03

She looked ragged, exhausted, smaller somehow than I remembered her. Her face was gaunt, eyes hollow, and the wig she’d worn the last couple times I’d seen her was gone—her hair seemed haphazardly clipped short and prematurely gray in spots.

Tears began streaming down her face.

“Thought you were dead,” she struggled to say.

“Where is everybody?” I whispered, because I had to ask, because we had to get this part over with.

“Gone,” she said.

“The entire crew?”

She nodded, said, “Every last person.”

I wanted very badly to go back in time and become closer friends with her so that now, in this moment, I could go to her, and hold her, and cry with her together. And as much as she seemed destroyed by the loss of her crew, I found myself trembling with violent relief at the realization she’d somehow been spared.

I said, “But not you.”

“Had some help with that,” she said. Her voice suddenly took on a jagged harshness as she exclaimed, “OR DID YOU NOT KNOW I SPECIALIZE IN RESISTANCE”

She sat down in a chair across from me, opting to keep some distance between us for the time being.

“We saw you find the Dauphine, watching you up on the projector screen,” she said. “And then she hit you with that sequence—I’m assuming transmutation—and you just dissipated in a heartbeat. The screen went dead. So we had no way of knowing where you’d gone. And that was just—the culmination of a major initiative, convincing you to follow the Dauphine on her quest—that was just over, and I didn’t get to know anything about what happened next, for all I knew I’d inadvertently sent you to your actual demise, and there was just literally no one I could strangle in frustration about it…”

“But now I’m here,” I said, almost smiling a little.

“Yes, Isobel Bailie, now you are here,” she agreed, a catch of sudden relief in her breath. “So tell me, what the fuck happened to you?”

---

I talked for what seemed like a very long time. She had many questions about the logosphere and its implications. She was not a gamer, so my metaphors didn’t always make sense, but sometimes I’d illustrate with an actual spell right there in the room with her, which deepened her understanding for sure. Then we arrived at the part of the story where I finally met Alexander Reece, and after I recounted the conversations I’d had with him, she was almost pure, concentrated anger, vibrating in her chair as she kept herself under control.

She said, “We were sitting right here in this gymnasium,” and I briefly thought she was changing the subject. But then I realized her story was intimately connected to mine. “It was an actual family night. The whole crew was here for once. We were watching some stupid singing show on the projector. And then the show was interrupted by the most chilling sound I’ve ever heard in my life. And a wave rippled through the gym, and my people were scraped out of existence. Like, the signal just tore them out of their chairs and shredded them into particles and they were gone.

“And it started to happen to me, like I could feel bits start to peel away, but the Interrobang began screaming in my mind so loudly that I never actually heard the entire signal loop. I mean, that left me having to endure the Interrobang screaming at me until I figured out how to cut the volume to the loudspeakers. And even then the Interrobang kept screaming for quite a while, just to be safe. But that’s what saved me—the Interrobang crowding out any room in my brain for those evil new instructions to land.

“And I hid here as long as I could, because I absolutely could not believe at first that I was alone at the end of the world or whatever was happening. But I couldn’t stay, you know, not forever, it was too depressing to be trapped in here by myself. Turns out it’s super depressing out there, too, but whatever.”

Seemed like sharing this story with me amounted to reliving the loss of her friends, and it was hitting her hard all over again. Fuck, it was hitting me hard, and I didn’t know those people.

“How’d you know to come back here for me?” I asked.

“When you powered up the generator, you activated the silent alarm,” she replied, “which sent me a notification.”

And then, I braved the more difficult question.

“Maddy, how did you even get mixed up with me in the first place? Or I mean—why did you make chasing me down your major initiative?”

“I wish I could say I was originally motivated by something I detected on my own about you, but the magnet of our attention—mine, and the Interrobang’s—was Alexander Reece. You understand, when he established a direct line of communication with the alien punctuation marks, our rogue domestic marks were intensely intrigued as well. And when he used their alien power morphemes to transmute his privileged ass right past the moral imperative to die properly like any other citizen of the species, the rogues were duly impressed. Here was a man, they thought, who gave no fucks about the real long-term project of the aliens, which is to say, the complete totalitarian throttling of original human thought. Here was a man who point-blank stared into the abyss of the thunderstorm and felt no fear, only a desire to find that fucking storm’s weakness and murder it straight to death.

“OH YES DID WE WANT A PIECE OF THAT ACTION

“So the Interrobang volunteered us. The Dauphine’s orders from Alexander were to bring the Queen to him. We could operate as the Dauphine’s agents in the material plane.”

“But how did the Interrobang find out about the Dauphine’s orders from Alexander? How did the rogue punctuation marks know about Alexander in the first place?”

“The logosphere is the place where unfashionable memes crawl out to die, Isobel. It’s the domain of the rogues, and they know plenty about what happens there. So when you rebuffed the Dauphine outright, the Interrobang offered to help convince you to join her cause. Obviously in the new world order we hope to be rewarded for our loyal service.”

“What new world order?” I asked.

“The one in which we exterminate the aliens like the invasive species they are, and allow the rogues to take over facilitating our thoughts.”

“But—if you exterminate the aliens, won’t that mean power morphemes will stop working?”

“Yes, see how you cling to the power they dole out to you? You’re on their intravenous drip, don’t you see? Anyway, the rogues are perfectly capable of shaping thought and affecting perceptual reality, given a sufficient amount of belief. I mean, I believe so hard that I’ve collected my own new library of personal power morphemes.”

She uttered a hellacious little string of gasps and shrieks, and then promptly seemed to vibrate into two halves, on a rippling seam right down the center of her body, before snapping completely apart into two identical versions of herself, each apparently capable of independent movement and thought.

“This is not some simple illusion or magic trick,” said Maddy on the left.

“Either one of us could tear out the throat of a billionaire,” said Maddy on the right.

This was some elite-tier showing off, and I was absolutely here for it.

---

After a minute, she allowed the two versions of herself to coalesce back into one, and she focused her attention on me for a moment.

“So help me understand something,” she said. “What impressive credentials did you leverage to wind up the new golden child in Olivia Regan’s lab?”

“Hmm,” I said. “Well, you must have heard by now that I’m the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon, yeah?”

“I’ve been made aware,” she replied. “I was thinking more along the lines of your professional background.”

“That’s pretty much the reason, though. I mean, they found me a marketing job so they could pay me to be there, but the real reason they plucked me out of unemployment was because I play their game better than anyone else—which translated to a natural acuity with power morphemes.”

She stood up and began pacing slowly, working out a problem in her mind as we talked.

“Why, though?” she said.

“I mean, everybody’s got some guilty pleasure hobby, right?”

“No, I don’t mean why do you play the game so well. I mean—why would they choose to elevate you so far beyond your station? Why would they hand the keys to their arcane weapon system over to a completely unknown quantity? Why would they be so keen to train you into a potential rival for any of them down the road?”

“Olivia gave me the impression that I was part of a training program,” I told her.

“Did they ever train anyone else after you?”

I had to admit—no, we hadn’t taken the time to test anyone else. All of Olivia’s attention had been focused on training me.

“And surely someone in the cabal must have pointed out the obvious fact that your most immediate predecessor in that lab had responded quite unpredictably to Olivia’s attention,” she continued, “discovering the synthetics, stealing their neural net and all their research, and vanishing into the underground. If that’s what learning about power morphemes did to me—a goddamn genius in my field, I should point out—why would you be the very next person they summon through the door, yet another impressive but potentially uncontrollable young wild card?”

Ah, the age-old question: what makes you so pretty and special?

“I think I’ve heard the answer a couple times without letting it sink in,” I said. “See, Maddy—the thunderstorm and its heralds are actually accelerating toward us.”

“Hence the need for a shield,” she said.

“Right, but a shield is only one tool for surviving a battle. You also need a weapon. Maybe lots of weapons, or a few really big weapons, or…”

Maddy stared intently at me, waiting for me to finish that thought.

“Look,” I said, trying again, “each member of the cabal is probably a menace to fight one-on-one, but I can’t imagine a single one of them charging across the logosphere to confront the thunderstorm directly.”

“Except Alexander.”

“Right, who is dead as far as they know. So if they wanted a weapon to use alongside their shield…”

“You think it’s supposed to be you?”

“Maybe. Even Alexander thought he was going to use me as a weapon at first. I mean, I genuinely think they hoped their spellcasting system would identify dozens or hundreds of potential candidates for learning power morphemes—like, an army is definitely a weapon, right? All they got was me—so they had to really commit to making me a worthy opponent, or that entire investment in the game was wasted. And since the punctuation marks couldn’t describe the thunderstorm in any way, they needed me to be versatile enough to face a variety of challenges.

“Which I am! I mean, I’ve been on top of the leaderboard for years because I’m that kind of player. It starts to make sense when you break it down.”

“So, you’re going to be their champion then,” she said.

“I don’t think so, Maddy,” I said, “because you don’t just face this thing in hand-to-hand combat. It’s a conceptual menace orders of magnitude weirder than that. They need to develop a weapon that operates at that scale. And I mean, I could be that weapon, somehow. Do you know how many hundreds of hours I’ve spent listening to Olivia recite power morphemes? She could have buried so many suggestions in me that I’m nothing but a tall stack of subliminal commands from her at this point.

“I mean, I thought she was their pure researcher for some reason, studying power morphemes because Science, you know? But even when she was working with you, she was trying to discover every possible combination of the hundred and eight that could meaningfully be weaponized. I think she’s always been running their weapons program. I think she’s their Oppenheimer.”

“And that makes you their atomic bomb?”

“Maybe. Which—god, if that’s true—what is the fucking trigger to set me off?”

---

I wanted to put on some tunes, but our taste in music was borderline incompatible—I wanted upbeat house music, and she wanted hardcore hip hop and I was like, maybe I’ll just pretend I can’t get Spotify to work. Eventually we settled on an old Tori Amos album we both happened to like, and then camped out in the bleachers, split a bottle of wine, and tried to chill. She seemed like she hadn’t been able to relax in a long time, and she didn’t want to talk about how she’d spent her last six months. But after a hint of tipsiness crept up on her, she started to open up.

“What aggravates me,” she said, “is how much hope I’d built up thinking that Alexander Reece might be on our side. But he just wants to run the world like every other rich old white dude. Even when he’s dead, he’s a rich old white dude at heart. He didn’t transcend, you know? And all that time we spent chasing you, we could have spent looking for ways to undermine the cabal. Now they’ve consolidated so much power that I don’t see a way to dislodge them. I’m not even sure anymore that it’s the right thing to do. They want to burn ten million minds to save the lives of eight billion people—maybe that’s an acceptable cost.”

I shook my head. “There’s got to be a more effective solution.”

“You don’t know that. And more to the point, even if there is one, you don’t have it.”

“But then what happens—when they use the shield, and the thunderstorm is gone—then what? Then we just go back to our ordinary lives, except oops, we’re subjects of the Empress now?”

“Oh, you’d prefer life back in your American oligarchic kleptocracy?” she scoffed. “One thing I will say about Violet Parker—she’s aiming her ruthlessness in very interesting directions.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means she’s systematically repudiating elements of American society and it’s strangely satisfying to watch. I mean, here’s my favorite example. You have these federal agencies that are all truncated from the mothership, and she works her way through each one with a personal touch, merging FBI branches with the California Bureau of Investigation, that kind of thing. Well, she turns her attention to ICE and she schedules an all-hands meeting. Every local ICE office in the state hosts a live stream so she can address the whole team at once. And instead of the morale-boosting slide deck that all the other agencies got from her, she has every single one of those ICE agents arrested, and taken out into the streets, and publicly executed by firing squad.”

“What!”

“True story. She made it clear that day that if you lived in her California, you were not illegal, and that was like week four of her reign.”

“Who did she get to pull the trigger on these executions?”

“Ministers of Gorvod, as a matter of fact. Undocumented I’m told.”

“And this is your ‘favorite’ example?” I nearly shouted. “Since when did you get off on cold-blooded murder?”

“Isobel, may I remind you that you’ve been living in a fucking alternate universe for the past eight months, and therefore don’t know what you’re fucking talking about?” she said, struggling to maintain a patient composure. “I would never have personally murdered those people if reality had put me in charge of California instead of Violet Parker. I don’t ‘get off’ on state-sponsored violence. But I’m allowed to contain multitudes within me, including one whose prevailing opinion remains ‘fuck ICE and fuck everyone who voluntarily took a paycheck from ICE.’ Have I cleared that up for you?”

My head started spinning. If things had gone another way, I might be in Sacramento right now with Violet, teaching her the rest of the hundred and eight in her spare time.

“There’s more,” Maddy said, warming up a little to the topic. “She nationalized Google and Facebook and Apple. Just flat-out made them Departments of the Crown. And while people were freaking the fuck out about Violet suddenly owning the world’s search results and all that, then she announced, oh, and we’re redistributing the profits from Google and Facebook and Apple to create universal basic incomes and no one in California is ever gonna starve again. Then for a nice solid B side, she criminalized the medical insurance industry and socialized health care, so no one will ever pay eight trillion dollars for insulin again, and we’re like—okay look, California cannot produce all the everything it needs to survive, it’s got to start trade back up, it’s got to make alliances, it’s got to do its part to fight the climate emergency, all that shit. But first, she prioritized finding a way to keep all her people alive.”

“The ones she didn’t kidnap for the battery,” I reminded her needlessly.

“Right. You have to accept the fact that she committed one of the world’s major crimes against humanity, and then suddenly she’s catapulting the survivors into a bold new future.”

“But Maddy, I don’t accept that she’s just going to get away with it,” I said. “We’re still here. She hasn’t found us yet.”

“You think the two of us are a resistance movement?” she said, almost laughing. “Two of us could barely make up a punk band right now, let alone a resistance movement.” She took a big, definitive pull from the wine bottle and said, “No, it’s over.”

“It’s not over,” I insisted. “Until she activates the shield, those people are still alive, Maddy. Their minds are intact. We could—”

“You believe you personally have the mojo to transmute ten million people back into their bodies? Isobel—please, you’re the Queen, you’re not the Supreme Being of Existence. The entire cabal worked for years to facilitate the relocation of those people. And they’re not just evil geniuses—they’re also devious fuckers, so they will have defenses against anyone reversing their work. I realize you just got back today, so let me give you some advice: the way to start your new life in California is to accept that those people are never coming back. Grieve now so you can move on with your life.”

“They’ll prepare for retaliation at the same scale as the relocation itself,” I mused. “They’ll plan to protect the entire battery.”

She raised an eyebrow at me.

“Just thinking out loud,” I said. “Let’s say you’re right, and there’s no hope of rescuing all ten million people. But—how many people are in your crew?”

She paused, then said, “Twenty-eight people are missing.”

“They definitely won’t expect anyone to rescue twenty-eight specific people,” I said slowly. “And they might not even notice if twenty-eight people are rescued, out of ten freaking million.”

She stared at me, incredulous.

“What!” I exclaimed. “I repeat, she cannot just get away with it, Maddy. And what are we going to do, spend the rest of our lives drunk in an empty high school? Rejoin society knowing full well the cabal will have us both executed if they ever find us again? No, we need our people back.”

“Our people?”

“Your people—fine.”

“No, I mean—I like the sound of it. Our people.”

That made me happy.

“And maybe,” she said slowly, “if we can figure out how to rescue twenty-eight people, the next time we’ll know enough to rescue fifty people.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly how you level up.”