Chapter 7: Systemic Behavior
Once upon a time, Cato had been a scholar.
He’d spent much of his time on exogeology, puzzling out the ways that non-terrestrial planets were put together. Partly just for pure knowledge, partly to be able to find resources, and partly just because he found alien planets fascinating. In that sense, being able to disperse throughout the System had been a delight, because he had access to more alien planets, at a closer vantage, than any other human ever had. Or would.
It wasn’t just geology that he had to study now, but also the processes of the System. Not simply for the goal of knowing the enemy, but also for figuring out the people within it. Cato didn’t really believe that he’d be able to crack the fundamental basis of how it worked – that kind of esoteric physics was well out of his purview – but he could at least discern a few things that hadn’t been revealed back on Sol.
One of those findings was the topic of his presentation, a word that took him back to far in the past, when had expounded to fellow academics on details extracted from icy interstellar bodies. The audience was the same, too; interested and not quite skeptical, but more than willing to challenge him. The venue, of course, was entirely different.
Technically it was two different audiences; he was talking to Initik and Harik Lim, on Uriv, and Mii-Es and Yaniss, on Ikent, the pair of relevant Catos integrating their experiences for the moment. Neither audience was directly aware of each other, as secrecy still held, but he was amused that he was talking to people on planets thousands of light-years apart by way of a fungal communications network broadcasting through magical portals. Even better that the topic of discussion was, essentially, the magic itself.
“Unfortunately I don’t have any of the more robust images I normally use,” Cato said, since he was speaking through ordinary remote frames. “But I have the analysis of the neural frameworks here.” He tapped a thick packet of polymer print on the table he shared with his respective corporeal counterparts. Yaniss immediately leaned over the table to snatch hers up and began reading it. “The basic summary is that the Bismuth cornerstone Skill phenomenon changes a person. Quite a lot, in fact.”
“It’s well known that the Bismuth cornerstone matters,” Mii-Es said, unimpressed. Though of course she didn’t have the data, the before-and-afters.
“It’s more than it just mattering,” Cato said. “From the perspective of my technology, the changes are incompatible with prior versions of the neural structure. Essentially, it changes who you are — motivations, drives, interests, even habits of thought. Not dramatically, but still enough to be serious.” It was something he would have figured out much earlier if any of the other Lineages had tried for Bismuth themselves, but he was glad his fear that it had completely compromised the Sydean Lineage had kept him from that experiment.
“There is a very specific reason for this, however,” Cato continued, glancing from technically-mortal representative to System-god, the same gesture in two different bodies. “It goes back to the anti-entropic nature of essence. Now, this is just a hypothesis, but at this point I’m fairly well convinced it’s all related to immortality. Most people are not cut out for it, but the neurological alterations combined with the resistance to change introduced by replacing the entire cellular structure with anti-entropic, well, stuff, puts people into a state where time doesn’t much matter.”