Chương 18: A Trader or Not

[You are currently in Floor Six] The clearing appeared between two trees that had grown close enough together that I had to angle my shoulder to pass between them, and on the other side of that gap the purple forest opened into a space maybe thirty feet across where the grass grew shorter and the firefly insects gathered in higher density than anywhere else on the floor, their orange glow concentrated enough that the clearing had its own ambient warmth distinct from the canopy light above.

Someone was sitting in the middle of it.

'There,' I thought. I stopped at the tree line and looked at them before they looked at me. They were seated on something low to the ground that I could not identify from this angle, and they were cloaked, a deep green that caught the orange firefly light and held it differently than fabric usually did, more like the light was resting on the surface rather than reflecting off it. The hood was up. I approached them. I saw them. They were the same person I had encountered in all my previous runs.

I bore no specific feeling toward them other than having a useful relation with this person. More than the savage humans… They looked up as I approached them.

"I know about this run," they said. I stood in front of them and did not move toward the forest path. The Stamina Draught was still active. My health was full. I had no mechanical reason to stay at the checkpoint and several practical reasons to start moving, because floor six had a collapse timer the same as every other floor and I had already spent more time in the entry clearing than any previous run at this stage. I stayed anyway.

"That is a precise thing to say," I replied. The trader looked at their inventory display. Not at me. The display was not active, nothing was selected or highlighted, and the gesture of looking at it had the quality of something performed rather than something functional. A person looking away from a conversation without committing to ending it.

"Floors wait for no one," they said.

"You told me that already," I said. They did not respond to that. The purple grass moved around the clearing in the low current of air that came off the forest edge, and the firefly insects drifted above it in their slow patterns, and I watched the trader's face and thought about the three-second pause and what it had contained. In fifty-two thousand runs I had never had a conversation at this checkpoint that lasted longer than the time required to complete a transaction.

The trader had answered questions with deflections, prompts with redirects, and silences with more silence. They had never offered information that was not a direct response to a direct transaction, and they had certainly never opened with an unprompted observation about my condition.

"You look worse than usual," I said, repeating their own words back at them. They looked up from the inactive display.

"That is what I said," they replied.

"It is a comparative statement," I said.

"Worse than what. Worse than which visit. You have a reference point, which means you have memory of visits that predate this one, which means when you told me you know about this run and not previous runs, you were making a distinction that required knowing about previous runs in order to make." The trader was quiet. The inventory display remained inactive in front of them. The firefly insects continued to move. The grass moved.

"You are more articulate this run," the trader said.

"Intelligence allocation," I replied.

"One hundred and four. It changes the cognitive processing."

"You should try it… the humans call it IQ."

"I noticed," they said.

"You noticed," I repeated.

"Which run did you notice that from?" They did not answer. What they did instead was reach up with one hand and adjust the hood of their cloak, and in doing so the hood shifted back several inches further than they had intended, or further than they had been maintaining it for every previous interaction I had ever had with them, and the light of the clearing, the ambient purple filter from the canopy above, fell across their face for the first time in fifty-two thousand runs. I had never seen their face before.

Not once. In every interaction across every loop the hood had been positioned in a way that kept their features in shadow, and I had accepted that as a stylistic constant of the checkpoint character and had not pushed against it because the trader was furniture and furniture did not have faces worth examining. Green hair. A clean vivid green that caught the purple ambient light and held its own colour against it.

The cheeks beneath the hood were warm-toned, flushed slightly, and the expression on their face was not the flat transactional neutral I had catalogued across thousands of interactions. It was the expression of someone who had been caught doing something they had intended not to be caught doing, and who was deciding in real time how to respond to that. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. They were smiling.

A small, compressed expression that sat at the corners of their mouth and carried more information in its restraint than it would have carried if it had been wider. It was the smile of someone who found the situation genuinely funny and was trying not to show that, and failing at the trying part.

I looked at that face and understood that I had been having conversations with a person this entire time and had categorised them as furniture, and the person was aware of that categorisation, and the smile was, in part, about that.

"You have a face," I said.

"Many people do," they replied. The smile remained, controlled but present.

"You have been keeping it pointed at the ground for fifty-two thousand runs," I said. The smile shifted. Moving from restrained amusement into something that had more weight in it. They reached up and pushed the hood back further, a deliberate motion this time rather than an accident, and I could see their full face now in the clearing light. They were younger than I had assumed from their voice, which I had always registered as ageless in the way that automated responses were ageless.

The face that went with the voice was younger than that, and considerably more alert than anything I had ever projected onto the shadow where their features had been. Green eyes, green hair, and a piece of jewelry on their right ear with what seemed to be... a slight, sharp smile, unlike any I had seen on humans. Their veil was wrapped around their shoulders as they leaned forward, playing with their hair. This one was the most amusing. But there was also something sinister lurking behind it.

They were someone not to be taken lightly. Someone I had never encountered in all my fifty thousand runs, and someone who could very well end up costing me my life.

"You never asked," they said.

"You never invited the question," I replied.

"No," they agreed.

"I did not." The trader, whose face I now knew was framed by green hair and warm cheekbones and an expression that shifted with more range than I had ever observed from them, looked at me the way someone looked at a problem they had been watching for a long time from a safe distance and had now been asked to engage with directly.

"How long have you been here?" I asked.

"At this checkpoint," they said, "or in the spire?"

"Both," I said.

"Either. Start with whichever is shorter." They looked at the clearing around us, the grass and the insects and the treeline, and something in their posture changed in a way that was subtle enough that I might have missed it on earlier runs even if I had been watching their face. The shoulders settled slightly, a release of something held rather than a collapse of posture, and the smile faded into an expression that was more neutral but more honest than the transaction-face had ever been.

"I have been at this checkpoint since before you started running," they said.

"Since before this run," I said.

"Or since before the first run?" They did not answer that directly. What they did was look at me with an expression that contained the answer without committing to it, and I read it the way I had learned to read the half-second warning a body gave before it committed to a direction. Before the first run. They had been here before I started dying on floor one fifty-two thousand times. Which meant they had been in this tower, at this checkpoint, for longer than my entire accumulated history in it.

"What are you?" I said. Not aggressively. As a genuine question delivered to someone.

"A trader," they said.

"That is a function," I replied.

"Not an answer." The smile came back, briefly, at the corners.

"You really are more articulate this run." They picked up a small object from the surface beside them, something I had not registered as part of their inventory display, and turned it over in their hands. It was flat and dark-surfaced, unreflective, and it caught no light at all from the clearing around them, which meant it was either absorbing light or the light was simply declining to interact with it. They did not offer it or explain it. They turned it over once more and set it back down.

As if to answer an unspoken question they spoke.

"The tower generates information about every climber," they said.

"Class selection, attribute distribution, skill acquisition. It is not private. It is architectural. The tower knows what is climbing it the same way a body knows what is in it."

"And you have access to that information," I said.

"I have access to certain things," they said.

"This checkpoint is mine. What passes through it is something I observe."

"Every run," I said. The pause was shorter than the three-second one had been. One second, perhaps less.

"Every run," they confirmed.

I stood in the purple grass clearing with my health at three hundred and ten and my mana recovering and the class advancement screen minimised in the corner of my display, and I looked at the person I had been transacting with across fifty-two thousand deaths without ever once looking at their face, and I thought about what it meant that they had been watching from this checkpoint since before the first run, and what it meant that they had chosen this run to let the hood slip, and whether the slip had been an accident or the most precisely timed deliberate action I had ever witnessed.

"I would like to know about my class advancement options," I said. The expression on their face shifted again. Not the restraint of the earlier deflection. Something more direct, and less comfortable, which was the most informative response they had given me to anything.

"I cannot speak to the advancement screen," they said.

"Cannot or will not," I said.

"Both," they replied. It sounded sincere, like they really didn't have any information about it. Suddenly they spoke once more after a question. It was rare.

"The Aion is eternal and absolute." Aion. My mind raced over endless information. It was true that there was only so much limited information about the human concept of knowledge in the spire. But my mind still raced dissecting the word.

"Ai – on" They watched me.

"You said you had one hundred intelligent points," they said.

"Eternal," I replied.

"Your name," I said.

"As in?" Her eyes lowered into a scrutinising gaze.

"As in time. Me and the world. Ai, as in I. On, as in am."

"Therefore, I am... the world…" They seemed to observe me with an expression of intrigue. Their lips parted for a moment, and I could feel myself being heavily scrutinised beneath their gaze. However, that fact did not concern me. I meant what I said. The smile came back fully this time, a complete expression that changed their face entirely and lasted for exactly one second before they brought it back under control.

"You are not... buying anything today," they said, their voice uncertain. I looked at them for a moment longer. They looked back. The firefly insects moved above the grass between us in their slow orange drift, and neither of us resolved the silence into anything conclusive.

"No..." I said.

"Well then... I have a gift." My eyes sparked. Something new, something that had never happened in any previous run.

"Here," she said, placing a gadget on the table. I looked at it. It was small and geometric, almost like a stone block carved from obsidian. At one end was a circular shape covered with what looked like glass. What kind of strange object was this? This wasn't equipment. It was an artifact.

"Floor Eleven," she said.

"I will ask again there."

"That's... new?" I said in an unsure tone.

'Seems neat,' I thought to myself. A human expression, too. She folded her hands beneath her chin, studying me with a concerned look.

"Take this and record your journey through the Spire... I think that this will bring great yield in this iteration... you are different, young one."

"What is this?" I asked, unsure of what she had just given me.

"A camera. You can record and capture the past with it." She inclined her head.

"A bright colleague of mine once said that it could capture fleeting moments from the past and preserve them in the future, forever suspending a single moment in time." I took it and examined the device. It seemed useful. And besides, it was free, so there was no reason to refuse.

"Alright... until floor eleven, I guess. I will try my best."

"You will," she agreed. It wasn't a deflection. It meant they already knew I would reach Floor Eleven, and they weren't saying it was uncertain. Before I turned away, I looked back.

"May I borrow some potions?" They remained seated, observing me.

"Of course. Put it under my tab. And I won't die... not because I care about living, but because I don't want to carry any loop debts." Loop debts were another thing I wasn't particularly keen on paying. I had only just finished paying one off. I hate debts.