Some scenes and characters just sort of force themselves in. In all my stories, there have been things I never planned, ones that seemingly wrote themselves — and when I look back, I like the result better than my original plans. This story is no exception.

And whoa, this chapter ran quite a little longer than I intended...

Chapter 4
ANOMALY

Deduction

"All right, all right, all right," Norm mumbled, walking around the cave in a circle waving his arms. "Let's get this straight, I told you, I have no idea why the hidden door opened when it did. Maybe because I touched it, maybe... Neytiri, you walked past that cliff many times, didn't you? Did you ever notice anything unusual about it?"

Neytiri shook her head.

"Fine." Norm stopped in the middle of the room, standing with his legs spread and looking up. "Um, what attracted you to that wall?"

Um scratched her temple and leaned on a relatively dust-free portion of the cave wall. "Um does not know exactly. Um was getting bored with the discussion about Eywa, the rock was smooth, so Um thought it was good for leaning."

"Hmm, riiight..." Norm moved his legs together again. "Quite a situation here. Who knows how many more such discoveries we'll make accidentally? Or maybe... maybe not accidentally. Neytiri, I heard you that day once," he wrinkled his forehead, "saying something about... subtle... what was it that you said? Eywa subtle something..."

"Eywa works in subtle ways, I said," reminded Neytiri. What does this have to do with our discovery?

"Exactly! So what if... no, no, that's just a hypothesis. If Um was, well, not pointed, but slightly nudged... Or it could be an accident indeed. Right, Neytiri, I think it's time for you to make that contact with Eywa that you planned, while I look at you sitting under the tree and try to make sense out of this new information." He glanced at the strange humanoid skeleton again. "We'll also need to take samples back to Hell's Gate for analysis. The bones, and perhaps some of the machinery, too."

Norm pressed a couple of buttons on his communicator and said into it, "Max, you might want to look at this. Something very important here. Send Dave and Walter here to the mountains, let them do the measurements. I'm sending you the coordinates." He put the device away and turned to Jake and Neytiri, who were eyeing the skeleton from the other side. "Let's go."

Neytiri looked at Um and shook her head slightly, but said nothing. Slowly and silently, the four walked out of the cave and began to climb the narrow road. Um trailed a slight distance behind, curiously turning her head, to the point that she almost slipped on one spot.

Neytiri was the first to reach the stone ring with the Tree of Souls. She stopped in the corner of the entrance, gazing forward with awe. The Tree itself looked much like it did a year ago, sprawling its branches over the far side of this improvised temple, its white threads hanging down, their dim glow drowned by the shine of the daylight sun. And the place was empty. Last time, her people were refugees, hiding here, in the last place where the na'vi could seek shelter. Now, however, they were busy building their new home, and the Tree was not visited so often as it was before the conflict with the sky people. Nobody from the other clans was present either; it was not the customary time for them.

She approached the Tree, softly, carefully treading on the ground. The others stood a small distance away, in the middle of the circle, looking at her; Um with interest, Norm with patience, and Jake with adoration.

The procedure was all too familiar to Neytiri. With her trained hands, she took her queue and moved it to one of the white strands. She was prepared; ready to let her mind wander free, to let its boundaries weaken and bond with Eywa, a slow, slightly numbing sensation of falling through. But instead—

She felt jolted awake. Electric impulses went from the back of her head and down her body, making her limbs twitch. Neytiri tried to turn her head back and jump up from her knees, but felt her muscles failing her, and her eyes blurring. Almost immediately they closed by themselves, as if forced shut. Her thoughts accelerated, as if her brain was trying to process desperately what just happened — before her mind, too, switched off suddenly, and consciousness left her.

Jake blinked and stood puzzled for a moment, seeing Neytiri stop twitching and fall limply onto her knees. "This... this is not how it usually went," he mumbled, walking forward towards her.

Suddenly, her eyes opened again, as rapidly as they closed — but they looked unfocused, as if she was trying to look through her companions rather than at them. She turned her head towards Jake and said in a flat monotone: The others must come.

Jake froze in place, only extending his arms towards Neytiri indecisively. "Whuh...?"

The others must come, Neytiri repeated without changing her voice in the slightest, like a looping record.

"I..." Jake turned to Norm and Um, looking quite lost. "I don't know what's going on here, but maybe Eywa is speaking through her?"

The others must come.

"Who are the others, though?" asked Jake.

"Um believes means Um, Jake and Norm," said Um, leaning on Norm's shoulder with her hip.

"Is it true?" asked Jake, looking at Neytiri; but she remained silent.

Norm made a step back, bumping his heel into a stray stone. "In any case, I can't exactly be plugged in. You know, being human. Comes with restrictions."

"No, there is a way." Jake raised his tail into the air, laying his hand on Norm's other shoulder. "There was one with Grace. There was one with me."

Submersion

Neytiri slowly regained her senses.

At first, she did not feel like she had a body at all. A disembodied observer, moving through — what exactly? A substance too dense to be air, yet not enough quite liquid; waves of color and disturbances flew by, and her view was suspended in this sea of morphic nothingness, moved by her will.

Gradually, her features coalesced below what could now be called her eyes, as if shaping out of the strange substance around her. She looked at herself and cringed in disgust. Her body looked human, as it did in her latest dream with Grace; instead of clothes, she was wrapped in tangible forms of the abstract waves flowing around her. And as she looked aside, some of the waves, distant, morphed into faces — some familiar, some not; one among them, though, was all too familiar. She saw a fuzzy, indistinct vision of RDA troopers pointing their rifles at a na'vi girl...

Sylwanin?

Despite feeling like she could melt in her surroundings at any moment, Neytiri leapt, with some effort, towards the likeness of her sister. But the image dissolved quickly, and Neytiri found herself struggling to move forward, as if stepping into denser water. She felt being washed downriver, and at least the indistinct images materialized into something concrete: she was now being carried by an actual stream along a stretch of Pandoran jungle. When finally she found strength to swim to a bank and climb out onto solid ground, in front of herself she saw, again, one of the faces that deeply imprinted in her memories.

Miles Quaritch. The vilest, most depraved alien this land has ever known — or at least, as far as Neytiri was aware. And now, somehow alive and apparently not even needing an exopack to breathe, he was running towards her, knife drawn, his already not-so-pretty face twisted in animalistic rage. In the distance among the grass and leaves, for a moment, she noticed an avatar station trailer, exactly like the one Jake's body lay in during the last decisive battle.

Neytiri bent forward and let out a na'vi battle cry, which, however, turned out to sound far less convincing than usual. She tried to block Quaritch, but he easily dropped her onto her back, and she barely dodged his attack when his knife drove into the ground where she just was moments ago. Jumping behind a broad leaf of a riverside plant, Neytiri caught her breath.

She was alone, as far as she could tell, stuck in a body obviously physically weaker than her opponent's. The two advantages na'vi had over humans in battle — size and agility — were gone. All she could do was... run? Or try to use her knowledge of terrain to— Time was running out, however. The colonel ripped the leaf to shreds with his knife and charged at her again.

As Neytiri was frantically considering her options, the entire scenery around her suddenly froze — including Quaritch, stuck floating motionless in midair in his jump. It seemed like the sun dimmed a little as a second figure appeared out of the air behind him, very clearly seen, almost unnaturally so. Wearing her white lab coat, there she calmly stood, the person Neytiri remembered fondly from her past and her dreams: Grace Augustine.

"Ah, hello." Grace moved a cigarette to her mouth thoughtfully, but immediately tossed it away, and it vanished into the air. "How've you been, princess? Because I've been all too bored with being dead. Only thing left to do is building illusions, like of a certain—" Grace said a few words in English that Neytiri didn't understand, but she clearly sounded annoyed, "—thanks to whom I'm stuck in a tree now."

She nudged Quaritch lightly with her knuckle, and he fell onto the ground without changing position, like a statue. "I could spend this time on writing, but no computers, no paper, nothing to take notes on. Just my head. My... virtual head. What could you be doing here, though? A mere communion with Eywa shouldn't have brought you this deep, and... something seems amiss with you, now if only I could point out..."

Neytiri exhaled and stood still, watching the far reaches of the jungle being consumed by the indistinct blur, her and Grace standing on a shrinking patch of tangible ground. Grace approached her and squinted her eyes, mumbling something unintelligible.

"Grace..." Neytiri struggled to pronounce the non-na'vi name, "Are we with Eywa now? Have I died?"

"Not died, I'd be able to tell that. Residual imprints have a distinct pattern. In layperson's terms I suppose it can be called a dream, but... why you?.. Hmm."

"But I saw a dream about you, and you were not surprised to see me," said Neytiri. "You showed me your world — do you not remember that?"

"Wait, what?" Grace took a step back, and the ground under their feet blurred, swallowing Quaritch's motionless body into the soil. "I couldn't have, Eywa is not exactly wireless... unless... Right, that explains it." She stepped towards Neytiri again and knocked on her forehead, turning her ear as if trying to listen to some inaudible noises coming from Neytiri. "A copy. Easy to do when you are software, except I didn't sanction it. Not consciously. Let's see if I can merge memories."

Grace pushed Neytiri down by her shoulders, making her drop onto her knees, and pinched the sides of her neck. Neytiri felt a mild tickling sensation at the back of her head — the spot where her queue was in her na'vi form. She turned aside, trying not to think about the strange process she was being subjected to, but at the instant her head stopped—

"By gosh, Grace, what do you think you're doing?"

It was Norm's voice, shouting from behind her.

Grace removed her hands and stepped back again. For a moment, as Neytiri noticed, it seemed like she lost concentration — and the scenery changed abruptly. Now the two of them were standing on the back of an enormous wingless toruk, flying through clouds in violation of all experience and common sense. "Foosh, synchronized..." Grace said wearily, turning towards the source of the exclamation.

Said source consisted of Norm himself, in person, in the same field garb he was at the Tree of Souls, but without his exopack. Next to him stood Jake as he was before replacing his body, with his short haircut and stubble. And finally, the two were accompanied by a pale-skinned girl in a human-sized version of Um's outfit.

Said girl was also the first to break the silence, upon inspecting herself and making a thumbs up gesture. "Ooh, Um is human now. Fun."

"This is hardly what I expected to see," said Jake, making a step towards Grace. "What's going on? Are you the real Doctor Augustine?"

"Interesting question." Grace folded her arms. "Here's one for you then, son: are you the real Jake Sully? What if that man died when his brain was disabled, and you are just a copy built from his memories in the spare body?"

"I... I never thought of it that—" Jake stopped abruptly. "Well... actually I did. And I decided that I'm—"

"...Real enough as far as everyone cares," Grace concluded for him, smiling, and watched Jake nod. "No copy is one hundred percent perfect, unless it's digital, but there is a number of other stimuli that can turn you into a different person. Aging, for instance. Honestly, I think the real reason my mind was redirected here rather than into my avatar was—"

"Redirected here?" Norm interrupted. "Where exactly, here?"

"And I'm glad to see you too, Norm." Grace smiled again. "We haven't seen each other in a year, and the first thing you greet me with is a technical question? But to answer: into this... shared dream, virtual world, whatever term you prefer. I should say, Norm, it feels nice to have all the possibilities I enjoy here, courtesy of... Eywanet, to coin a term. Shame I can't interact with the real world, though, it feels lonely here at times."

The scenery around Grace and the four adventurers kept changing as she was talking, showing fragments of different places in and around Hell's Gate, the former Omaticaya settlement in the now-destroyed Hometree, indiscernible faces, both human and na'vi...

"Have you seen her?" Neytiri asked with a hint of anticipation. "Witnessed the Goddess? Perhaps even conversed..."

"Sorry to disappoint." Grace sighed, moving her eyes away. "It may be hard to swallow, and I think we could keep this for later; all I can say now is that I finally understand what has kept the na'vi unchanging for centuries, and why they're changing now. And they arechanging, subtly but surely, the memories of my copy all but confirm this."

"Changing?" Neytiri looked up and moved her fingers down along her neck. "My people are just how I have known them. Except for..." She cast an annoyed glance at Um, who was listening with her arms crossed behind her back.

"I said subtly — with... rare exceptions, " replied Grace, looking at Um as well. "She is an anomaly as far as I can tell, but if Eywa's hold on you was still as tight as it once was, you wouldn't even get that far."

"Wait... Eywa is leaving us? Abandoning us?" asked Neytiri, sounding worried.

"No, I would just say Eywa's priorities are shifting. Well, I know there are some out there," she moved her eyes to Jake and Norm, "who wish it was true that Eywa planned this entire thing to help her wounded sister Gaia, but frankly, if you're building sand castles, don't— I don't know, myself. Eywa may or may not care about Earth, I can't know. I'm a scientist, I deal with facts, not prophecies or wishful thinking."

She smiled again, with visible sadness this time. Norm was listening intently, Jake looked bored.

"Point is, Eywa has always acted in what looked like the best interests for the world as a whole. And generations after generations, dying na'vi elders were taken to Eywa, and had their minds shared. All seemed well with the world, and life continued without changes, frozen in time. A self-perpetuating cycle, until the humans... until we arrived. And even then, to act against this theat, it took something truly extraordinary, an inflow of completely new data, like nothing seen before."

"Like what, for instance?" asked Norm, apparently the only one left who could follow her train of thought by now. Grace just moved her eyes down, looking at herself, and Norm slapped his forehead. "Of course! That explains everything."

Jake only shrugged. "Explains what?"

"If Eywa is acting upon Grace's memories now..." Norm scratched his chin. "Riiight. I take it this includes your memories of Earth, too?"

"Yes," said Grace, "and I'm not even sure if they're fully accurate now. Haven't been home for so long, I could easily mislead everyone."

"Doctor Augustine, for a couple of words in private, if you will," Norm said in a more formal tone. When he and Grace walked far enough away, leaving Jake, Neytiri and Um stand behind in surprise, he continued. "What are you doing, Grace? Playing along with this 'goddess' thing?"

"Psst, Norm, I'm trying to be diplomatic here. These adorable na'vi could achieve so much in their due time, if only they're given a chance to develop unimpeded. And even if it means letting them have things we got over with. I don't want them to call me a blasphemer and an enemy, nor you. So no word about neural networks and feedback loops, please."

"Grace, just before coming here, we found what looks like remains of an ancient civilization. Seems like some middle ground between humans and na'vi, and looks suspiciously like the avatar chambers. Unknown language."

"Hmm, hmm..." Grace took a deep breath. "If anything, it's just more evidence that the na'vi may not be native to Pandora. We discussed it before, remember? Different biology, four limbs, all too human-like vibes..."

"Should I tell them?"

"I'd rather not. They aren't prepared to accept even a remote possibility. Would be like explaining Copernicus to ancient nomads. Let's not upset their worldview, for now. And... if there are more chambers like you describe hidden around the world, then our best bet are the unclouded na'vi. And by unclouded, I mean with perception unaffected by Eywanet's biases."

Grace turned around and walked back to the three left behind, motioning for Norm to follow. Once Jake, Neytiri, Norm and Um gathered in front of her, she cleared her throat, and the visions around them simply disappeared; they were standing in blank whiteness.

"I have decided," she said softly. "Find the Exiles, learn from them. They may have turned away from Eywa, but believe me: this is in Eywa's best interest."

...It was snowing outside.

A large, hairy male hand picked two white dice from an official-looking plastic table and rolled it. They bumped into the wall under the window and rolled back, stopping next to the hand. Two sixes.

"Hmm, hmm. Talk about a promising start of the day," said the owner of the hand, mostly obscured by his office chair, in a voice that sounded deep, pointedly masculine, yet reserved and subdued. He turned to the window and knocked on the table with the fingers of his other hand, looking at the barren mountains covered with a smooth layer of snow.

From what could be seen, his arms were clad in sleeves of green camouflage, the kind found on military uniforms. He was sitting in a small room with walls coated with thick beige paint, a room with nothing in it except for his desk, a pile of papers and parcels in a remote corner, and a computer and a stack of folders on his desk. In general, it cast the impression of having been hastily put together.

Suddenly, the computer screen flashed, displaying a small dark rectangle saying "HPX — VOICE ONLY". The man did not seem surprised; he turned to face the monitor, exposing his ear with a wireless headphone plugged in, and laid his arms comfortably onto the desk.

"Yes, yes, of course," he said without raising his voice, picking his dice and tossing them in his hand idly. "I'm glad we are on one side in this dispute. I'll need to take a closer look at the archives I've just received, but it would be ridiculous, wouldn't it? If I was denied talking to you blue people just on the grounds of being, you know... not blue." He pressed a few keys on the keyboard and added, "I'll speak to you again shortly."

Turning away from the computer again, he detached a radio from his hip and moved it to his unseen face. "Lieutenant, send reinforcements to the perimeter. Johansson's troops can attack us again at any moment."