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Echo is standing in front of the blue wall, painting wispy white clouds on
it, paying close attention to details. It would look complete to anyone
else, but to him, the work is never done. He can always add one more
curve...one final flourish.
Clavia walks up to him. “There you are. What are you doing?”
“Painting this wall. It ain’t gonna paint itself,” Echo replies, still
watching what he’s doing.
“It’s literally going to paint itself,” she counters.
He smiles. “I know. Sometimes I just need a break to unwind. Like you with
your little headplays.”
She nods. “Fair enough.”
“What’s the count?”
“Three thousand, seven hundred and four.”
He drops his elbow, and looks over at her. “Technically at quota. We’re
ready for move-in.”
“Like you said, in the technical sense. We still need to figure out how to
convince a supermajority to do it, or it’s not really helpful.”
“We also need to figure out how to do it without loading everyone
onto a proverbial bus, and driving them here.”
“It’s time to talk to Cedar,” Echo realizes. They have been dreading this
day for a long time. They like him, but they don’t know how he’s going to
react or respond to this news. There are whispers that the Cloudbearer twins
are building something, but no one knows what, and all of their
guesses are wrong; though off by varying degrees. Cedar ran his campaign for
power on a foundation of intercivilizational unity. He believes that the
only way to keep the Reality Wars at bay is if there’s no one to fight
against, because everyone is on the same side. The amount of space
between people in this universe could tear them apart. It’s the
distribution. Cedar is probably gonna have trouble with the distribution.
“Yeah, we have no choice. Do you think he’ll be mad we didn’t read him into
the situation earlier?”
“He’s serving as Head Advisor to our parents,” Echo replies. “He was too
preoccupied to worry about this. That can be our excuse for keeping it a
secret from him.”
“Good idea.” Clavia takes her brother’s hand, and transports them both to
what essentially amounts to a holodeck, though on a much grander scale.
They’re standing on an island floating in the air. At least, that’s what it
looks like to them. It’s just an illusion. The “air” around them is clear
purplish water. They can still breathe, of course, and talk just fine. The
sky above is much more unambiguously an ocean. It’s upside down. Waves jut
down, and spray a sweet misty rain down towards them. Some of it tastes like
chocolate, other drops like honey. Their feet are planted firmly on the
ground, though they feel like they could float away at any second. All
around them are crystalline structures, also purple, since that is the
theme. A stream gives way to a waterfall that slips over the edge, and
disappears into the oblivion below, though again, it’s just invisible floor.
Between them and the sky are giant turtles, swimming around. One of them
nods and winked before moving on.
They aren’t alone on this floating island. They summoned Cedar, and are
currently patiently waiting for him to get his bearings in this new world.
“This breaks the laws of physics,” he notes. “I’m assuming it’s not real?”
“No,” Echo replies. “Our powers do have some limits.”
“You’ve been gone for nearly a month,” Cedar points out.
Clavia smirks. “We’ve been gone longer than that.”
“Framejacking, or temporal acceleration?”
“Both,” Echo answers. Time is moving faster in this universe, so more gets
done in a shorter amount of time in comparison to the Sixth Key, but their
own minds are also operating at much higher speeds, allowing them to think
and act more quickly.
“This is what you’ve been working on?”
Echo laughs. “This took only a few seconds to construct. We got the idea
from Castlebourne. Most of the domes on that world are physical, except for
the holographic sky. One of them is nearly all holography. You can
make it look like anything. We chose this today. Isn’t it cool?”
“Yeah,” Cedar agrees. “What am I doing here, though?”
Echo clears his throat. “What is the number one cause of tension and
conflict in the Sixth Key?”
Cedar dismisses his words with a wave of his hand. “Don’t pitch me. Just
tell me what you’ve done, and what you want. You’re gonna need to learn this
for when you take over in a more meaningful sense. We’re in charge of
undecillions of people back home. No one has time to beat around the bush or
be polite about it.”
“Very well,” Echo decides. He reaches up and pantomimes pulling a stage
curtain open. As he does so, a tear in the hologram appears in the far, far
distance. Behind it, they see what looks like regular outerspace, but as the
curtains separate even farther, a figure appears. It looks like a big metal
statue of a humanoid, or perhaps just a big robot. It’s hard to tell what
scale they’re working with here, so Echo has to explain. “Have you ever
heard of the matrioshka body?”
“I have,” Cedar confirms. “I went to a sort of school like you did. That’s
where the afterlife simulation was housed, before it collapsed, and everyone
was transported into Fort Underhill. The Sixth Key shares interdimensional
space with them now. I never knew what happened to matrioshka body, though.
That it?”
Echo shakes his head. “That. Is MB-3704.”
Cedar laughs. “You made your own? That’s impressive.”
Echo and Clavia exchange a look. “He said it was three-seven-zero-four.”
Cedar is confused, but only for half a second. Then his face drops into a
frown. “You made 3700 of these things?”
“Yeah,” Echo says.
Cedar starts to pace around and shake his head, almost in disappointment.
“Why? What do they do?”
“Well, they...have people live in them.”
“Who lives in them?”
“No one yet, that’s what we’re asking you for.”
“Asking me for what?” Cedar questions. “I told you, get to the point.
Stop trying to be dramatic.”
“We need you to transport everyone from the Sixth Key who wants to live
here. Send them all to their new homes...all at once.”
“I can’t do that!” he cries.
“We’re gonna let them consent,” Clavia defends. “We’re not gonna make anyone
move, but this will be better, and I think there will be a ton of interest.”
“Think about it,” Echo begins before Cedar can make another argument. “There
are hundreds of billions of stars, but we don’t have enough resources for
everyone. How is that possible? Because stars radiate a ton of their energy
away, even with dyson swarms. Matrioshka brains are more comprehensive, and
more efficient. And matrioshka bodies are just stylish and cool.” Honestly,
I don’t know why no one ever thought of it before. I thought that was the
point of the original matrioshka body, and its successor, Big Papa.” There
ought to be far more than two of these in existence. The Parallel was more
than capable of doing it, but they chose not to. They still orbited stars.
Even the interstellar settlements were quite literally few and far between.
Why? Why keep the stars? Aesthetics? Safety? Ethics? Probably all of the
above. Or. Echo and Clavia are just that clever.
“That’s not my point. I literally can’t do it. I don’t have that kind of
power.”
Echo and Clavia are both confused. “What are you talking about? You already
did it. You moved them all from their original realities, to the Sixth Key.”
“No, I didn’t.” He starts to look around on the ground. Guessing at his
needs, Echo manifests a chair for him to sit in. Cedar hunches over and
stuffs his face in his palms. “That wasn’t me. I didn’t do any of that.”
“What? It had to have happened,” Clavia argues. “Everyone’s there.”
“I’m not saying that it never happened,” Cedar tries to explain. “I’m
telling you that I didn’t do it. I have powers, but not like that.
That’s insane.”
“Then who did?” Echo asks him.
Cedar looks up to meet Echo’s gaze. “I have no idea. They didn’t tell me.
They have to keep it a secret, even from me and my family, even now that
it’s done. We were...a misdirect. It’s like sleight of hand. We were the
left hand that distracted everyone so no one would see what the right hand
was doing. I don’t know if anyone knows who saved everyone during
Reconvergence. All I know is that it wasn’t me.” He pauses before adding, “I
just took credit, per my instructions.”
Echo and Clavia manifest their own chairs to sit in. They sit there in
silence for a good five minutes before Echo decides to speak again. “Time is
not linear. If something exists at any moment, it exists in
all moments. If you know something about the past, you can change it.
Keeping it a secret was smart. Even if someone were to go back and kill you
as a child, it wouldn’t stop the creation of the Sixth Key. You’re like a
bodyguard, there to take a bullet if one ever comes flying through. That’s
how I would have done it if I were there.”
“Maybe you were,” Cedar reasons. “Maybe you two are the ones who
created the Sixth Key; you just haven’t done it yet from your own
perspectives.”
They exchange another look. Clavia decides to explain. “There’s a small
group of people on a planet in the Sixth Key who are aware of what we’ve
been up to. Just a few billion people. They were our test group. We’ve
already tried to transport them to our new universe. We don’t have that kind
of juice either. Stars are easy. Giant metal statues are easy. Moving
people? That requires a level of precision that we do not possess; not with
hordes anyway. We could probably move them a couple thousand at a time, but
that’s all but useless for our needs. That’s a meaningless rounding error
compared to the total population.”
“What about Ellie Underhill?” Echo asks after another bout of silence. “I
don’t remember how many she transported into Fort Underhill.”
“It was only 120 billion,” Cedar replies. “Not quite a rounding error, but
still not good enough. Besides, she gave them all new bodies; it was a whole
different animal.”
“So what we’re saying is that we need to find the person who actually did
move everyone from the five realities to the Sixth Key. We need them to do
it again.” Clavia starts to pace. Finding someone out there in the abstract
is not something that she’s ever done before. She always knows who she’s
targeting, or roundabouts where they are. This is a mystery individual, who
might be in either of two universes—or, hell, maybe neither of them. They
could have also done it subconsciously, like how Echo lived before he became
self-aware and realized his true potential. Maybe it’s not just one person.
Maybe it was a group, or somehow everyone. Maybe through the spirit
of survival every single living organism consolidated their untapped
collective power into one brilliant miracle. Ugh, Clavia doesn’t know, but
you know who would?
“Hey, boys!”
Echo nearly falls out of his chair, but catches himself by spreading his
feet apart. He stumbles away from her. “Debra. How did you get out?” She
still looks like his sister. She’s still occupying that body, and nothing
about it has changed. But Echo knows. He would always know. “What did you do
to Clavia?”
“Relax, she’s still in here; on the first stage. She gave me control of the
body, because you need me.”
“I need you for what?”
“I can find your mysterious god-being,” Debra spits back like he’s an
insignificant little ant on the ground. “I found you, didn’t I? You
were alone on a nothing planet in the middle of the universe. I knew exactly
where you were. I intuited that you existed in the first place.”
“We can’t trust you,” Echo contends.
“Believe it or not, I’ve changed. Living with those people, doing those
plays...it’s changed me. I’m no hero, but I’m not a villain anymore either.
Clavia maintains full veto power. She can come back whenever she wants.”
“Prove it. Let me talk to my sister again. And don’t try to trick me, I’ll
know.”
“I know.” Debra actually does what is asked of her, and temporarily returns
control of the body to Clavia.
“She’s not exactly right,” Clavia says. “She doesn’t need my body, she needs
my brain.”
“Can’t you just do it? You have all her power, don’t you?”
“It’s more complicated than that. You would understand if you could be
inside my head. You would get it if you could see the construct that I’ve
constructed.”
Echo steps forward, and places a hand on each of Clavia’s shoulders. “I bet
I can. Show me. I think it’s about time that I meet your little brain buds.”