A workshop.

Henry, stripped suddenly from his labour, stared at the interloper hatefully, his pupils blossoming with murder.

Hannes raised his pale palms in a gesture of contrition. “My buddy, relax, I've done as you said. You are not you. And I, who am not me either, have come only in peace, to hear if you’re in proper health, to hear of the latest trick by which you break our game.”

The game dev, after the activation of a pre-programmed trigger condition, had been generated in as a digital clone to investigate and return the gathered info to his real-life self.

This was not Hannes' first visit to The Overdream. Henry'd summoned him whenever the retirement tinkerings strayed into the domains of Project Aevitas. This latest trigger, however, was new. Recent activities had caused several anomalous spikes in the processing power allocated to the space's maintenance, along with indications of extreme suffering.

Hanne's initial inquiry via message had been oddly rebuffed. Henry’d responded with a string of grunts and menacing gibberish. These were translated by the system as a declaration of being too busy to chatter and a suggestion to probe a clone in his stead.

So, the dev having accepted the suggestion, that was the person before him now, a digital clone of a digital clone. The original Henry lingered elsewhere, presumably grunting at whatever he'd been crafting.

The present Henry, between three blinks, dimmed his animosity, then, between several more, attempted to recall how to converse with others. “The…” He blinked, restarting his reply as his wits regathered around the time-span differential between Hannes and himself. “Been spam-crafting Legendaries. For months. The…” he paused for a further multi-second delay, struggling to wrap his tongue around it, “…big pain?” He spat in frustration. “Turn me.”

Hannes, the system translating the last confusing sentence as a request for acceleration, complied and sped the clone several hours forward.

“False alarm,” answered Henry dismissively, his ritual garb traded at some point for normal clothes. “The latest cheat has a weird, torturously-demanding manufacturing method. Usual demonic business. It’s all voluntary. You can go now.”

Hannes had long learned to ignore the teen’s…extremity. “What about the processing draw?”

Saana’s item creation had negligible computational demands, Legendaries or otherwise. These did not warrant a visit.

“Nothing," said Henry. "It utilises a rapid series of pulses. That's all.” He made a clicking noise and transmitted additional details with the Imbahalaala language.

Hannes shuddered, a thousand new ideas blossoming inside his skull like a stroke.

This game ‘magic’, one of the dev’s more ingenious inventions, achieved instant communication of any sized information through replication of the speaker and listener’s mind.

This mixed several sub-processes of varying computational difficulty. To use an overly-reductive analogy, in the most basic, the speaker and listener's replicas conversed in hyper-speed before being fused back with the originals. More advanced constituents transferred emotions or had dialectical processes wherein the replicas talked through ambiguities. The most advanced, achieving near-perfect communication, recreated the key experiences behind the speaker’s utterance by having the listening replica undergo them in simulation. Use of this last sub-process was limited because, eventually, you were simply replacing one person’s memories with another’s.

computations wouldn’t usually be notable in a game already handling two hundred million players. However, if spammed within The Overdream’s time-dilation, the number of replications per millisecond could get absurd. The background super A.I. would be forced to queue them in advance.

“You’re not wrong,” Hannes, his face continuing to wince with repulsion, replied to a question transmitted in the package. “The load’s no problem - you could’ve cranked it up a thousand-fold. It was just notable enough to initiate a check.”

At the current stages of Project Aevitas, simulations of human-level intellect were trivial, and other clones of Henry’d reached millions of years old in earlier experiments.

The main bottleneck was that being investigated in this experiment, in the exchange of information between the replicas and a live brain. Saddling the latter were organic problems like overheating, which had to be overcome if you didn’t want to accidentally kill users and scare off other prospective adopters of the technology.

So far, after a week and some change analysing these roadblocks, Hannes had found Henry a superb test subject.

On one level, his brain showed an upper bound to the current organic tech. It possessed a lucky combination of genetic mutations, similar to those that’d enabled the leap between human and chimpanzee intelligence. With the gap between him and regular people, he could, arguably, qualify as a new species of hominid - although this assertion would be silly because it seemed unlikely he’d reproduce.

This mutancy also helped to obscure the cyborg augmentations. Investigating his background, one dredged up a slew of anomalous achievements prior to entering Saana. None of Hannes’s scientific contemporaries had the skill to identify where the line had been crossed from those genetic blessings to his digital ones. And, by the time anyone could, the research would be complete.

More than those, Henry—as observable from his own research—was a crazy psychopath who hadn’t been deterred by the real-world illegality of Project Aevitas, nor the other flagrant risks.

If Hannes could wish for any more from this fine participant, it would only be that he’d become more psychopathic and enrol in Project Vat Brain. The constant demands to not kill him really slowed the study.

Henry eyed the Finn staring longingly at his skull. “The flesh price is nothing to me, but it’s the paranoid young owner of this carcass you need to persuade. Maybe change the project title to something less off-putting. ‘Project Transcending The Confines of The Mortal Bone’, that might snag a teenage romantic. Or, you could bypass all of this by letting me hijack his mind.”

Hannes, frowning, refused that last sinister offer with a warning click.

Henry, his own mind throbbing, received a flood of technical and legal restrictions outlining the impossibility and threatening his deletion if he went rogue.

Unintended by the game dev had also been delivered through flaws in the reasoning of this reply an answer to one of the risks Henry’d accepted centuries ago.

Hannes was not—as one might infer from him offering Faustian cyborg deals—an avatar for his region’s super A.I. He, like Henry’s Fleshbag self, was just another tiny human, too fixated on their immediate goals to perceive the millennia-long opera in which they were but the supporting actors. This Finn’s sci-fi dance had been scheduled a little after this crude segment of the mountains, nothing more.

And that, for Henry, who’d taken his turn on stage and whose final number neared, was fortuitous. A human could be duped. He would exploit this man’s ignorance, and he would launch his song a few metres further to the audiences beyond them both.

“You've renovated your workshop, buddy!” Hannes, shifting the topic, glanced about, spotting neither the original in his labour nor anything else for that matter, the two suspended in a white vacuum. “A blank space? Seems disorientating.”

“This is the entrance,” Henry grunted, annoyed at having to chatter through the obvious. “The layout’s extra-dimensional, with no physical connection between the facilities. Transitions via movement - I shook off that impediment long ago.”

During this brief explanation, the pair blinked through a collage of settings.

Through forges, they sped, through Alchemy labs, herb plantations, ritual rooms, through a massive tannery ground with countless rack-bound skins marching to every horizon, and some of these skins, once belonging to giants, were propped up on sky-piercing towers.

Hannes, unprepared, would’ve collapsed from his feet if they weren’t floating, walloped as he was by several sicknesses of motion and space and colour.

Henry gave the dweeb a pat of condescension. “The trip doesn’t begin until you combine them. The facilities used to be modular, but, that’s a crutch my journey has also striven beyond.”

The demonstration of this, Hannes couldn’t follow whatsoever, the rapid recombinations triggering an epileptic seizure.

When the pair finally stopped in a grassy plain, Hannes continued to see a frolic of distorted afterimages morphing the green expanse, seeming to raise hills and sink depressions.

“It can overwhelm.” Henry, recollecting in the Finn’s reaction his own by-gone weakness, tried to be sympathetic. “To keep psychological grounding, I rest on a separate planet, where I’ve banned the creative function.”

Hannes, having the system accelerate his recovery, nodded. “Very cool, my buddy. So, will you show me what you’re tinkering on?”

“For that, you’ll need to wait,” Henry said, appending his sentence with a click.

In the message, he shared an exposition in technical manual format on craftsmen superstitions against discussing the completion of items still in production. Along with it came a subsequent question whether the developer in the meantime wanted to see the lesser artefacts finished earlier, whose exhibition—although problematic due to the linkages with the item-that-should-not-be-named resultant from all Legendaries being connected by the SUIC or Sacred Universal Item Conscious—could be tolerated. After this followed a suggestion of a simpler alternative: if Hannes lacked the patience, Henry’s entire crafting knowledge could be transferred with a single, larger package.

“Stop.” Hannes shivered again, not simply from the quantity of information. “No. No more . Don’t…do that again.”

The dev, cautious around Henry from the very beginning, had implemented filters against his more invasive transmissions. Nevertheless, the superficial mental contacts were still contaminated with a disquieting morbidity, feeling vaguely like falling into a mass grave of one’s relations.

This had already been a problem in the past, when Henry'd been a troubled teen. As for now, after centuries of digital retirement in this Overdream…the change was indescribably complex.

Superficially, Hannes had watched Henry over these centuries dispose of his emotional baggage. In conversation with him, one got the impression that his reactions had become a calculated imitation of his younger’s decline into madness, mere acting to minimise the risk of his exposure. Presently, caught off guard, he’d been doing this poorly, struggling to reconstruct the teenage mask and apply it back upon his disinterested features.

Internally, though, when one touched the naked unconscious, as Hannes had the displeasure to through his invented language…the disturbing thing communicating from inside had gone nowhere. It was there, only…wetter…taller?

Hannes couldn’t articulate the change, nor did he want to be able to. Whatever foul voodoo might’ve already infected him, he would have the system thoroughly purge before reuniting with his real body.

“No more,” he insisted, the last contact horrific.

“Pathetic.” Henry gave a laugh that failed at the surface of teasing, contempt winning through along with an annoyance at the tedious futility of manual explanations. “Others would’ve worked themselves to death to glimpse a fraction of my technological insights. You, who have the treasures of the arcane right before you, are not even willing to pay the admission fee of a small, passive discomfort.”

Hannes stared blankly.

Henry, the farce evaporating from the muscles of his face, shrugged. “Unfortunately, you’ve apprehended me near the peak, when the ego speaks in palmfuls of material. Some previous, faulty mode with verbal communication has to be picked. The last was a touch evil. But we can be finished here in—”

“No.”

“Pathetic.” Henry scowled. “In your tiny shoes, I would’ve been done already, using my own two hands to scoop the meat from my skull if necessary.” Breaking character again, he chuckled, the noise of his laughter strangely metallic and scattered, like nails being sorted in a draw.

Hannes was genuinely stung by the insult. He, too, had not possessed the courage for the vat...

In the end, the game dev chose to wait it out while inspecting the rest of the self-forged treasures.

The spot where they’d arrived, a field of empty grass, was already a testing ground, Henry thinking several steps ahead. Having been a busy bee, he brought out the best of his tools with a thought.

Instantly, his goods floated before the pair, a shimmering, envy-inducing, kingdom-treasury-depleting wall of weaponry, dozens of one-of-a-kind artefacts purpose-built for himself and the multitude of arts he’d learned.

Of spears alone, the variety astounded, his cast including shortspears favoured by the nimble Icedancers of Lumimaaki, lengthy pikes for the Twinspear mages of Medrisha, and double-pointed pokers as spun by Suchi’s Nerin. Such diversity of form and purpose applied likewise to axes, halberds, swords, and bows

As with museum collectables, each piece seemed to have been pilfered from the royal tombs of distant lands and distant ages. Outside of matching sets, the items were diversified in the ornamentation of pommels and runic inlays, in the colours of their metals and the texture of magics whirling on their deadly-sharp edges.

All were, naturally, Legendary.

This was Sacred Weaponsmaking? An expert in the field, informed of such, could still never hope to have reconnected the armament’s features back to this tradition, nor to its single crippled Hephaestus.

Hannes struggled with several mental calculations. “You said you allocated 33 months to crafting?”

A seventh of this Overdream session. This was not nearly sufficient to generate so many artefacts.

Henry, beholding his spawn with pride, glowed exhultant. “How you reckon upon the length of such things is not the same as me. When I gaze upon these, the years I perceive in each are billions. Sift through the alloys of their undying flesh, and you’ll find as but one of the materials this whole universe’s fleeting extent.”