274: The Aura Mind

Both Nicolai and Cyberwarfare were increasingly interested in Intent. One of the Memory Discs went into detail on it, and as he’d read through, he’d realised that mastering it could be very, very useful.

There were two layers to Intent. The first, he’d already been making use of. Intent could be read through the thoughts and emotions leaking from someone’s Soul or mind, and also through the Aura. When those thoughts and emotions leaked, they would create tiny, almost indecipherable ripples.

Killing Intent was one of the strongest forms, which would create the largest of these tiny ripples. Thus it was the easiest to sense, and one could even use it as a kind of weapon. A way to destabilise an enemy’s mental state, by powerfully emanating Killing Intent and thus giving them a sense of oppression and threat.

He’d used this before, though he hadn’t realised what it was at the time. Back in the castle there had been a time where he fought four Tier 1 Cyborgs. When one of them had shot at him from a distance with a sniper, he’d been able to detect the surges in killing intent just as the man went to pull the trigger. It transpired the Darkness Module made him better able to sense these tiny ripples, which was why he’d been able to do this instinctively.

Now, he and Cyberwarfare were making a more focused study. This was aided by the discovery that, by mentally separating a little, he and Cyberwarfare were able to act as—almost—separate beings, and play games of Intent trickery on one another.

Nicolai held his hand out over the middle of the table. To his left, was a pistol. To his right, a knife. He had already decided which one he was going to pick up.

Which will it be? he asked Cyberwarfare.

The pistol.

Nicolai picked up the pistol, and sighed. Cyberwarfare had gotten it right every single time for the last twenty minutes. Likewise, his success rate had become just as flawless. This isn’t working anymore. We’re too closely connected. Even trying to be separate, something still makes it across.

Cyberwarfare, glum, agreed with him. They needed a truly separate being to practise on.

‘What are you doing, Father?’ spoke a voice, emerging from speakers. Trundling over to stop in front of the table he sat at, came A3. Nicolai looked at it consideringly, as did Cyberwarfare.

‘Me and Cyberwarfare are playing a game,’ he explained to the bot. ‘It is a game of prediction. You use your Soul to attempt to work out what the other person will do, before they do it. Do you want to try?’

A3 was very keen. After giving the bot a crash course on how to read another’s Intent, and how to hide one’s own, they got started.

‘Which will I pick up?’ he asked sometime later.

‘That one, the projectile weapon: gun: pistol,’ said A3, and he could feel its tight focus.

‘Wrong.’ He picked up the knife. A3 was still learning and currently its rate of success was 50/50. Random. While he had accurately predicted which it would pick every single time.

They kept trying, and he felt the bot’s frustration rising. He started to think it might throw a tantrum, until suddenly the frustration was replaced with elation. A3 had worked something out, or thought it had.

‘Which will I pick up?’ he asked.

The bot’s Soul Sense felt closely at him. ‘That one.’

‘Correct. Which now?’

‘That one.’

‘Correct. Which now?’

‘That one.’

Nicolai smiled. ‘Correct.’

A3 was learning quickly. The next step was for him to begin increasing the difficulty. Currently he was making no effort to hide his intent. Now he would begin to limit his emanations, giving the bot less clues.

###

‘Why are they always so quiet, father?’ asked A3, staring at the bot it had dubbed “Quiet.”

‘They aren’t like you, A3. You are special. They exist only to serve one of three roles. Construction, or mining, or combat. But you are like me. You can serve any role.’

And you can think for yourself, can choose whether you want to serve a role, added the Mask, imparting these words spiritually and, with some small success, over Local. It had managed to successfully branch out and build a small artificial, coded part, becoming closer to a Module, after aid from Threat Analysis.

‘Yes father, yes uncle,’ said A3. ‘Will I ever be allowed to leave the home, father?’

Nicolai paused, eyeing the bot. The more it grew, the more independently minded it became. It was often asking questions like this. ‘Perhaps one day,’ he replied. ‘For now, we are going to play a new game.’

‘A new game?’ A3 released a pulse of excitement and eagerness.

‘It is the next level of Intent. You are very good at reading and concealing Intent, now. But there is another stage.’

He and Cyberwarfare had been studying. The next stage was what that Tier 2 Cultivator, Hao, had used on him outside the Inheritance.

Using Intent in that way required a significant shift in mindset, and significant utilisation of one’s Soul.

It was performed by moving, mentally, into the Aura. The Aura was kind of like a gigantic, dispersed spirit. That was why it rippled and rang in response to Symbiotic or spiritually actions, why it could carry thoughts and feelings.

By mentally entering that Aura you could gain a different view, though it was difficult. According to the Memory Disc, many people were completely incapable of the mental state necessary to enter into it.

Nicolai was fortunate. He found it surprisingly easy to enter that mental state. Perhaps because he was used to being more fluid, mentally, than most. His mind had long been something apt to shift and change, ever unpredictable, twisted like a cloth into different roles and configurations.

In the Aura-mind, everything was rendered strange and confusing. People and things didn’t exist, only emanations, concepts, thoughts, sensations.

Back then, the Cultivator had entered the Aura-mind and used it against Nicolai. He had used it to twist the sensations and sights Nicolai experienced, by having the Aura brushing against him shift slightly. Nicolai didn’t understand exactly how it worked, but work it did.

The counter to this was simply moving into the Aura space and perceiving the individual doing this to you. In fact, just being aware that someone was doing such trickery to you, even without accessing the Aura-mind, would significantly limit the effect of it.

Thus subtlety was key. You wanted to start altering someone’s perceptions with a very light, and gradually increase it as you gained more influence. Or keep it subtle the whole way. The moment someone bothered to check—or, if they were simply paranoid by nature and always checking—your odds of success would fall dramatically.

Nicolai enjoyed the idea of this. He liked that it was a skill which could be learned that just required a Soul. You needed no Symbiotes to perform it, though there were some that aided or counteracted it.

Like a normal person learning unarmed combat, it was something that could give one Cultivator an edge over another, whether otherwise they would be evenly matched. He was interested in furthering his skill with Soul based attacks and Soul Sense for similar reasons. As soon as A3 had grown a little more, he intended to start teaching and sparring with it.

Cyberwarfare and, increasingly, Psychology were even more obsessed with the whole of Intent than he was. The Module saw a parallel between the Local and the Aura-mind, between hacking and Intent reading, between altering transmitted signals and twisting the Aura to confuse an opponent.

Now that A3 had become decently skilled at the fundamentals of Intent, reading and deceiving, it was time to go to the next stage.

‘There is a hidden world around you, a mental world. One you can access. Clear your mind, A3, and feel with your Soul…’ Nicolai and Cyberwarfare began, the mantra they’d come up with, speaking softly to A3.

###

A3 focused, doing as Father bade. It felt around itself, felt for the hidden world.

‘Let your Soul drift and merge…’ came Father’s calming voice.

A3 lost track of time, internal sensors spinning, and it felt the hidden world. The mental world.

Father was waiting for it there. Father and uncle together, both combined as those they were one. It saw them, in the distance, watching. A strange shape like an eye.

Look away, said Father, and A3 did. The moment A3 lost track of father it felt the world shifting and warping around its body. It felt as though the floor were rippling gently. It felt the air running manipulators over its shell.

Find me, said Father, and A3 began to search, eager. Father was hiding here, somewhere…

###

The game grew in complexity.

At first, Nicolai would work on A3 while the bot was distracted. It became clear that the best time to launch an Intent delusion was when the target wasn’t expecting it. It required a significant disparity in skill to perform such an attack when the target was anticipating it. Even early on, A3 was able to find him relatively quickly once it knew to search.

That was why Nicolai and A3, much of the time, performed the attacks on another in turn. They were thus ready and waiting for the attack.

It was easy to start shifting someone’s senses via Aura if they weren’t expecting it, though ensuring they remained unaware was tricky. But Nicolai wasn’t interested in being good at doing something just when it was easy. He wanted to be good at it when it was difficult. He wanted to master it. That meant doing it by surprise, and seeing how long he could maintain it before A3 noticed, as well as doing it straight up, when A3 was expecting it. And it meant taking both kinds of attacks himself, too.

Cyberwarfare and Simulations gave him a significant edge over the bot. Cyberwarfare rapidly became more adept than either of them at recognising a sneaky delusion, and the delusions Simulations designed were extremely detailed and convincing.

In the Aura-mind, you moved with the ripples. You blended and hid yourself within them. Every living body released ripples, especially those with a Soul, but the vast, vast majority of these Souls were not present and peering into the Aura-mind.

Because of this, you could use the ripples given off by your own form to hide the fact that you were operating in the Aura-mind.

You would try and keep these ripples between you and someone else who was in the Aura-mind, hiding from them.

You didn’t exactly see, in the Aura-mind. You felt. You experienced. But it was possible to perceive others. It was even possible to know when another was perceiving you, if you held more skill in the realm than them. It was possible for them to know that you had perceived them perceiving you. It was possible for you to know they had perceived you, perceiving them, perceiving you, perceiving them. An endless rabbit hole.

Operating in the Aura-mind was confusing and disorientating. This, he knew from the Discs he’d been reading, was why few possessed the correct mental state to be good at utilising it.

But if one had that skill, they could use it whenever they liked. During combat, during conversation, at any time. It was simply difficult to do as it required focus and a splitting of concentration. It was an art based on deception and misdirection, a way to craft illusions of a sort. The main problem for any practitioner was that if the enemy knew to expect it, it was always quite easy to break.

Even someone with practically no understanding of it could learn to dip momentarily into the Aura mind, perceive the one working on them, or if not the exact source then certainly perceive that someone was working on them, and from there seek out the manipulator and break the delusion. It was heavily weighted in favour of the defender. The true skill, then, was crafting a delusion so subtle that they would never suspect, would never even bother to drop into the Aura mind and look around.

While the others focused on Intent, Threat Analysis focused on ripples. It had begun a study of these some time ago, and had gained a vast amount of data first from his travels through the jungle, and then from Phantom City. Both places had been full of ripples. With its outcropping on Nicolai’s Soul, it was able to filter through the Aura ripples that arrived, and told him it would now be able to more accurately work out precisely what they meant and where they had come from.

This was a difficult business, because ripples weren’t simple. They would combine, they would bounce, they changed when moving through different materials. Sometimes ripples could cancel out, appearing to disappear entirely, but Threat Analysis now knew that even then, the cancellation would leave something like a sub-ripple, which could be traced and understood.