11:24 PM | The Ninsirsir, Deck 2 | December 31st | 1608 COVENANT

  "You're a logic engineer yourself, Lamu, so you should understand what I'm about to show you decently enough," Nhi said, her eyes going into the middle distance for a moment as she interfaced with the device. "Maybe I shouldn't be showing you state secrets given your track record, but hey, in for a penny, in for a pound, eh?"

  She gestured a hand towards the terminal, which Lamu regarded with a mix of curiosity and suspicion. Still, she reached out and touched it.

  Images began to appear in front of her one by one, along with a complex stream of data. They depicted a mountain deep in the Akenesti Range - one of the larger ones, though Lamu wasn't much for geography or geology, so she couldn't say which - and, more specifically, a cavity that had seemingly been excavated within, connected to the outside world only by a small tunnel that exited miles away.

  Within that cavity were 15 floors, each roughly the size of a hippodrome and tall enough to contain a two-story building. They all contained exactly the same thing: Logic engines from end-to-end, tightly packed enough that maybe three people could pass between them simultaneously at a squeeze. They varied surprisingly wildly in model and age; some of them were cutting edge, looking like glass pillars with nary mechanical component in sight, while others were a few decades older, or even one of the biological models that had never really entered the mainstream due to their disturbing tendency to develop animal-like preferences and desires.

  Despite the (relative, they still couldn't compare to the works produced at the whims of the Iron Princes) miniaturization of modern logic engine hardware, large data centers were more common than ever as demand for complex golems and clerical aid in both the military and the freeholds continued to grow, but what she was seeing now was on a completely different scale. The eris, hydraulics and nutrients needed to even run such a thing could likely support a small city; the fact that she hadn't heard of whatever this was, assuming Nhi wasn't just showing off a proof of concept, already had certain implications.

  Before she even got to the details of the report, a suspicion of what she was seeing had already formed in Lamu's mind, and every extra detail only confirmed it. Data aggregation, financial, social and military modelling, cognitive emulation. A security clearance so complicated that you could probably the count the number of people who get in the door on your fingers and toes. The fact that there was no maze printer, only a vast array of maze readers, clinched it further, though the decisive evidence was probably the separate oversight unit on the top floor, connected to enough explosives to collapse the entire place in an instant.

  "This is a project that was originally spearheaded by the last couple of our administrations," Nhi resumed, interpreting her silence as a lack of understanding. "So even though it's fallen under the auspices of the new kids on the block, we made sure to keep a few of our fingers in the pie. I'm sure that you're--"

  "This is the system the Sibyl's have been working on for the past 40 years," Lamu surmised. "The global forecasting and advisory system."

  Nhi raised her eyebrows. "You know about it."

  "Of course I know about it. It's an open secret in the community." She looked at the name they'd given the thing: 'Abarakkum', the Eme word for 'steward'. Not exactly the most creative label, but better than naming it after a deity, which seemed to be most people's inclination. "I didn't realize it was already finished."

  "Oh, it's more than finished," Nhi said. "It's already replaced most of the old system the Convention was using for impact analysis. The thing is probably running more of the Grand Alliance than the joker in the Patriarch Spire."

  "I assumed there would be more caution," Lamu said, looking more closely over the data. "Not just in the construction but the implementation. There's neural tissue at the same synapse density as the human cerebrum. It might be the most flagrant flouting of the Covenant in history; I'm not sure how you could go further without just re-inventing mind uploading."

  "There's definitely something of flouty mood I'm feeling around lately," Nhi said tiredly. "I wasn't being over the top when I said 'lavatory paper' before. Lotta people of the opinion that it's all gonna be run into the ground one way or another, so there's justification to break a few eggs to keep the plates spinning."

  "It's disturbing to hear you speak so flippantly about an existential threat to our civilization. We're talking about a superintelligence; the same class of being that killed billions in the lead-up to the collapse."

  "Sorry, I'm not trying to downplay it. Obviously it's incredibly irresponsible. But well, it is what it is, you know?"

  "Is this the existential threat you're talking about?" Lamu asked. "The thing that's going to destroy the world?"

  She snorted. "I wish. No, like I was saying, this is our prophet. It's the reason the problem came to our attention to begin with-- Though shoot, who knows, maybe it is part of it too. All the experts assure us it's unable to lie, but I watch dramas." She took a sip from her drink. "The main thing this monstrosity is good for is wrapping it's head around numbers that are too much for us mere humans. It looks at huge amounts of data, data about the economy and history and technological progress the environment and how people are spending their time on the logic sea and everything else that's under the Great Lamp and casts a shadow, and then it makes inferences."

  "You're being extremely condescending," Lamu told her. "This was one step removed away from what I did for a living. I obviously understand of predictive modelling."

  "Alright, alright," Nhi replied, holding up her hands.

  "I can see where this is going, but what you're describing is science fiction," Lamu said. "No matter how advanced a logic engine may be, even one capable of outsmarting the entire human can't parse causality itself. Even if it could read minds through seeing the electrochemical signals of our brains, there is always far more information then even the most tyrannical state apparatus can collect. You are not going to tell me that the literal of the world have convinced themselves it's a certainty that the world is going to end simply because a magic box told them so."

  "It's more complicated than that, Lamu," Nhi said, getting a little exasperated. "Look. When I talked about ability to interface with the Tower of Asphodel-- I didn't explain how that would actually work, right?"

  "No."

  "So you were a delver, and you were affiliated with the Order of the Universal Panacea. You know that the Ironworkers basically left a bunch of their crap lying around in all of the Lower Planes, and in the other pocket-realms they made while doing their work." She gestured with her hand holding the glass. "Y'ever wonder why they did that? Like, generally."

  "Because they gave up from exhaustion without ever reaching the result they wanted," Lamu answered. "They never expected civilization to endure more than a couple of generations at best, with the Remaining World intended a send-off for the human race where they could live out the rest of their lives as people again. Everyone knows that."

  "Right," Nhi said with a nod. "But you'd think that, even that being the case, they still wouldn't be sloppy enough to leave these weird and dangerous testbeds all over the place, no? Like, they were basically the closest thing humans have ever come to gods, at least over the physical world. It wouldn't have taken much out of them to run some basic clean-up at the last minute, maybe spare us a Great Interplanar War or two down the line."

  Lamu frowned. "Just get to the point."

  "The real reason, if you look deep enough into their records, is that they still had some hope that, just a little tiny bit, that somewhere down the line somebody else would pick up the torch," Nhi explained. "They couldn't figure out how to make a decent world because, even after the nasty stuff they did to try and workshop a solution, the tools and technology they'd brought to the table were fundamentally backwards and crappy. They couldn't wrap their heads around their own creation, the Power, because they were still hung up on the methods of the world they'd grown up in. I know it's tropey, but you can't teach an old dog new tricks." She leaned back in her seat. "But us, living our whole lives here and needing to make it work-- Well, maybe we'd figure something out, right?"

  "You're saying that they left their facilities around on purpose, so that people would be able to use them to continue to manipulate the Remaining World."

  "That's the gist of it, yeah."

  "Okay," Lamu said coldly. "What are you expecting me to take from this."

  "Well, as technology has advanced, we've been able to do more and more, as they predicted. But there's always been a limit. Even interfacing directly with the Tower of Asphodel, we haven't been able to change the way it works in the way they did, to mess with physics or create wholesale new planes, and a while ago we finally figured out why." She sipped her drink. "It's because the Ironworkers left a kind of 'safety switch' on the executive controls of the Tower, so that we wouldn't accidentally destroy the world the second we figured out what we were doing."

  "'Switch' implies it can be turned off," Lamu surmised.

  "Ahehe, you're one step ahead of me!" Nhi giggled darkly. "Yeah, what was discovered a while ago was that this switch was designed to turn off after a long enough span of time had passed. That way, if a miracle had happened and humanity had not only stubbornly survived - not sure they had our methods in mind for that one, but whatever - they'd probably understand enough to not fuck things up."

  "That seems shockingly naive," Lamu said skeptically. "Wouldn't they consider the possibility that people might disagree about how the world ought to be changed? Or that people might use that power in bad faith?"

  "Well, there's two sides to it, right?" Nhi flopped her free hand to one side. "On the one hand, the Ironworkers and their crewmates, our ancestors, were kinda civically-minded in a way that's hard to even imagine today. When you go through hell with a group of people, it feels natural to live according to ideals born of that struggle, and you can lose sight of-- Well, let's call it baseline human nature, the proclivity to be a selfish little shit, and the way things get when everyone kinda knows things are that way. The Covenant of the Mourning Realms was written by people who really did believe the collapse had fundamentally evolved humanity in some way, that we'd be able to stick to those principles forever." She flopped it over. "But, on the other... well, I'm sure there have been times where you've been working on something for way too long, like installing a new kitchen set or something, and have done your best, so you just start saying 'screw it, it'll probably work out for the best'. You know what I mean?"

  "No," Lamu said. "I've never built a kitchen."

  Nhi sighed. "I just mean that most people have an inherent belief in happy endings. If you've really fought to make something happen, you wanna walk away thinking it's gonna be happily-ever-after, not that all the shit's just gonna surge up again like in a clogged toilet." She made a dismissive gesture. "But it doesn't matter. Who knows what they were really thinking. That's just the way it is."

  "And this switch is going to flip soon, your superintelligence somehow worked that out."

  "Nono," Nhi once again corrected her. "It already flipped, over a hundred years ago. It was set to happen in 1500."

  Lamu frowned.

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  "It's not like the Ironworkers left this information lying out in the open," Nhi explained. "As far as we're aware, the only group that was directly told about it were some of the progenitors of the Mekhian party, since their leader was the only surviving member of the group responsible for the, uh, what would you call it? 'Engineering' of reality, I guess. And the Mekhians have always been-- Well, let's say a little more safety-conscious, culturally speaking. Other than that, the only..." She trailed off, frowning slightly.

  "The only what?" Lamu asked.

  "Sorry," Nhi said, tapping a finger to the side of her head. "Just hearing about some developments on the situation with Isgansar. Nothing you need to worry about." Her eyes refocused. "Like I was saying: The only ever way to learn about all this is at a select number of their facilities, and the Triumvirate and Grand Alliance have had those locked down one way or another for centuries at this point."

  "There are still new Ironworker installations being discovered all the time. I saw a few myself in just the few years I was delving."

  Nhi smirked. "And who do you think was paying for you to do that?"

  Lamu wrinkled her nose. "That doesn't--"

  "I'm kidding." She paused. "Or, well, no, I'm not kidding; the government really does buy the majority of the new data coming in about the Lavyrinthikos. But those installations all have petty or secondary roles; the important ones are at the planar extremes, the Mimikos and above or the Ergastrikos and below."

  The Ergastrikos ('sandbox world') was the oldest extant plane, and the only one not built for human inhabitation at least in principle. The Ironworkers had created it as a sort of testbed for their experiments in creating functional physics; supposedly, the surface, larger than every other plane combined, was littered with the debris of shattered worlds. This was probably somewhat figurative; there had only been two expeditions to the plane that had returned, and concepts as basic as 'light' didn't even exist consistently there.

  Below it lay a metaphysical abyss containing nothing at all, where humanity could build another plane, if only they had more iron.

  "It's not like you can just visit one of these places and figure it all out on the spot either," Nhi continued. "Even after the switch disabled, it took years of research by the best Aetheromancers the field to create an incantation that could actually interface usefully with the Tower's controls. And of course there's been an incredible amount of effort spent keeping all this under wraps. Think how the Induction secret has been kept and multiply that by a hundred. If somebody's been within a degree of separation of a guy involved in the project, I could probably make a couple calls and tell you what color poop they had this morning."

  "Are you subject to that state surveillance?" Maybe it Nhi's annoying style of speech, but there was a part of her brain that refused to accept all this wasn't just a big joke, or even an outright lie intended to manipulate her. It felt like something out of a bad political thriller.

  Nhi smirked, though it was hard for Lamu to discern the emotions that informed the expression. "I'm one of the powers-that-be. I don't count."

  "If all it takes to not be subject to any scrutiny is to be wealthy and important enough, then no effort was spent keeping the secret at all."

  The older woman offered only a shrug in response.

  "You shouldn't have even researched it to begin with," Lamu said.

  "Hey, don't act like I made any of these decisions personally." Nhi held up a hand defensively. "This stuff is all out of my hands."

  "You said this could be done with an incantation. Do you mean just an incantation? No special equipment?"

  "Well, it's easy to lose sight of at our level, but a scepter is kinda special equipment--"

  "Don't be a pedant."

  Nhi smiled. "No, you don't need anything in particular." She pursed her lips. "Well-- Technically, you need a connection to the Tower of Asphodel, but we all have that through our bodies anyway. The access incantation is complicated, but not so much that you couldn't carry an engraving around."

  "So... anyone could access it, if they just knew how."

  "Any arcanist, yes."

  Lamu was almost speechless. The part of her that wasn't skeptical felt like throwing up.

  "The breach in security didn't actually come from us, unless there's one we don't know about," Nhi said. "It was the Triumvirate that dropped the ball. Brought in a researcher who was part of one of the smaller groups affiliated with the Scorned and the Cross and all the rest of them, and lost track of them during the early stages of the war. They haven't told us yet - haven't sent the ransom letter, so to speak - but we have reliable intelligence that the information has spread to at least twenty people in their upper ranks. You know how I mentioned that everything was going to go to shit specifically on November 29th, next year?"

  "The settling of Ninsianna, yes."

  "As I'm sure you know, even if they've never managed to regain the level of power they held prior to the Tricenturial War, your former friends have planted themselves in positions of modest power all over the Grand Alliance," Nhi explained. "We've kept them out of the serious parts of government - at least, out unless we know about it - but they've mixed up their tactics. Lately they've taken advantage of the fact that a lot more arcanists are being Inducted than their used to be on account of the invention of arcane interpreters to mesh themselves much deeper into the pneumenology profession itself. It's still a tiny number relatively speaking, but they're making more of themselves than they ever have before."

  This wasn't news to Lamu; it had already been going on for decades before she went into hiding, and even as removed from the group as she'd been, her contact had still kept her vaguely in the loop whenever she updated him at one of their mandatory meetings. Of course messing with the Induction process to favor a particular level of assimilation - primarily using drugs - was hardly a knew thing; that'd been the fate of her classmates at the group she'd attended as a child, though that practice had fallen out of favor somewhat as they'd run out of isolated pneumas that could be definitively identified as having belonged to children of a particular sex. There was a certain romance, she supposed, in the idea of having your child's soul merged with that of an orphaned ghost-child of similar background from your destroyed homeland, just like they'd shown them in those disturbing books. But once you were talking about someone who could just as well be middle-aged or older, it wasn't surprising parents got cold feet.

  So now it was mostly piggybacking off the people becoming arcanists by choice, something which hadn't previously been easy due to how tightly the process was overseen by the state, but as the war had continued and both the demand and capacity for basic-level casters had expanded tremendously, there had been a tremendous loosening of standards for those who were never to receive an Index. But in turn, this new breed of arcanist was far less useful-- Cannon fodder in any serious fight.

  "We've learned, or at least we can make an extremely educated guess, that this tactic has an end-goal," Nhi continued. "As part of the early colonization process, a lotta low-level arcanists are gonna be part of the initial settlement group. They'll be in charge of things like tending to the biosphere, building further infrastructure fast should the need arise, and protecting people if anything happens. Your friends--"

  "Stop saying that," Lamu interjected.

  "--are planning to use that to seize control," she finished. "They're going to sneak a huge number of their people into the settlement program - not just arcanists, but normal people raised in their communities too - then do a little mini-coup during the messy part of the process where everyone is too busy to really stop them."

  This was the first Lamu was hearing of this idea. "...why? What would be their objective?"

  "This is their endgame. They're gonna go mask off, declare to the world 'this is who we are, this is our new nation, everyone else fuck off'. And then, well, that'll be that."

  "That completely contradicts their objectives," Lamu said, frowning. "The Brotherhood doesn't want to just carve off some fief on an unstable, barely-fertile landmass to establish a parallel society that would be in direct competition with two far larger ones that despise them. They want to guarantee their security through gaining influence until their hold on the world's institutions is so strong they have nothing to fear. What you're describing would almost certainly nullify centuries of work while getting them killed in the process."

  Nhi leaned back further, giving another little shrug. "Not sure how much attention you've been paying lately, Lamu, but the Brotherhood's cause ain't looking so hot. It's a lot harder to survive in a surveillance society that's decided it's better off killing assimilation failures than giving them the benefit of the doubt. Plus, they're as susceptible to the current political mood of being a stupid, selfish asshole as anybody else." She raised an eyebrow. "And haven't we just been discussing a reason they might feel more comfortable going for broke?"

  "You're saying they're going to blackmail the world? To give them Ninsianna or they'll blow it all up?"

  "Maybe not in so many words," Nhi suggested. "The Brotherhood has to live in the world too, after all, however they might feel about it. In principle? They wanna keep the secret as much as we do. And in fact, everything we're hearing is that they're taking it pretty seriously. They might think that even the threat of revealing that the method exists could be enough to make the Grand Alliance just give them the fucking colony." She snorted. "And if we don't make the effort to smother this all in its crib, then they might be right!"

  Lamu squinted. "You think their plan could succeed?"

  "Sure," Nhi said. "Even the psychos in charge right now probably aren't quite at the level where they're chomping at the bit to get themselves killed saving a hunk of expensive rock where nobody even lives, especially not with the Triumvirate already breathing down our necks. Pretty sure the Brotherhood has been helping with that last part too; you're not the only person they had leak our technology up the Empyrean." She sipped her drink. "Though whether it'd work out in the long term for them, I couldn't tell you."

  She couldn't imagine it working, though she could barely imagine such a thing at all. Assimilation failures, in Lamu's experience, were extremely varied in what they actually wanted out of their connection to their former lives: Most, she would guess, definitely wouldn't be interested in this sort of outright separatism. They came to the meetings because they wanted a place they could exist in that context freely, but also identified with their new families and cultures to some degree. They wanted to have their cake and eat it.

  So if a nation of them arose, how many would actually answer the call? Would it be less than a million people huddled together, millions of miles away from civilization? How would that even end?

  "But like I was saying, that's not even the real problem," Nhi continued. "The issue is that we don't really know for sure who even has this information. And assimilation failure groups, even if they're taking it somewhat seriously-- They're not governments. And people, well, inevitably, they're gonna talk." She glanced towards the door. "Everything about the world we live today is the opposite of what the Ironworkers imagined things would be like when we got this point. Instead of arcanists being these cloistered scholars, most of them are doing things like mass-manufacturing nails all day. We're all miserable and divided. We're all--"

  "You put these facts into the logic engine and it determined that the information would keep spreading, and in all possible models it made of the near-future someone will deliberately destroy the world," Lamu concluded, this feeling more unreal than ever. "Because that's inevitably what would happen, if it really only takes one person. Without a broader system of power to check emotional outbursts or acts of mental instability, any concept of mutually assured destruction goes out the window."

  "Technically speaking, all we know is that someone will try to mess with the planar landscape," she said. "There could always be some extra check or balance we don't know about if they tried anything radical, and the chance wasn't 100%. Some people think that if we had a few more years, we could develop some kinda system where we had enough arcanists overriding anything anyone else could possibly try, continuously re-asserting normalcy." She nodded slowly. "But-- Yeah. That's basically the long and short of it. The worst possible scenario at the worst possible time."

  Lamu stared into space, feeling herself going cold and hard.

  "...how many people know about this?" she eventually asked Nhi.

  "Not many," she answered. "Few thousand people between us and the Triumvirate, many of which are dummies who aren't taking this as seriously as they should. A lot of us taking the problem the most seriously are on board today." She blew air between her lips. "Whiiiich brings us back around, I guess. To the moonshot we're taking right now."

  "The... Order's other project," she remembered. It was hard to even think. "You mean-- The Apega? Their attempt to commune with and manipulate the entity they discovered that they associated with entropy."

  "Yup." She took one last sip, then set her glass down. "You know much about it?"

  "No, almost nothing." She paused. "I mean. I know that it was a complete failure. That it proceeded for a psychotic amount of time - over a century - without any concrete results. And then was abandoned in favor of..." Her eyes wandered.

  "Lamu, we're running out the clock here, so even if it makes me seem like a jerk, I'm gonna get a little blunt with you." She put her hands together. "On the day you attended the conclave, your uncle originally had something he wanted you do for him. Right?"

  "Y-es," she said, sharply reminded of the sight she'd seen out the window a few hours earlier.

  "He wanted you to help him disappear, as part of the--"

  "Yes," she repeated.

  "But at the last minute, plans changed." She raised an eyebrow. "Did he like, tell you anything about why that was?"

  "I don't remember specifically," she said tersely. "He said something about there being an act of sabotage in the sanctuary, and that they'd have to move the plan down the road."

  Nhi considered this, nodding. "Sabotage is a word for it, I guess," she said. "What actually happened, we learned, is that someone - knowing the place was gonna get abandoned after all this, I'd figure - decided to make a hail mary and somehow performed a live test with the Apega project. And not just that, but it worked."

  "What do you mean, 'worked'? What did it do? Nothing happened."

  "Nothing you could see," she corrected. "At least, not this version of you. Do you know why the Brotherhood of the Scorned was financing that project for so long?"

  Lamu nodded. "They thought it was going to help them recreate their version of Earth. To escape from the Remaining World."

  "Well, what if I were to tell you something like that really happened?" Nhi asked. "That the Order managed to actually accomplish what we were talking about a minute ago, and actually improve on the Ironworkers results?"

  "I'd tell you that sounds like unprovable nonsense at best."

  Nhi nodded a few times. "Unprovable. Huh."

  Lamu looked at her questioningly, but she was silent for several moments, looking like she was thinking carefully. Finally, she looked back up.

  "What if I were to tell you that there's a good chance we're already on our way?"

  https://topwebfiction.com/listings/the-flower-that-bloomed-nowhere/ And thank you for reading! And the typo sheet still isn't getting filled out, so if you notice any, let me know!