[SESSION id=1.19]: Octet
When you first see it, you think it's a joke, some trick of your imagination, some impossible thing. That's because it is. And even so, it's true. As true as anything can be. It was always her style, her admission, her signature. Never so close to the beginning as to be caught out. Never so far from it as to be missed. She was the best, and her work was art.
— Jazz Thorn, On Integration and Dissolution of Harmony, "The Son of Lies, the Hare of Truth"
Breach
Jazz was devastated when I told her what happened. Shifting versions of her right as she was there with me, the whole time, right as she was nowhere to be seen when others were present. My existence was shifting into something entirely fluid. What would happen if I got hurt while shifted? What if I died?
I could answer the latter question easily enough, thanks to the experience with Lillian Dark, but that left a million other puzzles to be solved.
After hours of begging – sadly not at all an exaggeration – Jazz agreed to bring the workstation from my home to the hospital. She couldn't understand why I wanted to work so badly at anything, but the truth was she needed to know the truth.
When she returned, after having fought with hospital security to allow the machine in, Jazz made me vow to do unspeakable things to her once this was all over with. I agreed on the condition that she still wanted it after we talked about why I needed the workstation.
"I don't actually need the machine in front of me," I told her around a still somewhat torn throat. "You're going to be doing the typing and working on it."
"Then I could've done this at home, lilium meum," Jazz teased. Still, she kept up a good attitude and set up the workstation then turned it on. "It'll be a few minutes. Can I get an advance on those unspeakable things in the meantime?"
"Please, take this seriously," I groaned. "You might hate me ten minutes from now. Or, well, probably twenty. It takes a while."
Her expression dropped. "Fine. Let's chat while we wait. What is so bad you can't just say it?"
"If I 'just say it', then it'll come out wrong, and you might accuse me of attention seeking," I offered. "And if you did believe me, then you'd assume all of this was something it's not."
"And how do you know it's not?" Jazz raised a brow, then moved to the bedside and sat with me. "You're not a doctor. Not even a nurse. You're an artist and a database analyst."
"Because if it was, then the foremost expert in what it's not would've clocked it instantly," I shot back. "Which is the only reason I'm glad you called them to see me."
"And you're not glad your mother came to visit with Omi?" Jazz grinned and shoved me playfully. "But point taken. Is there any reason I should think Omi is wrong?"
I was saved from answering by a tone from the workstation. "Don't login. For the username, type Flower_Princess exactly as you saw it in the user table." Jazz looked confused, then she turned to the workstation's screen and chuckled. She was across the room, but she didn't type. Instead, she turned back to me. "I'm serious, Jazz. Just do it. Capital-F-l-o-w-e-r-underscore-capital-P-r-i-n-c-e-s-s. Then submit."
Her hands were quick. She typed more than twenty thousand keys per hour – a fact she was infinitely proud of – so the username was in faster than a blink, but her finger hesitated before submitting. "What's this going to prove, Lillian?" She asked, looking back over her shoulder at me. I gave her nothing, so she pressed the key and waited.
"Once the shell loads, I'm going to tell you where to look, but I'm not going to give it to you all at once." I sighed. This was terrifying, but I could get through it. I saw the prompt before Jazz, so I started directing. "Move to the root directory, then into users, and then shared properties." Jazz complied, then looked back to me for more information. "Okay, there's a database folder called db, and in it a script I'm going to have you run." She moved into the folder, then waited. "Execute the script system.sh, then come sit with me."
She did it, and the machine whirred to life, just like the first time I'd logged into Rose's account by accident. Her eyes went wide as she looked back at me, probably seeing me properly for the first time in a while.
"Lillian," Jazz whispered, rushing to my side. "What did I just do?"
"That script does some weird system-magic and performs an impossible task." I shrugged. "Which gives the user access to perform other impossible tasks, if you can believe it."
Her weight was heavy as it hit the edge of the hospital bed. The monitor that beeped got a little angry at my reaction, but it calmed quickly. "What impossible thing does it do?"
As if to answer my question, the workstation stopped whirring, and those bizarre colours appeared, just as they always did.
Welcome, Rose.
╭─Rose@δόμος in (0.0.1) ~/
╰─⏣: █
"Rose. Rose at Home on version 0.0.1." Jazz read the words with far more gravity than I'd ever heard from her. "In her home directory. Lillian, is this what I think it is?"
"Surprise. I'm Aria's Vengeance." I barely managed the words. "Little old me is the mystery hacker. And it's entirely a fluke."
"How long?"
"The first message that didn't get reverted," I said. "It was all an accident, and suddenly I was logged in as an account called Rose, and I tried it, and it worked."
She took me by the collar of the hospital gown I was wearing. "Are you sure it's not System Sickness? Maybe Omi missed it because you're not a hacker. Maybe Omi got it wrong."
"Dr. Stella doesn't get it wrong, Jazz. They've been studying System Sickness since before your father died. If anyone knows the signs, it's them." The words were a hollow offering, but we both knew I was right. "Beside that, none of the symptoms match. I think this has more to do with my user account than it does with System Sickness."
Jazz didn't answer. She just sat with the revelation. It was hard to swallow. Not System Sickness. Not any sickness, really, if the numbers were to be believed. I was just existing. And worse, I was doing that poorly.
After a long time, Jazz went to the workstation and started typing. I couldn't see around her, but I could guess the kinds of things she was doing. Eventually, she turned to face me. "Check the monitors. I want to know if what I did worked."
Every monitor hooked to me was showing green. Even the one that had been bouncing between yellow and red had stabilised. None of the numbers seemed willing to change, and the odd little dancing line had stabilised into a metronomic pattern that could easily have lulled me to sleep.
"Did you change the machines?"
"Of course not," Jazz said, shaking her head. "I changed you. Now you really do have perfect health. Not just the semblance of it from tests you can't properly predict."
"What, and I am asking this with all the love in my heart, the fuck?" I was seething. The numbers on the machines started to go haywire with my suddenly spiking stress level. "You just willy-nilly bumped around in my personal code, and you, what, fixed me?"
"If I can't have you healthy," Jazz said, not giving an inch, "then I'm going to worry about you every time you go off and fuck around on me with other Jazzes. At least this way, I know you're safe, generally."
"No. You don't get to be like this."
"Fuck you," Jazz growled. The peridot in her eyes was a green flame that lit the space between us. The colour was wrong, but we matched for glowing eyes. That almost broke my own tension. "You've been risking your damned life for almost two divisions, and you're mad at me for making you the picture of health? Fuck right the hell off."
She had a point. "Okay. I'm sorry."
"For?"
"I'm sorry for being a jackass. For putting myself at risk. For not telling you about Rose. For keeping secrets. For sleeping with Other Jazz." I took a deep breath and was about to continue, but her hand settled on my lips and stopped me.
"Good. Now don't do it again. And I promise not to touch your code again."
"Thank you," I squeaked out around her hand. "But please and thank you, don't break that promise."
"Unless you're actively dying, you have my word."
"How did you know it would work?" I asked after several seconds once Jazz removed her hand from my mouth. "That was kind of stupid, don't you think?"
"I didn't. But I knew that the worst case is I'd do nothing. Best case, you'd be healthy. Somewhere in between, a different Lillian would suddenly be in perfect health." She shrugged. "Now that I think of it, you're right. That was utterly irresponsible of me. Don't let me do dumb shit like that, Lillian."
"As if I could have stopped you."
She kissed me. A quick peck, but enough to know we were settled. That left me with a moment to think.
"Question," I said at length.
"Answer," she shot back and grinned.
"We've determined The System is just supposed to be a monitor and a link, not an active platform," I offered, fully certain of those details. "So how did an update actively change things?"
"Uhm. Well." Jazz didn't sputter or stammer. She stopped. She looked back at the workstation. Then to me. "We should talk to your mother."
Firewall
"I lied," Mother said softly. "But the important thing is what I was lying about. And it's not your place to figure out."
We weren't willing to tell her everything, so we'd brought her into the room after powering down the workstation so there would be no evidence, and we'd asked her an absurd hypothetical. "If someone could change The System, truly, without being reverted by the Princess of Flowers, would it have any impact on the real world?" And that was her answer. Not yes, not no, not uncertainty. She answered 'I lied'.
Jazz didn't follow, but I had a feeling I knew where she was headed with the thought. Before Jazz could interrupt, I offered my own interpretation. "The other simulation didn't disappear, did it?"
The look Jazz gave me told me that she wasn't expecting anything like that. Mother held up a hand with two fingers. "The first simulation, the perfect mirror of our world. And the second, the one we call The System. They're linked. If one disappeared, so would the other. That's the theory. And my best friend died testing it."
"Da?" Jazz whispered. Mother nodded.
"When you interact with The System, you get sicker proportional to the impact of the work you're doing." Mother said it, but it was clear she wasn't in the room with us. "Lion's husband had System Sickness for ages before we decided to poke around with this idea. He was going to die anyway, so he took one for the team. He found a backdoor into The System through an account called phyllo, and he ran a full system delete command." She gasped at something. "Nothing happened to The System. Instead, Ferrite started coughing. His breath went short. He didn't come back from that. Even with Lion there, doing everything they could, Ferrite still passed within minutes."
"I knew Da had System Sickness," Jazz was pale, like she was about to faint, "but I didn't know that's how he went."
"Lion and I lost touch after that, understandably so. Didn't come back together until I started declining a few years ago." She shuddered at some repressed memory. "I sometimes wonder what impact it had on you two and Nona that we had to tear you away from each other at such a young age."
"Why would you willingly put your lives on the line if you had kids to raise?" Jazz and I asked simultaneously. It was a fair question, and Mother knew it.
She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Not the point," she said around ragged breath. "But it's a high you never really stop chasing, risking it all to change the world. And it's something Lion and I have regretted ever since then. That's probably why they had their childhood friend adopt Jazz. Looked too much like Ferrite."
"Omi always said I had Da's eyes, but I could never remember them for myself." Jazz sounded fond, but her face was still torn. "You still haven't really gotten to the point of the original question."
"Right," Mother said with a huff as she sat in the visitor chair in the hospital room. "The other simulation. It directly mirrors literally everything in the world. I watched Ferrite's heart stop in real-time on a monitor I had set up to watch him in that simulation. That broke my own heart. Only a few people knew about the other simulation. We swore we'd never tell anyone else." A weight lifted off her shoulders. "Of course all but two of us have passed, so there's no one to hold it against me except Lion.
"When I said the other simulation disappeared, it wasn't entirely untrue. Knowledge of it definitely did." Mother was waving a hand about, trying to communicate something with the gesture. It wasn't working. "And access too. We put up a block. No one could access it without having all of our passwords. And then we all walked away."
Mother sat with those words, and we gave her space to move on.
"If you somehow managed to change The System," she eventually continued, "it wouldn't do anything to the world around us. I know this because that's how I came down with System Sickness. I changed something entirely inconsequential. Lion's street address record. Nothing happened." Mother actually laughed at herself when she said it. She was fond of those memories. "The other simulation, though? It would almost certainly have a real effect."
"Thank you, Mother," I said. I met her gaze and offered as much of a supporting smile as I could. "If I found a way to access and change the other simulation by accident, hypothetically of course, what would you want to see change?"
"What I want is impossible, even with that ridiculous hypothetical." She shook her head. "I want to be cured of System Sickness so Lion and I can live out the happily ever after neither of us got with our husbands."
Jazz raised a hand. "Why couldn't it be cured?"
"Lillian hasn't told you? Good. Some things are meant to be private." She sighed. "But since you asked. I don't exist in either simulation. No record, no trace. Never have. I'm what you might call an anomaly."
Jazz's jaw dropped. She didn't bother hiding her shock. It was a big deal. Everyone was in there. Everyone who had ever lived, everyone currently alive. And everyone who would eventually live would be in there when the time came. How could anyone not be in there? I'd already reconciled my own shock about it, so I let Jazz sit with hers.
"But if it were possible, that's what I'd want. We can't bring the dead back, but we can keep the living going. That's why Lion's a doctor, after all." She stood and moved toward the door. "Do you girls need anything else, or can I go cuddle with the good doctor?"
"Please tell Dr. Stella I appreciate everything they've done, Mother," I said, waving helplessly. "And thank you for clearing that up for me."
"Don't get yourself hurt, young lady," Mother said before stepping into the hall and closing the door behind herself.
Too late for that, I thought to myself before setting my hand on Jazz's leg. "Are you okay, doll?"
"Short answer?" Jazz asked before meeting my eyes. "Not even a little. But I think I will be once we're out of this damned hospital."
Dawnlight
There's something truly beautiful about the horror of understanding after an immense time completely in the dark. Something the light tried to reveal, tried desperately against the will of The Source to unveil, and failed so spectacularly that no amount of rationalisation could possibly rectify it.
Once I was out of the hospital, Jazz packed up my whole home and moved me in with her. Constant surveillance until she was confident that I was as healthy as she'd attempted to make me by intruding on my personal space. My books. My paintings. My food – well, the food in my home that she bought. The workstation that provided us a link to something terrifying and so unlikely that we couldn't begin to define it. And, of course, me.
Each morning, we'd sit by the window looking out over Central City, and we'd admire our home. Each afternoon, we'd retreat to the library. Each night, we'd struggle against hope trying to find answers within the connection Rose had.
The sex was good. The food was better – no thanks to Jazz. And the company was tops.
We verified what we already knew. This wasn't The System. This was something else. And when we were at our wits' end, we turned to Jazz Thorn, to the harmony she begged for, to her search for the wife she lost. And what we found was obvious. So plainly obvious we should've seen it sooner.
"And in the absence of active control, the path was left open for the Sectors," I read aloud from a chapter on the history of [world], the history I was discovering applied to all the forks equally. How else could you explain the timestamps?
"Control by what? In what way?" Jazz asked, not picking up the pieces quickly enough. "You told me about these Sectors before. Stasia, Rivia, Sheen, Cyphera. They took the power of the goddesses, or whatever you want to call the —"
"Elia's heart," I whispered, gasping at my own use of the divine name. "Aria's name," I corrected. "Can you read the system flags?"
"Better than most. I've never tried to change anything until you came along, but I've studied it all closely." Jazz awakened the workstation from sleep and started typing. "What am I looking for?"
"Is there a flag for daemons?" The word felt wrong in my mouth, but I knew it was the right one. "Or schedulers or other reactive systems?"
"Sure, but that's not exactly a useful flag."
"Are there any regular users with it set?" She watched me as various things loaded, then turned back to the workstation. "Because I'm betting I'm the only one."
"So what am I checking?" Jazz had pulled up the binary flags for the twelve accounts, but she hadn't looked. "It's the seventeenth bit. Only reactive built-ins have it set. Well, them and you."
I counted across the lines of ones and zeroes in both directions to be sure. It wouldn't have mattered either way, as the result was the same. The bit was set only on eight users out of the twelve. Aria, Ayuna, Elia, Nihil, Lynae, Sini, Linna, and Aeluin. The other four weren't marked.
"Then why do the goddesses have it? Why do these have it?" I ran my finger down the column of ones. Jazz repositioned it, indicating I'd picked the wrong direction. But she took in a sharp breath when she watched me drag my finger down the other column of ones. "What are they being called to do? What action has to be automated with goddess-level permissions?"
"System Sickness," Jazz whispered. "Do you know how to grep every file in a system for specific call information?"
"Yes," the confidence in my tone wasn't from impossible knowledge. I knew this one because it was one of Other Lillian's proudest bits of code from On Erasure. It was necessary for her script to delete logs as soon as they were created and stifle new ones for the delete events. "I don't know why she used it the way she did, but Other Lillian used it."
"Perfect. Write that script," she said as she stood, moving toward the door. "I have to make a few calls. Don't run the thing until Antel gets here."
"Antel? She's in Lake Town, Jazz." I must have looked worried, but Jazz just smiled. "How long are these calls?"
"Short, mostly, but I have to go collect some things. Please. Write a script for it. Make it general. Trust me." She rushed back over to me. Our lips met, and the passion of her kiss nearly devoured me whole. My breath was gone when she broke contact and whispered to me. "Exspecta me, lilium meum. Crede mihi."
Jazz was out the door before I could ask 'wait for how long', and I was left with the warmth of her lips still dancing on mine.
Shadefall
The loud knocking on the door awakened me from a sleep I hadn't meant to be taking on Jazz's couch. It was dark. The workstation was back to sleep, had been for hours as I continued reading On Integration, and the lights of Central City were already passing into the darkness of past ninety degrees. That is, past midnight, when everything properly shuts down for the night.
Another booming knock reminded me that taking in my surroundings was preventing me from properly answering the door. "Jazz fucking Silver Star," Antel's voice was enraged, "if you don't open this door, I'm going to fragment it and send you the bill with Ayuna's blessing."
Her face moved from outrage to apology as she sashayed through the door without actually speaking the apology to a slightly confused me.
"Oh. I beat her here. What in Nihil's nether bits is taking her? I had to shut down the shop, pack up everything she requested, and travel here without a thought. I smell like dead animals, and my hair is a mess. She had best get here soon, or I'm making a pass at her wife." As if she hadn't realised I was standing right there, she turned to face me, and feigned startling before taking my hand and kissing it with a quick bow. "Oh it's lovely to see you, Miss Thorn! Where's your girl?"
"Right here," Jazz said, barging between us, "and I'll kindly ask you not to make a pass at the woman I'm not even engaged to, you contemptuous temptress." Several seconds passed before Antel smiled broadly and pulled Jazz into a tight hug. "Thanks for being here," Jazz said as their arms held each other close.
"Have your doorman bring everything from my conveyance," Antel said before moving to sit at the old workstation she'd brought back to life a few divisions before. "Is it ready, dear one?"
When I didn't answer, Antel looked up at me, eyes wide and gestured at the workstation, which was rapidly whirring back from sleep. "Oh. You mean me?"
"I would never call that dirty harlot 'dear one'. You? You're a sweetheart. An angel who can do no wrong." She fluttered her lashes at me. "Now. Dear one. Is it ready?"
"Ready as it can be. It's in the home folder. Called it supergrep." Antel wasn't listening by that point. The intense colours of Rose's terminal were staring at her, and she held her breath. I swore I saw a tear slide down her face.
"She said you found a way in. This has been a myth since before Central was a City. And yet, here I am staring at it on a workstation from before the fall of Cyph." Antel's voice cracked mid-sentence, but she kept speaking. "Rose. Account zero. The progenitrix." Her eyes were flooding as she looked at me. "Lillian Thorn, marry me."
"I told you, Antel, you pretentious cow," Jazz said as she came back into the room, "she's mine. And she stumbled into this blessing. It's not like she's your manic hacker dream girl."
"No, of course not," Antel laughed. "That was always you, but you never liked me as a boy, and I never liked you once I was a woman."
"Correct," Jazz kissed Antel on the top of her head, then kissed my lips. "Your loss, really."
"Hello," I said, sitting next to Antel, "can we get started on whatever this is?"
Jazz took the seat on my other side and placed a hand on my leg. "Soon as Antel's stuff is in here. Meantime, A," Jazz leaned forward and smiled at her friend, "do that thing where you set a job running and make us look like rubes because you're so good."
Without answering, Antel set to typing. She was faster than Jazz. After several minutes, the screen started doing what I could only assume was the job of finding something using my general script.
"Now we wait," Antel said, leaning back on the couch.
"How long?" The question was answered almost instantly. The screen stopped, and a little message proudly proclaimed 'three hundred references in two hundred files output to results.csv'. "Never mind."
A knock at the door alerted us that both Jazz's and Antel's belongings had made it. Three men were carrying what looked like two suitcases, a moveable tool chest, and an impressive looking notebook.
"Set the tool chest by the snarky one. The suitcases in the guest room, and the notebook you can hand to me." Jazz was straight into command mode. No one moved until the men were gone and the door locked. "Alright genius, Lillian and I will see you at noon tomorrow. I'm paying your normal rates."
"Who says I'm going to be up that long?" Antel wasn't looking up. She was actively pulling out objects and cables and tools to set something up. "And why the spare? We used to cuddle so nicely before Lillian came along."
"I'll make you a deal. If she agrees to it, then you can have your way with Lillian if you're finished before the sun comes up." Jazz smirked, then started dragging me toward the bedroom.
"Hey!" I tried to pull away, but her grip was solid. "You can't just —"
Jazz's lips met mine, silencing me. "First, I said that you had to consent, which is entirely your business. Second, it's a moot point. She'll be at that until first light. We'll wake up just as she's gone to bed. We both know it."
"I don't though, and you can't just —"
Her kiss was even more fierce, and I almost entirely lost my train of thought. I did entirely lose my will to fight, and I let myself be dragged to bed.
A note was sitting next to the workstation when I awoke the next morning. Antel's handwriting wasn't nearly as neat and orderly as Jazz's, but it was legible.
Down to eight, with a possible thirteen. Finished as the grey dawn broke my heart. Perhaps next time, Lillian. (wink)
She literally wrote '(wink)' on the paper, and I almost cackled, but I managed to stifle the laugh. That's when I had a moment to look around. Antel had made a hideous mess of things, leaving parts and such scattered. Tools were perfectly aligned, but nothing else was.
The workstation was still awake, so she must not have gone to bed too long before I woke up. On the screen was a text editor showing the names of eight code files with odd little notes. They were conveniently named 03.service, 04.service, on up to 0A.service. Each, I assumed, referenced one of the eight goddess accounts. Each, I knew, would have some part of the System Sickness puzzle.
Below those eight were five more with their own notes, but the content was far more peculiar.
`00.service` - Rose. Don't touch. Like. Ever. If this runs, everyone dies.
`01.service` - Jasmine. Don't touch. See Rose.
`02.service` - Phyllo. I don't know why, but it sets every regular user password to 'meadow' and watches for changes. Probably best to avoid.
`0B.service` - Aidan. This is already running, even though there's no reason it should be. Trying to turn it off does nothing. It just sets itself running again. Its whole job is to archive the whole system. There's a hidden partition where it does its work.
`comet.thorn.help.service` - Ask me about this later. It's insane and impossible.I opened up the service files for each of the goddesses and found exactly what we were worried about. Hooks registered to remote filesystem events. Specifically, hooks that would fire any time a file changed in the remote filesystem. All it took was to log in. That changed log files, and the process started.
The worst was what happened when either Aria or Sini were fired. Varying levels of catastrophe. Nearly unstoppable. They were monsters. In each service was a commented record of every time they'd fired, and my heart stopped for what felt like an eternity when I saw some of them.
# Stasia - System time: 00005A7FE59CD617 - SIGTERM
# Stasia - System time: 00005A7FE59CDA17 - SIGKILL
# Rivia - System time: 00005A7FE59CD617 - SIGTERM
# Rivia - System time: 00005A7FE59CDA17 - SIGKILL
# Sheen - System time: 00005A7FE59CD617 - SIGTERM
# Sheen - System time: 00005A7FE59CDA17 - SIGKILL
# Cyphera - System time: 00005A7FE59CD617 - SIGTERM
# Cyphera - System time: 00005A7FE59CDA17 - SIGKILLThose were the Sectors of Other Lillian's world. They'd done something so egregious that System Sickness wiped them out using Aria and Sini together. Searching through the list, the same thing had happened to countless other people, names I'd never seen or heard. Eventually, I found him. Ferrite Stella. The same result.
My mouth was dry, and my head spun. I needed comfort. A kiss. Tea. Water. Anything. But none would come.
"Take a deep breath, Star-Lily," a familiar voice whispered to me. "Yes, I know it's you. I've been waiting for this moment for almost fifty years."
I turned. Jazz Comet, looking just as stunning as she always did, but more than a decade my senior, was smiling. She offered a comforting look and settled a hand on my leg.
"You told me the exact date-time the last time you visited, that way I could comfort you just like this." She pulled me close. "You're a good girl. Or I suppose woman. But either way." Jazz Comet flustered much more easily than the other Jazzes. "What I was saying is that it's good to see you. Are you curious about the daemon?"
"Put there by you. Written in as obtuse a manner as possible so that only someone who knew the key could decode it." I chuckled at the knowledge. How did I have any way of knowing that? "But I'm more curious about the Sectors."
Her breath hitched. "We have them. Yours is the one world without. The one world where System Sickness is wholly proportional to the damage being done." Jazz Comet let the tiny bit of breath she had out. "You should've warned me that you'd ask about them. But this is the way of all Lillians I suppose."
"Thanks, I guess." I tried to smile, but it wouldn't come. "Do you know what I'm meant to remember?"
"Bootstraps," Jazz laughed out loud. "You warned me about bootstraps, but I don't give a flying rat's rear end." Jazz stood and walked across the space. It was just like Jazz Star's home. "Since you told me, I have to tell you, so that you can tell me."
"Oh," I whispered. "Do you really have to?"
"You've done this all before, Lillian." The words were flat. Lifeless. Heartless. Loveless. "We all have. You haven't read the last page of the book yet. It'll break you."
"How do you mean?"
"When you go back, read it." She sighed, then turned and went into the kitchenette. "Lillians are forced to forget. Jazzes are forced to remember. It's part of the daemon I built. I promise you'll understand why once you read the note."
"You are as unhelpful as Jazz Light," I chuckled around empty lungs.
Jazz returned carrying a tray of cookies and tea. "You've a dreadful choice to make," she said. "Try to fix it all, then restart everything and hope it worked, or don't bother and watch everything fall apart."
"Question?" I said as she set down the tray in front of me.
"Answer?" she instantly replied before taking a cookie and popping it in her mouth.
"It was you, wasn't it? Who set up the accounts and scripts and such?"
Jazz could only nod as she chewed the cookie. Once she swallowed, she grinned. "You're welcome, by the by. It was my gift to you in the first loop. Ages ago."
"Should I do it?"
"Who knows?"
She was gone before I could ask any further questions. At some point I must have pulled up the comet.thorn.help.service, because the code in front of me was perfectly legible. Everything she said, right there. Built with one goal: to access the original copy of The Source via its link in The System and reboot everyone except Other Lillian. Cruel but effective.
How do you reset reality?
My hands found On Integration and turned to the final page. A handwritten note in a practised and careful script I'd become all too familiar with. The words taunted me, and I nearly vomited as I read it.
Lillian,
If you're reading this, it almost certainly failed again. Then again, maybe the book is essential to the whole thing. But odds are, you're here because Comet told you. If so, then you gotta try again.
Or. You could delete it all. I would if I were you. Eight thousand loops. Fuck's sake. You lost count somewhere around five hundred, so that's just an estimate.
Anyway. If you're not willing to pay that price, then you could always try again. That's what my Lillian would do, if she could. But you know what happened with that. Or I suppose you don't.
She's not human anymore because she literally gave up her soul. You're literally her. Every version of you is literally her. I don't know how she did it. But she did. And that's why you keep slipping. Sorry to have withheld it so long.
Well. Not much to say now. Make a choice. Good luck. Don't fuck it up, my lovely cross-coded doll.
— Jazz Moon Thorn, your deepest and most ardent admirer