Aliyah woke. Someone was sifting through her expertise.
She’d been working in shifts to protect Daddy; fourteen hours on, ten hours off, rotations ordered by General Kanakia to keep them as alert as they could be until Daddy was done.
Nobody slept well. Each time they woke, the sky had been chewed further away. The Thing’s erratic pulses crept into their dreams…
Daddy hadn’t slept the whole time – but unlike the mania that had turned him into a hateful revenant, this work seemed to energize him. He drank the gray nutritional fluid when Mommy prodded him, dozed on the general’s orders – refusing to leave the square inch of space he’d created.
And it glowed. That tiny cube hovered in his cupped hands, radiating a green CRT light as Daddy queried it with fine strands of magic.
He didn’t look angry; he looked joyous. He was playing with the space, tinkering with physics, laughing whenever the cube collapsed into a one-dimensional tesseract that he had to rebuild.
Aliyah would have shared his exhilaration, except the sky kept pulsing. Just when you relaxed and thought maybe it’s over, the heavens convulsed again.
Something was coming.
Yet the general had ordered them to relax, so she’d curled up with Ruth and drifted off.
Until something sifted through her Super Mario expertise.
That sifting feeling wasn’t unusual among ’mancers; it was a courtesy to leave your skills open to anyone, even while sleeping. Yet Aliyah’s skills were mostly videogame trivia – not a subject the hivemind needed often.
Aliyah knew the ’mancers with useful skills dealt with constant intrusions; the combatmancers’ and the biomancers’ and the psychomancers’ brains churned like frequently-accessed hard disks.
Who needed Super Mario this urgently? Someone vacuumed huge chunks of Mario from her head – every monster, every secret, every speed run trick.
Valentine? Aliyah thought – but no. This access was precise in a way Valentine had never been. It felt computerized.
“Ruth?” She tapped Ruth on the shoulder–
Ruth was gone.
Aliyah flailed, pinging the hivemind for her girlfriend’s location. Except Ruth’s rage floated up from the collective–
Dammit, Mom, I wanted to play!
Your strategies were suboptimal, dear.
That’s the point! I’m supposed to learn!
I’m supposed to teach you.
The only reason Ruth didn’t hurl the Nintendo DS across the tent was because she knew it had been Valentine’s.
“You OK?”
“Couldn’t sleep.” Ruth shook the Nintendo, abusing it because she couldn’t get at her Mom-construct. “I wanted to see… what you saw in this stuff.”
Aliyah felt half-truths rising up. Ruth had known Aliyah was exhausted, hadn’t wanted to steal her precious sleep…
But floating behind that was a deeper truth: she felt guilty over Valentine’s death. In driving Paul into choosing brute force over bureaucromancy, she’d made a lone ’mancer sacrifice herself to save them all.
This was Ruth’s fumbling attempt to preserve one of Valentine’s memories.
Aliyah hugged her.
“I know it’s broken,” Ruth said, so angry she couldn’t return Aliyah’s embrace. “I figured maybe I could play for a few moments before it rebooted. And…”
That explained Ruth’s fury. Ruth had sought Valentine’s memories of exploration, her ability to lose herself in the castle–
–and when she’d played, her Mom-construct had downloaded the knowledge from Aliyah’s brain to fill Ruth’s head full of winning strategies.
Ruth buried her head in her hands. “…Welcome to my childhood.”
That, Aliyah knew, was what made Ruth truly furious; her actual mother had killed herself, leaving her with a brittle Mom-construct who valued facts over feelings.
Aliyah’s father had cultivated her sense of wonder with beautiful magics before joining the hivemind; Ruth had never known mystery. Her Mom-construct had given her force-fed education, or panic.
“We could play together,” Aliyah offered.
“No.” Except secretly, Ruth said yes. Aliyah felt Ruth’s desperation to play a videogame with Aliyah, to tune into her joy.
Except Aliyah’s enthusiasm was entwined with fear. Playing videogames for fun triggered ’mancy, triggered flux, triggered death. She’d told Valentine videogamemancy was “baby stuff,” but Aliyah was pretty sure Aunt Valentine had known the truth:
Aliyah was terrified she’d kill again. And Ruth didn’t want to force her into those flashbacks.
“We could play together,” Aliyah insisted, taking the Nintendo. “I mean…”
Pressing the “start” button and watching Mario pop on-screen was like rebooting a part of her soul.
“You sure?” Ruth asked. But she knew: Aliyah wanted to grant Ruth the thrill of exploration, Ruth wanted Aliyah to get in touch with her childhood again.
More than that: now that Valentine was gone, Ruth wanted to know what had bonded her girlfriend and her aunt.
Aliyah called out to Unimancers from around the globe who had the spare cycles to play boundary guards. We’re gonna do my obsession, she told them. If you see me doing something impossible, stop me.
On one level, it was unnecessary; any time a Unimancer did something they’d once been obsessed with, other ’mancers were drawn to their enthusiasm like moths to a flame. Yet the crowds also muffled the obsessions, smothering other ’mancies with the low-grade pressure of now, you know that’s not possible whenever they strayed from normal human experience.
But Aliyah wanted maximum safety, so she called in spotters.
“Ready?” Aliyah asked.
Ruth squeezed her hand. “Let’s go.”
Aliyah raced towards the end in a full-on speed run, the kind of joyous fun you only got when you pushed yourself to your limit.
And she pushed herself to her limits, she realized; of all the people in the hivemind, she was the most skilled at Mario speed runs. Ruth cheered her on, surfing her enthusiasm as Aliyah did something no one else in the hivemind could do…
Then, in mid-Mario leap, the Nintendo rebooted.
No videogamemancy, the spotters chided.
I didn’t!
You did. Didn’t you feel that?
Aliyah exchanged glances with Ruth.
“…take this outside?” Ruth ventured.
“Yeah.”
They walked out; though it was dark, those fractures glowed like blacklight in the sun’s absence. Aliyah restarted, losing herself in another speed run, smashing through level 1…
The Nintendo rebooted.
The sky flickered.
“Do that again,” Ruth commanded.
Aliyah launched herself into another speed run – and the game rebooted within a few minutes.
So did the sky.
The hivemind woke at once, immense powers of statistical correlation brought to bear upon this problem.
Yet Aliyah knew.
She knew.
She ran to her father in the field.
“Valentine!” she cried, holding the Nintendo aloft. “Aunt Valentine! She’s alive!”
Mommy’s head snapped up.
“That’s impossible,” Paul said. “The buzzsects devoured her.”
“They did. They are. They’ve killed her every few minutes for a week.” She held the screen towards them expectantly until it rebooted. “There. She died again.”
“Aliyah,” Imani said slowly. “That makes no sense.”
Aliyah hugged the Nintendo to her chest, watching the game restart with a flare of videogamemancy, jubilant as she realized what that endless cycle truly meant.
“She’s reloading the game until she wins.”