Several hours earlier.

“Will, you might be an idiot,” I said. He wasn’t, not really, but this deal of his was a really questionable decision. Something weird was going on with this game, and that suspicion made me more cautious than I was willing to say out loud.

“Come on Joe! I got us the key to the next ten floors without a fight, plus a promise that it’ll help us look for subscriptions! This thing has some sort of direct access to the game’s database. If the subs are in some weird place, this could be the only chance we have to actually save the project.”

He wasn’t wrong. We were pretty screwed if we didn’t make some sort of breakthrough.

“Well I think it’s good,” slurred Lindsey. She was up and moving about, but she sure wasn’t steady yet. Her accent was a lot stronger in her present state, though I experienced and enjoyed my fair share of French accents, back when I was younger and the world was more connected, so I could understand her just fine. Will, on the other hand, seemed to pause and focus each time she spoke before he responded.

“See?” Will pleaded, as if the opinion of a doped up youngster would make me change my mind.

“Especially as you did it, so I have no need to. You take risks, I get rewards,” she chirped happily. That sure took the wind out of his sails.

“While I agree that you didn’t do too badly in terms of what we’re getting,” I said, holding up a hand to halt the interruption I could see brewing in his eyes, “that is assuming that everything you’ve said about the deal is true.”

Will stopped, and I halted a few stairs below him, putting us about eye level with each other. He seemed almost guilty. I hadn’t meant to imply any wrongdoing on his part, but it looked like there might be something he was hiding. Still, I trusted that it wasn’t anything that would hurt us. And I certainly wasn’t going to ask him to spill any secrets here, where my recording for today would catch everything.

“What I mean is, how do you know that any of this is true?“ I asked, quickly following up with, “Other than this one key, which we can directly check.”

“It was…” he trailed off, a distant look in his eyes. The silence stretched, reaching towards being uncomfortable. Just as I was about to speak up, he continued, “It was big. Well beyond human in scope. It had a great deal of knowledge, but interacting with it felt raw. It knew all the theory, but It didn’t know what it was doing in practice.”

He resumed walking, supporting Lindsey as we descended the stairs to the next barrier. I kept pace, taking two or three stairs with each slow step and gouging marks into the painted concrete with my talons. Stairs were one of the bigger thorns in my side, these days. Getting old and rickety in the real world, too big to use them properly here.

“That suggests that either it can’t effectively deceive me, or that it’s good enough at deception to make me think all this, in which case nothing I could have done would have made a difference, except refusing to talk to it at all.”

I sighed. It came out as a hiss, which probably sounded more hostile than I meant it to be.

“That isn’t really what I mean,” I said, trying to distill down my exact concerns, “How do you know that you’ll be able to continue playing? If we lose you, then that’ll ruin the project as surely as failing to find more subs. Giving up your avatar might have some kind of deeper repercussions, and all you’ve got are assurances from the very thing that wants it.”

His face lit up with realization, and I felt like he finally understood why I’d been ragging on him this entire time.

“No no, I wasn’t just taking its word for it, I managed to get a look at the stuff behind the avatar function.”

“And that mystic sense of yours hasn’t ever told you something that wasn’t true? No illusions or camouflage or anything? It could have shown you something fake, just to get you to agree.”

“No,” he said right away, but then seemed to give it some more thought, “no, definitely not. The closest to deception has been the veiling effect which seems to surround my game functions, which just hides the whole thing somehow. Other than that, there are situations where there is too much stuff for me to see past, or details are too fine, or, you know, normal stuff that would keep you from noticing something. So I guess you could put something deceptive together, but it wouldn’t be like a magical illusion, more like hiding machinery behind other machinery. And again, if that boss could do something like that on the fly, then we’re already fucked.”

If his mystic sense was anything like my weird passive future fire sense, then I guess I could understand why he trusted it so much. I hadn’t managed to trick it, and it really felt like authentic knowledge and not just a stream of data from the game. The last flight of stairs went by slowly, as we made sure our woozy lady friend didn’t slip and end up tumbling down. I reflected on just how fucked we probably were. Probably impossible project deadlines. Probably a rogue alien AI. But it was an egg already broken at this point, so I just hoped the omelet ended up good.

At least we had something to show for it right now. Will called us closer, and dropped the key into the barrier junk pile. I sucked in breath as I was hit with a distinct sense of gross wrongness, just as a game popup sprung up.

You have gained a mark: Sigil of Excess

I dismissed it, wondering how the idea of excess tied into any of this. Especially the horrible feeling of snakes slithering around under my skin. That my skin was tough and scaly made the entire thing much worse.

You are under the effect: Essence Hunger

That sounded bad. I brought up my interface to check what it did.

Summary

Pyromancer, Level 8 - 21%

Bound: Earth-Human-UpperCheckpoint-11

Logout estimate: 1.5 hours

Status

Skills

Equip

Friends

Marks

Logout

Well, the status button wasn’t flashing red or giving any other signs that something was wrong. Despite feeling awful, it probably wasn’t immediately dangerous.

Status

Fortified Essence Foundation: Your essence is stronger.

Essence Hunger: You can draw in and use external essence.

Well that sounded useful. Could use a less threatening sounding name though. I checked my marks, just to make sure there was nothing useful.

Marks

Mark of Knowledge: You have read a manual of basic information.

Sigil of Emptiness: What was empty might one day be filled.

Sigil of Excess: The way forward need not always require more.

Nope, nothing intelligible. I read out the name of the mark, the status effect, and what it did for the benefit of my interface-challenged companions. Only a second later, another notification popped up.

William Bekker, Conservator of Hidden Worlds has logged off.

Except he hadn’t. Or his body hadn’t disappeared as it usually did. He just collapsed, and once I had cleared away all the notifications I could see him just lying there, eyes open, like a puppet that had its strings cut.

There was something visceral about seeing a friend in that state. I hadn’t seen much fighting during the revolution so I hadn’t ever seen anyone die in real life, but seeing Will’s still form woke up all sorts of horrible, instinctual feelings. Dread, that something terrible might have actually happened to him. Fear, that the same thing could be done to me. Regret, that I hadn’t done more to head off this stupid plan.

Then he moved. Or, his body moved. He gasped, as if someone had just performed CPR and succeeded. Then he proceeded to move, starting with his feet, then his legs. The motion was jerky, a seizure happening in extremely localized muscle groups, traveling upwards through his body. I stared in muted horror as this was happening. Lindsey crouched down to watch. Where I was unnerved, she seemed more curious.

“You have the whole body, yes?” Lindsey asked the entity puppeteering our friend. “Why not use the brain? It should already know how to control the body.”

Will’s body opened its mouth as if to speak.

“Aaag. Uooo. Guh.”

Then, a spark of blackness fizzed into being next to Will’s head.

“I do not know how to use a brain. I have never had one.”

The voice was artificial sounding, and would have certainly seemed creepier if it wasn’t competing with the ongoing horror show of Will’s helpless flopping and jerking body.

“Do not worry, this will be easier. It should only take two minutes and between seven and nineteen seconds to complete a comparison between the motive functions of this body and my usual shell. Physics may be my enemy, but it is one that I know well.”

The surge of adrenaline or whatever chemical was responsible for my first reaction was fading a bit. I took a deep breath. The game had said that Will had logged off. He was probably safely asleep in his bed. The realism on display here was just throwing me for a loop. Normally, no matter how good the tech, there were still tells here and there, pulling the curtain back and reminding you that this world wasn’t real. Other than the interface, there was nothing like that here. I guess my friends, with their weird magical perception, could peek behind the curtain, so maybe it was just me.

Lindsey remained crouched near Will’s body - his avatar, I reminded myself. She seemed transfixed, but not by anything visual. She had her head cocked to the side, as if she was trying to listen to something faint or distant.

“You are… big,” she said.

“I am.”

“Is there any way for me to get that big?” she asked. Just what the hell was she seeing? Or hearing, I guess.

“No.”

The writhing and twitching continued.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Lindsey sounded hopeful.

The writhing stopped, and it sat up. Mechanically, no movement wasted, it shifted its legs beneath it and stood straight up. There was a slight wobble, then it was still again.

“Maybe,” it said again, “Your soul is different from humans in the same way that human Will’s is, and similarly large. He assures me that he is human. Perhaps humans have changed. The jailer was approaching eighty percent of my essential mass. It was not human, but there were similarities.”

A lead on the aliens? I wasn’t sure about all the soul stuff. Maybe some clues there about how our powers work, but the real gem here seemed to be the bit about a jailer. I was still wary of the thing, though if human guesses about superintelligence were accurate, then just listening to it would be more than enough for it to do whatever it wanted with us. Might as well seize the opportunity while we had it.

“What can you tell us about this jailer?” I spoke up for the first time.

The puppeteered avatar’s head snapped to face me, its eyes glassy and vacant. It opened its mouth again.

“Hraaa. Eeeeeehhh. Maah.”

Its mouth closed.

“You make speaking appear easy,” the little black spark stuttered and vibrated once more, now suspended just above the avatar’s head, “The encoding must be somewhere in the brain.”

Lindsey had stood and moved up next to it. Before I could repeat my question, she extended her arm and pushed the avatar. It leaned away from her, totally unresisting. As soon as she had pulled her hand back, it righted itself with flawless balance. It was certainly right about having physics all sorted out. Other than returning to a standing position, it seemed to totally ignore the push.

“You. You are human, and closer to the normal mass and function, but you have devices attached to your soul. And your body is not the usual human form. Tell me why this is, and the function of the devices, and I will tell you what I know of the jailer.”

I shot Lindsey a look, hopefully she would stop provoking the horror movie monster.

“I can tell you what I know. I’m affected by the same thing that changed Lindsey and Will,” I said, indicating her with one of my claws, “but I selected a different option. This led to the different body, and also the ‘devices’ you mentioned. I think they give me access to the game- ah, I mean the interface for this place. I have more access to it than they do.”

It sat there for a few moments. Processing the information? Checking the ‘devices’ compared to whatever it used to access game information?

“Can we walk and talk?” I asked. I wanted to bind myself at the next crystal if nothing else. Exploring one of the next batch of floors would be a bonus. “I’ve only got an hour or so left before I have to… leave.”

“I am capable of performing both tasks at the same time.”

And so we set off. Lindsey and I waded through the pile of junk, objects moving out of the way to make room. The thing dragging Will’s body around just mechanically stepped down the stairs, totally ignoring the presence of the blockage. Objects which should have been in his way were turned to dust instead. There was an inkling of something in my weird fire future sense. It was almost like there was the opposite of fire where it was, like fire wasn’t and could never exist there. After we passed the barrier, and it was no longer actively turning things to dust, the impression faded away.

On the next landing, predictably, there was another spawn point crystal. Our little group walked right up to it. Lindsey and I both reached out to touch it.

Would you like to bind yourself to location: Earth-Human-MidCheckpoint-11?

I confirmed, then checked my status to verify.

Summary

Pyromancer, Level 8 - 21%

Bound: Earth-Human-MidCheckpoint-11

Logout estimate:

Status

Skills

Equip

Friends

Marks

Logout

“What is this thing?” The mechanical voice drew my attention. Will’s hand was also reaching toward the crystal, though standing far enough away that he couldn’t make contact.

I considered for a moment if it was wise to tell it, if it didn’t already know. It could wait near one of the ones closer to the top, and get access to random players, possibly ones less aware of how potentially dangerous it was. And if there was something more going on with this game than it seemed, it might even be able to mess with the crystals on Earth through them, or something similarly bad. And- and why didn’t it already know this? It seemed to know a lot more about Earth than about anything inside the game.

“It is a spawn point,” Lindsey said before I could figure out a suitable deflection.

“It is untouched by entropy. When all of existence has spread out so far that all of space is flat and empty once more, this thing will remain. I do not like it. We should move away from it.”

It started walking down the next flight of stairs.

“I must now tell you about the jailer, in accordance with our agreement,” it said as we descended.

“Ah!” Lindsey spoke up suddenly, “I think I am out of time. I will see you later, Joe. Let me know how all of… this goes.” She motioned about vaguely with her hands as if to indicate this entire clusterfuck, and then she vanished.

Lindsey Auclair has logged off.

“Such a waste. I would have traded for that body as well. Now it is gone.” There was no emotion in its voice, but its choice of words called an image to mind: my mother scolding me for wasting food. I shook my head to clear out that hopefully incongruent image.

“We need to see what happens when Will logs back in before we make any more deals like that.”

“I have agreed to return this body if the human Will requires use of it again for some reason. It was one of the terms of our agreement.”

“We don’t even know if what you’ve done to take control is reversible, if that does end up being something we need to do.”

“Things are not reversible. Actions may be taken, accounting for present circumstances, with the aim of creating circumstances similar to something which may have previously occurred.”

“Yes,” I said, speaking with patience that I did not feel, “But humans see the world in approximations. What you just described is an approximation of reversing whatever changed the circumstances in the first place.”

This was neither helpful nor pleasant, so I stopped, pushed open the door to the landing we were on, and stepped through. Probably level thirty-two or thirty-three, I hadn’t really been paying attention. Will’s avatar followed.

I looked out onto a huge vista, rolling hills stretched out as far as the eye could see. There was no obvious boundary anywhere that I could see, as there had been for the open areas on the last set of ten floors. The path forward led to a little picturesque European-looking town, and just past it, up a much larger hill, was a castle. The colors everywhere were saturated and bright, making the hills and town look open, inviting, and cheerful. The castle, however, and the woods surrounding it were dark and gloomy instead.

“I am going to clear this floor,” I said, “and you still owe me information on this jailer.”

I stepped forward, eager to kill stuff with fire to take my mind off of the rest of the madness going on. It followed behind, narrating as we made our way down the footpath.