Undefined Behaviour [draft 0.0.1]

It was one of the last times I spoke to her.

She leaned back on her chair, levering up the heavy base of the desk chair to wobble on two wheels, just to look at me upside down. Edges of her hair catching the light of her computer screen and the various lamps and uplighters scattered haphazardly around the room. I was on the sofa, fiddling with a character rig on my laptop.

We’d often have days like that, back then: I’d go round, we’d put some music on, work quietly side by side on the game for a little while, maybe cuddle and watch some anime later but more likely get caught up talking shop until the last train had gone and I’d just have to stay the night. At some point I started bringing my toothbrush.

She wasn’t working on the game at this point, though. Some webtoon was on the screen, you know, the long infinite-scroll kind which all have the same blandly animesque artstyle.

…ah, that’s unfair, isn’t it? I’d hate it if someone cast that sort of judgement on the things I like. Someone called my style ‘Artstation-core’ once and I don’t think I ever recovered. But she was reading something like that, or maybe it was a web novel. I mostly just remember what she said about it.

“I fucking hate this isekai shit!”

I gave her the look. She pivoted the chair back and spun it round to face me properly, leaning forward on her knees. She looked… more distressed than usual, really.

“Yeah, OK, I… OK. Come on, Indigo. Don’t look at me like that.”

“You wouldn’t read it if you weren’t getting something out of it.” I lifted the laptop off my knees, patted the cushion next to me. “Come on. Tools down. You’re not working, you can’t tell me that’s research. Come and tell me whats up.”

She stood, wobbled the way she does when she hasn’t been paying attention to hunger signals for several hours, and picked her way past some of the piles of books to settle between me and the pile of plushies. I held her for a minute or two, stroking her hair and letting her figure out the words.

“It’s just…” She glances at the cold cup of tea on the desk she left and winces. “None of them get it, you know? I keep thinking, maybe this one will actually do it properly, but it’s always just… it’s just a simple version of this world in medieval cosplay, it doesn’t even try to get the weltanschauung, or—”

I couldn’t suppress my smirk. “Weltanschauung.”

“You know, like—”

“Yeah, no, just, that’s like the most Violet way you could put it.”

She didn’t laugh like I expected. Just pushed away from me, hugging her knees. “That’s the problem, isn’t it…” she said, hollowly. “Among, you know, the company, we’re like, the two weird trannies. And, well,” She smiled at me weakly. “It means the world that I’m not the only weird tranny. But among the weird trannies, I’m still like… I’m still the girl that says weltanschauung. The words that come naturally to me are like, they’re the words that make me an incomprehensible nerd.”

“You know we’re all incomprehensible nerds, right?” Even then I’m sure I knew this isn’t the bait I should be taking, but… “Like we’re all freaky autists with our little obsessions. You don’t know what I’m on about when I talk about graphics programming. And the fact that you even humour me, most people don’t even give me that.”

She winces a little. “You’ve got all those nerds on Discord. The demoscene.”

“And in the demoscene, I’m a weird tranny. Making inscrutable things about dolls that nobody understands. Or if they understand what I’m getting at with the dolls thing, they don’t know what a mesh shader is.”

This made her crack a brief smile at last. “I don’t know what a mesh shader is, and you’ve explained it to me like four or five times. But, yeah. I guess we are all… composites of stuff. Occupying our own strange little combinatoric worlds.”

“Right. The German word.”

“Yeah. And with these isekai type stories, I always hope that they’ll actually take me into a different world. Step across the magic circle. And I suppose they do, like, have a world they wanna explore. The same janky fucking RPG that nobody ever made, where the protag has some unbalanced power and everyone loves them.”

“And he just goes around collecting girls, yeah.”

“Not even just that, I don’t bother reading the ones with boys, but it’s like…” She sighs. “You know, there’s these ‘Connecticut Yankee’ style ones, where the protag is bringing the light of modern engineering to medieval times. And they’re like, wow, check it out, I invented soap. Bet you idiots never thought of that one.”

“Yeah, I mean, it’s just slop. Wish fulfilment.” We were still saying ‘slop’ back then. “This world crushes people, they want to imagine being strong and important. But honestly the whole portal fantasy thing always felt sorta goofy to me, right? You sorta have to accept that people in our world are special. The other world has to be lesser. So you’re going somewhere which the narrative has already made clear is inferior, or phony somehow.”

She frowned. “I guess when you put it that way…”

I guestured for her to come back in for more cuddles. She obliged, face still creased with thought.

“If you actually got isekaied into a game, it wouldn’t be like that, would it? I mean, you’ve played MMOs, obviously.”

“Yeah, I mean, FFXIV mainly…” I reached behind her for a plush tonberry.

“Well, that’s a great example.” She fiddled with its little knife. “Did you like, raid and that? Or just RP?”

“I had a static back in SHB, we used to do savage prog. Before I got this job, obviously. Not much time for raiding these days…”

“Oh yeah, that was Eden right? Well, you know what it’s like, then. There’s a whole meta. You can go on youtube and learn the mechanics. Someone works out all the gear and rotations.”

“Right.”

“If there was a broken mechanic, everyone would use it, and then the devs would patch it out. There wouldn’t be one ultra special little guy who’s better than everyone. Being good at the game is grinding up the gear ladder, a few extra GCDs for a 3% dps boost…”

“Yeah!” I tapped through the Dragoon rotation on her leg. “That’s double weaving.” She giggled, I continued. “I mean, I always thought of it like a dance I was trying to learn. But in other games, like, fighting games and such, there’s more room for someone to be the best player…”

“Right, but like, fighting gamers, there’s still that community aspect! They know all the framedata and stuff, it’s like, everyone’s on five levels of prediction mindgames and you have to understand all that shit before you even have a chance.”

“OK, sure.” I said. “But that’s just how it is with fiction, isn’t it? I mean, it’s always like, heroic guy fighting through dozens of people, not ‘I got gangrene in a trench’. In sports manga, the protagonist is special too…”

She squirmed and twisted to face me again. “Sure but, in sports manga, their special power is always just tenacity, isn’t it? They’re usually a huge idiot who’s maybe good at like one thing at most. But they keep trying and getting beat up and trying again, until eventually people respect them.”

“Heh, there’s probably a sports manga about computer games.” I glanced down at my laptop, Blender open still, a hand painted in lurid weight-paint gradients. “We can search mangadex. I bet there’s a dozen that are all about, you know, moe girls playing competitive FPSes.”

Violet flopped down into my lap, dispelling thoughts of the laptop. I stroked her cheek isntead, hoping to distract her. But her mind was still working. ‘Like a doggirl with a bone.’

“That’s not it, though…” she was saying. “I mean, it’s sort of ‘it’. Like, sports manga is usually trying to explain the sport to you, right? It’s trying to say, here’s why you should care about this. Welcome to that special interest. But it can’t get too far into the weeds with it.”

“I don’t know about that. Do you remember the one about mahjong where the girls just get bigger and bigger boobs for the entire run so it goes from just like regular manga to full-on fetish art? But it’s still all about mahjong?”

She laughed. “Well, OK. I guess the mahjong boobs one is pretty out there. But… it’s still gotta follow the formula right? If it’s too esoteric, it won’t sell.”

“Hm.” I said. “I mean, I kinda worry our game is like that, you know. We’ve gone too deep.”

“Have some faith…” Violet rested there a moment on my lap, staring up at the broken lightbulb on her ceiling. “Do you think you could make, like, a sports manga about graphics programming?”

I cracked up. “What, like, the protagonist is being beaten down by Vulkan, teeth gritted, tears in her eyes?”

“No, seriously! She’s gotta go to demoparties and stuff. SIGGRAPH tournament arc. And you know it’s like, here’s an opponent of the week whose special power is path tracing or something. They reveal the number of triangles in a scene, and the protag is all, nani!?… so this is the power of Phong shading…”

“I mean, I’d read that.”

“Obviously you’d read that. It’s your special interest.”

“I mean, you’re right! It would work with the formula. You could teach people about it.”

“But… I don’t just want the same formula all the time. If I’m going to another world, I want it to actually be… different. And if I wanted to take someone into my world… I’d want them to understand it. So I guess I want that from these isekai stories. I want to be taken somewhere that I’d really have to understand.”

I didn’t really know how to answer that, so I kissed her, and we didn’t discuss games or isekai stories any more.

All things considered, I think the game launch was fairly successful. We rolled out of the Next Fest with a decent snowball of positive reviews. We got attention on social media that we hadn’t paid for. Marketing was, thankfully, not my department, but it seemed that Violet’s story was just the right level of obtuse, and indeed, before long there was a fan wiki, and then a second wiki that isn’t on Fandom, and fan videos where people would paraphrase the fan wiki…

My efforts got some praise as well. You know, one or two lines in the reviews saying the ‘graphics’ are ‘pretty good’. But really it’s what they didn’t say. Nobody complaining about frame drops, no crashes on unusual hardware, no motion sickness for the VR players. All ten of them.

Let me tell you about the game. We called it [gamename]. It was one of those overambitious heartbreaker projects that is like a candle to the indie developer moth, an immersive RPG with a robust simulation. We used a heavily customised version of Bevy for the engine. There was networked coop, even. Proper rollback netcode. Violet was the head writer, and she cooked up this wonderful branching narrative with five different factions. You could side with the Seelie or Unseelie Courts, or the Alchemists, the Homunculi, the Jellies… or take it your own way, and whatever you did would advantage one side or another and trigger events all over the map. I’m pretty sure it was based on an old tabletop campaign she’d run. She worked like a machine. I can’t even pretend to know half the things that could happen even with the whole script on my hard drive.

In week three, a popular Korean vtuber called PURPLE (as in the English word, so 퍼펄 in Korean) got into it, and that brought in a whole wave of new attention. Kind of a sketchy moment for us! We were gearing up for the first significant content patch, Violet was spinning this crazy story about a gang of alchemists working to create the Perfect Androgyne. Really on some Jodorowsky shit, but she could make it work. But suddenly it was like, we need to get the Korean language localisation out the door already, get it tested, we won’t get a chance like this again. My colleague Yeong-Mi ended up handling pretty much all the communications with the Korean publisher and localisation team, which was really not her department but it was a small company and she was an actual native speaker so… you know.

It was chaos for a while. But it really seemed like we’d pulled it off. There was decent activity on the multiplayer, word was spreading in indie gaming circles, Violet seemed as excited as I’d ever seen her really.

Then she disappeared.

She didn’t leave a suicide note or anything. But, you know how it goes with trans girls. We feared the worst! The longer it went on, the harder it became to think she’d just skipped town without telling anyone. After a week, I went round her flat. All her shit was still there, the milk going off in the fridge… Her coat and shoes were gone, but everything else was there.

We found an ex who got us in touch with her parents, but of course none of them knew anything. After a couple months the landlord got pissy about rent not being paid and, as the girlfriend with the key, it was my job to get her stuff into storage.

I never found out. Dead, kidnapped by some weird cult, some other mad thing. Never. We put out word but like, there’s a lot of trans girls called Violet. I think someone put her name on the TDOR list. We never held a real funeral or anything because like, I think we all kind of hoped she’d show up one day and by the time we got resigned to it, it the moment had passed.

At work, well, they never officially fired her, but that’s because the company went bust six few months later. With Violet gone, it was like there was something fundamental missing. We made updates still, but we’d lost some sort of spark. PURPLE moved on to another game, and so did our other players.

That was fifteen years ago.

I think at some point, the game got covered by one of those Youtube video essay people, like, ‘the insane MMORPG whose writer DISAPPEARED’ or something like that. It wasn’t even an MMO! We wanted it to be, at one point, but it was just not feasible with a team of this size. One of the only times we thought about scope. Still, it was nice that someone remembered it. I can’t really say that about any of my other games. I got in touch with the girl that made the video, another trans girl, went by Rose Reviews. We talked on Discord now and again, but at some point, we drifted, one or other of us got cold feet, we stopped messaging as much…

And then year twelve or so, some speedrunners picked it up. I don’t think it was a major speed game, but it got a couple of GDC runs. The WR was held for years by another trans girl, name of Lilac. By that point I didn’t feel up to writing to someone. I put in a big donation saying I was a dev, and they read it out, but that was about the extent of what I said to Lilac.

I’ll be honest, for my part, those fifteen years were hideous. I bounced from studio to studio. Made assets and shaders for this and that. Mobile games and such, some of them were even released. And as I’m sure you know, the law got worse and worse. A few more of my friends died, in rather less ambiguous ways. I stopped travelling to demoparties and all that, stopped going to synagogue even a few times a year, then I stopped going out at all. The graphics stuff was my escape. I made a few films, here and there, but nobody paid them much attention.

It was really just a few months ago that I finally accepted I couldn’t bear to live in the UK anymore. Got my papers in order (big fat M on the passport), a ticket to Germany, and a job lined up at a studio making games about cars.

I will be honest, I hate cars. But I mean who gives a shit? It’s the only offer I got. That’s my role in this system, right? The ones who have some sort of tech skill are like siphons to pull money out for the rest of the community. Doesn’t matter how I feel about it. At least it’s not fintech.

And, OK, lets not mope too hard. I make it all sound pretty wretched. But I managed. There were good times. Didn’t get sent to prison. Even managed to stay on hormones, like obviously I had to switch to DIY after the whole thing with the NHS, but it got a lot harder to get that stuff in through the cracks and I ended up supplying half the girls in my neighbourhood.

So, when I got a knock on my door, 1am the night before my plane… well, frankly, I thought this is it, they’re finally gonna put me in a camp.

You know where this is going, don’t you? Of course it was Violet. She looked different, the wheelchair especially, different hair, but even my faceblind ass could tell it was her.

How can I describe how I felt in that moment? More than relief. I didn’t say any of the stuff they say in films, like, I thought you were dead, I could kill you. I couldn’t make a joke out of it. I just broke down sobbing. I think part of me thought it could all have been some awful hallucination, a bad and labyrinthine acid trip. And another part of me was just glad of some sort of proof, proof that for once the missing person would come back alive.

“Don’t go to Germany.” she said. Her voice was colder, then, than it had been in the time before. There was someone behind her, a bony East Asian woman in a heavy coat, watching the street furtively. I gestured for them to come inside—though by that point my flat contained little more than a mattress and a kettle—but she shook her head. “I can’t stay here. But there’s work for you, Indigo. Game dev, like we used to do. You’ll like it, I promise. The car will come back in an hour.” I scrambled for my phone as she recited the numberplate. “If you accept… get in it, bring whatever you need for a long stay. Don’t tell anyone anything. Don’t even cancel your taxi. We can get your stuff later. I can’t tell you where we’re going, but it’s a chance to make things better. And we need you.”

Violet said it all in a rush, almost staccato, like she’d practiced so long that the words had lost their meaning. She reached up and grabbed my hand, pulled me towards her, almost knocking our heads together—and planted a kiss on my collarbone. She let go, looked back up at me, almost afraid I’d shout at her.

The woman behind her smirked.

“Can’t I just… come with you now? I can be out in five minutes.” Violet’s eyes widened, like she thought she’d have to talk me round. She glanced back at the other woman, who took another look up and down the icy street, and shrugged.

“OK, go!” It was like her voice had colour again. I didn’t need telling twice. Shoes, coat, scarf, toothbrush, meds, phone charger, bag… I turned off the light for the last time. Landlord-white walls disappeared into shadow. Lock the door. Key through the letterbox.

Violet had already rolled her wheelchair into the waiting taxi—a black cab, the kind with the ramps. The other woman was leaning on the side of the vehicle, her expression a little sardonic.

“And she said we’d have to kidnap you.”

Violet’s mysterious friend drove the taxi; I sat in the back, with my foot propped behind the wheelchair to stop it rolling about. The windows had curtains, which were pulled down. Good thing I don’t get motion sick.

“So what, you steal this or something?” I said, after a few minutes of awkwardly sitting a foot apart. Violet shook her head. I watched her, and she watched me back, like we weren’t even autistic. I wondered what state my makeup was in.

“It’s not a registered taxi, but, legally owned.” she said, after a minute. “And it’s not like we’re selling taxi services so I mean, technically, we’re not breaking the law.”

“Right.”

“But yeah, uh…”

I reached out a hand, and she took it. “It’s good to see you, Violet.”

“You too, Indigo.”

Another silence and we held each others’ hands, as if afraid to do or say anything else. Up in the front of the car, behind some sort of weird metal screen, our driver clicked the radio on. Jazz. I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Is she trying to like, make this romantic?”

“Nah.” Violet said. Then, after a minute: “She just likes jazz. Though, you know, if you want to make this romantic..?”

I gave her hand a squeeze.

“Violet, I…”

“I know.” She sighed. “Like. Yeah, I know. I mean, I didn’t even know if you’d speak to me.” The car rumbled, shifting into a higher gear. I could hear a motorway outside. “Ha. The fuck do I even begin?”

“Hey.” I still couldn’t help but reassure her. Or try to. “I won’t pretend to know what’s up with all this spy shit. But take your time. I mean, you’re like… alive?”

Poke.

She laughed. “Yeah, I can’t imagine how this looks. I mean.” She turns to the front of the taxi. “I haven’t even introduced you to my friend here. You’re gonna shit.”

“Go on then.” I Tturned to the driver as well. “Uh, hey. I’m Indigo. Graphics programmer. Estrogen dealer, I guess. Isn’t that fucked up?”

I’ll admit, I never even considered the possibility that Violet had gone over to the government. It just didn’t seem in-character. Rubbish spy I’d make.

The driver didn’t turn, still keeping her eyes on the road. Through the metal, I could make out vague lights moving outside, and little else. “Violet’s told me a lot about you!”

“Good things, I hope?” She smirked in the mirror. I waited. Something about her seemed familiar.

“You won’t recognise me.” she said after a minute. “Not even the accent, right?” I shook my head. “OK,” and her voice shifted abruptly into a much higher register. “하지만 제 스트림을 보셨죠?” She took a hand off the wheel to make a V-pose in the mirror.

I didn’t have to remember my rubbish Korean. “No way. PURPLE? The fucking, vtuber? With, the, uh, shell thingy?”

PURPLE’s smile was, if anything, kind of forlorn. “Su-ni to my friends.”

Violet was curling up with laughter. “I had to take her.”

“Well, obviously. You can’t drive, bitch.” Su-ni said.

I looked between them.

“We already picked up Lilac and Rose.” Violet was counting on her fingers. “I think you know about them.”

“Huh. The uh, speedrunner? And the girl that did that big video essay? Everyone who…”

“Everyone who was touched by it. Everyone who gave a shit.”

“Everyone who gave a shit is a trans girl whose name is a shade of purple?” Su-ni looked a little put out. “I mean. I’m assuming—”

“Yeah, no, you’re right.” Su-ni’s hands tightened on the wheel. “Just kind of anxious about passing and… yeah.”

“No, yeah, I get you.” That was not a subject I wanted to get into. “But yeah like, whatever, we’re all trans girls, it’s a niche trans game. But… everyone has purple names?”

“So first up, Lilac goes by xe/xer now…” Violet was still counting on her fingers. “Some boys too. But you’ll meet them later.”

“I mean,” I tried to digest it. “I picked ‘Indigo’ because you were Violet, and flower names are kind of a meme…”

“Aren’t you the one who’s always on about statistics?” She waved away my protests. “No, this was all me. Even back in the day, before I went under. I even got this one into it.”

“It’s true!” Su-ni said. “Though I mean, we’d known each other for years. Violet’s the one who suggested ‘PURPLE’, actually.”

I gave Violet the look again. She shrugged.

“Fine.” I said. “Fine. So. You’ve carried out a fifteen year conspiracy to find, or even create, trans girls whose name is a shade of purple, and…”

“Get them into the game, yeah. Plant those seeds. And now it’s time.”

Oh, come on. “Time for what?”

“To bring it back, to start with.”

I slept in the car, in the end. I had no idea where we were going, anyway. I did ask at one point, but Violet just shook her head and said something about opsec. Seemed a bit rich when she let me keep my phone, but by that point I was too tired to argue about it. Later I’d figure out that the car was actually a whole damn Faraday cage. Maybe Su-ni hadn’t entirely been joking about the kidnapping…

I asked her plenty more questions, of course. Questions like, ‘why does a game reboot need a whole cloak and dagger routine?’, but she only waved it away with promises that all would be revealed in time. And honestly? Whatever she said, I was in. Even if this was just a pleasant dream, I was in no great hurry to wake.

When I woke up, I was not in a car. It was something akin to a hotel room. Simple white walls, a painting… oh, that was concept art. Cute.

Outside the window… a courtyard, and the opposite wall of the building, three stories high. Nothing that could particularly tell me where I was.

No sign of Violet or Su-ni. No sign of my phone or clothes, either, which was rather worrying. My meds, at least, had been left in a little pile on the bedside. I was wearing some kind of dark blue pyjamas… no, I realised after a minute. Indigo pyjamas.

On the table was a piece of paper. It was rather brief. Said, simply, “I will keep the magic circle.” And a line for me to sign. An old-fashioned fountain pen, and in place of an inkwell… Yeah, that was a needle. Did Violet expect me to sign in blood?

The door opened, and Violet’s wheelchair rolled in. “Yes, in blood.” she said by way of greeting. “I can’t tell you anything until you sign that. Sorry. It’s the rules.”

“And if I don’t sign? What happens?” I mimed pointing a finger-gun at my head. Violet shook her head rapidly.

“We’ll drop you off in Germany. Ideally we’d set it all up so you could drop acid and write the whole thing off as a fantasy, but… that’s strictly voluntary, to be clear!” She held up her hands. “I promise this isn’t some weird cult. We just really, really cannot let anyone know we’re out here.”

“Violet…” I picked up the needle, which had been helpfully stuck in a cork to make it easier to hold. Turned it around in my fingers. “You can’t tell me why, I get that. But… whatever you’re doing here, it’s more than making a game, obviously?”

A rueful laugh. “Well,” she says. “Yes and no.”

“And whatever it is… is worth it?”

“Absolutely.”

“Fine.” I stabbed my finger, wincing. A drop of blood splattered onto the page. I tried to get some onto the fountain pen, and managed to make a very wobbly mark on the paper that sort of resembled my signature. My actual signature, that is, not the one I had to come up with after the Real Names Act.

Violet handed me a plaster, and I wrapped it around my finger. “This had better be the only one.”

“Yeah. I mean, we’re kind of outside the law here. If a court knew what we’re doing… contract law would be the least of our problems.”

I decided not to think, for the moment, about what that implied for my rights.

“So what is this?” I said. “Some sort of AI project?”

“Well, not exactly, no.”

“What did I just sign up for, Violet?”

“Follow me.” She leaned forward, rolled up the contract and slipped it into what looked like a leather case, with an indigo panel on the end. “I’ll show you the latest build.”

“Well, it’s [gamename].”

Violet turned to me, nodding significantly. In front of her was a bank of high-res monitors, at least 8k. A headset sat on the desk beside, along with printouts of all sorts.

“But there’s players,” I continued. “Quite a lot of players, it looks like. I don’t think we ever supported that many.”

“Yeah.” Violet says. “It’s sorta complicated to count the limit, because of how the backend is. I don’t really understand. But it can be a whole lot.”

“And you’ve improved the physics, obviously.” A homunculus had just been thrown bodily through a wooden fence. “Looks nice. Wish I could have been involved…” Even if the price was, well… I wasn’t sure, yet.

“We haven’t done much.” Violet says. “Just updated a few libraries, minor refactors. I had to be sure it would work, first.”

“Right, yeah. I mean. Obvs you’d have to port it to one of the Bevy forks…”

“Not yet.”

“Old version of Rust, then.”

“I think so. You’ll have to ask Turquoise.”

I scratched at my wrist. “That’s not a purple?”

“Right, he’s not one of mine.”

“So… you’re not a weird cult but everyone has colour names.”

Violet grins awkwardly, seeing where this is going. “Yeah…”

“Because you’ve been recruiting from the trans population and subtly influencing people, including me, to call ourselves after colours.”

“Well, uh, you picked Indigo before we started the colour thing properly. Kind of what inspired it, actually.”

I didn’t want to deal with the implications of that. “And if they don’t take the hint, what, you just don’t invite them to… whatever this is?”

“That’s one reason, yeah. One of the rituals.”

“Of the thing that is not a weird cult.”

“Right! It’s not a cult, just a game studio. We’re doing what every game studio does.”

“OK, and how many is ‘we’?”

“Well, there’s Celeste. Me, of course. And Amber.”

“So, cyan, magenta, yellow? Like a printer?”

“Trust the graphics programmer to spot that. Yeah.”

“And does that mean there’s a, what, Madame Coal in charge of it all?”

“Madame Coal?”

“You know, because there’s usually a black ink along with the other three.”

She took it on board, thoughtfully. “Oh, that’s pretty good. Yeah, I should put that in.”

“Into the game?”

“Into the game, yeah.” Violet scribbled a note. “But no, there’s no Madame Coal. I guess we didn’t know that much about printers.”

I laughed, shaking my head. “So when you disappeared, you’d also joined up with this… scheme? To… remaster a dead RPG, fifteen years later? A game you were already working on, at the time? I’m missing something.”

“Yeah.” she said. “Take a closer look, Indigo.”

I turned back to the screens, peering at my avatar. It looked pretty much how I’d rendered it back then. Pathtraced mode, of course. It seemed like I’d gone the Unseelie route on this playthrough, and my avatar had the shadowy sheen that had come to me in a particularly inspired week. Other avatars ran to and fro, naturally weaving around each other. Did they add a new animation system? Or were these VR players..?

“Hey.” I turned back to my 15-year-absent, annoyingly evasive host. “Where are you finding all these players, if this is all so secret?”

“Well. That’s kind of the crux of it. But, I can’t tell you. Not yet.”

“I signed in blood!”

“Yeah, but that’s kind of just theatrics at the end of the day, and I have to sorta… convince the others, first, to let you in.”

“OK, I’ll guess.” I swivelled to face her square on. “You’ve invented actual, genuine AGI in a secret lab and you’re testing them on our game before unleashing your bottled god on the world?”

“That’s a fun idea. But… no, hold on. You can’t get me that easily, no 20 questions. Go with that theory. Close enough.”

I whistled. Well, I tried to whistle, but it came out as a sort of sad ‘pfft’. I made a mental note to look up how to whistle when they let me on the internet again.

“You won’t tell me anything else? Like, are we talking, turns the world into paperclips if we get it wrong, or…”

She mimed sealing her lips.