“You are not ready yet.” Talani sat on a stump at the edge of the swamp.

  “Because it’s impossible. Even here.” When she heard her own voice, Alaya couldn’t ignore the petulant tones or the faint whine. “It’s not fair.”

  Talani cackled. “You produce a single iota of “fair” in the Verse, and we can skip the trials altogether.”

  With a harrumph, Alaya sat down with her back to the wall and pouted some more. A wall surrounded the swamp. It might as well have sealed at the top and enclosed the whole area like a cylinder ship. Whatever material the wall was made out of, neither experience nor implant data told her what the off-white, rough substance was made from. Nothing she’d done to it had so much as scratched off an odd patch of speckled material. She couldn’t jump over it, she’d tried climbing it to no avail, and — at least so far — she couldn’t fly.

  Talani could. Alaya had seen her transform into a bird the way Gaz could.

  “You can just take me across, why not do that?” What lay beyond the wall, Alaya could not say exactly.

  “Because this is a simple task. Because I do not wish to.” The old master tapped the stump absentmindedly. “And because this trial is for you to pass.”

  “It’s fucking stupid.”

  This time she shrugged. “Or my aspirant isn’t as smart as she fancies herself without her little electronic helpers.

  Ire rose up in Alaya and took her eyes away for a moment. Sudden, blinding anger lashed out, seeking a place to unleash itself and finding nothing to bounce against, it flayed Alaya herself. That rage turned inward as she watched Gax die a dozen times in her mind. Before a minute had passed — relative time, Alaya had turned off the subsystems which automatically told her how much time had passed in the real — grief replaced the anger.

  It wasn’t just Gaz who’d been lost. No, Alaya had lost her whole team all in one fell swoop. Kirk would have been better off if Alaya had never come to Bahl-Mau. Isham too. As for Evan, frankly Alaya was disappointed at how easy it had been to kill him.

  Then there was Gaz…

  Hundreds of years of life squeezed into a beautiful, compassionate mind more expansive and wonderful than a dozen lesser minds. And the Root priests had reduced that mind to sludge.

  There was her rage again.

  When she escaped this place, Alaya intended to burn the Root down. Ludron’s bald head and sneering expression rose up and Alaya screamed at him, her scalding fury too hot to contain.

  “Shh.” Talani was at her side, cool palms on Alaya’s cheeks, her voice soothing the incredible anger in Alaya’s breast. “The Verse has given you a piece of Herself. You can’t indulge in it like this, you have to give it space, let it breathe in your mind or it will consume you.”

  Superstitious mumbo jumbo; Alaya knew magic was real. But she didn’t believe. Whatever the “Verse” had shoved in her head, anger and fury were old companions. She’d been close friends with them since the day her parents died.

  “You’re ignoring me.” Talani and the host of elders in Alaya’s memory banks could read her mind like a holographic billboard.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about and it’s just pissing me off.”

  Trickles of energy flowed from Talani’s fingers into Alaya’s skin. The flush of power numbed her cheeks and jaw, ran down to her neck and numbed it too. A final flare of the rage and Alaya would have shoved Talani away, if she’d been in control of her limbs at the moment. Numbness tracked down her upper trunk toward her fingers and gut. The anger did not depart, but rather the fiery aspect of it cooled enough to touch.

  Alaya started weeping. “Everyone I know is dead.”

  Talani rocked back on her feet and fell to her haunches. “I know.”

  Anyone else might have expressed sorrow on Alaya’s behalf. They might have commiserated with her or tried to change the subject and make the scene about them. But not Talani. Her silence and the soft rhythm of her breath lulled Alaya into a calm mental state. Naturally, her breath shifted to match Talani’s pattern.

  “There you go.” The old woman’s voice didn’t suffer from the crackling rasps of age. If anything, she sounded younger and clearer than Alaya did some days. “Fight against the Verse and what happens?”

  Ugh. Here go the questions. “You die.”

  “Give up and what happens?”

  “You die.” The answers were always the same, but sometimes the questions changed subtly.

  “So what’s the answer?”

  “The middle path?” How Alaya had come by that answer weeks ago, she could not say precisely. Though her cybernetics continued to function, providing her with a pinhole stream to the external world she wouldn’t have had otherwise, this place stretched the limits of their abilities. Something about her condition here prevented her from recording these sessions, prevented her from running an extra 3-4 mental tracks while taking in her lessons, and her meta-examination abilities were severely curtailed here. As far as her implants were concerned this world did not exist.

  “I wonder…” Talani ran a finger along the line of her own jaw. “Do you need some additional motivation?”

  There was something other than the anger: fear. “Oh please no.” Images of slavering wild beasts, the likes of which Alaya had never seen or heard of before came to mind. This wouldn’t be the first time Talani sent a small host of animals after Alaya. “I will overcome the wall.”

  “Before the sun sets?” Talani rose from where she’d sat in the mud, her bleached white robes picking up a dirty imprint on her backside. It brought a snort out of Alaya. A cocked eyebrow wasn’t Talani’s only answer. “The Verse isn’t clean, girl. It’s messy and heterogenous. Parts of it are full and swollen,” Talani made a lewd gesture with her hand, “and parts of it are empty. How does humanity survive in the swollen places?”

  It was the closest thing to a hint Talani had given Alaya. And it made no sense.

  “The Verse” was a common term for the universe, the totality of space and time which made up the potential experience of reality. But Talani and the other elders in Alaya’s mind had a different perspective. For them The Verse was an object of veneration, something sacred and ineffable. Alaya didn’t get it at all. But she could start from the common understanding.

  What does humanity do to survive? The question evoked images of her father and mother. There’d been a time when Alaya considered mother’s skillset less useful than father’s. Father could repair the cylinder with whatever he happened to find laying about. Mother could tell him where the ancients tended to keep their supplies. But were those components of survival? Was there something wrong with the wall that it required repair?

  Upon first encountering the wall, Alaya had walked its length to confirm it surrounded the swamp. She’d set a stick at the beginning of her route, jutting up from the soupy ground and pointed away from the wall in a rather obvious marker. Not one part of the surface had been damaged. Every section of the wall looked the same as the previous, with the only difference being the swamp. There was nothing Alaya could do to repair the wall.

  Trials like this made her feel inadequate and small. Give her a code puzzle or a security system to crack… Oh crap I’ve been thinking about this wrong this whole time.

  Alaya stood up right away and turned to face the wall. If this was a firewall, how would she break through it?

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  The easiest way to break through a high security firewall was to find an exploit, usually a piece of bad code waiting for a signal that would let her slip under or over the firewall. And if there was no such fragment of bad code?

  Fuck me.

  Alaya walked back toward the center of the swamp. The mangroves which populated this wetland grew to incredible sizes and heights. And a decent few of them had toppled under their own mass. As a result, she could pick through the remains of those ancient trees for bits of wood and debris she could use. What if there was no sneaky way through a firewall? The answer was to build one.

  She was being hyperbolic earlier. Now that she looked up at the wall with her plan in mind, the top didn’t seem all that far away. Without her cybernetic assistance, she couldn’t say exactly how tall it was, but that didn’t matter in the moment.

  Branches sturdy enough to support her weight were also sturdy enough to resist being pulled from their trunk. In her normal life, an improvised tool often meant using a screwdriver as a weapon. Or bashing out a pane of glass with a multitool. But here in this strange liminal space, an improvised tool meant Alaya wandered through the swamp looking for a stone or something hard enough to chop through her branches.

  Talani had not deigned to follow her through the swamp. But each time Alaya deposited her supplies near the spot she wanted to try her ascent, she found her master sitting on the stump, watching in silence. The position of her master and the way she wore a faint smile over her face combined in Alaya’s brain to produce a revelation: the strumming of her fingers on the stump… that had been a hint too.

  Alaya wished for her nanites as she slammed a wedge-like rock into the junction between the branch and the trunk. With a swarm she could have finished this project in minutes. Without it she was hitting a fucking tree with a fucking stone. Like a fucking caveman. The mystery of the incredible volume of money the wood in this place represented had lost its allure for her long before now. Striking wood this valuable with a “tool” she’d scrounged out of the mud truly bothered Alaya in the moment. Hard not to imagine she chipped credits away from the wood with each blow. Not that such credits would have been as valuable to Alaya as the wood itself.

  The focus of an interminable chore preserved Alaya’s sanity. Repetitive tasks took away the mental space to worry over Gaz, stopped her from her otherwise endless self-castigation. Before long — Alaya couldn’t say how long — she’d chopped a pile of branches off of the trunk for her use. Taking more wood off of that old tree might have helped ,but Alaya truly had no idea how to split it or prep it for use. She didn’t even know how to pick up and move the lumber once she’d made it, other than hauling one piece at a time.

  Bundle of branches in arm, she staggered back to Talani and let them spill down to where the wall met the Earth. Now the question was: how the hell to get these branches connected well enough to support her weight?

  Every once in a while a sim would come out featuring some rugged explorer lost on an untouched planet with nothing to their name but gumption and grit. Those sims skipped right over the important parts. Montages would show their hero chopping wood with a stone not unlike Alaya. Then it would show them wrapping the stone around a long branch to make an axe. How the hell did the hero get the stuff to wrap the axe in the first place?

  Aside from mangroves, the swamp was filled with plant life. There was nothing else Alaya could use to bind her stone to her axe. Even if she’d found animals to hunt, Alaya had no idea what to do with them once she killed them. Thus she experimented. The vast, vast majority of grasses were as useful as mulch in binding her stone to her branch. More often than not, Alaya pricked or sliced her hand on some grass’s defensive measures. By the time she’d discovered a clump of grasses which didn’t just come away when she pulled on them, her hands had grown slick with blood. Everything stung her fingers as she dug around the roots of the grasses to expose them and pull them out. Growing medium was way easier to deal with than actual soil.

  When she’d liberated her plant from the ground, Alaya washed the excess dirt off in the swamp water, gasping as the pain from her cuts flared. There wasn’t enough grass for her purposes, not with her first harvest. But the second, third and fourth turned up a bundle of the ropey strands she needed to complete her axe.

  Axe finished and ready for use, Alaya took it deeper into the swamp and used it like a shovel. There was another weird new word. Apparently early gen colonists had all been diggers of one form or another, so they’d kept “shovel” in their lexicons. But Alaya and her folks had never had cause to use such a basic tool.

  Hours went by. Alaya’s back and shoulders ached from the constant motion. How she could feel pain in his strange non-sim while she couldn’t even turn her sensors on with her cyberbrain was beyond her. At the end of those hours, Alaya had amassed a large pile of her preferred fibrous plants.

  The next step was tedious, even more so than chopping because she had to braid and twist her fibers into something akin to rope. Here was one more place those old survival sims helped. They were woefully under informative with respect to how the hero obtained their raw materials, but they loved to show them weaving strands of fiber for cord or rope. No idea what she was doing, Alaya ruined a good three quarters of her first tries. Hence the massive pile she’d collected.

  A good many little bits of rope or cord produced, Alaya tested their strength next. The engineering problem of how to test her weight without killing or hurting herself came up. Whether she could die in the Summerlands was an open question, one Alaya had no interest in exploring. In the end she settled on taking her two largest branches and tying a smaller branch she’d been unable to break between them. Again, trial and error resulted in something crude but serviceable. If she left the fiber rope too loose, the crossbar slipped down the branch to the ground, depositing her on her backside. But there was no such thing as too taught for those ropes.

  Alaya found a small, strong branch and used it to twist off the rope, and then slipping the end through the running loop she’d made for the branch worked great to keep the rope from unraveling. With that construction system in place, Alaya found she could stand on her crossbar, she could even jump up and down on it without it shifting or sliding down the support branches.

  Nighttime came and with it, darkness. Darkness aboard a ship was beyond dangerous. Darkness meant power loss and impending death. But out here in the Summerlands, darkness just meant nighttime. And as dark as the green sky managed to turn, Alaya never lost sight the way she did during a blackout. If early people lived like this, how did they ever stop working?

  “I just made a ladder.” The words echoed out into the night sky. She’d used thousands of them over the course of her life. In terms of building a ladder, Alaya had never done anything like it. This… this was special. There’d been no ancient fabrication plant sending its effort forward over the millennia. No other mortal or digital hand had laid themselves upon Alaya’s work. The two rungs of her ladder, she’d made them both herself.

  By the time she’d finished, the sky shifted from bubbling cauldron green to something closer to lime. The sun would rise soon and Alaya would be ready to test her experiment. Light returned to the world and Talani wandered up to Alaya, to inspect what she’d done. But the old master did not speak a word, either of approval or condemnation to Alaya. Rather she nodded as if the ladder were a fellow elder and moved on.

  Fucking galling. But if Talani wasn’t going to speak, then neither was Alaya. On the plus side, the swarm of animals or insects never materialized.

  When the sky reached its maximum luminosity, Alaya lifted her ladder with considerable effort and leaned it against the side of the wall. Its top passed the halfway mark, but Alaya couldn’t be certain of whether she’d be able to leap the distance.

  Only one way to find out.

  A glance toward Talani, who stood with her arms folded, watching impassively, Alaya grunted and climbed up her ladder. She’d fixed a rung to the very top of her branches and it was a little uneven. Getting those rungs to lay flat had been a serious task, one which Alaya abandoned for lack of precise instruments.

  Swaying back and forth, Alaya lay her hands against the pocked stone and held her breath. Down was farther than she’d expected, farther than her mind had let her assess until she clambered up here and looked down. How was such a short distance so sickness inducing?

  Bile swallowed and eyes shut, Alaya took several deep breaths. Less than twenty centimeters separated her from the walls’s upper lip. Few occasions in her life had made such a small distance so significant. But those twenty centimeters might as well have been a kilometer.

  “Fuck you wall.” It wasn’t rational, or wise. Gaz would have asked her why she did it, and Alaya would not have been able to explain herself.

  She jumped.

  Another day of building a slightly larger ladder would only have enraged Alaya further, possibly discouraged her forever. It was twenty centimeters, she could jump that, no problem.

  Branches snapped as Alaya’s feet left the upper rung and her hands hit the ledge. Smooth stone would have let Alaya slip down the surface unimpeded. But the rough texture of the walls gave her purchase and scrapes from the base of her palms to her elbow. The spots on her elbows hurt especially bad.

  But there she hung. It was the closest Alaya had come to breaching this wall and she wasn’t toppling to the ground now. Feet scrabbled against the wall, like a idiot trying to run in zero-G. Her arms burned, not just from the raw wounds where she’d shredded her own skin, but from the shear pain of exertion.

  I am not fucking falling from here. Alaya shouted at herself silently in her mind.

  This time her anger was silent, quiet as the chilling death of the void. In fact every part of Alaya’s mind hushed itself in that moment. All she was, everything in her form and body, each individual moment in her life had added up to and produced this. Millions of potential futures, billions of cells, more particles than contained in her absurd debt, all united to a singular purpose.

  Blind and in the darkened mental space of her own potent focus, Alaya found herself atop the wall.

  Over the edge lay a blue sky, as fake and weird as the green for of the swamp. She had to blink her eyes before the rest came into focus. Fields interspersed between hills rolled out before her like a blanket unfurled, but left rumpled over a bed.

  “Beautiful…” she’d had more to say, but Alaya teetered and fell forward off the wall, her body finally reacting to the intensity of effort she’d put in over those recent seconds.

  Her arm hit a corner of the wall as she fell. Alaya didn’t even scream.