Arc 8 | Chapter 285: Nuclear Explosion, Anyone?

“Knew that would look fucking stunning on you, Emmie,” Baylor cooed as she stepped out of the room she barely slept in, his hands immediately reaching for her, tugging her into his side.

Her room, located across from the set of rooms the triplets shared, was more a place to keep her shit than a place she actually spent much time. While each of the boys had offered to let her move into their room, her habits lay somewhere between Baylor’s chaos and Taelor’s organization, and she hadn’t wanted to feel like she was intruding on their space.

Don’t get her wrong! Everything she owned had a home, it just rarely ended up in it, her mind and body constantly rushing from one place or task to another. As it was, there were barely enough hours in the day, and she already spent a respectable number of hours inside the Virtuosi System, coding this or that—largely pranks to deploy on Halen, because while their days of forced proximity through compulsory schooling might be done, she still owed him a few for the last few weeks of their decade and a half long prank war! She had a reputation to keep, and if that meant she had to see his stupid face again just to get even with him, so be it.

Taelor, of course, still came into her room regularly—Baylor’s as well—tidying it up for her, a habit he had picked up when they were still young, her ADHD getting worse as she aged, the fluctuating hormones of adolescence adding themself to the mix. In hindsight, the fact that he had never really cared about the effort or inconvenience—never even expected a thanks from her, despite the snuggles and heartfelt thanks she still forced upon hm—may have been the first sign of his proclivity to caretake the people he loved, at least to her.

Would it be inappropriate to ask him when he’d started caring for his brothers in a more parental manner? While she knew he had started when they were young, Emilia wasn’t sure they’d ever been more specific than

when we were young.

“We were younger,” Baylor told her when she asked, his arm tight around her waist while Valor’s hand was laced through hers, the tail of that arm’s ribbon slid through his fingers. The best thing about having such old friends? They knew her mind was a wandering wreck and to just go with whatever topic popped up inside her! “Maybe… six or seven? That’s when Loren started to step back, and I became a moody brat and Taelor took over, rather than force me to grow up. You are definitely the first outsider Taelor cared for—what were you? Seven or eight? It feels like it should be eight—like we should have known each other for longer, to be that comfortable around each other—but maybe it had only been a year?”

Taelor, trailing quietly behind them, his eyes suspiciously low when she glanced back—he definitely enjoyed her butt more than either of his brothers, and she was a little surprised he’d never asked to fuck it, although perhaps it was simply an inability to ask for something she’d never done before?—hummed softly. “It was a little over a year, and Emmie is the only

outsider

I’ve ever cared for.”

“Oh, now that’s a lie!” Emilia gasped, twisting and turning until the younger men finally let her go back to their brother. “I’ve seen you carry Janie’s things, and you definitely stepped in to get Lux away from ‘ariah when things started to get bad.”

“True, but I did those things for you, not them.” Taelor shrugged, the look he gave her not quite exasperated, but not quite not. “If you did not care, I would not.”

It was funny how even understanding black knots so well—probably better than any other non-black knot in the country, to be honest—it still felt like she missed things sometimes. While Emilia knew the Hyrat clones had always been closer to her than any other member of their friend group, had always been a little

apart

from it in ways that Rafe or the Baxter twins weren’t, sometimes she still found herself thinking they were at least a little attached to the rest of them.

Then, she’d bring up something like this, and realize that no, the triplets didn’t feel anything for the rest of her friends. They tolerated them, would protect them because their discomfort would make

her

unhappy, but if she weren’t there…

If she weren’t there, they would be perfectly fine never seeing any of them again.

“Thank you,” she said, tugging Taelor down for a quick kiss that had the other two crowding up behind her to get a kiss of their own before they left the dorms. “I like how much you care for me, and how you extend that care to my friends, even though it just makes your life harder.”

“Definitely,” Baylor agreed, his fingers scratching over the bare skin of her back, visible through the ribbons Taelor had helped her cinch—Emilia would need to design a skill if she wanted to put the dress on by herself. Perhaps there was a market for skills that could help with dressing? How to make them adapt to any outfit, was the question…

Emilia was snapped out of her wandering thoughts about fancy, annoying dress skills when Baylor continued, his tone flippant as he asked if she was sure they couldn’t just get rid of everyone else.

“Wouldn’t it be nice, to live the rest of our lives in peaceful bliss, just the four of us?”

Snorting, Emilia grabbed Valor’s hand again, trusting Baylor to catch up, lest he be left walking without a warm body pressed into him. “Pretty sure you’d have to kill everyone on the planet for that to work.”

“That could be done…” Valor noted, a collection of images slotting themself into her mind, all of which featured

her

destroying the world. She looked pretty badass in them, and admittedly, if she put her mind to it, she was pretty sure she could destroy the world with the right skill…

While she wasn’t actually going to destroy the world—as much as it just being the four of them would be fun, she had lots of friends and quite liked the world most days!—it was fun to consider the type of skill that could even manage something like that. The scale of it would be insane, and as they made their way to the restaurant Taelor had booked them at—one that was nearby and the clones had dined at for generations, the waitstaff well used to their presence—she and Valor contemplated the issues that would keep a skill from being able to destroy the world.

Valor was an acceptable, if not ideal, person to discuss the issue with—another reason they couldn’t kill everyone else, some of her interests far too niche for the clones to a match her interest or passion. Still, he let her babble, occasionally offering up ideas and asking questions that led her to fill the air between them.

“The problem is mostly the scale thing,” Emilia concluded as they entered the restaurant, amusement spiralling through her at the brief moment where other patrons and the staff of the restaurant noticed her, her voice and words near booming in the quiet space. While she would reduce her volume—more out of habit than actual need thanks to the building’s built-in sound-dampening skills, although it still took a moment to register new voices for reduction—it was amusing to watch their expressions turn from annoyance with her to horror at who she was with—the clones might dine here often, but that didn’t mean the ever-changing patrons knew it. Quickly, she was forgotten, all that remained wariness with the clones.

Poof, gone. Nothing of her existence remaining.

Taelor, their fearless and demanding leader, stepped around them to address the hostess, who quickly led them off to their table, Emilia continuing to babble about the problem of scale with skills.

Really, there were a number of issues with a skill capable of killing every human on the planet. For one? How did you target only the humans? The few large-scale skills there were—most of which were classified and hadn’t been used in a couple of centuries, and were therefore highly outdated—wiped out every living creature in the vicinity, often even the user dying in the blast because they were really only attacks meant to be used as a last resort.

While the skills themself were classified, the documentation of what had occurred during their use wasn’t… or, at least, it wasn’t to her, anyways. Those documents showed that

everything

within blast zones of substantial size—and from what she’d seen in records, the upper limit of skills hadn’t changed much in centuries, despite the increased power of Censors and the refinement of skills—died. Humans, plants, animals—even the fucking bacteria died. They also tended to decimate the aether, which took decades to fully recover, almost as though

it

were dying along with everything else.

Without seeing the skills themselves, Emilia wouldn’t be able to know for sure whether this was by accident or design, but the fact that the aether was left so mangled suggested it wasn’t a design simply because she didn’t know of any skills that purposefully damaged the aether that way despite its potential use as a defence. There were a few core abilities, allegedly. None had been used in recent memory, but there were myths of someone from the Moonlit City in the far, far north having once damaged the aether surrounding the city in order to make it more difficult for a war to reach them. While cores could be used to attack independent of the aether, most core abilities still utilized the aether to some extent, and energy itself was a conversion of aether by the core.

The surrounding aether too damaged for the core to absorb? The person would slowly run out their core, and then die, while those who used their aetherstores—like Baalphorians—would quickly run their aetherstores dry and be defenseless.

At least… Emilia thought that was how it worked for cores. While she’d spent far more time within the Free Colonies than most Baalphorians—and definitely more time training with Free Coloniers than anyone who wasn’t an undercover clone—the fact that she couldn’t use her core without making her Censor panic meant she only had a theoretical understanding of how cores worked.

Either way, it seemed more likely that at a certain point skills just became less focused, less controllable, and more just… toxic to the world. It was a strange thing, from a hacker’s perspective. Sure, Censors definitely reached a point where their processing power ran dry and errors started to appear, where the user’s brain potentially starting to burn out if safety features had been disabled, but until it hit that upper size limit—which no one was stupid enough to get

anywhere

near—it had less to do with size and more the amount of aether the skill was altering, and even a cubic metre of condensed aether was enough to overwhelm most users. Given that, theoretically, a single drop of aether could be used to cause a nuclear explosion that could decimate, well, most of the planet, yet would fail simply because the result was

too big

, it seemed like something else—something about the aether, perhaps—was stopping skills from growing too large.

So, that was the main problem: the

why

of whatever was holding skills smaller. Even if someone found a workaround for that, there were other problems. The big one was that whole processing power thing. If she ignored the whole

wanting to keep animals and some people alive

thing, Emilia could imagine the shape and form of the world-destroying skill she’d make—nuclear explosion, anyone? A skill that wouldn’t destroy the planet—honestly, blowing up the planet would be easy compared to

just

wiping out all the humans—but just rid the planet of its most terrifying and violent killers was more difficult. That sort of skill would be far too much for even a single non-dev to use. Their brain would burn out long before it finished even the initial calculations needed to set up points at which to draw aether—to draw power.

“Maybe there’s a way to use an external system to bolster a Censor’s power?” she was still musing as Taelor pulled a chair out for her, followed by chairs for Valor, and finally Baylor—the order he seated them varied, although she was usually first, and Baylor being seated last was probably a punishment for his failed attempt at a solo shower earlier. “There are a few skills that leverage two people’s Censors, although they’re rare. Connect more? Connect to a bigger machine? Actually, I wonder if size backlash would occur on a group or individual level? If it’s individual, and you get enough people involved, place them at strategic points where they hit just below the upper limit, it might be possible to create the effect of destroying the world with a single skill. I mean, you could do that with individual skills, but I feel like it would be cheating the whole premise of

using a single skill

to not make it a tandem skill, so there would have to be some sort of link between each user.”

Honestly, creating something like that, even on a much smaller, less deadly scale, might just open a box no one could close. They weren’t at war, and Baalphoria’s relations with most Free Colonies were acceptable enough. There had been some worry after the incident in Norvel that

she

might have caused a war with them, but with Dion between them, that had been somewhat difficult. Now, nearly two decades later and with so many friends and powerful connections in Dion, it was no longer just an accidental barrier, but a defence between her and the angry little prince who couldn’t take a joke.

If skills got too big, too powerful, there would be consequences. As much as law enforcement the world over complained about how few skills and core-abilities could take out a coding lavender code, Emilia had looked at research on their overwhelming abilities. To be able to take out a lavender code, even a coding one, would be to design a skill that could shatter the aether itself.

A skill that could get through any defence.

That sort of thing… Emilia understood that lavender codes were dangerous, that they were

recruited

—read: forced—into organized crime due to how difficult they were to stop, and yet, there was something to be said for there being people out there who were untouchable.

To displace someone untouchable didn’t mean the world suddenly became somewhere where no one was untouchable; rather, it simply meant that someone else became a different sort of untouchable. Where lavender codes were untouchable—at least by skills, willbrands still worked on them—while coding, someone with a skill

no one

could stop was untouchable while prepared to use it.

“Well,” Taelor said, sliding into his own seat and pulling the menu up on all of their Censors, “let’s hope we never find ourselves in a situation where our brilliant silverstrain has to decided whether opening any of those boxes is for the best.”