Agnosis – Ch. 12
“Amara!”
“I’m here, John.” Her voice was very small, timid and quavering. “You were gone a long time.”
He found it difficult to hear her. The wind rose and fell in the background in whooping gusts that reminded him of some of the highland dells that riddled the mountain range to the west of Sonali. Her voice had the same sort of thin air, tinny quality he had come to associate with altitude. He wished for a fleeting moment that he had programmed an audio modulator as well as a volume control.
“I had to reconfigure some environmental variables to keep the bad guys busy,” he said. There wasn’t any reason to explain the scope of this statement, to tell her what he had done to his foam. It was true from a certain perspective, and it sufficed for now. “It took longer than I expected, that’s all. Where are you now?”
“I’m inside, but…” He had the impression that she was looking about, trying to find some adequate descriptor for her location. “It’s different than the last time. More solid, more…familiar.”
“That’s part of the map overlay I built,” he assured her. “What can you see?”
“There’s a tunnel behind me with a gate across it. It’s locked now, I think. It leads through a cleft in the rock, then down into darkness.”
Dorian blew out a relieved breath. “That’s the way back to your bounce point. Make sure you get a good look at the terrain around it, so you’ll recognize the location if you have to come back this way in a hurry.”
“Okay. Can you hear me well enough? It’s windy up here when I get out from the shelter of these rocks.”
“You’re coming through clear enough for now. I’ll let you know if the signal starts to deteriorate on this end. What else?”
“There’s a path here. It leads away from the bounce point. The sky is fairly overhung with clouds, but I’d guess that it leads east. It feels like east, anyway. I guess there aren’t really any directions in here, are there?”
“That’s fine. We just need to fix a point and stick with it. We’ll agree that the path heads off to the east.” Dorian rose and advanced to the panel directly across from the Captain’s Chair and lifted the univisual cover. Inside was a wireless keypad logically associated with a plasma triDvid projection unit that manifested ex nihilo from the air in front of him. He took his seat again and brought up a command line prompt, then proceeded to scale his file structure until he had drilled into the map of the orb’s code index. He called up another projection unit so he could view the code along with a parallel three dimensional render of the navigation route he had plotted for her at the same time. He started at the beginning, a long and meandering channel between high walls of impenetrable binary babble he hadn’t had time to parse. The walls were largely illusory sleight of hand. He’d just done his best to wall the chaos off from her perception. In his display, the path looked like a desert arroyo carved from phosphorescent stone.
He was pleased that the path had rendered clearly enough for her to find it. Amara becoming immediately lost was one less thing to worry about. He tapped a series of keys and designated the cardinal points on the map display. Tentatively, he associated a red dot where he estimated her position to be.
He consulted the system time. She’d been inside the orb’s datascape for a little over six minutes. It was time to get moving.
“Any time you’re ready, you can head out for the first signpost. Make sure you keep an eye on your environment. Let me know if anything looks kludgy or feels off to you. I’ll do what I can to diagnose those problems from here and provide you with workarounds. I mark the first signpost at just over two hundred meters east by northeast relative to your current position.”
He was already scanning ahead in the text to the next chunk of overlay, anticipating code eruptions or environmental instability caused by the constraints he had lain over it. A few seconds passed before he realized that Amara hadn’t acknowledged him. “Hey, Amara? Are you still with me?”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Do you have your map?”
“I do.”
“Just follow the path where it leads for now. You can flip into a view of the map if you get disoriented or just want to gauge your progress. It isn’t–”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with the map. It’s them, John. I don’t think they want me to go there.”
“The Exousiai?” He stopped short of saying: They’re just constructs playing out pre-designed logical loops. Ignore them and get on with it. Amara believed they were real. Dorian pinched the flesh between his eyes, trying to chase away the beginning of a migraine. Be sensitive, he reminded himself. She’s under enough stress as it is. “How close are they?”
Hesitation. “They’re not close yet. Not the way you mean…physically. But they’re never completely removed from this place. They’re everywhere here, in the water and the stones, riding on the breeze, turning the world on its axis. They knew me the moment I arrived, almost as if they’d been expecting me. Waiting for me to return. I think their focus is still a ways off yet, but they seem to…something is wrong. They’re disconcerted, filled with wonder and speculation, as if they’re having trouble reading me like they did before. They’re trying to decide what I’m doing here, so they want me to come to them.”
Dorian experienced a sudden stab of panic. He stiffened in his seat. “That’s probably not a good idea.”
“I guess it means that your defensive scripts are working, eh?”
“Sure. Let’s go with that.”
She was quiet for a time. “Can you hear them singing?”
Dorian heard nothing but her quick, shallow breaths. He sat there, frozen, with his fingers poised over the keypad, but there was nothing he could conjure that could help her if the song represented a threat. “They’re just singing?”
“They’re singing to me. That’s how it feels, at least.”
“I don’t like this,” he decided. “The code you’re carrying should have rendered you all but invisible to the orb’s access response sensors.”
“It’s okay, John. I can hear them, but there’s no compunction to obey like there was before. I can think through it. I can resist their call.”
He found no comfort in her explanation. Dorian delineated a new public sector in his foam with a rapid flurry of keystrokes. “I’m going to give you a new foam coordinate key. Bounce here and we’ll figure out what went wrong.”
“There isn’t time,” she said.
“We’ll make time.” He was trying to keep her safe. Couldn’t she see that? Dorian had loaded Amara up with every sig dispersion script in his arsenal. He didn’t know what kind of application Raville was running that could break his dispersion fields that fast, but he would figure it out. “It has to be something in the orb’s code that uniquely tags you on entry. Get back to your bounce point. We’ll find a way to circumvent it and try again.”
“Let’s see what they do if I move forward,” Amara said, her voice low, as if she was afraid of being overheard. “You said the first signpost was only a couple hundred meters off. The rest doesn’t look far on the map.”
It wasn’t far. Dorian had dropped her as near to the artifact as he could find a crack to exploit, but every step toward it was a step away from her secured bounce point. “Seriously, no. It isn’t safe.”
“Hush,” she said.
Before he could object again, he heard her feet crunching along the pebbled path he had laid out for her. In the background, there was a sudden sound, a reedy sort of whisper that reminded him of strong winds blowing through vast fields of summer grass. Strange aural eddies of discorporeal sibilants like the precursors of an unknown language swirled about her. There was a vague insistence in the sound. For Dorian, it was the equivalent of a sinus headache, an abrupt sensation of pressure right between his eyes.
He couldn’t tell how it translated inside the code environment, but the rhythm of Amara’s footfalls increased sharply, all at once. He realized that she was running. And the susurrus of half-heard voices chased after her, louder now, gusting. His scalp prickled. Dorian gripped the edges of his chair, afraid to move.
“What’s happening?” he cried.
Her voice was calm, but strained with tension and exertion. “Which way?”
Which way?
“The crossroads, John! Which way do I go?”
“Left! You go left.”
Dorian snapped his head up and consulted the render of her proscribed path. There should have been a signpost there. He wondered what had happened to it, what he might have failed to understand. He closed his eyes and listened to the scrabble of her footsteps over stone, the heaving gasps of her breath.
“What do you see?” he demanded.
“Up! I’m going up, into the mountains it looks like.”
Mountains?
“Where are the Exousiai?”
“They’re behind me, but I think they’re just watching for now. Keeping their distance.”
“Tell me at once if that changes.”
“You’ll be the second one to know, I promise.”
Not that he would actually be able to do anything from here, of course. All he was capable of doing was shouting directions. If they decided to stop her, to harm her, he wouldn’t be able to offer much more than a sympathetic ear to her dying wails.
Best not to think about that.
As she pressed on, the wind that had shadowed her steps gradually dissipated. Amara eventually regulated her pace to a brisk walk.
“You couldn’t have rendered a nice, flat plain, could you? Maybe some pretty pink flowers along the side of the path. And kittens.” She laughed at her own teasing. “No, you had to make a big, rugged man render. With lots of climbing and calf-aching angles.”
He could have dizzied her with a technical defense, with line by line explications of the environment she had handed him and why it had rendered the way it had, but he wasn’t in the mood for it. He wasn’t even sure he could have argued it convincingly to himself. There was too much of the orb’s fundamental structure he hadn’t had time to analyze yet.
“Tell me about these mountains,” he urged her, trying to picture what she was experiencing. He glanced at the map again. He hadn’t intentionally rendered any mountains. That shouldn’t have bothered him, but it did, and not just because it was hard to predict three dimensional effects when one was writing two dimensional code.
Amara exhaled raggedly. “They’re steep.”
“Mountains tend toward steepness, yes.”
“They’re not anything out of the ordinary.” She must have peered over a ledge, because her voice took on a faint echoing quality. “Green down there. I think there’s a small river running through the valley. Up here it’s mostly scrub grass and some ambuscade bushes. It’s going to brown, it looks like. The temperature is too cool to be comfortable, but I can’t tell if spring is coming on, or if we’re nearing the end of autumn.”
“Is the path still clear?”
“Mostly. There are bones of bedrock beginning to poke out here and there, and I’m heading toward stonier ground. We’ve been angling steadily up for awhile.”
“What else can you see?”
“Everything.” She paused, cursing under her breath. Dorian imagined her standing before some unpredicted obstacle, a sheer and impassible chasm plummeting a thousand feet to a muddy, raging river. “Hold on. I’ve got to climb.”
“Be careful.”
She grunted with effort he could only imagine, at one point setting loose a clatter of tumbling stones and debris, the sound of which pattered in his ears for a time (and distance) that seemed eternal. He tried not to think about how far up she must be. When she reached what must have been the top, she stood still for several long seconds, taking deep breaths.
“This sucks, John. Which way do I go now?”
But he couldn’t tell her. He had no idea where she was. She was off the map.
“Do you see anything that looks like a signpost?”
“I see an outcropping that points to the right. It has a treeish thing growing out of it. Is that what you mean?”
“Which direction does the path lead?”
“That pebble path, you mean?”
“Yes.”
Amara made an exasperated noise. “I just climbed an almost completely vertical ascent of some forty meters, John, because your path led me to it. I’m now officially scaling the rock face of a mountain, surrounded more or less by other mountains that look exactly the same from where I’m standing. As best as I can tell, it’s one big collection of pebbles up here. Big ones, small ones, even some in between ones. They’re kind of hard to tell apart.” When he didn’t answer immediately, she said, “I’m going to the right. The tree thing seems pretty comfortable with that direction.”
Dorian considered the winding, meticulously plotted map from bounce point to artifact once again, but it told him nothing. “Amara, I don’t know where you are.”
“I can’t be far from the end. The map said it was only a thousand meters or so. Granted, I didn’t expect most of them to be vertical, but I’ve got to be getting close. This direction appears to be leading pretty consistently up. It will give me a good look around at the very least. Maybe I’ll see something useful.”
It would also stick her on top of a mountain whose descent was blocked by inscrutable code aliens who might or might not appreciate her presence there. Dorian filed that observation away under More Things Not To Say.
“What are the Exousiai doing?”
“Stop obsessing. They’re still considering for now, content to see what happens, I think.” She sucked in her breath.
“What?”
“Sorry. Vista.”
“Vista?”
“You should see the view from here. It’s breathtaking.”
“Remember what you’re there for,” he cautioned her. “Don’t waste time.”
She climbed higher, following what she said was the appearance of a path. Perhaps even the path he had set out for her. Dorian had his doubts.
“I’m almost to the top,” she said. “When I get over this next ledge, I should be able to see down into the valley on the other side. Hold on. I’ve got to hoist myself up again here. I’ll be back with you in just a second.”
A second ticked by. Then ten. A full minute of silence.
“What do you see?”
Amara spoke to him in a flat, distant voice. The sound of complete bewilderment. “Sonali, John. I see Sonali Real.”
Dorian realized that something, somewhere had gone very wrong.
“That can’t be right,” Dorian growled. He switched from map to code, bounced around the text looking for signifiers, looking for anything that would make sense of what she was seeing. He went back to the map, spun it a complete revolution of its axis. There had to be something he was missing. Anything. “There has to be–Amara, are you sure?”
“I can see the dome of the Landgrant Office. And your building. And the peaked roof of the Archive to the north. It’s Sonali.” Her harsh resolve cracked. On the summit of her virtual mountain, the wind whipped past her, keening among the rocks. “What’s happening, John? How is this possible?”
Dorian stared at his displays, lost. Overwhelmed by what she said to him. It wasn’t possible.
Unless he’d made a mistake.
Unless he’d misunderstood the code.
The code.
He switched views again, from the map to the decompiled text, the foundation of the orb’s environment, extracted from Raville’s foam, the great Aleph which all else sprung.
“John?”
But he had no words. His jaw hung on a broken hinge.
As he scanned the parallel display of code, it changed. The characters shimmered, truncated, self-organized into new patterns. New lines emerged from the appalling whiteness of the code tablet, burst into existence like novae in a nursery of stars. A sprawling network of interconnections, hidden correspondences, and sympathetic magicks revealed themselves before his eyes. Remaking the world.
It was impossible.
The map remained stationary, just as he’d drawn it, but the environment it represented was being irrevocably transformed.
But that wasn’t right, either. Not just the environment enclosed in the orb’s cohesion matrix. He wasn’t looking at code that represented the orb as it actually was, a living entity appended to Amara’s foam, but an independent copy of that code sequestered in his own foam. A dead artifact, the skeleton of a thing that had never been.
Amara’s universe wasn’t shifting. Only his.
It was his own foam that was being altered. His text, his shadow datascape, his untraceable temple that no one but himself and poor, dead Ray Morrical knew existed.
“Bounce,” he croaked at her. “Bounce now, Amara.”
She may have nodded rather than speaking. He could not tell. But he heard her feet scratching against brittle mountain scree, heard the catch of tears on her breath.
Then silence.
Amara hissed. “I can’t go back. There isn’t any way down.”
Dorian hardly heard her. His attention was consumed with the scroll of text on his display. He was watching the universe reshape itself before his eyes. A new Torah, a living Word exploding from the dense pinpoint of nothing into Being. And it was terrible. Awesome and incomprehensible and bursting with potentiality. Foam was supposed to be immutable. Strands and the barriers between them were fundamental building blocks of the data universe. They couldn’t be manipulated without key access. He was witnessing an event that violated all the Laws of Information he had ever known. It unfurled a vast landscape without rules to structure it, without delineations between points and states and quantum waves, a perfectly malleable and chaotically plastic dataverse encoded by gods alone.
And not just his foam, he understood suddenly, but Amara’s as well. That was why she had come back again to Sonali. The orb had twisted his code, his overlays–her core environment–from the very beginning. But that made sense, didn’t it? The orb had been integrated into her foam. It was part of her.
But that corruption shouldn’t have touched his space. He shouldn’t be watching files in his own storage blocks change. Even having shared his foam with her, the buffers between them had been as secure as walls of iron.
The Strand was the only mediator between foam, the only conduit for real data transfer, and they were off the Strand in a virtual private network ungoverned by system servers and ex-connex translators. Amara had left it when she jumped from Hermes Square, and Dorian was isolated by his foam’s theoretical non-existence and his unregistered ip. The only thing that allowed them to even communicate was the finely tuned signal translation algorithms he had devised to link them together, to extract the one meaningful pulse of her array’s processor from an ocean of cosmic noise. But there was always, always that keystone barricade between them, that basic distinction between wave states that represented their separate data universes.
And still the quae-ha-distra was changing his data blocks.
His own universe was being jacked right out from underneath him, and he had no idea how it was being done.
Impossible outside of the connection supplied by the Strand, unless he supplied the key himself, which he hadn’t done. He would never have compromised his foam security, never have lowered his digital guard.
Except…
Dorian muttered a curse.
He’d taken code from Raville, too. Code he had copied from the dead port on the Archive’s network. A script to pull Amara out of the orb. A simple tool, pointed out to him by Raville himself. Dorian hadn’t even looked at it, just trusted. He had been so desperate to save Amara. So stupidly, ravenously desperate for anything that would help her.
Raville had said about the orb: Even as we speak, the quae-ha-distra has begun to execute a sophisticated load mapping of some highly secure, pre-formatted proprietary foam…The moment the quae-ha-distra passed with Amara into a live Strand environment…
And Dorian had been off the Strand since he had executed the script–the tether saw, Raville had called it. Until now, until they’d chosen to go back through the Strand and into the orb, just as Raville wanted them to, had told them that they must, to retrieve the artifact. And like any good mule, Dorian had synchronized his infected foam with his new foam, passing the viral agent from one to the other like the common cold.
How long, he wondered? How long had he been inside his own quae-ha-distra, the portal to the dimension of the overlord Exousiai, believing all the time that he had been in real space?
Had any of it been real?
He sat back for a moment, gathering himself, looking for alternatives to what he must do.
Amara was alone in there, surrounded by monsters and vivid with need. There was no choice, really. Nothing to debate.
Without really thinking, he plugged a series of extraction spiders into his file system with specific comparison parameters. Looking for one app, one common binary string in the series of recent data maps he carried in his storage sectors: Amara, the dead port, his own foam indices. He knew what they would find, but he had to be certain.
It was smaller than he expected. The spiders returned with it almost at once, a sub-file executable called, appropriately, orb.app. Amara called it a portal. He recognized it as a recursive key metalink, a way to bind independent environments into one overarching architecture.
Brilliant. Nefarious. Whatever.
Amara called his name one last time, the need in her voice was poignant, as forlorn as the bleating of a lost lamb.
Raville had played on his desire to save Amara and slipped him a mickey. His own ticking bomb. The quae-ha-distra itself, active from the moment he hit the Strand, but kept dormant because of Dorian’s intense environmental controls. Just as Raville had predicted.
He’d been right all along. He’d never had a choice.
He said, “I’m coming.”
Dorian loaded the script into his cache, and with a single key click, transported himself into infinity.
He was.
Fingers and toes, arms and legs, torso and head. Thew and bone, skin and hair, gristle and joint and mind, mind, mind. He was wind and grass, pebble and leaf, water and wood and fierce, burning sun. He was constructed, atom by atom, from the raw matter of the universe. Where there had been nothing, becoming transformed into being.
He was. Nothing.
He heard water first, distant but roaring. Then breeze, then his own shallow panting. Next came scent, green and pungent, then the snap of cool air on his skin. Thin air that made his lungs ache. Finally, light, pink through closed eyelids, flickering like candles.
Dorian pitched forward. His knees and palms struck hard stone. The impact drove shivers of stark, white fire all the way up his arms and into his shoulders. He gasped, and opened his eyes, terrified of what he might see.
But it was only bare rock, gray like slate, littered with misshapen flecks and pebbles of scree.
Somewhere behind him, Amara made a frightened sound, a exclamation of surprise instantly silenced. Then there were hands supporting his shoulders, hot breath on his cheek and in his ear. She spoke words to him that he did not understand. It was the crash and din of ocean waves breaking on the shore.
Dorian lurched to his feet. The universe revolved about him, clunked into sickening geometries that whirled and jittered out of focus. He would have fallen if she hadn’t caught him, but she did, and for her kindness, he collapsed into her arms and vomited all over her feet.
It was unpleasant, this being in the world of gods.
Amara held him until he stopped retching, then allowed him to stand on his own. The universe stopped spinning. He was able to focus on the simple, welcome solidity of teeth and scale and implacable reptilian wonder.
If she had been Ryoku here, he might have puked on her again.
“Hey,” he said at last.
“What are you doing here?”
He shrugged, a gentle gesture that almost cost him his balance. “Someone said they were reenacting the Charge of the Light Brigade around here, so I thought I’d pop over and see if they needed an extra.”
“John–”
But he waved her off. Just standing was difficult enough. He didn’t feel up to explaining. “Speeding bullets. Single bound. Blah, blah, blah.”
“Come over here where you can sit down.”
She led him by the hand to a slab of rock that had fallen against the mountainside at a convenient angle. Dorian sat, bracing his hands on his knees to keep himself upright.
“Wow,” he said. “Somebody needs to work on their integration protocols. Seriously.”
“It’ll pass,” she said. “It was easier the second time.”
“If this is anything like Raville’s first experience, I can see why he was in such a hurry to build the zap. I mean, why wouldn’t people pay for this?”
Amara stroked the back of his neck. “Shh. You’re babbling.”
“No, I’m dying.”
“Don’t be a baby, John.”
“Sorry.”
He focused his gaze on a small patch of dirt until the knots in his stomach loosened and his limbs felt whole and strong again. He took longer and longer breaths until he was sure he wasn’t going to vomit again if he decided to move. Eventually, he lifted his head and smiled uncertainly at her.
Over her shoulder, he could see blue sky where the clouds had begun to break, the shoulders of mountains crowding off in the distance. To the south, the land lay like a rumpled cloth, bristling with trees in teardrop vales. And far below them in a green valley, squatting like a filthy pigeon in a nest of brackish foothills, he saw the sprawling eruption of the city. The unscarred towers of Quiksand glinting in the light, the mesh of crumbling streets, the tumbledown concrete houses unimproved by distance and unreality.
“That’s Sonali, all right.”
Amara nodded. “I don’t think it’s real.”
“No, it’s a render. My coffin isn’t smoking.”
“What do you think it means?”
He had no answer for that question, so instead he asked, “Where are the Exousiai?”
“They’re on the other side. I thought for a moment that they might be making a move, but whatever was exciting them seems to have gone away. They stopped when you arrived. Now they’re just waiting.”
Dorian glanced warily over his shoulder, but all he could see was a spur of rock, weather battered and a dozen or more meters high. “What do you think they’re waiting for?”
“To shepherd us down into the city.”
“Did you tell them we’ve been there before?”
“I don’t think they care.” She gestured to a thick yellow tangle of ambuscade bushes off to their left. “There’s a path that leads down toward the valley over there. My impression is that we’re supposed to follow it.”
Dorian narrowed his eyes. “Are they communicating with you?”
“They’re transferring data to me,” she said, grimacing. “They had more freedom the last time I was here. It was easier for them to communicate their will, what they thought, what they wanted. It just rolled over me like waves. Something is constraining them this time.”
“At least some of my code is still working, then.”
Amara looked at him thoughtfully. “You don’t hear them? Their whispers, their singing?”
“It’s difficult to explain. This–” He squeezed her arm. “–is not real. You’re not really here with me. Raville tricked me into accepting my own copy of the quae-ha-distra. What I’m experiencing is a parallel datascape running synchronously with yours in my own foam. The architecture allows us to share some variables…conversation, representational object simulacra, environmental structures. You present as though you’re here, but you’re not. You’re in your own foam, just like I am. We’re having the same dream in separate universes, subconsciously agreeing to play by the same rules as we go along.”
“Not unlike real life.”
Dorian chuckled, even though it didn’t strike him as being particularly funny. “My foam is configured differently than yours. The Exousiai are capable of interacting with you and your environment in ways they can’t with me. At least that’s my guess. Raville thought it would work that way.”
But maybe he was just supposed to believe that. Maybe they had just given him an environment that had replicated his expectations of the behavior and performance of his foam. Perhaps everything he had done since geeking onto the Strand had been an illusion. He had no confidence in what was real and what wasn’t anymore.
Amara leaned close to him and lowered her voice. “So what does that mean? Are you immune to them? Can you–can you control them?”
“I have no idea.”
“But it’s worth trying,” she said.
“Later, when there isn’t a mountain to fall off, maybe. I don’t think I want to go poking them with sticks until I’m sure that they can actually be poked, you know?”
“If you don’t make the attempt, we won’t know if we can get back to the bounce point if they decide to stop us.”
It was a reasonable argument, but Dorian wasn’t ready for it yet. He still had his hands full just trying to keep his code-form under control. He levered himself to his feet and tested his balance again. He didn’t feel the slightest desire to fall over, which seemed to be a good sign.
He turned back to Amara. “What does your map say? How near are we to the artifact?”
“It’s down there somewhere, in the city.”
“Guesses?”
“Most likely the Archive.”
Dorian chewed over that one for awhile. “Ironic.”
“In a boot to the gut sort of way, yes. Has Raville ever even seen the Archive?”
“I’m sure there were schematics somewhere on the network, and probably detailed maps of Sonali as well. Plenty of triDvid footage laying about to get the renders right, but I’m not sure how much of a hand our Raville had in this. Consciously, I mean.”
“I don’t understand.”
Dorian didn’t either, not really, but he had seen the text change before his eyes. Whether those changes happened as he experienced them or had come earlier, while the orb had lain dormant in his foam didn’t really matter. The orb had changed itself to integrate with his expectation, his personal experience and Amara’s. “Raville didn’t have any control over the particular manifestation of the orb’s architecture once he passed the code to us. You experienced a different environment the last time you were inside, yourself. This experience may have been extrapolated from the overlays I created for you, using your own data storage as a reference to add relevant navigational points, but I’m beginning to doubt it. I didn’t code any mountains for you, and I certainly wasn’t thinking of Trithemius Orbis while I was doing the work. I think they’ve been here all along, waiting for you, just as you said. Perhaps even something inside the encoding of the orb itself registered your extreme discomfort with the raw experience and adapted. That makes more sense. Raville talked about how the foam the orb extracted to build your initial environment was an artifact of how the original quae-ha-distra had integrated with him. In any event, I doubt that he would have chosen Sonali as the manifestation given the choice. It doesn’t seem like his style.”
Amara nodded slowly. “But if the orb is adapting to my needs, that doesn’t explain why you’re having the same tangible experience. You’re in your own foam. The environment you perceive should be different.”
“Maybe it’s trying to be, but can’t overcome my system buffers. I could be seeing what you see because my compilers are still reading the signal being transmitted between us.” Dorian shrugged at the inadequacy of his answers. “That’s all I’ve got.”
“Did it occur to you that we’re sharing an environment because the Exousiai want it to be that way?” She lifted her face and studied him carefully, searchingly. “Or do you still insist that gods don’t exist?”
“I haven’t seen any gods.” He offered Amara a hand and after a moment, she accepted it. He tugged her to her feet. Though he tried to ignore it, he didn’t like the way she looked at him. “Let’s get this over with. Gods or no gods, it should be warmer down there, at least.”
