THEN: AUG 10th, 2016 - BATON ROUGE, LA

President Ashe was scheduled to attend a small rally in Monroe, Louisiana in a few days, so while in the area, she spent the day traveling and visiting the few Democratic officeholders in conservative Baton Rouge, then had dinner at a donor’s house. The donor, Michael Winsome, a rich media executive with an historical estate that had been vetted by her security already, had offered his place for the President and her retinue to stay overnight. Professor Xeniya Raptis, Chief Science Advisor, was also attending, which caused a little buzz, since Andrew was homebound most of the time and rumors existed already about whether the two were involved. Xeniya however was firmly ensconced in an external building, while the President was in the main one.

After the formal dinner with Winsome and a few dozen of his (also rich) guests, he gave them all a brief tour of the estate. The main house was a more modern affair, but there were a few antebellum period-restored buildings that were open for tours on the weekends he liked to show off. President Ashe attended, but her mind seemed elsewhere.

Later, as Wendy lay awake in the expansive guest suite, waiting for the sleep that took hours to come and thinking back on her interactions earlier, she got to thinking about the kinds of attention she got from supporters. She had her interested folks, her party-line faithful’s, people who just liked her policies - nothing unusual there. She even had the ones she already placed an Authority on previously, some of them months ago, attending here. She noticed the Authority spells tended to weaken over time, depending on how strong it was when she applied it, or how much it went against the person’s thinking. Sometimes she saw someone with an Authority with almost no degradation or even strengthened, but then discovered they had a partner or were in a group also with applied Authority, and finally deduced there was some kind of feedback going between them.

She and her coven, and Xeniya, and her other secret scientists, all treated Magic like some kind of applied science, she thought, stroking the silk sheets. But she might need to start considering that it was a bit more complex than that.

In all of these cases, though, she didn’t get any kind of Kha back from them unless they were the people she dubbed internally as worshipers. Andrew, of course, and Tommy the Secret Service agent who was now a permanent fixture by her side, and the other aides who hung around with her who had seen her do miracles. The people present at the suicide attack. She didn’t understand the process exactly, yet. At first she thought it needed an Authority to work, but lately she found that people who really worshiped her were sending her tiny pings of Kha on their own whether they had a previously attached Authority or not.

As she considered it while lying in the big four-poster bed they’d put her up in, she rolled a theory around in her mind. Maybe people who thought about her a lot were essentially running a sort of primitive sim of her in their own minds. And, by giving this vision of her “life”, some of that life in the form of Kha bled through to the “real” world, similar to the Dingus array in the Delta labs running spells in a sim or her running spells in her dream. It probably also explained religious prayers or rituals in general - any repeated formula running over and over built brain structures, and brain structures equals magic. It would explain why she seemed to have extra Kha these days, too. She no longer needed to rest as much, other than the few hours of sleep every other night she fitfully had, but the days it used to take to recharge between magic uses were gone. And, any spells tied to her that used to degrade did so more slowly, now, instead of her needing to periodically recharge them.

Wendy also noticed worship Kha coming in from odd locations. Most felt like they were coming from the immediate U.S., but a few felt like from farther away, in ones and twos. People around the world. A cluster from Russia. She wondered sometimes who they were and if they also were someplace suffering and hoping she could help them. Well, she had her hands full with the U.S. The rest of the world would have to be someone else’s problem.

-

NOW: GCD RING OF REPRESENTATIVES, 5.5 MONTHS AFTER THE ATTACK ON THE FESTIVE NIGHTBEAK

The message to all senior representatives of the GCD had gone out a week ago: Concordance. Usually the GCD didn’t need to all meet at once, as the Consortium (the Blee/Mbth/Cyph’d leader triumvirate) did the heavy lifting as far as policy went. But, for larger, empire-spanning events, a full Concordance was sometimes called. The forty-two member nations plus the Consortium were instructed to send their leaders to the Ring of Representatives, a small ring station built out of a hollowed-out dwarf planet untethered to a star, in the cold in-between of space. The Consortium also required all members (other than themselves) to shuttle in from a distance a few Lsecs out, so not exactly accommodating. They claimed security reasons, but being forced to queue on a shuttle while the warships of the GCD glowered at you on the inbound trip helped to remind everyone who was in charge.

Most species were atmo-compatible, so would simply come on board and start mingling, once they got through security and customs. The few that weren’t were required to don suits. No hanging out in VR when at the Ring; everybody was required to come onboard. For a few species this was more than problematic and bordering on cruel, but that was the rule.

It would take a few days for everybody to get queued, onboard, checked, scanned, and admitted, so everybody settled down to wait. That also gave everyone a few days of shadow diplomacy and to gossip about why they were there (obviously the Thirders) and what was going to be happening (obviously war.)

Everybody sat tight and tried to be patient.

THEN: AUG 11th, 2016 - BATON ROUGE, LA

“You do know there’s a storm on the way, right?” the crow said casually, still examining the Futhark and Aatlan runes Wendy had carved into a piece of stone on the ground in the dream-forest, red highlights glinting off her black feathers. Wendy, sitting nearby, looked up and said “A what now?” Sometimes the conversations between them required more concentration to follow - both of them were language polyglots, and even though the crow mostly spoke Old Gaelic, she’d dip into other languages for words or concepts that didn’t translate.

“You’d call it a ‘cluster of thunderstorms’, I think,” said the crow, looking up at her. “You’re the witch here, you should be able to sense it.”

Wendy sighed, then forced herself to relax. She tried to cast her senses out the way the crow had taught her (in return, she had explained the geopolitics leading up to WWI), but only got something vague and dark. She cast a seeing-eye in front of her face, grimacing slightly as the crow tut-tutted at her. “I know, I know,” Wendy said, “‘I shouldn’t need a spell for everything’, blah blah.”

Looking up in the dream through the seeing-eye, she saw it then, off in the distance - a roiling mix of storms, banging into each other. Rain, wind and thunder. Not furious exactly, but just sort of sitting there. “It looks like a bad storm, I guess,” said Wendy. “Am I in danger?”

The crow shrugged. “I’m sure you would be safe enough where you are, or you could leave the area. You’ve got time. But the people who stay, once that rain turns to floods, they won’t fare as well.”

Wendy felt her guts go slightly cold. Conversations with the crow had a certain rhythm to them. The crow would show up in three slightly-different shades: one with highlights red as blood; once with tinges of green, and one with just black coloring. They had the same voice, but the red one seemed to favor discussions about strategy and the future. The green one mostly talked about nature and matters of sovereignty. The black one didn’t talk much, but when she did, it was mostly about war. All the same voice, but slightly different.

Today was the red one, and for her to be discussing details of the future was unexpected. The only topics the crow steered away from were specifics of who they were, or their names, or events in the future.

“Is this a prophecy?” Wendy asked carefully. “Is this the future you’re describing?”

The crow shrugged again. “It’s a possible future. Call it what you like. If something’s not done about the storm, the flooding will be bad. Thousands will be displaced. Homes lost, lives ruined. Perhaps fifty people might die.”

“Well… what am I supposed to do about a storm?” The crow just gave her a look, and Wendy rolled her eyes. “I know, I know, I’m a witch. I just… I mean, I don’t have the kind of power to just… wrestle aside something like that.”

The crow cleaned under her wing casually. “You’re not a traditional witch, but you are a witch, and I think you could just wrestle it aside, if you had time to prepare,” she said. “But why wrestle when you can be subtle? It’s not always about raw power. A single spark can burn a forest; a single rock can start a landslide. Untying a bootlace can trip up the strongest warrior. A rumor can distract the-.”

“This isn’t something I can use subtlety on,” Wendy interrupted. “It’s nature! It’s a mass of… I don’t know, water and wind and heat and physics!”

“Sure, and that’s one way to look at it, lass,” the bird said, fluffing up and shaking. “But why do you think so much about magic is bound up in words? Magic is telling a story to the universe. There isn’t just one telling, little witch. Yes, you can look at magic as ways to move energy and probability around, and storms are just wind and water. But, sometimes a storm can be a living thing. Sometimes it can be a rage of death. It’s all just perspectives. But,” the crow said, flapping a few times, “What do I know? I’m just an old crow in a dream. Aye, I’m not even real.”

The crow took flight, landing on the nearby rock, which Wendy knew meant she was getting ready to leave. Wendy stood up as well, and asked, “Are you asking me to do this?”

The crow took off, flapping and cawing, flying circles around the clearing in the dream-woods they met in. “I don’t deliver prophecies for no reason!” She said, her voice raised. “I think dismantling a storm would be good for you. But you aren’t some brutish man-warrior or king. I’m not ordering you. You are a witch!” she said, cawing, playfully diving in close so Wendy had to jump aside with a yelp. “Free and fierce and terrible and whatever else you want to be. You decide for yourself! But-” and now she was over the treetops, so her voice was getting fainter,”...I’ll be disappointed if you don’t try.”

“But-”

“And a friendly piece of advice! Storm-breaking is a lot easier inside a storm. Tall mountains, top of a castle, that sort of thing. Or… “ and now she was very far away, so very faint -

“...the more traditional method.”

THEN: MOST OF 2016: DELTA LAB

The land didn’t have a name, or much in the way of features. Formed of gently rolling fractalized terrain, low-pixelated scrub and trees, some flat water surfaces, and a few blocky boxes in the solid blue sky, there wasn’t a lot to see.

Moving across the surface of the world were various low-bitrate humanoids, and in one corner, a sort of snaking tube with a bunch of hands and arms (like a centipede) and sort of an end with a face.

When the Dingus array came online to test spells, it was pretty simple - put 3d representations of runes in a string inside a blank 3d space, with the vertices and inner transforms connected. If they could all connect, great, you had a working spell. Then the spell processes got more complicated to model, so more and more was added to the sim. Spells needed targets, depending on the type of spell, so objects were added. Spells needed an origin, and a voice that could make sounds, and needed to work with various fingers and hands, and some basic acoustic modeling and so forth. Before long some enthusiastic modders in the lab started slamming together physics engines rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, and from then on let the Dingus array A.I. (we’ll call it DAI) take over the modding.

DAI was now creating an extremely basic world.

When spells first needed to be cast from a specific X/Y/Z location in the world, DAI created “Dingus the casting origin point” (just Dingus.) Eventually as Dingus evolved (to have the stuff the spells needed to test) the origin point turned into a line to gain two coordinate sets, and then a sort of tube to give it more three-dimensionality. A few rudimentary organs were added (again, things needed for casting, like lungs, and eyes, and hands). Dingus didn’t need to be humanoid so it only got what it needed, at first. Some basic memory. The ability to see (in a very primitive way). You can’t test spells designed to stop pain without a pain receptor. You can’t cast spells that heal without a way to record damage, and so on.

Some of the evolution didn’t work so well. At one point the system needed to test a spell that improved the ability for a person to run, but Dingus didn’t have legs. DAI noticed it already had working arms, so to be efficient it just used the arms as legs and added more arms. Some very basic skin was needed (in sort-of-cell form, for the purposes of testing some no-harms) so DAI threw some interlinked skin cell analogs big as saucers on top. And so on.

While this was happening, the A.I. was optimizing the world for whatever gave better spell testing results. The world was forked, recombined, forked, better branches kept and others pruned. Meanwhile while all this was happening, the various copies of Dingus also got optimized, killed, evolved, killed, pruned, had its digital DNA fragmented and used and backed up and re-used.

And, while all of this was happening, Dingus was casting and iterating spells, which meant Kha was pouring through it constantly. Spells designed to heal, grant life, make yourself smarter, make yourself faster, make yourself cheat death, make yourself regenerate, you name it. After billions of castings, most of the time they didn’t do anything to the Dingus construct. A fraction of the spells actually activated, backfired and killed it, whereupon DAI resurrected it. Barely any of them activated and modified the Dingus codebase in a way that was unexpected.

Barely.

-

THEN: AUG 11th, 2016, 3AM - BATON ROUGE, LA

Xeniya was shaken awake by Wendy, fully dressed, looking more manic than usual. Xen blearily looked at her mobile, which said 3 A.M. She looked at the window in her room and saw rain pouring down. While she was looking around, Wendy had been talking, so she refocused. “Wha” she managed to get out before Wendy shook her.

“Xen. Wake up. Are you awake? Xen!” Wendy said as she shook her. Xen feebly smacked her hands away, grunting, “I’m up, I’m up. What’s happening?”

“Xen, I need you up up. Do you need a Morning-Has-Broken?” Wendy said, naming the spell she had created that was a combination hangover cure and alertness hammer. Xen shuddered and yelped, “Wendy, that spell sucks. It’s like getting a bucket of cold water thrown on you while someone turns a spotlight on in your brain, and every pore vomits. No. I’m up. What is it?”

“Listen to me. Get any climate or weather scientists you know on the phone. Right now. There’s a storm near here, and everything’s gonna flood. I need to know how to stop it. How you… uh. Bust it. Whatever. Then we need a magical way to do it, if one exists. OK? Xen!”

Xeniya squinted at Wendy, remembered she wore contacts, and fumbled for her glasses. “How do you know this?”

“A crow in a dream told me. I already know how it sounds.”

Xeniya nodded, grumbled a weak “Yes yes fine. But what are you-” but Wendy was already out the door, calling back “call my phone!” as she ran down the hall.

Michael Winsome was next to be shaken awake. Wendy explained about the storm, and Michael nodded. “I can call the local police and fire department, and I can call the governor and warn him,” he said. “What else do you need?”

Wendy took a deep breath and said dryly, “a style choice that’s going to define me in a way that’s not as forward thinking as I like to present.“

“Excuse me?”

“Back in the carriage house, there were some historical recreation tools, right? I… uh…” Wendy stopped, rolled her eyes, and grimaced. “... do you have a broom?”