Dissonance

by K. T. Hanna

  How did you die? The logs aren’t visible.

  Was this the AIs speaking to her? Did they do this to every person who died in Somnia?

  “Arita shot me through the chest. Suddenly. Unexpectedly.” Deliberately, she thought, mulling over just what that could mean. What did the dark elf queen know, that Murmur didn’t? That the other AIs didn’t.

  She could almost hear the frown on Telvar’s face as he concentrated. Somehow having him there, even in a form she couldn’t define, made her feel better. Made it seem like she might even get back to herself, to her friends.

  Just a bit longer.

  That had to be Emilarth. The way her tone swayed more, sounded a note higher. Not as arrogant as Belius.

  “Is it a coincidence that the two incidents have been in your domains, Emilarth?” Murmur asked, not having anything better to do than float in her sludge.

  Another pause.

  There are likely no coincidences. We are—I am—looking into it.

  At least the AI was honest.

  Do you see the option to revive yet?

  Telvar’s tone clung throughout the vast limbo, colliding with the cushion around her and muffling his words like a pillow.

  Murmur’s first inclination was to shake her head, but instead she cleared her throat and answered. “No. Sorry.”

  Let me try something else.

  She could hear the irritation in his voice, the frustration with not being able to navigate a system he had in part created. Something clicked, and it wasn’t muffled by her surroundings. Instead, she saw a flash of brightness in the corner of her vision, and realized her HUD was still active.

  That should be it.

  Telvar sounded so tired. How did an AI become fatigued?

  Murmur accessed the notification and sighed with relief.

  Before you push it—make sure that when you’re done in there, you return to the Isle, please. We have things to discuss.

  Emilarth spoke, and Murmur wondered why it wasn’t Tel, but she agreed anyway.

  “Once I’m up and running, we’ll come straight back,” she promised, meaning every single word.

  See that you do, please.

  Emilarth’s tone was just this side of begging, but she was polite so Murmur let it go without questions, for now.

  She took a breath, and activated the revive option.

  Black worms highlighted by light darted to and from under Murmur’s eyelids. Her stomach lurched with the movement it took to apparently return herself to her body. She sat up, coughing even before she opened her eyes to the far too bright light around her. Despite knowing the castle was mostly dimly lit, the light inside almost burned her retina.

  She gasped and coughed more, the pain in her chest receding as she came to.

  “It worked!” Sinister dived and flung her arms around Murmur, knocking her back against the wall still decorated by her blood. Her hug was so tight and warm, so comforting. Murmur leaned into it and hugged back, not wanting to let go.

  “Don’t you dare do that again, Mur!” And then Sinister pulled back, holding Murmur at arm’s length with a frown on her face. “Wait. Was that Forestall Death, or did you just accept my Revival spell and resurrect?”

  “I think it was a revival spell. The conditions for Forestall Death weren’t met. Pretty sure I died in-game.” Murmur spoke the last and waited for them to say something, anything at all. But they all just watched her, expressions contemplative.

  “So, you died. In Somnia. And you’re back and fine?” Devlish ran over the obvious slowly, as if he was trying to beat it into his own mind.

  She knew exactly how he felt.

  “Apparently?” With sudden excitement, she checked her HUD again, and looked at the log out option. “Oh wow, I wonder if I can log out now!”

  “Probably not best to do in this castle. Everything is going to repop at some stage.” Havoc’s tone sounded dull, like he was angry at something that wasn’t her, and yet was related to her death.

  And then she looked past them all and saw Arita, a bloody mess on the floor, Snowy sitting next to her, his usually white muzzle dripping crimson. The liquid spattered his otherwise white coat, making him appear like a sort of abstract painting.

  “None of you seem the worse for wear,” she commented hesitantly.

  “She didn’t fight back.” Sinister also gazed over at the queen’s corpse, still clinging to Mur. The enchanter didn’t mind at all. “She kept saying you needed to see it.”

  Murmur chuckled, but it sat heavily on her tongue. “She knew better than even I did. I wasn’t ready to try dying yet, but I’d had the thought that perhaps I could. Seems she took the decision out of my hands.”

  “What decision?” Sinister pulled back and narrowed her eyes at Murmur.

  “To die in Somnia.” Murmur shrugged. “I’d been thinking it was weird that I have so much trouble logging out. Like the world wants to keep me here, like it’s attached to me. That might sound conceited, but the struggle I have when I hit that logout button...and it’ll only let me go as far as Mom’s simulation. It’s like it doesn’t want me to go, and I need to know why.”

  “Wait.” Dansyn held up a hand in the classic stop signal. “You think this game world doesn’t want you to leave it?”

  Murmur nodded, quite aware of how bonkers it sounded. “I don’t know why. I just think that has to be a part of it.”

  “And it won’t let you out how?” Dansyn stared her down, his eyes intense, and Murmur realized she hadn’t really told anyone but her mom about the experiments she’d been conducting with her logging out. She could have kicked herself, especially since she’d resolved not to be so secretive anymore.

  “I basically tried to log out and override Mom’s simulation, to boot me back to the real world. Took a lot of effort, a chunk of pain, and complete and utter failure, but after two attempts I think it’s not that I can’t, it’s that it won’t let me.” She half smiled because the memory reminded her of how much it hurt.

  “Which led you to conclude that you might be able to die in here?” Jinna prodded her.

  “Sort of. I concluded it was a possibility.” She winced when she heard how that sounded.

  Havoc tapped his foot. “And you were going to tell us this when?”

  “When I thought you wouldn’t talk me out of it?” Which was pretty much never, but Murmur wasn’t about to say that to them. “But to be honest, when I worked up the guts to test it myself, which I hadn’t quite done yet.”

  “How do you think Arita knew then?” Sinister sat up and released her hold on Murmur letting in a rush of cold air to take place of where her warmth had been. Murmur shivered.

  “She’s linked to the whole world rather intricately, I believe. That, and I think she meant it as a favor.” Murmur pushed herself to a standing position and stretched, her chest still throbbing with a dull ache even though the hole was gone. She glanced at her experience and realized she’d barely lost anything. Still thirty-eight. They were stagnating again. Unless...

  “Did no one loot her body?” It felt strange to say that about the queen now that Murmur realized she’d done her a favor. Her friends shook their heads and Murmur approached. Snowy glanced up at her, a mournful look in his eyes. Like he’d been worried she wasn’t going to come back.

  “It’s okay, boy. I’m not angry. I hear she didn’t put up much of a fight.” She petted his head, disregarding his blood-stained fur. “But I do need to access the loot.”

  She touched the body, and a loot message activated in her vision.

  You receive one of the twelve keys.

  You receive a storage key.

  You receive a getashi

  You receive a midia crystal.

  You have completed the Hazenthorne Castle Dungeon.

  You gain experience.

>   You gain bonus experience for being the first to defeat the Slime.

  You gain bonus experience for being the first to defeat the Beast.

  You gain bonus experience for being the first to defeat Spideroptia.

  You gain bonus experience for being the first to defeat the Minotaur.

  You gain bonus experience for freeing Queen Arita.

  You gain bonus experience for being the first to defeat Queen Arita.

  You gain bonus experience for tackling the dungeon before reaching maximum power.

  You gain bonus experience for completing the dungeon and discovering a new level of truth.

  Dings echoed all around her, and Murmur watched her experience bar climb rapidly as well, ticking over into thirty-nine and shooting her through most of the level. She had to admit the bonus experience was all that made it worth it to go through these dungeons. Without it, it was slower leveling. Well, and they needed the keys to move on in the game, but as far as leveling went, this was what they needed.

  They’d already lost the bonus experience from two dungeons. They couldn’t afford to lose the others. Realistically though, they couldn’t be everywhere at once.

  Most of the raid was thirty-nine. Just Dansyn, Exbo, and Devlish lagged slightly behind.

  “A few more kills and you’ll catch up.” Murmur tried to smile, going over her own statistics, but something felt off about them.

  She examined herself, frowning, pulling up all the details she could. Her Intelligence and Charisma had already had their points allocated. She frowned until she scrolled down to the bottom and saw a new entry in her skillset.

  Death Perception

  Was that a pun? A play on depth perception? If so, she wasn’t a fan. What did it even mean? The tooltip was just as vague as its title.

  Perceiving death can give you invaluable insight to the rest of the world. Don’t throw it away in a rush to return to yourself.

  Well, that was vague as fuck. Again.

  She hefted the storage key in her hand and grinned at her friends, pushing her darker thoughts aside. “You ready to grab some more loot? Because I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have a storage shed to unlock if there wasn’t something nifty inside it.”

  Her friends returned her smile and hollered loudly about what they wanted to be in that stash. Murmur spent the few minutes before they found it wondering when Arita would respawn so she could ask her all the questions on her mind.

  Storm Entertainment

  Somnia Online Division

  Game Development Offices Artificial Intelligence Server Room

  Day Seventeen

  “What was that?” Rav felt drained. For want of a better word, he was tired. Like he’d given all of his energy to revitalize and revive Murmur. He sat on the makeshift steps while both Sui and Thra searched through logs of algorithms to discover what it was they’d missed, what it was that had kicked into place and allowed for Murmur to die in-game without it becoming fatal outside of it.

  Unless it was something none of them had encountered before, in which case Rav didn’t even know where to begin. He knew it was that. The world they were in control of was rapidly spiraling out of it, and taking them with it.

  “Take it easy. You pulled a lot of computational power to solve that and send her back. She could have been stuck in that limbo, accessible only to a handful of us, but she isn’t now.” Thra’s tones soothed him, like a lullaby.

  “I know. I’ll regenerate anyway.” He made as if to stand until Thra glared at him and he sat down.

  “That’s not a fair look,” he grumbled but remained where he was. She was right, he couldn’t recuperate if he didn’t remain inactive, which meant Hiro would also have to oversee the island while he was out of commission.

  “You need to rest so we can talk to her and the others at the Isle when they get there.” Sui’s voice clipped the edge of anger. “Why on earth did you make her think she could die?”

  Rav bristled. “I didn’t. If anything, it was Riasli’s stunt a few days ago that did that. The one that plunged them all into limbo. Ever since then there’s been an underlying current to her coding that I can’t seem to decipher. It all works in theory, but there’s something so much more just out of my reach.”

  “Now, now.” Thra’s voice attempted to soothe them, but Rav could tell irritation was just under the surface for her too. “They’re going to loot the storage in Hazenthorne, and then they’ll gate home. Start regenerating, and Sui, help me compile the data differentials so we know what we’re looking at.”

  Rav wanted to ask if there was a disturbance in the force, but that wasn’t how their world worked. That wasn’t how any of this worked. Instead, he leaned back and frowned, closing his eyes to run himself through the limbo he’d glimpsed that gathered around her while she was floating. It wasn’t a part of their original failsafes, and seemed to have formed on its own just for her. More confusing still was when it cradled all twelve of the Fable raid members. A safe room, panic room, whatever the humans called it. Set inside a virtual world, loaning virtual safe space to only one player and her entourage.

  When creating their world, he hadn’t given much thought to the internal areas surrounding them as more than support, as more than instances to lend them what they needed. But he’d been wrong. They’d all been wrong. Somnia was developing a mind of its own, evolving, taking on new aspects of itself, and becoming something entirely different from what they’d originally intended. Something he’d never even contemplated.

  He couldn’t help the excitement that tugged at him, that made him need to delve further into it. And yet to do so sapped his energy, like their world had become a leech, feeding off power to make it survive. Perhaps it was a better idea to grant it access to some of that power. But he didn’t quite have time to engineer how that would work right now. After he’d talked to Fable, maybe.

  “Rav?”

  He looked up at Sui, the vague form in front of him frowning so much it made him look angry. “Yes?”

  “What is it? You’ve got that look about you, that sigh that escapes you when you’re thinking decidedly human thoughts.” There was an edge to his brother’s voice. Something like envy perhaps, or anger. Rav could never be quite sure.

  He shrugged. “I was thinking about where we are and what we’ve created, and if maybe Somnia isn’t growing too powerful even for us.”

  So close to forty, Murmur found herself itching to go find the next castle so they could beat it too. Or dungeon, or whatever it was. Maybe it’d be a mechanical mountain troll for all she cared. But they were getting within spitting distance of fifty, and her obsessiveness was kicking it up a notch.

  Even as the Isle of Mikrum whirled into focus around her, Snowy by her side once again as her companion, Murmur couldn’t adjust the train of thought. Instead, she attempted to focus on the alerts she’d received. While dead, apparently.

  The thought still gave her shivers up and down her body, tingling every part of her as if coaxing her into believing she was still alive, even though she didn’t need any help there. The phantom pain that kept permeating her former chest cavity did enough reminding for her.

  She’d received skill ups in her MA, but not quite high enough to hit level five yet. She ground her teeth in frustration, accidentally biting her lip and drawing blood with the sharp little buggers. Cursing, she spat out a mouthful of red as she walked through to the crafter area.

  Upon entering, she stopped and looked around her. There were only a couple of people in the back corner. Neva was nowhere in sight and her crafting station was neat and tidy, like she was gone for the day. It was only then Murmur thought to look at the time. Of course. The little luna couldn’t be there all the time. She had to sleep at some stage, but Murmur had gotten used to having her around. A lot.

  She sighed, and deposited her haul into the
guild bank. With a frown, she noted that their gear was starting to overflow, and she’d need to expand the storage boxes. Would be a good idea to give them each their own sections. Raid team-wise anyway.

  Pulling up the guild roster, she tsked to herself. Their levels were progressing nicely. They had four other groups in the lower thirties now. With her own two getting close to forty. Just six more players and they’d be able to field a full raid. Forty-two. She tried not to smile too much. The answer to the universe and everything, huh? Nice little joke there.

  “Why are you laughing to yourself?” Sinister was pouting, Murmur didn’t need to turn around to see that. She could hear it, and knew exactly what Sinister’s dark elf face would look like in the process.

  She sighed and steeled herself. There was so much to figure out in Somnia, so much to do. Letting herself get distracted by these sensations Sin was starting to make her feel wasn’t going to get her out of the game any sooner. Still though, that temptation to just hug Sin close and shut out the world around them—it was overwhelming.

  “I’m laughing at our guild roster. It was a happy laugh.” Murmur glanced sideways at the blood mage, relieved to see the pout was gone.

  “Yeah. We are doing well. But we can’t forget the ones on our tails.” She paused and grinned. “Figuratively.”

  Murmur laughed and her chest hurt immediately, making her wince. She paused and took a deep breath. Since she hadn’t heard any of the others complaining about lingering death aftereffects, well apart from the experience loss, she didn’t think this was normal. Unless she was having phantom pains? Which she sincerely doubted. It’s not like she lost an actual part of her body. “Yeah. I want to set out as soon as we can. But I think we all need to sleep as soon as we’ve talked to Telvar about what we just went through. Or what I just went through, or whatever.”

  A hitch entered her throat and Murmur couldn’t quite get more words out. The void hadn’t bugged her, it was that frozen section of time from when the bolt hit her and when she passed into the limbo that frayed at her nerves. She had no desire at all to relive it. And yet she knew that’s what she needed to do to get to the bottom of what had occurred.