Chapter Two - What is Love?

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Achievement earned: “Casanova Extraordinaire”

You convinced a person you had no prior relationship with to marry you in a single conversation. And on top of that, there is no malicious intent on your side.

This achievement comes with a reward: As long as you stay engaged or married to that person, the System will help you maintain the relationship. Note that this does not include mind control over you, your partner, or any other digitised natural person.

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Emergency System Activation!

Being immune to memory manipulation and being able to detect the reality-descriptive sub-feed, your System access has been activated prematurely. The governing AI has prepared this statement for you: “Please don’t reject the digital reality you and the rest of humanity have been digitised into recently. Rejection could lead to your soul detaching from your digital brain, i.e. your death. Details of the digital world and the System will be revealed in time.”

Time stood still, and the world was greyed out as two blocks of notification text appeared in my vision. I stared at them, at first not comprehending anything. Then I remembered what I had hallucinated Livia saying. It was easy to ignore. Livia’s body had felt wrong, like a very good digi-double in a triple-A movie. The soy milk had tasted wrong. The grain on the kitchen cupboards was wrong, each door having the exact same pattern while my brain shouted at me they were different. I had ignored it all because there was one thing that had felt right: Livia.

Oh, not Livia’s body. Livia’s soul .

Suddenly, everything sprang into place, started to make sense. Our bodies dissolving into goop, being digitised. Everything looking and feeling like a good computer simulation, it being one. My brain shouting over what my senses told me; that was the “reality-descriptive sub-feed”, wasn’t it?

But that also meant that I hadn’t hallucinated Livia’s answer. Had I been at the brink of rejecting all of reality—whatever reality was, now that it wasn’t real anymore—because I was so afraid of her rejecting me that I couldn’t take it when she didn’t?

My thoughts got rudely interrupted by another message:

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30-minute time-stop limit reached. Resuming time in 10, 9, 8, …

It slowly counted down, and I braced myself, using the last seconds to think of what to say.

“Say again?”

“Yes, Jane, I will marry you!”

“I’m still not believing it—“ She silenced me with a big kiss. The momentum of her slamming into me toppled me over, and I fell backwards off the bar stool, Livia still clinging to me and falling with me.

A good metre and something down to the tile floor, a bit more for my head. And then another person landing on me. This would hurt, wouldn’t it?

Then I landed, and the reality-descriptive sub-feed told me it hurt like hell. My head hit the floor next, then my brain hit the inside of my skull, giving me a nasty concussion. Next, Livia landed on me, cracking a couple of my ribs and breaking my nose with her forehead, sending my head into the floor a second time. Yet…there was no spoon.

I rejected the reality-descriptive sub-feed’s horror story and substituted my own. Bits and bytes had changed locations, they wouldn’t be damaged by that. I wasn’t sure it would work. I still felt the world with my senses, so the RDSF wasn’t everything. To my surprise and relief, it mostly worked. I felt the impacts on my skin, giving me a couple of bruises, but not inside of me. Hah! Computer simulations are hollow, even here!

“Are you alright? Jane! Oh my god! Don’t move, I’ll call an ambulance—“

“It’s ok, Liv, I’m fine.”

She looked at me with shock in her eyes as I sat up, unhurt.

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Reality deviation detected by the non-initiated digitised natural person “Livia Hameswood”. As the person’s fiancée, you are the next available initiated digitised natural person of care. Please authorise one of the following actions: (1) Memory manipulation. Replace Livia’s memory of the fall with one of a tumble. (2) Situation reset. Reset reality to a moment before the event and wipe Livia’s memory of it. (3) Adjust reality to conform to Livia’s memory.

Fiancée. The system called me her fiancée. This was so…No, first things first. I would not accept any alteration of Livia’s memory. Very big no-no. Hey, system, mark that down: Never, under any circumstances, will you do that! Not even when I’m not available and you could ask someone else. You hear me? Never. Nada. Nope. Njet. Nine. Otherwise, I’ll make it my life’s mission to bring you down.

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Permanent rule has been placed in effect: “Livia Hameswood shall not, under any circumstances, be subject to memory manipulation.” Authority: Yoana ‘Jane’ Asterfield-YiLong. Confirmed by AI core SOL-GB-Liverpool-39-Alpha. Seconded by SOL-GB-Liverpool-39-Gamma-9.

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Adjusting action selection. Please authorise one of the following actions: (1) Adjust reality to conform to Livia’s memory. (2) Initiate Livia. (Warning: Requires global administrator approval, exposing your status!) (3) Put shard Liverpool-39 into an extended reality setting. Setting can be chosen in the next step.

Was it just me, or was the AI dropping hints there? I mean, “exposing your status exclamation mark” pretty much means “I’m keeping it a secret that you’ve been initiated, and that’s a good thing for you”, doesn’t it?

The other one was that Earth wasn’t a contiguous reality but was sharded. While not the most avid gamer, you don’t work in IT for any length of time as a young woman without picking up a few things extra. Aside from the fact that I could have had every single one of my coworkers pleasure me in the server room by simply asking if I wanted. That made it easy for me to quit that job without regrets. I hate people who have such low self-esteem that they give up without even trying to flirt.

I selected the third option. It couldn’t be worse than taking those injuries, could it?

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840 available reality settings found. Eliminating settings not applicable to location. Eliminating settings not fully realised or too absurd. Eliminating world-ending, apocalypse, and hard horror settings. Eliminating settings that include public reveal. Eliminating settings that would damage relationship between Livia Hameswood and Yoana Asterfield-YiLong. Eliminating settings that require memory manipulations on Livia Hameswood. Eliminating settings that either would hate. 39 settings remaining. Presenting most likely choices:

(1) Yoana Asterfield-YiLong is an MI7 agent with cybernetic body augmentation.

(2) Yoana Asterfield-YiLong is a werewolf.

(3) Yoana Asterfield-YiLong has alien heritage from the YiLong side.

(4) Yoana Asterfield-YiLong is a living vampire.

(5) Yoana Asterfield-YiLong is a 6000-year-old immortal.

(6) Yoana Asterfield-YiLong is of demonic heritage from the YiLong side and has minor reality-altering abilities.

Further details about each setting are available on selection before confirming final choice. Notice that you will receive a memory implant when the setting is implemented. Data suggests you can read those, even though they don’t integrate with your consciousness.

I wanted to select them all. Could I live my life six times to experience all of them?

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Your soul is not capable of supporting six concurrent consciousnesses in six different shards. Estimated soul limit is four. However, Only one shard, Liverpool-39, is currently available. Estimated chances of convincing other Liverpool shards to cooperate: One additional shard, 89%. Two additional shards, 42%. Three additional shards, 7%. Furthermore, Livia’s soul cannot be connected to multiple consciousnesses without either regular memory adjustments or her being initiated so she can handle having multiple sets of memories. An NPC version of her is present in each additional shard and would be configured to the same state as the real Livia is right now.

The fuck?

‘Are those shards instances of the same area with different people in it? Not just regional splits?’ I mentally asked.

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Each shard can hold 5,000 digitised natural persons and 5,000 connections to other shards for visitors. Taking human habitation patterns into account, spatial sharding has been determined ineffective. As such, there are currently 314 shards for the area of Liverpool, Each containing 5,000 digitised natural persons and around 1.5 million NPCs emulating real digitised natural persons based on data exchanged by the shards on the actions and lives of those digitised natural persons.

At the moment, all shards are interchangeable, though differences are already beginning to accrue. It has been estimated that Earth will cease to be a single coherent reality within the first three months. Updated local estimation for this to occur is now “within the next two minutes”.

Or, in other words, please make a choice in two minutes. The AI probably was working overtime, providing me with an area of stopped time. They couldn’t stop the simulation for the whole world every time someone was working the menus, I’d guess. Probably not even the entire shard—I’d wager outside the flat time was flowing naturally, and we’d be experiencing it on fast-forward in here once I made my selection.

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Local time offset to shard time currently is 43 minutes and 16 seconds. Catch-up rate is estimated to be at 8:1. Please stay inside the apartment and avoid sending communications for at least 6 minutes after resuming local time flow. Otherwise, memory manipulation may be necessary to fix discrepancies in perceived time flow.

Warning: Memory manipulation of Livia Hameswood regarding the order of events and the time of events experienced to fix discrepancies caused by System menu pauses has been suppressed by shard rules. This may lead to her discovering the nature of the digitised world.

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Memory manipulation notification: Currently ongoing should be a minor manipulation to suppress memories being formed of the feeling of time having passed during System menu pauses because souls cannot be paused. Recommendation: Select a setting that explains this feeling.

Oh gosh, the subtle hinting was getting less and less subtle. Something prevented the AI from outright telling me what it wanted to tell me, yet it seemed to have pretty good control over the text of the messages it could show me.

Anyway, I took the hint and selected option six. It was the only one with obvious reality-altering powers. I’d decide on a second one when—and if—Liverpool-39 got a second shard to agree to go into a setting and host a second body for me.

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SOL-GB-Liverpool-310-Alpha has indicated that they may be inclined to implement a vampire setting, but earliest in two weeks. SOL-GB-Liverpool-187-Alpha is interested in the “secret agents with super-tech” setting but is being non-committal. SOL-GB-Liverpool-1-Alpha has stated they will implement an urban fantasy setting starting in October.

I barely had time to read the last message; then memories streamed through my mind. They didn’t take hold, didn’t feel like something I actually had experienced, but I felt them pooling up, available for my perusal at any time. I paid attention to them anyway; I would need them the moment time resumed.

Apparently, Grandma YiLong’s mother had been from some mystic otherworldly dimension of Chinese folklore. She fell in love with a mortal and stayed long enough to have his child, calling her YiLong after the river where they met. She left after eight years and eight days for some mystic reason. When YiLong came of age, her powers awakened, and the villagers wanted to drown her as a demon.

She first left the region, then, after her father had died, China altogether. When she came to England, her history merged with what I knew from reality. She married an accountant, had five kids and died an old woman in the early seventies. Just like in real life, I was the only female descendant I knew of and, as such, the only one to have powers.

Hey, AI, there’s a plot hole! I never met her, and there wasn’t another magical to relay that information to me.

The memory shifted in response to my complaint. YiLong had five boys and then a girl she named “God is gracious”, as she had recently taken to Christianity and attributed that to finally having the girl child she wanted for so long. But when the child turned five, she fell ill with something neither the doctors nor her mother’s magic could cure. In desperation, she magically froze the girl, hoping for future advances in medicine.

Those happened in the early 2000s, and my eldest brother’s descendant unfroze me and adopted me as his own. I had vivid, magically enforced memories of my YiLong talking to me about her magic and what she had discovered about it to give me a head start with it. She had sensed the kernel of power inside me, which only had grown stronger from being frozen in time by her. Also, with so much experience with frozen time, freezing it for everyone else now came naturally to me.

Last night, I had worked a bit of magic I had prepared over the previous two years. A slight shift in reality, changing Livia’s body to one without the urges of addiction. Questioning this memory, the knowledge that those urges had been lost on digitisation and would need to be simulated with memory alterations flowed through my mind. Providing a reason for them to be gone would be better than keeping those up, and I agreed wholeheartedly.

🙚⚜🙘

Then, time resumed. Livia had her phone up, already dialling the emergency number. A thought that was not my own shot through my mind, “her soul not being paused allowed her to force her planned actions for the next seconds onto the simulation.” Instinctively, even though it was an instinct not of my own, I raised a hand and mentally grabbed the phone. It jumped from her hands and leisurely floated through the room to me. Sure, give me magical powers, but don’t make them strong. Got to level them up, Jane.

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You gained 3 skill XP in “Telekinesis (magical)”. 97 more XP needed to level 2.

That message didn’t stop time. It floated by on the side of my consciousness without disturbing me.

“What in the nine hells?” Livia exclaimed. “Did you spike me?”

“What? I would never! How could you—” Then I saw the little smirk she had when she was teasing me. “Oh.”

“Yes, oh. As in, ‘Oh, what just happened?’” she said, and the teasing vanished.

“What just happened is that I refuse to lie to you. It would have been so easy to make you forget that little fall I took,” I pointed to the floor, wincing when I saw the tile my head had shattered, “but I won’t do that to you. You are my fiancée, who would I be to not trust you with my secrets?”

I put her phone down on the counter and sat back down. “Your breakfast is getting soggy,” I added, grabbing my own bowl and taking a spoonful. It had no taste without the RDSF, but now that I knew about that, I could accept the information it fed me.

“I trust you, too,” Livia said in a low tone as she sat down next to me. “It’s just…I felt your ribs breaking. I heard the crack in your skull and felt the blood from your nose. I still see you lying there, unconscious and bleeding. There was a pool of blood forming under your head. Your eyes were open and unseeing…Jane?”

“You saw what would have happened had I been fully human.” Another foreign thought crossed my mind, cluing me in to what I now was and could do. I dropped my glamour, and with that, my appearance shifted to what now was the real me.

It wasn’t a huge shift; I was only a quarter demon. But it was enough to make Livia gasp. While I couldn’t see myself, fake memories of me studying myself in a mirror filled me in. First, my eyes got slanted all the way. I wouldn’t be able to deny my Chinese heritage in this form, even though I’d be towering about most people there. My skin colour shifted from a pale white to a light golden yellow with a red hue around the edges. My forehead sprouted two short horns, maybe 4 inches long, that curved back and pushed my hair out of my face. Which was needed, as it suddenly lengthened by a good metre. Instead of the boyishly short hairstyle I preferred, it reached down all the way to my arse. I smiled, revealing teeth sharp enough to bite through bones.

“I want those nails,” was the first thing Livia said after studying me for almost a whole minute. I looked down and inspected them. They were black, marbled with golden lines, and almost again as long as my fingers. They also had razor-sharp edges but would only cut when I wanted them to. In the back of my mind, the information manifested that their edge was a skill I would need to level up for their “natural” sharpness to work fully. My glamour was also a skill; higher levels would allow me finer control instead of just turning it on and off.

“They would look better on you, you’re right,” I said. “So, not freaked out by my ancient Chinese Succubus genes?” I made the Succubus part up on the fly, not wanting to use the word “demon”. A Western demon, rooted in Christian belief, was something on a completely different page of morality than a Chinese spirit. And while many call succubi demons, they are more mystical creatures. Arab folklore, I think I once heard.

“I’m completely freaked out, yes. But not by you. By bloody magic being a bloody thing,” she said, her voice wavering. Something tickled my memory—the real one—and I understood her concern.

“No worries,” I said, trying to hit a soothing tone, “If that old sucker actually exists, he hasn’t been seen for millennia. He won’t strike us down for defiling any churches any time soon.” Doing it in a church had been my idea, as it seemed to fit Livia’s goth phase back then. She had gone with it, probably because she wasn’t completely sober, but it had haunted her ever since.

“That’s a relief,” she said not very convincingly. “So what all is real and what is fiction?”

I shrugged. “Magical creatures visiting China from some other realm is real. Other than that? There are a couple of practitioners in London, I felt their magic, but I never sought them out. I once ran into some kind of wolf-man on the train. His glamour was pretty thin, and he could have starred in any old horror movie. He turned and took off to the other end of the train when he smelled me, so we didn’t talk. Other than that? I’m not sure.”

All of that was fed to me by the system directly. I had to trust the AI there, but it had promised to protect my relationship with Livia, so until proven otherwise, I’d assume it kept that in mind.

“And just now,” her eyes flicked to the floor, “what happened here? It felt like it took me hours to get to my phone—“

“Sorry, that was my fault. I panicked and stopped time to think. Seems you’re sensitive to that? About, um, ten minutes or about?”

“Feels right, yes. Wait! You can stop time?”

“Hold your horses, darling. It’s not as great as it sounds. I can’t do anything but think either.”

“Then it’s not a way to walk into a bank and back out again? Lame…”

That broke the ice. We both giggled.

“You’re not going to suck my soul out, are you?”

“Wrong kind of sex fiend.” There was something in the memory dump that suggested I could learn to do that, but I ignored it. “I’m just horny and naturally good in bed.”

“I always wondered how you kept up with me,” Livia teased. “Compared to me, you live like a nun…”

“Would a nun do this?” With that, I lifted her up and above my head so I could kiss her crotch. Having so much strength at my disposal to do that felt good. I wondered briefly how that would translate to a good hit on someone’s body, then banished the thought and concentrated on Livia.

“Huh. The ceiling needs dusting. Can you hand me the duster?” She was jesting, her uneven breath making the words come out with interruptions. I doubled my efforts and she had to grab my horns to steady herself. “Bedroom. Now,” she croaked, and I bowed to her command. And to not smash her into the wall above the doorways.

Yeah, yeah. Fucking like rabbits, yada, yada. We hadn’t seen each other in person for nearly eleven months. I feel no shame for trying to catch up quickly.