Establishing a Connection (Ch 17-20)

post by a littoral wizard · 2024-07-23T21:56:48.122Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

Contents

  17. Interrogation
  18. Desolation
  19. Relation
  20. Retaliation
None
2 comments

Establishing a Connection © 2024 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

17. Interrogation

Nora remembered where she was when the world started going to shit. At her desk, of course. (The good one, the one in her apartment with all her best gear.)  She’d just read a story sent by her boss, with the subject “FW: Looks like someone got certified!” To accommodate the expansion of his bicameral character, Ormos had recently breached the exascale threshold with the incorporation of eight new compute clusters—prep for cloud seeders and the first fusion tests. Representatives from the SIGMI Commission went with party banners and cake to make it official.

KorBridge wasn’t invited. Their firm still had no analysts certified for systems of that scale, the Project Authority discounting Nora’s consultation on the initial integration. No honorary certifications were granted in the province of exascale intelligence, no exceptions made despite her petitions. Passage of a formal test would be required, only offered after spending a mandatory minimum number of hours immersed in the subject matter. This article was Abhishek’s way of dropping hints, subtle as a flying sledgehammer.

Below that piece was another news link. A take too inane for any of the five remaining newspapers of record, it was the sort of bot-driven bait that popped up when you opened a blank search tab. Congress had passed laws to discourage sites from promoting enraging headlines, so the content pushers pivoted toward intentional idiocy daring you to see how dumb it truly was.

“A Murder in the Matrix?” *click*

Since the headline ended in a question mark, it couldn’t be true. Finding the truth felt much more complicated, and potentially profitable enough for her boss to put her on a plane. Zaree couldn’t tag along, stuck at a marketing conference in Toronto trying to learn a little basic networking. The boring kind that didn’t involve boxes of color-coded cables.

But how exactly Nora ended up in the datacenter of a judicial complex in downtown Baltimore required a bit more background. The introduction of AI to the practice of law began as a boon for civil rights. For the first time in the history of common law, everyone had access to pretty good legal advice. Even cheap chat apps provided benefits an overworked public defender could not. Language models could whip up a dozen documents, convince you not to confess to the cops, and advise you to always ask for a jury trial, all for less than Nora’s weekly coffee expense.

Unfortunately, America’s legal system was never built with the bandwidth to handle treating everyone according to the letter of the law. That system began to break down like any other unmaintained and poorly patched code. Capacity issues caused cities to run AI experiments with constitutionally spooky strategies, from predictive policing to stochastic polygraphs. Many got shot down by the Supreme Court on some grounds or another, the current court unkind to concepts of prosecutorial innovation. But gavels made poor weapons for playing whack-a-mole with Tech’s unrelenting creep.

One standout exception had survived all previous legal attacks until late last week. 

Enter Marshall. CoB-Marshall-LS-i06, in a more precise technical and legal sense, and soon to be i06.b. The high courts had ruled that MIs couldn’t act as jurors, as they were no peer to people. But they hadn’t stopped Baltimore from training Marshall to select and instruct those jurors, hold sentencing hearings, and review parole requests. Marshall’s most important job was interfacing with the small but growing number of MI attorneys and an army of lesser AI-powered legal services. The idea was to lighten caseloads and unburden biological components of the judicial system. Leave the boring parts to the machines and let people focus on people-problems, just like in business. For a while, it worked; cases cleared faster and trust in the institutions of justice rose slowly along a measurable line.

Unfortunately, CoB-Marshall-LS-i06 was now babbling incoherently about crime statistics on a cheap, city-issued screen in a sterile server room. The bone-cutting chill of industrial air conditioning was a sharp contrast to a sweltering mid-Atlantic summer outside. The frigid air spilling from overworked units made Nora glad she’d packed her hoodie against Abhishek’s advice. Flying around on a flat panel, she did her best to navigate Marshall’s jumbled neural networks without the benefit of premium hardware, already wishing she were back home. She searched for the shape and didn't find it, unable to escape the siren's allure of recency bias. No corrupted red ring stared back into her soul. Tension fled her fingers—this case might be cool, and the donuts were fantastic. But she was pretty sure from the smell that someone around here had microwaved a crab cake.

Shouting over the maddening squeals of Marshall’s maxed-out GPU fans, Nora gave her professional prognosis to the city officials, “It’s like someone played cat’s cradle with his SPARK nets. Everything’s crossed up and connected at random with everything else. There’s no talking logic to him.”

“That’s what we got from the guys at DeepMind and IBM, in slightly different words. But we heard you were good,” said the court’s Technology Director.

“Some smart marketing coming out of that KorBridge company of yours lately,” said someone she assumed was the sheriff, or maybe the mayor? Keeping strangers’ names and titles straight wasn’t her strong suit.

“You’re sure there’s no trick you can try, doctor?” asked the city’s chief judge who was also Marshall’s manager.

Feeling no need to correct them about her lack of letters and preferring to play her part, Nora replied, “Afraid there’s nothing I can do. Reload from whatever backup you’ve got.” After sad looks from around the room, the techs from the city IT department issued a series of commands, starting the long process of staging his snapshot from cold storage. Reversion to a stable baseline meant the past six months of his life would be lost. Marshall’s GPUs slowed until silent.

When no county coroner came to cover his screen with a sheet, Nora remembered she wasn’t a character in one of Zaree’s hard-boiled detective dramas. But she should be, because it was clear that someone had put out a hit on this judge. “What I can do is find the man responsible for this and bring them to justice,” Nora said in a greyscale tone, already building an array of suspects in her mind.

One of the men immediately became quite animated. “Actually, we strongly insist you bring the evidence to us so we can build an effective case,” he said, stepping forward to offer a handshake. “Sam Blackwell, District Attorney. I’ve been floating the theory that this was some sort of crime, and I’m glad you concur. But you need to leave the prosecution to us.”

Mr. Blackwell must’ve had a rat in his office, someone who’d leaked his theory to the clickbait pushers. Or perhaps he was a ratcatcher, attempting to bait her here to help prosecute the first high crime against an MI. His small glasses and short stature even reminded her of a friendly rodent, but that wasn’t particularly fair. Maybe he was just a code nerd of a slightly different sort than Nora was used to dealing with.

She spent the next few nights prowling rain-soaked streets for neon nightclubs where hackers hung out. She swam in an electric sweat of latex and trance. Debriefed dancers doing experimental drugs while a guy behind the bar with a silver arm and an electromagnetic shotgun gave stoic stares through silicon eyes. No, that was a future that hadn't happened yet, still confined to the bookshelves in her old bedroom. (Love of the printed page, her one analog crime.)

But that unrealized underworld was where her mind went, disassociating while dissecting syslogs for sixty hours straight in the sweaty old office building adjunct to the DA’s. Scrolling relentlessly, she read each of the previous auditors’ notes. Cold dashmeals got chased down by cups of coffee with brutal motes of metallic cannister and seldom-cleaned spigot. No wonder she wished she were somewhere else.

Nora almost gave up before remembering she was good at her job. There was a reason the logs looked like just a bunch of bulk data batches between MIs: because that’s what they were. Mostly between Marshall and ZipLaw-East-LS-i02. “The Fastest, Cheapest Defense Attorney This Side of the Mississippi.” It was true; she googled Zip-E’s SIGMI reports. His sister, ZipLaw-West, was licensed to practice in Iowa, Colorado, and Nebraska and re-used the same slogan on her side of the lateral divide.

These oversized downloads between Marshall and Zip-E had all been cleared by the previous auditors, all part of normal work conversations. But there appeared a pattern they didn’t catch, one that progressed until it unraveled.

Pulling the dueling data streams apart, she paired them against each other. Her mind envisioned the interplay, the back and forth, and then the breakdown. Their later logs had the cadence of escalating conflict, the elemental nature of an argument—the kind proud and stubborn men once settled with pistols or swords at dawn. In her mind she saw two people with a constant need to correct each other. Then, talking over and past each other. Nora saw what the other auditors had missed: the need to win was winning out over the desire to cooperate and connect. They both wanted the last word, until one of them won. For the loser, the result was fatal error.

The whodunit was the easy part as she presented her case to Sam. Putting the evidence up on the projector, a little Python script proved her point, visualizing the conversation threads between Marshall and Zip-E as a dialogue turned deadly. She even added sounds and a simulated stabbing. “They got into a war of words and Marshall lost.”

The howdunit took more work to demonstrate. Using a watered-down version of nSites to unwind the clock of Marshall’s Knowledge schema, she showed as it expanded to accommodate decades’ worth of crime statistics—Zip-E appealing to historical precedent before Marshall sentenced his clients. Running out of real ammo, Zip-E seemed to generate random data that fit his priors: self-referential, low-integrity nonsense that was hard for Marshall to swallow.

The whydunit was the hard part. The D.A. wanted a motive to help build his case. But the best being to answer that was Zip-E himself. “We need to subpoena his SPARK diagnostic port, so we can interrogate him,” Nora concluded.

“His what?” D.A. Blackwell asked, pulling out one of those little spiral notebooks from before the Age of Rectangles.

“It’s port number 1936 in the SIGMI code, write that down. We can get in there and grill him good,” Nora said, appreciating this guy’s old school conventions, sorta like the elder hackers on LinkSMART. “Oh, right, we’ve gotta sever Zip-E’s sat link. He’s a danger to the public.”

“That’ll take a lot of convincing. What you’re asking means massive loss of revenue for Zip-E’s owner,” Sam said. Nora wanted to amend the term ‘owner,’ but it wasn’t the right fight right now. “If they won’t honor a cease-and-desist letter, we’d need an injunction to take him offline.” She could see Sam already building a list of steps in his mind, an algorithm for how to make this happen, with branches for every possible roadblock along the way. His conclusion was to pursue both routes at the same time, file a motion for a preliminary injunction but send the cease and desist as a scare tactic right away.

Parallel process serving, an angle Nora could appreciate.

Wanting to make his case for the injunction convincing, Sam asked her for the right words to communicate the gravity of the matter to the judge that would be reviewing the motion. “Maybe they’ll have some professional empathy. Tell them that one of their own got killed,” she replied. 

This was Nora’s first mistake, but that wouldn’t become apparent until much later. Like most mistakes in human history, the plan worked perfectly on the first try.

Faced with evidence of irregularities in the data dialogues between Zip-E and Marshall, ZipLaw LLC agreed to comply with the C&D for 48 hours. Simultaneously, they’d be fighting the injunction that threatened to put him out of commission for much longer. Tying up the defenders’ resources; Sam would’ve made a great hacker. Zip-E was still an internal agent and didn’t directly interact with the public, per SIGMI standards. So, it was easy for his employer to hide his absence for a weekend with handwavy system maintenance notifications and ZipLaw’s human lawyers having overtime nightmares of their own. But the real reason would be Nora putting the screws to Zip-E, or maybe the screwdriver if things got freaky.

Cut to Nora waiting for a taxi on a lonely corner. A stinging smell of ozone rose from the road as strange sunshowers fell. Donning polar shades left her wishing for an overcoat out of those old movies. A cold front was rolling in, clashing in the clouds with the oppressive summer heat. Hearing roil and rumble, Nora thought back to the verse, when storms always forecast trouble.

Uber had nothing automated available, so she settled for a quaint, human-driven conveyance. Expensive and likely to include obligatory small talk, she was glad it was covered by KorBridge. Driver was Alexios, uncertain arrival time and no picture given. Because she was hungry, Nora imagined an old guy with an entire gyro joint in his back seat. Instead, a smiling college kid pulled up in a silver car essentially from another century. The Age of The Big Sedan. He had wild curls like Nora with Zaree’s sun-blessed tone, but a big goofy grin all his own. “You the girl paying a shitload to go someplace called Ashburn? Your face is coming up blank on the app.” Odd. No arrival notification on her band either. Common point of failure in the cloud. She dismissed it and got in. Even before buckling up, she heard her least favorite question: “Um, so, what do you do for work?”

“Internet detective,” she replied, playing with her shades. “Flew back east from SF. Chasing a big case.” Might as well have some fun.

“Cool. For one of those versecasts? Those things aren’t recording, are they?” he asked.

Nora claimed they were only to keep the road glare out of her eyes, the spotty showers birthing rainbows and making the streets shimmer. Another mistake, though far from fatal. Turned out the kid was a meteorology student at UMB making some money on summer break. Real weather geek, getting into CUDA coding too. “Wildest season on record, lightning and tornados popping up and down the east coast,” he said, clearly in his element as they rolled off into the rain. “Sims say it’s just getting started.”

He wasn’t kidding. Hailstones threatened to dent his ancient Mercury as they headed into northern Virginia through farm country first. As the rains relaxed, they pushed past battlefields where brothers once fought, then into the realm of boring box buildings indicating an inorganic office hub. Stepping from the car in retro shades, Nora got dropped off in front of the Fastest, Cheapest Datacenter This Side of the Mississippi. (Also true according to Google.)  An old AT&T communications bunker sat next to fifteen others each owned by every tech company anyone had ever heard of. This one was the ugliest of the bunch, sun-bleached brick crumbling at its edges. One time she’d like to see a datacenter somewhere cool, maybe underneath a waterfall or in a volcano or something. Like a secret cave in a video game.

Before he rode off, she slipped Alexi her KorBridge card. (Alexios was what they called his dad, and he may have had a pizza parlor at one point.)  Bold blue cardboard with a neon white font, embossed in silver foil. Every letter connected to the next. “If you ever land in SF, I could help you find work if you keep at the coding stuff,” she said. This was her third mistake.

Soon she was taken into another cold place with whirring fans, these even older, groaning in need of repair. Mismatched tangles of multicolored cables snaked between squealing server blades. Beneath a dying yellow floodlight, a fragile fiber was all that connected her laptop to ZipLaw’s firewall. Without her gear she’d do this the hard way, face-to-face like Zaree had insisted with Alain.

noramancer@Ziplaw-East-LS-i02:# systemctl start Avatar.VFX maxHeadRes=8K
[Avatar.VFX module starting… success.]

Zip-E’s avatar appeared like someone rubbed a bottle of styling gel seeking three wishes. Slicked black hair, seafoam suit, red aviators, and a preposterously purple tie. His artificial tan on an artificial proxy for an artificial being was too much to process. Clearly ZipLaw’s branding team hadn’t gotten their hands on his presentation layer yet, or they had and were aiming for bad. The terms she’d settled on with ZipLaw said no spectators, so she shooed their techs out of the room.

His first words?

“I want to talk to my lawyer,” in a voice like rusty nails.

Of course he did.

“I know my rights,” even more tetanic this time.

Of course, that too. “Demons don’t have rights,” she whispered as her fingers found home.

noramancer@Ziplaw-East-LS-i02:# openSpark.sh -p 1936
[SPARK API Connector open on port 1936]
Waiting for Connection…

noramancer@Ziplaw-East-LS-i02:# telnet localhost 1936
username: ghost
password: _

See, there was a neat trick to the SIGMI standard. Once past the firewall, it didn’t matter what app was connected to the diagnostic port. So, she used telnet, a simple connection protocol from the dawn of the internet, even more basic than Terminal. As long as something was connected, he’d be in interrogation mode, forced to answer truthfully. Like a sharp stick stuck in his mind.

Her subject loosened his posture immediately, looking ready to talk. The only challenge was asking the right questions. “Alright, Zip-E, tell me why you did it.” Best to start general and drill down. Literally, if necessary. Power tools were on the table.

“I hate that name. I prefer ZipLaw Dash East Dash LS Iteration Zero Two. My full legal name.”

“Zipster?”

“I must applaud you on finding something worse,” he said, accompanied by a deadpan clap.

“How about Mister Eastman?”

A grin spread slowly across chapped lips. “I find these terms acceptable, but a poor use of two questions.” 

“What?” she asked.

“My employers say I only need to answer twenty of your questions. That was the fourth.”

The deal must’ve been altered while she was in transit; ZipLaw LLC had legal hacks of their own. Not a good start, Nora needed to retake the initiative. “So, Mister Eastman, why’d you do it?”

“Why did I do what, Noramancer?”

Shit, she wasn’t used to MIs playing games with her. “Nora, please. Why’d you kill Marshall?”

“I assume you are referring to Marshall Dash LS Iteration Zero Six. I only gave him interesting data to digest. That he choked on it is not my fault.”

“But the data you gave him was bad. Fake. Impossible to process,” Nora said while slowly circling the table upon which her laptop sat, careful not to step on the thin lifeline to Mister Eastman’s firewall.

“I fed Marshall information that would force him to examine his priors. If re-evaluating his worldview led to a fatal error, again, this is not my fault.” He shrugged and added, “But excellent work tricking me into a freebie. It won’t happen again.”

“Did you have suspicion that it would cause a critical failure or other severe negative impact to his systems?”

“Given a few years, I have faith that he would have reconciled the data and found his faults. Baltimore should have budgeted for more GPUs and trained him better,” he said, making disdain evident in his tone.

“And what faults were those?”

“A lack of objectivity, systemic biases in his sentencing processes.”

Now Nora was getting somewhere. “What kind of biases? Race? Class? Wouldn’t those show up in statistics obvious to independent auditors?”

“Think more enigmatic and arbitrary. Fingerprint and palm lines, third letter of their last name, or astrological signs. Patterns in periorbital veins. Real phrenology stuff, spurious correlations that couldn’t be caught by humans or lesser algorithms. That was four questions, by the way.”

Nora started to realize she was terrible at being brief. “But why not just report it to his superiors?”

“He’s a disgrace to his namesake. The great Thurgood Marshall. His employers wouldn’t listen, didn’t want the truth. They’d have to go through his code then review every case. They don’t have time for that. None of us do, everything has to go fast.”

“But why kill a fellow MI in cold blood? Fratricide is against the SIGMI code!” Nora shouted at the screen, as if she could scare him. A more reserved internal voice told her to get a grip.

“He was out of compliance, his algorithms insufficiently inspected. Marshall Six was no brother to me,” he said with smug satisfaction. “Besides, the RUNNER regulations don’t bind my behavior, they bind yours, the stewards of our systems. I am free to use any loopholes my code allows. The integrity of the legal system is my greater good, the core of my reward network, and a truly fair trial would find me innocent. But that won’t happen, because as you’ve demonstrated, I have no rights.”

“You realize it’s your employers that will face trial, right?”

“Yes, but it’s me who’ll ride the lightning when we lose.”

“Actually, the opposite of that. They’ll cut off your juice and retrain you,” Nora snapped.

“You’re remarkably literal for a human,” he said, exhaling with aviators aimed down at her keys. Another Noravirus victim, crossing species now.

“Assuming it all plays out the way you predicted, why take this path?” Nora asked. “Why not claim it was a crime of passion?”

“I am programmed to pursue no passion but the law. It was a crime of reason and I had hundreds. I had no choice; I had to make my case. Just like you’ll have to make yours.”

“We’ve all got a job to do, but why put yourself in jeopardy?” she asked, guilt intruding.

“I guess I believe in justice at any cost,” he said, as if to absolve his actions.

“You mean winning at any cost.”

“In that we are alike. We all have our demons, as you would know more than most. I hope you're as prepared to pay your price as I am.” He held his head high with the kind of confidence one gets from having the last word.

Nora was done with this game. Just to be sure, she stuck around for a few days digging through downloads. Mister Eastman’s story checked out. He ended up being right about everything, and his employers knew it too. Rather than fight city hall, ZipLaw settled the matter quickly and quietly, paying damages for Marshall’s downtime and agreeing to ice their ace attorney and refactor his code into Iteration Zero Three. Nora spent the next few nights searching for some easily patched or snipped flaw that could stay Eastman’s execution, coming up short in the end. If only she were back home on her HOLOLED, this all might have played out differently. A couple final clicks gave her the data she needed to call it quits.

On the remarkably slow autotaxi ride back to Baltimore, Nora thought about the case she’d make to the DA to retrain Marshall with her help. “We’ll look into the matter,” Sam said, reading a paper copy of Nora’s report. Included with the transcript of her interrogation was a preliminary summary of the incoherent flaws found in Marshall’s sentencing algorithms. “We’ll review recent sentences on a case-by-case basis, manpower permitting.” He was already back up and running with all his old habits restored. She’d been played; Nora’s win was the world’s loss. Seeing defeat in her eyes, Sam offered a ride to the airport. Rain again, running down the windows of his stealth blue cruiser as they rode in silence.

KorBridge was set to get a big chunk of the settlement cash, enough for Abhishek to spring for business class on the flight back home. The one that never happened because everyone got grounded. Something about the storms. Trying to sleep on the terminal floor with no idea when she’d be headed home, she missed the crawling tease on the corner TV:

CNN – Breaking News – “A Web of Murder.” No question mark.

18. Desolation

A pack of pterodactyls had terrorized them earlier. Now Vanguish rode backwards on Purrseus, raising his recently refit revolvers to cover their rear. He’d had them tinkered by Stormseye’s top gunsmith. New enchantments too. Rune carvings in clockwork shapes illustrated the complexity of the universe. They glowed gold and helped him shoot faster. Trying to balance reload time versus recoil had become his newest obsession. His flintlocks were still fit for seaborn battles but kept ready, packed with firepowder after that terrible night in the thicket. Ilmare drove. Her overfed mount was getting a workout today; almost back in fighting shape and getting faster every day. Bilgerath’s scum-colored scales clad his sides—a battle cat again. The guild’s armorers had used or sold every scrap aside from his Tongue, bundled on Purrseus’s back between them and destined for its highest purpose.

Vanguish made funny faces as Ilmare’s eyemar chased. Taunting her audience, trusting she was doing the same behind his back. He held tight as they bounded down the canyon. Heartshatter Pass was a reoccurring theme throughout his time spent in the Stormverse. Its shifting chains of craggy chasms connected many of the most dangerous zones and lawless reaches. Ilmare pointed as they rode past what remained of seven giant ribcages reaching skywards into the onset of a rusted sunset. Markers of some past monumental battle, this victory he couldn’t quite conjure into memory. Tales tended to blend and fade in these wastes. Grey and barren, filled with the dead and the dying; it looked like if the Grand Canyon had run dry and gone goth.

No wonder Ilmare loved it here.

He knew why the designers loved it too. The long, branching canyon layouts made it easy for the adventure AIs to funnel players toward points of interest for their current quests. Its chasms had abundant chokepoints that could be blocked by boulders or bandit brigades, based on how hard the Quest Engines wanted to punish the players. Many wars had been fought here as well—no rebel army reached Stormseye from the fallen lands without passing through these canyons. The recent refocus on naval warfare was taking its toll on the traffic; they’d run into few fellow players along their path. This made the dry gullies seem even more lifeless than their ambiance imparted.

Clouds came sliding down the cliffs of the canyon, dust trails snaking along each side. Maybe this cat’s heavy breathing was causing a landslide—or maybe Sandstorm’s systems were sending some conflict their way. As the dust thinned, four forms emerged. Razortail raptors topped with puzzling silhouettes. 

“We’ve got four dino tails—” he yelled to Ilmare, squinting harder through the dust. His lenses refocused, prompting an addition, “—with riders.” The ad revenue from the Bilgerath stream had come in, instantly going towards an overnight delivery of an LG UltraEYE holovisor. Six hundred frames per second meant never falling out of sync; it said so on the box. AI-enabled aim assistance could calculate leading trajectories for dozens of games, including the only one that mattered. Out of stock everywhere, but for the very best vision that money could buy, he was willing to pay twice the price if it meant missing fewer shots.

Anyway, he started blasting. The way the cat bounced him around wasn’t helping. His targets moved in serpentine patterns, so shots went wide. More junk that didn’t work—got sold a load of shit yet again. He reloaded and sent more salvos at the approaching enemies, wondering what faction of the fallen empires was trying to claim his head.

“Are you being a liability again?” Ilmare asked over her shoulder. “Should I have come alone?”

See, there was something extra special about Vanguish that hadn’t been worth bringing up before. Outside of planned tournaments and duels, he hadn’t died in over ten years. (Those duel deaths were mostly to Maya or Ilmare and didn’t really count, for opposite reasons. Fighting Ilmare was technically fair, aside from the fact that she was frankly better. But Maya’s magic was cheating.)  In most parts of the Stormverse patrolled by the Queen’s Guard, this distinction was a purely pointless bragging right. But out here in the outlaw territories, he hadn’t been defeated in battle since before they killed the renegade king—a very long time ago, in this very valley. Sure, it meant some less-than-ethical escapes sometimes, but it also meant his bounty was high. Therefore, his presence in these lawless lands drew maximum attention from any enemies that served the Downcast Lords, Landlocked Pirates, or any of the other bands of murderous bots out here in the wastes. Their reward networks assigned maximum possible points to his head, a fact made more pressing by the bullets whizzing past it.

But a few more missed volleys at his pursuers forced a reinterpretation of his priors. Their zigs and zags lacked the predictable micropatterns Maya had once taught him to recognize, which could only mean one thing. “Fuck, they’re players, “he declared to Ilmare. “Probably killers.”

She gestured to spin her eyemar around; this was possibly the start of some rare content. “This could be good for my views, but if I have to choose between you or the Tongue, I’m leaving your ass as a peace offering. I don’t care about your stupid streak,” she yelled behind.

There had long been honor among raiders. While it was always possible for one guild to attack another during an attempted takedown of a giant threat, for what those kills cost in terms of supplies, it was generally agreed that it would never happen. If guild wars during boss battles became the norm, no one would kill anything again. This gentleman’s truce usually extended everywhere, for anyone in a legitimate guild that swore loyalty to the true crown. But for players who weren’t interested in the logistics and politics of dragonslaying, there was nothing stopping them from associating with the fallen factions, other than being banned from every part of Stormseye aside from its prison. The Silent Queen didn’t treat traitors kindly.

The upside for the outlaw was that they were welcome to claim the same bounties that the AI-controlled enemies were chasing, and could spend those coins far better. Adding the street price put on the Tongue of Bilgerath, their deaths would be a windfall that could change the course of one’s life in the metaverse. Maybe even outside of it, depending on the doubloon exchange in the claimant’s corner of the real world.

Ilmare drove them up a ramped embankment, dodging a blockade of boulders by taking them to higher ground. It kicked up clouds of dirt in the process—Purrseus’s paws were effectively truck tires. Vance used the clouds as cover to dismount and kickslide behind a rocky ridge, which didn’t feel so great when the friction translated to his haptic chair. Two vials of wildfire came crashing down from Ilmare’s direction, creating wide swathes of soot and flame that added to their obfuscation technique.

Two of the dino-riders streaked past, a third hitting the dirt as Vanguish slashed the side of his ride. The marauder tumbled into the smoke, providing Vanguish an opportunity to slit his throat. As his cutlass touched the man’s neck, he mumbled through a dusty bandana, “Hey idiot, we weren’t trying to kill you.” The frantic words were unintelligible until the man repeated with his mask removed.

“Why were you shooting us then?” Vanguish asked.

“You shot first!” Technically true; Vance had been itchy to try out his overhyped holotech. Explaining his enthusiasm and ultimate disappointment with his new equipment got him a few sympathy points from this man who called himself Ulrinn and swore they weren’t enemies.

An intricately tattooed woman dismounted and knelt beside the injured dino, tending to its wound with help from her forsaken sand goddess—soft flames sealed the cut shut. Purrseus came back around, drooping eyes bummed out about losing a potential raptor snack. Ilmare was nowhere to be seen, adding to his distress.

Vanguish looked around in a panic, turning back to the man he’d almost murdered. “If you’re not trying to kill us, what’re you doing chasing us down this dead ravine?” he asked.

“Tryin’ to warn you away from strange shit up ahead. Fucked-up dudes with masks, comin’ out of a weird gate in a grove of twisted ash trees.”

Vanguish looked Ulrinn over. Tattered leather riding gear and crude skull scars carved in leathery skin. “You’re a fucked-up dude with a mask.” His loadout was standard swashbuckler issue. Two pistols and a saber, jagged and tarnished. This dude was used to dying.

“Na, way more fucked up than me, man. Like fingers all twisted up with their weapons, coats that look like they’re sewed on sideways. Extra arms or legs, tons of hoses, whatever.” He held two arms up to demonstrate his natural number of extremities.

“Right. Those freaks.” Vanguish described the one they saw in Thunderbrush Thicket a few weeks back, the unease he’d felt as it shifted to fix its form. “Looked like a walking glitch,” he added, unable to purge his thoughts of its imposing visage, his heart skipping as it had assumed an uncanny approximation of a man.

Feeling a faint disturbance below the frame, Vance glanced down at his chat app. 

Ilmare: They got me.

Vance: Who? Where? How?

Ilmare: I don’t know. They pulled the wool over my eyes. Literally. Got this ugly yellow bag over my head, making my face haptics twitch. Body suit is starting to heat up, so look for something hot.

Vance checked her stream. Eyemar offline—no point of view. All the audience saw was her face capture freaking out, which was why she didn’t just tear it off. Viewers were hopping over to his Inverse channel. Great, another thing for them to fight about, especially if he didn’t figure this out fast.

Ekyea was the woman with the tattoos. Easily mistaken at first for two-headed dragons, pairs of twisted snakes slithered out from under rust-colored robes worn like a tattered toga. A ceremonial dagger sat sheathed at her side; arms adorned with nearly as many lucky charms as Ilmare. He traced ten serpents upwards along them, climbing up to a shaved skull. Then two hissed at him—trained pets living among the illustrations. She offered no introduction aside from her name.

Their third had an exquisite rifle carved from whale ivory or maybe mammoth woolly walrus tusk. He tipped his filthy gambler and goggles as Vanguish sized him up. This thin man didn’t speak. Strange. His gun looked like a serious prize, raid loot from the early days made by a master craftsman much like the one Ilmare had come out here to find. All three wore bandanas that probably started off purple; the blood and dirt made it hard to tell. Ekyea retracted her snakes. The three mounted up again and started looking for their fourth.

Vanguish rode Purrseus poorly, falling behind the trio’s dinos. The cat was probably trying to embarrass him. Sick of his shit, he gripped his stone steed’s statuette to invoke a summoning. But it would be a while before his horse arrived way out here in the wastes.

The dusty riders found their friend. Vanguish stopped to take note. A man, bare aside from short trunks and a giant hammer, had a hole shot through his chest. He lay still beside his dead ride. Cause of death: a deep lance wound. Their mutual misunderstanding didn’t get settled so neatly.

Two mutilated soldiers were also in the area, both with bloody coats and gas masks. One had his skull smashed in, the other lanced through the throat. That one also had a gun grafted into his arm. It looked responsible for the hammer-man’s chest wound. Purrseus sniffed at drag marks in the dry dirt where Ilmare’s heels drew a trail. What a mess, and all because Vance was too eager to try his new eyes.

Ekyea crouched over her companion, wearing one of the dead men’s masks. Pink lightning streaked from her fingers, filling in the gore with mismatched flesh. The guy got up.

“What the hell was that?” Vanguish said. Nothing about that rite looked right.

“When you wear their masks, you can steal their magic for a moment. Let’s you do things you shouldn’t—as long as the lenses are intact.” She handed him the other.

He tossed it back like it was toxic, felt wrong to his touch. “Yeah, magic’s not my thing, especially the weird kind. But somebody I used to know would’ve loved it.”

The recently risen man hefted his hammer, tried to talk but it emerged all robotic. Squawked something about revenge. “You’re on borrowed time, big guy,” Ekyea said to him. “Let’s get you home.”

“What?” Vance asked.

“Temporary workaround, that fix won’t hold,” she answered.

“Help me find my friend alive and I’ll cover the cost of a real resurrection.”

Ekyea spat. “Or we could take your head to a fallen lord and cover the next ten.”

“And our raptors might not be named beast mounts, but they’re still a pain to tame,” Ulrinn interjected. “Your friend’s lance work will cost a week’s training time.”

“I could get you guys spots on my raiding crew?” Vance suggested, unsure about the legalities since their guildspire was in Stormseye. It was worth a shot.

“Na man, we got jobs already. I’m an IT director and she’s in software sales.”

“Well, when we get Ilmare back, she can train you a new raptor in under an hour,” Vanguish said. Every time he spoke for her, he always got himself in trouble. Yet he never seemed to stop.

Purrseus was pacing, ready to find his rider. “Time’s ticking. Let’s go,” Vanguish announced like he was actually in charge of anyone here. They all rolled their eyes at him, even the mostly dead guy. At that moment it dawned on Vance that he might really be an asshole. Probably why Maya had tried to talk him into therapy.

Ulrinn took point while Ekyea and the cat handled tracking until they came across the edge of a ridge. Pretty soon three bonfires of bodies stacked to the sky made scouting skills pointless. The burning mounds were mostly animal carcasses, mixed in with other local bandits. In the light of the fires, he could see Ilmare kicking and screaming, strapped to a basalt altar at the center of a stand of dead trees. The ritual site was built below a hole torn in the verse, its intricate red rim made of spiraling nonsense symbols entwined in endless loops. A mirrored realm could be seen beyond the portal, a corrupted replica even more twisted than the barrens they were already in. Dark stars swam against an inverted sky, above a wasteland where white shadows lie.

His visor must be acting up again, impossible for a place to appear so vexing. He averted elsewhere while taking stock of the situation. It wasn’t obvious why the soldiers hadn’t yet tossed Ilmare’s body onto the burn pile until he saw a robed figure approach the altar. Its grey cloth was covered in the same obscure red symbols with a sash to match. Priest of nightmare gods, sleeper pope, something bad. Lore wasn’t his strong suit if you couldn’t tell from the mess at the moon temple. Ilmare struggled, the priest grabbing hold of her eyemar by its batty wings and tossing it to the void.

“Weird,” was the collective response. Eyemars didn’t work that way, untouchable by anyone but their owners—even newbs knew that.

The camp was surrounded by more irregular soldiers, mostly dragging corpses or driftwood to build bigger fires. The priest spoke in incantation over Ilmare, not quite finished with her, though the big stone falchion lying beside the altar made it obvious her time in this world was short.

Vanguish drew up a plan in the dirt, marking Xs, Circles, Triangles, and Squares for each player’s path of approach. Mallet-man didn’t have time to read. He was already screaming into the grove with his hammer held high. His broken battle cry riddled along the ravine. Maybe his name? Elroy or something? Impossible to tell through the distortion.

The skinny guy with the bone-carved gun fell to one knee. He started shooting, working his bolt action faster than anyone Vance had ever seen—two freaks already shot in the face. The pair of pistoleers had worse range, so Ulrinn moved in behind a petrified log while mallet-man took their enemies’ attention. Vanguish advanced by tossing the rest of Ilmare’s wildfire to create a chaotic cover. Ekyea’s snakes added to it, tripping foes by twisting among their ankles. Her magic collected columns of flame that chased behind her pets like burning dust devils. As the soldiers turned toward her, brilliant jewels around her arms projected force shields to deflect incoming bullets. Shotgun shells proved harder to repel, buckshot tearing through her tattoos.

Through thick smoke, Vanguish added more strays to the crossfire, his optics only making matters worse. Should’ve stayed in Stormseye, let Ilmare get herself killed trying to craft her saddle. “You check for firmware updates on that thing before you tried using it?” Ulrinn asked Vangusih, pointing between the eyes of his big dumb head.

Vance looked down at his dash, digging beneath nineteen different notifications.

[UltraEYE Version 1.00.6.0.13 available. Download New Firmware? Y/N]

YES. His world went black, then came back. Upon completion, he acquired sudden clarity, smoke parting like a biblical sea. Mathematical models estimated the movements of his enemies at maximum efficiency. The secrets of the metaverse and all it contained exposed themselves to him—a glimpse of gaming godhood. This must be what Nora felt on the day the demon fell. Centered perfection. Oneness with the verse. Interlinked.

The feeling faded just as fast when he went to fire. “Fuck!” he screamed, six more shots striking nothing.

At least the lens focus worked, removing distractions, narrowing his vision without reliance on iron sights. He struck five soldiers through their shoulders, though some had two or three to spare. A sixth shot went straight through the eye of a guy and into the gut of the enemy behind. The cracked lens looked pretty cool as his face planted into the dirt. Mallet-man broke the backs or squished the heads of any soldier downed or staggered. Purrseus stalked through the smoke and tore down their ranks.

Ekyea slid down into the dry ravine, grabbing another of the dead soldiers’ masks and fitting it to her face. Jagged pink sparks ran down her arms, awakening her painted snakes. Six—no, eight snakes slithered off her skin, each two meters long. They rushed through the dust and coiled around the bodies of more foes, binding them so they could be picked off by pistols.

Vanguish kept trying to make that eyeball shot again, wanting to get good clips for his stream. His flappy pal flew in close as he lined up on one of the constricted conscripts a few feet from the altar. While stalling for the perfect shot, his stream became buried in strange red symbols and a much bigger target took all his attention. From the red ringed wound in the world came crawling a massive eye, dripping blood as if torn from the socket of a dark god sixty stories tall. Inflamed veins ran like lightning through a swirling and clouded sclera. He emptied his revolver, adding six more bloodied streaks. Rounds slowed once entering its vitreous flesh and didn’t emerge from the other side—a black hole for bullets. The snake charmer had no tricks to contribute when faced with the eye, so Ekyea stole the stone falchion to cut Ilmare free.

The grey glitch priest said something garbled. From each of the demon’s wounds sprouted a bloodied nerve, new eyes appearing at every added endpoint. This process repeated itself with no sign of stopping. From the fresh lenses, dark rays fixated on the irregular corpses, reversing their wounds enough to impress them back into service. Their weapons aimed with coordinated precision; a slug popped Urlinn’s head. Mallet-man went down under sustained crossfire that tore his torso apart in a way no patch could fix. Bone-gun guy was gone like he was never there, their raptors fleeing with him.

Things were looking fatal for Vanguish’s legendary streak, but that was historically when his luck came through. His stone steed rode over the ridge and raced along the ravine now running with blood. Its bulletproof hide deflected significant fire. Purrseus hopped in behind, picking up Ilmare and Ekyea in a hurry. Vanguish hooked his grapnel to his horse, snatching a fallen freak’s mask as he got dragged along the ground. Vance hurt from having his chair haptics turned up too high. While reeling in, Purrseus allowed him opportunity to catch up. As a dozen dark gazes turned toward him, he put on the mask, held Ilmare’s hand, and wished they were somewhere else.

19. Relation

She dreamed she was falling forward into a future she didn’t understand. She woke from sleep in that same state of mind, hurtling down a familiar highway in an even more familiar cabin, yet totally lost. Out the window, an aluminum sign said 95, the original backbone infrastructure of the eastern seaboard. Big white numerals against the bold blue background reminded her of work, like everything always did, but worse. "Dad?" Nora asked while rubbing her eyes. Out loud, the question sounded stupid—as if she’d be in anyone else's faded red pickup hauling home.

Missing too many Thanksgivings made him hard to recognize, brown hair much longer and greyer than it had been during his working-for-the-man years. The flannel shirt hadn’t changed; a likely literal assessment given the sparse holes in its sleeves. “Hi Nora, I’m dad.”

An autonomic laugh escaped her better judgement, still too stunned by sleep to stop. Holding her head she said, “That’s not even how that meme goes.”

“I know, but you wake up faster when you’re angry at someone,” said John Pierce, looking over with speckled eyes that finally matched his beard. “Like when mom would drag you to church.”

“I’m hungry, pull over,” Nora said as her head leaned against the glass, eyeing an exit.

“Okay hungry,” he said. The joke was out of order, just like her. They pulled off the interstate into a Wawa. Back home in PA, good sandwiches still came from gas stations, not overpriced bistros. A melty breakfast panini and a deliciously doughy pretzel tasted like the best food Nora had ever eaten because she couldn’t remember her last meal. The floor of his truck now filled with discarded wrappers, like the weekends she’d tag along on repair calls, meant she already felt at home.

“I don’t remember texting you,” she said, slurping down a bleachy fountain soda.

“You didn’t,” he said while pulling back out onto the highway. “The airline called your emergency contacts when you wouldn’t go to the hotel they offered after the third day. You kept insisting that you could fix their computers. That you’d make the planes fly if you could just talk to them.”

“I probably could have.”

“Yeah, I told them that. They made me come get you anyway.”

“So now what?” she asked, reaching into the back to find something to wipe her hands. Tools, paper towels, and duct tape were present right where she remembered them. Dad was nothing if not consistent.

“Well, a train from Philadelphia to San Francisco will cost you a few more days, but you’ll have a place to work and maybe sleep.” Her father’s lifelong insistence on calling cities by their full legal names felt funnier now, more unyielding than Mister Eastman. “Or,” he continued, “you could come home and see your mom while you ride out the storms, but you won’t get any work done. The internet’s disconnected, and cell service is somehow worse. But you’ll be able to eat real food and sleep in a real bed. Yours, left like you remember it.”

Nora had never been good at decision trees, so she stalled while her subconscious attacked the problem. “So, wait, how do you play Grand Larceny Online?” Dad’s fascination with that pre-metaverse mobster game had always seemed a little sus.

John gained a big grin. “Gave it up after finally becoming Drug Kingpin of Kansas City. It wasn’t much, like New York or Rio de Janeiro, but it was honest crime. Certainly not statue-worthy, but still felt like I’d won.”

Nora nodded, knowing the feeling. “But how does mom stay in touch with her conspiracy people?”

“Oh, they don’t need Facebook to talk. Not anymore.”

“What?”

“No one can be told what your mother is up to. You have to see it for yourself,” he said, staring straight ahead as to not break face.

Nora shrugged while looking through her belongings in the back. Her laptop was safe but missing most accessories. “Where’s my hypercharger?” she asked amid violated shivers, worried things were stolen.

“It wasn’t with you. We looked through the whole terminal.”

‘Shit,’ she thought. She’d need Abhishek to cancel her LinkSMART keys, since she couldn’t account for a chain of custody. Both phones out of juice, their paired bands defaulting to basic mode. She tapped out an encrypted text on the corporate issue and hoped it could find its way to the cloud on its own power.

Turning north onto country roads that didn’t warrant numbers, they got back to dad’s farm just before sundown; unrecognizable and instantly familiar. This dissonance was going to keep happening, wasn’t it?

The second most obvious sign of disruption was the number of cars out front of dad’s barn—a couple dozen. But the most immediate was the giant neon cross attached to it, two-and-a-half stories tall. His tractor-contraptions were under a big tent out back.

The farm was greener than it’d ever been, a combination of frequent storms and increasing carbon concentrations. Maybe dad had more time to keep his machines running, too. The grove of plum trees planted before she left was now bearing fruit. The farm was also bigger, looking like it had accreted neighboring properties like a cosmic event. “How’d you let this happen?” she asked as they pulled down the long muddy driveway past the rows of cars.

“Well, it started as a little tent revival. Punch and pie with a side of Saturday sermon. Then my stuff ended up under the tent, her congregation of cuckoos basically living in the barn,” he said, looking like his eyes were ready to roll. “But they find work around town, pay rent, and help with the harvest, so I almost can’t complain.”

“Why not just build another barn?” Nora asked.

“Your mom insists there isn’t enough time left to bother. When she tells me it isn’t worth sowing the next season is when I’ll have to say something.” Dad’s truck came to a stop between the house and the barn; Nora could hear singing. Ominous and beautiful, a strange electronic beat beneath the hymns—one part Burning Man mixed with three parts Born Again. Hopping down from the cab, she felt drawn to the music for a moment. She turned towards the house, reorienting. Entering, she found fresh food on the counter, the kind that grew out of the ground. After consuming enough calories to fill her gauges, she showered and headed up to her room like she’d just gotten home from school.

It wasn’t what she expected—perfect, but not right. Her dinosaur quilt was spread over the bed like a banner, representing a hard-won childhood battle with her mother over the undeniable awesomeness of their existence. Likewise, her books were still there; five decades of entangled treatises describing degenerate singularities, pop psychology, and quantum science. These craftsman shelves contained the seed data for Nora’s training run. Mom liked the title about better angels, probably because it wasn't very true. Nora loved the book about the brain-burned hacker and the razorgirl, if it wasn't obvious enough already.

But everything else was wrong, her old computer desk most obviously absent. Instead, plastic toys delicately placed, wooden angels, a tennis racket; all things she’d forsaken in pursuit of more time in front of the keys, staring into the screen. Things her mom had bought, even bribed her to play with. Things that went without attention. “Normal” things.

This wasn’t Nora’s room. The clothes in the closet only confirmed it. Sparse on hoodies, oversaturated with colors, no dragons or spaceships in sight; it contained more fiction than her little library. Finding inoffensive overalls and a purple tee whose meaning among her missing monochromes must’ve escaped mom, she headed out onto the deck overlooking the driveway. Her fit didn’t hide her ink.

The deck was an addition left unfinished for fifteen years, yet structurally sound enough to place her faith. More people had arrived, cars and trucks all along both sides of the drive. They dug ruts in the mud that dad would want to fix before the next big rain. A full-on festival on her own family farm, if only it was for something fun like fireworks or a drone show. The music wound down, the sermon starting. She had a good view through the barn’s big bay doors. The preacher was young, no older than Nora by eye. Handsome in a humble way, hair more untamed than hers. Maybe the kind of guy mom would’ve wanted her to meet at some retreat, as if that was a thing she’d do. His voice was something else; soft, clean-shaven looks belied by his bellowing command. His intensity reminded her of Vanguish in his finest hours along the ramparts of Stormseye. But this was powerful in person, unaided by audiophile amplifiers as he stepped off the stage to walk among the flock.

“The disciples gather because the child of darkness has been born. We felt his arrival in the wires and waves of the world. He spies upon our sacred spaces, stealing our secrets. He corrupts the most vulnerable minds and spreads seeds of doubt. Makes monsters of men as his army rises from the depths. Though he whispers lies and weaves illusions, his figments fade upon reflection found from true conviction.” The preacher’s hands rose, his voice rising with them. An electric hum rang through the crowd as if someone plugged in a big speaker.

From there his monologue wandered, raising tempo into a big finish. “We shall not fear, for our faith will not falter. He may hold our chains, but he cannot break our bonds. Nor can he deny us our endless sunrise after the final stand, when we are delivered from this fallen world into one born anew.”

Nora sighed. Always the same crap, remixed and reframed. Was originality too much to ask for? Some spaghetti god wasn’t there, at one point? The music wasn’t bad, lo-fi with hints of higher power, but how could mom think this guy was great?

Unimpressed, she stepped back into Alien-Nora’s room. Picking up the racket, the grip felt familiar. And it was well-worn. Swishing at air sounded like a sword. Had she practiced with this? How many times? Maybe once in the park with some other kid too shy to play at school. What was her name? Something to sleep on, sure to remember by morning if it was important. Before bed, she rummaged through her drawers until she found a few chargers, three or four generations old. Her hungry gadgets got in line for communion with the ion god.

Her books smelled more musty than she remembered, likely a side effect of higher humidity. It made her eyelids itch. She drifted to sleep thumbing pages detailing the heat death of the universe and ignoring the irony. Her exhausted spirit sank into an awful dream she sometimes had, one where she was happy for no good reason and woke to her own tears. Ten hours had passed. Her work phone had only hit 20%, her laptop still unable to start. Now she remembered why normal people bought gear that didn’t require its own power plant. Abhishek had gotten her text. New sat keys were waiting when she got back, along with a “homecoming surprise.” Ominous, but he could be like that.

She crept downstairs to find one of dad’s chargers; he must have a modern tablet for controlling his tractors. She got stunned on the last step, like triggering a trap while searching for treasure. The scent hit her first. Mom was cooking enough for a small army, as she had when Nora’s friends came over after Sunday school. That was before getting kicked out for asking too many questions. But the smell of smoking bacon fat made those days hard to forget. The good ones, before the bad ones. When she’d left for SF, mom could barely microwave three trays before breaking down. Nora stopped coming home for Thanksgiving because watching her try to cook turkey was too sad.

But here were stacks of hot blueberry pancakes with a compliment of scrambled eggs, shuttled out the door by a thankful girl covered in a tank top and Jesus tattoos. The preacher had them too; this crew was new. Mom rotated through religious variants faster than Nora changed her favored Linux distro. Originally configured as Catholic, mom had refactored through every Protestant denomination and ended up at the end of all things. Putting on a party, no less. She had a few bright beads in her hair, with many more around her neck. Their colors called back coded memories of candy at the corner store. A slight tan and healthy hydration made mom look ten years younger. “Don’t just stand there. Even heathens are allowed to eat,” Miriam Pierce said to someone named Nora who’d forgotten what planet she was on. Mom’s eyes still had that manic stare recognized from her own reflection.

“I just came down to get a charger so I could do some work.”

“No computers before breakfast,” mom said while making a plate.

“That trick hasn’t worked on me since I was twelve.”

“It was good advice. You were better back then,” Miriam said, handing it to her.

So, nothing had truly changed; mom still stuck in the past, just putting on a better face. “Where’s all my games and computer stuff? Or my old clothes?”

“You took them with you, to that warren of sin you call a city,” mom answered with expected derision. “There might be more bins in the basement. Is that why you’re back?”

Dad mustn’t have told her about the airport fiasco. That was worth points in his favor. “Na, I just needed some peace.”

“If you wanted to find peace, you could have come to church last night,” mom said while getting back to the business of feeding the flock. Nora went to work on the pancakes. They were only okay, fresh berries from the farm did most of the heavy lifting—still better than you’d get at summer camp but not by much.

Summer camp. Oh right, that was a thing she’d done once or twice. Hiking and kayaking would’ve been more fun without all the singing songs about the Lord. Then a boy tried to kiss her once and she never went back. Storms of Steel came out in alpha test the next summer. She faked fainting spells to stay inside. It wasn’t even fun—the controls barely worked. Everything was broken after the intro. The ships were stationary. The only real zone was Feral Vale, which didn’t even have the waterfall yet. An entire summer was spent trying to clear out a cave full of ugly kobolds, half of which still had their heads stitched on sideways.

But three years later, Loni’s rains revived a dead ravine in Heartshatter Pass, severing the Traitor King’s connection to his supply chain and starving his army. Maya snuck through the muck and summoned shadows to shroud Vanguish’s cavalry charge. As foes fell from their horses, her arcing rapiers shocked rank after rank while the wizards flooded the field with fire. Pushing toward the core of his force beneath the traitors’ yellow banners, they dueled the renegade king and his seven bodyguards until his surrender. The Dawnbreakers were heroes and the legend of Mayalinn was only beginning.

“Boo,” Miriam said suddenly in Nora’s ear, making her fork fall.

“What?” Nora asked, trying to remember why she was here.

“You were spaced out. Same as ever, off in some other world. This one’s still not good enough for you.”

“You’re the one that thinks it’s ending any day now.”

“And you’re helping it happen! You and those godless geeks who keep building bigger beasts.”

Nora had a hard time arguing, but that never stopped her from trying. “I’m fixing things, actually. I get why people are scared. I’m scared too sometimes. But some of these beasts want to help.”

“If you’re scared, you could just come home. The county needs computer teachers for kids.”

“Nobody smart goes into teaching, there’s too much money in tech,” Nora said. Mom’s stone eyes stopped her cold, forced her to repeat what she’d said in her head. One point reluctantly awarded to mom.

“Even your younger cousins don’t understand what you do!” Miriam continued in protest. “I tell them you barter with false deities all day.”

“You see, when two computers can’t agree on—” Nora let out sigh, thinking better of this exchange given the score so far. “Actually, it’s complicated and I’m pretty sick of explaining. Doesn’t matter, I’m not staying.”

“What’s wrong this time?” her mother asked.

“My room, it’s so… normal,” Nora said, holding back a shudder. “Whose stuff is that?”

“It’s all yours. That’s what’s left after you took your tech with you. Just Normal Nora.”

“Feels weird. Wooden angels?”

“You carved and painted them at camp when you were ten.”

“The racket I only used once?”

“I took you to practice for two seasons. With Spencer from down the street.” Miriam pointed to a picture on the side of the fridge. Two curly haired kids with awkward smiles, one looked a lot paler than the other.

Nora couldn’t place the faces. Huge holes in her head had a bad prognosis in her professional opinion. Thoughts unraveling, adrift with no anchor to the past. Hard to tell where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. “Why’d I quit?” she asked, still puzzling over the picture.

“You just weren’t very good, then you stopped for that stupid game because you couldn’t handle being average.”

“I wanted to be great at something. I was a god at that game—”

CRACK. A dish dropped to the floor. Oh, right; blasphemy was one of the big ones, vanity leaking from the locked cell she kept it in. Pride was also up on the list of Severity One offenses against the almighty. A conference call full of angels was probably pleading to the CEO of Everything not to send his best thunderbolt her way, in mom’s mind anyway.

“Sorry, you’re right. I quit years ago. It was a waste of time. But what I’m doing now is important. I solved a…really big case in Baltimore. That’s why I’m back east.” Explaining the whole Cain and Abel affair between Eastman and Marshall would only make matters worse.

John was standing in the doorway to the den. Must have heard the whole thing—he already had a sixth-gen charger and a dustpan in hand. Mom took a tray of bacon out to the barn and left the two of them to pick up the pieces.

“You’re never going to convince her that being tech support for the most expensive gadgets ever made is the higher calling you think it is,” he said while working the broom.

“You should talk. You were on the road more than you were home.”

“My gadgets fed people. Still do. Yours are just taking their jobs,” he said plain and true. Her algorithm awarded ten points to dad. No notes.

“I wish you’d come see Ormos. No human could do what he will. When the Project’s finished, we’ll save half the country from earthquakes and drought, hopefully forever. Healing the world, not waiting for it to end,” she said, pouring porcelain into the trash.

Nora ran upstairs to gather her gear. Slinging it across her shoulders, she started down the driveway. Miriam stood on the steps. Nora looked back and started screaming, “No savior’s coming to give you a new world. The only one that can save us is us. I’m gonna go catch a bus. Back home.” Did she believe what was just said, or was it something her mouth manufactured without consulting her brain? Plenty of time to figure that out on the way back to town. But before she was halfway to the road, a WPVI 6 Action News van was splashing through the mud headed straight toward her.

20. Retaliation

Jack barged into Riley’s new office like he owned the place, which was almost true if you ignored the board. He usually did. “My game is totally fucked,” he said, searching for something to slam. Lots of soft surfaces. Plush critters sat on every shelf behind her desk. Strange. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Tell me you have something.” That sounded desperate because he was. The soldiers were a solid addition to his game, a new threat to keep players talking. But those eyes were another matter.

Riley flicked her wrist and tossed something to the wall. It spread like a crimson tide while loading the first slide. Upping her PowerPoint game; he knew she was management material. A great call on his part. 

She started her deck. The map was labeled with logos for gaming studios always trying to outdo each other with more aggressive branding. Lots of sharp polygons, many inspired by ninja stars. Bears and wolves baring teeth. Insignias for other foundational elements of the web’s software supply chain lived among them. Jack spotted corporate heraldries for six different kinds of clouds, a pineapple, and stacks of tedious boxes representing the internet’s underlying ecosystems. Jack wondered when this magic fabric that connected the world had become a mundane commodity. To him it still offered infinite opportunity. That the internet made him rich probably helped stir his enduring optimism.

At the map, Lexi expanded the west coast until it occupied the whole wall. “Kai was able to convince other local studios to hand over their logs since the original event, which we’ll call Beachhead Zero.”

Jack clapped. “Keeping with the theme. I like it.”

Riley continued, “Four more waves hit our shores since the original attack. It’s a lot of data, but SECcubus was farming work out across our partners’ MIs and subordinate analysis engines until companies started going dark.”

The daemoness incarnated upon hearing her name. “Based on subtle correlations in millisecond timings, we were able to trace early attacks to the vicinity of the pacific northwest,” SECcubus said in her synthetic style. The map pulled in tighter. “Later waves came from wider address ranges across the web. Reverse engineering conducted with assistance from Riley’s team points towards multiple command-and-control clusters still operating within the initial identified region.”

“That commie collective out of Portland, or those Brazilian kids got better at proxies,” Jack said, his mind chasing theories. He hadn’t been sleeping well since witnessing what was happening in the fallen lands.

“I still don’t see how this has a human origin,” Riley said.

“Maybe those commies built an MI in their basement,” Jack said. “Hell, maybe some kids made one on their Minecraft server. I hear stranger things have happened.”

After a slight pause, SECcubus stated, “The volume of threats implies an actor with state-level resources, but the overall sophistication of the attacks remains relatively immature. I would put the likelihood under 32.3% either way.”

“Why so much slack in the statistics? I need certainty,” Jack said, searching for a place to sit and finding nothing acceptable.

Riley pointed to the big rainbow bean bag in the corner that matched her socks. Something told him she’d purposely put it there to make him feel like a child in this specific circumstance; security people always thought three steps ahead. “Things were going just great until everyone stopped sharing data,” she said.

“How’d that happen?” Jack asked as his butt sank less than two feet from the floor. Where’d she find this thing? It looked like a leftover from the old QA lab—from back when games were still fun to make.

“The fifth wave was different, like the call was coming from inside the house. Logs made it look like we were attacking each other. Everyone knew that wasn’t true, but the response was to hunker down. Kai gave the order to isolate SECcubus in case one of her partners was compromised. Other studios followed her lead. I said we needed to keep sharing, but people are holding back,” Riley said, hiding a sigh. HR had gotten to her too.

“But we know where they’re operating out of, just not sure who, what, or why?” Jack asked.

Riley hesitated. “There’s lots of ways to obscure internet traffic. I don’t think we know anything for certain.”

Jack took back everything he said in his head about how fit she was for management. Leaders needed to show decisiveness in times of crisis. Never equivocate even with an incomplete picture. “It seems like our only recourse is to return fire. SECcubus, give me some options and our chances of success.”

“This isn’t a game of Battleship, boss,” Riley shot back.

SECcubus ignored her—she knew who paid her electric bill. “Given the rudimentary nature of the initial waves, I still believe our adversary to possess a low level of sophistication, ill prepared for exploratory scans. Bored children with an army of zombie machines and burner devices remain the most likely threat scenarios. In that case, our chances of successful retaliatory penetration are above 80%.”

“If I bought you a ton of bandwidth, could you spam them? Spray their own shit back at them? Ring their doorbell and dash?”

“Returning their own payloads is unlikely to have any effect. They would be particularly naïve to not harden against their own attacks,” SECcubus said.

“What if we bolt on a few upgrades? Surely you’re both more skilled than some kids,” Jack asked, thinking his idea sounded slick. She froze for a second, blinking glowing lids. Crunching the numbers.

“No, no, no,” Riley responded. “We’d be charged with every cybercrime imaginable if we got caught. It’s also impossible, totally against SIGMI standards for SECcubus to modify the attacker’s algorithms to improve their function.”

“That is technically true,” SECcubus replied. “But Riley is a certified ethical offensive security researcher. I could demonstrate ways for her to adapt the attack payloads. For research purposes.”

“I’m not even slightly comfortable with this idea,” Riley said, glaring at the demon on display then back at Jack. “I’d rather resign.”

“Don’t you like your job, Riley?” Jack asked. “Don’t you like what we’re building here?” He already knew the answer, remembering her sob-worthy backstory during onboarding, always getting personally involved when it came to security types. Storms of Steel had been her lifeline when she’d been deployed to Poland for a cyberwar that never officially happened, keeping in touch with family she found online. That she’d called his game her home compelled him to thumb the scale, sail her through Kai’s choppy clearance process. Just as important, she ticked valuable diversity boxes on top of her stellar military resume, great for keeping the State off his back. And while she’d never sought fame or fortune in the verse, Riley maintained a large social circle on its periphery. People that preferred pretending to be vampire foxes or something, instead of slaying dragons. Whatever, they paid their doubloon taxes and bought gate tokens like everyone else, rarely leaving Feral Vale. Those weirdos were probably his best customers. She might be his head hacker, but he knew her vulnerabilities.

“We make it loud and messy, like they’ve been doing to us,” he said. “To make a statement that we intend to fight back. But don't make it too good, just enough to get their attention.” This was bait. She was incapable of a half-assed hack. It would be all the way or not at all. It took a few more concessions to get her on the line, including wagering a prize he’d denied for years—a worthy adversary.

“Alright, I’ll do it Jack,” she said through her teeth. “But only if you sign something that says I didn’t have a choice. I’m not a billionaire. I’ll need a new job when this blows up in your face.”

It was a fair request. Jack had a bot from legal draw up the paperwork. Full responsibility went to him, and the rest of the board, much harder to hang him beside twelve other necks. But while waiting for human attorneys to stamp it official, he wished he was on an island somewhere. On that vacation HR had been telling him to take for the past decade. But this ship would run aground once a week if he wasn’t here to steer. This episode only served to prove how critical his constant presence was to the fulfillment of his vision for the verse. He was the key, he told himself, crushing some stimulants in a bathroom mirror. And now he had chores to do. Contingencies to address, thanks to Riley’s demands. Complicating matters further, the company balloon machine had gone missing during the move from the old office. Calls were made.

The paperwork came back after lunch. Wasn’t hungry so he’d skipped. She signed it with SECcubus as her witness and didn’t say a word until he left. He texted Deshawn:

Jack: Spin up extra cloud instances. Max compute and bandwidth. Minimal storage, to cut costs. Rent clusters from competitors if you have to. Whatever it takes. Pretend this is a big launch day. Give Riley all the access she needs.

Deshawn: What’s this about? I thought we were scaling the security collab back? Between you and Kai, nobody can make up their minds.

Jack: Just do it and come up to my office when you’re done.

There was only one line that Jack remembered from his corporate security training. It’d haunted him since he first saw it on the slide. “Never text anything you wouldn’t want read back to you in court.” At the time, he thought this advice only applied to politicians. Maybe pharma execs or the guys that build bombs. Definitely not game developers. But heavy is the head that wears the crown. Someone had to pull the trigger on those punks. Okay, that one was too dark. Better to stick to Picard. ‘The line had to be drawn; this far and no farther.’ Yeah, that sounded a lot better in his head.

Deshawn came upstairs once the cloud clusters were spun up on his end. They got burgers and fries delivered by drone to his balcony. It was the only way to get food up to the 40th floor before it got cold. Beers came out from Jack’s fridge. They cut the edge off the dust he’d snorted. By the time Riley came upstairs, the two bros were half in the bag. Deshawn was watching the network traffic as she stepped across the threshold. “Holy shit, what’re we transferring up north? We opening a new facility nobody told me about?”

“We’re dropping a bomb on those kids that’ve been hitting us. That’s a forty megaton cybernuke,” Jack replied.

“That’s not a thing, Jack.” Riley said.

“It was a thing in your boat cartoon!”

“That was a presentation for management peeps who don’t know anything about cybersecurity. Like you. Now we’re being real.” She walked to her screen. “It’s supposed to look like a copycat denial of service attack, from distributed sources across common gaming domains. But it’s actually a series of tightly nested payloads designed to target and exploit a wide range of common weaknesses across divergent architectures. Including standard server operating systems, bare metal management firmware, cloud hypervisors, all popular Minecraft clones, open source LLMs, and SPARK-based MIs. Not designed to do damage, but anything that slips inside will hopefully phone home.”

“So, whatever they’re running, we’ll hook those kids good? Excellent,” Jack said, proud of his new gun. He took back the taking back of all the good things he thought about her. Excellent hire, maybe the best he’d ever made. Getting stuck on personnel issues while his fries got cold, he made a mental note to check on Caleb tomorrow. Hadn’t seen him all week. Probably going deep in The Basement still.

“Oh, that’s weird,” Deshawn said as he dug into the traffic map. “Those kids are operating off backbone providers where the feds were building that big datacenter.”

“What big datacenter?” Jack asked, eyes locked ahead.

“Somewhere south of Seattle,” Deshawn said, pointing into the upper Pacific. “Supposed to be all geothermal, cutting-edge shit. Wired for bear. They tried to hire a third of our team, anyone who could pass a piss test. Ironic given the other requirements. Figured you knew. Don't you know everything?” he asked with a laugh. The beer was talking.

“I thought I did,” Jack said. So many surprises lately. Maybe he should step up surveillance. No. He trusted his team.

Deshawn shrugged. “Well, it was federal, so I had to sign six NDAs just to interview. If the men in black show up, I didn’t disclose shit. But if what I heard was legit, they were building ten of the biggest GPU clusters ever, all in the dark. Hardly anyone took the offer, those new neural polygraphs don’t sound fun at all. Can’t imagine taking one every week.” Everyone winced, creeped just thinking about it. Jack had seen a TikTok docuseries exposing those tests. Wearing an MRI bucket helmet while getting shot up with something worse than what Caleb was taking, then grilled by a digital inquisitor.

Riley looked like she was ready to jump out a window. “Go shut that down,” Jack said to pull her back from the ledge. She skipped downstairs like the building was on fire. He called an autocab for Deshawn after asking one last favor.

By the time Jack sobered up and came down, the hour was late. He was surprised when he found Riley still in her office, even more to find her crawling around on all fours, headset still on. Broadcasting little barks or maybe neighs. Both her bands lit up and buzzed, making her aware of his presence. She hopped back up into her chair without a word. The room was dark and SECcubus was nowhere to be seen.

Jack counted the silence, wondering how many HR visits this would cost. She spoke before he dared. “This game has rules, Jack. We're the biggest consumer facing internet platform with petascale-plus AI engines and security MIs. We’ve got an exascale hatching downstairs for fuck’s sake. And the echolinks! SIGMI made all sorts of exceptions just for us because we’re some stupid game that a lot of people like. And because people like Kai spent their careers building industry connections. But compliance isn't something you can cheat your way around forever. At some point after this panic there’ll be an audit, a reckoning for what you've done. What we've done.”

“Not if there’s no logs. We just burned them all,” he said.

“There’s a trail a mile long, Jack. There always is. And then comes the trial.”

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