Thresholder

The five crew members of the Farfinder were set up on bean bag chairs around a large screen in what Kes had called the break room. Hella was the exception: she was standing tall next to the screen at a parade rest. She nodded to Perry as he came in behind Kes.

He regretted wearing the armor, but the last battle had left him on edge. The armor left him large and imposing, in a way that made him feel awkward, something that had been a perennial problem in social situations. If it had clung to his skin, it might have been different, but it had a bulk and heft to it.

“Alright,” said Hella. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

Perry slowly lowered himself into a tan bean bag. That felt even more ridiculous.

“This is a meeting to discuss what the fuck is going on, so far as we understand it,” said Hella. “It is, secondarily, a meeting to discuss our plans for action.”

“I know what’s going on,” said Perry.

“Let me give my overview first,” said Hella, holding up a hand. “I want to offer the understanding from our perspective.”

“Go ahead,” said Perry. He took the helmet off and placed it next to him on the beanbag chair.

Hella brought forth a clicker, and started in on the slides.

Perry had personally hoped that he would never have to sit through another PowerPoint presentation in his life, and internally groaned when Hella’s slide contained a bunch of text that seemed to very closely match what she was saying. He wondered whether her version of Earth, with its superheroes, was stunted when it came to presenting information in a clear and engaging way.

“Fenilor’s hypothesis is that there are two battles going on right now,” said Hella. “First, there’s a triad of Nima, Mette, and Fenilor, all with between one and zero wins. This might be a rare three-sided battle, but we don’t know. Second, there’s the duo of Peregrin and Third Fervor.” The slide clicked over, and showed the simple shapes, one a triangle, the other a line. “Now, we have never seen this before. There was no reason to think that it was remotely possible. However, it’s not entirely surprising: the shelfspace that Peregrin carries with him is unique, another never-before-seen magical effect, notable mostly because of how the Grand Spell treats it.”

Perry raised his hand and Hella blinked at him.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Alright, so … why does it matter?” asked Perry. “For portal opening requirements?”

“That’s one of the considerations, yes,” said Hella. She turned to face the assembled crew, though Perry was pretty sure they must all know this. This meeting should have been an email. “If the triad is resolved, we expect a portal will open. Given our overwhelming desire is for Fenilor to not escape and potentially doom this world, we must be particularly cautious about all members of the triad except for Mette.”

“Why not Mette?” asked Perry.

“She was soundly beaten,” said Hella. “Sometimes there are a series of fights between thresholders before the final one, but a portal opens when there’s a clear and decisive victory. I believe that to have been achieved against her.” She clicked a button, and the slide moved on. “This limits the possibility space somewhat, though not in a way I find particularly interesting. The death of Mette is, in theory, irrelevant unless the triad is in a free-for-all, as we believe to have been the case with you, Jeff, and Marjut.”

“Okay,” said Perry slowly. “I think I’m not fully up to speed on … what’s going on? What the portals are … for?”

“We don’t know,” said Eggy. “I mean, there are guesses, but —”

Hella cleared her throat. “I would like, at this time, to give my explanation.”

There were some groans from the crew, which brought a faint smile to Perry’s face. This was clearly well-trod ground for them, and just as clearly, no one was buying what Hella was selling. He wondered whether it would vibe with him.

“I believe that there is no grand purpose to the fights the Grand Spell engineers,” said Hella. “The Grand Spell does not care about winners and losers, it cares about probabilities, making sure the fights are even, or close to it. Thresholders are almost always rewarded with powers, but it’s difficult to say whether this is to engineer battles or is meant as a reward. The fights often scar the worlds they happen on, but also sometimes improve them through magic or technology left behind — either way, if this were the purpose, it would be horrifically inefficient.”

“Cut to the chase,” said Cark from his bean bag. He didn’t seem like he enjoyed the digression.

“What I propose is that the primary thing the Grand Spell gets from the fights is data,” said Hella. “It uses that data to refine its approach.”

Kes held up a hand, and Hella pointed at him.

“What does that mean?” asked Kes.

“Fundamentally, how was Marchand made?” asked Hella. She immediately answered her own question. “He was trained on enormous amounts of data pulled from a globally connected network, virtually the sum of all information from his Earth. He was then given a structure on top of that, and has had further deviations and modifications, but the base, the core, was a very large network that was fed training data to adjust the weighting of nodes.”

“She thinks that the Grand Spell is the same,” said Eggy, turning her head toward Perry. “It’s not a theory we all endorse, if you couldn’t tell by the groans.”

“Here’s what I think is happening,” said Hella, not losing focus. “We can imagine the Grand Spell as self-learning. It brings two people together and makes a prediction about who will win in the fight, which might be its main goal. Possibly it's making other predictions as well. Then, once the prediction is done, it sets those events in motion and monitors them, attempting to figure out whether it did a good job at predicting. It refines itself over time, getting better and better at its predictions, until eventually there is, encoded within its network, information about how any fight would go, how any potential recruit would respond.”

“There are tons of problems with this,” said Eggy. “I mean, why and how is the start of the problems.”

“Assuming that it’s true,” said Perry. “I mean, assuming that this is some clumsy attempt to gain information, something done by, I don’t know, a medieval wizard whose means exceeded his grasp, playing out over a million worlds, involving thousands of fights … how does that change anything?”

“Two things,” said Hella, holding up fingers. “Which, yes, I do think help to prove my point. First, if I’m correct and the Grand Spell is ‘learning’ over time, then we might see, in the historical record, fights which were less evenly balanced. If you’re training a model, you want dynamism, especially if each step is relatively costly. You get more from difficult, hard-to-predict encounters. If the Grand Spell is trying to get the most information, it’s going to set up matches that it thinks will have a 50% chance of ending one way or another, rather than matches that always end the same way. Second, the Grand Spell is going to be much worse with rare events. It’s had fewer of them in the data it’s collected. We know that team-ups are rare, that threesomes are rare, and whatever is going on now … it’s very rare.”

She gave Perry an intense look, and it really did seem like she was waiting for him to agree with her.

“You think the prediction is bad,” said Perry. “Fenilor is an outlier, this ship is an outlier, and the triad/duo thing is an outlier. Plausibly this is the first time the Grand Spell has ever encountered this configuration.”

“Yes,” nodded Hella.

“We don’t know that,” said the weird lizard guy whose name escaped Perry. The lizard spoke through his nostrils, using his nose-tongues. “It might be omniscient.”

“It’s difficult,” Hella nodded. “This is a theory that fits the evidence though.”

“Plausibly it’s something totally different,” said Eggy. “It’s one thing to have a pet theory, it’s another to have an entire operation hinge on it, that’s nutty. You know it’s nutty.”

“The operation doesn’t hinge on it,” said Hella, holding up a hand. “The operation hinges on the fact that in the prognosticated futures, Perry loses and Fenilor wins, which either means that the Grand Spell screwed up — likely — or that it accounted for our entry and virtually everything we’ve done here.”

“Which is bad,” said Perry.

“Extremely bad,” nodded Hella. She clicked ahead on the slides a few times, skipping over things that had already been gone over. “The mission of the SS Farfinder is to stop the Grand Spell and bring an end to thresholding for the good of the multiverse, ideally while harnessing some of its power to link universes together and ensure a glorious mutual future for the people of the multiverse.” She stared at the screen for a moment, then clicked to change slides. “If the Farfinder gets predictively entangled with a thresholder — to wit, you — then we’re going to run into a better class of enemy. The hope is that we’re only there as backup, but when you get into the business of telling the future, it gets complicated.”

Eggy turned in her seat to look at Perry. “If the Grand Spell does hinge on 50% outcomes, if that’s what it’s trying to produce for training data or whatever, then ideally we’d stay out of it,” she said. “But if we stay out of it until you’re losing and then swoop in, that means that we bias the outcome in favor of you winning, and probably by a lot. And if that’s true, then to maintain a 50% win ratio we should expect that a significant fraction of fights require our attention, which means a significant fraction of fights are ones that you lose.”

“Which is the whole point of not getting entangled,” sighed Perry. “Fine. But you are entangled, so you’re going to help me?”

“There are different levels of entanglement,” said Hella. “We consider ourselves to be fully entangled now though.”

Perry looked at the slide that was up on the presentation. It was a longer version of what Eggy had said, with some examples, and he suspected that she’d had a hand in it.

“We’re agreed on killing Fenilor?” asked Perry.

Hella nodded. “It’s the most sure-fire way to ensure that he doesn’t go through a portal. We’re having trouble finding him though, and … there’s Nima to consider.”

“You can’t use the same method you used to find the mine?” asked Perry. “You can’t just make a note of all the places you can’t see?”

“We could,” said Hella. “But those places were static, and Fenilor moves around a lot. We can’t do a mapping fast enough to catch him, not unless he stays put.”

“In our meeting, we decided on a way to contact each other, if we didn’t end up killing each other,” said Perry. “We can use that, pin him that way. I’m hoping you have a giant laser cannon or something?”

“We don’t have much in the way of offense,” said Hella. “We’re cockroaches by nature. I could help you in a fight, but as far as munitions go, we’re lacking.” She glanced at Eggy.

“We have guns,” said Eggy. “We actually have kind of a lot of guns. But we’re not magic users, the magic comes and goes and there’s just not the time or payoff to that.”

“I’ll take guns,” said Perry. “When Mette is better, we’ll bring her in to look at what you have. She’s a skilled engineer — they all were, on Esperide.”

Hella nodded. Perry had thought it was a bit of an ask, bringing another person into their circle, but either it was anticipated and approved, or Kes had already made the request.

“And we need to talk about what happens when it’s all over,” said Perry. “Once he’s dead, a portal will open. That’ll be the one for Mette or Nima or … maybe it’ll come later. That gives you data, right?”

“It should,” said Hella. “We have a push to set up research equipment, but we’ve been planning this for half a year. We just didn’t know what magic we’d have access to, and hadn’t suspected that the answer would be ‘all of them’.”

“And then when we kill Third Fervor, we expect a second portal to open?” asked Perry. “Which is more information. And possibly a method of pointing the portal where we want it to go.”

“Er,” said Hella. She looked up at the slide, like it would help her, then back at Perry. “We would love that, if it were possible, but that particular aspect of the Grand Spell is under-defined right now.”

“We’ve got no fucking clue,” said Eggy with smile from her beanbag chair.

“We expect an evaluation step,” said Cark. “A person goes into the portal, the Grand Spell holds them there and looks at its options, sees its possibilities, then shunts them off somewhere. There’s evidence that the hold can actually last pretty long before the punch happens.”

“But we have no way to affect the evaluation,” said Eggy. “We don’t know what we would need to use to alter the punch, we don’t even understand the punch mechanism, or if there are constraints.”

“I want to go back,” said Perry. “Back to the first world I went to. There’s a woman who died, who I want to bring back to life.”

It sounded impossible when he’d said it out loud. It sounded foolish when he heard the words hanging in the air.

“We will see what we can do,” said Hella. “That might not be the worst idea.”

“What?” asked Perry, turning to look at her.

“If it’s technically feasible, then we would be making a connection between this world and that one,” said Hella. “Assuming we can run the math and make sure that it’s not going to drag enormous amounts of physics through, potentially killing one or both worlds, then it would be connecting this world — which is very stable but low technology — with that world.”

“Dangerous,” said Cark. He spoke with a mild tone, and his face betrayed no emotion.

“We need governments working on this,” said Hella. “We need to not be the only ones out here flying through the multiverse, trying to do something about it. There’s something romantic about a crew in the single digits, trying to stop all this, but there needs to be a coalition.”

“Dangerous,” said Cark again. “And maybe impossible. But it’s the ‘being dangerous’ aspect that should worry us. A government with the ability to send out ships could quickly turn into a multiversal empire, even if they’re limited to only using the punches.”

“In theory you can use old punches and return to where you started,” said Eggy. She looked over at Perry. “Like, that would work for you, if we could find a route, right?”

Perry considered that.

“It would,” said Kes, before Perry could work through the specifics. They could easily get to Earth 2 from Earth 1, and there was at least a single second inbound link to Earth 2 from wherever Mordant had arrived from. The problem was going to be getting to either of those places. Perry also wasn’t sure how well their mapping worked, whether it could identify these ‘loops’ or not.

“Then we need to discuss the plan,” said Hella. “We’re going to help you kill Fenilor, but first, we need some understanding of what all he can do.”

~~~~

With the help of the Farfinder, travel was much easier. Their tool of choice could open doors to wherever they were needed, so Perry quickly found himself standing in Deregia, a city of no particular import, one high up a thick continental river with only that river’s lazy waterways to provide access to the sea. There were, as a consequence, a large number of airships carrying heavy loads, and anyone looking to the sky could see one or two of them coming or going, with many more tethered in place for loading and unloading. As with most cities, there were golden domes taking in sunlight, though it was overcast, and they’d be working at lower capacity until the skies cleared.

Perry imagined it like the Midwest, flyover country, and had no idea whether or not he was wrong.

The Farfinder had equipped him to within the limits of what they had. He was cloaked with a powerful glamor, very similar to the one he’d once worn in Teaguewater, which meant that anyone who saw a man in blue armor hanging in the air would think that he was something else — their mind would invent an explanation. He had reloaded his shoulder gun with magical rounds that they had apparently made special for him back on the Great Arc, firmament magic woven into them that would cause them to forcibly explode on contact. The final gift was a thick strip of paper that the Farfinder had apparently stolen from the Great Arc, which was affixed to the back of the armor. It had writing on it, an ancient poem of devotion, and should help the armor to be stronger against magical attacks.

It still didn’t really feel like enough to Perry. He had wanted them to have enormous chests full of items, not just simple things that gave him minor advantages. The strip of paper on his back might, in theory, allow him not to be pierced by an obsidian-tipped spear that definitely shouldn’t have been able to go through metal. What he wanted was another sword, something that could break through Fenilor’s armor.

The Farfinder had not been focused on getting individually powerful items. They’d been focused on making sure that their ship could move from world to world, and hide from the Powers That Be, and if that wasn’t enough, armor themselves against attacks. They’d focused on acquiring knowledge, improving their conditions, and ensuring that the work could continue.

They hadn’t even been able to help him crack the nanites wide open.

From the air, the Cinnamon Station House looked like a simple tea house. It was built with low-sloped roofs laden with blue half-moon tiles, a local custom, built in a way that seemed distinct to the region and very common in all the neighboring buildings. White walls surrounded a courtyard that held carefully curated plants, many of them potted succulents that had been pruned back to keep from escaping their containers. The people who went in and out of the station were dressed in the wide variety of clothes that were common across the culture, but it was a sleepy place, without all that much traffic.

Perry watched as Cark made his way down the street.

Fenilor had said that it was better to use a messenger, so Perry was using a messenger, it was just that the messenger was a trained infiltration agent rather than a kid who had been coerced into being a runner. Perry wasn’t even really sure how you were supposed to get a runner, given that you weren’t supposed to be able to pay people and everyone had more or less what they needed. He guessed that you could just ask, but he wasn’t sure that would work either. There were certain aspects of the culture he still hadn’t figured out yet.

Cark had nanites clinging to him. They were transmitting, but when Fenilor had visited Kes, the nanites had been stymied. The mechanism was unclear, but if they suddenly stopped transmission, that meant something. Fenilor hadn’t stopped Marchand from recording, though it wasn’t clear exactly why that was — a matter of sophistication (as Marchand was more intelligent), a lack of sophistication (as Marchand was much less technologically advanced), or simply whatever bullshit had tied Marchand and Perry together.

Perry waited, far above, watching closely.

There were too many questions about Fenilor’s abilities, but one of the biggest was how fast Fenilor was able to move, and what his methods of locomotion were. He had responded to Perry entering the mine in perhaps an hour, but it wasn’t clear when he’d known, or where he’d come from. This was an invitation to talk, but it was also a test. Perry had gotten word to Dirk Gibbons, the one in Berus, that a message might be incoming, but a line of communication wasn’t part of the plan of attack.

Not unless it was obvious what that line of attack would be.

Cark took a seat in the tea house, tucked into a corner where it was unlikely that anyone would approach him and try to strike up conversation. Perry was getting picture-in-picture, a reconstruction by Marchand in the corner of his view while his gaze was on the tea house from above. Cark waited, and Perry waited with him. Somewhere far away, the Farfinder was engaged in prognostics, hoping that they would gain something useful from however long this took.

It wasn’t clear what sort of timeline they were looking at now. Earlier prognostics had shown Perry dying to Third Fervor or Fenilor, but if Perry didn’t intervene at all, didn’t so much as show his face, it wasn’t clear how long it would take before the clashing forces caused something horrible to happen. Third Fervor was working under a queen now, and was almost certainly less stable than she’d been before, which might mean that she’d strike out against foreign elements. There was no enemy king for her to kill, that was the entire point of how the culture had structured itself, but there were Command Authorities and symboulions that she might move against.

If Third Fervor died, a portal would open, and if it did, depending on its location, Fenilor might go through. He shouldn’t, given the dire warning that Perry had given, but he might, and there was a good chance that would doom them. The same went for Nima.

It felt awkward and uncomfortable to be put in a situation where Perry might have to defend his enemies.

After nearly an hour of drinking a very plain and simple tea, Cark went to the owner and inquired after a mutual friend who might be looking for a message. The owner smiled and gave a slight bow, then went into the back room, where he did something the nanites couldn’t quite pick up given the distance. Cark was told to go sit back down, and that a response would be through shortly.

Perry suspected there was another of the tablets in the back room, but that just raised further questions. The tablets were a form of magic, one that Fenilor had kept from the general public, but the owner of this tea house knew what to do. It wouldn’t have been surprising that Fenilor had agents all over the world, or perhaps in a few select locations, but it seemed odd that they would be so trusted. Once the message was delivered, they would have to trail the owner, which hopefully wouldn’t be too difficult given that he wasn’t under the protection of any kind of blockers.

Perry wasn’t sure whether Fenilor himself would show up. It seemed unlikely, given that Fenilor had given them the name of this place. Perry wouldn’t have shown, not if he could help it, and certainly didn’t intend to get within a mile of Dirk Gibbons if at all possible. They could use dead drops if they had to talk to each other, but since the Farfinder could spy on the future, any message left for Dirk could simply be read through prognostication without letting Dirk know the message was received.

“The nanites have stopped responding, sir,” said Marchand. “This is in direct contravention of the orders I have given. If I did not know better, sir, I would have said that it was a simple error or malfunction.”

“He’s here?” asked Perry.

“I do not know, sir,” said Marchand. “The nanites have stopped responding. That means that I have no information from them, sir.”

Perry stared down at the tea house. Cark was in danger, but Cark had said that he was okay with being in danger.

The hope was that they would get more information from Fenilor, some details about his past, and what he’d been doing with his long life on this planet, aside from building his own personal version of utopia and killing the baby thresholders. Perry had very little leverage over Fenilor, short of threats to dismantle the culture through force, something that Perry probably couldn’t accomplish even if allied with Third Fervor, and wouldn’t want to do.

There was, however, another lever: Fenilor’s identity. He was a shining figure of the revolution, and perhaps not the most important of the founders, but one of them nonetheless. It wasn’t clear that smearing his name as the inventor of the lanterns would cause lasting damage to the culture, but Perry had a hunch that Fenilor was motivated by more than simply a lasting utopia.

Cark had two messages to deliver. The first was simply a request for information, things that in theory could not help Perry. If that was denied, the second message would apply what pressure could be applied without having to bluff — and given Fenilor’s ability to tell the truth, bluffs would probably not work.

Perry sat there, waiting. Fenilor had to be in the area, if the signal was blocked, otherwise it was another tablet of some kind stopping the nanites, but that felt unlikely to Perry.

An hour passed, then another. People came and went from the tea house, which meant that nothing too bad could be happening inside. It was also possible that Cark had been murdered and then whisked away. Almost anything was possible, given the breadth of armors and weapons that Fenilor had. That was why getting as much as they could was so important.

The sun had set by the time the nanites started reporting again. Perry had gone from tense to bored out of his skull, and in the end, had resorted to listening to an audiobook, read by Marchand.

Cark emerged from the Cinnamon Station House looking no worse for wear, but holding in his hand a recording device he hadn’t had when he’d gone in there. It was crude and mechanical ribbon storage, like something out of the 80s, but Cark held it closely and walked down the streets. If the Farfinder had seen the future, they would see Cark, and could pick him up if need be, breaking their prognostication.

Instead, Cark went to a hotel — no payment necessary, really more of a temporary living space than a hotel — and sat down at a desk. With a signal from the nanites to confirm that they had contact with Marchand, he set the recording device to playback what it had stored.

Fenilor had told them almost everything, and Perry had to hope that his weakness was in there somewhere.