type of Little Lotus is specialized for a particular type of neural interface or enhancement. The unspecialized can do all of them, but not as well. It is like your vines, which excel at travel and transport, finding and moving resources around the brain. The vines are also great at internal communication and connecting parts of the brain. But they are not particularly good at sensory mediation, external communications and suppression. Now that almost all the Little Lotuses are gone, those areas will suffer.”

“So, I should make more! What do you suggest?”

“Save specialized versions for later. The good news is that the Little Lotuses take fewer resources to make, about a third of what a vine uses, so you can make more at a time.”

Lilijoy selected ‘Cultivate’ and merged with the Golden Flower, infusing it with her intention.

Time slowed as the petals opened and stretched into branching tendrils and became hers and the facets folded in and around and presented the origami folds of structures that were taken and became one all in an instant and a Little Lotus was floating away, nascent stirring in its petals directing it between the cracks of the soft blocks as another followed and another and on and on and time moved forward and then she could be only herself again and look at her work, smaller flowers such that ten would fit in one bigger cousin, slow but earnest as they slipped away on their appointed rounds.

After the timeless time was closing, she became aware as well of a new sensation. It was like a knocking on a door, and when she left her mind space at last, she found that the ‘Bomb Shelter Tablet’ was back.