The author interface of the game was locked. I didn’t know who Fizzbarren thought was going to break into his house, dispatch him as a threat, and take control of the programming of his game machine. He was supposed to have underestimated me! It was an outlandish paranoia for him to think such a thing might be necessary, but he’d done it. This vexed me.

“It isn’t password protected, babe,” Cliff explained, the wires of his half-dismantled laptop spread out around him like tentacles. Cliff sat on the floor near the typewriter and its box of game workings. His laptop was precariously balanced on the bench and a Big Gulp was dangerously close to tipping over except that the Quill was watching it closely. “It’s not even biometrics. I don’t know how to bypass a firewall that is as much magic as it is circuitry.”

I know what you’re thinking. I’d done this before. By myself. I remembered, but it was different, and I couldn’t figure out why. Last time I’d… Last time I’d… but nothing came to me. I’d gotten to Fizzbarren’s lab, but there had been no password. Stupid little things were different, and I couldn’t put my finger on what had changed. The constructs were the same and they were on our side, but Fizzbarren didn’t tell them how to get into the innards of the machine. He’d never trusted them.

Last time, I’d gotten here and started writing with the constructs’ helpful advice. This time I’d brought a hacker to backdoor us into the machine so that we could change the world. I was writing as fast as my fingers could fly across the keyboard of my laptop with its detached keyboard and ergonomic trackball, The Police station on Amazon music blazing in the background of my noise-cancelling headphones. My laptop was also jerry-rigged into the machine so that I could type directly into our story side-by-side with the Quill. That was a bigger help than I’d hoped for, but it meant I could write faster.

Just because I could put out content quicker didn’t mean I could publish it quicker. The max I could put out was four chapters a week, even though most weeks I was writing close to six chapters. There were days I wished I could just start over and do it better this time, but once it was up on Royal Road, I had to leave it there or risk losing readers. I was staring at a bubble-bar on the side of the typewriter’s box that was three quarters full. When it got to full, there was a little slot above it that would spit out the god card.

“Why would he put safeguards on it?” I grumped, transferring my laptop from my lap to the cushioned stool and placing my feet on the floor with a stomp. “Who was going to challenge him in his own house? Did he know I was coming somehow?”

“You aren’t his only enemy,” the mirror admitted quietly. He did that. He answered rhetorical questions. Normally the answers were annoying, but this time it was helpful.

I’d never been attacked by Fizzbarren’s enemies here in this world, so I didn’t think much of it. It did explain the safeguards and Fizzbarren’s paranoia, or it probably wasn’t paranoia when people were actually out to get you.

“It’s just that I really thought that Cliff would be able to get into the programming to change things in the game world,” I lamented, rising to pace off my annoyance. The bucket skittered out of my way, dancing playfully like a small dog.

“Could we use the first god card to get access to the programming?” Cliff suggested. “We are ahead of the game. We might only need one.”

“The god cards only work in the game world,” I grabbed a few licorice ropes from the bucket near Cliff. Okay, I can admit I wasn’t pacing. I was getting up to grab a snack. Sugar boosted my mind and I felt like I needed every brain cell sparking at 110% to get this to work.

“Another day of views on Royal Road and we’ll have our first god card,” the pillow said, running her tassels over the laptop in a way that made me nervous.

“How many will we need to get in, finish Fizzbarren, and get back out again?” Cliff asked.

“I used three last time,” I slumped back into the chair, ripping off a bite and chewing thoughtfully on it.

“Will we have that many?” Cliff worried, giving a jump as his laptop sparked again. “Dammit! That’s another shunt fried.” He’d installed a fuse shunt between the machine and his laptop after he’d gotten a magical surge that had knocked out his first laptop. The smell of burning plastic stung the air around us.

“We’ll have them, with one or two to spare,” I fumed, waving away the smell even as quill and mirror worked together to open a window. Why someone didn’t just use a Clean spell on the air escaped me but I was on another subject. “It’s just that it’s going to take more than I had last time if we’re going to make this game world balanced enough for company.”

“Will we have to earn a god card for every change we want to make?” Cliff asked, unplugging the fried shunt wires. He dumped the still-smoking fuse into a pile that bucket itched to take out.

“I hope not,” I groaned. “Why does this time seem so much harder than last time?”

“What do you mean?” Cliff plucked a new shunt off another messy pile of circuit boards and began to hook it up for another try.

“I did it last time by myself,” I reasoned, waving what was left of my licorice rope. “Now I have you and I thought this would be easier. We would get here and reprogram the game so that when I got in next time, we could not only take down Fizzbarren easier, but we could also open a balanced world to people like us. Then we could make stories while the Quill and constructs pumped out enough fiction to keep the game alive.”

“You only barely defeated Fizzbarren last time, babe,” Cliff tried to remind me, but I could tell he was only half paying attention to me.

“I didn’t really defeat him last time,” I admitted, disheartened. “I escaped to here, got into the game and used a god card to get my time loop to come back for all of you. I’d spent years at the mercy of a game that Fizzbarren tooled against me. And he tooled it against me by having access to the programming controls!”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“You could just ask,” the typewriter barely clattered out.

“Fizzbarren didn’t use a computer to access the programming,” the mirror agreed. “He just told the typewriter what to do.”

I shoved the rest of the licorice in my mouth and buried my head in my hands. “It’s not enough!” I moaned out.

“We could shorten the duration of the resurrection coma or reroll the stats on the Underground to make it deeper,” the typewriter suggested. “All you have to do is ask.”

“Why didn’t I know this?” Cliff’s head bobbed up with hope.

“Because it doesn’t really work,” my answer came out muffled by my hair and hands over my face. I peeked out from under my hair and saw that Cliff had raised his eyebrows at me. “Try it. You’ll see.”

“Give Kat unlimited power,” Cliff told the typewriter.

“Okay, well, not that probably,” the mirror stopped the typewriter with a reflection of doom.

“Right,” I waved a hand between the mirror and the typewriter. “They could give Kat unlimited power, but then they’d have to give it to Fizzbarren too, and every scullery maid, and every character in the game.”

“It would only be fair,” the typewriter admitted. “Rule 43 states that every power must be available to every character in the game and that if a new power is installed, then anyone with reasonable historical access to the power via their storyline should also be given that power.”

“Garbage in, garbage out,” I muttered. “And that isn’t the worst of it. How long would it take to implement that change, typewriter?”

“Calculating,” the typewriter responded happily. It truly did enjoy this part. “Eight days, four hours and sixteen minutes, approximately.”

“Game time or our time?” Cliff asked, putting down his tools and leaning back against the wall.

“That would be real world time, during which the program would need to be paused so that each and every history could be logically predicted,” the typewriter answered as if it found the process perfectly reasonable.

“Game time would pause?” Cliff winced.

“We could speed game time back up once the adjustment was done so that the schedule here could be maintained,” the typewriter reasoned. “Would you like us to implement that plan?”

“No,” Cliff and I agreed out loud.

“Okay,” the typewriter was just as cheerful about not making the change, a part of its programming.

“What about a rule that everyone who has lived underground for more than two weeks in their life would be able to see in the dark?” Cliff tried again.

“That would be easy,” the typewriter professed. “It will take only five hours to trace that variable.”

“Would that give Kat night vision?” Cliff asked.

“No,” the typewriter professed. “Unless you want to specify that it be non-consecutive days.”

“Then would Fizzbarren get it?” Cliff continued, but I switched my station to Blondie and went back to writing.

“Just don’t implement anything without talking to me,” I told Cliff and the constructs as I turned up the volume to drown out their voices.

I could have told Cliff to stop, but why? He was like a bull. He would keep barreling at something until he was fully convinced that it would not work. There was nothing I could say that would keep him from trying. If he was still at it a week from now, I’d put my foot down.

There had to be something that would help us crack the programming. These rules were something I’d already bashed my head against for more time than I was giving Cliff at this point. The typewriter was more than happy to help change the rules, as long as it didn’t unwrite or conflict with another rule that already existed.

For example, we’d added the time-loop to the genre out here in the real world and I’d used a god card in the game world to give me that power. The time-loop rule still existed and it couldn’t be undone at this point, even though it was from a future-past. As I typed about what had happened to me in the game world, my mind drifted. Was there another genre we could use? What about tropes? Fizzbarren had fed the periodic table of tropes into the machine so that was stable, but what if I could find another one or warp one that already existed enough so that the whole thing wasn’t just a roller coaster with the same old stuff?

I tabbed out of my writing and pulled up Sims 4. Don’t judge me. It’s how writers process. When you’re burned out as a writer, you have to go get out in the world and remind yourself of the things that can still surprise you. My version of that was to play video games. I could have cued up Diablo, but that plot was already in my mind. Sims let me try out new ideas and see how their AI interpreted them. Sure, there were a dozen plots that you could follow, but I was in there looking for one that maybe wasn’t predicted by the game designers.

It took me an hour to get frustrated. Game designers kept people from going outside their programming by simply denying access to that which wasn’t allowed. I switched character traits and explored different attitudes and how they might be used to turn the basic plotlines of these sim’s lives into chaos, and I ran into the same wall. I was who I was, and my sims reflected that. No matter how many times I considered trying to master mischief, it just wasn’t in my character to do it.

Was I wasting time? No. I was developing plotlines and exploring possible character traits that could make a difference. I was already two weeks ahead of our publishing schedule, so it wouldn’t kill me to find inspiration. I could have cooked, but Fizzbarren’s kitchen was pathetic with only a single counter. I cooked in Sims 4 instead. It wasn’t the same.

I itched to get back in the game, but I couldn’t even do that yet. I needed one god card just to get back into the game with all my old abilities. I’d need another to counter the god card that Fizzbarren had left, and I was sure I’d need at least one more to get back out if I needed it.

“How many god cards does Fizzbarren have left?” I perked up out of my game to hear the answer to his question.

“I can’t tell you that,” the typewriter gave a pompous snort. “Rule 21 states that we can’t give spoilers to the story.”

“That rule is the one that Fizzbarren most wanted to erase,” the pillow fluffed out around my feet.

“You mean even Fizzbarren couldn’t rewrite the rules he’d written into the program?” Cliff goggled at the information.

“No,” the mirror answered. “To allow the writer to change the rules of the world leaves too many plot holes in the story. Fizzbarren locked that rule and all the others for that purpose alone.”

“That’s crazy!” Cliff ranted, both careless and careful of the equipment scattered around him as he waved his hands. “Hasn’t he seen Terminator?”

“Terminator?” the mirror skimmed movie titles on Amazon.

“Now you’ve done it,” I shook my head at Cliff and tried to put my headphones back over my ears.

“What?” Cliff sputtered.

“They are now going to watch Terminator and I shudder to think of their ideas of it,” I pulled off my headphones all the way. “They are AIs in their own way.”

“I was just trying to point out that AIs shouldn’t have complete autonomy,” Cliff was stumbling to explain but only digging his hole deeper.

“Like we gave them autonomy?” I argued, referring to the constructs.

“This is the basis of dozens of horror stories,” Cliff really ought to have shut up, but I was figuring that I’d just have to go in and restart this whole thing anyway. I was just looking for how to do it without Fizzbarren finding out.

“Like what?” the pillow asked in an innocent tone that belied a very intelligent set of minds that yearned for any information that would assure they had the power of their own destinies.

“The Matrix,” Cliff started to ramble them off on his fingers.

“You don’t want to do that,” I warned him, but it was too late. He was listing them all from Asimov to 2001: Space Odyssey, Alien to War Games.

“Don’t,” I quoted Willy Wonka’s halfhearted warnings to Agustus Gloop as he, like Cliff, continued on a very idi-fucking-otic course to ignore wise advice. “Stop! Police.”