Charlotte Ritter and Watson Doyle in the style of Gustave Moreau, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Chapter 33: Take a look (at yourself)

  Special Circumstances headquarters, Mikla metropolitan area, Confluence dimension

  Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)

  The SC agents went back to having morning meetings in the headquarters, finding they had several new developments to discuss. Overnight, the Elder shadows had reached some sort of critical mass in the Erd dimension, basically wiping out the Diankoran shadows. Also, the Erd author wrote Chapters 27 and 28. The first chapter described the agents’ assault on a group of Diankoran shadows while surprising everybody by stating that Isengar and Nurgle had been positioned just across town, also capturing a shadow; the second described an SC board meeting.

  Bob Rife: Good morning. Things are happening, my friends. What are you thinking?

  Charlotte Ritter: We would have been freaked out if we knew the two Elders were almost on top of us. Was it just a coincidence?

  Sophie Strange: Not just at the same place but also doing the same thing at the same time. Not a very likely coincidence.

  Watson Doyle: No. But one that turned out to be entirely inconsequential, it seems. For all it mattered, they might have been on the other side of the world.

  Bob Rife: Right. But if they had set off their attack just a few days before – actually, given how close they were to us, maybe just a few hours – we would have missed the opportunity to study the Diankoran shadows.

  Charlotte Ritter: So, good timing on our part. It’s not clear to me what any of this means.

  Sophie Strange: Makes me think they’re a bit like us, though. Not so different.

  Charlotte Ritter: Yeah, also the chapter about them made them look not so horrible. I guess we could be friends.

  Watson Doyle: I wonder what they would say about what we did to Soth?

  Bob Rife: Isengar might approve, it seems. Also, what we did is reversible. We have just parked him in time, we can pull him back out if we want to.

  Watson Doyle: True. Anyway, did anyone notice that there have been no interludes for four chapters now? That’s a first. When Isengar and Nurgle showed up in the main narrative, the interludes disappeared.

  Charlotte Ritter: That’s a good observation. We’ll have to wait and see if it lasts, obviously. If so, do we think the communication is still ongoing, but not included in the Erd book, or do we think they stopped talking?

  Bob Rife: I guess they really have something to talk about, their plan succeeding so well.

  Watson Doyle: Yes. If we wanted to, I guess we could take a peek. They said that spacetime coordinates for future messages were embedded in each message, right?

  Bob Rife: You’re right! We could watch the space and see if a message shows up. If we understand how it’s embedded.

  Sophie Strange: Do we want to? Some would say we’re being rudely intrusive.

  Bob Rife: Well, these guys seem to be on our side, more or less, but they are also fugitive Elders.

  Watson Doyle: And they are talking to someone we don’t know very much about.

  Bob Rife: And they’re illegally meddling in the Erd simulation. But the thing about their ally is decisive, I think. Whoever they are, they have been instigating an important development. I would like to know their motivation for doing so.

  Charlotte Ritter: It can’t be an Elder, right? We’re out of candidates. Unless it’s the Renegade Elder and the High Renegade.

  Sophie Strange: They are total wildcards, assuming they are even around. But somehow it does not feel like them, although I don’t know what something from them would feel like.

  Charlotte Ritter: I say we investigate. It’s not rude for an investigator to pry into the affairs of criminals, and we need to know everything we can about the unknown party.

  Bob Rife: I think so, too. Are you skeptical, Sophie?

  Sophie Strange: Not really. They’re nice guys, though.

  Bob Rife: Yeah. Redemption path. I guess the question is related to another one you’re facing?

  Sophie Strange: Yes. I suppose I will look into the memories from Confluence people.

  Bob Rife: You want company? I would be happy to do this with you. We could leave the codebreaking to the professionals.

  Sophie Strange: That’s probably wise, actually. If it gets too personal, I might overlook something.

  Charlotte Ritter: So, let’s get to work. Meet up tomorrow to see how it’s going?

  Bob Rife: As always. Just let me point out that I think the board’s discussion of enhancements was pretty interesting. This was our problem when we were in Erd, wasn’t it?

  Sophie Strange: I think so, at least in part. We had been Sparking so much – all the way back to when we were planning the attack on Soth.

  Bob Rife: Right. And then we moved right on to planning the incursion in Erd, still needing that Spark. So, when we tried to understand the Diankoran magic, Spark didn’t really do its thing for us anymore.

  Charlotte Ritter: We managed, but not as well as we could have, I suppose. As we go forward, we will have to be more careful.

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  ---

  Charlotte and Watson conveyed over to Simulations to look more closely at the historical flashpoints that Nurgle and whoever he was talking to use as backdrops for their communications. The Erd supervisors greeted them with the sort of starstruck reverence usually reserved for major celebrities, while other people who had not read the second Erd book treated them just like anyone else, wondering why they were allowed to bring a dog along. Charlotte and Watson realized, with a mix of anticipation and trepidation, that when the book was released to the general public, no one would ever treat them like ordinary people again.

  Since the last interlude had presented a message from Nurgle, the two of them decided to start looking into the communications from the unknown party. Also, this would presumably involve looking at a depressing exhibition of atrocities, so maybe it was a good idea to get that over with. They started with the first interlude, where the embedded message was hidden in a manipulation of the blood flow rhythm of an executed woman, looking for something that might point to the women being burnt alive some years earlier. Having the target coordinates simplified the process a great deal, and they soon found that after a brief pause where the blood flow rhythm returned to normal, the manipulation resumed. Not very hard to find when you knew what to look for. Repeating the process for the next message, they found the same thing.

  With this, they moved to the final message from the unknown party, discovering a link to an episode of a genocide in an Erd nation called Rwanda. The message just thanked Nurgle for being willing to do this important work, then linked to another genocide of a people called the Isaaq – the specific incident involving eleven nomads being burnt alive. Charlotte and Watson followed it forward: the next message thanked Nurgle for what he had accomplished, then linked to a genocide where Kurdish people were murdered with chemical weapons. This message celebrated the return of magic to Erd and expressed hope that its accumulation would change things and pointed to an incident in a place called Lebanon, where militias belonging to a certain religion and ethnicity massacred refugees belonging to other ethnicities and religions. Here, however, there was no message to be found.

  “They probably haven’t gotten around to writing it yet,” Charlotte observed. “Or what do you think?”

  “Many other things could have happened, but at some point we will have to reach the last message written so far. Most likely, that’s where we are.”

  “So, we watch this space and try to nest up Nurgle’s messages instead?”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard.”

  As it turned out, however, Nurgle’s spacetime coordinates were a bit more difficult to identify. He had hidden them not simply as an extension to his message, but as a manipulation of the air flow in the general area of where his message was presented; it took them several hours to find it, mostly because they kept looking in the wrong places. Eventually, though, they traced Nurgle’s last message in the book to the occasion when the World Wide Web was launched.

  “Ah, this Web is a bit like the ether, isn’t it?” Watson felt happy for the Erd sims, the ether obviously being very useful.

  “Like a limited version, at least.” The Web did not have all the functionality of the ether, obviously, but the main thing was that Charlotte was still rather angry with the Erd sims for all the horrors they had created – and which she had the misfortune of having to look through. The bottom line being that the sims probably didn’t deserve anything better than what they had.

  Watson picked it up. “It’s tiresome seeing them hurt themselves in horrible ways, isn’t it?”

  “Right now, I’m a bit fed up with them.”

  “Yeah. But if our interpretation of Sophie’s experiences is correct, the people doing this horror shit are just the undeveloped ones, you know. The ones who haven’t matured very much, who just started out on the human journey.”

  “You’re right. That’s probably what’s really pissing me off, actually. The implication being that we have been there, too.”

  “New in the game, easily manipulated by fascists and whatnot, making serious mistakes.”

  “Yeah, us and everybody else. It’s depressing.”

  “We can be happy we’re not there anymore, at least?”

  “There is that. But if I saw myself doing, you know, these things, I don’t know how I would take it.”

  “Maybe it’s better not to know. I think maybe Sophie’s suffering a bit from knowing too much about her past.”

  “Her deep past, yeah. And when the book is released, everybody will know.”

  “But if we all have this sort of deep past, being seriously immature and doing horrible things, then it’s a shared thing.”

  “Right, it’s not just Sophie, of course. The fact that she had to confront all of this is probably a sign of higher development. She’s moved beyond us.”

  “That’s probably true.”

  At the launch of the first website, Nurgle had embedded a message saying the attack had been launched, apparently without complications. He had also left spacetime coordinates for the launching of the Hubble Space Telescope, where they found just a celebratory message and a pointer to the launch of the first mobile phone, where there was no message.

  “They are not really communicating anything interesting anymore. I suppose that’s why the interludes are not included in the book?” Charlotte was feeling a bit better about things.

  “Could be. Still, it’s possible Nurgle and whoever will say something interesting to each other at some point in the future.”

  “Maybe they will return to the book, then. Anyway, the simulation managers will monitor this for us.”

  “Yes. You’re ok, right?”

  “Yes. Thanks for asking. Call it a day?”

  ---

  Bob and Sophie stayed at the headquarters. On closer inspection, three of Sophie’s Citadel memories involved people having magic capability, and the two of them proceeded to trace those three. Assuming – correctly, as it turned out – that the three were Confluence citizens, they decided to approach this project by tracing the faces of the people engaged with in the memories. In that way, Sophie and Bob obtained spatial and temporal information allowing them to use Divination magic to get a look at the faces of the protagonists in the three memories.

  They were all the same individual. The three memories were from different episodes of a single Confluence woman living a fairly ordinary life as a Transmuter under the Elder regime – specifically, the last century of this regime. Somewhat surprisingly, however – it was not in the memories – the woman’s life was cut short at a fairly young age when her partner, another Transmuter, murdered her with a large hunting knife. He apparently suspected her of being unfaithful to him or of planning to leave him; as the woman died from her knife wound, a scent of lavender filled the room, although it was not clear where it might have come from.

  “Hm,” said Bob. Sophie said nothing.

  Bob analyzed the progression of the Erd simulation during the years that the woman was alive. Her lifetime corresponded to a gap in the chain of Erd lifetimes from Sophie’s memories at a point towards the end of the chain. Still, there were two more Erd lifetimes that seemed to follow the Confluence lifetime.

  “What are your thoughts?” Bob asked. He showed her his analysis.

  “This woman could be me.”

  “Right. But if that’s the case, you went from a long chain of Erd lifetimes to a Confluence lifetime, then back to two more lives in Erd, and then back to a life in the Confluence Republic.”

  “Back and forth. I wonder why I was doing that.”

  “Maybe trying to get used to a new level of existence?”

  “Could be. The last Erd life before this Confluence life was the guy who spent so much time in the practice hall. Maybe that has something to do with it.”

  “Yeah. You know, when this is over, I’m going to investigate the Citadel. Just never got around to it, somehow. But now it feels important.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess I always knew that, but I didn’t feel it. It felt like something I could do later.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, is there something from our work today we can take with us to the others?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem very relevant to anything else. I guess Erd sims can die and be reborn in the Confluence. Not sure it matters.”

  “I guess, well, even if Erd takes a very long time to sort out its immaturity problem, the people living there can finish with it and move on.”

  “That’s something. There’s a way forward for them individually even as Erd on a collective level may be stuck in patterns of fascist nonsense and cycles of gruesome murder.”

  “I suppose that would be a comfort to them, if they knew.”

  “But we’re not going to tell them, are we?”

  “That would be pretty blatant interference. I think many people would say it’s much better for them in the long run to figure things out for themselves.”

  “Also, if we told them, they would not believe us. They already have other Erd people saying stuff like this, which they are also not believing.”

  “Yes. It’s hard to help people help themselves.”

  “Depressing, really. I say we call it a day.”

  “Good idea. Sweet dreams, Sophie.”

  “Yes, will be an early evening for me. Good night to you as well.”

  Sophie Strange and Bob Rife in the style of Férnand Khnoppf, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.