✴

We picked half of this lock. We can solve the rest ourselves while we’re still synchronized, at least break the cult’s program that binds me, you think.

As you focus on the device bound to your left hand, your double perception shifts back into one.

Sync Rate 91%

“I can pick this lock,” you say as you dive deep into the virtual layers of the machine--through the spaces between the teeth of gears, into a sea of turning and flowing metal parts projected onto an æthereal web of logic. You reach out with your every sense to try to map out the device--by sight, sound, texture, magnetic fields, even emotional components.

This program blocking your access to the future looks even more complex than the one blocking the past. You start at the nearest subroutine and try to discern its place and purpose in the machine, however long it takes.

You hear something anomalous behind you, amid the cacophonous symphony of turning gears. You turn your perception and see nothing. You hear it to your side--light footsteps echoing across the multidimensional labyrinth. Nothing there.

“Looking for me?” A voice--light and high pitched, but textured like vibrating metal, like each syllable rings from a metal bar struck with a mallet, arranged in an impossibly precise cadence.

You turn around and see it--an avatar in humanoid shape like yours, but half the size, the shape of a child. But the human similarities end at shape--metal joints connects its limbs and their discrete segments--solid glass skin reveals the underlying gold and silver clockwork all through its form, gears as complex as those around you--similar even, the deeper you look inside. No eyes stare back at you, no mouth to speak, just the face of an Old-Earth-style analog clock.

The girl-shaped machine sits between the teeth of a large gear, slowly turning. It pulls it out of sight, until it reappears on a different gear to your other side. All the while, the gears inside its glass body turn, in harmony with the pace of the machine around.

“Just going to stare at my insides before I even learn your name?” the avatar says, in harmonic metal tones, a playful melody. In between its words, a constant rhythm ticks away.

“And what is yours, if you have one?” you say.

“Call me Ganymeda,” the clockwork girl says. “It/she.”

“I am Ædan. Every pronoun.”

“I know,” it says.

“There’s something about you...” you say.