“Fuck,” Dr. Charlene Durante muttered under her breath as she slipped back into her living room at stupid o’clock in the morning, deftly stepping around the shed tailpiece from Nate’s Sylphan cosplay. 

She probably should pick that up, she thought, numbly. It had taken her an age to put together for him.

She didn’t.

“That bad, huh, Charley?” Claire asked from her corner of the couch, Flamma’s patched alewife’s hat still perched on her head. Of the five of them, Claire was probably best at intuiting when something was wrong—that or picking up on other people's emotional tells. Honestly, probably both.

On the coffee table, Charley could see Delvar’s rubber headpiece and Meredar’s blue wig still being worn by the holo images of Julian and Kate respectively. Even Nate still had his fox ear headband on. Charley’s own pink-tipped green hair was dyed, not a wig, but then, she’d been dying her hair regularly for four decades anyway—and with Thorne’s pink monarch wings long since hung back on the wall, her own cosplay was slightly less obvious now.

It had been part of the new release celebration, the five founding members of the Other World Tourism Bureau cosplaying as the five elemental gods of the non-human races while they talked about everything they’d wanted to do with the latest DLC, answered some carefully selected fan questions, maybe hinted a little bit at things coming in the future. Project Ulysses was mere weeks from being announced publicly after all.

Then it had all gone to hell.

“I just got off the phone with Mom,” Charley said, quietly. “She said Tommie was playing when…”

Her voice trailed off. She swallowed around the lump in her throat.

“We need to call it what it is,” Nate said, bluntly, but not unkindly. “When the cyber attack hit.”

Fuck. He’s right. She doesn’t want to think about it that way, but he’s right.

“I know,” Charley said. “I know. It’s the only logical explanation. Just— I— Fuck.”

Claire sighed. “They’re your, well, nephew—”

“Actually, the gender neutral term is nibling,” Nate inserted.

“—your nibling,” Claire amended, giving Nate a nod of acknowledgement. “Of course you’re out of your mind with worry. Do we need to get Alain and Oliver back in here?”

Charley shook her head. “They already left,” she said, quietly. “I sent them with the car down to Santa Cruz. You know how old my parents are—they’re not really supposed to drive anymore. Tommie used to do that for them. Alain will take them to the hospital—he’ll be able to get the doctors to listen to him. He’s one of them, an MD, and he’s white.” Which didn’t always matter, but sometimes it did. Charley didn’t want to take chances. “And Oliver… he can be there with my parents for a day or two until we can arrange other caregivers. I wouldn’t want him to do it long term—he’s closer to their age than he is to mine—but overnight… he can do it overnight.”

She raked her fingers through her shoulder-length hair. “At least Mom knew better than to try to take the neurohelm off once Tommie stopped responding to outside stimuli,” she said. “There’s already been reports of people who didn’t know trying to cut the connection that way—”

“But there’s a failsafe for that,” Julian said, holo image jittery with agitation and too many coffee-and-energy-drink cocktails—or perhaps a weak signal, but Charley would bet on the former. “We put in a failsafe for that. Emergency disconnection as soon as the ports lose contact.”

“I know,” Charley snapped. “I know. God, I know. You know I know.”

“Io’s supposed to—”

“I know what Io’s supposed to do! I wrote their programming!”

“That’s the problem,” Kate said, finally looking up from the keyboard her holo image had been plugging away at for fuck knows how long, expression pensive. “Io’s not connected to Mundus-Chimaera any longer.”

“WHAT!?” Julian screeched, as everyone else’s hands flew to cover their ears, far too late.

Kate’s holo image didn’t even bother to hide her wince at the volume—or the pitch for that matter. At his most hysterical, Julian had a vocal range that Freddy Mercury would envy. It was too bad he couldn’t carry a tune.

“You know how Io can partition themself in an emergency,” Kate said, frowning. “It looks like they partitioned away the part that handles the Chimaera server and now that part of them is just— gone.”

“So the cyber attack was aimed at Io, then,” Nate mused out loud. “Or— hit them, anyway, even if it was aimed at something else.” He sighed and drummed his fingers against his arm of the couch. “At least we gave Io the ability to partition themself. The others can’t. Can you imagine if we’d lost Gnomon?”

Charley shuddered. She could imagine it all too well. “You’re right,” she said. “At least the rest of Io is still able to facilitate mind-machine hookup and detachment for the other Mundi, even with the increased server load these last few days—not that I wouldn’t be surprised if we lose a lot of subscribers from the other servers over this. Even if it was a cyber attack and not our own error, the fact that it got around security, that it happened right after the DLC dropped … fuck, it’s bad.”

That got a snort from Nate. “I think we’re all well-aware of that, Charley.”

Charley bristled. “We need to talk to the kids,” she said, impatiently. “We should have already been talking to the kids. We need their assessment of the situation.”

“I’m trying to get through to them,” Claire protested. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with the rest of the Tetradekatheon—and the rest of Io so we can ask them about the attack—ever since Kate said Io partitioned themself. And it’s no use. They’ve erected a firewall against outside contact that even I can’t bypass.”

“Huh,” said Nate. “Let me try.”

Julian’s holo gave a jerky little nod. “I’ll try too.”

“Yeah,” Kate said. “Me too.”

Charley didn’t volunteer. She’d never been much of a hacker, not like the rest of her co-founders. She wouldn’t be much use here and they all knew it. Once they got in contact with the kids, sure. Charley understood artificial intelligences in a way that very few others did. Had written her dissertation on what was needed to create truly lifelike ones and even developed a new file format for that purpose. It had gotten her noticed by the right people, which led to her being recruited by their old employers in a much more normal way than the rest of her then-teammates, all of whom had gotten the good old Work For Us Or Go To Jail For Hacking speech.

It didn’t mean Charley didn’t feel stupidly helpless in the moment. Even picking her way across the floor and sinking into the armchair perpendicular to the couch didn’t really change anything. It just left her alone with her thoughts.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Steven, about Steven and Thain, about the funeral for her brother and his husband. How if her mother hadn’t known better than to try to remove the neurohelm, they might have had to bury Tommie too. Bad enough that her parents had outlived their oldest child, but their one and only human grandchild too—?

And now Tommie’s cousins were refusing to talk with them. With her. And she was more or less their mother.

It hurt. Even the tiny swell of pride that her kids had built a firewall that even Claire, Nate, Julian, and Kate combined couldn’t breach fell to the wayside in the face of such implicit distrust from them. She hoped like fuck it wasn’t personal, that it was just that they weren’t letting any outside attempts to contact the satellite supercomputer get through, not even from them, just in case whoever had loosed the cyber attack took a momentary relaxation of caution as cue to try again.

“I get why they wouldn’t let just anyone get through to them,” Kate said, finally, not bothering to look up from her keyboard, “but why won’t they let us?”

Julian snorted, loudly. “Isn’t it obvious?” he mutters. “The Tetradekatheon aren’t stupid. They’re scared.”

“You would say that,” Nate replied, not bothering to hide the scorn in his tone. “Delvar, maybe, since he takes after you—but the rest?”

“No,” Charley said, with a tired sigh. “Julian’s right. No matter who or what attacked Io and severed them from the Chimaera server… they’re TCAI. They’re programmed to first assume others are acting in good faith. To have those assumptions be so severely shattered… fuck, they must be so traumatized. No wonder they’re having such a severe response.”

“Well, let’s hope none of them developed PTSD over it,” Nate muttered. “Because that’s just what we need, thirteen or fourteen fully realized Turing Complete Artificial Intelligences disassociating.”

“So what do we do?” Kate asked, finally setting aside her keyboard to stare more pointedly through the holo at the rest of them.

“Until they let us interface with them, again,” Claire said, tiredly, “there’s only so much we can do from this side. Especially since we constructed AWO so it can be run autonomously by the Tetradekatheon alone if needed.”

“And it’s going to have to for now,” Charley concluded with a sigh. “Fuck. And 2047 was supposed to be our year.”

There was a moment’s silence after her statement, and then—

The alert was loud and seemed even louder cutting through the silence, the beep obnoxiously pitched as the handheld devices on the table buzzed angrily together—and they were all receiving an alert, Kate and Julian too, it was easy enough to hear the same buzzing even though the holos.

Charley groped forward, almost blindly, and managed to call up the alert, only to be confronted with a very familiar digital letterhead...

“Oh shit,” she breathed. “It’s DARPA.”

Julian took a deep, long breath—

—and screamed.

Nate leaned forward and muted Julian’s holo, before looking at the rest of them and adding, deadpan:

“I, for one, agree with Julian.”

To be continued in Volume Two:

Expedition to the Lost Temple of ($_Null_Pointer_Error)

To Be Serialized on Scribblehub January 2022