We embarked upon a classic, old-school training montage.
First order of business: teach Isobel how to teleport.
Maddy had taught her crew, one at a time at first and then in a couple of larger classes, so she had a proven method for instructing me. The synthetics were more demanding on your vocal cords than the hundred and eight. You needed to build up greater flexibility in order to endure delivery, and your voice would be put through unusual muscular stress, so she’d developed exercises to start building strength. Imagine that mastering the hundred and eight required you to be in vocal shape equivalent to how fit your body would be if you were going to the gym three or four days a week to work out with a personal trainer. Mastering the synthetics was next-level vocal training, equivalent to the exercise regimens actors went through to bulk up their bodies for playing superheroes in movies. At first, I could only handle about twenty minutes of exercises before my voice was too thrashed to continue for the day. After a couple weeks, I was up to two hours of exercises a day.
In parallel, I taught Maddy how to play Sparkle Dungeon.
She’d never bothered to learn how to play it, of course, because she learned power morphemes the old-fashioned way: straight from Olivia at first, and then straight from her own neural net after that. But the spellcasting system in Sparkle Dungeon was a good primer, and she’d made all her anarchists play it when they were learning power morphemes.
I skipped past the first four games in the series. She didn’t need to learn about the elaborate mythology of the game. I wanted her to start with the current, cutting-edge game mechanics introduced in Sparkle Dungeon 5; the older games were showing their age by now. I’d played enough of SD5 the day I was transmuted into the game to know that SD5 would be the sharpest vector for getting Maddy up to speed on the Sparkle Dungeon spellcasting system. She was a battle-hardened linguist mage in the material world, and I was not surprised to see her pick up spellcasting in the game lightning fast. Spells were an efficient metaphor for describing power morpheme sequences, and once she understood that, I could start teaching her useful cantrips and first-level spells that worked outside the game.
Once I was physically ready, she began teaching me the thirteen synthetic power morphemes I would need to teleport.
Quickly I realized that the synthetics were considerably more versatile and complex on a morpheme by morpheme basis than the hundred and eight. Within the hundred and eight, each morpheme had a concrete, fixed method of execution. The neural net that cranked out the synthetics innovated on that form factor. Each synthetic had its own unique set of parameters you could adjust and inputs you could provide to extract maximum value from these discrete chunks of unnaturally dense meaning. You controlled these variables with visualization techniques that were familiar to me from the transmutation sequence.
There were two synthetics that Maddy called the GPS pairing. The first one required you to sufficiently visualize your current location, which got encoded into the presentation layer of the morpheme. The second one required you to visualize your destination location. Didn’t matter if you’d been there or seen it before; what you needed was a rock-solid conceptual understanding of the place you were headed. Pairing the two established the spatial relationship the punctuation marks would need for transit.
Then there were three synthetics that Maddy called the skydive set. These worked together to create a safe psychological bubble or vessel for your mind, to keep continuity of consciousness while your physical brain and nervous system and body were disassembled and catapulted across the logosphere to your destination. She called these the skydive set because they reminded her of how she felt the first time she went tandem skydiving.
“You’re standing at the doorway of the plane looking down fifteen thousand feet to the Earth,” she said, “and your body is screaming at you to back the fuck away and put on a seat belt, and you have to just take the plunge and push off. Of course, with tandem skydiving you have an instructor strapped to your back and they push you out of the plane whether you’re ready or not. It’s the same thing with teleporting. Your body on its own has absolutely no incentive to voluntarily pull itself apart particle by particle, because ordinarily that experience would be called death. So we use the skydive set to prime and condition the whole organism with convincing assurance that death is not the outcome we’re shooting for. You willingly accept the punctuation marks as your tandem instructor who will push you out of the material plane, as it were.”
Next were five synthetics that Maddy called the shock absorbers. To continue the skydiving metaphor, you definitely needed a parachute to survive the landing. But then you also needed the equivalent of hard-core, immediate PTSD counseling, so that you didn’t suffer from damaging imprints about how frightening and unbelievable the experience had been, or so that you didn’t walk around afterward questioning whether you were even truly a physical person anymore. You also needed some intensive spiritual cushioning. Teleporting wasn’t a religious experience or whatever, but you definitely got a blistering peek behind the curtain at the mechanisms which held reality together, and you needed a framework to place yourself safely and comfortably in the tapestry of existence again, or else you could lose yourself in nihilistic corridors of self-loathing at your apparent insignificance.
Finally, there were three synthetics that Maddy called the checksum algorithms. In computing, checksum algorithms are used to determine if errors have been introduced into data sets during input or transmission. The parallel here was that you needed to confirm that you actually got reassembled correctly and were healthy and operating within tolerance. You could run diagnostics on your autonomic functions to get thumbs-up responses. You could analyze your psychological profile to ensure that your identity and awareness were intact. Each time you teleported, the punctuation marks edited you in small ways to improve you—increased your short-term memory buffer, for instance, or shaved some neuritic plaque from your brain just to keep things tidy—and you needed a readout of the release notes to make sure you weren’t caught off guard by any of the changes they made.
At the end of four weeks, teleporting was firmly in my arsenal.
Our parallel training programs, in teleporting and Sparkle Dungeoning, occupied the meat of our days. At nights we took to looser, unguided knowledge sharing. She knew fifty-two of the hundred and eight, and Olivia hadn’t shown her some of the most impressive power morphemes that appeared late in the library. I explained that I had acquired mastery of all hundred and eight by imprinting them from Alexander’s memory. Someday, I expected I would find a pressing need to recite all hundred and eight in sequential order and establish direct communication with the punctuation marks. But until I had extremely good reason to do so, I wasn’t ready to gamble my safety on that experience.
Meanwhile, the five hundred synthetics that she knew allowed her a dizzying array of micro effects on local reality. A bunch were cosmetic, as though she had a video projector remote for reality where she could adjust contrast and brightness and sharpness on the fly. A big, significant set allowed fine-grained psychological adjustments, akin to the marketing promise of pharmacological drugs for anxiety and depression and ADHD and the like, except the effects of these synthetics were quite specific and inherently reliable (also typically short-acting and probably addictive). And some were like those medical techniques you could use to stimulate parts of your brain into having a sudden undeniable religious experience. You had to be careful with those, or you could inadvertently smack your belief system into a whole new swim lane; the effects of these experiences didn’t simply “wear off” every time.
Many seemed to be designed specifically as attack morphemes, for use in close-quarters melee combat—conceptual jabs and slices and punches. By comparison, only a small few allowed ranged attacks; it was psychologically costly to leverage the teleport mechanism as a broadcast conduit for attacking someone across town, for instance, and it exposed your position if your target was skilled enough with power morphemes to know how to trace the attack signature (a target group that likely included no one at this juncture, but if any crafty bastards out there could figure it out, the cabal was certainly top of the list of candidates).
The hundred and eight seemed powerful in the way that nature is a force to be reckoned with: primal, large scale, rapidly unfolding like hurricanes or ice storms. The synthetics seemed like command line interfaces to reality, where you could issue instructions with precision within the vast mainframe environment of the material realm. We began brainstorming ways to combine them into novel sequences, as though we were fusion martial artists welding the strengths of our respective disciplines together.
Periodically the Interrobang would emerge to offer a surprising insight, leveraging its perspective as a guest in Maddy’s brain whenever she used the tools of the aliens. The Interrobang was becoming a more regular visitor. She trusted it on a deep level for saving her life, and its motives were sympatico with her own.
Meanwhile, Maddy’s appreciation of Sparkle Dungeon was delightful to me. She advanced through Sparkle Dungeon 5 slowly, but I loved coaching her and seeing the game through her fresh eyes. Not surprisingly, she enjoyed the story line of joining the underground resistance to a fascist copyright-abusing government.
A chunk of the story involved liberating an ancient tome called the Crossfade Chronicles from a heavily guarded vault within HQ, and once she had it, she unlocked a new spell category that had mesmerizing implications: limited, short-range, time-manipulation spells called Transport Controls. You could pause the action all around you to study it safely; you could rewind the action to give yourself a second shot at something; you could even fast-forward through a challenge if you wanted to let the game engine play your character during that window of time. These spells weren’t cheap to use. Some fantasy games used “mana” or some similar unit of measurement for how much spellcasting mojo you had available. Sparkle Dungeon 5 used old-school iTunes gift cards, which you acquired by robbing record label street teams. And you used a fuckton of them to cast these spells.
We eagerly took on the research project of discovering the power morpheme sequence equivalents of the Transport Controls. Maddy peeled away from the game for a solid two-day coding marathon in which she enhanced her neural net to help with the job. I was the initial Rosetta stone, teaching the neural net the set of spell-to-sequence correlations I currently knew. Then we could feed it the Transport Control spells, and let it churn on finding synthetic equivalents.
At the end of eight weeks, Maddy was a convincing fifth-level character, skilled in the arena of melee data retrieval, sitting on top of a small but valuable cache of MP3s from the days before the Chairman imposed draconian magical DRM upon all expressions of music in the Realm. During that time, the neural net produced jackpots, giving us the Transport Control equivalents we were looking for, as well as some innovative variations to consider.
Maddy went first learning each of these, as the resident master of the synthetics. She was experienced with learning the synthetics without a manual, so to speak, unlike my heavily tutored acquisition of power morphemes that had been charted already by Olivia. Didn’t take long for us to get the hang of these. Outside the game, we didn’t have obvious stacks of iTunes gift cards to spend; we just knew that these spells wore out our voices faster than the other spell categories, and had a “burn in” effect on our psyches during use, so we had to be highly tactical about using them. Hard to say what using them under stress would do to us.
Every night I retreated alone to the classroom that I’d claimed as my bedroom, collapsing into my cot with headphones on, listening to an ambient mix to soothe me to sleep. Most nights I closed my eyes and found myself replaying moments from the day’s training sessions. I wasn’t doing this to deepen or cement some aspect of what I’d learned, which might’ve made sense. Instead I was replaying little moments with Maddy, like when she laughed at one of my silly jokes, or when she seemed impressed by some game trick I casually showed her, or when she was genuinely surprised again that I brought her snacks while she was focused on leveling up … and I constantly wondered if she would’ve taken me seriously if her crew was still around, or if she was even truly taking me seriously now.
But that’s where my head was at: completely submerging my feelings for her at all times when we were together, deeply enamored of her when I was alone.