Undefined Behaviour ch3 [draft 0.0.5]

Chapter::Entscheidungsproblem

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 some new people…

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 cream 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 for my colleagues. And I went to argue for a narrative game as our next project.

Glasgow was, I’ll admit, not exactly known for its gamedev scene. It’s sooort of a techy city, like you had all the fintech companies in the centre, big banks drawn by the smell of lower-than-average wages to find new developers to bleed out for the money machine. I have terribly positive feelings about that. And don’t get me fucking started on the arms companies.

But as far as game dev… well, an hour away in Edinburgh, you’ve got a Rockstar office, at the time still embroiled in that union-busting controversy. Back here, I think there was also an animation studio which made pre-rendered trailers and the like for big games. There was another studio making a Silent Hill spinoff, which 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.

So the studio I worked for was that kind of small scale. But we had some really technical people. Not all 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’re on a bench by the duck pond in Queen’s Park. Today, that pool is a grey panel of clouds flecked with wind, the oddly angular American sculpture still wobbling, half-broken, at the centre. Far outnumbering ducks is the pigeon brigade, each of its soldiers eyeing up suspicious park-goers who might be hiding a handful of bread or peanuts.

They’ll actually jump right up on your hand with the right enticement. It’s very cute.

Violet, for her part, is locked in. Alternately scribbling in her notebook or sucking on the end of the pencil as her gaze bores its way into the asthenosphere.

I’m saying “Hey, you wanna feed these little fucks?” Then, catching her expression at last, I start to worry. “Damn, Violet, are you OK?”

She pouts, and flops against me, causing my handful of peanuts to rattle off and incite a mutiny in the pigeon corps. I hug her as well as I can. It’s coming into spring, but it’s still pretty damn cold, and we both have a lot of layers.

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

“Is this for the game?”

She groans. “I mean, 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 twists 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 turns 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.”

“Deal.” Smile achieved.

“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 say, poking her in the ribs.

“Sure, let’s say they’re Jewish.”

I laugh. “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 lean down to kiss the top of Violet’s head. “But I mean, you know I’m not very good at being Jewish, right?”

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

“Eh, well, it’s complicated.” I wonder 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 closes 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 say. “I mean I’d say ask people to give it a look over? Don’t just try and, I don’t know, keep writing it different ways til you git gud at not doing antisemitism?”

She snorts. “Yeah, fair point. But then, I dunno, let’s say we have another category, let’s say there’s a gay leather guy in his 50s or something. Or, I dunno, a working-class taxi driver from Pakistan. Hell, maybe they’re the same guy. But 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 say. “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 sighs, and taps the 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 giggles. “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…” Agh, I’d better reciprocate. “Ehh… you wanna hear about my family shit? Fucked up or otherwise.”

“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. So I wasn’t exactly sorry to see them go. But yeah, like, my mum is actually a rabbi, and a really fucking awesome one, like, you know all the jokes about how you ask three rabbis a question and get five answers, she is the embodiment of that. She can give you all five without even having to think about it. Just the incredibly nerdy side of Judaism, where you’re just constantly rules-lawyering God and he’s like, haha, you got me, well played.”

“Damn!”

“So you can imagine how much I was into that. I’d bring her all these scifi thought experiments about vampires and stuff and she’d always give me a thought-out answer, it was great.”

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

“Yeah?” I scratch the back of her neck.

“Yeah.” Violet leanes into the scritches, closing her eyes. “Mmm. 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 pull her into as tight a hug as I can. Tension, all through her shoulders.

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

“Mmm.” I say. “I mean, well. After I got into my teens and started transing, which was also when all the family shit went down… I started learning a lot about Palestinian history, right? I became, like, a real firebrand about it. And I also got into other weird online ideologies, the rats and all that. So I kind of couldn’t get into religion anymore, too many stupid arguments with people. But I guess when she figured out what a dorky anarchist her kid was, my mum would tell me a lot about the Jewish Bund and all that. The whole radical, anti-Zionist tradition… So, it took me a while, I kind of needed a time out, but eventually 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.”

“Your mum sounds kind of awesome, honestly.”

“Yeah… I mean, she can be a bit intense. But she’s legit.”

Violet nuzzles against my shoulder. “So, do you like, believe in God now? …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 gets 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. Being part of all that. Same reason I’m into programming. Whether or not God is really real is kinda besides the point. Don’t tell HaShem I said that, though.”

“Yeah… I guess so.” No reaction to my dumb joke.

I fidget. “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, what the real answers are and how we know. And 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 familiar. ‘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…” She takes a deep breath. “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.”

“She seems to like it in there.”

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

On the screens stands 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 have been updated to our new system and more or less fleshed out. Our full-time playtesters have taken up residence in various parts of the world. Maggie, though, seems 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 reaches out, wiggles her fingers into mine. “Most players do. We’re not too terrible at this.”

“Yeah…” I turn 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 is silent, watching me. Like she knows the answer but wants 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, and if not me, well, one of your dads should’ve gotten the memo. 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 says. “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 try to make it add up. “Do you think they’ve been shipped in from Korea or somewhere? Something to do with Su-ni and her family?”

Su-ni’s office. Nineteen days after I joined the company. She’s been asking to talk to me for a while, and I’ve run out of excuses. I don’t know what I’m expecting, really. An alchemist’s workshop full of cobwebbed tomes, candles dribbling onto each alembic? A clean, perfect corpo office with some plastic trees? Lain’s nest of wires? An actual UFO?

But no: it’s a regular (if cluttered) office for the most part, except for big a window into the hall of ‘players’. The floor is inlaid with a geometric figure—but not some traditional magic circle like I half-expected from the Key of Solomon or whatever. No, of course it’s from Trismegistus. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?

“You recognise it, Ms. Indigo.” Su-ni is standing behind four or five different monitors on her desk, whatever’s on them casting all sorts of colours across her white costume.

“Well, yeah. I programmed that thing in fucking Typst.”

“Oh, wonderful. I had wondered…” She steps out from behind the monitors, and finds an obnoxiously stylish way to lean against the desk.

“I mean, I can send you 500 others like it. And the program that generates them, if you like this kind of thing.”

“But you chose this one.”

“Yeah, I mean, it looked the best. No particularly deep reason.”

“Not one that you could perceive, perhaps. Nevertheless, you are looking at a spell that worked.”

I grimace. “A spell to do what? I think we used this in, what, the alchemist HQ?”

“Don’t play dumb, Ms. Indigo. It’s not becoming.”

“OK.” I sigh. “Yes, I know what it represents. More or less, I mean. Structure-formation. A gathering of forces. Creating the seed of a homunculus, imposing will into the formless quintessence. Umm, also some Deleuzian thing about the body without organs but I never really understood that bit. There’s a quest in the last act where the rebel homunculi ask you to steal it for them. Are you trying to say that’s not just some shit Violet made up?”

“It absolutely is some shit Violet made up.” I’m taken aback as she drops, abruptly, the arch wizard-CEO act and starts pacing rapidly around the room. Eyes fixed on me. “It is also an effective piece of magic. It created this place.”

“That seems, uh…” Barking mad. “Like perhaps a misattribution?”

“Oh, it is just one factor among many. Like any program, it is a tool to be used until it is discarded.”

“It’s a program, now?”

“Of a sort. Programs and spells are the same thing. This one runs on wetware.”

“You have absolutely lost me.”

She stops, face to face with me suddenly. “Everyone who played Trismegistus knows what this sigil means. When they see it, it brings their mind to the goal. Focuses their thoughts. The rest is recursive elaboration.”

“You’re saying this little drawing made everyone come back and work on the game?”

“The drawing itself is immaterial. It’s what it represents. You armed it, with… you know, chaos magic sigils in your corner of the world, bujeok in mine, all kinds of anime and games with magic circles… anything to prime the idea that writing can be magic. And then you fired it, by creating Trismegistus.”

She steps back, holding my gaze.

“Of course, we can’t forget your preferred form of sorcery, Indigo.”

“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 rescues me, and then I convince her to make it into a model-train version of The Matrix.”

“Huh. Wow. I mean that’s insane but it sorta makes sense. From the sounds of things, not very many people from there?”

“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?”

Violet sits in silence for a moment. “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 shakes her head. “Like, I told you what Su-ni 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 their 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 sit with this for a minute. On the screen, Maggie’s avatar gets up and stretches. Or would it be more accurate to say her body, in the world she now inhabits..?

“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.’”

“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 makes the gesture we’d set up to request admin attention. A notification pings on my phone. I type “be there in a sec” and the words appear 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 don’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.”

“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.”

I shake my head. “I don’t know that I have a preferred form of sorcery, Su-ni. Unless you count, like, D&D shit.”

“Really? You’ve never asserted your will on the world by building up a system of symbols?”

“Oh, you’re saying… programming?”

“Precisely! Yes! You get it. Recursion, self-reference, Turing tarpits and all that. The marvellous Lambda Calculus. The greatest form of sorcery invented since DNA transcription, and really, it’s kind of the same thing. Endlessly generative.”

This woman is employing me. And she’s wrapped up so many others in this. I can’t just tell her she’s full of shit.

“You’re full of shit.”

She looks delighted at this response. “Go on.”

“Programming isn’t magic. It’s fiddly, bastard-hard engineering. Programmers just like to pretend we’re wizards because it’s the only way for awful nerds to feel good about what we’ve done to the world.”

Su-ni nods.

She takes a surprisingly deep breath.

“Then let me tell you one thing, Indigo. I am full of shit. What did Violet say? That I’m some kind of chaebol heiress?”

“Yeah, I mean, she didn’t seem sure, but…”

“That’s a little spell. You want a Korean to come off all powerful and mysterious? Invoke the chaebol. Easy. Of course, you have to be eccentric enough to play the part.”

“Wait, so who’s…”

“Oh, we are ripping off the chaebol. And both sides of the war… the military will throw money at anything. Same as we’re ripping off the Brits, China, and three of the American blocs. At least one esoteric society, too. As for my parents… well-off, but not chaebol well-off. To be very frank, I haven’t spoken to them in decades, they have no idea I’m mixed up in all this, and I intend to keep it that way.”

“Fuck me. So what’s true? Are you actually PURPLE, the vtuber?”

“Yeah, that part’s true.” She reaches out, and oh, her hand is on my face, taking a strand of hair..? “Where do you think I learned magic? Tell people a beautiful enough lie, and you can make them do anything.”

I take a step back.

“So, OK, let me see if I get this straight. You’re trying to… use magic from a videogame, which you absolutely agree is some bullshit I personally made up with my girlfriend, to uh… hyperstition a virtual world for trans people into existence? That’s what this is about?”

She lowers her hand. “Yeah. I mean, more or less.”

“And it’s working!?”

A clear evening in Kelvingrove Park, painfully cold. Stargazing, at least in principle. Not many stars have been gazed at.

Violet has devised a story.

“It’s kind of a cold war between the two groups of the fae. The Seelie and Unseelie Court are like the nationalists and the communists, or the cavaliers and roundheads. And, well, 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 say. I nuzzle up to her on the foam mats, bumping my head on her binoculars. “I’m liking this so far…”

“I mean, 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 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 laughs the awkward laugh of the autistic person who’s gone too deep, and I get 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.”

She rolls to face me, her breath misting between us. “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 take 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 runs 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 regard her, the awkward set in her shoulders even as she laughs at my dumb joke. “It’s impossible to do that though, right? Like, to have a fictional world as complex as the real one.”

“Yeah.” Violet said. “The trick is to hint at it. Like, you meet a guy, and that’s an instance of a type of guy there might be, so you imagine there are other guys like that going around.”

“Kind of like Monte-Carlo sampling, now I think of it…”

How many people are in this organisation? How many has Su-ni told what she just told me? I am starting to feel like the early stages of an acid trip, gravity giving way and the symbolic order retreating into the shadows.

“Would you like a seat, Indigo?” Su-ni has retreated for a moment, and now she’s bringing me her desk chair, white and… embroidered? Who embroiders a desk chair? Well, I sit on it anyway.

“If any of that is true… how can you believe it can last? Surely that’s just a very long list of people who think this place belongs to their enemies? Like, no way you can keep all the lies consistent, right?”

Putting me on a chair has left me looking up at Su-ni. “How much have you been paying attention to the world in the last few years, Indigo?” she says, quietly now. “Do you read the news?”

“Ha. What do you think? I keep up with the big stuff but it’s just endless AI-generated shit, nano-optimised to get under your skin.”

“Well, quite. Do you think it’s any better for the ones at the top? That are running the wars and all that?”

“You mean…”

“I mean, Indigo, nobody has any clue what’s going on out there anymore. We are deep in the time of monsters. Out there is a complex system beyond human understanding. In here, we’re midwifing the new world.” She claps her hands together. “Now, do you know what I mean when I say ‘weird machine’?”

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 make your body forget what it’s supposed to be, so you turn 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…

Violet, meanwhile, set about 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 people, so 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.

Well, you, the sneaky fairy spy, aren’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’s another fairy trying to stop you.

“Oh.” I have to think for a minute as I try to make sense of Su-ni’s question. “A weird machine, isn’t that like… when a hacker finds enough functions exposed by some program acting out of bounds that they can build a whole Turing-complete system, right? You find enough random bits of instructions you can jump to, to do operations you want, and… it’s basically a specialist programming language at that point. You take over the machine.”

“Yes. So, the metaphor?”

“You’re hacking… society? Like, building ROP-chains out of primitives and shit?”

“Yes.”

“There’s no way anything is predictable or consistent enough to pull that off.”

“Well, it’s nothing as complicated as all that really. That’s just a helpful metaphor. Mostly, we steer attention, get a little creative accounting through the cracks in a bloated military budget, trade legitimacy and authority upwards, and distract whoever we need to look the other way.”

“It sounds like a very… convoluted conspiracy. How can you trust everyone who’s involved in this? Like, what if I went straight to the press?”

“Would you?”

“Obviously not. But someone…”

“If I misjudge someone, and they try to pull something like that, we’ll deal with it as appropriate. Hasn’t happened yet.” She wiggles her fingers. “Magic.”

Queen’s Park, the pigeons.

“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 cackles. “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 lean down and kiss her. “I’m glad I get to see the whole Violet.” She reaches up to kiss me back. Smiles, 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 laugh awkwardly. It’s my pattern. Until I know the rules I’m stuck in that sort of place of vulnerability, like back in the early-transition days. I have to know the dynamics, have to know what role to play… But I don’t know how to say that. “I trust you.”

“Means a lot.”

“You dork.”

TRISMEGISTUS took shape in waves.

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.

We chose 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. Monster Hunter style.

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 needing to be consistent for everyone.

But what happens when the players do something inconsistent? We cooked up an NPC influence system, so if one player started a quest, the other player could try to convince them to betray the first player. The great part is, the NPC spy could use the same system.

It didn’t entirely make sense, but it made enough sense to seem convincing. Players are used to papering over such things, after all.

The internal deadline came with two thirds completed, 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.

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 dialogue 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 Su-ni’s project, anyway…

“So, I’ve told you my secret.” Su-ni seems almost… anxious. Another act?

“You convinced all these people that this will work?”

“For the most part, no. Most of them are content with what they know.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

Su-ni regards me without speaking.

“Violet?”

She nods. “‘Drop the act, she deserves to know you properly’ were her words, I think.”

Oh, damn. “How did you two meet? The rehab centre?”

“I knew her online, from some trans thing. Well before her accident. If you’re wondering why a Korean vtuber would suddenly pick up your game… well, she’s why.” She shrugs.

I digest this for a moment. A painful premonition… “The accident, is that another lie?”

“No. No, that’s basically all true. She was in a coma, we did help her out of it.”

“How did you find out what happened?”

“Would you believe me if I said a summoning spell?”

“Not remotely.”

She folds her arms with a half-smile. “Then I’ll just say I had to pull a lot of strings.”

“Come on!”

“Indigo… I haven’t told her the full story. At some point I’ll have to. But it involved her family. And she said she’s not ready. So, I’m going to have to leave it at that.”

“Oh, fuck me. You mean that cult from the states?”

“The same.”

“OK. Well.”

“Getting her to our rehab centre was almost harder than the experimental neurosurgery.” She sighs heavily, suddenly more tired than I’ve ever seen her. “I feel like I’ve told you too much at once. I know this is a lot.”

“Well.” I look up at my increasingly confusing… boss? Metamour, perhaps? Spymaster, for the secret mycorrhizal trans nation? “Thanks for the talk, I guess?”

“Drop by any time, Indigo.”

PaddingByte::Amaranth

The maniacs actually did it. They did it, and now you’re here. Inhabiting some kind of slimegirl body, which seemed like the coolest option. It turns out slimes can sorta fly in this world, so that’s even better.

You’re in the factory. It’s a weird sort of factory, apparently built out of stacked mannequins and random bits of detritus, all made into stone. And industrial zones still kinda rule, even in this new life. Seems a little pointless to have factories if nobody actually makes anything here, not in a way that matters. But you liked this area in the game, and here you are again, where it’s benefitted from a decade of Indigo’s obsession with graphics programming.

You’ve watched it change over the last few weeks: a wall replaced with something more detailed, motes of dirt abruptly present in the air, the lighting somehow getting softer. You asked her for a camera and you got one. Now, your urbex photos float in midair, stacked several deep. She offered a screen, or simulated paper, but you told her not to worry about it.

A world where anything can be created with a thought. Anything except someone to talk to.

Back to Scurries, then.

The Scurrier’s Market was at one point the whole of New Trismegistus (you’re the only person who calls it that). It’s still the main place the players make their home. The one inhabited village of this bold colony into mathematical space.

The inhabitants are a varied bunch. Most of them speak English, with a variety of accents, but a certain jargon has been developing among the players.

One little group declared a library in one of the larger mushrooms, and you find yourself going there more often than not. Three levels, each taking you further from the world. On the top floor there’s a search terminal, which lets you type in the title of just about any book written before 2032, and have a copy miraculously appear beside you on the shelf from a libgen dump somewhere. But that’s the ‘outerworld’ section. The middle section has all the lorebooks from the original game, of course each one just a fragmentary passage in Violet’s instantly recognisable style; the ground floor houses the ‘New Literature of TRISMEGISTUS’.

There are players here. Some are typing at typewriters that for inexplicable reasons each contain a bubbling alembic; others have learned to use the neural interface to stream words out directly, and they sit there in apparent meditation as a book fills itself out. The New Literature is for now maybe five or six authors, but they do not lack enthusiasm.

You’re not here for the New Literature, though.

Helio is sitting in the middle layer, lorebook room, on an armchair which looks incongruously low-poly—one of the few assets spared the recent updates. You kind of miss the old style. It’s instantiated as a homunculus; this one made out of hammered iron, except for its hands and feet, sackcloth poking out from holes in the shell.

“Sup, Amar.”

“Hey hey…” You find an identical armchair to sit on. Despite its appearance, it feels perfectly soft. No doubt one of those nerds from the game company ‘upstairs’ could tell you why.

“Umm. Good photos?”

“Yeah… I think I’m doing some pretty good stuff with composition.” You feel humoured, but it’s sweet of Helio to take an interest. A gesture in the air summons a perfectly flat rectangle with your photo gallery, and Heliotrope flips through them for a minute, before waving it away like smoke.

“Nice.”

“Thanks.”

“I liked the old ones especially. More surreal. Kinda makes you feel like this place was better when they weren’t trying so hard…”

“I guess. I mean, I like some of the stuff they’re doing.”

“Sure. But like, the old one had… you know. It had a style.”

“I mean, yeah. A lot of the new look’s kind of… blandly photorealistic, right?” You itch at your scalp. Doesn’t help. Probably a bug you have to report. “You know, I was kind of getting tired of seeing the same textures everywhere.”

“Mm.” Helio says. “Ugh. Why are we here, anyway?”

“I mean. I kinda thought we both… you know. Did it.”

It chuckles. “No, I mean. Why this fucking game? I thought, you know, I’d be free of all that garbage. Indigo and all her drama.”

“I wouldn’t know. I thought she was pretty chill.”

“I mean, she… agh. Like. I mean this was all probably years ago, right? And like she’s literally god now. I don’t want to dredge all that up. If she’s chill now that’s great. I just want to fucking leave!”

“Have you asked?”

“Oh, yeah, I’ve asked. They’re working on it. Or, someone has to ask someone to ask someone and then they never get back. Evasive shit like that.”

You feel hollow; forlornness that you don’t think a slime body can really express. “You really wanna go back there? I found some newspapers and shit upstairs, it didn’t get better.”

“I mean. Speak for yourself. I made a really fucking stupid mistake. I’ve missed years of my life, but they… they brought me back, right? So maybe I should be relieved, grateful even. I get another go. But… I feel like a prisoner.”

“Well, there’s fuck all to do, right? Even if they’ve made it all very pretty.”

“Yeah.”

You lapse into silence for a minute or two.

“You know, I saw Maggie the other day?” Helio says. “She’s like, an actual doggirl.”

“No fucking way.”

“So I mean if you want to be a dog it’s great apparently, go nuts in the woods. But like… I don’t know.”

“Yeah.” Your gaze wanders along the bookshelves. “Ha. You know, I hear they got sex working recently?”

“No thanks.”

“No, I wasn’t… I just mean, they’re working on stuff like that, I guess. Stuff to make you feel it more. There’s a lot of people roleplaying, taking up jobs from the game world.”

“Is that what you wanna do, roleplay a fake job?”

“Not really. I mean, I had a photo studio for a minute.”

“How’d that go?”

“Felt completely phony. Went back to the urbex thing after two days.”

“So…”

You look at Heliotrope, your gloopy slime body and its metal one, each on your low poly chairs. “I want to do something that actually matters. Where people care if I do it well.”

“Yeah.” Heliotrope crunches its segmented iron jaw. “Feels like I’m a zoo animal. Weird Transsexual #41. What are they keeping us around for?”

You’re back in the factory. You can still remember the first time you played that prototype, on Indigo’s sticker-encrusted laptop. It was pretty sick, then. Enough to imagine a whole world beyond.

Oh, here’s a wall panel with the old textures. One little fragment of the past, buried here as the world is remade. That’ll make for a pretty good shot.

You manifest the camera, which resembles a lovely old analogue film camera and doesn’t work like one at all, and click the shutter.

And then you look at your photo, frowning. The itch on your scalp is worse.

There’s a bright purple pixel in the corner. That doesn’t seem right.

On your hands and knees, you poke your fingers around. There… right where the old texture meets the new one. The new one juts forwards, the old one is flat… and in between, a tiny little gap. You press your face up to it. Emptiness, filled with trails of things you’ve just seen.

Vertiginous. Or it should be. You’ve not felt motion sick since you got here…

It’s cute, this little mousehole out of bounds. You point the camera through it, and click away. Mostly it comes out purple.

Ha, well, slime can squeeze through small holes, can’t it?

Don’t you want to know what’s down there?

FanWiki::Atlantis

Atlantis is a city and hub area. It can normally be accessed only after completing “Oberon’s Judgement” on a Fae playthrough, or “Mercy to Poets” on a Traitor playthrough.

An underwater city which has been reclaimed by specialist homunculi, Atlantis is divided into three main areas. From the Sour Undergarden, it is possible to reach the Bathyal Colony and the Excavators’ Warrens. These both connect to the Unterkeep, but the player must win favour with the Garrulous Unterbaron or find a secret entrance to enter this area. (See Questlines: Atlantis.)

Atlantean events

See Events: Bathyal Colony, Events: Excavator’s Warrens, Events: Unterkeep, Events: Deluge.

Money

For a Fae-aligned player, the Gargoyle Soothsayer double-or-nothing game in the Procession of Fools event is the fastest way to get money in Atlantis, provided the player has acquired some Atlantean Bones to manipulate luck.

A Traitor player can attempt to bluff Fae alignment with the Soothsayer. Otherwise, joining the Free Homunculi gives the lucrative recurring Knaves at Work event.

Influence

The Injured Cat-Sìth event is a good source of Blackmail Material. Alms and Arms can be used to gain reputation with the local Free Homunculi. The Alchemists have a limited presence in Atlantis itself, but Atlantean Bones can be traded at the Southern Atelier for a small amount of reputation.

Permanent Atlantean NPCs

Garrulous Unterbaron

The human ruler of Atlantis, secret friend of the Free Homunculi, a major questgiver and holder of the area’s Seal. He has been smuggling weapons and quintessence. The player has the choice of gaining his trust by assisting with the excavations, or infiltrating his palace. The Unterbaron is a sincere believer in the doctrine of Homunculisation and, once his trust is gained, will eagerly argue the matter with the player.

Gwyn ap Nudd

The Seelie spymaster has just arrived in the city. This is the first chance to find out he is a double agent reporting to Titania.

On a Fae playthrough, he tasks the player with infiltrating the Unterbaron’s court. A Seelie-aligned player can infiltrate Gwyn’s sanctum and discover that he is a traitor; this evidence may be given to Secretary Mab for a reward. On the next visit to Atlantis, a cat-sìth squad will move to attack Gwyn, although he is likely to escape without the player’s assistance.

On a Traitor playthrough, his agents oppose and attack the player in various missions. Gwyn is usually under an Invisibility spell and moves around the city frequently. The easiest way to find him is with a cat-sìth companion, but he is a very difficult enemy at this stage in the game.

Providence of Horses

A homunculus in the Bathyal Colony who acts as a doctor. Providence teaches several spells in return for treating damaged homunculi. They can also be bribed to receive Homunculus Parts, but each time the player does this there is an increasing chance of discovery, which will incur a high level of hostility from the Free Homunculi, and Providence will be banished from Atlantis.

Maximilia

The leader of the Free Homunculi group in Atlantis. Standoffish, but if the player brings a letter of recommendation from another Free Homunculi cell, Maximilia will invite them to help with the Unterbaron’s smuggling operation. In the evening, she can be found playing cards in the Barrel. Deliberately losing to Maximilia is a fast way to gain standing with the Free Homunculi.

If the player possesses a Homunculocordion, they have the option to give or sell it to Maximilia. If so, she will occasionally be seen playing it.

Haruspinsor

A jelly alchemist who specialises in grafting living organs into homunculi. The player can donate their organs, which command a high price, but this inflicts a random, permanent Missing Organ status effect which has a small chance of being lethal.

Bountie

A homunculus encountered throughout the Excavators’ Warrens, who is researching the Atlantean civilisation. Notable for her long giraffe-like neck, large glasses and florid speaking style. If the player is courteous across multiple encounters, she will give information on the Atlantean weapon. (See: “Her Magnificence”).

Stola

A homunculus worker in the Excavators’ Warrens who is fascinated by doors. The player can tell them door-related facts for a very small reward.

Modulofinor

A human jellylike alchemist in the Excavator’s Warrens. The first time the player enters the Warrens, sie will be performing a Work of Disintegration. Subsequently, sie can be approached to provide cryptic comments, mostly on alchemical matters.

Porridge

A young jelly in the Warrens who has recently split, losing most of hir memories. Sie asks the player questions about the world, which they can answer truthfully or not. Answering all of Porridge’s questions incorrectly gives the ‘Miseducation’ achievement.

Catspaw Emissary

A Catspaw Villager in the Bathyal Colony, who wishes to petition the Unterbaron to stop excavations near the village. If the player gains the Baron’s trust, it is possible to help or deliberately deceive the Emissary. (See: “Her Magnificence”).

Puck

The Puck can be encountered in the Bathyal Colony during a real-world waning gibbous moon. (This is based on the system time, see Puck manipulation.)

Speedrun: Atlantis

On Speedrun: any%, Atlantis is accessed early by manipulating Mari Lwyd to grant water breathing, then diving from the Bleeding Cliffs. The player must swim directly downwards for at least 49 seconds to ensure they will respawn in the Bathyal Colony after drowning.

The player can then enter the Sour Undergarden from the back entrance, which will immediately trigger the fight with Ysbaddaden.

In earlier versions of the run, the Keep would be accessed by chaining Teleport Cancels starting from the church on the far side of the city. This was later superseded by the less reliable but faster Emissary Boost.