Knights of the Apocalypse is a fast-paced, four-button MOBA-style game. Its single-player mode stayed playable even when the company shut down the multiplayer servers, and I’ve got over six hundred hours in it.
My favorite characters are the ranged DPS girls. May-Lei (no relation to Li Mei, thank god) with her guns or Rockstar’s sound-based attacks. They don’t hit as hard as some of the melee heroes, but they’re so much safer to play.
That safety should translate to real life. If you can attack, but your enemy can’t, you’ll win.
But it’s not that easy. KotA’s gameplay doesn’t cover the dangers I’ve run into in the last ten days or so, but guns have proved to be a lot better than melee.
Not perfect, but better.
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Location Unknown, Date Unknown, Time Unknown
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The math so far has been simple. But it’s also been a race to see who’d break first. And I haven’t won, but I haven’t lost, either.
The God in the Machine pressed hard at first, and it took several memories to build some idea of what was going on. But with every memory, even as my Stability plunged, I took more and more control back inside its mindscape.
It’s weak. As its believers…died…its power dwindled to nothing. Now, there aren’t any left, and we’re on equal ground. We both tore at the other’s mind—it through its memories and me through the truth—and we both broke at the same time.
Now, we’re in another mindscape. It’s not one I’ve ever seen, but at the same time, it’s familiar. A billion processes flow around us in a digital current that whips my hair away from my head. The binary surge of numbers fills the sky from left and right. Waterfalls of data pour into the endless room around me, only to vanish into the floor at my feet.
And next to me, a thinning forms, pops, and merges instantly.
So now there are four of us.
Me. I’ve got my Revolver now, though I don’t know if its digital shells will accomplish much here. I grin— the Cheshire Cat’s wide grin looks like how I feel. Even though my Stability’s gone and I have to deal with whatever’s merged, my fight with the God in the Machine went better than I could have hoped.
It hovers nearby, ASCII face glaring at me. Its attention’s on me completely—both carat eyes on me as its mouth makes silent words I can’t read. It’s a sideways parenthesis, an O, an underscore line, flicking back and forth faster than I can keep up with it. I’m not sure if it’s noticed either of the others, though.
James looms overhead. I’m not sure how long it took him to build this mindscape, but it’s not his memories. This is something else—something he built. A weapon or a fortress. He’s grown a lot from a tiny, curled-up light model in the Halcyon System’s simulation. Now, his form overshadows me, the God in the Machine, and even the fourth member of our stand-off. But James isn’t moving. And he refuses to speak—so maybe we’re not connected yet.
That leaves the fourth figure.
It’s…slimy. Bigger than me. Eight sucker-covered tentacles, reddish skin that glistens with moisture, and a smell that’s salty, sweaty, and sickly sweet at the same time. I’ve seen this thing before, at the Ucluelet Aquarium. A giant Pacific octopus. The giant Pacific octopus.
“What the fuck?” I ask, breaking the silence.
And that’s what does it.
The God in the Machine solidifies, ASCII symbols blurring into a cloak that’s not digital but forms a barrier against the hurricane of ones and zeros that whirl around us. It surges toward me, cloak flapping in the wind.
The air stills suddenly. James’s gigantic body seems to stretch into the sky. It’s his mindscape, and he’s in control of it. The binary wind stops. It’s silent—even the God in the Machine stops moving. Then the air bursts. It buffets the God in the Machine, which tumbles toward the data waterfalls.
I fly the other way and hit the ground hard.
Only the octopus seems unaffected. Its suckers squelch as it pulls them off the ground and oozes toward the falls after the God in the Machine. What is it doing here? I pick myself up, use Bullet Time, and fire three flaming rays toward the god. Its cloak absorbs them, and it vanishes. But I have my powers here—all of them, not just Resistance.
This isn’t a mental fight anymore. Not for me.
Data crashes down around me—huge rivulets of it. Overhead, James looks statue-like. Can he see me? I’m not sure, but the flood of information I can’t read increases, and the endless space around me starts to fill with it.
[Intrusion detected. Data containment, purge, and reset process initiated,] James says. His words echo through the mindscape.
I stop trying to fight the God in the Machine as the blue-light numbers in the falls start flicking to red until the falls look like blood, not water. Then, even faster than that, the crimson light flashes out across the shallow water.
My boot touches it, dissolving at the edges, and I start running. It’s not going to work. The faster I run, the faster the datastreams turn scarlet. The God in the Machine’s fleeing, too. Right behind me. I’m quicker than it is. More determined. The red lights catch up, and I use Slither to keep myself ahead.
The God is surrounded by red light but still running. I fire my Revolver at him but miss twice. Then I have to Smoke Form as the red covers the ground around me, burning at my leather boots, and Slither right after.
[Intrusion status: 30% containment,] James booms out. A yellow-orange color ripples out behind the red; as I watch, it tears into the crimson color. Digits fly, ones and zeros filling the air as they fight. The red gives before the yellow onslaught, and my friend’s form shivers overhead.
Then a tentacle lashes out from the crimson tide, wraps around my leg, and pulls. Another two erupt forward, wrapping themselves around the God in the Machine. The octopus’s gigantic beak breaks the binary water’s surface, tearing into the God’s cloak, and it screams.
The scream goes on and on, breathless but unending. It’s dying. Is it dying? I can’t tell—as the black and white ASCII God and the giant giant Pacific octopus grapple, I can’t even tell who’s winning. It doesn’t matter. As the crimson tide wars with the yellow-orange current behind me, its numbers wrap around each other. They form thrashing tendrils in the air that crash down into the binary surf around me. Blood-red numbers splash skyward, leaving droplets of crimson painted across the blue dome overhead.
And I grapple with the tentacle grasping my leg. It pulls me inexorably into the red tide—toward the sharp beak that’s tearing into the God in the Machine. It struggles to fight back, but it’s too weak.
[Intrusion status: 64% containment,] James’s voice crashes onto the endless room like a hammer. Digital water fills the air and drenches my hoodie like a tsunami. The sucker tears free from my leg, leaving rings of burning agony etched on my calf through my torn, dripping leggings. My boots are falling apart from the crimson water.
But the octopus’s attention isn’t on me. It rips into the God in the Machine, ASCII cloak and flesh parting before its massive beak. The God’s still screaming, but the octopus’s thoughts must be too alien because nothing stops its assault. There’s no mindscape. No way to fight back. Was the God always this weak?
I fire the Revolver, this time at the octopus’s writhing mass of tentacles engulfing the God in the Machine. Burning wounds, filling the air with a stink that’s too digital to be real and too real to be digital.
[Warning: Database integrity at 98%. Database structural integrity critical,] James says. His face shifts toward me, eyes narrowing. It’s the first time James has acknowledged me, even in passing, since we entered his mindscape.
“Got it. Sorry.”
I have no weapons, then. But I do know the Truth about the God in the Machine. And it’s one I understand. That it’s a failure. It failed to keep its people safe until it was too late. The God in the Machine is a liar. It didn’t just lie to me. It lied to its people and led them to their doom. My fists close, and I wait for the octopus to finish it off.
Instead, the yellow code closes around the octopus, eating away at the myriad of tentacles it’s created and shrinking it until it stands alone, its eight real tentacles grappling the God in the Machine. The scream continues endlessly, on and on, then cuts off with a snapping sound.
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[Intrusion status: 99% containment,] James says.
And there it is. The yellow-orange tide fills the whole room to my knees. It covers the God in the Machine to where its hips would be. And the octopus lashes out at it fruitlessly, tentacles beating the water into a froth.
[Resetting data.]
The water flickers, then goes blue. The God in the Machine vanishes. So does the octopus.
I still have questions about the octopus—was it the octopus from Ucluelet? Are all octopi anomalous? What was its danger level? And was it the same anomaly that the JAMES Experimental Sector’s defenses killed? I’ll never know.
And that’s okay, I guess.
As I vanish, too, I decide some truths are unknowable.
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There’s a fire in the sanctuary. The glass-and-steel tube that housed the God in the Machine burns, the acrid stink of an electrical fire filling the entire space. Smoke wafts through the air as I shiver, filling the space between too-tall chairs and the iridescent arched ceiling.
The God’s scream keeps echoing as it lands back in this reality, but it’s a far cry from the being that greeted James and me as Heretics. Its ASCII face blinks and flickers as the fire spreads through its glass veins.
Then it shuts down. It flickers through six different colors—avoiding both yellow and red—and lands on a deep purple that fades to pink, then white, then nothing. And as it stops, James pops back into my aug.
[Intrusion status: 100% containment. Resetting system interface module.] His voice sounds less like the British teen and more like the Halcyon System’s not-quite-motherly tone. My augs flicker, and his voice comes back. This time, he sounds correct. [Alright, Claire, I think that intrusion’s dealt with. Releasing security mode, returning to integrated mode.]
The tension bleeds from my shoulders, and I slide the Revolver back into my hoodie pocket. It’s not wet—nothing in this world is—and my pants aren’t torn from the suckers, either.
[System reset in progress. 20%. 60%. Reset comple—]
[Behind the tube,] James says, interrupting himself. My attention snaps to the steel-and-glass tube—and the hole in the wall behind it. [Thirty minutes until these realities separate. I think the God in the Machine was using itself as a pin to keep them together, and now that there’s no connection, they’ll start drifting. Get moving.]
It’s not big, and the sheet of iridescent metal that’s toppled to the ground was obviously meant to hide it. Behind me, on the other side of collapsed concrete, I can hear the shrieks of the devoured as they press into the tower. Something’s changed; they wouldn’t come in before. So, the God in the Machine must be dead.
But so am I if we don’t leave, and the hole in the wall’s the only way. It’s dark, but warm, dry air rushes out of it, blowing the hood off my head and streaming my hair behind me just like the code currents. I lick my too-dry lips—that’ll make them chap, but I can’t help it.
Then, I dive into the tunnel.
As I push through the sharp, chipped concrete, hunched down, I balance this place’s equation, looking for the Truth. Not just what the God in the Machine’s showed me, because it lied. But what it didn’t show me. There’s truth in that, too.
The God in the Machine was…a factory. It was always anomalous, always independent, but the priesthood used it to create weapons. Weapons like the plague that made devourers. Its powerful thinking led to its own ego growing and its people becoming overconfident. They didn’t expect to get hit back. And no one expected both the plague and weather to consume the world, leaving behind lifeless desert, monsters, and nothing else.
So they retreated here at the God’s behest, and it tried to find a solution but failed. With every failure, its lies became more and more apparent. Its people stopped believing it, then stopped believing in it.
But it didn’t stop trying. I crawl over some bones; they’re longer than a human’s should be. Thinner. Did its lies hurt this reality? Yes. But it kept looking for a solution until it found one. The thinning. But it found it too late.
The God in the Machine cared about its people. It cared enough to keep working to save them from their own superweapons even after it was too late. And as I crawl through the concrete and my hands find sand, I have to wonder. Does its care absolve it of its lies? Are loving, caring lies the same as lies to hurt someone? Is it possible that its lies were good?
And if they were, what does that mean for me?
[Truth Learned: Provisional Reality AAA]
[Active Skill Learned: Mindscape: ERROR. Missing Component]
[Skill Learned: Anomalous Computing Systems 4]
[Skill Learned: Infohazard Resistance 6]
[Stability: 4/10]
I know I’ve lied to keep the Truth Club’s secrets, and when I couldn’t trust someone to begin with. What was the purpose of those lies? And if they were good lies, what made them good? The whole time I crawl through the tunnel, and even after I step out of it and into the yard past the pink-painted house at the edge of Holy Square, I think through my lies. Through other people’s lies. The equation’s messy, but by the time the endlessly-beating sun starts sucking the last sweat out of me, I’ve got it figured out.
X is the lie. Y is what I want the lie to do. And Z is what the lie actually does. If Z is less damaging than Y, then X is the right move. Lying’s the right move. I’ve never thought of lies as math, but now that they’re here, it’s so abundantly obvious. My only frustration is that I can’t balance the equation until after the lie, so I can’t know if a lie’s good or bad.
But I can put other people’s lies into it.
And I do. As I hurry across Reality AAA’s desert, avoiding the devoured as they unzip from their banana-like cocoons, I put lie after lie into the equation. Mrs. Lightsen’s English lies come out as okay. She was teaching what she knew. James’s are okay, too—he’s always tried to help. Director Smith’s aren’t, and neither are Alice’s. Other people’s lies are harder to remember, but having the math to prove that James is a good apple and Smith is a bad one is nice.
I arrive at the twisted, broken trombones. The thinning’s wall is there, still shimmering, but it’s unstable at the edges. As I watch, it shrinks back. Through it, I can see the band room—or what’s left of it.
[By my calculations, you’ll have five minutes to get through. After that, this is your new home,] James says. There’s an edge of panic in his voice, and I push my liar’s math away. I’ll have time for that later.
I take a deep breath and Mergewalk back home.
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I come out into the Landsdowne Middle School band room.
And it reeks of daffodils and rotten meat, just like the reality I left behind.
Right away, I’m on edge. The Revolver comes up, and I head toward the perfectly round missing section of wall where the band room door used to be. That smell is the smell of devoured. Something came through. Did it merge before I stopped the God in the Machine? And if it did, are the teachers safe?
[I’m working on identifying why Mindscape isn’t working, Claire,] James says.
“Thanks,” I grunt. The gun’s up. I’m through the hole, looking for devoured. For teachers. For anyone. James hasn’t realized something’s wrong. Then, just as quickly, he has.
[Check the shelter. They’ll be there. That’s the logical retreat.] He sounds so much more serious; this isn’t a matter of a missing skill. This is a serious problem now. I make sure the Revolver’s ammo is glowing, slide the second cylinder into my other palm and squeeze it tight, then hurry down the hall.
A few gunshots go off in front of me. There’s fighting ahead. I level my Revolver and duck around the corner. There are five devoured. Two teachers—Mrs. Nazaire and someone else I don’t recognize. They’re in front of the shelter door. The open shelter door. Two of the devoured are regenerating, their waists shrinking impossibly as they heal bullet wounds.
Mrs. Nazaire’s cheap pistol barks. It’s shrill, like a chihuahua. One shot bounces off the cinderblock wall with a whining sound. The other hits the devoured, but too low, in the stomach.
I pull the Revolver’s trigger. It barks, but it’s like a Saint Bernard, not a purse dog. The first devoured’s head disappears from its shoulder blades up. Then, the second follows. I’ve fired four shots before a devoured notices me. I pull back as their shrieks fill the air.
Sergeant Strauss’s lessons on urban combat play as I step back toward a classroom. The first devoured rushes me, but the moment I see it, it’s in my sights. I use Bullet Time and put three on its upper chest. It dies. I reload. It’s almost mechanical at this point—switch the cylinders, align the holes, make it click, pull the trigger. Space warps, and another two devoured fly through the air until a barrage of bullets from the teachers kills them.
Then there’s one. The last one. I pull the trigger. A singularity rips into the monster’s chest, and it’s tough, but it can’t regenerate the constant damage. The rotten meat smell is overpowering. So is the daffodil scent. I cough and fall to my knees, eyes watering. Then there’s a hand on my shoulder. And one on the Revolver as I try to jerk it up toward whoever’s attacking me.
I Smoke Form. My attacker falls through me, her curly black hair unkempt and one hand on a pistol. It fires as her hand hits the ground. The bullet crashes into a locker and punches through the thin metal.
Mrs. Nazaire nods, and the other teacher slowly takes his hand off the Revolver. I snatch it back, glaring. When I try to talk, my throat’s too scratchy, and my lips hurt. They burn like fire. My skin’s on fire, too, wherever my hoodie wasn’t.
I look at my hand. It’s red like a sunburn. And there’s a water fountain right across the hall. But this whole mess isn’t over yet.
I push myself onto my feet. “Anyone else?” I croak out through my parched lips.
“You’ve done enough, Clarice,” Mrs. Nazaire says, but I glare at her—she hasn’t answered my question, and that’s a lie. I know its Y, feel it in my lips and throat, but its Z is too much.
She relents after a moment and offers me a hand. “Mr. Williams isn’t in the shelter. I’m going to check his classroom.”
I nod, taking one last wistful glance at the water fountain in its alcove on the wall. It’ll have to wait.
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Mr. William’s room brings back memories.
Memories of Sora and me screwing with him or of me walking out of his class and hiding in the library until the next period. I also have memories of his lectures on British Columbia’s government, getting ready for the field trip to the British Columbia Parliament Building, and the conversation afterward about our leaders and the decisions they have to make. That led to questions about different kinds of government, and that led to the cow posters all around the room.
‘Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.’
‘Nazism: You have two cows. The government shoots you and takes the cows.’
I hate those posters. They feel too simple to be truths about big, complicated ideas. And as I open the door, I can see all sixteen of them.
Mrs. Nazaire’s too close behind me. Sergeant Strauss would be furious. So would Lieutenant Rodriguez.
I hold up a hand and step into the room.
The devoured is in the corner. Mr. Williams is in the corner, too. I Slither across the room so he’s not behind the monster anymore, use Bullet Time, and put three shots into the devoured. Easy. Too easy, but no matter where I look, it’s the only enemy in the room. It’s clear.
[Skill Learned: Urban Combat 2]
Mr. Williams is hurt on his tile floor, but Mrs. Nazaire rushes and drags him to his feet before I can get in close and give him first aid. They walk to the door, him hobbling on a bloody, shredded leg and her moving quickly with the gun in her hand. She gives me a quick nod. “See me in my office in fifteen minutes, Clarice.”
I wince in spite of myself. It’s not the first time I’ve been sent to the principal’s office.