Book 7. Chapter 30: Urs
The protofeather leaned away from me and lifted a few plates, shaping them up into a finger snap. I could feel some kind of digital wall built around us. A cocoon of kinds. But only for sounds. “It's a privacy ward?” I asked, hand reaching out to touch the invisible wall.
“Good work kid, looks like my lessons are really shining through to you now. ” Aztu said, already noticing I’d copied the wall and added it into my growing library of pilfered junk. “Once you get the hang of how to create things out here, you’ll be able to construct them yourself. That’s step one for my ultimate plan.”
The wall was sturdy and unbreachable. There were no holes, windows or doorways through it, built for one task and one task only. The simplicity made it durable, and I think that’s what Aztu was teaching me. “And when you say ominous things like ultimate plan, would you mind sharing some details instead of keeping me in the dark?”
"Nope." She still sat in her sofa, looking like a pile of plates all stacked up with two glowing blue eyes darting around the room under that giant triangular hat/plate. I felt I was in a fever dream of sorts at this point. The smaller finger plates waggled in front of me, right to left. Like a hovering hand too big for the main body. “I shall reveal my schemes when they are appropriate and not one moment earlier.”
I raised an eyebrow, but Aztu didn’t back down. So I shifted tracks, “This ward is for the Icon I'm guessing?” I could feel the limits reached up to her desk but not further past it. The Icon herself remained waiting on the other side, forced to smile on.
The more bells and whistles something had, the easier it was to re-use those very same channels against the user.
“For her protection you could say.” Aztu said, “She can see blurry figures of us and won't hear us. we'll be chatting about things she doesn't need to know. There’s plenty of truely ancient programs out here, so it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for a roaming digital nomad like myself to have taken some interest in world history.” She shrugged, “Still, best to be cautious sometimes when it comes to Urs. He was the first human Relinquished really knew by name and hounded after. She hated him almost as much as Tsuya. Abraxas is occasionally a little bit wise on what I should be careful about, but you never heard me say that if he asks." She waved her prop bottle at the Icon, almost like a taunt of kinds.
The Icon’s eye twitched slightly, but she remained smiling, waiting for us to wrap up whatever scrapshit we were up to.
“Oh quit being a sour sport, this is for your own good.” Aztu said, and even if the Icon couldn’t understand the words anymore, the intention seemed to have gone through. "See, she’s got the hang of fighting in the digital sea already, I’ve been jousting with to keep my sofa and bottle in her office, so now a bit of extra practice fighting through a ward like this would be the next lesson. I give it about half an hour more until she’s good enough to actually slap all of this out of my hand.”