[SESSION id=1.12]: Rhythm
Your ever shifting motion,
never settling, never giving,
I cannot forget a single breath.
— L.
Syncope
'That thing I like', no matter how licentious we made it sound when we were going to sleep, was entirely tame. I cooked breakfast for Jazz. Even Mother appreciated my taking over the work, though she questioned whether I was ready to be upright for so long. It wasn't like there was much for me to do, given that Jazz left all three books I wanted to read back in Central City.
Of course, I did have the new skill to learn, but that required at least one of my tutors to be present. Which meant that in the quiet of the morning, I was left to perform other sorts of tasks. Breakfast. House cleaning. Clearing the storage room. Though I was restricted to very light versions of each.
Eggs, fruit, toasted bread, and hot tea.
Served up just as Jazz and Mother stepped out of the hallway, the meal played its part well. Jazz blushed that I enjoyed the task so fondly. Mother appreciated real food, given that she'd largely given up cooking for herself, barring insta-foods.
As a group, we gathered on the couch. Jazz on my left, Mother on my right. It was cosy. Almost too idyllic, but if either of them noticed, they said nothing. I couldn't blame them.
"How goes the repair job, Jazz, dear?" Mother asked after a sip of her tea.
"I'm thinking I may need to call in a favour for this one." Jazz shrugged as she spoke around a mouthful of toast and eggs. "By any reasonable measure, it should be starting up, which tells me that it may need special attention from – well she's not exactly an expert, but more of a savant."
"We're going to see Antel?" For some reason that excited me. "I mean, if Dr. Stella says I'm okay for it, of course."
Jazz's warm lips touched my forehead. "They said short distances would be fine, dove," she was grinning. "I'm glad to see you're excited. She will be too."
"Didn't know I was so well-liked," I muttered. "But I'm glad to hear it."
"That, and she loves a puzzle." Something behind her words told me she didn't just mean the workstation. "I gave her a vis-call while you were showering after cleaning up my hand."
I'd forgotten about her injury. That's when I noticed the gauze wrap was still there. Not quite rust brown beneath the first several layers. That meant it had finally stopped bleeding, which was good.
While I inspected my apparent handiwork, the words hit me. A shower. Cleaning up the wound. I couldn't remember any of that. I'd been working to help her, then I passed out, or something like it. More lost time?
My face clearly spoke volumes to a distress that was gripping my throat. "Lillian," Jazz said with a gentle nudge, "everything's okay. It's not that bad." She held up the hand, and despite what I knew I'd just seen, it really did look fine. "You did expert work, though I could tell you were out of it. Your clothes, by the by, were tossed in the wash."
"Thanks, I suppose." I could barely breathe, but it was slowly coming back to me. Not the lost time, but the calm I normally held. "I think I should lie back down for a bit. Can we hold off till the afternoon before we go see Antel?"
"Already factored that in." How was she so on top of everything? How did she plan for every contingency and every loop inside of every recursive process? "Beside that, she doesn't open up shop until lunch rush passes." That made more sense. "Finish your food before you lie down, if you can. Gotta have strength if you're going to be in the presence of two exceptional women."
"Give her my regards when you go, girls," Mother cooed something pleased. "I'll be resting after my rounds. Oh, and thank her for taking care of Lillian the many times she's come through."
"'Many' times?" I stared at Mother, then looked to Jazz, then back. "Explain?"
"A woman must have her secrets," Mother said, standing and taking her empty dishes to the kitchen. "Anyway, I'm off. Have a fine morning, you two."
She was out the door too quickly for me to stop her, not that I felt it viable anyway.
Once our food was gone, Jazz lifted me and carried me, whole body, to the bed. She sat on the floor and stared at me, eyes glittering in the gentle light. Deep in her amber and peridot eyes, I saw something like fascination, but more than that I saw admiration. Something like love.
"Why do you like me?" The most absurd, unconfident question possible. "I mean, you're a successful human acquisitions specialist with a penchant for workstations and computing. I'm just —"
Her finger found my lips. "An artist with a mysterious condition causing her to slip out of time and space without anyone noticing. But before that, you were a lost woman, excited by the world. And between those two, you were the woman who looked at me the first time like you knew my very soul." With each word, her eyes seemed to well with tears, molecule by molecule stacking until the first drop slid down her cheek. "And whose eyes held the universe until very recently, and now they hold even more."
"You don't hate the glowing?" I latched onto the only thing I could, knowing it wasn't even the point. She shook her head. "And the sapphire looks good? It doesn't do bad things to my skin?"
"Never in my life," Jazz stood and climbed into the bed with me, rolling me over to face her once she took her place, "have I met someone so cosmically perfect who can't fathom that anyone might notice and appreciate it. Lillian Thorn, are you an idiot, by chance?"
"Of course not! I'm a genius! I even know your deepest secrets." I didn't, but I said it so compellingly, that I realised it wasn't false just as a dark thought passed through me. Jazz, receiving the news. She had System Sickness. Early stages. "Your darkest, most telling things that you don't even tell your sister or any of your family."
"Not so. No one knows those." Fear swept through her expression. I wouldn't push the issue. "Unless you're talking about the collection of tiny glass frogs I keep in a box in my library. In which case, sure."
"What else would I mean, Jazz?" I shoved her gently, then leaned in and stole a kiss. "I know you're afraid to love me, or at least afraid to admit loving me. And that's okay. Because I'm afraid too."
"Then we remain on equal footing, my flower." She sighed. "Try to sleep."
I managed, barely, to drift off, and didn't wake again until lunch. Clearly I needed rest. Real rest.
Cadence
As Jazz drove her conveyance around Lake Town, effortlessly navigating the maze of streets as though she'd been raised on them, I watched the world float by. The buildings nearer the streets tended to be taller, often supporting public housing or other non-private use facilities. When a street raised above ground level, there were often parks or play areas built for similar purpose. Those were my favourite parts of the city, as the buildings became a sea of rooftops, displaying what people did with the space.
Half the rooftops were covered in photovoltaic power generation systems, only the taller ones. Half the remaining rooftops had gardens or fenced play areas or other recreation spaces. The further you looked from a raised street, the more the space resembled the lake's surface during windy season, lapping and whipping the sky like greedy birds, desperate for a bit more attention from the sun.
So I imagined the scene as Jazz drove without speaking. The tallest buildings were birds skimming the surface. The shortest buildings were their prey. Small fishes or bugs or aquatic plants. None of it quite stationary. All of it perfectly still, giving me still frames to admire as we travelled. It was stunning. Almost inspiring.
My sketch pad and pencil were in hand before I could think, and I tried my best to capture the image. But when I looked back to appreciate it a second time, it was gone. And the page in my sketchbook looked less like an idyllic lake and more like a workstation in the process of defragmenting, not that I had any true reference for the phenomenon. I kept the page in place and put away the sketchbook as Jazz stopped the car.
"Antel may be a bit spooked at the old tech." Jazz grimaced as she ran a hand along my leg. "But like I said, she loves a good puzzle."
"Welcome in, J," Antel greeted as the bell on her door rang. Then with a puzzled look addressed me. "And our esteemed Miss Thorn!"
"Don't worry, love," Jazz droned, "she's not lost this time. I brought her. And we have a puzzle for you." Antel lit up at Jazz's words. "Good girl! I knew you'd be interested."
I carried the workstation to Antel's work counter, and she immediately set into a troubleshooting loop. No other words were exchanged at first. Jazz just pulled me back, and we watched the woman work.
Her hands took the workstation apart rapidly, like she didn't even need to see the work. Clearly she'd disassembled her fair share of old tech. She didn't even look like she was worried over the specifics. Just straight to the task once it was open. Tiny pieces were removed and replaced. Bigger pieces were cleaned. The whole thing was dusted down in a flash, and she was reassembling it before I could really process it all.
Antel connected the workstation to power, and the screen lit up at the touch of a button. Black field with mild green text. Not a minute later, it sat on something like a login prompt, and she turned it to face us.
"Courtesy of Antel's Workstation Repairs," she beamed, "now tell me about this puzzle."
"What do you know about lock exclusion breaking and clock misalignment?" Jazz asked. So this wasn't actually about the workstation. "Say I've got a case of lock exclusion breaking that I need to trace, and I think it's connected somehow to a random clock misalignment. How would I piece that together?"
Jazz didn't stay still as she spoke. Instead, her attention was immediately on the workstation. She produced a small mobile drive from somewhere and connected it before doing something that appeared to reset the device.
"Depends on the process. Most locks aren't time-dependent," Antel muttered as she hopped up and sat on the counter. "If you think it's clock related, then it's less likely lock breaking and more likely lock bypass." She reached under the far side of the desk and procured a notepad and pen. She drew as she spoke, crossing her legs to support the work. "Security systems, especially on network, are often time sensitive, breaking down if they miss by more than a few seconds.
"If this is connected directly to The System, which most of your problems are," Antel shook her head, "then the clock is a lot more lenient from what I've seen. The Princess of Flowers you told me about seems able to spoof the clock to any time she pleases, like time itself is her plaything." She kept scribbling away, not letting me look at her work. "Now, if a lock happens to be in some way clock dependent, then the ability to spoof the clock allows the process to claim it's safe.
"Consider, for example, the subroutine that handles The System's age and regression algorithm. It always runs once every day, so if you told it that today is actually tomorrow, or some day in the far flung future, and if it believed you, then you could hijack that subsystem and make pretty much anything happen."
At last, Antel turned her drawing toward me. It was a convoluted conceptual map of what she'd been describing.
"Now, I'm no Lillian Thorn," she shrugged, "but this should be a pretty decent explainer." It wasn't. I smiled anyway as she tore out the page and handed it off. "Speaking of clock misalignments," she turned to Jazz, who nodded but didn't look away from whatever she was doing, "there are rumours going around that The System's board time is reporting anomalies. Like big ones. Most recently, a year passed on the clock in ten days."
That pulled Jazz's attention. Her eyes were wide as they traced from Antel, then up and down my whole body, then back to Antel. "You still have that connection to the user database, by any chance?" She powered down the workstation before hopping the counter without waiting for an answer.
Both of them walked into a backroom, leaving me alone fore several minutes. I wandered around the shop, not touching but admiring everything from outdated hardware to modern fine components. There was nothing to do but wait, so I waited.
"Antel, take Lillian home. Take the workstation with you," Jazz said without looking back at me as she stormed through the main part of the shop. "Give her the slip of paper I handed you, but not until she's safely on the couch."
Not even a nod in my direction. Jazz was out the door, and in her conveyance before I could say a thing.
"Come along, illustrious Miss Thorn," Antel whispered, staring at me like she'd seen some manner of ghost. She lifted the workstation effortlessly and led me out to the same car she'd driven the first time I'd wandered into her shop. "Let's get you home."
The drive back to Mother's house was quiet, still, entirely too dead to feel real. Unlike the trip to Antel's shop, the air itself seemed to attack me. We said nothing for the near hour it took to get back to the small house on the eastern lakeside.
"Mother said to give you her regards," I muttered as I pulled the workstation out of the conveyance. "Have a good day, Antel."
She didn't immediately drive away. Instead, she got out of the vehicle and set something on the front of it. A paper folded into a tight square. Then she stepped back, giving me room to take it.
"Have a good day yourself Miss Thorn."
Suddenly, I was alone again. No Jazz, no Mother, no Antel. No one. To make matters worse, my conveyance was in Central City because Jazz had brought hers. So I did what any isolated person might. I went inside and started reading.
Lillian,
I'm sorry for leaving all of a sudden. But I can't. It's not you. It's not me. It's The System. Perhaps you will understand eventually. I wish you well.
The username is
rose, but it's only local credentials. The password I set to my favourite flower. You can either guess it, or you can bypass it. If you choose the latter, you'll have the necessary skill to understand why I left.Please forgive me, as I will likely never forgive myself.
— Jazz Star
That out of the way, I opened the fundamentals book, and did what I could to not stain the pages with tears.