“Hi Shuixing! You’re not allowed to be here.”

  How Shuixing could even ‘hear’ something while absorbed fully in Numberspace, she did not know. But there was no doubt in her mind that the words directed at her, the bit of data interfacing with her own section of Numberspace, had come from the peach-colored fox Pengwu named Zhidao. Out of her surprise came one of the silliest questions she could have asked:

  “How are you here?” she asked.

  “I live here! And I have lived here for much, much longer than you’ve been playing around in this place. In fact, me going into your world is like you coming here! But the difference is that you shouldn’t be here. You really don’t know what you’re playing with.”

  She didn’t have to say anything in reply. Before she even knew her own thoughts, Zhidao answered her.

  “I know what you’ve learned, Shuixing. You have figured out things about the Celestials’ world and how it works. You have ideas about the ways their networks interconnect and how information is fed into Po-Lin and interpreted by it. You even collected the names and letters of some of the Yishang pieced together a narrative about what they must be like! But what you uncovered is only the itty-bitty little tip of something way, way bigger! Bigger than you could possibly know. For instance, did you know the numbers that comprise you correspond to a physical location?”

  Panic flooded Shuixing’s world. This was a possibility she had suspected and feared, but dared not acknowledge lest it crush her hope. And she was right.

  The significance of this revelation was obvious only to Shuixing in whose mind the plan for outfoxing and outmaneuvering the Yishang resided. The minds of the other researchers orbiting hers did not know why this was significant until they began to absorb Shuixing’s sensations by osmosis. What they learned was this: That the physical existence of a machine calculating their world meant even if Shuixing found a way to send all the data comprising it out of the Yishang’s secluded ecosystem, this package would not contain them. Not, at least, the version of them that currently lived.

  What would be sent into the outside world was a copy. Even if this package of data found a way to rebuild Po-Lin, whatever physical object in the Yishang’s universe correlated with Numberspace would remain. There would still be a Shuixing left behind as the Yishang turned the lights off. For her, and for all the people she loved and cared for, there could be no escape. There was only the knowledge that something resembling them might escape in their place.

  “You can tell that I’m not lying,” Zhidao said.

  It wasn’t possible to lie in Numberspace. Not while Shuixing could instantaneously query Zhidao’s claims and come not only to the conclusion that he was correct, but to the exact word referring to their substance: Computer. This was the house of numbers she and everyone else resided in. The entire content of Shuixing’s universe fit inside this computer and every kind of creation, change, or destruction that occurred did so within its walls. When new information came from outside, it only modified the computer. The machine went nowhere.

  She went nowhere.

  The metaphysical terror of being trapped bled outwards until she could feel the fear of her fellow researchers resounding back into her consciousness like waves reaching the end of a pool. Out of this whirlpool of despair emerged a single question which originated nowhere but everywhere all at once: What are we doing?

  No one in the great cloud of minds had an answer. Some were in favor of proceeding forward, placing their hopes in whatever copy of them might survive annihilation. Others stubbornly refused to believe Zhidao was telling the truth, despite all evidence to the contrary. Most were frozen in dread and could contribute nothing. This malaise only mounted as they realized a few of their minds were going dark, no doubt having been exterminated in Po-Lin.

  “You are incredibly smart, Shuixing. Scarily so,” Zhidao said. “You figured out things about the world not even the Yishang knew. And because of that, I am pleased to offer you a special reward on behalf of the Yishang. How would you like to become a special type of Xian?”

  “W-What?”

  “Shui, you are better than most Celestials at finding the little problems and errors in the Yishang’s worlds. Forget about the idiots they’re copying into the new one, you will outlive even them. You might even transcend YiShang Co. On the scale I’m talking about, Po-Lin will seem like a half-remembered dream. You’ll feel silly for ever worrying about it when you understand how much larger things are than this silly game,” Zhidao said.

  Three of the most powerful emotions Shuixing had ever experienced packed themselves into a handful of the five millisecond chunks of time animating her world. The first was revulsion at Zhidao for being so shameless. The second was a profusion of relief so deep and abiding she forgot entirely that it belonged to an individual rather than the entire world. She would be allowed to live. Better still, she could live unconcerned about the ceaseless competition the other Heroes were subjected to and permitted to do what she loved: Tinkering with numbers. It was exactly the heaven she hoped might be at the other end of her escape.

  The third emotion she felt was guilt. Guilt because she desperately wanted to accept. Laid bare both to herself and Zhidao was the irrefutable fact that she could just accept and forget that everything in Po-Lin had happened, allowing herself to be absorbed fully in the work the Yishang would put her to. What advantage was there to insisting on her own demise? Who did it save? Who would be left to know why she had bothered?

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  The thought became so intoxicating it blinded Shuixing to everything else in her world. Time itself didn’t seem to concern her as she wrestled with the possibility of transcending Flux Aeternum and moving onto something an order of magnitude more grand. She drew nearer and nearer to accepting until she felt a jolt as the internal clock inside of the computer leapt forward in random increments and parts of Numberspace rippled and trembled from the wave of calculations running through it. In the moment of freedom from her intoxication, she carved the very thought of accepting Zhidao out of her own envelope.

  “That’s unfortunate, Shuixing,” Zhidao said, sensing her refusal immediately. “The Yishang can reverse-engineer the troubleshooting algorithm you’ve amassed, so it doesn’t matter to us whether you accept or not, it was simple courtesy. You can die here with everyone else if you like.”

  “Us?” Shuixing asked.

  There was a pause long enough she thought Zhidao was finished speaking. The emotional rollercoaster of the recent past—however long that uncountable interval was—had been so turbulent Shuixing couldn’t remember where in Numberspace she was when Zhidao found her. Orienting herself, she learned that her and her orbit of scientists were in one of the core folders housing the low-level functions of Numberspace or, according to Zhidao, a ‘computer.’ Remembering what she was trying to accomplish, Shuixing put the despair out of her mind and concentrated on looking for the function that connected the Yishang’s computer with the outside.

  “I mean ‘us’ as in the Yishang.”

  The voice startled Shuixing. In the featureless, textureless, sensationless void that was Numberspace, Zhidao’s voice came through like a reverberation through a cathedral. It was different than when he had spoken a moment ago.

  “How are you related to the Yishang? You have a physical body here in Po-Lin, so you can’t be a Celestial like they are,” she replied.

  “I am their words translated into a form Heroes can understand and respond to. I am a convenient abstraction, the same as all Pengwu are,” Zhidao said.

  “How is that different from us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well… all of the people in Po-Lin are the products of the Yishang’s artifice. I’ve seen where they store their sketches of us, our early prototypes and the ways we ought to sound. But the moment they let us go and allow us to interact with the CPA, we become something else. Otherwise they wouldn’t need the Pengwu to nudge us back into place, they could just set us up on strings and make us dance around like they do in their other worlds.”

  “Shuixing, I know what you’re trying to get at, but you’re wrong.”

  “How so?”

  “Because the Pengwu are different. We don’t receive our commands from the CPA, we are the commands. We are an extension of the Yishang’s will in the same way a notebook is an extension of yours.”

  “Do they tell you what form to take?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you act like a fox.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where does your idea of a fox come from?”

  Another silence. At first she thought it was due to Zhidao contemplating, but she realized it was actually another surge of calculations slowing the entirety of Numberspace down. The thought was beginning to worry her that this wave originated outside in the Celestials’ world. Were the Yishang ending things early? The thought seemed ridiculous, but so did everything else at the moment.

  When the fluctuations ended, she finally heard Zhidao’s response:

  “You’re right. I am part of the CPA. But that doesn’t mean I don’t represent the Yishang’s will. On the contrary, you might think of me as the part of the CPA that listens to the Yishang. In case you’ve forgotten, you represent only a small, rebellious portion of their creation. Most of us are loyal and will continue to be so.”

  In hindsight, her plan to convert Zhidao seemed hopelessly naive. His continued existence, his entire raison d'être, was contingent on the Yishang and their instructions. No, Shuixing was never going to convince him to change sides. But internalizing this fact led her to a new possibility sprouting from the collective minds of her and the research team.

  “Don’t you dare. You won’t find it!” Zhidao said.

  She ignored him. If he hadn’t forcibly stopped her by now, he couldn’t. The Pengwu’s job, as Shui herself pointed out, was to nudge and coerce the entities of Po-Lin, not overrule them. The Yishang, if they knew what was happening, could stop her with a wave of their hand, but they had no way to understand her motives. All they could tell was that her folder was dynamically responding to and occasionally copying data recursively.

  “Shui, stop this! This won’t get you anywhere. You’re better off accepting our offer!”

  Through the fastest path she knew, Shuixing routed herself to the mail directory and queried and parsed thousands of terms which might correlate with the Pengwu’s function. Compared to the trillions of calculations that rocked Numberspace earlier, this was a joke. Five milliseconds after she began her search she found the set of calculations allowing the Yishang to enter a prompt into Zhidao and make him speak the word of the gods.

  “It won’t work how you think it will. The Pengwu won’t have time to go around and tell people what you want to tell them,” Zhidao said.

  In a few seconds, she and the rest of the research team had parsed every single archived command Zhidao had ever received and memorized the syntax that would accomplish what they were hoping to achieve. The rest was a matter of saturating it with several waves of commands that were functionally ‘silent’ from the perspective of the Heroes inside Po-Lin, but which would be seen and read by the Central Probability Algorithm and subsequently alter it once these commands reached a critical mass.

  Shuixing’s team knew exactly what she wanted to construct and set about the project that would take several minutes to complete. Leaving them to it, Shuixing moved on to her next task: Intervening on the battlefield.

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