Draft Update 09/05/24 (Patreon)

(Sorry for the minor delay with this one, and it's shortness. I spent a while editing and adding to the previous chapter, which turned out to be very hard... I feel like I still haven't really resolved the sense of uncertainty I'm feeling with this whole part of the story. Maybe it's just hard, and it can't be helped.)

I looked across the table suspiciously. "You're really just going to tell me?"

"Is that so surprising?" She asked. "Like I said, it's no fun if you don't have even a rudimentary understanding of the situation. A mystery is uncompelling if the detective doesn't have any boundaries to their reasoning."

"...why do you care whether it's 'compelling' or not?"

"Did I not say just a moment ago that you might think of me as a mirror? Perhaps I'm merely reflecting your own passions back at you." She held up a single finger with her gloved hand. "Again, don't let the errata of the situation concern you for now. Just hear me out."

I wrinkled my nose in discomfort and irritation, and the corner of the half of her lips visible turned upwards in amusement.

I can't believe that after all these years wondering, I'm going to find out the truth behind all this in such a stupid way. Assuming her supposition earlier wasn't truthful, and this is all some fantasy my brain is conjuring up while I'm having a stroke or something.

How many times in the past 24 hours had I speculated about what I was seeing being a hallucination? It had to be a new record.

"Firstly, let me correct another misconception you seem to be operating under," she began. "That time, at any point, was 'looping'."

"That's not a misconception," I corrected her. "I know it was something local and artificial-- That it didn't even affect the pantry, and everyone was resetting their memories every time it happened of their own free will. I..."

I hesitated suddenly, biting my tongue. Even under the circumstances, I couldn't say 'I heard it from myself' without feeling like an idiot.

"Be that as it may," she replied casually, "your use of that turn of phrase shows that you still haven't internalized that knowledge. And while in some ways that doesn't truly matter, I'm sure it's biasing your thinking to some extent. So let's get into the weeds of it. Chorus?"

Once again, a spotlight descended, this time to her right, and there Aruru was again, still posed in that unsettling, rigid bow.

At least it's comfortably far away from me this time around.

"The blackboard, if you would."

CHORUS: <inclining head> As you command, my lady.

It turned and raised a hand, and just as had been willed, a large blackboard took shape in front of the golem, seeming to be woven together by the very shadows themselves. Once this was done, it reached into the apron of its dress and produced a long piece of chalk.

"As you know," the Lady - entropy, whatever - began, "the Order constructed its sanctuary in two interlinked locations. One at the bottom of the ocean on the Atelikos, and another in the interstitial space of the 'Nekrokos'. (We'll use that term since it sounds cooler than the other one.)" She lowered her brow. "But the mechanics of how that works remain a little vague from your perspective, since you only heard them once, and from an unreliable witness. So let's begin by spelling things out."

I bit my lip. "I thought you were supposed to be explaining the time loop, not how the sanctuary works. That's the one part I feel like I did figure out."

"Be patient, would you?" She rolled her visible eye. "Fuck me, kids these days can't wait five minutes for someone to deliver them the answers to their lives' biggest questions."

"I'm two-hundred and thirty-one."

"No you're not," she corrected me. "You're much older than that. But I'm as old as the concept of time itself, so shut up and listen to my roundabout explanation. At the very least, it'd be good to refresh your memory." She cleared her throat. "Let's establish another timeline-- No pun intended. As you were told, the first version of the sanctuary to be constructed was the one in the Atelikos. After learning of my existence, the Order had scoured the ancient records for information on the infrastructure the Ironworkers had used to observe what remained of the old world, and that led them to discover the observation facility... but they could not simply build their sanctuary upon it directly." She raised an eyebrow at me. "Do you recall why, perhaps?"

I hesitated. "Uh, well... Anna-- Rather, that woman called it a 'demi-plane', and said that it had no defined sense of reality. So they had to impose something from another plane on it rather than building it directly."

"That's reasonably close, but only half of the truth," she said. "Obviously, there was some sense of defined reality, since the facility was there in the first place. It just wasn't one suitable for the presence of human beings." She folded her hands together symmetrically on front of her face, aligned with the veil that split it in two. "The Ironworkers were human consciousness bound within machines. They had no need for habitable physical spaces. So when creating a plane through which to regard the rest of the universe outside of the Tower of Asphodel, their only concern was efficiency. Now, when you're a mere human and you're trying to optimize the speed of a logic engine, the most you can do is to reduce the friction of the elements - regulate temperature, energy, background interference - but when you are a being capable of manipulating the very nature of planes themselves, what is your first port of call?"

"I'm not sure what kind of answer you're looking for," I said bluntly, wearing an uneasy frown. "I don't really make a habit of thinking about how best to design worlds."

That's not even true, my imagination scolded me. You think about how you would fix the Ironworker's decisions all the time. Mostly in the context of politics and making people's brains explode when they try to ignore any cognitive dissonance they're feeling, but...

"I'll give you a hint," she said. "Think back to the very first conversation you had with Linos upon arriving in the sanctuary during the 'looped' version of the weekend."

"If you asked a normal person to remember a specific conversation from 200 years ago, they'd think you were nuts," I told her.

"Don't you remember what Ptolema said?" she asked. "Everyone in this realm has a memory far in excess of the capabilities of an average human, so I'm afraid you're not special any more." She pursed her lips with amusement. "Perhaps if you were to live for 10,000 years, you might start standing out from the crowd again? I wonder."

I ignored her, trying to think back to the conversation. We were talking about immortality - the 'dragon' and 'phoenix' crap - and then before that, listening to Linos's bullshit explanations of how the sanctuary works. And how we got there in the first place...

I blinked, recalling something.

"Is this... to do with time?" I asked her. "Like, how it flows differently on different planes, with the difference between the Atelikos and the Mimikos coming up in that conversation?"

"Ding ding ding," she said, sounding unimpressed. "A roundabout way to say it, but correct. The Ironworkers had the ability to control, albeit crudely, the speed of time passage on the planes they created, just like every other aspect of physics. And while they tried to keep the ones they intended to be settled more or less in alignment, there was no reason to do so for the ones where they performed their, well, let's call them 'executive operations'. Quite the opposite, in fact."

"You mean, for observing stuff, it would be an advantage for time to pass slower, or even be outright relative, like in this reality," I concluded. "That way they could spend as much time processing the data as they wanted, and there'd be a much lower chance of them missing anything important."

"Indeed," she said, with a small nod. "As a matter of fact, the Ironworkers were not able to make time truly 'relative' in the manner I am capable of, since at the end of the day they were still mundane beings operating in lower-dimensional space. Well, lower-dimensional by our current standards, at least." She chuckled. "But they gave it quite a good shot! They were able to slow its progression compared to their other planes by a factor of many thousands."

"How many is 'many'?" I asked, already having a hunch about where this was going.

"Not too many, but quite a few. Think somewhere in the hundreds of thousands."

"Hundreds of thousands."

"I know, quite paltry. Still, though, more than enough for their purposes." She glanced towards the chalkboard. "But let's put a pin in that for a moment. So: The Order were faced with the proposition of constructing a base in a space with dimensions only designed for computing, and within which time flowed, at least naturally, at a speed utterly incompatible with the outside world. Where one could spend an entire lifetime while one's friends and family didn't age a single day."

I hesitated. Both Linos and 'Anna' had alluded to and eventually outright spoken of the sanctuary's nature as a fortress several times, but this revelation - theoretically - made all I'd learned about its utility as such feel like small potatoes. If the Order had imposed not just the Atelikos's mechanical physics but also its temporal physics, then did that mean they had the power to reverse that state? In the event of a siege, could that version of the sanctuary have been removed from normal time altogether?

As Ran had originally observed and 'Anna' had confirmed, it was clearly designed to be acceptable for long-term inhabitation, even if it had never actually been used that way. Did all of that really come down to just making it a good home for the child implanted with the entropy connection and their carers?

"Thus, they arrived at their plan of creating it elsewhere, then projecting it - or rather a synchronized copy into the Nekrokos using the Power. Of course, the connection would be a fragile one, desynchronized by even the slightest damage to the boundaries to the version in ordinary space. It was for this reason that the sea of the Atelikos was chosen-- For its isolation. We'll call this 'Sanctuary A'.

She gestured, and Aruru drew a circle with chalk, then wrote this inside in extremely typeface-esque text, followed by 'Atelikos' in parenthesis. I frowned. All these theatrics are making this even weirder.

"...again, I know this stuff already," I told her.

"Just listen," she told me boredly. "After this sanctuary was completed in its basic state, the Power was used to impose the sanctuary into the Nekrokos. This event could be considered one of both duplication and synchronization at the same time-- A very complicated bit of arcana that can't easily be summed up, but essentially entangled the matter within both sanctuaries together down to the particle, while overlapping the actual spacetime of the two locations."

This time unprompted, Aruru drew a second circle, partially overlapping with the first, and labelled it 'Sanctuary B (Nekrokos)'. Then it drew a circle around the two of them, which received the annotation 'Linked Mundane Spacetime'.

"Now, with that established, we can move into discussing the phenomenon which took place that night." She cleared her throat. "I trust you remember that the Apega only existed within the Nekrokos version of the sanctuary."

"Y-Yeah," I affirmed. "I can't quite remember if Linos or Anna first mentioned it, but then it came up a couple more times after that."

She nodded. "This is principally because interfacing with me is only possible via the Ironworker's observation tools. In the most basic sense, you could think of their original installation as a 'receiver', the first half of the Apega as a 'transmitter', and the final additions as amplifiers. Well, I suppose at a certain point 'teleporter' becomes more apt, but you understand my point." She leaned forward. "But there's another reason too, which is - as I discussed earlier - that I am only able to directly bring matter under my power under incredibly select conditions, where it is isolated from the wider ecosystem of the universe."

My face flinched with confusion for a moment as I processed her words. "Uh, not to repeat myself, but a normal person from my time wouldn't understand that 'transmitter' and 'receiver' analogy, either," I told her. "At least not someone in my position. Humanity hasn't used radios to communicate in almost 2000 years."

A funny smile came to her face for a fleeting moment. "You really do protest too much. I know precisely what I need to say to convey my meaning." She made a small laugh under her breath, then continued. "But to get to the point, on that night, a command was given to me to eat Sanctuary B."

I furrowed my brow in discomfort. "To... eat it."

"Oh yes," she said, smiling enthusiastically. "And I did! I devoured it. Vored it good."

I flinched backwards, and my face flushed. "Don't say it like that!"

"But it's the truth!" she affirmed, holding a hand to her chest innocently. "In one fell swoop, I took that half of the Sanctuary of Apsu's metaphysical reality and subsumed it into my being." Her eyes wandered wistfully as she licked her lips, like she was discussing a really nice breakfast she'd had this morning. "Though, in truth, in many senses it was already part of my totality. After all, I am bound deeply into the structure of the three-dimensional space humans inhabit. Even the act of building a machine capable of monitoring me at all but amounts to burrowing into my flesh."

"Seriously, do you have to say everything in the creepiest way possible?"

"Yes," she answered. "Anyway, to backtrack slightly, there's one point about the mirroring process of the two Apsu's that remains somewhat ambiguous, which is how it deals with people, and to a lesser extent, foreign matter." Her radiant eye flicked backwards me. "It came up in your conversation in the security center basement, did it not?"

I glanced away nervously, rubbing at one of my eyes. "...you mean when the imposter talked about how she didn't know what an outside observer would see happen to our bodies if the connection between the two sanctuaries was broken," I recalled. "Where she speculated that maybe there were a bunch of duplicate corpses lying on the floor in the other version."

She wrinkled her nose slightly, seeming to be considering how to navigate something tricky. "...well, I certainly can't speak to the accuracy of that speculation had the circumstances of the separation been more straightforward," she stated diplomatically, "but I will tell you the basic mechanics of the situation."

She flickered a finger towards Aruru, who this time produced a sheet of parchment from its apron. It folded and ripped it precisely, producing a human shape, which the golem placed at the intersecting point of the two circles.

"Human bodies and foreign objects within the sanctuary, under normal circumstances, were not mirrored at all, but simply sat at the point of intersection, manipulating both sets of matter at the same time as a consequence of the aforementioned entanglement." She gestured her ungloved pointer finger towards the figure. "In the event of desynchronization, they would simply be shunted to the version of the sanctuary that was not the source of deviance, with little concern given to what happened to the other. One would assume that the Order set this up so that, were the Atelikos version to be destroyed, anyone inside would remain unscathed... but the process works in the other direction, too. So when I subsumed the sanctuary..."

Aruru, as she explained, began drawing a much, much larger circle - unnecessarily large, honestly - at the periphery of the blackboard, which it labelled 'HER LADYSHIP' in all capital letters. It cut through the center of the two sanctuary circles, the Linked Mundane Spacetime circle, and straight through the human figure.

"...it was the Nekrokos instance that was the source of deviance. Meaning that you and all the others were to be left behind in the Atelikos."

Accordingly, Aruru shunted the human figure to the 'Sanctuary A' bubble, then erased the boundaries of the Linked Mundane Spacetime circle around Sanctuary B, leaving it stranded.

I pushed my lips together furtively. "So... if we were left behind, how did we end up in the time loop, and eventually here?"

She smiled. "Well, I copied you, of course."

Fuck!

"Oh, don't have an existential crisis on me now," she said, with mock-disappointment. "I'm half-fucking with you. The term 'copied' is reductive - I simply tweaked the paradox that already underlies the existence of humans in the Remaining World to my own purposes, splitting you off like a line going on a tangent." She held her two forefingers together and then sent them off to the left and right.

"That... just seems like a pretentious way of expressing the same concept," I said, frowning as I processed the now explicit invalidity of my sense of self.

"Not at all! You are as much yourself as the idiot in the Remaining World you've convinced yourself you are. Even more so, in a sense, since the matter that comprises your sense of self has not suffered the erosion of time." She leaned her head to the side, clearly enjoying my reaction. "Now, the rest of the people in this realm, the ones who weren't within the Sanctuary? Those you could argue I copied. I simply drew upon the composition of their minds via their Indexes. Their physical bodies didn't even factor into it."

"Why haven't you told them about this?" I asked. "They have a whole belief system that runs counter to it. And you brought that up earlier, so you can't just be, well, ignorant of it."

She sighed. "I knew you'd eventually start asking questions about my contemporary relationship to 'Dilmun', but I was hoping to put off any explanations until I'd at least finished explaining the rest of this. I suppose I did bait it by bringing that up, so I can only blame myself..."

"So... you won't answer?"

"Later," she said. "For now, we can finally get to the crux of the matter."

Aruru took a large wool eraser from the corner of the blackboard, and proceeded to wipe away the 'Sanctuary A' bubble away altogether, setting the human-shaped parchment piece down on the edge of the board. Then, she drew a line arcing from the edge of the 'HER LADYSHIP' circle to the 'Sanctuary B' circle.

"I was quite surprised when it happened," she told me. "I had subsumed the sanctuary, and intended to fully realize the Order's wish, dissolving the last of the boundaries between the sanctuary and myself and elevating it here to the Higher Planes. When suddenly I found I could not do so."

Aruru, at this, drew a big, extremely on-the-nose cross where the two lines met.

"Whatever had defined the criteria for the process to take place had set it to something quite unexpected. Absurd, even. And using the safeguards built into the Apega, it wrested my power from me and forced it to conform to its will."

"...what were the criteria?" I asked.

"There were three," she said. "All quite elaborate, so I'll do my best to sum them up for you in simple words."

"Firstly, that the Conclave of the Universal Panacea must be completed without serious interruptions to the established program, or any attendee suffering fatal injury."

"Secondly, should anyone act - either by accident or with deliberateness - to disrupt the fulfillment of the first condition, then their actions and motivations must be exposed in full."

"And finally, that until the first two conditions are fulfilled, the weekend of the conclave must repeat from the beginning, with no alterations to the initial conditions in any way."

I stared for a moment, dumbfounded, as I considered the implications.

"...I... I don't know what to say."

"I'll allow it this time," she said, amused. "Take your time."

"So... wait," I said, trying to gather my thoughts. "Whoever - or whatever did this... they really made it a murder mystery on purpose?"

Like we'd just arrived at the punchline to an extremely long and roundabout joke, the woman across the table from me suddenly erupted into deep, rumbling laughter, the sound echoing through the balcony chamber like the pounding of a ceremonial drum. She swung her head back, her star-hair falling over the back of her regal seat, while Aruru stood motionless.

"Well," she said, after finally calming down a little bit. "I can't speak to the intent, but that was certainly the result!"

My face flushed, and I stared down at my lap, still trying to even process the information.

"Oh, when I realized what was going to happen, I'll tell you that was a truly magical moment," she spoke to herself wistfully. "Human beings! You think you have their motivations all figured out - and, well, you do, at least on the fundamental level - and then they pull something so inscrutably wretched that it leaves you at a loss for words?" The laughter died down a dark chuckle. "But we haven't even got to the good part. Have you spotted any of the good parts of how those tenets interact? The 'fine print', if you will?"

I swallowed the air, already realizing what she meant. "Assuming anything happens, the first condition clashes with the second... and the third." I held a hand to my mouth. "If someone has acted to trigger the second condition in the first place, then it's impossible to fulfill it. Which means the third condition fails too. Which means..."

"That it's impossible to resolve things in a scenario where a murder - or indeed, any serious disruption, has already taken place, yes. And when it 'no alterations to the initial conditions', it means no alterations."

"So people wouldn't be permitted to retain experience and knowledge between scenarios, either," I concluded. "Which means... there'd be no way to prevent the exact same tragedy from happening over and over again."

"That's the obvious catch," she said, her tone mischievous, bordering on sinister. "But there's another, too."

I frowned furtively. "What do you mean?"

"Consider the second condition more closely," she spoke. "In particular, its relationship with the third."

I thought about it for a few moments, squinting as my gaze bored down into the table. Then my eyes widened a little as I realized. "I-It's open ended. The requirements don't specify anything like 'by the end of the weekend' or 'by the time the third condition is enacted." I bit my lip. "So if an incident occurs in one loop, it still needs to be solved by the next."

"Even though by that point, no one will even remember what happened!" She laughed again, falling back in her chair. "It's magnificent, isn't it?! An utterly cruel, unwinnable, irresolvable game. Like being trapped in a spider's web, where one can't even move without entrapping oneself further!" She shook her head. "But I ought to have expected no less. You are the creatures which invented hell, after all."

"But why?"

"Why?" she smirked coldly. "'Why' is none of my business, human. As I believe I already explained, I am incapable of interfacing with your world on my own terms. My role was only to carry out the instructions I was given."

"Like a fucking genie?"

"What a fun comparison!" she declared, the smirk growing wider. "Yes, like a genie."

She casually snapped her fingers, and the decor of the room instantly changed to a more Ysaran style, the table now more rounded and the chairs embedded with complex woven patterns. Her clothes changed, too, her dress becoming looser and silken, with golden bracelets around her wrists and folds of partially-transparent black cloth falling from her arms and waist. A lamp appeared between us, emitting the smell of incense.

"In fact, one could hardly say it was me carrying out the instructions at all," she continued. "As I said, my power was bent against my will from the moment it passed through the Apega. I could no sooner stop myself from fulfilling the request then you could shut down your own limbic system." She shook her head mirthfully. "But I will admit, to play such a role did not bring me displeasure. To live forever in paradise... it's a bit of a banal desire, don't you think? I know I said I saw some intrigue in it, but still: Not exactly the peak of entertainment. "

"Q-Quit screwing around," I protested. "I mean, who was behind this? If not Neferuaten, who was this 'proxy'?!"

"Let's move on to the next question you're going to ask that I'm actually interested in answering," she declared, then conjured a pair of glasses and did a crude impression of someone pushing them up their brow nervously. "'B-But you s-said your power was only c-capable of interacting with m-matter under very specific c-circumstances! How c-could you p-possibly have f-fulfilled a request like t-that, when the loop s-starts in the outside w-w-w-w-world?!'"

I blinked, only having time to feel annoyed by the caricature of my mannerisms for a moment. That was true, wasn't it? In fact, I'd wondered about it repeatedly during the loop itself. It was one thing for it to encompass the sanctuary, but Fang had spoken about things starting at 9:33 AM, which had been roughly the same time I'd started getting those episodes of deja vu. At that point, we'd have been just arriving at the academy.

Balthazar had called the sanctuary a 'closed circle'. But that wasn't a closed circle at all.

"The answer to that is very straightforward," she continued, reverting seamlessly to her normal persona and leaning casually against her chair's left armrest. "I couldn't. I had, quite literally, zero power over anything beyond the boundaries of 'Sanctuary B'. To wind back time on a grand scale is impossible-- Even for me. It was an unreasonable, impossible wish."

"Then... how did it happen?" I asked suspiciously.

"Well, I was in quite a pickle, you see," she said. "I had already 'eaten' your sanctuary-- I couldn't simply spit it back out like a bad nut. But neither could I proceed without following the instructions I was given, even if it was a fact they were unimplementable in literal terms." Aruru began wiping away everything left on the blackboard, and started to draw something different and oblong. "Thus, I was forced, like a lake of water driven through a dam via the smallest of pipes, at a more creative solution."

"What did you do?"

"It's simple," she stated. "I organized a performance."