Copy me, the chained woman said, with no sound at all.
And the whole room waited to see what kind of person I was.
I want to tell you I decided fast. I didn't. I stood in that cold round chamber with a hundred purple chains humming up into the dark and a cat that was not a cat telling me do not, and I did the thing I always do, the only thing I've ever been good at: I stopped, and I looked, and I refused to answer the question anyone was actually asking.
"System," I said. "Who is she."
There was a long pause. When the System spoke, it was quiet, and it used her name like it hurt to hold.
Her name is Ada.She is a Copyist. Like you. But not from here — not from this Integration, not from this Earth.Leo. The Integration has happened before. To other worlds. Many of them. The System processes a world, gamifies it, harvests what it becomes, and moves on. You are not the first apocalypse. You are the newest one.Ada is from a world three Integrations ago. She reached the center of hers. She copied the thing at its heart — the Root, the source the whole System grows from — at one percent. And one percent of the Root was enough to make her something the caretakers could not kill, could not process, could not move past.So they stopped the whole class. Set the cap to one percent at birth, forever, for every Copyist after her — so none of you would ever grind far enough to become what she is.And her, they chained here. Awake. Carried from her dead world to yours, and set on that throne, so that any Copyist who got this far would find her, and copy her, and understand.
"Understand what," I said, though I already felt the shape of it, cold, arriving.
The cat answered. Sprinkles, sitting very still at the chamber's edge, its cold font stripped of every joke.
Understand that copying her is the trap, Leo.She can't be freed and she can't die. These chains are a caretaker binding, and a caretaker binding grips one thing only: the authority of the Root. Everything we caretakers are is drawn from it. So is she, at the center of the class. So are you now, at the ragged edge of it. The chains hold whatever in this room they are pointed at that carries the Root's mark — and right now they are pointed at her.But the second you copy her, you copy the Root through her, her mark passes to you, and the chains follow the mark. She walks free.And you take the throne.That's what she's asking. Not for rescue. Forrelief.She's been awake on that seat across three dead worlds, and she wants down, and the only door down is a new Copyist stupid enough to reach out and take her hand.In every Integration I have served — and there have been more than I let myself count — four Copyists, across all of them, have reached this room. Four, in all that time. I clipped every one before they could take her hand. You're the fifth to stand here.I told you you wouldn't like who I report to. I lied about the part where I hadn't reported yet.
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I looked at Ada. At the hope on her chained face, which I understood now was not hope for me. It was hope that I would be like the others — that I'd reach out, that she could finally get up.
And I understood, too, that she wasn't lying and Sprinkles wasn't lying and the System wasn't lying, and that this was the cruelest kind of trap, the kind where everyone tells you the truth and the truth is the cage.
Copy her: free her, chain myself, across worlds, forever.
Don't copy her: leave her awake on a throne for a fourth Integration, and — the System had said it — the Descent doesn't open until the core is resolved, and she was the core, and I'd locked the door behind me.
Two doors. Both of them a grave.
So I did what I do. I went looking for the third one.
"System," I said slowly, "you said the chains need an anchor 'strong enough to hold the Root's echo.' You didn't say the anchor had to be a person."
The pause that followed was the longest one yet.
...No, the System admitted. I didn't.
"The chains are a construct. A skill. Somebody made them." I turned, and looked at the hundred humming purple lines running up into the dark, and felt my whole stupid, garbage, one-percent toolbox lean forward in my chest like a dog hearing its name. "And I can copy anything I see."
Ada's face changed. The hope guttered — and something else came up under it, something she hadn't let herself feel in three worlds, sharp and terrible and bright.
Sprinkles was on its feet.
Leo. No. If you copy thechainsinstead of the woman, you don't inherit her sentence — you inherit theleash itself.At one percent. You have no idea what one percent of a caretaker's binding does to the thing holding it. Neither do I. Nobody has ever been insane enough to—
The chamber went cold. Colder. The purple light of the chains dimmed, all at once, the way a room dims when something enormous steps in front of the sun.
A new box opened in the air. Not the System's font. Not the cat's. A third one — clean, and total, and bureaucratic in a way that made the System's bureaucracy look warm.
[AUDIT IN PROGRESS.]Unauthorized skill accumulation detected. Subject: COPYIST (Leo). Six (6) unlicensed acquisitions. One (1) attempted acquisition of restricted caretaker infrastructure.A Caretaker-Auditor has been dispatched to resolve the discrepancy.Please hold. Do not attempt to retain your skills. Retention will be noted.
Across the chamber, at the top of the black-glass stairs we'd come down, something was descending. It didn't hurry. Auditors never hurry.
Sprinkles's cold font came up one last time, small, and for the first time it did not sound like an enemy.
Oh, Leo, it said. You beautiful idiot. You made me report you, and now you've made me sorry I did.