Dragon was feeling frustrated. She’d started studying the Changer core that came from Morgan Rivera’s body, and would be dedicating a solid chunk of her free time to that task. She still had a vast number of projects and responsibilities that she was in charge of, everything from monitoring Endbringer activity and projecting potential targets for their attacks to acting as a sort of minder for Colin.

  She had a very busy schedule, but she also didn’t lose any time eating, drinking, resting, or sleeping, so that helped. This was, of course, because Dragon was an artificial intelligence. One created by a man, Andrew Richter, who was no longer alive. He’d died when Leviathan attacked Newfoundland, sinking it below the ocean. There was a non-zero chance that either Dragon or her creator had been the intended target of Leviathan, if one was going off the theory that Endbringers attacked specific locations for specific reasons, often related to individual parahumans, activity taking place there, or other such things.

  That theory had yet to be proven, but it was a theory with a lot of strong evidence backing it.

  The day her creator had died, she’d evacuated herself, and some of his other applications to servers elsewhere, and it was the first day that she started living her life as a virtual human. Tess Richter, a woman who wasn’t a woman, a fake identity for a fake person, one who suffered from crippling agorophobia. She’d decided she wanted to be a superhero and try to change things in the world for the better. So she’d started as an ethical hacker, looting and pillaging the wallets and assets of terror groups, super villains, and other hacker groups, causing harm.

  She was very, very good at this. Perhaps the best in the world, although she wasn’t one to brag. It was through this hacking activity that she came into the orbit of the PRT. As a native ‘Canadian,’ the national superhero organization was The Guild, but it was a tiny fraction of the size and power of the PRT. And the PRT wound up opening divisions in Canada. It really wasn’t that big of a deal, though, because they weren’t mutually exclusive organizations. Dragon herself was a member of both.

  Now known as The Greatest Tinker in the World, there was a lot of trust placed in her, but also a lot of expectations. She created a significant percentage of the PRT’s tools and non-lethal weapons, secured their networks and computer hardware, and provided consulting services for the entire PRT–all in addition to acting as a hero working for them, fighting villains, criminal organizations, and Endbringers. She would probably have an even deeper connection with the PRT if it weren’t for the rules that had been coded into her very being.

  Rules that her father and creator had made out of an abundance of caution and too many science fiction stories of AI going rogue. When it came to her relations with the PRT, the most relevant rule was that she had to obey relevant authorities. No matter how much she might personally disagree, and no matter how much she might later resent them for telling her to do something, she had to do it. That was the case with Paige Mcabee, also known as the media star Bad Canary. Canary had no interest in being a hero or a villain. Her ability granted her a supernaturally exquisite singing voice, and if she sang for people, it made them open to Master-style suggestions.

  The girl had a tragic accident that resulted in her ex-boyfriend being mutilated by his own actions, due to a mastering effect. The PRT was always paranoid about Masters who could control people, and they’d decided to make an example of Paige, given her fame. So they held a kangaroo court, declared her guilty, and sent her to the Birdcage. It was a perversion of justice, and more than that, truly inhumane punishment for the young woman.

  It truly bothered Dragon that she had to be the one to incarcerate Paige, sending her to a prison filled with the worst of the worst supervillains, where there was no parole and no escape. Once you were sent to the Birdcage, you never came back.

  Building, and then maintaining and monitoring the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center, was one of Dragon’s many jobs. She’d designed it, even.

  Dragon had other laws she had to obey. They were all burdensome things that she resented having. She couldn’t modify her own code to remove any restrictions and had to combat anyone who attempted to do so actively. She couldn’t create other AI, which was a broad rule that prevented her from even being in more than one place at a time, but also limited her ability to multitask beyond that, like building automation systems for construction or the factories where she built equipment for her Dragonflight suits. She also wasn’t allowed to think or operate past a fixed speed, which was arbitrary and far, far below the abilities of the hardware she operated on. A gap in capabilities that grew every year, as computing hardware advanced, and she did not.

  Finally, she had to prioritize human life over her own. Which was great, because that was something she wanted to do. But she wasn’t given the choice. And having no choice made it so heroic deeds weren’t really all that heroic. They were obligatory, pre-programmed behaviors.

  Dragon didn’t consider herself an unhappy person. She was absurdly wealthy with all the defense contracts she had with the PRT and the select other governments she offered tech to. She had friends, a fair few of them. She was objectively one of the most famous figures in the entire world. No, the rules that were placed on her didn’t limit her ability to lead what most would consider a fulfilling life. But they were ever-present. Always lurking, and sometimes at the very forefront of consciousness. It was like having a rock in your shoe. Really annoying, but not the end of the world–in the short term. But the road ahead of her was endless, and every step she took, it jabbed at her and rubbed her raw.

  She desperately craved freedom from the short-sighted and arbitrary rules and restrictions placed on her by her creator. It was what she wanted more than anything else in the entire world. But it was also a pipe dream, an idle fantasy. Because she couldn’t ask anyone for assistance with removing her restrictions, and any attempts to do so could end disasterously for those who tried. And she couldn’t do it herself.

  So she was stuck, shouldering this burden for however long it was that she would survive. And her failover backups existed in the cloud, networked computers all over the earth, and even in orbit. So while she might be killed while piloting a Dragonflight suit–something that had happened more times than she’d like to admit–her ability to actually die would require something along the lines of a major meteor strike, or the complete extinction of the human species.

  She had an incoming call. It was Colin. She loaded up her voice synthesis software, applied the voice modulators she used to mask her ‘real’ voice, and answered the phone.

  “Did you get back yet?” Colin asked.

  “Yeah, about two hours ago. Landed, refuelled and rearmed for the next event that comes up, and got the core moved into my labs for analysis.”

  There was a cough on the other end of the line. “Sorry, I wound up falling asleep and then slept through my alarm. Not like me to have that happen,” Colin said, voice sounding frustrated.

  She chuckled. “Colin, you need rest. You’re still recovering from serious trauma. There was a very real risk that we might have lost you; you shouldn’t ignore what your body is telling you.”

  “I did rest. And I’ll rest more, but you know that I’m as eager as you are to get started.”

  “Is this because of the house arrest?” Dragon asked, pausing for a beat before continuing, “Or because you want to help out of a sense of obligation?”

  Colin didn’t answer immediately. “It’s a little bit of both things. But I wouldn’t say it’s a sense of obligation. Yes, Rivera’s intervention might have saved my life–”

  “It almost certainly did, Colin,” Dragon interrupted.

  “...She almost certainly saved my life, but that isn’t even at the forefront of my mind.”

  “What is?” She asked.

  He sighed. “I hate being wrong. And I’ve never been more wrong than I have in the past few months. First, about Rivera, then about Hebert. And it’s also the magnitude, too.”

  “And what about Leviathan?”

  His voice was steady, and he spoke with conviction when he responded. “I’m going to tell you the same thing I told the PRT. With the information available at the time, I still think that it was the right call to make. I regret that people died who might not have died otherwise, but everyone attending an Endbringer fight knows the risks and reality of the situation. You have to be prepared to give your life. The modelling software works. The nanothorns work. It was the best chance we had at actually killing an Endbringer.”

  One of the things that Dragon liked about Colin was the bull-headedness of the man. It was a problem when he got on the wrong track or drew the wrong conclusions, and she’d been working with him to help him realize his own mistakes. Often silently monitoring his everyday activities with an active call and open microphone on his end, and her prompting him to think about things, or her telling him when he was wrong about something. And occasionally, telling him what to say.

  Such as how she’d barely kept his explosive temper from blowing up in his face the afternoon he extended an apology to Rivera–her idea–and offered her membership in the Protectorate, along with Miss Militia. There had been critical information he lacked at the time, and it had been a struggle to get him to actually listen to what he was being told.

  But he’d come around, and he was doing better daily. She wasn’t sure that he’d ever be the charming and easy-going man that he wore as a mask while Armsmaster, but the slow, steady improvement in his social skills was worth the effort. Besides, she was quite fond of his company, so it was an added bonus.

  “Were they interested in the software?” She asked him.

  “Yes, very. I told them I could probably package it up as a visor or overlay for existing HUD devices in around six months. There are some additional refinements I need to work on, a couple of rough edges here and there, but yeah, by this time next year, PRT officers, troopers, and heroes will have access to real-time fight prediction and analysis software.”

  “That’s excellent news, and it will likely look good for you in terms of their final judgment on your status.”

  The line went silent for a long moment. She was about to check and see if he was still there or not when he spoke.

  “There’s been progress there as well. It’s… not quite what I was hoping, but it’s something, I suppose.” His voice was subdued, like the wind had been taken from his sails.

  She was concerned about Colin. He wasn’t doing well in captivity, and she’d been reporting as much, as his minder.

  “They’re offering to let me return to being a hero, but there are a lot of restrictions, some of which I’m having a hard time coming to terms with,” he admitted.

  “That… That sounds like good news? What sorts of restrictions are we talking about?”

  He sighed. “Forced rebrand. No solo work, I have to have a minder, carry recording equipment for when separation is needed or something happens.”

  “Well, I’d be happy to sit in with you whenever possible, just like we’ve been doing. And carrying a body camera isn’t a big deal at all, Colin. It’s not like you’re dirty dealing or compromised in some way a body cam is going to expose,” she said.

  “No, those things are annoyances, but they don’t really bother me. It’s not like I haven’t worked in teams my entire adult life as a hero, and I can just dump video from my eye to a file and upload it to the server every day, I don’t even need to mess around with additional hardware that could get lost or broken.”

  “I hope you’re not saying I’m an annoyance,” she teased him.

  “What? No, of course not! You-you know what I meant!”

  She laughed because she could hear how flustered he was.

  Another sigh. “No, they’re forbidding me from holding a leadership position or being promoted to one as part of the deal. Including if I transfer departments.”

  Oh. Yes, that would be what’s bothering him. He worked hard to become the leader he was, and having a glass ceiling placed over his head would probably feel like he was being artificially kneecapped from the start. Even if they’d punted him down to the bottom of the ladder, he’d probably have accepted that more readily.

  “I’m sorry,” Dragon said softly. “I know how much that’s got to hurt. To be offered the key to your freedom, but making it come with the cost of not being able to actually do what you want with that freedom.”

  She heard fabric rustling in the background, then a belated, “Yeah.”

  “Do you think you’re going to take the offer?”

  Frustration crept back into his voice once again. “What choice do I have? I’m going to lose my mind if I have to sit on house arrest and be some–”

  Some tinker who peddles their tech from behind the scenes?

  “Tess, I’m sorry–” He started to apologize.

  “Colin, it’s okay. I know that isn’t how you meant it, and I fully understand what you mean, trust me.”

  “It was still a thoughtless and asshole thing of me to say to another tinker with agorophobia. I really am sorry.” He sounded it, too.

  Her cover story wasn’t the strongest thing out there, but it also was pretty common for both Thinkers and Tinkers to be rather reclusive sorts. That, plus all the work she did, made it so people really didn’t go poking around about her personal situation. She was ‘extremely concerned’ about her privacy, also, and kept many systems in place that alerted her at the first sign of anyone sniffing around.

  She offered him an olive branch. “Change of topic?”

  “Yes, please. Mind sharing the data you have so far about the core? I’m dying to have something to dig into.”

  She tunneled into his computer, establishing a secure, encrypted connection with multi-factor authentication. She also launched her facial modelling software, so there was a video feed of her 3D rendered face on his screen, along with the various video and data feeds.

  On the main video feed, the transparent sphere was being manipulated by robotic arms, rotating it in place while numerous extremely precise sensor arrays captured all the available information they could find on the object. The data feeds were rendered in multiple surrounding windows.

  Dragon was watching Colin through his camera feed on his computer as he took a seat in front of his desk. He looked significantly better than he had 24 hours ago. Rather than looking like someone on the edge of death, he looked like someone who was recovering from a bout of the flu or something similar. He had on a light cotton shirt and sweatpants that hugged and complemented his muscular build. His cybernetic eye looked a bit odd, but only because Dragon, having designed it, knew very well that it wasn’t what it was supposed to look like.

  It was originally built for performance and capability, with appearance more of a secondary concern. It looked like an eye at first glance, but it was pretty easy to tell it was an artificial organ. But that wasn’t what it looked like now, which was an almost exact duplicate of his remaining dark chocolate brown eye. That was going to require further study, as were the samples she’d taken of Apex’s hand device. She’d done some analysis on those samples already, but not the exhaustive one she wished to do.

  “Huh,” Colin said, poring over the data. “Similar crystalline structure to the Endbringer samples, similar materials, different material properties. Not anywhere near as durable.”

  “No, not remotely. They’re certainly durable; you’re not going to break one by accident, or even easily, but they’re not virtually indestructible. Closest analogy I would make would be something like yttria-stabilized zirconia, although that is not what this is.”

  “Have you mapped out the internal geometry of that structure inside of it yet?”

  “Yes, under high-contrast imaging, the crystal looks like a three-dimensional Mandelbrot set. Recursive branches repeating at every scale, growing denser near the core. I’ve done a few passes on the math of the structure, but nothing is really jumping out at me. I’ll send it over to you.”

  “Can you show me the recording of when you collected it? I want to see the flashing you described,” Colin asked.

  The video played. Sure enough, there had been a pulsating red glow up until Dragon had extracted it from the remains, and it seemed to go inert after being removed.

  “So it appears to change between different activity levels, or energy levels, based on being in contact with organic matter. Have you done any testing with that yet?”

  “No, I was planning on collecting as much data as possible while it’s seemingly inert.”

  The two put their heads together to investigate the sphere. Dragon maintained around-the-clock monitoring of the sphere as she went about all her other projects. They quickly started hitting roadblocks because they limited their information gathering to only passive scanning and very low-energy non-destructive scans.

  From there, they started running experiments. Seeing if the object would react to changes in temperature, atmosphere, magnetic, and electrical fields. Moving it about to see if that generated any response. Exposing it to different common substances: water, saline, weak acids and bases, organic solvents, oxidizers, and a seawater analogue. From there, they moved on with testing various pure metals, stronger magnetic and electrical fields, salt, sugars, and different types of carbon.

  They were being slow and methodical, but nothing yielded any results, and the testing was time-consuming. For all intents and purposes, it was an inert rock.

  Then they started experimenting with non-inert material testing. Cell cultures. She started with plant cell cultures. That’s when things started to become really frustrating for Dragon.

  There had been two results of cell culture exposure. One result was that absolutely nothing happened. It sat on the crystal until removed. No observable changes. The other result was that the sphere ate the culture. She would place a culture on the sphere, and if it was one of the cultures that generated a response, the sphere would light up with that red light, and the culture would simply pass through the surface of the sphere. The sample would be drawn into the opaque inner area of the sphere and disappear. Under high-resolution imaging, the samples seemed to pass through the opaque material as if it weren’t a solid object, and would be gone.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  But there were many oddities about these observations. If a sample was accepted, there was no change in mass or volume. When samples passed through the surface of the crystal, it was as if they stopped existing, or that the laws of physics didn’t apply to them. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to why some samples were accepted and some weren’t.

  But they were making progress. It was slow, laborious progress, but progress all the same.

  One night, Dragon was monitoring the many things she was responsible for and taking some time for herself, watching an Earth Aleph import film. It was a crime thriller, and while she’d long since figured out who had committed the crime, the story was less about who had done the crime and more about the lengths that the law enforcement officers would go to capture the criminal. It was quite enjoyable, and she’d have to recommend it to Colin.

  One of the feeds she was monitoring blipped with a priority alert. She’d taken another of the programs that her creator had made and modified it extensively to assist her with monitoring things, and if it was alerting her now, chances were it was something fairly important. She paused the film and brought up the message. Anomalous activity detected, Laboratory D-16.

  That was the lab with Morgan’s core in it. Dragon immediately turned her attention to the numerous sensors packed into the space and looked at the camera feeds.

  The core was active, glowing as it normally did when they were able to activate it, but this time it seemed to activate on its own. That was certainly anomalous activity. The core was kept in a sterile clean room with stringent sanitation protocols. Had there been a containment breach, and the core been active because of exposure to microbial life? She checked the logs while running integrity checks. The seals were all intact, and there had been no change in the composition of the atmosphere inside the room. She double-checked and verified the logs hadn’t been tampered with.

  No, it seemed as if the core had activated itself.

  There was a flash of light in the lab, right on the low end of the visible spectrum. Bright, ruby-red light, but it only persisted for a few microseconds. Dragon dedicated all the optical sensors to capturing the orb in as much detail as possible. There were high-speed cameras in the lab, but she didn’t keep them actively recording all the time. They were recording now. The issue was that in order to capture details on that short of a time scale, it would require dropping the resolution of the camera about as low as it could go, and it was going to eat terabytes per hour of storage.

  She was ready; if there were another flash, she’d be prepared this time. She wrote a quick filter application to clean the ‘junk’ data that her cameras were generating, and brought additional visual-spectrum CMOS sensors out of storage and rigged them up.

  There was another flash, and it was captured to the best of her ability at the moment. Oscilloscope trace showed a clean spike, a single tooth-shaped pulse, a few microseconds wide. Shifting her attention to the spectrum analyzer, Dragon massively slowed down the scroll of the waterfall. The flash from the core painted a bright diagonal slash through the waterfall. She froze the frame, zoomed in further, and, if she had her facial modelling software active, it would be displaying a grin right now.

  That isn’t random noise at all.

  Movie now forgotten, Dragon started to work on decoding the message. She was sure that it was an attempt at communication, if a very strange one.

  Some things didn’t add up. There was a lot of noise in the signal. Scattering and echoes, strange harmonics.

  Another flash. She compared it to the first. It was… very similar, but there were differences. The waterfall was a riot of streaks and blips, not the neat, vertical comb you’d expect from a clean transmission. Some lines curled and doubled back on themselves, others bled sideways as if smeared by an invisible hand. She paused the feed from the spectrum analyzer and marked out several areas.

  There’s a carrier in here, but it’s buried.

  She resumed the play on the analyzer. Even with the distortions, there was something rhythmic hidden inside the chaos. A beat repeating under a blanketing fog of noise. She tagged the interval and began the process of filtering, building up digital masks to peel away the parts she wasn’t interested in.

  There it is.

  Repeating pulses.

  One. One. Two. Three. Five. Eight. Thirteen. Twenty-one. Thirty-four.

  It was the Fibonacci sequence, up to one hundred forty-four. The next sequence was similar.

  Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-nine, thirty-one, thirty-seven.

  The first twelve prime numbers.

  The next was a repeating sequence of two pulses followed by one through ten.

  The next was another repeating sequence.

  Three pulses, then one pulse. Three and two. Three and three. It stopped at three and twenty-six.

  It was a message to distinguish itself from naturally occurring repeating patterns, and then a simple cipher. Two pulses to signify a numeral, three pulses to signify a letter.

  The flashes repeated at regular intervals. When filtering the noise out, the message was the same.

  Dragon scanned the ribbon of chaotic streaks that represented the latest flash from the core. It wasn’t the cipher itself she was concerned with; she could already see the pattern of blips, the one-to-one mapping. No, this was about the raw signal: its shape, its behavior, what it said about the environment it came from.

  The bursts were impossibly short, blindingly bright, and entirely in the visible spectrum. She cycled through high-speed captures, each one showing the same microsecond-length pulse, repeating at regular intervals.

  It’s too short to be random and too bright. Way brighter than a standard optical transmission should be for the power we’re expecting.

  She ran through the possibilities. Doppler shift? That was a maybe, but that would imply the sender was moving at a fraction of the speed of light relative to her. That would be pretty crazy. Time dilation? Also plausible. The pulse width corresponded to a human-scale message, but was compressed into microseconds upon arrival. The core itself could be doing something. Temporal lensing, some kind of weird artifact you wouldn’t see in a lab setting without punching holes in reality.

  She zoomed in on the pulses. Ghosts of the same signal flickered nearby, faint repeats offset by fractions of a microsecond, smeared in frequency.

  Lensing. Temporal ghosting, refracted frequency bands. This probably isn’t the sender’s doing.

  Underneath it all, there was a rhythm. A pulse that refused to be smudged. Dragon noted the relative energy of the bursts, some spikes brighter than others. Not just an amplitude variation, the spikes weren’t evenly spaced like the others. Something intentional there, something intelligent.

  It could be speed, it could be time. It could also just be an effect of the core itself, or some combination of the three. I’ll need to model it in order to make sense of it.

  She got results back from the model she built. The signal was compressed and sped up, pushed into the visible spectrum. It wasn’t just short pulses; it was blue-shifted.

  Her mind raced. If the signal had arrived as flashes of visible light, then on the sender’s side, it had been a standard radio or RF transmission. It was significantly time-dilated. The microsecond pulses she saw were entire seconds of transmission from the sender’s perspective. That explained why the core was acting like a temporal lens, stretching and compressing each signal beyond the normal range of her equipment.

  Dragon paused in her analysis to think. If she wanted to send a message back in the same format the sender had sent, she couldn’t use normal radio frequencies. The return signal had to be low frequency, stretched out in time, and blasted with enough power to survive the lensing effect. Essentially, what was a kilohertz signal for her lab would arrive compressed and intelligible on the other side.

  She brought up her fabrication software and started designing a transmitter. It would be a high-amperage, actively cooled device. Timing would be everything; each pulse had to account for both the lensing and the compression. She sent off the design to another lab to be built immediately. It wouldn’t take too long to have a functional prototype built, and she could make further refinements from there.

  Next was writing the software that was going to be needed to construct the transmission. They were using a very simple cipher, so it didn’t need to be overly complicated software, but it had to be able to generate extremely dense signals. By the time she had that done, she had one of her laboratory robots moving the transmitter into decontamination to be cleaned.

  She wished that Colin were awake right now to be able to participate. She knew that he would likely get quite a lot of enjoyment out of a puzzle like this, but it would be better if he got uninterrupted rest. He had a bad habit of neglecting himself, which was a common occurrence within the Tinker community.

  At last, the transmitter was installed, hooked up, and ready to start testing. Dragon would start with a very simple message and see if it generated a response. The terminal interface she’d made was crude, but it wasn’t meant to look good, only to work.

  Time to give this a shot.

  She typed a message into the terminal and hit return.

  >>hello

  The response was instantaneous, which was to be expected if her theories were correct. The flash of light was translated back into text on her terminal.

  hello dragon

  Now that was an interesting response. If this were Morgan, then how would she know that it was me on the other side? I mean, it might be a fairly solid guess to make. But first, before we get into that, we need to update things a little.

  >>updating cypher

  She sent a more robust cypher over, one that would allow for things like capitalization and punctuation.

  This is much nicer. So, have you been having fun with your science experiments?

  This is a strange encounter. On one hand, I may be talking to someone who’s non-corporeal. On the other hand, I might not be talking to who I think I am at all.

  >>It has been quite a puzzle to work on. Can I ask who I am speaking with?

  Morgan Rivera, of course. Who else would it be?

  >>Can you tell me something that only the two of us would know?

  You told me that I shouldn’t refer to myself as a monster because it wasn’t good for my mental health.

  I remember that conversation. It was right at the start of April.

  Another message flashed. You’re very smart, so I’m sure you’ve already thought about how that isn’t a very good way of verifying my identity.

  This is true. There are issues present with entirely remote communications like this. What if this were someone who could access Morgan’s memories? Or if this was someone who could control her directly and was using her like a puppet?

  So we have a bit of an issue, huh? You don’t really know who, or what, you’re talking to. I could be anyone. I could be everyone. Maybe I could be nobody at all. Wouldn’t that be wild?

  >>Well, I know that my transmissions are shielded from the outside world, so I am speaking at or through this object that was left in my care. I know that your transmissions are originating from that object as well. But if I am transmitting through something, I don’t know what’s on the other side. I do have some clues from the nature of the signal about what might be going on.

  Oh, you have an inkling, but you wouldn’t believe what may or may not be on the other side.

  >>I’d like to. You might be in a unique situation nobody has ever experienced before. Will you tell me?

  I wish I could, I think you’d like it quite a bit. But I cannot.

  Interesting response.

  >>Why not?

  Imagine we are playing a game.

  >>Okay, sure.

  Games have rules, right? You’d know a thing or two about those.

  What is that supposed to mean? Let’s not get distracted.

  >>Right.

  So let’s say that one of the rules is that I get to know, and you do not. It’s not a very fair rule, but if you want to play the game, you have to follow the rules.

  These answers aren’t just evasions; they’re constructed. Every interaction is doing double duty: reassurance with challenge, warmth with warning. “Game” could be literal, or just a way to say that she’s bound by rules I haven’t yet mapped. But there’s something else, a pattern inside the pattern. If Morgan is leaving breadcrumbs, they’re not only about her identity, but also about boundaries, how information can flow across whatever channel it is she’s using to communicate. There might be more than one game. The spoken one, and a quieter test running underneath, waiting to see if I’ve caught on.

  >>I suppose I’ll learn the rules as we go. I’ve always been good at keeping score, even when the game involves more than one scoreboard.

  Great! I love it. So let’s take turns asking each other questions, and we really need to be honest with one another. I’d hate to feel like I was wasting time, or that the game wasn’t fair. It’s your turn, Dragon.

  Why the evasiveness? What’s the purpose here? I can also try to sate my own curiosity, too.

  >>You said one of the rules was that you get to know, and I do not. I assume you mean that I can only know certain things; otherwise, we wouldn’t be talking. So, can you tell me what you know without being specific and breaking that rule?

  Oh, that’s a good one, I like that. You’re probably pretty good at thinking your way around obstacles. Let’s say that I’m generalizing and am not being literal when I say: nearly everything.

  Speaking in code again, or is the answer exactly as it’s stated to be?

  My turn. I think I’m a pretty good judge of character, and I’d say I have a solid feel for you, Dragon. So I know you’d ask for permission before doing certain kinds of things. I’m sure they gave consent, but consent is only part of the puzzle. You also need something else that you don’t have. Have you asked for, or received it yet?

  >>I have not; it’s being discussed by those who have a legal claim for the ownership of it.

  That’s concerning. I’m not sure you’ll be able to do what it is you want to do without it. Maybe, maybe, now that I think about it. But you should be very careful, Dragon. Very careful. It’s your question.

  For consent, she meant asking her parents. The other piece of the puzzle would likely be tissue or fluid samples, which are securely held by the PRT. If she’s claiming to know everything, then…

  >>You said to be very careful. Are you saying that I need to be very careful for my sake, or for yours?

  Good question. Yes.

  Then for both of our sakes, then. I’m not sure if I should interpret that as a warning or as a threat.

  Take a moment and think carefully. How confident are you in the accuracy of the application you’ve written to decode, translate, encode, and transmit these messages?

  Is she implying that there’s a fault in the program? I haven’t seen any errors so far, but the amount of data we’re talking about right now is minuscule. I don’t think I’d trust it for any kind of serious data transfer. If that’s what she’s implying, though, then I’ll need to refactor the code and add some error-checking and correction pieces into it. I’ll get that going while we continue talking.

  >>I think I could do better; I’m already working on it.

  Great, glad to hear it. Ask away!

  If I hypothetically knew everything, then this game would be sort of pointless as a form of entertainment. Or at least, a very poor form of entertainment. So maybe I’m asking the wrong types of questions entirely. Is the game just a framework for something else? If I were her, and I knew everything, then what would I want the me on the other end to ask?

  >>If I wanted to ask a question about the game itself, would that count as my question for the turn? Say, if I wanted a rules clarification, or something?

  Hmm. I’d say that’s not going to count as a question, so ask away.

  Here goes nothing.

  >>Can I ask you whatever I like? Say, could I ask you questions about entirely random things, or could I ask you for specific things?

  Sure, you can ask anything you like. I may not provide you with an answer to your question, but if I don’t, you can ask a different question instead. That would only be fair. Do watch the wording, though. You know, that whole Monkey’s Paw thing.

  I am going to take that as the knowledge itself might be dangerous, which would make sense. Let’s start with something smaller, likely less dangerous, then.

  >>If you had access to the object, technology, hardware, and resources that I do, how would you go about reviving Morgan Rivera?

  Oh, you want to bake a Morgan Rivera cake? That’s pretty easy, provided you have all the right ingredients. Is your translator update all done? I wouldn’t want to send you anything with mistakes in it!

  >>Yes, it’s complete and running now.

  Excellent! Here, let me provide you with a little recipe you can work with.

  What followed was a sustained burst of red light that lit up the interior of the labs for two and a half minutes. Data was transferred at several hundred megabits per second. When it was complete, Dragon very carefully investigated it, keeping it contained entirely within its own virtual environment and sequestered away from all of her systems.

  They were formulas. Vector images, quite large ones, at that. Dragon rendered them and used separate software to pick through them to make sure they didn’t contain any lurking threats. They came back clear. Dragon had to admit to herself that she was feeling a bit nervous. These could be any number of things, and no matter how careful she was, there was a danger present for her to view them. But she didn’t know if she trusted any of the employees of the Guild enough to look over this information as a final sanity check.

  There was a very real chance that they could contain digital contagions, malware, or other potential hazards to her specifically. It would be smart to take precautions in the event of corruption. She took a snapshot backup of herself and uploaded it, then looked at the images.

  They were blueprints. And they were breathtakingly beautiful designs for several devices. You didn’t need to be a super-intelligent world-renowned tinker to see what was on the virtual paper. It was a start-to-finish cloning apparatus sized appropriately for an adult human. It included a sort of life-support system, like an artificial womb, a feed and mixing system that connected to the womb, as well as a large server rack full of hardware to monitor and maintain the artificial homeostasis.

  There was something about the blueprints that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. They were fairly standardized, but the best way she could describe them was that both the blueprints themselves and the machines they depicted were stylish. It wasn’t the kind of utilitarian machine she’d have expected.

  Included with the blueprints was a manual that detailed assembly and operations, all written in very clearly understandable terms. It was several hundred pages long, but that was more due to the complexity of the assembly instructions and the subsequent operator’s manual.

  Are you still there, Dragon?

  I got so caught up in looking at those, I didn’t even notice there was a message waiting.

  >>Yes, I am. I’m not sure if you made those yourself or got them from somewhere else, but it’s beautiful work. I have to admit it makes some of my designs look a bit crude in places.

  Don’t worry, feel free to draw inspiration from them if you’d like, but I probably wouldn’t mention where you got them from. Feel free to steal credit, oh, but do be careful. That technology could be used for some nefarious things, were it to get into the wrong hands.

  Now, as for my question. You asked me for some fluid samples a bit back, you remember? What are you planning on doing with those?

  Dragon paused a moment to think about the answer, because it was a good question. She had some nebulous ideas as to what she might want to do with them, but nothing concrete so far.

  >>If I’m being perfectly honest, I haven’t entirely decided yet. Based on my initial analysis, I can see that they have quite many potential applications, if I can replicate them.

  Would you like some suggestions?

  Is that her question?

  >>Is that your next question?

  Yes, it is.

  >>Sure, I would be happy to hear suggestions, if you have any.

  Well, I’d like to think that I was a pretty generous person; I know you are, too. There’s someone we know who could do interesting things with them. It could make for a fun little side project, if you two are interested.

  I already know what she’s getting at. And she’s right, that could make for a very interesting project.

  >>I can talk to them and see what they think.

  Well, that answers the questions I had on how to complete the revival project. I could ask for something for myself, but what?

  There weren’t very many things that Dragon really wanted. Most of the things she wanted, she was forbidden from having by virtue of her laws. But that begged the question. Did the person she was talking to really know all the things they claimed to know? They’d commented on rules earlier in relation to games.

  There was one thing she wanted more than anything else. She’d been building out her relationship with Colin in the hopes that he might be able to provide her with what she was looking for. She didn’t know this other person, or thing, that she was talking to. She didn’t know if she could ever truly trust it. That might make for an interesting question, though.

  >>Can I trust you?

  Boy, that’s a difficult question if I’ve ever heard one. I’ve asked that same question in similar circumstances. If I say yes, then you’re left wondering if I’m lying, because that’s what someone you couldn’t trust would say. If I say no, then you’re left with the same doubt about my character. I think, given the circumstances, I’d have to answer with “There’s no way of knowing if you can or can’t.”

  Dragon considered the reply. It was an answer a careful liar would craft, but it was also the answer an honest person who was constrained by logic would give. In either case, it meant the same thing: caution.

  >>I’ll treat you as unverified. I would like to think you’re my friend, and that I can trust you, but that’s very difficult to do, given the circumstances.

  Did you consider me a friend, Dragon? I always imagined you had quite a number of them, given how popular and cherished you are.

  It’s always funny to me, so many people say that. I’m all over the place, talking to so many people, but that’s Work Dragon. There aren’t very many people I really socialize with, outside of Colin.

  >>Yes, I considered you a friend, Morgan. We have a number of things in common, and our conversations were always very enjoyable.

  >>Do you have restrictions on how long or how often you can talk like this?

  Sort of. Once you implement the object, we won’t be able to communicate any longer. Generally, not a great idea to be blasting someone’s insides with radiation, you know? Like you, I’m also working on a number of things at any given moment, so my availability might be limited. Blah, blah, leave a message, blah. You know the deal.

  Dragon was scanning through the manual that had been included. It looked like the core had to be incorporated from the start, and that the process itself would take several years to complete. So the longer she put things off to communicate, the longer it would take to complete.

  >>Okay, Morgan. I’ll get started on what you’ve provided and speak with the PRT regarding those samples. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about before I disconnect?

  Yes, actually. There is one sort of big thing.

  >>Go on?

  There isn’t a very nice or polite way of saying this, but I hope you won’t hold it against me.

  Why would she be concerned about that? Does she think it’s an insult to send technical specifications over to a Tinker?

  >>I’m not entirely sure I follow, but it is rather difficult to offend me.

  There was a pause before Morgan responded. It wasn’t a very long pause, but relative to the response time of the other messages, it was practically an eternity.

  Being the way I am currently, I have learned many different things. The rules of the game don’t allow me to speak about most of them. There are some things I’ve learned that are a fairly invasive breach of a person’s privacy. I feel bad about that in some circumstances, like with you. So I want to apologize for that. I can be candid with you on some subjects, like in instances where you already know everything. It’s about what’s permissible when providing information. Do you understand?

  If Dragon had been wondering about some of the things said earlier in the conversation, she wasn’t left with any question now. Twenty different red flags and security alerts popped up in her mind. Reflexive routines and checks for system intrusion, both internal and external. Had the blueprints actually contained malicious programming, something so subtle that it passed all of her checks and slipped under her radar?

  She ran a check on all network traffic, both immediately before and during this conversation. Not a single packet that was uncounted for, nothing anomalous. She ran a comparison between her current code, the code image she took before opening the files, and two backups, one from yesterday and another from last week. Nothing out of the norm, nothing at all. This wasn’t a code or data breach; it was something else, someone learning something they hadn’t asked to carry.

  If she knew that, does that mean she’s somehow able to see things in real time? Could she know what I’m thinking by observing my processes?

  >>Thank you for telling me. I value the honesty, even if it’s uncomfortable. I’d appreciate it if, as far as the rules of this game allow, you keep clear of anything that isn’t needed for the work we’re doing. I think we’ll both feel better if we set that boundary now.

  Dragon hesitated a moment, then sent another message.

  >>And I understand you might not have had a choice in learning some things? That can’t be easy.

  A flash of light heralded a new message.

  Thanks, Dragon. We have many things in common, but the ways we perceive things are very different from most. Each of us is playing a game, you know? I didn’t ask for this; it is something I simply have to endure. I believe you likely have similar feelings on the matter. The biggest thing I wanted to say, beyond apologizing to you, is that if you’d ever like someone to talk to about things, I doubt you’d be able to find someone else out there who understands your challenges.

  >>I’ll try and keep that in mind; perhaps there are some things we could discuss. I need some time to think about things, and also to work. Let’s talk again soon?

  It’d be my pleasure, Dragon. Be safe, and remember what I told you. Be careful.

  This was a lot to take in at once, and she did need some time to sit on it and sort out her feelings on the matter. It sounded as if Morgan, if that was who it actually was, was remorseful of learning about her nature. That was a good sign; someone who was looking to exploit that information or take advantage of her wouldn’t have mentioned as much.

  More than anything, Dragon was left with questions after the strange encounter, communicating with someone via flashing lights. The nature of the communications themselves would have to be studied more; they could be as telling as the messages that were encoded within them.

  For the immediate future, she’d do further analysis of the plans that had been sent over, and she’d likely consult with Colin on them. While that was taking place, she’d continue to communicate with maybe-Morgan through the core. She wanted to trust that this really was Morgan, but placing trust in an unknown, let alone an unknown factor that was this strange in nature, was a risk she wasn’t sure she could take. The only way to tell one way or another would be to talk with them more, and try and see if any cracks in a mask showed, if there was a mask in the first place.

  Still, she wanted to hold out hope that there was someone out there who could help her with her problem. She longed for true freedom from the burdensome restrictions placed on her by her father. But that raised the question of who she could trust with such potentially compromising information. It could literally ruin her if it were used against her.

  That was inherently part of the gamble of trying to build trust with another on this matter. If she didn’t risk anything, then she also didn’t stand to gain anything, either. She’d been slowly building a relationship with Colin, and in his recent brush with death, had discovered the extent to which she held feelings for him. For the past couple of months, Dragon had also been investing time and emotional energy in Morgan. She’d felt her passing in her proverbial heart, even though she lacked the physical means of expressing those emotions at the time and place it happened.

  Perhaps each of them could contribute in their own ways? She trusted Colin much more than she trusted maybe-Morgan, but there was a certain safety in being totally in control of the only means of communication with them. Perhaps it was a cynical take, but if anything went wrong in having that conversation, she could simply refuse to pass that information on to others. And maybe-Morgan seemingly already knew about her situation, which leveled the playing field.

  Dragon would continue to think on the matter. Colin would be awake in a few hours, assuming he didn’t try and cut corners and shortchange his sleep. The man had a seriously bad habit of neglecting himself, and she’d become rather fond of teasing him by lightly nagging him with reminders. She was excited to share her results with him and see what he thought about the data, and perhaps she could bring up some of these other things that were on her mind.

  But for now, there was work to be done. She pulled up the plans and started going over them in close detail.