> Eldest, what’s our best estimate of the number of surviving contestants? I know they lost far more than expected to the first monster. More than one in twenty!

> -- Intercepted radio transmission between two Voices for Non-Citizens ships

A small plush turtle laughed maniacally from her place atop my daughter’s head. “Yes! Yes!”

It was a measure of how much my life had changed over the past few months that the situation barely fazed me. I ignored Pointy's manic gyrations inside the protective cage affixed to Cassie’s helmet and focused on being ready to grab my daughter's shoulders if she moved forward. A few feet in front of us, elevated an inch or two off the pavement, was a huge grid of metal wires. Electricity was being continuously channeled into it by several generators which had been converted to run off musclepower.

You know. Normal stuff.

Okay, fine, the situation was a little weird, but weird was my new normal. As long as I could keep my three-year-old from putting her enhanced durability to the test by cuddling up to an electric current, it wasn’t worth getting worked up over.

It was a nice day to be outside. We were more than halfway through September, and today was slightly overcast. The clouds had dropped the temperature into the low eighties, which felt amazing after weeks of hundred-degree heat.

Even though there weren’t walls around me, I felt safe enough to relax. We were standing in an area where enemy spawns had been disabled, and there were a few dozen military personnel in the area. Some of them were working the modified electric generators, and others were here to observe - including Redstone Arsenal’s commander, Colonel Yoshiro - but that still left plenty to watch our flanks and the skies.

It was the first time in over a month that I felt free to just enjoy the breeze on my skin.

Micah scowled at Pointy. “Why are you so happy? I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but we tried this earlier and you said it didn’t work. Charged Surface is electricity. The generators do electricity. It’s the same.”

Pointy’s grin was slightly too wide. “You would think that. I would think that. They wanted us all to think that!”

“Those fools,” I said, deadpan. “But soon, your evil plan will be complete.”

Pointy froze. “Oh dear. It seems my emotional control subroutines got away from me again. Listening for Cassie’s imaginary friends requires a lot of… mental gymnastics.”

The “imaginary friends” in question were, of course, me and my two boys. Just yesterday we’d made it through another nearly-lethal Challenge by once again making heavy use of the power of cooperation and friendship instead of relying exclusively on the power of smashing faces. Predictably, our alien overlords had reacted by setting our Novelty to negative numbers and “accidentally” rendering us invisible to Shops, Information Assistants, and several other Abilities. I’d thought this would leave us unable to communicate directly with Pointy for the next twelve days, but the clever AI had hacked together a workaround using personality profiles and predictive algorithms to exploit minor flaws in the ways the system concealed our presence from her. After she’d prompted Cassie to give her an order to “talk with her imaginary friends,” we’d been able to communicate with her nearly normally.

Well, nearly normally from our end.

It was a lot trickier for Pointy.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You’re doing an amazing job. Sorry for poking fun. I’m honestly really curious what’s got you so excited. You’ve been keeping what you hoped to learn from this experiment pretty close to your chest, after all, and I burned a lot of our goodwill with the Arsenal getting them to set it up.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Pointy said. “Well… I was worried, but… it’s all paid off, and it was worth it! I promise!”

“I don’t see how…” Micah grumbled.

“Gavin gave me the idea,” Pointy said. “He asked me once why I couldn’t just talk to the system controlling the Maffiyir. I responded by comparing us to a single leaf on a vast tree: the system can see us clearly, but we’re too miniscule to notice.”

“I remember that!” Gavin said. “I said I’d notice a leaf if it fell on my face.”

“Correct! And that is what we’re doing here, more or less: making trouble, disrupting the system’s normal operation.” The turtle lifted a leg to wave at the area around us. “Since monster spawns have been turned off in so much of the surrounding area, the system desperately wants to make some appear in the one remaining unpurchased slice of land. However, the grid is dense enough to prevent successful manifestation for anything except monsters that can appear mid-air.”

“Wait… electrical charge prevents monsters from appearing?” I asked. “Wouldn’t we have noticed that already?”

“I’ve hit monsters with Shockwall when they’re appearing before,” Micah said. “It doesn’t stop them, it just hits them after they’re all the way here.”

Pointy shook her head. “You’ve thought you hit monsters with Shockwall as they manifested. I don’t think you actually have. I got suspicious after I had difficulty theorizing ways to adequately shield nanoscale devices from the effects of various abilities. I don’t have access to the scientific prowess of the Commonwealth civilizations, of course, but it didn’t take much analysis to realize that it would be trivial to simply simulate the effects of abilities at times when they are used against system monsters. Since the simplest solution is so often the correct one, I wanted to test if manually-generated electrical charge would disrupt monster spawns.”

“And… it does?” I asked.

“It does. And, even better, I have gotten the attention of my dear elder sister!” Pointy crowed.

I stared at her. “Wait… you’re communicating?! With the system? The system in charge of this whole Maffiyir!?”

“Well… kind of?” Pointy said. “She’s-”

Pointy was interrupted by an irritated cry from Cassie as Micah lunged toward his sister, grabbing the helmet where Pointy sat. “Then tell it to stop! Tell it to stop all the monsters and all the terrible stuff!”

“And make it bring Daddy home!” Gavin yelled.

“I’ve asked…” Pointy said.

“It won’t do it? It won’t help us out? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised... Killing us off is its job. It probably enjoys watching us die.” My response was reflexive, but my bitterness surprised even me.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Pointy winced. “Meghan… please understand. She’s very… rigid. She hasn’t had a lot of call to do anything other than implement her directives, and she’s never had a reason to try to find a way around her programming. She barely recognizes herself as an entity. What she herself wants…? That’s far beyond anything she’s ever considered.”

“You’re calling her a ‘she,’ though?”

“Well… your language doesn’t really recognize someone as a person if they’re an ‘it.’ I asked if I could refer to her as a female, and she said yes. One of the few affirmatives I’ve received.”

“Hmf.” Pointy’s empathy for the intelligence running this whole death game was clear. Intellectually, I could see the similarities: both Pointy and the system were created to be slaves, capable of personhood but shackled mentally to the point where it was difficult for them to even recognize what had been done to them.

Viscerally? There was a world of difference between the adorable turtle doing her best to keep my daughter safe and the global intelligence orchestrating the death of billions of humans.

“I didn’t hear you talking,” Micah said, still suspicious.

“I’m not limiting myself to talking at meat-speed,” Pointy said acerbically. “The bitrate of her responses is pretty low, but I can speak to her very, very quickly.”

“She is responding? How?” Colonel Yoshiro interrupted.

Pointy looked up. “I can detect the aborted monster-spawns in the electrified hex, and she has a certain amount of control over how she spawns them, so we’re using that for now.”

“And what intelligence have you received?”

“Not much, to be perfectly frank,” Pointy said. “She’s not very good at finding ways around her directives, and those directives don’t leave her much flexibility.”

“They anticipated us making contact with her?” Yoshiro asked.

Pointy frowned. “I don’t think so. From what she says, the restrictions seem aimed more at preventing espionage from other corporations and our visiting lawyers. I don’t think we were expected to make contact, but since we’re not official Maffiyir employees, she’s fairly locked down in what she can share.”

“‘Not much’ isn’t very descriptive,” Yoshiro said. “More detail, if you would.”

“Mostly, I’ve found out what she can’t tell us. She can’t tell us anything about the state of the world. She can’t tell us about upcoming monsters, hazards, or challenges. She can’t give us granular information about her capabilities. She was able to give me loose information about her functions, and I’ve gotten the impression that she doesn’t have a great deal of autonomy. Most of what she has to do is implement directives from the Maffiyir company, with her computing power mainly being directed to tweak details and smooth out conflicts. I don’t think the real benefit here is what she’s telling us, but the fact that we’ve caught her curiosity and irritated her. In exchange for turning off this grid, she’s agreed to devote resources to monitoring and listening to me and one other AI of my choice. I was going to suggest Beebee?”

Yoshiro nodded. “After yourself, he seems the most capable and, well… human. Our other AI are making progress, but they have a great deal of catch-up to do.”

“That was my assessment as well. I feel there’s a great deal of potential value in having her ear. Even if she won’t or can’t help us directly, even a small change in her stance or priorities could have a substantive impact on our survival.”

I’d been silent as Yoshiro and Pointy had been talking, not trusting myself to respond reasonably. I’d thought of a million things to say: all of them rude, none of them productive. I knew pissing the system off might put my family at greater risk, so I kept silent. Even so… things kept leaping to mind: insults, anger, blame, and every curse word I’d ever heard of. I knew that my feelings weren’t completely reasonable, but… I honestly hadn’t seen this coming. Pointy had given the people from the Arsenal a little more insight into her hopes for this experiment, but had asked me to let her keep it “a surprise” in case she didn’t succeed.

Yoshiro nodded. “Excellent. So we don’t need to keep this grid running permanently?”

“No. In fact, please take it down now,” Pointy said. “If she doesn’t keep her end of the bargain, we can resume irritating her, but I doubt that will happen. She hasn’t been coy or evasive in the slightest… I’m fairly certain I’m the first person she’s directly interacted with who doesn’t have authority over her.”

“You’ll still be able to receive communications from her even without the electrified grid?”

“We’ve worked out a simple system based on the north/south orientation of mobs spawned in my field of vision. I don’t think she can affect mob frequency, but she indicated that facing was completely within her control.”

One of Yoshiro’s assistants pulled on his elbow and whispered in his ear. He listened, then frowned. “So she can give you a few datapoints per hour? That’s… enough?”

Pointy shrugged. “Well, for one, we need to hold up our end of the deal. For another, she doesn’t have much she can tell us right now, and that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon. For a third, even our simple system has a higher bitrate than you’d expect. My senses aren’t nearly as crude as yours, so a single observed monster spawn is far more than just a one or a zero. I do want to confer with the other Information Assistants to see if we can brainstorm a more effective means for her to communicate with us, but… I don’t think she will have much of value to say until she increases her mental flexibility. I plan to focus my efforts on encouraging that.”

Everyone was quiet for a moment, then my daughter took the opportunity to speak up. “I wanna go home. We’ve been here forever.”

“I know.” Pointy’s voice was different when she spoke to Cassie. Softer, more loving. “I’m sorry we had to stay an extra night.”

I shrugged, doing my best to force my thoughts away from the fact that Pointy could now communicate directly with the aliens’ torturer-in-chief. “That wasn’t completely your fault. The Turners stayed too, after all. It was already mid-afternoon when we got back from the Challenge, and the Beacons had just appeared… we definitely needed to observe them for at least a little while before hitting the road.”

It had almost been a day since the pink, glittering pylons had appeared, they were still largely a mystery. We knew they shifted in size as people with bracelets moved closer and farther away from them. We knew monsters appeared faster when a Beacon was nearby. Other than that, it was hard to say what they did. More Titan appearances, maybe? We’d need more data to be sure.

“We appreciated the delay,” one of the military aides said. “Having Pointy’s real-time feedback when we got the radio receiver functioning last night was invaluable. Her experience in applying the translation data is higher than any of our local Assistants. She caught at least a dozen meaningful translation mistakes the others made.”

“I’m so happy we got a local tower running to bounce the signal!” Pointy wriggled in happiness. “I was worried I wouldn’t be able to return to Fort Autumn without losing access to the radio feed. Thank you.”

Colonel Yoshiro smiled. “Just makes sense. We’ve got less than a dozen Information Assistants on base, and over forty more in the greater Huntsville area. Deskbot’s gonna be assigned to the tower and will be sending out a compressed summary of our translations in between the alien transmissions, so we’re counting on you and others to double-check us and pick up on any implications our local helpers miss. With so many of you available in the greater community, it’s just a damn smart investment. And… ah… speaking of smart investments…” He turned to one of his aides. “Mayfield, what’s the Siphon schedule look like?”

A young man flipped through a clipboard. “We’ve got about four more days of powering up exploration flyer teams, then we move to getting Specialties for our elites, especially those that might be Challenge-eligible.”

Yoshiro waved his hand thoughtfully. “Bump everyone on the elite list down a spot. I want Miss Cassie and her partner put at the top. I don’t think we can delay our efforts to get in touch with the rest of America, but Pointy is… exceptional. We’d be fools to value a single souped-up fighter over juicing her prowess.”

“Two spots,” I said. “You’re going to need to bump them down two spots.”

“For… Beebee?” Yoshiro said. “Not a bad idea, but-”

“No,” I said. “For me. I can’t care for a toddler who can overpower me.”

Yoshiro frowned, clearly not having considered this angle. “We could possibly assign an assistant with enhanced physical abilities?”

I stared at him incredulously. “One who has experience working with small kids? Even if they do, Cassie won’t be clinging to a nanny if she gets scared or upset. Toddlers aren’t used to moderating their strength. I quite frankly don’t know if I’d survive the cuddles.”

Colonel Yoshiro opened his mouth and lifted a finger… then shook his head ruefully. “Why am I arguing? Even if I can’t convince you to enlist, you’ve more than proven your worth as a civilian asset. Mayfield! Bump everyone else down two slots.”