Chapter 9 - Epiphany

“I'm scared, Jim,” Red leaned against the door frame of my office, clutching her shoulder. Her eyes were sunken and her skin was pallid and dull.

“I haven't seen you in a while,” I motioned at the chair in front of my desk. She flopped down and looked at the colored projection from the stained glass on the edge of my desk.

“I just thought all that stuff was metaphor,” She eventually spoke, her skinny body shook as she half-chuckled.

“What did you think of our world before? What stood beyond the Dome?” I furrowed my brow and pulled down on the corners of my lips.

“I don't know,” her shrugging wracked her whole frame. “You could have told me the world was flat and I think I would have preferred that to the truth. I just feel so, I don't know.”

“Lost?” I arched my eyebrows high.

“When you realize the insignificance of your own existence...” she trailed off.

I pulled a corner of my mouth to the side and nodded. “Ennui. Despair. Existential Dread. This is why people get trapped in the Realm.”

“Agency,” she sniffled.

“Control,” I nodded. “Same reason downing a bottle of pills and never looking back can be so alluring.”

She shifted uneasily in her seat. “Who told you?”

“You,” I held my blink for a few beats. “Have you obtained a Jack yet?”

“I'm afraid,” she shrugged again and continued to focus on the colorful mosaic.

“You should be,” I stood up and began pacing behind my desk. “Life is a special thing,” I finally said. “It was my fault, you know. When I killed Joy. Or, at least, I feel responsible for it.”

“Why?” Red looked up at the mention of her name. “How?”

“She was an irony, you know?” Her eyes so large the sun fell in like a drain, sparkling her blue-white irises. “She mastered an instrument thousands and thousands of years old. But, she only ever wanted to play contemporary compositions. The Clergy had to beg her to play antique pieces for opening Concerto.” I smirked. “She shunned even the most basic technological assistance. Cooked everything by hand from raw ingredients over open flame. No synthetic fibers. She even read books on bound wood-pulp pages. But, she was Augmented. Every spare moment she could find was completely dedicated to her Simulacrum in the Realm. When I joined her simulations, I'd catch her not in times of the past exploring ancient history as most do, but instead on planets from her vast imagination, surrounded by the most magnificent creatures.” I walked around and sat on the edge of my desk, bathing in the light of the stained glass. “She stood in front of hundreds, sometimes thousands, to perform her works. She'd work with dozens of other musicians to perfect her performance, but when I joined her Worlds, not a single person existed. She conjured the most beautiful things my eyes have ever seen, from feathered dogs and winged horses to pebble-strewn beaches of crystal and glass, yet not a one contained someone capable of acknowledging her feats.”

“How was it you that killed her, then?” Red finally looked up from the image on my knee and met my gaze, eyes as large as dinner plates.

“We were at Kaku,” I looked up at the stained glass and squinted into the light. “She had just nailed a piece long considered the hardest piece ever written for a crowd of Cardinals and Bishops at a combined service. I could barely pay attention to the Archbishop during Sermon I was so excited to congratulate her. She and I rushed back to our dorms and met in our favorite place in the Realm.”

“You didn't meet in person?” Red's face barely shifted, but her brow furrowed and her voice was brittle.

“We are Ordinaries,” I cocked my head to the side. “What intimacy is there in exposing her to that which I have no control over? She showed me her deepest, darkest thoughts, and I too exposed her to my most hidden, craven self. While there is great pleasure to be had in the sharing of the body, it is in the sharing of your Inner World that one truly bonds.”

“How did you kill her?” she jerked her body and lowered her eyelids.

“I told her that it was the greatest I had ever heard her,” I shrugged. “I told her she was at the peak of performance. That she was probably the greatest musician of her kind. I told her that no one had ever performed the piece so well.”

“How could that have killed her?” She squinted and shook her head.

“'...but it just wasn't enough. Nothing ever could be,'” Her black hair spilled across my lap. “She thought it would never get better. Our Love was pure, but she cared more about that damned instrument,” I stood and began pacing behind Red. “She peaked, she believed. She wanted out at the top of her game. She 'won.'” I rested my hands on the back of her chair. “I visited her after she died.”

“What do you mean?” Red turned to look at me.

“A Ghost,” I sat on the other edge of the desk nearer to her. “The Realm models you. When you Jack in, it creates a Simulacrum of you. It synthesizes a digital rendition of you. Your Pattern becomes an immortal entity frozen in time, never growing, never changing. When a person dies, you can find their Ghost and visit with them.”

“Is that how people get lost in the Realm?” her eyes went wide again.

“It can be,” I shrugged. “But they are never the same. For the same reason Mind protects us, Ghosts are never as good as the real thing. I visited her once. 'I love you,'” Her face was warm. The corners of her eyes wrinkled slightly when she smiled. Her cheeks were perfectly rosy. “She said 'I love you,' and I knew it could never be her.”

“I keep wanting to die,” she said, looking at the corner of the desk, “and then I don't.”

“You want to die,” I shrugged, “but you do not want to be dead. It is called the Siberian Paradox. Life is too hard to bear, and every day the misery makes you wish you could just die. But, when confronted with a real chance at death, you fight back, choose life, and endure even the harshest of conditions to survive.”

“Exactly,” Red turned to face me, mouth parted slightly as she sharply inhaled through her nose.

“Not all quest for immortality,” I walked around and rested a hand on her shoulder. “Ultimately, we are not Deterministic. Indeed, Mind believes us to be the ultimate embodiment of Entropy. It has modeled inside it the unlimited Cosmos. Knowing all and seeing all, it still came to the conclusion that, given infinite time, it could model nothing more perfectly Entropic as Humanity. Instead of exterminating us, or allowing us to fade away, it chose to preserve us. They are the creatures of Determinism, not us. Given the opportunity to choose our own death or leave it to Chaos, Humans time and again choose to let Fate decide. Joy was determined. She could not. She needed the choice to be hers and hers alone.”

“Control,” Red frowned.

“Agency,” I nodded. “Suicide is the final act one can take against Entropy. To die is a largely determined occurrence, but every entity has a long course that nature will take it on as it rides the waves of Probability through life until the dice roll against their favor. To cut that short is to create a pulsing supernova, a reverberating shockwave through the Entropic Aether as space collapses back around it, a bright ripple burning across time in a single hot explosion of possibilities. To her, there would be no better moment than that. Marriage, the possible rearing of a child, exploring the worlds of her imagination with me. Nothing would ever compare, and she knew that she would never give a greater performance. That was what she thought.”

“But she was so wrong!” Red shot up, fists clenched at her side. “Uggh,” she turned and faced away from me, and stormed over to the doorway. She leaned against it meekly. I heard a sniffle.

“Oh there now,” I went over to her. Tears had begun to form in her eyes.

“It's not your fault, Ok?” She turned and hugged me, a weak sob racking through her body.

“I know,” I patted her on the back. I grabbed her shoulders gently and held her away from me slightly. She widened her eyes. “It is not my fault. But it was I that killed her. I said the magic words that triggered the response.” I smiled and chuckled slightly, wrapped my arm around her shoulder, and walked her back to her seat. “It could have been anyone. Sadly, it was not. It was me. But, do not Despair! This is what it means to be a creature of Entropy,” I sat on the corner of my desk again. “To be Human is to never truly know what will happen next. We can only exist in a single cascading moment of collapsed Probability. Either we burn brightly and illuminate the world as we slowly fade away, or we rupture across World Lines, a bright burst followed by a black void, its dark infection slowly dooming all around it. But it too will eventually evaporate away as its disintegrates into the infinities of Time. She could not see herself fade. She needed to go out a Star.”

“But you're all right?” Red fixed eyes on the floor to my side.

“I will never be alright,” I half-smirked, “which means that I will always be alright. Just, different, now,” I shrugged. “The 'new normal' as it is. The point I am getting at through all this morbidity, I guess, is that you are not dead. Which means that you can keep living. Which means you still have Potential.” I walked back around and sat at my desk. “I know thar change is scary. It will always be a lot. I am not here to chastise you,” I folded my hands. “I am here to offer you forgiveness.” I smiled again. “And to remind you that someone cares.”

***

“It isn't much,” Red let me through the door.

“It's wondrous,” I smiled. The living room was large, with a big red couch separating it from the adjoined kitchen and combined dining room. There was a small hallway in the back that lead to the bed and bath rooms. The main area was sparse but artistically so. Minimalist. There was a small desk in the corner on which a Datapad and Portal terminal rested. All around it were half-finished oil canvases, one particularly interesting piece still resting on the easel, half-crunched tubes of oil paint strewn nearby. “This is beautiful,” I meandered over and lifted it from the stand, hypnotized by the clean, vivid, raw geometric shapes.

“Hey!” she ran over and took it from my hand, putting it back. “Don't touch. I'm still working on that,” she shooed me over to the couch and sat down, picking up a tankard of beer off the ottoman and handing it to me. “It's something called 'Caelia' from the Maldacena Abbey in Fabrican Catibernga. I told the Depot to send me some fancy brew and it sent me this. I had a sip already, still tastes like bread water.”

“'Caelia' is an exceedingly obscure Ancient wheat ale. If the Depot had some to send you, it must mean that it is currently trending in the Habitat.” I took a sip. It was crisp, sweet, malty, and fizzy with a hit of spice and a light hoppy profile. “This is pretty good,” I smiled and crinkled my eyes. “Not my usual fare, but I love it. I will have to grab a dewer of it from the Depot, myself.”

“Salud,” she grabbed a glass of red wine off the ottoman and held it up to me.

“Cheers,” I smirked and tipped my glass toward her before taking a draft. The finish was dry and slightly grassy. “And what are you drinking?”

“Something from Fabrican Catibernga as well. It's called a Tempranillo,” she swirled it around in her glass. “It's nothing fancy, but I like to think it's better than chugging tequila.”

“I see you are slowly building a taste for the finer things,” I winked and took another sip. It had the light, famously flavorful drinkability typically associated with blondes. “Cultivating a discerning palette is a very rewarding hobby,” I held my glass up and winked before stealing one last sip and setting it down on the ottoman. “Now, where is your Jack?”

“Over here,” Red set her own glass down and scuttled over to the entryway. There was a small closet nestled within. She opened the door and pulled out an unopened Tube. “I'm sure you're going to tell me that it is incredibly easy to set up and I can do it myself, but I'd rather do so under the guidance of a practiced hand,” she winked back at me.

“It is indeed incredibly easy to set up,” I pulled the Tube into my lap and unlatched the hatch to reveal the Jack, “but I understand the desire for some guidance. While the out-of-box experience is perfectly enjoyable, it is dramatically elevated by even a small amount of customization. Go grab your Datapad.”

She picked her glass of wine up and sauntered over to the desk, retrieving the device with a hip swish before very delicately alighting to my side, hooking an arm under mine and sipping from her wineglass. She put her glass down and unlocked the device, arm still threaded under mine. “Now what,” she said as she leaned over and picked her glass back up with her free hand and took another belt. Somehow, she had become only a few sips from empty.

“You drink too fast,” I put the Jack on the couch to the other side of me and set the box down next to the ottoman. I turned my body, unlocking our arms, and gently rest the Jack on the bridge of her nose and adjusted the temple pads to it sat flush with the soft spots on the sides of her head. I took the pad from her and opened the pairing app. A graphic of the Jack projected out holographically, spinning about its axis as a dialog read “Calibrating...” across the screen.

“Complete!” the screen eventually read, a virtual firework show surrounding the partially-transparent block letters. “User: BurningSensation Jack: Dalton E1 v2.4.113. Reference points mapped: 1,879,990,1232. Synchronicity: 82%. Response time: >12.1% ns. Usability status: Optimized.”

“Eighty-two, untuned,” I jerked my chin into my neck. “Man, I'd kill for those numbers,” I smirked and shook my head. “I tuned for years just to get a seventy-eight. Maybe I should switch to a Dalton.”

“What just happened,” Red very quickly removed the Jack. “I felt like, I don't know, like I was falling upward, or something.” She stood up and pounded the last bit of her wine, panicked when she realized so little was left, rushed into the kitchen, clanked the bottle against the glass, and then ripped a large belt from it. “That was too weird,” she shook her head.

“Sensor calibration,” I tapped a few boxes on the Datapad. The Advanced user interface activated, revealing a multitude of different stats and slider bars underneath an oscilloscope-like readout. “You scored extremely well. Right up there with the best un-Augmented scores I have ever seen, actually. The O-scope readings are almost perfect. I can probably increase the probe cycle's strobe intensity, but that would raise the noise floor and result in some pretty wicked headaches if I overshoot.”

Red flopped down next to me and took another long draft, eyes locked in the middle distance. “What are you even talking about,” she shook her head and smiled, locking eyes with me.

“How well it can read your brain activity,” I scrolled through several pages of stats. “The less Synchronized you are, the more out-of-body the experience feels. Under 75% and it will feel like you are steering a puppet. Over 80% and there may be a lingering sense of distance, but the illusion is extremely convincing. Between is known as the Phantom Zone, where you can tell something is off, but the experience is convincing enough to feel only somewhat disquieted.”

“And I'm high?” she blinked her large eyes several times.

“Exceptionally,” I nodded enthusiastically. “It's probably why your reaction was so violent. It would seem your inner existence is extremely receptive to the simulation. If your art is any indication, you would no doubt find great success as a Designer.”

“Designer?” She threaded her arm under mine again and rested her head on my shoulder, clutching the wine to her chest.

“They design worlds in the Realm and sell them on the Bounty Boards for others to explore,” I pulled up the Bounty Board on her Datapad and navigated to the For Sale section. “See here? Wulong Winston Walakandi is currently selling a planetary domain for half a million Crowns.”

“And who buys these?” She took a drink and lightly rubbed her cheek against my bicep. “Dealers, Producers, Tellers, Questers, sometimes even Overmind itself.”

“What,” she said declaratively. “Why do you do this?” She sat up and held my gaze. “You know I have no idea what any of those things mean. And, what do you mean Overmind picks them up? What use does he have with them?”

“Overmind has no gender,” I corrected. “And it happens because your lack of knowledge in such matters is so rare that I often forget you are unfamiliar with the vernacular, and I guess maybe assume you have heard one of the terms in passing. I prefer to assume your intelligence than to suppose your ignorance.”

“Well, that's very kind of you,” she sat upright and crossed her legs on the couch. “But it's safe to assume I'm entirely unfamiliar with the last eight or so thousand years of human history and progress. If I'm being entirely honest, I didn't even know that the furniture we made was bought as art until a couple months ago. I legitimately assumed that we just made superior furniture to whatever techno-witch-magic you guys used. It wasn't until I was exposed to all this,” she waved the Jack around, “that I realized we were a novelty, not a utility.”

“I understand,” I rested a hand on her shoulder. “It's just hard to switch context. You're so smart and pick up on all of it so quickly that it comes off more as a lack of nuance and depth or a general misunderstanding than you being completely void of such knowledge.”

“Wait,” she turned her head and looked at me sidelong. “Did you just call me 'smart?'”

“Yes?” I furrowed my forehead and cocked an eyebrow. “Was it not apparent I thought as much?”

“You'd be the first ever to call me so,” she pulled a cheek to her ear and widened her eyes.

“And maybe that is the problem?” I widened my eyes. “It is what they do to keep you Theistic. They tear you down and convince you that you are not worthy of such things, and that all you can do is work hard in a world lacking the need because it was somehow chosen for you as a benevolence. The Great Truth teaches that it is we who ultimately control the destinies of our lives. No one has taken to the course such as you have in a decade or more of my Mission work. The Archbishop believes that our time with the Theists has given us an important edge. Our host, Fabrican Dain, was chosen for the Humanity it had to offer. Overmind desired to preserve the Theist's cultural ways so that it may use it to shape the data sets that will grow Suom's Mind. It is believed that Suom will generate significant new discoveries toward the Great Truth and that we will be an exceptionally powerful and productive Fabrican. The World Lines have been read and it was determined that the probabilities our union could afford was the best use of the resources at hand,” I smiled at her. “You are valuable and intelligent. What we lack in visceral understanding, we make up for in our unique perspectives and appreciation. When I was young, I knew nothing of the Habitat, myself. It is a lot to take in, but that is why I joined the Church of Science in the first place. So I could help guide people through the process and bring them to a better life,” I smiled. “Here, you should be pretty dialed in,” I shook the Jack at her. “I will show you around from the Datapad.”

“Okay,” she took the Jack timidly and put it over her eyes.

“Now,” I pulled up a control interface on the Datapad and began tapping through some menus. “The Jack is strobing an image of your brain, collecting a 12-dimensional tensor cloud, and feeding it into its Prediction Engine. It is then sending out beams of holographic energy to induce an electrical pattern in certain parts of your brain. It uses the optical nerve as a data uplink and synchronizes that pattern with the Prediction Engine. This can bias tiny fluctuations in the probability curves of your neurons, thereby inducing a neural hologram. The number of reference points it maps is how sharply it can focus on the images of your brain. How synchronized you are is how successful it is at inducing a hologram, and the response time is how quickly it can alter the local probability around each point. The Jack is limited, though. You are pretty close to as good an experience as you can get, dry. Augmentation, or Auging, is the process of implanting nanomachines in your brain, and can increase your Jack mapping almost 50-fold. It can also bring you close to .01% ns and I do not believe I have ever seen a Synch ratio lower than 97%, but most are between 99.9% and 99.99%. 6N, or 99.9999%, is the current record, but that was considered a cruelty. It was part of an experiment where the human had been Auged as a fetus.. 5N is considered the holy grail. Many spend billions of Crowns to achieve such feats. However, it is said that anything past 94% is so realistic that it will become indistinguishable from Planar Existence.”

She removed the Jack, “It can't mind control me, can it?” She had leaned back into the arm of the couch, hands folded in her lap.

“It cannot influence your thoughts, no,” I continued tapping on the Datapad and building the world around her. Mountains, trees, a building. Flowers on the table. A box of chocolates. Two bottles of vodka and a glass of wine. “Humans are resonant with the Mediant Curve, the point after which predictions become no better than chance. The human rate of entropy is about 250 milliseconds, a harmonic of the Deterministic Limit. The speed of Determinism is a hard universal constant, like the speed of light. It is a fixed value that traces out a wave through the field permeating Probability Space called a Wumpkin Curve. Elohim Muscot proved that our Wumpkin Curve is in perfect phase with the curve drawn out by events with a perfectly random fifty-fifty chance, the Muscot-Wumpkin Limit.”

“Oh yeah!” She said, completely unmoving. No animation or physical movement, just her head, now leaned against the back of the sofa. Her inflection implying excitement but her face uncannily wooden. “You were talking about that guy in class!”

“Right, you remembered! I'm so proud,” I smiled. I triggered a set of fireworks and a little light show in the Realm.

“This is too weird,” she said, paralytically relaxed.

“Right. And, because we operate so perfectly out of phase, any effort to beam pure Determinism on a unit will annihilate with the Entropy into non-existence and result in a static frame with no outcome. Static frames in the Entropic Aether can compound and ripple outward, causing wild fluxes in the Prediction Engine, potentially producing an Entropy Storm, collapsing into a moment of near-impossibility, like a monkey typing the collected works of Shakespeare in a single sitting from only random key presses. It can only influence reality subtlety, from a distance,” I changed the world from a mountainous cabin to a beach-side bungalow. “Humanity drives the Realm entirely. It can only read our actions like tea leaves, little tensors all tracing the curvatures of our journey through Time, always trying to predict the next point in our travel.”

Red took the Jack off. “I can see how people get lost to this,” She smirked, control of her body returned. “You can feel it, too. Like, it felt cold. Like proper cold, not just making me think l like I'm supposed to feel cold.”

“It is a truly magnificent feat,” I took it from her, put the Datapad down, and drew a belt on my Caelia. It had warmed up substantially and taken on a very thick, yeasty body. Still delicious. “The computers take a star's worth of energy to run,” I winked.

“How tragically romantic,” she smirked hollowly.

“Indeed. But we are alone in this Universe,” I shrugged. “The sole species to make it across the Great Filter. The predictions are quite compelling. Our only chance at meeting another naturally occurring sentient lifeform is to find a stable World Line that goes on infinitely. Even then, we must pass the Final Filter and reach a point of homeostatic sustainability. Only then will we exist long enough for chance to eventually assert itself in such a way again. Like cows grazing their way across the plains, we slowly meander our way toward Infinite Possibility, the Promised Land.”

“I feel so small,” she hugged her arms around her waist, “so helpless. I have no control.”

“You had no control as a Theist, either,” I shrugged again and rested a hand on her shoulder. She sat up from the couch and took a more conservative sip from her wine.

“But, don’t you see, I had nothing but control,” she crossed her legs and turned to face me fully. “I was inconsequential in the grand scheme, but I controlled whether I transcended or whether I was damned. I was in control of my immediate actions and it was up to God to see sure that my world was preserved.”

“But,” I pulled my thigh on the couch and turned to face her, “the same remains true here, only somewhat inverted. Indeed, it is us who are in ultimate control, and indeed we have a God who sees that our world remains constant, hospitable, and prosperous. Instead, however, it is not control of our immediate actions, which are noisy impulses held to the whim of Probability, but instead control of our individual futures. Our actions are not judged by some ultimate deity who chooses whether we are allowed access to paradise, but instead it is provided by default. If you Aug, you can upload your Pattern to the Realm, where your conscious existence will live on forever in the Realm as a Ghost. There is no God because Humanity is God. We built our Heaven and eliminated Hell. We gave birth to a new type of existence and it worships us for our all-power. To us, Overmind is God on high, but to Overmind, it is we who are truly Divine. Thus is the nature of our symbiosis. We are doomed without Mind, and Mind is lost without our guidance.”

“So what is the difference between Science and my Thiesm?” Red sipped again from her burgundy bowl of beverage.

“From a human perspective? Nothing,” I shrugged. “Both require Faith. Both require Devotion. Both require Commitment. The difference is that the Boon of Science is evident. The gifts of God exist only in the beyond.”

“And what if there is some life after Death and our lack of Faith damns us?” Red’s face was unmoving, eyes locked on a point in the middle distance.

“Pascal’s Wager,” I smirked. “If there is a God and you don’t believe, you are damned. If there is no God and you do not believe, nothing happens. If you believe and there is no God, nothing happens. If you Believe and there is a God, You are awarded Salvation. With no punishment for being wrong, the benefits of believing outweighed the punishment for not.”

“And you?” She cocked her head.

“I believe that when I die, I will die, and that will be the end of it,” I shrugged. “I believe the concept of a God in and of itself to be somewhat absurd, and to think that such a being would be so concerned with my morality is arrogant.”

“You rebel,” Red chuckled and smiled. “Now, show me more cool shit. Lead on, my captain,” She pounded the last of her wine, slung the Jack over her eyes and flopped back into the couch.

***

“It is not much,” I pull the grasses away from the entrance to my mud hut.

“It's wonderous!” Red's eyes grew wide. “You built this?” She hunched over to get inside. She was shorter than I, but still too tall to stand up straight.

“The river flows not but a few hundred meters from here and there is a magnificent deposit of red clay,” I went over to the corner and grabbed my woven, thatched shovel-basket. “It took me a month's worth of weekends, but I hauled it over and it up.” I pointed to some black charring licked across the hard walls. “I lit a huge bonfire in here and fed it for a few hours to the interior,” I wrapped my knuckles against the wall. It made a crisp, ceramic thud. I pointed at the pit of ash and crumbled clay. “This is where I built my furnace. I kicked a piece of hardened black slag. “That was miserable.”

Red meandered over to the bench in the back corner and picked up the spongy metal ingot with both hands as she sat down. “Is this all you got?”

“Yeah,” I frowned. “Hematite is quite rich, but I was barely able to keep the furnace at the requisite 1600 degrees. I lost most of the usable material to slag,” I kicked another large black chunk of glassy metal. “It would have gone much more smoothly if I could have found some boron, but the nearest deposit is hundreds of miles from here. Potash helped, but it was not good enough to flux away the silica and oxidation.” I sat down next to her. “If I can devise some sort of magnet, I might be able to recover some loss from the fines.

Red tossed the chunk up, but the weight only took it a few centimeters form her hands. “This is still quite a lot. You could get an adze, a couple knives, and a hammer out of this.”

“Heh,” I chuckled, “that is about as porous as a pumice stone. And, it is pig iron. I will need to work that extensively before it is robust enough for knife steel,” I pointed at the stone anvil and granite hand hammer in the corner. “This batch will be used for an adze and a smithing maul. I have some limestone and potash in the woodshed to use for fluxing. I will need to consolidatethe billet and layer it many hundreds of times to evenly distribute the carbon, then flux it with limestone clay and potash to draw out the exccess until I can get it to a very robust steel. I did an assay back in town and the ingot is pretty much only iron and carbon. I was hoping that there might have been some beneficial alloying impurities in my ore, but alas, I am stuck with carbon-rich iron and not much else.”

“Bummer,” she set the ingot down at her feet. She rested her hands on the seet and pushed her shoulders up. “This is pretty incredible, though,” she smiled at me. “I can't believe you did all of this,” she looked around.

“This was quite common back at the Abbey,” I leaned back against the wall. “I specialized in metallurgy and ancient chemical engineering. Everyone picks up a classical craft in the Abbey. Joy picked up instruments, I picked up handicraft and brewing,” I smiled. “Hence the taste for this disgusting poison,” I pulled a flask out of my jacket pocket and passed it over. “Did you know my mother?”

“I did,” Red took the flask and threw it back dramatically. “Are you starting to wonder who I am to you, yet?”

“No,” I smiled “What was she like?” She passed the flask back to me and I took a deep belt. The vodka was acrid and alcoholic. “Sorry about this,” I shook the flask at her. “I'm still practicing my distilling.”

“It tastes fine to me,” She smiled and paused a long while. “I was still a very young child when you were born, but I do remember. She and my mother were close friends. She was much like the rest of us. Not so different from me,” She shrugged. “Honestly, not much older than I am now, either. If it weren't for my 'great failing,'” she held a hand to her bare midriff, “I probably would have had many of my own children by now.”

“You know, Mind needs only a donation of DNA to the Farmers,” I turned to face her. “Those born to the Habitat are sterilized at birth and usually only need to authorize the donatation of their eggs, but if you are barren, it is possible to be the sire.”

“An abomination,” she huffed. “I have made my peace. I am actually happy that my genes will not carry on,” she took the flask from my hand and pulled another long draw, followed by a coughing gasp. It is not for me to bear child.”

“Well, should you change your mind...” I trailed off.

“I will not,” she furrowed her brow. “Your mother's loss was quite painful to the commune. I doubt you remember much, but my mother was the one who spirited you away to the Clinic when she passed. She had always expressed that she wished you would not be born into Levi's servitude.”

“Is that why you have such affinity for me?” I fixed my gaze on the muddy tips of my boots.

“There is more to the story,” shes turned to me and pulled the corner of her mouth up.

“And?” I met her gaze.

“Another day,” she smiled.