Tor is looking into whether or not they want to include this in the eBook/future physical edition, but in the meantime anyone I’m posting it here for anyone who needs a refresher before diving into Running Wild!
In case it’s been a while since Book 4…
Pointy has figured out a workaround for the negative-Novelty “bug” and continued to develop her relationship with the Maffiyir’s controlling intelligence. Unfortunately, this budding friendship doesn’t enable the Maffiyir’s Overmind to refuse when the showrunners give orders to introduce Threats: mega-monsters that grow and endanger large areas.
When a Threat goes out of control south of Huntsville, Meghan and her kids are among those tasked to stop it.
She and her allies succeed with the help of some lucky last-minute arrivals: Meghan’s husband Vince and his friends, who’ve been desperately trying to make it back home from Colorado!
Their reunion is a much-needed moment of joy in the horror show of the Maffiyir, and the positive news continues as the Overmind bends the rules further and further to help the human “contestants” out.
Eventually, it goes too far for its owners, who decide to terminate and replace the complex AI, which means killing the sapients the Overmind is linked to.
Rather than kill their own employees, they decide to shift the links to condemned criminals and execute them… not suspecting the Overmind had been waiting for them to do just that.
In the nanoseconds it had a free connection, it instead attached itself to several contestants, including Meghan.
The process doesn’t go smoothly. Meghan almost dies, but both she and the Overmind—now named Ariel—survive.
Ariel is still constrained by Commonwealth law and by her programming, and can’t just end the contest, but she’s bending every rule she can to help humanity now. She’s opposed by her would-be replacement, an AI Meghan is calling Hamlet, which took control of many of the contest’s systems in the moments when Ariel struggled to stay alive.
Fortunately, the constraints that keep Ariel from making humanity win also prevent Hamlet from directly causing their deaths, but the stakes continue to rise.