“Thirty million people?” I whispered in amazement.
“She’s talking about the rest of the population of California,” Jordon said.
“Why would they do that?” I gasped.
“Sweetie,” she said gently, “they’re trying to evacuate us.”
“Shortly after the relocation,” Jordon said, settling into a chair next to my cot to tell a story, “Bradford Jenning finally finished learning the hundred and eight. He proceeded to recite the entire library in order, with the intent of establishing direct communication with the punctuation marks.
“He definitely succeeded. And see, everyone kind of accepts that Alexander Reece was the real genius in the Jenning & Reece equation, but people forget or they just don’t know, Bradford’s got his own set of chops for sure. Dude got his PhD in musicology. He invented his own innovative musical control system for enhancing the effects of power morphemes. Alexander didn’t do that—punctuation marks didn’t think that up—that was Bradford.
“So, when Alexander first made contact, via his blazing insight about imaginary linguistics or whatever, the response from the punctuation marks was, why yes, absolutely, here are a hundred and eight pieces of evidence to back up your strange but entirely true theory.
“Bradford, on the other hand, is a different kind of mind. And because he’s the second person to connect with the punctuation marks, they’re less shocked and surprised by him, and they don’t feel this massive sudden urge to transmit all the data as fast as possible, and instead, they can kind of just … get to know each other somehow.
“I guess they clued in to the unique way that Bradford experiences music, and also—Bradford starts this interaction with more information about reality than Alexander had. Like Bradford already has a mental picture of the logosphere and the imaginary realms and on and on. So the punctuation marks just have this major head start with Bradford to introduce him to some higher-level concepts.
“And the major accomplishment they achieve together is—if you imagine all of reality to be an elaborate, gorgeous set of audio frequencies, and you start to tune your ear to the wondrous variety of wavelengths that constitute life and matter and love and everything else, you might sift that set of audio frequencies for lifetimes in a row and never notice a tremendously unique frequency that resonates like overtones in the gaps between the atoms—or I mean, in the gaps between planes of existence. This frequency is unique because it is a signal. It comes from something intelligent, out there somewhere in the multiverse. It’s a message.
“The punctuation marks spotted this signal as they fled the approach of the thunderstorm. They didn’t understand its meaning, but they understood some of its properties: it manifested as a recurring musical motif, in a complex harmonic scale, and it could be detected from across many dimensions of reality provided you could attain this precise holistic vantage point on how reality operates. The punctuation marks enabled Bradford to immerse himself in this musical motif, and he spent thirty-six hours alone in his office, working through implications until he had a way to describe to the rest of the cabal what he’d learned.
“Bradford calls this motif the Beacon. He can sing it actually, the parts of it at least that line up with the human voice. It’s indescribably lovely to hear him do it. Takes him about ten minutes to get through the whole thing, and you feel like you’re suddenly in the presence of an ambassador from whatever true pantheon is really on the hook for this whole mess. And he walks you through a series of calm and hopeful instructions, which end with a sudden heartbreaking twist. He gives you a chance to absorb what you just heard. And then he repeats it for you, but this time he breaks it down into distinct phrases and he stops to translate each phrase.
“I’m paraphrasing wildly here, but the gist of the message is—let this Beacon stand as a rallying point for survivors of the thunderstorm. You are not alone, and hope is not lost. Follow this Beacon to these coordinates, which repeat in a sequence throughout the motif, and you will be welcome among our camps. Always look forward, never look back. To those of you we lose before you find us, we sing this song for you, the lullaby for thunderstorms, to ease you into darkness when it comes. And then the last two minutes are just bittersweet, beautiful sadness.”
I couldn’t hold it together, and just started sobbing. Jordon gripped my hand tightly.
“So they’re not planning on using the battery for a shield any longer,” Maddy said.
“No,” Jordon agreed. “They’ve designed an interdimensional arkship. The battery will power the arkship’s jump drive.”
“They’re planning to abandon Earth,” Maddy said, like she was trying to convince herself of something she desperately did not want to believe. Then she seemed to have a change of heart. She leaned back in her chair with a hardened look and said, “I can respect that.”
“Can’t they just stick to a goddamn plan?” I exclaimed in frustration. “They went to enormous trouble designing the shield—and the shield could have worked! They spent all that time trying to fashion me into a weapon they can use—and then they just turn and run instead!”
“You plan with the best information you have at the time, Isobel, and when you get new information, you plan again. It’s all iterative, it all stacks on itself from a learning perspective.”
“But how do you just design a fucking arkship, Jordon?” I cried out through my tears.
“From what I understand,” Jordon replied, “Bradford is responsible for navigation. He’s been working for months now, feverishly developing a new set of power morphemes that are all delivered via music. You don’t just string these power morphemes together into sequences. You compose entire arias or concertos or cantatas that work like power morpheme sequences, but are generally more powerful. So, it’s much harder to improvise with these, but you can do a lot more with them.
“He’s got a sequence that’s the interdimensional travel version of the teleport sequence. You describe your location in the multiverse, so in our case, the logosphere because that’s where the arkship is parked. Then you describe your destination, so in this case, Bradford feeds in the coordinates to the rallying point that he’s learned from the Beacon motif. And that gives the punctuation marks the directions from point A to point B.
“Cameron designed the arkship itself. It’s a much bigger version of the armored dirigible skyships in Sparkle Dungeon 5. You know how you start SD5 with that training level where you learn how to pilot the jetpack? Well, about halfway through SD5, you get a similar new training level, where you learn how to pilot a skyship. It’s the same principle as the jetpack, except now you’re controlling microrockets all across the surface of a larger vessel in order to maneuver. The skyships are designed to share control among multiple pilots and navigators and gunners, so you have to synchronize among them in order to move safely. Cameron’s built the control interface to the arkship along those lines, so that Bradford can navigate, while leaving an actual pilot latitude to fly the arkship in dimensional airspace on either side of the jump.
“Additionally, he’s been loading up the arkship with weapons systems, a blend of concepts from Sparkle Dungeon 5, and stolen from other sci-fi games that he knows. Technically Olivia’s handed over temporary control of her power morpheme weapons research to Cameron.
“Olivia’s responsible for care and maintenance of the battery, and development of the living quarters for the evacuated population. It’s on her to figure out all the resource planning to keep everyone alive and healthy for the journey, given some maximum duration for the trip they haven’t settled on yet.
“And Violet’s responsible for orchestrating the next relocation.”
“What was Lonso supposed to do?” Maddy asked.
“Ministers of Gorvod were supposed to be internal security for the ship. They were preparing to live many decades on the maiden voyage, and the plan was for Lonso’s people to keep the peace, as neutral parties that everyone basically hated equally. That’s kind of a major hole now in their plan, honestly. Thirty million people aren’t going to just magically get along under this kind of stress.”
“Why doesn’t Olivia keep everyone in stasis like she does in the battery?” I asked.
“The way I understand it—the battery is fault tolerant to a certain amount of degradation over time. Like bit rot on a hard drive—eventually you can, like, defrag it to reclaim storage and improve its efficiency, but at the cost of potentially losing some specific bits of data. So that works for a mind you’re keeping alive but don’t expect to restore to consciousness, where missing bits of data could create meaningful problems for the personality.
“For people you plan to be your survivors, your population, you can’t store them in stasis for decades or you’ll potentially lose big chunks of people. So they’re all going to be aware of the experience this time. They’re going to be relocated out of their lives and transmuted into passengers on the ship with no warning and no opportunity to opt out. It’s going to be almost impossibly difficult for everyone, and very demanding on the cabal to manage without a mutiny.”
“So our people might already be degrading in that battery,” Maddy realized.
“‘Your people’?” Jordon asked.
“We lost twenty-eight people in the last relocation,” I told her. “We’re trying to rescue them. Took a detour to rescue you first.”
Jordon’s eyes welled up.
“Hoping you can help us find them actually,” Maddy said. “Where is this freaking battery?”
“They’ve installed it inside the original Sparkle Dungeon,” Jordon said.
“How are they going to get it from there into an arkship?”
“The Sparkle Realm itself is the arkship,” she replied. “Cameron built a hull around the entire map.”
“How do we track down twenty-eight people inside a ten-million-person battery?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” she said. She paused, and then said, “But that’s definitely something they’re working on at Jenning & Reece. Actually Isobel, I think you know the person they’ve specifically assigned to the problem.
“Their name is Devin.”