Day 34.
Star grabbed the Mirror, while Marco was still asleep, and spoke to it: "How long does Marco have to live?"
"THIRTY-FOUR DAYS." Probability: 0.9999
Star groaned. "Has anything about his probability of death changed since we started?"
"NO."
Star sighed. She opened up her notebook, and flipped through her notes from the previous day's research.
The Artificers had been gathering in the Outerlands.
Before she took Marco there, she'd never been to Mewnie's Outerlands. Without Dimensional Scissors, traveling comfortably through the region was simply not an option. There weren't any towns there, Mewman or otherwise, and the Canyon, with its river, was the only source of water in the whole region.
"Mirror. The cave where we found you, where we got attacked by the Artificer: how long has it been there?"
"THAT CAVE HAS EXISTED FOR SEVEN THOUSAND, NINE HUNDRED FOURTY FOUR YEARS."
Easily predating Eclipsa and her conflict with the Artificers.
But Star, while certainly not having any significant Geological knowledge, still understood that that was a shockingly small amount of time for a cave to have existed. "Did Mewmans create that cave? Did monsters create it?"
The Mirror took some time to respond: "THIS DEVICE IS FORBIDDEN FROM ANALYZING THE GEOLOGICAL COMPOSITION OF THAT CAVE."
Star blinked. "Wait, really? I thought it was just anything related to your home dimension that you can't talk about." Star's eyes widened. "Wait, does that cave have anything to do with the dimension you came from?"
"NO."
"Wait." Star stared at the ceiling for a moment. "So the mouth of the cave is basically a permanent portal to that dimension, then?"
"NO. THE CAVE IS IN THE SAME DIMENSION AS YOU ARE."
"Okay, okay, okay." Star covered up her face with one of her hands. "So the material comprising the cave came from another dimension and now forms the cave?"
"YES."
"Okay, I guess that makes―wait a second! I've asked you questions about that cave before! You told us about the time distortion trap that was in there! The trap that froze myself and Marco in time for a whole month!"
"THIS DEVICE IS NOT FORBIDDEN FROM ANALYZING THE CONTENTS OF THE CAVE, ONLY ITS GEOLOGICAL COMPOSITION."
Star groaned. "You know, you have some very specific rules about what you can and can't tell us about."
Star blinked the moment after she said that.
They were very specific rules.
Suspiciously specific.
Star looked at the Mirror, with the last message still visible on its main panel.
It wasn't just about the Mirror's damage now: its internal rules all seemed designed specifically to impede her and Marco's attempts to get information about the curse, and about the Artificers. In fact, especially the latter: the Iris Experiment, which Star was quite certain held a lot of information they needed in order to finally save Marco, was still unqueryable for the Mirror. And even learning about that probably wasn't going to be enough: even if they see the experiment itself, they're still probably going to have to learn how to perform Fate Magic, and the Mirror can't help with that.
"What do we need to do to successfully repair you?"
"THIS DEVICE DOES NOT KNOW WHERE THE MISSING MODULE IS."
"Ugh, whatever. I get it." Star slumped up against Marco's bed.
He was still sleeping.
She reached out with her hand and began to trace her finger down the length of one of the curls of his hair. When it fell in front of his face, she brushed it out of the way. He really was adorable while sleeping.
Star frowned.
The passage of time was starting to wear on her.
The big problem was that they didn't even have any kind of checklist or "progress bar" or anything. Every time she asked the Mirror, it gave her the same answer: Marco was going to die, 99.99%. Sure, there was that last fraction of a percentage point, but Star was pretty certain that that was just a hedge for cosmic weirdness.
When she was at school with Marco, a scientist had once come in to talk about something called "Quantum Mechanics". She understood very little of what he was talking about, but at one point, he'd discussed how something called "Quantum Tunneling" could teleport an object from one place to another. The trick though was that the odds of this kind of phenomenon teleporting an entire human (or Mewman, in her case) to another position, with no alterations, was an absurdly low probability: something like 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or so.
If she were to ask the Mirror "will Quantum tunneling not teleport me to the other side of the room in the next minute?", the Mirror would have to report that the odds are 99.99%, right? Sure, she won't get teleported: that much is blatantly obvious. But if the Mirror is being honest about the odds, then it has to acknowledge that last tiniest fraction of a chance that makes the odds less than 100%
That, more than anything else, was what worried her about the Mirror's proclamation that Marco had a 99.99% chance of dying: Because the Mirror wasn't really suggesting that Marco had a 1/10,000 chance of living. What it was actually suggesting was that Marco was straight-up going to die, and it choosing to not simply report it as 100% was an accommodation to sheer improbable interference.
But there was one problem.
Last night, when viewing Eclipsa, Eclipsa at one point asked the Mirror the following question: "When it goes to trial, will my mother find it guilty, and sentence it to death for its crimes?"
The Mirror reported the odds as being 99.99%. Based on Star's interactions with the Mirror, those odds didn't really make any sense. Eclipsa fully planned to break Lyros out of jail and spirit him to safety. And even if she didn't, she certainly felt compelled to do so when she learned of what would happen.
So one of two things had to be true: either Lyros was going to get recaptured and executed, meaning Eclipsa misinterpreted what the Mirror said and then went through all that trouble without successfully saving his life; or, the Mirror was just straight-up wrong about the odds. After all, when Star had asked the Mirror about things that were so absurdly unlikely to happen as to be functionally impossible, the Mirror would report something like "THE CAUSALITY COEFFICIENT IS TOO LOW TO MEASURE" or some similar result. Even when she tried to narrow the conditions down.
And come to think of it, she still didn't have a good answer for the "if I ask it 'what am I going to do?' and then do the opposite" paradox. Every time she tried to make the Mirror work out a decision like that ("Mirror, am I going to eat the delicious chocolate sitting in front of me, or the disgusting dirt on the ground?"), the Mirror always gave hedging odds that were neither adjacent to 0% nor 100%. That made perfect sense, but it also meant that she couldn't test anything.
Except for one instance: one time, when Marco was in the bathroom, Star asked the Mirror the odds that she would try to kiss Marco when he returned from the bathroom. The Mirror straight-up said there was a 0% chance. So Star mustered all her courage, along with a dozen potential excuses she could use to write it off as "just a friendly Mewman tradition that she completely forgot Marco would interpret the wrong way", and when he left the bathroom, Star… Couldn't. She chickened out.
And that meant something, right? Did the Mirror know, even with Star actively planning to subvert its predictions, that there was simply no chance of her following through?
Does she even have Free Will?
Is the universe Deterministic?
If it is, why does the Mirror bother reporting probabilities in the first place?
If it isn't, why could the Mirror know with nearly certain confidence that she wouldn't break its prediction just to prove it was possible?
The Mirror couldn't answer any of those questions: they all involved access to that missing module.
Star's fingers were now lightly massaging the back of Marco's scalp. She was amazed he hadn't woken up yet. His tiny breathing pattern was mesmerizing to watch.
With her free hand, Star picked up Eclipsa's journal and reviewed the section on the Doom Curse again.
When Eclipsa wrote the last pages of the journal, according to her, only two Artificers were left. Star and Marco had an encounter with one of them in the cave, who annihilated itself to afflict Marco and her.
So right now, there's one Artificers unaccounted for. Did Eclipsa go out and hunt it down? Did someone else kill it off, or get killed by a Doom Curse?
Star addressed the mirror: "Are any of the Artificers still alive?"
"ONCE THE ARTIFICERS TOOK ON THE FORM YOU ARE FAMILIAR WITH, THEY CEASED BEING 'ALIVE' IN ANY DEFINITION YOU WOULD RESPECT. HOWEVER, THERE IS A SINGLE ARTIFICER THAT STILL EXISTS; THAT HASN'T CEASED TO BE, AND REMAINS ACTIVE."
"Where is it?"
"IT RESIDES IN THE SAME CAVE WHERE YOU FOUND THIS DEVICE."
Star shuddered. So the last Artificer was still in there. "Was it the one that astrally projected into my head, or was it the one that attacked us?"
"THIS DEVICE IS UNABLE TO IDENTIFY THE SOURCE OF THE ASTRAL PROJECTION, AS IT REQUIRES ACCESS TO A MISSING MODULE."
"Of course."
Star thought about the ramifications of that response. That could have been a form of Fate Magic in its own right, couldn't it?
"You know, Marco," Star said quietly, not wanting to wake him up, but still wanting to talk to him, "it's the same thing over and over: we keep getting more questions than answers. It's too much to keep track of at this point. And then, on top of that, all the stuff you're dealing with…" She shook her head. "I'd never blame you if you did decide just to give up. Because even as I'm haunted by the same creeping visions and terrors, I still know that it's nothing compared to what you're going through. No one deserves to suffer like that, least of all you."
Marco's breathing didn't change.
"I guess what I'm saying is how much I admire you. Not just for hanging in there in a moment like this, when everything seems so grim, but really, in general. I can be selfish and narcissistic―I think you know that about me―and I'm trying to be less of that. But even so, you've put up with me this whole time. That's a true strength of character that, when I really think about it, I'm not sure I have."
Star could feel heat rising in her cheeks, and she tried to suppress it.
"The thing is though… Even in spite of me trying to do better, I still want to ask something selfish of you. And I know I have no right to ask it of you, which is why I'm not asking you in person. Because if you actually felt obligated to fulfill my request, you'd hate me for it. I know you would. But even so..." Star took a deep breath. "I want you to not give up. I want you to fight, even until the bitter end. If not for yourself, then for me. Because the truth is that you're everything to me. My crown, my status, my magic… They don't matter. Because you're everything to me, and if I were to lose you, I'd have… nothing."
Star was surprised to hear herself say that. It was something she'd never thought about before, but now that she was saying it out loud, felt wholly true.
"There's another reason I don't want you to give up. Because I've been carefully rereading Eclipsa's notes, and I think I've realized something important. I have this hypothesis, that―"
There was a loud knock at her bedroom door. Star retracted her hand from Marco and scooted away from him, towards the nightstand where she kept the mirror. "Come in."
Moon was standing in the doorframe, with a relatively neutral look on her face. "Good morning, sweetie. How are you doing?"
Star shrugged. "Obviously, I've been better." She grimaced.
Moon nodded. "Naturally. I'm here to let you know that our doctors finished working with the Human doctors on Jackie."
Star's eyes widened. "So is she going to walk again?"
Moon looked to the side. "It's still too early to know for sure, but both the Human Doctors and our Doctors are confident in her chances. At any rate, the reason I'm telling you this is that she's going to be transferred to a Human Hospital now, back on Earth. She wanted to speak to Marco before she left."
Star raised an eyebrow. "Did she want to talk to me?"
Moon shrugged. "She said she wouldn't mind seeing you, but she really only has things she needs to speak to Marco about."
"Sure. When is she going to leave?"
"Later this evening."
"Alright. I'll make sure Marco gets a chance to go see her before then."
Moon folded her arms, looking uncomfortable. "How's your research going?"
Star narrowed her eyes, remembering what her mother had told Marco's parents. "It's a lot, to be sure, but we're really close to a potential breakthrough."
Moon smiled, but looked slightly guilty. "I've never seen you this focused on anything before."
Star blinked. "Well, I'm saving Marco's life. It's easy to ignore distractions when literally nothing else matters."
Moon's smile faded. "Right. Of course."
She still doesn't think it's possible, Star realized, with a sinking feeling in her gut.
"At any rate, let me know if you need anything."
Star nodded. "Alright. Thanks mom."
As the door closed, Marco stirred from his slumber. He turned his head and blinked slowly at Star.
"Hey Marco. How'd you sleep?"
His eyes darted around the room for a moment. "My nightmares got… Weird. Like they were the normal level of creepy and unsettling for the most part, but towards the end, they got really serene, which ironically, now that I think about it, was actually a bit more unsettling."
Star shrugged. "I've been sitting here asking the Mirror about things; the proximity to me probably improved things a bit."
Marco smiled. "Maybe."
"Hey, did you catch any of my conversation with my mom?"
"Only the tail end of it. What did she want?"
Star thumbed the edges of the Mirror. "Jackie is going to get transferred back to Earth this evening, and she wants to talk to you before she leaves."
"Oh." He looked melancholic.
"What is it?"
He narrowed his eyes slightly. "I still feel… Not really guilty, necessarily, but… Still bad about the circumstances."
Star nodded in agreement.
Marco got out of bed, crossed behind one of the dressing barriers, and began to change his clothes. "Do you want to come with?"
"She didn't say she needed to talk to me, just you."
Marco poked his head out. "I'll need to take the Mirror. You okay hanging out here without it?"
"I can handle it."
Marco didn't retract his head, and instead looked concerned.
"Well. I just..."
Marco pulled his head back and resumed changing clothes. "It's your call."