First things first: we needed to get Devin out of Jenning & Reece. They were not an IT resource, so asking them to shut down the Wi-Fi routers all over the building or even just on their floor wouldn’t be feasible. We didn’t know how many were necessary to keep the teleport-jamming signal up and running, and it was too risky to set them at the task of trying to physically pull the plug on the devices one by one.
I had a gut feeling that the teleport jammer was not a transmutation jammer, however. They didn’t know I had mastered transmutation via Alexander’s memory, after all. If that were true, we could evacuate Devin out of the building via the logosphere. Devin was a more experienced linguist mage than me, and I suspected I could teach them how to do it.
Destination: Sparkle Dungeon. Devin would transmute into Baroness Bassline.
I would transmute into the Queen, and meet the Baroness at the Sparkle Dungeon itself. Together we’d enter the battery.
“You’re just barely back on your feet,” Maddy said to me, “and you’re about to attempt a transmutation?”
“You need to come with me,” I said. “We need you there when our people come out of that battery. They’re going to be massively disoriented and seeing you there will be crucial to convincing them we know what we’re doing.”
“Who is going to convince me we know what we’re doing?” she replied. “This isn’t a plan you’re devising, this is a long-form improvisation.”
“Improvisation is my superpower,” I said with a smile.
“Mine is knowing how to avoid getting killed,” she said, “and you are setting off my Spider-Sense here.”
“Maddy, once we’re inside Sparkle Dungeon, I am the goddamn Queen. Nothing is killing us in there, I swear.”
Maddy finally agreed, unwilling to miss the action. I taught her and Devin transmutation over the course of an hour. Jordon sat in and listened, learning a bit of principle if nothing else about how power morphemes were similar to diva-casting in the game.
“Is anyone going to miss these people when they’re released?” Jordon asked on a break.
Devin said, “They’ll show up on the daily leakage report, but no one will notice them specifically.” Turns out the “leakage report” referred to a tally of the number of people who died every day inside the battery. It was the tiniest of trickles from the large-scale perspective: twenty to a hundred people most days. When this occurred, the network released the identity pattern of the individual from memory, and the individual simply dissipated into nothingness. The cells in which people died were noted in a database. They’d be included as target destinations for new people in the next relocation event.
“My god, the machinery at work here is vast and cold,” Maddy murmured.
“You could argue that’s true at the scale of reality itself,” Devin countered.
“Wouldn’t argue the point,” Maddy said. “But it’s always worth noting when humans figure out a way to make reality worse than its original design.”
Devin went first. We had to know if they succeeded in getting out of Jenning & Reece, or we’d need to come up with another plan altogether. We had them put their phone on a table and set up a video link, so we could watch. Sure enough, within a split second of finishing the sequence, we watched them dissolve into a conceptual swirl and then they were gone.
I went next, to get to Devin as quickly as possible before anything weird or unusual could happen inside the game. Within moments, I was back in my Queen of Sparkle Dungeon avatar, glittersteel jumpsuit atop glittersteel skin, with fiber-optic highlights punctuating the ensemble. I arrived at my spawn point in the Iridescent Warehouse and set out immediately to find Devin.
At plebeian character levels, you spawned at a crossroads outside Platinum City. One road led into town, toward the Sparkle King’s palace. One road led into danger, toward the Sparkle Dungeon itself. One road led to the faerie kingdom of Needle Drop Downs, where you could find yourself trapped in a dazzling world of relentless club remixes and adulterated gin and tonics. And one road led to the Dark Granite Arts Festival, where you navigated a bewildering and dangerous encampment in the wastelands at the edge of the Realm; your quest to find a spot to DJ seven nights in a row was constantly imperiled by delirious costumed adventurers and Bureau of Realm Management agents.
I swiftly made my way to the crossroads, where Baroness Bassline awaited me. The Baroness had adopted a subtler look than mine, using a dragon onesie as a base but then layering leather armor all over it, with pleasing snaps and buckles here and there gleaming in the sunlight. I guessed the Baroness was easily tenth level, judging by the impressive kit hanging from their belt: a combat telescope, useful as both a beam weapon and a blunt instrument; a set of combat poi with small mirrorballs at the ends that could conduct electricity; and sparkle-powered roller skates—a classic touch.
A few moments later, Maddy appeared. The journey had been more difficult for her; she’d never played the original Sparkle Dungeon, so she transmuted into her SD5 character and then teleported from SD5 to my location. It was an impressive feat, but it had taken its toll; she looked exhausted. I had healing for that.
Maddy’s SD5 character was named Madeleine Torch, an appropriate surname for someone who wanted to burn society to the ground. The avatar costume choices in SD5 were a significant departure from the zany options in the first four games. Madeleine Torch wore stylish, black-and-white business fatigues, what the game called “militarized professional accountancy attire, just the thing for producing accurate and timely royalty statements for each of the Realm’s hundreds of recording imprints, while ensuring your survival when insurgents from Bandcamp and BitTorrent try their luck invading corporate HQ.”
We set out for the Sparkle Dungeon.
The Baroness said, “Things have changed on the servers. The original Sparkle Dungeon game is no longer accepting new players, and everyone playing it was booted from their sessions and locked out, right before they installed the battery. You can still see the Sparkle Dungeon when you’re playing in campaign mode, but you can’t get there anymore. The map just bends you away in a different direction.”
Right on cue, we came in sight of the entrance to Sparkle Dungeon, where floating billboards displayed messaging: THE SPARKLE DUNGEON IS UNDERGOING RENOVATION TO CELEBRATE THE UPCOMING TEN-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE SPARKLE DUNGEON SERIES! BUT DON’T FRET—WE’LL BE REOPENING NEXT YEAR WITH A BRAND-NEW ADVENTURE IN THE DUNGEON, AS WELL AS A CONCERT FESTIVAL FEATURING SKRILLEX! Further proof of the cabal’s wicked cruelty: promising a Skrillex concert they had no intention of delivering. Always new depths, etcetera.
The entrance itself was a massive stone staircase descending down into the murky depths. Normally you could just walk right down the steps and onward into adventure. Now, though, a foreboding obsidian wall completely blocked the path. They’d put a barrier in even though players couldn’t actually get here—obviously the cabal’s fear of reprisal was operating at a high level.
Plan A involved an unprecedented amount of teleportation to pull off. I loaded Maddy up with every buff and booster spell I had in my arsenal to massively overclock her stamina for the job we had in store for her. She knew she’d pay for it eventually, but this was the moment of truth, and she was fully committed.
Plan A would die a sharp death if we got inside the Sparkle Dungeon and discovered they’d outfitted the entire thing with teleport jammers. The Baroness was confident that they’d have been tasked with project managing that kind of rollout; you couldn’t just have IT install physical routers in the logosphere, rather you’d have to issue power morpheme instructions to the battery, and Devin was the hub for such communication. No such effort took place; the entire cabal was perhaps far too preoccupied now with outfitting the arkship for launch to protect what it considered to be an unassailable asset in this fashion. Perhaps they understood that no effort by a band of scrappy anarchists could truly threaten their ten-million-person array; this is what we’d been counting on from the start, that no one would notice or care if twenty-eight people went missing in the first place.
In some ways, Sparkle Dungeon was a classic dungeon crawl in the time-honored tradition: giant mysterious dungeon in which every room has a monster, a trap, or a pile of treasure; the monsters get tougher as you make your way deeper; eventually you find the biggest monster of them all waiting for you in the final chamber. Nowhere are the physical realities of such a dungeon addressed: how the hell did a giant underground complex ever get excavated; why do all these monsters live there when you never run across piles of food; how come these monsters never seem to set off the traps; why does the big bad just sit in the final chamber waiting to get killed instead of proactively turning all those monsters into a horde and trampling you to death; if it’s a dungeon, where the fuck are the prisoners in the first place; and so on.
But as we teleported to the other side of the obsidian wall, I quickly realized this was no longer the Sparkle Dungeon I remembered. We appeared on a slim walkway, and then emerged to find the entire dungeon had been terraformed—oh, excuse me, of course I meant sparkleformed—into a single vast chamber spanning enormous heights and stretching much further than the original dungeon ever had. Inside we saw countless stacked rows and columns of gleaming, jeweled glass sarcophagi, each with a subtle glow emanating from within. (Actually, they were probably countable if you had time to count to ten million.) The visual effect was mesmerizing, as the flood of glowing light was refracted through so much jeweled glass of varying colors. The light cycled through seemingly billions of colors including, somehow, colors I thought I’d never seen before—an impressive perceptual illusion. The towers had their own system of walkways and ladders, as though someone foresaw the need for manual maintenance on this system of sarcophagi, and as the Baroness deduced, there was a clear and predictable numbering system that could be understood holistically in order to navigate the space.
This enabled us to correctly visualize the row in which our people were stored; that was our next teleport. Now we were literally standing in front of physical objects containing human forms that we could recognize through the jeweled glass. They each looked frozen in the moment of fear when they realized what was happening to them. They hung suspended in some kind of glowing fluid inside their cells. Their eyes were generally open, but they seemed to show no sign of recognizing us on the other side of their prison windows, or of even being conscious in a classically understood fashion.
We examined these sarcophagi up, down, left, and right to see if there was any way we could physically crack or pry them open. This would save us a hell of a lot of effort if we could figure it out. Experimentation made it clear this would be an unpleasantly uphill battle. The jeweled casing was thick and almost impervious to scratching, which we tested by slowly attempting to increase the speed of Blades Per Minute against the material like a drill and finding ourselves duly rebuffed. There were no hinges we could attack because the units weren’t devised with doors, since intake occurred via teleport/transmute directly into position inside. The units did have one apparent weakness, an electrical-style conduit at the top that connected the unit in a web to the entire network, but severing this connection seemed to offer no immediate benefit except possibly disguising our rescue attempt somehow; this likely came at a nonzero risk of also damaging or killing the person inside.
To be fair, everything we were about to do came at a nonzero risk of damaging or killing the people inside. We’d discussed this for several minutes before we embarked on this mission. Maddy was absolutely clear that her people would, to a person, rather die in a flawed rescue attempt than live to be “spent” by the cabal in their battery. That didn’t make us cocky about it, but framed necessary decisions in a meaningful context at least.
These options exhausted, we were prepared for our original plan A. One by one, Maddy made two lightning-fast teleports per person: once to get inside each unit, and once to get back out with one of our people in her arms. The Baroness and I caught each person and gently lowered them to the walkway floor; they were almost always semiconscious, or in a kind of waking dream state, and the next order of business was healing each person to a stable point where we could talk to them, soothe them, let them know they were with Maddy, and inform them we were rescuing them. They all fairly rapidly seemed to ramp up on this context. They had been sufficiently aware of their imprisonment and it was sickening to imagine this was true for the people all around us that we weren’t planning to rescue.
Once our people were all collected, stabilized, and ready to move, and once I’d reupped some of Maddy’s buff spells, we needed to get people out of the Dungeon. I delivered a sequence to Maddy that essentially conveyed the equivalent of an in-game invitation to join me at the Iridescent Warehouse, which was otherwise hidden from all players. To test that she’d accurately received the location information, she took my hand and teleported me there. Satisfied, one by one she teleported each of the twenty-eight anarchists, and the Baroness, back to the Iridescent Warehouse.
The most she’d teleported in one encounter prior to this was the day she saved herself, Jordon, and me from the Church compound. Today, she teleported once leaving SD5, once to get herself and the Baroness into the Sparkle Dungeon, once to get herself and the Baroness to the row where the anarchists were being stored, twenty-eight times to get into the battery cells and twenty-eight times to get out with an anarchist in tow, thirty times by herself from the Warehouse to the battery, and thirty times with another person in tow to get people out of the battery to the Warehouse.
At the end of this beyond heroic effort, satisfied that she’d done the job, Madeleine Torch collapsed and died on the dance floor.
This immediately triggered the effects of an amulet I’d given her called Late Night Encore, for use when those bastard club owners wanted to shut the party down at 2 a.m. but you had a solid half hour of gold left in your DJ set. Late Night Encore was a single-use resuscitation artifact that yanked you back onto your feet with around a quarter of your original hit points, cleared you of any curses or lingering ill effects you were suffering, and ever so slightly repaired you of potentially permanent stat damage, to give you a fighting chance to play your set right up until that last ecstatic anthem came on and finally, once and for all, tore the roof off the motherfucking house. “Fuck you, roof!” you’d wake up screaming and your enthralled dancing fans would put their hands in the air like they just didn’t care, but you knew, down deep, that they cared, oh yes, did they most certainly care.
Safely ensconced in the Warehouse, the Baroness began to sing a variation on the musical sequence that they and Bradford had sung at Cameron’s condo, and it was exactly what we needed to revive our spirits. My healing was the equivalent of emergency room triage, getting people patched up and out of immediate physical danger. The Baroness offered a deeper salve for the trauma the anarchists had experienced. Likely these gently euphoric effects were short term and they would be recovering from this trauma for the rest of their lives, but for now, the reunion was a beautiful thing to watch.
When Devin finished singing, I thanked them and tried to assess the toll the experience had taken on them.
“Look, I could have found a way to rebel from within at Jenning & Reece,” they said, “but I didn’t have the guts. Maybe I was just too loyal to my grandfather—for a lot longer than I should have been. It’s hard watching someone steadily destroy your trust and faith in them over such a short window of time. Anyway—no more excuses. I should be thanking you for giving me a second chance to do something meaningful before it’s too late.”
I received my share of deep appreciation from the crew, even as I realized they were all staring at me a bit wildly. They hadn’t seen my glittersteel skin, and I realized I had no intention of ever transmuting it back, either here or back on Earth.
We spent several hours here, regrouping and gathering our strength for the next step of our journey. I was about to perform a similar stunt to what Madeleine Torch had just accomplished: the mass transmutation of thirty-one people back into their original material bodies, back in the gymnasium.
“Shouldn’t you just take it slow and do it one person at a time?” Maddy asked me.
“I’m initiating this sequence from within my sanctum,” I told her. “Everything I perform here has an array of bonuses to it. I’d like to be able to focus all of my concentration exactly once when I’m at my best and just get it done.”
“This is you improvising again, right?” she said. “You’ve skipped past ever transmuting a single other person besides yourself even one time and are just leaping into the deep end with transmuting the entire crew?”
“Isobel would never get away with this,” I said. “But I’m the Queen, Madeleine, renowned for legendary feats of audacious diva-casting. I will pull this off.”
In the end, it took me fourteen tries to get everyone back to the gymnasium. I didn’t have an amulet to help me recover, but I was sufficiently conscious that I could utilize my own healing spells to get me back on my feet. Maddy didn’t spend any time on “I told you so” with me because, by fucking god, we had rescued our people.
Jordon was waiting for us when we got back. She’d organized cots all throughout the gymnasium so that, for tonight at least, people didn’t have to recover alone in disparate classrooms throughout the building. She had hot soup waiting for whenever anyone thought they might want sustenance, and every cot had a full water bottle placed beside it. She’d gathered all the variety of first-aid kits and pharmaceuticals from both the general stash and everyone’s personal stashes, to distribute as necessary. And perhaps most critically, she had a pretty great soul playlist going over the loudspeakers.
Devin was quite skittish. Start to finish, from the time we contacted them at 10 p.m. last night, to this very moment, was twelve hours of clock time. By now, their absence in the lab would have been noticed by Olivia’s team. Olivia herself kept unpredictable hours and rarely visited the lab, issuing instructions by fiat and code reviewing from her office, but if she had tried to reach Devin this morning, she might begin wondering why Devin wasn’t responding.
But it had become a habit of Maddy’s to check the spyware on Cameron’s LAN anytime we pulled off a significant maneuver. No video calls had been scheduled; the cabal seemed not to have noticed our activities.
I realized how much the gymnasium had come to feel like the Iridescent Warehouse to me. It was the one zone in Los Angeles where I just felt absolutely safe, and now I was surrounded by the whole crew again. And I was part of the crew. You adventure alone for long stretches of time when you’re leveling up, because that’s how you prove yourself worthy to even join a high-level raiding party. That’s how I felt here: these people had seen me in action at Cameron’s, they’d seen me flat-out demolish the first quest in SD5 before meeting the Dauphine, and here I was, right alongside Maddy in the midst of their rescue. No questions asked about my background, how I’d gotten into this position; all of these people had their stories and maybe someday we’d all sit around the glow of the projector screen and share them, if we managed to escape the next relocation, or if the planet didn’t get subsumed by the thunderstorm.
I caught myself constantly tracking Maddy throughout the room, from my vantage point lying on a cot near one set of bleachers, as she chatted with her friends. I couldn’t recall ever seeing her so genuinely happy, and I was swept up in it. I was probably imagining it, but I thought I spotted her casually glancing my direction just to check in with me. Couldn’t dare read anything into that, but it was easy for her to make my stomach flutter in the midst of all the emotion in the room.
At around 10:45 a.m., with a crack of wild electricity in the air, Olivia Regan teleported into the gymnasium and began killing people indiscriminately.