The Boy King
Ironeyes Linguistics is a producer of Large Language Models (LLMs) for the publishing market. Something has gone very wrong; copy their models produce has come out stuttered, crazed, and even outright maddening in its structure.
A new cast is being formed.
The Truth.
During one of their regular transcription rounds, the company purchased at auction a large lot of books and manuscripts from one K. Zholgoz, an otherwise nondescript man who traded in literature. He died of old age with no heirs, and all of his items were put up at county auction to pay for his pauper's funeral.
Included within this documentation, unbeknownst to anyone, was a manuscript copy of The King in Yellow, which some intrepid intern auto-transcribed via standard scanning procedures without noticing the contents of the text. Consequently, everything produced by Ironeyes Linguistics which uses a Large Language Model has ‘fragments’ of the King in Yellow studded throughout its data.
The Program’s own algorithms picked up key phrases from the King in Yellow from the website description of Rapiers and Rapists: A Bawdy Fantasy Tale, a book published by Haus & Hoch. H&H are innocent in the matter— they simply used the BoyKing-2 model from IronEyes to produce a short description of their cheap erotica. Tracing it back to its source, the Program is now scrambling a task force to prevent things from getting any worse.
The Briefing
Make an executive call on whether the Program briefs the party about the threat presented here — whether they outright say ‘this is an infectious infohazard’ or are vaguer is up to you. The briefing should provide a general gist of what has been written here, without directly saying ‘The King in Yellow’.
The Program wants Ironeyes Linguistics shut down and their three LLM models (BoyKing-2, TumbleJester11-1, and Garden_PRANCER) destroyed or expurgated, ideally destroyed. Ideally, they want to do so without destroying any lives, but they’ll allow it to happen if need be. They are, however, of the opinion that the employees of IronEyes Linguistics should not be killed unless there is absolutely no other way.
If the party reports that the IronEyes employees are innocent, as they are, then the Program is vehement about sparing them. Killing them is the final acceptable option, and is considered a partial operational failure.
Despite the KiY’s infectiousness, nobody at IronEyes has been exposed to it— whatever force governs its chaotic spread has either hidden itself from them to avoid expurgation, or the operation is so lackadaisical they have failed to even read what they’re feeding into their idiot-machines.
Ironeyes Linguistics
Headed by Trant Hinkelsturm, Ironeyes Linguistics is a small outfit operating out of a converted industrial building on the Old Tinicum Island Road in Essington, Pennsylvania; a stone’s throw from Philadelphia.
It has only four employees total; Trant Hinkelsturm, acting CEO and COO, Johnny “Zoo” Zuleta, their marketing director, Mina O’Hanrahan, a coder and PR expert, and Jim Priest, coder and an expert in LLMs.
The Ironeyes building is slightly dour. The offices are cold and heated only by floor-level space heaters. The space is much larger than it needs to be; Hinkelsturm had a substantial grant to buy real estate and he splurged for the largest square footage he could, unaware of how large that actually was. As a result, the central ‘Bearpit’, where Zuleta, O’Hanrahan, and Priest work, is composed of three desks wedged together in the centre of the cavernous floor with a cheaply-made chipboard divider to give them some privacy. Hinkelsturm has his office in the old foreman’s room.
Despite this, they’ve done their best to make it seem like home; trinkets and post-its dot the large factory floor. Posters and cheerful chintzy motivational slogans have been stuck to the old grimy concrete walls, and strings of LED neon-style lights run over the tops of their desks. The place is unprofessional, but rendered cozy by the sheer slapdash nature of it all.
Hinkelsturm
Trant Hinkelsturm is an Ivy League dropout and the perpetual fail-son of the Hinkelsturm Steel lineage. Though not a name one would breathe alongside true industry giants, the Hinkelsturm family still has a sizeable amount of wealth thanks to their involvement in what remains of America’s steel production and associations to the Military-Industrial Complex.
Hinkelsturm is a real polo-shirt and phone-holster kind of guy, always grinning, his receding hair perfectly gelled-and-combed in a ‘safe bad boy’ sort of way. His behavior is overbearing and slightly odious, but without outright sleaze or malice; he’s just been raised to act that way by society types. He carries the casual disregard for his fellow man that most rich kids do, but he genuinely cares for his team and, ostensibly, the public at large— he’s just a business shark, and by nature, capable of fiscal cruelty.
IronEyes is his hail mary— he received a grant from his father’s people to buy real estate and found an LLC to start up ‘one of them AI things’, and despite a few pratfalls and mistakes, he has just begun to eke IronEyes toward a legitimately profit-turning business. What he remembers of his business schooling has enabled him to broker some eye-wateringly cruel exclusivity contracts with minor publishing houses to use their LLMs for copy-writing purposes. Before this, IronEyes was circling the drain and facing the burst of an industry bubble. Now, Hinkelsturm feels like he might succeed.
Zuleta
Johnny ‘Zoo’ is on paper as IronEyes’ marketing director, but in truth IronEyes sells itself, and Trant ends up doing a lot of the client outreach, and so he’s become their de-facto bug tester; for 8 hours a day Johnny will pump as many prompts into their models as he can, trying to find ‘hallucinations’. In truth, he likes to slack off as much as he can, while still pulling his weight; he doesn’t like to see “the guys” suffer.
Dark-haired and tan-skinned, he usually wears a Johnny Bahama shirt to the office, and fancies himself a superstar. He likes to say ‘disco!’ as an exclamation. He seems like a great victim for the KiY infection, but is not at all compromised. It has hidden from him.
O’Hanrahan
Mina O’Hanrahan is 23, overworked and frazzled. Though Hinkelsturm doesn’t demand crunch, the demands of working on three models at once with such a sudden boom in customers has been exhausting. She wears her bleach-blonde hair in a tight ponytail, and there are streaks of pink through it. Her cat-eye glasses are a fidget toy to her bony fingers, and she is very nervous around newcomers. She’s also in charge of their social media, and hysterically unequipped to do so.
Priest
Jim Priest is a Welsh import. Foul-mouthed, dark-haired and sallow-skinned, he’s going bald at 28. His desk is marked by heaped cigarette butts around a thrift store ashtray. He’s quick to anger, but a pacifist. He’s strung-out by trying to keep IronEyes’ models intact; despite how they seem, their LLM models have a funny habit of exploding like ‘fucking Swiss clocks struck by toffee hammers’, in his own words. He was the sole “functional” (his words) employee of IronEyes besides Zuleta when it started up, and he is very grateful for O’Hanrahan’s hiring. He has a dead-man’s-switch in the models, in case he’s ever fired.
The Chase & Solution
The infected models have to be destroyed - it’s on to the agents to decide how.
The hard way is an update to the models that expurgates all KiY-related information would require an agent to be exposed, before or during this process, causing them to be corrupted and suffer malign effects (see Tomes in stat blocks for mechanics.). Though this might not catch all the infested texts and not every client might be updated, it’s better than nothing, and the Program will be satisfied — stragglers can be caught by other teams.
Another update, that merely destroys the models themselves, is also acceptable. IronEyes will take the fall and might collapse, but nobody will go to jail or die.
A mad scramble to stop books with the King in Yellow seeded into them or their descriptive covers would be a fun setpiece, however- I leave that to you to decide how to handle and deliver.The easy way out is to destroy IronEyes violently. The Program doesn’t like this, especially if the Agents inform their Handler that IronEyes is relatively clean. There’s no skeletons in their closets beyond the believable (software piracy, weird but legal porn, marital affairs etc). Destroying IronEyes (or otherwise removing Priest from his employment or life) would trigger the dead-man’s-switch DRM that Priest has snuck into their models in case Hinkelsturm gets the ‘wisebastard’ idea to fire him, rendering them completely useless and stopping them from generating any more text.
Using bogus prosecution, EPA concerns, copyright forgery etc is another great way to go about it — seizing IronEyes will trigger the dead-man’s-switch, but also allow The Program to scoop up their technology. It might have another use, after all.
Stat Blocks
Trant Hinkelsturm
All 10 except CHA; at 14 (70%)
Law 50%, Persuade 65%, HUMINT 50%, Bureaucracy 30%
Johnny “Zoo” Zuleta
All 10 except CHA; at 7 (35%)
Law 60%, Bureaucracy 60%, Computer Science 30%, Language (Spanish) 25%
Mina O’Hanrahan
All 10 except INT, at 16 (80%)
Law 10%, Bureaucracy 30%, Computer Science 80%, SIGINT 20%
Jim Priest
All 10 except INT, at 18 (90%)
Bureaucracy 20%, Computer Science 85%, SIGINT 50%, Language (Welsh) 5%.
BoyKing-2/TumbleJester/Garden_PRANCER Model Infestation
Study Time: Hours, Language: English/French (Either works)
Any one Art skill +5%, Unnatural +5%, SAN Loss 1D6+2\
BoyKing, TumbleJester, and Garden_PRANCER are all thoroughly besotten with the King in Yellow’s jumbled-up, chewed, and garbled text. Parsing their data to expunge the offensive text will expose an Agent (or patsy) to a fractuous version of an already maddening text. Consequently, the effects are the same despite only experiencing maybe 1% of the offending play.
After reading The King in Yellow, the Agent begins to encounter a number of unnatural phenomena with increasing SAN costs, at least once per operation. The Agent sees the Yellow Sign manifest where Hastur has irrupted, at a cost of 0/1D6 SAN. After four such encounters, things get really intense the Agent may become attracted to Hastur, rotate into Carcosa, or develop a mental disorder.
Credits
The Boy King was written by BBFIII/Harlequin for the 2024 Shotgun Scenario contest.
Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PSsg3QDKIUP-GJqFa2l_918Gx8d44P9qpm8hr7Z9sno/edit