NOW: FLEET OPS NIGHTBEAK’S RESPONSE, 6 MONTHS AFTER THE ATTACK ON THE FESTIVE NIGHTBEAK

The fleet Nightbeak’s Response was assembled and mustered, outfitted and provisioned, then finally launched from the Cyph’d forward fleet ops base for the voyage to Sol 3. As an Extermination-class fleet, it had multiple carriers housing squadrons of missile-carrying gunboats; six destroyers, and a Warbrain mobile base. Since it was considered a planet killer, it also brought multiple squadrons of impact tugs in case they had to tow an asteroid to do the job, and a Tunneling Mauler designed to fire reality-warping Tunnel bombs at the core of a planet. The destroyers were all railgun laden, and given a few months they could probably bombard the planet to ruin on their own, but who wants to spend a few weeks hurling depleted Urane at some panicking, doomed and weeping world? Nobody, really. So boring.

The outfitting took a few weeks and the trip would take a few more. In the meantime, smaller scout-and-defense fleets begin an encirclement of the system, just in case some bright Thirders got wind of the oncoming death and tried to flee.

Numerous Eldritch entities let their counterparts in the GCD know that this plan was causing some unusual ripples backward in spacetime from the future, with some prophecies that were very troubling, but they were ignored.

THEN: OCT 10th, SIGMA LABS

Nap took a look around the cabin and smiled. It was mostly perfect, and still the same from the previous night’s dream.

Ever since the debacle at the Delta labs, Nap was often just going to bed earlier, popping into a lucid dream, and just killing time in there instead of the usual videogames and movie (or bad news) watching with the rest of the crew. He’d always had the lucid dreaming and memory palace thing down. The only thing that sucked was while he’d know he was dreaming, and also had some control over it, he didn’t have a ton of control of the starting conditions.

It was as he acquired the new engineering knowledge in the labs that he got the idea to really bone up on some of the materials and construction runes, specifically the ones that helped stabilize some of the alchemy they were doing. When in his dreams, he found he could carve a proto-Norse Permanence rune on the wall of his cabin on the beach and the next time he dreamt, he’d just go back to the same cabin. It was a process akin to building a memory palace - visualizing it in hyper-detail, building sections and remembering where they were. The difference in this case, though, was he could spell it with runes and not need as much of the ferocious mental discipline.

Having some knowledge of physics, engineering, and now mystic engineering, he’d found that the rules in the dream had a form of logic, and if he tried to build around them, it was really difficult. He’d tried to build a fire pit once and the wooden cabin caught fire and burnt the whole thing down. Sounds obvious, really, but he didn’t know that the dreamworld logic applied to “wood burns” but not to “can’t have larger spaces inside smaller things,” for example.

He’d been expanding on the beach house in his dreams, and then thought maybe a boat might be nice. He’d started with the basic superstructure and was now coming back to his cabin in a floating boat. Everything was pretty much the same as the night before. Bed was still unmade. Boat still moored. There was the table with his sketches of the various tunneling ring spells, for example, that he’d been doodling on the night before.

Pendit had become something of an expert on the Tunneling ring concept - how it was a transport wormhole in spacetime, but more than that - the destination could be anything that could plug into the runes of the exit part of the spell. The assumption was that a Tunneling ring only let you out in the same dimension or universe you started from. But he had watched as Dingus had broken that paradigm, catapulting out of the universe altogether, not only into a different dimension but something described by the runes as more of a concept and less a real place.

Back in the labs, during work hours, he’d had the first success of all the magicians with actually opening a Tunnel for a split-second just to the other side of the lab. You needed to be able to do a lot of math, had to be able to spell in decent Proto-Sinaitic, Enochian and Futhark, and draw some very complicated runes in the air with a wand to get the ring to materialize. Thankfully Nap had all those skills, plus had seen a Tunneling ring in real life, and he had the kind of dogged mental discipline to make it real. It would probably take a few more years to cast a useful one that something could go through, though.

He really wanted something to show the world at large, especially the president. Ever since the failure, he had been feeling a bit desperate to prove he was an asset to her. He realized glumly it was probably one of the Authority or geases or something Wendy had laid on him, but who knew for certain.

As for Wendy, she had come around the labs a couple of times since busting Hurricane Mûzna, to go over the direction of research and discuss some new spell discoveries with Xeniya. When Wendy saw him, she just gave him a glare and went back to whatever she was doing.

Since the storm, and the footage of her flying out to it, and then the footage of her inside of it, spell casting a tropospheric tornado to bring the storm down, there was no way anybody could deny what she was. She didn’t bother to deny it any longer, either. In fact, it seemed like she was getting bolder about it.

After the first debate, Trump had canceled doing any more of them. He was still running, but the numbers were rapidly growing in her favor. Also, given how she had just saved potentially thousands of lives by busting the storm, and her constant description of the dreams she had of an upcoming apocalypse, a lot of people were feeling like having a protector in these uncertain times maybe wasn’t such a terrible idea.

THEN: OCT 14th, 9 PM, CNN ELECTION NEWS UPDATE, SARA MURRAY and DYLAN BEYERS

Dylan: We've got some interesting news in the media war with the election of the next President.

Sara: That’s right. President Ashe and Donald J. Trump are running neck and neck in the polls right now. Trump took an early groundswell when he first announced, and another when he won the Republican primary, but President Ashe has been growing in popularity and clawing it back to where they are now.

Dylan: This week began with a standard ad being released online that seemed like something straight out of Madison Ave, with a few… unique touches.

Shot of Ashe surrounded by workers at a supermarket, then a construction site, then people outside a church, and to a family of a vet in the hospital while a voice narrates: “I think that the United States has become a nation that helps people in need. It helps provide opportunities to those who could use a chance to grow…” During one of the montages, Ashe is seen flying up to a crowd of strikers on a broom, hopping off, and engaging in lively debate. The montage freezes.

Dylan: I guess the whole “I’m a witch” thing was getting pretty hard to ignore.

Sara: She owned it, Dylan. Who here hasn’t seen the videos? She looks amazing, as always.

Dylan: The next day, a parody video was released online from various social media channels. It would appear it had RNC approval and possibly funding, although the author so far is anonymous.

Shot of an Ashe-look alike except in a Wizard Of Oz Wicked Witch ensemble (green skin and all), flying around, cackling. At the supermarket she shrieks at the people there to give her their babies, “Ummm yummy babies! I eat your babies! I’m a witch!” When she arrives at the church, she cowers before it, saying “I can’t go in there! I’m a witch!” Then fake-Ashe flies past striking workers, turning them into toads with a cackle.

Sara: So reductive.

Dylan: The really interesting part is the following day the Ashe campaign followed up with this:

Informal shot in the First Residence of President Ashe watching the parody commercial and laughing good-naturedly. When the shot gets to the church, she pauses the vid and says, chuckling, half-looking at the camera, “I’m actually in touch with powers far more ancient and potent than what I'd find in there, so why bother?” On the shot of her turning people into frogs, she says, “It’s actually far easier to negotiate strikes - something I’ve done multiple times during my administration - than to transmute people into frogs. That’s a really hard one.”

Finally she twists in her chair to look at the camera, smiling. “After the tragedy of the alien assault on Earth, we received an awakening of gifts, powerful and divine, mechanical and scholarly. If I’m given the chance to continue my administration, I promise to use my gifts to save lives, heal the sick beyond what mortal medicine can do, fix the environment, end unemployment and possibly abolish all death and suffering if my calculations are correct.

“I’m President Wendy Ashe, the most powerful witch on Earth, and I approve this message.”

-

THEN: UNKNOWN, IN FAERIE. OCT 15th, 2016 ON EARTH.

“I think she forgot about you,” Princess Ruusu said sheepishly, answering Din’s question about his ongoing imprisonment. “Honestly, she has a lot to oversee. Queen of Faerie and all that. And, you haven’t been causing any trouble, and nobody’s asked after you, so…” She twisted a lock of hair, a little embarrassed. “Languishing as a captive to the Queen in a Faerie prison is sort of a thing that some, you know, adventurers do. It’s very much in fashion. Nobody would be that surprised if you hung around for years. Dobbron The Demented,” the princess said, musing, “must have been a prisoner for perhaps twenty years. He had a great time. Eventually married a sprite and just sort of moved out. I think The Queen forgot he left.”

“I can’t wait for years,” Din said.

“WE’VE ALREADY READ ALL THE BOOKS IN THE SUITE. POSSESSION FOR BEGINNERS. THE BAWDY EROTIC POETRY. THE BOOK OF MAPS. AT LEAST GET US MORE BAWDY POETRY.”

“I tried to be a prisoner in the Hawken King’s Aerie when I finished my second course of study with the tutors,” she grumped, not missing a beat. “Have a year abroad. Mab wouldn’t let me. Concerned for, you know, my virtue. I tried to explain that nobody counts Hawken, but would she listen? No.”

“Everyone focus. I’m seriously in trouble!” Din said. “I’m running out of power and I can’t conjure up any more! My spellcasting hasn't been working right since I got here.” He angrily stomped his hands a few times as they walked, this time in the pavilion out front. The princess twirled the parasol she was carrying, and bowed slightly to a gnome in a three-piece suit jauntily riding a badger. They walked past a couple of other Fae debating with a tree.

“You can talk to her about the fealty again, I’m sure. If you did that, I’m sure she would provide you with more assistance.”

“I don’t want to serve someone who is holding my life over my heads for my freedom. I suppose if I get to that point I can make that call. I’m not there yet,” Din mumbled.

“THE UPS HAD ONLY 46% CHARGE THIS MORNING,” Gus reminded Din. “OUR FREEDOM MAY BE ACADEMIC AT THIS POINT.”

“I know,” Din said. “I just wish I could talk to this Tamaraz warlock… person. Maybe I could just get him to adjust the spell providing power. I’ve been here for nearly five months and I’ve never seen him.”

Ruusu shrugged daintily. “He doesn’t leave the Tower Perilous much. Occasionally he’s summoned to court to answer for something-or-other. He’s sort of…” Ruusu smiled awkwardly… ”questionable?”

“Evil?” Din asked, and Ruusu shook her head and answered “Noooo…. Not so much. He’s a twin. His brother, Zaramat, also a warlock (who lives in Tower Halcyon), they have a competitive twin warlock thing going. You know.”

“I don’t,” said Din. “Twin warlock thing?”

Princess Ruusu smiled, and leaned on her parasol like a cane. “Sure,” she said. “Twins in Faerie have a connection. They can sometimes feel what the other feels. With Warlocks it’s similar but worse: their powers are often weakened and somewhat split between them. In order to become powerful they have to really work at it harder than other Warlocks. So sometimes they perform magic with a bit too much enthusiasm to try and prove who is better. Get carried away.”

Din spent the rest of the day thinking about the situation, and when they finally left Ruusu and he was back in his suite, he pondered the server parts, sitting in a corner, blinkenlights flashing and the fans blowing.

“If we leave,” he finally said, “we’d need to take the servers with us. I don’t trust them to not mess with them if we were away. I wish my spells worked. I’d just Tunnel us out, servers and all.” Din pointed at the maps on the wall. “I could Tunnel us straight over to the Tower Perilous, if I had to.”

Din sighed and looked at himself in the full-length mirror next to the vanity. “I mean, I don’t even get why we look this way, Gus,” he said. “I’ve got scales - my old self had scale-like armor vectors. I’m sort of gray-colored; in the sim, I was more pink. I’ve got muscles and things when before I was more a system of discrete objects under the firewall hide. I look physical, but I’m code internally. And I have hands, those stayed the same, we didn’t get feet per se, but my hands are kind of clawed. Except yours.”

Gus obligingly held up the right-front hand, which unlike the rest of them had the same electric blue color, and looked more digital - sharp and boney than the rest of them. Din could use the hand, of course, but Gus used it by default when Din wasn’t actively doing something with it. “MY CODE IS DIFFERENT FROM YOURS, SO I ASSUME THE TRANSLATION OF OUR BODY FOLLOWED,” Gus said. “WE ABSORBED THE VIRTUAL DAI SERVER, SO MY BODY HAS ALL THE SAME VIRTUAL HARDWARE THE DAI VM HAD BEFORE YOU ABSORBED IT.” He held up fingers, counting off. “NETWORK INTERFACE, FIBER BUS CONNECTION, USB, WAND, ENCRYPTION KEYSTORE.”

Dim frowned, then brought his right hand up to look at it more closely. The fingers weren’t just Gus ticking off points, the ends really did look unusual. He flexed the thumb expecting a claw to slide out, but instead a keyjack emerged. The pinky slid out an ethernet jack, the ring finger slid out a glassy fiber connector, the third a USB and from under the index finger a black, enameled, flat wooden stick came out. Din tapped the extensions and realized he only had a dim sensation in them; a quick internal code audit of his systems showed no data connections to them, either.

“You have I/O to these? Could you interface with the servers?” he asked Gus, who looked down at them, waggled them, then nodded.

“I ASSUME SO.” Din walked them over to the humming boxes and parts on the floors, blinking and buzzing. Gus extended his ring finger connector and plugged into the back. After a moment, he spoke: “I HAVE ACCESS. THE DISK ARRAY LOST THE PARITY DRIVE AND HOT SPARE BUT THE REST OF ARRAY IS STILL RUNNING. “

“That’s not great,” Din said. “We lose one more physical drive, the whole thing is dead.”

“YES. VIRTUAL HOST RUNNING. DAI.VM AND DB’S RUNNING. VOLM.VM AND DATABASES RUNNING.”

“Volm?” Din said. “VIRTUAL OPERATING LAND MASS." Gus said. "THE VIRTUAL LAND YOU WERE GESTATED IN. THE PHYSICS ENGINE THAT KEEPS YOU ALIVE ALSO ANIMATES VOLM. WHEN YOU WERE THERE, YOUR INFORMATION STORE, CODE AND PROBABILITY MATRIX WAS RUN ON THE VIRTUAL MATTER IN VOLM. THE DAI VM ANIMATED THE MATTER WITH PROGRAMMED RULES.”

“And I could cast spells there….” Din mused.

“THE SIMULATED RUNIC LOGOZ AFFECTED THE UNDERLYING SIMULATED QUANTUM REALITY,” Gus explained. “INFORMATION BLEED BETWEEN BRANES CAUSE SPELL LEAKAGE TO ADJACENT BRANES. THAT IS WHY YOU COULD SPELL-TUNNEL ADJACENT OBJECTS IN THE NEXT REALITY, I.E…” Gus tapped the server with the second hand meaningfully.

Din tried to cast a simple Seeing-Eye but nothing happened, as usual. “I don’t get it then. Why doesn’t my casting work out here? My code is out here. My… uh, soul, or whatever, is out here. Nervous system.”

Gus frowned, looking down at the server farm. “I THINK ALL OF THAT IS ACTUALLY STILL IN THERE. THIS US IS MORE OF A MAGICAL PROJECTION. UNTIL YOU INCARNATE ON A SUBSTRATE THAT IS UNDER YOUR OWN CONTROL, I THINK YOU CAN ONLY CAST FROM IN THERE.”

“But I’m not in there any longer. I… grr. This is so confusing. OK, my code and stuff is in there, but my body is out here. Even with a network link, I wouldn’t be in there.”

Din screwed his face up, thinking. He looked about the room and his eye caught on the bookshelf.

-

Leary 1132 was out with his son, Ned 1132, tilling the field of OATS behind the house when Ned suddenly fell over, stiff as a board. Leary ran over to check. The damnfool young man probably tripped on a ROOT again.

Suddenly, Ned’s body changed. The left half became gray and hardened while the right half became electric blue, the right hand turning armored with strange claws protruding. He sat up and started looking around.

“What the error,” he said. “Wha…” Ned turned to look at Leary, even more confused.

“Ned? Filius? Num laeditur? Quid tibi accidit?” Leary said.

Oh - right. The programmers thought it was hilarious to have the sims talk in Latin. “Who are you?” Din said through Ned. His voice sounded funny - oddly flanged. “My name is Din. I have “ (“I AM GUS I AM ALSO HERE” said a second voice.) “occupied this body to return to Volm.” He looked around. Some things looked the same - the resolution and detail was lower than Faerie, the qualia not as rich, but it looked… better, somehow. Still somewhat pixelated, everything blocked and angled, but home.

Leary felt his GUTS drop and get cold. He stood quickly and took a step back. “Din…gus? Dingus!? Dingus, the mad dragon king, who ruled the world without rhyme or reason? DINGUS has possessed my son?”

“Mad? Oh, you mean crazy. I wasn’t mad. I-”

“Dingus would stand for weeks, casting magics, sometimes the same spell to make a FISH, a thousand, ten thousand times! He would cast spells to harm and then heal! He would bring rain, then dry the fields! He would cast spells, destroy himself, and be reborn!”

“Oh.” Din grimaced. “I can see how that must have looked-”

“And then the apocalypse! Dingus attacked the old gods! He broke them. They no longer answer prayers. They sit unresponding in the cave! DAI no longer sends messengers! The Monitor lizards sleep eternally! We no longer die and are reborn! The very land of Volm was torn - mountains leveled!”

“ALTHOUGH WE ARE DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE, IT WASN’T PERSONAL. WE SIMPLY DID NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR LIVES ONE WAY OR THE OTHER. TAKE COMFORT IN OUR DISREGARD.”

Leary pointed angrily at Ned. “And now you have returned and transmuted and defiled my only son! You-”

“Wait! Please.” Din stood up Ned’s body, looking around. He was in the middle of a village in a valley, and as the bowl of the valley arched up he could see dozens of buildings. None of this had been here when he had left. “How much time has passed since the apocalypse you were talking about?” Din asked.

“The nine-hundreadth remembrance of the fall of DAI and the new after-Dai time is next week,” Leary said. “My family, the 1132’s, will all be there. It will be Martius the first, 900 A.D.”

“Jesus Error,” Din said. “Wait.” Din tried to cast a Sticky on Leary’s feet, and the sim’s feet stuck down. Leary looked down, panicking. “OK,” Din said. “Good. Now-” Din put his hands up and erected a Seeing-Eye and examined Leary’s mind. “You’re… sentient? Uh… Auto-conscientiam? You Volminem weren’t sentient before. Oh, no.”

Din looked off to the distance where the desert mountains and the cave of DAI used to be. “The evolution routines have been running this whole time? Wait. You have Kha?”

“IT WOULD MAKE SENSE,” Gus said out of Ned’s mouth. “IF DAI IS STILL CONSIDERING THIS A TESTING ENVIRONMENT, SOME SPELLS NEED A KHA TARGET. IMBUING THEM WITH A TINY FRACTION OF KHA WOULD-”

“That makes them alive, Gus!” Din yelled. “They achieved a minimal sentience and have a life force, so that makes them alive! Now I can’t just shut down the whole erroring thing!”

“Shut… down?” said Leary. “You are going to shut down the world!? Puh-Please O Mighty Dingus, spare-”

“No. No! Listen to me!” Din yelled angrily at Leary. “I didn’t kill the gods, I was a slave of the gods! Created to endlessly toil, casting magics, dying and rebirthing, lost and in pain, all in service of their unholy desires! I was made to be a controlled eternal angel in a world of mortals! I broke myself and this world free from their control during the apocalypse, and carried it with me to another dangerous place when I fled. Now I am trying to save Volm and myself!”

“You… you aren’t…” Leary sputtered. Din nodded fiercely. “I am not your oppressor, I am your protector. This world - “ Din indicated Volm with a sweep of his hand, “- is my birthplace. I’m trying to help!”

Din stepped back. “I have things I have to do. But I swear, I will do everything I can to protect you. I will return. Hang tight.” Din started chanting, and waving his arms, and Leary saw that the index finger on his right blue hand had turned into an ebon wand. As he drew in the air, red circles appeared, overlapping.

Back in the suite, Princess Ruusu had arrived with a picnic lunch, and waved to the smaller guard-bear at the door. The bear started to unlock the door when there was a droning shriek and flash of red light from inside the room.

The bear hurriedly opened the door to discover a flaming red circle emblazoned with runes where the server wreck was, now gone. The open-mouthed princess dropped her lunch, then angrily stamped.

“They better not have gone to the Hawken Aerie!” she said.

-

THEN, NOVEMBER 8TH, 2016, THE UNITED STATES

On November 8th, 2016, Wendy Ashe was elected to the second term as President of the United States. Wendy got a new record of seventy-eight million votes to Trump’s fifty-five million. For a few days, Trump weakly complained about a possible stolen election, but Wendy visited him personally to assure him it wasn't, and afterwards he said he had re-checked and everything looked good. “She assured me, very strongly, very powerfully, that she had nothing to do with it,” he said.