08

The Interrobang combined the exclamation mark and the question mark into a frenzied explosion of dazzling WTFness at the end of a sentence. Sure, you could always just end your sentence with?! but how much more decisive was it to smash those fuckers together into a single punch in the rhetorical faceimage And of course, it was invented by the head of an advertising agency, who must not have been particularly good at his job, because he failed in convincing the world to adopt his visionary Frankenpunctuation.

“Interro” came from the interrogative of the question mark; “bang” was old slang for the exclamation mark. Together they formed a dynamo that was vastly more expressive than the sum of its parts. But the Interrobang never memetically captured the culture’s imagination and was a relative footnote in typographical history—unsupported by most fonts, unknown to the average person.

Until Maddy decided to grant the Interrobang, a fellow resistance leader, stage time in her mind.

Lonso and I sat quietly on opposite sides of a large sitting room in his private quarters. Ordinarily you’d never find me going back to the “private quarters” of a man I barely knew, but this was the only spot on the entire Church campus where you could find alcohol. He’d promised me very good bourbon, and he’d delivered. We were each sipping it neat from elegant crystal rocks glasses.

His suite of rooms was vast, pristine, antiseptic even. I felt like a tiny particle of consciousness in a vast galaxy of absurdly spartan decor. One little corner had furniture—a small love seat and matching easy chair, overlooking a view of the city through tall windows, and a small end table with a tablet computer perched on it. A few prints were mounted here and there—drawings and paintings of scenes I couldn’t understand, probably Gorvodian mythology. The primary concession to popular culture was a large television mounted in view of the furniture.

Sunlight was starting to stream into the room, reflecting off the finish of the wood floor to brighten up even the far corners of the living space. Dawn was rising on a completely new world, after what I’d seen. I shook with anxiety and fear. I’d planned on sipping that bourbon, but as my heart raced, I opted for a more generous volumetric approach to drinking it, and then poured myself another.

“Did you know these people could just appear and disappear like that?” I finally whispered.

“No,” he said.

“What’s stopping her from coming back here?”

“Probably nothing.”

I wanted to scream.

Lonso’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked it, and said, “Violet’s here.”

We watched the video of my brief interrogation session with Maddy on Lonso’s giant television, giving me the opportunity to cringe at my inexpert handling of the situation and freak out all over again as I watched her dematerialize. She almost took me with her. In the seconds that she had her arms around me, I’d become horrifically convinced that she was somehow blasting my epidermis completely away even though she hadn’t even touched my bare skin.

Violet took a moment when the video was over to digest what she’d seen. Then she said, “Olivia needs to see this. Can you conference her in?”

As Lonso tried calling Olivia, Violet sat next to me on the love seat. She saw the half-empty bourbon bottle—to be fair, Lonso had also consumed his share—and said, “You can’t drink away the trauma of this experience.”

“Maybe I can, Violet,” I said sharply. “We live in an upside-down world now, where the laws of physics are just a set of suggestions. So maybe given this new information, possibly yes bourbon can erase my trauma, or give me X-ray vision, or make me levitate out the window or something—who knows until I run the experiment?”

Sure, I was a little tipsy.

“I don’t understand why you’re so surprised,” she said. “You shattered four glass walls with your voice on your second day in the lab.”

That was a good point. I’d practically forgotten about that day. I didn’t understand it at all, though.

“I thought power morphemes convinced punctuation marks to reorganize a person’s thoughts into new patterns,” I said slowly, trying not to slur my words. “How could power morphemes physically break inanimate objects?”

“Your perception of a thing is integral to that thing.” She was almost blithe about saying that. It was a tantalizing non-answer that origami’d itself into sixteen new questions about consciousness and the nature of so-called reality.

I realized I wanted to be as far away from these people as possible.

Olivia appeared in the corner of the television screen. I’m sure I seemed quite ragged from her perspective.

“Isobel … are you hurt?” she asked.

You did this to me, I thought. You made your previous lab assistant into a superpowered menace, and now you’re making your current lab assistant into a cowering wreck. Late in the game to start thinking about OSHA regulations, I realized, but maybe if we did the right thing now, future lab assistants would survive intact.

“I’m pretty fucked up, Olivia,” I said.

Lonso replayed the video for her. I shouldn’t have watched it a third time, but I realized I was studying it, trying to learn how she did it. The cadences and intonation were deeply unnatural to me, but I could tease them apart a little better each time I heard the recording. She was targeting these presumably “synthetic” power morphemes at herself, triggering her own disappearance, while also making sure we didn’t intervene, so what we felt from watching the recording was the stupefied glow that I’d felt in the room with her. The sequence she used was unnerving, slightly euphoric, and most significantly, effective via the modern miracle of streaming media.

“Now, let me see if I understand the state of things as they are today,” Violet said, a slight twinge of irritation in her voice. “We have a neural net at our disposal that is churning its way through combinations of the hundred and eight, looking for jackpots, for really juicy sequences that could liven up practically any situation.”

Olivia nodded slightly. I think she knew where this monologue was headed.

“Meanwhile, your former associate likely possesses her own instance of the same exact neural net. But she’s using hers to invent, by her own admission, hundreds of synthetic power morphemes above and beyond the original hundred and eight. And she is apparently also searching for jackpot sequences based upon her shiny new synthetics, as evidenced by the very sequence she demonstrated that allows her to vanish into thin air! Do I have that about right?”

“Maddy’s clearly delusional,” Olivia said. “The synthetics have not been beneficial for her psyche.”

“Spare me the amateur psychoanalysis,” Violet retorted. “I can decide for myself if disappearing from the clutches of my enemy is beneficial for my psyche, Olivia. She called herself the ‘resistance.’ Who do you think she intends to resist? I’ll give you a hint. She intends to resist us, in case that wasn’t blazingly obvious to everyone. Not only that, but now we are in an arms race with her, and she is winning it!”

Interesting. If Violet was worried about a resistance movement forming in opposition to her, then she was potentially planning something that might deserve to be resisted. I needed to figure this out.

Violet turned to me, her gaze becoming slightly less angry, and said, “Now let’s talk about you, Isobel. Maddy said she was working with someone she called the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands. Who do you suppose she meant by that?”

“It’s a character from Cameron’s game,” Lonso said quietly.

Violet shot him a mean look—the question was meant to test how I’d respond.

“The Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands is the patron saint of losers in Sparkle Dungeon,” I said. “She’s pestered me twice to join her on a quest to explore outside the official map, and I’ve said no twice, because first of all, no NPC is the boss of me, and point B, you may have noticed I work hard at my day job and deserve twelve promotions right about now. I may not be qualified for a director position but feel free to just put the word ‘senior’ in front of my current title twelve more times.”

And then, because we were fully in the business of entertaining the ludicrous and the impossible lately, I realized something I should have realized during that first encounter with the Dauphine in the Warehouse:

“Oh, also I think her AI must be sentient now.”