His office on the first floor was huge, with filing cabinets full of miscellaneous computing and A/V gear jammed haphazardly against most of the walls—drawers full of joysticks, cables, hard drives, tools, and so on. He maintained a wide open central area for his state-of-the-art VR gaming platform—you strapped in at the waist, put your headset on, and the platform gave you a range of motion, like a combination treadmill and gyroscope. I sat in a plush, high-end office chair; his was an elaborate gaming chair with strange ergonomic cushioning, controls built into the arms, speakers built into the headrest, coolers for sodas mounted on the sides, the works.
We sat by his desk, which housed an elaborate computer workstation with a half-dozen video monitors, a few splayed-open game consoles of various brands, several models of VR headset strewn about carelessly, and many open cans of Diet Coke. A large electronic whiteboard stood nearby with snippets of code and pseudocode all over it.
The majority of the video monitors provided views into the security system he’d installed in his condo. High-resolution micro spy cameras were positioned everywhere, giving him live video footage that he could scroll through, and he could toggle between normal and infrared display. He could zoom out from a grid of video feeds to a floor plan of the entire condo, or he could zoom in on a specific location to get a closer look. Tiny drones gave him mobile coverage when he wanted it. Face recognition identified each guest, constantly comparing images against the invitation database that security was using at the door. Using this system, Cameron could determine exactly who it was, for instance, that was having sex behind DJ Luscious in the loft at that exact moment.
“That’s very creepy,” I said.
“I’m a technologist,” he muttered. “I do things because they’re possible, not because they’re ethical.”
I realized as I settled in that two of the side monitors were looping the video capture of my most recent encounter with the Dauphine. One was from my player POV, and one was from god mode POV, hovering near the ceiling looking down on the whole scene. He saw me staring at the scenes.
“At first, we just thought this video was machinima,” he said, referring to a style of animated video art that utilized existing game engines and game footage to create new original stories. “Now I have nearly fifty developers, network architects, infosecurity specialists, system administrators, quality assurance engineers, and IT professionals working on figuring out how this performance of hers is even possible.” He sighed deeply. “So thank you for your bug report.”
“It’s not a bug,” I said. “She’s sentient, right?”
“No, the AI is not sentient,” he replied, a little peevishly if you asked me.
“Then what are all those people you just mentioned actually looking for? I mean, what are they expecting to find?”
He changed the subject, saying, “What did you come here to discuss? I’m sure we’d both like to get back to the party. Well, I’m sure you would. I’d like to sneak out of the building in a catering van and go hide in a Holiday Inn.”
“Did Lonso send you the video he took of Maddy and me this morning?” I said.
“You allowed Lonso Drake to take video footage of you—on purpose?” he replied. “You must be deep in the shit right now.”
He pulled up a secure, end-to-end encrypted email service, and sure enough, found an email from Lonso with a paragraph of text and the video attached. Without a word, he launched the video.
As Cameron watched, he seemed unusually disturbed or agitated, whereas I felt the same mild stupefaction from hearing Maddy speak on the recording that I felt when I was in the room with her for the actual experience.
When it was over, he sat back in his chair and seemed very exasperated. “Isobel, nothing personal,” he said, “but you seem to be an epicenter of extremely bad news.”
“Maddy’s probably coming here tonight,” I said.
“Right. And you came here anyway?”
The small amount of confidence I’d started the night with seemed to drain away all at once.
“I didn’t want to miss the party,” I said.
He was silent for a long moment.
“Well, if she knows anything at all about the Dauphine,” he said at last, “maybe she can be useful to me. Because if I can’t solve this Dauphine problem you reported, I can’t risk launching Sparkle Dungeon 5. So what’s your plan to take her down?”
Oh. Uh.
“I was hoping you could help me with that,” I said.
“Ha,” he replied. “The Queen needs tactical assistance in combat? Unheard of.”
“No—this isn’t like the game at all.”
“It’s exactly like the game, but for the first time in years, you’re facing someone who’s many levels above you. You can’t just go toe to toe with her. You need to surprise her somehow. Spring a trap. Which would require you to, uh, go back in time and set a trap. Which, okay, so you might just be fucked here.”
“Isn’t there something you can do? Some unexpected skill you’ve got? I mean—Violet can perfectly mask power morphemes in her voice, Lonso can make guns materialize in his hand, Olivia is the genius researcher … what’s your superpower here?”
“If you were me, and you had a ‘superpower,’ would you just blurt that out to a complete stranger?”
“I’ve been on top of your leaderboard for eight years, Cameron! That’s how I got pulled into this whole mess in the first place. Doesn’t that count for something?” When he didn’t respond, I said, “Why are you even involved with these people? Why are you training legions of gamers to use power morphemes when they grow up? What are you getting out of all this?”
“Let’s not change the subject,” he said. “Here’s the deal. I’m immune to power morphemes. I can hear them and recognize them, I can even deliver them, but they don’t affect me.”
“Does that mean you don’t have punctuation marks coursing through your brain like everyone else?”
“Of course I do. But I was born with partial congenital hearing loss. I’ve got the most cutting edge cochlear implants available, but power morphemes don’t work when amplified digitally. So certain frequencies or some other aspect of power morphemes we don’t even know about must be muted or just shaved off, somewhere in between the implant’s microphone and the electrode array that fires off signals to my auditory nerve.”
Ah, so when he played the recording of Maddy just now, that was the first time he’d ever actually experienced the effects of power morphemes. That would explain how unsettled he seemed as he got a surprise taste of his own spellcasting technology without warning.
“How many power morphemes do you know?” I asked.
“You want to know what level I am, is that it?”
“How many?”
“I know one fewer than Olivia at all times,” he said. “As a courtesy.” After a beat, he asked, “What about you? Have you developed a ‘superpower’ yet?”
That was a good question. Compared to Maddy or any of these people really, I felt like I was running around with a squirt gun during a live-fire engagement. But that didn’t make me helpless.
“I improvise well under pressure.”
A series of red dots suddenly started appearing all throughout the security feeds on his monitors, along with distinct loud pings announcing each one. He swiveled around to take in this new information, and then muttered, “I think it’s time to improvise.”
Each red dot corresponded to a person that face recognition couldn’t find on the invite list. We counted twenty-two before they stopped appearing from nowhere. They were spread throughout the condo, sweeping slowly, dressed in street clothes which made them easy to spot in the crowd once you knew to look for people who weren’t in costume. They wore thick jackets, thick pants, scarves, leaving very little exposed skin. These people did not intend to fall victim to any Tasers tonight.
“Holy shit,” he said.
A familiar sensation swept through me, the rush of adrenaline that accompanied the start of a major combat. We were about to make history: the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon and the Sparkle King himself, side by side on the battlefield for the very first time.
“They’re going to fucking kill us, aren’t they?” I said.
“Hopefully just you,” he said.
Suddenly a new red dot appeared on the screen with a loud ping.
Fuck—someone was in the office with us.
I spun around to see Mohawk standing on the guardrails of the VR platform, bits of his form around the edges still materializing. He seemed disoriented, like he couldn’t quite understand where he was yet, or like he was temporarily dazed from the strain of appearing out of thin air in the first place. I realized this was the perfect opportunity to catch him off guard.
Then he locked eyes with me, and I froze up completely, becoming in that moment the personification of oh shit.
He took a deep breath, clearly readying an attack.
Cameron swung his prop scepter and smacked Mohawk on the side of the head, knocking him backward off the guardrails into a hard fall on the floor behind it. The scepter was made of a flimsy plastic which shattered from the impact. Mohawk was probably more hurt from the fall than from the blow; regardless, he began delivering a power morpheme sequence from the floor.
“Feel free to start ‘improvising’ any time here,” Cameron said to me.