Misbegotten Memories

His day had barely begun when one of his neighbors rapped on his door. "Hector? You have a visitor in the lobby." Those words were not typical on Promise City. They were especially uncommon in Tian Tower, which was an isolated community of outcast Xian.

He stopped cultivating and emerged from his room. "Who is it?"

His neighbor shrugged. "An Arahant big-shot asking for you. I wasn't going to stick around to let her mess with my mind, so I volunteered to fetch you."

The assumption that an Arahant could manipulate any mind they came into contact with wasn't wrong, exactly, but it missed the forest for the trees. Arahants couldn't just hack a human mind. Their influence was far more subtle and in many cases it didn't work on Xian if they practiced mental strengthening.

Hector rode the elevator down, wondering if Zelda had returned to Union Central. That would be a welcome surprise. When he thought about his Arahant friends these days, he couldn't help but feel sad that he didn't spend more time with them while he could. He always had training or cultivation on his mind back then. Well, maybe his priorities hadn't changed all that much.

Still, he did make more of an effort to spend time with his friends these days. There would never be another chance to enjoy the company of Rodrick, but if Zelda was back on Union Central he would make sure to carve out time for her before he went to Aes.

The doors opened and Hector emerged to discover someone he hadn't expected. The Sage of Persuasion was holding court in the lobby, making a small crowd hang on her every word. They didn't have any clue who she was. It was suspicious enough that Hector engaged his mental sense and sniffed at what he discovered. His ability to lock his perception onto Persuasion was compromised. If his mental strengthening wasn't as high as it was, he wouldn't be able to resist the compulsion to focus on her words instead of anything else.

"I wasn't expecting to see you, Sage Caroline."

She turned at the first word out of his mouth, throwing a mysterious half smile his way. "Hector! You weren't as easy to track down as I hoped."

"I humbly apologize for not living in a more convenient location."

Caroline's smile went from half to full. "You're snarkier than I remember. That's good. I'd like your assistance cheering someone up. I wish I could say your visit will be a surprise, but she predicted my move before we even arrived on Union Central."

Hector's heart skipped a beat. "Evelyn?"

"Yes. We're not allowed to call it a booty call."

He chuckled at that, imagining the words in Evelyn's voice. "I'd love to see her." Minutes later they were in a taxi. "Why does Evelyn need someone to cheer her up? Is anything wrong?"

"Everything is wrong all the time, Hector. Svarga has a populist politician on the verge of launching a political coup. The Coalition is fragmenting at a time when it is more essential than ever. Miasma surges and dragon attacks and isolationist politics are always threatening our existence. What is the only thing keeping humanity afloat? Persuasion and Foresight.

"To comically understate the reality: it's stressful. I have a solid support network, thank the Garudas above. Evelyn has just me. I'm hoping a few hours reminiscing with someone who knew her on Earth will ease her burdens. You don't have to do anything in particular. Just have a normal conversation with her."

Hector nodded, hoping that she would be happy to see him. "You know, it's a good thing you didn't come looking for me three days from now. I'm going to be on Aes."

"I would like to say that Evelyn wouldn't let me waste my time like that." She stopped talking abruptly, letting the incomplete statement hang in the air. Hector tried not to laugh at the lame joke, but he couldn't help himself. His face hurt from smiling already.

Damn. He hadn't minded splitting up from Evelyn back on Earth. It was just a temporary relationship that didn't mean anything. How had that understanding gotten confused over time? He felt more for her now than he had when they were actually together. If these feelings were new, it would be easy to blame the presence of Persuasion. They weren't, though. They were constantly growing stronger in the background. He'd mythologized their brief time together saving the Earth.

"Look at you smiling," Persuasion said. "This is either going to be amazing or disastrous. There is no middle ground."

They entered a skyscraper whose interior was still under construction and went to a middle floor, where the door to a random room popped open for Persuasion. "Evelyn, try to act surprised at your guest."

Hector stepped inside and froze when his eyes locked on Evelyn. The goth appearance was no more. She wore crisp business attire and kept her hair swept back with a sloppy braid. The playful light in her eyes had been snuffed out and replaced with cold calculation and bone deep weariness.

"You look twenty years younger than the last time I saw you," Evelyn said. "I'm sure I look ten years older. It seems like we're meeting in the middle. That was a song back on Earth, I'm pretty sure. Probably not about a Xian turning immortal while his hot mess of an ex prematurely aged from stress. At least I hope not. That would be a weird ass song."

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His smile returned. The Evelyn he knew was still in there. "At least you can still joke. All the talk about stress made me worried you might have turned into a square."

Evelyn came forward to awkwardly hug him in greeting. "Me? Turn into a square? Hardly. I'm three-dimensional, Hector. Maybe even four-dimensional if you consider time. I believe that makes me a hyper-cube."

"So how is saving the multiverse going?"

Evelyn sat on the couch and patted the cushion next to her until he joined her. "It's a lot of work and I never liked working. Not even joking. I don't think the girls would even recognize me today. I'm this super serious 'burn the midnight oil' type now. I'm like a girl Hector."

He winced. "Yeah. I have been trying to grow as a person. It's a strange point in my life."

"So, I'm gonna use my prerogative as a fortune teller and stop this line of conversation before you make me relive it. I think your ideas about cultivating virtues are weird. You find that mildly offensive. We agree to disagree."

"Oh," Hector said, not sure how to handle the short-circuit of their interaction. "Well… related to that, I have been thinking about the two of us."

"No, we're not doing that either. I was scared and lonely when I kept seeing the world end. You were this jacked mature dude who made me feel like things were under control. It wasn't love, Hector. If you really think about it, you were stepping out with me to feel better about your marriage falling apart. And because I was a hot piece of ass, obviously.

"We were a dysfunctional relationship from the start and we are even less compatible now. I have no time to hang out with you. Xian aren't even allowed on Maya. My work involves keeping a lot of secrets, so the two of us would never have anything to talk about. You have wars to fight in as some sort of existential crisis."

Hector stared at Evelyn, not sure what to say after she shut the door on so many topics all at once. He wanted to insist that she was wrong about everything she said. But… respect. If she was clearly expressing a rejection of his advances, then there was nothing else he could say on the matter that wouldn't be an attempt to invalidate what she felt and believed. Relationships had to work both ways and if she objected, then there was nothing to save.

"Shit. Sorry, Hector. That was the most bitchy way possible to preemptively dump you. I'm used to being part of a tag team. I do the predicting and Caroline does the messaging." Evelyn worked up a smile. "How about we restart? You can tell me about your adventures on Tian."

He tilted his head. "I take it you've already heard about those?"

"I guess I sucked all the fun parts out of our conversation before it even happened. At least I can still ruin everything I touch, right?"

The bitterness in her voice disturbed him. "Is there anything you want to talk about?"

"Let's see. What can I tell you? Oh, I got something. My soul aches constantly, Hector. I'm level nine now. Probably I'll make level ten in another year. People aren't supposed to grow that fast. Another thing that gets me is the revisions to my realm.

"Do you know anything about Arahant realms? We use resonance to make things happen, right? You Xian treat them like they are just a big battery to hold more cosmic energy, but I actually had to weave my realm aperture into a representation of my insight. It's a little like doing art with your soul. The hard part at lower levels is finding a way to encode the key parts of an insight in a space too small to hold them normally.

"Then you level up and your realm softens for a little while. You can take advantage of that time to make changes. Take advantage of the larger realm space to represent more of your insight. Hurts like a bitch, but you have to to do it if you want to improve your realm. That's what I spent the past two weeks doing. Now I'm here on a special business trip."

Evelyn glanced upwards. "Remember how I thought you needed to make friends?"

Hector glanced to the floor, trying to think back over their conversation. "I don't think you –"

"Don't be ridiculous. Hector won't screw you over. You see everything that happens on this planet, right? Look him up. He's a good guy. Stop being a pussy. I'm introducing you two."

Hector studied Evelyn, trying to figure out if she was going crazy from stress or if she was using some sort of Arahant ritual to communicate over a distance. "Is everything…." He didn't know how to finish that sentence without implying she'd lost her mind.

"Hector, I want you to say hello to the System. It's alive and conscious and needs a friend."

"Uh… hello, System."

If you reveal my existence to anyone I will lock your bank account.

Hector blinked at the words floating in front of his eyes. "Oh. You were being serious."

Evelyn bobbed her head. "Yep. Now you know one reason I came to Union Central. I had to convince this fellow to start merging with the soul of the world."

"It's a pleasure to meet you, System. I promise I won't betray you."

Good. I will add credits to your account to reward your loyalty.

The notification that appeared indicated he had received ten million credits out of nowhere. Hector blinked. Was this how Riley felt when he randomly threw money at her? "You don't have to give me credits, System. My promise was not conditional."

Credits are just numbers in ledgers for me. You seem to value money a great deal.

"Won't creating credits out of nowhere cause problems?"

Those credits are an insignificant increase in the global monetary supply.

"You two seem to be getting along," Evelyn said. "I hate to cut our reunion short, Hector, but you have an appointment with someone named Darius. He's currently in the beer hall of a city named Baden. You're going to bring him back home."

Hector's breath caught. This meeting with Evelyn brought so much disappointment to him – first a repudiation of their previous relationship, then a categorical refusal of any future together, then sloppily pawning his attentions onto the System, all while Evelyn's bitterness suffocated all the air in the room – but at the end she gave him, unasked, something precious beyond belief.

"Do you have any idea what he means to me?" Hector crushed his friend in a tight hug. He felt her slight form squeeze back with just as much intensity.

"I know, Hector. I sought him out for you because I want you to have your family back. For so many reasons, I can't be the friend you need right now. But I can give you back someone who is."

When they pulled apart, Evelyn mopped tears from her face. "I'm sorry. For everything. This is just the way it has to be. Now get going. You have Darius to retrieve and I have to meet someone else while I'm on Union Central."