While we walked back out of the overlap, Makesi asked me to meet him once I was done scouting out the area so he could explain how Manifests worked. I apparently had to choose one to access anything more than the General Manifest, which only contained basic objects like the mirror I bought.

  I agreed, and we split up after we were out, and after tucking my sweater over my gun belt holster, I found myself walking through the small village. When I first learned that the Tiānlǜ Group didn't restrict the spread of anomalous objects, I didn't realize what that actually meant.

  They were everywhere, little ideas hidden away attached to seemingly random objects. I wasn't sure if this was because we were so close to a rift or if Toronto had been like this too, and I just hadn't noticed.

  None of them were all that interesting. It was mostly stuff like a rock that was way more interesting than it should have been. I broke the idea held in the rock because Aurin, who had followed me along and was still wearing the skinsuit but had removed her mask, couldn’t get it out of her head.

  That was just the objects that contained ideas, thoughts or acted cognitively. There were also oddities like plants that glowed in the evening light, or a cat that couldn't quite decide if it wanted to exist or not and chose a point halfway between the two states. Unlike most anomalies I'd worked with, these seemed to be more like quirks of physics instead of concepts made real.

  The cat itself had a completely normal mind for a cat. It sat crowned upon a throne overlooking an endless empire, its subjects slaving away for its satisfaction. Just normal cat thoughts, you know?

  We passed by a man in a corpo uniform who was delivering packages, and I swiped Mandarin from him and then passed it over to Aurin. Once we understood what was being said, we headed towards the one teashop in town.

  As we walked through the village square and past vendors hawking produce, every single person turned to stare at us. I didn't know if that was my obviously anomalous appearance or if it was because we weren't Han Chinese like everyone else. Even before the travel ban, it was probably weird to see anyone of literally any other ethnicity in rural Tiānlǜ territory.

  Their spotlights mostly contained curiosity and a bit of confusion, so I wasn't all too worried. There was a little bit of hostility, but I just gently nudged those minds away from focusing on us. Several people were suddenly very interested in patterns on walls or random clouds.

  The front of the tea shop was open to the outside, even though it was the middle of January, it was barely hoodie weather, given the local climate. The shop’s worn plaster walls reminded me of my childhood.

  Entering through the door, I paid for two oolong teas while ignoring the shop owner staring at my eyes, with some money that Makesi lent me and found a seat near the back of the shop. I wasn’t sure where he got it. Could you buy fake money on The Stream?

  That might be useful.

  Aurin sat down across from me while I opened up the General Manifest and started browsing through it. Options were apparently still being generated because the System had to figure out what worked within the physical laws of this dimension, but right now, there was a lot of very basic stuff, like toothpaste and painkillers.

  I found the music player app built into the System on that manifest and purchased it for fifty Dust. The app came with a free lifetime trial for the music service. Which would be great if I didn't have more than one life by default.

  Dust: 1057

  Scrolling through the music made available to me, I noticed it was an odd mix of Western Pop music, a single alt-rock playlist, and Eastern everything else. Checking the terms and services of the music player, it seemed to absorb music that was being played nearby and integrated it into the player as playable songs.

  While I did this, I listened in on the minds of the other patrons of the teashop. Nobody was thinking about anything relating to the overlap. To a degree where its absence was kind of odd. Either everyone in the shop was repressing their thoughts on the subject, or they didn’t even know it was there. I’d need to do a deeper scan to figure out which it was.

  “So… you signed on with them?” Aurin asked, my fight-or-flight response activated, and I fell out of my chair.

  “N… yeah, okay, I did. I was locked in my own mental prison until I accepted. But I didn’t want…” I started, while I climbed back into my seat, only to trail off as I buried my head in my arms, facedown on the table.

  Aurin let out a long breath and placed her hand on my head, tussling my hair around.

  “How long until you have to go?” she asked as her hand ran down my spine.

  “A couple of weeks after they’ve closed the last rift,” I replied. “I don’t know how long that will take, but Makesi said if they don’t finish it within the next few years, the world will end anyway.”

  “You mean ‘if we don’t finish’? You are one of them now, after all. Might as well start thinking in the correct framing.”

  I let out a muffled groan, “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to take you as well. Makesi said I could buy a ticket for someone that would effectively bring them along, but I don’t have anywhere near enough Dust for it right now. Nor do I even know how I would get enough.”

  “Well, it wasn’t like I ever thought we’d live forever together. It was going to end eventually with one of our deaths. Yours just happens to have to happen much sooner than we thought… Also, you could just bring me along without a body. You made it possible to remove my mind, didn’t you?” Aurin said, prompting me to lift my head from the table and look her in the eye.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  “No. Fuck that. I refuse to kill you just so that I can carry a dead copy of your mind around as a fucking souvenir,” I said, then followed Aurin’s gaze down to the table, and noticed I had dug my nails into the wood itself. I flinched back at what I had done and looked back up at Aurin.

  “Alright, that's okay. Just leave me here,” she said, a soft smile on her face. Her mind told me a different story.

  I took a sip of tea and looked back at the General Manifest. The tea had already gone cold. I sighed, then purchased a free sample of a painkiller that came as a pill, allowed it to manifest directly in my mouth, and knocked the rest of the tea back to swallow the pill. The addictive variety was cheaper than the non-addictive.

  Honestly, even just the fact that they had a non-addictive variant surprised me.

  “You know the way back, right?” I waited for her to nod before I continued, “I’m going for a walk. Please don’t follow me,” I said, getting up to leave.

  “Wait, Ren, I’m sorry, don’t—” she said, but I was already walking out of the building and down the street. As much as I loved her, I wasn't interested in letting her attempt to manipulate me, especially since that was just a knee-jerk emotional reaction on her part.

  And mine.

  Flipping through the music player, I found something I could tolerate and put it on. Noting it sounded like it was being played directly inside my ear.

  Having the music playing made my mind slow down slightly so that it could process the sounds. Like how hearing people talking worked, but far weaker because it didn't take much for me to process the music.

  I wondered if Aisling heard everything pitched down a few octaves due to the speed difference in her audio processing. That would suck.

  The line where the overlap began ran straight through town. It wasn't antimemetic in and of itself, so people should be discussing the massive field of orchid flowers. Which begged the question, why weren't they?

  As I approached the line of flowers, a warmth tingled its way down my spine. My body relaxed, and it felt like a warm blanket was wrapped around me.

  Staring out over the field of flowers, everything felt a lot simpler all of a sudden. A part of me realized I was stressing out over nothing. If Aurin wanted to come along as a dead construct sitting on my stage, who was I to tell her no?

  It wasn't like I could ever see her again if I did leave without her, which was basically the equivalent of killing her from my perspective anyway, if I couldn’t ever see her again.

  I chuckled to myself at my failure of basic object permanence. But the opinion stood anyway.

  Did they add an anti-anxiety component to whatever I just took?

  Opening the listing, I checked, and no, it was just some kind of opioid. It was like I was re-experiencing the golden month from the first time you tried them. The fleeting moments before you ruined your life.

  Did it feel like this because my brain was completely rebuilt when I had Dust injected directly into it?

  Hmm.

  Looking around, people were walking along the edge of the flowers just like I was. Nobody had crossed into the field, nor did they seem to even be paying attention to them.

  I picked someone at random and walked up to them, without spending several minutes calculating whether I was socially allowed to do so. It was refreshing not to be forced to think that way. I should use these more often…. wait, nope, getting dependent on them again is a bad idea.

  I was going to have to ask Makesi if there was a way to block myself from purchasing certain things.

  “Why does nobody seem to care about the field of orchids consuming the village?” I asked a guy who was walking away from the market carrying a bundle of mixed vegetables.

  His spotlight went from curiosity straight to shock, slowly blinking at me before seeming to realize I asked him a question. “The flowers? It's safer to ignore strange happenings than seek them out. If you want to court death, go ahead and chase demons.”

  “Demons? The flower field is promoting virtue. What do you mean by demons?” I asked.

  The man chuckled and shook his head before walking past me.

  I wasn't sure what to make of it, so I reached into his mental concept and pulled out specifically what he meant when he said ‘yao’ or demon, which was a lot more ambiguous in Mandarin than English.

  While he was walking away, I managed to steal a set of images and associations with the term. A white fox that he thinks is a huli jing but hasn't seen himself, a woman holding a red envelope out for you to take, and lights at night that you shouldn't follow. They felt like a mixture of folk tales and actual anomalous objects blended into some kind of odd mythology.

  He hadn't seen any of these himself, and his view was that ignorance was bliss. Looking around at other villagers passing by, I could see similar patterns in them when referencing the memories I took from him.

  They had decided that ignoring the field was the best choice. It couldn't hurt them if they didn't enter it after all.

  Except, well… he knew something about the fox. So clearly someone entered the field and lived to tell the tale. Following the association to its nearest connection, he heard about the fox from his neighbour, who in turn heard it from someone else. So that was useless unless I wanted to comb the town for the origin of that gossip.

  But, nah, that single conversation had already brought me to my limit of times I could talk to random strangers outside the social contract in a single day. Normally, my limit was zero, and I’d have to construct reasons to get closer to people if I wanted to make friends. But there wasn’t really an ‘in’ for me in a rural village in the middle of nowhere.

  There was a small terraced hill overlooking the field of flowers that I climbed, allowing myself to focus on how I was feeling. How the warmth running across my skin calmed me down. Finding a stone wall near the top, I just sat down on it and stared out over the endless white.

  While listening to music and allowing my mind to just drift into comfortable bliss, I noticed a car driving up the road to the town. That wouldn’t normally have been much to note; there were a few run-down, rusted farm trucks that were likely being used to haul crops around the village. Except this wasn’t one of those.

  Inscribed on the side was a circle within an octagon with eight sets of lines. I was pretty sure I had seen that symbol somewhere online. I closed my eyes, trying to remember what it was… I didn’t have wifi here, so I couldn’t just look it up. I’d have to go back to the aircraft and use their magical worldwide internet access.

  When I finally opened my eyes again, I realized that maybe I should hurry back. There was more than just one car. A whole convoy was now in sight, rounding one of the karst towers.

  I got up and started walking back down the mountain.

  When I spotted the tank, I started running.

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