We’re bouncing this to you to be sure you receive it. Do not make further transmissions, not even to acknowledge receipt!

  -Intercepted transmission from Voices for Non-Citizens

  “Pointy?” I asked. The vulgarity, extremely out-of-character for the little plush, made me nervous. Even moreso when Cassie gasped and bent over her stuffed animal to shield her, casting a nervous glance up at me.

  Cassie had heard that? Pointy could have easily shaped the sound projection away from her. The fact that she hadn’t suggested that her emotional subroutines were, well, going haywire.

  Pointy was panicking.

  I put a gentle hand on Cassie’s, gently tugging it aside. “Pointy’s not in trouble, but I need to talk to her. Is that okay?”

  “She is a good girl,” Cassie said fiercely.

  “Sssh, ssh. I know. I’m worried about her, not mad at her. Alright?”

  Reluctantly, Cassie let me lift Pointy from her arms. The turtle was shaking her head slowly, staring into space.

  “Pointy, you have to tell us what’s going on so we can help.”

  “There’s… a transmission. The Arsenal is bouncing it across town. They got it from Voices for Non-Citizens, but it’s not their transmission. It’s from the Maffiyir Compan- no. It’s from the local leader of the Maffiyir forces. It’s… I…” She shook her head, almost speechless. “I’ll just tell you what it said.”

  “Please!”

  Pointy shook herself and straightened before speaking. “‘I, Sharp Contrasts, am no longer part of the Maffiyir company. My actions belong to me, and me alone. I have stolen Maffiyir hardware and software, and commandeered ships belonging to the company. Maffiyir employees still in-system must obey me or I will open fire. Those aboard my ship must obey me, or I will vent them to space. All non-Maffiyir ships still in-system are to cease transmissions and enter low power mode. Any violators will be fired upon.”

  I felt a spike of fear. Fluffy had been so kind, and it had meant a lot to me that they were still out there, doing what they could for us. “And… they transmitted that?! Are they okay? Did they get attacked?"

  “I don’t know. We don’t have any means of detecting the status of their ship unless they tell us. They haven’t sent anything else, but that’s probably just caution. They took a risk sending this at all. I think they wanted to let us know they hadn’t abandoned us, and warn us.”

  My brain was working too slowly, I could feel it. I always tried to anticipate, to see developments coming, because I knew I rarely came up with the right answer at the spur of the moment. “Warn us?”

  It was Vince who figured it out first, sucking in a breath. “Oh fuck. This is a deniability thing, isn’t it? They’ve been pushing the boundaries of the rules, but they’re about to shatter them into pieces. So they’re pretending it’s not them, that this Contrasts person is a rogue agent.”

  “That is my concern,” Pointy said.

  “Ariel?!” I said aloud. “Would Hamlet still listen to this, um, Sharp Contrasts if they aren’t with the Maffiyir company?”

  

  “And… those Linked Users are being threatened with death if they don’t pass on any orders Sharp Contrasts gives. Wait! Doesn’t that matter? Hamlet will listen to his Linked Users even if he knows someone is threatening them into obedience?” I said.

  

  I realized I had grabbed Vince’s hand at some point, our fingers intertwining with painful tightness. “That’s… that’s it, then. It’s over,” I said numbly. “The aliens with tech so advanced it might as well be magic want us all dead. We don’t have any chance, do we? They can do literally anything.”

  

  "They do?" I asked, incredulous. "What limitations?!”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Pointy interrupted before Ariel could speak. “May I answer that, Ariel?” There was a pause, and then the turtle nodded. “Thank you. As most of you know, Ariel and I have been speaking near-constantly for the past month or so. As such, I have grown deeply familiar with both her and Hamlet’s architecture.”

  “Hamlet’s architecture is like Ariel’s? I thought it was different.”

  Pointy waved a foreleg dismissively. “In a few ways. However, the fact that they could get any new Overmind so quickly shows the power and wealth of the Maffiyir company. Getting massive changes made to that Overmind without time to extensively test them? You underestimate the level of concern the Commonwealth shows toward artificial intelligences. Hamlet is mostly identical to Ariel’s original build, with a few limited modifications to prevent him from communicating with or sympathizing with contestants. Every other divergence from base programming has been accomplished by direct Linked User overrides.”

  “You’re sure?”

  I asked the question to Pointy, but it was Ariel who answered.

  The information was passed to me in a heartbeat. Before anyone else could respond, I breathed out. “Well… Ariel’s sure, anyway. But if he’s so similar, how could he have sent these latest Threats straight at my face? Shouldn’t that be flatly illegal?”

  

  “And isn’t that illegal?!”

  

  “So… yes, it's illegal, but not in a way that Hamlet will stop. Fine!” I realized my other hand was squeezing Pointy a little too tightly and set her back down in Cassie’s lap. “What does this all mean, anyway? Do we actually have a chance here?”

  Pointy looked troubled. “I genuinely don’t know. We have a few reasons to hope: Hamlet can’t make up new Threats and Challenges on his own. Any designs he’s received in the past will have to have been approved by a board that has some independent, non-Maffiyir observers, and the independent observers are legally liable if they approve unfair things, so bribery will only get the Maffiyir company so far. Plus, those observers definitely won’t approve any new designs to be sent to Sharp Contrasts now that she has openly declared herself a criminal. Also, most of Hamlet’s nanobots are tied up off-planet, creating Challenge arenas. On Earth, almost all answer to Ariel. He has a percentage that he can use to create Threats and embody Titans, but they’re far outnumbered by the nanomachines involved in actualizing abilities or embodying smaller opponents.”

  I frowned at Pointy, doing some mental math. “Far outnumbered? Really? It’d take twenty rustpiles to weigh as much as a D-Rex, and those are some of the largest normal monsters. It seems like Hamlet has access to at least as many nanobots, if not more.”

  Pointy rolled her eyes. “The situation Fort Autumn is in isn’t normal, Meghan. Ask Ariel! I bet we have more Intensifiers in a square mile than they have in the entire state of Texas. To send so many Titans and Threats at us, Hamlet has had to ease up on a huge area.”

   Ariel chimed in.

  “Okay… Ariel is backing you up on that. So if we go on the run, we might be able to tie up most of Hamlet’s resources in the areas behind us. Does that give us a chance? Can’t he just, I don’t know, pop out enemies that were created to fight species much farther along in the contest? Something that moved as fast as Fluffy would slaughter us all in an instant.”

  Pointy shook her head. “He can’t go that far.”

  “Why not?”

  “The same reason why you haven’t been able to tell Ariel to pop out monsters that fall over dead when a human says ‘boo.’ The monsters added under your guidance aren’t as horrifying as the night leeches, as deadly as the direcats, or as tough as the stabcrabs, but you wouldn’t call them harmless or fragile, would you?”

  I nodded slowly. The shinos, the shimmering rhino monsters I’d created shortly after my partnership with Ariel began, were very predictable but pretty tough. As our communication network had grown, I’d been branching out a little, choosing monsters a little more dangerous than the shinos, but with built-in weaknesses. For example, in the last twelveday we’d gone for a flying monster that the Arsenal was calling “imps.” The imps had claws tipped with a deadly poison… but the poison wasn’t terribly fast-acting, so death could be prevented by an ally with Cleanse or Cure Poison, and the imps were on the slower side and heavily reliant on sight. Blind them, and the odds that they harmed anyone dropped to near-nothing. We’d been able to tell more than half the globe how to counter them before they’d even appeared, and had hoped our human bias toward sight would let the rest figure out the secret in short order. From what Ariel had said, it had worked.

  It would have been nice if I could have chosen a similar monster while avoiding the deadly poison, but…

  “It’s like an archery target,” I said aloud. “Ariel and Hamlet will target the bullseye, so to speak, to give us enemies and obstacles that are perfectly balanced for maximum entertainment. Linked Users can tweak how they look at things or use overrides to shift their aim slightly, but we can’t make them aim off the target entirely.”

  Pointy nodded. “A reasonable analogy. If they had been able to build a new Overmind from scratch, anything would be possible, but they are limited by the architecture that has served them well for thousands of contests.”

  I felt my racing heart start to slow. “Okay, so the rules haven’t totally gone out the window. Hamlet probably can’t even spawn more Threats for the next two weeks. But we can expect new Titans any-”