A woman with purple-streaked hair looked up from her tablet and waved. “Morning, Casey. New recruit?”
“Alex’s boyfriend,” he tossed a thumb toward me. “Finn, meet Gretchen, our lead character designer.”
“Oh, so thereissomeone she’s willing to introduce into the inner sanctum,” she grinned, holding out her hand. I took it. “Nice to meet you.”
She turned back to her tablet, stylus already moving across the screen in fluid strokes. I caught a glimpse of intricate character sketches—armor details, facial expressions, weapon designs rendered with precision that told of years dedicated to her craft.
Casey led me toward the development side, where the energy shifted from artistic flow to methodical execution. Developers sat in front of monitors showing lines of code, debug consoles, and what looked like game engines running test environments.
“This is where Sherlock lives,” Casey stopped at a workstation with three monitors arranged in a semicircle. “Want to see what Jordan was babbling about earlier?”
“Sure.”
Casey settled into the chair and logged in before pulling up what looked like a sleek interface—clean lines, intuitive design, nothing like the clunky military systems I was used to. “ Sherlock, load Gretchen’s Moncalez concept.”
The screen displayed detailed environmental art—hand-painted trees, lighting studies, architectural sketches for stone formations. Gretchen’s signature style was evident in every brushstroke.
“This is all Gretchen’s work,” Casey explained. “Concept art, environmental design, color palettes. Sherlock takes her art assets and uses them to build playable environments.” He spoke clearly to the interface: “Generate a forest clearing based on Moncalez concepts, medium density.”
The environment assembled itself using Gretchen’s art—her painted trees arranged in natural clusters, her stone designs placed strategically, her lighting schemes applied dynamically. The AI wasn’t creating art; it was implementing human creativity at scale.
“Impressive.” It was massively impressive. “So the artists are still doing the illustrative work.”
“Exactly,” Casey navigated through build options. “Artists like Gretchen design the world, Sherlock helps us populate it efficiently. Means we can create massive environments like Legends of Heliox with a small team while keeping our artists employed and valued.”
He pulled up a tactical overlay. “The strategic elements come from design documents our team creates—sight lines, cover positions, defensive choke-points. Sherlock implements the strategy and then figures out how realistic it is, suggests improvements when needed.”
“And the tactical concepts?”
“The team working together. Jordan worked with some military consultants on the strategic frameworks, but every implementation gets reviewed by humans,” Casey minimized the interface. “Alex was very specific about Sherlock being a tool that amplifies human creativity rather than replacing it. She’drather hire more artists than buy better AI. Turns out it means she attracts the best artistsandhelped build a world-class AI.”
“Nobody else has this?” I asked, mesmerized.
“We own a handful of patents for it. It’s something we’ve discussed licensing once it’s in a better place. I think Alex feels guilty about pulling the trigger since we developed it in order to produce Legends, but she was very careful to write into the contract that we retained all ownership rights to any tools we developed during the project.”
“Brilliant.”
“She really is.”
A notification appeared on one of the monitors—an incoming message from Alex. Casey glanced at it, then at me.
“Speaking of brilliant, Alex mentioned lunch in about an hour. You feel okay to meet more people, or do you need a break?”
The question was casual, but I caught the meaning underneath. Casey was looking for signs that I might be hitting my limits.
“I’m okay for now.” The tension at the base of my skull had remained stable, and the stair climb had helped settle some of the pressure. “Who else will I be meeting?”
“Tabitha, probably. Alex’s assistant. More like chief of staff, really. She basically runs Alex’s life so Alex can focus on running the company,” Casey closed Sherlock’s interface. “And Oliver, Alex’s business partner. Fair warning, he’s been stressed lately about some corporate stuff, but he’s a great guy. He was Alex’s mentor before they started Catalyst.”
Corporate stuff. I filed that away, wondering if it connected to Jordan’s earlier comments about business decisions.
“Anything I should know about the corporate stuff?”
Casey’s expression shifted slightly—not evasive, exactly, but cautious. “Not my area. Alex handles the business side of creative, I stick to execution and technical strategy. But there’s been some... outside interest in the company lately.”
“Good interest or bad interest?”
“Remains to be seen,” Casey stood, locking the workstation. “Come on, let me show you the conference rooms. One of them has this ridiculous smart board that Jordan insisted we needed but nobody knows how to use.”
