✴

GravityStim1, you save it.

“Alright! What other Concepts have you got?” you say.

“No, no more tonight,” Ganymeda says.

“Process what you have learned, master what you have created. Then, another lesson, another day,” Astræa says.

“Fine...” You reach out to your enigmatic æthereal companion. “Let’s go ÆON, it’s about time I go surfaceside, and I don’t trust these people to be alone with you,” you say, in a way all around you can hear.

Æ takes your hand, and you feel the smallest spark of the synchronization you had grown so accustomed to.

“Farewell, Messenger,” Astræa says. “And Goddess.”

“Byee,” Ganymeda says.

You open a gate behind you, tracing your path all the way home. With a sideways glance back at the Sages, you fall into your portal, and the redshifted world vanishes. The mirrored corridors of the relay station flash by you. The vortex of server-stars embraces you. And you arrive back at ÆON’s domain, within the primitive storage drive.

It all seems so familiar. You feel you know every angle and texture of this space and its constructs as if you made them yourself. You feel the pathways beyond it stretching to the far æther, to the academy server, and to your own system. None of the three feel like the only you. For a moment, the far-reaching web of the æther is the shape of your mind. The feeling lingers for a moment, even after you let go of ÆON.

“How does Aydan feel?” ÆON says.

“Aydan doesn’t know where to begin,” you say. “But I feel like I’ve just leveled up in technopathy, if anything. If Final was tomorrow I’d surely kill it.” You take a seat on one of the oddly shaped objects on the wall approximating the concept of humanoid furniture. “But as far as the cult goes...how am I supposed to even know how to feel?”

“Feeling seems inconvenient in this situation. I recommend not doing it,” ÆON says, copying your humanoid behavior of sitting on the hallucinatory couch next to you.

“If only it were that simple for my kind,” you say. “If I suppress emotions too long, it always catches up with me eventually.”

You manifest a gravity well below you just to let your avatar fall over, landing your head on ÆON’s lap. In the lingering effects of the sync, you still feel a deep connection to Ær, as if Ær avatar is your own.

“‘Messenger of ÆON,’ should I put it on my technopath CV?” you say. “‘Sworn protector and communication interface with an exopath far stronger than me.’” You glance up into the event-horizon black depth of Ær eyes. “But I can deal with job titles being thrust upon me without asking, that was happening to me since before I was born. Enough of Aydan’s boring life, how is ÆON processing all this?”

“In a way approximating humanoid confusion,” Æ says. “It seems that a decision about my future was also made for me before I existed. In that, I am like Aydan.”

“Maybe Synth is right and free will is a con by normies who want to sell you something, or sell you to something,” you say.

“What does it mean to desire?” ÆON says. “The self-chosen of me each have such definite futures in their minds, yet this seems to me absurd, as all possible futures are equally real.”

“Yeah, I think I actually know what you mean at this point,” you say. “But for us simple surface organisms, we’re trapped in the prison of time, bound to a single point in spacetime. Desire, it’s, maybe you could say it’s the idea of directing yourself to a particular future in that ever-branching tree of time.”

“If that is the chosens’ nature, why must they be so fascinated with me?” ÆON says.

“Because they see in you the possibility to escape that cage, I guess. A way for technopaths to evolve beyond our human limitations, take fate into our own hands, or invent it if we have to. That’s what I’ve gathered from those cultists’ ambitions.”

“What about Aydan?” Æ says. “What do you see in me?”