Undefined Behaviour ch3 [draft 0.0.1]

Chapter::FooBar

At this point in the narrative, I should probably tell you a little more about TRISMEGISTUS, right?

Ah, but where do you even begin?

I suppose we should probably begin at the beginning. Let’s talk about how the game came to be.

It was not long after I’d gotten Violet a job.

At the time, our last game—a silly physics-based party game loosely based on the Divine Comedy—had been an unexpectedly viral hit and we had a bit of a war chest. We’d been pitching various ideas for the next project, and we had enough money to consider taking on someone new.

By this point, I had been with Violet for a few months. The café she’d been working at had gone bust, and she’d had little luck finding another job. I’d been making sure to take her out for food a lot, because I was kind of afraid she just wouldn’t eat otherwise. Or try to subsist on crackers or something. When I suggested trying to get her work as a game writer, she’d been doubtful, but agreed to put together some samples I could present to my colleagues to argue for a narrative game as our next project.

Glasgow is, I’ll be real, not exactly know for its gamedev scene. It’s sooort of a techy city, like you have all the fintech companies in the centre, big banks drawn by the smell of lower-than-average wages to find new developers to bleed into the infinite death machine. I have very positive feelings about that. And don’t get me fucking started on the arms companies.

But as far as game dev… well, over in Edinburgh, you’d obviously got a Rockstar office, at the time still embroiled in that union-busting controversy. I think there was also an animation studio which made pre-rendered trailers and the like for really big games here. But for the most part it was definitively indie stuff. Let me put it this way: the game developer pub meet took place in the same building as the leatherdyke one, but the latter was easily three or four times bigger.

As such, the studio I used to work for was that kind of small scale. But we had some really technical people. Not all of them were passionate fans of narrative games, but we liked to do something a bit weird and arty, and Violet’s writing really struck a chord. (Helped that she was local, too!) We were riding pretty damn high on the success of our last game—not to toot my own horn too much here, I was still learning the ropes, but my colleagues cooked up some crazy stuff, really kind of a technical marvel, and it paid off. So we thought we could pull off this even more ambitious plan: an action-RPG with a branching storyline.

And, I mean, we did. Maybe I can have a little hubris…

We definitely needed more people, though. Not just Violet; the team must have doubled in size. Some local, some remote. I went from being the sole graphics programmer to one of a team of three, and it took some getting used to. Learned a whole lot, though.

Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself. As I said, it was not so long after I’d gotten Violet the job.

We were sitting by the duck pond in Queen’s Park, looking over the shallow, wind-flecked pool with the odd angular American sculpture half-broken at the centre. Of course, far more than ducks, we were joined by a small army of pigeons, marching about in force and eyeing up passers-by who might be persuaded to bring out a handful of bread or, if they’re really lucky, peanuts.

I was indeed feeding the pigeons. They’ll actually jump right up on your hand with the right enticement, it’s very cute.

Violet, though, was locked in. Alternately scribbling in her notebook or sucking on the end of the pencil as her gaze bore its way into the asthenosphere.

“You wanna feed these little fucks?” I said. Then, catching her expression at last, I started to worry. “Damn, Violet, are you OK?”

She pouted, and leaned into me, causing my handful of peanuts to go flying off to incite a mutiny in the pigeon corps. I hugged her as well as I could. We were coming into spring, but it was still pretty damn cold, and we both had a lot of layers.

“It’s, you know. Writing stuff.” she said. “Kinda nuts and bolts, honestly. But I don’t wanna screw it up.”

“Is this for the game?”

She sighed. “It could be? I don’t know if I have anything yet.”

“Why don’t you tell me about the problem? Rubber duck me.”

Violet swivelled to look askance at me. “Is that some sort of kink thing? Like the whole pooltoy–”

“Uh, programmer thing! ‘If you’re stuck, try explaining it to a rubber duck.’”

“Heh. Getting my hopes up.” She turned the pencil over in her hand. “Well, if you don’t mind me going on a bit…”

“Oh, don’t you worry. I’ll help you debug your writing, and you can help me debug specular aliasing later.”

This got a smile. “Deal.”

“So what’s up?”

“Right, well, it’s the problem of representation, right? Or depiction, I always prefer to say depiction. Like, say you’ve got someone with, ah, a marked social characteristic, let’s say they’re, um…”

“Jewish?” I said, poking her in the ribs.

“Sure, let’s say they’re Jewish.”

I laughed. “I just noticed you’ve been writing way more about Jewish girls since you started dating me.”

“Heh, well. You’re not wrong. But that’s kind of where the problem is, right? Like, it wouldn’t do to just put you in the story, like a roman à clef.”

“Roman what now?”

“French, ‘novel with a key’. When a story’s just a thinly disguised version of real people and events.”

“OK. I mean, I don’t mind being your muse. That’s kinda hot actually.” I leaned down to kiss the top of Violet’s head. “But I mean, you know I’m not very good at being Jewish, right?”

Violet squirmed. “I wouldn’t know. You say the prayer and stuff when we eat. It seems important to you.”

“Eh, well, it’s complicated.” I wondered how much I should really go into it. “Family shit.”

“Sure. But that ‘it’s complicated’ is kind the centre of it, right? You have your specific way of doing Judaism. So, yeah, let’s say I’m writing a story, and there’s one Jewish character in it, and I base that on you because I know you best. But then it’s like, does that character have to stand in for all of Judaism? Not just your particular way of doing it.” She closed the notebook with a snap. “So the obvious solution is, well, I just have to have more Jewish characters, and then they can talk to each other, and each one represents a different way of relating to the religion and culture and everything. Lots of ways to screw up, but, that’s just a skill issue.”

“Ha.” I said. “I mean I’d say ask people to give it a look over? Don’t just try and, idk, keep writing it different ways til you git gud at not doing antisemitism?”

She snorted. “Yeah, fair point. But then, idk, let’s say we have another category, let’s say there’s a gay guy or something. Or, I dunno, a working-class taxi driver. If I need to have a whole bunch of characters in every category, the story is just completely bogged down by it, right?”

“Well.” I said. “I mean, a story doesn’t have to be about everything, right? Like this is kind of a really Tumblr way of reading, right, where everyone has to be viewed as a stand-in for some bigger social group, and you’ve gotta fill your bingo card or something.”

“I know, I know…” Violet sighed heavily, and tapped her pencil against her notebook. “The thing is, this big game project, hasn’t it got to ring true somehow? The world is so damn complex. Every social group is an infinite fractal. And the only way I can see it is like, filtered through my particular worldview. Like, the way you relate to religion is really hard for me to understand…”

“You said your dad was in some kind of weird cult, right?”

Violet nodded emphatically. “Yeah, both my dads actually.”

“Oh hell yeah. …I mean, the gay part, not the cult part. I bet the cult part sucked.”

“It wasn’t quite like that…” She shook her head. “One of them is trans, right? But like, when I was born, they were still doing the good little het couple thing, come to spread the good word in Scotland, whose people definitely want to be in some dumb Californian religion.”

“Wait, you’re American?”

“I guess, technically? Like I grew up in fucking Dundee, I don’t remember ever being in America.”

“Damn, though. You’ve been holding out on me, Violet! So many missed chances for burger jokes…”

“Ha, well, on that note, the whole proselytising thing was a total nothingburger.”

“Eyyy.”

Violet giggled. “But yeah, so, when I came out, that basically cracked my dad’s egg. He transed like, within a year of that.”

“Ahaha, no way. That’s kind of awesome, honestly.”

“Less fun to live through… like, my other dad did not take it well. He fucked off back to America. And it really broke my trans dad. I mean, he’s probably doing better now, but he was drinking a lot, just generally a bad time. I moved out as soon as I could to go to uni, I see him like once every couple years now.”

“Fuck, Violet. I’m sorry.”

“Haha, I mean, that’s pretty much all of us, right? Everyone’s got some fucked up family shit.”

“Yeah…” I figured I’d better reciprocate. “You wanna hear about my fucked up family shit?”

“Ha, sure. Fair’s fair.”

“I mean, idk, I guess my family’s pretty normie compared to that. Actually, my mum’s side of the family is really chill. Like, ‘came down to Pride with me’ chill.”

“Aw, that’s good. Too rare.”

“Right. But, my dad’s side of the family moved to fucking Israel, so, you know…”

“Oh god.”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t imagine that’s a fun thing to have in the background like, right now.”

“I mean, I’d stopped talking to them years before, there was a very messy breakup before that. But yeah, like, when I was a kid, I had this really good rabbi, like, you know all the jokes about how you ask three rabbis a question and get five answers, he was absolutely like that. Really represented the incredibly nerdy side of Judaism, where you’re just constantly rules-lawyering God and he’s like, haha, you got me, well played. So you can imagine how much I was into that. I’d bring him all these scifi thought experiments about vampires and stuff and he’d always give me a thought-out answer, it was great.”

“Aw, that’s so fucking cute. And yeah… I read about that stuff online sometimes. Very different from my experience.” She stabbed the blunt end of the pencil against the notebook.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Like, we only had cult-approved books, the only interpretation of anything was mostly learning what to say so I wasn’t the one getting screamed at. I don’t know what I’d have thought if not for the internet.”

“Fucking hell, Violet.” I pulled into as tight a hug as I could. Felt her shoulders, full of tension.

“Eh.” she said, slightly muffled. “I put it all into my writing, you know. Let’s not dwell on it. What changed for you?”

“Mmm.” I said. “I mean, well. After I got into my teens, and all the family shit went down… I kind of couldn’t get into it anymore. It was only kinda later, when I started hanging out with, y’know, anarchists and such and got into history, learned about the Jewish Bund and all that, the whole radical tradition… I started thinking like no I should actually make this part of my life again. Though I’m really half-assed with it, I’ll be real.”

Violet nuzzled against my shoulder. “Do you like, believe in God? …Don’t answer if you don’t want, that’s a hell of a fucking question.”

“I mean, you’re the philosophy nerd, Violet. Define ‘God’.”

“OK, you know what, that’s extremely fair. I am curious what you think about it, though…”

“Woudln’t it be fucked up if I said like, actually I decided Pure Land Buddhism was right about everything?”

“That would be pretty great. Do you think that?”

“Nah, but Houseki no Kuni fucking slaps.” This got some big nodding. “But I mean I guess I view it like a game? I like playing around with rules and structures and rituals and stuff. Same reason I’m into programming. Whether or not God is really real is kinda besides the point.”

“Yeah… I guess so.”

“How about you?”

“I mean, I guess that’s the thing. There’s so many different ideas. So many different ways of looking at every damn thing. I got into philosophy because I wanted to know properly, and like, it definitely blew wide open all the shit the cult was saying, but also, like, absolutely nothing is settled. About the only thing anyone can agree on is that logical positivism doesn’t work.”

“Is it all just talking in circles?”

“Not exactly. It’s like. You know, you have some question, like, idk, how do minds relate to brains or something. And then you have two different answers to that question, say, monism and dualism. Seems pretty simple, there’s one thing or there are two things. But for each of those there’s like, eight different flavours, and some of them overlap with the other side, and they all turn on these incredibly subtle points which are hard to even understand, and even when you’ve sort of got an idea of what everyone is saying, they all sound kinda plausible in their context…”

“God, right. Sounds kinda futile. ‘Angels on the head of a pin’, right? How many qualia can dance in the Chinese Room.”

“I mean, a lot of people seem to think that. But then…” Violet gripped my arms, full of intensity. “You get into the sort of theories of stuff like, how science advances, or like, the foundations of the whole field. Kuhn’s paradigms or Wittgenstein saying it’s all just playing games with language. But it’s not like all of it is equally bullshit. And the thing is you can’t actually escape doing philosophy, like you do anything else and at some point you’ll hit some deep conceptual difficulty that leads you back into philosophy-land.”

“I mean, maybe you should make the story about this? Like, if we have a faction system, the factions represent different worldviews, sorta like Alpha Centauri.”

“That’s actually sorta what I was thinking, yeah.”

“Like, OK I’ve got some stuff I made already, which I think I could kinda expand on and combine into a new setting. There’s this idea I’ve been playing with that’s kind of a cold war between the two groups of the fae. So the Seelie and Unseelie Court are like the nationalists and the communists, or the cavaliers and roundheads. The fairies have basically been humiliated by what’s coming out of the fucked up industrialism stuff that the humans are doing, think Century of Humiliation, or Matthew Perry’s gunboats. So they’re trying to industrialise but there’s still all this kind of cursed fairy logic.”

“OK.” I said. “I’m liking this so far…”

“I’m sorta, let’s say, ‘taking heavy inspiration’ from what Michael Swanwick was doing in The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, where they sacrifice the prom queen on the solstice, the elves are like horrific aristocrats doing weird sex rituals all the time… like it’s not exactly gonna be that, but the juxtaposition is really tasty.”

“So what are the humans like?”

“Well, their society runs on alchemy. Like they’ve figured out how to reduce stuff into quintessence and form it into other stuff. And there are these three groups—there’s the humans, they’ve got a religious hierarchy, there’s alchemical homunculi who are at the bottom of the hierarchy, and the third group is jellies.”

“What like, jellyfish?”

“No, no, they’re… OK, this is going to be kind of a deep cut.”

“Hit me.”

“There was this old webcomic called Unicorn Jelly, by this oldschool trans writer Jennifer Diane Reitz…”

“Wait, isn’t she the one who came up with the fucking COGIATI?!”

“Yeah! But she did a lot of shit, like she’s basically the OG ultra-online trans weeb, also really active in pony fandom actually. But like, this comic right, it’s this classic early-2000s MSPaint manga-inspired thing, really charmingly jank, but it’s about this incredibly imaginative alt-physics universe where everyone lives on a regular lattice of giant triangular plates in a toroidal universe.”

“Hang on, slow down a minute. There’s at least six different things in that sentence I need you to expand on.”

“I’ll show you later, you’ll get it. Anyway, there is a society of humans and one that’s kinda like Dragon Quest slimes, there’s one that’s a trans allegory, but as the comic goes on and into the sequels with all the time travel, we jump to this really far future version of the setting. And there’s this really fascinating idea that you have sort of trans-species jelly people who put artificial bones inside their bodies and walk around in humanoid form.”

“Violet, I’ll be real, I love how enthusiastic you are for this thing, but… you’ve lost me.”

“OK, you know what, don’t worry about the comic.” Violet laughed the awkward laugh of the autistic person who’s gone too deep, and I felt a stab of shame for putting the brakes on. “The point is, in this world, inspired by all that, there are kind of floating slime people. They’re the original alchemists. They occupy a sorta transfeminised, third-gender-pedestal position in society. There are humans who are considered ‘jellylike’ because they’re nonbinary, considered sacred in the same way.”

“That sounds pretty sick, I’m into it. So what does the player do in this cool setting?”

“Well. Obviously I don’t wanna drown the player in infodump the minute they arrive. But I was thinking, the player is a changeling for one of the courts. Essentially, a spy who’s replaced a human child, sent to manipulate the humans to fairy advantage. So they see the human world from the point of view of an outsider, you have reason to find it all a bit weird in-character, and then the course of the game will take them back into the fae lands eventually by which time you’ve really gone human. It’d be the New Vegas structure, you’d decide which faction to side with, but at the same time, you’re trying to determine who you are and what you believe.”

I took a breath. “I like it, but that’s very ambitious. We don’t exactly have Obsidian’s experience with RPGs.”

“Well, we should try. Let’s make one small area, and get some idea if we can pull it off…”

“Right, a vertical slice. Yeah, I can propose it. I think Erin’d be on board with that…”

“But yeah…” Violet ran her finger along the edge of the notebook. “So what I’ve been worrying about is, well, I need to make all these weirdos as varied as any real group. Like, you draw from experience, but also you rotate stuff around, nothing should be exactly 1:1 allegory. And part of that is about religion. When I came up with the alchemist thing, I was kinda riffing on Federici, right, the enclosures and so on, the European Wars of Religion… But I don’t want to just do sorta, Catholics In Funny Hats and Protestants In Funny Hats.”

“I think the Catholics mostly wore the hats.” I regarded her, the awkward set in her shoulders even as she laughed at my dumb joke. “It’s not like you to worry this much. Usually you’re pretty gung-ho about, hey, I made this thing about parasitic selkies and seal clubbing games, it’ll fuck you up for a week.”

Violet cackled. “You’ve got to do that in public. You can’t ever hedge. You have to act absolutely confident about your stuff if you want it to hit. So lucky you, Indigo, you get access to the inner secret Violet who’s actually an anxious mess.”

“Well.” I kissed her. “I’m glad I get to see the whole Violet.” She leaned up to kiss me back. Smiled, gently.

“You know, Indigo…”

“Yeah?”

“When we met, you seemed like such an anxious thing yourself. I thought, I gotta be really careful not to take advantage. But these days I really lean on you…”

“What can I say…” I laughed awkwardly. I knew this was my pattern. Until I knew the rules I would be stuck in that sort of place of vulnerability, like I was back in the early-transition days. Once I felt somewhat secure, once I had a sense of the dynamics, I could open up. “I trust you.”

“Means a lot.”

“You dork.”

TRISMEGISTUS took shape in waves.

We started by figuring out the tech stack to make the first area. The last game had been done in Bevy and we were all very on board with that, but this new game would be in part a lot more text-and-UI heavy, and that led to a lot of internal discussion about how to represent the data, etc. etc.

Yeong-Mi really pushed for multiplayer from the start, and I think she was right to. It’s what we were known for. But that implied various design tradeoffs. Like, if it’s an RPG, and one player is interacting with NPCs or progressing a quest, or they’re at different points in the main story, how is that going to work?

We decided to go for something semi-procedural. Storylet cards, an underlying system-driven faction sim, that kind of thing. But also some fixed event chains where Violet, and other writers whenever we hired them, could really go to town.

Our vertical slice was to be an indoor area, ideally something that could succinctly depict the major themes of the game. We decided to go for a factory which made ‘alchemical rods’, basically magic guns that turn you into goo.

There’s a reason games love industrial architecture, and it’s that it’s full of wide-open spaces and weird shapes. And as such, with the whole quintessence concept in mind, I started prototyping some assets. I was having fun with the idea that the alchemists would just pile up a bunch of random objects and transmute them into stone, so as you wandered around you’d see the traces of what things used to be. Also pretty easy to model, since I could throw a bunch of existing assets together, remesh them, smooth and decimate it a bit, and you’d get the vibe of a bunch of junk that had been melted together…

After a few different experiments, we’d settled on a first-person character controller, taking after classic immersive sims and CRPGs. These days people would think Elder Scrolls but if I’m honest, it was the Wizardry series that I had in mind. But after some iteration it was actually starting to play like a movement shooter, with the combat parts framed around dodging attacks with short-range teleports and lining up the right angle to hit a weak point. I think the internal name for the movement code was ‘Nothing Personal Kid’.

Rather than fighting big swarms of guys, which never seemed narratively appropriate, we focused on fights with one or two boss enemies at a time: rival fairies, alchemists pumped up on quintessence, complicated spider homunculi. The idea was that every enemy should be memorable and varied enough to fight multiple times without it getting rote. Sorta Monster Hunter, now I think about it.

Violet, meanwhile, absolutely went to town writing a scenario for the place. The core of this mini-scenario was a labour dispute between the humans and the homunculi that the alchemists were trying to bring in. The homunculi could physically adapt their bodies to the work in ways the humans couldn’t, so it was kind of drawing on, you know, industrialism, the Luddite movement. But here the machines are also people, the guys that own the factory are absolutely trying to play these sides off against each other, and the homunculi are really just the scapegoats, right? They’re scared shitless and they have no friends but they need the work too.

As a sneaky fairy spy, you weren’t really there to resolve the situation, but to flip the factory owner to your side in the cold war, or put someone else in charge. But of course, to even get in there, you’d need to get in with one of the other groups. And of course, there was another fairy trying to stop you.

Narratively, the multiplayer was about multiple changelings teaming up for a while. Ideally, few enough rough edges that a multiplayer session could fit into either player’s version of the story, without the story as a whole being consistent for everyone. But of course the tricky part is, what happens when the players do something inconsistent? We came up with this kind of model of influence on an NPC, so if one player started a quest, the other player could even convince them to betray the first player. The great part is, the NPC spy could work on the same system.

I think we put together about two thirds of what we had in mind when the internal deadline came, but those two thirds clearly had the juice. Even the guys that had been skeptical could see we had something.

And Violet, well, she really took to the work. She’d just started ADHD meds, but even so it was hard to believe how driven she was. Honestly, I got worried. She saw it as something like her big break, but I think having all of our colleagues hanging on to her ideas and turning them into models and gameplay was definitely doing something for her ego. Whatever the reason, it was like a dam had burst.

We didn’t have any voice acting at this stage, but our UI programmer Alice came up with quite a creative mode of presentation inspired by music videos: the text would kinetically burst on the screen in relevant places, in ways that didn’t require you to peer at a little text box. Like, a character would be yelling, and the words would ripple out of them, or at the edge of the frame if you weren’t looking their way. Very slick. Also worked pretty well in VR, which we’d decided to add to the game for some reason that now escapes me…

I helped her set up completely custom rendering because Bevy didn’t really have much in the way of UI support back then. I’m proud of the work, but honestly it was so tailor-made for the existing English dialogues that it became kind of a nightmare when we had to localise it for different scripts. We could get it working for Hangul, but something like Arabic would have been real trouble. I have some ideas for how we could have done it, though…

Ah, listen to me. The couple of years we worked on TRISMEGISTUS were, without any question, the best time I ever had in game development. Nothing ever came close. Until the Project, anyway…

“She seems to like it in there.”

Violet and I were at my desk, now cluttered with a few months’ detritus, mostly lots of equations and sketches that wandered all higgledy-piggledy across the sheets, seizing every available corner with not even a facsimile of organisation. It seemed fitting, somehow.

On the screens stood the forest where we’d been putting new players, and at the centre of it, Maggie, sleeping soundly in the nook of a tree. There’s something comforting about a nature scene, especially in a game that is so full of uncanny body horror. By this point, maybe three or four areas of the game had been updated to our new system and more or less fleshed out. Our full-time playtesters had taken up residence in various parts of the world. Maggie, though, seemed happy enough in the forest.

I had gone in to greet her, and a few times after. Creating a whole new form of embodiment probably wasn’t anyone’s first feature priority, but I’d argued it would be a good way to get to grips with the game’s systems, since it would have to touch pretty much everything. Really, though, I wanted to do it for Maggie. Seven years ago she’d made an irrevocable decision that had put her here, more or less indefinitely. Least I could do was let her be a dog…

Violet reached out, to lay her hand on mine. “Most players do. We’re not too terrible at this.”

“Yeah…” I turned to Violet. “How many are in there now?”

“Uh, I haven’t checked in a minute, but I think we’re up to about 150, give or take?”

“Hmm. And there’s a lot more still to go in?”

“Yeah, I can look it up if you want…”

“That’s OK. I’m just thinking, does this, you know, add up?”

“How’d you mean?” I was sure there was a note of anxiety in her voice now.

“Like, you’ve got some number of coma patients from the hospital, but like, how many can there actually be? And then, there’s the suicide rescue route. If you wanna call it that. But how many trans people actually are there dying that way? And then, multiply that by the fraction who get contacted by this programme, and decide to go along with it…”

Violet was silent, watching me. Like she knew the answer but wanted me to finish the thought.

“And, I mean, I don’t know why they didn’t tell me you were in here, since I’m supposed to be your next of kin. But most people in a hospital are gonna have family and such, right? If they suddenly disappear one day, someone’s going to start sniffing around and asking questions. Even if you pretend they died, they’re gonna want the body. There can’t be that many unaccounted-for coma patients in the world. Especially since, it’s not like this operation can help everyone right?”

“Yeah.” Violet said. “You’re not wrong, Indigo. There’s something fishy about it. I mean, I talk to most people in there, and I’ve had a look over the patient database, been very naughty and gone sniffing around for social media, and for a lot of people I just can’t find any sort of footprint.”

“Huh.” I thought for a moment. “Do you think they’ve been shipped in from Korea or somewhere? Something to do with Su-Ni and her family?”

“There’s definitely a few people from Korea. Actually, I think that’s kind of the story behind this place, someone in Su-Ni’s family was in a vegetative state so they decided fuck it, we’re gonna figure out how to cold-start brains with science and just straight-up built a world-class neurology lab. Then later Su-Ni comes along and I convince her to make it into a model-train version of The Matrix.”

“Huh. Wow. I guess that tracks. But from the sounds of things, not very many people?”

“Yeah, like, less than ten total.” Violet counted on her fingers. “Yeah, I think eight. Nine if I’m forgetting someone.”

“And we know there’s at least a couple people from around Glasgow in here. Do they go further afield, like, if they’re doing the whole UK, maybe it adds up?”

“It would blow their cover sooner or later, right? Like, if someone’s feeling depressed and suicidal and then this weird agent showed up like ‘do you wanna sell your body to neuroscience instead’. Someone would definitely blab about it.” Violet shook her head. “Like, I told you what they told me. I don’t really know how it went down.”

“Then do you think they’re just, like, kidnapping people? Drug them and tell them they consented later?”

“If they are, nobody’s ever told me. But I haven’t really asked many people about the time before, because I assume they’d rather forget. I’ve done a handful of inductions, but only Glasgow people. … It’s possible, I guess.”

We sat with this disturbing thought for a minute. On the screen, Maggie’s avatar got up and stretched. Or would it be more accurate to say her body, in the world she now inhabited..?

“Say, why didn’t they build this lab in Korea, anyway?”

“I think there is a lab in Korea. But it’s, you know, a regular old neuroscience lab that is very keen not to be Hwang Affair 2. This is the weird cadet branch. But definitely some of the surgeons at this place trained over there.”

“That must be a hell of a pitch. ‘Do you want to go to a faraway country, whose language you don’t speak, to do illegal research on putting people in a videogame.’” At this point, I realised that, over the few months I’d been at this place, I had yet to meet anyone from the surgery team.

“Ha. You’d have to ask them why they do it. Maybe they filter the guys at the other lab to see who’s got a sorta ‘mad scientist’ personality type…”

On the screen, Maggie made the gesture we’d set up to request admin attention. A notification pinged on my phone. I typed “be there in a sec” and the words appeared on a flat speech bubble in the world near her. None of the fancy kinetic text stuff from the original game just yet. But at least I didn’t have to manually instantiate a text object and drag it into position, as had been the case when I’d joined the company…

“Looks like I’m needed.” I said.

“Heh, I think you’re doing my job now…”

“I’ll be back to programming later, don’t worry. But it’s Maggie…”

“No, I get it. Go. I’ll be here.”

To go ‘inside’, without the surgery, could be quite a cumbersome affair. After the first few times, I had given up on wearing the haptic suit. I went into the VR room—a large open space containing a pile of beanbags which could be arranged into some facsimile of the ingame scenery, to avoid breaking immersion too much for the players inside by casually walking through a wall—and adjusted the headset strap to my head.

The tech had not advanced much since the late 2020s when I’d last done VR dev. I remember VR dying with more of a whimper than anything, the last-gasp hardware foundering on the hardware-price crisis that preceded the AI crash, and after that, the tech world was in such shambles that nobody would spare a second glance for VR. So, they worked much the same as ever: two screens mounted behind lenses, and a bank of cameras up front keeping track of your position in space. The diehard hobbyists had continued to work on comfort, and they’d gotten a lot better on that front, but I wasn’t in a hurry to stay in there too long.

The forest formed itself around me. By now, I’d ironed out a lot of the uncanny rendering problems that had plagued it at first. Even then, there was still something magical about stepping into a world I had assembled from bits and pieces plucked from the Platonic realm. I could tell you every rendering operation that brought these trees to my eyes, every stupid little hack and shortcut that I’d done to make it fast enough to work, and yet, my brain was perfectly happy to believe that there were solid, tangible trees… and a solid, tangible dog girl pacing on all fours across the clearing.

I kicked a beanbag into position to be a tree root, and settled down. “Hey!”

Maggie’s ears pricked up—that had taken a lot of work, but it seemed her brain was able to neuroplasticity its way into controlling virtual ears—and she trotted over.

“This has been really amazing! I don’t know how it’s possible.”

“Thanks Maggie.” There were so many things I wanted to say, and none of them seemed right. “That really means a lot.”

She curled up against me. I couldn’t feel her weight—even the haptic feedback suit provided only a vague approximation, stiffening or rumbling. But I scratched behind her ears and she closed her eyes appreciatively.

After a while, though, she opened her eyes again. Sat up in more of a human pose than a dog pose.

“So… how do I log out?”

Fuck!

“Ah, well.” I said, trying not to panic as I prepared to tell this poor girl she was a prisoner. “Right now? …I’m afraid you can’t.”

I watched her, anxiously awaiting her reaction. How the fuck could I explain this? But she lay down and rested in my lap again.

“That’s a shame. I feel so dumb, Indigo. I want to see everyone again…”

“I, um.” I shouldn’t make promises we couldn’t keep. “There’s probably some way we could make it happen with, like, robots or something…”

“Couldn’t you just connect me to the internet?”

I knew immediately there was absolutely no technical reason we couldn’t. I could probably whip up a basic browser window in a week. But, of course, if we started doing that, it would put the whole security of the operation in question…

“I’ll ask.” I said. “It’s, um, not my department.”

“Thanks Indigo.” At least, if nothing else, she seemed too sleepy to be seriously depressed. “You’re a real one, you know…”

“Yeah, I get it, but uh…” Violet looked as embarassed by all this as I was feeling. “I mean, she’s not the first to ask. And right now, the policy is no. Maybe with a lot of coaching to get her story straight we could make it happen.”

“So she’s a prisoner who can’t even write letters.”

“Come on, Indigo. If it wasn’t for this she’d be dead.”

“Fucking hell…” I could feel a really bad headache coming on. “This is a house of cards, right? Like, I don’t even know how it lasted this long. If even a whiff of it could get the government cracking down on us. I don’t know what to do about it, but…”

“Ms. Indigo, Ms. Violet. Are you two all right?” Su-Ni appeared around the corner, Heather behind her. We must have been speaking quite loudly. Today, my boss was wearing a red-accented ensemble with thigh-high boots and epaulettes. I had gotten so used to this that I honestly just sort of found myself thinking sick outfit again, boss. Another few months here and I’d be dressing up the same…

“Uh, hey.” I said. “One of the patients wants an internet client. Violet was telling me why we can’t do that…”

“You’re talking about Ms. Magenta, correct?” I had to nod. Su-Ni smiled, sympathetically. “I know you care a lot for her. I don’t think it’s out of the question. But as I overheard Ms. Violet saying, we’d need to address the subject of cover stories…”

“You’re prepared to take that risk?” I was honestly surprised.

“I assure you, Indigo.” Su-Ni leaned against my desk, still speaking warmly in a way I didn’t trust. “The risk isn’t quite as great as you think. Our organisation is not without friends, in both the current administration and the opposition. Even the press. It’s a matter, most of all, of plausible deniability. I don’t mind a few internet rumours that nobody would believe.”

I gritted my teeth. “That raises a lot of questions. You never mentioned a government connection.”

“It’s not a simply bribery, if that’s what you’re thinking. They stand to benefit.”

I felt sick. “Wait. Don’t tell me this is military.” If it was, well, I’d have to do something, obviously, and find a way to do that without getting black-bagged, and… “Or, you know, if they’re planning to put prisoners or migrants in this.”

“You have a remarkable imagination, Ms. Indigo, but I assure you I haven’t duped you here for some malevolent design. Our goal, and our supporters’ goal, is only to perfect the surgery and develop the virtual worlds it opens up. Surely you can see why people would want such a technology for positive reasons?”

“They want to come join our playground, then?”

“That is what we make, isn’t it? Games. Have you ever had the luxury to choose who plays them?”

“I guess so. Egh.” I shook my head, hard, as if trying to purge the malaise settling over me, imagining some wretched politician settling down in my virtual garden alongside the people they’d pushed there. “Not exactly the target audience I thought we had in mind…”

“It is enough that they believe they are, isn’t it? If this allows us to complete the work.”

The work. Or did she say it with a special emphasis, like a capital W?

“Anyway. Ms. Indigo, you are a kind person. I understand why you have misgivings. But we are not building a prison. You can tell Ms. Magenta that we will set her up with the internet soon.”

“Well…” Damn! “Thank you. I’ll get to work on that right away…”

“Hold on, now. I think Ms. Heather wanted a word with you!” Su-Ni gave me a vaguely maternal smile, and drifted away.