“During the first relocation, they didn’t have the foresight to imagine they’d need to know the identities of the people stored in the battery,” Jordon said. “They thought the end goal was to spend those people on the shield, you know? But now that they’re using the battery for the arkship, they won’t be using up the entire battery on one jump. That means there could be opportunities down the road where it may become useful to know who they’ve got with them.
“Devin’s been tasked with project managing a computational census of the population of the battery.”
“I assume that doesn’t mean yanking people out of storage and getting them to fill out a name tag,” Maddy said.
“Yeah, it’s definitely weirder than that. I haven’t been able to follow this in detail, but my understanding is that shortly after relocation, Olivia used her neural net to issue a series of power morpheme instructions to the minds stored in the battery. This established a network. Now she’s having to go back to that network and somehow algorithmically analyze each individual stored in a power cell to extract what they’re calling identity tokens. These tokens are pattern-matched to various databases maintained by the state of California, so that each one can be tagged with occupational and historical metadata. The goal is to be able to easily pull categories of workers out of stasis as needed on the journey.
“They’re basically trying to future proof for the scenario where they need some specialized expertise, and what if the world’s foremost expert is in the battery and not roaming the passenger compartment? You’d want to get the expert out of storage.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked. “I can’t imagine the cabal expected Lonso to keep you completely in the loop on every aspect of their planning.”
“Ha, no,” she said, “it’s more hilarious than that. Lonso was an arrogant fuckhead who didn’t bother to password protect his tablet. I’ve had spyware on his devices for years. Every email, video conference, phone call, text message … every search query, every IP address he ever connected to … I got it all.” She paused, thoughtful for a moment, then said, “I didn’t know he could teleport, though, and I didn’t know they could jam teleports.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Violet demanded extra operational security around that information,” Maddy said. “It’s the first time they’ve stolen something from us, instead of us stealing from them. I mean, these people haven’t had meaningful opponents until we showed up. I bet they really didn’t want us to know how quickly and thoroughly they acquired the sequence and built a defense for it.”
“What would that look like, though?” Jordon asked.
“Could be as simple as a strict rule where they only discuss their teleport research in person,” Maddy replied. “Not much of a hardship really if they can all teleport now.”
“I don’t buy it,” I said. “If you were that worried that we might eavesdrop, you wouldn’t just hide your teleport research, you’d surely also hide the fact you were planning another relocation event.”
“True. They might have at least one open channel among them that Jordon doesn’t have access to,” Maddy said.
“Oh shit, wait a minute,” I said. “Jordon, so you never even saw Lonso train to teleport?”
“Nope,” Jordon replied.
“God dammit,” I said. “I mean, I spent weeks learning how to teleport. But I’m remembering now—Olivia told Bradford after she finished extracting the teleport sequence from the video of Maddy, she was able to teleport to Cameron’s condo that night. How could she possibly have mastered it that fast?”
“Let’s assume her voice is just in massively better shape than yours was,” Maddy said. “Not unreasonable—they’ve all been at this for years longer than you. That might mean she could skip weeks of vocal exercises. But she’d still need practice with the visualization side of the sequence.”
“But what if Olivia’s already designed some kind of meta-sequence that you run to rapidly assimilate new sequences? Something that just … installs a new sequence in your mind like a piece of software, instead of you having to train to learn a new sequence like you’d train to learn any other new skill?”
Maddy sighed and said, “Maybe I need to just go back to her lab and steal every damn computer that isn’t nailed to the table.”
“So any time her neural net outputs a sequence she thinks is particularly useful, she just has the cabal run the equivalent of an executable and boom, they all have it,” I continued. “They’d probably always do these upgrades in person by visiting her lab or meeting her somewhere.”
“Well, peachy,” Maddy said. “Question then, if they got you on video at the Church compound, what new sequences might they be extracting from that video as we speak?”
“I was practically subvocalizing, Maddy,” I told her. “They didn’t get anything from me.”
“If they show up at our next softball game and they all have glittersteel skin, you will be hearing about it from me,” she replied.
Jordon said, “God, for a minute there, when you said they might have a channel I don’t have access to, I thought you meant something like telepathy.” She paused, then said, “Do you people know telepathy?”
“Not yet,” Maddy said, “but Olivia’s not the only science wizard in this struggle with a neural net to call her own. I bet I could figure it out.”
“It’d be something like a combination of teleport, for precision point to point addressing across a distance, and the Headphone Splitter spell, where you’re guaranteed to hear a specific person in line of sight,” I said.
“I believe I can work with that,” Maddy said, impressed. “The cool thing is, if we design it right, you’d only ever issue a telepathy sequence silently, so they can’t fucking steal it from us.”
“Why wouldn’t you just do all your sequences silently?” Jordon asked.
“It feels nontrivial to replace the relatively cheap transmission method of voice-to-ear with something like mind-to-mind. In the former, you’re just using the air in the room to transmit instructions to the punctuation marks in the vicinity. With telepathy, you’d basically be emailing the instructions via the logosphere or something. Don’t know yet, but I suspect this won’t exactly be a chatty communication method.”
“So let’s think this through a bit more,” I said. “How would you jam one specific sequence without jamming every other sequence you wanted to use within a given radius?”
Maddy said, “I don’t know, Isobel, and even if we come up with a hypothesis for how they might be doing it, we’re still probably chasing our tail thinking we’ll outwit them well enough to counterattack their counterattack in the time we have left, you know?”
“You’re thinking about Devin, aren’t you,” Jordon said.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Assuming Devin could be convinced to help us, we may have to get them away from Jenning & Reece somehow.”
“What’s this ‘we’ of which you speak?” Maddy said. “Or do you have some trick up your sleeve for getting up off that cot that I don’t know about?”
“I’ve only used half of my healing spells,” I told her. “By tonight, I’ll be ready to go out dancing.”
“It’s noon right now,” she replied. “By tonight, Devin could be off work. If we want to get a message to them before that, we should figure this out now.”
“Is it safe to try to reach them at work?” Jordon asked.
“Probably not,” I said, “but it could be faster than trying to figure out where they live. I mean—is Jenning & Reece still operating as an advertising agency now after the relocation? Or did they drop all pretense of that and just become a power morpheme R&D division for the Crown?”
“They still maintain their advertising business,” Jordon said. “But they also had their pick of every linguist and data scientist and programmer in the state to work in Olivia’s lab. They chose something like two dozen people, I think, to join them—a small enough number that they could all be closely monitored and controlled, but enough people to generate a significant boost to Olivia working alone. These people all report to Olivia, but Devin’s their team project manager.”
“Maddy, do you still have back doors on the Jenning & Reece network?” I asked.
“Not for a long time,” she said. “But hell, you were an employee there, too. You imagine they remembered to shut down your corporate account given they were busy with the transmutation of a quarter of California’s population?”
“Hmm, good point.” I could easily just create a burner email account and send a cryptic message to Devin’s work email address. But a careful IT department answering to the Crown itself might enhance the typical scanning of incoming email by adopting a more suspicious stance, tweaking spam filters to make it harder to get through in the first place, restricting based on a broader variety of keywords or domains. An unknown email address hitting the Jenning & Reece network for the very first time might rank high for additional scrutiny before being passed on to its destination. You might even cut off email to and from the outside internet altogether for rank-and-file employees. We couldn’t afford to fire off a random email and then wait and see if it even got through, let alone if Devin intended to respond.
Let’s say in the best-case scenario, then, that my work credentials were still sitting there dormant because no one technically fired me, so IT never locked me out. Let’s also say I didn’t want IT to notice me on the network. With a little ingenuity, I bet I could modify my Apply DRM spell to encompass a trail of activity tied to a logon.
We used a simple, internally hosted, web-based project management system at Jenning & Reece for keeping track of work tasks, stacking them in priority order, that kind of thing. Devin and I shared several project boards, going back to our days working together on Violet’s fundraiser and the SD5 release party, as well as other smaller projects. I could get into this system, create a task, and leave coded instructions within it for them to reach out to us. By assigning the task to Devin, they would get an innocuous notification in their email that would look to IT like any of a dozen notifications that this internal system generated per day.
Maddy approved of this plan. After easily stealing the entirety of Olivia’s research from her lab, Maddy had a dim opinion of Jenning & Reece’s IT department, and doubted they’d focused any energy on significantly improving the operation since.
I said, “Well, isn’t that the kind of cockiness that got us busted at the Church? We didn’t expect that they could have upgraded their defenses?”
“The difference here,” she replied, “is that we won’t be on-site if they spot these efforts of yours.”
“Devin’s on-site, though,” Jordon said. “Definitely a non-zero risk to them if you get caught trying to communicate with them.”
“Devin’s currently collaborating with the enemy,” Maddy replied. “I’m not super worked up about the risk to them.”
“If we lose Devin, we’ll never find our people,” I reminded her.
“If we don’t find our people in less than a week, we’ll lose them regardless,” she said. “I think your plan is solid and worth the risk, and also, I don’t have any better ideas. Neither of us is in any shape to risk being on-site at Jenning & Reece, where two members of the cabal could wind up quickly engaging us if things go south.”
“Listen, I respect this focus on finding your people, I absolutely do,” Jordon said. “But they’re going to put thirty million people on an arkship and they’re going to try to leave with them. Isn’t—I mean, shouldn’t we—”
She fell silent. She didn’t really know what we should do any more than we did.
“It’s just us, Jordon,” I said softly. “Us against the most powerful people on the planet.”
“But you two are that powerful, aren’t you?”
“On a good day,” Maddy said. “We don’t get many good days anymore.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I’m extremely confused about what the right thing to do is. Like—the shield was an all-or-nothing defense. No way to test it in advance. And if the thunderstorm defeated the shield, then Earth would be fucked. So now they want to evacuate. It’s fucked up that they’re only going to take Violet’s subjects. But maybe the arkship makes contact with somebody who can help get the rest of the planet to safety. It could happen, right? Maybe the members of the cabal are horrible people because their methods are cruel and vicious, but—what they’re trying to do isn’t evil through and through, you know?”
“Violet is hedging her bets by taking the population of California with her,” Maddy said. “She wants to pop into some new dimension down the line somewhere with a full-fledged army at her disposal. She’s an Empress. She’s thinking about conquest.”
“Bradford’s thinking about joining an interdimensional community,” Jordon said. “I mean, Violet’s nominally in charge of the cabal, but Bradford could take her down if he wanted to, I imagine.”
“These aren’t contradictory impulses,” I said. “Join an interdimensional community, but do it backed up by an army. I have to say, for my first experience fighting a superpowered cabal, I’m impressed and overwhelmed. They’re good at it.”
“But do you want to be on the arkship when it goes?” Jordon asked.
“You mean, do I want to let them relocate me onto the arkship?” Maddy asked. “No way. Not interested in having my ‘identity token’ in their database. I might be willing to sneak on board, though. Could be downright happy to lead the resistance when the time comes.”
I was conflicted. Was escape the only option, just because no other civilization seemed to have found a way to defeat the thunderstorm? Didn’t someone need to stay and defend the people that the cabal was leaving behind? Shouldn’t I reconsider elevating Alexander Reece to godhood and letting him fight the thunderstorm for us? But didn’t I need to give the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands more time to find a weakness in its front?
Didn’t I always beat the final boss?