[Can’t Opt Out]

Levi edged forward, his fingers grazing over stone and a soft dampness that he was hoping wasn’t poisonous—or was it venomous? What was the difference again? One required a bite? The other didn’t?

It didn’t matter—what mattered was that whatever strange thing was growing in this cave didn’t kill him, something he thought highly unlikely as he let himself be moved along. Still, a flicker of curiosity lit up within him as to what he was being dragged over. Dark as it was, no light reaching this far into the tunnels, Levi still imagined it was a moss or some shit like that, the fibres of it—if fibres was even the correct word for the carpet of sensation under his hands—soft and smushy. Could moss be deadly? Levi had no idea. Annoyingly, after this adventure within the cave system, he was pretty sure he was going to have to learn more about various plant life. Stupid—his brain worked much better when it was memorizing weapons and skills, techniques for fighting and whatnot. These sorts of mundane details were just boring, his mind never able to focus long enough to retain anything more than the vague sense of things, those moments of curiosity snuffing out the second he learned the bare minimum.

Focusing was hard, unless his mind decided it wasn’t. Currently, his finicky mind was finding it difficult to focus on anything. Yes, the location of his not-a-rock lingered within the darkness of his skull, but as he trailed the woman who had taken it, swerving through the complicated tunnels and trusting that he wouldn’t be seen or heard, it was difficult to focus on even that.

Instead, his mind wandered. It skipped along from topic to topic, reliving conversations with his friends—obsessing over the fact that while he had left everyone alive, there was no way to know if they had all survived the battle. Fuck if he wouldn’t kill Leerin if somehow she got Darrian hurt—fuck knew the girl had a tendency to get her cousin into the worst sort of trouble. The number of times he had been injured due to her actions—or, more often, inaction—wasn’t something Levi could quantify. And if his friend—if one of the few people he actually cared about—died? Well, then his wrath would be such a brutal, torturous thing that Leerin would be begging him to give her over the Baylor. Levi’s cousin was terrifying—able to vivisect humans into oblivion, secrets falling off their tongues as they begged for the relief of a blade slitting something vital. The guy didn’t even have much experience in torture yet. If the aether were kind, it would force those who fell into his cousin’s path to spill their secrets long before he made even a single slice into them. The aether wasn’t really kind, as far as Levi had ever seen; so, more likely, it wouldn’t be kind to anyone Baylor set his eyes upon. Instead, Baylor would stuff more experience into himself with blood and guts, until he was able to rip truth from even those whose very cores were bound to bite their tongues off, lest they share those secrets.

Levi had learned that was a thing, from a passing traveller on one of his trips to Dion. They’d both been on the road, stopping at a random tavern, close to the Dionese-Crisharian border—he’d had a craving for a specific sort of cookie from the area, and had detoured south before heading into Seer’ik’tine, and then back to the Penns.

Not the point—and Levi would hold on to this point, even if his brain was now trying to distract itself with thoughts on food, all of which had been left with his friends.

What he wouldn’t do for a snack right now, Codeth having gone and picked them up some cookies before leaving and—

No.

No.

Focus.

What had he been thinking about?

Oh! Yeah! Baylor’s potential ability to remove locks from the mind from people! This was, in the end, a clone specialty, but usually, it was limited to Censors. It wasn’t well known, even within The Black Knot, but the clones could force their way past most memory manipulations, imperfect as that ability was. They could taste when a mind had been manipulated by another clone, could pull at the threads of {A Private Moment} to reveal bits of the information—not all of it, unfortunately. Emilia had plans to try pulling the skill completely free of someone’s mind one day, but…

Well, that sort of pulling and tugging was dangerous. Not to whoever was pulling, as far as Levi knew, but to the person who was having their memory set free. As a result, she was mostly waiting for one of the clones to end up on death’s door, rather than die in the field, as was more common. While most of the older clones didn’t like her much, there were a few who would volunteer to let her experiment with their mind, knowing that even if she broke them, they weren’t long for this world anyways.

It was all rather morbid, but also the sort of necessary that moved the world forward.

Sometimes, human experimentation was needed. Usually, it just wasn’t so dangerous—like, when Emilia and Halen had tested out microsparking with Doctor Vickers! They did so many trials with themself and one another and other people with Censors before ever trying it with the baby clones—not real babies, but preteens, to start. Then, they moved younger and younger, Doctor Vickers carefully monitoring it all through computers, his Censor, and various devices attached to the participants. No one wanted to accidentally smush a baby’s brain microsparking with them, and in the end, while the trials had all proven safe, the three of them had decided they needed a more specific, child-safe version of microsparking. It wasn’t a skill most of them had experience with, and the extra padding and precautions it placed around the child’s head and neck were so resource intensive that Levi wasn’t even sure anyone who wasn’t a low-dev could support the skill—fuck, he wasn’t even sure how long a low-dev with aetherstores the size of his own could support it for.

Things like that, he knew, caused moral and ethical dilemmas for those who had to decide whether to release the skill or not—now that was a topic that Levi enjoyed. There was just something to picking apart the reality of morals and ethics that he inherently couldn’t care about that was just fascinating. As not just a black knot, but one who was permanently confused about his emotions, Levi could pull apart arguments until there was nothing but brutal reality.

The OIC wasn’t ready for microsparking; therefore it shouldn’t be released.

Microsparking could save lives; therefore it should be released.

Microsparking could cost lives, through both acts of murder that the OIC couldn’t track, and potentially through the use of the non-child-safe version while carrying children; therefore it shouldn’t be released.

Three of the main arguments that were placed onto the platter of reasons why Emilia and Halen weren’t releasing microsparking and why those who had a copy weren’t supposed to use it outside of the Penns—except, they had used it outside of the Penns, for Emilia.

Levi liked that—the brutal selfishness of their decision to bend their self-imposed and logically sound decision for not releasing microsparking the Baalphoria as a whole. It was their skill, and they had no obligation to give it or anything else to the rest of their nation, who had let their own ability to code skills and functions fall flat. If they had nothing to give in return, why should Emilia and Halen give anything they created up to the world?

They shouldn’t—that’s what Levi thought. If it were up to him, he would tell Halen to stop giving anything to the masses, who were selfish in their own way for increasingly looking to Hail with demanding eyes. It had only been a few months, but Levi had still been able to see that thirst for more, more, more in the Baalphorian public—they had seemingly forgotten what it was like to have skills and functions able to do virtually anything at the flick of a thought, and now that they had gotten a taste?

Well, if Halen suddenly decided to pull back and release less skills, Levi didn’t think it would go well for him.

All of this was a distraction from the point that one day, Emilia would do human experiments on dying clones, all so she could learn how to break apart {A Private Moment}’s encryption of the human mind. This was, in itself, a distraction from the point that he knew that Baylor could do the same—could learn to pry apart the core abilities that similarly locked up the minds of Free Coloniers.

That was what the man he had met in passing near the Dionese-Crisharian border had told him: a rumour of a clone who was once able to get around the majenstra. Levi had never been able to figure out exactly what the majenstra were, every person he happened across who had ever heard the word telling him that it were as though the knowledge of what they were was hidden beneath murky water—a thought that was there and yet not, all at once.

From what he had been able to figure out, the majenstra were from Crishar, and they may have been people with a specific irregular deviation or people who underwent a specific sort of training. Opinions were mixed, but it was clear that they possessed some sort of ability to manipulate the minds and memories of those around them.

Levi thought back on that meeting with the traveller often, mostly because it remained the sort of strange collision of souls and knowledge that left him feeling uneasy. Too many coincidences, the man’s words falling on him too easily. There was no reason to tell him these things—not in a tone that implied he needed to know and retain every word he dared speak—yet, the man had spilled it all and then left, Levi wanting to follow but knowing that he shouldn’t.

It was odd—just as odd as the feeling that he felt for his not-a-rock.

If his not-a-rock vanished into the wind, Levi thought he would still be able to track it to the ends of the world to get it back. It were as though something about it had dug into him, dragging him forward because they had somewhere they needed to be—someone they needed to meet.

So strange, but Levi was used to strange—after all, he was perhaps the only person in Baalphoria who could use their core with any confidence, even Emilia’s occasional use of hers paling in comparison to his own control. Unlike him, Emilia had never shuttered her Censor in order to make it leave her to her training.

As he moved, Levi catalogued the tunnel with the energy spiralling out of him, perfect and controlled—a gentle caress through the aether of everything she touched upon. He was good at this—much better than Hurinren, never as good as Yujao. This was an art of patience—the only modicum of patience he could ever drag out of himself, and yet did so beautifully. It was like a game, in some ways—this lingering question of how little energy he could release and still receive back in answering vibrations.

What is here?

What is there?

What should I do next?

Levi knew what he should do next. This wasn’t the awkward, clumsy gait that he often had when he moved through the world without his core, acquired by accident after having spent too long learning how to navigate the world in within the grasp of darkness and his core. No, this was what the mentor the Blood Rain General had given him had called walking the lines of fate. Ironically, Levi didn’t think even the Blood Rain General himself believed much of what the old woman believed. Perhaps the old man believed in the will of the aether to some extent, but the ability to allow the aether to guide each movement a person made, if only they let it consume them—fill them?

No, that wasn’t something the old man believed. Still, the Blood Rain General had dragged the old woman who became Levi’s mentor out of the darkness that had been her home for decades, effectively giving her to Levi to deal with and learn from as he liked—and oh, how he liked.

This was where his absentmindedness and distractibility flourished, for the aether could not fill a container that was already full, nor would it deign to enter someone who can do nothing with what it gave them.

Levi could be empty—could allow his body to move on what some people would call pure instinct, but he would never claim to be anything that originated within himself. This was a gift from the universe, grabbing hold of his body and moving it as it willed. Eventually, his control would return, and he would need to be whatever the situation the aether had dragged him into required him to be, but for the moment, he just let himself be moved along—a puppet for the universe itself.