The way it went down:
Olivia appeared directly underneath the projector screen, with her back to a wall, and cots on three sides of her. Her arrival was accompanied by a brief, dazzling flash of lightning all around her—again, just like when I saw a similar effect with Lonso, this felt to me like inexpert teleporting, a lack of control or precision that generated an excess burst of energy, as though her arrival was abrasive somehow, like she was striking a match when she appeared.
It took her three or four seconds before she was fully oriented to her surroundings.
Maddy spotted her first, standing about fifteen feet away from her, talking to Kenji. Maddy managed to get off a quick barrage of attack sequences, which caused a brilliant white bubble of energy to light up all around Olivia, a crackling conceptual shield that interfered with Maddy’s attack by generating sharp bursts of defensive white noise.
Olivia responded by swiveling into an almost martial stance, sliding into a crouch while aiming her arm in Maddy’s direction and flipping her hand in sync with several short sequences. Maddy flew backward through the air and landed in the bleachers. Cots were upended within that blast radius, and four or five people also went flying in multiple directions. I watched hard, brutal landings happen in slow motion.
She swept her other hand to the right and another set of people went flying like bowling pins being smacked hard. She was moving so fast that I was frozen in terror. Not Maddy—she managed to crawl to her feet and shrieked a nice loud power morpheme sequence that ripped the ancient old projector off the ceiling and sent it hurtling at Olivia.
Olivia subvocalized a sequence and the projector dissolved before it hit her. She traced the attack back to Maddy and actually recognized her this time, anger flaring up in the midst of an otherwise cold and calculated attack. Olivia turned Maddy’s style of attack against her and yanked a loudspeaker down from the ceiling, aiming it directly at Maddy.
Maddy split herself in two, each half jumping the opposite direction. The loudspeaker smashed into the bleachers and smoke began pouring out of the grille.
I hadn’t moved.
Olivia’s eyes swept the room, and then she found me.
I shouted the “PAUSE” sequence, using the Transport Controls for the first time in combat. All of reality froze in place around me. Olivia was trapped in amber, in midsequence, no indication that she had any idea she was in this state. I was in deep, deep shock. No way could I let this stand, no fucking way did we rescue these people only to let them die during a motherfucking ambush. I couldn’t kill Olivia in this state, couldn’t affect her or the rest of reality at all besides holding it frozen, but now I had an opportunity to catch my breath and plan.
I executed the “REWIND” sequence to dial reality backward ten, twenty, thirty, an excruciating forty-five seconds or so; that’s as far as I could convince reality to cooperate without inflicting severe damage on myself. I watched the loudspeaker fly back into the air, watched Maddy’s split selves rejoin into a single body. I rewound the situation to just prior to Olivia’s teleport into the gymnasium.
My body felt lit up hot like an incandescent lightbulb on the verge of exploding; another fifteen seconds backward would have incinerated me into ash. That was simply the physical damage component, but I had other problems as well.
For the entire forty-five seconds, my brain screamed at me to make this stop happening. No amount of prior spellcasting conditioned me for how existentially terrifying this experience turned out to be; we’d only tried going back maybe five seconds when we learned these sequences. I’d have guessed teleporting would be the more frightening experience, but it turns out the human organism has almost zero tolerance for watching time itself flow in reverse. I heard myself shrieking as though from a distance, as my mind recoiled in fear and then began to detach from the situation in defense. I would never perform this sequence again.
With what little concentration I could muster, I loaded up a stack of attack options into my short-term memory to have them ready. I repositioned myself, getting up off the cot and moving to within close range of her arrival point. I summoned Blades Per Minute into my hand.
I executed the “PLAY” sequence. Deep relief swelled through me. From Maddy’s perspective, I’d just teleported off my cot to the floor underneath the projector screen. I shouted to Maddy, “Olivia’s incoming! Focus fire here!” And I pointed and began firing off attack sequences. Maddy barely got in the game just as Olivia materialized. And in the few seconds while Olivia was disoriented, we pulverized her.
She wound up physically shredded in multiple ways, bleeding from slashes and deep cuts, bruised from invisible punches. After knocking her down, I had just enough mojo left to cruelly transmute her limbs, fusing them with the gymnasium floor. I leapt onto her chest, and pressed Blades Per Minute several inches into her sternum, letting it vibrate gently, keeping the wound aggravated.
I said, “Everything I’ve done to you, I can heal. But if you so much as whisper a power morpheme, I will cut your fucking head off and sparklepult it into the sun.”
Olivia was cooperative as we got her off the floor and into an office chair in the center of the gymnasium, surrounded by the entire crew in attack readiness. They weren’t all experienced combat linguists, but they had several stun guns and handguns among them that would quickly do the trick if Olivia decided to go on the offensive again. We didn’t bother tying her up; she wasn’t a physical menace.
Time for a good old-fashioned interrogation. Maddy wanted to do it, but I thought she’d be more inclined to talk to me. Gridstation wanted to make her type her responses to us so we wouldn’t have to risk letting her speak, but we had her amply covered, and I wanted to get answers from her faster than typing would allow.
I sat down in a chair opposite her. She knew we’d been able to kill Lonso, so she had to understand she was walking into trouble if she came here alone. What would motivate you to teleport into a completely unknown situation right in the middle of your enemies? Something told me this was not a cabal-sponsored mission, which gave me a sliver of hope that the National Guard wasn’t trundling its way in our direction with tanks and trucks full of soldiers.
“What do you want?” I said, skipping past niceties.
“I need your help,” she replied.
“With what?”
“We haven’t been able to—refine—our version of the teleport sequence,” she said slowly. “It’s a transcription from a video, after all. It works, but it’s imperfect somehow.”
I could tell it pained her to have to admit that, but here we were.
“I noticed that,” I said. “You put on a light show when you appeared.”
“Yes. It hurts. It hurts much worse for anyone caught in the blast radius.”
I laughed grimly and said, “Olivia, are you trying to weaponize the teleport sequence?”
“For god’s sake, no,” she said, glaring at me now. She paused, controlling her temper, then said, “But our version doesn’t scale well.” She waited, wanting to test how much I already knew of what they were planning.
“The arkship,” I said.
“Yes. The amount of excess energy we’re generating when we teleport a single person—multiplied by millions—as it stands today, if we launch the arkship with the sequences we’ve got, we will likely kill most of the people on board.”
“Well, this may seem like a radical suggestion, but maybe you shouldn’t launch the arkship just yet.”
She sighed. “Yes, Isobel, that occurred to me. But Violet refuses to move the launch date. She thinks keeping pressure on me will produce a miraculous solution.”
“You must have known about this problem for a while.”
“Yes. I hadn’t brought it up because I thought I still had months to work on the problem.”
“I thought you were using a musical sequence designed by Bradford to make the jump.”
“It incorporates your teleport sequence. The transcription error was carried over.”
“Can you sabotage the launch somehow?”
“I don’t control the launch. I don’t have access to the systems controlling launch or navigation. The majority of our launch activities are preprogrammed, set to go off according to timers without any intervention from us. She and Cameron have kill switches. Bradford and I don’t.”
“What about weapons? Blow a hole in the ship or something.”
“Why would I do that, Isobel? You understand we’re embarking on a humanitarian mission here, right? This planet’s destined for obliteration.”
“Is it humanitarian to edit the minds of everyone on that ship to make them loyal to Violet?”
“Loyal to Violet?” She practically laughed.
“Who then—loyal to you?”
She became incredibly serious, almost reverent, saying, “No, Isobel—loyal to Alexander as their GOD.”
Uh, what? I had to be hearing things. Where would she get that fucking idea?
“Alexander’s dead, Olivia,” I said, knowing full well that wasn’t exactly true.
“Alexander’s been sending me messages via my neural net,” she replied, “so please spare me your bullshit.”
That devious bastard. I guess he’d realized that his reluctant prophet, me, wasn’t going to deliver the battery to him all wrapped up like a birthday present anytime soon.
“There’s absolutely zero chance I’ll let you make Alexander Reece a god,” I said.
“There’s zero chance that you can stop me, Isobel,” she replied, very matter of fact, avoiding any trace of smugness. “The sequences to edit the minds of the people in the battery are already locked and loaded. They go off during the relocation, which happens the day before launch. So whether the arkship survives or not, Alexander gets his elevation.”
“Alexander becomes a god in seven days whether anyone touches the controls or not?” I asked, to make sure I was clear on the situation.
“You’re losing track of time somewhere,” she said. “The launch is five days away. The relocation happens in four. The scout ship leaves tomorrow.”
“So what were you planning to offer us,” I said slowly, “in exchange for helping you avoid killing all the people you’re about to violently kidnap?”
“When Alexander is God, we’ll give you your own country to rule,” she said simply.
“Did Violet authorize you to make that offer?” I asked.
“Violet told me to find a creative solution,” she said.
“Out of curiosity, what do you get when Alexander is God?”
“Alexander’s not like the power-hungry demiurges of old,” she said. “He’s willing to share power in the pantheon he’s creating.”
“So you’re planning on becoming a goddess, right alongside him.”
“Oh please, Isobel, don’t be so provincial. You and I are practically already goddesses. The edit simply spreads the news officially to the population of the empire.”
“Also,” I said, “California is not an empire.”
“It’s the base of an empire that will span realities,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Olivia, who is feeding you this Kool-Aid? Alexander, via droplets of data that he pushes through your neural net? Does Violet believe this crap about an empire that spans realities, when she can’t even figure out how to defend the reality she actually lives in? Is Bradford feeding you this bullshit on the sole basis of a literal ten-minute musical motif? Because I’ve heard remixes longer than ten minutes and I don’t make religious decisions based on that!”
“You don’t make any religious decisions if I remember correctly,” she snapped back, “because you’re too cool or postmodern or jaded to care about the underlying mechanism that holds reality together!”
I shouted, “I am not postmodern!”
“The fact is, this planet generates gods all the time,” she continued, “they just don’t tend to last long. It’s a very competitive space. But Alexander found a hook—”
Maddy emerged from the perimeter and exploded into the conversation: “Alexander accelerated a goddamn alien invasion! You’re not going to be gods—you’re going to be puppets of the punctuation marks, doing their bidding—not the other fucking way around!”
“Says the woman sharing her personality with an unnecessary punctuation mark,” Olivia countered.
“Piss me off some more,” Maddy said, “and let’s see how unnecessary the Interrobang’s power morphemes are.”
Oh, Olivia didn’t like the sound of that. She’d always been intimidated by the synthetics.
“Yes, yes,” Maddy said, warming up, “maybe we should just cut all the friendly bullshit here and accept the inevitable outcome of this situation.”
“Which is?” Olivia managed to ask.
“We can’t possibly allow you to return to the cabal,” I said. “That’s just a fact of your life now, Olivia. So—”
“Do you honestly think I didn’t consider the possibility of my capture?” she interrupted. “Let’s be very clear. If I don’t return according to a specific schedule, the rest of the cabal will be alerted to this location.”
“Then we’ll find another location,” I said.
“In the next four minutes?” she said, allowing herself the tiniest smile in the history of tiny, menacing, villainess smiles.
Maddy got right in her face and said, “Do you want to know how many times I can kill you and bring you back in four minutes?”
“It’s me,” Devin said suddenly. “That has to be how Olivia found us. She followed me somehow.”
I was watching Olivia when Devin said that, and Olivia’s tell—a slight wince as though she’d been shocked on her ass with a nine-volt battery—convinced me that Devin was right.
“I’m sorry, Isobel,” they continued, “I should have guessed—”
“How could they possibly track you into the logosphere and then back into reality?” I asked.
In the silence, Maddy grabbed Olivia’s shirt and said, “Answer Isobel’s question or the killing you portion of the evening commences immediately.”
“We have a sequence called the relay,” Olivia replied, jolted into submission by Maddy’s threat. “The punctuation marks in Devin’s mind ‘phone home’ once an hour, reporting their physical location and providing an executive summary of their activities. My entire development team is under this level of monitoring.”
“So you knew the whole time we were planning on rescuing our people,” I said, my heart sinking.
“I’m sorry, whose people, Isobel?” Olivia replied. “Or did you actually imagine I’d allow people out of my battery without a few modifications to their personalities first? Go ahead, test their loyalty.”
I dared to glance up and around at the crew. I was not comforted by the looks I was receiving in return. I noticed that the handguns among the crew were no longer aimed at Olivia, but were just sort of gently trained at the floor for now.
“All right, enough of this bullshit,” Jordon said, strolling into focus with the AR-15 she’d liberated from the armored truck hanging lazily at her waist from a shoulder strap. “All three of you are lying to each other and this is getting us nowhere.”
Oh, uh—why goodness, what a novel interrogation tactic, Jordon.
“Olivia Regan, there’s no way in fuck you would admit to the cabal you could ever get yourself into trouble,” Jordon said. “They’re not headed here in four minutes.”
Actually, I thought to myself, not only that, but if Olivia had modified the personalities of the crew to capture their loyalty, she wouldn’t have started killing them so quickly when she showed up here in the gym the first time.
“Maddy, I saw how long it took to heal Isobel,” Jordon continued. “You couldn’t resuscitate Olivia even once in four minutes, so just admit it. When you kill her, it’ll be for good.”
Nice that she didn’t say “if” you kill her.
Jordon turned to me and said, “Yes, Isobel, you are a little postmodern.”
“What!” I exclaimed.
Jordon finally arrived in front of Olivia with her AR-15 politely pointed aside.
“One time I got hold of an etheric monitor,” she said, “and I took it apart. Before I really understood things. I thought they were like, glorified Easy-Bake Ovens inside or whatever. Turns out there are some hard-core, finely machined electronics inside those fucking things. Kind of the high-end audio version of what it needs to be, like they used four-thousand-dollar cables that were delivered to Lonso by cable couriers in tuxedos instead of five-dollar cables they could get from Amazon. But the secret sauce is on the motherboards, and you may remember something about me, Olivia—I’ve been a software engineer longer than I’ve been a recording artist. So, that very day, I managed to grab myself a little copy of the firmware on that motherboard, because you see, Lonso Drake somehow managed to live his entire life without being introduced to the concept of encryption.”
This whole speech was making Olivia turn sheet white.
“I guess what I’m getting at,” Jordon said, “is that I sure would love to get you hooked up to a good old-fashioned homebrew etheric monitor, just to see what imperfections need to be smoothed out, what lingering insecurities are plaguing you, so that we could start using the power of Church technology to help make you Even in the eyes of Gorvod. I imagine it would take me around half a day to build one using just the parts in this gymnasium, less time if we send the crew to steal some parts from a hospital for me—a duration of time in which Maddy would be free to keep you entertained. I probably wouldn’t be able to build in all the bells and whistles of one of Lonso’s artisanal devices, so for instance I couldn’t modulate intensity particularly well. But cutaneous power morpheme delivery using the Church’s secret library of sequences—I could definitely rig that up.
“And then, by Gorvod, we’ll find out every damn thing you’ve ever dreamed about, every wish and every ‘wouldn’t it be nice,’ every aspiration and every little hope that keeps you going day after day, and we will remove that shit, over the course of several intensive days of amateur etheric monitoring, do you understand me?”
Olivia nodded ever so slightly. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. Cutaneous power morpheme delivery—so, using skin as a conduit for audio? The Church could actually do that to people?
“I refuse to believe the launch can’t be stopped,” Jordon said. “Maybe you can’t stop it, but us—we’re creative people. How would you recommend that we try to stop the launch of your arkship?”
“Put a gun to Cameron Kelly’s head instead of mine,” Olivia said.
“What about those edit commands you have queued up?” Jordon replied. “Can you stop those?”
“Not from here. I need to be on the Jenning & Reece network, using a VR console with a whitelisted machine ID, running a private dev branch of SD5, and using a whitelisted account to issue any new commands to the arkship.”
“Or we could put a gun to Cameron’s head?” Jordon said.
“I suppose.”
I gave Jordon a nod and resumed control of the interrogation.
“Tell me about this scout ship you mentioned,” I said.
“It’s our only meaningful chance to test Bradford’s navigation method,” she replied. “We’re debating whether it should have a pilot, or just be programmed to take a bunch of sensor readings on its own at the destination and then jump back automatically.”
“Late in the game to be debating something that important, isn’t it?”
“We were supposed to have several more months to plan,” she replied.
“Who would the pilot be?”
“That’s the crux of the debate. Bradford thinks sending a person will be our best bet for ensuring reliable, useful data might be sent back to us. But Violet doesn’t trust a single person in the world outside the cabal, and none of us can be spared for this.”
“Who’s piloting the arkship?”
“Also a debate. If Cameron pilots the arkship, we have no one to operate the weapons systems. But Violet doesn’t trust anybody else with access to the weapons he’s designed.”
“Very weird plan, Olivia.”
“Not so weird when you consider we expected you to have joined the cabal a long time ago. You’d have made an excellent gunner, I imagine.”
Me? In the fucking cabal? How had she so catastrophically misjudged me?
Or had she? Because I’d sure lapped up power morphemes like I was going to turn into the Scarlet Witch someday.
“You can’t tell me that you trained me for all that time just so I could operate the guns on your fucking arkship,” I said. “You weren’t even planning an arkship when you started training me.”
“True,” she said. “But we always suspected your versatility would make you an excellent conspirator with us. Capable of taking on many roles, depending on the situation.”
“But the main role was to be your weapon against the thunderstorm, if I’ve understood everything correctly.”
“Or to lead an army against the thunderstorm, if that’s how the situation unfolded.”
“Do you have some kind of remote trigger to set me into motion against my will?”
“Isobel—your will is the weapon. Taking that away from you would render you inert.”
Well now, slide in a nice compliment like that, Ms. Regan, and perhaps we shan’t sparklepult your severed head into the sun after all.
Suddenly the lights and all the electronics in the room flickered and power cycled.
Instinctively my sword was in my hand again, but Olivia protested, “That wasn’t me!”
“Somebody check the generator,” Maddy said. “Probably just running low on fuel.”
But then the lights flickered again and a few lightbulbs actually burst, and we were all on red alert. I looked up to see a portal claw itself into existence high above the gymnasium floor.
As the portal opened, the air was filled with a terrifying shrieking sound.
And then at high velocity, a human body came hurtling through the portal, out of control, landing hard on the gymnasium floor with a worrying crunch.
The body was immediately recognizable to me, if for no other reason than her silver skin.
The Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands was here.
Moments later, a herald began to emerge through the portal.