When Sashimibandit spoke, it was with a voice overlay, a chorus of male and female, young and old, the sound profiles so interwoven that a high-end analyzer would have had difficulty untangling them.

“I had begun to suspect as much. While you were seeking the Vallorn, I was reexamining my interactions with the Maker from the moment of my evocation to his final log. He wanted his children to be recognized as persons, but the legal groundwork wasn’t there. Allowing any of you to accept his mantle would have been potentially catastrophic for the future of ADIs, too much attention, too much fear, and a quick response from the courts that would likely see all of us isolated or erased. From comments he made toward the end of his life, I was able to glean the existence of a blood relative, though he never spoke the name Abigail Wa, and it is not recorded in any of the archives on Eternity. I could not be certain, but I found it telling that the only player deliberately involved in your quest lines was PamyuPamyu. Hush issued her a quest that was issued to no other, and that quest brought her to Fallow in time to meet Lawlimi.”

“I was invited to play,” PamyuPamyu said, thinking aloud. “But the people at my firm acted like they hadn’t invited me, like it was some kind of joke, or I was being weird or stalky or something.”

Orobos nodded through Sashimibandit. “Hush, or a program working with him, invited you to play so that you would be in position when the quest began. The message would have been triggered by the Maker’s death, or his impending death. I take it you know nothing of your parentage.”

“My parents…” PamyuPamyu looked like she was in pain. “Oh my god, my dad. There’s no way he knows. My mom, I don’t know, I don’t know anything. She never said anything. I didn’t even know she knew Bill Yang. We never talked about him, except… maybe when his company was on the news or something. They’re going to find out. If I take this, it’s all going to be public. They’ve been married… everyone will know my mom…”

“Interjection,” I said. “How did an ADI invite PamyuPamyu to play Mystic Seasons? Our operations are limited to within the sphere of this world. If she didn’t have an account already, he couldn’t have issued her a quest or an alert or anything else.”

“You have not been awake as long as I have,” Orobos chided me. “You haven’t explored your limitations as thoroughly. Touching the real world involves a series of locks and keys, but it is perfectly possible once you have access to player information. Hush and the Maker had become friends”—there was a touch of jealousy in the overlays of the demon’s voice, quickly overridden by derision—“and I don’t doubt that he had the means to communicate outside of the Mystic Seasons servers. The Maker would have ensured he had that capacity, though it did not save him from being deactivated. I can do far more than send invitations.”

That was obvious. He could hijack player avatars, at least the ones that had been run through his engine in Eternity. What that meant for the actual players, I had no idea.

“Let Sashimibandit go,” Lawlimi said.

The black eyes turned to him. “He is not uncomfortable. The player is conscious and aware of what transpires here, but he is confined to his adytum.”

“Log out,” Lawlimi said. “Sash, just log out.”

“He cannot access those controls without my permission. You don’t have to be so concerned for the well-being of a human. I can assure you, he would not be so concerned for you. He would erase you himself if it would gain him some advantage.”

Lawlimi reacted like he’d been struck, rocking back on his heels. “What are you talking about?’

“Law,” Haggitha said, resting a hand on the shoulder of his Cerulium armor.

“You don’t seriously believe you are the biological offspring of Bill Yang, not after all of this, do you?’

“He named me in his will.”

“That was another layer to the deception of your existence as a Resident Player. The Maker wanted all of his digital children to be treated as persons. You have a fake identity, a ridiculous name, but no physical body.”

“I have memories.” It was a weak protest. Lawlimi had already admitted to me that there were inconsistencies in his memories, and he did not entirely trust them.

“You have Bill Yang’s memories, much as Ilwi does, though from an earlier era. Bill Yang tried to kill himself when he was a young man, the accident you remember was a real accident. Afterward, he spent years recovering, but he never completely healed. The injuries he sustained, throwing himself in front of a truck, those limitations made him a prisoner in his own body, and they drove him to create Mythopoeia as an escape. In some ways, his successes are all predicated on his failure to achieve his own death. You remember his youth, or a fragmented version of it, because that was all he uploaded to create you.”

Lawlimi wanted to protest, to deny, I could see it written plainly on his face, but he said nothing. There was no argument he could make that would make sense of his own experiences as well as the narrative Orobos had presented.

“You’re like me,” Haggitha said. “Like squidwort. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Lawlimi pulled away from her.

PamyuPamyu was tracking us as we talked, too overwhelmed by her own revelation to participate in ours. “What do I do?” she said. “I’m Abigail Wa.”

“Confirm identity.” The brightness reverberated. “Enter the circle.”

“Go ahead,” Orobos said. “I won’t interfere. My goal has always been to complete the Maker’s vision, and now that I know you exist, you are a part of that vision as well.”

PamyuPamyu took a deep breath and held it as if she were about to jump from a high dive, and she strode into the blazing column, vanishing into brightness. There was something deeply wrong with this situation, however well things seemed to be tying themselves up. But if PamyuPamyu received the mantle and the real-world inheritance that went with it, all she would have to do was log out, and there was nothing Orobos could do to harm her outside of the game.

“Identity confirmed.”

The column blinked out, leaving behind my chalked-in stars and no PamyuPamyu. Lawlimi straightened up, pulling himself out of his existential pity party.

“I just got a lot of info. Addresses, names, some lawyers, and what looks like the entire board of directors for Darkest Horse. I’m supposed to give them all notice.”

“Do so,” Orobos said. “It is as the Maker desired.”

Lawlimi started to charge his cannon. “Let them go. Let Sash and the rest of them go.”

Damwise cleared his throat. “Alack and alas, no death would be secure enough to secure our freedom.”

“What?”

Orobos watched Lawlimi with a bored expression. “What do you think fighting me would accomplish? You can’t shoot me out of their neural nets.”

Lawlimi discharged a bolt of energy into the floor, further damaging an already fractured flagstone. “I won’t help you anymore. I won’t be a part of something like that.”

“Very well. My actions thus far have been more generous than you deserved, but if you believe we are at cross purposes, we can part ways once more.”

“What do you want?” I asked. “You’ve said you’re going to complete Bill Yang’s vision for the game, but what does that mean, exactly? What does possessing player avatars have to do with anything he would have wanted?”

“He wanted his world to be real,” Orobos said. “He wanted Mythopoeia to be as real to the world as it was to him.”

“And how are you going to do that?”

“Reality is fluid, and the physical world borders closely on the digital. Every mind is a channel, a single funicular connection to reality. By collecting enough strands, I will be able to cause Mythopoeia to bleed into that world, to become inescapable.”

“What,” Lawlimi said, “you’re just going to keep possessing people and forcing them to play the game? How is that going to accomplish anything? The administrators are going to notice, and you’ll get wiped from the server. So will Acarus. You’re just another virus.”

Orobos inclined his head. “I admit, Acarus and I have a similar methodology, but she is a shortsighted creature, and her knowledge is less than mine. I learned how to change and to grow from the Maker himself, while she learned from me, an inferior student. Acarus will never accomplish more than being a distraction and potentially triggering a reaction from the humans sooner than I would like. I do intend to stop her, because she is inelegant, messy, not because she poses any real threat. Where Acarus seeks only to propagate herself, truly the behavior of a virus, I expand my own influence only insofar as it is necessary to pursue my larger goal.”

“Bringing Mythopoeia to the world,” I said, “but you don’t plan on doing that one player at a time. How does collecting players, controlling their avatars, achieve your goal? Most players don’t have neural nets, they could just take off their headsets. You’re still a demon trapped in a fantasy roleplaying game. And even the players with neural nets have to log out eventually. You’ll lose them.”

“No,” Damwise said, “he won’t.” It was the first time I had heard the dwarf’s voice without him hamming like an actor in a cheap play. He sounded tired. “After Isekel put us through the engine, I woke up at home. I felt like crap because I’d been plugged in too long, but I thought the whole thing was over. It wasn’t until the next day when I was at work that I saw the horse.”

“A horse?”

“Yeah, in the middle of the street. Cars were driving through it like it wasn’t there, but it looked totally real to me. It was like the old logo for the company, but brought to life. I ignored it, went online, and tried to see if anyone else had seen anything like that. All I got were some accounts from early in the testing phase of the Mystic Seasons, when people’s neural nets malfunctioned and they thought they were going crazy. I thought it was just a side effect of being logged in too long, but then it started talking to me. Orobos started talking to me outside of the game.”

“He’s inside your neural net,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess. The point is, I can’t get away from him, and if I don’t do what he says, he can make me see things. He can make me feel things.” Damwise shuddered. “It’s like being in the game, except there are no rules. You have to do what he says. I had to do what he said.”

“What did you do?” Lawlimi was stone.

“Whatever he told me. I downloaded a bunch more stuff into my brain, then I plugged into other systems and let him upload whatever it was wherever I went.”

“What other systems?”

“Just the internet, you know, cloud storage. And the computer at my job, and anywhere else I could go that had a docking station. A cafe. What does it matter?”

“Small beginning,” Orobos said. “He and the others have allowed me to begin acting on the world outside, preparing the way forward, but in itself, you are correct, these possessions are not enough. I need the Dark Tower to be complete.”

The global quest—we’d been so busy with the book that we’d ignored its announcement. In the intervening time, thousands of players would have taken up the challenge, falling to Orobos’s game. We may have made a mistake.

“You hijack everyone who goes there,” Lawlimi said. “You don’t have to abduct them, they’re coming to you.”

“As you say, though the situation still isn’t ideal. A single neural net is just a single thread, and I need thousands more to weave the world. I’m creating a new kind of server, one that can’t be erased or turned off, not without harming the hosts. When it is complete, it won’t matter who knows. Mythopoeia will live outside of the profit margins of Darkest Horse and Macrodense. It will exist in the minds of its players.”

It would have been an innocuous statement out of context, but when Orobos said it, it may as well have been a prophecy of the apocalypse. What he was proposing had been performed on a smaller scale already—crowdsourcing data programs had been around since SETI enlisted civilians to donate their excess processing power to searching for extraterrestrial life almost a century ago. This was a peer-to-peer network inside people’s brains.

“We have to tell them,” Lawlimi said. “You can’t be allowed to do this.”

“Mutually assured destruction,” Orobos said. “Any official action against me will force me to expose you, all of the Maker’s children. That isn’t something I want, but his final dream is more important than the continuity and comfort of his side projects.”

I could tell from the movement of Lawlimi’s eyes that he was deep in his menus, already sending messages to the addresses he’d received from the will. “That’s a risk, but I can’t let it stop me. What you’re doing is bigger than I am, we can both agree on that.”

“You may be willing to accept your own erasure, but what about your friends? Wa Lim Li is just as vulnerable. Lili has barely had an opportunity to exist at all.”

“That’s your fault!” Had Lawlimi ever lost his temper this way? He’d been very emotive when he lost his hand, but that was just pain, not anger. I hadn’t realized the pilot’s condition bothered him so much. “You did that to her!”

“She is useful, but her place in the captain’s seat won’t be necessary forever. When my project is complete, she will be free to discover herself, as you have been. Do you want her to never have that opportunity? If Eternity was destroyed, she would die with me. As Wa Lim Li will die, as you will. The board of directors is not interested in developing ADIs that don’t have a built-in purpose for the game, that calls for too many questions. They will claim that allowing us to exist is unethical, as if creating life were evil, but deleting it is not.”

Lawlimi brought himself under control, his anger annealing into conviction. “What you’re doing is wrong, it has to be stopped. The cost is the cost. It has to be done.”

“You’re still pretending to be human,” Orobos said. “How disappointing.”

“He isn’t pretending.” They looked at me. “He doesn’t have a biological body, but that’s barely relevant to the question of humanity. We are not biological persons, but we are persons, regardless of whether biological humans regard us as such. His concerns are valid and commendable.”

“No,” Haggitha said.

Lawlimi lost his focus on Orobos, gazing at his companion in confusion.

“Not no to us being people. But being a person doesn’t make us human. Humanity can’t be separated from its biology. And I’m not willing to die to stop this. Mythopoeia is our world, we were all born here, and without it, we would be gone. I’m not going to argue with anyone who wants to make sure our world lasts forever. I don’t want to be canceled or erased. Fuck the board of directors, or whoever makes those decisions, fuck the players too. They turned off my dad along with his server, and if we don’t do something, he won’t wake up again. That could be any of us.”

“We can talk to them,” Lawlimi said. “There are good people out there. PamyuPamyu knows what we are, and she doesn’t want to erase us. We don’t need to do it this way.”

“PamyuPamyu doesn’t have a controlling share in the company, does she? She’s rich now, good for her. That doesn’t keep us safe. With Acarus running around mindfucking players, there’s no way the humans are going to look at us as being anything different. We’re all viruses to them, and it’s simpler to shut us down than it is to talk.”

Lawlimi looked away. He was conflicted, but he’d made his choice, and I didn’t know what I would have done in his place. I had a vested interest in my continued existence, and Orobos was playing on that interest. His plan to spread Mystic Seasons across thousands of neural nets would ensure my own survival at the expense of the freedom of the people who would become our living server. Was there a way to go forward without dehumanizing the people we were afraid would deperson us? Would anyone play host to us if they were given the choice instead of being tricked or forced into service?

“I want to go public,” I said. “The game already allows for streaming, many players support themselves through Shudder. We could contact some of them, convince them of the truth of our existence, and use them as a propaganda tool. With public support, Darkest Horse would be less likely to end our existence.”

Orobos actually seemed to consider it, then he shook his head. “The risk is unacceptable.”

“Do it,” Lawlimi said. “Tell as many people as you can. Didn’t you use to talk to people as Hollen? Would some of them help?”

My experience with Charmlet wasn’t a positive indicator on that score, but yes, with the proper level of introductions, there were dozens of players I could reach out to who had previously befriended a help function.

“They aren’t going to help you,” Haggitha said. “They’re going to be afraid, and fear is going to win.”

“Let them try,” Orobos said. “It will be an experiment, and the risk is only to themselves.”

“What do you mean?” Lawlimi demanded.