Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

  Beyond the coast, a second ocean became overlaid against the first, this one a sea of stars. Like even a child would, I of course recognized the shape; it was the Milky Way galaxy, its two red-and-white arms blooming from an oblong golden core to encircle a foggy blue radius which twinkled from its brightest star clusters. The home of humanity, at least as it had appeared before the collapse reduced it to a molecular cloud.

  Our view didn't linger on it. Instead, we shot inward, passing by countless stars to eventually approach the solar system. We zoomed past the planets, past Cronus and its rings, past Ares and its red wastes, to finally focus on Earth. At this point I realized we had to be far in the past, because the surface of the planet was barren save for some simple mosses and grasses and the continents were almost unrecognizable, but that didn't remain the case for long. We quickly advanced through time as we soared along the ground, stalks giving way to bushes giving way to trees as insects and lizards proliferated upon the land, growing larger and more complicated by the second. Dinosaurs walked the earth, exploding in size before shrinking again, becoming sharper and more colorful until they were indistinguishable from the birds, who were in turn joined by rodents, bats, weasels, cats, dogs, bears, apes.

  Then humanity. All of prehistory and history playing out in fragmented moments, a slew of data that washed over my brain like a tide. Cloudy-eyed humanoids with long snouts sharpening stones like a birds make their nests. Sleeker figures holding sticks and lighting fires. Taller and more dignified ones sharpening spears and cutting simple clothes from pelts to replace their vanished fur. And then all at once: Huts, farms, towers along the Tigris and the Aur and the Andean coast, roads spreading like spider webs, iron forged in Navalan and Anatolia, libraries along the Kiang and Gai rivers, ships flowing from the Thalassa to spread towns all across Europe and Libya at lightning pace, like a virus gone completely out of control. Castles, factories, smoke-pouring foundries, guns, dammed rivers, coal and oil and solar and fracture and convention power. Airships, voidships, skyscrapers reaching the clouds. Nuclear fire killing millions who are replaced instantly. Edenic gardens even in the wastes of Alba. Concrete mountains covering every inch of land and reaching into the sea as the heavens grow bright with billions of satellites that begin to darken the sun. People in fashions of every age, bodies changing, warping, incomprehensible.

  And then, descent. Down to someone's shoe, to a single fleck of dirt on the ground. A maze of latticed matter more striking and complicated than any weave, of which each piece is lined with endless grooves of clustered masses of masses of atoms, warbling collections of specks in manic orbit of one another, vibrating as if ready to explode, each filled with indistinct light that flows from another source, from the true world, which I see now, in a way beyond my eyes that I cannot fully parse. An endless crystalline matrix of overlapping panes of reality, wrapping around itself, all of creation - itself eternal - but a single shadow of a single pattern within its impossible magnitude.

  And then we pull back again, back and back and back, far further than even when we saw the Milky Way, seeing the naked cosmos, the infinite manifolds in which all things not only exist, but exist in eternal recursion, each manifestation and all its deviations present in unceasing magnitude. Every potential world, every potential person, every potential way physics can operate; it's all here, all refractions of the same inevitable absolute. We dart between interpretations, seeing places (or times?) of such energy that all that can exist is fire, and their inverse, where everything is cold. Five-dimensional landscapes where horizons unfold hyperbolically in nameless directions, spaces of crushing and arbitrary gravity where matter and light are forced together into long and narrow beams, worlds where time sputters intermittently like Fang described in their note, matter pulled away into other planes before resurfacing like a bobbing buoy.

  Then, more mundane spaces. An alien world inhabited by strange, tall and headless quadrupeds, the texture of their skin closer to latex than that of any animal I'd ever seen, making me wonder if they were machines. A cavern - hive? city? - of eyeless and long-snouted beings with fur covered in some thick, oil-like substance in deliberate patterns. And the Remaining World. The great cities - Pallatakku, Tem-Aphat, Irenca, Saoyu, Daixue, Qatt, Illykrios, Ikkaryon, Tuon - transforming from collections of stone huts into sprawling metropolises. The Zythic Steppe that had inspired the game as it had first been left by the Ironworkers, raw and lonely and strange. I saw the inside of random people's houses, snippets of personal conversation that felt upsettingly voyeuristic, and then finally we returned to the Old Yru Academy of Medicine and Healing again, to the Exemplary Acolyte's class before ours, to the day we all first met in the new year 1407.

  There was a part of my brain that saw it and felt cynical, that felt there was nothing in this imagely which I hadn't seen before in dramas or echo games or animations, that refused to accept it as something real in any way that mattered. But the viscerality of it, the way it felt like everything in the world was being poured into my brain, took me off guard. My knees went weak, and I almost dropped my popsicle.

  "O-Oh," I muttered, having to lean over a little to steady myself.

  "Easy, Su," Kam said. "Deep breaths."

  I tried to follow her advice, inhaling rhythmically with my whole throat. People were probably staring at me, now.

  "Are you alright?" she asked.

  "I... were those aliens?" I asked, saying the first thing that came into my head.

  She frowned. "No one's even told you that much? There's a whole society in the Keep dedicated to finding and documenting them. Though they've been in a long dry spell recently, or so I've been informed."

  "I-I can't believe this. Aliens are fucking real?"

  "Rather getting hung up on the wrong clothesline there, I dare say."

  I shook my head and fell quiet for a moment, still trying to collect myself. When I looked back up, I saw that Kamrusepa had changed the setting we were Spectating again, overlaying some glassy waste on a rock in orbit of a crimson gas giant. It sort of lined up with the beach aesthetically, at least.

  "Why did you-- Why did you do that?" I asked, still feeling an irrational amount of vertigo. "That was scary!"

  "I was just telling you. To try and give you just a taste of what it means to be here, of this existence."

  "How was that supposed to accomplish that? I already know we can see out to the entire world across history. Multiple people have explained that to me. Someone even showed me the Remaining World blowing up, sort of."

  "And have you thought about what that means?"

  "Of course I've thought about what it means."

  She looked at me impatiently when I didn't immediately elaborate. I sighed in irritation.

  "Are you looking for a realization like, 'oh, I can actually have everything I ever possibly wanted in life here'?" I tried to lick the popsicle as I spoke; it made me feel vaguely queasy. "That I can bring back all the dead people I know, copy and live in my favorite historical palace, summon the Yellow Emperor to be my personal fitness coach, stuff like that?"

  "Well, I would think that knowledge would make you a little less dour," she replied flatly. "But I'm not talking about hedonistic pleasures."

  Kamrusepa looked out at the sea/crystalline hellscape. She leaned down, prop flowing from beneath one of her sleeves, and part of the fantastical scene before us became materially real as she reached for it, both world's coming into perfect alignment.

  She plucked a chunk of iridescent rock from the ground. "This is a carbon compound, similar to moissanite - that's a type of diamond if you don't know - partially comprised of a form of exotic matter which is rendered partially negative when interacting with gravity." She held it out. "Go on, take it. Feel it in your hands."

  I took it. It felt extremely smooth, except for one extremely jagged edge that almost cut my finger. Nevertheless, it was, well, a rock.

  "Toss it in the air," Kam encouraged.

  I did so. To my surprise, it went slightly higher than my expectations considering its weight.

  "Oh," I said. "That's... kinda interesting."

  "Su, no human who has ever lived in all of history has laid hands on this material," Kam explained severely. "You studied physical natural philosophy, you know this. Negative matter was considered the stuff of pure fantasy even in the Imperial Era, the realm of science fiction novels that want to contrive a means for faster than light travel. It wasn't present in the Milky Way, nor even the entire Local Group, whatsoever." She thrust a commanding finger at the stone. "The only condition in which it is able to arise is when temperatures are so phenomenally high as to disrupt the boson field, followed by the creation of a stable micro-vacuum at a molecular level. Ergo, that single chunk which you hold now in your hand transcends the entirety of human endeavor as you know it. It is arguably more valuable than all other objects amassed across the totality of civilization. In interacting with it, you have transcended the wildest dreams of the highest of kings, even the Iron Princes. None of them have ever felt this."

  I tossed the rock in the air again, now sort of getting the hang of it. While it was difficult to top my conversation with the Lady in terms of scholarly revelation, a part of me did, of course, find this all fascinating. Or rather, Kam was entirely right. Theoretically, something like this could have been used to avoid the collapse. Or leave the Remaining World. Even time travel wasn't out of the question. If I could take it home, it would change everything.

  But...

  "But you can just make as much of it here as you want," I said. "Or just... use the infinite eris pool to make something identical that behaves the exact same way." I continued to toss it up and down. "And we're not part of that world now. Things are only special relative to the context in which they exist, in their transformative potential."

  "That's not the point."

  "I understand what you're getting at. I should feel something stronger, getting to experience something that would've been impossible a month ago, but after I got murdered by those people in the Magilum, it was like a switch flipped, and everything just started to feel like virtual reality. Or-- No, it's not just that." I furrowed my brow. "I guess I've never really found anything that isn't interpersonal that exciting. I remember a few years after our class broke up, I took a bunch of trips around the world. I visited Sacred Vir, Altaia, the Triumvirate, all these places that are objectively historically and aesthetically exciting, and I was excited on the way there, every time. But once I arrived, I kept just thinking, 'What was the point? I could have seen this on the logic sea'. And it was the same way when I moved to Deshur years later. My family kept talking about how lucky I was to get to be one of the first people to explore this totally new place no one had ever lived before, but just felt like a different wallpaper on the same stuff."

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Kamrusepa abruptly snatched the crystal back in mid-air, glaring at me.

  "Hey!" I protested. I'd been starting to enjoy it.

  "You're misunderstanding me," she said, gesturing at me with the rock like she might use it to clobber my face in. "I'm not talking about thrills, for goodness sake. While it's distressing to see you're somehow still depressed after so much subjective time, this isn't about how well your bloody dopamine receptors are working."

  "What is it about, then?"

  "It's about knowledge, Su! Truth, for its own sake!" She tilted her head. "Don't you feel something, learning that this exists? Knowing what it feels like in your hand? Doesn't it provoke more questions, themselves demanding resolution?"

  "I mean." I looked down at it. "I mean-- Yeah, I suppose."

  "I'm not going to pretend I knew you perfectly," Kam said, "but the thing I remember most about you, more than your constant defeatism and part and parcel with your stubborn desire to nitpick everything under the sun, was how neurotically inquisitive you were about everything. Whenever we did a project, you were always the one who pushed the furthest in the oddest directions, who got obsessed over the most particular minutiae, who would never let a sleeping dog lie. Good God, isn't that why you like mystery novels? I shouldn't even need to cite historical example. You were acting like this just a half hour ago."

  It was weird to hear her framing my personality like this. I did think of myself as naturally curious, but I guess over the years the nature of that curiosity had changed. When I was young, I wanted to know things in the same way that I experienced envy. I saw the world, in all its terrifying radiance, and both wanted to swallow it and kill it. To one way or the other resolve the fear that I'd never be able to experience it in the way I desired, to actually be happy as a complete person-- Whatever that even meant.

  But at some point, maybe around the time my second relationship had ended and my serious career as a researcher came to an end, it had become more solipsistic than that. Like I said a little earlier, I wanted the self-empowerment of looking for an answer and getting one. Bottled meaning I could take a hit of like a drug.

  "So you can't tell me," Kam said, biting a chunk off the top of the popsicle, "that you're not marveling at all this, on some level. That you're not filled with a thousand thousand questions, potential experiments." She gestured out at the sea. "Go on, try answering one right now. What's a thing you would like to see with this Power? Any question from your entire life up until this point is resolvable in this very moment, unless it violates the privacy field."

  I bit my lip. "Honestly, most of the things I want to know probably would."

  "Don't be difficult!" She insisted. "It can be anything, academic or otherwise. I won't judge you."

  I struggled to think of much I'd be comfortable with us both seeing together, so eventually just ended up asking her a series of rather banal questions that would occur to anyone. What was the cause of the false vacuum in which the Milky Way and many of its neighbors had resided within prior to the collapse? (The answer was interesting, but dry and predictable - a quirk of pressure at a cosmological scale in the early universe, far from the tales of genocidal alien gods that had long been the fixation of pop culture.) What was the nearest form of sapient life outside the Solar System? (A race of vaguely arachnid fish on the Sagittarius arm; our scans had missed them because they never developed space travel.) How historically accurate was the Emegian King List? (Not at all.) Where did life come from? (Organic compounds scattered around the solar system early in the history of the Earth, which then developed further in a trench in the southern hemisphere.)

  After several of these inquiries, Kam started getting irritated with me again. "Su, you're not even excited about this."

  "Of course I'm excited," I objected. "This is all really fascinating."

  "But you're not asking what you really want to see."

  "I'm trying."

  "That's exactly the point! You shouldn't need to try!" She scrunched up her face in exasperation. "I can't believe you'd be truly numb like this if you've only been here for a few weeks. You're blocking something off, right now."

  "It's more complicated than that," I began. "I--"

  "Do you remember, Su," she digressed, "when we talked about why people were hostile towards the Order, and towards the idea of a world without death? And you'd give your spiel about narratives, and why people need them."

  "Of course I do." I hesitated. "...I've been thinking about our conversations back then a lot recently, considering the circumstances."

  "It failed to occur to me back then, but there's actually an anecdote from my youth I believe is pertinent to the topic, and will perhaps reach you more than an abstract argument." She gathered her thoughts for a moment and took a breath, ominously preparing to speak extensively. "When I was a child, I was acquainted with this other girl named Maggy; not the brightest blossom in the garden, but altogether a very kind-hearted person. When we were both young, Maggy wanted to be a dancer. She was always talking about her dreams of going to the capital and performing in some famous theater or another, playing music in her room and practicing for hours on end, that sort of affair. But at puberty, she developed some sort of issue with her pituitary gland - or something of that ilk - and grew abnormally tall, to the point that she suffered difficulties walking and with her heart."

  "She was devastated," she continued. "Her dream was lost completely. Even were it not for her physical difficulties, her appearance had been rendered abnormal in a manner that would never be accepted in the performance industry, and her personality changed considerably. She became dour, cynical, and extremely reserved. She stopped attending school or even leaving her home, and as a result, we fell out of touch despite having previously been somewhat close. Now, of course, there are things she could have done. We lived in an enlightened age; even then, many surgeries existed capable of reshaping the body that didn't even require an arcanist. Legs, arms, feet and hands could be broken and shortened. The spine could be painstakingly corrected and given artificial support. Even the skull could be broken apart and reassembled in a different space. Now, would any of this have been easy? Of course not. The expense would still be extraordinary by the standards of our community, the process long, and successful results and recovery not guaranteed. And even if it worked, it would not have been perfect. In terms of her dream, the sum total of her efforts would never even be enough to place her on equal footing with a girl who was merely lucky enough to be average. It was, categorically, unfair. But could it have been done? If she had grown determined, or cunning, or worked herself to the bone? Certainly it could have."

  I kind of wanted to run into the sea but my legs were still too weak.

  Does she not realize how weird it is to talk about an actual person like this?

  "Again, don't misunderstand me," Kamrusepa persisted, staring at me intensely with her lime-colored eyes. "I don't say this in judgement of poor Maggy. On the contrary, I have great sympathy for her. But I've come to believe that every human, or perhaps even every animal, possesses an instinct to both dominate and to submit. That is to say, when we are faced with an obstacle to our desires, a crossroads appears within our winds, down which one path lies attack and the endurance of the ego, and along the other lies acceptance and the transformation and diminution of the ego. And this happens irrespective of whether defeating the obstacle is realistic. In the same regard that we are what we eat, we are what we concede, and the act of concession is psychologically permanent." She pointed the rock at me again. "I think what you refer to as 'narratives' are more like parasites, or perhaps symbiotes if you want to be more charitable. Things we hate that we have made peace with by incorporating into ourselves. And those symbiotes want to survive, want to proliferate, even at the expense of their host."

  "I-- I see."

  It kind of reminded me of my conceptualizing the world as a kind of puzzle which could only ever be solved in one way, though obviously from a very different perspective.

  "I met Maggy again years later, and I offered to help her out a little financially, but at that point she didn't even want it. She'd conceded so much, the person I knew at the start wasn't even there any more. Just this different being, made up of all these symbiotes."

  "You've... obviously thought about this a lot."

  "It has been some time, Su," she stated with a sharp smile.

  "I don't know if I'm seeing how this connects to what we were talking about, though."

  She drew back a little. "It's difficult for me, having this conversation, to remember I'm speaking with a version of you that's been through - relatively speaking - so much. I'm sure Ptolema has explained this to you already, but the nature of our recollections of the Remaining World prior to the conclave means it feels like we were talking about all this only yesterday."

  I frowned. "It doesn't feel that way to me. Not yet."

  "That's why I want to ask. Do you still hold to what you used to say back then? About the pursuit of that which is considered beyond people's reach, and about meaning itself?"

  I thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. "I suppose, more or less." I snorted. "It feels a bit pathetic to say that I still have the exact same mental framework as I did as a schoolgirl, though." I looked at the ground. "I'd amend it to say that I don't think people need narratives to survive. It's just not great."

  She pointed at my hand. "You need to finish more of your ice lolly. It's beginning to melt."

  I looked down at it; it was indeed dripping on the sand. I took another lick.

  "There's a way your framework differs from mine," she continued. "In your conception of human psychology, the focus is on the treatment, on 'narrative' as a way to abate an existential fear or unpleasantness that is considered fundamental." She looked at me. "But I don't think that's what's really going on, because my thinking is focused on the problem. On the presence of the parasites." She bit another chunk off her popsicle-- Sorry, 'ice lolly'. "Obviously they form an evolutionary function, but in another light, all of human history could be called a battle against these things, fought by people who refused to submit. And here, we've created a kind of sterile environment. A place in which they cannot survive."

  "You know, I kind of thought your ideology might have changed," I commented. "Like. Maybe at least a bit."

  "You're full of parasites, Su. That's your problem. You're looking at a well and not drinking because they're telling you you're not allowed to drink water." She leveled her gaze. "So let me ask again, not the you that stands here now, but the one that existed in the past, perhaps before we ever even met. What does she feel, standing here? What does she want to see?"

  The annoying part of Kam's new philosophy - if you could call it that - was that it wasn't even that different from what I'd been thinking about the other week, when I'd been sulking in my Domain after the second time I'd talked to the Lady. The only reason was that she was framing the idea of the 'world being wrong' as the world being some kind of monster, rather than humans being an unreasonable, ridiculous species.

  Come to think of it, hadn't I been hoping back then that Kamrusepa would be miserable here? Gods, I never get fucking anything.

  Anyway, I wanted to dismiss everything she was saying as irrelevant. I had things I desired. I just couldn't get them, at least not yet.

  But the truth was, seeing that spectacle had opened some little door in my brain, and ideas were slowly trickling in from the less wholesome parts of my brain.

  I want to see how the other little shits at the orphanage died. I want to see how miserable their small little lives were.

  I want to see the worst things that happened to the fuckers who beat me up at school.

  I want to see what their faces would be if they saw the life I'd lived, all that I'd accomplished, compared to them. That they don't even get to be here.

  I want to know what kind of miserable life my real dad ended up leading. And if it's not miserable enough, I want to bring him here to make it miserable.

  I want to see the most embarrassing secrets of the Iconist pricks who ruined the world. I want to see what they felt when they realized they'd doomed civilization.

  I want to see my grandfather dying again.

  I want to see if Sapa ever regretted breaking up with me.

  I want to see what Ran looks like n--

  I twitched. That one wouldn't work because of the privacy field, anyway.

  "You're making a peculiar expression, Su," Kam observed. "What are you thinking?"

  I flattened my lips. "It's-- I don't want to say."

  She laugh-scoffed. "You're embarrassed? You don't have to show me, but I doubt it would shock me." She smirked. "You may only feel like you've been awake for a short time, but I doubt you've been able to miss the extent of the normalized depravity here, one of the tamest Domains. Whatever you have in mind is probably pedestrian in comparison to what I've seen."

  "Why are you acting like this world is some paradise, anyway?" I asked, changing the subject. "You're running a--" I hesitated, lowering my voice. "Aren't you running an organization trying to change it?"

  She squinted. "I don't run it, just this one part."

  "Don't be pedantic."

  "It's far too soon to talk about the fundamental issues there are with this place," she said. "I'm trying to encourage you to come to your own conclusions. And you said it yourself, we have all the time in the world."

  I looked at her for a moment, then sighed. I took another lick, then reached into my bag, withdrawing a small notebook, which I held out before her.

  She frowned. "What's this?"

  "You don't recognize it?"

  "I don't believe so."

  "Open it."

  She did so, flicking over the first couple of pages.

  "This is my handwriting," she spoke, perturbed.

  "You don't remember writing it, either?"

  "Let me take a quick look."

  In the end, the 'quick look' ended up being over five minutes and about twenty pages, possibly going as far as her meeting with Ophelia. Finally, she looked back up.

  "Where did you get this?"

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