Mark put on some better clothes before he went to meet the delegation from United Sapients. Slacks, a proper jacket, a nice shirt. By the time he came back out of his room everyone else was also better dressed. Eliot had on something similar to Mark while Sally wore her nicest winter cloak over a blouse and slacks, and Isoko was wearing a sharp business-dress and jacket.

  Isoko was wearing the least of any of them.

  Sally looked at Isoko, and asked, “You’re going to be cold?”

  Isoko smirked and turned platinum. “I don’t think so.”

  They walked out the door, into the frozen night, Isoko holding her head high and reflecting all the illuminated sky and castles and snow on her platinum surface. Mark caught himself looking at her a bit, and she smirked back at him and winked.

  Mark laughed as he crunched across the snow, leading the way to Castle South, just down the sidewalk.

  Eliot’s attention was not on any of his surroundings, in a normal sort of way. Instead, he looked at the ground, at the snow, and openly asked, “Heated sidewalks?”

  Mark scrunched his face. “Aren’t there energy concerns?”

  “Not really, no.”

  Isoko stood atop the snow, flashing the ground platinum as she stepped, and asked, “There are better solutions than energy draining solutions, right? I’m absolutely sure there’s a permanent magical solution, but I have no idea what that solution even looks like.”

  Sally winced a little and though Mark and Isoko noticed Sally’s reaction to the mention of permanent magic, Eliot did not notice Sally at all.

  “That solution involves trapped souls,” Eliot said, “And we’re not doing that.”

  Sally flinched.

  Isoko paused, then said, “Oh.”

  “I think I remember that now,” Mark said, remembering something Lola had said months ago about magic and stuff. Soul crystals and trading in souls. She had also said something about dragon souls being used to empower certain places on Daihoon, or something like that. Mark had never really looked into it. He asked, “How does that work, anyway? It’s not human souls, is it?”

  Sally looked at Mark. “The fuck?”

  Mark said, “Well it certainly can’t be monster souls. I never see anyone here trading in soul crystals for monsters, and that’s all we kill all the time. I don’t even know what a soul crystal looks like.”

  “What does a soul crystal even look like?” Isoko asked. “I tried to find a picture but I couldn’t.”

  Sally sighed a little, feeling miffed that Mark and Isoko were somehow being flippant about the trading of human souls. She said, “Of course you never see a picture of a soul crystal. They’re highly illegal. The AIs on the internet hide that.”

  “Well we’re not doing any of those solutions either,” Eliot said, still looking at the ground as they walked, slowly. “And of course you never see monster souls in a crystal.”

  Sally frowned.

  “Why not?” Mark asked.

  Sally said, “This is an uncomfortable topic.”

  Isoko brushed past that, saying, “You’d need, like… thinking souls? For magic making?”

  Sally went, “Gah.”

  “Thinking souls make magic, yes,” Eliot said, “All other souls can’t do anything. All of the big installations in the big cities of Daihoon have those sorts of things, and they all use dragon souls. We’re not doing that, though, of course. The energy concerns with keeping the sidewalks clear aren’t really a concern at all, but keeping the walkways clear is a concern, because you can’t have people slipping around… And I just talked myself into altering the sidewalk. Hold on. I need to backtrack.”

  Mark, Isoko, and Sally watched as Eliot jogged the hundred meters back to the edge of Castle One, their apartment castle. And then he came back this way, walking slowly, his vector flowing into the ground. Mark was already connected to him and Sally and Isoko, helping all of them stay warm in the dark of early winter night, so he changed some of his Union to help support Eliot’s use of his Man-made Manipulation. Soon, Eliot was standing next to them again, but the ground was still frozen the way he had come.

  Eliot was focused on the ground as he walked ahead of the group, as he said, “I’ve been meaning to do this, but I got caught up on the gatehouse. It’s really not that expensive, electrically… But I do need more supplies…” He mumbled, “Only be able to do this stretch…” He hummed.

  Mark, Sally, and Isoko followed Eliot across the frozen ground.

  Sally kicked a little at the ice, at the stone ground, asking anyone who wanted to answer, “It’ll melt later?”

  Isoko asked Eliot, “A just-above-zero electrical heating system?”

  “A few degrees above,” Eliot said, “And some spillways for the water.”

  It wasn’t their fastest time walking to Castle South, but the castle was right there and fully lit up, so it wasn’t that bad of a walk at all. No need to wait for the tram. It was a bit chilly, though, even with Mark and Isoko both doing Unions of warmth and cold. There wasn’t a lot of warmth in the frozen world all around them, after all. High in the sky, the Winter Auroras were still 5 bands of blue light, like snakes the sizes of continents curling and stretching this way and that. Mark only counted 4 bands, but the 5th band was way off to the west.

  … Probably.

  Mark slipped his phone out of his pocket in a simple wire cage of adamantium, and Quark flickered to life. Mark pointed him at the sky and asked, “Quark? Is the weather still holding at 5-band?”

  Isoko and Sally glanced at Quark as Quark started to work, his cameras flickering on to process the image in the sky.

  Isoko asked, “Is it gonna be weird to have him as a real boy?”

  “He’s going to be a non-person familiar,” Mark said. “But… Eventually he’ll be real… And yeah. I have no illusions about that. The limits will break eventually. I’m not even sure what the limits are. 5 years? 10? When I choose to break them? When Quark outgrows himself, or some—”

  Quark flickered silver and said, “The weather in this location has a 40% chance of trending toward 4-band in the next 3 days. If the weather holds at its current pattern then it will remain 5-band.”

  “Thanks, Quark.”

  Quark flickered down to a blank screen again and Mark put him back into his pocket.

  Isoko asked, “So do, uh, we have to interact with Quark like a member of the team?”

  Sally scoffed, obviously unwilling to do that.

  Eliot was in his own little world, but he came back to smile, saying, “It’ll be great! He can make a chatroom for us, so we don’t have to use COFR’s chat room, and maybe Sally will actually use that one.”

  Sally rolled her eyes, saying, “I don’t like that City AI of yours knowing everything I type in that chat.”

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  “Oh please,” Eliot said. “COFR is a city AI like any other and they all read everything and they don’t talk about it to anyone else. It’s part of who they are.”

  Sally went, “Ah ha! But Mark is on some sort of auto-approved list that any of them can access, which means shared information for all, and COFR planted Quark with Mark for this day right here. So the AIs conspire all the time, and we simply don’t see most of it. They’re allies of humanity, but they are just as far reaching as demons. They censor stuff on the internet all the time, too.”

  Mark said, “That’s probably not… fully true.”

  “No, that’s fully true,” Eliot said. “But so what? Their society is literally information-based. To deny them information is to deny them life.”

  Sally nodded. “Like demons.”

  “Superficially, yes,” Eliot said, without reservation.

  Sally kinda flummoxed at that open admission, which Mark didn’t really understand.

  “We’re information-based, too, Sally,” Mark said.

  “What! How?”

  “We grow and change based on the information around us?” Mark asked, because he didn’t understand how this concept needed to be explained.

  “That’s different,” Sally said.

  Mark snorted.

  Their walk had taken them close to Castle South.

  The lights of the building poured out through big open doors, though the cold did not intrude upon the space within, and the warmth within did not flow out into the night. People were out and about in the open courtyard spaces of Castle South, and there was some sort of enchantment holding the heat in and the cold out. Mark wasn’t sure if souls were involved in this magic right here, or not.

  Probably not, considering what Eliot had already told them about how souls were needed for city-sized magics… and yet enchantments existed everywhere and those weren’t soul based, right?

  Unless…. People cut off bits of their soul to make magic?

  … Maybe?

  Did the soul grow back?

  It probably did, because if it didn’t then older mages would be weak—

  Isoko asked Eliot, “Are there souls in that doorway magic, too?”

  “Probably not,” Sally said, though she was unsure.

  “Oh no. Not at all,” Eliot said. “That’s a basic energy shield. Most solutions to life’s problems here at the settlement are technological. Magic using souls is like… Like those death crystals that float over the cities of Aluatha; of Crytalis.”

  “But people cast enchantments all the time, everywhere,” Mark said.

  Eliot shook his head. “Not here. This is tech.”

  Castle South was busy as ever, and especially since the delegation from Memphi had arrived. The whole place, from the Artificer’s Guild to the offices of the nobility, to the individual offices for the armed forces and the big open hallway to the command center, were open and active, with the day shift turning things over to the night shift, and a lot of people getting caught in between. Castle South had a movie theater and several eateries, too, though there were developments to the south of the castles, near the club, The Spot, where people were building restaurants and otherwise. So some of the businesses that had started here were moving elsewhere, and eventually Castle South would be all about governing. It would need all of this space, and more, eventually.

  As of right now, about 40% of people here at the settlement were some flavor of warrior, like Mark, but 60% of people worked at the settlement and they never left unless they had to, like Eliot. A lot of that 60% came through here every day, if not multiple times per day. That was 6,000 people, on average.

  So there were a lot of people here tonight.

  The delegation from Memphi still stood out.

  Aurora, with her white hair that shimmered rainbows, stood amongst a group of men and women who were all focused on her, but also on the world around them. Kandon, Aurora’s much more physically impressive brother and the one most people interacted with, stood to the side, speaking to a few visitors of his own, all of them looking like warriors discussing strategy.

  Mark could tell a lot about them from their vectors.

  The people with Aurora were looking at the multileveled interior of the castle, the whole place looking kind of like a mall on Earth, with businesses and people and made of layers, but built with bunker-strength in mind. The walls were thick, but also carved with small details like furrows in the vertical pillar-like stones, to give the place some designs and character, while all of the lights were bright and comfortable. Overhead lights shone down like sunlight, and there were even some colored lights up there, too, to mimic the auroras common to the Daihoon sky. The businesses all had real signs made of illuminated glass or holograms, and they all looked highly professional. Like something you’d find on any normal street, in any established city.

  Mark was sure he heard someone in that group ask ‘But isn’t this temporary? It doesn’t look temporary,’ and then someone said something about recycling materials and ‘Eliot is very accomplished with working with trash.’

  … Mark focused on that last comment. It had come from a man who wore the livery of Crytalis and the Aluatha Empire, and it seemed to be a pointed comment toward Aurora, and not actually about Eliot.

  Aurora gave no indication that the comment had bothered her at all, which was somewhat concerning. Had she been subjected to words like that all the time? Maybe she had. House Valen was tolerated by the Empire because they had power, but they weren’t exactly popular.

  It kinda made Mark wonder why Aurora was given the responsibility of the settlement at all, but… Whatever. Aurora didn’t let it bother her, so Mark just filed away the information and didn’t let it bother him, either.

  The warriors with Kandon were looking at the walls and emergency lights, which were currently off, and wondering about the bunkers set up downstairs. They seemed to respect Kandon, but…

  There was an undercurrent of dislike from most of the delegation, which was weird.

  Some of the people from the delegation were openly using their Skills, too, their hands glowing as they pushed at the walls, or at the floor. Which was rude. But Mark supposed that they were doing their jobs, since their vectors were in the walls and floors and they were investigating what they saw.

  One of those people felt Mark looking at them, and they turned right to face Mark. They were a True AI, and Mark didn’t know what to make of them, other than that they didn’t mind being seen as an AI. Sometimes AIs had human-colored plastic skin, or polymers, or something, to hide most of their non-humanness. They wore clothes and they acted like people.

  This person was shaped like a human, but they obviously didn’t care if people saw them as non-human. They wanted it known that they were an AI. They wore a bright orange toga, which was completely at odds with the winter cold, but they did not seem to care, for they were not made of flesh at all.

  They were made of metal cables, and yet there was a smoothness to their metal features that made the open areas of their body look like normal human body parts. The planes of their cheeks, and the lengths of their biceps and forearms and the top left of their chest, were all normal metal cable. They were barefoot. Or rather, ‘bare cable’, for even their feet were made of cables and clockwork. Underneath the metal cables, between the muscle groups, lay clockwork, like gears and springs for bones, while their eyes were bright orange stone. Those eyes might have been illuminated, or not. Mark couldn’t tell.

  The person had a plain grey package in their cable-made hands and their vector was pleasant.

  They had been looking at Mark since even before Mark stepped into Castle South.

  The person walked Mark’s way, and Mark waited several meters inside Castle South.

  The person said, “Greetings, Mark Careed. I’m Orange City, though ‘Orange’ is fine. I’m glad to see you again.”

  Orange was the City AI for Mark’s home in the Floridas. Basically AI royalty. All City AIs were responsible, at least in part, for all the lives that lived under their auspices.

  Orange City had the dragon’s share of culpability for the deaths of Mark’s parents.

  Mark blinked, unsure of everything.