My vision flashed violet as I entered the vault.

  Then it flashed violet as I slipped out again.

  It was right there along the top of my screen, under the heading Basic Quest 1: FATE’s final step for the glitch. I had to go in and out of the vault repeatedly, until I got a notification that something had changed.

  I did it so fast that I could actually see myself flicker. Lore had shown me another glitch once, where—if you went in and out of a specific building fast enough—you could essentially phase through its walls and get to a hidden chest quicker. That was still several Curves away, though, and Lore had never mentioned this glitch before.

  FATE had said the Conduit created the glitch when translating the game to their systems. I bet Lore would have understood the specifics better.

  Lore.

  I was not fully material as I switched from inside to outside the vault. My form was hazy, and I wasn’t too worried that the other Hunter would be able to harm me if she came back. That was, if I hadn’t killed her. She would have needed a health potion, or a healing well, and who knew whether she had access to either right now.

  So that left me alone with my thoughts as I entered, exited, reentered, and reexited the bank vault, doing it so fast that I barely got a glimpse of the bank telling window or the leaning water tower between flashes of loading-screen violet.

  Lore. I hope he’s okay, I thought. I this quiet, liminal nowhere-space, that niggling thought burned hot.

  He was in space, on a ship. Did the aliens find him first? Is he dead?

  He must be dead.

  I hated to think it, but it seemed likely. These aliens had taken Earth so easily, and Lore had had an ID chip of his own. So maybe he wasn’t dead, but collapsed, like all the rest of them. Helpless.

  Or maybe he’d had something to do with this.

  The men in tactical gear, waiting to accost me after I got my chip….

  The aliens, ranking me as a high-value target….

  Those two things together were more than coincidence. The Earth government had wanted me secured for something. I didn’t know if that security meant imprisonment or bodyguards or what. As for the Conduit, they had wanted me dead. That was obvious.

  But I hadn’t stepped a toe out of line in years, and before that, I’d never done anything to warrant this sort of attention. I was just a regular guy, albeit with a checkered past. I wasn’t that important.

  Yet I wasn’t naive enough to think that I had no value at all. Oh, no—I’d be valuable as a hostage. Either to my father… or to Lore.

  My father shouldn’t have anything to do with this, but it wasn’t off the table. Lore, though… Lore was more likely. He was in space. He might have encountered the Conduit’s ships before Earth did. And he knew everything about Seven Keys. One could argue that he was the best player alive.

  The Conduit had turned Earth into their own personal version of Seven Keys. What if they had found the expert? Had they killed Lore for what he knew, and now they were after anyone else he might have known?

  The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that my situation had related to my brother. But given the power I’d seen displayed by these aliens, I didn’t think it likely that my brother was still alive. Unless they had taken him on as an adviser? And he’d refused to help them? And they’d killed him as punishment?

  I couldn’t help the stab of despair that sent through me. Not Lore. Not my kid brother. No.

  I was about to spiral even deeper into this line of thinking when a light flashed on the right side of my screen. I stopped tugging the handle already in my hand. I’d stopped inside the vault, so that was good.

  I searched my sidebar. FATE had said it would take dozens of tries to achieve anything. I had no idea how many times I had done this, but I grinned when I saw it: Hergvor’s avatar icon above Flower’s, grayed out but present, despite the fact that his icon put me over the 4-person party limit. It was clearly glitched out, as it overlaid the HUD mini-map slightly, the two images messily overlapping each other.

  But he was there, when he hadn’t been there before. The game had reclassified him as something new.

  I was about to check my Conscript menu when violet text lit up my HUD, so large it could have been dangerous if it had happened to me during a fight:

  WARNING: IMPENDING GAME UPDATE.

  THE QUEST [HERGVOR’S QUEST] WILL BE DISABLED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

  I grinned. “Hey, Dave. I think we might have pissed off the Conduit.”

  He had fluttered off to land on one of the bank’s many golden balusters. “Yeah, I can see that. It’s all I can see.”

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  I checked the room for any changes since I’d been here in the original game. The place was littered with those movable, golden balusters, which held up blue velvet ropes leading to bank teller windows across the back of the room. The vault itself hadn’t changed much in this new iteration of the game; it was still an opulent, marbled space at odds with the rest of the town. It was meant to display the wealth and power of the Arcanum, the scholar society that managed most of Ostium’s currency and lawmaking.

  There were no guards here, when in the game there were eight of them, and there was only one teller. She stood in the center booth, behind crystal, with the bank’s vault directly behind her and a magical aura humming around her. She wore long blue robes with golden trim and cuffs, which marked her as a member of the Arcanum.

  She had the same name as her character in the game—Katerina—but a different face. She was a Grayling, like most of the humans I’d seen so far, but she had dark skin where the original character had been ruddy. I checked her for a Conscript symbol, but she had none. She must be a chipped person, then, repurposed for the game.

  I took a step toward her, just to see what dialogue might exist in the game, and then someone new appeared in front of me.

  I stopped dead.

  I was looking at a robot.

  It was huge, taller than me by at least three feet, with guns outfitted on its shoulders and arms. It gleamed as if polished, made almost entirely of a silvery material that gave off its own faint violet light. At its chest was a glass plate with a burning purple core inside, the light so bright that the glass had been tinted to keep it from being blinded.

  Its helmet was the same glass, all across the face plate, with metal wings rearing back from the head like thrusters—or possibly horns. Aside from those things, it reminded me of my own NerveGear helmet. It might well be the same technology.

  “Prisoner REM731K,” it said, listing out the digits mechanically. “I am Developer 9TRV8E4OR. I have come to negotiate with you on behalf of the Conduit.”

  I blinked. Its voice was androgynous, obviously computerized and yet so smooth, like an AI copy of a real person’s voice where the inflections weren’t always natural-sounding. I realized I had drawn my spear without thinking. I lowered it a fraction. The robot did nothing.

  “Holy giraffe knobs. You snagged a Developer? Remmy, what the fuck did you do?”

  I remembered what Dave had said about being alone in the vault. We were supposed to be alone here, and not listened to—but if we weren’t, it would be obvious. There wasn’t anything more obvious than a nine-foot tall robot appearing in the middle of a bank queue.

  Could I Whisper him? Or was that not safe now? I knew enough to understand that Developer meant someone who built and managed the game of Trash Planet. This guy worked with the very same code I had just exploited to save Moran.

  Better safe than sorry. I didn’t Whisper Dave.

  I planted my spear in front of me and straightened out of my attack pose. “My name’s Remnant. What do you want?”

  “Correction: your designation is REM731K.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “What did you say your designation was?”

  “9TRV8E4OR.”

  “Ah. I’ll call you Trevor, then.”

  That seemed to stump the robot for a moment.

  “Designations are of little consequence to this conversation,” it said after a few moments. “I come with a proposal for you. Are you amenable to hearing this proposal?”

  Since when do you care what I’m amenable to? I wanted to say. These guys had killed or enslaved the vast majority of people on my planet, and they hadn’t asked if they were amenable.

  Then again, this guy thought I was Remnant, a shape-shifting piscin alien and a star of their show. I might be a prisoner, here because Remnant had committed some big crime, but I apparently had more rights than the entirety of Planet Earth did.

  “Sure. I love free shit,” I said.

  Violet light flashed across the thing’s helmet, where its eyes should have been. It occurred to me that it might not be a robot, but a mech suit with someone else inside it. Or a remotely controlled drone.

  “We, the Conduit, have become aware of an error in the translation of the game code from the local operating system to our own,” Trevor said. “We thank you for bringing this error to our attention. It will be corrected in the upcoming game update.”

  “Fantastic,” I said, my hackles rising. Were they going to make me give back Hergvor? Or punish me for using a glitch?

  “We, the Conduit, applaud your discovery and use of the tools available to you,” Trevor went on. “However, in the spirit of the game of Trash Planet, we request that you cease all Conscription for the remainder of your game.”

  I blinked. I gain one guy, and they get this upset about it?

  I stowed my spear so that I could cross my arms at the robot. “Maybe I want to keep Conscripting people. It’s not against the rules, is it?” They had built it into the game, after all.

  The robot nodded. “Conscription has always been a game option, but it has never been used on this scale before now. The general weakness of a selected planet’s population typically renders Conscription useless, except in the case of distractions, quest effects, and other forms of trickery.”

  Dave leaned toward me. “He means that Hunters usually use Coreless people as bait or meat shields.”

  “That is not correct,” Trevor said, turning to Dave now. “Sometimes Hunters utilize Conscripts as tools to achieve quests. For example, a Conscripted Riftguard might be able to pass a Riftguard checkpoint to glean information—”

  “Or they can be used to figure out where a boss’s aggro range begins,” Dave countered. To me, he said, “It’s the spot where the Coreless goes from walking forward in a straight line to a puddle of blood and organs on the ground.”

  My stomach turned.

  “As I have said, native Coreless are generally quite weak, even at higher levels,” Trevor said. “In addition, the stat cost to Conscript is a further deterrent to Hunters. On occasion, we have seen fighting bands built by Hunters, but it has never been a winning strategy. These bands are inevitably targeted by competing Hunters for their stat point rewards, further depreciating the value of Conscription.”

  “Okaaaayy,” I said, drawing out the word. “But if it’s such a bad strategy, why do you want me to stop?”

  That violet light flashed again.

  “We, the Conduit, applaud your discovery and use of the tools available to you,” the robot repeated. “However, your use of this error has given you an unfair advantage in the early game state. If you wish to be allowed to keep your army, concessions must be made.”

  Wait. Did he just say “army”?

  I opened up my Conscript tab as Dave gave a snort. “You mean that the viewers already know he’s got Hergvor. You can’t take him away without a lot of backlash, so instead, you’re asking us to pretty please, not do it again?”

  “Dave,” I said.

  “Well, fuck that!” Dave squawked. “If we want to Conscript every bearded backwater mook this side of the Core, then we’ll bloody well do it! You can’t change the rules mid-game!”

  “Dave,” I repeated.

  “You shiny little fuckers think you can just waltz into our game and try to control us with this corporate ‘we, the Conduit, applaud you’ bullshit—”

  “Dave!” I shouted, loud enough to shut him up.

  “WHAT?” he burst out.

  “Check the Conscript tab!”

  He blinked his dark, beady eyes at me. Then he checked, dipping into my systems.

  Those beady eyes got so round that I realized they, too, were green.

  I turned back to my own screen. To the list of my Conscripts.

  There was Hergvor, at the top of the list. Then Flower, greyed out, but still in my party.

  And then the 32 other people in Flower’s party.

  We had Conscripted the whole Tendua tribe.