It was very odd to hold a conversation with a disembodied voice. It lent the impression that Ebi was both everywhere and nowhere, the speakers too numerous and well-hidden to pin down most of the sources of her voice, which was diluted further still by the cavernous spaces of the penthouse, resonant with the hard surfaces of the kitchen and devoured by the many soft sitting areas in kind. It was like the building itself spoke to us—and in a sense, it did.
“So you still don’t have your body back? I really thought Ai would…”
“She’d what? Put me back together again? I’m already together,” retorted the hidden speakers. “Like, dude, think about the words you just said. Is that ‘my body’ or are you sticking labels on stuff?”
“…Ah.”
“Not one body,” Izumi supplied with a grin of camaraderie. “I know what that’s like.”
“Not like me, you don’t.”
She had a point. It was a misnomer to think of her as being either embodied or disembodied. Yes, she seemed to have quietly lost use of, or been separated from, her bipedal android form in the wake of her direct contact with Sugawara, and I was rather upset that my help had never been enlisted to deal with it. But Ebi was bigger than that. She was, in effect, the entire building, and apparently also extended beyond that into the surrounding fourspace. Her absent doll-like teal shell was the sprout, not the roots.
“What’s that like?” I ventured to ask, scanning the ceiling to look for cameras. I couldn’t see any, so maybe she had other sensors; locating and identifying people with infomancy wasn’t particularly difficult when you could set up an array encompassing the entire building.
“Oh, y’know. I’m a big ol’ terrarium full of people.”
“People who mostly don’t know you’re there.”
“Oh, they know. I’m Ebi-tan, building systems and services AI and Amane’s caretaker. That’s something they cover on day one of orientation. They just think I’m a really fancy climate control algorithm and chatbot, not a whole person. Important to maintain that charade, since…y’know.”
Izumi nodded. She’d decided to direct her attention toward one of the visible PA panels, the one between the kitchen and the sitting area, more or less directly above where Alice liked to flop face-down on the sofa. “It works. I didn’t, we didn’t, know that you’re…whole. Is that a good word?”
“Sure. Always wondered if you guys sniffed me out, though. Thanks for keeping quiet about it, if you did.”
Izumi shook her head, her hair following the motion with state-of-the-art physics interactions. “Hikanome? No. You hide well, and I was never looking through the shell when I was here before. Miyoko might have known, but she hasn’t been here since…”
“Before?” I asked, then facepalmed. “Ah, no, stupid question. You’re VNTs, Todai are VNTs, of course you’d have been here for meetings and stuff, yeah.”
Ebi emanated a harsh, digital buzz, the soundbyte for “wrong answer,” which made me flinch for both the sharpness of the sound and the implication. There was a smile in her voice, though. “Way to miss the drama Izumi just dangled, Ez.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. Miyoko hasn’t been here since…? Sugawara was put away? Since you moved in?”
“No and sorta. Specifically since the Blue Spark Incident. That was mass casualty, and she was in here—hospital, remember—healing folks. Doesn’t like it here now, I imagine. There be ghosts. Point is, that means I got away with it, hell yeah.”
“Hell ye—”
“Until Sugawara came in here and walked through me.”
“Oh.” I nodded in understanding. “He messed you up bad, yeah, but he also glimpsed your nature or something?” Worry sprouted in my chest as I glanced toward Izumi. “Do we now have to extra kill him before he tells somebody?”
“Doubt he’s much of a talker anymore. Maybe if the Peacies get their hands on him. They know how to make people sing. Even if he’s only debatably a person. And that convenient segue brings me back to what you two were floundering about. Souls! Ez, do you think he has a soul?”
I frowned at the panel. “I mean, there’s something there, right. Maybe not a whole guy, but I felt something. Scientifically it’s pretty up in the air whether—”
“Izumi, you?”
I crossed my arms in outward annoyance at the interruption, deep down grateful to have been cut off before I could get rambling.
“No. That is Flame shaped like him. That has been…inkanshita?”
“Stamped,” Ebi supplied.
“Stamped, with his wants.”
I took issue with this reasoning. “I don’t know if that’s different from a soul, functionally. I mean, Ebi, if you’re going where I think you are with this, then you’re also Flame imbued with a will, right? And I’d say you’re pretty ensouled, qualitatively speaking.” I blanched. “Er, not to equate you two, since he’s a fucking monster and you’re…Ebi.”
“Hah.” The laugh was mirthless and synthetic. “Okay, time for a visual aid. You’re going on a field trip. Izumi, grab ‘em.”
I managed to yelp out a “What?” before I was yanked by the scruff. Severe motion sickness followed as Izumi dove into the fourth dimension, dragging me away from everything.
Crossing into the fourth dimension was very…wrong. Physics worked well enough once you were out here—I wasn’t dying on the spot due to catastrophic biological failure, after all—but that membrane between worlds didn’t work right compared to what the math suggested, confounding thermodynamics and both old and new field theory. The physical boundary was too harsh with the sudden disappearance of gravity, the differences in geography too stark for things that should be only meters apart, the locale too alien for what should have been merely a strange extension of Earth. Even ripple was reluctant to cross from threespace to fourspace in the same ways as it usually did—a boon for our purposes, since the mantles abused that property to hide out here, putting distance and thus safety between the pod and the battlefield, but still damning in its suggestion that the fourth dimension didn’t even play nice with the other novel physics of the age of magic.
The entire space, with its floating detritus and the unnerving, back-of-the-neck sense that there was something living out here, was not supposed to be here. It had been stitched to our reality. An ugly stitch, too; tentative models showed that the “seam” had a truly horrendous amount of folding and bunching, far less clean and predictable than any conventional warping of spacetime due to gravity. Anyone who tried to cross it without knowing the local geometry risked being dashed against the rocks. The seam between light and darkness, air and oil, was so tenuously, terrifyingly thin and sharp, a jagged blade to make even the Vaetna blush, and only flamebearers were empowered to pierce it.
That didn’t mean we were naturally good at it. I was, in fact, worse than most at it. Moving in a direction that hadn’t existed in one’s evolutionary history played hell with the inner ear, and the visual chaos of the “flattening” of reality challenged my visual cortex as my eyes struggled to decide which direction I was moving. The two senses agreed I was falling, the eustachian tubes saying that I was in freefall while my retinas argued the vanishing light indicated I was actually being dragged beneath waves. It was not a good combination. I think I screamed before vomiting, and I certainly thrashed against Izumi for a moment.
But only for a moment. Inwardly, I was overcome with resentment at these animal reactions; Hina didn’t have them, and apparently they were much less visceral for the others when they were in mantle. Izumi certainly didn’t have any trouble, tugging me in a straight line as we flew-floated-swam into the abyss. I wish I could say I steeled myself, gathered my courage in my gut and overcame the psychosomatic awfulness through the sheer willpower of a flamebearer asserting their will over reality; what I actually did was disassociate hard, mentally escaping into the reasoning that this flesh body was a deeply suboptimal temporary shell and anything bad that it experienced was a design flaw we’d deal with later. This worked well enough that I managed to still my body and dared to open my eyes and look around as my instincts dealt with retching out the bile.
My vision first fixed on the relatively static and far-off distance rather than trying to track anything nearby. Last time I’d come here had been from the sparse woods and open spaces of Yoyogi Park, and there hadn’t been much out there, just impossibly massive hunks of driftwood and dust bunnies of unknown origin. This time, our transit into the area of fourspace inside Lighthouse Tower brought us to a much more occupied environ. Glowing mats of what I could swear were bioluminescent algae floated far off, some of them in regular enough grids that I suspected they were somehow attached to buildings of the city—wait, no, many of them were attached to structures out here in fourspace, surprisingly mundane boxes of concrete. Here and there longer columns stretched across further distances—perhaps tunnels, I thought. Many of them cut off abruptly and continued to warp as we fell; that was a hardware limitation, my eyes only able to perceive three-dimensional slices of the complete space as we moved along the fourth axis, thus causing the appearance of motion and transformation even in far-off objects that should have had the static safety of parallax.
What I observed was that most of the city, for all it was a major metropolis, didn’t make it into fourspace. Everything that was out here was deeply utilitarian, stripped down to its essentials, the barest outposts of what scientific equipment or infrastructure was worth contracting the nation’s flamebearers and magitech-equipped services to set up. Debris was still everywhere; the driftwood was replaced by what looked like concrete and rebar, evidence of construction or destruction. Very little made it readily identifiable as Tokyo. I spotted several places not too far off where there was some kind of distortion, places where I suspected battle had taken place in realspace and orange ripple had managed to leak all the way out here and now lingered still.
Then we landed on a platform that I didn’t see until right before impact, despite it being as wide as the penthouse’s upper level common area. It had gravity; I felt my foot shake for a moment as the stabilizer reoriented, turning uncomfortably hot in my pocket. Izumi put me down and I was able to take in the tower surrounding us.
Well, it didn’t quite look like a tower. It resembled Lighthouse’s HQ in the same way that a nervous system resembled a body. A network of glowing threads stretched upward around us—I noted with some alarm that our three-dimensional orientation had changed—punctuated by hundreds of boxes that I was recognizing as pocketspaces. The lines were a familiar teal, and mostly changed directions in right angles that clearly sketched out the individual floors and walls of the tower, converging and then diverging again like a dance distributed over space rather than across time. Taken as a whole, the sight was beautiful, for its color and neatness as much as the sheer scale. Ebi was beautiful. And this wasn’t even all of her, since I reasoned that much of her physical hardware was inside the various boxes, things like alternate attachments for her drone body or the entire pharmacy that was somehow stored out here. No wonder she hadn’t really minded me ogling her backside way back on that first day, if this was her true form.
There was also damage. One of the furthest-off boxes, which must have originally been four meters to a side, looked like it had been blasted open from within, and no threads led to it anymore.
“Where Sugawara touched her,” Izumi surmised, gazing up at it as well.
“The part of her that interfaces with the drone, then. Looks like it’s been abandoned completely.” What a saddening thought.
We waited for a long moment for Ebi to chime in. She didn’t. She was right here in a very literal sense, yet we seemed to be alone. She’d called this excursion a visual aid—for what?
I lowered my gaze toward Izumi. “You’ve seen all this before, right? Just as you’ve passed by, coming and going?”
“Yes.”
“Are there other buildings like it here?” I looked toward the horizonless distance again. “In Tokyo, I mean. I certainly can’t see any from here. Hikanome HQ?”
“No. Our temples have some, but this is…different. Look there.” She pointed.
I followed the finger down. First, I realized the platform we had landed on was actually another box, and a solid half of all the threads eventually converged into a few bundles that passed into it. We were standing on the mainframe, or one of them. Then I leaned toward one bundle and frowned in polite incredulity at what I saw, my hands pausing in their absentminded task of fixing my incredibly messed-up hair.
“That can’t be right.”
The threads were not simple, linear threads at all, but entire chains of glyphs woven tighter than human hands ever could. Ebi’s nervous system—because I knew that was indeed what I was looking at—was not only built to a breathtakingly large scale, but an impossibly small one as well, and together the two presented a problem. Even if Ai had found some novel way to make them tiny—if anybody could solve the open problem of a magical pantograph to imitate her motions in micro it would be her—she would have had to weave for years nonstop to create this many glyphs. If she even had that much Flame.
I thought back to the first day we met. She’d claimed the Radiances powered their magic, motivated their Flame, through positive emotions, and Ebi had countered with a very heavy-handed gesture toward the concept of sacrifice, implying…something. That little interaction had mostly fallen out of my mind since then, busy with fresh trauma.That exchange returned to me now as I scrutinized the impossibly compressed chains of glyphs.
I took a deep breath of the oily air as I inspected one of the chains. “Fuckin’…what is this, {IDENTIFY}-{ASSIGN}-something else, repeated like a hundred times with multiplexers on this strand alone? It’s just too much to weave. Not to cast aspersions, but…blood magic, right? Can it be anything else?” I looked toward Izumi, hoping for an alternative.
“That’s what I thought as well.”
“Then what did she sacrifice? And why?” I looked around again. “Because this is insane. I mean, not to be a caricature of myself, but I’m not sure anywhere but the Spire has this much integrated Flame. All to run Ebi? For the…clout of making a true AI, only to keep her secret? I don’t get the point. Er, no offense,” I called out toward the gargantuan lattice, cognizant of her presence. I received no response. “Huh, guess she can’t hear us. I wouldn’t be able to hear something inside my body either, I guess. Though wouldn’t that be cool?”
“Ezzen.”
“Sorry.”
“Ai does not strike me as somebody who would do all of this for ego. Not just to prove she could. She loves magic and technology, but not in that way, I think. Do you agree?”
“…Yeah. And she’s…I don’t know, whole. Amane, Alice, Yuuka, they’ve all got problems or scars, stuff that’s visibly some type of exchange from negotiating with their Flame for the power they have. Hina doesn’t count. For Ai to have done all this and not have sacrificed…Omelas,” I intoned with a heavy heart. “If this is blood magic, she must have outsourced the sacrifice.”
At the barbecue, I’d vehemently argued against the idea that the Vaetna’s power came from some kind of central suffering battery that provided the payment toward the Flame. Izumi had been there, as Kimura. She snorted. “You know, I read that after the barbecue, as something to do to stay awake. I think you missed the point. Have you read it?”
“That’s off topic—” I swallowed the defense. “No. I just…invoked it because I want to think the Vaetna are better than that. And I hold Ai in similar regard. Which is why it kind of sucks that I’m just now remembering she accused them of the same thing, and it’s occurring to me that maybe she was projecting.”
“What did she say?”
“That the Vaetna either broke the rules of magic or were…well, doing some Omelas shit. Conducting some heinous sacrifice of others that explains the power they’ve got. But she wouldn’t do that herself,” I argued. “I mean, she’s so…kind, it’s like her whole modus operandi.”
Izumi needed a moment to parse the borrowed Latin before nodding. “I agree. But I think she is taking advantage of another suffering.”
“Don’t love the sound of that. Also don’t know what you mean,” I admitted. “Since I guess I’m just admitting when I don’t know stuff now.”
“The Blue Spark Incident.”
I frowned, trying to recap what I knew of Lighthouse’s history to fit the two events together in the timeline. About four years ago, they had rescued Amane. This had led to or exacerbated a schism in Hikanome that culminated in Sugawara being deposed. The Blue Spark Incident had come sometime soon after, some necromantic ritual gone wrong which had torn open a scar in Tokyo’s sky and destroyed the hospital that was now Lighthouse Tower in the process. Todai had then renovated it and moved in—I wasn’t sure if the donation of Flame they’d received was before or after that, but it definitely preceded Ai creating Ebi.
That was all well and good, but I didn’t know enough about the incident itself to see the relationship. I told this to Izumi, who explained somberly. “The incident was caused by a Hikanome scientist who was trying to bring back her husband. Scientist is not the right word—researcher? Builder? At any rate, she had been gifted part of Sugawara’s Flame before the schism, and used it in a ritual where she used one of the summer fireworks displays to make the shape of a glyph. At the same time, she killed sixty people. You remember what Sugawara did in the video?”
I did. When Hina had killed him, his corpse had splattered a fountain of gore into a perfect glyph to excise his soul—or a simulacrum of it, depending on if you asked me or Izumi—and transmit himself through the camera of Alice’s mantle to reach us. There was an intersection between blood magic and glyphcraft that was truly powerful, all the precision of intent that came from glyphs married with the ultimate desperation that the Flame seemed to crave. “Christ. That, writ large?”
“Yes.” Izumi’s tone carried an awful gravity. “She wanted to…reconstruct her husband’s soul with that power, after Miyoko could not help her. Instead she made, or called, something, which the Radiances sealed away in the sky above the bay. That part is not important. What is important is that she was attempting to make a soul. Ebi-chan is…a successful version of that, I think.”
She let that sit. I didn’t know what to say; this was beyond my wheelhouse, and my thoughts were beset by the buzzing of flies feasting on the dead. It felt like Izumi was making a leap that landed us squarely at a secret far darker than anything I’d imagined, but I didn’t know how else to explain what I was seeing around me. “I don’t like this speculation,” I decided, looking down at the concrete box beneath me. “Ebi? Care to chime in? Please?”
Izumi sighed. “Not necessarily. I think she used the incident itself afterward. Many more died in the fighting, and I think she…found a way that the suffering would not go to waste. The timing is very close, and I cannot think of another way for what we see here to exist without Ai hurting many, many people.”
“That sounds more like her,” I admitted. “I don’t want to be here anymore. Take me back, please.”
“Can’t really see or hear you out here, y’know. Like what you saw?”
“You’re beautiful,” I replied, and it wasn’t a lie. Regardless of whatever had transpired to create Ebi, I couldn’t deny the beauty I’d seen in the result. Maybe that reflected poorly on me. “And confounding. How did Ai—”
“Bup bup bup,” she interrupted. “Doesn’t matter. Just riddle me this: do I have a soul?”
“Oh. So that was the point of all that?” I spared a glance at Izumi, who crossed her arms in self-satisfaction.
“Yeah,” Ebi confirmed. “So, what do you think?”
“I mean, yeah, of course you do,” I reasoned. “If that’s not a soul, I don’t know what else I’d call it. Are you just saying that it is possible to create something indistinguishable from a soul with enough glyphs, and that’s what we should be pursuing for Izumi?”
“Fuck no. I’m way too much work.”
My ego attempted to challenge that for a moment—surely I was smart enough to wrap my head around the basic architecture that made her tick, and I could replicate the principles given enough time, and once I had it in GWalk, even the most repetitively absurd schematics were just a simple matter of copying and pasting patterns around. That was the fantasy of Ezzen the genius, and it had little bearing on reality. Actual hands-on glyphcraft was not the abstracted universe of a diagram, where adding more glyphs was as simple as a drag-and-drop or muscle-memory sequence of shortcuts. Each would have to be woven individually, by hand, with no economies of scale save for the simple monotony of practiced motions. The only shortcut there was in blood magic.
“Figures. You’re really not gonna confirm or deny…?”
“What, so you can learn enough about it to accidentally spill the secrets on the forums? ‘Oh yeah, just kill a hundred people and you too can have your own artificial intelligence running the show.’ I’m sure the Peacies would love to know that’s all it takes. Oh, wait, no, cause if it were that easy, we would have had Skynet two minutes after the firestorms started.”
I sat back in my chair and shot a glance at Izumi, trying to tell her to follow my lead. I wanted to know more, but Ebi clearly didn’t seem interested in giving us the details, and I had to admit that was probably for the best. “Okay, so we should stop guessing, we get it. I’d love to stop prying, but…if not that, then what was the point of showing us?”
“Showing you was the point,” the slightly irritated voice from beyond replied. “My soul is a thing you can show, a physical thing, sitting out thirty meters kata of here for all to see if you can get out there and don’t get shredded by the brain-to-twizzlers traps.”
“…The what?” I hadn’t seen any traps out there—but I supposed they wouldn’t have been very good traps if I had, would they?
“I’m there,” she continued, pointedly ignoring my question. “You can look at me. Now, point to where Izumi’s soul is.”
Izumi’s arms stayed crossed; mine made it about halfway up before I understood it was a trick question. “In my other body,” she said.
“Is it?” Ebi countered. “If I go down there, pop open the cranium and the ribcage to do an invasive soulectomy, will I find a special wishbone that contains your essence? Your memories, your personality, your morality, all that other shit? Hm? Again, if it were that simple, the Peacies would have done it.”
It was a discouraging thought, the same reasoning we’d taken refuge in regarding time travel now flipped on its head to become a barrier to something we actually wanted to do. I tried to think out loud nonetheless, aware that I was walking in the footsteps of arguments much older than actual magic.
“I mean, it’s probably more emergent than that, isn’t it? As in, there’s a lot of crossover between the body and the brain. We’re animals made of meat, and the meat has far too much input.” I almost spat that part; the comforting disassociation had long faded and I was back to feeling like a sack of fluids. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a soul, right? The Flame has to attach to something, and you can’t weave it while in a mantle. That means the real body has something, or is something, the mantle does or is not,” I reasoned, now almost pleading with reality as claustrophobia closed in around me.
“Philosophically, sure,” Ebi agreed. “But you see the problem. There’s not a clear thing to work magic on and move around.”
“That was the problem with the Blue Spark Incident,” Izumi agreed. “She was trying to retrieve a soul that didn’t exist.” That was probably why she didn’t look as distressed about this epistemological reality as I felt; for her, it was old news, something she’d seen others attempt and fail at already.
And then it hit me. I raised my hand as though I had an objection for the professor, despite having not been in a classroom in five years. “Hold on.”
“Holding,” replied the disembodied voice.
“What about Sugawara? I mean, we all felt him, right? Had something like spiritual contact with him? Felt the malice?”
Now Izumi’s face twisted, immediate understanding soured by the deepest discomfort. She nodded. Ebi had nothing to nod with, but I could have sworn the kitchen countertop’s overhead lights flickered briefly. I took that as my cue to keep going.
“Even if that is just a simulacra of him and the ‘real soul’ or whatever you want to call it is gone, he did still manage to imbue himself into it. Translate his personality, the essence of it, into Flame. Like, died and immediately made a ghost of himself, one that apparently could pilot a body if given the opportunity to do so. That’s what we want, right? And yeah, sure, he did kill his physical body to do that, but that’s kind of a goal for you, right, Izumi?”
The party goth gave another nod. “It is. And he did it with what seemed to be only one glyph. But I don’t think it was that simple. Hikanome, before and after him, do magic with ritual, and he had the worst of his cult with him at the end. I doubt the part we saw was all of it.”
“Yeah, we lost contact right after, didn’t we? And the others came directly back, they didn’t stick around to investigate. Ebi, forgive me for not keeping track—did any of us go back after the fact?”
“Nope.”
“Can we?”
The supercomputer in the walls took several seconds to answer that. Imagined some of her threads darting out into the void from the main rectilinear grid, feelers of infomantic sub-lattices plumbing for information in ways I could conceptualize but not imagine. I realized that that imagery, that of tentacles sent far afield through the dark, bore a striking resemblance with the lights beneath the ice in my dreams—a thought for later. Ebi hummed. “I think so. I like where your head’s at. As far as I can tell, and I can tell quite a lot, the government’s really embarrassed that we got the whole extrajudicial killing thing past them, so they kind of covered it up for us. Helps that we bribed the shit out of the local police there, they were already corrupt as fuck, that’s how he got his goons all together there in the first place.”
“Great. So…we should go look,” I decided. “Go out to that hospital, see if we can piece together how he did it, see if we can do it nice and clean with more glyphcraft. And then…do a little necromancy.”
I was about to prompt Izumi for her thoughts on the matter—her shoulders had gone rather hunched and I suspected this would be a hard sell—when a new voice joined the conversation, one that was very slightly out of breath, as though she’d rushed over as soon as she’d heard but was trying her best to hide it. Or, realistically, rushed over before she’d heard, judging by the Australian accent.
“Hey, did I hear extrajudicial killing? And forensics? Finally, some shit we can actually bond over.” I turned to see Yuuka grinning at me, her eye aglow. “We’ll find something there if we go right now.”
Author’s Note:
4.13 is a doubly unlucky number. Four is an omen of death in Japan, and thirteen is unlucky in the USA. Surely that will have no bearing on the outcome of this excursion to find the remnants of a cult leader’s necromantic ritual! Right? Say it with me now!
Sorry that this chapter has been so delayed! The last couple of weeks have seen my household gain a new pet. I’m trying (and thus far succeeding) to build better writing habits and make the best of the time I have. Thank you as usual to the beta readers, as well as the patrons and everybody in the Discord; your collective enthusiasm is doing a lot for my work ethic. Anticipate the next chapter on Sunday as usual!
That’s pretty much all for this week. Next chapter should coincide with new art and the story’s 5000 reader (RR+Shub) milestone. See you then!
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