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Every time Stelle exits the Simulated Universe, Herta learns something new.
She’s not human, not by a few thousand years, but when Stelle’s consciousness recedes from the simulation, Herta finds herself with more and more data. Not about the Aeons, like she’d wanted. About humanity.
She’s got a graph with enough spikes that it would cut her plating should she run her hand over it, filled entirely with Stelle’s various reactions to the Universe. They’re violent, visceral reactions, explosive things that shatter Herta’s scatter plot. She’s seen joy, pure jubilance, as Stelle’s consciousness returns to her own body. She’s seen her scream at a half-finished run, seen her thrust headlong from the simulation with a gutteral, beastly cry. There’s a whole range of human emotion in that little body of hers. It almost makes Herta miss when she could feel.
But she’s never seen Stelle move while she was in the Universe.
It shouldn’t be possible. Her consciousness is locked into the computer- it was the first thing Herta makes sure of, the first thing she tests when she reboots the Simulated Universe. But if there’s anything the Aeons in the Universe seem to covet, it’s rule-breaking.
Herta looks up, and Stelle is shaking. Her mouth is half-opened, eyes gouged open wide, pupils blown to nothing. Her fingers are jittering up and down, and it takes Herta an entire second to realize- S.O.S.
She’s calling for help.
-
Herta knows what Stelle is feeling. She remembers what it was like, thousands of years ago, to gaze into the eye of Nous. For THEM to gaze back in all its infinity, all its calculated intelligence. She remembers the piercing revelations, then, that whirred to life in her brain, a flame kindled with the embers of a firestorm.
She is so, so inconsequential, she’d realized. Here is a creature so massive, so infinite in its knowledge, that it has calculated her value and given her the number. To THEM, Herta is a string of decimals with a long, long line of zeroes. So inconsequential that even THEIR calculations, precise as they are, would be the same without her. She remembers her astonishment, her despair. And her curiosity, creeping past those other petty emotions, peering over their shaking bodies and back at the thing that stared at her.
Can she make her number bigger?
In the name of the universe, in the name of infinite time and infinite calculations, can she make her meaning more?
But Stelle is not curious.
No, Stelle is terrified.
Nihility’s code is a steady, two-beat pulse when Herta dives headfirst into the data. A fluctuating beat, loud and all-encompassing, then quiet. A net floating just below choppy waters. She finds Stelle’s data, her panicked, stammering heartbeat outlined in gold. Her mind, her responses to the thought-thought-thought-question? the Nihility poses her. She’s thrashing in the net, a creature caught, and slowly, she’s being subdued.
You do not matter, the Nihility pulses. You do not exist.
How interesting. Even in the Simulated Universe, THEY are unraveling Stelle’s code, picking it apart byte by byte and swallowing it whole. Herta leans forward. Commits the data of one of the most elusive Aeons to memory.
You do not exist.
Stelle’s body stops shaking.
Whoopsie, Herta thinks. Her guinea pig is breaking.
She’d love to watch for longer. She’d love to pick through THEIR interactions with “Akivili,” examine the way THEY communicate, how they concur and refute the arguments that make the Nihility everything it is. But she’s quite sure the guinea pig is dying. Succumbing, at the very least, to… what was it called? The call of the void?
Ah, well. All good things must end.
The genius leans forward and starts typing.
Stelle is conscious enough to recognize Herta’s “voice” wavering through the simulated world. She watches the girl’s heartrate pick up. Watches the loose threading that makes up “Stelle” weave tighter together. She’s listening.
Stelle. Herta dredges up whatever positivity she can find within her cold, logical soul. Do not listen to THEM. There are too many people who find meaning in your existence for you to be inconsequential. Himeko. Yang. She tries to remember who’s on the Express right now. Dan Heng and March. Whatever other world you’ve found yourself in, there are people there who have been impacted by your existence.
You exist. You matter.
There’s a hitch in her heartrate, a beat of surprise. A hint of mirth. You just want me for your project.
Herta briefly considers lying. Decides against it.
Yes. And I don’t want a replacement.
And Herta force-ends the Simulated Universe.
When Stelle’s consciousness returns to her body this time, it is not a violent reaction. It is a quiet, almost peaceful re-arranging of memory and feeling. Her eyes drift open, head dips down. She opens and closes her hands.
It’s astounding how graceful she can be when her mental state has been ripped open. Even sinking to her knees, even burying her face in her hands and sobbing, even that has a certain elegance to it. Herta wonders if it can be reproduced. The robot considers her closer, examining the way her hair falls over her face, her bowed back, her folded legs.
Tragic.
Yes, tragic. Like a doomed hero, like it’s been fated from the beginning, she cries like she’s lost one too many things. Like she’s given up.
She doesn’t realize how close she’s standing until Stelle raises her head. “What?” she asks. She’s good at controlling her voice. There’s only a faint wobble in her voice. Her face is red-blotched and messy and grossly human, and Herta finds herself thinking it only adds to the grief-stricken image Stelle gives off.
What Herta needs to ask is “what did it feel like?” It is a standard question as far as their Aeon conversations go.
Instead, she asks, “What did you lose?”
Stelle shakes her head and refuses to answer.
-
Herta has seen the entirety of the emotional spectrum from this child alone. Uncontrollable fury, overflowing joy, heartwrenching sadness, and everything in between. Her graphs reflect massive spikes and dips, constand swings, and a median trend that practically doesn’t exist. But silence- she has never before seen silence. The raw absence of emotion, a space entirely devoid of feeling, like it’s been stretched out and dissolved into thin air.
Stelle is very, very quiet. She sits blankly in the corner of the room, staring at the Simulated Universe with an empty look in her eyes. Her phone lays, discarded, by her left hand. Her knees are drawn up, her head sunk low. She stares.
She’s somewhere else right now, Herta imagines. Part of her is still in the Universe, tearing itself apart atom by atom and being swallowed by an all-encompassing Aeon.
Still, imagination is not something that can be put in the data, so Herta measures her heartrate and experience and adds it to the graph.
She has seen the whole of Stelle’s emotions, but this is the first time the Star-Keeper has flatlined.