Meanwhile at the headquarters of The Slum Empire, a clay-walled underground chamber, its air perfumed with the aroma of smoke and a sickly-sweet iron scent.

Ramiro was admiring himself in a mirror. On display was his chubby form, nude except for an ogre mask he sometimes wore when out on the town. On the wall adjacent to his reflection played out the projected footage from one of the many street murders that occurred in his domain each hour. Zooming in on and tracking the assailant's face, he'd been trying to align it next to his own in the mirror.

'Stop! Please!'

'I'm defending myself. This guy was about to kill me. Check the Assailant's Penalty.'

'He's lying! Fuck you, fuck you!'

"Nicholas is panicking."

Behind Ramiro, a woman was splayed out naked and exhausted on a spread of animal furs. This was Queen Atusa, whom he'd put in charge of their Greater Iran division. He'd just fucked her - a last tussle for her to remember him by.

"Little Nicky always lacked faith," said Ramiro of their fellow leader.

"Should he have faith?"

Ramiro, sliding the butt of a cigarillo through his ogre mask and taking a drag, replied with a puff of smoke. "Doesn't hurt."

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

In his duty as The Slum's headman, he'd been replying to messages from his fellow Kings and Queens who'd caught news of The Company apprehending their smugglers. One distraught leader after another, he'd calmed them with reassurances and reminders of their plans for this eventuality.

None of these plans, he knew, would be fulfilled. The Company was about to demand they transfer control of their territory, monetary reparations impossible to meet at this point after the crash of The Slum's currency system and the WBAE stealing their industries. To their request, his weakling comrades would cave in. They would lay the blame for the scandal solely on himself. They would beg their new lords for favourable treatment in the subsequent restructuring.

-Graeme Walker: His friends say he isn't logging on till the evening. Apparently, he's taken a random day trip to Canberra.

Ramiro, at the response from Byzantium's leader, gave a questioning glance at the assailant in the murder scene. "Travelling overseas at a time like this…what's the grand plan, comrade?"

"Sorry, my love?" asked Atusa.

Ramiro silently scrutinised the woman's supine reflection. My love - this calculative bitch would be one of the first to betray him. She'd only ever been attracted by his power. Once that was gone...

Atusa lifted herself out of the furs and staggered over. "Come on. Tell me."

Ramiro, ignoring her once again, grabbed her and pulled her before the mirror. Rotating her, he wrapped his arms around her slick body and rested his chin on her wet hair. With his ogre mask and their naked bodies splattered with her gore, she appeared to be wearing the freshly-butchered skin of a hog. His slaughtered pig's face made for a nice headdress.

"Can you spot the resemblance?" he asked.

"Hmm?"

Ramiro pointed at the assailant's eyes, visible through the slits of a zebra-head mask. "The one Suhita was complaining about. HF."

"The 'Oracle'? But he sounds American."

"One of many habitual disguises. This kid's actually The Cripple."

"Who's The Cripple?"

"The Invincible Cripple."

Ramiro told her about this whacky duellist from an era long before either of them had started playing. He himself had only had a vague familiarity due to the name popping up in accounts of The Company's Saana II campaign, Operation Phantom Limbs. Some researchers mentioned him as a minor factor in their success. Disciples of his joke cult had spread anti-Offworlder propaganda by preaching passivism, reducing NPC loyalty to The Company's adversaries; and, The Cripple having trained his disciples to fight, their pestering everybody for duels screwed with attempts by The Company's enemies to rebuild their destroyed navies.

This teen's identity had been discovered by Duke Edwaldo, whom Ramiro'd ordered to shadow him. The Cripple may have changed his appearance, age, game-class, and language – from archaic Japanese. Nevertheless, The Duke, a Cutthroat who'd studied the noteworthy masters of the class, eventually recognised the guy from his ironic trash-talk and his sluggish reaction speed. This suspicion had since been corroborated by the revelation that Stratford-on-Saana, of which 'Henry Flower' was a member, had published an anonymous 'fan fiction' about the duellist's adventures. Any further doubts were cleared by the match Ramiro'd watched last night, in which the teen had showcased the myriad of martial arts he'd been learning during his hiatus. Edwaldo believed the New Suchi Arena had been commissioned as a testing grounds for polishing off a style designed to compensate for the poor reaction speed.

Atusa re-examined both the scene and Ramiro watching it on loop. "Is he connected to current events?"

"That's what I'm wondering," Ramiro lied.

There was no wondering left. From his vantage point at the very centre of their organisation, it was obvious that this duellist from a bygone era was the locus of all the troubles unfolding now.

The day he'd arrived in Suchi, commissioning an over-sized stadium for his latest hijinks, coincided with the arrival of other strange events and a stranger cast of personalities.

During the wolf invasion incident, there'd been a 'Bob From San Francisco', an American player who'd foiled Ramiro's attempt to wipe out the Instructors Union and arranged the construction of the fortress where the Wolf Emperor had been slain. This player had taken immense precautions to avoid detection, only his username being captured in chat logs. Nevertheless, Ramiro's investigators did source a clip on the forums of a masked expert at the tutorial grounds dispatching a group of cholo roleplayers around the time this 'Bob' would have begun the tutorial. The assailant in that footage, beneath the disguise, had an identical physical build as the teen, 'Henry Flower'. The investigators in the same forum search also discovered the much obscurer clip Ramiro was watching now, of another masked figure assassinating a random Ibanmothe wagon-driver shortly before the wolf invasion – again, an identical build and, like Bob, an American accent and a notable lack of a Martial Class.

'Fuck you, fuck you!'

The wagon-driver fighting for his life, Sofor, had usually picked customers up from The Trading Post managed by Senior Director Okai Van. Minutes prior to this assassination, The Senior Director had been in the arranged meeting with the teen about a duelling stadium, the stadium for The Cripple in disguise.

'Henry Flower', 'Bob From San Francisco', 'The Cripple', these were the same individual.

During the subsequent vampire moth incident, more mysterious figures began sneaking around The Slums. There was 'Dr Iskander', the Volefan NPC who'd knocked out most of the theoretical research for the cure, sent the fake Bengali sponsors to The Empire to arrange the final testing, and later called Ramiro to taunt him. When Ramiro delayed the cure's delivery, a 'Master Brady' gave the completed recipe and correct application to Central City's Alchemists. A Maranyan pygmy, Lupi, excavated a tunnel under a sham emporium to an Empire supply depot and stole the supplies being hoarded for the cure. Someone even dared to dress up as Ramiro himself and trick The Delivery Roaches into couriering letters to the gangs coordinating the arson attack that distracted from this heist.

'Dr Iskander', 'Brady', 'Lupi', 'Ramiro', and several suspected others without names - this entire cast of oddballs had been played by one actor. Karnon had given away their unity when he popped up afterwards and declared some random his protégé. His own help, the God had explained, had been unnecessary because 'the Earthfriends of Suchi, unbeknownst to themselves, were already in the protective hands of a curious fellow, whose heart is the same as my own.' A curious fellow. One person.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Karnon then abducted this curious guy to guide him through the Earthfriend acquisition ritual in a series of globe-spanning pranks that concluded with a moon being painted over.

Finally, a couple hours later, 'Henry Flower', 'Bob From San Francisco', 'The Cripple'—absent throughout the moth episode and Karnon's hijinks—turned up at Byzantium Village to hang out with his school friends. And, what do you know, he'd become an Earthfriend.

'Henry Flower', 'Bob From San Francisco', 'The Cripple', 'Dr Iskander', 'Brady', 'Lupi', 'Ramiro', 'Karnon's protégé' - the temporal consonance, the succession from Classlessness to the basic Martial Body to an Earthfriend, indicated they were all one and the same. Discrepancies between accents, appearances, and personalities were resolvable with transmogrification, a penchant for deception, and an obsessive commitment to anonymity. The different usernames were harder to explain, but one player was suspected of having this name-changing ability: The Tyrant, who switched between 'crusadingintheshadows' and 'Mayonnaise' depending on which organisation he was representing. Making a final, minor speculation after that, by assuming that this ID-spoofing ability also imparted NPC-spoofing, all the gaps were filled in.

Now, the average player would have stopped at that penultimate step. They would reason that this could not be possible because The Tyrant, 'Mayonnaise', Alex Wong, was in Abhaya right now, streaming his raid progress and boasting about loot drops.

But what if 'crusadingintheshadows' and 'Mayonnaise' weren't the same?

This dissenter might rebut again with all the evidence dredged up by journalistic sleuths: the rarity of their simultaneous public appearances, the confirmation by daring assassins that they employed body doubles, Alex Wong's absences in battles except after victory had been achieved, The Tyrant having been caught delivering orders in Alex Wong's Harbin dialect, and so on.

But, no, Alex Wong was not The Tyrant.

Ramiro hadn't once been deceived by The Company's elaborate masquerade to conflate its dual leadership. Alex Wong and The Tyrant must be different people. Ramiro could make this claim with 100% confidence because he himself and The Tyrant shared a unique trait, one that Alex Wong, this laid-back pop culture celebrity who'd named himself after a condiment, could never possess.

'Stop! Please!'

Ramiro gently grabbed Atusa's face—tilted towards his own, trying to peer up through his mask—and twisted it until she was staring again at the juxtaposition between his reflection and the murder footage. "So, my love, can you spot the resemblance?"

'I'm defending myself. This guy was about to kill me. Check the Assailant's Penalty.'

'He's lying! Fuck you, fuck you!'

"Between you two?" asked Atusa

"Mhm. Guess right, and I'll answer everything without you having to go behind my back."

"Arsehole. I'm not playing this game." Atusa—having already compared them and identified nothing similar aside from the obvious, the animal mask and the murder habit which she'd used to blackmail her way into her position—feigned annoyance at his accusation. "Let's wash up. They'll send a delegation soon."

Ramiro locked her in a bearhug, giving a playful pat to a string of intestine sticking to her healed belly. "We'll welcome them like this."

"PAL!" Atusa shot a spell-projectile into his wrist.

Ramiro attempted to cling to her a moment longer. However, his body shrivelled up like a prune, her curse ageing it seven decades in an instant. She threw off his weakened grasp, then scampered over to an attached chamber to run a bath.

He had no further use for the bitch anyway.

Alone, he admired his grotesque, withered form—the wrinkled skin, the drooping breasts—and he thought of how vile it was that men would allow themselves to reach this state. Luckily, the curse was short-lasting. Gradually, his body healed, the same youthful vigour returning to it as that of the teenager in the footage eviscerating an NPC.

Or, crucially, not an NPC.

That's what separated himself and The Tyrant from an Alex Wong.

Saana's players could be sorted into two fundamental categories, depending on their perspective on the game's digital citizens.

Factually, the NPCs were not people in any significant metaphysical sense. This was indisputable. Since the AI revolution, there'd been severe international prohibitions against creating self-aware AI with independent thoughts and interests. Saanatek were open about their work-around to this restriction. They used a modular approach to building their game characters. Their NPCs possessed the qualities of a normal person—personalities, thoughts, feelings, desires, memories—but all of these were separate, originating from no singular agent.

The process could be analogised with traditional methods of animation. While the viewer might perceive a character on screen as a unitary entity, the figure in each frame had no physical connection to those in the frames preceding or following. Each had to be drawn from scratch by an external animator. Likewise, the voice out of the character's mouth was a separate audio track recorded by a different person at a different time, and the dialogue that this voice read was written by yet another party. The impression of unity was an illusion, a neural leap enacted entirely in the spectator's mind in response to these disconnected elements being synchronised and correlated.

A similar process of composition was used for Saana's NPCs, independent modules generating the various components of a human before combining them together into an illusory unity.

The majority of players, receiving the presented facts, accepted that the NPCs were non-persons. This was helped by the general prejudice against artificial intelligence following the AI revolution.

For others, however, the knowledge of a designed origin didn't matter. Superficially, while in-game, NPCs were indistinguishable from a flesh-and-blood human beyond their alien culture. Their appearances, mannerisms, personalities, and responses all perfectly mimicked humankind's, down to the many imperfections. Shown all the external features of an individual, the last step of projecting into the empty form an internal conductor, a 'person', was trivial. In fact, we all already did this. In the physical world, there was no direct means to verify another's internal existence - it had to be inducted second-hand from observed similarities to the self and reinforced by the positive feedback of behaving according to this assumption. Personhood always started with a leap of faith. Yet it was one that mankind was expert at making. So innate was the capacity to leap that savage man, in the form of animistic spirits, projected personhood onto rivers and the wind simply due to these non-living entities possessing some human qualities like motion. That modern man didn't was entirely due to the trained negation of this instinct, the psychological imposition of uniform mental categories by a homogenised society antagonistic to moral deviation.

Thus, certain players—unshackled to the norms of their peers, touched by a stirring experience with NPC companions—formed the forbidden view of Saana's characters as people.

The shift in mindset had a drastic effect on the player's decision-making, behaviour, reactions, and priorities.

The majority in the non-person camp behaved around NPCs with a child-like morality. They acted out motivations originating entirely from within – I want strength, I want riches, I want fame. No friction was generated when these desires conflicted with an NPC's. When one encountered a character with a bow one wanted for themselves, there was only a brief hesitation in calculating the chance of succeeding at the theft. If the risks weren't significant, one seized the bow with the ease of a child snatching a toy. Afterwards, one guiltlessly used their acquisition until either it was reclaimed or one found a shinier upgrade to steal.

Players intent on being good, on being heroes, were no exception to this behavioural warping. The evil they sought to vanquish was whatever shallow evil managed to permeate their psychological reality. If a poor woman begged justice against a usurper who'd slain her family and stolen her land, the hero didn't truly consider the quest-giver's agentive capacity to skew the truth in her own self-interest, whether she might be hiding the corruption and abuse of power that'd warranted her family's downfall. The hero didn't scout her past domain for the grateful accounts from peasantry for the new lord. The hero, modelled in the flimsy image of knights in fables, never considered the boring, peaceful solutions. With a child's impatience, they gathered their companions, they rode straight for the enemy's lair, they slaughtered a horde of 'minions', they plunged their swords into the bad guy's heart, then they departed for the next adventure, abandoning the area to the ravages of lawlessness and banditry.

Those players who refused to confer the NPCs personhood were bound to simplistic, uncanny scripts. In a sense, they became NPCs themselves.

In contrast to the pseudo-NPCs, the player who dared to imagine these game entities as real must themselves, like a real adult human-being, deliberate forever afterwards on the extra repercussions for their actions upon the widened network of others. Inside of them sprung up a noisier conversation between the multiplied ranks of contradictory wills, and the lengthier developments of this expanded discourse produced hesitations, changes, unpredictabilities. It raised the importance of time, man's definitive fourth dimension, as the perceived justifiability of one's choices fluctuated between moments X and Y until the argument settled around a solution.

The theft of a bow for a player of this second nature involved the overcoming of much stronger forces. The joy that could be gained by the weapon had to contend against the anguish of losing it, returned to them through the sympathetic identification of the other as being akin to themself. Even though the player could, they might not steal the bow. Or perhaps they do, but later, the incident continuing to weigh on their conscience, they return it and apologise. Or, if the stolen bow cannot be returned, then they might dispose of it in the woods as a cat buries its shameful excrement, and, later, when another tempting item is wafted beneath the nose, the residual stench of the first episode disinclines a repetition.

That last is another feature unique to this second player: change. Through greater involvement in the world, they are punished more for their misdeeds, and conversely rewarded more for their selflessness. These intensified feedback mechanisms consequently shape the player closer and faster to the whims of this digital realm.

This class of player, by having taken the small leap of madness, undergoes a metamorphosis that makes them more controlled, more nuanced, more rational, more complete – more human. Ultimately, they awaken to a higher mode of interfacing with Saana in which these computer-manufactured events attain the spiritual substantiality to penetrate the walls of the soul and make it shake.

Ramiro was himself an exemplar of this divine metamorphosis.

He'd begun an ordinary serial killer roleplayer.