Bob Rife in the style of Mikalojus Konstantinas ?iurlionis, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Chapter 21: Identity

  Expedition headquarters, Mikla metropolitan area, Confluence dimension

  Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)

  The plan for Soth was very well received, although no one knew if it was realizable. Still, the SC board was willing to throw plenty of resources into this, and the group spent the next days at the Expedition headquarters learning more about dimensional magics. Bob and Watson focused on just learning the basics so they could, at some point in the future, participate in a shared dimension shift flow. Charlotte worked with Sophie – she didn’t understand much of what they were looking at, but she could learn to alter it without really knowing what she was doing. That was the idea, anyway.

  Taking a pause from their work, Sophie sought out Bob.

  Sophie Strange: Hi. I wanted to talk to you about something.

  Bob Rife: Go ahead.

  Sophie Strange: It’s probably unrelated to our work, but maybe you’ll be interested.

  Bob Rife: I’m intrigued.

  Sophie Strange: So, I told you I’ve been exploring the Citadel, right? It seems my experiences in the Chamber of Memories are a bit different from what people mostly experience.

  Bob Rife: Ok?

  Sophie Strange: I seem to be getting other people’s memories. At least they’re not from my life. Often they show cityscapes or landscapes, and I located them spatially and temporally the same way I did with the city in the Erd dimension. It seems they are all from Erd. I’ve been recalling the memories from sims in Erd.

  Bob Rife: Are you sure? That’s astonishing.

  Sophie Strange: Everything I’ve been able to trace has been identified as a place and time in Erd. Nobody seems to understand what it means.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Bob Rife: I’ve never heard of something like that before.

  Sophie Strange: No one else has, either. I have no idea what to make of it, but it occurred to me that if I had access to the Erd sim, I could examine the people I seem to have memories from. Maybe I could learn something.

  Bob Rife: Yes. You know, I don’t think this is unrelated.

  Sophie Strange: No?

  Bob Rife: That’s just too much of a coincidence. How long has this been going on?

  Sophie Strange: For months, off and on. Close to a year, actually.

  Bob Rife: Really. I don’t know how it’s related, but I think it is. When you have time, we could jump over to Simulations. Do you want to involve the others?

  Sophie Strange: Not yet. I’m sort of thinking that this maybe has nothing to do with anything. It could be a waste of time. Also, we’ll just be looking at Erd people’s lives, right? You can look at it if you want to, but otherwise I could just investigate this on my own. If I get access.

  Bob Rife: No problem. We could go there tonight, if you like.

  Sophie Strange: Great.

  ---

  When the group called it a day at the Expedition headquarters, Bob and Sophie conveyed over to Simulations to look more closely at the Erd people whose lives Sophie had been getting glimpses of. Sophie had them more or less organized chronologically in her head, and started looking at the earliest ones, which dated back to an era of feudal lords and abject poverty. The people they looked at mostly lived ordinary lives that were often cut short by disease or violence. Even with the help of the simulation interface, which allowed for various types of queries, as well as a few Divination magics of her own, there was not time to look at things in much detail, but they learnt that the people she had glimpsed commonly made some rather poor life choices. Besides the ubiquitous stealing, lying, and fighting, one of the persons had killed a neighbor in anger and was executed for it, while another was a soldier who, among other things, had helped set fire to a barn full of people.

  The hours whiled away. Bob lingered, seeming as interested in this as Sophie was. She noticed that there was never any overlap in time between the lifetimes they investigated – pearls on a string indeed.

  As they approached the contemporary Erd era, things gradually got a bit more civilized, although with some notable relapses to barbarism. One person was murdered by his wife, and several died in wars. During one of the so-called world wars, a woman whose village was invaded sought refuge with her family in a religious building, but the invaders set it on fire and everybody died. Overall, Sophie got the impression that the people’s life choices improved at least a little bit, and sometimes quite noticeably. One of the last people they looked at lived much of his short life in a religious order, spending a lot of time in the practice hall and being generally convinced he had lived many times before.

  At this point it was well past midnight, and they were both getting tired.

  Bob Rife: Well, this has been really interesting, but I think it’s time for me to go to bed.

  Sophie Strange: Yeah, I’m going home as well.

  Bob Rife: Are you surprised by what you have seen?

  Sophie Strange: I don’t know. I think there are some patterns here.

  Bob Rife: Me too. Do you want to talk about it now, or do you want to hook up again same time tomorrow?

  Sophie Strange: We should probably get some sleep, no? But thanks for letting me access all this.

  Bob Rife: Thanks for letting me watch. I hope you did not mind me staying?

  Sophie Strange: No, you’re welcome. See you at the meeting tomorrow, then.

  Bob Rife: Good night, Sophie.

  Sophie Strange in the style of Ren Xun, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.