We stood there for a moment, as our bodies finished assembling themselves, coalescing into physical form once again. I barely had time to register the sight of a mist rapidly dissipating and then suddenly there she was, staring at me as though her eyes had been locked on mine the entire time we traveled.
She was still holding my hand, and when she tried to let go, I wouldn’t let her. I held her hand as tightly as I could, terrified of losing contact with her, afraid I might slip back into the logosphere and be lost forever.
I could already feel the pacifying effect of Devin’s voice rapidly wearing off. I no longer saw Maddy through an idealized soft-focus lens; now I also thought I saw the raw determination and unwavering integrity that seemed to fuel her, and it scared me.
What if it turned out she hated me after all?
What the fuck was I doing here?
“You’re safe, Isobel,” she said gently.
I bit down hard on the impulse to argue the point with her.
“Where are we?” I asked after daring to glance around at our surroundings. We were in a classroom, but all the student desks were gone, replaced by camping furniture mostly. Instead of bright overhead lighting, the room was sparsely illuminated by small lamps and rope lights.
“Home,” Maddy said. She allowed herself a tiny smile at my disheveled, costumed expense, and said, “Let’s get you some real clothes, Graziella von Groove.”
Maddy’s crew had established a headquarters for itself inside an abandoned high school, in an undisclosed neighborhood somewhere in Los Angeles. Every last window or door had been boarded and chained shut, which was perfect for a crew that could teleport in and out of the place. I changed into borrowed street clothes in a locker room and then she led me into the gymnasium.
The whole gym had been transformed into a research hub or control center, like the gleaming computer labs you’d sometimes see on TV shows. They’d taken care to gel the overhead lights, so instead of brash basketball game lighting, the room took on a cool blue hue that suffused the space with an aura of technological sophistication.
A ring of folding tables around the periphery housed an array of computer workstations and laptops. In the center of the ring, several VR dance mats were stationed, and I saw VR headsets and consoles scattered all about the room as well.
They’d mounted a projection screen where one of the basketball hoops had been, and they could presumably toggle between projecting POV shots from VR game sessions or displaying live streams or other video when necessary. Loudspeakers were hung in the rafters to provide accompanying audio.
I recognized several individuals here from the fracas at Cameron’s condo, gathering to watch something that hadn’t started yet, and they definitely noticed my arrival with Maddy. A cool silence fell over the crowd as they tracked me following her. I spotted Mohawk leaning against a desk on the other side of the gym from us, surrounded by friends, all of them trying to determine if my presence here meant they’d actually succeeded on their mission after all.
“That’s Kenji,” Maddy said. “He’s one of our best Sparkle Dungeon players.”
“Really?”
“Everyone here plays a ton of Sparkle Dungeon,” she said. “That’s how I taught most of them power morphemes.”
Maddy got his attention and waved him over to us. His eyes got wide with excitement, and he practically bounded across the gym to meet me.
“Kenji, this is Isobel,” Maddy said.
I said, “You might remember me from when you tried to kidnap me just a short while ago.”
“I’m so sorry about that,” he said. “Are you okay? Did we hurt you?”
“You scared the shit out of me,” I said, “but I’m fine.”
“Good. You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to meet you, and this is not the way I expected it to happen. I thought we’d meet at a pro tournament someday or something. Probably watched a thousand hours of your live streams.”
“Aw,” I said, genuinely touched, “thanks for the twelve cents in ad revenue.”
“Thanks to everything I learned watching you play, I’m holding down number eighteen on the leaderboard!”
“Impressive.”
“And number fourteen, and number eight!”
“What?”
“We have some hardware geeks here who hot-wired a few consoles together,” he explained excitedly, “letting us split signal to and from a single headset, and with that configuration, I figured out how to play three characters at the same time!” My competitive brain began to itch with jealousy.
“Probably voids the warranties,” I said through teeth gritted so tightly together that I could hear enamel cracking.
He shrugged and said, “They’re stolen.”
“Maybe you can show me how you do that sometime,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t steal them myself.”
“No, I mean—show me how you control three characters at once,” I clarified.
He smiled and said, “Yes, I bet the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon would like to add that trick to her arsenal. Fair enough—I probably owe you a show-and-tell.” Maddy gave a little nod to dismiss him, and he said, “Anyway, glad you made it here. Very few people do.” As he started to wander back to his own domain, he added, “The few who do tend to stay.”
Next Maddy introduced me to someone at a standing desk who hadn’t participated in the raid at Cameron’s condo.
“This is Gridstation,” Maddy said. “He’s got technical skills.”
Gridstation was medium height, slender, white, he/him per Maddy’s identification just now, short brown hair, fashionable specs, looking pretty good actually in a dark blue designer jacket and blue jeans. Seemed like he was in his thirties, probably could have pulled off facial hair but he was clean shaven which was okay with me, reasonably fit, and crucially, I noticed he had slamming good shoes, slick blue-and-gray wingtips that were ostentatious but worthy. Overall, his appearance received my silent seal of approval. Now that the beauty round was over, we would move on to judge his thoughts on the important topics of the day.
“What do you know about all this, Gridstation?” I asked him.
“It’s some extremely weird shit.”
“Do you know how to use power morphemes?”
“I don’t. But I’m useful in other ways.”
Contestant, if you are attempting to flirt with the judge, you are succeeding.
“How’d we do?” Maddy asked him.
“Perfect score,” he replied. He tapped a few spots on his tablet, and the projection screen lit up with a grid of surveillance feeds from Cameron’s condo. Either they’d brought in their own spy drones and deployed them, which seemed unlikely, or they’d gotten a tap on Cameron’s LAN somehow. Maybe when Kenji had access to Cameron’s office, he put their own spyware on one of Cameron’s machines.
Gridstation began slowly swiping between various drone angles, catching us up. Devin and Bradford were done singing, and now Cameron was smoothly circulating among the guests, politely encouraging them to leave. Nothing controversial; the party’d been scheduled to end at 2 a.m. and it was almost 5 a.m. now, so these folks had definitely gotten a lot of mileage out of this shindig. Someone turned off the dance floor lighting and switched on the condo’s ordinary lighting, providing an additional cue that the event was drawing to a close.
I saw Lonso debriefing with Phyllis and Max for much of this time, as the members of Gorvod’s Frenzy calmly made their way out of the condo in a long single file line. Meanwhile Devin dismissed the catering staff per our prior arrangements; a fresh crew would be back at 10 a.m. to clean up the kitchen and load out their equipment.
Bradford remained seated on the dance floor right where he’d been for our little question game, and that’s where Olivia found him when she arrived. He stood up to greet her, and the two began a very intense conversation.
“Can we get audio on that?” Maddy asked.
“I’m recording it, yeah, but I won’t be able to isolate it from the ambient noise in the room without post-processing,” said Gridstation.
But from this camera angle, I could imagine what Olivia was saying. She seemed to be berating him for being there in the first place, or maybe for the extremely poor judgment to let me out of his sight; gauging by his body language, he wasn’t having any of it.
As the last party guests finally exited, Cameron dismissed the security team, who packed up efficiently and left the condo. The cabal and their crew organically wound up stationed at each of the corners of the dance floor, sitting or standing in a holding pattern: Lonso with Phyllis and Max; Bradford and Devin; Cameron; and Olivia. With the ambient hustle and bustle in the air gone, Gridstation cranked up the gain on the collection of surveillance mics in the room. You could practically hear them breathing, but they said absolutely nothing to each other.
Cameron’s phone went off; he checked it, then buzzed someone in.
An elevator ride up from the lobby later, Violet Parker strode into the room, dressed like she was about to headline a town hall on CNN—sharp, crisp, ready to draw blood even at 5 a.m. She surveyed the scene from the center of the dance floor, taking in the body language of her comrades, and then choosing her words carefully.
“I like to imagine that in complex situations like ours, one can always find a sliver of good news to call out, along with whatever requisite dose of bad news must also be delivered. So I’d like to offer the floor now to anyone who’d care to provide me with any good news whatsoever that you might’ve gleaned from tonight’s events. Take your time, and don’t fret about how insignificant your good news might seem. I’m sure we’ll all want to hear your unique and upbeat perspective for morale reasons alone.
“Then we’ll be having a very frank and detailed discussion about the bad news that’s practically radiating from this epic clusterfuck. I’ve only heard the slimmest of summaries, and I’m already this close to having this entire apartment vaporized by military space lasers.”
In the gymnasium, we pulled chairs together in a clump and sat on the proverbial edge of our seats, munching metaphorical popcorn, glued to the scene unfolding on the screen above us.
“Here’s some good news, then,” Olivia said. “I successfully broadcast power morphemes for the first time in my lab today. I can amplify them with electronics now, and I can transmit recordings via digital or analog with their effects intact.”
Violet actually slow-clapped for that and said, “Very good news, Olivia.”
“I take it my recording of Maddy today was helpful,” Lonso said.
“Yes. She’s been using the synthetics so long that her vocal cords must’ve physically mutated. She can emit tones so low it’s like she’s got a subwoofer in her throat now. They’re so low they’re supposedly inaudible, but they’re detectable with frequency analysis, and your body can feel them even if you can’t hear them. I don’t know why this works, but if you deliver a power morpheme, even one of the hundred and eight, on top of a tone ten hertz below the audible floor … the presence of that foundational tone somehow enables electronic transmission to work.
“Doesn’t have to be purely vocal, either—I was using a tone generator to create the foundational tone in my lab, then pronouncing power morphemes over the top of it, and I could reliably create effective recordings that way.
“This discovery opens the door, Violet. Now we can distribute power morphemes via the internet, television, radio … now we can finally go big.”
I glanced at Maddy. Her eyes were wide—she hadn’t seen this coming, and the implications of Violet using this capability were not pretty. The governor of California could cast a very wide net.
Violet’s smile was shrewd and grim.
“Does anyone happen to have any better news than that?” she asked the cabal. “I believe the bar’s been raised.”
The others remained silent.
“Then let’s discuss a more pressing concern,” she continued. “I saw pictures of a little prayer circle out here. You were there, Bradford, and you were there, Cameron … and Maddy and Isobel were sitting right there with you, you were all practically holding hands out here for—how long was it, half an hour? All I saw in those photos was smiles and banter. So how could it be that when Lonso arrived to collect them, both Maddy and Isobel had escaped?”
“They didn’t ‘escape,’ Violet,” Cameron said, “because this isn’t a prison, it’s my home. I don’t hold people here against their will. I mean, what’s the emergency? Isobel’s been gone fifteen minutes and for all we know, she’ll be back at Jenning & Reece bright and early Monday morning.”
“No, Cameron,” said Bradford, “Violet is concerned that Maddy will be a bad influence on Isobel before then.”
“Well, Bradford,” said Cameron, “if Violet is truly concerned about bad influences on Isobel, she should look in a freaking mirror.”
Lonso attempted some performative toxic male bluster on Violet’s behalf, but she cut him off and said, “What did you assholes talk about in your prayer circle?”
“I’m glad you asked,” Cameron said. “According to Maddy, Isobel has been summoned to join a Sparkle Dungeon quest, by a being from the logosphere who is calling itself ‘Alexander Reece.’”
“That’s ridiculous,” Lonso said.
“Lonso, we’ve discussed this—certain words, like ‘ridiculous’ or ‘preposterous’ or ‘ethical,’ just aren’t allowed coming from a guy who charges people money to worship a billion-year-old space octopus.”
“Not an octopus, Cameron, not even a cephalopod—”
“So that’s where Isobel went?” Olivia interrupted. “On a quest with Alexander?”
“On a quest to find Alexander,” Bradford corrected her.
“In the logosphere?”
“In the game at least. Tell me, if we took no further action here, when would we reasonably expect Isobel to reappear back on the grid?”
“Monday morning at work,” Olivia said.
“Or late this afternoon for my flight back to Sacramento,” Violet said.
“Friends, I propose we adjourn for now,” Bradford said, “and trust that Isobel can judge for herself the merit and risk of pursuing her quest.”
I thought that was maybe all we were going to get. I almost got up to go use the bathroom, but Maddy grabbed my arm and convinced me to stay. Violet and Lonso both had cars waiting and they made brisk exits. Cameron wandered off into his office. Devin needed to grab their things from the kitchen, which left Bradford and Olivia temporarily alone in the main room. Then we observed one last quiet exchange.
“Did you get anything else?” Bradford asked.
“I extracted the whole sequence,” Olivia said. “I used it to get here, Bradford.”
“What makes it different from transmutation?”
“Teleporting’s like taking a taxi from point to point, with a rock-solid GPS system for navigation. Visualize where you’re headed with technical precision, and bam, there you are. Transmutation’s like—taking an airplane across the ocean, only you don’t actually know whether there’s land on the other side, or whether the plane will survive the landing, or whether the ocean won’t just rise up and swallow you along the way, and then when you finally get there, you realize you’re now a sentient cloud of bacteria on Mars. I have an idea about how to combine the two, though—visualization plus transmutation. And then on top of it, now we know how to broadcast. So if all that comes together like I think it will, we’ve finally got a way to mass populate the battery.”
“We finally have our battery,” Bradford repeated, getting used to the idea.
“Yes, my friend,” she agreed. “We finally have our battery.”