Author's Note - Please read from Chapter 1 to make sense of this. This is not a quick stroke story. There will be sexy-times, but they will only happen as the story's pace dictates.
Edited 11 November 2019. Never forget.
All characters participating in sexual activities are 18 or older.
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Chapter 14
Tauriz was unable to hear it directly, but Ray's memory was clear enough for her to confirm that he really had received the far voice through Hinn, not just some hallucination or assault. She urged him to reach out to it, showing him how.
And so Ray found himself stretching mental muscles he'd never used quite this way before. "
I am Hinn. Are you genie, or Hinn?
"
"
I had been Hinn. I have been genie. I am both more and less now. Please, retrieve me, end me -- stop this madness. These others cannot be allowed to keep their travesty.
" The far voice faded away, but not before images appeared in Ray's mind. A white-capped shiny dark building, long but not very wide, loomed over a few white buildings within a war camp. Many minds surrounded it at a distance, but very few ever came close to where it was within the building, and none visited it anymore. The far voice went quiet, seemingly exhausted from its efforts, but there was one last set of information squeezed through to Ray - a website, user name, and password pulled from the final human to visit its location.
Ray had just been given a rather indirect way to find the building's location, but also strongly suspected that others would be alerted as soon as he started looking for it. Ray was aware through Hinn (and Tauriz through his memories) that these mysterious others had done something much worse to the far voice than had ever been done to Tauriz, but the details remained frustratingly vague. Somehow the once-genie was being blocked from the Hinn in a way or ways Tauriz had never learned. This just underscored to Ray that he certainly didn't want to follow that monitored route. Nor did he fully trust Mac to cover his activity were he to try to bring in the other being.
Bouncing ideas back and forth, they considered who else they might discuss this without an unacceptable risk of discovery. None immediately came to mind until Ray had a minor brainstorm. If the far voice had been Hinn, communicating via Hinn, they still had at least some connection. Reaching through Hinn, Ray was able to gather better mental recollections of the building and the war camp, but not their links to the far voice.
The more he pulled from Hinn, the worse the feeling he had about this location. The building was seemingly brooding, squatting massively in the middle of a broad stone plain that was always in daylight. Things were moving around the building, things unfamiliar and foreboding to the far voice, things that moved unnaturally and sporadically yet nearly as rhythmically as the tide. The odd motions from atop the plain passed through a small number of sally ports in the surrounding war camp before escaping and going elsewhere, or arrived via the same ports and ceased motion, apparently resting for a while. Warriors moved purposefully singly and in small groups behind incomprehensible, arcane defenses carrying strange weapons -- mostly different sizes of metal clubs wrapped with unnatural materials, it seemed. No one wore armor, but a portion wore some of the most peculiar liveries.
There were so many people just beyond the war camp and its defenses that there was a constant gloom of thought fragments slowly dissipating in the sky. That gloomy cloud went all around the war camp but was more oppressive to the northeast, and there were many, many more flowing into the area from further south. Even outside those directions, the gloom hung in the sky, just not as densely as in the northeast or from the south.
Tauriz was unable to pull this information directly from Hinn, but Ray's memory copied it faithfully -- thus, she found her way clear to access it. She had previously learned of 'memory clouds' like those described, but they had been rare and quite dangerous before her long sleep. That these clouds had been there for quite some time made her uneasy -- the memory clouds she'd previously known of had led to slaughter. It seemed these clouds overwhelmed and confused those trapped in the decaying remnants of others' memories, leaving them unable to determine what was real and what had been real for others. She showed Ray simple techniques to defend himself from the devious threat, and he quickly wished that the two of them would remain unaffected by such clouds other than noticing their presence.
Looking back at the problem, something from the confused and confusing images reminded Ray of something he knew he'd seen before. Unlike the short time since he became Hinn, his memories as a human were relatively imprecise and fuzzy - but there was something there. Grabbing Tauriz' tablet off the kitchen table and floating it into the bedroom on jawhar, he fired up a search engine and started looking through images online.
Results from searching for "black building" didn't tickle that hint of memory, nor anything that seemed to fit the far voice's description. "Mirrored black building," "black building white roof," "shiny black building" all failed. Getting a little frustrated, Ray tried "mirrored black building guarded," and there it was.
The far voice was apparently in the NSA headquarters. Whatever they chose to do, it wasn't going to be easy.
Tauriz pulled information from Ray and was shocked at how many spies and people who served spies these modern humans had. They spent vast fortunes on these spies, and other cities -- nations, she corrected herself, they were now nations made up of many cities -- had their own spies to preempt and combat them.
If she hadn't seen innovation wars before, she would have been saddened, but it seemed to be part and parcel with most intellects. Only the Jann appeared to have avoided that particular societal problem. Those kind beings cooperated and survived in groups that, in turn, collaborated and survived together, more than at the individual level. Hinn shared more, but Jann lived more. It was a minor strangeness in how the mortal world worked.
All of that was fascinating, and I wanted to know more, but -- life has its own way of enforcing priorities. In this case, the far voice needed our help and had needed it for some time, it seemed.
Hinn don't necessarily require food or water to live. Their samum is a nearly-bottomless well of energies for their use. Nor did genie, regardless of what mortal form in which they began their existence. But too much conscious time without food or water for either would cause discomfort. Hinn would need to either alter themselves to reduce or eliminate their digestion processes, something that always dampened their joy in life.
With their astounding memories stored in Hinn, they never forgot just what they were giving up when they had to do something like that. The slightest thought about their situation and they knew -- completely, to a very fine degree of precision -- what all they were missing.
Humans adapt -- it's one of their greatest strengths. Over time they'd forget the good times before and come to enjoy their current times. Similarly, over time, they'd forget the bad times and be as emotionally devastated for a fraction of the problems they'd survived before.
Hinn do not have that option, but they can and do endure in the face of challenges humans couldn't begin to survive. Being the first made, they had been built far beyond what turned out to be the minimum requirements for life - too connected, too durable, too loving, too much. Over time the other mortal kinds were created, each closing in on lower thresholds of capability, closer to some ideal goal that the non-mortal had never shared with any being Tauriz ever spoke to or heard rumored to exist. All that was obvious was that each iteration, each new plan was less intensive, less individually impactful than those before.
Genie, on the other hand, could learn to be comfortable without eating, but it took a long time and much discomfort. Once they'd learned, they had just as much trouble eating as not eating before, so it wasn't the ideal situation for them if they had social interactions. And genie existed for social interactions of one sort or the other.
So, while the far voice wasn't likely to die from not having sustenance, they are almost certainly hurting in ways humans cannot fully comprehend without assistance. Few superhuman abilities are unencumbered blessings.
Tauriz felt confident that human organizations wouldn't be able to prevent us from reaching the building, or even entering it at our convenience. It seems it had been something she'd done for various previous masters with great success.
Ray was much less complacent about it. In Tauriz' past, human technology was nowhere near where it now was, and it was evident that at least some humans had access to Hinn somehow. A captive Hinn-derived genie certainly seems the least unlikely possibility, but there might be others. Even if the reality was a genie, from what they'd learned, that genie should have been driven back into its bottle by the loss of its Master. That it was this coherent was an aberration, something to be learned from and possibly something Tauriz could emulate, reducing some of her vulnerabilities.
Tauriz hadn't considered things in that light, and now was quite curious. "Master? Did you realize that the constraints of my sheathe use the word, 'bottle,' but still affect me, even as wishes using 'bottle' don't?"
Ray nodded. "Yes, but I'd let sleeping dogs lie. I had figured that being part of the whole that makes 'you' now, constraints on the sheathe are handled differently than those imposed by wish, especially wishes imposed against your will. First approximation guess -- the binding doesn't precisely use words as an intermediary but instead judges compliance at something like the Hinn level, but in a genie frequency for lack of a better word.
"It only makes sense to me that genie gain a fundamental link to some different fundamental energy or something like energy, to allow wish granting. All the other abilities we've discussed and I've rediscovered via Hinn are energy-derived and -linked. Each type of power requires a different energy type. So -- if the wishes are a separate power type, the being or beings which first created genie applied limitations and constraints at that level. Until we do get more time, I'd decided to hold off researching that to focus on more urgent matters. When we do have more time, I have a few ideas we could look into more."
Her eyes were wide, her mind whirling with new takes on ancient concepts. "I am fascinated to see your mind work, Master. Your insight continues to amaze me, especially given this is your second day as Hinn, second day aware of beings other than humanity. I wonder where we'll end up."
Ray laughed. "Me too!" Hugging her close, he continued, "This is a helluva journey we're on, Tauriz. Another thought, and then I'll let this sit for a while as we push on and decide how to deal with this far voice -- If there are limits baked into the creation of genie, why couldn't the angelics have baked in limits on the beings they created in other ways?"
"That... might make quite a bit of sense, Master. When we are ready to continue this conversation, we shall need to consider each of the types of mind separately and compare them."
"Noted, my dear, but that's for later. For now, we know ... well, one second..."
Ray stretched his senses, trying to feel for malicious intent as well as curiosity or scrutiny aimed at them. Mac didn't appear to be very active in the local area, but Ray knew it could be present in all the networked devices. Mac might be listening in, but there was no immediate indication of it. Ray pulled his phone out and started recording -- it didn't show up in his sensorium. Tauriz had been taught techniques using samum to burn through concealment and reveal the hidden, which Ray incorporated into his attempts, which brought a couple of satellites back to his attention that appeared to have various sensors and ....other ....things? aimed in this direction. No hint of samum, no jawhar, so probably not mystical, but they were sending not receiving. Weird.
Instead of going from large to small, Ray decided to try to reverse it. Paying close attention via samum-backed jawhar, he turned the recorder app on his phone off and on, regularly. At first, he was unable to notice any difference, but with a minute or two practice and drawing lessons from Hinn, he started to find minor differences. Leveraging the little differences, he built a mental model of a trivially simple parsing engine based on one he'd written once in Java. Setting up the engine to dig for those differences, he was able to create a low-power, high-complexity sensorium that noticed at least some recording devices. He made a mental note to try other recording devices later -- tape recorders, old-style record makers, that kind of thing.
Sharing the technique with Tauriz and extending it into the local area, he immediately picked up on the fact that his landline phone next to the bed was listening, even though the handset was hung up, as was the new thermostat in the hall his condo had installed a year or so ago. Both linked back to Mac, happily and unhappily both.
A quick sharing with Tauriz laid out a strategy. Samum wasn't subtle or gentle. Neither were Hinn, normally -- Ray's human mentality and approach were different from anything Tauriz had experienced from Hinn before. She'd known humans, had worked with them at various Masters' command, but never experienced the way they saw the world the way she now did.
Together, they wondered if this would pull Tauriz into a more creative direction -- her ability to wordsmith her way around some of the constraining wishes wasn't something the Jinn community had ever considered, perhaps indicating a much higher than average mental flexibility on her part.
The other option and just about as likely, would be that Ray would lose some of that mental agility over time. Both decided then and there to try to work on maintaining or even expanding that flexibility to keep their advantages going forward together.
They kept flipping into long-term thinking. Ray wondered if that might be a weakness of these longer-lived beings, as well as an advantage. It was, unsurprisingly, something to think about later.
