Day 593,

There’s a part of me that’s saying I should write a bit about the island we’ve stopped at for the night, and maybe I will at the end of this entry, but for now it’s more important that I finally have the opportunity to write down what we found inside Cloud Tower.

Floors that blur the line between stone and metal.  Glowing strips of light the same colors as the Village’s crystals illuminating the walls and ceiling that upon closer inspection are filled with fluid running through them.  Insectoid machine constructs ambling about and pulling off wall panels to reveal complex mechanisms and circuitry.  Rooms with functions we could only guess at.  Things that appeared to be computer terminals… Trying to focus on some of those words I just wrote brings on the old outsider translation headaches.

I recorded more detail on all of that in my archival notebook though.  And while I still intend to do a more detailed recounting in this journal at some point, the more important thing to this personal record of mine to recount at the moment is the message Maiko’s mother left for her.

The directions on the printed message we found outside Cloud Tower’s entrance led us to a room filled with large glass (or some glass-like material) cylinders, each with what I took to be a small computer terminal at their base.  The message bid us to ignore those for the moment and to instead focus our attention on a central terminal with a large screen.  While none of us could read any of the text we found in the tower thus far, the first message from Maiko’s mother also included instructions on how to turn this machine on, how to operate it, and what options to select to bring up her second message.

The second message was a video recording.  Thankfully, my companions caught on fairly quickly to the concept with a minimum of explanation despite their lack of technological context.

That didn’t make watching Maiko’s reaction to unexpectedly seeing her mother’s face and hearing her mother’s voice any less heart-wrenching.

But on to the content of this second message.

The recording started with Maiko’s mother standing right where we were, looking into the camera embedded somewhere in the terminal and apologizing for the fact that if Maiko’s seeing this then it means she wasn’t able to tell her everything in person.  From there, she went on to tell how she came to be here.

Much like me, her first memory is of washing up on a beach in a white draping garment.  Unlike me, the island she washed up on was entirely deserted.  While she couldn’t recall specifics related to her identity, what pieces of knowledge she could remember seemed to imply that she was some sort of scientist in her past life and not a particularly outdoorsy person.  The first few months were difficult for her and she almost fell prey to both the island’s wildlife and the shades multiple times before she learned how to consistently avoid them both.  Eventually, after a fair amount of trial and error, she was able to cobble together a relatively seaworthy raft and set sail for Cloud Tower (or as she called it, simply the Tower) as the obvious sign of apparent civilization.

Of course, she found the Tower deserted save for the maintenance constructs but in lieu of any other goal or direction she set herself to the monumental task of deciphering its mysteries in order to climb it.

She never did figure out just what the Tower was or what it’s purpose was, nor why she could read one of the two unfamiliar scripts inside but not the other without painstaking translation efforts, but she did eventually manage to figure out how to work some of the Tower’s systems, some of which she found uncannily familiar as if she’d worked with something similar in her past life.  She left other recordings explaining some of her findings, but we only watched half of one of them before it got too painful for Maiko to watch and too unsettling in their implications for Lin and Cass.

Her attempts at ascending the Tower were hampered firstly by the presence of the shades forcing her to retreat outside every two weeks and secondly by the fact that on the highest floor she ever reached further progress was blocked by a mechanism that requires at least two people to operate.  And so, she returned to this room where she made the recording and hatched a plan she came to be ashamed of.

The chamber we found this message in possessed the equipment to be able to grow a person essentially from scratch.  And so Maiko’s mother used that machinery to grow a clone of herself.  A copy.  An identical twin separated by decades.

At this point in the recording the camera shifted to focus on one of those glass cylinders that in the present day lies empty and dry but back then was filled with a clear, yellow-tinted liquid.  Suspended in that liquid was a tiny crimson-skinned infant.

Maiko.

And, truth be told, both my and Cass’s initial reaction to the recording was mistaking Maiko’s mother for her until she told us otherwise.  There’s a similarity in appearance that goes beyond mere family resemblance.

However, once her mother started Maiko growing in that vat, the implications of what she’d done really started to dawn on her.  It started to seem incredibly cruel and ruthless to create a person - her daughter - for the express purpose of using her.  And so she made a decision.  Once Maiko had developed enough for it to be safe to do so she would remove her from the machine and raise her outside the Tower.  The two of them would make whatever kind of life they could in this world and once Maiko was an adult she’d tell her everything and give her a choice in the matter of whether to continue living in this world or to try ascending the Tower with her.

The recording ended with another apology for not being able to say this all in person and with a promise to Maiko that she loves her and that by the time she gets this message her mother will have had treasured every moment they were able to spend together.

The rest of the day, and the days since, have been… difficult.   Maiko’s been swinging back and forth between shutting us all out and practically clinging to Lin.  Meanwhile, although no one’s explicitly said anything, the rest of us (for varying reasons) are disturbed by the host of implications and new unanswered questions.  If Cloud Tower can grow a whole new person, what else can it do?  What does that imply about the nature of outsiders?  Could we use that place to decode Iole’s book that I’m increasingly convinced is an operating manual for some system or another in there?  Why did Maiko’s mother go over two decades without ever telling her all of this?  Did something happen that changed her mind?  If so, what?

What’s Theo going to do to us when we get back home?

 I don’t know the answer to any of that, and frankly I’m torn between being afraid to find out and horrifying curiosity.  I need to find something else to focus on if I’m going to get any sleep tonight.