Trinity Spiral – Primal – AAA

The strong living things had come back together after long journeys each having found a tool to break the veil, and each finding a piece of the weapon which might slay the sky. When they had split apart there had been many of the strong living things which had been born of sky and dropped in the moment of their birth to the soil. Each had gone forth, in their own direction, seeking the weapons which might slay the sky, and the tools which might sever the veil, but now there was three only and their thinking was changed the paths they had trod to gain the tools being long ones filled with many dangers and travails. But at last they were reunited even without the rest of the strong living things. The strong living thing which had the power of the making of makers had in their quest acquired a weapon which could kill the sky by striking its many surfaces all at once in an instant. The strong living thing which journeyed always after knowledge and always alone, had returned with a blade which might slay anything, a stone which might command its commander, eyes which might contain in them multitudes, knowledge of times before and times after, and a key, broken into three which might only be reforged by the three strong living things which had once been weak. The strong living thing which sought always to change the hearts of others had returned with a weapon which could think, a storm who’s electrical power could cover the sky, and who’s thinking was like the lightning, quicker than any thing of the world. They saw one another, and though long parted remembered. In meeting, the strong living thing which brought knowledge took from its pack the key which was in three parts and gave each of the strong living things one part, so that, when the time came, they might bring them together. Then, with no sound, they all looked up, knowing that first they much reach the sky. The changer of minds used its power to call forth the storm, which had great strength and much power, and it lifted all three of the strong living things who would slay the sky and break the veil for the soil up into the air towards the sky. When the sky saw the storm, and the three strong living things coming, it sent its winds to strike down upon the coming storm and the strong living things which rode it. When the winds came to strike at the strong living things, the maker of makers used their weapon to strike at each wind in its own way, knocking each from the sky, where they fell, not the soil, which surely would have killed them, but to the place between sky and soil where the storm kept them imprisoned. Seeing its army routed sky fell back towards the veil hoping to defend its work at least even if it might itself be slain. The storm came after the sky, and the three strong living things ascended from storm into the veil. The sky had their own secret way through the veil and had entered thus, passing through to heaven. The three strong living things each had passed the veil before however, in their quests to find the weapons and the tools, and each followed the secret passage which they had learned in their journey. When they reached the other side sky rose up to stop them, but the little thing which sought knowledge held up the black knife which they had brought, and sky knew that it could kill them. It drew back from the black knife, retreating from three strong living things who stood now before the chain which held the veil up in the sky, and the lock which held up the chain. Each took in hand the piece of a key which they had been destined to hold and together they built the key which might open the lock which held up the chain, which held up the veil which separated the soil from the heaven. Before they used the key however, one of the three, the one who sought always to sway hearts, held up its hand and used then the power of speech which they had learned from the valley of yellow teeth all those many eternities ago, before the quest which had split them apart.

“I feel like we shouldn’t open this lock. I’ve been listening to these stories, and the soil definitely feels like the bad guy here.” The strong living thing which was a maker of maker used also their power of speech.

“I’m with you. I’ve definitely gotten some major, domestic abuser vibes from all the bits that talk about that guy. Not to mention how he hates stars and the sky and like everything else.” The third of the strong living things, the seeker of knowledge also used the secret of speech.

“I was pretty suspicious of these keys already, since they were given to me out of nowhere. If you two believe the soil to have ill intentions towards heaven then I am happy to leave the lock locked.” The three strong living things nod in accord, the decision made. Each grips the key and pulls it apart, so that once again the key which had been three was three again. Then each turn up to the sky which sits between them and heaven. The sky, seeing that the strong living things had not opened the veil, despite bringing the key which might have sundered the chains, moves aside, granting the three living things a glimpse of heaven. The strong living things gaze upon heaven and behold their majesty, then turn back to the veil, heading back down. As they descend once again through the hidden paths which they had uncovered in the veil, they could be heard again, using the secret of speech to share their beliefs.

“Heaven is pretty cool looking, I gotta say.”

“Yeah, I’ll remember that for the rest of my life.”

“It all felt like a bit of an anticlimax though. We stormed the veil of heaven, but we didn’t even do anything once we were there.”

“True. I think we should go and do some more adventures down upon the soil.”

“I only have the power to be here for a little while, as there is an entire cities worth of electricity powering my way in here.”

“And I have family waiting for my return.”

“But that’s fine. We can just adventure for one eternity and then get back to those things.”

“Oh, yeah, time is all wonky here. I guess it makes sense to get a lot of good experiences from all this.”

“I had not considered that my time here might not be time at all back home. I didn’t need the time slowing spell.”

“Wait, you can cast spells?”

“You can’t? How the hell did you get here without spells?”

“It would seem we have much to discuss during our eternity together. Perhaps we can swap tales as we ride the storm back down to the soil.”

“Sounds good to me. My life has been crazy and from the sounds of it your guys’ must be pretty cool too.”

“Not trying to brag, but yeah.”

“I’m the lone explorer of a race forged from the fusion of space scavengers and the spark of a dying child of a sun.”

“That’s pretty rad. I killed capitalism, which probably doesn’t mean too much to you, but was pretty important.”

“Man, you guys are cool. I jumped out of a helicopter to break into a Walmart in order to power the mechanism which sent me to this world.”

And so the three strong living things, empowered by their journey through divergent worlds did once again come together, sharing tales and setting forth on adventure. Each would in time return to the worlds from whence they came, and share their stories, but first they had an eternity of adventure to get through.

Anne

“I got literally an infinite number of stories to tell you guys. Also, its safe and we can all go explore it together if you want.”

Anastasia

Upon returning to her realm, she was trapped for two weeks by the time spell that had just finished casting. Once free from that, she shared the tales of her exploits and all that had been learned in the True Realm.

Alice

“Hey babe. It definitely worked. I think we might be able to optimize it a bit though, because I had an infinite amount of time to play around with in a single moment. Also, get over here, I haven’t kissed you in forever.”

Trinity Spiral – San Francisco 25 BHC – Alice

“What did you say?” shouted Alice, the helicopter blades making it nearly impossible to talk at a reasonable volume. The black face masks weren’t helping either.

“I said,” shouted Aaron back, “that this is definitely the coolest way we have broken into a Walmart.” Alice smiled at him, but then realized he couldn’t see it because of the damn face mask.

“It’s a lot more direct than I am used to,” shouted Alice, “I kinda liked the sneakier ways. Felt more personal.”

“Yeah, but like, we didn’t get to jump out of a helicopter all those other ways.”

“You bring up a fair point. However, you don’t get to jump out of a helicopter either way.”

“What? I’m definitely breaking into the Walmart with you.”

“Of course you are, but you promised me that I could push you out of the helicopter, and I ain’t giving up that opportunity.”

“Fair enough.” And she pushed him. A moment later, after taking a second to savor the scream, Alice jumped out after him.

The pair managed to link up as they fell, and then activate their parachutes at the right time. They took great pleasure in pointing out all the security that they were bypassing as they slowly fell from the heavens towards the roof of the largest Walmart in California. They had to do a bit of active movement here and there, as somehow, someone had actually at least vaguely considered people parachuting in from the sky as a possibility, and so there was one lone soul up on top of the Walmart, with a massive spotlight, pointed up into the sky. But the guard in question had spent months of his life pointing that spotlight at the sky, never having seen anything with it, and as such, he had fallen into patterns, and with a recording of those patterns, Absalom was able to direct them in their parachute angles, such that they would skirt around the spotlight.

The last trick was to avoid making too much sound as they landed. In preparation, they had both taken several classes on rolling landings, and so just before they reached the ground, they loosed themselves from the parachutes, and rolled. Alice heard Aaron’s fall, but it was at least a quiet thud, and she was certain that the man with the spotlight hadn’t heard it, as he was on the other side of the roof. Her landing of course, had been perfect.

Once they had retrieved the fallen parachutes and hidden them in a non obvious location, they made their way to the hatch which they knew was the best way into the building in order to get to their objective. One disgruntled former Walmart employee had provided them with the key, and so they were able to slip in just fine. Once inside, it was up to their own stealth, and Absalom’s hacking to make sure they were not detected moving from the upper chamber to the power controller room. Absalom was able to hack the camera’s almost as soon as they got on, making use of the free wifi to infiltrate the system, and so they were able to spot the movements of others, and dodge the rotations of the cameras themselves.

All in all the journey from the roof to the power control room had taken about twenty minutes. They had done better in practice every now and again, but it was a good time. Assuming that their friends over at the H-corp server farm were on track, they had about ten minutes to gain full access to the power system.

The camera’s showed that there were two people inside. Alice took out a few different dried flowers from the pocket on her stealth pants, mixed them together in her fingers and chanted a quick series of arcane words. Absalom reported that the cameras now showed the two people within slumped over, sleeping. Witnesses out of the way, Alice and Aaron opened the door, slowly pushed the two sleeping operators into the corner of the room, then got to work on the control system. They hadn’t know exactly what to expect, as this Walmart’s power system was different than all the others, and they paid their power guys enough that none had quit yet, but they had studied other systems and knew the basics. After a few minutes they had figured it out, and they got to work rerouting everything. Once it was all set up, Aaron sent a message to the team infiltrating the server farm, saying they were ready, then helped Alice get into the suit, before plugging her in. The word came back from team two, that they were ready, and so Aaron leaned over for a quick kiss, got shocked in the lips for his troubles, and then after a nod from Alice, activated the system.

In that moment, there was perhaps more computational power being used towards a singular purpose than had ever before been focused in the history of the human race. In the ten months since Alice and Aaron had reunited, the basic components of the spell which would allow a human to visit the story world had been figured out. Each of the pieces worked separately, on limited samples, and all of the math was such that scaling up shouldn’t add any new complications. The problem however, had been power, both in the electrical, and computational senses. When they first had come up with the solution, someone had calculated that it would require a Kardashev Two civilization to pull off. A few months of optimization later and they had gotten it down to Kardashev One. A few more months and the recruitment of some of the best software engineers in the world, had gotten it down to only one server farm running at near max capacity. The problem was, that it had to be one of the top five biggest server farms in the world, and it would need a heck of a lot of extra power for the time it was running.

Initially the feel had been that more optimization might be possible and waiting for that was the right move, but eventually the optimizers explained that they had basically hit a wall and that was just about as little power as they could get it down to. And amazingly, that wasn’t the end of the project. Instead, Aaron had found the one spot in America where there might be enough power, and enough computers close enough together to do this. Agnes put out a call to the story hunters of the world, explaining the purpose of this experiment, and the story hunters had stepped up. A helicopter pilot and helicopter, a team of people willing to break into the server farm, people who made stealth suits, people who could teach Alice and Aaron how to silently land a parachute on a Walmart roof in the dead of the night, disgruntled former Walmart employees with spare keys, trained electrical engineers with decades of experience managing power plants. And somehow, it had all worked out. The server farm had been captured, and software installed, the Walmart had been infiltrated and its power center redirected to the server farm. A bit of extra power had also gone to powering the hardware on Alice’s suit.

The power from the largest Walmart on the west coast jumped across the city to power the server farm, which was running hot, overclocked for the occasion by the fine folks of infiltration group two. The computations were run, and the data streamed to the suit, which cast microspells upon Alice, connecting her across time. The data from those points in time came back out of the suit, to be computed again by the server farm, before being routed back to suit for display to Alice.

For Alice, the experience started out rather painful, with the charge of the suit making her hair stand on end. Then, as spells being cast on her body went off one by one, she felt torn asunder, her body strewn through time. It was only once the data came through, and the servers began streaming the visual from the disparate places in time to her mind, and its many places in time, did she begin to experience something positive. She saw something, some piece of the story, and then Alice was gone, her body remaining behind, its senses being overloaded with the computational power of a small nation.

Trinity Spiral – Ainsley Village, 49th Cycle of the 12th Age – Anastasia

“Are you sure you have everything packed?”

“Yes, mother, I’m packed,” came Anastasia’s reply from the center of the stone structure which she had spent so much time in over the last few months. It had been an interesting experience having a quest at home. Ever since she had been strong enough to journey out on her own Anastasia had done so as frequently as possible, starting with exploration of nearby asteroids and the empty space between them, and eventually graduating up to the realms of the aspects which had been specialty for much of her adult life at this point. Her visits home had always been happy ones, as she had always brought back some treasure or new bit of knowledge, but they had also always been short. Usually there was a few days of celebration and sharing of what she had brought. Then a few more days of time spent with her family, followed by a week or two of preparation for her next journey. And then, she would be out again, once more alone with only herself and the vastness of all that was left to be explored.

This time however, the knowledge had been gained quickly, and the follow up work was the long part. The rituals she had learned to communicate with the truth breakers worked in town, so she hadn’t had a reason to wander off alone in order keep learning more about her quest. She had worked with several members of the community to see if she could uncover anything as far as the other names on the bundles she had been working on, and spent long evenings with the historian, going over ancient lists. And then, once her research had shown that she would need a secluded chamber in order to perform the ritual necessary to travel to the True Realm, instead of disappearing into the wilderness to find the right spot, the town had come together to build her the perfect location.

It had taken time to build, and so she had used that time to make sure she was as prepared as she possibly could be for the trip, the constant presence of her family and community making her more careful, more contemplative about the risk she was taking. Her mother had taken it upon herself to help with the process of packing, and had truly been a great help, even if she was more focused on comfort than Anastasia would be on her own. And in those times together, one amazing thing happened, or rather didn’t.

All her life Anastasia had assumed that her family didn’t actually want her going out and doing the things that she did, that they might really prefer her to be safe as opposed to uncovering lost knowledge. It was for this reason that she had often kept herself a bit cut off from her family, even when back, only giving them a short time with her in hopes that they would only have time for the positive feelings, and never get around to telling her how worried they were. But, as Anastasia and her mother worked together, planning and packing for the trip to a realm from which no one had ever returned, never did her mother even imply a thing about wanting her to stay. She was obviously concerned about Anastasia’s safety, but this concern manifested itself only in ways of making the trip safer, not in trying to make the trip not happen. Anastasia didn’t know whether her mother had always trusted her and supported her as much as she did now, or if it had happened at some point in her career as an explorer, but in the end it had happened, and Anastasia could not really express how much it meant.

For the first time in years, she truly felt like she could relax at home, like she could simply let her guard down and enjoy her time with her family without worrying that that peace might be used against her. And so, she and her mother packed together, and her father was a lead designer on the building the town was making her. Her brother even helped how he could, going from house to house and looking at old books that people had stowed away, which were not part of the town archive but which still might contain history or clues to the mystery of the names or the packages. Nothing ever came of this, but she and her brother learned a lot about the town’s history which they hadn’t before, and as with her mother, she and her brother grew closer. Unlike with her mother however, this was not a return to something that once was, but rather the start of a real relationship, as he had been but a tiny child when she first began leaving on her journeys, and she had never really known him well.\

The experience was special, and for the first time, when it came time for her to leave again, this time perhaps on the journey least likely for her to return from, she felt sadness in the leaving. Always before the excitement of the coming journey had overwhelmed completely the feelings of loss from going away, but this time they were much more comparable. This was not to say that Anastasia was any less determined to see what lay on the other side of the True Realm, but rather cemented what it was that Anastasia was truly building onto by her journeys. She had always cared greatly for the village, and the desire to bring back new things for it had been a great driver of her ambitions, but until this trip, she had never truly understood how much the village loved her back, that they didn’t simply celebrate with her for a few days then return to their lives. She was a part of the village culture. People cared about her and thought about her, and she was carrying with her many of their dreams and ambitions.

But now at last it was time to go, and she was packed. Her coat’s contents had been carefully selected, her pack filled as much as it could be while still letting her move freely about. Her mother stood at the doorway of the stone building which would soon be closed. They looked at one another, and then both smiled, and gave each other one last nod. Her mother closed the door. The room darkened. Anastasia turned around one last time, making sure the ritual was set up correctly. Or rather that both rituals were set up correctly.

Research had suggested that not having a body to return to might be part of the reason no one came back from the True Realm, and that in theory, only ones mind was truly needed for trip. And so, a ritual was discovered through conversation with the truth breakers via the other rituals which would send Anastasia’s mind alone to the True Realm. Meanwhile, in the village there were a few who still followed the way of the Aspects of Change, and those knew a ritual which would slow the rate of time, allowing Anastasia’s body to stay alive even if the journey were to take weeks. Why then for all the packed things, if was all to be left behind? Because the ritual which only sent the mind didn’t actually only send the mind. It was more that the mind was the only part which wasn’t also left behind. Because the True Realm was said to be the world who’s reflection this one came from, the things you had already should be there with you. It still felt a bit nonsensical to Anastasia, but she was confident that working within the truth breaker system, she had done everything she could to not only bring her things along, but also leave them them behind so that her mind might find her body again back in the realm of her birth.

Rehashing the fundamental logic of the magic she was about to enact wasn’t going to make it work any better however. The tricky part was activating the two spells quickly enough in succession. If she activated either before the other the whole thing wouldn’t work, because she would either go to the True Realm with time slowed down, which would mean she wouldn’t get anything done, or she would leave, and her body would die as the spark which contained her thoughts expired and the body cooled and turned to stone. Executing both spells at the same time was the key, or rather executing the them such that one had been finished without yet activating. Either way, Anastasia had practiced a ton, and she was ready to go.

She dropped sand through her hands several times, straining it till only a few of the grains remained, the fittest sand grains for this arbitrary situation. She used that sand to start the ritual of repose, speaking words of power as she broke each speck into dust and spread that dust on her body. Part way through this, she started the ritual of self rejection, which should expel her mind from this realm and into the True Realm. The trick was timing the parts of each spell that required movement such that the words of the other spell could be spoken then, and visa versa. In theory it might be a beautiful symbiosis of alternative magical systems, but in practice it was extremely spastic looking, as the movement types and speeds between the spells were vastly different, and the words not even in the same language, let alone cadence. Each of the two spells ramped up near the end, and the casting got trickier. Anastasia kept up however, the practice sessions paying off. The movements finished, and Anastasia vanished, her body falling slowly to the floor.

Trinity Spiral – Pluto 2092 – Anne

“Why are we doing this on Pluto again?” asked Anne.

“Cause Pluto is awesome!” came the threefold reply from Arch, Ando, and Amberly. Anne shook her head, turning back to the giant ring of whiteness set upon the far wall of the massive complex which the group had constructed on Pluto. Anne still thought it was just Amberly flexing about how well she had figured out the engineering of the environmental systems for these bases, especially considering how the place was honestly more toasty than it was cool.

“And why are there a bunch of meaningless runes carved into the outer rim of the reality schism generator?”

“Because Stargate is cool!” was again the communal reply. Anne, who had never been that into television, even the shows of her own time, continued to be amazed that the rest of ETA all seemingly had a strangely overlapping love of a bunch of really old tv shows. It didn’t make sense to her, but she had come to accept that both Ando, and Arch, could make references that she would never get, but they both would get with ease, despite her own age being right in between the two.

“I’m going to turn on this thing and pray we don’t break the universe,” said Anne, excited to actually test out the device, despite her general confusion about the location and shape of the thing. If they had just built it on the moon, then it would have been done a month ago, though, since they still had some stuff to figure out with the math, it might still not have been usable till today.

Everyone was in a good mood that day, as it was the day when they might just achieve the culmination of fifteen years of work. In the years after the discovery of the whiteness a lot had been learned. The dreams were indeed determined to be connected to the whiteness, and eventually they figured out the transmission mechanism, being able to make machines which could record the stories which seemed to emit from the whiteness at all times and on many different bands. This led to an in depth investigation into the contents of the stories, which while interesting, did not result in much on a scientific level, except perhaps some very high level ideas about how the outer universe might work. More study was done on interactions between different pieces of whiteness, and on what could affect the whiteness, and if making changes to it effected the outer universe at all.

Changes were observed to be possible, and with that, the focus turned on getting the information from the stories in a different format, and whether higher fidelity knowledge about these stories might be gained. Arch had made some progress on this front, finding a way to “tune” the whiteness, altering which story it was telling until it got to talking about what you were interested in. Then, by tuning two differently shaped bits of white to the same “channel” one could get different stories about the same events, each containing details that the other didn’t. By arranging an entire array of these shaped whitenesses, a more detailed story could be crafted. Of course these more detailed stories were dang near impossible to read for a human, as the stories all contained these wandering, gigantic sentences, and the combination always resulted in those sentences exploding into ten thousand line monstrosities. A parser was built which took the details from these “high definition” stories, and made a graphical representation of them, making them a bit more understandable for humans. Still, there were some details that were seemingly never sent out, and it was generally believed that they were missing a great deal on the observation front, even if what they did have was a lot better than what they started with.

With observation functional, as well as alteration, it, in theory, became possible to try and do some conscious manipulation of the world and observe the outcomes, effectively sending probes into the outer universe. In practice this was extremely difficult, as the tuned arrays would be thrown off of their observation when an alteration occurred. The tuning apparently depended on a specific state of the outer universe relative to the inner, and when the inner made a change to the outer, all the numbers had to be redone. This could be done autonomously, but the rate that the outer universe changed compared to the speed of them being able to retune to the same place meant that they would only be able to change one tiny thing at a time, and they could not even observe the direct results of these changes, as time would have passed by the time of the retuning. Experiments were performed, and it was shown that this could work, in theory, but it was so laborious that the attentions of the ETA turned to alternative methods.

The next big focus was on trying to get objects to be either changed to their outer universe version, or sent to the outer universe. Since the method of creating the whiteness effectively involved removing everything from this universe from a place in order that the outer universe could shine through, it could only be used in places where there was not any objects. There were two routes that were gone down in this path. Ando focused on an alteration of the original formula, trying to remove properties of an object without removing the fact of its existence. This might have been a fool’s errand except for some late stage bugs which were uncovered during experimentation with the whiteness which involved being able to alter traits of things independent of specific real world values. With these bugs as his tools, Ando tried to find every trait which seemed superfluous to the outer universe and remove it, so that the object might be filled only with the underlying outer universe thing.

Simultaneously, Anne and Amberly worked on the other direction, trying to see if they could pierce the veil, and push an object from this universe through the theoretical emptiness of the whiteness and thus into the outer universe. This work was aided by Arch’s research which focused not on solving the mystery of crossing over, something which, after the disappointment of the probe via 3d modal experiment, he was taking a break from, but rather simply hoped to uncover new properties of the whiteness and see if it could be used to make new bugs or solve any engineering problems that might be useful to be solved. It was this same research which had led to the property alteration bug discovery which Ando was using.

These two paths, or perhaps three, depending on how you want to look at it, had their ups and downs, and more could be said of the events here, but ultimately the next great breakthrough, in this case literally a breakthrough, came from the synthesis of the two projects. Ando had become able to create these strange featureless objects, but they never seemed to fill themselves with their outer universe selves as the void had. Meanwhile, Anne and Amberly had worked hard at slipping things through the universes, but the whiteness seemed penetrable only by other whiteness. For all other things, it might be deformed, but never could it be passed through. As it turned out however, the objects which Ando were creating were sufficiently close to the whiteness such that they were able to pass through, which was a fact discovered only after an office party in which both groups lamented their lack of progress, and a drunk Anne suggested just shoving the projects into each other.

And that there was the real tipping point. They began sending things through, and even taking things back out, finally able to interact with the outer world. Things it seemed could move between the universes, but the process seemed to cause a loss of qualia. Anne dubbed it similar to the problem of converting something into a lossy format before transferring it between computers, or simplifying certain information for transmission but leaving out other stuff that didn’t translate. Then Arch figured out that what qualia exactly could be transmitted depend on the “frequency” which they set the whiteness too which they were moving through. And this allowed discovery, for they were able to pull bits of something through at a time, changing the frequency as they did so, and thus uncovering more of its qualia, even if each piece of it had only one of these.

Then came the nanowhiteness arrays, which attempted to pull things through in such tiny increments of changing qualia that, like pointillism, the object might as well have all the properties as a whole. This worked on simple things, but complex things which required interactions at those nano levels couldn’t be pulled or pushed through this way. And then, at last, everything came together, and they recalled how shape seemed to alter what was transmitted by the whiteness even if tuned to the same frequency. From there they focused on building whitenesses which were shapes that were able to transmit more qualia at once when tuned appropriately. With the help of some bugs, the whiteness was able to be manipulated at a scale that was so small as to be able to be smaller than anything which existed in their reality, and by altering whitenesses at this scale they were able to build something which could be tuned to as many channels as they wanted at once, and effectively transmit things whole.

The one qualia that was not editable by the bug was of course consciousness, which had been the whole thing in the first place, and so the big question was what would happen if a person went through. The theory of course was that consciousness existed already in the outer universe and so by transmitting the body with all its qualia there, it would have no problem controlling it.

The discussions here were endless but ultimately came down to the fact that in order to test this, someone would have to go through. Debates were had about whether someone should, and once they all realized that despite their moral objections each of them was totally willing to volunteer, it became a question of who would be the first tester. And that decision came down to a game of poker, which Anne won. Of course as soon as she won, everyone else became suddenly very cautious, and it was realized that for there to be the best chance of consciousness transferring, the body could not go out piece by piece but rather needed to be sent all at once. As such there current method wouldn’t work. But, several long weeks of engineering later, they had a solution. It was convoluted, and reminded Anne too much of an explosion for her taste, but everyone, after looking at all the pieces, were pretty sure it would work.

And so, here, on Pluto, the device had been built, the reality schism generator. And in the next few minutes, it would be activated. First it would be tested on a bowl of fruit, which would be observed through a conventional whiteness snagger, and then Anne would go through. The reality schism generator could be used to bring things back as well as long as they were in the exact spot in the outer reality that they had been when they came through. Everyone, in general, was less sure about this half of it, but seeing as it was all dependent on whether the consciousness traveled and there was no way to know that till they tried, and so they decided that it would only be used in an emergency situation.

Anne watched as the rsg activated, and the box of fruit vanished. She checked the visualizer, and tracked down the fruits. The rsg was activated again and the fruits reappeared, not the worst for wear. The tests had passed. For a moment Anne imagined herself back in her company, building the bot which would change the world, and seeing its pass one by one. She had gotten a chance to change the world once, and so if it didn’t work out, she at least had that. With these thoughts, she headed towards the center of the rsg, moving the fruits away. Amberly adjusted the device and strapped her in, while Arch adjusted the settings on the computer side. Anne tried to think of a word which started with n which would be synonymous with schism. It would be far better if the device were called the rng after all. Everything was set to go.

“Dang, I can’t think of a way to make this thing have the acronym RNG.”

“Maybe the outer universe will include extra words we can use,” suggested Arch.

“Could be.”

“You ready.”

“As much as I will be.”

“OK.”

The device turned on, and Anne vanished.

Trinity Spiral – Seattle 24 BHC – Alice

As Alice approached the meeting place, she could see a few remaining pieces of architecture, which identified this mall as once having been a Walmart. This one had fallen to the forces of H-corp a year and a half prior, and since land was so precious, it had not lain abandoned like many such defeated Walmarts, but rather been repurposed by local businesses and small office spaces for H-corp startups. It felt wrong somehow to be walking right in the front door of this place, instead of sneaking in through the back, and yet, here she was, largely undisguised, stepping into the shopping mall past smiling H-corp militia. While most H-corp controlled locations would have been checking for ids and she would have had to do some kind of disguise, since this place was shared with the local community, everyone was allowed inside, so long as they didn’t cause any trouble. She was being recorded of course, and that was where the word “largely” came in, as she had worn some face paint which was supposed to be invisible to humans but cause facial detection algorithms to view her as someone else entirely.

Once inside the massive place, she felt the wrongness doubly now, as this place was both Walmart and mall, and abandoned malls had likewise been a haunt so frequently that seeing others in such places was leading to some kind of pseudo cognitive dissonance. Pushing that aside, she checked the map of the place which was set up near the front and found her destination, walking quickly through the place, stepping around pedestrians moving with less purpose than her. When at last she reached the destination she almost turned around and left. It was so totally not the right aesthetic for this.

Despite its saccharine pink and pale blue color scheme, and the frankly disturbing number of stuffed animals and beanie babies, it was clear, after stepping inside, that this was indeed a shop for those interested in the occult rituals. Seemingly random objects were bottled and neatly sat inside display cases, the sometimes macabre nature of the contents being offset by the three dozen stuffed animals which surrounded and sat on top of these cases. Alice took note of a few ingredients that she would particularly like to get her hands on, in order that she might purchase them on her way out, but kept moving, heading towards a back room of the mall shop. Above the bead covered entrance to the back room was another example of the eccentricities of whoever owned this shop, having lettering reading “These?” over a picture containing sugar, a stick with a crook at the end, and a scruffy looking mountain man planting some seeds in the ground.

Alice smiled a little at this, saying softly, “Arcane.” After she spoke, she heard a reply, suddenly seeing an older lady dressed in the same pink and light blue of the shop only a few feet away from her.

“Right you are dear. Head right inside for the meeting. You got it quicker than most do, I must say.” Alice kept herself from jumping away from the woman’s sudden appearance, realizing that the lady must have used a disguise ritual to keep herself from being noticed until she wanted to be.

“Nice charm ma’am, I should have been more mindful in my viewing of my surroundings.” The older woman grinned, motioning towards her two colored dress.

“It wouldn’t have been easy to spot me even if you had been trying to look through a spell like that, as I use a few less magical means to disguise myself.” The lady moved a little over, and Alice nearly lost sight of her again, her dress seemingly exactly the right pattern to overlap with the walls and shelves behind her. Even her face lined up with some shelves which held picture frames, and looked as though it was a stock portrait of a granny, more than an actual human face. Only by moving her head a bit could Alice perceive the slight weirdness around the border between the lady and her store.

“That’s pretty impressive,” spoke Alice, nodding approvingly.

“It’s always best to use layers, is what I always say. Why use just magic, when magic plus technology will work even better. Why wear one thick coat, when wearing two thinner ones lets you adjust your temperature?” Alice nodded at this as well, thinking it perhaps wisdom worth considering. Perhaps she had been neglecting Absalom in the past year or so as she focused more and more on the rituals and the occult. Her technological skills and smart planning had carried her through life long before magic had, and here she was overspecializing. At the moment however, she was here to learn some new magic, so she shelved those thoughts for further reflection, and located her host, extending out a hand.

“I’m Alice. Nice to meet you.” The woman shook her hand gently.

“And I’m Agnes. I hope you find what you are looking for today.” With that, Alice turned back to the bead covered doorway, pushing aside the veil, and entering the room behind. Some of the faces of the varied folks sitting in the room on the other side of the door she recognized, having seen them at other magical gatherings around the US. Many were new, either local to the Seattle area, or just ones that had happened to go to different events than Alice had. The room was large, much larger than it had any right to be inside the mall, and so it was easy for Alice to find a seat, in the front row, a few seats away from a gentleman she had met in Raleigh with whom she shared a pleasant greeting. After that she sat back and waited.

It wasn’t long before Agnes strolled onto the stage, no magical disguise this time, but still the pink and pale blue dress and long gloves. Agnes greeted the crowd, saying special hellos to a few people in the audience, and then, with little preamble, jumped right into the main topic.

Ever since she had experienced the story in the abandoned Boston Walmart, Alice had been learning all she could about the world in which the story had been set, seeking access to those magics which could tap into the world of the story, drawing forth some of the feeling of truth which the story had created. Twice she had been too places which tapped into the story again, and each time Alice’s desire to learn more, and experience more, had only increased. And it seemed as though she was not alone.

Countless occult practitioners around the world had there own tales to tell of their experience in the story, with records of what they could remember, always written in the same strange style which the story itself seemed filled with, its obsession with repeating the traits of characters instead of naming them, or its incredibly long sentences which might well have been ten sentences if written normally. And then of course there were those who tried to make sense of all the different pieces of the story which had been recorded or experienced. This type of archival work was broken up into two parts, the first simply being an attempt to categorize the various characters in the stories, and build some kind of less disjointed story for each one, putting the various pieces of stories that these people and places, for it seemed places were often as much people as the people were, into something resembling a chronological order. This was a tricky task, as time did not seem to work quite the same in the world of the story as it did here. This was demonstrated not only by the stories repeated use of infinite lengths of time between events, but further the way in which an action might in one story take an instant and in another be the work of an eternity.

The second type of work was more speculative, based on the theory that the story was the basis for the world and that events in this world corresponded to happenings in the story. The hope then was that since the story seemed to hop between times and places, it might well contain times and places which had not yet happened in this world, and if the correlation was strong, predictions might be made about the future. For Alice, the base theory of this line of work seemed reasonable, but she had not had good experiences with any of the actual predictions or attempts to find the correlations between the story and the world that she lived in. Her own theory was that this was because the story was far greater in scope than just her world and thus most events which occurred in the story would effectively be noise, as there would be nothing which would correlate on this side. She thought it possible to find bits of the story which were connected with her world, but she hadn’t spent enough time analyzing stories to find any of her own. Her own focus had been more on experiencing more of the story instead of interpreting it, and of course, the holy grail of story magic, trying to figure if it was possible to travel to the place. It was this later goal which was the subject of the symposium that she was now attending.

“I know all of you here are interested in finding new threads of the story, or perhaps in unraveling threads which have already been found. I’ve seen many of you before, and we all share theories online and in events like this. But let me not keep you waiting, for you all heard the title of the talk I am giving before you came, and I think likely, in most cases, came because of that title. And there is nothing misleading about the title. I am here today to tell you how I created a piece of the story.” There was a brief burst of sound as a number of people started trying to ask questions, or simply make exclamations of surprise, but it soon died down when it became clear that Agnes was not about to explain anything further till the room was silent. After the room became positively library level in volume, Agnes continued.

“Again, in order that I not lead you along, I will qualify this statement so that you might understand what I did, what I can do, and what I have yet to figure out how to do. The first question of course is whether I went to the land of the story. Unfortunately that one is in the last category. Another thing I didn’t do, is change a piece of the story we had already heard. The story was not retconned, there is no chunk of story which was first told one way and then told again in a contradictory one. What I did do was influence the events of a new piece of the story, not just once, but several times in a systematic way that I can show almost certainly had to be my doing.” Alice was glad for the specificity. Not only did it put her mind in the right reference frame, but further, it meant that visiting the story still had yet to be done, and so there was still hope that she might be the first to do it. Always when one announced they had done something new, Alice was filled with both excitement, and also disappointment, for she had of course, missed out on the chance to be the discoverer of that thing herself.

Agnes continued, explaining very directly what she had done, how she had managed to enchant a section of stone, such that when she changed the stone in this world, that same stone changed in the world of the story. The technical details were gruelingly difficult, as, not only was the enchantment of the stone difficult, but getting the story to talk about something specific was also near impossible, especially small things, like carvings on stones, as the story was wont to focus more on the broad strokes, with details reserved for its character attributes. It was this later detail which had been the crux of the experiment.

Agnes and a few who worked for her had found a story in which one character was described often as the river who bent around the large white stone. From this starting point, she and her people had worked magic to discover which stone this stone might be, searching the world for large white stones, found at the fulcrum of rivers. Upon each stone the agonizingly complex enchantment was woven, and then some big structural change was made to the stone, followed by a search for a place where the story might be listened to. When at last, they had found the right stone, it was discovered that they had done so by a tale recorded in an online forum in which one character was described as the river who bent around the large white stone who’s shape was etched with flowers. As they had put a different symbol on each stone, they knew from that, which stone it was which had been the correct stone.

The next step of course was to change it again, and see if the change went through. This was harder than it seemed as much of the complexity of Agnes’s spell which had been cast upon the stones had to do with disassociating the stone from time. As the world of the story seemed to exist in many times at once, if the carvings only existed for a brief moment in the current time, then it was extremely unlikely that they find a mention of those brief carvings. Instead, they had to carve the rock in a way that it both was carved, and also, had been carved, and also, would be carved. But still, it was possible to do this again, working within the strange world of eternities, Agnes was able to carve the rock differently in such a way that the rock had been carved with the flower pattern for an eternity, but then, in a later eternity, it had been carved with their next shape, a deep central gash.

They cast the spell, and then, waited, looking online for a new reference to the river. Not long after, they saw one, but it referenced the river without the gash. So they continued waiting, gaining a bit of hope when they saw a reference to the river again, but one without any carvings at all, which at least showed that the spell which had carved the flowers hadn’t changed any of the stories which preceded the carving of the rock, and that the tales of that river might still be told. And then at last, nearly a month after the second carving they read online of a story which involved the character of the river who bent around the large white stone which was cut half in twain. From there it had been a matter of doing all of this again with another character trait, and then calling the meeting to show what they had accomplished.

After the full explanation was given, there was a good deal of applause and then a period of time for questions. Alice listened, though not perhaps with her full attention, as her mind was still running through the details of Agnes’s spell which she had placed upon the rock. Something about the spell was giving her an idea, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on what. Eventually the questions petered out, and then a little after that, the attendants at the talk, who filed out, one by one into the back of the store, either enchanting themselves so as to be invisible, or simply leaving slowly, so that it did not seem as though an entire auditorium full of people just left a tiny two room mall shop. As the numbers dwindled down, Alice remained in her chair, continuing to think. At last, it was just her and Agnes, who had stood at the door, making sure too many people didn’t all go through at once. Alice stood up and walked up to the elderly woman.

“I wonder if I might discuss something with you,” she said, her thoughts still not formed entirely on what it was she wanted to discuss.

“I had seen you sitting over there, and I figured you might want to talk. Its getting a bit late, so maybe I can invite you over for dinner?”

“That sounds wonderful. I just took a train here, so I hadn’t made any plans for the evening.” Agnes nodded and told Alice to wait out in the mall for a bit so she could close up the shop. Alice was about half way out of the shop when she remembered the items she had wanted to buy, and quickly snagged those up before leaving, checking out at an automatic kiosk near the exit.

An hour later, Alice was sitting in Agnes’s kitchen where the lady was serving her a warm meal of baked potatoes and cheesy cauliflower, while Alice and Absalom helped upgrade the algorithm that Agnes and her team had been using to search for the terms that they had been looking for in the collected archives of the story. Once the pair had had a chance to dig into the meal, and the eating slowed, the real conversation got started.

“So, what exactly is it that you wanted to talk to me about?” asked Agnes a few minutes into the slowed eating.

“I’ll cut to the chase, since you were kind enough to do so earlier today. It feels to me that your enchantment, which worked so well to bind the state of the rock into the agelessness of time in order that it might have its state transferred to the storied world could perhaps, with a great deal of experimentation, be used on a person, and if so used, it might not just let them act within the story world, but perhaps even perceive it directly.” Agnes paused, a spoonful of cauliflower halfway to her mouth. She rotated her head a little and then spoke.

“I get the notion of using a much more robust version of my enchantment in order to have the person so enchanted able to influence the story world, but I fail to see how it might allow them to perceive into the story world. The one is an extension of the basic theory, though certainly an extension that might well require a total rewrite to actually be tenable, but the other seems completely separate in my estimation.” Swallowing a bite of baked potato, Alice replied.

“My theory here is that the reason why we have such a hard time directly viewing the story world except as these disconnected events, is our perception of time. Seeing as you were able to alter the nature of the rock such that certain events propagated through time in a pattern based on events happening in the present, might not the opposite of that be used to perceive events as the story world does? Instead of propagating an event in our time back to many distinct past times, we instead pull those same past times forward, and aggregate them into our current time, creating a live viewing of events in the same chronological pattern as the story world.” Agnes had set her fork down in order to focus on listening, and she nodded as Alice had spoken.

“It would require a great deal of testing, but I understand your leap of logic now. Getting the time intervals right will be the hardest thing, and I don’t currently have knowledge of a spell which might get us access to the view from certain periods in time, so that hurdle will need to be overcome. But other than those two problems, if your theory is correct, then its all engineering from there.”

“You game to work on this together then? I think I have a lead on the past viewing thing. I’d offer to work for you, since you went and did the heavy lifting of getting the first spell built, but I’m afraid that I don’t really do the whole, ‘following orders’ thing, so its either working with you, or going off and trying this with my own people.” Agnes smiled at this.

“As you might have guessed from all the heavy technical components to my work, my real joy here is the discovery and the work of figuring it all out, not any sort of need for control or anything like that, so I am happy to work together with you. Having people that work for you just means more work for yourself since you have to manage them. Now, I’m not going to commit completely to trying this forever, but I’m at least willing to give it half a year and see if we make some real progress.”

Agnes and Alice finished the meal, then shook hands, agreeing to meet up again as soon as Alice found a functional way to view the past. Meanwhile Agnes would continue her own experiments and work on generalizing the magic so that a new spell was not needed for each new state that the object went through, but rather that real time change in the object would translate to epochal change within the story realm.

Alice headed out the next day, getting on a train down the coast, headed for San Francisco. She slept well on the train, Absalom having found some really good tracks for sleeping that synced up with the sound and feel of the train’s movement. She was awoken five minutes before she got there by Absalom and exited the train with a spring in her step. A bus ride to a Walmart to pick up supplies, and a ritual of disguise later, and she was ready to head towards her destination. She slipped aboard one of the H-corp trams, and spent most of the trip being very careful not to accidentally bump into anyone. Then she slipped off at her stop, and moved quickly by foot, avoiding people but having a much easier time of it than on the tram.

When she reached the H-corp startup hub she was looking for, she needed a new plan of attack, as the entrances had scanners which were a bit too focused on detection to be tricked by her spell. She walked around the perimeter of the building, finding the back to open up into a nice park location which contained about a half dozen people all intently staring into space and moving their bodies in seemingly random ways, presumably playing some kind of vr game. The important thing was that none of them was looking up at the back of the building that she needed to gain access to. As such she reached into her bag, and withdrew some climbing gloves, as well as a pair of shoes with really good traction, and began her ascent, pulling herself up each floor of the building by finding sufficient indentation to gain good traction. When she got to the floor which Absalom told her was the right one, she accessed the floor plan which was on the website advertising the space, and located the restroom, waiting till the coast was clear, then coming in through its window. She put away her gloves, washed her hands and double checked in the mirror that her spell was still active. Then she headed out and down the hall.

Some quick reconnaissance at the front desk gave her the right room number, and a minute later she was standing in front of it. Absalom checked the web for exploits on the smart lock, finding several, and a moment later the door slid open. The man in the office was so intent on his work that he didn’t notice the door, even as Alice slipped inside and then closed the door behind her. She had Absalom lock it, then moved around behind the sitting man, gripping his chair and then spinning it around. The look on Aaron’s face was worth all of the effort of breaking in.

“Hi,” said Alice, softly.

“Hi,” replied Aaron, in a similar tone. Then Alice pulled his chair back and flipped it over, dumping Aaron on the ground. He had time to save his work on the program he was writing before Alice was on top of him. There was several minutes spent on a reunion before Alice got down to the brass tax.

“I need your help. Or I suppose I don’t need it need it, but I want your help over someone else’s and I think you’ll be interested in what I’m working on. I want to do this with you.”

Aaron stuttered a bit asking, “I-is it like some kinda p-pattern recognition thing? I don’t think I ever told you what I started working on after we split up, but I kinda figured you’d know anyways.”

“You got me there. I stalked you every couple of months to see what you were up to. Or rather, Absalom did. And it does have to do with your current job a bit, but it also has to do with magic stuff, so we are going to have to deal with that first.” Aaron looked away.

“I don’t know if I can do that stuff again. That last thing we did was just, too intense. I felt like I had lost myself in that experience, and I was worried I was losing sight of all the things I had wanted to do with my life. I was following your dream, and the suddenly that dream was consuming me.”

“Well, you will be happy to know that I have basically been obsessively looking into stuff related to that last experience for pretty much the entire year since we split. And right now I’m working on a thing to do what we did, but even more intense, as we would get to be part of the story, or at least, understand what part in the story we already have.” Aaron looked a bit less surprised than she had expected.

“I kinda went and did a database pull on the trains and plane system a few time and looked up places you were visiting, the looked up what kinda magic stuff was showing up in that area. So I kinda had an idea of the general trend of what you were learning about. And I gotta say, that wiki where they try and figure all of it out is a hell of trip.”

“You telling me you are more interested in all this than you seemed a year ago?”

“I think so. Having so much time to reflect, I think it was more me being scared with how much I was fascinated by the magic stuff than it was any fear of the magic stuff itself, well, at least no more than a reasonable amount of fear for freakin’ magic. I saw you changing so much, and since I figured I was at least twice as susceptible to having my ambitions subverted than you, I figured there was no way that if we kept going I would get done any of the stuff I had wanted to before, and if that happened I wasn’t sure who I was, cause I kinda felt a bit like an addict, and that didn’t feel great.”

“I get that for sure. And I think over this last year I might well have been a bit too focused and not kept up with other stuff I used to enjoy. I mean some of it had to do with obsessing about stuff makes it easier to not think about other things, but also like, I just kinda get obsessed with stuff in general, and its hard to know whats the good kinda obsessed where I get really good at stuff and learn a lot as a person, and whats the bad kind, where I neglect other bits of myself and the people around me and stuff like that.”

“So are you asking me to help you with a new project that sounds exactly like the kinda thing that you are going to get completely obsessed with, or are you asking me to stop you from doing that?”

“Definitely want to do the project, but I want to do it with you, and I want to do it while still like, living a life at the same time. I’ll be there to talk about like, changing goals and what stuff is important to keep a hold of for you, if you’ll be there for me.”

“OK, so what exactly about this whole project did you feel like you needed me for? I don’t recall ever really figuring much out about magic that you didn’t grasp quicker.”

“I mean, sure, but I’m like freakishly good at getting the gist of things. The thing I need you for is that in order to do this whole, interact with the story world thing, we gotta get some magic to let us see into the past at specific time intervals. And I know that past viewing actually was a thing you were interested in, more than me at least. Cause when we were looking into the scrying stuff, you were the one that was asking all the questions about moving the vision point back in time and all that. Plus you’ve been working on software that scans through surveillance footage to gather all sorts of arbitrary info about the past, so my guess is that you know a lot about finding stories in visual data.” Aaron had leaned in as she was talking about it all and he nodded along with her points.

“That does actually sound crazy fun. And even if we can’t find any existing magic which can do past viewing I do actually have a possible way that we could do it with a bunch of math and the scrying magic we used before, plus a computer.” Alice nodded for him to go on. “You know how, to some extent, light just kinda keeps on keeping on? If we could use scrying magic to view points in space at an arbitrary distance and at an extremely high resolution, we could reconstruct events on earth from whenever ago. Its been distorted likely and there will be some of it that will likely be unusable, but effectively there is a high definition video of our whole planet shooting out from it at all times, its just a matter of being able to know where to look in order to get all the visual info. I’ve been doing stuff with getting a bunch of info out of reflections in the surveillance video, so like making pictures out of distorted bunch of light is kinda my thing at the moment.” Alice was smiling.

“Its good to have you back. There is one thing I am a bit disappointed about though?”

“Yeah, what’s that? Is it my shirt? Or that I am not as in shape as I was?”

“OK, I guess there are three things I am disappointed about then.” Aaron stuck out his tongue, which Alice promptly bit, and there was a brief intermission in the conversation.

“For real though, what were you disappointed about?”

“You were like, completely ready to do this, as soon as I showed up. I was honestly looking forward to having to convince you.”

“I mean I haven’t like you know, said fully I was down. Maybe I still need some convincing.”

“I think perhaps that can be arranged.”

Trinity Spiral – The Cairn of Fallen Stars 49th Cycle of the 12th Age – Anastasia

Somehow the emptiness still felt strange to her. Which was itself strange, as the void of the aether had been her home long before any of the realms had been visited or explored. But, in her previous explorations, her time had always been short, at least relatively. She’d spent a month in the realm of murder, a few weeks in the realm of control, maybe three months in the realm of beauty. But in the realm of order, where she had been given the keys to the Archive and could learn, without distraction or interruption, she had spent almost three years. The cramped and complicated library had been her home for those years, and everything in the library was packed, with scrolls, or books, or paintings, and each of those alight with word or drawing. But eventually, she’d come back, returned to her people, shared what she could of the things she had learned. And now, after more than two months back in her home realm, she still felt overwhelmed by the emptiness of the space in which the many homes of her people lay.

Now, there was perhaps an extra bit adding to the current bout of agoraphobia, seeing as, even compared to her home, the cairn was an empty place. Where as her people’s homes were built into the stone, and the pathways between homes similarly indented, in this ancient place, which was said to memorialize the great calamity which had created her people, and separated them from their ancient heritage, everything was built atop the stone so that if you walked, you felt no comforting walls, no protection on your sides, but rather you simply stood atop the stone and there was nothing holding you to the surface of the rock but the magic of young dragon which slept in its core. The paths were the worst part, because at least when you were inside buildings, you had something to catch hold of, or stop your rise should you jump to high or take too strong of a step, but the paths were nothing, just a different colored rock, no indentation, nothing to hold onto. And so, as Anastasia walked from building to ancient building, she was forced to walk slow, making each step gentle so that the force would not send her shooting off into the void of the aether.

Why did she subject herself to perils of these walks of faith? It was a long story, but it came down to things learned of her history from the tomes of the ancients. She had read much about further realms, thinking, even as she absorbed the knowledge of the realm of order, of her next trip. In theory she was half way done with exploring the realms which seemed to border her own. N practice however, she was more than half, most likely, for two of the four which remained had no record of visitors from her realm, ever. Or at least sort of. Again, it got complicated. Suffice to say, that while it seemed quite reasonable that she would be able to explore the realm of freedom and the realm of change, the realm of the 8^th had literally no precedent for being explored, or even described, and the realm of the truth breakers had never had anyone return. There were those who had disappeared, apparently to that realm, but never had they come back. She might then have considered exploring the two which seemed the most achievable first, and then beginning a quest for the other two afterwards, and she likely would have done so, if she had not discovered the connection between the truth breakers and her own kin.

According to the work of Atlus Vodavast, one of the voyagers to the realm of order who had preceded her, Anastasia’s own clan, the Zadarast, had been famous in his time for their association with the truth breakers. They had been acolytes of a temple built to the truth breakers, and had had several of their members ascend to the “True Realm”, the name which the truth breakers had for their realm which they claimed was the truth which the lie of reality had been painted over. Anastasia had been to enough realms now that she had little faith that this True Realm would be any more fundamental than the others she had visited. Which is not to say that it would not be powerful and mind altering, as all of them had been thus far, but that it had some special level of that which surpassed the other realms seemed perhaps a bit overconfident in her mind. Still, there was room for wonder, as the True Realm, together with the realm of the unknown eighth, had remained not just unexplored by her people, but unexplored, or even contacted, by the aspects of order. There were extensive records of interactions with and travels between the other five realms and the realm of order, but never with the truth breakers.

And so, with curiosity and a hope of being first as her driving factors, she had elected to explore the temples that her family had once watched over, in search of knowledge about the truth breakers. No one living in her home was a worshiper of the truth breakers, for their popularity had waned many generations before Anastasia had been born. Her grandmother remembers one or two in her youth, but it seems their truth had not spread, and if believers still existed, they were not among Anastasia’s people. And so, instead of people, she was turning to stone, which held memories for longer than even her own long lived race.

Thus far in her journey through the temples built atop the cairn of fallen stars, she had found little of interest. There had been a carving in one small shrine which spelled out Zadarast in the ancient language of her people, which seemed to at least confirm the stories that her clan had once been believers, but the other buildings had either been places of gathering instead of worship, or temples to other aspects.

Once gain however, she was walking the slow paths between the buildings, approaching a building which looked to hold promise, as it was not only large, but she could see the same script writing out her family name, carved into the stone above the double doors. Several dozen agonizingly slow steps further down the path left her standing under an overhang of the temple, the two great stone doors looming over her, seemingly built for people much larger than herself. After taking a moment to admire the stonework on the doors, and look for any revealing patterns or words, she grasped the great handles and pushed. At first it seemed as though the doors had been jammed shut with age, but as she put all of her weight into it, she could hear the screeching of stone on stone, and knew that she was making progress. Another minute of concerted effort, and she had pushed open the entrance, at least enough to fit herself through comfortably. Taking one last look at the empty sky, she stepped through the opening in the doors, and entered the temple of the truth breakers.

Though nothing was immediately obvious visually, Anastasia knew she had entered the right place as soon as she stepped inside, a strange feeling of life washing over her as she entered the abandoned building. It was like the smell of plants, and the sight on top of a mountain, and the taste of wild berries, all mixed together into a tactile sensation. The sense filled Anastasia with vigor, all her muscles becoming relaxed and calm, while the fears and uncertainties which had surrounded her trip here fell by the wayside, seeming much less important. There was a part of Anastasia that was a bit concerned about this whole thing, but its effect on her was more like a gentle reminder than any of the normal physiological effects of concerns.

Thus renewed, Anastasia took stock of what she could see within the temple. The doors had opened into a massive hall, with a central staircase leading up to another set of closed doors, while beside the stairs on either side stood additional doors, leading to deeper parts of the temple. The main hall was seemingly bereft of ornamentation, with flat walls, floor, and ceiling, all built of the same dark grey stone which composed the ground of this asteroid. The emptiness of the design contrasted greatly with the sensation of life and movement which hung, invisible about the temple.

Having little information with which to make a decision, but positively bursting with energy, Anastasia elected to run up the stairs and check out what lay beyond the stairs at the summit. With the momentum of her run behind her these doors did not resist her as the entrance doors had, despite being only a slight bit smaller. Instead, they crashed open as she ran through them, bringing her into the room beyond.

This room was much smaller, as the ceiling had not risen any higher than in the first room, while the floor was at the level of the top of the stairs. It was however, the source of the great sensation which infused the place, Anastasia knew instantly, looking at a section at the back of the room, made of pure white stone. This small chunk of space could be felt from across the room, its positive vibes pulsing outward. Except for the small section of white stone, the room was similar to the main room, lacking any design at all, simply flat stone in every direction. With no other goal in site, Anastasia approached the white place, slowing down from a run to an amble as she did so. The strength of the pulsing waves of positive vibes strengthened as she closed in on the white stone, and it was all she could do to keep herself from leaping the last few meters to the white stone. Instead, through an act of great mental fortitude, she kept up her slow pace, stopping just outside the white stone.

It turned out however that the last step, while technically being outside the white stone might as well have been some kind of event horizon for enthusiastic chill, the attempted stop lasting only long enough for the next pulse of good vibes to propel Anastasia into an impromptu front flip, which once landed, brought her into contact with the stone.

When the stone was touched, two things happened at about the same time. One was simply a super charged version of the emotional boost, one so strong that Anastasia in that moment did not believe she would ever sleep or worry again in her life. The second effect was not as immediately obvious as it spread out from the point of contact, writing and words in many different scripts filling the white space with text. Nearly every script she had ever seen before was written in different sections of the white stone. Drawing the meaning from the scripts, in the way that only her people could do, Anastasia understood each to say roughly the same thing, explaining that the white stone was one true thing in a world of deceptions, and that by marking the stone with carving instruments, communication between the True Realm and the false world was possible.

For perhaps the second or third time in the history of her adventures, Anastasia was glad that she always packed a small hammer and chisel. After a second of riffling through her bag, she brought out the tools, and set to work on the stone, carving a simple greeting, telling her name, and saying hi. As she had begun carving, the text upon the white stone disappeared, as if it were being washed in real time. By the time the message was being finished, the text began spreading back out again, this time exclusively using the script type that Anastasia had written her greeting in. This time the message was much more varied, with no repetition, simply descriptions of rituals which allowed one to get access to the True Realm, or call upon the aid of those who resided in that place. It seemed there was a great number of possibilities, seemingly from different approaches or philosophies. Anastasia looked for a few of the simpler methodologies, and memorized them, wanting to give herself a few options for progressing into this mystery. Once she had finished memorizing, she moved to carve a new question into the stone. As she began, not only did the black text fade away, but even her own previous carving seemed to fill up and heal, leaving no trace of the markings.

Her next carving asked for a description of the history of this place. She expected expanding black text, but instead, the light of the white stone intensified, and then, in a flash, her mind filled with a strange song, or story, or fragment.

In the days when the heaven and the soil were separated by the building of the veil and the interdiction of sky, there was one star which fell down from heaven onto the soil, but which, through great strength of radiance was not subdued by the soil and its jealousy towards the fallen stars for their part in the separation of it and heaven. Where other stars hid their radiance and moved in secret through the land of the soil, or changed themselves to be other than star in form and mind, the star which would not hide would instead glow always, never letting up the harsh light of itself, never not being as full and bright as it ever had been during its time as a servant of heaven. Indeed, its brightness was even more than it had been in those happy eternities for in those days it was the job of the stars to shine a light which would illuminate the heaven and reveal its beauty for all to see and not to shine a light so harsh as to overpower heavens own shimmer. And so now, without the need for beauty, the star which would not hide glowed as bright as it could, its radiance so powerful that despite it living upon the soil, soil could make no war against the star, having no power in the place where the light of the star which would not hide extended. And so in time and the fullness of eternity, the place where the star which would not hide projected its light came to be known as the land free of soil for it was there where those who had not the favor of soil could be safe, protected by the radiance of the star which would not hide. Indeed even other stars which had themselves hidden found their way to the land free of soil, wanting a place where they might shine as well. And so it was that as more stars came to the land free of soil, the radiance of that place increased even more with the accumulation of stars. But the star which would not hide was not one that liked well to share itself, even with other stars and so while it tolerated the others which came to the land free of soil they were not welcome in the center of the star which would not hide’s radiance, making there way instead to the outer parts of that place, and thus expanding the border with their own radiance. In the solitude of the central place there was only the star which would not hide and those few who had gained its favor. But after the second eternity after falling from the place next to heaven the star which would not hide found itself to miss companionship. It still scorned the light of the other stars which had come to the land free of soil for safety, but it thought that it might make itself some companions that were more agreeable to its disposition. And so in the fullness of that eternity it crafted from itself and the lifeless soil over which it had dominion three beings which were not stars but which still contained a radiance, not as bright as a star but still great and beautiful. These three the star which would not hide called its flame children. The first flame child was the one that was the closest in its form to that of its creator, thinking much the same and following always the will of the star which would not hide. The last of the flame children was the most dissimilar always thinking different thoughts and changing the color of its radiance to a different hue than that of its creator. And the middle flame child was the most friendly, making quick friends with the small beings which had been allowed a place in the center of the star which would not hide’s radiance. An eternity passed, and then another, and the star which would not hide was well pleased with its flame children, enjoying their actions and the movements they made through its domain, but most of all enjoying the love that the children had for it, their creator. In these times, each flame child made itself a home within the center of the land free of soil, the third flame child the closest for the star which would not hide felt it must watch always the strange ways of this child lest its differences become so great as to require teaching. The first flame child then was the one which lived the furthest away, for it was this child which the star who would not hide trusted the most to carry on in the right way even without the guidance of its creator. Then of course it fell upon the flame child which was in the middle to live in the middle, for it was between the two other children in many ways. It was after this eternity where the three flame children made themselves homes that there came to the land free from soil wanderers who were different than any others which the star who would not hide had ever seen or known. Eight in total came, though of the eight, six came together, from outside the land free from soil, one came down from the veil, claiming to have passed through it, and the last seemed to have come from nowhere at all, but simply appeared one moment, having not been there the moment before. These travelers each came with the gift of speaking except that one which simply came from nothing, either learned from the valley of yellow teeth far away in soil’s domain, or learned from a wind which lived up near sky and had stolen the secret of speaking from the soil. And so it was that the children of flame, and the star which would not hide learned from these strangers the secret of speaking and came to be able to talk then of the why, and not simply show the how and what. From this came much discord, for while the three children of flame would do the what and the how which the star which did not hide wanted of them, many times the why of it was thought to be wrong by the star which would not hide. And so in that time the star which would not hide came to hate the eight who had come into its place, and called for them to leave the land free from soil and change not the natures of the three flame children which the star who would not hide loved. But unlike the stars which lived at the edge of the land free from soil, these eight would not obey the command of the star which would not be hidden. They continued to live in the center of the land free of soil, and though the star which would not hide would strike them when it saw them, it could not always see them, for they hid well in the dead soil and seemed able to move freely when the star which would not hide turned its countenance upon other matters. And so, not able to remove the eight which had come the star which would not hide instead turned to its children, telling them that they must not speak with the eight, that the star which would not be named hated them and that the eight wished ill against the flame children, that they must not be tricked. And so, the flame children came to know that their creator hated the eight who had come from outside, and each reacted in its own way. The first flame child which was trusted did as its mother suggested, and would speak not with the eight, striking them when it saw them near its home. The third flame child had some love for the eight, but knew it was close to the star which would not be hidden, and so it spoke to the eight but only for a short time, and only when its creator was not looking. The middle flame child however had come to love the eight greatly, for the secret of speech had become the favorite pastime of the middle flame child. So it was that despite the star which would not hide ordering its children to turn away from the eight who came from outside, it was the middle flame child which disobeyed openly. It welcomed the eight into its home, learning much from them, and they from the middle flame child. For an eternity this continued, with the middle flame child simply refusing to obey the wish of the star which would not hide. In all that eternity the star which would not hide grew more and more filled with anger. Again and again it spoke to its child, telling it to turn away from these eight from outside, but never did the middle flame child listen, instead preferring to spend time with the eight who often came to its home. After that eternity of growing anger, there came another eternity, in which that anger at the stubbornness of its child turned to hatred, for the child which had been made by the star which would not hide seemed to its creator to have lost its place in the land free from soil. And so after an eternity of hatred the star which would not hide made within itself a great lance of power, a weapon of destruction which had not been seen since the eternity where the sky built the veil and warred against the soil. Then at the closing of the eternity of hatred, the star which would not hide struck out with this lance against the middle child which had continued to speak with the eight from outside even after the star which would not hide had forbidden this speech. The lance struck the home of the middle child, shattering it into a hundred pieces. Those of the eight which were visiting the house at the time were injured by the strike as well, though not badly. The middle flame child however was slain in that moment, the lance striking true and piercing the body of that middle flame child. Its body burst asunder, and despite the death of that middle child of flame, there were sparks from its sundered body which died, not been instead caught flame in some distant places. Many such sparks were seen by the star which did not hide, but since they were small it did not smite them. Others of the sparks would fall into places where there was nothing to burn and the sparks would die out of their own accord without the smiting of their origin’s creator. Some of these later sparks were helped to live, even in the empty places, for the eight which had come from outside had loved well the middle flame child which had listened to their words, and so they came to help what sparks they could, wanting to protect the memory of the middle flame child which had been slain for its friendship with them. One such spark, which fell far from any place where things burned was seen by the eight which had come from outside and they tried to find a way to keep it from burning out. So it was that one of the small beings which had been allowed to live within the inner radiance of the land free from soil, lived close to the place where the spark had fallen. The eight moved together then, and lifted the spark from the place it fell and brought it to the being which was living close. The spark and the being which lived close came together, and though the warmth of the spark burned the being, it too saw the beauty in the spark and brought the spark in close, allowing then the spark to live by burning its body. The spark, understanding the thing which the being was doing and wanting not to consume the body of the thing which was helping it, burned not outside, but instead brought its light within the being, the spark and the being together being something not one or the other, but a thing which was a being which lived in the empty places of the land free from soil, but also being a something which carried the spark which had once been a part of the flame child who had been slain by the star which would not hide. The eight, seeing that the spark and the being which lived in the empty places had found a way together to live, would visit often this new spark filled being, watching over and protecting where they could. In time the spark filled being grew and it began to think about the places which were not empty. For surely the spark within it had been born from the death of one who had lived in the places which were much more bounteous, and despite the memory being long ago and of one who was now sundered, the thought of these bounteous places lingered still in the mind of the being which contained in itself a spark. So it came to pass that after many eternities, the being which contained in it a spark began to long for those bounteous places and the eight who came from outside sought to help, though they were not then as strong as they had been in the days when the middle flame child had been struck by the lance of the star which would not hide. Indeed the passing of the many eternities had affected even these eight, which knew a special affection for the being who contained in it a spark but could not easily remember why.

The story ended, and Anastasia felt tired for a moment, before the next pulse of good vibes from the white stone cast away the tiredness and filled her once again with vigor. The story had been conveyed, not in words, or even thoughts, but in the form of story and song together, with no medium in between. It contained within itself a feeling of truth and importance which Anastasia felt a bit suspicious of, at a peripheral level, but still believed on an internal level. The contents of the story had at first seemed removed completely from the question which she had asked, but as she reflected upon the histories she had read in the realm of order, she began to see where it was that the story might reflect the bits of history she had been able to discover. The logical conclusion then was that the story was a metaphor for the early history of her race and its relationship with the aspects as well as with Sol, but with the truth feeling radiating from the story still strong in her mind, she considered whether her peoples history was the metaphor instead, with this story being the true thing over which the tale of history was drawn as a disguise.

Even as she wanted to learn more, that peripheral suspicion about the nature of the truth feeling was sufficiently convincing that she decided then that she would have to ponder this outside of the temple in order to have a good idea what it was that she actually felt. And so, with an act of great self restraint, she stepped back from the white stone, and out of its direct influence. The story and the feelings dimmed in her mind a little, and slowly, each step difficult, for it felt as though she was walking from truth to lies, she made her way out of the room at the top of the stairs, and then down the stairs themselves.

When she reached the bottom of the steps, she faced a choice. She could leave the temple and consider what she had learned within the chamber with the white stone, or she could see what lay beyond the two other sets of doors near the base of the stairs. Curiosity still her main driver, it was not hard for Anastasia to make the decision, despite feeling as if the desire to keep feeling the refreshing feeling of the temple might well have influenced her decision. The first door on the left opened smoothly, requiring neither the slow effort required to open the outer doors, nor the running dash which had served to open the ones at the top of the stairs.

Without a sound it revealed to her a room behind itself which contained only one thing, another door. She approached this door and tried to turn its handle, but it would not turn. She pressed hard against it, as she had done outside the temple, but still it would not move, even a little. After several long minutes of straining with the door, she looked for a key or mechanism which might open it to her. It was here, as she was looking to see if she could see anything beyond the crack between the door and the wall, that she realized there was no crack. As she considered this, and where this door was in relationship to what she had seen from the outside, she suddenly burst out laughing. The door was not a door at all, but simply a piece of the wall carved to look like a door. If it had been a door it would have led outside the temple, which if one were to believe the rhetoric of the truth breakers was a world of falsehood and lies. As such it felt to her a great joke that the door to a world which appeared true, but was in fact false, would itself share these characteristics. She hoped it had been an ancestor of hers which had come up with idea for this carving. Smiling she left the room, heading towards the second door which was at the right of the stairs.

This door too opened smoothly, perhaps even too smoothly, for as soon as she touched its surface the door leaped open revealing a room similar again to the fake door room, but this time containing objects. The objects in question seemed to be great stone shelves, set not against the walls, but erected instead in the center of the room. Upon these shelves lay several bundles, covered in a cloth that she knew must be somewhat magical in nature, for no cloth could have survived the long ages since this temple was abandoned. Three bundles were present, and each contained on it a rune, which in the ancient language of her people, made before they had gained the knowledge of all scripts, were used for names. The first of these bundles contained a rune which meant in this tongue, “maker of makers” and was pronounced as An. The second’s rune was one which meant, “changer of minds” and was pronounced Ahlys. The final, which was a bit startling was the rune for her own name, which meant, “seeker of knowledge”. She had touched the other two bundles as she were reading them, with no unexpected response, but as soon as she touched the one which contained her name, just like the door to the room, it sprung open, revealing its contents.

The bundle contained within it a set of the ancient robes which had been the garb of the priests of the truth breakers, and within these robes was a key, or at least a piece of a key, looking like it might well be combined with two other pieces. Assuming that the other two bundles contained the other pieces of the key, she gripped them in order to open the bundles, but try as she might, the cloth which wrapped them would neither tear nor come undone. They could still be moved however, so she put the bundles in her bag, as well as the robes of the order, and put the piece of the key which had been wrapped in the robe in an inner pocket of her coat. Then, having seen all which the temple contained, she departed, only slightly surprised when the main temple doors creaked closed behind her.

With the continuously pulsing feeling of natural vigor no longer supporting her, Anastasia felt incredibly tired from all of the events and knowledge she had acquired within the temple. The world felt dimmer than it had before, or rather, more as though she saw the dimness which had always been there better now. It reminded her of the feeling she had felt after coming home from the realm of beauty, knowing the beauty of the world would never compete with the things she had seen there. Now it was the case that the world would never feel as real as the story told to her in this temple. Anastasia shook her head, wondering in that moment if all of this was truly worth it. She had traveled so far, and now the world looked dull and fake, not comparing to the wonders she had seen in the outer places. It didn’t feel very motivating to keep coming home and finding ones home less and less appealing with each visit. She stood in this feeling of melancholy for a time before striking it down in much the same way as she struck down other doubts in the past, by thinking not of the effects these journeys had on her but rather on the knowledge she was bringing back for her people.

Thus refreshed, she was able to turn her mind away from loss and towards her next step. If the story which she had heard was a retelling of events in the True Realm, then it seemed like she would need to learn how to travel there, and hopefully resist whatever seemed to keep others who had done so from coming back. She took out her journal, turning to the back pages, and filled them with her memory of the few rituals she had managed to memorize from the white stones description. Once this was done, drew forth the piece of the key which had apparently been meant for her. She stared at it, and considered the implications of its presence. Always in her adventures, she had known that it was her alone which controlled her destiny, her decisions which created both the danger and the rewards which befell her. That there was now apparently something which had been left to her by others and in a way that was so obviously a quest of some kind, was not something that set easy with her. In her youth she had always preferred the heroes and villains who did the most to create their story through choices, never finding those who simply fell into heroism or had their lives manipulated by others to be compelling. And now here she was, finding that someone or something seemed to be wanting her to do some kind of task or unlock a door or something. It was disquieting.

After many back and forths in her mind, she decided that to hurl away the key just because someone had wanted her to have it was no more her decision than accepting it was. Instead she simply considered what she would have done had she entered the room and found the three bundles unnamed. Certainly if she had found a fragment of a key and clues which seemed to lead toward forging the whole one, she would have followed after that mystery, as long as it did not pull her too far from her own original goals. That the piece of a key had been given to her by mysterious forced ought not change that, except in as much as she was on guard for strange forces watching or trying to manipulate her. Thus decided, she put the key back into her coat, and made her way towards the ship which had taken her out to the cairn of fallen stars. Neither of the rituals she had written down required anything specific to this place, and considering the danger of being trapped in the True Realm, it seemed wise to bring back what knowledge she had gained here first before beginning the next step on the journey.

Walking the careful steps over the pock marked ground that separated her and her ships, she considered how the inclusion of the two packages marked for others would influence her quest. While her rune was a traditional name as well as having an ancient meaning, the other two runes had not been used as names to her knowledge, and were simply words. She might then look and see if those people she knew who shared the traits of those words would be able to open them, even if the name was not correct. Further more, there was a town historian who might know more than her of the history of these words and whether their had ever been those with these names among her people.

Thus decided, she walked the last part of her journey thinking little, but simply taking in the emptiness of the place, something which, somehow in her journey into the temple, had lost its power of fear. She had been cured of the agoraphobia that the realm of order had inflicted her with it seemed. Once she reached the ship, she stowed her bag in large box, then kicked off from the cairn, turning the ship, and giving it the momentum to get started. She looked out in the distance at Sol, glowing far in the distance and turned her small sail so as to catch the light in the right direction and propel her towards home. This had been her shortest journey yet, at least in terms of when she left home and then came back, but she knew well that the quest which the journey was the start of had only just begun.

The Moon 2087 – Anne

In the end, they had kept the universe hacks a secret. It had not sat well with Anne, or with any of them really, but when they thought about it, it seemed like the only way to get more work done. The two main alternatives to keeping it a secret from everyone, were, showing some people, and showing everyone. The former was problematic because, as they soon figured out, these “cheat codes” could do things far more efficiently than it seemed possible to do without them. If anyone they shared it with had dreams of an entrepreneurial nature, then they could have some advantage over the machines, and they might just start capitalism back up again. On the flip side, if they shared it with everyone, the fear was a bit more philosophical. They did not yet know whether they were being simulated by someone who was paying attention, or if this simulation was just kinda happening. If it was the former and suddenly a huge population started making use of the “cheats” or “bugs”, then two dire possibilities presented themselves.

The first possibility was that the creators/moderators of their reality might patch out the bug, if that was possible. In that case, they would lose access to a tool they hoped to use to learn more about the true nature of their reality. This was certainly a fear that was perhaps a bit selfish, but then again, the purpose of HUGE, was to try and find the things that only humans can do, and removing one of those things seemed rather counter to their purpose.

The second possibility was the one which really forced their hand however. Whenever any of them started talking about how the people of the world had a right to know, and that they had no right to make such a big decision for so many people, one person or another would bring up possibility two, that is, the possibility that exploiting bugs might make the creators or the simulation view the simulation as a failure, and turn it off. How many times had Anne discovered a bug in code, and terminated it right there and then, seeking to fix the bug before running it again, the right way. If their creators had the same mentality, and didn’t see the simulated people as having intrinsic value, then surely they might react the same, starting the simulation over after fixing the bug, and thus deleting every person that existed in the world Anne knew.

And so, out of fear of the bugs being discovered, and the universe being terminated, the ‘Eschatological Transcendence Algorithms’ group, or ETA, as they came to call themselves, kept the secret of universe breaking cheat codes, to themselves. Additionally, they kept their experiments low key, never repeating the same cheat too frequently, or in any obvious way. They came up with bogus, but vaguely plausible explanations for everything they were doing, in case the theoretical creators took an interest in what the group was up to, and looked at their documentation. After their first few experiments, they devised codes to disguise the data and experiments, keeping nothing decoded outside of their own heads. They figured that if the creators could easily read minds, then they didn’t have a shot of hiding it, so they might as well prepare for the scenario in which either mind reading was impossible, or just annoyingly difficult. Considering the premise of this whole thing was based on the fact that minds were more complicated than this reality needed, it seemed plausible at least that the mind had some special protections from being interpreted by the simulation.

All of this was very hard for Arch, for, though he obviously needed to prove it before he could really claim it, maintained the personal belief that the minds existed outside reality in a real way, and that even if the universe was restarted, no one would die, as the minds would obviously still exist as the players of reality. As such, when experiments were delayed because of fear of the bug being too visible, or he was forced to write fake documentation for hours, he was the first to complain, and the first to try and fudge the rules. As all the rest of the group believed this behavior had a chance of bringing reality to the brink of annihilation, tensions in the group escalated over time.

It was Amberly that found the compromise, working on a project of her own on the side, running the numbers, and looking at pieces of the test data that others weren’t interested in. One evening, after a giant spat between Arch and Anne over the fact that he had explicitly mentioned one of the bugs in a message that had been sent digitally, Amberly spoke up.

“I think I have a way that we can experiment freely, keep notes freely, and generally be a lot more chill than we are being right now, without compromising much on our goal to not get deleted.” This got all their attention. What followed was not what any of them were expecting. “I’m pretty sure we can just build a base on the moon.” The blank looks that followed were, shortly followed, by an exclamatory whoop by Arch.

“Yeah, because if they had passive scans, they would have found out already when we tested the teleportation before. If we didn’t get deleted then, then we know that they aren’t paying attention to the moon, and we can work there safely.” Anne had followed the logic just as fast, and considered it as well. The logic wasn’t flawless, they certainly would be increasing the risk by doing it there, but if it let them work faster, and kept Arch more focused, the overall risk might go down. After Arch and Anne explained the logic to the others in the group, the next questions were logistical, as they had never done any kind of large scale construction with the bugs before. This was where Amberly’s research payed off, as she carefully explained how she had been looking at test data and thinking about bug combos that could pull of the moon base with relative ease. There was still math and programming to be done to execute it, but the principal of it was sound. Convinced, and generally enthused by the prospect of building a moon base, the group was quick to rally around the idea, and within a month, they had a secret base, on the moon.

It was there, six years after its construction, that the next major advancement in their theories was found. In the decade of research, they had learned a great deal, expanding on their understanding of the bugs, and discovering others, not to mention building a moon base, but the base idea they were working on, trying to figure out something about the reality which theirs was a simulation of, or a screen over, or a game within, had not truly gotten closer. But, on the twentieth anniversary of the day that Anne had ended work, a new breakthrough was discovered.

It might be more fair to say that a breakthrough had been discovered a few weeks prior, but that it had not been understood or interpreted until the day of the Anne-iversary. This time it was neither Anne, nor Arch, nor even Amberly, who made the big discovery, but rather Ando, who, though respected by all as a founding member, had never had the technical skills to truly contribute to many of their discoveries. In addition to that, Ando had been old when Anne first met him, and the two decades since then had brought him to something of a twilight. He couldn’t move as well as he once had, and he sometimes seemed to fall behind in conversations, even those which were less technical. Still, no one begrudged him his part in the group, or an occasional experiment of his own. And so, in his own way, Ando worked on his own theories, moving perhaps slower than the others, but with a methodical and mischievous air that was unique to him.

These personal experiments, much like Amberly’s which had led to the moon, would, in the end, bear fruit. His obsession had been with clearing away reality. They had discovered, early on, how to teleport, first individual atoms, and then, thanks to Amberly’s efforts, whole objects and people. Once they could teleport objects, few focused on the atoms which they had started with, but Ando felt an affinity for the building blocks, or perhaps an antipathy, as his goal was to remove them entirely, from a region. When a large thing was teleported, in order to avoid nasty effects involving vacuums, a swap was the preferred method, with, whatever matter existing in the place to be teleported to, being teleported back to where you were coming from. They had not enforced this swapping with individual atoms, and as such, it was with the early version of the teleportation hack that Ando worked. Day by day, he tried to remove atoms from a place, and more importantly, tried to keep new ones from coming back. He observed the location he worked on with powerful electronics that he had brought from Japan to the moon, and slowly, day by day, he started figuring out how to do what he wanted to do. And a few weeks before the Anne-iversary, he finally did it. But, due to the upcoming date, and a desire to spend a bit more time working alone on this, he spent those weeks repeating and perfecting his process.

Then, it was the day of the event. The group had all decided to hold something of a celebration on the moon, bringing food and cake, and whatever else, celebrating the twentieth year without work, as well as close to the tenth year of the ETA. The party started, food was eaten, drinks were had, words were spoken, and a general feeling of well being was felt by all. Though each was somewhat haunted by lack of progress on their original goal, it was easy to forget that when you are having a party on the moon, and all the other people who seem like they might have the same concern are trying not to think about it either. Due to some miracle of human empathy, the fake peace that each was trying to project got picked up as real peace, and everyone ended up actually feeling peaceful because everyone else was. The event wound down, and for the first time that evening, Ando got up to say a few words. Everyone gathered close by, for Ando had begun speaking rather softly, and some of them were a bit drunk, so they needed help hearing anyways. But then, instead of some words of inspiration or a philosophical statement on the importance of the work they were doing, they only heard a simple command.

“Follow me. I have something to show you all.” And so, the group followed the elderly man out of the main hall, and down the hallway to the room which Ando had claimed on the moon. Each had a room for personal experiments and records, and no one had ever spent much time in Ando’s as when he was in it, the door was closed, and when he wasn’t, then that would be rude. Either way, they were all a bit excited to see the room, after six years of just seeing a closed door and occasional cracks of light. Ando opened the door, and entered the room, and the group filed in behind him, filling the small space to capacity.

On the main work surface was a box, one which was recognizable as being hardened to be able to contain vacuum without imploding. There were other features of this box however, which were less recognizable, with tubes and pumps and magnets, and a host of other devices which all might have a conceivable use, but together seemed to make no sense. Ando approached a monitor, and powered it on, showing pictures of a dark space, crowded with shapes and colors. After hitting play, they watched the space slowly drained of colors and shapes, not simply being removed, one by one, but rather through a series of careful shifts which seemed to always keep the space filled up. When the blue was removed, the red seemed to expand out to fill the space, when the circles were removed one by one, squiggly lines seemed to extend to fill it in. As the pieces were removed, the picture became simpler and simpler, with less and less components, until at last, there remained only the squiggly lines, stretched and split across the screen. And then when it seemed that that might be the end of it, they saw that even the squiggly lines might be simplified, bits of it being removed and the shapes changed to accommodate, the space still filled up, but less densely. On and on, with painful slowness, the squiggly lines retreated, until only a single line over a white background remained. And then, a moment later, there was only white.

“Have you created some kind of pure vacuum Mr. Hitomoto?” asked Anne. He nods, but then raises his eyebrows and walks slowly over to the box, pressing on a large button affixed to the side. With a hiss, they hear the seal of the box break, and slowly, the top half of the box is pulled away from the bottom. None are sure what to expect inside the strange box, something that can only exist inside a perfect vacuum maybe, but if so, wouldn’t opening the box destroy it? A dozen questions pop through the ETA crews minds in the seconds it takes for the box to open fully, but once the box is opened, all of those are wiped away, replaced by just one, “How?”. The blank white they had seen on the screen is visible within the center of the box. But it isn’t contained. There is nothing keeping the matter, which was so carefully pulled away from rushing back into this empty space, and yet, nothing of the sort seems to occur. The blank white space, a perfect vacuum, somehow, maintains its shape and size, despite every force in nature working against that possibility. It is Arch who voices the question at last that all are thinking.

“How?” Finally, after so much silence and pointing, and showing, Ando speaks.

“It is my theory, that this whiteness, is akin to scraping paint off a canvas. Only when all the coverings and coatings are cleaned away, can anyone see the true color within. And so it seems with our reality, when we wash the paint away, we get this, a glimpse into the world which ours is built upon.” This proclamation leads the whole group to chaos. Questions and answers bounce from person to person. Technical questions about the properties of the whiteness are directed at Ando, who answers confidently, but sometimes in a maddeningly incomprehensible way. In the end though, there are far more questions than answers, but the consensus agrees with Ando. After a decade, they have finally gotten a glimpse into the world they had theorized. Perhaps it was a bit disappointing that that world seemed so uniform in coloration, but that might well be a limitation of their own senses as opposed to a restriction of the space where the white glow originated from. Everyone seems to want to believe it is as Ando speculates, but all concur that there are other possibilities, and that they must be explored. The group agrees upon this and seems ready to call it an evening and take a dive at the problem on the following day, but Anne puts up a finger, seemingly having had an idea.

“There is one simple test we can do right now, which will clearly show whether this thing is a part of our system, or from outside it,” speaks Anne, slowly, clearly thinking through her idea even as she verbalizes it. “All we have to do, is try the bugs on it. If the bugs work, then its part of this reality, maybe some kind of firmament layer to the reality coding or something, or a bug of its own. If the bugs don’t work however, then it is either from outside our system, or directly draws its nature from outside the system.”

“I mean, it could just be a bug that has priority over the other bugs in some way we don’t understand too, but that feels a bit unlikely,” observes Arch. Anne nods at this, but no more speaking is required, as they go to set up the bug tests. First they try teleporting the whiteness, but it doesn’t move at all. Then they try teleporting something into the whiteness, which results in the object appearing at the edge of the whiteness instead. More and more bugs are tested against the white, and always it is the white which prevails. The weaknesses of their reality are not present in the purity of the white. After the last of the bugs is tested, the group look wonderingly at the white space. The next step presented itself before them, and it wasn’t some mysterious data irregularity, or part of an equation that doesn’t add up, but something real and tangible, a literal brightness to fill the darkness of their ignorance. As they all look and ponder, Ando speak once more.

“There is one more thing which I wish to share. At first I thought it something of my own eccentric nature and the passing of time, but after running a few experiments, I believe it connected to the whiteness. This will certainly sound like pseudo-scientific nonsense, but ever since I uncovered this thing, if I sleep in the room with it, my dreams are incredibly bizarre. I went back to earth, and my dreams were normal. I slept in a different room here, and my dreams were normal, but when I sleep in the same room as this scar, my dreams are filled with a vivid place, which seems entirely disjoint of the logic which we live by. I took the trouble these last two nights, of recording the memories that I had, and when I did so, even my writing seemed to change, reflecting the way that the place in my dreams felt.” As the group looks on, Ando retrieved several long scribbled pages of text, feeding them into a computer, and telling them to read. It spoke thus:

In the dark of the place which filled itself each morning with light there was a star which thought itself a pond. The beings in the place of the pond thought the pond beautiful, for it shone with an ethereal light each time the darkness fell, and faded to a blue pond when the light filled the place each morning. This star, while thinking itself a pond, did still dream of the heaven from which it had fallen. When its light shown in the dark it missed then the other lights which once shown together with it, illuminating the heaven and rejoicing in their manifold nature. But during the day, when the star did not shine and instead tried hard indeed to be a pond, it thought not at all of the heaven, feeling instead a great longing for a river it had once known, which shaped itself in many strange ways, and who’s color lived apart from it and flew through the sky. There came a time when in the night when the star which thought itself a pond shone brightly that another star, which knew itself a star but hid its nature for fear of the soil came upon the shining pond and saw in it the star like nature. The star which was hidden took its form to be that of a bush growing ever this way and that, hiding in its center the burning brightness of its true star nature, whilst growing always new vines and branches to replace those burned by the fire within. The bush which was a star sat beside the pond which was a star and the bush marveled that the pond might reveal its radiance and still be unharmed by the soil which had in times past so hated the stars for their closeness with the heaven. Lacking speech the bush which was a star watched the pond which was a star seeking the secret of its protection. In time seeing the pond which was a star in the day and the pond which was a star in the night the bush which was a star began to see that it was the true belief of its pond nature which protected the star which thought itself a pond. When the soil came in search of those things which shone in radiance like the stars once did beside the heaven before the veil and the hiding of heaven by the sky, it could feel the thoughts of those things which laid upon it. And so when it saw the radiance it heard only the dreams of a star, which many things have, for the stars were once so beautiful that all would dream to join their ranks, and in the day, when the light came and snuffed out the radiance of the pond it would see in the pond the thoughts of a pond alone and so it was that the soil did not wage war against the pond in order to smite the stars which had fallen from its love the heaven. Knowing itself a star the bush which was a star knew that it could not reveal its light, for the soil would come to see its thoughts and the bush which was a star would not simply be dreaming the dreams of a star, but be thinking the thoughts of a star and so the soil would wage war against the bush. But the bush so wished to shine and reveal its fire within that it conjured then a plan from the bright mind hidden with the gnarled vines. It was the mind of the things which lay upon the soil that the soil could read and not the minds of those above the soil, so the bush needed only then to find a hill, or another bush to be beneath it when the soil came to look upon the radiance that seemed a star in its land and it would find the mind of a hill, or the mind of the bush instead of the mind of a star and be satisfied. So it was that the bush which was a star went forth from the place of the star which thought itself a pond its mind filled with thoughts of shining again. At the same time in another place the strong living things which had once been weak little things searched for a way to kill the sky, for the sky had been that which they had fallen from, but it had abandoned them in the moment of their birth and the hill which missed the heaven thought darkly of the sky which hid the heaven beyond the veil. In moments of action the strong lives passed from place to place seeking in each either a weapon that might slay the sky or a thing which might carry them to the sky. An eternity passed again as the strong lives searched, finding many things which claimed they might kill the sky, but none which they knew could succeed. Until at last after the passing of an eternity, the strong lives came upon a place which had once known the touch of a different life, one who rode the wind a while before falling from the heights and landing in this land which was called in those times the valley of yellow teeth. The strong lives traveled into the valley which few chose to do as the valley was known to eat those who ventured inside, its teeth closing down upon them and gnashing them to pieces so they would be gone an eternity then another eternity beyond that one, though not so long an eternity as the first of these. But the strong lives had no fear of the valley of yellow teeth, for the valley was within the soil and the soil had given them its blessing wanting as well for sky to be struck down and heaven rescued from the veil which sky had erected. So it was that the lives went between the teeth and found deep down the tongue of the valley which, in the many eternities since its birth had created then the thought of speech so that that which was known by one might be told to another. When the strong lives came before the tongue, it spoke to them, and they understood for it was the same speech which the soil had spoken to them in the eternity when they grew strong, having learned the speech from the tongue of the valley of yellow teeth. And the tongue told them then of a weapon which might slay the sky, for it had been made long ago by heaven not meant to be a weapon at all but such was the power of heaven that even those things which were but normal things might contains such power as to be used for the slaying of great beings. In time all such things of heaven had either been taken back to heaven by sky, with the help of the winds which often helped it to touch those things on the soil, or they were pulled down within the soil which greatly hungered for the things of heaven not willing to part with such a thing for any reason, such was its desire. But there still was one which was found in a place which neither the wind or the soil might touch, with stone above and water below blocking the wind with the stone and blocking the soil with the water so that the thing which had been made by heaven still existed. Trying out this gift of speech which they had heard but not till now thought to use for they had thought it a thing of soil alone for many things were for soil and not for others the strongest of the strong lives asked the tongue of the valley of yellow teeth where it might find this place between stone and sea. The tongue told then a tale of a bird made from metal and snow which knew of the place between stone and sea and would travel there for those who gave it a gift of the coldest snow or the hardest metal. With this knowledge learned the strong lives left the valley of yellow teeth which was good for though the valley of yellow teeth knew that the strong lives were favored of soil it also knew great hunger and so had they stayed longer it would have eaten them and gnashed them to pieces so that they would be gone for two eternities, the second not so long as the first.

The members of ETA felt a strange sense of loss as the speaking of the computer came to an end. Each felt as if they had woken from a dream, or rather more that they had fallen into a dream, after briefly being awake. Even Arch who rarely thought of his dreams felt weirdly drawn to this strange telling, and despite how strange and disjointed the telling it had felt true in a way that nothing before in his life had felt, which, seeing as many things in his life had felt true, was saying a great deal. It was Ando who spoke first, as he had at least dreamed the dream before and thus was more prepared for its telling.

“This was all I could remember of one night of my dreams. Each night is much like this, not always with the same characters, but with the same style and some feeling of continuity. It feels to me like part of a much larger story but I have no idea where the thoughts came from, as I’ve never read anything quite like this story before.”

“One of us should sleep by the whiteness then. That would be the best way to tell if it is a story in your mind which the whiteness seems to let loose or if it is a story being told by the whiteness in some way,” spoke Anne softly.

“It would have been better if it had been placed by someone’s bed without there knowing, so that their dreams were not influenced by hearing the story. It was such a compelling story in all its weirdness that I think perhaps all of us will dream something like it tonight,” said Arch, seemingly annoyed by this loss of a chance to experiment.

“We can try with one of us first, and then, should it work there, we can try it with someone else who hasn’t heard the story since even though we can’t teleport the whiteness, we can move it manually, and get it down to earth,” said Anne in response.

“Or, we could make another whiteness on earth,” said Ando, softly. “I made the whiteness you see before you after first making one much smaller. We just need to move some of the equipment down there.”

“Did you have the same kind of dreams with the first whiteness you crafted?”

“Yes, the dreams seemed much the same, though perhaps more colorful after I crafted the larger whiteness.” Anne bit her lip upon hearing this.

“I think we ought to be careful with this stuff,” she said, “If a mere retelling of a tale was sufficient to stupefy all of us here, I wonder what the mental effects of even stronger dreams might be? Testing another similar one on earth seems fine, but we should try not to bring the two together in case there is some intensification from their close proximity.” The others were amenable to this, all feeling uncomfortable with how much a strange fairy tale had been able to seem more real and important than the work which had driven them for a decade. And so, with caution as well as wonder, ETA began the second phase of reality exploration.

Trinity Spiral – Boston 23 AHA – Alice

Aaron shook his head, looked down the side of another abandoned building, and gave an exaggerated sigh.

“How is it that every time we go looking for more occult knowledge, we always end up breaking into a Walmart? What is this, the fifth time?” Alice gave him a smile.

“This one is abandoned at least. That’s a first.”

“Yeah, cause sneaking through abandoned buildings, in order to gain access to different abandoned buildings, is so much better than sneaking through them to break into actively used ones.”

“Hey, at least we don’t have to sneak you by any guards this time. Just security cameras this time, nothing living.”

“True enough. And security cameras may as well not even be there considering all the ways we have to deal with them. What’s the plan this time? A technology evasion ritual, or just plain old vanilla, hacking?”

“Seeing as you used up the luncheables last night, we don’t have the right materials for the ritual.” The pair each secured a rope to a reasonably sturdy bit of the roof.

“I was hungry. We’ve been camping out in these abandoned buildings for days, with ready to eat food right there in our packs.”

“I mean, you could have just gone into town and gotten something.”

“Looking like this?” He gestured to the dust and dirt covered clothing which they both wore. “I’d create a lot more trouble for both of us if I showed up in Boston, covered in dust, without any record of a ticket getting me here. The facial recognition databases would flag me down in an instant and pull all the records it needed to figure out what I might be up to. Even if it didn’t prove anything, it would be enough weirdness that we’d have a human auditing my trail, and we definitely don’t want that happening if I want to keep my H-corp membership.” Alice had started down the side of the building while Aaron had been explaining all this, and once he finished talking, Aaron started slowly descending down as well, keeping tightly a hold of the rope and walking down the side slowly.

“Fair enough. You could have asked me to get you something. I could have rustled something up for sure.”

“Yeah, but then I’d have to ask you a favor, and we both know how that always ends up.”

“What, you don’t want to add to your eternal debt to me? You know I’m always so nice about my collection methods,” Alice emphasized the words by releasing her rope and jumping down the last couple meters of the wall. “It would have been fun.”

“It would have been a concussion. Concrete combined with your debt collection method rarely turns out well for me. I’ll wait till we are someone a bit more padded till I actively subject myself to your special brand of attention again.” Aaron clamored down the last few meters of the rope, letting out a breath as his feet touched the ground again. Alice pushed him against the wall just as he turned around towards her.

“Well, you owe me for the missing luncheable, so, there goes that plan.”

“Hey, now, I was the one that bought the luncheables this last time. We were trying out the beguilement ritual to see if it worked on computer systems checking for where my card came from remember?” Alice made an annoyed face, pushed him again, gave him a kiss, then turned around towards their destination.

“I mean, if you don’t want to have a good time with your beautiful girlfriend, who am I to stop you I suppose. Just know that the wait time is only going to make the next time more painful.”

“Oh, I know that for sure.” The jibing came to a stop for a moment as the two approached the ruins of Boston’s largest Walmart, each on high alert, not wanting to get spotted by a camera they hadn’t seen. As much as they’d talked flippantly before about hacking the security cameras here, these ones in particular were a bit more of a challenge than most, as they operated on a closed, wired network, with only outgoing internet traffic. They’d have to gain physical access to some of the network wires before they could mess with the cameras, and in the mean time, they had to operate on their own vision, and on the vision of the cameras they were hunting down, as the up-streamed video data was at least accessible. The pair enjoyed the hunt, as it was almost like a second person video game, trying to sneak around when the only info you had on the guards locations was the guards own vision.

A combination of their own observation and the data from the cameras got them through the back parking lot of the Walmart, then around the side to the front entrance. It was here that they ran into an issue. From their feed, it seemed like there was no path through this part that was unobserved. Sufficient camera coverage existed such that there was literally no path from the side to the front that wouldn’t leave them clearly visible on at least one camera.

“Looks like we might need to see if we can break in from the back,” suggested Aaron.

“Yeah, either actually getting inside that way, or getting up to one of the cameras on that side and tapping into the network. Its going to be tricky to get that close to the wall though. Remember how much we had to make use of the further parts of the parking lot sneaking by the vision cones?”

“Yeah. I can have my PI compute any possible safe routes, but considering the constraints, if this Walmart’s cameras are in the database, I’ll have some weird geographical data tied to my profile.”

“Sure would be nice if we had that luncheable right about now wouldn’t it.” Aaron, looked down a bit bashfully. It made Alice want to drag him into one of the abandoned cars for a few minutes, but the edge of a thought prevented acting on that idea. “Wait a second, we’ve been being silly. We are looking for magic junk, and we haven’t even been using our magic viewer.”

“I was waiting till we got inside. Didn’t figure it’d be out in the open. Plus I’ve been trying to keep my PI use down for this trip. Words been going around that vision data that’s processed offline still ends up getting sent to the cloud later and analyzed, so I’ve been trying not to do anything camera related.”

“I’m glad its you that has the nightmare, hell company software connected to their brain and not me. I’ll run the app then, but you gotta watch the feed and make sure I don’t walk us into the line of sight of one of these things.” Aaron nodded, and Alice fired up the first arcane app that the long ago ritual had installed on her PI. Normally she ended up using it in places she already knew had something magical going on, or places where she was searching for any trace of magic presence, so she was used to either a near total shift in vision, or almost nothing, but the experience this time was nearly smack in the middle. Most of her surroundings seemed the same, but there were several notable magical changes visible immediately. The most obvious was that the inside of the Walmart was clearly filled with all sorts of magic stuff, as a strong green light seemed to glow out of every window and opening visible. The more subtle magical effects were seen on the ground of the parking lot, and up in the locations she and Aaron had determined the cameras had to be sitting. The bits on the parking lot pavement seemed to be moving about, so those were the parts that Alice focused on.

It only took a moment for Alice to deduce that the magical patches were footprints. The shape wasn’t right for feet, but the alternating left and right zig zag, and the pace could really be nothing else.

“I see the path in. I’m going to have to go in first without you though, cause there is no way that you are going to be able to follow this path without being able to see it.”

“Fair enough. I’ll stay here and watch the feed. If the magic path turns out to be a dud, and you show up, I can let you know and we can scram.” Alice nodded, gave Aaron another quick kiss, then walked swiftly towards a spot she had seen the footprints start from several times, behind a pile of abandoned, broken carts. She stood ready, watching the ground until the magic lit up beneath her feet. From there it was basically just a really high stakes game of hop scotch. Whoever’s feet had made these tracks originally had much longer legs than Alice, so she found herself hopping between step locations, hoping she wouldn’t lose her balance and tumble into view of the cameras. Thankfully her dancing lessons from her youth paid off, and she never stumbled, keeping her balance, even as the pace of the steps increased and the jumps got further and further apart, with less and less time to recover between individual hops. And then, suddenly the steps were gone.

At first Alice thought she had messed something up, but after looking up, she realized she had made it to the wall, directly below one of the camera locations. She had been so concentrated on following the footstep patterns that she hadn’t realized she had made it over. Pressing herself up against the wall, she turned to where Aaron was hiding behind a tipped over cart pushing mule, and waved. He signaled back with an OK sign. Seems that the magical footprints hadn’t led her astray. Now that the camera’s vision radius had been penetrated, there only remained the problem of scaling the featureless wall to get access to the camera wires.

Had it been a year prior, Alice would have had to have planned this all out a lot more thoroughly. Since she and Aaron had started screwing around with the magic stuff however, she had found herself acting much more in the moment, figuring that she would have some tool to overcome whatever it was she ran into. She really wasn’t sure how she felt about the change, having previously taken a lot of pride in her rigorous planning process. Still, she had also always wanted to be flexible enough to deal, should the plan fall apart. When she got worried about it, she explained it away as limit testing. She was eschewing plans currently in order to enhance her flexibility. There would be some future point where she would be able to synthesize the two divergent mentalities and since she had practiced each alone, she’d be much better at it than if she had only ever stuck with one. Or at least that’s what she told herself, preferring it greatly to the thought that she had grown reckless or arrogant.

As it turned out however, the Alice of a year ago really did have a lot less options available compared to the Alice of today. While she might have been flummoxed by the wall without a plan, present day Alice had a quick solution. Reaching into her bag, she drew forth a few different randomly assorted objects. She placed them around her in a rough approximation of a ritual circle, then started mumbling some arcane words, whilst searching the ground and wall for the last ingredient. A tiny bit of movement revealed her prey, and lightning quick hands snagged a spider which had been unlucky enough to come out of a crack in the concrete at just the wrong time. A few magic words followed, and then Alice swallowed the spider whole, feeling it wriggle as it went down. Nothing seemed to happen for a moment, and then, in her magically enhanced vision, she saw the soft glow of magic coming forth from her fingers.

Alice had learned more than two dozen rituals since her first magical experience a year prior, but while several were a good bit more flashy than the one she had just performed, she still knew in her heart that this one was her favorite. Not only did it let her climb in a way she could never have before, but it was literally straight out of a comic book. She got to stick to walls, just like Spiderman. Well, just like Spiderman, if he had to eat a live spider and chant for a couple minutes before he got to climb around. It was not as convenient as the web slinger’s power, but while it was active, it was just as cool. Moments later she had ascended the sheer surface, and she had spliced into the wiring that ran from the wall to the camera. Once she hooked him in, Absalom made quick work of the networks defenses, and only a moment later, they had complete control. From her perch half way up the wall, Alice motioned for Aaron to walk on over. He got up, moving cautiously, clearly watching the feed as he walked. She saw his pace quicken, and his concerned face loosen as he saw nothing of himself on the feed, and a short run later he stood under her.

“Nice job. Good thing you found a spider around here.”

“There is no way an abandoned building isn’t going to have spiders living on it. Now catch.” She gave him a half second to figure out her meaning, before pushing herself off the wall, and falling straight down. The half second had been enough apparently, as she landed softly, right in Aaron’s waiting arms.

“I didn’t know you trusted me like that.” Alice leaned up and gave him a kiss, before twirling her feet down onto the ground.

“If I really trusted you, I wouldn’t have given you a warning.”

“I think you might have been the one with the concussion in that case.”

“We’ll have to try it in one of the nice soft locations you seem so fond of. We’ll have a day of trust falls mixed in with the usual activities.”

“Looking forward to it.” Alice had set off as she finished her sentence, and Aaron followed behind while speaking his own. Not needing to avoid the cameras, they simply walked around the side of the building. Aaron waved a couple times at the cameras, making Alice giggle. A short moment later they were at the front doors of the Walmart. The big automatic doors were blocked off, painted Xs across each one. A little fiddling revealed that while the automatic doors didn’t work, it looked like the manual door was just secured with a normal lock, which was match for Aaron’s efficient lock-picking, which consisted of hitting the small lock a few times with a rock till it shattered. Once the door was free of this constraint, Aaron held it open, gesturing grandly for Alice to make her way inside. There was a bit of hesitation before she took him up on the gesture however, Aaron turning to see Alice fiddling with some setting on her PI. He cocked his head questioningly.

“There is a boat load and a half of magic inside this place. I had to turn down the brightness settings for the magic in order to avoid blinding myself going inside.” Aaron nodded, looking inside the abandoned Walmart. He shuddered a little, caught between a desire to activate his PI and see what Alice was seeing, and a desire the run the frick out of the parking lot, and leave this magic stuff all behind. As much as he’d come to accept all this stuff as part of reality, it still spooked him, and he wasn’t sure if he really felt better off knowing about the arcane. The world had made so much more sense a year ago. Still, it was super interesting and useful, and Alice seemed to love it, so Aaron put aside the part of him that wanted to run away screaming, and followed Alice, who had entered while he was deliberating, inside.

It was dark, the only lights visible to Aaron being the red and green leds that glowed at the ends of the internal security cameras. He could just barely see the form of Alice moving ahead of him.

“Hey, I can’t really see in here without the magic overlay, and I don’t want to overburden Absalom with having to live edit out a light. You want to help guide me?”

“Are you asking me to hold your hand?” asked Alice with a little fake mocking to her tone.

“I am, in fact, asking you to hold my hand… because its dark.” A moment later Aaron felt Alice’s warm hand gripping his own, a gentle pull indicating Alice’s impatience to explore deeper. Aaron had to overcome his own impulses to move slowly through the dark in order to keep up with Alice. Since he wasn’t using his eyes anyways, he closed them, and simply imagined a lit corridor that Alice was dragging him through.

“We are almost there,” whispered Alice after a few minutes of imagined lightness.

“How do you know? Is it just brighter in certain places.”

“You could saw that. There is something in the corner that is about as bright as the sun in the magic overlay. Even when I set my brightness as low as possible, it still doesn’t render as anything except pure white.”

“That sounds, a bit, you know, dangerous. You remember the crazy magic thingummy we found in the woods in Germany right? Near on got us both turned into frogs or something.”

“I mean sure, but if we hadn’t gotten nearly transformed, we never would have learned the ritual to see through animal eyes would we?”

“Maybe not. Still, all the times we have run into the crazy bright stuff, its never been exactly easy on our continued health.”

“If it was easy it wouldn’t be magic, nor interesting.” She had him there. There was nothing Alice loved more than a challenge, and all his talk about the danger was likely doing little more than making her excited. He sighed.

“At least let me know before we step right into it.”

“That’s what I was doing, before you started complaining.” A few more steps forward, then Alice spoke again. “Right on the edge now. Might want to step together.” Aaron moved forward, following Alice’s arm to the rest of her and moving next to it. “Alright, on three.” There was a countdown, they stepped, and then…

The green of an apple floated freely down the river shaped like a statue. The shivering of the colors slowed, and the apple green floated out of the water, leaving a clear behind, a clear with nothing behind it, nothing but more clear, and more beyond that. The statue continued to flow its clear water, the twisting of its rapids pulling from their dregs something different than clear, a light blue, the same color as triangles. The green meanwhile had flown high, leaving the statue behind to flow its river into triangle colors, instead meeting a cloud and filling it with the growing things which grew from the green. The cloud filled to bursting with the growing, feeling much as it did when it filled with rain, but containing something different this time, for rain didn’t move on its own, only moving when the cloud pushed it, but the green’s gift of growing pushed back, twisting and turning within the cloud, making it remember when it hadn’t been a cloud and had been an angel, making life in the soil and the sky. The life within it was different than the life of the soil or the sky, and the cloud was not creating, but rather containing, and when one contains it is often the case that the thing contained wants to be no longer. And so it was with the wriggling of the life, which overflowed the cloud, ripping its way free from the green tinged ethereal wisps, falling down upon the ground its color had just escaped from. The life was abundant, and even as there was life which fell crashing upon the hard stone of the earth, turning from life to food in the instant after freedom had been gained from the cloud, still there were those that landed in the statue river which was filled with triangle color, and other life still which caught hold of wind which had been passing by, learning to ride it, even as the wind sought to buck it off. Some of the winds were stronger than the life, and the life was hurled from the winds and fell in many different lands, the place of the stone of everflowing red, and the place of the loam which feeds on loam, and the place of the squares which feed on circles. Still other life was stronger than the wind, and the wind became a servant of the life and the life flew farther still, eventually falling only when it forgot the wind was not truly its servant, and the patient wind threw its riders away, scattering them further and further from the place of the dying green cloud who thought still of its time as an angel, even as it bled from wounds inflicted by the green life, a dying cloud sinking down towards the soil which it had once ruled over, falling away from the heavens which it had so desired to rule and to love that it had abandoned its rulership of the soil in order to become a cloud and look ever at the sky, the patient floating at last failing it, as the green pulled itself out of the dying cloud which now had neither the sky, nor the life, nor the green, which ventured even higher, not content with that which dies when the green life springs forth out of it. But even as the cloud died and the green ascended the far life found itself in places more wondrous still, one bit of life in a mask like world where everything seemed what it was not, and the only way to know a thing was to show it had never been that thing before. The masks were like chains, as they refused to cover the face which shared their visage. Within the land of the masks was a deeper land, seeming like everything shallow and small, in order to hide its monstrous size, its depths which contained more things than existed outside it, which went deeper within itself than the height of the sky and soil. And some life, the strongest life, which had ridden the wind for the longest, and which had not forgotten that the wind wanted to be free until the very end, had fallen into the great big, deep thing, which was really quite unlikely, as the thing appeared to be so small, and so shallow that surely nothing would fit within it. But still the life had fallen into that tiny place, and somehow it did not seem so shallow anymore, but instead seemed filled with more eternity than the eternity which had lasted up till then. Not that the life knew much of eternity, for it had only been born from the cloud for the time it took it to fall off the wind, which is much shorter than the time it took the cloud to become a cloud after it stopped being an angel, but much longer than the time it took for the triangle color to be created from the ripples of the clear, statue river. It was in this new eternity that the strongest life lived its time, being much and growing more, and making life from its life, but never a life as alive as it had been, each life ending long before the life which had ridden the wind ended. But end it did, the eternity within the deep, big thing being so much more of an eternity than that which was outside the big, deep thing, but, which, because of the mask, seemed to those outside the thing, to be just and instant, perhaps the smallest eternity that any had ever seen, seeming much to short a time to be an eternity at all, but somehow still known by all to be an eternity. Even though the strongest life died in the big deep thing, and even though the life it had grown from itself also died, some of that life had had life as well, and some of that life, life of its own, and some of that life had found its way to the edge of the big, deep thing, which is even more impossible than it is to find your way to the edge of reality, but it happened all the same. And this life, child of the life, which was child of the life, which was child of the life, which lived the longest on the wind, saw the edge of the big, deep thing, and grew past the edge. And outside the edge of the big, deep thing, was the rest of the world, much smaller than the big deep thing, but because of the mask seeming so much bigger to the life which stepped out of it, believing now that all the world it had known was only as small as the big, deep thing seemed now with its mask. And thinking about that size, and about the size which this new place would have to be if it was that much bigger, this great great grandchild life stopped trying to find the edge, believing it had gone as far as it could go, not knowing that the edge was so much closer than the way it had already gone. So it was that that life met the life which had fallen into the land of masks, but because it had lived in the land of masks for an eternity, even a small eternity, the life which had fallen there had the shape of death, and acted like death, and so the life which had come out from the edge of the big, deep thing, which was too new to the land of masks to know about the masks in the land which it was named after, didn’t recognize the life as life, but thought it instead its enemy, death. Now, it had no idea before what an enemy could be, knowing only the search for the edge of the big, deep, thing, but such was the perfection of the mask which the life which had fallen into the land of the masks wore that because they should have been friends, these two lives, the life which had crossed the edge of the big, deep thing, knew instead that they were enemies. But while enemies often try to kill each other, when your enemy is death, you instead must try to live it from death to life instead, so the life from within the big, deep, thing began to grow onto the life which seemed to be death. And the growing continued for while the thing seemed to be death, the death was only a mask and the life in the mask could not bring itself to kill the life which was now growing into it. Indeed, such was the power of the growing that the life which seemed like death cast aside its mask and made known it was life too. But the other life, the one which had crossed into this world from the edge of the big, deep, thing, thought that they had defeated death by turning it to life, and that the life which was greeting it was the death brought to life. The life which had seemed to be death but now did not was happy enough to greet the other life, from the edge, and the situation with the masks was so confusing that it did not try to tell the other life the truth, and even if it had tried to tell the other life the truth, the invention of talking had not been found by the lives yet and so it would not have know how to tell. But now there were too within the land of masks which did not where masks, and the land of masks could not be the land of masks if it allowed such a thing to be. For if there was only one who didn’t wear a mask, that was OK, for everything has an exception, but when you have two exceptions, they aren’t exceptions anymore, and the rule of the land of masks was not the rule and longer. With the rule gone the land of mask might have changed its name, to the land of no more masks, but instead, the land was quite clever. It kept itself the land of masks, and so it itself at last wore a mask, for its name was not what it was, but rather the opposite, and so its story stayed with it. But because the land of masks was now a mask for wearing masks and was no longer a place where masks were worn, the masks of all the things within its borders had to be removed. Some of the things within the land of masks still wanted to wear masks though, and so they left, moving to the sea of revealed faces, which had, in many ways, just copied the land of masks, but still, it let you where masks, while the land of masks didn’t so things that wanted to wear masks were OK with it. Others though, took off there masks and became again in form and function the thing which they had not been since the beginning of the land of masks. And it might have been the case that the deep, giant, place took off its mask and it became as big as it was, and swallowed up the world, but in order to keep from eating the world with its size and its depth, the big, deep thing became the exception to the land of masks, being the only thing which still wore a mask in a place where no one wore masks any more and everything was as it seemed. It was then, as the land of masks became the land of masks and the life which had fallen to the land of masks met the life which had crossed the border from the big deep thing, when the green thing reached the sky, which stood guard for heaven, not wanting the things of the soil to touch the heaven which the sky thought was so beautiful. The green thing though was different than the other things from the soil for it was not something which grew from the soil but rather a grower itself, not a thing alive, but a thing which made life in others, and as the green touched the sky, the sky felt the growing within it. Unlike the cloud, which had been an angle, the sky did not try to keep the things which grew inside it within itself, and so as soon as they grew, they fell down, lives younger than any other lives made before this, not even given the time in the cloud to grow before they became scattered by the wind. None were strong enough to ride the winds and so the winds, which had been quite angry with the other life for riding it, and making it a servant, was cruel to these new lives, hurling them this way and that, crashing the lives into each other, and smashing them into the ground. But there was one wind which felt sad for the little lives which were cast about by the angry winds, and this wind took a few of the lives away, hiding them from the other winds, and putting them down on the soil, not in strange and wild places like the land of masks, or the deep, big place, but in calm and gentle places, like the ever turning hill, which turned itself around to follow the bright bits of heaven which could be seen through the veil of the sky, which tried to hide the heaven from the soil and the creatures of the soil. The turning hill loved the small lives that the kind wind brought to it, for they had been born in the sky, and even though the sky was hiding the heaven from the turning hill, still, the sky was close to the heaven, and so these small lives were close to heaven too. So the hill protected the small lives, and they lived on the hill, learning from the hill of the beauty of the heaven, and the wickedness of the sky which they had grown within, learning how the sky hid the heaven, which was so beautiful from all the creatures of the soil, which only wanted to see the heaven, and know their beauty. So it was that when a short eternity passed and the small lives had become large lives, they went out from the turning hill and looked for a way to reach the sky, that they might kill it, and save the heaven from the sky’s evil veil. These big lives, which had once been small lives, had learned much from the turning hill, but of killing they had learned from the soil itself, which had on occasion, noticed the little lives on the hill, and when it saw that they hated the sky, it sought to teach them to kill it, for the sky was keeping the soil from the heaven, and for that the sky must die, so that the heaven and the soil could be united again. It had been the sky that had tricked the heaven into running away from the soil, and then the sky which had learned to weave the veil which trapped the soil down below and kept it from finding the heaven.

Then, suddenly, they were back. For long moments, neither the boy, nor the girl could remember their names, or how they came to be here, or really anything at all. The sky and the soil, and the thing which was big and deep seemed far more than whatever pale thing they had been doing in this dark place. Eventually, after maybe minutes, maybe hours, one of them squeezed the others hand, and in that action, everything seemed to come rushing back. They were named Alice and Aaron. They had come into the abandoned Walmart to seek a cache of magic that they had heard it contained. And they had reached that cache, only to find… whatever it was that they had just experienced. Even now that they knew who they were, neither seemed willing to speak. In fact, they left the Walmart, walked around its parking lot to the back, and climbed up the ropes they had left behind to get back on top of the other abandoned building which they had traversed getting there before either of them said anything. And in that moment, they both spoke.

“I need to go back,” spoke Alice suddenly, just as Aaron said, “I can’t do this anymore.” They looked at each other, each turning their head, trying to understand the other. They locked gazes for longer than they had ever done so before. Then, after a long, long time, they kissed one another gently, and then walked together out of the abandoned building, holding hands. Once they got to the end of its long twisting driveway, they looked at each other one more time, and turned in separate directions. Both ended up looking back, but neither at the same time, so they both assumed the other hadn’t.

Trinity Spiral – The Endless Archive 46th Cycle of the Twelfth Age – Anastasia

The grid extended away from Anastasia. Though the edges were visible if she squinted, the complexity of the board position was such that it might as well be infinite. She had wandered from corner to corner, trying to follow the logic across the expanse, to see exactly how her small change might propagate its effects across the whole of the state, but there was simply too much information. In the end it would come down to intuition. She simply had to trust that the info she had, and her guess as to how that logic would follow through would work out. With that thought in mind, she walked back over to the part of the grid she was allowed the alter, grabbed a cube that was currently showing green, and rotated it so that it instead showed red. Once she placed the cube back down with the red side showing, the board began to respond immediately. Colors changed rapidly, the cubes rotating around on their own accord, struggling to follow the rules of the pattern. As she had expected, the slight change to red had imbalanced the colors in her section, and the advantage for that color led to a propagation, an apparent red tide sweeping across the board. It crested across the opposite side of the board, and her blood froze, as she couldn’t see any movement. Had she created a red supremacy?

Hope returned a moment later however, as the frothing color changes which had survived on the far corners of the board, invisible to her at first due to their distance, had expanded outward, the tangled complexity of the changes tearing away the red veil. What had been a field of red became instead a kaleidoscope of change and disorienting color shifts. And then, in an instant, the movement stopped, and the color was constant, a plaid field of alternating green and red, spreading across all of the massive board. Anastasia walked softly around the board, looking for any spot of failure, any fault in the pattern. As the grid continued unabated, a thrill rose slowly within her. As hopeless as her goal had seemed at the beginning, it was perhaps accomplished. She heard a shift of movement to her side, and her gaze turned from the patterned board to the approaching form of the arbiter.

“You were very close outsider,” spoke the rumbling voice of the arbiter. Its form when she had first arrived in the archive had been indescribable in its complexity, but as she had proven herself through various trials, the arbiter had accommodated her, taking a form more familiar, looking now like a wizened elder, though nearly twice as tall as any such elder she had known back in her own realm. The arbiter had approached the board on a corner she had not yet reached to inspect. They gazed down at the very corner of that edge, and after a few moments of hasty movement, she too looked down at the point which occupied the arbiter’s attention. There, in the corner, one cube out of a multitude of millions, a yellow coloration showed, surviving in the corner where a red ought to have been to complete the pattern. “You bear it better than many of my own kind. The young aspects of order who take the trial and through choice or chance reach this puzzle and fail in the same way as you are often driven near to madness by the imperfection hidden within apparent perfection.”

“This result has to have been designed surely? It seems inconceivable that chance might create a result so maddeningly close.”

“Once more you show your wisdom. This result was indeed designed, a trap of logic woven into the puzzle, designed to capture those who did not follow the pattern to its full conclusion. It was built in as the obvious choice for those who followed the logic for a while, but let themselves be lulled by apparent order without proving its rigor. The cascade of red into wild movement is a much more appealing move than the slow and arduous pattern shifting of the true answer.”

“I can see the logic of that, but if this single yellow within the world of pattern drives the young aspects of order to madness, then why not have the end state be more blatantly unpatterned?”

“That is the result of the puzzle crafter. This and many more puzzles in the archive with similar insidious outcomes were designed by a singular puzzle smith. Not pure aspect like most who contribute, but an outsider like yourself, who somehow served both order and freedom in equal measure, betraying neither. Their puzzles pushed the limits of order and freedom in equal measure, causing questioning and doubt in those who had never questioned, but furthering the understanding of those who sought to know more fully. It is unfortunate that, due to their nature, having come from outside, they, like most all of your kind, eventually withered and fell away. It is cruelty itself that that spirit of questioning is not with us today, continuing to push the limits of what we know. Still, their puzzles remain, and for those with the right mindset, they continue to lead down paths of understanding. Though, perhaps at the cost of the sanity of a few of the more rigid adepts.”

Anastasia pondered this, as she had rarely heard tell of others like her traveling to the outer realms. In her experience, it was always the aspects who visited her own realm, and almost never the reverse. She wondered if some of her work might repeating something already learned.

“I have never heard of one of my kind coming to these realms. Is this a common thing, or was this puzzle maker an exception?”

“The puzzle crafter was an exception to many rules. And as such, their very existence pushed the same agenda that their craft did, carving down the cruft of the rules and finding the true essence within. However, they were neither the first nor the last of your kind to make the journey through the veil of our realm. History is long, and every era contained a few exceptions here and there.”

“Did any of these exceptions write of their experiences here? My goal is to be a teller of tales, but I wish not to retell a tale already told, claiming it as my own.”

“The Archives contain many writings, including some written by the puzzle crafter and others who came before and after. Despite my many cycles as an arbiter, watching over the Archive, I still have much more to learn, and I have not read many of the writings by these exceptions. What little I have read focused more on the opposite, recording your world in a way that this one might understand it.”

“Might I have some time to look at some of these writings?”

“If that is your choice for your reward than I will retrieve them for you. However, let it be remembered that your trials ended here, and as such you have only the right of request for three tomes. Further, when one seeks to paint a picture, is it better to paint the world, or a painting of the world?”

Natasha understood the wisdom of the aspects words. As curious as she was about these travelers which had come before her, would it not be a better service to her listeners if she learned as much about this realm as possible from its own, as opposed to listening to another tale? She considered this for several long moments while the arbiter waited patiently. Several times, she opened her mouth as if to speak, but closed it again, her mind turning over another possibility. If only she had gotten further into the challenges, so that her reading was less restricted. In the end, after much deliberation, she made her choice.

“I would like to read the following three books. First, a history of the early cycles of your society, that I might understand your origins, second, a great work of fiction, written by one of your kind, that I might understand your dreams, and last, notes by the puzzle crafter, or one like them, that their understanding might be combined with mine to see further.”

“Very well storyteller. I will seek to find the tomes which you have described. Please be patient, for the Archives are vast, and the titles you seek are not concrete.” Anastasia nodded in understanding, and the giant being turned away, melting back into its indescribable form as it entered through the doors of the Archive. She stood up after a short while, taking a moment to shake her head at the nearly complete puzzle which could have given her greater access to the Archives knowledge, before beginning her exploration of the large room which she had done the puzzle within. She had examined the room when she came in, but her attention then had been focused on the game in front of her, and there were many parts of the room that could not be seen from the center, as columns and shelves filled the rooms edges, contrasting the openness of the central puzzle with a cramped outer edge.

It did not take her long to discover the main contents of the many tiny shelves and drawers which filled the dense parts of the room. Each drawer contained writings, engraved on metal, with colored lacquer filling some of the engraved locations. These writings were not stories, nor histories, but rather, puzzles. Each contained an initial board state for the central puzzle, as well as the rules by which that puzzle must be played, and the end goal of the puzzle. The complexity varied greatly from game to game, some being simple enough that Anastasia thought she likely had a solution without ever setting up the board, and some being so byzantine that she felt as if understanding the rules was a harder puzzle than any she had ever completed. After the first few, she began skimming, more than reading, looking at different puzzles in different locations, reading each just long enough to understand the twist that that puzzle contained compared to the others. After some time, she noticed movement behind her, not in the direction of the Archives, but rather from the doors which she had entered the room from.

She turned her head, looking at the source of the movement, and saw another aspect of order, but not an unfamiliar one. As she turned to address the being, she saw further movement behind them, and saw a second figure enter. She recognized both as the two aspects she had bested in games in order to get this far into the trials. Their shapes remained incomprehensible, neither going through the effort to accommodate her that the arbiter had. Still, despite the forms unfamiliarity, there was something in their movement which told a story of their intent. These two were not here for gentle words or calm conversation. There was anger in their movements, and hints of violence in the way they approached. She turned towards the two, hoping she could resolve whatever was their concern before it escalated. She doubted the arbiter would take kindly to violence within the trial rooms, and she had little faith that self defense would hold up as an excuse.

“Adepts, what can I help you with? Have you questions that I might answer, or some way that I might help you?” The pairs movements slowed a little, which was something, but they advanced still, as they spoke their response.

“You might help us yes. If you explain swiftly to the arbiter the manner in which you cheated during our games, then the situation might be swiftly resolved.” Anastasia glanced towards the door which the arbiter had left through, hoping that a swift return might calm these two, but there was no sign of the arbiter. As such, Anastasia focused her attention back on the two, who continued to approach her slowly.

“Is it even possible to cheat in games of order? I am not sure I understand what you are talking about.” There was a brief pause in the movements of the two, and one spoke again.

“You know well what we refer too outsider. You brought magicks from another realm to ensnare the senses of your opponents, preventing them from making full use of their reason, and thus claiming victories undeserved.” Anastasia considered this a moment. It was certainly the case that her eyes might well be considered imbued with power by the realm of beauty. She was uncertain what was considered cheating in this realm, so it was hard to say that the passive distraction of her eyes might not have had some adverse effects on these two’s play. On the other hand, it was not something she had disguised or used actively. She hadn’t even considered the possible effects of her eyes on aspects of order until now, assuming that they would be immune to the beguiling influence that her eyes had on her own people. In the same way that she was able to avoid the distractions of the realm of beauty, these two might have avoided her gaze and thus prevented any concentration breaking effects.

“I know not your customs here, but know that any magicks that might have effected you were not intentional. I visited the realm of beauty, and in its depths my form was changed to more resemble its denizens. I can not but be who I am, and my eyes were not disguised when I presented myself for the trials, and those who let me in had no warnings about them.” The two forms seemed to extend some part of themselves between them, as if communicating or sharing something. Then the movement toward her began again, somehow containing once again the same menacing aura it had held when first she saw them enter the room.

“If we were beguiled, than why not the trial officials? Even should you confess your crimes to the arbiter, then you might ensnare them as well. Such magicks must not be permitted to further despoil this place of learning. If you will not turn back of your own accord, then it falls to the two of us, who have seen through the fell magicks to prevent further corruption.” With the threat so openly stated, Anastasia considered her options. She could turn back as they suggested, but then the three tomes she had earned access to would be lost from her tales. Even if her own curiosity was not considered, it was for the sake of the tales that she must defend her access to this knowledge. She reached deep into one of the pockets of her coat. So standing she spoke again to the advancing duo.

“My eyes are no threat to your people. You may well have been distracted by their complexity, but it was on you to keep playing distracted and not clear your mind before continuing on. There was no limits for time and I would happily have turned away my gaze if you had spoken of it. Whether you lost due to my eyes or my wits, you lost all the same, and I shant apologize for it. Seeing as you seem intent on violence however, I do feel compelled to warn you of another gift I received from a different realm than beauty.” This halted the two momentarily. “Before I visited the realm of beauty, and before the realm of control which preceded that, I visited my first of the realm of aspects. It was there that I acquired an artifact that might well be complained about if it is used.” Slowly she drew forth from her pocket the object hidden there, a small blade, rusted to blackness, its blade warped and pocked. “This was a gift given to me in that first realm. I think you might guess its powers when I tell you that it was the realm of murder which was this knifes home.” This warning was enough to push the pair back a bit.

“The first realm you visited was one of murder? You tell us this and yet expect us to believe your eyes were not intentional cheating? I know not what you take us for, but order can not be maintained if violence prevents justice. I think perhaps you are more a creature of guile than murder. Why reveal your weapon if not as a tool for further deception. A murder blade is much powerful concealed than revealed.” With these words, one of the aspects began their advance again, this time moving not as one threatening, but more as one already engaged in combat. The other moved opposite, spreading apart and beginning a flanking maneuver. Anastasia backed up slowly, trying to give herself more time to think. If this was truly to be a fight, then her best move was to engage on one of the two, closing the distance and changing the fight briefly from two on one, to one on one. That would of course involve actually killing one of these fools however. If she charged and didn’t kill them quickly, then she would be taken down by the one who she had turned her back to. But then, of course, she would be a murderer in the realm of order, and her chances of getting a hold of the books she had won would be likely as bad as if she simply walked away. The two continued to move around her sides however, and if she didn’t do something it would be a two on one without any choices in the matter.

Still trying to buy time, Anastasia gambled that the aspects were more afraid of her knife than they had claimed. With her blade held out in front of her she charged at the aspect creeping around her left side, and when they flinched back away from the blade, she rushed past them, putting herself more towards the center of the room and giving her more room to back up before hitting a wall. As soon as she had gotten a short distance past the aspect the had charged, she whirled around again, putting the blade between herself and the other aspect, who had charged after her, looking for the flank. Unwilling to face the blade alone however, that aspect slowed its chase, retreating back to the distance of the other, before the pair once again began moving in concert, seeking once again to surround. This time the pair did something else besides simply move slowly. She could see their forms shifting, the indescribable shapes becoming noticeably longer and thinner. Not only were they advancing, but they were increasing their range. If she tried the same trick again, she’d likely be struck in the back long before she could create distance again. Even as she considered what next to do, the aspects took the initiative, each one stabbing a piece of themselves toward her without warning. Thinking fell aside, and instinct took over.

Anastasia dropped backwards as the two appendages whirled towards her, ducking under the expected route of the projectile. Unfortunately, these aspects seemed able to control their form more perfectly than she had assumed, and the angles changed, the two spear like limbs shifting down to the same height as her falling body. Kicking her feet into the ground, she sharply changed her location again, but to no avail. Left with no other choice, Anastasia struck, twisting her body into a rotation which resulted in her blackened blade stabbing into one of the two attacking aspects, even as the other punctured her other arm. Had she truly been lying about the origin of the weapon, then that would have surely been the end of Anastasia, as the two aspects seemed quite prepared to turn her body into a pincushion. Instead, the black blade’s nature went to work, and the tiny wound which she had inflicted on the stabbed aspect erupted, wounds extending out from the puncture at incredible speed. The wordless screaming of the inflicted aspect froze the other mid impalement, and Anastasia had time to wrench her arm free from the stab wound, jumping away from the living aspect. Or rather the only one of the two aspects who remained living after the several seconds it took the black blade’s nature to tear the other aspect into so many indescribable chunks.

Anastasia pointedly kept her gaze upon the living aspect, having seen the effects of the black blade enough times to know that watching it would serve no purpose but to render her unable to eat for several days. Instead she held her gaze on the remaining aspect, hoping that self preservation would prove stronger than any thoughts of rage or revenge. Unfortunately she was not that lucky in this case. After several seconds of presumably staring at the remains of its dead companion, the other aspect seemed to intensify. Its extended limb retracted into its body, and the form itself seemed to grow smaller, but brighter. She readied herself for the beings charge, but her preparation was for nought. One moment it was condensing its form, and the next she was hurtling across the room, the aspect having closed the distance and slammed into her in a single instant. Before she could think further, the being crossed the distance again, crashing into her uninjured arm and snapping it like a twig. The black blade crashed to ground across the room, and Anastasia struck a pillar behind her, both injured arms flailing back uselessly before falling limp at her side. Her mind was reeling, and she didn’t have time to think much of anything at all before the remaining aspect spoke, its voice overflowing with rage.

“You’ll not go down easy for this. You don’t have any idea what you have done. Your disgusting people die on their own, so what is death but a shortening of the time till you end? But for us? For us there is no end. My friend needed never to die. Their existence might have continued indefinitely, perfecting itself always, becoming greater and greater as they learned and understood more of the perfect order. But you cut that infinity. The crime of murdering one of your kind is a finite one, for the life you cut down was finite, but the crime you have committed now is one that deserves infinite retribution. Luckily for you, your life is finite, so no such retribution might be devised, but surely at least the punishment might fit the crime.” Anastasia understood enough of this to turn her head slightly to the side, looking at the twisted blade which lay across the room. “You are quick to understand your death I see. Fitting, I suppose, for a death dealer to be felled in their own cruel fashion. My only hope is that I might somehow slow the death’s spread in order that you might feel it longer.” The aspect turned towards the fallen blade, but before it had begun to move, a voice cried out, loud and commanding.

“Halt you fool!” Anastasia turned her head again, slowly, seeing what she could only assume was the shape of the arbiter, for the indescribable thing was carrying three great tomes as it stood in the doorway that led to the Archive. The aspect which had shattered her arm spoke, confirming her suspicions.

“Arbiter! Why hinder my retribution? Is it not justice to slay a killer of our infinite people?”

“Whether it be justice or not I have yet to decide, knowing not fully the details of the events which transpired here. Justice aside however, I would not wish for a second young adept to fall to that murderous knife in such a short time. Have you not sensed that the weapon’s nature infuses all of itself, not just the blade? If you were to grasp the weapon which tore apart your friend, then surely you would face the same fate.” Anastasia saw the brightness of her attacker dim, the concentrated power, releasing back into its previous size.

“You see further than I, arbiter. I shall leave the judgment to you then. I look forward to word of your decision.” With these words spoken, the aspect turned towards the door, moving swiftly out of the room, and leaving Anastasia alone with the arbiter, and the corpse of the fallen aspect.

Anastasia did not speak, not certain if she could do so without great pain. Instead, she watched, as the arbiter moved about the room, observing this and that, stopping briefly over the body on the ground before at last standing before Anastasia. She considered it likely that this would be her last moment, and made a note that, in one way at least, the aspects had been right, she should not have revealed her blade, but made use of it swiftly, without her attackers knowing its power. Some hope returned to her mind however, when the arbiter’s form shifted, and the giant elder who had observed her trial stood before her.

“This situation presents me with a great conundrum. Many lines of logic all seem to point to different conclusions here, and I find myself conflicted. From one perspective, you are a killer of my people. You brought with you a weapon which can end the infinite lives of my people, knowingly, and almost certainly with the thought that you might have cause to use it. From another perspective, you are the wronged one. You sought knowledge, and went through the proper channels to gain it. You used your talents to win your way through several challenges before reaching your current limit and accepting that loss with grace. During your wait for the knowledge you earned, you found yourself accosted by those who lost not as gracefully as yourself. You tried your best to end the conflict without violence, but in the end were forced to defend yourself, using the only weapon you knew to be effective against such powerful forces. Even after having been injured, you killed only one of the two, though you had the chance to kill the other, still trying your best to do the least harm you could. Which perspective do you think is the true one traveler?” Still broken and battered, Anastasia considered her words carefully.

“Both seem true enough to me. Though perhaps the second interpretation is more charitable about my intentions than is strictly fair. My hesitancy to kill those attacking me stemmed less from an inherent desire to do no harm, and more from a fear of the kind of repercussion likely to result from the first interpretation. It was my desire to gain access to the knowledge which you were bringing which stayed my hand the most I think.”

“I see you are of the same cloth as the puzzle crafter. Always they would speak the truth, even if its telling was more painful than the falsehood they contradicted. So it is with you. But, I must respect the honesty, even as I cast judgment on its speaking. So it is that I speak a twofold decision. As the first perspective is a loss to our society, and as has been pointed out, the infinite loss it represents can never be taken from any one individual of your people, I shall cast this judgment upon your race in its entirety. Just as you have taken from us a future with infinite possibility for gain, I think it is fair that the cost here comes from the infinite past. Never shall the ancient histories of our people be shared with yours. That knowledge shall never again be shared with those who come from your realm. So it is that an infinity of knowledge is lost to your people for an infinity of time and the losses are equalized.” Anastasia shuddered at the thought of this. Her goal had always been to learn and share knowledge with those back home, and with her actions she had instead lost access to not just some knowledge, but an entire well of it, not just for a time, but for all time. Never mind that there was still many more infinities worth of things to learn, suddenly the knowledge lost seemed the most important of them all.

“Your judgment is harsh arbiter. From my perspective it hardly seems fair that my mistakes might cost so much to so many who did not share in the making of the mistake.”

“Perhaps it is not fair to them, but neither is it fair to the future people who might have learned from our dead adept that he was killed due to his own mistake. When it comes to death, the ramifications always affect many more than those who are involved in the fighting.” Anastasia considered this, finding the idea of potential future losses an interesting part of moral theory that she had never considered much. She supposed that when the potential future losses are infinite, they start to add up, even if the value of each potential loss might be small in and of itself.

“You open your eyes with your thinking arbiter. You spoke of a second judgment though. If this judgment is one meant to rectify the societal costs, then I assume the later is one of personal costs.”

“Within the philosophy of my people, it is society who’s order depends on an equalizing of costs, but when it comes to individuals, it comes down to the decisions they made, more so than the results of them, for the society is aggregate, and good decisions are assumed to have good outcomes in the aggregate, but in the personal case, each individual is bound by the whims of chance. Someone might make the right decision and yet have a terrible outcome, so too might they make a wrong decision and be rewarded. In order that the right decisions are made so that the outcome is the best in the aggregate, it is important not to judge the individuals by the outcomes but rather by the decisions. From my view, your actions each seemed grounded in good logic. You chose to avoid violence in order to avoid breaking the laws of our people. When forced however, you defended yourself, a right which we must always view as correct, lest those who would do wrong be allowed to get their way. Indeed it was the other party who’s actions were not grounded in good thinking. The one which lives shall be punished in our own way, but as the victim, you are to have some recompense. Seeing as the attackers sought to take your finite life, and keep you from personal knowledge and acclaim, my judgment is this: You alone shall be exempted from the ban which I have placed on the learning of our history. You shall be given access to our Archives for as long as you live and be recorded in our history as a special member of the Archive Assembly. However, you are bound by the restriction which I imposed before on the sharing of any historical knowledge with your people. You may learn our histories, but you may not share. You are of course allowed to share other sorts of knowledge which you gain in our archives.”

“Again, your judgments are harsh. You put my two natures in conflict with each other. Personal curiosity is battling now with a commitment to sharing that which I learn.”

“You may of course elect not to read the books of our history. Then you will know nothing which you are not permitted to share.” Anastasia considered this, as the arbiter lay down the three books next to her. “I shall fetch a flesh stitcher to help fix your body, traveler. As you are an Assembly member, such services are readily provided.” The arbiter left to fetch the flesh stitcher and Anastasia managed to move her impaled arm a little, enough to pull the book of the puzzle crafter close enough to read, and flip the pages slowly. After some time the stitcher came, operated on Anastasia and left. The arbiter and Anastasia were again alone. Silence was left unbroken for some time, until at last Anastasia asked a question.

“Is the work of the puzzle crafter considered your history, or ours?”

“Though his doings and their influence on our culture are surely a part of our history, the writings of one of your own people can not rightly be considered anything but your own history.”

“And you said that starting from the judgment was when our people were banned from learning your history?”

“I surely cannot undo the learnings of those who have long since passed from this world. All judgments can only affect the future going forward.” Anastasia thought she saw something that almost resembled a smile on the wizened face of the arbiter.

“Understood. Once I recover, and finish the reading of the books you have brought me, might you be able to guide me to the writings of others of my race?”

“Always do I support introspection, on both a personal and cultural level. I would be happy to assist you in finding the writings of your people.” Anastasia smiled, looking at the arbiter for but a moment longer before turning her attention once again to tome which lay next to her. It seemed there would be a lot more to learn from her predecessors than she had expected. Once can learn much from reflections, even if you can’t see that which is reflected directly.

Trinity Spiral – Tokyo 2077 – Anne

Life had changed a great deal for Anne in the years since she had finished her program and ran the human race out of a job. In the first few years, she had traveled a great deal, not only because she had earned a near limitless supply of money through the royalties on her bot, but also because there were more than a few people who wanted her dead, and after the years she had spent working on her bot, she preferred the type of hiding which involved not spending too long in any one place to the kind that involved holing up in one indefinitely. She had made a lot of friends during that time, but due to the nature of her circumstances, she had not kept nearly any of them.

The exception to that had been Ando Hitomoto, an older man she had met during the several stays she had made in Japan. Having family there, and knowing the language, she had visited much more often than other locations during that time. Somehow on each of her trips, despite ending up in different parts of the country, she seemed to encounter Ando. After the first couple of times, she had become worried that he was tracking her somehow, but eventually she realized it was simply due to shared interests. Both she and Ando were part of a growing group of individuals who were looking into what sort endeavors might a human population freed from all burdens lend itself to.

Anne had felt herself able to add to that conversation due to her work on her bot, believing that since she knew what the strengths and weaknesses of machine thought and work were, that by examining the negative space of that knowledge base, she might find places where humans still had something to contribute. Ando on the other hand looked at the problem from the other end, examining not what humans might be more or less capable of than machines, but rather what kinds of goals were worth working towards whether the progress itself was completed by man or machine. That both were skilled in their area was evidenced by the fact that despite coming from opposite ends, they managed to meet in the middle finding questions and discussions the other might be up to tackling.

Their meetings had been put on hold for several years however, during BR2, the worldwide revolution in which the existing power structures largely fell apart, having been out-competed at every level by machines. The purest capitalism of the machines turned into a communism for the human race, as every money making position was competed away by the machines, and the labor costs of all tasks approached zero, resulting in all activities simply costing the value of the materials involved, and the electrical power required to run the machines which figured it out. In order that the machines continued to have something to compete over, now that no human was getting payed, a ubi based system was set up, and everyone had the same monetary units to spend each month, with the spending power of those units being quite high due to the labor cost being close to zero.

Now, of course, nothing ever quite works it out that simply, and there were years in which nations and groups attempted to keep themselves in the game, either through violence, or monopoly on basic resources, but the parts of the world which allowed the machines to do their thing had such a higher quality of life that in the end, all but a few small pockets fell under the communism through capitalist machines system that folks took to calling Capitalism 2.0 or just C2. During the most intense years of that transitional period, which, despite more than a few deaths and injuries, came to be called Bloodless Revolution 2, Anne was at last forced into the more traditional form of hiding in which one doesn’t move about, spending those years with a colleague in China, and his family.

After those hectic times, the general consensus on Anne was that she was the hero of the revolution, the harbinger of C2, and perhaps the most influential living human being. As such, she again spent the next few years after that traveling, but this time, not in hiding, but from function to function, the many dying governments around the world wanting to host her in order that by association, they might keep hold of some of the power that was slipping through their fingers. As time passed however, Anne grew bored of these functions, and the governments lost the funding to put on lavish invitations. It was at this point that Anne once again reconnected with Ando, who had spent those years that she had been on tour, building an organization, or think tank, dedicated to the ideas that the two had been exploring together before.

The organization had a broad array of people, some of which valued deeply the gravitas of the organizational goals, while others found the humor in the whole thing, and the divide between the two could largely be defined by whether they called the organization by its full name Human Universal Goal Empowerment, or referred to it by its acronym HUGE. Those in the later camp were fond of referring to any problem identified by the group as being worth studying, as huge problems. Anne and Anda both found themselves in the later of the two groups, taking great delight in speaking of their upcoming huge meeting, and the fact that they would both have a part in making huge decisions. It was at the first HUGE meeting that Anne was able to attend after the BR2 that she and Anda stumbled onto the question which she would focus for next decade of her life.

Upon first arriving, Anda greeted her, and showed her around, introducing her to different individuals that had unique talents and foci. One of the observations that Anne had made in the early days of these discussions, before HUGE had formally been formed, was that while machines were capable of doing research into topics that already existed just as well or better than humans, one of the few places where humans might have an advantage, was in the formation of new theories, or expanding the edges of scientific discipline. This idea had taken off in the HUGE community, and experts in every branch of science, as well as philosophers and artists were a significant part of the contributing membership of the organization.

After meeting her twentieth scholar who had been the best in the world of their particular branch of theoretical science, Anne started to wonder if there was actual a way for her to contribute in this environment. She had been helpful in the beginning, in pointing out areas that might be worth focusing on, but now that the main problems seemed to have come down to actually discovering or inventing new science or philosophy, Anne was not sure if she could add much. She had been the best in the world at the field that she had focused on, but by completing her bot, she had effectively solved that field. Her specialization didn’t matter any more because everything she had learned and thought about it had been encoded into the machine she created, thus allowing the machine the capability of creating itself, as well as all the other bots it could manifest. With those feelings in mind, Anne spoke to Ando during an intermission between introductions to eminent scholars.

“Mr. Hitomoto, I’m so thankful that you invited me here, especially considering all the work we had done together in the early days, but I’m starting to feel like I’m at one of those government conventions again, being shown off for what I did, not for what I can do. I don’t know anything about experimental science, and I doubt I’m going to be able to catch up and contribute when all of these scholars already have every opportunity to keep their knowledge at the forefront.”

“Miss Yamamoto, I think you underestimate yourself. If specialized knowledge was the only thing that qualified one to contribute to HUGE then I would have been disqualified from the beginning, having only an amateur self taught knowledge of any of these fields. I was a history teacher before my job became irrelevant. You bring a unique perspective that no one else here has. And even beyond that, you do have specialized knowledge, even if you don’t yet know it to be helpful. Allow me to introduce you to one more giant before you write yourself off, and see if their field might be one that intrigues you.” Anne nodded in assent, more out of respect for Mr. Hitomoto than any belief in what he was saying. He led the pair down a long hallway in the building which had been requisitioned for the meeting.

At the end of the hall was a conference room door with a taped on piece of paper detailing the type of work being discussed. On this door it had the perfectly impenetrable description: ‘Eschatological Transcendence Algorithms’. Anne was still trying to wrap her head around what that combination of words could possibly mean together when Ando pushed open the door and began introducing her to the small group standing inside the conference room. The most notable quality of the individuals inside was their young age, and their hectic energy. It wasn’t until Ando’s last introduction that Anne was really paying attention, being too distracted by both the mysterious name, and the wild dress of the members inside the room.

“And this is the ringleader of this particular circus, Anne. I am assured that he has a normal legal name laying around somewhere, but you won’t find him referred to anywhere around these parts except as Arch.” Arch started shaking Anne’s hand distractedly, obviously not one for introductions, but then froze up, staring at Anne.

“Great gear galaxy! You are Anne Yamamoto!”

“Yes, Arch, that is what I just told you. She was feeling like she might not have anything to contribute, and I was thinking that perhaps your groups mission might be right up her alley.”

“Cantankerous cast-iron clockwork! Of course we’d love to share our theories with Ms. Yamamoto. She was the one that put us all on the path after all.” Anne had decided already, that as likely crackpot as this guys theories were, she would at least let him make his case, if only to hear more of his exclamatory alliteration. She smiled, and spoke.

“Might I reclaim access to my hand Mr. Arch?” Arch released her, as if she had suddenly become electric.

“Just Arch if you please.”

“Very well, Arch. Your rooms title intrigued me. I haven’t yet figured out what it is you all are trying to figure out in here. Perhaps you could enlighten me?”

“Dastardly detailed digitization! I would be honored. Assistant A, can you pull up the slides again,” Arch shouted, his words nearly running into one another.

“The names Amberly, Arch, and no one here is an assistant. But yeah, I can put up the slides,” came the response from a dark haired girl close to a projector, dressed in punk looking street fashion.

A few moments later the projector lit up, and a bunch of rather dense looking equations lit up the large white wall on the far side of the room. Something about the equations seemed familiar to Anne, but she couldn’t quite place it. Before she could ask about them, Amberly clicked a few buttons and the slide show went back a few slides, returning to a title screen with the same name as the label on the room had had. Anne was about to ask about the equations, but Arch started in on his explanation, so she figured she would wait and see if he explained them eventually.

“When you finished your program ten years ago, and effectively solved all the pressing problems of humanity, in some ways it was simply an extension of the implicit promise of Turing complete computers. It showed that all of the tasks of humanity were Turing computable, and that there was nothing extra that humanity had that made it more complex than these machines. Or rather, more specifically, it showed that there were no tasks that humanity commonly tackled that were more complex than what these machines might solve. Humanity itself however, still seemed to contains some mystery. If all of the tasks which we worked upon could be solved by algorithmic process, then what then was the purpose of our consciousness, our self awareness? Throughout the history of AI, there was always the belief that hard AI would be created before machines became capable of certain tasks, that before machines might replace us fully, they must first contain that same spark of consciousness that humans so value. One by one however, the tasks that had been considered too hard for dumb algorithms were checked off, and in the end, we solved everything without ever making a machine that was conscious, in the way that you our I are. The question then becomes, why are we conscious, if the difficulty of its creation is so great that we have not yet discovered it, and yet it doesn’t seem to be necessary for any task we set out to do? How could evolution have created this impossibly complex thing when, for all practical purposes it seems useless?” Arch paused here, seeming to want to see if Anne might follow this logic to the same conclusion that he had. For her part, she thought it through, considering what had been put forth and what might be an interesting answer to these questions, for surely the boring answers wouldn’t have spawned a meeting room in a HUGE get together.

“Well, there are some boring answers, but I suspect you aren’t looking for those,” spoke Anne, thinking out loud so as not to leave a long pause or have Arch interrupt her with his answer before she had considered it as much as she wanted to. “It might be that consciousness is a slow, bad solution, that just happened to have been stumbled upon by the process of evolution, something that provided a way forward, even if it wasn’t the optimal. Alternately, our concept of consciousness might simply be a side affect of something else happening, and simply due to the machines algorithms using a different medium, silicon vs carbon, that side effect never occurred for them. However, based on the name I saw outside and at the start of the slides, I’m thinking that you are thinking of something a bit more existential. What other systems are there where consciousness exists, despite alternates doing just as well or better? The only answer that comes to my head is games and simulations. Which makes me think that you might be heading down the route that so many science fiction, and futurists of the early information age took, which is the belief that this reality is a simulation, or more specifically, in your case, since you seem fascinated as to why consciousness is here at all, perhaps more that reality is a game, in which consciousnesses are playing, being excessively complicated for this kind of world.”

Anne was amused to see Arch’s mouth hanging a bit open, and more amused that the other members of the group seemed quite happy as well, Amberly piping up from by the projector.

“She got you dead to rights Arch. Not sure why you were trying to test the lady that put the whole world out of a job.” Arch closed his mouth, and gave Anne a respectful nod.

“Outstanding outlandish ontological observations! You got me right. The general belief that I had after asking those questions after hearing of your programs success was right along those lines, that it seems likely that human consciousness has to have originated from outside this framework for it to make sense to exist. This world is, by nature of being computable without usage of consciousness, too easy to justify consciousnesses creation. Finding where that consciousness came from thus became my life’s pursuit.”

“Not to make light of your observation, which does indeed seem like a plausible, or at least possible explanation, but where does one go from there? We had a great number of luminaries thinking similar thoughts in the early days of computing, and despite all the conversation, it effectively just became a question of philosophy, as, from a practical standpoint, it doesn’t matter whether we are in a simulation or not, assuming there is no way to interact with those running said simulation. Or, I suppose, in the more specific case of your assumption, no way for those playing the game to get info from outside of it while playing.”

Anne saw the others around the room, and assumed for a second that she had scored another point on Arch, but Arch too seemed to be badly concealing a grin. The attempt at concealment stopped almost as soon as she looked at him, and he let forth another exclamation.

“Incredible intensifying insatiable impatience! You think we have been spending the last decade on philosophy? I mean I didn’t get much done till I’d gathered a group of like-minded folks to work with and I got some direction from Ando, but we’ve been getting results and making progress on the problem for at least three years now. How to interpret those results is certainly still an undertaking, but its undeniable we have something more than a supposition.” Anne felt a bit sheepish for assuming that they had just got the question, and hadn’t done any work with it, but she was more intrigued than embarrassed, so she hopped right into the next set of questions.

“You are telling me that you have some kind of evidence, aside from the previously mentioned logic that your theory has some merit too it? How did you even approach the problem? Where did you start looking?”

“That was the question which plagued me in the early days, before everyone else came on board. After long consideration, there were only a few places I could think to look for evidence. But even then, it depended on which way the simulation worked. Cause in one case, everything is internal, the consciousness of the players is recreated in its entirely within the simulation, with the only external factor being the existence of the consciousnesses in the first place. In the other case, the consciousness is external, and there is nothing in our reality which contains the ability to create or maintain a consciousness. In that case, our brain is in some sense, being controlled by our consciousnesses which exist in some outside location. It was this later case which seemed the most vulnerable to attack. For in this case, there would be signals, somewhere in our brain, which would seem to originate from nowhere. Those signals, would be the result of outside forces, making direct changes to our reality, and if they could be found, then we could start learning some stuff.”

“Of course Arch here didn’t know the first thing about brain science,” interjected Amberly, “This is where I got recruited to this little gang. Arch was looking for someone who knew enough about computation that he could convince them of his theory, but also knew enough about the brain to start doing some real research to figure some of this out. As it turned out, I had been studying brains in hopes of becoming a doctor before the job became obsolete. Having my life pulled out from under me, I started researching computers, wanting to understand the thing which had made me obsolete. I ran into Arch on a message board, and after I got over his peculiar brand of speaking and self aggrandizing, I decided to help out.”

“And help she did. Once I had explained to her my theories, she started teaching me about the brain, while starting to do some experiments with some equipment she had access to. This was before the BR2, so it was a lot harder to get a hold of research equipment then. Unfortunately, with the equipment she had, we were not able to look deep enough to find anything. We both started to get a bit hopeless about this method, as, even if the main theory was true, if the simulation was using case one, in which the whole of consciousness was created internally, there might be nothing to see. We didn’t know if the equipment wasn’t good enough, we weren’t good enough at reading the data, or the whole theory was just completely wrong. If it weren’t for Ando, we might never have got anywhere.”

“Yeah, Mr. Hitomoto stepped in a big way. I was about to give the whole thing up, and Arch was trying to figure a completely different way of looking for results, but somehow in all of this, Mr. Hitomoto heard about us and what we were trying to do. I still don’t know how he did it, but he reached out to us, and told us that he had gotten us access to the most cutting edge medical equipment. We thought it had to be a hoax at the time, someone screwing with us, but sure enough, a few days later, we got some logins for a bunch of medical computers in Tokyo, and some tickets to take our research there. We both hopped on the plane, and found ourselves a couple miles from where we are today, with full access to some of the best brain scanning hardware that existed.”

“It took us a few weeks to get up and running with the new hardware, and even more time to catch up with the most up to date research on the brain at this level of precision, because we had to know what was explained, before we could look for stuff that hadn’t been. Ansley worked with the machine, and explained what kinda stuff to look for, and I got to work building some software to interface with it, scanning through all the raw data that the machines were able to gather.”

“It was a crazy few months getting everything up and running. And then of course, we had to wait. We had put together the program to analyze everything, but the stuff we were looking for was so small and specific that we needed a lot of data to start filtering out all the noise and finding what part of it was signal, in a more literal sense than usual. We ran experiment after experiment, trying to do actions deliberately and comparing to when we let our reflexes take over, looking at differences between when a decision was made, and when our brain actualized that decision. Anything we could think of to narrow down some place in the brain where the signals were coming in.”

“This part never felt as hopeless as the first bit had, since, not only did we have some real cool tech to work with, we also had a lot to learn, as well as someone in our corner who believed in us, at least enough to secure us millions of dollars worth of medical equipment. The wait didn’t seem so bad. And by the end, it payed off.”

“We found specific places in the brain where signals seemed to come out of nowhere. Once we had established a few likely places with our research, we went into the work of showing that the signals which started in those parts of the brain had not been caused by something else in the brain. As it turned out, this involved a great deal of math.” At this point the slide show had gotten back to the slide it had been on initially, filled with dense equations. With the context of the story thus far Anne now understood why she had felt like she remembered the equations. They were neural net equations, similar due to a great number of neural nets being used in Anne’s universal job solver, but different enough to not be immediately obvious since this math was based on the neural net of a real brain, as opposed to the idealized networks used within computer programs.

Despite the equations being a bit different than what she had been used to, Anne was an expert at this sort of math, and started working through the math presented on the board. Arch and Amberly kept going for a little bit of their explanation, but faded out once they realized their audience wasn’t listening anymore. For Anne, there was just the equations, and she had no idea how long it was before she finished up, looking around to the others.

“Is that data used for these accurate? Is this some of your real results?” she asked, startling the others, who had drifted off into their own conversations while Anne computed. It was Arch that recovered first.

“Yeah, these are some of our first results computed using math from our friend over there.” He gestured to one of the other figures in the room that hadn’t spoken up yet. “Once we got to the neural net math, we knew we had to bring in more people, because it was a bit beyond either me or Ansley. Once again, Ando came to the rescue, getting us connected with more and more like minded people. It wasn’t until the math results came back that we knew we had really discovered something. And based on your expression you see it too.”

“Not that I’m doubting you guys, but I’d really like to get a look at the raw data myself before I fully commit to this, but from what I’ve seen, this is crazy convincing. You guys have near on proved that humans receive signals from somewhere else. Doesn’t necessarily prove another reality, but its getting there.”

“We’ll be happy to show you the data. But before you dive too deep into that, we want to show you one last thing. You see, once we had shown, to our satisfaction that signals seemed to be coming in, in some way, we naturally wanted to know what kinda stuff was going back out, and further more, if there was a way for us to directly affect either of those streams.”

Anne nodded, kinda open to anything at this point. Amberly went over to another part of the room, and grabbed a thick stack of papers, lugging it back towards Anne. Anne looked at it, opening it up and turning through the pages. Some of the math and science inside she understood, other stuff was new. Reading between the lines though, she felt like she was able to follow the general flow of the logic of the document, even if she didn’t understand all the steps. The deeper she got, the more she had to skim, and soon she was just reading the section headers, the broad idea of what was happening in the paper starting to creep into her mind. Page by page, she flipped through it, until at the end, she saw the conclusion she had begone to hope for as she read the paper. She turned back to everyone else in the room.

“You guys found cheat codes to reality?”