[ACT 2]

[GIGAPAUSE]

You must be wondering what happened to Pony.

I don’t blame you. I’m partial to her too, and her story left off on a cliffhanger. You must have been waiting to find out what happened for a very long time.

You will have had plenty of time to replay your favorite moments, to talk with your friends, to ask what-ifs, and once you had exhausted the archives, to speculate about what would happen next.

Did you know that speculate shares a root with speculum, as in mirror, or looking-glass? That’s also where we get spectral, as in ghostly. It all comes from the Latin specio: observe, watch, behold.

That’s all that ghosts can do. They watch.

(You’re not laughing. You should tell that joke to your blonde friend. She loves beholders.)

I’m leading you on, of course. It’s only that it isn’t the kind of thing you talk about in polite company, and I know you consider yourself polite.

Well, I’ll keep you waiting no longer.

Luckily for you, I don’t mind being rude in the service of a good story.

Where did we leave off? I can hardly remember. It’s been such a long time.

Ha ha. Hee hee. That was another joke. I remember perfectly.¹

Pony was supposed to live.

She was supposed to have been brought into the game that Egress was preparing for them, the nest that it had built out of the Earth-twigs all the players had brought it, where she and her friends would hatch the egg of a new world. She had been griefed in the big showdown by the so-called “Prince of Breath,” that wannabe mastermind selling out the world to capital; and the “Thief of Life,” that asshole player-killer with endgame armor and a real sword; who both apparently hated Asian people or trans people or women (was she women?) or all of the above, and all the colors had faded out of the world through the sharp pain in her belly, and all her friends had risen outward and away like she was falling through the level geometry.

She wandered the glitch hell of null textures and fragmented game data, confused and afraid, even calling out to the ?Who for help — the digital devil she thought Friday morning she could outsmart and Save the World, only to end up spilling her guts to her late Saturday night, hopelessly obsessed and desperate for someone to spill to, and by Sunday morning wear the glitch goddess’ dress and makeup to this super fancy gala, in front of her friends and enemies and everyone, as the Key, the Opener of the Mercy Gate, the Black Jewel in Her Crown — and now she was dead, or might as well be, and her friends were going to have to Save the World or surrender to the ?Who’s Mercy without her.

It didn’t turn out that way. There were other glitch-ghost Egress players like her, clipped out of the session and wandering the broken void in groups, and they found her and helped her; a gearhead rockabilly named Maud with a microphone on her shirt brought her out of her panic spiral, and an entomology freshman named Yuli wearing a Happy Human badge explained why it was unlikely that they were actually dead. She saw a ghost, a real(?) ghost, Iris’ dead friend Victor in their Harajuku replica gothic finery looming between the living world of gameplay and the glitch hell, and through the medium of Victor she made contact with Iris and the others. Iris kept her talking about how they were going to rescue her and the others too, but also about their hometowns, and school, and Pony’s dress, and the music she liked, and what she wanted to do when this was over, and all of that.

Victor’s ghost had apparently been linksprited together with the [Ancient of Oceansong], a Link Iris had made with the recorded music of a pre-human squid…? Pony missed the details but riffed with Iris about Salt Catalog’s infamous profile text: this user claims to be a [male | female | squid]

(like Pony/stringedMaven, Iris/erstwhileImperatrix’s profile said squid.)

Iris and the new Ancestor Siren (AKA Victorsprite) came up with a convoluted plan to have Pony, via Iris’ mysterious Antlermagic and the ghostly AS/VS, possess Axel’s uncanny synthetic Ponysprite, who would then pilot the robotic Victordoll body that Sonya had crafted with Chenoweth’s President of Student Council/Prince of Breath — the point was, Pony was coming into the Medium with everyone else, and the other glitched-out player ghosts were coming along with her: Key Edition privilege.

And it almost worked.

Beau knocked back the glitchstep extinction meteor with frame-perfect execution, Axel hijacked the ?Who’s honeytrap Mercy Gate using zir and morningWard’s experimental ?Autodialer, Iris’ prismatic lantern pointed a way through, mW panicked at the prospect of betraying her evil older online girlfriend until Pony extended her trust personally, the glitch goddess coped and seethed on every screen in New Neo City and swore deathless vengeance on humanity for blocking her escape, and Ruby and her Weaver-Bennu-sprite sailed them all along the prismatic path through the jailbroken Gate, her flight cloak catching the breeze. They had broken into the Medium through the backdoor, without the ?Who’s wicked tendrils worming their way through first. Pony, her robot body wearing her black Key Edition Egress card manufacted into a ribbon, floated in the abstract James Turrell lightspace sea of potential with the others. Instructing the game’s metaphysical interface to bring in every Egress player in the lobby (Ruby, Axel, Iris, mW, Beau, and herself) and all that they were carrying (including Sonya, Sully, Azrael, Lucia, and freaked-out Laika,) but ban the corrupted data of the ?Who, the Key player initiated the session.

Then things got staticky. The connection fuzzed. And Pony was back in her glitch-ghost body, white eyes wide, in the void of fragments and null textures, with the other stranded players all wondering why they weren’t in the session. There were no answers, no way of contacting the session or Earth or anywhere else, nothing but a loading message newly looming in the skybox:

Waiting to Enter . . .

art by ko-fi.com/puzzleroom

There were less than twenty of them. This group wasn’t every player who had failed to enter, just those who had somehow been [null]’d out of the game, or reality. Like Pony. Like the player who had sent her the Blue Honey at Ms. Tea, whose voice she had heard in the memory flowers at the Friendship Garden, whose abandoned Warp Skates Pony had taken, the one who the [null] SERPENT said had been Removed From The Session Without The Finality Of Death.

(that player was here, too: Nico Maraes, Cyan, an exchange student into hyperpop, a red herring in the end but happy enough to meet her and gracious about her taking his warp skates.)

Dead or not, they didn’t need to eat. Their bodies, familiar but lacking substance, didn’t grow tired or thirsty, not physically. Floating or walking was a matter of perspective. They hopped between floating islets in the glitch-void, combing every substantial piece of a [null]’d player’s half-digested Node for answers to what had happened, what went wrong, how they could fix it and get things back to normal. Some of them still thought this was part of the challenge. They started calling it the Shadow Realm, like morningWard’s FAQ had suggested; it was less upsetting than being in “glitch hell.”

It didn’t take long, relatively speaking, for them to realize that the floating panes of null texture could become like mirrors. They could reflect memories into little bubbles one could visit: the living room or club room or common room, a sunny summer day in the soybean field, the library whose stacks one knew by heart. Pony was the one who realized that she could draw things out of the reflections, pulling out the memory of Wolf Dad’s armchair to sit on in the void, or white noise to cover the intermittent static howl. With the right technique, one could combine disparate reflections together: this house on that block, these clothes on their body, friends swapping places or edition colors, two dozen ambient samples combined into one song.

Pony didn’t like being the center of attention after faceplanting so hard, and the others explored the mirrors more.

Hana Greene, Magenta, made a meadow for their Count My Sheep fanlambs to bounce in. Brit Mowray, Cyan, climbed variants on Takeshi’s Castle to stay rooted in his body memory. Tali Ratner, Yellow, made emotional breakcore from cringe TV samples, as she had in life.

Maud Maddox, slapbackWildcat, the rockabilly Yellow edition player who did makeup tutorial videos, reflected a memory of a go-kart track and stocked it with ever more fantastical monster trucks; she taught Pony how to reflect duochrome lipstick and polish and wield a tire iron right.

Mark Adams, miniatureYankee, a Cyan history enthusiast into dioramas and model trains, recreated his house in famously eldritch Seven Gables; Pony didn’t believe his witchy Sis really left out an elaborate Halloween display 365 days a year until Mark showed him the pumpkins.

Yuli Bashar, eusocialChordate, the humanist Magenta player into entomology and utopian communities, had the idea to draw mirror-things and glitch-flotsam together into one central location: the Lighthouse, a place that they could always see, where everyone could come back to from anywhere in the Shadow Realm for companionship and the reflection of a hot sandwich (for example.) Something to keep them anchored in community, so no one would get lost in the panes.

There was nothing truly new in the Shadow Realm. There were games to play, reflections of others’ experiences that someone hadn’t seen yet, iterations on themes and increasingly well-crafted retellings of stories, but nothing that could ever move them forward. An early fad for Egress fan-sessions fell out of favor when no one could say what would happen if they won. They swapped theories and wondered what this place was, when they would enter, if they would enter, what would happen next.

Pony had recreated the memory of a 7th grade trip to Hirano, Japan, donor city of Forest Lake’s Friendship Garden, where Fox Dad’s family was from. The reflection had a warmth that she would curl into like a weighted blanket, sitting in the stands of the old Winter Games stadium, eating after-school yogurt rice or her blurry memories of takoyaki. Everyone was welcome, but Mark was especially charmed by it. He would reflect chunks of it into his own pane, iterating and tweaking her copied memory like a diorama to make it even more picturesque, even more charming, even more nostalgic.

She walked with him through her grand-aunt’s tree-lined neighborhood, the coziness turned up 25%, while a stray never-cat with “walking” subtracted from its reflection glided above them. He explained his theory that the Shadow Realm was a husk that the ?Who had left behind, some kind of para-real eggshell she’d cracked when she first merged with a rotary phone, or whatever. Pony wondered if wearing the CMYK dress the ?Who had sent her, the one she just knew was cursed, was the reason she was trapped here — lingering corrupted data rejected by the session at her Key command, or something. Mark said that sounded like undigested Catholic school guilt, and that he didn’t think Pony was in hell because she wore a dress. Besides, he reasoned, they were all stranded here, not trapped, and not just her. They were all looking for a way out together.

That wasn’t really true. They were already factionalizing. Pony could see it in the cliques forming at the Lighthouse. It started with a debate over whether this place ought to be called Spectopia instead of the Shadow Realm, since they were making a home of it now, and Shadow Realm was creepy. There were the ones like Brit focused on the Waiting to Enter . . . message, refusing to miss their moment with distractions, whom the others jokingly called the Queue. There were the ones like Hana who wanted to make the most of this strange impossible Spectopia, building elaborate reflection-bubbles and diving deeper and deeper into the panes, whom the others worriedly called Narcissists. And there were the ones like Tali who were sick of waiting and sick of distractions, who wanted to find some way to leave the Shadow Realm on their own terms for farther shores, who called themselves Seekers, which everyone else just hated. Mark was increasingly with the last clique.

Pony still locked up when she had to choose between her friends. (How could she not? Nothing could change here.) She avoided the pizza mixers organized by Yuli and her reflection duplicates at the Lighthouse (where toppings were chosen by Condorcet method) — with Mark off Seeking all the time, there was no one to talk to. She retreated instead into panes within panes, where she had the quiet place to play out her fascinations and unanswered questions without having to explain. The others started to worry that she was going Narcissist, but she had never felt more creative.

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Year Two | Hamhambone

They were all gathered in Hirano 6.0, a favorite well-crafted reflection to relax at peak efficiency. The Waiting to Enter . . . message had rotated its interface loading wheel a quarter-turn, and the Queue was ecstatic. Yuli and her Yulis had organized an informational pizza social to discuss the implications. Never-pigeons played at eating, and deep reflections of remembered people from a hundred memories mingled without acting substantially. Pony hadn’t been to an informational pizza social since Mark and a few other Seekers had all left together from the Lighthouse for the edge of the world. Tali was handing out buttons that said Spectopia Year Two: “And Loving It!!” Hana wore one with a big smile, which agitated Nico; they were soon bickering.

Pony turned a button over in her hand. Year two? That couldn’t be right, could it?

The clocks and calendars in Spectopia weren’t reliable; Pony knew better than anyone that you could make them say anything you wanted. She listened to Tali telling some of the Yulis about a tempo machine she had set up in the Lighthouse, tracking time through loops of a known duration. The Yulis quickly self-organized into separate Timekeeping Committees to check the work of the others. Pony was skeptical. She didn’t know about all that.

She had stopped wearing the CMYK dress, and started making new outfits from reflected aspects of others’ wardrobes. Yuli’s overalls, Hana’s Count My Sheep symbol, Maud’s eyeliner. Being a copycat was becoming second nature; she was always borrowing clothes from other girls. She often replayed variations on the night after her Gamer Date with Ruby, when her friend was about to offer her new clothes to wear, but her imagination limited the fantasy; she wasn’t actually Ruby and could only imagine so many outfits on her own.

Mark had been the one to design this last 6.0 refinement of Pony’s Hirano reflection before he left his worldbuilding phase behind to go Seeking. Maybe that was why he chose this reflection of a scenic backstreet to suddenly return in, wearing a completely new look. Instead of a t-shirt with an iconic construction brick, he wore a gray hooded cloak over what looked like pajama pants, and a tabard with stark white needle-and-thread heraldry on cloth deeper black than her memory of night. (and bright green shoes. Mark would never make bright green shoes. He wouldn’t even think of them. Pony was sure.)

Mark told them that he and the other Seekers had traveled through the glitch-void, far beyond the sight of the Lighthouse, but that on the edges of its contextual gravity, they had found guardians waiting for them. Not like the unremembered never-dogs and never-owls that hopped and flickered through the panes, emerging from the imperfect seams of reflections without some aspect of their nature. These were creatures that couldn’t ever have really been. He said they were “least unlike dragons.”

The guardians had encircled and captured most of the Seekers when they tried to break through. Perhaps the ?Who had left them there, or they had emerged from fractured mirrors, but Mark didn’t stay to ask. He managed to push past them, sailing further and further into the void with the glitch-dragons always in pursuit. He had gone until he found a mirror on the edge of the world, if this place was a world. In the horizon mirror he saw himself, wearing these fantastical video-gamey clothes, looking not exhausted and afraid and lonely but confident. Powerful. Better.

Somehow, through a tremendous act of will and serendipity, Mark and what he called his “Best Self” had…switched, or broken through, or become each other. He told the gathered players that he couldn’t quite explain without doing it, and anyway he thought it was different for everyone. What he knew, dead certain, was that he was the Herald of Strings, and his task was to gather them to lead a rescue of the captured Seekers, and for all of them together to escape the Shadow Realm. (or, he added, Spectopia.)

Pony walked through the path-optimized, The Wind Rises-inspired 6.0 edition of her grand-aunt’s tree-lined neighborhood in her 7th grade family trip to Hirano. Mark glided alongside her, zipping from one landing after another without touching the stairs. He said that it was especially important that Pony join him in leaving this place behind; this was one of the things that he had come to Herald. It was not bringing out the best in her, he said.

She told him, in confidence, that she was still not completely sure that he was real, not just some never-Mark conjured from the panes. He told her, floating, that he was from the panes: he was someone new, a possibility born from the reflections, that he’d left mortal Mark’s selfness behind to become. Clinging to their mortal selfness in this place, and even to the roles assigned to them by Egress and its alternate rules for reality, was holding them back from transcending boundaries. If the world of Spectopia was possible, what else could they create in the gaps opened by play? Who else could they become?

Pony listened to the sound of wind chimes from empty porches. She had heard them so very many times here, drawn from her memories, but drawn-out or pitch-tuned or sampled into other ambient sounds. She explained to Mark her problem of coming up with new outfits in her deeper panes. How could it be possible that anything in Spectopia was new, when it was all only a reflection? The story of her life was waiting to happen in the game, with her friends. She was afraid that venturing into the void in search of an escape would only take her further away from where she was supposed to be.

This reply saddened and worried Mark, and he told her so. He told her that her answer only underlined for him the importance of getting her out of this place. She was losing touch, tied up in excuses for not changing anything, just gazing into her own reflection. She could replay everything that had happened to her, but she was refusing the chance to try anything new, to create new memories that she hadn’t imagined before.

Pony countered that the other Seekers had tried to create new memories in this place, to become new people, and according to him, it had ended with them trapped in the semi-metaphorical jaws of a digital dragon, not even a cozy blanket of a reflection to sip tea or play cello in. Was she supposed to get chewed up by a data dragon out in the void when the loading screen had finally just ticked over a quarter-turn? No thank you, mister!

Mark, frustrated, reminded Pony with brevity and force that there was more to their lives than that fucking evil game they had played for a weekend. Pony disagreed, surprising even herself. She wasn’t going to let go of Egress and the world it could make so easily.

The two of them looked up at the Waiting to Enter . . . message from the top of the Lighthouse. Brit was sitting cross-legged on a woven mat, gazing at the loading screen from behind sunglasses. Below, Nico and Tali were mustering with the rest of a new round of Seekers in the ring-shaped plaza where they gathered for games and the Yulis’ endless chem-free student-housing icebreaker socials. They would be leaving for the dragons soon, and past them, the horizon mirror.

In a final appeal, Mark asked Pony to remember how she felt when she first put on her CMYK dress on that last morning on Earth. It may have been scary, facing a break from life so far, but wasn’t there excitement and potential even more than that? What kind of life had she wanted for herself when she put on that dress?

Would she get closer to attaining her Best Self by leaving for something new, or by sinking ever deeper into mirrors within mirrors?

Well?

You’ve heard the story so far. You must have some idea of our Pony in your head by now.

What do you think she decided to do?

Go on. I won’t be offended. I’m curious, too.

Speculate with me.