The work task I created for Devin on our project board was simple. The headline was “build ‘contact me’ form” and the body of the task was simply my new burner email address. But crucially, the task was assigned to Devin by a certain Isobel Bailie. I used a board for a project that was long over, so no one but Devin would even recognize it.
We received a terse communication from Devin around 7 p.m. that evening, in the form of a brief email from an address I didn’t recognize:
Meet me in SD? Look for Baroness Bassline, 10:00 tonight.
Not surprising that Devin would pick up Sparkle Dungeon after the glamorous release party we’d coordinated together. The cabal would probably be watching for the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon to make a surprise appearance eventually, so I had to be on my toes.
We wrote back:
Lady Luminescent will see you then.
You could activate all the chat and in-box features of SD without ever actually starting a game session, just by hanging out on the startup screen, and Cameron always prided himself on the end-to-end encryption in his game, so we were optimistic that we weren’t triggering any undue surveillance. We hooked up a voice chat and piped it through to the loudspeakers, and hot-wired some headsets as ambient microphones, so that Maddy and Jordon could participate in the conversation.
Just to be safe, we ran through some Q&A for each other that only we would know, in-jokes about our days working together, some quotes from the first performance review I’d written for them, that sort of thing. More than enough to satisfy ourselves that we were truly online with each other.
“Are you safe?” they finally asked.
“As safe as I get these days,” I said. “Are they treating you okay?”
“They treat me just fine as long as I don’t ask questions. But Isobel—I feel like I’m working at IBM during the Holocaust.”
“Aren’t you trying to evacuate people to safety?”
“They won’t be the same people after the relocation,” they said. “Olivia’s planning a mass edit to make people loyal to Violet. No fucking around with resistance movements or anarchists or anything. They’re gonna sweep everyone up and make damn sure they do what they’re told on board the ship.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Of course they weren’t planning some altruistic act of mercy. It couldn’t possibly ever be that.
“I heard about Jordon,” they said. “Can you do that for me?”
“Are you imprisoned somewhere?”
“My whole team is confined at Jenning & Reece until the launch. I sleep in my office. Well—your office, figured you didn’t need it anymore. I’m chatting with you via the mobile app on the cell network so IT can’t monitor.”
“How are they confining you?” I asked.
“National Guard.”
“You can’t power morpheme your way past the National Guard?”
“Not that many, not all at once. Can’t you teleport me out of here?”
“We found out they’ve got teleport jamming tech. Don’t suppose you could figure out how they’re doing it?”
Long pause, in which I almost thought we’d lost our connection.
Then they said, “Huh. Apparently IT installed new Wi-Fi routers throughout the building just recently. So maybe these routers are pumping out some kind of subliminal wave or something that interferes with teleporting … anyway, I could try to find a way to disable these routers.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I hear you know how to locate people in the battery.”
Another long pause, in which I could just feel Devin unpacking the implications of what I was about to ask.
“Not everybody, not yet,” they said. “We’ll probably still be working on it after the jump.”
“I need you to find twenty-eight specific people before the jump.”
“Or else you’re going to leave me here?”
“I didn’t say that. But I’d prefer to rescue you and those twenty-eight people, and you’re my only hope of doing that.”
“Okay. I need their full names, and as much information as you can give me—home addresses, Social Security numbers, where they worked, where they went to school, everything you’ve got.”
I turned to Maddy, who was shaking her head.
“They don’t have full names,” she said. “they have aliases. They didn’t have jobs, because they were busy trying to undermine capitalism.”
“Do you have pictures you can dig up?” I asked. “Maybe they’re in a facial recognition database and we can find them that way.”
“Do you really think they hung out on social media in plain view?”
“If you don’t give Devin something to work with, we’ll get nothing in return, Maddy.”
She spun up a laptop and got to searching.
“The data’s likely going to come one person at a time,” I told Devin. “Meanwhile, let’s talk about a plan to get you—and our people—out of Violet’s reach.”
Between Maddy’s online searches and Jordon ransacking the classrooms for personal effects, we miraculously managed to cobble together a trace of every missing person.
Aliases were actually a useful key for identifying people. Olivia’s power morpheme sequences interrogated people’s subconscious minds for personally identifying data, and an alias resonated loud and clear because it was chosen by the person, typically worn proudly, and not frequently shared as a moniker with other people. Gridstation was the first person we found this way.
Devin had a much harder time when all we could come up with was a first name that could be shared by many people, with little other identifying data except maybe a snapshot. We could certainly feed snapshots into law enforcement databases, or DMV or passport databases, but it was a multistep procedure—analyze the snapshot, compare to the DBs, and then if that person hadn’t already been located in the battery, you had to send out a broadcast request through the network of minds to get self-images that matched on categories—for instance, “if you are a Black woman in your twenties or thirties, send us your self-image.” Maddy might remember details like “oh and she’s currently got blue hair” to help narrow down the query.
For analyzing the results, Olivia’s team had developed a perceptual compensation algorithm, since most people carried idealized self-images around with them that might not even match their current decade in appearance. So the algorithm ran every self-image through the equivalent of one of those little applets you see on social media where you rapidly age yourself to see what you’d look like in the future. This was all considered a super crude, brute force method of identifying someone, and could take anywhere from thirty seconds to thirty minutes before finding a match or announcing no match.
If we could get snippets of other data about a person, things got easier. Although the anarchists prided themselves on living life completely off the grid, every now and then one of them would leave a signature trace in the world. One person had a Spotify account dating back years before they joined Maddy’s crew, which they kept alive because they’d invested so much time tuning the recommendations that they weren’t willing to abandon it; the account name had their first initial and full last name in it. Innocuous to the rest of the world among millions of Spotify accounts, but gold for our purposes.
After we’d located ten people, Devin said, “This looks really good, Isobel. These ten people are clumped too close together in a single row to be coincidence. I think they were all captured and stored in a series.”
Devin summoned the self-images of fifty people in that row, until Maddy clearly confirmed that all twenty-eight of our people were present and accounted for. It was a joyful moment.
“Now, how do we get them out?” Maddy asked.
“I have no idea,” Devin replied. “The system was designed for intake. There’s no mechanism for releasing anyone.”
“Sure there is,” I said. “You’re sending them sequences of power morphemes to get these self-images back, right? How are you doing that?”
“It’s really demented actually,” they said. “Olivia’s got a speech synthesis system that can pronounce power morphemes. So she loaded her personal vocabulary, and a giant pile of sequences that she knows, into a library. Then her team developed a command line interface that gives me the ability to specify sequences from that library. I can just type in commands with plain English parameters and the software generates a proper sequence for broadcast throughout the battery.”
“It was a teleport/transmute combo sequence that got them into the battery,” I said. “That’s what we use to get them out.”
“You don’t happen to know that sequence,” Maddy reminded me.
“We don’t need the actual combo,” I said. “We do the original sequences one at a time. I probably know transmutation better than any member of the cabal thanks to downloading it from its original designer, and actually having the experience twice.”
“You’ve never teleported another human being,” she replied, “let alone twenty-eight in a row. I’m not sure even I could do that.”
“And neither of those sequences is even supported by the command line interface to begin with,” Devin said.
“Then, my friends,” I said, a larger plan forming in my mind, “we are going to have to go on an adventure.”