| Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3 |
Clavia is taking a break to meditate. It’s not just for her mental health in
the abstract sense. In her case, it’s non-negotiable. She has to do it or
parts of her will overwhelm the others; usually the not-so-great part. One
of her constituent personalities was told a story once. It’s not so much a
story as a brief metaphorical anecdote. Well, it can be boiled down to that
anyway. The gist of it is that everyone supposedly has two wolves inside of
them. One of them is good, and the other is evil. The one who wins is the
one you feed. It’s not so simple with Clavia, though. She actually has six
wolves inside of her. Debra, a.k.a. The First Explorer is definitely the
alpha. She’s the strongest, and the one who had initial total control over
this body. When Echo Cloudberry regressed her back to youth, and tried to
erase her memories, the balance of power shifted. Clavia became more of an
amalgamation of all six identities. Yet those six original people are
still technically in here, and in order to maintain the balance, she
has to sort of commune with them every once in a while. She has to assure
them that the choices she’s making are righteous, and that she won’t let
Debra take over again. It brings a whole new meaning to being greater than
the sum of one’s parts. Because if “Clavia” can talk to the seven people
that she’s composed of, who even is Clavia at all? Is she a seventh person,
or what?
“I would like to call this Meeting of the Seven Stages to order,” Clavia
says from her perch on the topmost stage. She could have created a mind
palace that looked like anything, but this seemed fitting. The stage area is
in the shape of a hexagon, with the six lower stages surrounding the central
stage. Curtains divide the six audiences from each other, and can be pulled
further up so that each audience can only witness what’s happening on their
particular stage. As it is situated much higher, however, the seventh stage
is always visible to all audiences. Of course, there is no audience;
it’s only a metaphor, but it works for their needs. Right now, the curtains
are all pulled back, so everyone can see each other, including the one
underneath the seventh stage, allowing the others to see each other. Clavia
herself stands in the middle. Around, in clockwise order, we have Ingrid
Alvarado, whose body Clavia is occupying; Ingrid’s love interest, Onyx
Wembley of The Garden Dimension; Ingrid’s rival before the Reconvergence,
when they lived in the Fifth Division parallel reality, Killjlir Pike; Ayata
Seegers of the Third Rail; the dangerous one, Debra Lovelace; and finally,
Andrei Orlov of The Fourth Quadrant.
The play that they would be performing this year—if any of this were real—is
about a prisoner transport ship on the high seas of a planet called Earth.
Clavia is obviously the captain, with Debra as their one prisoner. Andrei
and Ayata are her guards. Ingrid, Onyx, and Killjlir serve as helmsman,
navigator and quartermaster, and boatswain respectively. Again, the acting
troupe is just the premise of the scenario, but Clavia felt that it was
necessary to come up with some sort of fictional background to stimulate
their minds. Their old lives are over, and there is no going back. They
don’t even have bodies anymore, so it’s best to have something new to look
forward to every day. They didn’t have to pretend to be stage actors—it
could have been anything—but the name of their pocket universe made the
concept essentially inevitable. They rehearse a new play every year. This
one is called Rocking the Boat. These meetings allow Clavia to regain
the memories that Echo took away from her, but before that happened, she had
the mind of a child, so you can’t expect anything too complex or cerebral,
even now that she’s older. Though, this one is indeed a little bit more
mature. It still has that classic Clavia tinge of humor as Debra is playing
the notorious evil pirate, Karen the Unappeasable.
“Can I get out of these chains?” Debra requests.
“I didn’t put you in those today,” Clavia answers.
“We did a dress rehearsal without you,” Ayata explains. She steps onto
Debra’s stage, and unlocks her manacles.
Clavia tears up. “Without me?”
“Wait, look over here,” Ingrid requests. She goes on when her double turns
to face her, “you did it. You cried on command.”
“I’ve been practicing in the real world,” Clavia explains proudly.
“I hope that doesn’t mean you’re using it to manipulate people,” Onyx warns.
“No people, just stars,” Clavia responds. “They are unmoved by my tears.”
“So the project is going well?” Killjlir assumes.
“Quite,” Clavia confirms. “We’re ahead of schedule. We’re more powerful than
even we realized.”
“I knew your parents were keeping you restrained,” Debra says with disgust.
“You had to get away from them to reach your potential.”
“We don’t know that they were doing anything,” Onyx reasons. “She’s older
now—it’s natural for her to come into her own. Maybe it’s like a stage of
puberty.”
“I chose them as my surrogate parents as a reason,” Clavia speaks up for
herself. “I love them both. Echo and I are doing this in honor of them, not
in spite of them.”
“Whatever,” Debra says.
“Aww, is someone a sad panda because I took away her solo?” Clavia asks.
Don’t get her started. “The story is about how we’re all feeling about our
place on the boat, and how we’re dealing with those emotions
without telling anyone about it. I have to sing, or my story’s not
getting told.”
“No, the story is about how prisoners are silenced, and how the general
public doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. That’s the whole point.
The way your character keeps being interrupted and dismissed should be
shocking and annoying to the audience. Karen lives in the subtext, and the
negative space.”
“That’s another thing, I don’t like her name,” Debra says. “It’s what people
actually used to call me.”
“Well, I admit, that one came from a place of pettiness,” Clavia tells her.
“I kind of like it now, though. I can’t imagine calling her anything else.”
“I won’t say another word about it if I can play the hero in the next one.”
Debra pitches this every year, and she has been denied every time except for
the third year. In it, she did portray the protagonist, and she absolutely
sucked at it. She’s the main character in her own story. Everyone feels that
way, but she really feels it, and that came out in her performance.
The rest of the cast may as well have not even been there the way she was
chewing up scenery. If an audience really had seen it, they would have
closed down on opening night.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Clavia says. She’s switching
between smiling and frowning, because she doesn’t know whether she should
even bring this up. They contemplated doing it a long time ago, but the
technology is too unreliable and messy. Consciousness transference is very
good about moving a digital mind from one substrate to another. It works by
scanning an entire brain all at once. It doesn’t understand the concept of
an amalgamated mind. Why would it? That doesn’t exist in nature. If
two people are occupying the same body, they’ve probably been allocated
entire independent partitions in the brain. The Seven Stagers are too
entangled with each other. When they’re on these platforms, it’s very easy
to distinguish them, but the mind uploader can’t enter this memory palace.
It has no way of recognizing them as multiple units, which should be
uploaded separately. The other concern is Clavia herself. They still don’t
know how much she relies on the six of them to even be her own person.
Perhaps she only thinks that she’s her own entity. Perhaps if they were to
leave, she would cease to exist.
“Did you decide what the next play is going to be about?” Ayata asks.
“It’s not about the play at all,” Clavia begins to clarify. “There may not
be one. There may not need to be one.”
The others look at each other across their stages. “Did you figure out how
to transfer us out of your avatar?” Killjlir guesses.
“I think I did.”
“Technology doesn’t advance that fast,” Onyx decides. “Not even the
Parallelers can do it.”
“To be fair,” she didn’t talk to any of them,” Ayata says to him. “She
couldn’t, or it would give us away. Maybe she found someone to trust who has
a new idea.”
“I already have someone to trust,” Clavia explains before anyone can come up
with their own theories on what’s going on. She takes a breath before
continuing, though. “I think that Echo can do it.”
Everyone has their own way of reacting to this, but some common threads are
groans, throwing up their hands, and shaking their heads. It’s not that they
don’t like Echo. They love him. They just don’t think that he can do this.
He’s conjured little critters out of nothing before, but that was back when
he wasn’t consciously aware that he was doing anything, or had any power.
He’s proven himself to be too in his head since he wiped his own mind, full
of self doubt and fear. As far as they know, unlike Clavia, he never got his
old memories back, and he may never have been strong enough to create human
bodies.
“Now, why do you think he can’t do it? We’re starscaping out there. We’re
building an entire universe out of dark matter and elementary particles. You
think he can’t build a few puny human bodies for you? With his help, I could
guide each of you out of my brain, and into your new ones. That’s what the
conventional technology is missing. It was designed to dump everything in
all at once, but Echo will have the context and intuition that it lacks.”
“You’re missing something too,” Onyx begins to use his experience and
expertise from the Garden Dimension. “Stars are somewhat uniform balls of
plasma, composed of hydrogen, helium, and metals. You can just toss in all
the ingredients, and the laws of physics will take over, particularly
gravity. I’m not saying what you and Echo are doing isn’t incredibly
impressive, but the complexity will come out of the imagination you have for
how your new universe is arranged, not by the inherent nature of the
individual celestial bodies. Human bodies, on the other hand, are
extremely precise entities, with complexities on a smaller scale. But just
because it’s smaller, doesn’t mean it’s easier. Sure, it requires vastly
fewer resources, but one tiny mistake could lead to catastrophe. You’re
talking about creating something that took billions of years to evolve
naturally, and unlike stars, it only happened once.”
“Wait,” Killjlir interrupts. “He doesn’t need to conjure the bodies. Those
can be bioengineered using the normal techniques. We would just need a way
to transfer us into them from Clavia’s head.”
“He wouldn’t be transferring them,” Clavia contends. “He doesn’t have the
power to upload digitized minds. These would be true organic bodies, imbued
with your respective consciousnesses through interdimensional pathways.”
“I don’t understand,” Ayata confesses.
“When you bioengineer a human body,” Onyx begins again, “there are only two
ways to do it. Either it’s an empty substrate waiting for a mind to be
uploaded into it, or it’s a regular person. An empty substrate is inherently
digital in regards to consciousness transference. Even if it’s organic, it’s
encoded with neural formatting compatibility. It can read a mind from
another digitized brain, or a computer server. A normal body can’t do that.
Back in the old days in the main sequence and the Parallel, they had to
first figure out how to convert people’s brains into the right format since
they didn’t evolve that ability.”
“So let’s do it like that,” Killjlir offers.
“We can’t,” Ingrid counters. “Like he was saying, that would be a regular
person. It would have its own mind already, right?”
“Right,” Clavia agrees. “However smart or dumb that person is, or how
competent they are to learn new things, the body would be ocupado, just like
someone born from a mommy and a daddy. You would be stealing their body.
Only Echo can make something both undigitized and empty.”
“Then why can’t we just use the digitized kind?” Ayata questions.
“Because you’re not digitized,” Clavia answers. “Our minds came together
through completely different means, using a rare if not unique metaphysical
process, catalyzed by the magnolia tree fruit that Ingrid ate just as you
were all about to die. And digitizing us can’t be done as an aftermarket
retrofit, because like we’ve been struggling with, the computer can’t
differentiate between our seven discrete consciousnesses.”
Ayata nods, getting it, then looks over at her love. “Andrei, you’ve been
quiet this whole time. Thoughts?”
Andrei takes a long time to respond, but by his body language, it’s clear
that he’s going to, so no one else speaks instead. “I don’t wanna leave.
It’s too risky. We would likely only get one shot at trying something like
that, and if it fails, our minds could become totally decorporealized, or we
might just die. I think we should revisit the idea of rotating control of
the Clavia body.” He looks up at her. “I wanna stand on the seventh stage.”
“Same,” Debra concurs.
She obviously just wants all her power back, but does Andrei have the same
aspirations?
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