Enmei woke to a wooden ceiling. From somewhere came a soft wind, carrying the chirping of songbirds. Someone's arm was draped across his chest, and a soft breath tickled his neck. A dull ache throbbed in his temples. Still half asleep and bleary eyed, he sat up, letting the arm fall off of him.
A futon. Tatami mats. Paper walls. He was in a traditional Japanese room. One of the sliding paper walls had been pulled back to reveal a walkway outside, and the morning sun cast a beam of soft light across the room toward where they slept.
Where they slept.
He looked down. Katsumi lay curled up next to him in the futon, peaceful as could be. She wore the same navy-blue yukata as Enmei found himself in, long hair splayed out impressively around her.
Enmei looked at his hands. The black metal discs, the outlets, were still there. Their glass centers shone faintly. The events of the day before returned to him all at once.
The Flesh Artisan.
Katsumi.
The Custodian.
That man impaled on the creature's spear.
Matchlight's death, the quick snap of his neck. Enmei's heart began to hammer in his chest. No. It's over now. It's over. We're safe.
"Are you alright?"
"Huh?" Enmei flinched as Katsumi's fingers brushed his cheek.
"Oh . . . sorry," she said, drawing back. "But, um, are you alright? Your breathing just now . . ."
"I'm fine." Enmei forced a smile. "I didn't realize you woke up."
Katsumi rubbed her eyes and looked around. "Are we back in Japan?"
"I can't answer that one."
"I can," Aspentas said, snapping into existence in front of them. Enmei jumped, stifling a cry of alarm.
"Stop that, please," Katsumi said, clearly not impressed with the antics of their mechanoid host.
"I will attempt to refrain from startling appearances in the future," Aspentas responded. "In any case, now that you have both had a restful eighteen hours of sleep, may I begin my explanation of your situation?"
Eighteen hours, huh. That was impressive. Their bodies must have been truly exhausted from, well, their creation, if the Flesh Artisan was to be trusted. And the series of events that had come afterward. Enmei doubted he had slept eighteen hours straight in his life. But with his memory in such a jumble, he was tentative about asserting anything.
"No." Katsumi's stomach rumbled. Very audibly. She blushed as he looked over. "Can we have some breakfast first?"
*****
Aspentas obliged, taking them to an adjoining room where a veritable feast had been laid out across a massive wooden table, set at kneeling height. The table itself looked as if it had been carved from the trunk of a single tree, and on it had been set plates of neatly sliced fruit, western cakes and pastries, bowls of miso soup and rice, along with glasses of various juices, coffee and teas, and a number of other random breakfast items all set haphazardly where space allowed.
It was as if someone had thought up the most common breakfast foods and placed them all on the same table.
"Here is a selection of the most common breakfast foods eaten by Japanese citizens in the 22nd century. I hope you enjoy."
"What is going on here?" Enmei said to Aspentas. "Did you just make all this?"
"In a matter of thinking, yes I did."
"How about not answering every simple question like you're trying to dodge the answer?"
"I'm not complaining," Katsumi said, shrugging and walking over to a cushion to sit down. Enmei followed her, finding a cushion opposite. He took a bowl of rice and soup and some disposable chopsticks from a holder in the center of the table.
He started in on the food, and immediately began gagging.
"Oh? Is my approximation of the taste of 22nd century rice not to your liking?"
"It tastes like toothpaste."
"The pastries aren't bad," Katsumi said as she feasted on an entire plate of them.
"And the miso tastes like liquid rice, how does that make any sense? Are those eggs?"
"The cake is quite nice too."
"Nobody eats cake for breakfast."
"I am."
"Foods commonly found in 'cafes' were also included in my breakfast selection."
"Chicken eggs? Are they boiled?"
"Boiled?"
"These are raw eggs?"
"Yes, of course. Raw chicken eggs, it was a popular food–"
"No, no, that's not how it worked . . ."
"Here, try the cake."
"Don't – don't force feed me please."
"I'm not, I'm just encouraging you to try the cake."
"I agree, Enmei. The taste of the red velvet cake did take the longest to approximate."
"And how long was that?" Enmei asked through a bite Katsumi had pushed into his mouth.
"Approximately .3 seconds."
"Hmm. That must be why it tastes like chocolate, then."
"I am not familiar with this 'chocolate' you speak of."
Katsumi's eyes widened. "No. You mean even chocolate is gone? How many years must have passed for people to forget about chocolate . . ."
"Please wait. I will try and approximate 22nd century chocolate."
"Take your time, please, just don't make it taste like red velvet cake."
"Your jest is unappreciated, mortal. Your 'chocolate' has arrived."
"Wha–"
"That's nice. Just appears out of nowhere. I'll take some of that."
*****
It would be another half hour before they had finished stuffing themselves with the peculiar feast. Once they figured out they could request items at will, Aspentas worked overtime to meet their every whim. Despite his often wildly inaccurate taste approximations, Enmei found enough acceptable items to eat until it hurt.
It was certainly worth it. As far as Enmei could tell, it might have been actual centuries since either of them had eaten anything.
"So," Katsumi said, finishing a final plate of cherry tarts, "This fabled explanation. Care to begin?"
"Of course, mortal Katsumi. But let us move to a more interesting location." Aspentas spread his metal arms and snapped his fingers.
There was a horrible lurching sensation as Enmei felt his bodily position simply shift. One moment he was kneeling on the cushion by the table, the next he was standing on the wooden walkway outside the house, looking out down a mountainside. His knees buckled at the awkward change in posture, but he caught himself before falling completely.
"That was strange," Enmei said, "please don't do that again."
Aspentas ignored him. "Look, mortal."
Enmei looked. What he saw confused him.
"It's Tokyo," Katsumi said. "But how? I thought . . ."
Down past the mountainside, past specs of suburban homes and rice fields and thin, intersecting roads, lay the familiar metropolis of corporate spires, massive public centers of steel and glass, and rows of condominiums, all glittering in the morning sun.
"It is the Tokyo of the 22nd century, to be specific," Aspentas said. "And it is, as you would probably surmise, an illusion."
He studied the cityscape for a brief moment before continuing. "Information like this view, this house, and the food you just ate, is all widely available in various data archives. That is where I pulled this knowledge from. Ideas like taste or the chemical reconstruction of foods are much more difficult to reproduce than, say, a faraway view, but it can still be done."
"Hang on, is the food we just ate an illusion too?" Enmei said.
"No. Not really. It fills your stomach with physical matter, yes, but is it made of what you believed it was? That is doubtful."
"What did we actually just eat, Aspentas?" Katsumi asked cautiously.
"An easily reproduced protein mush with a soy protein isolate base, Arthrospira platensis biomass, alpha-linolenic acid, beta-glucan polysaccharides, complex carbohydrates and several other trace nutrients and vitamins."
"Lovely," Enmei sighed.
"So the taste, texture – everything was an illusion?"
"Yes." Aspentas waved a hand, motioning to his surroundings. "All of what you see around you is a complex Amorphic Sensory Magick. It is just one of a thousand magicks possible through harnessing the power of one's mind. And let me be clear when I say this – the space you see around you is the inside of my mind."
He snapped, and the world shifted again. Enmei blinked. The Tokyo cityscape vanished, replaced again by the ethereal glassy sea, the blue sun, and the horizon on all sides. Enmei noticed their yukatas had transformed back into the gray fatigues from before.
So that was an illusion, too.
"This ocean is my imagination. And right now, you two are standing 'within' me. I do not expect you to understand the nuances of such a concept, but if you survive long enough, you will surely come to. The bottom line is that within this space, I can do almost anything I please. If I did not have your best intentions at heart, I could kill you on the spot." Aspentas quickly held out a calming hand. "That . . . that really wasn't meant to be a threat. I was merely pointing out a theoretical – whatever, just know that much has changed since the 22nd century, mortals."
Enmei cleared his throat, and asked the question that had been on his mind since the beginning of this entire affair. "And what year is it, exactly?"
Aspentas strode forward, hands clasped behind his red coat, then spun to face them both. "Unfortunately, the world has changed so much since your time that the very concept of time has become debated."
Oh, god.
"I must explain something else to you first. This is perhaps the concept of greatest importance. Earth, the planet you knew and lived on, is gone. The holy texts we have say it was 'shattered like glass.' Some say the planet itself was wiped away, and only echoes of it remain. In truth, much of the past has been obscured by the passage of time, by the corrupting of information. We only know how reality presented itself then, and how it does now."
"But you must know when this disaster happened," Katsumi said. "You have records of a 22nd century, so why not a 23rd?"
"That is quite simple. Because the world's destruction is dated to have occurred in the year 2114. After that, the data archives have nothing at all."
"That's–" Katsumi met Enmei's eyes. "That's eleven years after we stepped into those machines."
"Huh?" What machines? Shit . . . not my memory acting up again. I really can't remember what happened before I woke up in the Flesh Artisan's workshop.
"But Aspentas," Katsumi said, "you must have some sense of time. How far back do the records go?"
"The oldest pieces of information I've come across in the data archives is dated to the Seraphic Year 0, the date in which the Archwarden supposedly came to power."
"And the current year is . . . ?"
"Seraphic Year 3512."
"You have over three millennia of information in these archives?" Enmei exclaimed.
"Yes. And I have reason to believe it is not fabricated, simply because of how long I myself have been around. I have experienced 582 Seraphic Years under the Archwarden's divine authority."
Katsumi and Enmei were both speechless. Three and half millennia. That's longer than most of human history, Enmei thought, how much has the world changed since then? It must be a different world entirely.
"And it is, mortal Enmei. In the present day," Aspentas held up three fingers, "our reality is divided into three worlds. The first is Heaven."
Katsumi's eyes widened in recognition. The name must mean more to her than Enmei thought it did.
"The second is the world governed by the Archwarden, whom I will explain shortly. We call this world the Overseen. The third is called Otherworld. You will probably never see Otherworld in your lives. It is only rumored to exist, somewhere far away in the dimensional pathways. My mind – where we are now – holds a physical location near the outskirts of the Overseen. Again, I don't expect you to understand entirely."
"Heaven," Katsumi said, "What do you understand that place to be?"
"Heaven is actually the most concretely defined of all the three worlds. It is widely inferred from our holy texts that 'Heaven' is what you called in the 22nd century, the 'Solar System.'"
"What?" Enmei said.
"I apologize, but that is my extent of knowledge on the topic. Any other information about Heaven is heavily biased, as it is provided from the Archwarden's church."
Katsumi looked deep in thought, two fingers pressed to her lips, rocking back and forth.
"So we come to the crux of the explanation, I believe," Aspentas continued. "What exactly is the Archwarden, you may ask? Well, you are no doubt familiar with the concept of God commonly held in the 22nd century." The mechanoid glanced at them for confirmation. "The Archwarden is God. There is little difference. Beneath the Archwarden sit the ten Wardens of the Overseen, each Warden administrating over one Stratum. Ten Strata for ten Wardens. The Overseen is like a tower with ten floors, and on the eleventh lies the Archwarden in Heaven. That is how our holy texts describe it, at least."
"I see," Katsumi said, "but one part of your explanation doesn't make sense. You called the Archwarden God, but the 'God' of our time watched over the universe itself. Does your Archwarden control only Heaven and the Overseen? What of this 'Otherworld?'"
Aspentas paused, thinking carefully before continuing. "There are a number of other . . . heretical gods rumored to occupy the Otherworld. Just as there are the Wardens and a number of other, lesser gods under the Archwarden."
"So the Wardens are gods as well?" Enmei asked.
"Yes. Deities, gods, whatever terminology you wish. They are figures of power in the Archwarden's pantheon. And the Archwarden, bless Divinitas, is not an omniscient force. The Otherworld exists, and it is outside of the Archwarden's control. I admit to other differences between our God and yours – your God was referred to with a capitalized male pronoun. The Archwarden has no confinement of gender. The Archwarden is referred to through no pronouns other than 'the Divinitas.' Not he, she, they, or it. The Archwarden may not be omniscient, but the Divinitas is our Holy Creator, and Lord of Heaven. Reference is expected in all environments. You will not find a nonbeliever in all of the Overseen."
Enmei frowned. "But the Custodian that chased us – he called your soldiers 'heretics.' But you seem to be defending this . . . Archwarden."
"The Custodian was mistaken in his judgment. It is true that the Prophet's Apocrypha is widely held to be a heretical organization, but this is not the case. We believe in the Archwarden as God, but . . . we see the Divinitas as having erred in the governance of the Overseen. We strive to change the order of the Overseen, to bring about a more just age."
"You're terrorists."
"No. And we are not rebels, either. We seek the realization of a dream. A dream which will be revealed to you in due time, should you stay with us."
"And that is what you need us for?"
"That is Mortifal's hope. But please understand that we will not force our ideology upon you. You will see the Overseen for yourselves soon enough, and you can decide whether you support our dream. If you do not, you will never see us again."
Enmei doubted that. A squad of soldiers dead, his and Katsumi's bodies specially commissioned for the Apocrypha's use. The organization wouldn't let go of them so easily.
He studied Katsumi now, fingers still on her lips, pacing back and forth.
Who was she? What had been his relation to her? He felt a pang of annoyance at Aspentas for Enmei's awkward awakening that morning.
"By the way, Aspentas," Enmei said, "why did you put us in the same futon? That was unnecessary."
Katsumi cocked her head at him. Aspentas looked as confused as one could without a face to show emotion.
"What do you mean, mortal? You two are lovers, I thought it proper to place you close to each other."
Katsumi blushed. Enmei was dumbfounded. "Um, lovers? Is that right?"
Come to think of it, several of my memories did imply that, didn't they?
So he did know her.
One of him knew her. More?
What is going on?
"Enmei . . . do you not remember?" Her expression took on a stricken look. He had hurt her deeply without intending to. "Do you remember me?"
"Ah, well, I do remember – partly – so yes?"
"Whose the one trying to dodge answers now?"
"You can shut up."
"No, this is serious," Katsumi's face hardened swiftly, emotion falling off it like a waterfall. "Enmei, how much do you remember?"
"I-I don't know, it's all so . . . fragmented. I get bits and pieces, but it's not a full picture. Even just before waking up in the Flesh Artisan's workshop – I can't recall anything substantial."
"Well," Aspentas said, "that can be fixed easily enough."
Aspentas snapped his fingers once more, and Katsumi disappeared.
"Be quiet, mortal, I know what you're going to say. Don't worry, I'm just having a conversation with her separately. I thought it might be best to have some time alone together, to explain things that Katsumi probably shouldn't hear."
Enmei swallowed hard.
"We knew that there would be faults in your memory when we created you, because your memories are the amalgamation of multiple individuals. Oh? You don't look surprised."
"I mean, I somewhat expected it. There were some memories that felt like me, and others that I couldn't understand. Memories of war, and death, and . . . Glass."
"Interesting. I would have assumed most of those memories would have stayed locked away for some time before you discovered them. Those memories must have caused you a great deal of stress. I apologize. Since your consciousness file was largely corrupted, it was the best we could do to ask the Flesh Artisan to hide them away."
"What do you mean by my consciousness file? How did you get a hold of my mind anyway? Mind downloading tech wasn't possible in the 22nd century."
"Oh, but it was, you see. Illegal, certainly. Hidden from public knowledge, yes. But it did exist. And somehow you got the data of your mind downloaded into a data archive. I believe the key to fixing your problems of self understanding is to reach back and understand exactly how. Come. Sit down."
Enmei sat cross legged across from Aspentas, who settled down opposite to do the same.
"Close your eyes. Here in this space, I have better access to your mind and memories than even you do. I will channel your mind through my own, and show you your past. Take my hands."
Enmei notices the hands had the same glass eyes in the center of his palms as were buried within Enmei's own. Enmei took his hands. The glass on their palms touched.
When the Flesh Artisan had touched Enmei, he remembered the stinging cold that came with the metal touching his raw skin.
The matt black steel of Aspentas's hands was warm, almost hot to the touch.
Through the glass eyes came a strange thrumming sensation in Enmei's arms. In his bones. The channeling cords. He remembered Matchlight mentioning something about them before, but it had all been too quick to process.
The thrumming reverberated through his body, up his spine, up into his brain stem. Enmei felt his mind falling away like sand down an hourglass.
Oh, not again.
For the second time since meeting Aspentas, the mechanoid pulled Enmei's consciousness from out under his feet.