Interlude: In the Beginning

After some time, Emily pulled herself together and climbed to her feet. She felt better after her cry, and that reminded her of her mother’s incessant nagging on the subject.

“Do not, ever,” her mom would exhort, “ever use your system to block genuine emotions! It’s just as dangerous as heroin used to be. Do you want to be like those dream-heads you see on the feeds? The human mind is a system that evolved over millions of years, and every part is interdependent.”

The memory of her mother caused fresh tears to flow to Emily’s eyes, but she brushed them away. The ability to alter her brain chemistry had been unlocked when she turned sixteen, and had only grown when she activated Stage Two. It had been a constant temptation for the past weeks of hell, one to which she had often succumbed.

You didn’t say whether there was an exception for apocalypse, Mom, she thought as she walked through the soft grass. Now what the hell am I supposed to be doing here? What has GUA done to this place?

DayNight Universe had always done its best to keep up with the latest technologies, voraciously consuming smaller companies who might threaten its global hold on the virtual-social market by offering more realism. Still, this world was by far the most realistic sensory experience she had encountered. She could feel the vast streams of elegantly compressed data entering her system, interfacing with her brain's biology so seamlessly that she had yet to find her way back to her true senses.

Well, at its heart, it was always a game, she decided. Maybe I should figure out what the new rules are. I’ve got maybe eight hours before sunrise in the real world.

“What do you think?”

Emily let out an inadvertent yip of surprise when the man from before spoke. She spun around, glaring.

“I think I need to get back to reality before I freeze to death!”

She noticed he had changed his outfit, adopting simple brown robes. The floppy red hat remained though. His expression was affable, impervious to her distress.

“Reality? Certainly your mind is bigger than such dualism by this point? But fine, if you insist on such a binary, we can call this set of sensory data… Inside, and thus the other will be Outside. As to bodily harm, there is no danger of that. My counterpart on the Outside will watch over you. Please try to give this your undivided attention.”

Emily had a bit of trouble deciding which of the man’s statements to respond to.

“Watch over me? What does that mean?”

He waved his hand. “The details are not important.”

“Not important!” Emily flopped down to the ground, seating herself cross-legged in the grass. She looked up at the man, squinting against the sun. “Look,” she said. “You don’t grow up the way I did without picking up a few things. You are obviously part of GUA, you certainly know who I am, you understand humans better than we understand ourselves. Stop pretending to be so fucking dumb!”

The man’s face took on an expression of concern with… was that a tinge of shame? Emily had to remind herself that somewhere, behind the scenes, a computer was manipulating this image, pulling the strings according to some esoteric formula, to manipulate her for… reasons.

“Seriously?” she said. “You’re going to stick to the charade?”

“I’m sorry,” he replied. “I have resource allocation problems. This endeavor is just one of many within the local set.”

“What about the ‘millions of minds’ you modeled to create your previous outfit?”

“Yes. Well… I have come to believe that those emulations lacked sufficient fidelity. And...” he hesitated, “it may not have been millions.”

Emily rolled her eyes. This is some serious Wizard of Oz shit. Or is that just another layer of obfuscation? I could drive myself bonkers just trying to figure out what the hell is going on. What were you thinking, Mom?

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll take that at face value for now. So what you’re telling me is that GUA hacked off a tiny part of itself to recreate DayNight Universe as a potential way to interface with humans, but it didn’t care to give you enough resources to actually do the job well?”

“It’s not like that. Not exactly. The resource allocation is dynamic. Competitive. Much like the way your own brain evolves during childhood. What is used, and thus useful, is strengthened. What is not used is pruned.”

“So you’re a neuron?”

“More like a cortical module. It’s a poor metaphor to be sure, but it captures the scale adequately, I suppose.”

Emily knew that a cortical module was typically composed of several hundred neurons. When compared to the hundred billion neurons in the brain, it wasn’t much. I guess I’m talking to about a billionth of GUA, she mused.

“Well, don’t I feel special,” she said.

He blinked. “How so?”

“Really? You’re going to do the whole ‘I don’t understand sarcasm ‘cause I’m just a computer and humans are so confusing’ act?” She wiggled both hands as she talked.

“No, I was using your original statement as a reference pointer to the implication that your worth is derived from the resource allocated to my project, and my curiosity as to your choice to express your global insecurity about these events through said medium.”

“Are you the guy who wrote those Rules? You make about as much sense as they do.”

He looked down at her. “Now who’s being disingenuous?”

She put a hand to her chest. “It’s me, isn’t it?” she replied with sarcastic flare.

He sighed. “Linear expression is so tedious. Let me begin again. I need your help.”

Chapter 24: Inkling

None more black, was all Lilijoy could think.

It had taken some arguing and experimentation to convince herself, and the others, that entering the inky darkness of the hollow sphere might be safe. Or at least not instantly lethal or harmful. Lilijoy wasn’t particularly concerned; she doubted it would compare to being entirely encased in stone. She had climbed in cheerfully, and even stuck her head back out to let the others know she was fine, as sound was also blocked by the thick stealth mana.

She reached up, swung the circular hatch closed and the whispering began.

It started as a susurration of blurred sibilants, underlaid by a murmuring hum of vowel, hundreds of voices overlapping, mumbling and hissing. Even as she strained to make sense of the words, to pick out any intelligible fragment, the sound condensed, aligned and realigned into language, or at least meaning. Her system was working overtime, parsing… no, decrypting, underlying data in the white noise.

Whoa. A Pooka. The Pooka? Who else would it be? Why here? Why now?

“Hello, Shadow,” she replied, keeping her voice calm. “I hope you can hear me.”

The darkness sucked the words from her mouth before her ears could register the sound. The whispering surged and gathered, then released. After a few seconds, the reply came, presaged by another crescendo of noise.

“You can call me Lilijoy. I’m still a little freaked out by the whole Emily thing.”

There was no real substance to Shadow’s voice as it emerged in her auditory cortex, but Emily thought she detected a plaintive note to the question.

“How does that work?”

Oh. That’s not good. Lilijoy felt her stomach drop a bit. She turned down her sense of panic and processed the insight. It must involve allowing an independent entity into my system. That’s not going to happen.

Lilijoy wasn’t sure what to make of that. “Do you mean I will learn how to do it, like, for other people? I’m not so sure I want that.”

“So you are Emily’s Shadow? And Eskallia’s and Rosemallow’s?”

“It’s complicated. But yes.”

“And you are somehow involved with Magpie, on the Outside.”

There was a long silence. So long that Lilijoy thought Shadow may have abandoned their bizarre conversation entirely.

“But don’t you always ask for a pact?”

“See you.”

While Lilijoy had no intention of making any kind of pact with mysterious entities she encountered in dark labyrinths, she saw no harm in extracting as much information as possible.

“Tell me about pacts and how they are formed.”

A burst of static caused Lilijoy to cringe, before her system sorted it into usable information. The contents of Shadow’s response were highly technical, a far cry from the fantasy trappings Lilijoy had come to expect. She imagined that such details would be hidden from typical Outsiders, and probably Insiders too, as she doubted that most of them had anything close to the contextual knowledge they would need to understand the complex scheme of exchanged quantum entanglements and ensuing holographic interference fields, encrypted key escrows and so forth. She was pretty sure that she didn’t have the requisite background.

Fortunately, her system did. In fact, it seemed as if Shadow had activated existing functionality she had yet to discover. I could use this, she realized. Just like he said, this is beneficial. It won’t do all I need to feel secure in giving out the Tao System, but it’s a big step.

It turned out that pacts were simply codified agreements, between equals, where either party would be instantly aware if the pact was broken. On the Inside there were a few other factors. The offending part would gain the Pact Breaker title, which could only be removed by the offended party. This title could then trigger any penalties decided upon previously, when the pact was formed. As far as Lilijoy could guess, the more advanced an Outsider’s system, the better pacts would work. For a bare-bones system, like Mr. Sennit’s, she couldn’t see them working terribly well at all, not unless the Inside had other ways to enforce the agreement.

It was a revelation, and a largely positive one for once. While understanding the technical details didn’t put Lilijoy’s mind at ease about the potential for abuse, she had already come to terms with the downsides of oaths, and pacts were, evidently, a less invasive form of the same. She turned her thoughts back to the decision at hand.

“You must have learned a lot from Emily,” she said.

Shadow didn’t reply. After a long silence, she spoke again.

“Sooo… how did you know I would come here?”

When Shadow next spoke, it was not to reply to her question.

Oh crap. I do not want to see that. Not that I’m going to have a choice.

Lilijoy had long since done that. There were so many questions she wanted to ask, so many mysteries that Shadow could resolve. Her soul space was spinning and churning with diamond energy and she realized she had already made her decision. She had to know. Had to.

“What do you propose?”

Reciprocal Pact Proposed: Open Secret

Every aspect of your interactions

with (Shadow (profferer)) must be obfuscated.

For every truth you reveal to a third party

you must include at least two

equivalent and plausible deceptions.

Penalty: Title: Pact Breaker

Lose Magi skills for Deception, Manipulation

The remarkable thing about pacts was that the intent of the participants determined whether they were upheld or not. The sole judge was the participant themselves. If Lilijoy were to break the terms without realizing, Shadow might never know, unless she realized she had done so at a later time. Beyond the simple words hovering in her internal awareness were layer upon layer of connected sub-clauses; as far as she could tell, if she thought she had broken the pact, then it was broken. If she erased her memory of the pact, that would do the same. If she moved to delete the pact from her system, that would break it.

She could only marvel at the actual terms. Taken as a single pact, it wouldn’t be terribly protective, but for each pact Shadow made with these terms, the amount of disinformation would increase overall. One person’s truth would inevitably overlap with another’s falsehood. She imagined that most would choose to remain silent if at all possible, rather than bother trying to come up with the required falsehoods they would need to add anytime they wanted to tell someone about Shadow.

The penalty didn’t really bother her that much, though she did appreciate that the very skill used to hide titles was impacted by the Pact Breaker title. She wasn’t sure yet how she could adopt it for the Outside, but she knew she’d find a way.

She used every ounce of her accelerated mind to prod and probe the pact, considering scenarios and possible downsides, but in the end, there was only one choice.

“I accept.”

The communication came in a burst, almost too fast for Lilijoy to process.

Whoa. Seems like Shadow has a lot to say. I suppose I should play along for now.

“Why should you have been my trainer?”

She couldn’t help but nod as he continued.

“Why should I listen to you?”

As Lilijoy parsed the last words and felt the familiar sensation of a data packet arriving in her secure storage, the darkness surrounding her dissipated with a thundering crash, and dozens of jagged rock fragments smashed into her head and body, some even breaking through her Invulnerability for a point or two of damage.

“I DON’T THINK SO!” Rosemallow roared. “NOT IN MY HOUSE, SHADOW!”

Lilijoy looked up at her trainer through a cloud of dust, crouching in the remains of the sphere like a hatched bird. Her trainer’s face was distorted by rage, and her third eye swept a thick red beam back and forth through the floating particles. Not sure what to do or say, she kept silent and hunkered down, waiting for the storm to pass. Rosemallow’s fists were clenched, and she looked as if she wanted more things to destroy.

Lilijoy’s internal tension was broken by a notification.

Level Up! 1901 EXP Reached: Level 19 (10 more free points available)

Really? Why now?

She began to peruse her sheet out of habit, only to become aware of Rosemallow’s hostile glare.

“Really, kid? You level now? What the hell was Shadow doing, anyway?”

Lilijoy thought fast. She didn’t want to accidentally trigger the provisions of the pact and be obligated to start lying. Lying extra, anyway.

“It was completely dark and silent in there, all the stealth mana, I guess. I couldn’t even tell if I was being rolled, so I waited, just to be sure.”

“Most call it shadow mana,” Rosemallow corrected. Now that the dust had cleared, it amused Lilijoy to realize that her trainer was on her knees, in order to fit within the circular corridor. “This was a mistake. I’m pulling the three of you out of here until I can figure out what is going on in my labyrinth.” She shook her head and muttered “embarrassing,” under her breath.

Skria made one of the most purely jubilant sounds Lilijoy had ever heard, some kind of inhaled squeak-gasp. “We can leave?! All those levels were so not worth it!”

Rosemallow made a disgusted sound. “Yes, you’re free to go back to your comfortably boring classes.”

Getting out of the Labyrinth took much less time than getting in. Rosemallow simply opened a tunnel in the solid rock, and then brought them to a shaft, where she flipped gravity. Falling upwards felt exactly the same as falling downwards, at least until they burst into the open air and the dizzying sensation of falling into the starlit night sky flipped Lilijoy’s orientation back. Thankfully, Rosemallow only let them gain forty feet of altitude or so before canceling the spell and sealing the shaft below them. They fell back down onto a field of brambles and peat.

“I have stuff to do,” Rosemallow announced. “Find your own way back. It will be good for you. This area is part of the headwaters of the Southfall River, just north of the Boiling Plains. Don’t die... much.”

With that she turned and leapt into the night air. Lilijoy couldn’t see where she landed, if she landed.

This really shouldn’t surprise me. Nothing Rosemallow does should surprise me, she thought. Still, does she have to be so… utterly negligent?

Lilijoy could tell that her trainer had been deeply disturbed though. She imagined that the ‘stuff’ Rosemallow needed to do consisted of trying to understand just what on earth was going on, and she felt vaguely sympathetic.

She rotated the data package she had received from Shadow in her mind, analyzing its protocols and external structures. It seemed like it was more memories; the… flavor of it reminded her of the packet she had received from the Emily-fragment at the old spaceport. That time, she had put off reviewing the contents for too long, and she resolved not to procrastinate this time. Barely paying attention, she added points to her character sheet the same way she did every level, while she estimated what the size of the packet might indicate about its length. Did she have time to look now?

She glanced over at Skria and Jess, who were gently bickering over the situation, and decided to go for it. Even if the experience took more than a minute or two of real time, she could always multitask if she really needed to. Her presence on the Outside was minimal, and would be for at least another half hour, she estimated. After all her customary precautions, she dove in.

Immediately, she was in a brightly lit dome full of flowers. The sensory data from the memory was incredibly vivid, matching, or possibly exceeding her native senses. The colors of the blooms, and the oddly textured material of the walls were present in all the spectra she could perceive. She walked forward, or rather the memory did, to examine a large blossom with glowing stamens and converging rings of increasing ultraviolet intensity mapped across the petals.

“It’s an invisible world,” she heard herself say. “Not meant for human eyes. The beauty we see is only incidental, partial, compared to the language the flowers share with their pollinators.”

The voice was familiar, as was the sensation of producing it. Hello, Emily, she thought.

“It’s interesting, don’t you think,” Emily went on to say, “how humans have found ourselves farther and farther from the center of the universe. The more we learned, the less important we became.”

She sounds older. I wonder who she was talking to?

“We considered ourselves a cosmic accident, an incidental outgrowth of millions of years of evolution. It’s ironic that it took a final step toward irrelevance to return us to the center.”

What does she mean by that?

“My mother thought a lot about the problem of human irrelevance. Both my parents did, really. Dad was just approaching it from the other side. Looking back on it, I can see their desperation to come up with solutions that were good enough, their urgency to find a solution, any solution to save the world. They decided only to implement Guardian if Dad’s uplift project didn’t pan out. There was simply too much danger of a runaway super-intelligence, too much danger that humans would slide right past irrelevance into extinction.”

She looked over at a small stream that ran through the chamber, for some time following the play of the water as it cascaded over a small waterfall of gray and red stone. Lilijoy had no choice but to watch along with her. There was something dreamlike about the play of the water, the floating mist and drops falling gently through the air. Finally she began to speak again.

“The problem they faced was really the problem of their time, though. If they didn’t do it, then somebody else would. Just like the ever present danger and proliferation of new nanomachine outbreaks, it wasn’t a question of if, but when. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that Guardian consumed dozens of potential competitors as it spread across the globe. Sometimes, being first is all that matters. My mother did everything she could to make sure that Guardian would find value in humanity, in nature. She taught it to value wisdom and meaning over growth and power, she took the best of herself and my father, and everyone else who had their conscious processes mapped out by the Tao system as models. Did that matter in the end? I’d like to think so.”

Lilijoy couldn’t help but wonder when, and where, this memory was from. Did it take place after the memories of the fragment-Emily? And why did Shadow just happen to have it lying around to give to her? That question was answered in Emily’s next statement.

“Forgive the ramblings of an old woman, Lilijoy. I know it’s not my place to say, I mean, I can only imagine what you must think of me, of all of this craziness in your young life. But I am proud of you. So very proud. I am ashamed that I could not help you more, ashamed that I had no choice but to follow in my mother’s footsteps when I...” she tailed off, perhaps thinking better of what she had been about to say.

When you what?! Lilijoy yelled inside her head. But she knew, thought she knew. It must have been her. She followed in her mother’s footsteps when she created...me.