My Scumbag System Chapter 728: The Topology is Identical

Skylar’s voice came out of the stairwell where she had been standing for who knows how long, because she is Skylar and she does that.

"Already texted him." She came down the last three steps with her hood up and her violet eyes going over the tablet and then over me and then over the tablet again. "He was awake. He has been awake since Wednesday. I think he has replaced blood with something worse."

Jacob came down at a dead run in socks and slipped on the second-to-last step and Skylar caught him by the collar without appearing to move.

"What is it, what happened, is somebody dying, I did the sensor scrub twice, I triple-checked the node four differential, if the gas authority flagged something it’s not on my end I swear to"

"Jacob." I held up a hand. "Pre-formation lattice. Sector 12. You logged it. Show me."

He blinked at me. Then he sat down on the mats with his tablet and his fingers went so fast they blurred.

"Uh. Right. Okay. So the reason I flagged it in the first place was the harmonics. Natural formation is broadband noise, it’s ugly, it’s a scream. This was a sine wave with structure. I mapped the particulate density across the block at eleven-minute intervals for six hours and got"

He turned his screen around.

Four heavy nodes at the four street mouths. Cross-braces between them. A center point over the storm drain. Loops that closed.

Nobody said anything.

Emi held her tablet up next to his without being asked.

The shapes were not similar. Similar would have been survivable. Similar I could have talked my way around, could have called coincidence, could have filed under pattern recognition and paranoia and a bad night’s sleep.

They were the same diagram at two scales.

"Oh," Emi said.

Skylar sat down on the bench next to me, which put her hip against my thigh, and she did not say anything clever and that is how I knew how bad it was.

"Jacob," Natalia said from the floor, and her voice had gone so quiet the room leaned in. "How confident."

"Ninety-four percent structural correspondence, I’d need to normalize for scale and the biological node placement is offset by about eleven degrees on the left hip which I can’t explain, but the topology is" He stopped. He looked up at me over his glasses and I watched a nineteen-year-old data goblin who committed his first felony four days ago figure out exactly what he was holding. "The topology is identical. It’s the same architecture."

"Say it," I said.

"Somebody built a Gate in Meridian Heights."

"And?"

Jacob’s throat worked.

"And your body is building one out of you."

The fluorescent flickered twice more and then held.

I sat there on a medical bench in a basement under a house full of teenagers, on a volcanic rock in the middle of the ocean, with frost on both my arms and a supernatural cat in my hoodie and four people who had followed me into hell before breakfast, and I laughed.

It came out wrong. Too high. But it came out.

"Well," I said. "That’s a hell of a thing to do to a man before coffee."

"Do not," Natalia said.

"What."

"Do not make a joke." She stood up off the mats and crossed to me and put both palms flat on my chest, right over the sternum node, and her hands were so cold they burned. "Do not do the thing where you make it small so nobody panics. Look at me. That is your body. That is the shape of the door somebody opened under a daycare and it is being built inside your body and you were about to tell me it was fine."

"I was about to tell you it explains a lot."

"Explain it, then." Her eyes were wet and furious and absolutely steady. "Go ahead. Explain it."

So I did.

"The transcripts said the son of Kimiko Nakano will open the door his mother closed." My voice came out flatter than I meant it to. "Everyone in this thing has been reading that like a prophecy. Like I’d find a door somewhere and turn a handle." I looked down at Emi’s sloppy diagram, the trunk and the loops and the five nodes. "That was never it. My father did not build a man who opens doors."

Skylar got there first. She always gets there first.

"He built the door," she said.

"He built the door."

Emi made a sound like she had been hit.

"That’s not," she said. "That’s not how bodies work. That’s not, you can’t, a person isn’t a"

"Emi." I caught her hand. Her fingers were shaking and her aura was leaking green all over the mats without her noticing. "Breathe. Ninety seconds. You taught me that."

She breathed. She hated it. She did it anyway, and her aura pulled back into her palms and the shaking dropped to almost nothing, and I got a whole new appreciation for what that girl has under all the flour.

Maki’s tails had gone still. That was the part that got me. Not the diagrams. Not Jacob’s number. The fact that a three-hundred-year-old bakeneko who thinks murder is a hobby had gone completely, unnaturally still on the mats with her ears flat back against her hair.

"Master," she said.

"Yeah."

"When you slept last night. Something looked at you." Her golden eyes had gone to slits. "I was in your shadow. I felt it come in through the window and sit on your chest and read you like a scroll and leave. I thought it was a dream. Cats do not dream about being read."

"Nel."

Silence in my skull.

"Nel."

I am here.

"Talk."

I am not permitted to characterize the observer.

"Then characterize the timing."

Nel was quiet for a moment, and then she did something she has never done, which is drop the performance entirely.

Your structural expansion accelerated by four hundred percent between 0341 and 0352 this morning. Prior to that window your growth curve was consistent with post-integration settling. After that window it is consistent with construction. Something adjusted you. She paused. I did not authorize it. Apollo did not authorize it. I want that on the record, and I want you to understand that a record existing at all should tell you something.

"So it wasn’t the integration."

The integration made you compatible. Something else has started using you.