Haunted
Millie never came out. Cordelia even tried to reach out to her by talking to her inside me, though she was unnecessarily loud. It was pretty annoying to have somebody shouting in your face while not actually talking to you. For one thing, if Millie could hear through my ears, there wasn't any need to yell. If not, being louder wasn't going to help anyway. But it was worth a shot, and I forgave Cordie for being her typical awkward and eccentric self. Eventually, Gilda suggested just giving Millie some space for now. Maybe she would come out on her own once she came to terms with what she'd been shown. Cordelia seemed none too pleased with that idea, but I figured there wasn't much else we could realistically do for now.
I hadn't gotten much sleep before I had woken up from the nightmare of the future, so I decided maybe I could try sleeping again. I thought that I might even have a shot at talking to Millie in my dreams. When I threw that out there, it seemed to calm down Cordelia somewhat. Gilda was also supportive of me going to sleep, but mostly because she thought I needed a rest. Watching Gilda, it seemed like she had other things on her mind.
Once I was alone in my quarters, all the things I'd just experienced kept racing through my head. I realized I was trying to hold it together for everybody else. There wasn't any denying that future Millie was a genocidal monster. But this Millie hadn't done any of that stuff yet. It wouldn't be right to hold things she hadn't even done yet, and may never do, against her. Anyway, even after everything that happened, what the future version of me really wanted more than anything else was to help all of these girls have a happy life. I wasn't sure if that was possible, but I was gonna do my damnedest to avoid any more future tragedies. With that commitment firmly in my mind, I drifted off to sleep.
My sleep that night was deep and refreshing. I really had needed it and, while I did dream, I didn't see Millie at all. When I woke up, I noticed a few signs that Millie had been in my quarters while I slept. A quick check of the door logs showed that she never left, but the bathroom had been used, so she probably just wanted to wash herself up. Regardless, I could somehow sense that she was back inside my mind now, even though she was silent.
Several days passed like this. When I was awake, Millie silently hid inside my mind, where nobody could reach her, not even me. When I slept, she came out to avoid meeting me in my dreams but never left my quarters. It was like being haunted but in a strangely comforting way. Millie was clearly feeling lost. Even without talking to the others, I could guess that she was afraid of hurting us after everything she saw and was staying away to protect us all. I even began wondering if the reason she chose to stay close to me was that she knew I would be able to kill her if she lost control.
None of us could say for sure, except Millie, and she wasn't talking. After that first night, I left out notes to let her know she was welcome to stay with me and keep her up to date with what was going on. I even got her stuff and set aside an area just for her. After several days of this, I settled into this new rhythm. I would work hard all day, then sleep a bit longer than I needed to, so she could have some time to herself in my room. I sometimes felt her softly touch me in my sleep, but I didn't try to fully wake up because I knew she would retreat back into my mind if I did.
Everybody else dealt with the situation differently. Idomu and Byakuren helped with moving the rest of the Earth life-form samples into Cordelia's core. Idomu was a fun guy to have around, and he really helped lighten the mood. I couldn't help but notice Byakuren was worried about Millie. I tried bringing it up with her a few times, but she seemed to be content to wait for Millie to come back to us on her own
Cordelia was the hardest hit by the situation. Those two had always been together since the bonding. To be suddenly separated after all that time together noticeably changed her behavior. She spent more time clinging to me whenever we met as if she was trying to feel Millie's presence inside of me. I didn't try to stop her. I was happy to have Cordelia around anyway. Even though my memories of the now averted nightmare future were becoming blurry, like a half-remembered dream, the feelings from it remained deeply embedded inside me. I doubted they would ever really go away.
Before all of this happened, Cordelia had told me that Millie did basically the same thing when they were first bonded. She didn't really even talk for the first few years, more or less hiding from the reality and memories that she didn't want to deal with. Millie was way more fragile than I would've guessed from how outgoing and carefree she acted. It was a bit ironic to me that somebody so emotionally fragile had singlehandedly brought the galaxy to its knees. It didn't make much sense to me, but maybe it was that same fragility that made the rage inside her so much more all-consuming.
Thankfully, The recording Gilda had made of my memories of the alternate future was still there. And Cordelia's memories remained intact as well. The reason mine were becoming hazy turned out to be my side effects from Reposition. It altered my consciousness in some unexpected ways. I had learned some tricks on how to better use it from the memories of the future me. Although most of those tricks I couldn't really use unless I also decided to totally discard my humanity the same way he did. I wasn't ready to go there yet, because it was a one-way ticket. That was only something I would do if confronted with a situation where I had no other choice.
The most important thing I figured out was the significant difference between going back in time versus going forward. Mana was sorta like the propellant I used to move through time and space. But the fuel efficiency was different based on what I was doing. By the end of his life, future me had figured out that Reposition was really just about moving information. My body was simply information that I was moving from one point to another. Distance between those points was the limiting factor, whether it was the distance in space or distance in time.
When traveling forward in time, everything was further complicated by the undecided nature of the future. From my viewpoint in the present, the past was set in stone. There was only one past. I could easily ride along that straight line, like a set of train tracks going back to infinity. However, the future was like a massive tangle of possibilities. I had to know which one of those possibilities from that chaos to move into, which meant unraveling enough of the mess to pick out a single thread. My integrated AI had been quietly helping with this at a subconscious level. But if I wanted to really fully use this ability, I needed to consciously control it.
The reason that became so important was that future me had learned by the end that he could isolate and send just the specific information he wanted to through time. Having less information to move meant better fuel efficiency. That was how the future me had sent his memories, along with Cordelia's last dream, so far back in time. It was the most fuel-efficient possible way to use Reposition. But getting it done required so much raw power that just holding that much mana for an instant shattered his superhuman body.
After discussing it, Gilda and I decided the best thing we could do was see if I could use Reposition to find a course to avoid the Demon Lord ships. Until I could talk to Millie about who the Demon Lords really were, it wasn't a good idea to come into contact with them. She might choose to come out in the middle of the fight, and then who knows what could happen. Well, technically, I might be able to see what would happen by looking into the future, but it still seemed like a bad risk to take. Besides, I could tell Gilda felt conflicted about fighting the Demon Lords until she knew more about the situation.
So I spent my time mostly trying to figure out how Relocate really worked. Future me had relied on the tactic of fighting until he reached a dead end, then moving back in time to try a different set of actions. Using an advanced form of Drain, he then instantly replenished his mana from a nearby enemy. There wasn't any shortage of nightmare monsters to drain. So the tactic was surprisingly effective in clearing the Nightmare Dungeon world. But this tactic wouldn't work when fighting beings that didn't have any mana, like robots or even the Nordics. I would run out of mana far too quickly, and the strategy would rapidly fall apart.
The breakthrough in understanding Reposition was Gilda's realization that time didn't have the same effect on me as it did everybody else. She'd asked me tons of questions about how it worked. She was especially interested in why my perception of time passing inside the simulations was identical to how I perceived time outside. She was also fixated on why memories of the eliminated future became hazy if I went back in time and changed events.
This time spent researching together felt a lot like how things were before anybody else came around. We gradually grew closer again and more comfortable in each other's company. It wasn't that I'd forgotten that Gilda was unpredictable due to her tendency for being coldly analytical. But I definitely trusted her to be true to her researcher instincts and earnestly work hard with me to solve the puzzles this magic presented.
After a couple days, she tossed out a bizarre theory that felt strangely right to me. The basic idea was that my magic had altered the way my mind functioned. She called it probabilistic thinking. The way I understood the past was simple: The probability of an event happening was always one-hundred percent. However, the future was nothing but possible events that were either more or less likely to occur.
When I moved forward in time, I was forcing the probability of that specific timeline occurring to instantly become one-hundred percent. Basically, I converted a possible future into the fixed past by entering it as my new present. In a way, I was writing the timeline I chose into existence. So the extra mana used when traveling forward in time was not just for the relocation of information. It was more about forcing events to fall a certain way. Gilda wasn't sure if the probabilistic effect was localized immediately around me or if these choices affected the entire universe. Either way, when I thought of it in those terms, it was a totally crazy ability for a guy like me to have. Even if I could only move a few seconds into the future, that was still way too much power.
However, there was a downside to the ability. My mind had a hard time subconsciously processing all the new information it wasn't really designed to handle. And since those possible futures has ceased to be viable possibilities, my probabilistic mind discarded them as useless information, like pruning dead branches from a tree. My brain just treated them like fleeting dreams. It was likely some sort of self-protection mechanism to keep me from becoming totally confused and losing my sense of place in time. The past always had to be a single thing, or I might become disoriented and confused about what the past actually was relative to the present I found myself in.
Regardless, Gilda thought I could develop this probabilistic thinking as a unique skill to scan future probabilities. If I could see the most likely future outcomes, I would always be one step ahead in a fight. She theorized this might be possible because I no longer perceived time in a strictly linear way. In effect, I was experiencing multiple points in time and timelessness simultaneously. I was surprised when such a crazy idea actually intuitively made sense to me. Like I suddenly had a language to describe strange new sensations. I could experience being on the ship and in a time-accelerated simulation at the same speed because time had a lot less meaning for me now. If the distances were close enough together, they could both be experienced by me simultaneously as the present.
She thought Relocate was using small amounts of mana, distorting my personal perception of the present, similarly to how gravity or speed distorted the perception of time in physics. If that was true, then magic was far more overwhelming than I could've imagined. She had said mana was possibly the source code for reality but, I hadn't understood the full implications of that concept at the time.
Since we'd learned that I could see much further into the future than I was actually able to travel, it was worth looking at the full range of possibilities. I was looking for the right choices to escape meeting the flotilla of Demon Lord ships between us and the training grounds. After some preparations, we were ready to put it to the test. Besides, there was something else I wanted to know about the future anyway.
When I tried to consciously perceive all of the immediate future, I felt a pressure building behind my eyes. As I pushed through, the pressure became pain behind my eyes, which became more extreme as I kept going. I could sense the AI layer as a separate entity for the first time in a while. It was a strange sensation, almost like stepping outside my own body. The AI layer was overwhelmed and borrowed processing power from the spaceship's primary computer system. Images of possible futures flooded my mind, almost too many for a single person to make sense of. I saw myself performing a multitude of different actions and the results. As I dug deeper, I came to a single startling and inescapable conclusion.
"All whens are now."
All whens are now. That realization almost destroyed my mind. It was more than a human mind could bear. I could feel the AI layer struggling to keep up with the overwhelming amount of data crashing into my mind. I was able to experience all nearby moments at the same moment. That is what it truly meant to be a time traveler.
Ultimately, even if I had glimpsed the non-linear truth of time, I just wasn't designed to experience it for very long. The problem was my brain was not built to accept that massive amount of information. Even with the AI layer and ships computer greatly expanding my mental faculties, I simply could not exist at that nearly omniscient level of awareness. Before my mind broke, I retreated back to the safety of a single point in space and time.
When I came out of the trance-like state, I found Cordelia panicking while Gilda frantically worked on me. I was bleeding from my eyes, mouth, nose, and ears. If I hadn't already been lying down, I probably would have collapsed from the strain. I wasn't in any shape to move, but I needed to tell Gilda what actions to take to avoid meeting the Demon Lord ships.
After I mumbled through the changes we needed to make in our course to successfully slip through their blockade, I turned to Cordelia.
"I'm so sorry, Cordie..."
She looked at me with tears in her eyes. She was holding my hand, but I could barely feel it.
"Gilda says you're gonna be okay! There's nothing to apologize for."
I tried to put strength into my fingers and give her hand a squeeze, but I wasn't sure if the muscles responded.
"I couldn't find a future where Millie comes back to us..."
Her eyes widened just long enough for me to notice, but then she sadly smiled.
"I understand... But please don't be so foolish again. I do not want to lose a perfectly good servant over a runaway master."
