Establishing a Connection © 2024 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

5. Orientation

Her minidrone turned out to be of little use. Even tossing its ball-like body and allowing its four tiny rotors to find their level caused 3F-0D to surrender control to SkyBOX and settle at head-height before responding to commands again. Nora had a hack for that: get her head higher. They’d climbed across a series of narrow walkways with rather rickety handrails, doing everything in their power not to abandon their beers. It wasn’t because they were especially attached to them. More of a challenge to carry them to the evening’s finish line; Nora mentioned something about “achievement points” that slipped past Zaree.

“We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so please keep up!” Nora yelled behind as she slid from one foothold to the next, careful to keep an eye on her companion while crossing a small outflow channel below. Zaree might not be the sorority girl she was expecting, but Nora could still haze her by boring her to tears. Best to rate limit her babbling. “The good thing about being up here is that you can toss me overboard if I talk about work too much.”

Once they reached the widest walkway, one designed for foot travel over never-ending pipelines and cabling below, a new hum superseded the ambient mechanicals. A larger twin-rotor drone approached, zippy and white like the taxis. Nora showed Zaree how to flash her band by thumbing the sensor and holding it skyward. Nearfield radios built into their bands exchanged encrypted keys identifying their persons. This handshake happened while organic diodes around their wrists flashed codes for the organizations that signed their digital credential paired with additional one-time authorization factors. Servers elsewhere in the city analyzed the entire cryptographic chain of trust upon which those keys were built. Nora’s drone followed suit with its own signature salute. The bigger buddy, appearing satisfied with their collective cred, lit a happy green emoji before returning to its route.

“That’s all doable with your company phone if you don’t wear your band, but that’s a great way to drop an expensive device,” Nora said, pointing below. Eight giant pipes ran under the skybridge they stood on, each large enough to ride a stallion through. Starkly banded metamorphic bedrock typical of disturbed beach waited eighty feet beneath. Anything that fell would be shattered, lying in pieces until swept away with the tide. Moving further down the line these steel aqueducts fanned out into rows of tanks used for storing seawater, yet more matching pipes on the other side. Secondary catwalks extended below, branching off towards access hatches for critical control systems secured by a mix of physical and digital locks. This slightly safer section felt like a wise and worthy place to finish their drinks.

Nora pointed toward the Project’s dominant feature; a pair of cubic structures covered in worn copper panels. Their flat faces opposed each other farther down the series of tubes. Each building was four stories tall, each face broken into sixteen artfully tarnished squares, four per floor. “Those are the buildings I got to work in, where the predictive cores for the control systems were.” Eight glassy shafts spanned the gap between buildings, connecting the top two floors rather haphazardly. Brittle candy drips frozen sideways in time; too small to walk through comfortably, barely big enough to crawl. The silvered conduits clashed with the patinaed motif of the buildings—a fluid, organic contrast to the weatherbeaten nature of their armor.

“Looks slick, but real talk. Just what do we do here?” Zaree asked, having to raise her voice over sounds of distant industry and a choppy bay. “Everyone has vague titles like developer or consultant. Even my new marketing manager signs her emails ‘Director of Customer Development.’  I was hoping this wasn’t one of those bullshit jobs you see on TikTok, but I’ll still take the paycheck either way.”

If they gave out awards for bad assumptions, Nora would’ve won. Nothing she’d predicted was turning out true. “There’s some bullshit, but not the kind you think. My job really does involve a lot of arguing with computers. I try not to, but this week wasn't a great one,” she admitted.

"A middle school Python wiz still makes me think some kind of coder, but if it was that easy you’d have said so. So, what was your major?”

“I review lots of code and training logs, analyze network traffic, but I can’t call myself a coder. My degree’s in psych, if you’ll believe it.”

“You’re some kind of shrink? You’ve been shrinking me this whole time? No wonder I feel so small.” Zaree said with a shiver, glancing upward toward towering tanks and ventilators, the scent of salt extra strong here, the breeze extra chill.

“Cold air makes people chatty. Read a pretty good paper on that once. Cold beer probably helps too, but I can’t cite specific sources. But I’m not clinical, nor a literal wizard, so no shrinking going on,” Nora said, knowing one of those statements was a lie.

“But how’s a psych major end up at KorBridge?”

“Abhishek was a friend from another life. Rescued me from indentured servitude—grad school. I’d been writing nutty stuff online about neural nets under different aliases since I was fifteen, even got published for some bizarre paper I’d written on a three-day caffeine binge during my bonus senior year. It somehow got picked up on a few big tech podcasts, mostly to tear it apart, but it still got a ton of buzz,” Nora said, at times yelling over the surf.

“But what the hell do you do there? Are people here that crazy?”

“Officially, I’m an AI Integration Consultant. But because Abhi knew it would flatter my ego, my official title is Senior Machine Psychologist.”

“Machine Psychologist?” Zaree almost lost it again, this time trying not to snort beer through her nose. “That’s effing-fucking nonsense. Are you saying I need to sign Siri up for my health insurance? The memes on my phone might be too traumatic?”

“No, but stick with me for a sec. Abhi’s idea was an analyst for artificially intelligent systems. KorBridge’s original business plan was doing systems integration work for companies that need middleware between AI systems and their existing business platforms. Making their shiny new neural nets talk to their finance packages, HR, payroll, logistics, customer service systems, whatever. But pretty early on they decided someone needed to get inside the head of systems that weren’t behaving right. Abhishek got me in the door and put me to work.”

“Still sounds ridiculous. If an AI isn’t working correctly, can’t you just turn it off and turn it back on again?”

A laugh slipped from Nora. It was more than that old joke deserved, yet it resurfaced memories of early attempts to troubleshoot tech around the house, often escalating to disassembly regardless of whether her parents approved. (Dad always came around once she’d won.)

“They’ve usually tried that before bringing in consultants. We don’t work for cheap—our clients aren’t calling us to consult on consumer-grade chatbots or AI office addons, like Siri or the services that probably helped you write your term papers. They’re employing Incorporated Machine Intelligences, a newer kind of AI with their own registered names and a quasi-personhood status—”

“So not apps for your phone, but like, actual people?" Zaree interrupted, sounding rightly skeptical. The last time Big Tech failed to bring the world to the brink of utopia, it sunk fortunes on six continents instead. Maybe her business professors had learned their lesson.

“No, not quite sentient yet, only people in an employer liability sense,” Nora replied, parroting industry doctrine to avoid diving into recurrent discourse on Zaree’s first day. “But someday? Maybe. Some MIs are pretty impressive,” she continued, nodding back toward the copper buildings, “while others are basically expensive babies. Huge investments either way. For most companies, they’re supposed to be something between a core business intelligence platform and an all-star employee, when they’re working right. So, their employers are willing to spend a lot of money to support them. Even with the fusion geeks overseeing the new ignition facilities”—she waved eastward, toward a web of concrete trenches crawling with construction crews— “AI consultants still bill the most expensive hours in the city. They’d only call in a company like ours if they’ve run into problems that can’t be worked around in the normal methods.”

“And those are?” Zaree asked.

“First rule of expensive tech says that systems are supposed to be backed up regularly in case they run into problems. For MIs, that means snapshots of earlier neural patterns that can be rolled back in the event of an issue. But storage requirements grow exponentially the smarter a system gets—some MIs are scary smart. If the problem started months or years before presenting, then a clean backup might not be available. Even if it was, rolling back involves erasing valuable learning experience. Computing power is expensive, so reloading snapshots is a last resort.”

"You're saying an AI can have behavior problems that go all the way back to childhood, for lack of a better term? And if regressing an AI to its childhood isn’t practical, they’d call in you?" Zaree asked, her distrusting tone steadily abating.

"Not just behavior problems, but biases, faulty logic, or a gap in their understanding of the world and the role they play in it.”

"Sounds frighteningly human.”

“Sometimes they’re just frightening,” Nora confessed on their way closer to the two cubes, carefully selecting the safer route. Zaree seemed less concerned, her new boots better for this kind of hike. Nora chose the long way around, bypassing an unfinished bridge while sticking to her onboarding pitch. “KorBridge bills a lot of hours on RUNNER audits. Making sure MIs aren’t trying to take over the world or whatever. Mostly a formality, but that’s how corporate compliance always works,” she said, giving up the game a bit. “Or NMEs, Network Maturity Examinations, testing whether an MI is mature enough to handle surfing the open internet without poisoning its mental model.”

“Makes sense. They should do that for kids, too.”

“Eh, I’ve more or less lived online since I was nine and I’m fine,” Nora said, deprecating herself through comedic twitches. “The oldest incorporated MIs are only around six years old—most are under three. The companies investing in training them hope they’ll grow up to run whole divisions someday, but for now they’re still sorta kids. But that means they can also be brats.”

“That some other acronym? Bad Robots and Terminators?”

“Na,” Nora snorted. “Just brats. Sometimes MIs develop awful attitudes. Companies make the mistake of training them on internal chats and emails. If all your engineers are overworked, your designer MI might start showing signs of burnout. Accountants with liquor bottles hidden in their desks? Your finance MI might develop depression. And if you’re a startup full of psychopaths with enough venture capital to train your own, you might get an MI with a god complex.”

“If you’ve got a company full of assholes, your AI might be an asshole too. Got it.” Zaree said, as though she’d dealt with her due.

“Zaree puts a point on the board,” Nora said, holding up her index finger for emphasis. It was good that Zaree had prior experience dealing with assholes; it meant Nora could skip that aspect of tech culture and stick to architecture. Unprompted, her drone tucked between them, perplexing its owner. Machines didn’t act alone; at least she remembered when that was still true. “See, neural networks are fundamentally different from normal computer systems because they’re built to learn and evolve. The best examples programmers have for learning and evolution were animal and human psychology, so they sometimes develop the same problems as people. Like being a jerk to coworkers, including other MIs."

"Does that mean there’s group therapy sessions for computers?” Zaree asked. “I’m imagining a bunch of robots sitting in a circle working out their anger issues, but these things are the size of buildings?"

Nora nodded again as unexpected chills stiffened her. “Right. Aside from the occasional clumsy puppet, true machine intelligence does not yet walk among us. All the deep learning pulling those strings is still done in datacenters—” Her words were ripped away as wind whistled across enormous fins stacked to the sky on either side of the bridge. Wispy frost formed from vents opening and closing to regulate flow. The catwalk wracked and rattled as breeze blustered Zaree’s coat and threatened to send their beers into the abyss below. Groans echoed among the pipes. They held fast through the surge, braced like sailors against a storm. For Nora it brought back a flash: sailing into Sleetwinter Sound through freezing fog, ready to face the frost giants for the first time. When the ill wind passed, Zaree still looked alarmed, but Nora’s drone slowly hovered head high to signal calmer conditions.

“Was that normal?” Zaree asked, starting to move again.

Nora paused, checking their platform for faults. “We sailed passed normal a while ago. This is unfamiliar territory.” The guardrails were supposed to be load-bearing, but the city's attention to safety had always been skin deep. The bones were showing here, out on the bleeding edge. Half of her knew the Project’s plan would fail before it ever fully launched. An old friend had often argued that having a plan was essential; even one that wouldn’t work. He was also kind of an asshole, or possibly just a jolly jerk. One that would’ve fit in all too well in SF, easier than Nora ever had. But he had bigger fish to fry.

Once the gust was gone and Nora could feel her fingers again, she clarified that the smallest class of MIs fit in a room full of hot, whirring GPUs. “The industry refers to systems this size as petascale. Organizations train these smaller MIs using private, confidential data to do research or help run their businesses. But more important MIs can get much bigger,” Nora said, pointing towards the twin buildings across the span in front of them. “Which brings us back to why we’re out here getting blasted by sea breeze. These buildings housed independent cores controlling the Project’s heat and flow systems, I forget which was which. When the Project Authority first set them up, each one was just doing its own thing. Overall system efficiency was awful. A competing firm, Opplex, came in and tossed off-the-shelf firewalls in the basements, implemented protocols for basic data exchange. That’s when shit became a fucking mess and they brought KorBridge in.”

“Let me guess they…hated each other? Couldn’t make it work?”

Nora held up a second finger and said, “There’s another point. Maybe you didn’t fly out to SF for nothing.” She pointed that same pair out toward the buildings again, adding, “They were constantly fighting for attention, putting their own needs before the other’s.”

“Meaning, couples counseling?” Zaree said, flinching. “Ugh, sudden flashbacks of mom and dad fighting, mostly about my brother.”

"These systems often need to interface at high speeds with other MIs, either in-house, or employed by other entities. Think about an airline company and an international shipping firm, or insurers and healthcare providers—”

“—banks and bigger banks?” Zaree asked, showing off her fluency in the language of money.

“Right again. To operate at low latency and high speed, MIs need to negotiate a communications protocol, rules that define the types of data and decision-making processes they want to share. Often, there’s disagreements on what to share, how to share it, and what to keep secret."

"Sounds like a job for programmers or lawyers. I still don't see where a psychologist comes in."

Nora laughed. "Yeah, those can get involved in negotiating these protocols, sometimes dozens of programmers and rooms full of lawyers. Some of those lawyers might’ve started off as coders, and others might be MIs themselves. Besides, by your original accusation, I am guilty of being programmer. But on coding ability alone I probably couldn’t hack it at the big firms that can afford their own incorporated Machine Intelligences. I can always find a subject matter expert for the crunchy stuff,” she said, wishing she had another taco.

“Okay, but where’s the therapy come in?” Zaree asked, leaning over the railing once they reached the end of the line.

“For mature systems sharing deep and unique insights into vast troves of data, like these two here, integration protocols can get too messy for even an army of hackers to hammer out in a reasonable amount of time.”

“And if left to lawyers there could still be red tape and arguments from the, um, parents? Is that the right word?”

Nora nodded with slight hesitation. “Sure, I try to stick with the term ‘employers’ for MIs, but ‘parents’ works too. They can be overprotective sometimes, try to micromanage every interaction, but it's often best to just let the machines work it out,” she said, going into additional detail. The whole point of training Machine Intelligences was to take people out of the day-to-day frustrations of getting computers to do their jobs. But sometimes they just couldn’t get along, their goals weren’t aligned. Or they couldn’t establish the level of trust necessary to allow each other high-priority access into their datastores. “A big part of the job is building that kind of trust,” Nora concluded.

"So, it really is like marriage counseling. Is that what this is all about? Am I looking at a happy couple?” Zaree pointed towards the two bronzed buildings, joined across the chasm before them by their glassy links.

“No, this ended up transforming into something else entirely,” Nora said as her face lit up with a spark, pointing across the chasm of conduits. “Through those eight crawl shafts run hundreds of the fastest fiber links money can buy. Two hundred and fifty-six in each, because computers like numbers like that, forming a two-thousand-forty-eight-petabit data bus between the two systems. The fastest fiber mesh ever built,” Nora said with subtle flex. “The systems aren’t just integrated or married; they now act as the right and left hemispheres of a single digital mind, controlling the heating, cooling, electrical and data signaling, flow control, and seismic regulators throughout the Bay, and eventually all the way to the Rockies. I wanted to call the solution ‘Norascience’ in the whitepaper we put out. Our branding team said no, but maybe now I’ve got someone on the inside?”

Zaree stepped back, asking, “What was it you were saying about machines getting a god complex? Have you ever had yourself checked out?”

Nora countered the criticism with electric enthusiasm; it wasn’t often she got a captive audience for wonking about her work. “It’s kind of a big deal. It was a win for KorBridge and the Project itself. Someday they’ll be joined with more cores cooling the fusion facilities, in a chorus of computing across the Bay,” she said, not knowing why. Sometimes techspeak spilled from her lips, escaping with a mind of its own. Immersed in it all the time, she drowned in it occasionally. Reality was historically thin in this city; certain words could warp it completely. It was best to wield this power only when necessary. To play loose risked inviting new demons when she already had enough of her own to deal with.

Zaree had spent that moment taking in their surroundings, gripping the handrail and peering below to ask, “It’s been a while since biology class, but if those are two halves of a brain, then these pipes are a circulatory system, and those vent stacks are like lungs, and the cables running everywhere are sending signals… doesn’t that mean we’re standing on top of something that’s sorta… alive?” As if to wash away that thought, she finished her last sip of beer.

Nora grinned and held up three fingers. “Three points is pretty good for a newb! His name is Ormos and maybe you’ll get to meet him someday,” she said, drawing Zaree into frame, their backs toward his pair of cores. Her drone took the shot on command. “Miss Valeri, I think you’ll fit in at KorBridge just fine.”

6. Restoration

The sun was shining when he appeared on the pier. His back was to the city as he got his bearings, Vanguish looking like he’d just woken from a bender at a dockside bar. Ilmare was already back in, hugging her bird. Vance’s dashboard showed her Inverse chat flooded with an outpouring of pixel art Perchival emojis in his famous action poses, flanked by hearts and sparks. All-caps jubilations of “SAVED!” appeared on the rapidly scrolling lines between. Her stream community skewed more wholesome than his, who were arguing over what kind of conspiracy brought down the servers and made most of the game unplayable for twelve full hours. Russians made the list, but the top was Sandstorm’s recent cost-cutting combined with perceived incompetency.

From the metrics, Vance was aware that half his fans didn’t even play, stuck watching flattened streams from cheap phones because the world’s rising economic tides hadn’t lifted all boats equally. Overseas teens were usually too broke to cough up token fees and buy the expensive gear required to truly appreciate the verse. This was also true in Ohio and Kentucky. But he was big in Brazil, which was becoming—

“—what the fuck?” Vance asked after a fish landed on his face, gumming up his visor with guts. It wasn’t even a whole fish. On some days he regretted that metasmell tech had so far failed miserably. This day was not one of those.

“Wake yer addled nob 'fore I give ye another dollop! Ain't no room on me pier fer layabouts,” said an angry fishmonger. “I run an honest trade ‘ere, not some flop-house fer blaggards!”

Vance reached for his belt. His weapons were missing. Rewinds were a tough sell psychologically; he valued the verse’s consistency and so did most of its players. “Getting half a mackerel thrown at me by a merchant bot with no recourse is really breaking my goddamn immersion,” he said to the fish seller.

“If ye can't keep a civil tongue in yer mouth, I'll have the Charlies on ye quicker'n ye can say ‘Pretty Polly!’ Best ye wobble on back to the dockside cribs afore I take me clam rake to yer backside!”

Vanguish fumed. “Your period-appropriate botshit isn’t impressing me today, and neither are your salmon prices. That’s my ship over there,” he said, pointing to Mellifluous floating backwards into the bay. The fishmonger looked puzzled, his simple merchant algorithm unprepared to deal with such absurdities. Regression was the only way to handle the world’s rapid unraveling. An entire region disappearing from the verse for half a day was no joke to its occupants; Storms of Steel was serious business. Time was still rewinding for any objects restored from Blightfin Bay’s untimely crash yesterday evening. Additional ships continued to appear along the northern horizon, floating wake-first towards him. He could see Principia Blastmatica, a sixty-six-gun warship from a rival fleet of serpent hunters, parking itself at the pier and refurling its sails and reganging its planks. Symphonic Spitfire, the Dawnbreakers’ damaged thirty-gun corvette from their now-forgotten fight, floated right behind—or rather in front of—the rival ship. The Spitfire’s silver sails were undissolving themselves thread by thread as the ship’s authoritative datachain squared itself with the cached copy stored on Vance’s personal computer. Jargle could be heard screaming bloody murder on his backwards-flapping bird. Even the weather was getting into the act with storm clouds unforming off the northwestern shore, hypnotic twisters unwinding their violent atmospheres before his eyes.

How exactly the math and metaphysics behind the rewind worked was mostly mysterious to Vance in spite of his spending so many years in the metaverse. An old friend with uncommon insight had tried explaining cryptohistographic trust chain reconciliation via stateful vector inference once and literally put him to sleep. He didn’t need to know. Contrary to his audience chatter, technical fuckups this large were rare and always corrected in due time. Stormseye was this verse’s ultimate source of truth—in the unlikely event of global data disagreement, all logs, ledgers, and ship inventories would eventually get settled as long as the Silent Queen’s capital remained intact. That’s where he was right now, sitting in relative safety on a popular commercial pier leading into the royal seat’s double gated strait, watching his world sort itself out.

He knew just enough about the settlement process to keep his back turned to the city. Looking toward its reinforced waterways and epic Victorian sprawl during such intense transactions would slow even his legendary gaming PC to a crawl. The envy of nearly every geeky kid on Earth, it still couldn’t keep up with the weirdness that was happening inside Storms of Steel’s crypto ledgers and render its splendid capital at the same time. As it was, ghostly trails lagged behind many fast-moving flyers, his sponsor’s promotional visor unable to keep pace with the untime fun times. Modern technology still came with compromises.

Another unfortunate thing about ledgers was that the Dawnbreakers’ books were trending negative, a matter Vance rarely wanted to discuss and one best left alone for today. The short version of their financial story said that doubloons were getting tighter; sourcing salted fish at decent rates occupied more mindshare than he cared for. The guild’s unrivaled glory days were long gone. “Why’s everything so expensive?” he asked the fishmonger.

“That foul leviathan what lurks in the briny depths - him and his damned winged spawn ‘ave been pickin' off fishin' skiffs one by one. Ravenous buggers been sinkin' whole merchanter fleets bound for these here ports, spillin' the crews to the cold locker!”

“I’m quite aware,” Vance replied. “But if supplies stay this jacked up, no one can afford to kill it!”

“Aye, yer Lordship speaks true as the north’rn star. Let me cut ye a deal!” he said, tugging the captain’s ear.

Lord Vanguish leaned in.

“Been thinkin’ I’ll let ye keep the fine specimen that landed on yer head fer free. Even throw in a brace of smoked haddock on the house fer such an esteemed dragonslayin’ sailor as yerself!” the fish seller said, laughing so hard two of his false teeth fell out. He quickly stuffed them back in once Ilmare approached. “I beg pardon, milady. Fergive an old sea dog like meself for starin' unabashed. But ye cut quite the fig’re, even 'mongst the wonders ye wearin’.”

Ilmare exhaled, letting Perchival help himself to the two haddock already offered. “He would’ve preferred them blackened, but smoked will do,” she said to the seller. Her bird squawked happily and lifted off after snapping both into his beak. He hovered above, casting shade over the merchant’s stall. The streamers’ matching eyemars flapped on either side of the stormhawk.

“How about that discount now?” Vance asked. Haggling got easier after that. Once he finally shook the man’s trembling hand, the Dawnbreakers received two complimentary barrels of mackerel with a ten percent discount on the remainder of their order. “Strange grip you’ve got there,” he added, the electroadaptive handle of his haptic grip having trouble translating their handshake.

The fishmonger shrugged and tossed in six sardine tins to cover his violation of trade protocol. For his side of the bargain, Vance swore Bilgerath would be dead before their next restock. A crackle of thunder crawling across Perchival’s bristled feathers drove that point home. An undeceased Jargle and a recently arrived Cavanaww started rolling the barrels all the way back aboard Mellifluous at the end of the farthest wharf.

The parade of ships rescued from Blightfin Bay’s unexplained disappearance were jamming up the docks and being directed deeper into Stormseye’s main port past the fortified strait’s steel gates. Shirtless treasure divers cleared the waters and swam to shore as more boats backed up. Luckily the locks were wide open. Signal flags and blank cannon blasts got the city’s recreational daysailers out of the way with help from barking pilot boats operating under the authority of the Queen’s harbormaster. It'd been many years since her seagates were closed for any length of time. Sporadic pirate raids sometimes prompted their closure. Protests over tariffs incurred standoffs with the crown on occasion. Bilgerath moving south would warrant it, but he was allegedly too big to leave Blightfin Bay for technical reasons.

Larger wars had been avoided since the city's devastation seven years ago, partly due to vigilance from raiding crews like his. They were always swatting down would-be villains on land or sea. For fame—and the accompanying fortune in terms of unique treasures and ad dollars. Other reasons for lasting peace likely stemmed from editorial decisions on the part of Jack's developers, too many dark tides brewing in the real world to import bad vibes into his virtual one. Even with his head buried in video games, Vance had felt a prelude to something ever since Greater China’s retreat from the internet. Half his family had relatives within their sphere, many unheard from for a decade.

Vance got sick of staring at the congestion and caught up with Ilmare. They made more deals for rope and sea rations. “Funny how things get cheaper when you’re around,” Vance said, letting her lead a path up the increasingly chaotic pier.

“Having charisma helps—" Ilmare said as they passed a pack of players carping about Jack’s shitty servers.

“—but a big scary bird is better,” he finished. She didn’t object, which he counted as a small win.

He scanned the strait. All seven of the guild’s ships were accounted for, recovered from the digital abyss of Sandstorm’s server disaster. Cavanaww counted everything then ordered the crewmen to do it again. Each ship was missing the two days of sailing supplies they’d spent tracking the serpent prior to their interrupted encounter, but fully intact otherwise. Vance wrote off the loss; it wasn’t worth arguing with customer service for a week over a reimbursement that would never come. The kind of rewind he’d just witnessed was an “aberration that only occurred under very specific circumstances of rapid data integrity issues in the cloud” was what the support ticket would say if he tried. Further restoration wasn’t possible for reasons were way above his pay grade as someone paid to play games all day. The Stormverse was back in one piece, and he had a serpent to slay.

Once back onboard his flagship, he checked his sea chest. His best weapons were stored safely aboard his boat. Ilmare was already refilling her flasks, her bird busy rinsing his beak after stocking up on calories. Vanguish asked for her spyglass.

“Use your own, I’m scoping the competition,” she said, scanning the bay with her crystal prismed prize from adventures past. He might be the guild’s only remaining founder and the fleet’s admiral, but as its chief scout she was entitled to their best glass. He borrowed the astralbrass sight from Cavanaww’s long gun instead. Rylander, the third and last of his windriders, was charging northward alone against an oncoming wave of ugly drakespawn. Vanguish took a few potshots, never as good with rifles as he was with revolvers. He obliterated the wing of one after wasting three shells, happy to hit anything at this range. This was before he noticed their shaman assisting from atop a ruined lighthouse north of the seagate. Loni’s slender arms held his hammer high, sending waterspouts toward the attacking baydrakes bearing the same markings as Bilgerath.

That meant Blightfin Bay was back online. Blastmatica was nearly rigged and ready, docked beside its sister ship Dangerous Calculus. Sine of the Times and Fermat’s Folly were one wharf over. They sailed under the guild banner Prime Factor. Their flag was a protractor for fuck’s sake. Vance had no intention of losing this first kill to a bunch of math puns. The hunt was on. The Dawnbreakers needed a daring strategy fast if they wanted to win.

Vance turned back to eye the divers on the opposing beach. “Ilmare, what’s the least amount of clothes one can wear and still broadcast without getting banned?”

She shrugged. “Pants are required. Nipple coverings depend on how womanly the moderation bots think you are.”

“Duly noted.” He’d skip shaving before setting out, leaving stubble to ensure he wouldn’t need a shirt. “Where’s the nearest gunsmith? I’ve got a new plan.”

7. Illustration

Nearly knocking over countless coworkers’ coffees, Nora carried her newest requisition through the cubicle corridors. Despite its nearly paper-thin panel, Dell’s latest 39-inch ultrawide HOLOHDRx8 display was cumbersome in Nora’s embrace. Its attached stand contained the potent GPU required to drive the eight layers of polarized film that made it a window into digital landscapes with fidelity beyond all but the best headsets and without the clunk. A self-contained marvel, peak techno-worship. All she had to do was get it home and plug it in.

On her way out, a striking figure stopped her in a strangely familiar spot, his real threads as impeccable as his custom pixels. A crisp collar provided sharp definition. “You remember this one?” Abhishek asked. “Back when it was covered in holocards and matterprinter figures from that silly game you used to play all the time,” he added, nudging towards a pale grey prison of stamped sheet metal.

“That silly game we used to play,” Nora stressed, attempting to prevent a DisplayDrive cable from snaking off her shoulders after stopping short.

“I was a mere tourist in that world. You were a legend,” said her boss while helping her regrip her graphics gadget.

“You were a legend?” asked a voice that Nora hadn’t heard since a few Fridays ago, Zaree’s consultant wardrobe now dialed back to a more modest eight. She’d lost the jacket—the city got hot.

“Technically true, there is a statue of me in the Valley of Legends in Stormseye. It’s a very long, very dorky story that I’d hate to tell sometime,” said Nora. Her pathfinding algorithm kicked up to high priority, simulating dozens of escape routes simultaneously using a deprecated model of the office floorplan still stored in memory from the last time she had the displeasure of working within these walls. Her extraction window was closing; time to flee with her prize, squeeze this beautiful tech into a taxi and take it across town to her apartment.

Looking lost again, Zaree said, “I’m gonna assume that’s some video game thing. Between that and the proclivity for Python, I’m afraid your cool cred account’s now overdrawn.”

“Not just a video game, the video game,” Abhishek emphasized with wide eyes. “Sandstorm Interactive is one of the biggest tech companies in the state. While they didn’t exactly invent the metaverse, they elevated the industry with Storms of Steel, arguably the most successful online game of all time.”

“More than the phone game? The one with the candies?” Zaree popped her phone from her pocket to provide a demonstration, stepping up and shutting down another of Nora’s routes.

“Yes, more than the candy game,” said Abhishek. “There’s a lesson here, Zaree, because they’re also an account that I desperately want to get KorBridge in on. Their SIGMI filings show they might be training the biggest MI west of the Rockies.”

“Bigger than the buildings down in the bay?” Zaree asked.

“Maybe? Not directly comparable,” Abhishek said, initiating an explanation, “The Bay Fusion system, Ormos, is more like a—"

Zaree interrupted, “—A nervous system and a bunch of organs. I worked that one out on my own, thanks.”

“She did. Pretty good, actually. Now if I could just—” Nora’s social anxiety was attempting to take control. A three-way conversation was among the worst interpersonal predicaments, impossible to navigate for prolonged periods. She needed a new course. Sneaking past the cozy new kitchenette, so blatantly designed to emit snuggly vibes meant to entrap one’s soul at work, proved easy enough for a veteran adventurer such as herself. Past that, each awkward sidestep probed for a path in the cube network to route around her boss and escape this container of little grey boxes called an office.

“As I was saying, rumor has it Sandstorm is adding an exascale intelligence into their development pipeline, alongside their other registered systems,” said Abhishek.

“Building an exascale neural net would cost billions. Less than thirty people on the planet are certified to train one, and it involves eldritch voodoo. Not even Jack could find that kind of cash.” Nora replied, still quietly seeking escape.

“SIGMI says otherwise,” Abhishek argued. “And I want to get KorBridge in there. Being in lead generation, bashing down doors is your job,” he said, pointing to Zaree.

“At a video game company?” Zaree asked. “I’d get stuck on the first level. And why would they need an AI that big? I’ve never thought of video games as anything other than something to click while standing in line at a Yankees game,” Zaree said.

Sirens went off in Nora’s mind, her mental defenses already forced into overdrive. The idea of voluntarily watching a sporting event in person, especially one as boring as baseball, was an incalculable paradox that caused all threads of thought to immediately cease.

“Zaree, the reason is that metaverse gaming and AI are fundamentally linked,” Abhishek said as he walked towards a nearby whiteboard, freeing up space for Nora to step diagonally to a new carpet tile. This position opened an array of exciting moves as he searched for something to illustrate his point. Her advance across the open board was hampered by flashes of her earliest days, when Abhi was the man with the marker; the man with the plan to make the consulting unit profitable. But this time he was sketching circles and lines, the beginnings of a flow chart or network diagram. As if he was some systems architect or a software guy. Nora glanced towards the door, down at her device, then back to the board. She couldn’t miss this for all the pixels in the world.

Abhishek had his weapons ready for battle. Or business, which was essentially the same thing for him. “The computer chips that powered the first cloud AI services, like the search assistant in your phone, along with computer vision for autotaxis and incorporated Machine Intelligences like Ormos, were all originally developed for more frivolous pursuits.”

“More frivolous than making office memes and delivering french fries faster?” Zaree asked.

Abhishek spent several seconds depicting a cartoonish computer by quickly connecting the vertexes of boxy trapezoids. “High powered gaming computers contain custom silicon cores built to efficiently calculate the billions of little triangles required to construct a game world—Graphics Processing Units,” he said, drawing the acronym GPU in big, rounded letters on the board. Zaree smirked, as if an ivy leaguer would have difficulty with spelling.

Already mentally in his own world, Abhishek explained that after their first decade of digital demon slaying and competitive counterterrorism contests, GPUs started working their way into science. These academic applications began with the invention of a software library called CUDA, for the rather clumsy acronym Compute Unified Device Architecture. He tossed those letters up on the board as well, starting to connect each concept into a tangled web. “Libraries like CUDA let GPUs run things like weather simulations, and then business applications, by adding powerful new words to existing programming languages. Computers started getting good at digging into data for financial insights,” Abhishek added.

“Yeah, I had to take Marketing with Big Data courses. They weren’t my favorites,” Zaree said, trying to trace a path through his board logic.

“That’s okay, everything you learned in those classes you can just ask a month-old MI to do for you in minutes,” Nora added.

“That’s not making me feel better,” Zaree said, giving a fragile grimace.

“Nora’s right, though. GPUs are great for anything that requires lots of repetitive calculations to break up blocks of data into smaller, more meaningful answers. But the killer app was deep learning, which is how neural networks are trained and truly intelligent systems started being born,” he said while moving things around on the board, making room for more circles and lines. He explained that training is when computers with hundreds—sometimes thousands—of powerful GPUs map out mathematical patterns in huge amounts of data. “They devour entire libraries of text, then practice generating output that looks like what they’ve already seen.”

“It’s a form of reinforcement learning,” Nora said. “Essentially, the AI writes and then grades its own papers until it can consistently get straight As, or at least stop making obvious mistakes.” Abhishek added the technical term ‘gradient descent’ to the board while she went on, “At some point those papers get good enough to show their parents. People. The learning process always starts with pure math and ends with human feedback.”

Continuing his whiteboard session, Abhishek showed that after enough training, a neutral net magically starts to mimic how humans understand language. “This lets them hold life-like conversations and interpret questions and commands naturally. Run through the human feedback loop enough times and their thoughts begin to align with ours,” he said, drawing stick figures furiously. “In fact, the science says that the more an MI tries to understand our affairs, the more they start thinking like us and less like bricks of electric sand.”

“And that’s how you ended up with Machine Psychologists on the payroll,” Zaree said, pointing towards Nora.

He nodded and made a modest attempt at drawing a very mushy-looking brain, connecting it haphazardly to other ideas already present. Stepping back, he erased earlier lines while making others bolder. Nora pointed out that Abhishek was inadvertently illustrating how a neural network really worked. “When a network is training, chains of random connections between symbolic neurons representing words, symbols, or concepts become stronger over time as the relevant connections, the ones that match the most patterns, take on more weight. The pointless connections not reinforced in the dataset are discarded. Connecting all this stuff at random sounds like a big waste of time to us. But for AI clusters with hundreds, even thousands of GPUs, they go through this training trillions of times using parallel processing power. Unlike the once or twice a year that Abhishek gets inspired in front of a whiteboard and starts pretending to be a programmer,” she said with a side of snark. Their history left little doubt about her job security, but he could find creative ways to strike back if her jabs went too far.

“Ultimately, machine intelligence arises from computers going through unimaginable amounts of trial and error to find the magic lines and numbers that connect all the data a modern society produces, trying to map all of our words and images, symbols and ideas,” Abhishek concluded.

For her part, Zaree’s own neurons were firing away, following along with the plot. “That just sounds like astrology with more math. So where does the metaverse come in?”

“Great question!” Abhishek said, flipping the board with a flourish that caught Zaree off guard but not Nora. He began by drawing trees, grass, houses, a radiant sun, smiling stick people, the entire kindergarten pantheon of what populates a world. “As artificial intelligence took off, the tech started sneaking back into gaming,” he said, explaining how game companies got stuck in development nightmares. The early days of virtual reality were a mess of different devices, formats, and protocols. Big titles often took ten years to make, or got derailed indefinitely and left for dead. Everything had to be coded by hand, forcing developers to foresee every possible action a player might perform.

“You couldn’t pick up a stick and swing it like a sword unless a dozen coders and artists spent weeks figuring out how that would work,” Nora said as she swished at Abhishek with a Sharpie. “Every cave, castle, dragon, or spaceship had to be built line by line, triangle by triangle, restricting the scale of the game and dragging down development.”

“They also had to account for every question players might seek to ask,” said Abhishek. Additional scribbles showed how questionable consumption metrics convinced many investors that funding fantastic visions wasn’t sustainable. The game industry buckled; blockbusters without assault weapons and car jackers stopped finding backers. Big dreamworlds went the way of the dinosaur. “But just like before, a new language emerged that changed everything. Metaverse Markup Language, or MML, allowed game designers to describe digital objects starting from simple shapes and natural language prompts. A river bridged by a fallen log. A crumbling castle haunted by a lonesome soul. An eccentric hag that sells talking lamps. A pack of timber wolves hunting for lunch. A blade made of glass, charged with lightning. A door in the clouds. A demon blinking in the dark,” Abhishek said, making his best attempts at artistic expression for each of the above.

Nora tried to restrain her facial contortions as she watched her boss doodle all of the above. Placing her hard-earned holodisplay down on the conference table, she swiped a scan of the surface scribbles with her phone, then picked up a prism-shaped device the size of a cup of coffee, clicked her cable in, and pressed ‘Play.’

The whiteboard gradually became a dark green space, a foggy forest full of feral creatures. Abhishek’s sad little stick figures transformed into beasts of terrifying beauty under the light of the projector. “This is how a metaverse zone takes shape,” Nora said as she offered the illustration. It turned out that neural networks could be trained to generate content beyond text, like images, video, sounds, and voices. “AI has the flexibility to get creative, translating player intent into action and helping developers grow game worlds from even amateur art combined with careful phrases, creating spaces that feel large and full of life. The better the base art and the more detailed the descriptions, the higher the fidelity.”

“In the same way that CUDA created a revolution in science and business applications, when MML appeared, aspiring game developers started hosting their creations on homebrew servers with lots of GPUs and inviting people inside.” Abhishek walked through the ways these early pioneers coded connections linking their little worlds together, using gateway protocols to help players travel and trade. “Coupled with advances in secure chain databases, this allows interconnected worlds with millions of users, each player able to carry on natural conversations with every innkeeper and traveling salesman,” he said, trying to connect the dots and bring the conversation back to the beginning.

Nora’s classifier could easily categorize the look on Zaree’s face. It was one she’d seen many times before, the glazed glare that came from finding oneself in the domain of weapons-grade geeks, depleted uranium nerds. Zaree drew a deep breath, ready to breathe fire. “So, if anyone can make their own worlds, where does Sandstorm come in? How do you build a brand in the metaverse?” asked the marketing major, already trying to take the fun out of video games.

“You’re right, much of the metaverse is like a little cosplay faire in Alamo Square,” Abhishek replied.

“Absolute amateur hour,” added Nora, still finding moments to sneak sideways, inching closer to the exit.

Abhishek aimed a pointer deep into the projector’s mirage, rapidly shifting their vantage. Silver strands connected spires of polished pearl, ancient stone, and brand-new brick. The terrain itself drew onlookers’ attention to the shining city rising from their first draft forest. “But Storms of Steel is an epic theme park by comparison. Jack Kepler, Sandstorm’s game director, gets compared to Mark Zuckerberg meets Walt Disney,” he said. Nora found it funny that he’d forgotten to mention all three of those dudes were afflicted with a certain condition mentioned earlier in this chronicle. She held her tongue. “He has thousands of the best artists and worldbuilders working for him, many hired from the early metaverse community, making new maps, monsters, and magical mysteries each month. They also host the most trusted datachains that secure the links between worlds,” said Abhishek.

“But what pays for that? How do they make money? Charging tickets to ride the rides?” Zaree asked, dropping down to the bottom line like a good Wharton grad.

Abhishek replied, “You do need a membership token to use their gateway protocols to get in the door. You see, a network protocol is a series of rules descri—"

Nora and Zaree gave each other a glance. “We got that vocab covered already when I showed her Ormos,” Nora said, before continuing, “but yeah, Storms of Steel has rules, more than most places online, which is how the whole security thing works. Since it’s set in a vaguely Victorian-era fantasy, you can’t just bring a glowing green plasma rifle or summon a swarm of flying toasters into their theme park. But because of the trust in Sandstorm’s protocols, nearly any object born on their servers will work anywhere else in the metaverse.”

“Most importantly, this trust includes their money. Sandstorm’s doubloons are the most stable currency in the verse right now,” Abhishek added.

“You’re saying people drag sacks of pirate gold across the metaverse to pay for things?” asked Zaree.

“The Queen’s Doubloons are actually Stormverse’s in-character representation of Sandstorm’s Quanta Derivative Tokens, or QDT,” Abhishek replied, still adding acronyms to the board.

“They're not truly quantum, but they compensate by being quite derivative. Metaverse junkies just call them doubloons,” Nora said.

“Oh, so they’re basically a bank. That’s boring,” Zaree stated.

Nora found that descriptor quaint from someone who’d rather spend half a day watching grown men stand in a field. “Well, if you squished the Federal Reserve and the Magic Kingdom together and ran it on a million GPUs in the cloud, you’d get Stormseye, the capital of Storms of Steel.”

“And that’s where there’s a statue of you?” Zaree asked as Nora remembered the monument that got this detour started.

“Yes. It’s a digital fortress city at the center of the metaverse, metaphorically and economically, but also topologically,” Nora replied.

“Don’t you mean topographically?” Zaree asked.

“In the metaverse, those are really the same thing,” said Nora.

“Everything’s Connected!” added Abhishek.

“Oh god, that’s the slogan on all the KorBridge corporate swag, isn’t it? I hate it here,” Zaree said, having hit her limit. “Wait, if you guys know so much about the metaverse, why aren’t you doing that? Why are you doing this AI integration consulting stuff?”

Abhishek looked like someone knocked the wind out of his sails as he erased his doodles from the whiteboard, wiping them away like dreams of days past. Nora took Zaree a few steps towards the great glass view of the bay.

“Abhi landed here from Hyderabad in his twenties looking to do exactly that. It never happened. What we’re doing here at KorBridge more than pays the bills. Jack can keep making his big bucks across the bay in Oakland,” Nora said, pointing out the window at a thirty-story glass complex near where the bridge connected across the shore. KorBridge’s eighty in-office employees occupied two floors near the top of a fifty-seven-story building on peak SF real-estate. Nora thought it should be obvious from the amenities that they were doing well, even if this venture fell far outside her boss’s original plan. “It’s been two and half hype cycles since MML was invented. It turns out most emotionally stable people don’t want to spend their entire lives online, no matter what these supposed visionaries might try to sell you. Metaverse stuff still hasn’t made much money for anyone but Sandstorm and some smaller studios, or freaks selling stolen pixels in the dark web,” she said, pausing as she turned toward her old cubicle. “I came to KorBridge specifically to do something real. I’ve been metaverse-free for five years.”

“That sounds like something my…an addict would say,” Zaree said.

“Yes,” said Nora, terminating that thread with no further input from either party.

Zaree stood at the office window. Nora’s path was clear, she could make her escape right now. She scooped up her monitor and cradled it tightly, attempting an advance across the open tiles. “So, the metaverse never caught on outside of gaming because of what? The goofy goggles?” Zaree asked, but Nora wasn’t about to let that break her stride.

“Well, widescale adoption is still plagued by competing headset—” she started to say on her way out the office fire exit.

“You don’t actually need a headset to get a good experience,” snapped Abhishek, already back from the break room. “That HOLOLED Nora’s carrying has eight layers of polarized film and eye-tracking tech that can create the illusion of 3D space. It’s big enough to fill your entire field of view, so you get almost the full metaverse effect.”

“It’s for work!” Nora said, autonomously intercepting unmade accusations of relapse.

“Hook that thing up. See if there’s any good streams you can show Ms. Valeri. For market research,” Abhishek said, pointing to the empty cubicle back at the top of the row, Nora’s former cell.

“Streams?” Zaree asked.

“Like a live feed of people playing a game,” Nora answered, shame already creeping into her tone.

“Oh, so you can pretend you’re doing the stuff that other people are pretending they’re doing? That must be the meta part of metaverse,” Zaree said.

Nora wanted to take a swing at a retort about baseball, but slowly walked to her first base, laying down her burden back in the box she originally occupied. “Oops. Don’t have my laptop, got nothing to hook this up to. Gotta go home!”

“That phone in your pocket is plenty, it cost more than our workstations and even some of our servers,” Abhishek said. He was right; modern hardware engineers packed extra GPU power into pricey displays, meaning even handheld devices could fill them with fancy graphics. The DisplayDrive protocol allowed applications to figure out where each bit of work was best handled. In this way, vast cloud clusters, cheap gadgets, and high-end hologear could all theoretically work together to produce quality output, just as Nora had illustrated with the projector. But, as had always been the case in computing, the best experiences still required expensive equipment end-to-end.

Nora snaked the cable from her shoulders and clicked in, the screen coming to life but remaining in flat format at first. Using the seven-inch black rectangle as the world’s worst keyboard, she navigated to mgp://inverse.vr. Little thumbnails appeared, previews of the action available on demand.

“Some of this stuff looks like softcore you-know-what,” Zaree said. “And the rest just looks like ads.” Oozing breakfast biscuits filled the panel, bubbling up from the page in ways subtly wrong to Nora’s trained eyes. The ad offered drone delivery in six minutes or less from a ghost kitchen operating out of some hyperlocal hole in the wall. “We’ve finally found something a marketing major can understand,” Zaree added, apparently unphased by cheesy branding.

“Well, once you see something you wanna watch, just click,” Nora said after recovering from being barraged by the internet’s original and continual sins. “The display will go polar and project a 3D image locked on the locations of your corneas. The screen will get all blurry for anyone looking over your shoulder, because it’s tracking your eyes only. We’d have to go get polar glasses to compensate, and that’s a pain.”

“Let’s see…” Zaree said, sorting by popularity. Storms of Steel was the most played game on the platform, with hundreds of players broadcasting live to audiences totaling over a million viewers. Clicking a peculiar preview at the very top, she asked, “How about these nearly naked idiots trying to stab a sea monster?”

“Oh no,” Nora and Abhishek said in unison as they squinted beside her head. “We know those idiots.”

8. Revisitation

It began as it did before. They tracked the briny beast by the wake of its terrors, with Ilmare and Perchival catching sight of it before the others. The hastily reassembled fleet converged from different directions this time; one wizard on each deck braced against the sludge spray, forceful barriers refracting the afternoon sun. Windrider Jargle and his wingmate Rylander approached from the front, veering off with opposing vectors once Bilgerath’s foul maw rose from the waves. Their ploy appeared effective, causing a cone of corrosive vapor to arc astray. Thrashing and shrieking, the serpent was entirely unaware of the deadly payload about to be delivered upon it.

“Glad I fed poor Perchy the good stuff. You’re draining his stamina too fast,” Ilmare screamed below as she sped through the sky, a pair of eyemars flapping in furious pursuit.

Wearing nothing but tattered shorts and climbing boots and showing off his almost cartoonish male musculature, Vanguish shouted back, “Mister Cavanaww and I wore as little armor as allowed, to lighten the load.” The two swashbucklers clung to the stormhawk’s claws, pistols and sabers strapped to their torsos with horsehair line. “I can see why you enjoy fighting in your underwear. It’s very liberating.”

The Dawnbreakers’ very modest navy encircled the serpent. Ilmare dove at its exposed back as broadside blasts forced the beast to fully emerge from the sea. Jargle and Rylander continued circling off, using flashpowder grenades to keep Bilgerath’s attention, drawing much of the breath away from the rest of the raiders.

Vanguish signaled Cavanaww to curl upwards until they both became cannonballs. “We’re not as skilled at falling out of the sky as Ilmare, so be prepared to land in the water. If you find yourself in the sea, swim behind the flippers and find something to climb,” Vanguish said, motioning for Ilmare to bring them in for the final approach.

Once above the target he released his grip. Within seconds his vision blurred beyond his ability to orient himself. His goggles couldn’t stay in sync with his rotation—framerate problems in gamer terms. He tumbled like a boulder, finding his orientation just as the serpent’s ship-sized tail came thrashing toward him, threatening to launch him into the next zone. Before diving below, he saw Cavanaww find traction, his very reflective moonsilver saber stuck between the beast’s scales right behind a flipper. One payload had landed. Ilmare’s striking figure was nowhere in sight; neither was her iconic blue locks. Vanguish dove beneath the waves.

Back in Boston, Vance flailed his grips. His immersive chair, unable to simulate being fully submerged, chilled his own sweat against his skin instead. It was cool, but also gross. Now somewhat safe under the sea, he had time to check his vital stats. He was on top, Inverse’s featured star even without the benefit of a sponsoring patron. Viewership was fantastic for lunchtime on a Friday; he wondered how many people were watching at work. The sheer size of Bilgerath, the biggest virtual creature ever built, was worthy of spectacle and its resulting spectators. But controversy surrounding the cluster crash last week had drawn more attention than deserved for an early boss encounter in an otherwise tepidly received release. Vance wasn’t sure what force in the universe compelled game developers to keep trying their hand at historically reviled swimming adventures, yet wet he was as he regained his bearings in-game.

More attempts at surfacing were each met with the threat of the tail. It was only once above the waves that he saw his salvation. A long lance extended; the other end held by Ilmare clinging to the tip of the tail. Spiked heels dug in deep, she surfed the scaly appendage. Her weapon swung toward his eager reach and pulled him from the sea. Fast thrashing flippers and the thunder of cannon fire made any exchange of words impossible without totally altering his audio settings. Ilmare adapted, motioning towards footholds for Vanguish’s soggy boots. Leaning on each other for stability, they slowly stepped their way up onto Bilgerath’s back, helping Cavanaww upon their arrival and finding their eyemars waiting faithfully.

The two men nodded and loosed their pistols, discarding the coarse twine binding them. His trusty revolvers were left back in the guildspire; they jammed when wet. Vanguish’s second most famous weapons were his matching set of enchanted flintlocks with elongated, sixteen-inch barrels to provide increased accuracy and range—also to look cool on camera. His clumsy muzzle loaders packed a punch, prizes once recovered from a watery grave. Prior to implementing the current plan, he’d spent many doubloons reforging their innards from the finest Seafarer’s Steel, anticipating a swim and wishing to ward off corrosion and wear. Runic inlays carved into their grips shimmered in the midday sun, a sign of fortune’s favor. Packing fresh charges from a waterproof pouch, he began blasting away at the back of the beast’s head. Their wide bore barrels cracked like handheld cannons.

Bilgerath began to tire from his thrashing. The ships circled closer. The remaining swashbucklers stood ready on the decks of their vessels. Once in range, their grappling hooks launched onto the serpent’s spines. Ilmare sprang from one foothold to the next, helping Vanguish secure the chains and bring more allies aboard the beast’s back. Sinking the grapples into place, Vance scanned the crevices between each slimy scale. Tiny fronds of seaweed swam within. His grip haptics buzzed, communicating damage from touching the scales’ caustic mucus. Damp crannies between armored plates hinted at the existence of simulated ecosystems living in the gaps, each primeval niche rendered down to the tightest resolution his visor could offer. Bilgerath, brutal and hideous as he may be, was ultimately some lead designer’s baby, built with love by a team of many to be slaughtered by another band of similar size. Vance appreciated symbiosis; some lived to create, others to murder and mount the remains on their wall.

Vanguish made continued gestures to coordinate his serpent boarding sailors. Some mates might’ve even noticed his motions. Behind his back, a flock of baydrakes burst from the disturbed sea before descending again as shrieking, spitting terrors. They shared the same tainted pigments as their father—or perhaps Bilgerath was a she? Vance wasn’t inclined to check. Either way, swarming spawnlings attempted to repel those attackers riding aboard their parent. Many torn and bloody doublets resulted; expensive sabers knocked and scattered into the waves. Clapping blasts from the gunslingers’ firepowder mixed with a wizard’s meteoric barrage, drowning any attempts to talk as swashbucklers shifted posture to counter the swarm. Once back in offensive stance, they began hacking Bilgerath’s brood out of the skies only to face more reinforcements.

The tide of battle developed an uneasy equilibrium, success visible but elusive and failure nearly as likely. Vance hated this part. Illmare tapped The Captain on his shoulder and pointed toward the spines on the serpent’s tall neck. Unlike their allies, they were ill-armored to withstand the drakes’ attempts to drive them from their foothold. “It’s time to rise above the fray,” he said to her. That meant quite a climb from where they stood. Her memory was sharp; quick steps retraced the exact path she’d taken upwards on their prior attempt. She stalled on for his benefit, instructing him to stay close behind. Ilmare was far better at the acrobatics needed to leap from spine to spine, both in the mathematically bound values that defined their characters within the Stormverse, and also from years of experience being at the forefront of a raiding force. Vanguish preferred leading from safer distance these days, shaking hands further agitated from needing handholding. Ilmare guided him along her cleverly plotted spinal path.

Approaching the top, Vance’s worries were realized. A trio of drakes had shadowed their ascent, circling to strike. He swung from one side of the beast’s neck to the other, narrowly dodging swooping terrors. Ilmare stabbed from one rung higher. Poor positioning left him no path to ascend. He was sure to be knocked back into the sea upon a second pass from the scaly squadron.

From nowhere, a stormhawk’s shriek pierced the sky, followed by Jargle’s lance lunging full force through the wing of one attacking drake, leaving only torn sinew and sparse tendons. Vanguish noted that his compatriot had crippled his pursuer, using the distraction to place a shot between the eyes of another attacker. The flashpowder stunned long enough for Jargle to circle back again, his trusty Wingdingz tackling the second target straight out of the sky.

Vanguish’s path was clearer now, the third drake circling Ilmare further along in her ascent, unlikely to let a single pest delay her fatal lance. He could see Rylander affording potions and aerial support to the raiders still on ships or boarding Bilgerath’s back. Vance held one arm stiff as Perchival came streaking by for a pickup. “Only the best birdfood for you from now on, straight out of the guild’s budget,” he yelled as the hawk carried him aloft. He might’ve even meant it.

Perchy’s clutches provided a marvelous view. The lead ships’ sails were largely intact, the pair of hawkriders having done their duty drawing acid breath away from their vessels. On Bilgerath’s back, Cavanaww was performing his best Vanguish impression, directing other swashbucklers to keep the skies clear of drakes with sword and pistol. His one complaint would be the wizards. They were too content to hold back, swishing wands and tossing spells while staying dry on deck under the full protection of their magical wards. It hadn’t been since the days of the great Mayalinn that he’d had a commander capable of coaxing the casters out of their comfort zone. Vance could imagine her here; gleaming glass blades bristling with lightning, teleporting a shocktroop into position to abuse Bilgey’s blind spot. Then again, she’d probably have found a trick to bait him out of the bay, beaching his butt on the shore and sidestepping this entire salty odyssey.

Regardless of fair fortunes so far, instinct foresaw events taking a turn in this final phase. Experienced admirals such as he understood the myriad ways in which naval battles could deteriorate quickly under far fairer conditions than slime-spitting seadragons. The last wave of beady-eyed baydrakes had worn them down; air cover limited with Ilmare occupied and Jargle somehow out of the picture again. That the swashbucklers were running low on ammo was obvious from wild slashes at oncoming attackers, gunslingers resorting to bayonets. The fleet was faring no better; only Mellifluous was still sending full volleys. Their previous flagship, Costly Endeavor, had two snapped masts and listed heavily to port. Or starboard? For a famous admiral, Vance wasn’t always fantastic with sailing terminology or direction sense; that’s what subordinates were for. The important part was how their second biggest and most aptly named ship was sinking. The others spent more time evading flippers than firing, trying to avoid similar beatings.

Worsening circumstances bent toward one conclusion—it was time to end this, to send this scourge upon Great Pacifica to the same cold locker the fish merchant mentioned. Unlike the simpler games of Vance’s chronological childhood, Bilgerath didn’t have a convenient red meter decrementing his remaining vitality by shrinking visibly over the course of battle. But from half a life of leading raids against the Stormverse’s most massive monsters, he knew the serpent’s anguished cries coinciding with its decreased thrashing frequency meant the time to deliver the final blow was drawing near.

Since shortly after their addition to Storms of Steel, Windriders were commonly designated for this crucial duty. Lances plus leaping mobility made them most capable of delivering fatal strikes. Rylander was wounded bloody, still trying to cover the rest of the raid. Jargle showed red on his roster. A quarter of the other crew shared the same fate, leaving Ilmare to the task as was often the case. But she was in trouble, still harried by the remaining drake that had accompanied them upwards. Worse, those math geeks were circling with their purple protractor banners. Their four previously named vessels had more cannons than his seven, not counting swarming scout corvettes forming a perimeter. Vance counted eleven lenses extended across their crows’ nests. Keeping distance only out of professional courtesy, they were angling to claim his kill should this assault falter.

Vanguish may need to do the deed, if he ever got his hands free to reload. Not wanting to be outdone, Ilmare leapt recklessly, failing to land on the serpent’s crown as it swayed violently westward. With a stroke of luck, her descent was arrested by another hawk—no, the baydrake that had harassed her earlier! With a malevolent gleam in grotesque and lidless eyes, the drake served her flailing body up to Bilgerath’s maw, seeking favor from its broodfather.

Vanguish swung urgently from one talon, landing atop the monster’s snout and sliding towards its eyes. He watched the spawnling release Ilmare, falling lance-first. Going down with a fight, she looked determined to dance on the dragon’s tonsils if needed. As her eyemar captured the action for her fans, Perchy took leave, streaking out of sight. Performing a rapid reload with his last firepowder charge, Vanguish’s boots found purchase on the serpent’s face, blasting between his feet in an attempt to prevent his favorite coworker from becoming food. The beast remained unphased, eager to devour.

Thunder struck from a sudden storm. Ilmare was the first to scream. All others looked aloft as her hawk trailed a tempest behind, possessing the storm itself. Sonic shock cut a wake through darkened skies. Having become a bolt of screaming sparks, Perchival made a decisive dive down Bilgerath’s gullet, loyal to his last cry. His rider took advantage, kicking off the beast’s ugly green tongue, barely escaping its snapping teeth. The coughing serpent was stunned; his nostrils fumed poison puffs. Seeing Ilmare hang in the air from her heroic leap, Vanguish nodded skyward and scrambled to make way for her last delivery of the day. Her lance landed between Bilgerath’s eyes and sunk into its skull. Gravity did the rest, crashing it into the waves.

Flares and other festive artillery shot from the surrounding decks, horns and drumbeats rising in celebratory surges. The party was cut short by crews rushing to bail Endeavor before she sunk. Other vessels had issues ranging from ordinary to severe, but the most important loss was the one inside Bilgerath’s throat. Vanguish slid toward the mouth of the serpent. Ilmare slowly ripped her lance free from the skull, saying nothing.

After shoring up the fleet enough to limp home, the attendant crews started stripping scales from the serpent, now a lifeless monument to their victory. That messy work was best handled by bots, non-player sailors, rather than officers. The other captains’ eyemars circled, streaming to their respective audiences. Ilmare’s came in for a closeup. Her lance propped open the giant jaw to look inside, intent to find what remained of her feathered helper.

Vanguish climbed in beside. His saber pried free a prize fang of fantastic size, inspecting it for fitness with misting eyes. Over the following months, nearly identical brethren from Bilgerath’s brood would be raided dozens of times and taken down by other notable crews, but this would forever be the first. Being a beast with no lair or loot of its own to take as treasure, it would be the Dawnbreakers’ choice to rip a trophy from its remains. From this they could forge a singular item that would be unique among the metaverse, stored immutably in Sandstorm’s central datachain. Statistically, it would be a few bits better than any craftsman could ever create again from a similar carcass. Stylistically, it would be instantly iconic, a permanent part of the Stormverse’s story for however long it lasted. Even the destruction of such a legendary relic could turn into a tale for the ages—a twenty-minute lore video on YouTube.

For an item of such significance, this fang wouldn’t work. Too many cavities; acerbic breath didn’t keep enamel pristine. Tossing aside the tooth, Vance asked, “What’ll it be? A new lance maybe? Serpentslayer? Bane of the Bay?” as they crept into its cavernous throat. 

Hunching below pendulous glands draining their acidic fillings, they came upon a familiar mass. Unable to look at the scorched lump lying before her, she turned, grinding her armored heel. “I’m taking this fucker’s tongue.”