✴

You decide to try something impulsive, drastic, and normally impossible. Nobody could just step backwards in time--except this isn’t normal ætherspace, you’re inside a song. Anyone can turn back time in a song, even a normie can do that. You keep that in mind as you pull back from the moment and look at your position from another direction, an axis perpendicular to the other three. It’s simple 4-dimensional math at this point.

You grasp the æther--the timeline of the song. Your avatar hand glows with a bright white aura as you rotate it, twisting space to turn back time. It’s overwhelming--the bright light, the chaotic noise--more mentally taxing than the time you held still the flow of time. You can only manage a few seconds. It’s enough--the music stabilizes into a familiar ominous lead-up, and you pull ÆON out of the way of the approaching current of spectral crowd. You make for an alley nearby and evade them.

“I did it?” you say.

“Yes, well done. But you may regret this action,” ÆON says.

As you look back toward the street, a harsh dissonant chord strikes you as you see only a concrete wall. Looking back at the other end of the alley, you also find a dead end, and a girl. Standing on the air midway down the narrow passage, the visage of Pulse looms over you, cloaked in rippling translucent fabric of bright-timbred sine waves.

“You can’t just turn back a fractal of æthersound!” Pulse says.

“Well, I can and I did, so...” you say.

“The æther allows this, maybe, but what of the artist’s intentions?” she says.

“Don’t you think it’s kind of up to the listener?” you say. “I’ll play to the notes in whatever order I want!”

“You can turn back a song, Aydan, but not your life, your memories...” The Pulse-construct executes a program, slipping right through the liquid pink surface of your shield. Purple metallic bracelets snap in place around your wrists, branded with a logo--PULSE.

“What’s this?!” you say, trying to disable the program--but your mind can’t even grasp its form.

“The Messenger twists sound’s meter and rhyme, so receives a gift from the Sage of Time...” Pulse’s avatar dissolves back into the soundscape.

You try to grasp the æther--its shape of false-space is as tangible as ever, but perpendicular to that, there is only void. “Agh, I can’t feel time at all...I guess that’s pretty normal for me, but...what did she do?”

“Powerful technopathy,” ÆON says. “You would classify it as AdminTech. It was a program pre-packaged deep in the sample patterns stored in this soundscape, disguised as audio data. I failed to detect its presence. I could not even disrupt its execution, I am sorry.”

“So this is more technopathy from the cult’s Sages...” You look at your avatar arms, bound by a temporal lock. “I guess I can’t use any time-manipulation tech until we can find a way to pick this lock.”

On either side of you, the concrete walls slide inward as the music slows down, growing more glitchy and distorted with every beat.

“That will need to be a problem for another place. This soundscape is collapsing,” ÆON says.

“I guess we kind of broke this song...this memory will just have to stay repressed a while longer. Fine by me.” You reach out to try to open a passage through the æther, but your hand only touches the enclosing wall. “I can’t even open gates to the other songs while I’m locked in time like this. Can you get us out of here?!”

“We will see. Where should I take us?” ÆON says.