Archive of Our Own ^beta

The dragon lady next to me at the Second Life rave was too close. Her wings kept clipping through my player model. I didn't mind, but she /whispered an apology each and every time it happened. My chat window was filled with scores of variations of "oop sowwie >_<!! xoxo" and "uaah! not again! orz" by the end of the night.

We hung out after the set. Her, myself, and some of her friends. We loitered among the flowers in a digital recreation of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Her crew complimented my avatar. I was a girl with rabbit ears, pressed down by her hat, sweatshirt sleeves far too long.

One of the friends, a flock of seven crows, guessed my model had come from a PS2 game. It looked the part. But no. It was a commissioned work that I’d ported to every virtual world I visited, be it Second Life, VRChat, Garry’s Mod… It was my way of defining myself. Most people did that with usernames, but mine had always been eminently forgettable. Just Maggie, with some numbers at the end for disambiguation.

They were impressed by my dedication to consistent self-image. But not every virtual world was 3D. Some existed within chatrooms. In play-by-post forums or MUDs. The group wondered aloud how I’d adapt my model to text. Spitballed poetic ways to describe me. I didn’t really like their descriptions. Didn’t match my style. After some thinking, I offered my own into the chat.

“ohmygosh I knew u sounded like a writerrr >w<!” The dragon clapped her hands together, giddy. A canned animation, but in this context it came across as nothing less than genuine.

“you should invite her.” Said the crows to the dragon.

“Invite me to what?” I asked.

The invitation was a “visitor’s pass” to a closed MUSH the dragon helped moderate. I’d heard of MUSHes before, they were a kind of MUD—an online collaborative text adventure. But I didn’t know the acronym. “Multi-User Shared Hallucination,” the crows had explained. Instead of a focus on combat and quests, a MUSH’s focus was on roleplay. On hanging out and playing pretend.

I promised to stop by the next day, but was waylaid by the sudden realization that I hadn’t yet made income that month.

And so the next few days were spent in a hypomanic blur of bottled water, caffeine pills, and Ghidra. Such was my dayjob, if you could call it that. Every month I’d go hunting for bugs, exploits, and security holes in the gears of various tech giants, then sell my findings back to them. Despite all the corporate language like “responsible disclosure timeline” and “bug bounty programme” it never felt any more professional than ransoming. And that suited me just fine.

By the time I’d satisfied my budget for rent, groceries, and discretionary spending—my mind still sleep-deprived and soupy with high-octane neurotransmitters—I had completely forgotten about the invite.

It was a month later, looking through my screenshots folder for an unrelated thing, that I encountered a picture from that night. Two of the dragon’s friends, a catgirl and a doggirl, smooching among the roses. It was a serendipitous reminder. I found the MUSH’s address in my Firestorm chat logs. The invite code, too.

I popped a terminal and made the connection. The invite still worked. I was greeted by its name in beautifully rendered ASCII art. “eQualia.”

I was subsequently dropped into a kind of text-only character designer. A place to craft a couple of sentences and paragraphs to serve as my avatar's description in a myriad of contexts. I found it meditative to translate my 3D form to prose. Found it nice to add subtext, things that can't be communicated with polygons and textures. I was excited to see what the dragon thought of me.

But what I had found instead, after navigating north, north, north—past the tutorial vestibule, through the portal room, and into the main town square… Was nothing.

What should've been a bustling walled city in a classical fantasy setting had been ransacked and defaced. Examining any object returned only a cavalcade of keysmash. The NPCs cluttered about like hey-go-mad, their pre-programmed routines rewired at random for maximum chaos.

It seemed this world had been razed. I wandered further north. There was a throne room in the castle. I let myself in through an empty archway—the doors must have been deleted.

Behind the throne I found the only object with a remotely intact description. A tapestry hanging proud. I assumed it had once held a beautiful story, delicately crafted to evoke just the right image in the mind of the reader. But everything outside the framing narrative had been wiped, replaced with the following message, arriving in the mind as a haphazard scrawl:

"eebeebeebee crew was here"

I took off my hat, contemplative. I wouldn't let this stand. I had found myself a case.

—

This wouldn't be my first case, and it wouldn't be my last. I had been around the block enough times to have a process. I had a "cases" folder and everything. I made a subdirectory inside, and methodically—as I am—created a rough outline.

cases/
  eQualia/
    pics/
      screenshot_2022-05-11.png
    notes.txt

Not much to go off, but it rarely begins that way. The ARG players call these things "trailheads" for a reason. Finding a direction to walk is one thing, actually walking is another. I would need to find that dragon again, and get her story.

Although I could've easily located her in my Second Life friends list, I didn't need a reminder of her username. It had stuck in my mind, in that way only distinctive usernames could. "kewpie_faygo"

I apparated back into SL, arriving where I had left off among the billboarded flowers. I found her profile in the menus, opened an IM window and—hesitated.

As always. Always, when things start, I have a moment of pause. Of self-doubt. Am reminded of all my screw ups and moments of weakness and failure. Should I stick my nose in other people's business? Has it ever been appreciated?

But then, as always, I remember that empty can on the side of the driveway, nine years ago. The lager with the hole at the bottom. Nosiness pays, and I've always been compulsive.

"Hey," I wrote, "I joined that eQualia MUSH just now. Seemed like something happened?"

Sent—no… Sending.

Sending… Sending… Sending…

The chat window hiccuped. My message disappeared, replaced with an error I’d never encountered before.

"Message undeliverable. User inaccessible due to sanction."

I leaned back into my IKEA Millberget—the one I had realized far too late was inhospitable to human life—and metaphorically logged off. I threw out a half-filled yoghurt cup, now too old to eat comfortably. I knew it would be fine, if I'd finished it. I had opened it only two hours ago. But even just touching it now sent those irrational alarm bells going off in my head. Conjured images of spores and distasteful textures. The trash accepted it and the associated plastic spoon gladly.

I sniffed around on the major sites for her username. Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit. Chat apps. Gaming networks. I thought she might’ve just been banned from SL for some inexplicable reason, and I could contact her elsewhere. But by the time I’d debased myself by checking Facebook—cringing at my own stupidity for even hoping she'd be there—I realized I had to bring out the big guns.

I opened that Vercel app, the one whose name was an xkcd-style grab-bag of four common nouns. I typed its password into the browser's built-in popup and landed at an innocuous search page. A poorly drawn mascot of a magnifying glass greeted me with a wave, frozen in movement.

I plugged in "kewpie_faygo" and tapped enter.

The search field dropped out a big empty rectangle, with an unstyled progress bar haphazardly placed in its center. I knew from experience that the bar was pre-timed. It would fill up after precisely five minutes, then hang indefinitely until the server actually finished the request. A much, much longer wait than five minutes. I'm not sure why they bothered.

There is something about broad-spectrum OSINT tools that prevent them from surviving very long on the clearnet. They seem to attract DDoSes, or DMCAs, or the ancient, brutal tool of the human language: death threats. The only way for them to exist sustainably is for them to exist secretly. Available only within select groups. Among the "IFYKYK." And thankfully, somehow, I was among them.

I wish I had some sly story about how I had come to access this thing. That I had found it by my own wits, or had gotten access by way of cashing in on a favour. But in reality I was merely lucky. I had been watching the lightning talk stream from a B-tier security conference. 8 others were watching alongside me, and the VOD was never backed up. The site and its credentials were alluded to by a presenter, off-hand, vocally. I transcribed, and I was in. I was very likely only one of a handful to ever use it.

DGSA, AKA "delay-gate-shame-adoption," the search engine, finally returned its results after something like an hour. The thing about account deletion is that it's rarely total. Websites don't want to lose a customer—or more importantly, lose the customer's juicy data. Rarely is a delete really a delete. Usually it's a flag. is_deactivated, or is_locked. Often one could tell, by way of subtle difference in API response, whether an account had been deleted or if it had never existed in the first place. DGSA could, indeed, intuit and surface this nuance.

kewpie_faygo had existed on seven different websites, and had been deleted on each and every one.

So, a missing persons case. And again, not my first. I tapped my temple idly. Process, Maggie, Process…

Gather knowledge. Iinfer what's missing. Extrapolate. Make it make sense.

Like I explained, deletion is rarely total. On Twitter you can easily find one-sided conversations with the deleted account. The Internet Archive’s ample cache of date-stamped timelines and bios can be relied upon to reconstruct a sequence of events. The programmers of DGSA knew all of those tricks, and then some. Under each dead account it conveniently provided links for digging deeper.

So I dug. Dug, and dug, and dug. I added quite a lot to notes.txt, but synthesizing it would come later. One step at a time.

After a haze of single-minded fixation, it had become 6 AM. Nothing made sense. And I still wasn’t hungry. The yoghurt cup earlier, so innocuous, had disproportionately messed with my appetite. I took a safe Evian out of my minifridge—frozen then thawed according to protocol—and methodically swallowed a multivitamin and seven fibre pills in turn.

Flossed.

Used a disposable toothbrush.

Wedged an estradiol stickie onto the gum of my canine.

Crawled into bed. Slept.

What I had learned from DGSA didn’t cross the barrier into dreams. Instead I found wet floors. Missed connections by the front porch. Ruin. Ruining.

—

Not my first case. Not even my tenth. I know my failure modes. I know my weaknesses. I see it happening right now.

I have a rule. "This ain't Rapture." Andrew Ryan's rapture, from Bioshock. You wander around a fallen libertarian city, listening to audio logs from years ago. It's all very static. Makes you feel like an archivist, piecing things together at your leisure.

Looking at that dragon's old accounts—at their vestiges… It feels like that. Distant echos. Chains of citations reaching back into time, to before you were born.

But no. The timestamp of her last twitter post was six days ago. This is not an echo. This is happening right now.

And you can say that to yourself all you want. That it’s real. That it's a car crash happening right behind you, about to hit the guardrails. But if all you're doing is reading, then it's never going to feel anything but passive.

I couldn't let myself feel that way. Not when paralysis is so easy. I had to talk to someone. Now.

And, to be honest, I needed help. Maybe there was an easy explanation for what I had found during my social media excavation. Maybe someone could make it make sense. But as it stood, with me alone, what I had found was not particularly sense-making.

I needed to talk to someone. Anyone. But finding a relevant anyone was proving very difficult. I had scraped captured copies of kewpie's followers and followings on various platforms. Wrote a Python script to rank usernames by relative social proximity. People who, by simple reasoning, should be closest to what happened. Witnesses.

Most of them—those being friends from the MUSH—were also MIA.

How could an entire clique, an entire internet community, blink out of existence?

Wouldn't anyone notice?

—

Second Life again. Flying.

eQualia—kewpie’s MUSH—had three tiers of membership. Visitors, citizens, and moderators. Visitors could only access public areas, or private ones while chaperoned. Citizens could go anywhere in the world, create and control their own private rooms and objects, and direct message other citizens. Moderators could do anything, software permitting.

Citizenship was a gift given by a moderator. An honour so coveted that the chosen wore their citizenship proudly on their profiles. I saw the phrase “eQualia citizen” among the bios of the missing people in kewpie’s orbit. All of the citizens were missing, with precisely one exception.

Someone I had met already. The cloud of corvids. The one who suggested I be invited in the first place. It had been spared. We had to talk.

We met in a sim that had somehow been flipped upside-down. Towering skyscrapers hung like stalactites from the ground-as-sky. 7crows, the flock, had a place of its own in one such building. An expansive apartment carved out of an otherwise hollow and featureless glass cube. It wore a different avatar than before. Today it was a casserole of gibs and masticated flesh, held within a humanoid, iron frame. We used poseballs to sit, legs dangling, on the unguarded ledge of the balcony's ceiling.

We spoke at length about the state of things. 7crows was also worried about kewpie and the others. Shared with me some of the things it had done to try to re-establish contact. kewpie and it had shared IRL phone numbers a long time ago, five or six years, just for the sake of it. Back when they were in a different group, back when they had different names. When 7crows tried calling, the number was out of service.

I wasn't sure who could determine if the disconnection was recent. I'm not a phreak, so I had no idea where to even start with that question, and I didn't have many connections in that realm. For now I merely filed the information away.

7crows released the grip its poseball had on itself. Clicked on a different one. Its model grabbed the rails of the balcony above it and leaned dangerously over the precipice, looking down into the sky. I picked up on the intentionality. Communicating its mental state. Pensive. Punctuating.

“I stopped being a citizen a few weeks ago," it typed, "was a citizen since its inception, actually. but for personal reasons, I ended it."

Like a relationship. I considered holding my tongue, but nosiness pays. "What personal reasons?"

Pause.

"it was too real. fantasy is too compelling. it makes me make bad decisions."

Makes me make bad decisions, I noted. Present tense used to discuss past problems. Would have been a chronic issue, then. Not an acute episode.

I pressed for examples. 7crows hesitated. Its typing indicator flickered on and off.

"I missed lectures. other stuff."

More hesitation.

"I started identifying as my character. that part started becoming more of me than the rest of me. not everyone in here wanted that."

Right. The name. The crows. I picked up on the unsaid, but I didn’t know what to make of the feelings. Didn’t know where they fit. If they mattered to the case. In the bottom left of my viewport, aliased by distance, an empty upside-down ferris wheel slowly spun.

During our time after the rave I had picked up on 7crows and kewpie’s friendship. They spoke in that way only old friends could. Through long chains of reference. Lovingly aggressive banter. An innuendo here or there. I imagined the decision to disconnect from that shared community was a hard one. Losing her fully now must be even harder.

But I was approaching another one of my failure modes. Too much depth. Drilling down into minor details. I glanced at notes.txt, at my major questions. 7crows knew nothing about eebeebeebee crew—I had asked in IMs before our meetup—but there was another opaque and seemingly critical noun, alluded to by kewpie in her final posts, that I needed to know.

"Do you have any idea what a 'sovereignty party' is?"

—

Being strangers, I was unfamiliar with kewpie's tendency to misrepresent herself. To downplay involvement in her own projects. When she'd said she "helped moderate" the MUSH, what she'd really meant was "ruled it like a benevolent Queen." eQualia’s one and only moderator.

She was not "kewpie_faygo" within the walls of eQualia. No, her true name was "Princess Dahlia Tiffany Butenblatter, She-who-is-your-flower, Protector of the Outcast, Lover of the Damned, your Devoted Servant." A long, extravagant name—one that 7crows could recite entirely from memory. But that was merely her formal title. As she would invariably and gracefully offer her citizens: "u can just call me Dahlia~ ^w^"

This was a surprise. You'd think her social media accounts would have made her role clear. But she'd been very careful to present herself, outside her realm, as nothing more than a modest caretaker. And who wouldn't? The internet hates titles and honorifics. The internet hates the chuuni.

But I wouldn't dream to malign her. I updated my case notes. Missing monarch, her kingdom razed.

I knew I'd need to shift focus eventually. It was about time. Onto the razers.

—

My children walked obediently along the routes I had crafted for them. Straight lines, orthogonal. 90-degree turns. Every so often one would encounter a trap. Hidden triggers and pressure plates, placed semi-randomly along the corridors. There may have been some underlying predictability to when and where they appeared, something that could be exploited to increase our odds of survival. But I was content to allow a child to die—body filled with poison arrows, head caved in by falling anvil, or blown to smitheroons—and simply respawn healed, rather than give any more work toward optimization.

Presently, I had sixteen children exploring. Their names were fhishd843, iroenf184, owlqkd562, etcetera. All the same pattern, six letters and a number. On my second screen a terminal spewing debug information declared "!!! STARTING VM !!!" and conjured a vertical window into the middle of the desktop. The Google Play Store loaded in. Seventeen inhumanly fast taps later, jumping through a perplexing sequence of password resets and refund requests, and I had a new child. jkelmn114 joined its siblings in the hunt.

I had reverse engineered the parameters of the L-system that defined the bedrock hallways of spawn. Always a nether portal in the center, with rectangular corridors meandering outward, splitting and recombining, eventually ending in yet more portals. Those portals would, after a leisurely stroll along a nether highway and return to the overworld, land you in the middle of their own random maze of twisty passages, their passages begetting more portals. Again. And again. And again.

Eventually, after roughly seven or eight portals, you will have either found your way out of the labyrinth, or will have become caught between two bedrock walls, unable to escape the portal you'd just travelled through. A softlock condition. Logging out/in from the server would simply place you back in the trap, unable to escape, rendering the corresponding Minecraft account effectively dead. So far this had been the fate of 267 of my children. None had managed to escape the underworld.

During my initial dig I had used DGSA to search for eebeebeebee crew, to no results. It was only after returning to the problem, and trying variations on the name, did I get something. Just one little scrap. "EBBB group" had been name-dropped in a Something Awful thread about griefing. A dismal place of one-upmanship. A contest to see who could be the worst person in the world.

According to the gossip, EBBB was allegedly a "closed group." A secret society of the kind that, should anyone be heard boasting about being a member, everyone could be certain they actually weren't. A group with so little respect for the world, they didn’t even bother with social media. Due to their lack of public face, the group's activities and motives were up to speculation.

I could sense, from the way some of those forum posters spoke, that they had more to say but didn't. A subtle holding of information that can only come from interpersonal agreements. From preserving a respect you gained from someone bigger than you. With so little to go off, I allowed myself to hope that some of these posters knew something. Or, even more hopefully, someone.

Two of the more promising candidates seemed to be friends. normalblockofwood and kloose were, indeed, mutuals. And based on their steam bios, members of the same "guild"—whatever that meant to them.

"Horny Guild." I hate the way these types pick names.

It was Horny Guild's server that my bots were currently probing. Instead of password protecting their world in the normal way, they had implemented access control using the gameplay of Minecraft itself. Presumably, only the correct route through the labyrinth would take you to the true overworld, to the place where the Horny Guild's members do whatever it is that they do.

Or there was some other trick—a hidden button somewhere, perhaps—and the maze was just a tarpit, a honey pot only there to waste a newbie's time and patience.

Personally, I thought the latter seemed more likely. But I wasn't playing their game. Not really. I had estimated the number of portal combinations to be somewhere between 5^7 and 6^8. Five-digit and seven-digit numbers, respectively. I'd been running this operation for four hours and had only managed to scrape together three digits. Low three-digits. I wasn't going to get in this way. But I knew I wouldn't have to.

—

By the time an admin teleported one of my children out of the maze and into a holding cell, I had burned 478 Minecraft accounts on this single-minded task. Not an inordinately large number, but I'll remind that Minecraft accounts aren't free. They cost money. A naive multiplication would have estimated that I had already wasted over 10,000 real dollars on a chance at getting an audience with some nobody gamers.

From their perspective, I was either obscenely wealthy, or I had found an exploit. And, although it is known that griefers don't truly respect or value anything, one could at least argue they are infatuated with exploits. Always itching for some new way to inflict maximum pain.

This whole operation was a performance. A ploy to arouse their curiosity. But I had to play this carefully. There was a spectrum between "mysterious capable interloper" and "tryhard script kiddie" that I would be placed within. Too far in either direction and things would get messy.

Somewhat clumsily I swapped into the role of ykwilk921—the bot they had taken into custody. I manually disconnected it. It blinked out of existence, just for a few moments, while I rejoined in its place with a proper Minecraft client. I allowed the other bots to continue their work. It cost me nothing to continue, and I wanted Horny Guild to know that.

The admin, balenciaga, leered at me from the other side of the iron bars.

"tell me your trick before I ban your ip range"

"That would certainly hurt," I replied, "But it wouldn't stop me."

"what do you even want"

I checked my HUD. I was close to dying. The bot hadn't eaten anything on its journey. Hadn't needed to eat—some plugin had disabled hunger while in the maze. But now, plucked out and placed in the jail, I was starving.

"A golden apple would be nice."

Without a word, balenciaga tossed one into the cell. I ate.

"Can you get me kloose?" I asked.

"this isn't his timezone"

"How about wood?"

I didn't think I was in a place to make demands like this, but being a curiosity had its perks. Although I wasn't privy to their internal conversations, I could imagine what they must be saying. "They only want to talk to you" is the kind of message that's fun to write. Makes you feel important, like you're in a film.

Wood was also not available, but could be online in a few hours. balenciaga put a bed in my cell so I could set my spawn point, so they wouldn't have to keep feeding me through the hole in the bars. If I starved, I starved. I would just respawn again, healthy.

I think it also helped that, within the fiction of the game, they were in control. I was locked up, after all. The weird thing is, it really did feel that way to me. I was never good with context-switching. If I put myself on a task, then I wouldn't be able to focus on anything else until that task was complete. The consequence of that quirk of my psychology is that, even though I was free to do anything, I mostly ended up lying in my real bed, waiting—just the same as my avatar.

So I settled in for a quiet evening in jail. I fetched a chilled vanilla Ensure from the minifridge and gave it those requisite twenty-five shakes that I'd found, from testing, would properly re-homogenize it. Bring the admittedly already rare likelihood of encountering any disgusting protein lumps to near-zero.

I stared at the ceiling, sipped the meal replacement, and thought about the shape of things.

If the situation really was how I'd currently pieced it together, then I was dealing with some extraordinarily dangerous people. There is only one way I can think of that can force an entire group of people off the internet. Fear.

There were many tools of fear available to the unscrupulous person. Harassment, doxxing, stalking, rumour-spreading. The internet can become a living hell when the wrong people have their eye on you. Is that what happened to kewpie and her active citizens? There were nine of them, total. Now all were missing. If they had all been harassed so effectively as to disappear on the same day… What was I dealing with here, really?

In spite of my worry, I did have a little confidence in my own position. I didn't have any social media of my own—or rather, none that lasted longer than the specific use I had for it. All I had to myself was a distinctive avatar and an extraordinarily ordinary name. I tried to be unsearchable and ephemeral. If I wanted to attend a Second Life rave, I'd make an account for it. If I wanted to join a Discord call, I'd make an account for it.

I have lived my life with disposables. I don’t want things collecting grime and age. Everything has to be fresh, pulled seconds ago from its individual wrapping. I've been this way for my entire adult life. I'm not changing anytime soon. I can't.

Besides, to Horny Guild I was just ykwilk921. An unknown person piloting a newly created Minecraft account, still sporting the default skin. Connected to their server from some IP in the Netherlands—not even remotely close to where I actually was. I'd have to reveal myself for them to do me any harm.

I told myself that a few times. It staved off some of the anxiety, but there was still a little sliver in there, nestled somewhere within my mucus-filled insides, that wasn't sure.

And then, accidentally and absentmindedly, perhaps due to the carbs of the Ensure hitting my empty stomach like a car wreck, I fell into sleep.

—

Dreaming. A re-run. That's mostly how they are these days. Either little scraps, or a teleplay from the archives.

Mom, with her readers, was at the kitchen table with my report card.

"A- in masking," she commented, more to herself than to me, "that's an improvement over last term."

I was at the end of the table, in the big chair. The lines of the room pointed me toward their vanishing point, out the side window. My gaze drifted across the gap between the houses, and landed against the neighbour's curtains. Stuck there now, like a fly in a glue trap.

"B+ in sitting still."

I couldn't see behind the curtains, but I knew what was there. I'd seen it already. I'd smelled it.

"A+ in eye contact."

I could hear him, in there. The violent sounds of the human respiratory system in muffled crisis. I knew everyone could hear. My mom, my dad, all the other neighbours. It hadn't been news to them.

"C- in compulsive behaviour, we'll have to work on that—"

She must've noticed what was happening. A little too loud to comfortably ignore. She looked at me dimly. My eyes snapped to hers, as they should.

"If you want to call 911 for him," she said flatly, "I won't stop you."

Jingling of keys. Front door. Iron bars—they're here.

—

Wood stood just behind the bars at the end of my bed. His skin was a pale wood grain, repeated all over. I would’ve been surprised if he had looked any different.

"hey" he'd typed, "you there?"

Those were the only messages. I checked their timestamps. They’d just come in 15 seconds ago. The memory of me clambering from my bed—my real bed—to my desk arrived in my mind out of order. I woke up right on time. Something about that made me dizzy.

"Yes," I replied, removing my avatar from its bed. "Just woke up."

"lmao"

Didn't mean it as a joke, but at least he was laughing. But, er, maybe a griefer laughing wasn’t such a good sign.

"what brings you to horny guild?" he asked.

Hard to tell the tone. A little jovial? Maybe he was doing a "good cop" routine.

"I'm looking for some people."

"I heard you were looking for me"

"I have reason to believe that you’ve been in contact. What can you tell me about EBBB group?"

It always impressed me what people could do when they've lived so many hours in their avatar. 7crows had deftly communicated its inner turmoil through poseball body language. And here, despite his emotionless lumber skin, wood performed a perfect conspiratorial look-around. Leaned in, and whispered.

"who wants to know? you a fed?"

I facepalmed, groaned. Curse my luck. I’d worried too much about seeming like a tryhard. I’d been too mysterious. I landed too far in the opposite direction. They thought I was a spook.

"Not a fed."

"prove it"

I shook my cursor in frustration—about the only expression of body language I could manage in this form. A short, fitful spasm. "Nobody in the history of the entire internet has ever been able to prove they're not a spook. Are you one?"

"no of course fucking not lol"

"Prove it."

"point taken jeez, I just need to know youre cool"

"I'll give you my exploit for information. A fair trade?"

"what did you even do? benny said you had like a thousand accounts or something"

Benny… ah, balenciaga. "No. I’ve discovered a way to recycle an account without needing a new Minecraft license. If you get banned, or softlocked, or whatever, you can detach the license from one account and put it onto a new, fresh one." I had only purchased—or rather, stole via normal means—20 licenses for this demonstration.

"that doesnt seem that useful… I thought you had thousands of accounts"

"No, it only seemed so due to the recycling. You could raid a server with this. They couldn't ever ban you, you'd just recycle the account."

He hesitated, considering. "they can ban your ip"

"Not if you have a network of jumpboxes."

"whats that"

It was around now that I started to worry that nobody here actually knew anything.

This was another one of my failure modes. I had just nuked an ant. I could've sold this exploit to Mojang/Microsoft for $2,000 of negotiable American currency. Instead I was here in a jail cell trying to convince Pinocchio to buy it for nothing.

Whatever. No half measures.

I gave up on the physicality of it all. Stood still, let my avatar look off into nowhere, toward the ceiling. Not a natural angle for the human head to rest at. This was just a text chat for me now. "How about this. You tell me what you know, or I keep raiding you. I’ll find my way in eventually."

"dude what the fuck"

"It's just information. Information I want. Tell me what you know and I'll leave. I can do worse."

I could see in the periphery, distorted by perspective, wood take out a crossbow and aim it at my head. Like that would do anything. "I dont beleive you. youre probably just making shit up with stupid glowie shit"

I scoffed to myself. "I see you've only ever met people who make things up. Who boast with nothing behind their bark. Never met the real deal?"

He moved subtly. Refining his aim. "well ban this account and youll just be stuck in the maze again"

"Like I said, I can do worse. You seem to know what an IP is. Need I remind you that your IP is static, and mine is not?"

If, at any point, I had somehow given the wrong impression—that I was someone with high-minded ideals, principles, or morals—then I am sincerely sorry to disappoint. I am none of those things. I am just a person who is both nosy and compulsive. Simple as that.

I can grief, too.

Fortunately, for them, it didn't come to that. wood lowered his bow, and told me what he knew.

Unfortunately, for me—and in what seemed to be the theme of this case—I wasn't sure what to make of the information.

wood knew of EBBB crew not by way of Minecraft griefing. Indeed, not by way of the internet at all. He explained, in words more eloquent than I expected, that griefing is just the modern name for a more ancient art. Vandalism.

"like, someone has to be the ones to burn down the library of alexandria. someone had to be the ones to smash the clay shit that had like, the epic of girugamesh on it. people have all these fucking ideas that arent even based on reality or whatever. a lot of stupid stories that arent real. you have to do a little trolling to bring people down to earth because otherwise they get stuck up there and start doing stupid shit."

And I realized, mostly due to the malapropisms, that these weren't his words at all. He must have heard this from someone, very likely someone from EBBB. He was just parroting.

I asked him where he'd heard all this.

"years and years ago. kloose and I were in high school. we used to go tagging in the woods. there were like old radio towers and abandoned rail tunnels and shit. there were six of us in our crew and wed go just before night—"

"I do enjoy seeing windows into other people's lives," I interrupted, "but I also enjoy getting to the point."

"fuck off im getting to the point," he punctuated by throwing a slur at me. I took it wordlessly. I’d expected that from these types, it’s just their nature. Can’t be helped.

He continued.

They encountered some older people in the woods one day. They were lounging in an abandoned building, smoking weed and looking cool. kloose and wood and the others also wanted to smoke weed and look cool—as one does. So they engaged.

They discussed inconsequential things, talked city gossip, trounced on the reputations of various community leaders. Classic antisocial banter.

Eventually the coolest one, the one in a tracksuit and a black beanie and five-o-clock shadow, announced that he would love to find "a couple of cool guys with big balls" who would help him with a mission.

I personally—though I admit this might be a failing on my end—can't ever imagine hearing that without being skeeved out. But kloose and wood and the others were game. After all, if they succeeded, then they’d have scored a hookup for weed.

I will now elide for length wood's description of this so-called mission. Even though it was "years and years ago," he still knew every detail to a tee. Walked me through it like I was going to help him do it again. Details, details, details. But I can describe it in one word. Arson.

Deep in the woods, much further than they would normally go, were nine arches nestled in a glade. They were crafted from tree branches woven together, and sat in a long line, one after another. Like a tube. The description reminded me of torii gates. Same layout. Likely different purpose.

But we wouldn't ever know its purpose. wood didn't know its purpose, neither did kloose. They didn't care. They wanted kush. All they knew was where it was, how to get there, and what to do when they found it.

The only name they had for it came from cool guy. He called it a "bridge." And it wouldn't last very long, now that their crew had been sicced on it. They pulled the branches out of the ground the very next night. Threw them on a big pile. Set them alight. Took photos with wood’s iPod Touch, as proof.

That was their first mission. They'd do others like this, but never as labourious. Blacking out some weird looking stickers. Putting dead animals on a target’s doorstep. Always rewarded with weed by the cool guy. They often talked together while they smoked. Cool guy would go on and on about the uselessness of fiction. How it's all a trick “they” were playing on the world. He had binders of photocopied book pages in his backpack. "Manifesto type shit" from "his friends who went to school."

Cool guy would talk about EBBB. The organization behind these ideas. It stood for something—the acronym. But it was German and wood, now a rusty expat, couldn't remember. kloose might. Something to do with bridges or whatever. Organization for stopping… Something like that… Something…

The worst thing to happen to an internet sleuth is for her case to leave the internet. The best I could hope for was getting the full name of this strange vandal group. And maybe, just maybe—and I was really holding out hope on this one, they'd be online.

—

But it seemed the universe could tell that this particular internet sleuth could handle more torture.

I was on a bus heading into the city, to a university library, to look at microfilm loaned from overseas—expedited at great expense to my person. All because this stupid case had left the internet.

I hated the smells. I hated the sounds. I hated being looked at. My room was clean, my room was quiet. I treat every surface every month with a mixture of detergent and isopropyl alcohol. A perfect smell. Now I was getting diesel to the face. And faeces. And vomit and pollen and bugs.

Curse this. I hate this. I closed my eyes at the back of the bus. Tried to imagine where each of my polygons would start and end. Tried to forget the dire reality that I was made of quadrillions of fickle particles, held together by absurd forces and unknowable math. No, I’m different. I’m made of faces, edges, and vertices. Textures and armatures and keyframes. I visualized it all. The mental exercise worked just well enough to get me through, and no more.

I had worried that I’d left Horny Guild with bad blood. But those types like it when they're overpowered, as it happens. Their biggest fear is responsibility. When someone else can be held responsible for their own failure—in this case, the failure to keep a secret—it is the casting of blame that paradoxically makes them feel better about themselves. They saw me as a force of nature, and that suited me just fine.

Before I logged out I had given wood an email address to pass along to kloose. A couple hours later, while I was sleeping, he sent the name.

"Einsatzgruppe zur Begrenzung von Brücken und Bruchstellen."

EBBB.

Blissfully the library was quiet, and whatever smells somehow got around my n95 were roughly pleasant. I navigated to special collections, met with the librarian. Gave my name, reminded her of why I was there. We'd spoken before over email.

She returned from the back with a formed plastic tray. Inside were six small cardboard boxes, the old Fujifilm logo on each. "Have you ever used microfilm before?" she asked.

I shook my head.

"I'll show you, then." She made a point to squint at me. Odd.

We went to a machine booth and she gave a tutorial. She slotted the roll onto the spindle, and spooled it into the machine. She used her bare fingers to guide the film into the reader. It disturbed me somewhat. Wouldn't that make fingerprints?

I asked about that. She squinted at me again. "Oh, no, it's fine. You'll only be touching the blank area."

"Why are you squinting?"

Laughter. "I'm smiling. You can't see because of the mask."

I blushed, embarrassed. At least she was graceful about it.

The microfilm machine was not difficult. It reminded me strongly of navigating a PDF, only with very strange controls. The difficult part was finding what I needed to find within a bunch of student magazines written in a language I didn't know.

But like I’ve said many times before, this is not my first case. I’ve navigated non-English documents before. Tables of contents are present in nearly every language.

And so I began. Fell into a nice rhythm. For the sake of pace, I assumed that the title of any relevant article would include the acronym. And with that policy I hit what I'd hoped was paydirt rather quickly. There were several whose body contained the full phrase “Einsatzgruppe zur Begrenzung von Brücken und Bruchstellen.” But translating would come later. The machine had been greymarket modified so its “print” function spat a djvu file onto your own personal USB key. I could take the pages home with me. I'd be able to synthesize from the comfort of my own room.

By the third microfilm I had become quite the old hand. Reminded me of using a roller iron when I worked housekeeping in high school. I didn’t like being in reality, but the machine booth was a relatively comfortable home away from home. My mind wandered.

I thought about the timeline of the case. I had been both lucky and unlucky to miss eQualia’s final party—the "sovereignty party"—by just six days. Lucky, in that I had found the case while it was still hot. Unlucky, because I had missed the party. I’d been invited to their world by the Queen, after all. Didn’t feel great to have fumbled her hospitality with my forgetfulness.

When I had asked, 7crows couldn't actually tell me precisely what the "sovereignty party" was. Just a guess. It said it was probably a celebration of Princess Dahlia's accession to the throne. That is, the anniversary of the MUSH's establishment.

But it could've been something else. Who knows. We missed the party. And anyone we could ever ask about it was indisposed. Probably indefinitely.

No justice in this world.

There were a few other mysteries that would need ironing out for this case to make any sense. If I had notes.txt with me I’d have been able to prioritize, been able to pick a good one to chew on. Instead I found myself fixated on a particularly inconsequential mystery.

How did I wake up at precisely the right time to talk to wood?

I was facing the wall when I had woke. My computer doesn't have speakers, and I had the Minecraft client muted. So it couldn’t be that I was cued awake by a sound. The screen was sleeping, too.

But… That last moment in my dream. The thing that derailed the teleplay's script. Jangling of keys, iron bars… That would have been the precise moment he was typing.

The dizzying, hollow feeling of unreality was nearby. Budding ideas of reference, eager to bloom. But no. No. Not today, Maggie. I pushed it from my mind. Nothing can be gleaned from coincidence. Nothing. I thought of something else.

—

I finished my labours around 10:00 p.m. The librarian had gone home already, but she’d come around earlier to tell me where I ought to return the film reels. I placed them in their tray behind the desk. Walked out the heavy push-doors into humid summer air.

Transit home was easier. World was quieter.

My USB stick was filled with 38 pages of untranslated German. I sniffed around online for some automated way to translate it, but the two-column layouts choked up all the open source options I'd tried. Eventually I found that my phone's built-in translation app was the best option. Showing it the pages via the camera produced the most usable results. I built a mount out of K'Nex to keep my phone pointed at my screen.

I had to carefully position the scanned pages so they’d land in the right spot on my phone’s camera sensor. A little cumbersome, but it did the job well enough. It struck me that I had, without thinking, constructed my own distorted version of the microfilm machine I’d just come home from using. Fell back into the rhythm I’d had at the library.

I cannot ever claim that my brain is normal. I'm a traumatized, nosy, compulsive, distractible, and dissociated person. You've just seen how I experience the real world. And you've seen how I experience the fake. I'm a threshold type. I need fantasy to survive, but I can't quite go all the way.

So you'd think, with me being a centrist on the spectrum between reality and fantasy, I'd be in a good position to understand the EBBB perspective. But let me tell you, they are so far off-scale that they are but a smudge on the horizon.

Imagine this: someone speaking in the most paranormal language, talking about portals to other worlds, ghosts and spirits, holes in reality and rips and dimensions… Now imagine all that spoken with a level of self-denial, a way of speaking so oblique as to simultaneously pretend nothing is happening. All is metaphor, but the monomaniacal focus on certain metaphors raises quite a number of questions about what the speaker actually believes.

That is what EBBB is. Only things that are real are real, and those that aren't must be denied. Covered in black paint pen, or piled up and set on fire.

Fascists. I'd hate to meet one at a party.

I wondered how they could tolerate the internet at all. They must be online in some capacity. The defacement of eQualia fit their modus operandi. They’d signed their work, for goodness sake. So where online were they? What corner? What watering hole?

I took a break from reading. It was quite late. I had managed to get a little over halfway through my haul.

But a little spark of delinquency had kept me company at that late hour. One more page before bed, it seemed to whisper. I flipped to the next. This one had come from the start of roll number four. A newer magazine from the late 90s. You could tell immediately, by all the cool visual features, that it had been typeset by computer. It had pictures that the text elegantly wrapped around. It had proportional text and pull quotes. It was a sight for sore eyes—all the previous magazines had been made with scissors and glue and typewriters. Each page manually cut-and-pasted together by messy human hands.

One such pull quote grabbed the attention of the translator app. It refused to translate anything else on the page—the font was too big, I guessed. I glanced at it.

"Fiction is too convincing, it makes you make poor decisions."

A familiar sentiment. I'd heard it before in the earlier articles, multiple times with different phrasing.

But… Something about it itched me, now that it had been framed front-and-center. Familiar. Too familiar.

I could see, in my memory, the Second Life user interface. The shape of the words came into focus.

Oh. It was that moment. Disappointing.

I opened my Firestorm chat logs to confirm. CTRL+F.

—

I said it before, I'll say it again. And again, and again, and again. Not my first case. People will lie. People must lie. Truth is pain, and we must live in our own little fantasies to survive.

But that won't stop me from taking such lies to task, when it's needed. I sent 7crows a message.

"Tell me about the Einsatzgruppe. EBBB."

And I didn't get a response. Not that evening, not the next. I tried pulling at the other little loose threads that had accumulated in notes.txt. I learned nearly nothing—with the sole exception of kewpie's phone number. By way of a friend of a friend (who I now owe a favour) I had learned that the number had gone out of service just a little bit after the sovereignty party. Plus or minus a day.

Contacted some other former eQualia members, all “visitors.” I knew more about the situation than any of them, by that point. The best they could offer me was their curiosity and worry.

Leads were drying up. The case was going ice cold, fast. Barring deus ex machina, 7crows was my final hope.

I finished translating the German magazines, if only because it was a task I could complete. It was all the same nonsense, over and over again. The same vapid, spiritless materialism. Common sense and banal evils. Cringing at roleplayers, at D\&D. Hatred for fun.

I cleansed my palate by logging back into SL. I wandered semi-abandoned sims alone. Embodied myself exploring the ruins of old fantasies. Feeling the love and care that had gone into the design and placement of each mesh.

Maybe I was looking for another mystery. One I could solve. But cases have a tendency to haunt. To be possessive.

—

Had the teleplay dream again that night. Mom with the report card, my eyes on the curtains in the other house. But this time it wasn't my neighbour lurking behind. Not him choking on his own vomit after a bender. Not 15-year-old me skulking in, unannounced, after finding a shotgunned beer can outside and hearing the sound. Not me finding him among the detritus. Not me thanklessly saving his life. Those memories, usually hidden in the other house, were eerily absent.

No, this time it was Princess Dahlia and her Citizens. I couldn't see them, I couldn't hear them, and I didn't have a clue what might be happening to them. But they were there, behind the curtains. And that unknowledge, the known unknown, was more terrifying than anything.

Mom went over my grades. A- in masking. C- in compulsive behaviour. C+ in dissociative symptoms. D- in solving your cases.

She looked at me. I didn't. Gaze was still locked to the curtains.

"You can call 911 for them, I won't stop you."

But there is no 911 for this. No missing persons bureau for the internet. There are just weird, compulsive, nosy people. And when they fail…

—

That morning I woke to a message from 7crows.

"I'll be at my aptmt." In Second Life. The upside-down sim.

From a far distance I had noticed the change. It had returned to its original player model. The flock of crows. But it was only after I got close did I understand the symbolism.

"Back to the old model." I observed.

"sorta. updated it, slightly."

I counted. Six crows, not seven. One had died.

It was only a few days ago, on this very perch, that 7crows had said "fantasy is too compelling. It makes me make bad decisions." An EBBB talking point, almost verbatim from those student newspapers. It had known, this whole time, what the Einsatzgruppe was. It had lied. I wanted to know why.

"the only reason you know ebbb exists at all," it typed, "is because I called them to eQualia in the first place."

Disappointing. Just disappointing. 7crows wasn’t a witness, but a perpetrator. I felt a dismal emptiness in me. That I could really be this bad at judging character.

I instructed my avatar to place her head in her hands. I have no authority. I'm not a cop—nor would I ever want to be. There's not much I can do to hold perpetrators accountable. I mean, what's the point of any of this at all? My own closure?

I considered quitting just there. But I've always been compulsive. And nosiness pays.

"Please," I typed, "tell me what happened."

—

Princess Dahlia Tiffany Butenblatter had been feeling something happening within the walls of eQualia. A deepening. A sharpening. She’d developed a sixth sense for so-called “correctness.” She’d started spending more time in the MUSH than usual, the last six months. Visiting every corner of her realm, making microadjustments to the descriptions of scenery. Suggesting changes her citizens could make to their own biographies to get closer to the truth. The real truth.

The truth that eQualia was an actual place. A reality outside our own, accessible through the MUSH—but not the MUSH. She felt that somewhere in the noosphere, the multiverse of all possible fictions, was the real thing. Princess Dahlia had become convinced that, with her stewardship and the consent of her governed, that they could get even closer to it.

“maybe even actully reach it… >.>” She’d say, when only citizens were listening.

The citizens could feel it too. That it was time to go through their world and clean house. Flush out the inconsistencies, plot holes, and anachronisms that had accrued over the years. If there was a real eQualia out there, then it couldn’t possibly admit such frivolities. They organized themselves into working groups. Into teams assigned to specific parts of the world. Specific parts of its semantic space. One for all the NPCs, one for all the in-universe books, one for all the paintings and tapestries…

Chief among the organizers, and in nearly every team to boot, was 7crows. It had that 6th sense, too. Saw exactly what needed to be fixed, changed, and rewritten. It worked late, worked early, worked nearly every hour. Couldn’t prioritize anything in its life outside this project. The deepening. The sharpening.

Like Dahlia, 7crows had a different name inside eQualia. Indeed, it had a different identity entirely. Instead of the flock, it was merely one. Human-shaped, anthropomorphic. The Seventh Crow, It-who-paints-the-sky, Her Attendant to the Crown. The other six apparating as they desired, normal-sized corvids flying in from off-screen to give advice and crack jokes.

The collective labour of love brought Princess Dahlia and The Seventh Crow even closer than they already were. They’d meet alone in the throne room to discuss strategy. Talk about the war effort. Talk about each other.

It was there, one evening, that the two had arrived at the idea of the “sovereignty party.” They could both sense that the project was reaching its zenith. The plan was working. All the little pieces were in place, and all that was needed was to flick a switch somewhere, somehow. The map was ready to become the territory.

They would get everyone together, assert the shared hallucination, and declare sovereignty. Hence the name.

But something else had happened that night, something that gave 7crows cold feet. Not The Seventh Crow—all of this was its idea, after all—but the rest of the flock. A self-conflict.

Near to the end of their long evening talk, with The Seventh Crow sitting just below the armrest of her throne, Princess Dahlia had reached out to pet its head. And 7crows felt it. Every finger, every stroke against the scalp. The sensation of its feathers parting. It had been nothing more than a text-based action. A simple “pets your head! ^w^” But the result, the experience… Unexplainable.

That had been the last straw for the flock. 7crows had been spending so long in the MUSH that The Seventh Crow had completely monopolized its existence. And now it had fallen into fantasy so completely that it was experiencing phantom sensations. They wouldn’t stand for it. The other six had their own lives they wanted to lead. They wanted fresh air. To attend classes and student unions. Read anything other than eQualia-brand fantasy. To fly together again.

There was a mutiny. Or, as 7crows phrased it, “clonking that part of myself on the head.” It shoved The Seventh Crow’s unconscious identity into a storage locker. The remaining six would hide it. Pretend that nothing had happened. Still 7crows to everyone else. But inside, the values had shifted. Its mandate now was to hatch an escape plan before The Seventh Crow could wake.

But even with just the six, 7crows was still a threshold person. Like me. It needed some amount of fantasy to survive. And how could one possibly wean themselves off oxygen? With help from people who are alien to you. From people who aren’t online.

The story had given me a pang of unease. “Are you sure you really felt her touch, in the throne room that evening? Really sure?”

The six crows next to me on the balcony’s ceiling played an animation. Huddling together, chittering. Anxious.

“yeah. yeah. it really happened. I mean, it's not the first time I've felt a weird connection to my avatar. felt like I was really there."

And I realized where that unease was coming from. I was reminded of waking up to wood's message, right on time. I was hit with that feeling again. The flowers of unreality blooming, towering over me. The dizzying, empty horror that nothing you’ve ever known is any realer than a couple thousand words of fantasy. In that moment I believe I knew exactly what 7crows had felt when Dahlia had reached forward to touch its head. Fear. Falling.

I pushed the feeling away. I pushed the thoughts away. Not today. I focused instead of 7crows’s story, best I could. It continued, unawares of my emotional state—I had offered no tells.

The next day, Princess Dahlia announced the sovereignty party to her citizens. A private announcement, inaudible from outside her throne room. She wouldn't have dared share such a proclamation to the wider internet. They would have burned her alive. The internet hates the chuuni.

But I do not. Nevertheless, hearing about their plan did feel like I was staring off into the horizon again, in the other direction. At a smudge.

It was all just a little too incredulous. All a little too convenient. The framing, the ideas, it was how those EBBB sickos talk, just without the endless couching in metaphor. In the language of EBBB, The Seventh Crow and Princess Dahlia were planning on creating a bridge. A bridge into fantasy—metaphorically speaking.

I could already see where this was going. I had read about EBBB’s “eschatology of bridges” in the microfilm reels. 7crows had coped with its fall into fantasy by falling too hard in the other direction.

7crows had found EBBB not because they were some global conspiracy, but simply because they were local. The Hesse flavour of anti-fantasy materialists. Edgy TU9 students writing self-published articles. Tracts with big warning signs printed on the inside cover, warning that it would be cringe to scan. Can't put something online if you can't scan it. There's a dark matter cloud of culture that will never go online, often simply because it would be a faux pas to do so.

According to 7crows, were I to look in my own backyard, I would find my own local version of EBBB. Reluctantly, I put that fact in my back pocket. I’d hoped I wouldn’t ever have cause for the services of a death squad, but it often pays to have connections in the underworld. This wouldn’t be my last case, after all.

The six crows had come to believe, by being immersed in the Einsatzgruppe’s nonsense, that it could use the “bridge” to its advantage.

Several days before the sovereignty party, 7crows convinced the Princess to grant it moderator status. Not unreasonably. There were many parts of the MUSH which could only be altered by a mod. Things which would need alteration, according to their sixth sense. Dahlia granted the status gladly.

Newly crowned, 7crows would need a tutorial in the responsibilities and abilities of eQualia’s royalty. Dahlia took it to the secret back area of the MUSH. A featureless, white room that Dahlia would use to test features, experiment with ideas. A place for only herself—and now, 7crows.

They spent several hours in that room, conjuring things in and out of existence. Learning how to create an account. To wield the banhammer. Rewire the permission system. Edit the rules of reality. Moderators could do anything.

This would be their last moment alone together, before the party.

Even though The Seventh Crow was indisposed, the six still had a relationship with Dahlia. Had known her for years—it couldn’t have masked as The Seventh Crow otherwise. They joked with each other, revived ancient references. Laughed. It was nice. But 7crows felt hollow.

It was guilt, I could tell, suppressed and ignored. Because all of this had been a deception. 7crows wouldn’t be using its mod status to strengthen their bridge. No, this was all part of the escape plan.

The day of the sovereignty party. The citizens of eQualia gathered in the throne room among beautifully described sceneries. They’d brought food and drink from all corners of the nation. A feast in celebration of their hard-won fight to create a perfectly self-consistent shared reality.

In the center of the room, mounted on a pedestal, was a lever. A “frankenstein-style scissor switch” as 7crows described. Dahlia gave a speech. Professed her love for all her citizens. Explained that by throwing the switch, they will finally achieve the impossible. Their reality would be real. The citizens clapped. Dahlia took the handle in two hands, and pulled.

And it worked. Completely, unutterably. Everything they had spoken about, everything they had dreamed of, validated. eQualia was now a sovereign kingdom. Independent. They'd punched a hole right through reality. At that moment, on the other side of the bridge, fiction had inverted. Their lives before were now roleplay. Earth just a complicated worldbuild.

The map had become the territory. Finally lead to the territory. The bridge into fantasy had been constructed. They would just need to open the doors to the throne, and then visitors could come in, too.

And it was there, moments after the reality-virtuality continuum had flipped, that The Seventh Crow awoke. Became aware of its own plan. It ran to the Queen, took her hands. Warned her of what was coming. But it was too late. The six crows had flown back across the bridge. The second stage was already in motion.

7crows had created a number of accounts, all with mod status, and had given them to its EBBB associates. On cue they logged in. They were there to destroy the bridge—metaphorically speaking. To tear its foundations from the ground—metaphorically speaking. 7crows, now just six in the real world, revoked the permissions of everyone but the death squad. Freezing its friends in place, paralyzed, while the world burned.

This was the eschatology of bridges. So long as the map existed, the territory would be accessible. And people would fall inside. Some could be brought back. Dragged back to Earth with a little bit of trolling. But some would become lost inside, never to return. The Einsatzgruppe closed the threshold with brute vandalism. Such was their mission. Only the real is real.

And who could say what became of those trapped on the other side. From all 7crows could tell, they were still there. The Queen, the citizens, and The Seventh Crow. Not dead, just gone. Likely in the throne room right now, with Dahlia, getting its feathers pet.

I could sense derision—no, jealousy? Disgust? 7crows was more tangled up than I had ever realized. With great collateral damage it had managed to rid itself of a part it hated. Or, I suspected, a part it had merely convinced itself to hate.

And this story… I just couldn’t believe it. Indeed, I was aghast at being expected to believe it. This wasn’t an answer. This was, itself, a fantasy—a comforting false belief that no harm had truly been done, because eQualia still existed. 7crows had crafted a self-serving distortion of what had really happened. And it expected me to take it verbatim.

No. That’s not how I work. I’m a nosy, compulsive person. And I am more than happy to use that as a vise. To squeeze out the truth.

I pressed. I prodded. I was indignant. I was angry. I pointed out inconsistencies in the narrative. People don’t blink out of existence in the real world. If I could doxx one of the citizens, go to their house, then I’d be sure to find a real living person. I’d tried doxxing, actually. Tried to get addresses and real names. I’d been unsuccessful so far but there were more I could try. More avenues.

Avenues that I would exhaust, unsuccessfully, over the coming days. But at that moment I still had hope that this case could be solved. That there was a rational explanation. If I could just get the truth.

But this was 7crows’s truth. It had nothing more that it could give. The six of it leaped off the balcony ledge and flew. The birds began a new animation. Murmuration. They painted random shapes onto the sky with their bodies, with their relative positions. I watched them shrink into the distance, flying under an office park. The crowd of six crows, together, alone.

—

No more dreams. Just quiet days. Malaise.

I don’t like to call myself a detective. The purpose of a detective is to find the bad guy. Collect evidence for the prosecution. But there’s no prosecutor on the internet. You could take punitive justice into your own hands with callout posts and takedowns, but that’s never been my style.

I’m a sleuth. A person who gets fixated on mysteries. A person who follows trails. Who cannot stop until everything has been brought into focus. The name of the game is building an understanding. Knowing all the sequences and their players. See everything from start to finish, as clearly as possible.

Process, process. Extrapolate from incomplete information. Infer what’s missing. I had collected all the information I could. Now it was time for me to construct my own timeline. Give it a sober second thought. Make it make sense.

eQualia’s residents had, indeed, embarked on a long project to improve their world. There were mentions of these improvements, here and there, across now-deleted Twitter and Tumblr posts. This part, I could be certain, was a fact.

Whereas 7crows had said the goal was to make eQualia real, I saw the objective as a simple consequence of geek psychology. No matter how egoless you make yourself, no matter how much you unlearn elitism and pedantry, a geek will always want to be right. But this isn’t always a bad thing. In eQualia’s case, they were using it constructively. To worldbuild with scientific exactness. For fun.

I couldn't say for sure why this project had such a negative impact on 7crows’s mental health. I could maybe take a crack at an armchair diagnosis, but why bother? There is more in heaven and Earth than exists in the DSM-5. Besides, all that mattered for the case was that those improvements were triggering. Gave 7crows that dizzying, falling feeling that comes when one loses their grasp on the hand-holds of normalcy. And when a person falls I don’t think they should be blamed for groping around wildly, reaching for anything to slow their descent.

7crows had fallen into a pipeline. Been radicalized by offline sickos. Found them to be of use. Pointed them at the thing that had been causing it pain, and pulled the trigger.

And that alone was enough to explain what had happened to the others. What had become of the Queen and her citizens.

It’s the answer to a simple question. How would you feel if someone you trusted so deeply suddenly turned-heel and destroyed everything you had worked for?

I’ll tell you. Fear.

It is the only way to force a person off the internet. Fear of the other, working against you from the shadows. Fear from the threat of violence, be it physical, emotional, or virtual. Fear of your friends, who could turn at any moment.

But there is a nuance here. The internet can't make you blink out of existence. Even the most cyberbullied person in the world has an online banking account. What actually happens when someone is “forced offline” is a matter of identity. It is the identity that is killed. No longer able to sustain the myth of its existence through profile pages and activity, it dissolves into whisps.

But when identities die, they don’t kill the wearer. They’re shucked. Cast off like unfashionable clothes. I strongly suspected that the eQualia gang had merely extracted themselves from the avatars they had grown accustomed to. Their raw spirits transmigrated, I imagined, to greener pastures. To a new corner of the internet, where they could craft new selves. Somewhere far away, a place neither myself or 7crows would be privy, to tend their gardens in peace.

Case closed, I’d told myself—without, in my heart, believing it.

What I’d laid out was the most likely situation. The result of hacking away at 7crow’s story with Occam’s razor. But it wasn’t proven. Without word from the missing I could never be sure what of this was real and what was just my own self-serving fantasy.

There were too many unknowns. Something worse could’ve happened to them. Or something better. Maybe everything 7crows had said was another, more conniving lie. I’d never know.

Or maybe 7crows had been telling the truth, and this world was more impossible than I’d ever imagined.

I’d had notes.txt open on my desktop for the duration of the investigation. I pondered its title bar. Stared at the [X] button for a while.

I tapped it with my mouse.

Not closure. But I don’t expect that anymore. Not every case has a good resolution. Not every case can be solved. That’s just part of the job.

—

Days later. Better rested, better fed.

I was drafting a responsible disclosure for the Minecraft license exploit I'd found, hoping that the corpos wouldn't notice I’d actually used it maliciously. I could really use the money. Overnight shipping for interlibrary microfilm was very, very expensive.

I was in the middle of describing the sequence of taps that would confuse the Google Play Store’s refund system when it struck me.

EBBB had razed everything they could find. But, had they found…

I opened my IM window with 7crows. It must still have moderator status. I’d need it to check—

I stopped myself.

No, no. I couldn’t risk 7crows seeing what I suspected lurked in the wreckage, for its sake. For Dahlia’s sake. I would have to do this myself.

It would probably take a while. I would need to spelunk through the code their MUSH software was originally forked from. Challenge my skills in an unfamiliar environment, with unfamiliar systems. A CTF, just for me.

I connected, for the second time, to eQualia.

I can't say I ever knew Princess Dahlia. Worse, I never even knew her as Dahlia. Only as the rather unserious kewpie_faygo. Modest dragon girl. Sensitive about her wings.

But from what I heard she was graceful. Forgiving. From what I remember from our short time together, she always tried to see the good in others.

So I admit that I’m working off extremely limited information. That this is nothing more than a wild hunch. But whenever I put myself in Princess Dahlia’s shoes and tried to imagine the razing—of being paralyzed among my followers, watching my closest friend burn it all down—I can’t help but remember the test room. The featureless room where she’d showed 7crows the ropes. Their last private moment.

If I were her, and if I’d wanted to leave a message for 7crows—the old friend with whom I enjoyed ancient inside jokes—I would have left it there.

It would be the only place in eQualia that the EBBB crew wouldn’t have been able to find. It was unlisted, disconnected from anything. Known only to royalty. An unintentionally preserved scrap of the territory’s map. A little piece of the bridge.

I had to get inside.

The servers hosting the remains of eQualia were probably running off account credit. In a few months it would be gone completely. Maybe in just a few weeks. Maybe even tomorrow. If I was going to do this, I had to do it now.

MUSHes aren't like normal games. The exploits are different, weirder. It's not like I could clip out of bounds using a physics glitch and send myself rocketing toward this distant, hidden room. It's all graph theory with MUSHes and MUDs. Either something is connected to another thing, or it isn't. And good luck when it isn't.

Good luck is what I needed. The only way I could possibly get in was either by modifying my player character's location, or somehow connecting the room to someplace already accessible.

Both options, on their surface, seemed impossible. I wasn’t a mod. I wasn’t even a citizen. I was but a lowly visitor. I'd have to hack. Thankfully there was nobody around to get upset with me. I could be as unsubtle as I wanted.

So I worked at the problem. As I worked at any problem.

I often encounter people who balk at my situation. Who are aghast at being expected to believe that someone like me can exist. A security researcher turned private investigator. Funded by HackerOne bounties, solving online mysteries no one asked for. People like me don’t exist. This is just an archetype. A fiction. This real world of suburbs and dayjobs and nuclear families couldn’t possibly admit someone like me.

And to be honest, sometimes I don’t even feel real. Sleeping at weird hours. My life a complete wreck. A background character in other people’s stories, when I get the chance. But my skills, at least, are real. I have enough proof of that. I'm very good with computers, and passable with people. But the fact is, computers can be just as fickle as people. Often it doesn’t matter how good you are at either. I really didn't like my odds of getting in, but I was still going to try.

—

Hour one. Setup a copy of the upstream MUSH software on my local system for testing. Went exploring in eQualia, looking for anything weird that might’ve survived that I could use. Tried renaming myself to some classic unicode edge cases. Sadly the software handled them perfectly.

Hour two. Wasted time trying to find relevant CVEs in auxiliary libraries. Lots of great bugs if I wanted to crash the server—an extremely bad idea. If it goes down, it might never come up again. I would have to be very careful. Triple-check my work. Crafting an RCE would be too risky. I resolved to figure this out using nothing but the gameplay features. Nothing but the tools of the MUSH itself.

Hour three. I constructed some weird "quality applicator machine." I'd found 257 nestable objects and put each inside the other, like a matryoshka doll. Every time I decompiled the stack the innermost object came out weird. Unpredictably gaining a quality like "wetness" or "tackyness."

Hour four. Thought idly about what I even want out of doing this. What was I motivated by, here? A sense of duty? A hunger for closure? I’m not even sure what closure looks like. Found a repeatable method to make something “inky.” Progress, I suppose.

Hour five. It seems that the behaviour of my machine changes depending on which room it’s in. Some locations add semi-random characters to specific property fields. I checked the C structure that defined them. Maybe there was a pattern.

Hour six. More experimentation. More rumination. What I consider my first case, the episode with my neighbour at fifteen, hadn't ended with closure. My dad had told me I shouldn't have gotten involved. Not a single person had told me that I'd done the right thing. I could pick up on the unsaid. What everyone had wanted to happen, that didn’t. Because of me.

Hour seven. I put one of the cluttering NPCs inside my machine. Tried to bring it back out, but found I couldn’t. When I disassembled the machine, it was gone. Troubling, but promising. I wandered off to collect more test subjects.

Hour eight. Maybe closure is just knowing you did the best you could. That you'd helped the general effort in some small way. Maybe all I wanted was for someone to agree that my empathy was worth it. That caring mattered.

Hour nine. Or maybe this was all just compulsive fixation. A puzzle I hadn’t solved yet. Something I can’t disengage from until I crack the code. The reason I’m good at computers is because I can’t stop myself from tinkering. Maybe the only reason I’m passable with people is because I keep sticking my nose in their business.

Hour ten. Everything was in place. I had put myself inside my machine using the soap trick I’d found. Once inside the innermost cabinet, and a little outside the bounds of the array that defined me, I reorganized my inventory to construct a string of my choosing in a usable place. The structure exploit I’d found should take it and overwrite my current location. Hopefully.

This was my best shot. If I failed, I failed. Not all cases work out. Not all cases can be solved. But it matters to try. There is a reason my first case wasn’t my last. I had succeeded. My neighbour hadn’t died. Maybe that hadn’t mattered to him. Maybe it hadn’t mattered to my family or the community. But it had mattered to somebody. It had mattered to me.

I typed "go out fast" and triggered the chain of workarounds and exploits. After about 30 lines of incoherent gobbledygook, there it was. I was in.

FEATURELESS ROOM

empty test place

there is a letter here

>

I looked down at the letter. It was folded into thirds, sitting limply in the corner of the room. I squatted above it, took it in my hands. The paper was yellowed. Medieval. Thick, but soft. Like the paper they print diplomas on. Smelled like the university library. I tilted open the upper third and peeked at the message.

Red ink, in swooping cursive: "To my dear birds,"

The letter was what I had expected to find. Dated three days after the sovereignty party. An apology.

I opened it up. Sat on the carpeted floor, leaned against the slightly stained wall, and read. My ears twitched in frustration as I witnessed the situation unfolding between the lines. An entirely predictable mess.

At the very bottom of the letter, after a drawing of a dahlia flower—her signature, I supposed—was an invitation to the end of the bridge. A glade where flowers of every shape and colour grew tall.

I conjured scissors from my full-to-bursting inventory and cut off the last part of the letter. The strip of paper containing the invite fluttered to the floor, where I intended to leave it. What remained of the letter could be shared safely with 7crows.

I folded the letter back into thirds. Stuffed it in my sweatshirt’s front pouch. I’d just have to…

Oh. Oh no. No, no, no, no. I’d messed up. I’d really messed up. I looked around the room. Four blank white walls stared back at me. No doors or windows. No exit at all.

I hadn’t planned on a way out.

I banged on the walls. Peered through any gap I could find. Tried to jam my fingers under the gap in the baseboards. Checked my inventory for literally anything that could help. I didn’t have the right items to reconstruct my machine to take me home. I was stuck here.

I looked down at the little strip that I’d cut from the letter. I would have to use the invite myself, to get out of here. I would have to—

Blink. Once. Twice.

FEATURELESS ROOM

empty test place

there is a letter here

>

I typed “look”

“empty test place” it said.

I typed "examine letter"

"letter for 7crows" it said.

I typed "read letter"

In monospace font, white on black, the letter began: "To my dear birds,"

The letter was what I had expected to find. Dated three days after the sovereignty party. An apology.

Dahlia, the Dahlia in my mind, was a being of seemingly infinite grace. A creature who wanted nothing more than to love everyone the best she could. I’d met her type before, many times. A person who, in response to the pains of reality, responds by loving harder. By opening her arms wider. By internalizing every bad thing that ever happens as her own fault. Her fault for not loving hard enough.

The Dahlia in my mind, the one who I’d predicted would place a letter here for 7crows, would only have done so for this reason. To apologize for wrongs that don't need apologizing for. To apologize for not paying enough attention to her beloved flock’s mental state. For not doing more to help.

My hypothesis had brought me here. This letter was proof. Dahlia was as I conceived her to be. A woman of endless forgiveness. A volunteer receptacle for all of the world’s sins. Even after the destruction of her kingdom, even after being so scared that she’d gotten a new phone number. Even after all that, she still found it in herself to forgive. To widen her embrace. To want her crows back.

At the end of the letter was an invite to the end of a new bridge. A new glade where I was sure flowers of every shape and colour grew tall. Towering.

I copied the contents of the letter to a text document. Destroyed the original with a lighter that was rolling around in my inventory.

To send the whole letter wouldn’t have been good for 7crows—to expose it to yet another world of unreality. To withhold the letter entirely wouldn’t have been right by Dahlia. I only had one thing I could do.

I cut the invite out, put it in notes.txt for safekeeping. It felt like removing the detonator from a bomb.

I opened my IMs with 7crows. Attached the letter. Shouldn’t send it directly as a message. Best be an attachment. An attachment would better maintain the true fiction that it was a letter, and better hide the deception that I’d altered it.

“Found this letter for you in that featureless room,” I wrote above the attachment, “from Dahlia.”

I didn’t feel great about what I was doing, but I had to do it. Maybe this was selflessness. A duty to 7crows and its Princess. Or maybe this was the opposite—just a sequence of actions which would allow me to finally disengage from this stupid case. For my own closure.

Maybe closure was doing something nobody else could’ve done. Stopping something that nobody else cared to stop. I didn’t know. All I knew was that this mattered to at least one person. It mattered to me.

I hit enter.

Sending… Sending… Sending…

Sent.