The Seventh Stage: Rock-Ribbed (Part VI)

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Echo didn’t like the idea of his sister’s body being piloted by an evil transdimensional god-being. Debra knew that he wouldn’t, which was part of her plan all along. They believe that he has the power to conjure entirely new substrates for the six of them to inhabit. He does that—he gives Debra a new body—she’ll do what the rest of them want, and find the person responsible for transporting everyone from the original five realities to their new home in the Sixth Key. She’s not asking for this for her own selfish reasons. She needs it.

Debra is not evil anymore. She’s become a better person, and genuinely wants to help now, which she knows will only make her an even better person. That’s what she learned on the first stage. Diversity and community are the keys to harmony, even though they can lead to conflict. If she doesn’t end up being able to find who the Cloudbearer twins are looking for, it won’t be for lack of trying. Someone that powerful is a master of time and space, and may have the means to shield themselves from being pinpointed, detected, or identified. Still, even with the uncertainty of success, Debra doesn’t think that it’s unreasonable to ask for a new body to call her own. It’s not like they don’t want to give her one. They just don’t know if they can trust her. That’s okay, she’s willing to do whatever it takes to change their minds.

He’s standing there, still weighing their options. “Think of it this way,” she begins.

Echo closes his eyes and holds up a silencing finger. “Shh. Just shh,” he says, shaking his head. He continues to keep his eyes closed while trying to make up his mind for another few minutes. “You don’t have to convince me anymore. I just need to figure out how to do what I’m trying to do.” Though his eyes are still closed, he can sense when she’s about to speak again, and shushes her once more. “I don’t want your help either. I have my own simulations running through my head at the moment.”

Debra sighs louder than she meant to. She quietly says sorry, even though that technically only adds to the ambient noise, and distracts him more. She centers herself mentally, and stands before him patiently and quietly.

After ten more minutes, he opens his eyes, and stares at her with a cold disdain, but also a sense of...determined acceptance, if that makes any sense. “I know what I have to do. Let me talk to Clavia.”life

Clavia passes by Debra on their way to swapping places in their shared mind palace. The former is center stage now. “What do you have to do?”

“Did I ever tell you that I met my mother?”

“What? No. You’re not talking about Judy, right?”

He laughs. “No, I’ve obviously met her. I mean the woman who gave me life. When I put us back to being children, we both collapsed and fell unconscious. We had to sort of reset to factory settings. I don’t know what it was like for you. I guess you and the others were formulating your internal seven stages metaphor. I left my body, and communed with Olimpia Sangster. We actually spent quite a bit of time together before we both decided that it was time to part ways. So I won’t go over everything we discussed, but it was nice to get to know her. Anyway, when I woke up as a kid, I didn’t remember any of it. Judy and Bariq raised us as siblings, doing their best to mould us into well-rounded, productive members of society. It wasn’t until later that I was able to recover those moments with her.”

“I wish I could have been there with you,” Clavia says. “Debra is cognizant of facts about Team Matic, and all that, but they never met. Ingrid and Onyx each knew them only briefly.”

“You might meet them one day,” Echo says with a knowing smile. Perhaps she was there, just at a different point in her own timeline. He goes on, “she comes from a time on Earth when religion had largely faded from society, but it was still around. A lot of factors were at play, of course, but the greatest push towards atheism happened because those who believed in God or gods usually also believed in some kind of life after death. They let themselves die because if they didn’t, they would never have the chance to live in the paradise they were promised. If they had just accepted the longevity escape velocity as a new characteristic of a devout life, superstition might have survived. But these die-hards had children, who watched their loved ones die for nothing, so they switched out, and eventually, belief died alongside the believers themselves.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because, Clavia, we are the gods. We are those who are believed in. And we’re about to give the two undecillion people of the universe everything they could ever need to be happy. If you think we’re revered now, just wait until we check every box in every religion’s idea of a true living god.”

“What are you saying? We should quit?”

“Absolutely not,” Echo insists. “I’m saying that we should leave. There is nothing for us in this new world. We don’t want them worshiping us.”

Clavia laughs. “You think they’re not going to worship us ‘cause we’re not around? I want you to think about that for a moment.”

“I should rephrase. We don’t want to have to watch them worship us. I agree, they’re gonna do it. I’m worried about a massive resurgence in religious belief, but I don’t think we can stop that. We can’t save them, and save them from themselves, at the same time. We can’t give them something tangible to reach out for.”

“It’s the opposite, Echo. We have to be there. We have to act like normal people. That’s what the Tanadama did, and it’s why those two undecillion people even exist. Almost everyone is from the Parallel. Ramses and Kalea are leaders. They’re accessible. If we too are accessible, it will make it harder for mysticism to take root, not easier.”

Echo looks away with a huge sigh. “I know.”

“Then why are you arguing against it?”

“Because I am going to leave, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

“What are you talking about?”

He turns back. “I can make new bodies for your friends, but I won’t survive it.”

“That seems arbitrary.”

“I ran thousands of simulations in my head. It never works unless I do it that way. I can’t make entire people out of nothing. I have to draw upon my own energy, and that will destroy me. I’m just trying to rationalize it by coming up with a way that that outcome could possibly be better for the universe once it’s done.”

“Even if it is, it won’t be better for me.”

“I know,” he repeats. “In a few different religions, depending on how you define them, there’s a story of the first man. His name was Adam. He was alone until God cut him in half and created a woman named Eve.”

“I’m familiar with Genesis,” Clavia says. “Debra is the First Explorer, remember? She watched all the people who wrote that book.”

“Right. Well, it’s kind of like that. But in my case, I have to split myself in sixths, and the result is that I’m no longer an independent entity. I suppose that my soul may live on in the others, but the simulations don’t have a definite answer on that.”

“No. There must be some other way. And if I’ve learned anything from writing several plays, it’s that when someone says there’s another way, there really always is.”

Echo smiles at her. “I’m not going to argue with you about it, but I am going to split myself apart, and give your friends new bodies. I don’t need to survive.”

“No. We just won’t do that. We don’t need to. They’re perfectly fine in there.”

“Debra says that she won’t help us if we don’t set her free.”

“Well, I’ll talk to her. If she knows that it will kill you, she won’t go through with that demand, and if she does, then we can’t go through with it, because she’s obviously lying to her advantage.”

Clavia’s consciousness suddenly disappears as Debra takes over. “Actually, it’s not a matter of being set free, but of getting my toolbox back. I can’t do what you asked unless I’m back to my old, powerful self. Here’s the metaphor. You’re asking me to shoot a target, but you don’t want to give me my bow and arrow. Recreating my body is like giving me the weapon. It’s non-negotiable. I don’t just want it. I need it.”

Clavia takes back control of the body. “I don’t think she’s lying.”

“I don’t either,” Echo replies.

“Hold on.” Clavia’s eyes glaze over as she recoils into herself to hold an impromptu meeting of the Seven Stages. It’s brief. “Okay. Andrei wants to talk to you.”

“Should I go in your mind?” Echo offers.

“Nah, I’m already here,” Andrei says.

“What’s up?”

“What would happen if you only split once? Just one new person?”

Echo contemplates it. “I’ve never run that scenario specifically, but I did try to generate one substrate at a time, as opposed to all at once, and it seemed to go all right until I got to the third one before I couldn’t continue.”

“Then just do that. Run that scenario for real, but stop yourself on purpose.”

“You want me to create a new body only for Debra?”

Andrei shakes Clavia’s head. “She has powers. She needs someone like you to make the kind of body that she requires. The rest of us can wait. There are other options. They’re just not in the Sixth Key.”

“I’m willing to try that, assuming you can convince everyone else.”

Clavia’s eyes glaze over once more. She comes back to speak for the group. “Will this work? Will you survive this?”

“I believe so,” Echo says sincerely.

Clavia breathes deeply, and looks around. “Couldn’t have picked a more beautiful place. They’re standing in the cold, sterile corridor in the finger of one of the matrioshka bodies. They don’t choose specific places to meet. Every time they’re in separate places, and need to reunite, they just think of each other, and rendezvous at a random location. Time itself seems to choose on their behalf, and it has no apparent preference.

He chuckles and transports them away. They’re now in one of the rotating habitats. It’s a lush garden, densely packed with life. In particular, they’re standing next to a very small, clear pond. It’s barely larger than a bathtub. They didn’t create this with any concentrated intent. They didn’t have the time or energy to conceive of every single blade of grass. They built macros from their powers, and programmed the worlds to basically build themselves, starting with a spark, and iterating from there. It was very effective, if not a bit unsettling. If they didn’t make this watering hole on purpose, did it just create itself, or is there another force at play. Is God indeed real?

“All right, Clavy,” he begins as he’s removing his clothes, and stepping into the water. “I’ll see you on the other side. Best put Debra front and center so it’s easier for me to extract the right consciousness.”

“I’m here,” Debra answers.

“Your residual self-image. Focus on it. Or...I guess if you would rather have the body of a tall black man, I’ll make that for you instead.”

“No one’s called me Airlock Karen in a long time, and I was never racist...” Debra pauses. “But no, I wouldn’t like to be a tall black man, thank you very much. My original form will be fine.”

He nods and closes his eyes, leaning back to float in the water.

“Though, I wouldn’t mind you making me a bit younger than I was before.”

Echo smiles but keeps his eyes shut. Like her, he focuses. He tries to count every atom in his body. Every molecule, every cell, and every organ. Atoms can’t really split, or they’ll explode, so the constituent parts of the new Debra substrate won’t really be coming from him. Instead, they’ll be composed of elementary particles that he sources from across the dimensions, and channels through his body. The energy builds in waves, accumulating in the pockets of space between his atoms. Pulsing, vibrating, firing. He can feel a hot pinprick in his forehead. It drives deep into his skull, and comes out the other side. The two ends travel down through the center of his face, and then further down his body. As the chainsaw of time and space cuts through him, the energy tries to escape, but the fundamental forces hold it all together. The two halves split apart, but they’re both incomplete. As one half morphs and transforms into a female form, new body parts take shape on both halves, replacing the bits that each lost.

When it’s all over, they both turn to face each other. Echo is confused. “Debra, this is not what you looked like, even at a younger age. You did want to appear as someone else.”

“Echo?” she replies. “I’m not Debra. I’m Clavia.” She looks down and away. “I’m alone. There’s no one in my head anymore but me.”

“We’re still in your head.” Someone piloting the original Clavia body remains standing on the bank. “You’re the one who has vacated.”

“Who is that?” Clavia asks from her new body.

“Andrei. I’m in charge now.”

“Why did you do this?”

Andrei frowns. “We can’t trust Debra. We only needed her power, and now...you’re the one who has it.” He lifts his chin in an arbitrary direction. “Go save the universe. We can’t hold you back anymore.”

“Don’t you understand?” Clavia questions. “You six gave me strength. Without you, I’m just...a baby.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” comes a voice from the other side of the pond. It’s some guy.

“Who are you?”

“Aristotle Al-Amin,” he answers stoically. “I believe you’ve been looking for me?”

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The Seventh Stage: Painting Rocks (Part V)

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Echo is standing in front of the blue wall, painting wispy white clouds on it, paying close attention to details. It would look complete to anyone else, but to him, the work is never done. He can always add one more curve...one final flourish.

Clavia walks up to him. “There you are. What are you doing?”

“Painting this wall. It ain’t gonna paint itself,” Echo replies, still watching what he’s doing.

“It’s literally going to paint itself,” she counters.

He smiles. “I know. Sometimes I just need a break to unwind. Like you with your little headplays.”

She nods. “Fair enough.”

“What’s the count?”

“Three thousand, seven hundred and four.”

He drops his elbow, and looks over at her. “Technically at quota. We’re ready for move-in.”

“Like you said, in the technical sense. We still need to figure out how to convince a supermajority to do it, or it’s not really helpful.”

“We also need to figure out how to do it without loading everyone onto a proverbial bus, and driving them here.”

“It’s time to talk to Cedar,” Echo realizes. They have been dreading this day for a long time. They like him, but they don’t know how he’s going to react or respond to this news. There are whispers that the Cloudbearer twins are building something, but no one knows what, and all of their guesses are wrong; though off by varying degrees. Cedar ran his campaign for power on a foundation of intercivilizational unity. He believes that the only way to keep the Reality Wars at bay is if there’s no one to fight against, because everyone is on the same side. The amount of space between people in this universe could tear them apart. It’s the distribution. Cedar is probably gonna have trouble with the distribution.

“Yeah, we have no choice. Do you think he’ll be mad we didn’t read him into the situation earlier?”

“He’s serving as Head Advisor to our parents,” Echo replies. “He was too preoccupied to worry about this. That can be our excuse for keeping it a secret from him.”

“Good idea.” Clavia takes her brother’s hand, and transports them both to what essentially amounts to a holodeck, though on a much grander scale. They’re standing on an island floating in the air. At least, that’s what it looks like to them. It’s just an illusion. The “air” around them is clear purplish water. They can still breathe, of course, and talk just fine. The sky above is much more unambiguously an ocean. It’s upside down. Waves jut down, and spray a sweet misty rain down towards them. Some of it tastes like chocolate, other drops like honey. Their feet are planted firmly on the ground, though they feel like they could float away at any second. All around them are crystalline structures, also purple, since that is the theme. A stream gives way to a waterfall that slips over the edge, and disappears into the oblivion below, though again, it’s just invisible floor. Between them and the sky are giant turtles, swimming around. One of them nods and winked before moving on.

They aren’t alone on this floating island. They summoned Cedar, and are currently patiently waiting for him to get his bearings in this new world. “This breaks the laws of physics,” he notes. “I’m assuming it’s not real?”

“No,” Echo replies. “Our powers do have some limits.”

“You’ve been gone for nearly a month,” Cedar points out.

Clavia smirks. “We’ve been gone longer than that.”

“Framejacking, or temporal acceleration?”

“Both,” Echo answers. Time is moving faster in this universe, so more gets done in a shorter amount of time in comparison to the Sixth Key, but their own minds are also operating at much higher speeds, allowing them to think and act more quickly.

“This is what you’ve been working on?”

Echo laughs. “This took only a few seconds to construct. We got the idea from Castlebourne. Most of the domes on that world are physical, except for the holographic sky. One of them is nearly all holography. You can make it look like anything. We chose this today. Isn’t it cool?”

“Yeah,” Cedar agrees. “What am I doing here, though?”

Echo clears his throat. “What is the number one cause of tension and conflict in the Sixth Key?”

Cedar dismisses his words with a wave of his hand. “Don’t pitch me. Just tell me what you’ve done, and what you want. You’re gonna need to learn this for when you take over in a more meaningful sense. We’re in charge of undecillions of people back home. No one has time to beat around the bush or be polite about it.”

“Very well,” Echo decides. He reaches up and pantomimes pulling a stage curtain open. As he does so, a tear in the hologram appears in the far, far distance. Behind it, they see what looks like regular outerspace, but as the curtains separate even farther, a figure appears. It looks like a big metal statue of a humanoid, or perhaps just a big robot. It’s hard to tell what scale they’re working with here, so Echo has to explain. “Have you ever heard of the matrioshka body?”

“I have,” Cedar confirms. “I went to a sort of school like you did. That’s where the afterlife simulation was housed, before it collapsed, and everyone was transported into Fort Underhill. The Sixth Key shares interdimensional space with them now. I never knew what happened to matrioshka body, though. That it?”

Echo shakes his head. “That. Is MB-3704.”

Cedar laughs. “You made your own? That’s impressive.”

Echo and Clavia exchange a look. “He said it was three-seven-zero-four.”

Cedar is confused, but only for half a second. Then his face drops into a frown. “You made 3700 of these things?”

“Yeah,” Echo says.

Cedar starts to pace around and shake his head, almost in disappointment. “Why? What do they do?”

“Well, they...have people live in them.”

“Who lives in them?”

“No one yet, that’s what we’re asking you for.”

“Asking me for what?” Cedar questions. “I told you, get to the point. Stop trying to be dramatic.”

“We need you to transport everyone from the Sixth Key who wants to live here. Send them all to their new homes...all at once.”

“I can’t do that!” he cries.

“We’re gonna let them consent,” Clavia defends. “We’re not gonna make anyone move, but this will be better, and I think there will be a ton of interest.”

“Think about it,” Echo begins before Cedar can make another argument. “There are hundreds of billions of stars, but we don’t have enough resources for everyone. How is that possible? Because stars radiate a ton of their energy away, even with dyson swarms. Matrioshka brains are more comprehensive, and more efficient. And matrioshka bodies are just stylish and cool.” Honestly, I don’t know why no one ever thought of it before. I thought that was the point of the original matrioshka body, and its successor, Big Papa.” There ought to be far more than two of these in existence. The Parallel was more than capable of doing it, but they chose not to. They still orbited stars. Even the interstellar settlements were quite literally few and far between. Why? Why keep the stars? Aesthetics? Safety? Ethics? Probably all of the above. Or. Echo and Clavia are just that clever.

“That’s not my point. I literally can’t do it. I don’t have that kind of power.”

Echo and Clavia are both confused. “What are you talking about? You already did it. You moved them all from their original realities, to the Sixth Key.”

“No, I didn’t.” He starts to look around on the ground. Guessing at his needs, Echo manifests a chair for him to sit in. Cedar hunches over and stuffs his face in his palms. “That wasn’t me. I didn’t do any of that.”

“What? It had to have happened,” Clavia argues. “Everyone’s there.”

“I’m not saying that it never happened,” Cedar tries to explain. “I’m telling you that I didn’t do it. I have powers, but not like that. That’s insane.”

“Then who did?” Echo asks him.

Cedar looks up to meet Echo’s gaze. “I have no idea. They didn’t tell me. They have to keep it a secret, even from me and my family, even now that it’s done. We were...a misdirect. It’s like sleight of hand. We were the left hand that distracted everyone so no one would see what the right hand was doing. I don’t know if anyone knows who saved everyone during Reconvergence. All I know is that it wasn’t me.” He pauses before adding, “I just took credit, per my instructions.”

Echo and Clavia manifest their own chairs to sit in. They sit there in silence for a good five minutes before Echo decides to speak again. “Time is not linear. If something exists at any moment, it exists in all moments. If you know something about the past, you can change it. Keeping it a secret was smart. Even if someone were to go back and kill you as a child, it wouldn’t stop the creation of the Sixth Key. You’re like a bodyguard, there to take a bullet if one ever comes flying through. That’s how I would have done it if I were there.”

“Maybe you were,” Cedar reasons. “Maybe you two are the ones who created the Sixth Key; you just haven’t done it yet from your own perspectives.”

They exchange another look. Clavia decides to explain. “There’s a small group of people on a planet in the Sixth Key who are aware of what we’ve been up to. Just a few billion people. They were our test group. We’ve already tried to transport them to our new universe. We don’t have that kind of juice either. Stars are easy. Giant metal statues are easy. Moving people? That requires a level of precision that we do not possess; not with hordes anyway. We could probably move them a couple thousand at a time, but that’s all but useless for our needs. That’s a meaningless rounding error compared to the total population.”

“What about Ellie Underhill?” Echo asks after another bout of silence. “I don’t remember how many she transported into Fort Underhill.”

“It was only 120 billion,” Cedar replies. “Not quite a rounding error, but still not good enough. Besides, she gave them all new bodies; it was a whole different animal.”

“So what we’re saying is that we need to find the person who actually did move everyone from the five realities to the Sixth Key. We need them to do it again.” Clavia starts to pace. Finding someone out there in the abstract is not something that she’s ever done before. She always knows who she’s targeting, or roundabouts where they are. This is a mystery individual, who might be in either of two universes—or, hell, maybe neither of them. They could have also done it subconsciously, like how Echo lived before he became self-aware and realized his true potential. Maybe it’s not just one person. Maybe it was a group, or somehow everyone. Maybe through the spirit of survival every single living organism consolidated their untapped collective power into one brilliant miracle. Ugh, Clavia doesn’t know, but you know who would?

“Hey, boys!”

Echo nearly falls out of his chair, but catches himself by spreading his feet apart. He stumbles away from her. “Debra. How did you get out?” She still looks like his sister. She’s still occupying that body, and nothing about it has changed. But Echo knows. He would always know. “What did you do to Clavia?”

“Relax, she’s still in here; on the first stage. She gave me control of the body, because you need me.”

“I need you for what?”

“I can find your mysterious god-being,” Debra spits back like he’s an insignificant little ant on the ground. “I found you, didn’t I? You were alone on a nothing planet in the middle of the universe. I knew exactly where you were. I intuited that you existed in the first place.”

“We can’t trust you,” Echo contends.

“Believe it or not, I’ve changed. Living with those people, doing those plays...it’s changed me. I’m no hero, but I’m not a villain anymore either. Clavia maintains full veto power. She can come back whenever she wants.”

“Prove it. Let me talk to my sister again. And don’t try to trick me, I’ll know.”

“I know.” Debra actually does what is asked of her, and temporarily returns control of the body to Clavia.

“She’s not exactly right,” Clavia says. “She doesn’t need my body, she needs my brain.”

“Can’t you just do it? You have all her power, don’t you?”

“It’s more complicated than that. You would understand if you could be inside my head. You would get it if you could see the construct that I’ve constructed.”

Echo steps forward, and places a hand on each of Clavia’s shoulders. “I bet I can. Show me. I think it’s about time that I meet your little brain buds.”

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The Seventh Stage: Rocking the Boat (Part IV)

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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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Microstory 2201: Understanding of the Data

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I came back into the office today. Actually, I got in really early, before the sun came up, but I just watched a nature show on the gargantuan TV until it was time to “clock in”. What happened was I woke up at the end of a cycle, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I didn’t find myself drifting away during the day, though, so I think it will be okay. Sometimes, fighting insomnia is worse, and it’s best just to accept what your body is trying to tell you, even if you’re better at math, and you know that it’s wrong. I won’t be making a habit of it. After everyone else came in, we put a meeting on the books. My Data Analyst wanted to put the finishing touches on his presentation. He gave us his initial findings. He now understands how jail guests are currently scheduled, and as we suspected, it really doesn’t have anything to do with group dynamics. There is so much data, and so many variables to deal with, this is going to be a difficult task, but I know that my people are up to it. The majority of the rest of the team will begin next week. They’ll be spending time on their training, and getting to know each other, so it won’t be until about mid-August before we start making progress, but that progress will happen. The presentation was interactive, with the other team members asking questions, and already contributing to the understanding of the data. He actually rewrote some of the slides while we were all there together. Right now, I’m consolidating and organizing the information that I’ve received in my brain, and thinking about ways that we can tackle this issue in the future, and I’ll continue to do that after I fall asleep tonight.

Microstory 2192: How Frivolous

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This is a very delicate period of time in this process, and I won’t be able to say much as these offers go out. It’s not like I’ll be able to summarize the conversations I’m having with my future staff members (or not, as it were). Luckily, I have something else to tell you about today. Well, two things, actually. You remember my parole officer, Leonard Miazga, right? I didn’t really think that I would see him again, but it seems that we’ll be working together at the jail. He’s been hired by the county to work on that side, so he won’t serve directly under me, but he’ll be in the meetings with us, along with the correctional officer, and the reentry specialist. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t named him on this site. Of course, the government knew who my P.O. was, but reading about him in my blog posts sort of stuck him in their brains, so when they were deciding who to hire, he was the first candidate that they thought of. Don’t worry, it was a fair process, but he ended up being the best for the job. You can guess why; because he’s not just a jerk who feels like he’s suffering through his work every day. He cares about his parolees, and that much was clear both from my anecdotes, and also his interview, as well as his references and résumé, I’m sure. The second announcement is that the lawsuit against me has been officially dropped. The company who sued me on the grounds that I damaged their reputation even though I never told you who they were finally relented. It’s shocking how long it took for them to realize how frivolous their case was. So now that it’s over, I’ll tell you who it was. Lol, psych! I still won’t, because that would be equal parts dumb and mean-spirited. I just want to lock the memory of the ordeal in my past, and leave it there. They’re doing fine, and I’m doing amazing, so there’s nothing left to talk about anymore. That’s all I got. What’s up with you?

Microstory 2159: Can’t Ever Be Happy

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Yesterday evening, I had my usual meeting with my therapist. We talked about the storm a little, but it was mostly about the volunteer work I’ve been doing. It was no big secret that I got an early jump on my community service due to the traumatizing meat-eating incident the other day. She was able to piece together that I’ve been pretty depressed about it, and I think I knew that; I just didn’t want to think about it. I’ve been filling my days with tons of stuff to do so that my brain doesn’t get a chance to stop and ponder my life choices. It’s been really hard on me. I feel like I’m an addict, and I just had a relapse. It’s super not the same thing as a real addiction, like drugs, or sex, or even food in general. I made a decision to become a vegetarian for several reasons, none of which was that it was harming my life, or causing issues with others. Even so, I made a commitment to stop, and I broke that promise to myself. It can’t be reversed. It will always mark a new beginning, but in a bad way. The streak cannot be repaired, no matter how long I live without ever doing it again. And that sucks. It’s gonna take a lot, and a lot of time, for me to be able to move past it, especially since depression always reinforces itself with dark thoughts on other things. I start to think about every bad thing that has happened to me in my life, and all the mistakes that I’ve made. I dwell on it, and everything negative. My therapist tried to figure out what brings me out of my funks, but I don’t know that anything ever really has. It just kind of stays with me. It subsides after things regress towards the mean, but I can’t ever be happy. Happiness is a concept that I only understand through the lens of relativity. I’ve been happier at times than at other times, but true contentment sounds impossible, and if you tell me that you’ve experienced it, I may not believe it. If you tell me that you’re in the middle of experiencing it, I can’t promise that I won’t punch you in the face, so just don’t give me that BS. Sorry, didn’t mean to become so violent, but it’s impossible to delete my words, so I won’t. I just don’t care for braggers. We get it, you love life, now shut up about it, and leave me to brood in the shadows.

Microstory 2101: I Won’t Live a Lie

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I’m out! I’m hiding from the authorities...somewhere. For obvious reasons, I’m not going to tell anyone where I am. When I first showed up in this universe, I didn’t have any identity, so instead of finding one on the black market, I procured it through the proper channels. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, but I’ve ruined it now. I had no choice. I got a parasitic infection, which messed up my brain, and started making me act crazy. After the body doctors cleared it all up, the mind doctors came in, and tried to convince me that everything I’ve been doing and saying has been crazy, and they wanted to keep me there for psychological treatment. The little committee I had to talk to twice before I could be released from the hospital brought up the discrepancy in the timeline. If I was infected in early February, why is it that I’ve been talking about being a bulk traveler on my blog pretty much this entire time? Well, some of them argued that the viral and bacterial infections I had before that could explain all that away. Others argued that maintaining the same symptoms across three completely different infections didn’t make much medical sense, and I don’t know everything that they talked about after I left the room, but in the end, I got out of there. It wasn’t enough, though. I was living around people who didn’t believe me, and didn’t trust me, and I couldn’t stay there anymore. I’ll always be grateful to my landlord, and my boss, and I know that none of this was their fault, but I have my reasons. I spent years pretending to be someone I’m not. I pretended to not be autistic. I pretended to be straight. I pretended to like Blink-182! I won’t do that anymore. I won’t live a lie. Even if I have to sleep in squalor, I’m going to live my truth from now on. So long, Boreverse Kansas City, I’ll never forgive you for the way you treated me. Now more than ever, I know that my only goal in life should be to get the hell out of this universe. Even if I never find my friends again, at least I won’t have to deal with you people anymore. For those of you reading this who are on my side, don’t you worry about me getting caught. I’ve got that covered. Some friends helped me set up a shadow workstation. As long as I always post from the cage, I can’t be traced, and as long as I don’t mention any specifics about my location, I can’t be found. I have to go now. I booked a boat ride on the Chicago River. As I said before, don’t look for me. I’m a ghost.

Microstory 2061: Anyway, I’m Taking Some Drugs

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If you’ve been following my microblog, you know that I got sick again. It’s not even the same thing. The first one was a virus that I can’t pronounce, but this one is a bacterium that I can’t pronounce. I guess my immune system was in shambles for so long that something else managed to get in there before I closed up shop. I should have known. It’s definitely happened to me before. I just forget these things. The thing about being immortal is it doesn’t change your brain chemistry. It’s a purely physiological situation. It’s pretty much impossible to study the condition, because no one could ever take my blood, or anything, but I think that one of the downsides is an inability to improve in certain ways. I could never get stronger. Lifting weights, doing cardio, none of it mattered. Exercise didn’t make me feel better (it also didn’t make me feel worse at least). Nothing could change. The brain isn’t a muscle, but I think it suffers from the same limitations. I could gain new memories, of course, but I couldn’t really grow as a person. Anyway, I’m taking some drugs besides the antibiotics, so I’m not sure if I’m making any sense, but basically what I’m saying is my memory sucks. People would always tell me I should keep a diary to remind myself of my own history, but I would always forget to do it, so that never really worked. I’m surprised at how diligent I’ve been about this. Don’t expect me to keep going. If it’s anything like my previous attempts, I’ll stop by the end of the month. The only thing more boring than this world is talking about my personal experiences with it. Nick Fisherman IV, signing off. Oh, wait. Did I never tell you what my name was before? Oh my God, that’s kind of funny. Maybe I’ll explain where the name comes from, and what makes me the fourth out of four. It’s not anywhere near as simple as that my father was the third, and so on up the bloodline. It’s more like how they name kings.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 20, 2399

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When the surgeon attempted to remove the foreign body from Alyssa’s brain, she went into autopilot and warned them not to do that. She spoke in monotone, and it was clear that she was only reciting a script rather than speaking from the heart. When the doctor let go of her brain, she was able to give him consent to remove it from her, but every time he tried, she would protest again. Under normal circumstances, no means no, whether or not it’s preceded by a yes, but in this case, it was obvious that the implant was speaking for her, and that the real her wanted the thing gone. The surgeon removed it, and then the anaesthesiologist put her back to sleep so they could seal up her head. If her substrate is anything like the ones that Ramses built for the others on the team, her skull should heal up completely. There shouldn’t even be a scar.

“Why not?” she asks. She’s woken up now, and asked to see herself in a mirror.

“I can actually answer this,” Mateo says. “I had a friend when I was younger who kept getting hurt. He ended up with this huge scar on his neck, and he explained that when the body is injured, it produces collagen to repair the damage, but it’s better to produce too much than too little, because too little would result in it not healing all the way. Too much ultimately creates extra skin. It’s evolution’s way of making sure that the healing finishes all the way.”

“Yeah,” Leona agrees, “but the medical nanites that you have now can gauge exactly how much collagen they need to order to get the job done, so there’s no extra.”

“Oh. And the hair?”

“Don’t know about the hair,” Leona replies. “Ramses may have included a subroutine that would command the nanites to activate the right protein growth factors, or it didn’t occur to him. If he did think to include it, it may still take a while. Hair treatment isn’t bad in this reality, though. We can sign you up for follicle stimulation. In the meantime, we’ll buy whatever wigs you want.”

“Don’t bother,” Alyssa says. She uses her illusion ability to generate a hologram of her original hair. “I may just leave it shaved. I’ve found it easier to produce an artificial image from scratch than to superimpose it on something else.”

“True,” Leona says as she’s waving her hand through the hair, and touching nothing. “However, the hair’s not really there, and people can tell.”

“Right.” She frowns slightly.

“I’m sorry we had to do this,” Leona said. “We just...”

“We just wanted you back,” Mateo finishes.

“Yes, and I appreciate that,” Alyssa tells them, “but there’s something you should know. “I am still bound to Dalton’s commands.”

“What? You are?”

“I’m sorry, the surgery didn’t do what you thought it would. That’s not what the dot was for.” What that thing did was block her from remembering certain things from her past. Removing it didn’t reprogram her. It’s just that now she knows what’s at stake, and understands why the Gyroscope must stay active. Fortunately, she can explain it now too. “It was just a...uh—what would you call it? A memory inhibitor. I still want to keep the Omega Gyroscope working, but now I know why.”

“Why?” Leona presses.

“Someone is trying to get into the Third Rail. They have been trying for ages. The original programming was enough to prevent that from happening, but things have changed in recent days.”

“What’s changed?” Mateo asks.

“You,” Alyssa says. “You, and the team. And Aldona, and everyone who came from the Insulator of Life. Everyone who disappeared into the Livewire. Every time you tap on the glass to the Fourth Quadrant, and every time you teleport, you’re pushing the boundaries. You weaken the system. Luckily, Dalton broke the rules, and looked into the future to see all this coming. He set in place a series of events that would put me in charge, and I have been this world’s protector ever since.”

“Well, he was late. All those versions of Constance managed to come through. I suppose, if it had to happen, he should have made it happen sooner.”

“Those Constances were about as threatening as a lone ladybug compared to the one who’s trying to get in now.”

“Wait, are you talking about Constance!Two, or someone else entirely?”

“Both,” Alyssa answers. “She’s the most dangerous, not because she’s inherently different than the others, but because she’s formed a relationship with the Superintendent’s alternate self.”

“The Superintendent has an alt?” Mateo questions.

“I don’t have the details, but yes. He has a...more local form of the real Superintendent’s power, but if you’re in the same universe as he is, he can do a lot of damage. Evidently, you were this close to meeting him a couple times. From what Dalton has discovered, he was on the Stage at the same time you were, before you came here. When we ran into your friend, Meliora by that river? He was there too.”

“Was Constance!Two there too?” Leona asks.

Alyssa waits a moment to respond. “She was Meliora. Or rather, she was impersonating her. Dalton thinks she started to try to break through just after you, but luckily the Superintendent’s alt stopped it.”

“So what do we need the Gyroscope for?” Mateo asks.

“I think he stopped it by distracting her. She ends up trying anyway. The good thing is that the portal she sent you through closed up, so she missed the only opportunity she had...unless you force me to take the barrier down.”

“It has to come down eventually,” Leona points out. “Certain things have to happen. This world is ending.”

“Dalton is aware, and has accounted for that. He will let Constance!Two in at the right time, on the right day, to destroy her before she can do any damage. That time is not now. That day is not today. You just have to trust us.”

“We can do that,” Leona begins, “but Dalton has to give us two things in return.”

“I’ll talk to him about Angela and the immortality waters.”

“You shouldn’t have to,” Leona says. “We want to talk to him ourselves.”

“I’ll try, but he hasn’t been very inviting with me. Our relationship is one-way.”

“I see that. He took your fancy cane back.”

“He didn’t take it back. I lost it,” Alyssa admits.

“Lost it where? How?”

“What’s the second thing?” Alyssa asks, avoiding the question.

“We want you back,” Mateo says. “No more short emails. You stay with us.”