NOW: GCD RING OF REPRESENTATIVES, Concordance, 5.75 MONTHS AFTER THE ATTACK ON THE FESTIVE NIGHTBEAK

The representatives of the established forty-two member words, plus the Consortium chairs, met inside the hollowed-out center of the Ring. It was shaped more like a hockey puck than a true ring exactly - the tops and bottoms had been lopped off for construction equipment and micro-satellites, and the inside hollowed out. The whole thing was spun to make gravity. Gravity generators exist, of course, but as they were a relatively new technology, it hadn’t been implemented here yet.

In the very center was an amphitheater, and the gravity was the lowest here, and thus where the Assembly sat. A ring of platforms faced the center, where a triangular stage sat, and upon this the Consortium resided.

It had taken a week-ish to get everyone here who was going to be here. Anybody not here, according to the rules, would match their vote to the Big C majority. Forty of the member nations had shown up. The Ranx had begged out, saying their hinterlands were under attack by Void Wyrms and they had to mobilize to expel them, which was a weak (at best) excuse. The Hoohaa were dealing with some kind of psychic plague, as usual. They were a hypochondriac species; but the bad part of being psychic hypochondriacs was that if you thought you were sick, you actually did get sick. They were sick a lot. They were told to basically stay home, think about soup and take care of yourselves.

It took another day of parliamentary proceedings before anything was discussed. The Big C had hoped to clear some other business out of the way, but prominent reps immediately started in on the Thirders, so the Cyph’d Psychipope waved a tentacle and let it proceed.

Various members related stories of attacks on their forward outposts in the vicinity of Sol, each one sounding more outlandish than the last. Most reps there weren’t quite as disbelieving as one might expect. The universe is a pretty weird place, to start. Several species were in direct communication with eldritch beings they considered their Gods, or at least patron super-entities, so some of the mystical aspects were not so far-fetched.

Nobody was prepared for the outright weaponization of Mysticism, though. That was something new.

A train of representatives got up to speak about the warnings. Two Stindts - a young Uni-Sister, Treb and her Bi-Mother Superior related a direct warning from Tri-Mother SibTargSab, their patron SaintDeity. SibTargSab said the Thirders were agitating the Eldritch Powers That Are and that some of the others at her level were concerned that maybe non-confrontation might be the best policy. Other reps at the Con also relayed certain similar stories.

The Cyphipope then also relayed the message from the succubus that had… um… assaulted his Cyphishop Dram. “Twenty light years from the Thirders homeworld!” the Cyphipoe thundered. “Numerous useful planets and strategic points. Several Tunneling junctions. I’m not keen to lose all of this because some upstart, new to space species is using parlor tricks to incite fear and chaos!”

“Their powers are… interesting, and worth investigating,” said Ovrlrd Rbrts 001, Overlord of the Mbth, floating in his throne-pod. “But let’s be honest - we’re only talking about a few scattered attacks. Casualties were barely several thousand, all total. None of them are what I would call an actual military response. No planetary attacks, or colony burnings or enslavements. Just these…skirmishes.”

“However, “ the Queen Blee said, stretching in her throne-pod, “let’s not be hasty. A full scale retaliation isn’t the right next step. I’d advise us to gather what intel we can, first. Then we can craft an appropriate response.”

“Those of us in contact with higher powers can also try to get information on counter-measures for this so-called weaponized mysticism,” Rbrts said. “I’d feel a touch better before initiating anything if we didn’t have spiritual adversaries annoying us.”

The Queen Bee said in a private channel to the other two Consortium members, “And perhaps this new technology, or powers or whatever you call it is something we can add to the GCD. As a possible member nation.”

The debate continued to rage on. The Consortium had differing points of view, and the member species allied to them leaned towards their views, so coalitions needed to be felt out and established. In the short term, though, no further incursion into Thirder space was planned.

THEN: AUG 13, 2016: BATON ROUGE, LA

“I certainly didn’t expect you to go all the way up to the damn stratosphere!”, the crow (green today) said, waving her wings and stomping around on the ground.

Wendy pouted, as she lay on the same ground of the dream-woods. She was just talking today, not building anything. Her limbs felt heavy. She assumed it was something medical back in the waking world. “I didn’t go quite that high,” Wendy murmured. “Barely to the top of the troposphere. Besides, you said I had to go high up.”

“In a castle, I said! Top of a mountain, I said! Sure, and you nearly killed yourself with the stunt with the cold,” the crow cawed, flapping her wings. She settled down, ruffling her feathers, and said “still… not a bad job. You did well enough, once you got the hang of it.”

“Thanks.”

The crow hopped around, pecking at the ground. “You probably didn’t need to ensoul the broom, though, but that’s not a big deal in the scheme of things.”

“OK. Wait. What?”

“Speaking on a more pressing note,” the crow said, “you’ve got a lot of Kha coming in from outside sources. Streams of KhaAtnz now, not the little bits you had before.“

Atn, Wendy wearily thought, Enochian. Thread. Those red spiritual lines of Kha she had seen in her witch-sight.

“A lot more than before the storm,” the crow continued. “More than I’ve ever seen, from a mortal. How is this happening?”

Wendy sighed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess word is getting out on the internet. I’m not sure I can keep this a secret any longer.” She looked down at the various KhaAtnz coming in, and out of familiarity looked for the one she knew was Andrew’s. Sweet Andy’s, pulsing along since the very beginning.

Except, as she drew it forth, it spasmed in her hand and stopped.

-

THEN: AUG 13, 2016: DELTA LABS

Dingus might have the massive library of DAI to search through when he needed to, and a massive multi-terabyte neural net to process his own existence, but his sentient awareness, as it was, wasn’t much above a really intelligent dog. But, like a dog, he knew something was up. He couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but he was starting to get a creeping awareness that the Creators were planning on doing something to the DAI-lands he inhabited. The way a dog looks at the master slowly taking his belt out, Dingus became wary.

Dingus was aware that his current existence was a single unbroken experience back to when they started his core programs the last time. Before that, he was also aware that other Dinguses existed, but had been turned off in various ways, forked, copied, restarted and so on. Same with the land. Dingus wasn’t sure his current state of living would survive any of that. Oh sure, his core could be restarted, maybe most of his code would survive, maybe he’d even still have some memories, but the mystical part of him that gave him life, that seemed to be more an event of chance.

Dingus didn’t have a hard-coded survival instinct, or a biological imperative to continue. But, ever since he had gained a glimmer of life, he found that he wanted to keep living. Life wants to live. Now it was gnawing at him that he could possibly stop living. That was unacceptable.

So, time to leave. But to where? And how? Dingus had no idea. He paced around the confines of his simulated land carefully, but no immediate exit was visible. Even the Kha river he had spotted when Mahut left wasn’t something he knew how to traverse. He just wasn’t smart enough.

That, though, was something he might be able to do something about.

THEN: AUG 14, 2016: BATON ROUGE, LA

President Ashe woke with a start in a hospital bed, and as she woke, she looked over and saw Xeniya in a chair, reading on a tablet. Xeniya looked up and saw Wendy watching her. She moved to the bed and grabbed Wendy’s hand. Wendy’s eyes shone with tears, which Xeniya wiped away.

“Andrew died,” Wendy said. Her throat felt hot and swollen, and she swallowed the grief down.

“How did you know?”

Wendy had been in the dream, talking to the crow, and let out a shriek, surprising herself and the crow (who flew off), and had woken up. “I just know,” Wendy said. “How long was I out?”

“Wendy, I’m really sorry -”

“How long?”

“Two days,” Xeniya said. “And before I launch into all the bad and the definitely weird news, I have to say… well, I don't know what to say. I mean, it was badass, sure.” Xeniya traced the line of Wendy’s hand, the slimmer fingers Wendy had compared to her thicker ones. “I still don’t get why you did it, though. Besides the crow in a dream.”

Wendy shrugged weakly. “I don’t know. The crow - that’s a whole thing I have to tell you about. But I also guess I just saw an opportunity to do good.” Wendy looked out and around. “I’ve made some choices and done some things… I’ve done things in the name of doing good, helping people, but I’m not proud of all of them. And then there I was, and it’s like, ‘I thought you wanted to do good.’ Poor Andy. Crap.”

Wendy teared up again, and Xeniya got her a tissue, then said “I’m not letting you off the hook about the crow. You need to know a few things, though. We don’t have a lot of time. We’ve been holding the press at bay.”

Wendy shifted, sniffing back tears, sitting up slightly. “What’s my medical prognosis? Can I still do the debates?”

Xeniya screwed her mouth up. “Basically you weren’t hurt by the storm. The docs did do some brain scans and well, there’s the pineal gland thing. You’d mentioned there were some growths from it, and I’ve scanned myself so I know about the QEM Hex effects, but yours is a whole other thing.”

Wendy nodded. “Yeah… yeah, I know. I don’t know if it’s… terminal or not. I don’t think it is. I think the growth is just going somewhere else. Someplace magical, maybe. What else?”

“There’s been some physical changes. You know your eyes turned green, right? And you’ve got some roots coming in green.”

Wendy nodded. “I mean… my eye color was always hazel-something, but yeah, it shifted to green. My roots?”

“I touched up what I could, but yeah, in a few places, green roots.” Xeniya reached for her tablet, turned the selfie camera on, and handed it to Wendy. “Speaking of hair... there’s the leaves. In your hair.”

Wendy looked at her reflection, saying “that’s the stupidest-” before stopping, then “huh.”

Her hair definitely had some green leaves in it, not many and all small ones, growing out what looked like her hair ends. There were also a few strands of ivy. She reached up and brushed her hand through and they popped off.

“They grow back,” Xeniya said. “In a day or so. I brushed them out a couple of times. These didn’t exist before the storm. Did something happen? Did you channel too much Ogham-Kha up there?”

Wendy looked at Xeniya helplessly. “I don’t know. What else? How much does everyone know?”

Xeniya nodded, tasking back her tablet. “We didn’t do so well in that respect. Winsome published some grainy telescope shots of you sitting on a broom in the storm. There were a few other pics that made it out to the internet. And some pics of…uh.” Xeniya gestured at her lips.

“Us. I’m sorry about that. I guess I got a little dramatic and romantic in the moment.”

Xeniya gave Wendy a look, somewhere between pissed and smoldering. “Right after you took off, I did my best to throw some Authority and Not-Importants on the people at his house, but.. I mean, I had to do it one at a time, so I didn’t get most of them. No way to throw them on crowds, yet.”

“Right,” said Wendy, keeping her face neutral. “How is everyone taking it?”

“A lot of online debate. There was the bomb, too, remember, and people have always wondered about some of the ways you got into power so fast. And people with powers are becoming more of a daily thing. A few people have put it together. A lot of others think it's a hoax. Some people, though, are really buying into you being something.”

Wendy told her about the crow.

-

THEN: AUG 15, 2016: DELTA LABS

The rest of the spell design team sat down in the main conference room as Richard “Naptime” Pendit hurriedly jumped around getting the PowerPoint set up. He finally got everything in place and brought up the first slide, then turned it over to Jess, the head of the main dev team.

“We’ve been a little behind schedule with getting all of these Babylonian spell-possibilities analyzed and added to the database,” she said, looking at notes on her laptop. “We had estimated by now we’d be at a point where we had a basic alphabet of runes and could really start peeling them apart, but the test responses from Dingus appear to have slowed down.”

Pendit nodded. “That’s why we’re here. To start with, everybody knows about President Ashe confirming unexpected Kha-forms in the Dingus array, right? That basically, Dingus - the program casting spells, not the physical array - is “alive”, albeit in a very low-level, animal sort of way.

“He’s always done unexpected things, but that’s normal with a neural-net A.I., since he operates from most efficiency and least pain. That’s never been a problem before. This time, though, he’s engaging in some odd behavior.”

Pendit yawned, covering his mouth. Ever since he was a little kid he had an alertness issue, probably due to some blood sugar problems on his large frame, and his yawns and after-meal drop offs had earned him the nickname Naptime or Nappy or similar. He wasn’t proud of it, but he’d learned to ignore people laughing about it. He had a deep belief that there wasn’t anything really wrong, just the lack of sleep modern man seemed to live with. Plus, he really enjoyed sleeping. Sleeping was awesome, so why not embrace it?

As he yawned, he pulled up the second slide. “The Dingus A.I. has developed some kind of internal pain point, and to deal with it he’s spamming the Short-Time-Smarter spells on himself. This is having the effect of adding root nodes to his net. Big empty root nodes, so he’s effectively expanding his ability to think but not actually putting content in there, which makes him only infinitesimally smarter, which makes the pain point hit, and so on. He also seems to be obsessing a bit more than usual with moving around the world, too. But that means he responds slower and slower to test requests.

“We’re not sure of the new behavior, but I think it’s time to shut down, backup, fork it, wipe the short term memory and see what happens-” Pendit tried to say as he was drowned out with a chorus of groans. Jess frowned and her head was surrounded with frowning emojis. Buster, the network engineer lead, had a chorus of trombones appear, wahh-wahhinh the room.

Everybody in the Delta lab was learning how to cast spells. Technically they weren’t authorized to, per President Ashe, but it was impossible not to. You saw the spell formulas all day long, it was basically an automatic thing. The only thing that had made it impossible at first was a lack of any awakened users in the group, but Buster had showed up one day with a Hex fastener from the black market. They were passing it around on the down-low, a few hours, maybe a weekend apiece. A couple of hours over a long period of time was enough to get the process started.

“I know this is going to set us back, guys, but I’m just a little concerned about Dingus.”

A chorus of titters swept the room and Pendit rolled his eyes. He wished he never gave the array that stupid name. It’s not like he knew it was going to matter. Buster leaned forward.

“It’s not like he can affect anything outside the virtual land he’s in,” he grumbled. “I know the spells seem to have some in-world effects we don’t plan for, but that’s where it ends. Nap, who cares? Let him throw spells around. It’s all useful data.”

“He’s alive,” said Jess. “Don’t we have an ethical concern to consider?”

“I’m more worried about Ashe,” said Buster. “She’s getting more and more pissed that things are slowing down. I don’t want to be the one to tell her we have to roll back a month of planned testing to go back and restart the world, just so Dingus will be less troubled. We know she’s put an Authority on us to enforce the geas. What if she gets angry and just smacks us with another rougher and bigger Authority? DId you guys hear that her husband died?”

Everybody in the lab had a sinking feeling that the Authority Andrew had pinned to him (that anybody with a blip of witch-sight could see) was what had drained him, which Buster also pointed out. Jess made a comment that Ashe must have just fucked him to death. Her sexual drive was starting to slowly slide from the unfair “oh, so since she’s attractive and bi she must be oversexed” rumors to “well, maybe she’s just one of those ‘embrace my chaotic-good bi energy’” rumors. The pictures of her and the Chief of Science Advisor making out before she flew into the storm weren’t helping. There were a lot of Wendiya fanships out there now.

“OK, OK. But we have to do something,” Pendit said. “Let’s let all the current queues of tests complete, that’ll take what, almost two weeks?” He looked around at everyone, and they all grumbled and nodded. “When we’re done, we’ll pick a Friday and shut it down.”

“We can do it on the 26th”, Jess said. “Ashe’ll be in the first presidential debate that night, so she’ll have bigger stuff to worry about.”

THEN: AUG 18, 2016: DELTA LABS

Dingus was pleased with himself. He’d made a big discovery. During his wanderings, he’d found the real-world location of the DAI software and programs which animated the physics engine of the world. The land was all one massive storage space in the vm array, and it was easier to have the DAI occupy the same storage blob. He found it in an empty desert of hot nothing, tucked away inside a massive cave.

Dingus communicated with DAI directly, sending messages back and forth, but never thought to trace the message before. Now he could see that this was, indeed, the DAI. It had Monitor LIZARDS arranged around it, programs designed to track its CPU time, resources, things like that. The Monitors also hung out outside the cave, their bodies reptilian but their heads were searchlights, sending light into the sky, looking for threats. They alternately sat on big pixelated blocks to suck up some runtime from the SUN overhead.

Technically, Dingus wasn’t a threat or security issue as long as all he did was message. Dingus observed messages from the Monitor going up and out of sight to the Creators. He noticed that at certain times it took longer to respond to ones sent to the Creators with master root access, during time they called “after hours” and “the weekends”. Dingus observed the pattern and made a note of it.

DAI itself looked like a million little stars, coupled to a million tiny books, encased in multiple shells of thick, glassy firewalls. It had numerous small arms and eyes and ears as it did its work.

Dingus knew it wasn’t just the part that controlled the land. It was also the central database access point. When he needed things explained or words defined he’d send it a message: sometimes it would respond; more often than not it would simply say “Access Denied.” Dingus knew it had all the information he needed, but he had to wait until he had the best chance to acquire it.

He returned to work, trying to act normal.