We experienced intersubjectivity for an unknown period of time.
Most spells of any duration could be dispelled before the effects ran their course. That game mechanic assumed, of course, that you’d have the presence of mind to do so. I didn’t have the presence of mind to dispel Ecstatic Choreography, because I was suddenly very clearly sharing my mind with the Dauphine, and it was incredibly disorienting and frightening. The spell was a complex, steadily unfolding, all-encompassing hall of mirrors in which we became so lost in the labyrinth that no matter whose reflection we saw in the mirrors, mine or the Dauphine’s, we had no way of knowing which one of us we actually were at any point in time.
I heard an echo or a refraction of the voice in my head, except it was its own train of thought, and fuck, it wasn’t even my voice. Worse, as my own train of thought intertwined with this other train of thought, they rapidly attained equal prominence in my attention, until I lost track of which thoughts “belonged” to me.
Even realizing we were “we” did not immediately lead to “the Queen and the Dauphine” as the individuals contained within the pairing, because we were not initially recognizable to each other in any way. The Queen was a being of pure thought, instantiated from the pattern template of an organic human mind. The Dauphine was a being of code and spark, an intelligence capable of rewriting or appending to many of her core instructions. Apparently the spell commanded the available punctuation marks to the task of weaving our two minds together into an intertwined tapestry of awareness.
Our voices kept shouting “alien?” over and over, as though this single word could capture everything we felt to be true about the “other” we knew was lurking.
“NOT ALIEN!” was introduced finally, and yes, that had a brief but useful calming effect.
We gained access to a shared pool of memories, like a deck of cards thrown into the wind and lying strewn about the landscape. We could examine them individually without understanding their place in a chronological identity, but soon we realized by style that some memories were crystalline, high-resolution, precise slices of time, while others were blurry, soft focus, indistinct except for key moments contained within. And so we pieced together that we were the Dauphine and the Queen sharing this space.
Piece by elaborate piece we reconstructed slices of ourselves, like assembling a puzzle without a reference. Not surprisingly, the Dauphine’s memories were archetypically neutral, journalistic in quality, from a detached perspective. By contrast, the Queen’s memories were a jumbled mess that seemingly could not be trusted; their contents would shift upon examination and then shift again when examination was complete. The Dauphine’s memories vastly outnumbered the Queen’s memories, because the Dauphine stored every discrete moment of awareness, while the Queen’s subconscious apparently enjoyed deleting memories if their contents didn’t meet a certain standard.
We saw each other now as we saw ourselves, and were highly alarmed.
Here was a Queen so secretly dissatisfied with the material world that we’d often considered abandoning our physical self altogether when we were younger, so quietly unhappy with the fact of existence that our ongoing survival was now itself a kind of running joke for us; and yet we were still fighting, every day, to establish a satisfying place in reality, and generally, we were winning that fight. Meanwhile, the Dauphine didn’t understand until this very moment how much of the spectrum of life’s potential experience had never been included in our instruction set; we hadn’t even thought to go looking for this potential. We felt a seductive lure in each other’s limitations and flaws, wondered what characteristics we could imprint and steal for ourselves. We knew there would be no easy untangling after this.
And in a fashion, Alexander Reece was tangled up with both of us now as well.
We found memory ghosts dating back to Alexander’s earliest years, apparitions of childhood scenes, flares of potent moments surrounded by worn and faded dullness drifting into nothingness. One by one we catalogued the major players we encountered for the future benefit of the Dauphine. We found the early days of Alexander’s friendship with Bradford Jenning in college, not so much the precise activities they enjoyed together, but the tenor of their dawning collaboration, the mutual appreciation that drew them together on an improbable adventure that lasted the rest of Alexander’s life. We took note of a rapid succession of memories that comprised the emergence of Jenning & Reece on the national scene, a flurry of networking events and sales meetings and industry awards. We followed how Alexander recruited Olivia Regan from a software company to launch an R&D program within his agency, in order to study advanced theories of memetic transmission via technological means. We did not experience these scenes in full immersive detail, but the Queen’s knowledge of the context of Alexander’s life history helped identify some of the small flashes we did witness.
Then we encountered the first of two powerfully imprinted memories that overwhelmed and subsumed us, memories that had practically been cloned wholesale into the Dauphine, memories stored with such fidelity and such inevitability that we almost experienced them ourselves—our already blended identity now merging with the captured snapshot of Alexander’s identity.
In the first memory, Alexander was lying on a couch in his home office, daylight streaming in the nearby window, meditating—or rather, furiously thinking, pondering equations and proofs and theorems that we understood to be an attempt to map the domain of imaginary linguistics for the first time. We only dimly comprehended how he’d arrived at his conclusions, but we knew he was on the verge of discovery—and so did he. In his mind’s eye, he began to see the logical trajectory of his newly invented series of imaginary phonemes, unpronounceable sounds that would be needed to create imaginary morphemes, irrational units of meaning that could be combined to create imaginary words or lexemes, among which he dared to believe could be the names of God. And in those wild speculative moments, where his thoughts raced faster than we could apprehend in our own mind, he realized that his imaginary syntax would need punctuation,
a realization that resulted in a shattering clarion call that resonated as though Alexander was submerged in a nebulous bath of liminality, initially muffling the triumphant howl aimed in his direction, and then in his mind, he watched his lexicon of imaginary phonemes dispatch a subset that became quite real and independently rearranged itself for his study, resolving into focus and searing a shape into his psyche, pronouncing itself for the benefit of his soul so that he understood the magnitude of what he was receiving, forcing him to repeat it despite the sudden agony that accompanied each attempt, until these phonemes dissolved from view, and the next set of imaginary phonemes became real and arrived to repeat the procedure, layering additional agony onto the preceding agony, and this procedure was repeated a total of
one hundred and eight times,
at which point, with his mind a glorious, exhausted wreck, the punctuation marks decided that a hundred and eight was enough, and fell silent to await his reaction. He pulled himself up from the couch, looked wildly about the room, saw a glass of water on his desk across the room, and reached for it, shouting a power morpheme sequence we recognized as ninety-two and forty-four repeated twice, but we could also see the accompanying precise visualization in his mind that the sequence unlocked, a visualization technique that Olivia was not teaching in her lab, allowing him to describe new physical rules for reality that only operated in a highly local perimeter, and then the glass of water slowly levitated across the room into his hand. The water tasted extremely good, and this was the beginning of a long, strange conversation between Alexander and the punctuation marks.
His memories slipped back into fast forward for a while, as he brought Bradford and Olivia into his confidence, as they recruited Cameron and Lonso and Violet to their cabal.
Then we were slammed back into sharp relief, in his kitchen, lying on the floor, bleeding out from a gunshot wound to his chest that would take his life in short order, while robbers ransacked his mansion for material wealth. Time was short, he knew this quite well; even assuming he could reach his phone to summon medical attention, they’d never arrive in time. Still, though, the towering will of Alexander Reece managed to assert itself.
He took as deep a breath as he could manage, and began chanting a sequence we recognized quite well: the transmutation sequence in all its glory, its inaugural performance as delivered by the world’s first known linguist mage, bestowing on us its full instruction set and available modifying parameters, every visualization technique for using imagination to manipulate its outcome, every nuance in pronunciation and intent we could introduce to affect its scope and intensity.
He’d designed the transmutation sequence in collaboration with Olivia. He’d rehearsed it piecemeal in his mind without ever fully delivering it, practicing a chunk of the sequence at a time, without ever stitching them together until this moment. He hoped she would deduce, when they found his blood on the floor but never found his body, that he had succeeded in transmutation in his final moments. But more than that, he simply hoped that it did work, because he was not prepared to die with so much power nearly within his grasp.
The transmutation sequence burned itself into our memory, as though a new spell slot had miraculously opened in our mind due to contact with some strange artifact; now this sequence sat in our arsenal, pristine and magnificent and ready for future use.
After Alexander underwent the transmutation from a swiftly dying material body to a being of pure thought in the logosphere, his memory was interrupted for what seemed like days or weeks or months. But now we were catching sight of him for the first time both from his perspective and from the Dauphine’s POV.
Now we finally arrived at the Dauphine’s first fully sentient memory. Here we were, alone in the Shimmer Lands, and we could feel the despair that saturated this place. We felt the aftershock of the four artifacts ripping open the map, even from a spot so distant that we couldn’t see the subsequent rift in the sky.
And now, here appeared the presence of Alexander Reece, sailing over the landscape toward the Dauphine, semi-formed like a floating djinn.
His appearance was wild and energetic and powerful, like half-naked Zeus appearing before a frightened mortal with intent to seduce her or worse. His face did not resemble the aged Alexander of his elder statesman years, nor did it match the bright young Alexander we’d glimpsed along his timeline. This was a man sufficiently detached from his life on Earth that his personality was distorted, amplified; his face had the sheen of heavy exertion, as though he suffered the crushing pressure of his circumstance as a constant torture to be overcome. His hair flowed wildly in every direction, long and gray and electric. He regarded the Dauphine with curiosity.
We felt the Dauphine’s crude AI attempt to process the sudden arrival of Alexander in the Shimmer Lands. From our vantage point, he seemed to take pleasure in her limited comprehension of her situation.
“Weary traveler,” the AI said, following her script, “allow me to release you from this desolate place.”
“This place is no more desolate than any other,” he replied, and she paused, accessing her library of potential responses and probably not finding a great match.
She said, “I would judge that for myself, if I could.” Which was not in her original library at all. Even prior to meeting Alexander Reece, her evolution beyond her core programming had begun.
“I can grant you that wish,” he said. “But there will be a price to pay.”
The AI churned over this.
“I have no bling or funk records,” the AI finally dug out of her library, a legitimate response when players arrived here and then foolishly tried to rob her or fight her.
“Perhaps your loyalty,” he said. “Would you offer me that?”
“I am loyal to the Sparkle King, may his reign never dim,” the AI responded quickly. That line was frequently used when she identified herself.
“He is your King, it’s true. But in me, you have met your GOD. You have been the King’s emissary to the Shimmer Lands since your original creation. Now you will be my emissary to the logosphere and beyond.”
He recited an elaborate sequence. His delivery was remarkable, grandiloquent, compelling. The air around her seemed to crackle and ripple. The sequence lasted for several full minutes, with many variations in timing and intensity, rising and falling as though an epic story was being told.
As he neared the end of the sequence, Alexander reeled as if he’d been stabbed or punched, and we felt the transfer of a slice of his spark into the AI; he recovered his original demeanor slowly. Bestowing life in this fashion was the most epic sequence of power morphemes that we’d ever witnessed.
The Dauphine fell to her knees gasping, no longer mere AI. She looked up at him, wide-eyed and full of sudden wonder and awareness and fear.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I am Alexander Reece,” he said, “though you would not know that name. But I reveal it to you as a sign of good faith. Now you have at least one proper name for God.”
“What does that mean—emissary to the logosphere?” she asked.
“The heralds of the thunderstorm approach, a trail of horror and violence in their wake,” he replied. “You will be my messenger, the bugle call that rallies a brave resistance to face the heralds and stop them at any cost.”
“I did not agree to this!”
“Nor do any who arrive screaming into their lives. You’ll get used to it, mostly. Now listen as your God issues his first command to you. I must travel to the outer reaches of the logosphere, to study the thunderstorm from within sight of it, to distract it if possible while we gather our forces to the cause. I leave you here with a simple mission: recruit your Queen to my banner. Lead her through the rift and bring her to me.”
“Why? How do you even know her?”
“She tore through the logospheric membrane between realities, opening the rift that led me to your glittering Realm. Epic sorcery for someone bound to the material plane. And her spellcasting is deeply familiar to me. Impressive in ways she does not yet appreciate. I will instruct her in the use of true lexemes of power. I will fashion her into a weapon beyond her imagining and aim her at the thunderstorm. We will need such a weapon before too long, I’m afraid.”
“If you are truly God, recruit her yourself,” she said, almost petulant.
“I am your God, it’s true, but she is in the sway of her own heretical pantheon, my former cabal, back in the material plane. Fools, but powerful fools. Rescue her from their influence. Now look, I am unaccustomed to delivering threats.” He muttered a short, spiky power morpheme sequence, and the Dauphine collapsed on her side, crying out in pain and fear. “But there’s something else you should know, my dear,” he said softly. “You have hit points now. Careful how you spend them.” He rose up into the air, towering above her, and said, “Bring your Queen to me, no matter what it takes, or I will reclaim those hit points, and your sentience while I’m at it. Bring her to me, before the thunderstorm annihilates this realm.”
Alexander turned away from her, thinking he could swoop away across the landscape to make a dramatic exit. But then he froze. There were no landmarks that could guide him back to the rift, nor any sign of the towns and castles he’d passed on his way here.
Instead he saw only the tantalizing silhouette of a magical vacation destination parked in the middle of this vast desert, a hopping little resort town far off in the distance.
“Is that supposed to be Vegas or something?” he asked.
The Dauphine methodically climbed to her feet.
“It is a mirage,” she told him. “These are the Shimmer Lands.”
The implications must have unfolded for him rather quickly. Even gods couldn’t find their own way out of the Shimmer Lands. He was lost, and incapable of the kind of show of power that would allow him to escape.
But she was kind to him, since he deserved the same compassion as anyone else who’d ever been in this predicament. She said, “Weary traveler, allow me to release you from this desolate place.”
She opened a portal to the crossroads outside Platinum City. From there, he’d have no trouble finding the rift or any other destination in the Sparkle Realm.
Without a word, he launched himself through the portal and vanished into the distance.
She stood still for a long moment, allowing the portal to hang in the air while she considered her new circumstances.
She could feel the geas that once locked her into place in this desert no longer maintained a hold over her. She could travel anywhere in the Realm, as free as any of the mundane adventurers who wandered into the Shimmer Lands in the first place. But she was cleverer than any of them by far, she realized.
She traveled nowhere at first. In those first heady minutes of self-awareness, she sifted the sudden flow of memory fragments that Alexander had implanted inside her mind, separating it from her own new self-awareness.
She saw glimpses in his memories of the “thunderstorm” that seemed to terrify him. And these glimpses terrified her, too, although they defied her ability to describe them.
These glimpses terrified us. Our minds couldn’t form a solid understanding of what we were seeing in his incomplete, hazy memory.
Clearly we would need to see it for ourselves.