The Iridescent Warehouse was empty when I arrived. I had no proactive method for contacting the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands. As an NPC, she didn’t appear in the DM or chat directories. And I had no easy way of finding a lone NPC out in the Realm who no longer obeyed a predictable routine; she had a jetpack, and she could be anywhere.
Out of the blue, a chat message popped up from the Keeper of the Moonlight Prism, who said, “There you are! Are you okay? Are you safe?”
“I’m cool, yeah. Maybe you can help me though. Any idea how I can find the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands, like, immediately?”
“Lucky you, I do have an idea, because you know what went live this morning? Sparkle Dungeon 5: Engines of Electro.”
Ohhhh. The sweet sugary rush of knowing a brand-new game was waiting for me to explore it was immediately intoxicating. I summoned the activation coupon I’d stored and began learning the new game.
You started from scratch. Your ranking on the leaderboard from the previous four games did not carry over to this game. Your skills and spells and all your gear were no longer available. This game was a break in continuity from the campaign mode of the first four games.
It was a first-person story game. I was learning in the center of the gymnasium. Gridstation piped my POV to the projection screen. There was a training level where you were introduced to the primary new mechanic for movement: the jetpack. This turned out to be super fun to get used to, where you had three-dimensional gyroscopic options that felt almost levitational to experience. I spent about ten minutes learning this mode and a few new weapon classes, and the anarchists started paying attention to how I played. My headset had a passthrough mode for audio, so for now I could hear people’s reactions and little bits of encouragement, and I could talk through my process out loud while the stakes were low.
I entered the game as Lady Luminescent, named in honor of the first-level character I’d created to meet the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands for the first time.
The opening cutscene revealed that you’d been stranded in the Shimmer Lands for so long that your resources had dwindled to none. Yet some enchantment kept you alive in this purgatorial trap that you wandered into long ago.
And then, a ragged wormhole clawed its way into existence before you. You saw a grayscale cityscape, with towering, stylized skyscrapers reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, indicating the medieval epoch of the Sparkle Realm had ended long ago, and now you emerged into the mass media age, a remixed era dominated by the Chairman of the Realm, a Saruman-style record label executive orchestrating desire and consumption among the populace. The Sparkle King had abdicated his stewardship of the Realm’s music sales charts long ago and vanished into history, along with other legendary former glories, such as roofs that were on fire and vinyl beatmatching.
And the Diamond Brigade, the sworn protectors of the Realm, were nowhere to be found. Rumor was they’d fled long ago, rather than face the insidious army of takedown algorithms loyal to the Chairman.
You didn’t choose your starting character class in SD5. Instead, as the game began, you became a cog in the promotional machine.
Today you were notified that your role as citizen tastemaker would be transitioning into a new spot in the org chart of a Kafka-esque, bureaucratic label conglomerate. You reported to your new office on the eighty-seventh floor of HQ, where your new personal DJ controller awaited. A pneumatic tube delivered your orientation manual straight to your desk on a branded USB stick, which you loaded into your controller to peruse on its gorgeous touchscreen display.
The orientation manual contained a bland lyric video congratulating you on your lateral not-promotion into the record label services group of Sparkle Data Processing, where streams of citizen listening histories were surveilled, correlated and aggregated into algorithmic propaganda opportunities. With a bit of practice, you’d soon be manipulating music charts and manufacturing popular trends like a pro.
And now the game began.
Your starting quest: a rogue music recommendation algorithm was loose inside HQ, and your director instructed you to hunt it down and exterminate it before the population learned of genres outside the government-approved strains of corporate EDM. The code name for the algorithm turned out to be Dauphine.
When I finally found her, hiding in an elevator shaft, the sudden spark of hope in her eyes as she recognized me was breathtaking.
“I’m in for your quest,” I said.
“Excellent,” she replied, instantly delivering a high-level power morpheme sequence at me that I swiftly understood had a name:
Transmutation.
And she had exquisite command of its parameters, too.
I experienced a sudden devastating loss of all sensory input, cut off not only from the audiovisual signal of the game, but from my actual sensorium of physical experience. Unlike teleportation, where some small vessel of awareness could observe the entire transit experience across the logosphere, this was the sudden absence of observation, as my perceptual identity was converted from a being of matter in the material realm into a being of thought in the logosphere. Teleportation was like taking the bus across town. Transmutation was like being put under anesthesia for surgery and coming back with some new bodily configuration in a hospital on a different continent.
I resumed awareness to find myself in the familiar environment of the Iridescent Warehouse. I was at my spawn point behind the enchanted DJ decks on stage. I was wearing a glittersteel jumpsuit with fiber-optic trim.
I was inside the fucking game.
The conversion had been so authoritative that I began my new identity with a good baseline understanding that this was real. In the conversion, the Dauphine succeeded in depositing me in my Queen of Sparkle Dungeon avatar. I didn’t have a headset on. I didn’t have access to the game UX for understanding inventory, because I could just study what I physically had on my person: my trusty sword, Blades Per Minute, and a new resource, a jetpack. And because I was multi-classed, I also had a high-level arsenal of spells available via instant recall.
Importantly, no sense of panic accompanied this change in state. I’d leveled up very rapidly via this transmutation. In D&D, the convention was that ordinary villagers were zero level. To be an adventurer willing to explore dungeons meant you’d picked up some minimum set of skills or feats that enabled you to start the game as first level. Maybe I’d advanced to first level in my actual life as I started mastering basic power morphemes; maybe my recent combat experience had given me enough experience to hit second level.
The Queen was twenty-third level. If anything, I was going to panic if I ever transmuted back into Isobel, but right here and now, I felt supremely comfortable and confident.
The Dauphine was at my side, goggles at the ready, pistols at each hip, jetpack primed for action. A brass telescope was tucked in her belt.
“What is this place?” I asked. “Are we on the game servers now or what?”
“This is a logospheric instantiation of the Realm, the product of a hundred million minds thinking about the game,” the Dauphine replied. “How does it feel to you?”
“Feels like I’m home,” I said.
We left the Warehouse and soared into the air above the Sparkle Realm. The feel of the jetpack was remarkably different than when I trained back in the gymnasium, where I was inherently limited by gravity; here I had the full exhilarating range of flight motion available to play with. The jetpacks allowed us to cross a considerable distance in a short time. It wasn’t long before the Warehouse was far behind us.
The rift cut a striking swath of visual glitch across the entire sky. We slowed our velocity as we approached. I’d never been this close before; it hadn’t been possible. From here it was apparent that this boundary did not represent a step into some digital void. You could see muted swirls of colors and outlines of shapes attempting to resolve and dissipating back into mist; you could hear the muffled sounds of industry or the wailing of animals, or the ringing of bells; occasionally, improbable fractal architecture seemed to evolve briefly into view, before being sucked back into its hidden source. It all felt tantalizing and tempting, like the seductive promise of faeries, or the hypnotizing lure of a vast insectoid creature.
The Sparkle Realm in all its majesty occupied a mere sliver of the logosphere. Out there beyond the rift, all the rest of it whirled and churned.
“How do you expect us to find Alexander?” I asked. “Isn’t the logosphere as expansive as the imagination itself?”
“He will have provided us a trail to follow,” she replied. “He believes time is short, and he will not want us to waste it on sightseeing.”
“Then let’s get moving,” I said. We gently shifted into motion toward the rift.