Sue steps in front of the winged lady to get her attention.
"Hey, who're you?" he demands.
"This is a weird little restaurant that moves its door around by magic," says Isabella, "and it gets visitors from all kinds of different worlds, and a lot of those worlds have near-copies of some of the same people in them. I'm one of those copies of your friend, I guess, and there are several more of us, and there are several of you, too."
"...Now I'm wondering if my world is a future of one like yours," muses Angela. "Our history says that our ancestors were carried away from a warlike place to settle peacefully and simply on the planet I live on. But there was nothing about giant bugs in particular. Which could mean that my history isn't yours, or that the part about the bugs was omitted."
"I don't think any of the other Whistles - that's what we call your template - are psychic. Alice has a power, but it's not a telepathic power. A lot of Bells are born with a power but it's consistent when we have it - and me and one of the others we've met so far just don't."
"Well," says Angela. "You look the same - Bells mostly do too, but so far we haven't encountered any Whistles who are actually a different species, while half the Bells who are entered into the guestbook in our club room upstairs are not humans. My deviations from template are the most visible, though," she adds, waving a wing. "The parents - are consistent. I don't know how many of you share birth names, because I haven't been so rude as to try to ask for anyone's besides Micaiah's, but there is likely some matching there. You like populated areas." Is that enough to avoid having to conspicuously say I'll tell you when you're older? She hopes so.
"There's one of you - not one who has a one of us to match, one we just met on his own - and he doesn't use the door," says Stella. "He just dreams about this place and shows up. I think you're dreaming right now, which is important to have figured out because it means we definitely should not try to visit you. That doesn't go well."
"My Alice went for a jaunt in the Joker's mindscape, didn't come home for a week, usually time at home does not pass while you're in Milliways so I thought he was dead, eventually I was able to rescue him but I think if I hadn't been able to force the door or hadn't had Lazarus with me to tell me how to do it he could've been stuck there forever. We now know that forcing the door doesn't always work, because Amariah tried it and got nowhere - and she was trying to go back to a world she'd already seen. None of us have been to yours before at all."
"...Is that because she's too used to having it, or did she get dealt a worse helping of clumsy than the rest of us?" Stella wonders. "Until I got magic I couldn't walk across a flat surface without finding something to trip on, but there was no technological solution proposed."
"Yes, and you're the odd one out. The rest of us don't have deities who care if we swear," says Stella. "Hell, Amariah named her Whistle after one of her goddesses, if that's not blasphemy I don't know what is, but I don't think the original minds according to her doctrine. You, on the other hand, associate swearing in full generality with people who also fail to take your somewhat more smite-happy deity seriously."
"No I can't," he snorts.
But he does flip to a blank page and write AEGIS at the top.
In handwriting that wavers between childishly crude and robotically precise, with drawings as necessary (of her crown and the exo and Battle School), he sets out the story of their friendship. It's written from his perspective, but he doesn't sign it, doesn't define himself in any way.
He omits all mention of being able to push to her.
"I don't mean exactly the format, but I mean that's the other example of someone writing about about a Bell who hasn't had a chance to do it herself," explains Stella, peering over his shoulder. "You probably at least want to identify yourself as a Whistle, even if you don't put anything else about you in."
"I can just see it. 'Hey Aegis, I had a dream where I met two more of me and two more of you, and they were paired off and one of the pairs was even engaged and pregnant, and one of the yous was an angel and the other was a space empress who lives on Mars, and they had me write about you in a book in a room they keep for copies of you and their friends to use!'"
"Of course she'd want a room for all of us to meet in. She's one of us, and we wanted it," says Stella, grinning. "Well, Shell Bell and Amariah started it, but same difference. You like this crown? I think there's a page of all the crowns extant in there, plus Amariah's prospective design for when she finishes her project."
"In which case the pattern is that she'll take over the world after locating some treasure trove of applicable resources - maybe local, maybe not," says Stella, "maybe a combination - Amariah could've done it without my minting her but she'll be faster this way, Shell Bell needed the boost."
Stella laughs. "Is it that obvious, that young? I don't think I started talking about it until I was at least thirteen, and I wasn't particularly serious until I found my first wishcoin. But I suppose I didn't have close friends, growing up. I moved a couple times, I was too introverted."
"Yeah, even if we make it explicitly temporary... you could wake up and your mindscape could expect you to have wings, which might not be temporary because Milliways fucks around with time, and then you'd go around with phantom limbs until you came here again, and we're not guaranteed to be around to fix it."
"Little bitty Whistle, I am a magic space empress who invents new superpowers for herself like some people buy new socks. I don't have wings. Doesn't mean I can't fly. You wanna do it my way? I'm faster than her anyway," laughs Stella, aiming a thumb at Angela. "And then, worst case scenario of that is that you wake up and you can fly, no phantom limb issues."
"What kinda brain steroids are you feeding my boyfriend, Sue?" laughs Stella, turning the race into a straightaway where her head start will keep her at the front regardless of anyone's mental horsepower unless Alice starts cheating with extra coins or teleportation.
The higher she goes, the more stubbornly indistinct these three features become. The forest seems to go on forever; the mountains refuse to let her peek over them; the building retreats into a concealing fog like a distant landmark in a video game.
The direction change from ascent to dive is enough for Alice to catch up significantly. With Sue directing him, he tracks Stella's progress from above the canopy, and that's enough to get him closer still. But his occasional forays down to her level don't do him any good in closing the final gap.
"Hi, Sue," she says through the forcefield. It's not unlike the one that separates the corridors from the battleroom entrances.
"Hi!" he says. "I just had the most amazing dream. I met two grown-up-ish versions of you and they had a room where all the yous could hang out and write each other notes about stuff. One you was an angel and the other one was an empress. And they were both dating grown-up versions of me. Then we all played tag in midair."
"Yeah. And if she tries anything outside the bathroom," shrugs Aegis, "I can fuck her up." Pause. "In the dream, how did the wings work with the exo, or was it one of those dreamy things where it was there and it wasn't and you think you can get a clear mental picture but you can't produce any details?"
"Huh. Do you usually get such vivid complicated weird dreams? With such funny stuff in them. I mean, even if we grow up and the orientations shake out right and we still like each other and don't just want to be friends, the Westermarck effect dooms us right there, and you dream not one but two pairs of us together."
"That sounds messy. I could run for Hegemon, but it's an empty title, and even a harmless kind of mutant like me would have a public relations nightmare anyway. And the military record doesn't help much unless I actually engage and splat some buggers first."
"I'm going to ask for my save file and see if I can set up my own server of it or something," Aegis says. "I don't want to lose all my work, that would be really sad. Unless I grow up and decide everything I've been doing is stupid kiddy stuff, I guess, but I don't think so."
"We're accumulating pay here and we'll be able to use it when we're sixteen. I guess it'd depend on how expensive it was, though. I'd still ask for the save file. Storage is cheap and then if I ever come into more money I could see about starting it up again."
Pfft, I sit and think in the middle of conversations all the time, I call it 'processing', they know how to explain it. Usually I do it with my desk on me and type but not always.
I've been thinking about doing some more hacking. Lots of kids start messing with the censoring protocols and stuff right in launch but it's never interested me that much, but I know some theory, I could see what they do have on us. I know they're taking psych data. They used to read my journals, before I stopped writing in language. I think the fantasy game might usually be a psych data collector but they don't know what to do with ours so I've been writing reports. I don't mind them knowing what I do in the game, but I want to know what they think of it.
The game is really, really smart. They must pour a hell of a lot of server resources into it - there's never lag, there's never glitchy graphics, I've never heard of an exploitable bug except for the existence of a tunnel that only I'm fast enough to reach. And it's creative, too. I wonder who wrote it.
Will do. Pause. A hundred years ago there used to be all kinds of science fiction - it's so dated now, but I like old books - all kinds of science fiction with computers who were people. And we kept making smarter and smarter programs, and they keep not being - people. As far as we can tell. The fantasy game is smart, it can make me villages full of critters that act like people, but you couldn't push it if you tried.
There are a lot of minds in the Battle School. Is he going to have to tap every one of them to find out if any of them is really a computer program? But no—different minds look different, that's how he recognizes them, or part of how. Surely the game, if it's there, would be the most different.
And sure enough, when he's been looking for a few minutes, there's... something. It doesn't have a place, that's what's throwing him off. It has a thousand different locations and none of them is really it. Decentralized. Like a complex program running on a bunch of servers, connected to even more terminals.
There's nothing there to touch, though. He can see the network of mind, but when he tries to nudge it with his power, it's like pushing air. No contact, no resistance.
He delivers his findings to Aegis.