I looked up at the towering behemoth floating silently across the expanse. It was massive. A hulk of stonework, impossibly suspended in the sky above. Like some ancient titan rolling out of the mists of mythology. I just gaped – you couldn’t fit it all in your vision at once! It was like… like a continent had been ripped out of the earth and set floating across the sky.

  We’d finally managed to finish Everett’s hell hole. I wasn’t the last one, so I’d had a couple of weeks just to recover from the nightmare. It was not something I ever planned on doing again, that was for sure.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, today, we set sail.” That was Winston. Perfect hair, perfect suit, and that flawless winter overcoat. The dust rolled silently and slowly across the darkened, empty plains of dust behind him. “I know the last scenario was hard. It wasn’t meant to be easy. You’ve all passed with flying colours, and it’s fair to say that your ability to focus will reap the benefits.” I glanced at Everett, who stood motionless staring at Winsford. I wanted to punch him in the face. I looked back at Winsford.

  “While you’ve been taking a few days of well-earned break, I’ve asked Simon to prepare the next thing we’re going to be focusing on. Imagination and focus are done. Our last stop is memory. What you’re looking at up there is Simon’s Labyrinth. His own, personal mind-palace.” We all looked over at Simon, I hadn’t really talked to him much yet. He didn’t do much talking. He didn’t look like the last challenge had particularly phased him. I guess he was used to living in the solitude and safety of his own mind.

  “Simon is a three-time world memory champion. He’s fluent in six languages, and capable of storing over 10,000 discrete data points in long-term recall... without error. Simon has spent three days getting this ready for us.” He gestured up at the hulking stonework floating distantly above us.

  “Before we can start pushing the boundaries of what we don’t know about this technology, and we’re not far away from that, I have to remind you: we need to work on and hone what we do know. As you know, memory is one of the three most important things when it comes to thought-casting. This labyrinth, concocted by the most powerful mnemonist alive, is designed to train you in that skill. Simon, the floor is yours.”

  Simon stepped forward. He was average build, black-collared shirt, black hair, and glasses. He looked like he should be a bit timid, but somehow he exuded a kind of confidence. He also kinda’ looked like a scrawny version of the guy from Black Books.

  “The most basic skill you need to start mastering the use of your memory is spatial visualisation” he spoke quietly, but with that same impression of confidence. “The Method of Loci – or, for those who watched Sherlock, mind palaces.” As it happened, I had seen Cumberbatch’s Sherlock. Brilliant. Mind palaces. Right.

  “Let’s go.” He stepped aside as a sleek black craft hovered down, slicing through the dusty air. It came to rest at a hover. FWOOOSHH. The sliding door hissed open, and we stepped inside. The seats molded to our bodies as the craft lifted off. It was impossibly comfortable, a very nice change from the last challenge. As the craft rose and moved upward, I watched the labyrinth looming larger and larger through the portal. It’s gigantic mass now really did fill our field of vision, and I began to see some of it’s details. There were stone walls crawling with hanging vines, blocks of stone moving and shifting, sheets of water spilling out of portals and pouring into nothing. Three days? He’d built this in three days? Impossible!

  We eventually came up level with one of the sides, and the craft glided down toward a wide stone platform. It felt like an ancient Aztecean Death Star. At the far end of the platfrom there was a portal, massive, dark, and silent, inviting us to dare the depths of the labyrinth. As we stepped out, a gust of wind hit us, and Simon and Winsford made straight for the dark entrance, their cloaks billowing out behind them. Inside the darkness, the air was cooler still as we moved in to this monolith of the skies.

  Tap… CRACK…

  “Let us risk a little more light” it was gruff impression of an old man’s voice. Ross grinned at me from under his new Gandalf hat as his wizard’s staff illuminated our surroundings. The others ignored him. Chen and I grinned.

  Our footsteps bounced off unseen walls in the further darkness, and the darkness deepened. Ross wasn’t far wrong, it felt a lot like some cavern in Moria.

  “Among the various skills that every world-class mnemonist has mastered, there are several core skills that are particularly important” Simon’s calm voice cut through the darkness, echoing and amplifying.

  “This labyrinth is designed to start teaching you those skills. You will have the opportunity in coming days to explore the labyrinth in your training, but today we begin with one of the most basic: mind palaces.”

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  As we continued walking, I could see a dim light up ahead, another doorway – much smaller than the portal we’d came through at the start.

  As we approached, and the light crept to meet our feet, I could see a stairway going down. Not stonework in the style of the labyrinth, but tiles. Gritty, dirty tiles. Like in a subway. Actually, it was a subway, I realised. As we came down to the platform, I could see tracks and a tunnel.

  “Think of the mind palace as a mental blueprint where you store ideas in visual images of real spaces. You might picture your apartment, and in every room you visualise an item from your grocery list. Mind palaces are powerful because our minds remembers spaces and imagery better than abstract data.” As he paused, a maglev slid up silently, gliding above the track.

  Shhh-click-sssht. The door closed behind us as we stepped in and took a seat.

  “With practice, you can use a mind palace to recall speeches, passwords, people’s names at parties, all as effortlessly as picking up your phone. A vast array of data, bigger than this labyrinth, at your finger tips.” The maglev moved silently forward into the darkness.

  At this point Winsford cut in and addressed all of us. “What are the applications of mind palaces when it comes to thought casting?”

  Everett answered immediately: “Data protection. Security. With that kind of ability, you could build a safe that’s more secure, and far less detectable, than any storage system on the face of the planet. You could build and design a mental firewall with shifting architecture that only you can interpret. Unless, of course, there’s a way to break a person’s mind in here?”

  “Good. What else?”

  “Construct reinforcement. You said focus determines the strength of a construct, but if you can create a complex construct with multiple tens or hundreds of data points, I guess that would strengthen it even further.”

  “Good. You’re correct, Ross. Well done. A sword might look like a sword in here, but you could layer structure upon structure into it’s blade, potentially at something like a microscopic level, patterns that you memorised and designed. That would will give the sword, or any other construct, durability and strength beyond the immediate force of your focus. My guess is that Simon here, with a bit of time, could cast a construct that would be all but unbreakable. It would also free you to divert your focus to some other purpose at the same time – that is an advantage worth having. What else?”

  “Immersive education. Why sit and listen to a boring lecture on history when you can step in and explore a real-life, expertly crafted lecture on Alexander the Great?”

  “Yes. What else?”

  I didn’t want to say it, but it had to be said. I’d seen it in a billion gaming scenarios. This had more insidious potential as well, especially since Winsford was willing to push the boundaries when it came to pain-dampening in here.

  “Cognitive torture chambers – although pain dampeners in the technology would normally blunt it’s effectiveness. Memory hi-jacking as well. A skilled mnemonist could build a false reality trap more convincing than anything Truman ever had to escape from. If you could get someone into your sim without them realising it, the possibilities for deception and information extraction could be devastating.”

  Winsford smiled. “Once again, Peterson, you don’t disappoint.” He paused a moment. “Sophie, if you please.”

  We all looked at her.

  “Ahem. One of the applications of mind palaces,” Sophie began, pushing her half rim glasses up her pretty nose, “is something far more intimate, and potentially transformative, than just memory, combat utility, or the other things we’ve mentioned. We're not just creating environments where you store data, we're talking about building whole psychoscapes that reflect how your mind actually works, for those who know what to look for” she paused for a moment.

  “Imagine walking through a corridor lined with childhood memories. Or a cathedral where every stained-glass window flickers with moments of trauma, joy, or repressed thoughts. This isn’t just storage. This is exploration. In the real world, you can’t simply walk into someone’s subconscious. But in here...” she gestured to the tunnel outside the maglev car, “...in here, you can.”

  The group was silent for a moment, the train humming quietly as it glided forward into the darkness.

  “Ummm…” Ross started, “...what does that actually mean?”

  “This...” she waved around at the darkness outside, “...this is just the surface. The training ground. We do need to master the basics in thought-casting, but ultimately the plan…” she paused again, “is that we want to enter the subconscious realm directly. In fact that is exactly what we’re intending to do.”

  She paused for a moment to let that sink in.

  “This is not just memory palaces, constructs, or learning how to use our focus. This is about mapping the psychological architecture of the human mind, and learning how to master it. Symbolic cognition, the possibility of split or melded consciousness – this is where we will begin the search for transcendence. When we enter the subconscious, we will enter parts of our psyche we don’t normally access while awake. The primal depths of who we are. Instincts. You’ve probably heard of lucid dreaming? It will be finger painting by comparison” she started to get animated.

  “If we can map those inner spaces of the psyche, if we can walk their corridors and chart their lines, we might be able even to rewrite identity itself, alter consciousness, who knows?”

  “If we get it wrong though…” she glanced at Winsford, then back at the rest of us. “We need to be real about this – we won’t be exploring the mind anymore. We could be lost in it.”

  “Waitwaitwaitwait…” Ross interrupted. “First you torture us, and now you’re telling us that we’re going to be attempting to enter our subconscious mind and literally risk losing our sanity!?!”

  “That’s why this training is so important” Winsford cut in. “Do not fail to master the basics. There may be dangers about the use of this technology that we don’t yet know about. We won’t be taking any unnecessary risks, and we will proceed with caution. And don’t forget: we’re in the driving seat here. This technology may even allow us to face and master the subconscious mind.”

  “We’re here” Simon said. I looked out, and my eyes widened...