Interlude: Nykka

“I am very disappointed with your lack of progress,” said Doctor Quimea

Nykka kept her eyes to the floor.

“It is beyond me how someone with your enhancements and training could fail to find a single ignorant boy. The implications are disturbing.”

She repressed her adrenal response.

“It’s obvious enough that he has been abducted by another faction...”

She didn’t sigh in relief.

“...which means that there has been a profound failure in my operational intelligence. I have been certain of my penetration into all the rival factions for decades. For someone to steal the asset from underneath my nose...” he tailed off.

“Perhaps it was an act of opportunity?” she suggested, careful to keep her head down. “I was able to follow his trail to the rapids.”

“Yes, yes.” He waved an impatient hand. “I am well aware. However, there has been no subsequent activity. No chatter.” He clasped his hands and remained silent for a full minute.

Nykka knew not to interrupt his thoughts. She had been caught up in the Doctor’s wake for almost three years, his most faithful retainer and shadow. She still didn't understand why he had taken her as his disciple. Until recently she hadn’t thought to question his decision.

Finally he spoke again. “Nykka, you have many strengths, but anonymity is not one of them. I’m afraid your failure is simply too obvious. You and I both understand that this is beyond your control, but I must maintain appearances. You are suspended from all Outside duties until further notice. Go Inside and report to Lieutenant Gon. I’m sure she will find a suitably demeaning duty for you to perform for the time being.”

She left in silence. The Doctor didn’t care for extraneous communications.

Chapter 6: Rare

“The good news,” Anda was saying, “is that this craft can really move on the flats.”

Lilijoy assumed he was saying this due to their slow progress through the bumpy terrain of the Andean foothills. Their journey would largely retrace the route they had taken on the way down from Manaus, though Anda had arranged a few stops for them to top up on hydrogen fuel along the way. According to him, the trip could take as little as three days, barring unforeseen circumstances.

Like that will ever happen.

Luckily for them, the majority of their journey would cross the interior of the continent, which was a no-man’s-land because nobody wanted the great dead swamp. The eastern side of the continent had been savaged by war, first when Brazil collapsed as a sovereign state in the mid twenty-first, and then as the powers of the world at the time fought over it like dogs fighting over a chew toy. The territory of former Brazil was a valuable prize as equatorial real estate, initially due to more the stable clime, and then even more as the ice began to encroach and displace most of the established world powers from their own lands. The end result was many small coastal territories controlled by over a dozen different clans from all over the globe.

Aside from Sinaloa, who controlled much of the west coast from Mexico to Ecuador, the most prominent were clans that originated in North America, though the Chinese and Europeans had a large presence too. The two big ones were Walden Clan, which controlled much of the Caribbean and the former state of Venezuela, and Lone Star Clan.

Lone Star evolved from the short-lived Texas Army, an alliance of former U.S. military, mercenaries and militias. They held Suriname, Guyana and most of Northern Brazil. Walden and Lone Star had an uneasy alliance, in part due to their shared roots in the American south, though their internal cultures were quite different.

Beneath them, both on the map and by numbers, were the Hongse, Tesla, Brasa, Sun and Union Clans, along with a host of others. Even though Lilijoy had studied the Renaissance tract Comments on the Clans quite thoroughly, she didn’t think anyone, except maybe Guardian, could possibly track the ever-shifting landscape of alliances, mergers, breakaways and incorporations that made up the Corp of Clans.

It didn’t help that the clans were far more concerned with identity than territory, at least on the Outside. She thought it might be because the vast majority of them were from nations and parts of the globe that no longer existed, or at least were no longer habitable.

There were exceptions, like the Brasa clan, whose stated, but not particularly acted upon, goal was to reclaim the territory of the former nation of Brazil, but most of the clans present in South America were more like Hongse, arguably the most powerful clan worldwide. Hongse had originally called themselves Xinhua, from their origins in the Chinese Communist Party, but for whatever reason they had shed that connection. They controlled huge swaths of the warmer territories to the south of their now uninhabitable homeland, such as the former nations of Thailand, Burma and Vietnam, and also held significant territories in Africa and South America.

Lilijoy thought the whole situation was tragic and a little ridiculous; humanity had been revealed as the poo-flinging primates they really were. The clans made up about one percent of the total population worldwide, and they directly employed or controlled another ten to fifteen percent, who were known as the clan associates. Magpie called them assies.

Everyone else, all sixty million or so, were little more than peasants, though the clans had a variety of denigrating names for the various types of uneducated and under-privileged peoples of the world. It was a society stripped of all the high-minded notions of equality and human dignity that had accrued over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. All that mattered now was how strong you were and how strong your tribe was.

“Anda,” Lilijoy asked, “Do you think Guardian wants the Outside to be miserable so that more people go Inside?”

Anda raised an eyebrow. “That’s a heavy thought. Sounds like you’ve been talking to Marcus.”

“Well, yes,” she replied. “But he has some really good points. I’m pretty sure that Guardian, or some part of it anyway, wants humans on the Inside, almost like we provide some kind of resource just by being there.”

Another eyebrow joined the first. “Are you saying that you think the entire Inside is a Dungeon?”

The emphasis on the word ‘dungeon’ threw Lilijoy for a moment, until her internet memory came through for her.

“You know? I think that’s almost exactly what I’m saying. Like that whole genre from the twenty-first where intelligent dungeons attract adventurers so they can feed off their energy. Except I don’t think it matters whether we die or not.” She wrinkled her nose before continuing. “But look at all the parallels. It's a place we can go, full of attractive resources and adventure, where we can improve ourselves and develop skills. I think that there’s another side to the equation, some kind of symbiosis. Why else would Guardian bother?”

Anda’s eyebrows settled into a mildly skeptical furrow. “You really do sound like Marcus. Except he’d be trying to convince me that Guardian wants to use our Outside bodies as batteries or something.”

She chuckled at the reference. “I don’t think Guardian would need our permission for that. Somehow, we need to be independent; free-willed or something.”

“Or, you know, Guardian just wants to keep us busy so we don’t destroy the planet. Again.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. This all feels like a conspiracy theory to me, where the act of looking for evidence makes everything look like evidence. Don’t we have enough on our plates without adding in problems that are way over our paygrade?”

“Speaking of our plates, how are you doing with the Tao System?”

He shook his head. “It’s amazing and infuriating. And frankly scary. My old system was like a machine. You told it what to do, you know, like running programs. Input and output. Enhance this, lower that. And Tao system can do all that too, but...” he tailed off.

“It’s like there’s no boundary between the program and the programmer,” she finished for him.

“Yes! I feel it changing my brain every time I use it. I can’t get over how much faster I can think and react. My old system used several different techniques to increase my reaction time, but it didn’t change the conductivity of my myelin pathways the way this system does. It’s not even halfway done, and I can already feel the difference. The sensory integration is remarkable too. And the control is so fine grained – I can feel it anticipating and modulating my reactions to pain and stress, without removing any clarity.”

“It sounds like you like it.”

“Oh gods yes. The scary part is thinking about what I will be able to do when Stage One is complete. It’s changed everything about how I see myself and my future, and I can’t quite wrap my head around that. I’ve been thinking that I’m just too old to change this much.”

“But Anda, you’re not old!”

“I’m old enough to have become… solid? I know who I am, or I thought I did. Now, who knows? I think that if I didn’t have the system, I wouldn’t be able to handle the changes the system is causing.”

“Paradox!” Lilijoy announced with glee.

“You know I love them. I’m just not sure I was planning on being one.”

“It only gets weirder. Just wait until you really begin Stage Two.”

She shuddered, a little unsure if she should warn Anda about the mind-rending soul blender. Would foreknowledge make it worse, or somehow interfere with its intended outcome?

She decided to err on the side of caution. “Anyway, you can definitely trust your guide, Deva. The only problem is that there’s a ton of missing documentation and resources that we were supposed to have. I’ve been filling in the gaps, so hopefully you won’t have such a bumpy ride. There’s even a different cultivation method waiting for you when you do reach Stage Two, that I got from the Head of the Academy.”

Anda looked a little startled. “That seems… odd? Why would an Insider have a cultivation method that just so happens to fit the Tao System?” He shook his head. “Okay. Back up for a second...” He tried to start speaking again several times, and then gave up. “I’ve got nothing. How did it happen?”

“I merged with a tree, who was actually the Head, who turned out to be an ocean, who merged all the parts of my mind, but also gave me the cultivation method that let me save you.”

Lilijoy enjoyed watching Anda’s face as she went from absurdity to absurdity. She could have explained it more clearly, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.

Finally, she relented. “The Head is at least a Tier Five subset, I’m pretty sure. Her mind, her intellect was so much greater than mine that she may have just designed it on the fly. I’d hate to try and predict what someone like that could or couldn’t do.” She couldn’t resist throwing in one more thing. “Plus, she’s a tree, and the method’s called Immortal Crystal Oak, so maybe she’s just really great at tree stuff.”

Anda was still shaking his head. “I’m assuming you used the ability that got you the Reality Bender title when you, uh, merged?”

“Two Minds One Self. Yes. I’ve been able to learn a lot with it. I just used it to join with my friend Jess, and I’m almost positive that the subsets use our emotions somehow.” She held up one hand. “I know that sounds even crazier than using us as batteries, but right now it’s all I’ve got.”

Anda seemed to be having some kind of internal debate. Finally he said, “You know, I just spent well over a week at a Renaissance outpost being grilled and put through stress tests to regain their confidence. Nothing too severe,” he hurried to say when he saw her concerned expression. “It was bad enough just having my mental integrity under the microscope. If you hadn’t given me the system when you did, I couldn’t have passed their tests in a thousand years."

He clasped his hands to her in thanks and continued. "They, or I guess I can say ‘we’ again now, have a far greater understanding of human cognition than past intelligence agencies and other covert groups. The basic concept of our beliefs is that the tragedies of human history stem from built-in cognitive errors in human thought. In order to form a more perfect union, as it were, it is those biases at the root of large-scale misbehavior that must be addressed.”

This wasn’t unfamiliar ground to Lilijoy. Between her system, Professor Anaskafius’ lessons, and her internet memory she had an excellent grasp on the topic. “Like confirmation bias and tribalism, or how the tragedy of the commons results from a blend of the fundamental attribution error and subject validation.”

Anda sighed. “A month ago you didn’t use personal pronouns, and now...it’s just amazing. Do you remember what it was like before you got the system?” After a moment he added, “Whatever you do, don’t read Flowers for Algernon.”

She had, in fact, already made her way through the story. It was the flowers in the title that got her attention. She thought it was incredibly sad, though it really bothered her that Charlie Gordon didn’t prepare better contingency plans when he was hyper-intelligent. It didn’t seem worth the time to explain that to Anda though.

“I remember my pre-system time surprisingly well, though my thoughts were quite foggy. I think it’s mostly that there wasn’t much to remember. Anyway, you were telling me about Renaissance?”

“Yes, sorry to digress. I was trying to explain that Renaissance and I have regained our mutual trust, to an extent, so there are many things that I shouldn’t tell you, in theory. Of course, I trust you with my life and then some, so I’m not going to keep any secrets. I’m just asking that you keep it between us.”

“Of course I will, Anda. There aren’t many people I could tell anyway. Speaking of people I might tell things, I need your advice on someone who has fallen out of that category.”

She had told Anda quite a bit about her Inside activities, so he already knew the basics of her group of friends and mentors.

“Who?”

She ran through her thoughts about Magpie, and her plans to confront her at the last minute.

“So that’s why you sent that enigmatic message asking when I told Renaissance about you. Had to eliminate me as a suspect eh?”

“More like confirm the chain of events. It still seems a bit surreal to me.”

He nodded. “To me as well. I can’t fault your reasoning though. If the Corp had enough sway at the academy to pull something like assigning you a roommate, there are a thousand other things they would do instead. Even though I didn’t go there, I know that the neutrality of the Academy is an absolute fact, at least for the time being.”

“I hope it stays that way! I suppose it could just be one Insider who was somehow threatened or corrupted by Outsiders, but the timing still doesn’t work out.”

“I agree,” he replied. “It almost certainly came from Inside. I don’t suppose you got a chance to ask your trainer who she asked for help on your behalf?”

“I didn’t see her before we left. I doubt I would have learned anything anyway. She’s stubborn like that.”

“So I gather. So if I’ve got this right, your theory is that there is an Insider pulling strings on the Outside and that he or she was able to bring Magpie in almost as soon as Rosemallow asked for help.”

He tapped his cheek. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like Magpie has only helped you, despite her dishonesty and obscure motivation. It strikes me as the kind of situation that arises with Renaissance at times. We often support like-minded individuals secretly, ideally without them ever realizing. I’m reasonably certain that we’re not behind this particular circumstance, but the parallels are striking.”

“So you think I should trust her?” She couldn’t keep a note of incredulity from her voice.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Just realize that she might not know much more than you do about why she is helping. The hallmark of such operations is compartmentalization. That said, you need to be extremely cautious going forward.”

“So do you think I should confront her?”

“Absolutely. Her response will tell you a lot.” He looked at her with a serious expression. “But you must be resolved to cancel the operation if you aren’t convinced. Otherwise you will fall into your own sunk costs.”

“Don’t worry about that. I have plenty of tools to address the issue.”

She figured she would tell Anda about her ability to split her mind when he had passed that threshold on his own. It was simple for her to have Jiannu monitor her for issues of cognitive bias and intervene when appropriate. That was her preferred method these days, as it allowed her to stay connected to normal human thought patterns without suffering any of the consequences.

She remembered something she had been meaning to ask Anda for a while.

“Anda, can you suppress the Rules? Marcus nearly blew a gasket when he found out I could.”

“I’m sure I would have never thought to try. Too bad there aren't any posted in here, or I could let you know right now. I did notice that my connection to the Outside isn’t restricted when I’m Inside. It wouldn’t surprise me if we could message when we’re there. That would be a great advantage.”

Lilijoy could only agree.

They spent the next several hours talking about all manner of things, catching up on matters large and small. As she had suspected, Anda was close-lipped on his Trial, other than to say his continued presence Inside relied on his discretion. They talked about Mr. Sennit and his situation, her coming operation in Averdale, and the journey ahead of them. At some point, the subject of rare earth elements arose.

“I’m glad you mentioned that,” Anda said. “I’m just about tapped out of the things. I assume it’s a built in bottleneck to prevent runaway replication. The original users probably had a small source implanted in their bodies.”

“It’s the main reason I want to go back home before we go to Sinaloa territory. The Piles are full of them, and exactly the ones we need as well.”

She wanted to see what Anda would make of this information, so she didn’t elaborate on her suspicions.

“Huh.” He scratched his jaw. “That’s just too much, right? There you are, as far from what passes for civilization these days as you can get, and a factory-mine just happens to drive by, seeding the area with all the resources your system needs to grow.” He snapped his fingers. “No, it gets even more ridiculous! Your whole little tribe, or at least the weird ones, are probably running Tao system too. When do you think the factory mine actually passed by that place you lived?”

“We call it Night’s Safety.” She ran a quick model, based from her memories. “Must have been thirteen or fourteen years ago... Oh.”

“'Oh' is right. I hate to say it, but I think everything that has happened to you, right from the first moments of your existence, is directly connected to that factory-mine, good old Crapper #7494.