The Simulacrum

Book 3 Extra 2: Time-travel, gods, pineapple pizza, and other assorted impossibilities

"You really made this place your own," I mused aloud as I entered Labcoat Guy's room, which originally used to be the kitchen of the mess hall that got repurposed into his workshop. The chamber in front of me was already completely refurbished into a living room, with one corner hidden behind a plain wooden folding screen hiding the man's currently quite messy bed behind it. As for the living area, it had a couple of amenities, like a bookshelf, a desk, and a dining table, but it was generally fairly simple, with all the furniture being cheap but sturdy ready-to-assemble stuff I bought in a local shop.

"Ki-hi-hi! Your minions have been a lot of help," Labcoat Guy, currently wearing a hoodie and sweatpants instead of his usual garments, told me while unsubtly eyeing the large, rectangular black bag I had in my hand.

"Don't call them minions," I warned him as I simultaneously placed said bag onto the table. For a moment, he looked quite perplexed.

"But the girl who sometimes turns into a fox also called them that," he noted in response, and I couldn't help but let out a sigh.

"She is just weird like that. You don't have to follow her example."

"Oh. Okay."

His reply was pretty damn absent-minded, with his eyes still completely glued to the bag, so I decided not to keep him in suspense any longer. With one motion I opened the zipper on the side, and no sooner than I did that, the other inhabitant of the place immediately barged in as well.

"Master, my airborne chemical analysis system detected elevated levels of pizza-particles. I wish to investigate."

Translation: I smelled pizza! I want some too!

"Can you even eat this?" I inquired while taking out the first of three boxes, and I'm not going to lie, I was feeling a little awkward at the moment. I mean, I was used to being in the center of attention, but the sentai duo was looking at me like I was holding the Holy Grail or something...

"Of course I can eat it," Galatea declared, then walked over and sat down at the table without any further ado. "I'm capable of performing most biological functions of the human body, including tasting, digestion, tasting, perspiration, tasting, intercourse, and tasting."

I responded with a slightly wooden "Too much information," and handed the first flat box over to her, followed by the second one, which I gave to the still standing Fred.

"Finally, some proper food!" he exclaimed with almost childlike glee, sat down, and then immediately frowned when he opened the lid. "Wait, this can't be... there shouldn't be pineapple on this!"

"Wait, that's Karukk's," I cut in in a hurry and I quickly swiped the box from his hand before replacing it with the last one in the bag.

"Karukk? Is he the one with the spear?" the currently not particularly mad scientist pondered aloud as he opened the second box, and his face immediately lit up when he saw the pepperonis inside.

"No, master. That is Mister Brang. Mister Karukk is the one on whose shoulder the shapeshifter often rides."

"Really? I still have a hard time telling them apart." After saying so, Fred bit into a slice, and he let out a borderline creepy gasp of pleasure. "Aaaaah! Finally! I thought I would spend the rest of my life without ever having another taste of this!"

"I'm glad you are happy about this, but I hope you are aware that I didn't come over just to deliver you some food."

"Ki-hi-hi! Of course, boss! Sit down and let's talk."

He didn't need to say it twice, but first I packed up the pineapple pizza so that it wouldn't get cold and only then did I take a seat at their table.

"In that case, I await your report."

"Ki-hi-hi! We are actually doing way better than I could have ever hoped, and it is all thanks to your generous patronage!" Fred declared as he used a half-eaten slice of pizza to point at me. "The generator upgrade is practically ready to go, we are only waiting for the minio khm, I mean, the 'staff' to finish building the plumbing system so that we could utilize the byproduct water!"

"They are really hard workers," Galatea noted between two tiny bites out of her own slice. "I never expected that Abyssal shock troopers would have such talent for construction. I had to discard my entire prejudice library master programmed into me."

"That makes two of us, and... what was that about prejudice again?"

"I did no such thing!" Labcoat Guy objected quite vehemently to my question. "Those were perfectly legitimate protocols! Fauns are dangerous! Well, maybe not the ones living here, but the ones not allied to the boss can still be a threat!"

The gynoid gave her maker an odd look before shaking her head and telling us, "It appears my joke subroutine just crashed. I will have to send a crash report later."

"How about we leave it at that and talk about more productive things instead?" I spoke up and tapped my fingers against the table. "How is the research into magic proceeding?"

"Erm... It's proceeding well, I suppose?" Labcoat Guy answered a little hesitantly. "A little too well, even."

"What master is trying to say is that we made large strides, but our conclusions are so evident he is worried about why no one else has made the same observations."

"Thank you Galatea, that's exactly what I tried to say," Fred responded in a rare display of harmony between the two. "That's more or less it. Granted, we are in a unique situation where we had the opportunity to examine the mystic techniques of the three winged races from up close, and the kids were really accommodating during the tests, but I'm still afraid we might've put the cart before the horse."

"Please stop beating around the bush and tell me what you found."

"Well... The basic magic theory of the magi says that to use mystic arts, one must follow certain pre-determined formulas, use the power of the ley-lines, or, failing that, ambient mana as fuel, and then use their own power as the primer to initiate the spell. Once that happens, it creates a phenomenon that is capable of breaking the rules of common physics."

"It is like a combustion engine," Galatea added in a serious tone. "In this analogy, the mage's own power would be the spark plug, the spell would be the engine itself, while the mana is analogous to gasoline. Individually neither of them is that useful, but when combined, the power of small explosions can be harnessed and turned into effective work in ways that should be impossible otherwise."

"We considered this to be common sense until now, but the way Celestial magic works don't seem to use any of these principles, and let's not even talk about the sigils your step-sister makes! None of what they do should work, yet they do! It was maddening!"

"To stay with the analogy, it would be as if you had a car that you could drive around the city block, but when you stopped and opened up the hood, the entire engine block would be missing."

Would this be a good moment to point out I was getting annoyed by her interruptions? Not because they were unhelpful, but because her analogies made much more sense than mine...

"Ki-hi-hi! But then we had a breakthrough! It was all thanks to your help, boss!" Fred declared while waving another slice of pizza with a bite mark in it. "We started working backward: instead of trying to figure out how each of those mystic techniques worked, we decided to look at the effects first, thinking that if we found a common point between them, we may be able to trace it back to how they could reach the same end-point with different methodology, and that's when something clicked into place! On the day we signed our contract you talked about how reality should have these layers beyond the physical and how it would be linked to the mystic arts, and I didn't understand what you meant at the time, but it all of a sudden gave me an inspiration: what if none of the mystic arts actually affected reality, but instead they all created an effect by essentially tricking the universe into correcting a non-existent error?"

"To illustrate," Galatea said as she stood up and walked a couple of steps away from the table. "Let's say I want to teleport from here to the other side of the room. Common sense says that it is one of the most complex mystic arts in existence because it requires one to completely bend space-time to connect two points."

"Except, as you have demonstrated in the past, it's not all that difficult," Labcoat Guy added as he picked up another slice from his box.

"Our current hypothesis says that, instead of directly affecting reality, teleportation spells instead trick the universe into believing that the item or person being teleported is already at another place." While saying so, Galatea walked over to the other side of the room, and continued with, "Instead of turning myself into pure energy and moving to another location, or breaking space itself, I simply tell the world 'I was actually over here all along'."

"At which point the world goes 'Oh snap, I accidentally misplaced her! Let's quickly move her to the right position!'" Labcoat Guy exclaimed with a flair for the dramatic.

So, according to these guys, all magic, regardless of the method, ultimately affected the supernatural stratum, which then had a corresponding effect in the 'real world'. That wasn't anything new, though the idea of 'tricking' the world and the Simulacrum itself doing the heavy lifting made a lot of sense.

"Let me ask something, though it may seem obvious to you: why is that teleporting normally costs so much, but something like creating matter out of nowhere seems to be dead simple?"

"It's due to permanence," Galatea answered in her master's stead, as his mouth was currently full. "Both evocation, which is the discipline of creating physical phenomena, and conjuration, which summons objects based on predetermined parameters, are limited by either time or mana consumption."

"That is to say if you cast a spell to create a ball of fire," Fred picked the conversation up where the android dropped it while making swirling gestures with his hands, "it would only exist while you maintained a steady supply of mana. Same for other objects, such as Amelia's golem. Once you run out of juice, the world would recognize the phenomena you created as a 'mistake' instead and erase them. However, when someone teleports to another location, the spell has to permanently rewrite reality, and therefore it needs way more power! It's probably the reason why only the magi have a functional teleport spell, as the mana cost is so high only a fully tapped ley-line could support it."

"I see," I responded, but before I could say anything else, Labcoat Guy continued on completely unabated.

"Incidentally, our hypothesis could also explain the reason behind the existence of the Three Impossible Magicks! You wanted to know about those as well, right, boss?" I nodded in the affirmative, and Fred immediately crossed his arms with a grin in response. "Ki-hi-hi! If we presume that instead of 'changing the world', mystic arts make the world temporarily change itself in response to a perceived error, then they make perfect sense. Permanently creating and destroying matter should be impossible simply because the amount of power required to perpetually trick the world would be so astronomical there simply isn't enough mana in the universe to do it! As for traveling through time, it would require for the caster to functionally disappear from the present, which would essentially be the same as erasing themselves and would run into the same mana-requirement issue as before!"

"And what about the 'no resurrection' rule?"

"According to our hypothesis," Galatea answered me, "It is due to the existence of souls. They are currently still not entirely understood due to technical limitations making interacting with them exceedingly difficult. However, if they do exist, we presume that they would be also within the same layer of the world that mystic arts interact with."

"However, if the soul disappears after someone dies, then there is nothing to interact with, which in turn would make bringing the dead back impossible. It makes perfect sense," Fred concluded with a proud smirk, and I couldn't help but nod.

He was right. It made perfect sense. Too much sense.

Ever since I first learned about the three things even magic couldn't do, I immediately recognized them for what they were: common sense writing guidelines. Bringing back the dead was a surefire way to deflate all tension in a story, time travel was a messy plot device that tended to create paradoxes left and right, while respecting the conservation of mass and energy was to explain why scarcity was a thing in the world when otherwise anyone with access to magic should be both infinitely wealthy and powerful.

In retrospect, the main reason why I wanted these two to look into the subject was because I was sure that such arbitrary rules would create some seams through which we could get a glimpse behind the curtain, but instead everything was wrapped up perfectly sensibly with a neat little bow on top. I would be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed.

"What about transmutation?"

"The same rules apply," Fred replied off-handedly.

"What about Ichiko then?"

"Shapeshifting is a different discipline," Galatea pointed out, though it didn't really answer my question.

"Switching between multiple forms that belong to the same being is different from modifying the shape or composition of something on the fly," her creator elaborated after finally finishing up his food and letting out a content sigh. "That is why shapeshifting is considered to be a different type of mystic art altogether. It is mainly practiced by the winged ones, who naturally have at least two forms."

"What about objects? Is it possible to, say, create a sword that can be instantly transformed into a spear when needed?"

"It is theoretically possible, but only if one of the shapes is a temporary form. Permanently changing the shape of an object runs into the same prohibitive mana requirements as creating or annihilating matter would."

At this point I fell silent for a while as I digested their words, a period that Galatea used to finish up her share of the food as well. Honestly, if I didn't see her hands detach on a hinge and then firing a beam from her forearm, I would've had a hard time believing she wasn't a run-of-the-mill (if slightly weird) human.

But putting her and her appetite aside, there was one last nagging question on my mind that I just had to ask.

"Okay, so here's a theoretical scenario for you: what if someone could take something simple, like a teacup, and somehow change it into another cup without actually being able to use magic or interacting with the supernatural substrate in the process? Also, said change would be most likely permanent."

"You mean without any mystic arts?" Labcoat Guy asked, and I gave him a nod. "That should be impossible."

"Yes, but that's kind of the point," I stressed. "Can you think of any way by which it could be done without invoking magic?"

"No, not at all," he denied it on the spot. "If something like that ever happened, it would completely destroy our current working theory, or at the very least we would need to completely revise it from the ground up."

"I see. So, what would you tell to someone claiming that there is a person who 'theoretically' could do it? Furthermore, they could personally guarantee that this person could do so without using any magic whatsoever?"

The duo sitting in front of me remained silent for a long time, to the point I was getting a little nervous. Then, at last, Galatea opened her mouth to say, "I would tell them that my probability subroutines say that there is a ninety-three percent chance they were deceived, a six percent chance they were mistaken in their assessment, and one percent chance that they met a god."

"Well, aren't you overdramatic," I grumbled, but the fembot appeared to be entirely serious.

"Ki-hi-hi. In our community of mystics, a 'god' refers to a person capable of doing something that is completely impossible. In other words, they could create a miracle," Labcoat Guy explained to me with a grin.

"Do people like that exist?"

"Ki-hi-hi! No, of course not!" he exclaimed, his grin so wide it threatened to spill off his face. "That's why they are called 'gods'!"

"It's a so-called in-joke only master finds funny. I apologize in his stead for his terrible sense of humor."

"What? It was your joke in the first place!"

"My hard drive contains no record of such a thing."

"You don't even have a hard drive!"

I could already see this turning into yet another one of their silly endless arguments, so I decided to cut my losses and call it a day.

"I suppose this is as good a point as any to finish our discussion for the day. I still have a pizza to deliver, so I will take my leave now. Please give me a written report of what we just discussed before the end of the week."

After saying that I stood up and tried to leave, only to be stopped in my tracks right away.

"Wait, boss! Before you leave, there is one last thing!"

"Yes?"

"So errm I'd like to ask for advance payment."

"A what now?"

"Master wishes to collect his monthly spondulix allowance now," the fembot added, earning herself a blood-chilling glare from the man, which disappeared the moment he looked back at me.

"We have been living down here for a while, and while the accommodations and the research environment are good, we are sorely lacking in entertainment. I understand that the Fauns don't really need it, but we do, so I wanted to ask for an advance so that we could maybe buy a TV and a video cassette player."

At first I wasn't entirely sure he was serious, but he seemed sincere enough, so let out a long breath and told him, "I'll see what I can do."

"Thanks, boss. You see, Galatea? I told you he would agree."

It was at this point that I left the pair behind, crossed the workshop, and it was only when I reached the main hall that I let the pent-up breath trapped in my throat escape. In conclusion, today I learned a lot about magic, ascertained that my research team was on the right track, and I was told I don't exist.

I didn't really know how to feel about that, but for now, I decided to let it go and deliver Karukk's pineapple pizza before it would go completely cold. Pondering about the nature of magic, the supernatural layer, and nonexistent gods could wait until after that.