4.24: The Price of Safety

“Do you think we should tell Miratova, though?” Kylie asked between bites of sandwich. “I mean, she’s one person whom I think we can be certain doesn’t want the world to end in a divine apocalypse.” We were picnicking in the valley, nominally because it was a nice day out and a picnic sounded like fun, but really to be out of range of the intranet since Max was still convinced that we might be being spied on, it was impossible to be certain we weren’t.

“There’s no point in doing so without a timeline,” Max said, dabbing at his moustache with a napkin and boxing up the remainder of his sushi. “If we can convince her it’s urgent, then it might be worth the risk, but… unless we have actual, undeniable evidence that this is putting everyone in immediate danger, she’s not going to be on our side. Nobody is. There’s… there’s no way to explain this to anyone that doesn’t make us look like the bad guys.”

I swallowed a bite of egg roll and frowned. “What? How can we be the bad guys? We’re trying to stop the Incredibly Bad Thing?”

“Think of it this way,” Max said. “Why is climate change a thing? If everyone with a lot of power decided that they didn’t want the global temperature to rise, they could fix it. Well… maybe not now. But they could have in the past, and they can still mitigate it. Yet the problem hasn’t been addressed nearly as well as it could be. And yeah, yeah, we can talk about corporate greed and selfish billionaires and fixed elections and stuff, but that’s a large-scale symptom of a small-scale problem. That problem being, humans just aren’t good at long-term risk assessment. We’re good at making sacrifices to mitigate risks about… a year in the future. We can preserve meat and store grain to get through the winter pretty easily, and beyond that, things get hypothetical. If there isn’t a deadline for a disaster at all, if it’s all vague ‘a problem sometime in the future’? Forget it. So governments could put a decent effort into combatting climate change if they all coordinated to, say, severely ration oil and coal products for five years while switching over to low-emission or neutral-mission systems, instill policies that all cut trees must be replaced, and put blanket bans on the production of minor greenhouse gases. That could go a very long way towards saving the planet. But nobody’s ever going to do that, because if they did, a lot of people would die quite quickly. Power shortages, food shortages, and supply distribution problems kill people. Even if everyone magically survived, the massive hit that every economy would take and the widespread unemployment would kill any such plan immediately, even though that’s mostly just dealing with fake numbers that human societies made up. ‘Thirty per cent of the workforce would be out of work within two months’ is, to the human mind, a much more serious problem than ‘we could all die in the ensuing climate disaster in fifty years’, especially knowing that I’m totally guessing ‘fifty years’ as I explain this right now. So instead, we get carbon credits and often-ignored emissions targets and tax breaks if you put solar panels on your home, and mostly people just ignoring the problem.”

“How do you know about commonfolk taxes and carbon credits?” I asked.

“My family lives in Sydney, Kayden, not on the fucking moon. We have solar panels. Anyway, us going to Alania and saying, ‘hey, we have this vague prophecy that we think might mean a major disaster at some point in the future, so we should break everything right away,’ isn’t going to help us. If we want her help, we at the very least need an approximate date, one that’s coming to pass soon. And we need more evidence than Kayden’s Initiation experiences and a handful of weird dreams. That prophecy is vague enough that it took us forever to figure out, and the people in charge here will want it to be wrong a lot more than we did.”

“Still,” Kylie said. “Upcoming divine apocalypse? You don’t think she’d take that seriously? I mean, shouldn’t they at least know that their system is breaking down?”

“I can guarantee that they already know that much. Everyone knows that the ventilation system went down last semester. They might not know about the failure that let you two get to Duniyasar through the wrong portal as initiates, but we can’t be the only people experiencing problems. I’d bet that dozens of things are experiencing little failures. The people in charge are probably doing the equivalent of issuing carbon credits; adding extra enchantments and changing the empowered water flow and whatever else they can do to scale up the spell storage capacity of the Pit. I don’t know how any of that works. But I can guarantee that they’re not going to help us bring down the whole system. They’re going to keep patching it until it breaks on its own, like a failing economy or a climate disaster.”

“But Miratova’s smart,” I pointed out. “Surely she can – ”

“Okay, let’s say we pull this off perfectly. Absolute best case scenario for preventing disaster. What do you two expect to actually happen?”

I shrugged. “We find some nondestructive way to break out the spells and release them ‘from the top of the world’, so they’re dispersed and can’t explode in the birth of an unknowable magical superbeing, I guess?”

“Without collapsing any part of Refujeyo and killing anyone?”

“Best case scenario, yeah.”

“Right. And then what?”

“Well. I imagine that the sudden influx of spells into the world will be… a big deal. An awful lot of witches springing up, suddenly.”

“And what do you think the sudden and permanent loss of the Pit is going to do to Refujeyo?” Max asked. “The school would shut down, for one thing. One of the three pillars of our government, eliminated overnight.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” I pointed out. “Because of all the new witches. They’d have just as many students – more, even.”

“The school would have to be totally revamped,” Kylie said. “Even if they stopped the scholarship program and made the witches pay, most people can’t afford the kinds of fees this place usually demands. Their budget would be massively reduced.”

“They could survive that,” Max said, “but the school would be politically destroyed. This place brings people into mage society, people who are vetted and selected in advance for their skills – ”

“ – or for being born into the right family,” Kylie cut in.

“Well, yes, or that. But the point is, it’s politically stable. Within a single year, permanently replacing the intake with completely random commonfolk would… well. There is going to be massive political upheaval, and people are going to die.”

“Sorry if I can’t bring myself to feel bad for the poor rich spoiled mages who will have to learn to share their toys,” I said.

“Feeling sorry for them isn’t the point. The point is, they’re absolutely not going to help us bring this about. The idea of destroying the Pit is simply never going to be on the table. Even people like Alania aren’t going to risk a revolution that could turn into an all-out mage war for a vague prophecy of future doom. And of course, the school, along with Politikala and Sekura Refujeyo, would all have to be relocated on extremely short notice.”

“Why?” I asked. “Best case scenario, we don’t damage the tunnels, right?”

“Remember when this whole place had to be evacuated because of a problem with the magical ventilation system? We’re talking about removing a key component of the power source to all life support systems. No airflow, no plumbing, no temperature control. How long do you think the light crystals can keep going if we break open the Pit? Or what about the portals? The portals are based on individual enchantments, and should be able to run on their own for awhile, but I have no idea how long. I don’t know if the lighting and intranet can run on its own at all, I don’t know where its enchantment is; it’s probably part of the Pit itself. There is simply no way to keep this many people living an a cave network this extensive without those systems; the whole complex would have to be evacuated. Which brings us to the next question: what about the kuracar?”

“What about him?” Kylie asked.

I dropped my egg roll and put my head in my hands. I knew what Max was getting at. “Malas can’t live outside his locus,” I groaned. “And we’re talking about destroying it.”

Max nodded. “One has to assume that the Pit itself is a key part of the system that the kuracar depends on to work at full capacity. When we destroy it, Malas Aksoy will die. How do you suggest that we go about telling Alania that it’s desperately important that we kill her friend?”

“There’s got to be some way to prevent that from happening,” I said. I didn’t like Malas, true enough. He’d lied and manipulated me a lot, he’d used me and my curse as a prop for his own political agenda, and I was at least eighty per cent sure that he’d wiped my memory without telling me about it, which certainly put a damper on our relationship. But, well. He saved lives. A lot of lives. Constantly. And I was pretty sure he generally meant well, even if we tended to disagree on what ‘well’ actually was. I wasn’t going to, to just murder him by destroying his life support.

“If you can think of one, I’m all ears,” Max said. “But there really isn’t a way. Absolute best case scenario, we’re killing Malas and probably causing some other unspecified deaths due to political upheaval. See? Just me saying that makes both of you uncertain. So how do you think Alania, or anyone else, would take it?”

“Malas,” Kylie said quietly. “When you put it like that, it’s… but I mean, the world is at stake…”

“And after Malas is dead,” Max continued, “what about the kuracar then? Those two spells of his won’t die with him. They’ll seek another host. Malas is one of the best mages in the world at being able to handle the sheer energy of a spell, and the kuracar has still destroyed his body to the point where moving out of his locus and crippling his spells will kill him. When he dies, there’ll be no Pit to hold those spells back. They’ll keep looking until they find a host that can handle their power. Do you think they’ll ever find someone strong enough, or will they just jump from doctor to doctor, killing them all over the world – ”

“Alright!” I said. “That’s… fuck.”

“Haven’t you two thought all this through as well?” Max asked.

“My future projections were a bit more optimistic than yours! I didn’t think about Malas!”

“There’s got to be some way to kill spells,” Kylie said. “I know we already went through this with Kayden’s spell, but we have to have missed something. We can destroy his spells first, somehow.”

“He’d still die,” I pointed out. “His magic is keeping him alive.”

“Yeah, I know, but at least his spells wouldn’t jump around the world killing doctors.”

“Great,” Max said. “Once you’ve figured that out, you can figure out how to kill the other spells we’ll be releasing. Remember, a few students are usually lost to the Initiation every semester, and they’re only allowed access to the safest, tamest spells. There’ll be big, dangerous, vicious things in the Pit that haven’t been in a human body for a century, and we’re going to break them out.”

“Are we sure we’re the good guys here?” I asked.

“Magical eldritch apocalypse,” Kylie said.

“Yeah,” I said, “but we don’t actually know how bad it’s going to be. Maybe we could just evacuate the school and, like, let it blow up? And maybe the baby magic god thing won’t actually be all that bad?”

“It would be far worse than releasing the spells individually before they can turn into a baby magic god thing,” Max said. “Believe me. Doing nothing will create the worst case scenario. But it’s going to be bad either way, and unless we can get good, solid numbers on just how bad this is going to be and when, we’re not going to be able to convince anyone in charge to help destroy the Pit. All telling people would do is tip them off to the fact that we might try something, and with out track record of ending up in magical labyrinths and creating illegal human familiars and soforth, I don’t think anyone’s going to trust us to sit quietly out of the way. All telling anyone does is give them the chance to stop us.”

“Hey,” I said, “remember back when we thought this whole thing was about my curse, and that it might kill me at any moment? That was way lower stakes. Is it too late to go back to that theory?”

“Do you think it might be true?” Max asked.

“Well… no. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t. I have a history of being wrong about stuff, right? Maybe I’m misinterpreting what the spellthing said, and my certainty is, I dunno, confirmation bias?”

“That’s not what confirmation bias is,” Kylie said. “But that aside, if we are right about the birth of a spell monster or whatever – and I think we are – then can we extrapolate what it’ll be like? I mean, you say it’s going to be worse if we don’t do anything than if we do – ”

“Jailers have a chance to choose/ Just how much they wish to lose,” I quoted. I stared down at my plate. I should probably finish my egg rolls before maths class, but somehow talking about the imminent death of all the people our actions were going to kill had dulled my appetite.

“Right, that – but still, shouldn’t we have a backup plan if we fail? Evacuate Refujeyo and… hope? I mean, we’ve seen the behaviour of certain parts of this thing already, right? Through Kayden’s spellthing at least.”

Max shook his head. “I don’t think you can extrapolate behaviour from specialised subsets of a thing, to the whole of the thing. Just because my liver is great at detoxing doesn’t mean my brain is. A neutrophil will chase down a pathogen in the blood and appear to hunt quite intelligently while doing so. But it would be a mistake to try to draw any conclusions on an animal’s intelligence based on how intelligent its neutrophils look while hunting.”

I sat bolt upright, scattering bits of egg rolls across the grass. “Wait, what did you just say?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind, no need to repeat it. This is really important, I’ll explain later. Kylie, do you have any clue what a neutrophil is?”

“Um, no?”

“Me neither!” I grinned triumphantly. My friends stared at me in open confusion. “Max. Please tell us. What is a neutrophil?”

“Uh. It’s a type of white blood cell. It hunts down foreign bodies in the blood.”

“And it looks like it’s hunting?”

“Yes. It looks pretty cool, actually.”

“Do you have video of it or something?”

“Yes, actually.” He pulled out is tablet and showed us.

It did look really cool. I narrowed my eyes. “That looks cool,” I said, sounding rather more accusatory than I’d intended to. “Seeing this will probably stick in my mind.”

“Um… great?”

“How long have you had this video?”

“I don’t know? I think I stumbled upon it shortly after the Initiation?”

“Aha!” I leapt to my feet. “I have to go.”

“W… where?!”

“To bed! I’m going to have to skip maths class. It’s vitally important that I go to sleep right now.” I bolted out of the valley, ignoring the bewildered stares of my friends. I needed to get to sleep. I had a date with my subconscious.

Because my subconscious was a fucking liar.