In my rage, I had absorbed the life energy of nearly two million people from the battery.
Upon realizing the epic nature of my cruel blunder, I released the energy and gently steered it back into place inside the battery. I had not yet set my mind to how I might safely release all ten million people from their crypts, but for now, the battery had been restored to its former status quo. I would not waste these people’s lives in combat with the thunderstorm.
If Isobel the Queen, newly minted goddess, could not fight the thunderstorm directly with the powers at my personal disposal, then we would need to find another way to fight it.
I considered that if rage could so quickly take hold of my personality, perhaps I didn’t want this godhood at all.
Perhaps I was learning what every young god learned in due course: the cost of exercising power could be greater than what you gained from that power in the first place.
I came to firmly believe that an insidious intelligence must be a factor in the thunderstorm’s composition, because I could discern, quite clearly, that it had retreated, ever so slightly, for what I believed to be the first time in its history. And then it stopped, perhaps waiting to see what I might do next.
God mode was handy for flagrant ego-driven demonstrations of power, and accidental mass murder if I wasn’t careful. But I sensed that my own identity would be dispersed if I stayed there too long, replaced by an inevitable inflation of ego beyond recognition.
After toggling god mode to an off position in my mind, I felt the tremendous burden of such mammoth responsibility and extreme capability lifted off my shoulders, and I dissolved like cotton candy in rain, dripping in sugary drops back into my avatar as Queen of Sparkle Dungeon, floating alone in the logosphere. The battle was over, for the time being.
I teleported back to the Sparkle Realm, right in front of the entrance to the Sparkle Dungeon—the last place I’d seen Maddy.
The landscape immediately surrounding the Sparkle Dungeon was decimated, but I mean, property values in this made-up game world were super low, so it didn’t bother me a lot.
Alexander and his heralds were gone.
Maddy stood at the top of the stairs leading down to the Dungeon. I don’t know how long she’d been waiting for me to return; I’d literally lost track of the actual concept of time while I was in my exalted state. I floated into her presence, landing softly on the field a few feet away from her.
I felt suddenly shy, like I’d revealed some dark secret about myself and was waiting to find out if she’d still be my friend.
She grinned and started slow clapping.
That made me laugh.
Jordon invited Maddy, the Dauphine, Devin, and me to join her and Cameron on the bridge of the arkship. Cameron pulled off the magic of an interdimensional video session to dial Violet into our conversation. Devin was a conflicted, grief-stricken mess about Bradford’s death, while the rest of us were basically shell-shocked from battle.
For a long while, no one had anything to say.
I could guess what was racing through Violet’s mind. I’d held two million souls’ worth of energy in my hands, and choked when it came time to use it against the thunderstorm. Even if it had survived, the intel we’d have gained from its reaction could have been monumental. But instead I’d chosen some perhaps misguided act of compassion by restoring those people to their merciless stasis, where their interrupted lives could continue to be preserved for some future expenditure.
And what had we gained? The thunderstorm had retreated. Ever so slightly.
That was something, right?
“I’m going to assume,” Violet finally said, “that the arkship is currently dead in the water. Would anyone care to dispute that point?”
“Bradford’s navigation sequences are preprogrammed,” Cameron offered.
“They don’t work,” Devin informed him. “Our version of teleportation kills people at scale.”
“Oh,” he replied. “That’s new information.”
“Olivia and Bradford were working on a fix,” Devin continued, “but they ran out of time, obviously.”
Maddy and I exchanged glances. We were now the key to the arkship’s fix. I was almost certain that Maddy wanted no part of this business, and I couldn’t bring myself to suggest that she help them solve their problem. And as for me—I’d be busy with other tasks.
Devin picked up steam, saying, “You also can’t pull off the relocation without Olivia.”
“Maaaaaybe we could,” Cameron said. “I’ve been reviewing the code her team is committing, and it’s workable.”
“Yes, but look, we were expecting to keep coding well after the jump. We were expecting Olivia’s constant supervision of the situation well after the jump. You can get all those people aboard the arkship, sure, but keeping them alive long term was going to require a long series of technical magic tricks and I don’t have the manual for any of that. You need Olivia.”
“I have four days to find Olivia,” Violet replied calmly. “Let’s turn our attention to the one part of our schedule that hasn’t been completely demolished. Isobel, I realize you fought quite valiantly today, but tomorrow is a brand-new day. Will you be ready?”
Maddy turned to me slowly, and said, “What’s she talking about?”
“Scout ship jumps tomorrow,” I said softly.
“So?”
“Isobel has volunteered to be our pilot,” Violet said.
Maddy looked dumbfounded.
“Why?”
“Bradford felt—and I agree—that we shouldn’t send an unmanned mission to the Beacon,” I said. “And we need to go to the Beacon.”
“Again—why?” Maddy asked. “If I’m interpreting what I heard correctly, the Beacon is a rallying point for civilizations that have been destroyed by the thunderstorm. If anyone at the Beacon could stop the thunderstorm, they wouldn’t still require a rallying point!”
“We don’t know how old that signal is,” Jordon said. “All we can deduce is that it comes from an intelligence far across the multiverse. Maybe by now someone’s found a weapon or a shield that we could use here, without spending millions of lives in the process.”
“Maybe the Beacon is a trap, Jordon,” Maddy said. “You literally don’t know anything about the source of the signal that’s coming from the Beacon. We’re only calling it a ‘Beacon’ because Bradford was somehow still a freaking optimist despite everything he’d seen and done.”
Fair point.
“Anyway, fine, let’s send a person to the Beacon,” Maddy continued, venting her anger my direction now. “Why does it have to be you, Isobel Bailie? It’s the cabal’s plot. It’s their evacuation plan. Why don’t they pony up a pilot?”
“Would you really trust their choice?” I said, incredulous.
“And why should they trust you, I wonder?” she replied. “When did they recruit you?”
“Maddy, the cabal never succeeded in recruiting Isobel,” Cameron said. “And the cabal as we know it is basically dead anyway. I mean, look around the room—if there’s a cabal of powerful illuminati left to be found, we’re it.”
“You still think it’s morally correct for a group of people this size to make decisions on behalf of the entire population of California?” Maddy snapped.
“I’m making decisions on behalf of the population of California,” Violet interrupted, “because I AM THEIR EMPRESS!”
Maddy looked at me and said, “You understand how collaborating with anyone using the title ‘Empress’ with a straight face is incompatible with my street cred, don’t you?”
I nodded. Maddy was an incorruptible anarchist. Violet would never win her loyalty.
She smiled sadly and said, “I thought we were on the same crew, Isobel.”
“I’ve always been the Queen,” I said. “Is that any weirder than Empress?”
“You don’t rule your kingdom.”
“Blingdom,” I corrected.
She cracked up a little despite herself, and she repeated, “Blingdom. Right.”
“If there’s any help to be found out there, I’m going to find it,” I said to her, as tears suddenly welled up in my eyes. “If there’s any hope to be found, I’m going to find it. Do you understand? That’s the whole reason for me now.”
She nodded. She didn’t like it, but she understood.
“So please, Maddy,” I said, “don’t walk away just yet.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “Not just yet.”
We escorted the surviving anarchists home. We’d lost eight people during the battle—eight people that we had risked our lives to extract from the battery, who turned around and sacrificed their own lives to keep the planet safe for an extra few days. Maddy needed time to regroup with her people, to be with them and mourn, but I couldn’t stay.
I could’ve certainly overruled Violet if I wanted to exercise my power and keep the scout ship from launching the next day. But truth was, the sooner we found out what was waiting for us at the Beacon, the better.
In the Iridescent Warehouse that night, the Dauphine and I met to plan for my trip.
“You should send me in your place,” she insisted. “I realize your Empress does not know me or trust me, but you are the only power we know that is capable of forcing the thunderstorm to retreat, even for the slightest of moments. We need you here.”
“I understand the sentiment,” I told her, “but we also have no idea what’s waiting for us out there, and I stand the best chance of returning intact with news.”
“Because of your new powers?”
“Yes. Because of god mode.”
She perused my display cabinet of weapons and magic items, almost absentmindedly choosing several and handing them to me, and said, “Powers that you have literally acquired today, and which nearly obliterated two million human beings—those powers?”
I felt the heat of embarrassment in my cheeks. I didn’t need that reminder, but there it was anyway.
“Powers which may not exist once you are no longer in range of those very humans’ belief in your ‘god mode’?” she continued. “Isobel, please. I understand you are a masterful fighter. But no proper strategy sacrifices a Queen on a scout mission. Let me go in your stead. If something truly hostile waits for us out there, we will need you here to help craft a defense—not because you can fight, but because you can think and lead. I am expendable, in every sense of the word.”
“If there’s something out there more hostile than the thunderstorm,” I said, “it won’t matter if I’m here or there.”
“Perhaps,” she replied, “but what if the thunderstorm chooses to attack once it realizes you are no longer present to counter it?”
This argument was getting to me. Leave it to an AI to pin you down with unassailable logic. We truly did need a pantheon, not just one pseudo deity. I could learn Maddy’s trick of splitting into two people—except I wasn’t enthused about bonding my personality with a rogue punctuation mark to make that happen.
“Look, maybe I should—go into god mode, and—deputize you,” I said, thinking out loud. “Surely it’s transferable on some level, right? It’s just—moving energy around, or some shit like that? I mean, what’s the point of being a god if I can’t just capriciously make other gods when I feel like it?”
She was very firm in her response: “It seems clear to me that you should never use god mode capriciously, Isobel. It seems clear you should almost never use it at all.”
“Because I’m inexperienced? We could spend the rest of the night training. Don’t you think I should at least become slightly more familiar with it?”
“How many people are worth sacrificing for the sake of training? Certainly you would not train your way through two million people. But—five thousand? Five hundred? What if you only destroy ten people, accidentally, as you learn to use this new power set? Is that an acceptable cost for you to pay?” She must’ve seen the shocked look on my face, because she took my hand then and said, “I know you well enough to know that it is not acceptable to you. Sister, we are the same in this. My mission in life is to rescue and heal people. I know you feel that same pull.”
“I didn’t actually kill anyone when I saved us from the heralds!” I protested.
“Cameron and Maddy stopped you from absorbing the lives of two million people in one final attack,” she agreed. “But—I have accessed today’s leakage report.”
Oh no.
“Tell me,” I said quietly.
“Six thousand four hundred and eighteen people died in the ninety-one seconds you were in god mode,” she replied. “Four hundred and twelve people died in the five minutes after you exited god mode. The battery has stabilized since then.”
I sat down heavily on the edge of the stage, the weapons she’d handed me clattering to the dance floor.
“Please remember—that transformation happened to you without your consent,” she said. “And you returned to yourself as soon as you realized what was happening. No one holds you accountable for the misguided actions of Bradford and Olivia.”
“I do,” I whispered. And then, with sudden rage burning in my throat, I said, “That’s why this scout mission is mine, okay? I should be as far away from the battery as possible.”
I don’t think she truly agreed with me, but this was the argument that swayed her at last. She picked up the items I’d dropped—an elite kaleidoscope, a powerful laser pointer, an opiate-laced healing pacifier—and set them on the stage.
“Very well,” she said. “I will try not to scratch your record collection while you are gone.”
The scout ship was a gleaming silver rocket in the finest steampunk style, sitting atop a launch pad on the roof of HQ. Cameron briefed me extensively about it the night before I intended to climb inside it and leave for parts of the multiverse unknown.
Although the exterior was cosmetically steampunk fashioned, inside the whole thing felt extremely high-tech. You could pilot either gyroscopically by climbing into a harness and making the whole ship a conceptual jetpack, with heads-up display goggles providing you necessary telemetry; or he’d provided joystick options if you wanted to sit back in a recliner and relax in front of a wraparound display screen while guiding the ship. It all seemed smooth and intuitive. And he’d built in every single armament that he could squeeze into its compact frame.
“I’ve wired up a button to launch the ship,” Cameron said, “programmed with Bradford’s coordinates to the Beacon. The same button will bring you back when you’re ready to come home. That’s all the button does. But the navigation movement that Bradford designed is freakishly ingenious because not only does it catapult you—”
“Sparklepult me,” I corrected.
“Not only does it sparklepult you clear across the multiverse to the dimension where the Beacon is located, but somehow it also manages to timestamp the moment of your departure into the coordinates for your return. This means when you come back, you’ll be reinserted into the timeline of this dimension roughly five minutes after you’ve left. Make sense?”
“I understand that you are saying words, yes.”
“Good. So, from a jump-drive perspective, you basically just get access to ‘there’ and ‘back’ in five-minute increments. Once you’ve arrived at the other side, then you take control as pilot to survey the environment from above or land the scout ship somewhere safe. A fleet of small sensor drones is packed on board to be released in the environment when you arrive, which store data locally or pipe data back to the scout ship when it’s in range. I don’t care if you bring the drones themselves back, just try to grab all their data if you can.
“Devin sang and recorded Bradford’s entire library of movements for you in case you wind up with time to study. You’ve also got a limited AI on board to monitor the jump drive, help with lining up targeting solutions, clean up the metadata in the MP3s you stole off the internet when you were in college, that sort of thing.
“Oh, and you’ll like this one: the power source for the scout ship is you. It’s gonna pull from your personal reservoir of ‘spark’ as you call it, but it’s a lean machine and you shouldn’t notice it. Basically the scout ship ‘charges’ when you take a nap inside it or lean on it for a stretch or whatever.
“And finally—my favorite—we’re not packing food and water in the scout ship. You are currently a being of pure thought in the logosphere without such physical demands. So if you wind up transmuting into a proper physical form down the road, you will need to forage, and please make sure you can breathe. I assume this is basic stuff for a spellcaster of your caliber.
“This scout ship is constructed mostly out of metaphor. We are not operating a ‘space program.’ We believe the scout ship will keep you alive inside a bubble of logosphere until you choose to open it up, but fuck if we know. This is all magic; none of it’s science. Our primary advantage right now is we didn’t realize when we designed this ship that the pilot would be a literal goddess with glittersteel skin and superb improvisational skills.
“So make it count, Isobel.”
The next day we gathered together for the launch. Maddy had returned to see me off.
Jordon had a gift for me: the artifact she’d won by being the first person to beat SD5, a small black box with a lid that opened to a vast vault full of goodies.
“It’s called the Compression Artifact,” she told me. “It holds compressed versions of all the magic items from all the games. Admittedly none of them are as powerful as the originals, but most enemies won’t notice the difference.”
The Dauphine also had a gift for me: her pearl-handled, Repeat All–enabled pistols, which I almost refused, but she said, “This is a loan. I will expect them back upon your return.” I reluctantly accepted this arrangement.
And of course, Cameron had loaded my entire music collection onto the ship’s hard drive, plus a bunch of new stuff I hadn’t heard yet that he’d gotten off of the internet for me. Hey, it wasn’t music piracy when the Chairman of the Realm did it.
Maddy could barely look at me as I finished packing the ship.
The others drifted off the launchpad to give us some space.
I said, “Will you be here when I get back?”
“Hard to say where I’ll be,” she replied.
“Can I kiss you?”
“Uh-huh.”
And this time, it did last almost as long as it should have, before she pulled away and said, “You’ll know where to find me.”
I nodded and climbed into the scout ship. I decided I would fly by joystick, reclining in the pilot’s chair, watching the journey on the wraparound video screen.
We had absolutely zero reason to believe this was going to work. Bradford himself had said he expected this mission to fail.
Jordon’s lovely voice began providing the countdown to launch via my enchanted in-ear monitor as I sat in the cockpit of the scout ship—deeply afraid, powerfully sad, unbearably lonely.
Then Maddy teleported into the scout ship, arriving pressed against me in the reclining chair.
She said, “This is how you’ll know where to find me.”
The countdown reached zero, I pressed the launch button, and the scout ship sparklepulted itself across the multiverse.