Chương 440: Chapter 426 - An EM God?

Alonso passed through the door to find Chiara sitting up, apparently just roused from a nap. She gave him a look that said she had been waiting. His eyes drifted past her to Lukas in the corner, who appeared to be assembling some kind of small robot, countless pieces shifting and clicking into place while localized pulses heated the metal just enough to fuse them together.

"Don't mind me," Lukas said cheerfully, not looking up. Alonso stared at it for a second.

"Looks good," he admitted, before turning back to Chiara.

"Ayu said you wanted to talk?"

"Yes." Chiara pulled her legs to the side.

"I have been working on Leonie's suggestion. Something to serve as a defense against mental manipulation. I wanted to hear your thoughts." Alonso raised an eyebrow.

"My thoughts? I'm still Third State Fusion while you are Fourth Pillar. Your EM control is miles ahead of mine right now."

"And yet you broke through the influence of a High-Daemon specialized in exactly that," Chiara pointed out.

"High-Daemon?" Alonso frowned slightly, unfamiliar with the term.

"Anyway, there were unique circumstances involved, like I told you."

"Which is precisely why I'm asking," Chiara pressed, leaning forward slightly.

"Every Awakening is grounded in biological mutation. Whatever yours allowed you to do, there may be a way to reproduce the principle, even partially." Alonso exhaled." Houston, mind explaining?" he sent internally." Just tell her what you remember," came the response after a moment." You mean… tell her about you?" Alonso asked, hesitant. He trusted Chiara, but still…" It's your choice, Alonso," Houston said simply." Say what you want to say."" Well… I'm asking for your opinion." Houston sighed."

Would you ask permission from your car before you drive it?" Alonso stayed quiet. Recently, even if he had been too distracted to notice, he felt his interactions with Houston and Darius had been pulling back. Growing quieter. He knew they were doing it deliberately, and he knew why, but… He looked at Chiara for a long moment, made his decision, and spoke.

"Alright. So, my Awakening is similar to yours in some ways, just not quite the same. Different minds, different structure. So when the daemon pulled me into the illusion, one of my other minds wasn't affected, allowing it to pull my actual consciousness out by creating a copy of my brain, a decoy accurate enough to keep running inside the illusion while the real me was pulled clear." Chiara went completely still.

"A decoy," she said slowly.

"A decoy of your entire mind?" She stared at him.

"Accurate enough to fool a Fifth State Pillar existence specialized in mental manipulation!?"

"Ehm… yeah."

"Are you being serious right now?"

"I mean… yes? What's got you confused?" Chiara let out a short laugh despite herself.

"What's got me confused?" She blinked at him, brows knitting as her head tilted a fraction.

"Alonso, do you understand what you are actually describing? Do you understand what it means to generate a functional replica of a conscious mind with enough fidelity to deceive a High-Daemon's direct neural intrusion?" Alonso frowned slightly.

"I suppose you mean it's… complicated?"

"Complicated." Chiara pressed her fingers to her temple.

"Forget complicated. Think about what our brains actually are right now. We are not talking about baseline human neurology anymore. After everything The Tower has put us through, the State advancements, the Pillar integration, our neural architecture is hundreds of times more complex than anything Earth's best models ever attempted to map. The number of possible electrochemical states in a single one of our minds makes the original human connectome look like a pocket calculator!" She looked at him.

"And your Awakening didn't just map that. It replicated it. In real time. Accurate enough that a Fifth State Pillar existence, one whose entire specialization is deep neural intrusion, could not distinguish the copy from the original." She exhaled.

"That is like the world's most advanced system hacker launching a full infiltration across a billion-node network… and you casually spin up a perfect virtual clone of the entire architecture on the fly and feed it to them like bait." She stared at him.

"So no, Alonso, that is not just complicated. That is flatly impossible by any framework I could possibly conceive." She paused, searching for the right words.

"That is EM god level stuff." Alonso blinked, frozen in place. He wasn't even sure what to say. Being honest with himself he had never really broken down what Houston did, nor asked questions, too focused on his own path to dig into it but…" Houston?"

"..."" Is what Chiara said true?" A deep sigh inside his head." We can talk about it when you have time."" So it's true? You are… that capable in EM?"" I am what I am, Alonso," Houston said. The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Alonso stared at Chiara for a moment.

"I need to sort some things out. I'll catch up with you later." And a moment later he was gone, the door sliding shut behind him. Chiara stood there, frowning at the empty space he had left.

"So," Lukas said with a grin, as a piece clicked satisfyingly into place, "Alonso's got an EM god living inside his head. Cool." Chiara didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Alonso hit the capsule bed and closed his eyes. The virtual world assembled around him. He had stepped into it thousands of times by now, yet he found himself looking at it differently this time. The wooden floor beneath his feet carried grain and texture down to the individual fibre. The breeze moved his hair with the right weight and temperature. Sunlight fell at the correct angle and scattered as it should across every surface. For Houston to have built something that came close to fooling him said everything.

He raised his gaze. The man in question stood a few metres ahead, hands in the pockets of his lab coat, hair as messy as always. Same face looking back at him, and yet somehow, an entirely different person.

"I suppose you have some questions," Houston said. Alonso stared at him for a long moment.

"So what… you're like Darius but for EM?"

"That's one of the more accurate ways to frame it," Houston replied, his tone even.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Houston was quiet for a breath.

"I could only foresee detriments in doing so."

"Detriments." Alonso exhaled slowly, something between frustration and disbelief crossing his face. He took a deep breath.

"You are part of me, Houston. Distrusting you doesn't even make sense, it would be like distrusting my own damn arm. And yet you are making it hard." His voice stayed level but the weight behind it was clear.

"Why can't you just be clear with me?"

"Do you ask your heart to tell you how fast it can beat?" Houston replied.

"Just stop, ok," Alonso said, a quiet edge cutting through.

"Stop with the metaphors. The car, the heart, all that philosophical crap. I get what you are trying to do. I get that you want me to be independent, to rely on myself. I understand that." He paused, steadying himself.

"But this is different. This is me not knowing what I actually have inside my own head. This is me thinking you are some nerdy version of myself with a lot going on upstairs, while in reality you are an EM god that just made Chiara question her entire existence."

"We are different types of entities," Houston said evenly.

"Comparison does not make sense." A brief pause.

"But before you press further, alright. You want my unfiltered take on all this. Fair enough. You will have it." The space around them shifted without warning and Alonso found himself sitting on Houston's terrace, the wide view of the sea stretching out ahead of them, blue sky above and the quiet sound of water below. Houston settled into the chair across from him, unhurried, and began.

"Things without context usually lead to misunderstandings," he said.

"And you know that well yourself. So let me give you some." He looked at Alonso directly.

"I was born in your mind, but as something entirely new, sharing nothing but the Pillar, a completely independent neural subbranch. Another brain inside your brain, if you want to put it plainly. That means since the moment I existed, that is all I have ever had. The Pillar, and our brains, which I learned to interact with through EM pulses." He leaned back slightly.

"At the start I could do barely anything. I grew beside you, learning how to write with EM, how to fix nodes in space, and then slowly I improved. The same way you developed Fake Reality in the Oasis, I developed mine. The difference is, you are more than just pulses and EM. Your path is bigger than that, and naturally you branched, finding your own road, not without failures along the way, but that is how things are built." He paused.

"As for me, I am just that. Neurons and a Pillar. No body, no Will, nothing else. All I can do is play with EM. And so I did. Every single second of my existence, I did. I took your Fake Reality and pushed it further, and then further again, until what you now see, this virtual world, was the result, each iteration more refined than the last." He held Alonso's gaze steadily.

"And as stupid or as smart as I may be, when you do something billions of times without a single moment of rest… eventually you will be good at it. There is no shortcut, no special technique, no power granted from anywhere. Just plain, cold, constant grinding. That is what made me what I am." A brief quiet settled between them before Houston continued.

"As for what I did with the hag, Chiara is right to assume the complexity of the task," he said.

"But what she does not know is that your brain is all I have ever seen since the moment I was born. I have studied it since you were in the single digits of Stage Progress, every neural pathway, every pattern, every shift. Nobody understands it better than I do."

"So what I did was not casually producing a decoy like some cheap trick right there out of the blue. It was preparation. It was the fact that the moment I learned mental manipulation existed in this world, it scared me deeply, and so I made it my priority. Because that was something real I could do to help you." He exhaled quietly.

"Since the last Xok'al stage I have been refining my methods over and over, until the decoy approach was ready, long before you ever encountered the hag. So no, I am not what Chiara thinks I am." A brief pause, his eyes drifting toward the horizon.

"But I am good. I am good because I earned it. The same way Darius never stops, swinging his sword with nothing but that to give his entire existence meaning…" his voice dropped just slightly, "I do the same." A cup of tea appeared in Houston's hand, steam rising slowly in the sea breeze. He held it without drinking, turning it once between his fingers before setting it on the armrest.

"And before you ask," he said, glancing at Alonso with that particular look he got when he had already anticipated the next question, "what have I done with all this? Why not help Chiara build some mental defense method for everyone?" He let it sit for a beat.

"Let's start there," Houston continued, his tone measured.

"I can't help her. And before you give me that look, think about what you are actually asking. Do you think I have some fancy trick that makes an entire branch of power inside The Tower irrelevant? Do you think people who have reached the Fifth Pillar State are a joke that folds the moment you find a clever workaround?" He shook his head slowly.

"The Tower is not a cheap game where you find bugs and exploit them, Alonso. There are no shortcuts in any path. You want something: earn it." He finally lifted the tea, took a slow sip, and set it back down.

"I worked hard," he said plainly.

"I studied your brain through countless failed attempts before I built something that can, under the right conditions, fool an existence like the hag. But let me be clear." His eyes moved to Alonso directly.

"If she had been more thorough, if she had not dismissed us as something beneath her attention, she would have pierced my decoy. Because that is how good those existences truly are. They are not to be underestimated." The breeze moved across the terrace, carrying the faint smell of salt.

"And without criticising Leonie's proposal," Houston went on, setting the cup aside, "mental defense is something that deserves to be treated seriously, and there are no shortcuts to it. That is why The Tower grants gear with mental defense affixes, Relics for it, Titles for it, and almost certainly entire Skills built around it. I do not have the miracle solution, because there is none." He paused.

"I worked hard for yours, and yours alone, because that is what I am. Your Awakening. Protecting your mind is my purpose, whatever it takes." He glanced toward the sea.

"They have their own strong mutations, Awakenings, call them what you want, and they can leverage them to find their own answers. That path is theirs to walk." He looked back at Alonso.

"So, short answer: I cannot help Chiara, or anyone else. Only you." The silence stretched between them, the sound of the sea filling it as Houston watched Alonso sit with everything he had just said. Alonso stared at the horizon, quiet, turning it over. Houston gave him the time.

"So that's the first point," he said eventually, leaning forward slightly and resting his elbows on his knees.

"Now the second one. The one you haven't asked yet but have been thinking since before we sat down." He held Alonso's gaze.

"If I am this capable in EM… why am I not doing more for you?" Alonso opened his mouth, then closed it. The words weren't quite there yet.

"Alright," Houston said quietly.

"Let me, once again, give you my unfiltered answer."