Chương 204: Interlude: Like they do it on discovery channel

Seen through the eyes of Zoe Harper Day in the story: 19th January (Monday)"You stupid asshole!" My voice echoed off the bathroom tiles, and I kept hitting the toilet bowl with a closed fist, hoping against all reason that this foul feeling would leave me along with the next vomit. When it came out of my stomach, through my mouth, and hit the water, I bent over so hard I could feel all of my muscles cramp.

A good fifteen minutes ago, I returned the last remnants of food I still had in me, and ever since then it had only been bile that escaped me. Bile and the occasional fucking curse, because this should not be happening now. Not for some time anyway. It was way too early, and that made me worry that I carried a supergirl in my stomach. I had decided today that it would be a girl and that she would become the next seer in line. No more water powers. No more magic that makes unwanted... Fuck, that wasn't true.

It wasn't unwanted anymore. Just unplanned. I loved that little bean swimming inside of me already, and it made me sick in my fucking stomach. Lite-fucking-rally. At least last night was all kinds of unhinged fun. I knew I shouldn't blame Alexa for all that happened, but somehow, deep down, I resented her for dragging Peter into this magical mess. Especially now that he'd caught the motherfucking, pun very much intended, May's-penchant-for-danger virus.

Now, of all fucking things, he'd decided that being a stupid mage was more important than being a good boyfriend. I still enjoyed her presence and the magic she brought into my life—even her herself as a person, so I would need to learn not to associate her with that dick.

"Are you okay in there?" A knock at the door preceded Soph's caring voice.

"No!" I shouted back at her.

"Don't come in. I stink!" I flushed the toilet and hit the wall behind it with my back and the top of my head.

"I heard that. I'm coming in."

"No, please!" The door was already slowly opening, and a slender foot moved through the threshold.

"You infringe on my sovereignty."

"Girl, you need me right now." She carried herself with a lightness I envied right now. However, she also carried some steaming tea she'd brewed herself, and that was enough for me to forgive any and all transgressions. This woman knew how to make a killer tea out of those leaves of hers.

"Take this." She extended a hand with a cup, and I cupped it in my palms. Perfect amount of hotness. Enough to feel warm, but not burning. I took a sniff through my nose, and the fragrance filled me with happiness and the expectation of goodness.

"You are practically a Leben already," I told her, when another fucking betrayer entered my life—again. My bloody stomach decided to enact its vengeful tendencies and bent me in half over the bowl again.

"Isn't it too early for that?" Sophie asked, dropping to her knees so quickly that she somehow managed to save the tea and get the cup back into her own hands.

"Sometimes," I coughed, and a long strand of saliva fought for its life while hanging from my mouth. I ended its suffering by spitting straight into the water and bile.

"Sometimes I wonder if it isn't too late."

"You know what I mean." She settled on the opposite side of the bowl, resting her elbows on the knees pulled close to her chest and extending her clasped hands forward.

"Are my flowers causing this?"

"Flo-wers?" I was starting to speak like a fucking child already.

"The scent. There are so many scents in this apartment. You vomited just now because you smelled the tea, so maybe it's all the vines and flowers too."

"I don't think they're the issue, Soph. The baby definitely is. She's all kinds of magical." This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"She? It was a he yesterday, and a she two days ago, and a he three..."

"Oh, give me a break. It could be whatever. I would still love them all the same. I already love whatever is cooking in there, and despite all the problems it brought into my life, I fear every night that something will happen to her."

"I will do everything in my power to help you, Zee. I promise."

"I know you will. I think it's better now. Give me that tea back." I dropped onto my hands and moved on all fours next to her. Sitting practically glued to her side, I carefully rested my head on her shoulder. She held the cup and slowly poured the golden-brown liquid into my mouth.

"You are way too good for this world. It will get you hurt."

"Maybe. I like my chances, though. I think I'll keep on keeping on."

"Do that. Do that..."

I sat in my spacious cubicle, staring at the monitor and trying to figure out where exactly the code had gone haywire on me. My mind wasn't as sharp as I'd gotten used to. I pushed myself away from the desk on my wheeled chair. Far, far away. About two fucking feet. Then I hit the empty chair behind me.

"Good God," I whispered and dropped to my feet, moving toward the window. I was near the top of the tower in Edge of Tomorrow's hand-shaped artificial island, right in the middle finger tower. It couldn't have been more poetic, and yet the view from up here was spectacular. The Hudson River flowed below while the city shimmered with evening lights beneath falling snow.

I bet Alexa could and would say something poetic about that, about EoT showing the city's a wild fuck, about artificial island where people worked on artificial intelligence in their artificial lives. Meh. Fuck that. I sighed, pushing myself away from the glass and back toward my desk. I felt like I'd treated her unfairly and needed to do better. If only I had the strength to be as good as Sophie was.

"Hey, Harper!" Luke called from the other side of our open office. He was the only other person working this late.

"What!?" I shouted back as I sat down.

"That solution of yours is shit. I ran it, and it returned gibberish. It ain't translating like it should." We both worked on programming artificial intelligence to learn the languages of the world and, based on that knowledge, understand how to decipher the tongues of animals and long-forgotten texts from annals, dusty tomes, and yellowed scrolls. Basically my dream job, as I'd wanted to work at The Library, ever since I read the first article about them.

"Show me." I stood again and practically pranced toward him. I couldn't wait to look at something other than the piece of shit code on my own screen anyway. It was all dead ends waiting to be officially declared as such. I wanted to give them one more night of pretending to be something they were not. To let them dream.

"Look." He pointed at the screen with his lollipop and promptly shoved it back into his mouth, sucking loudly enough to make my stomach turn again. I held it back like a champ this time. Miracles of Sophie's old-school, handmade, tasty, drinkable medicine.

"I trained it on the scanned files from the Unomicon folder, whatever that is, and it translated like ninety percent of the text correctly. I know because I read most of it and then ran it through an AI checker to see whether it was readable and to flag any illegible bullshit."

"That is very unlikely. If it translated almost everything correctly, how could it omit the remaining ten percent? It's not like it suddenly became a completely different language. Or is it?"

"Dunno, Zoe. Look." He scrolled down to the section he'd marked as nonsense.

"See? All scrambled letters with no sense." He pointed at the screen again. He was mistaken. I could read what was displayed perfectly fine and the first few lines provided an answer, as to why it was the case. The Universe has a memory, and it remembers every use of Authority, every manipulation of the illight. Understanding the language in which those manipulations of Reality were performed proves crucial to recreating the effect without access to the same kind of Authority.

Thus, through proper rituals, incantations, songs, or even gestures backed by meaning that reaches into that repository of cosmic knowledge, one could, with any kind of Authority, achieve the same result the Universe remembered...

"Zoe?" Luke asked.

"You okay?"

"What? Yeah."

"You're reading this gibberish? Those are just random letters, right?" His mind couldn't comprehend it. Reality itself worked to keep him oblivious to deeper truths, but my own mind was protected from that awful power. If what this text claimed was true, then every time a mage used their Authority, the Universe remembered the context and essentially implemented that 'spell' into its own repertoire for future use.

The key was finding the right combination of words, gestures, or whatever medium it had been encoded through. It was basically a wizardry manual. One that could change the magical world forever.

"Could I get this file? I'd like to work on it. Try to make it function properly."

"Sure." He handed me a flash drive.

"Already put everything I have on there."

"Thank you, Luke. Please wait before passing it forward until I make it right. I don't want you getting into trouble." I lied. I already knew how important this information was, and I had every intention of studying it myself.

"You rock, Zoe. Thank you!"

"No, thank you, Luke. It's exactly the kind of distraction I needed."