AN: I thank God so much for this chapter and it is a chapter that will explain all that has transpired from the perspective of the mirror verse. I hope you all enjoy this chapter as much as I did writing it for you and I hope you have a good Fourth of July for my American audience. I hope to see you all next time.

Pagliacci-11.

Chapter 76

Brynja entered the great estate of Jon Barrow and in many ways, it was more beautiful than she'd ever dreamed it of being. The ceilings were immeasurably high but frescoed with such elegance and grace, that Brynja couldn't help but stare at the art for hours. Along the great marble walls were all manner of beautiful pieces of art from all over the empire and as she went from the entrance along the west wing, the style went from the realm of superb realism into the realm of the truly surreal. Just where all these paintings came from, Brynja couldn't help but wonder but art appreciation wasn't the reason she came to the estate. She had a purpose in choosing the time she had and as the door to Jon's study opened, she was hit by a beautiful smell of jasmine and honey.

All around the marble room, all manner of beautiful moths and butterflies fluttered about and on John's desk, sat unique but tidy plants which offered nectar to the numerous species which flew elegantly around the room. A beautiful aspect of sunlight came through the columned spaces which supported a marble roman dome. It was beautiful and yet not too hot. After Brynja had finished looking around, she was startled by the sudden presence of Barrow. However, he knowingly smiled and gently sat down.

"Miss. Heringsdötir, so very good to see you again." He said gently, "How may I help you?"

"Mr. Barrow, I came to you because I need your help with something and frankly, I didn't know who else to turn to."

Jon smiled, "Please sit, be at ease. There is no need to be so formal. What do you need help with?"

Brynja sat down and after a deep breath and silence, she spoke, "It's a blend of two things, sir. It is what we are going to do about Sylvia and what we have done to the children of neighboring dimension. I—would be lying if I said I didn't have some interest in what befalls them and at the same time, I fear for what Sylvia might do if she were left unchecked."

Jon nodded, "Well, what do you mean by that? What do you fear she would do?"

"Frankly, Sir, I believe that Sylvia will not relent in establishing an emergency colony across the horizon. I genuinely believe that she will establish something of a forward camp to advance the imperial cause. Normally, I wouldn't have an issue with such a thing, but—" she sighed, "Sylvia lives in fear of Natasha, as if preparing for the inevitable when she comes back. She dedicates entire colonies, entire regimes to countering her sister when she arrives to power and I feel that no matter how this has ended, even though we have defeated Natasha, that Sylvia's innate drive, dare I say impulse, to build a counter offense is something that cannot easily be undone.

I need your help, Sir. I need your help because you're her father and despite how you've been here in a mansion practically unknown, she'll listen to you. If we can get her to pull up her roots and relocate all her resources back to the State where they should be, she could easily prevent an untold slaughter of innocents who have no part to play in her and Natasha's interplay."

Barrow nodded and was silent as he closed his eyes and thought for several minutes. He then spoke, "Brynja, what is it across the door that you seek to keep safe. Ordinarily, you care nothing for the people my daughter and her sister have affected. What makes this dimension any different?"

"Because there are people there who genuinely cannot comprehend what awaits them should her endeavors go forward. Equally, there are those who I've grown to care for, whose very life I allowed to become part of mine and for them, for him, I ask your intercession to stop your daughter before something horrible happens."

"Something horrible that cannot be undone, correct?"

"Yes, Sir."

Jon thought a moment and said, "And the blood tithe unto the State, what was that little play then? To beseech my daughter's favor should she not listen to you? I know my daughter well and despite her change as is evident, the fact remains your tithe would mean little to her. She would see them as predetermined soldiers for miscellaneous service generally speaking if you didn't specialize them, not an olive branch of peace. But I see your point. You have Della-Robbia, and you want to spare him specifically and his people by extension from the machinations of the State. Noble, a bit selfish, but noble." He sighed and said, "The fact is you have nothing to worry about. As the forces that are beyond you have decided, Sylvia will uproot so you have no fear of that.

However, in light of all that has transpired, we are in no position to fight a war. The revolutions and counterrevolutions between the sisters have seen to that. What we have done with the children is that we have given them our form of mercy. The memories we have given them reflect all that has happened so far with Sylvia and Natasha. At the request of one of our blossom units, we have rewritten, one key memory and that is all.

The simple fact of the matter is before the death of Akiko Ishiyama, the children had no genuine reason to be angry with us. But as our engineers showed us, that simple action is reason enough in their minds to warrant a battle with us and it's a reason they have been harboring secretly for some time. So, what if that grievance never happened? They have no leg to stand on and frankly, as cold as it sounds, we have the means to fully negate their grievance. The thing is, if they continue to pick at the scab that we have given them as a healing for a grievous wound, they will force our hand and we'd have to advance some form of takeover of themselves and their dimension.

However, if one is to look at this logically, the majority of irreconcilable damages were done during the first wave of Sylvia's arrival and Natasha undid that. So, the damage that we have done this time is microscopic in comparison and because our impact is genuinely so small, little needs to be rectified in terms of the genuine sufferers of the events. So, what ends up happening? We shrink the scale of conflict down from an entire world to essentially five people overall."

"Six, Sir. You forget Elisabeth Delmas."

"Still, better six than a world of several billion. My point is, if we isolate the sickness to a generalized region, we can treat that region before the entire body becomes afflicted. That is the very mindset we seek to advance. Now, is everything perfect? No. Like with anything, all it takes is a prolonged tug at that one loose thread to undo an entire section of tapestry. The hope is that they don't tug too much at the strings that exist and at the same time, we've made provisions and precautions which will protect our initial narrative."

Brynja listened and she said, "What about Sylvia? How are you going to persuade her to not build a reserve camp in case the worst somehow happens again?"

"We can't stop her if she chooses to. The more you restrain something the more it's natural desire to want to break free. If she wants to establish a forwarding colony or a reserve camp as you call it, if she's truly willing, she'll find a way one way or the other. At that point, it would be a trial on her own actions in spite of the High Council's command. You want your boyfriend to be safe, well, I'm sorry. The Council can't ensure his protection. If you want to reason with him and bring him here, all the better, but why waste additional time and resources when that same boyfriend has the power to change his own world for the better of his own accord should things get too hairy?"

Brynja was silent for a moment and then she said, "It's not that he wouldn't come over here; it's that he sees doing so as surrendering too much of his freedom."

"And why does he see it that way?"

"The State has too much control over the individual citizenry. While our advancements are what he would love to have for his own world, the unspoken provisos that come with our advancements were a bit too much. Which—coming from his mindset is understandable. The State IDs for example or the registration of the civil-servant amputees, that kind of thing. And I assure you, while I can understand the State having such a stance in such matters, you can see where someone like him is understandably cautious."

"Well, it seems his mind is made up then and if that is the case, you should content yourself to let him remain there. The boy is not ready for our world yet and if we were to show him the true extent of it, many in his situation wouldn't know how to feel due to how still primitive and divided they are both in individual mindset and towards each other. Again, thus why it is far easier for us to deal with a small number of people and nullify our existence in the long-term because even though they will still remember us, we will be but a distant threat in their eyes. I've watched the children, Brynja, and I have to say most of them merely want this war to be over. With a few choice words from Sylvia to hammer the point home, in their minds the war will be concluded, and they may proceed with their lives."

"So, your plan then, Sir, is to let this situation remedy itself. But what if they genuinely start pulling the loose threads? Are we to genuinely eliminate them if they pull one string too much?"

Jon looked at her and seeing the concern in her eyes, he replied, "If we have to—sure. Again, the prospect of individual eliminations being much easier than sacrificing an entire world through war. But thankfully, the undoing of the tapestry is a minimal thing to occur. Our engineers and sociologists in their understanding of the children's involvement with us have made it so that they will remember Natasha, Sylvia, and both wars they waged. However, what we are fully negating is the elimination of Akiko Ishiyama, again, their only foundation upon which their anger turns truly personal with us."

Brynja nodded, "I understand, Sir. But forgive me, there is still something that I don't understand. The Solovieff unit, she was the one you gave the kill order to, to demonstrate the power of our technology to the world across the horizon. Am I mistaken in thinking that it too is a form of memory anchor?"

"You're correct, and your observation does you credit. The technology demonstration serves as a primary anchor, a link between Natasha and Sylvia that unconsciously links all aspects of the two wars together. As we designed it, the technology is so alien and yet its principles so seemingly familiar that it will give the children the idea that either Sylvia or Natasha are testing weapons to prepare something, but the crux of this anchor is that they will never be able to prove it. It will be something they definitely keep on their radar, but it also will fade into the greater subconscious and serve as what we call a load-bearing memory to keep what we need to afloat.

The benefit of all of this is that the death of Akiko, while traumatizing to our own unit, it is very much minimal in the minds of most of the children and because it has somewhat faded, we were able to freely work with the actual event and work around the event in a natural and cohesive way that upon even a second look would be more easily rationalized. In terms of the narrative, we advanced what we came to call the Dorothy Dilemma in that we decided to place the tragic event into the minds of the children, as a bad dream that Yumi shared with Ulrich one stormy night, and he told the group out of concern for her. As this is reinforced as a dream, the actual event will fade into nothingness as it is naturally filed back into the CPU as a junk file."

Brynja nodded, "And the same way with the whole team?"

"Yes." Jon got up and stretched, "Sorry, it's been a while since I've had to explain dream mapping on this level before."

"Completely understandable, Sir. And if I may ask, with the aspect that we believe Natasha has entered the Temple of the Stars, where do we stand on that?"

"The proper solution is developing alongside the active problem, and it will remedy Natasha's presence before it becomes too great an issue. Although, a part of me genuinely wonders what Natasha will do with her power once she attains it. On one level she is far too young at this phase to be of any impact to Sylvia's reign and I think that's half the point. Natasha is working her own angle and as much as Nicolette and others thought her deviating from the White-Gold Interplay, she has been working along its parameters the entire time."

"So—" Brynja hesitated, "We terminated her for nothing?"

"Not for nothing. She was going to have her own breakaway eventually but with this being her I think fifth or sixth regeneration, that is going to be progressively more manageable to deal with. We anticipated this some time ago and the entire purpose of the High Council, Brynja, is to prepare the people for just such events."

"Just such events? With all due respect, Sir, you make this sound like a very orderly process that you more or less anticipate."

"In some ways it is." Jon replied and went to a nearby bowl of black beans, and he popped a few in his mouth, "Mm, delicious. Care for some?"

"What are they?"

"Chocolate-covered Coffee Beans, a treat I used to have when I was a young man."

Brynja took some and she chewed them. They were deliciously sweet and earthy, and Jon continued, "See, we've been keeping track of all kinds of technological progression; it has been the way of things since the way of the old masters. However, to properly serve the people as The Master charges us, we have steps and even strides we make but it's up to us to master the individual moves forward until it is free of kinks so the people can use it with just as much ease as we do. The fact is that the reason your Odd would never be able to truly exist here is that he has been raised and brought up to believe that nations could never truly have the people's interests at the heart of what they do. This is no fault of yours, it's not as if you didn't try to teach him.

But you see, his world operates very much so on the concept of the pyramid. There are layers of people who serve as the supporting layers of each layer of a higher placement of power. Each layer has more powers and more strength the higher it goes because his dimension has fallen into a state of disrepair where it has the mindset of keeping the people in a state of constant striving upward through strife to theoretically make it to the top of the pyramid though this is rarely the case.

The reason we are so alien to him is that the old masters were exactly as his world was, but we understood that after they fell, the people needed to genuinely be kept on a level playing field no matter where they found themselves. As you have observed many times, Sylvia is not above being put out of office but not on the degree of meritocracy as many believe. It is the guise of meritocracy, but the reality of the situation is that our government rewards the most forward thinking and the most productive. Now, there are weaknesses inherent. We do have those who don't want others to be ahead of themselves because we all have a sense of superiority, and we'd prefer it just be us and our friends ruling the world.

However, the way the world is run here is that such a mindset is eventually ousted when it is inevitably found and those who participate in such actions, rightly disgraced."

"And I've observed, it is not the case in Odd's world, sadly." Brynja replied.

"No, it is not, quite the opposite in fact. The fact is the reason this is so alien to Odd is that what you must account for, our neighbors have been taught to incessantly question and because this way of doing is so alien and backwards as compared to how they've always known it, not many of them last here without going back on their old ways. Mostly out of distrust of what we show them and it's a natural biproduct of their world after centuries of indoctrination to ensure this result of eternal skepticism.

Take Jim Morales, for example. He was one of the very first we allowed to come over to our side under Natasha when he was a teen, not much older than the kids themselves. He made fantastic strides as Natasha's chosen and he aspired to go back to his world after a suitable amount of time. However, so angered did he become at the state of his world compared to ours that he begged to be reset and so Natasha did reset him. But so much good had he seen here and back home where it was truly on its head in a sense, that our therapists trained him to allude to his experience in our world but where the dissonance was too great, we programmed him with a phrase, 'That said, I'd rather not talk about it.'

Brynja nodded, "So, Natasha programmed him as a sleeper."

"To keep an eye on things, yes. As she more than knew the sister fate that awaited our neighbors as they are literally right next door and many of us are derived from the awakened and anguished persons of our hosts after enough observation As a matter of fact, her own independence was birthed out of Aelita's own agony as a child with the seed idea to be truly different and stronger than her host."

Brynja thought on this for a moment and asked, "Sir, I've wondered about the nature of the seed idea. Just how does that work again? If we ever go across again, I'd like to have a better idea solidly from one who's in a position to give council in this regard."

"It's simple. See, where the host body becomes locked in a select mindset for too long, where we reside here, we are able to see the host for what it is. It's like being on the good side of two-way glass. The hosts don't always realize what they are projecting but if we get sick of seeing a particular thing, the seed idea is slowly nurtured and, in some cases, can be seized early by us. A lot of us have broken free from the host but those who can't quite reach the seed idea due to their compassion, become incorporated into the host often as a form of defense mechanism via dimensional bleed-through. So, the host and the side that dwells on our side become near indistinguishable. But because they are used in the aspect of a safeguard, they have that embryonic look to them; you know the looking like they're in a black clear sac."

"So, what is the actual seed idea?"

"Well, the best way to say it is that it's the idea that we can look so long at our host before deciding we want to break free of them and in so doing our dimension, our world, was birthed. It has been this way since the dawn of time. Ever since man gazed upon his reflection as they often do amid pain and sadness, or pride and hubris, vanity, whatever have you, we have always been there able to gauge our hosts and able to see just if we want to be part of them or want to break off from them.

The thing is, so strong do we have to be in revulsion that we can potentially break free of the glass coffin that binds us. For our neighbors it is the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. For us, it is being fed up enough to where we wish to enact true and lasting change where our hosts are too weak to perform. A breaking away from our confined form but this can only happen, as I said, if our revulsion towards our host and even their situation is strong enough and our compassion severely dampened, usually due to a combination of how much we've seen and how long we've been watching.

Now, you can go the whole nine yards as Natasha did and fully break from Aelita in her grief as a child but who is going to raise such a child? Thankfully, she didn't have to look far for the the form of our Lucius. He broke away from his own reflection because Waldo Schaffer was a moral coward. But had he not been there and helped fight back against those who had broken free and formed the old masters, our generation would all have been incorporated into our hosts and none of us distinguishable from them."

"So, as I'm to understand it, if it weren't for our own revulsion, we wouldn't be the beings we are?"

"Essentially yes. But at the same time, it is something that must be arrived at naturally by us and it can't be forced by someone who is already free. Many ask why not, and the answer is because such a revelation would be too great a shock and cause what we call dimensional discord."

"So, our natural revulsion is natural, even our rebellion?" Brynja asked.

"Well, it's only natural after a certain point. See many of us who are free don't remember what it's like being a receptacle of all the powerful emotions that we had under our hosts. Some do, like you, and you can remember why you left. But oftentimes, anger and disgust are not natural for us. Compassion, defense, protection, the yearning to help our reflection. All of these things are what make us quintessentially us.

And a lot of what makes the mental illnesses of our dimensional neighbors is our dimensional bleed-through where we have seen enough, and we have devised a means by which to defend our defenseless host. In many ways, we are tangible living entities even entire personalities that initially strive to help our hosts and protect them from horrid events in any myriad of ways. But such is our revulsion in some cases that we break free entirely and yearn to strike on a path of our own."

Brynja thought on this for a long time, "I'm curious, Sir. What about those on our host side that have the misfortune of being labeled insane because of our want to help?"

"Well, it falls into two parts. On one hand, you have those who are esteemed by their society as ill and because we can defend our hosts long enough, we can get them out of this horrid situation that they are faced with and once that function is successfully formed, we become a form of host habitational refuge. Meaning that we become a guardian that the weak and oppressed can trust to get them if not out of a situation entirely, at least draw attention to it. So, for example, many attribute schizophrenia to our presence and it is not unfounded. We have many personalities that have bound to their host and have willfully fragmented themselves or made fragmenting of the host mind easier to draw attention to or escape horrific trauma.

Then there's the other hand where the person is so crippled by what has happened that we endeavor to cut them off from their misery entirely and bring them to our side of the dimension. So, what appears as a genuine catatonic state in a psychiatric ward may very well be that the person has been brought over to our side of living and they are no longer residents in the body they once inhabited, in essence inverting the host, protector dynamic and where once they were the host we become the host and their consciousness placed into cold storage until we deem it suitably safe to release them back to their world. Some, unfortunately, are never safe again and they either remain catatonic or we integrate ourselves with them and override the worst portions to allow a genuine symbiosis which results in a safer life but not at the same liberty as initially given at birth."

Brynja was astounded, "And how long have you known this nature of us? Our codependency, our servitude?"

"I've known since I broke free from Jon Barrow for much the same reason as Lucius broke free, I've known essentially for the better part of fifteen years. Which, in many ways, I'm glad you came to me today." He leaned back in his chair, "You see, your Odd, the one you love has been through quite a trauma himself and as this pressure releases after years of abuse and oppression, his own counterpart is returning to help him and become part of him once again. Because, Brynja, the hell that he went through, the hell that he never told you it's slowly undoing him and to keep him balanced and to keep him safe, to keep our nation safe, to keep them safe, we've had to give his counterpart license to go back to stabilize him."

"What happened to him, Jon?"

"That is not for you to know. If he did not tell you, I will not tell you. But in many ways, I'm glad you were able to experience the passion, the love you felt for him. Because he's not going to be—exactly himself anymore."

Brynja shook her head, tears coming down her face, "No, No, you can't—I've got to stop him!" She got up and began to run across the large room to the door, but Jon's voice stopped her.

"Brynja, you yourself didn't want to compromise the life you built here to join him because you knew the alien nature of what we speak. But I want you to think about something. You only care for him because now you realize he'll be gone forever. If I hadn't told you this, would you still feel the same?"

Brynja stopped and she looked back at him. Jon's face was calm, and he simply waited for her response. Her gaze intensified and she said, "If you are to take Odd from me, I will take Brynja from you. Set me up to go back to her."

"Do you love him, yes or no?" Barrow asked, "Because I won't destroy a functioning life for the sake of love, this isn't some stupid romance novel."

"Put me back in, NOW! Do you hear me?! I want you to—" she stopped. A green light emanated from Jon's hand and suddenly her knees began to shake, and her legs began to lose their support. She felt frozen, paralyzed and slowly tipping forward but Jon moved in a quick motion and grabbed her before she fell too far.

She struggled to stay awake, but Jon's soft voice whispered these words as she fell asleep, "I'm sorry. I can't let you take a life like this, I just can't. I've seen it done before and it wasn't good. I'm sorry, but no."

Sleep finally seized her and as she passed from consciousness to sleep, her gentle snore was rising on the richly fragrant air.