“Can I get a status update, please?” I asked. I had no idea what was going on in the Real, but I needed to at least keep the kids strung along.

  Beep!

  I sent that onward. It was getting far too easy to do this.

  As the seconds stretched on, I began to worry about the kids unplugging me, too. I didn’t know what was going on, didn’t know what they were thinking. I was completely blind, just like I had been before the General had activated his medals and projected the Real around us.

  I frowned, looking at the Medal in my hand. Could I do something like that?

  The General had been a camera before this entire insanity began. Sure, Chris had attached a gun to it as a joke-slash-experiment, but we never believed it would actually work. It had been a side project, mostly because we had been so confident no one would ever even reach our laboratory. On our perimeter, our best anti-air guns had lined the walls to ward off Wyvern-riders and Dragonlords, and the mana-absorption forcefield was strong enough to shield us from weeks of constant fireball barrages. The last (and most experienced) of our soldiers were patrolling the walls, and I had personally made sure they had the very best gear I could give them without risking a drop into a Wish-exhaustion coma.

  I wondered what had happened to those soldiers, and felt a little guilty about not thinking much of them until now. I hoped they had gotten away. Hell, perhaps it was them who took my body. They would do something like that, I thought. They’d been so fiercely loyal, always looked at me exactly like Zephyro did, or that girl, Voni.

  I couldn’t disappoint them again. My soul wouldn’t survive that.

  As I waited, I flipped the medal in my hand, holding Pharus behind my head for light as I studied it for more details. Being the Torchbearer, I had learned early that if you held a torch in front of your face like in the movies, you got singed eyebrows and so much glare you couldn’t see anything for minutes afterward.

  Seeing…

  I frowned. Time was still marching on, but without Zephyro’s domain properly loaded or the General’s projections, I was essentially blind in the middle of active combat. Could I maybe do what the general had done? Use some sort of camera to project the world around me in the Domain?

  But the laptop didn’t have a camera. Why would it? It was the first and only laptop in existence on Tobes, so there was nobody to have a video call with. The same went for the microphone. There had just been no need. And if you wanted to take notes, there were far better magical solutions for recording yourself, even though they were prohibitively expensive.

  No, I didn’t have the correct hardware to even begin doing what the General did. Then again, the laptop had been fitted with a single-core processor when I woke up in this thing, but after several jolts of Logic, it now had two cores. Even I knew that wasn’t possible without opening the back of the machine and changing the part manually.

  Or by using Logic.

  Could I risk it? I had Logic to spare, sure, but maybe I could wait for Zephyro to reform his Domain. No, that was stupid. I was blind, and I needed to know what was going on to use what little chance I could get. Also, what if there were other humans around, or AI I couldn’t track in Domainspace?

  What about after Zephyro was gone?

  Taking a deep breath, I tried to focus on the Medal and what it represented.

  Commitment, courage, but also observation and diligence.

  Focusing was easier said than done, however. It was hard to keep one concept in mind above all the others, and as I thought of the General, they kept jumbling into each other.

  Advancing Pharus and Arx had been easy. Mostly, I assumed, because there hadn’t been any other option in the heat of the moment. I’d crafted Pharus because I needed a weapon, and created Arx because I had been terrified of Feral sucking my soul out of my body.

  Ardor, Nexus, Simulacrum, and MemOS 11 had been completely different still because they had already been programs. All I really had to do was think about what they did, and wish for them to do more of that.

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  But with the medal, it wasn’t that simple. I was operating in a tight time frame, sure, but the medal could represent so many things, and I technically needed all of them. If I just pushed Logic into it and hoped for the best, there was no way of telling what I would get. And after that, even if I had more than enough Logic left, the medal would most likely be consumed. If I didn’t get some sort of camera, I’d still be blind, down several bytes of Logic, and I’d still have to figure out a way forward.

  Then again, I’d already decided there was no alternative.

  Here goes nothing…

  I exhaled into the darkness, let my Logic-suffused breath hover in the void.

  Instead of the barrage of information and the headache I had come to expect, however, I got a different result.

  I frowned, that was new. I sent a quick thought to Chris, asking them ‘Trustworthy?’ just to be sure.

  Beep! came their response, complete with a quick readout.

  Oh, so that’s what that was! Fuck, I should have gotten that OS upgrade before I’d gotten anything else. Damn, but hindsight was 20/20.

  Letting go of my dreams about a past that would never be, I just said “Yes” and got a new response as a reward for my trust.

  Completely without any dreaded headaches!

  Yep, definitely the first program I should have upgraded.

  I forced myself to think through the options as fast as possible as fast as possible. It would have been nice to stop to consider, would even have been nice to appreciate the different choices, and ponder what they could mean. But every second I spent blind was another second the kids could freak out and disconnect the laptop, preventing me from unlocking the hoard of Logic I had sitting on my hard drive, and potentially corrupting my DPM forever.

  There was only one option that mattered to me, and of course, it wasn’t one of the choices that were named after streams, willpower, light, or the future.

  The Logic hanging in the air before me condensed into tiny blocks of cyan data. They shivered, then crashed into each other, arranging themselves into the vague shape of an insignia. It hung in the air, thrumming with power as its outline became more and more defined. A dark ribbon

  I was still surprised, but not at all unhappy about the fact that the words now flowed into my mind like cold water over smooth stones. It made it easier to focus on what was important, such as figuring out how to actually use Cura.

  But it turned out it was as easy as tapping the medal.

  I felt a soft tingle on my chest as the device activated, spilling light in a cone in front of me. It was like one of those old projectors, throwing the picture against a wall I couldn’t see, except that it was three-dimensional. Within the cone of light, figures blurred into existence, not nearly as lifelike as they had been when the General did his thing, but detailed enough to understand things had gone to absolute shit.