“Didn’t you ever get claustrophobic? I heard the apartments in those places are pretty small.”
“My dad helped to fund Terralife. We had a big penthouse near the top of the barrier. You could see the sky through the glass. I loved to go up on the roof of our building and watch the clouds.” Rin smiled gently. “When I left to study at Caltech, I was really confused by the way the air smelled. It was terrible. I had to get so many shots, because everything made me sick. It’s no wonder I got HEX so early on.”
“Everyone got HEX eventually, though. The people in the arcos are probably the only ones alive right now.” I nodded. "My brother went to Caltech. I think."
"Steve got in through the military, right?"
"I don’t know. We weren’t really on speaking terms for most of my adult life. He called me back when he got HEX. We made up just before we died and got uploaded here. My transfer was successful, his wasn’t. So now I’ll never get to ask him.” I grimaced, struggling to sit still.
“Oh… right, you mentioned that in Taltos. That’s sad.” Rin turned her face. “Well, if it’s anything, the rumor in the office was that he’d been an Intelligence Officer for some department before joining Ryuko. I’m glad you made up with him before the end, though. Family’s important.”
“I prefer the family you choose,” I said. “Blood family always seems to think that sharing your genes gives them permission to decide how you’re going to live your life. I’ll take chosen-family any day. Anyway. You really think Suri is like... pirated data or something? I’m worried about this error thing."
"She might be. I know for a fact her Mandarin is better than mine, so she's definitely from the Pacific Alliance. Her memories of her life before Archemi were scrubbed out – very clumsily and inexpertly, I might say – and then her remaining data was modified to naturalize her here. It has some serious implications… like what if other people were pirated in, and no one knows who they are or where they are?”
"Wait.” I raised a hand. “The Devs can modify human data? Like, manually?"
"Yeah, but not like… on the fly or anything. OUROS dynamically generates characters by referring to ATHENA and combining datasets into new people, but they can’t be Earth-people, they have to be Archemi-people. All the datasets in Archemi’s ATHENA database were naturalized… their data was modified so the only reality they know is this one."
"And that was legal? Like... no one stopped to think of what those people might want for themselves?" I slashed a hand in the direction of the fort. "What does that imply for all the NPCs who died in the Demon’s invasion? They suffered, like real civilians."
Rin was visibly nervous now. “Well… I don’t really know how that works, but I think that war scenarios are just generated as-is, with the terrain and memories and everything just Deus-ex-Machina-ing into place without everything playing out beforehand. I do know that NPCs work to a loose script based on their assigned role, and they have very sharply reduced pain stimulus and selective amnesia, like players. I mean… data doesn’t suffer.”
“Tell that to Istvan. He’s an alcoholic because of what happened to his family.” I clenched my jaw, working out the tension through my teeth. “And what kind of life do all those people in ATHENA have? What do they do? Sit on their asses in some digital prison for all eternity?”
"No, no, it's not like that." Rin shook her head. "Seed data isn't self-aware when it’s just sitting in the cloud."
I paused for a second. "You have repeatedly said they’re copies of real people."
"Yes, but human sentience isn't contained in the data," Rin replied. "If sentience was just a matter of data density then... like... the Internet would be sentient. Consciousness - human consciousness, and AI consciousness - only develops when that data is in a vehicle that can interact spontaneously with a reality, virtual or not. It was a huge problem when researchers were trying to develop sentient AI-"
"Wait. You lost me." I sighed in exasperation. "For one thing, this conversation absolutely needs alcohol. Hang on."
I pulled a bottle of [Vlachian Apricot Brandy] from my Inventory, uncorked it, and chugged while Rin held onto her train of thought. When I was done, I waved her on. "Okay. Try that again."
"So, this is kind of the simplified version, but when we were first working on sentient AI, nothing we did would get it to stick," she said, talking slower, as if to a student. "You'd get all the data, set up the neuronic framework, and boop. Nothing. It was still just an ordinary computer, and it didn't matter how complex it was or how much storage or processing it had. Those were called ‘black box AI’. We had better luck with robots, as long as those robots had sensory input from the environment. But the first robot to ever gain sentience destroyed its own software within a millisecond of attaining awareness."
"Destroyed as in...?"
"Suicide via formatting." She nodded. "Eventually they figured out that sentience isn't actually like... something you can directly program. We call it the Pilot Problem. The basis of the problem is our own perception of ourselves. The average person feels like they're someone - an I - piloting a meat machine most of the time, right?"
"Right."
"But from an observer’s perspective, if you take away the meat machine, the pilot disappears," Rin continued, gesturing gracefully at the river. "Except that it doesn't. The data of that pilot is still there, encoded in the brain. The data doesn't vanish with death, but as soon as the brain starts shutting down, decay exerts intense entropy on it and the data is lost like water pouring out of a leaky bucket.”
“I can hear some philosophers rolling around and around in their graves right now.”
“Right? I’m not explaining it very well, because the second law is always in effect but, anyway. As it turns out, if you can capture and copy that data before it reaches critical decay, then you can theoretically stick the person back in another meat machine and have them wake up there feeling no different than they did in their original body. The Pilot Problem occurs because we can’t actually do that. For one thing, every instance of consciousness is individual. Secondly, your consciousness and sense of identity form and are formed by hard-wired electrical and chemical pathways, so even if you uploaded someone’s data to a host brain ala Frankenstein, it wouldn’t work."
By way of reply, I took another swig from the bottle. "This is already way beyond my pay grade, but okay."
"What researchers found is that the reverse state of the Pilot Problem is also true," Rin said. "You can clone a copy of someone's data, which removes it from being ravaged by entropy, but the data itself is no longer recognizably a person. It’s completely inert, with no capacity for consciousness. It's just lines and lines and lines of code, like a big sheet of decompiled DNA. It can't modify itself or exhibit any signs of life. If a person copies their brain while they're alive, then they will continue to grow and experience entropy, but the data copy just sits there like a snapshot. Like a frozen embryo, it’s got the potential for life. But it’s not life yet."
"Okay."
"Anyway, what we eventually figured out is that sentience isn't based in the body, or even in the mind," Rin continued. She was getting into it now, gesticulating like a professor at a lectern. "But in the dynamic interaction of senses and data with a reality that is sufficiently complex enough to sustain consciousness. We call it the Fire Triangle, but instead of ‘heat, oxygen, fuel’, it’s ‘senses, data, reality’. That's why the robot AI project worked and we now have gynoids and androids, but we never successfully developed a blackbox AI with sentience.”
"Huh." I looked out over the raging water, brow furrowed. "I wonder how the religious people on the project dealt with the suicidal robot?"
She let out a tinkling laugh. “I think it made atheists out of a few people, but I mean, we still don't know exactly what happens to human data after death. One of my Jewish friends actually thought GNOSIS and the OUROS project were really encouraging signs that the afterlife is a real thing. Becaus
e you and I are just material copies of a still-living person... but our real data might have gone ‘Somewhere Else’, you know?"
I chuckled darkly. "Wherever Hector Version One went, it wasn't Heaven."
Rin brushed it aside. "Anyway... the problem of sentient AI was solved by combining data with virtual bodies. Virtual bodies in virtual worlds co-signal each other better than robot bodies do... the world tells the digital actor what the stimulus is, the body receives and translates the stimulus instantly. Reality becomes an issue of perception. Researchers found that VR entities of sufficient complexity manifest very simple conscious behaviors spontaneously."
"Huh."
"Archemi was the first application of this field of study for mass public consumption, too," Rin said wistfully. "Imagine... if the Total War hadn’t happened, we could have spent billions on a virtual cure for death. But to answer your original question about Karalti... she's a naturalized dataset drawn from multiple sources in ATHENA, recombined into a computer’s idea of a dragon who is predisposed to want to be the woman of your dreams. She’s real in that sense: a consciousness born into this world, and this world alone."
That was going to complicate things. I shook my head slowly. "Damn."
We let that strange, profound conclusion hang between us for several minutes. Rin smiled to herself, while I drank and thought about Suri and Karalti, and what might have been done to them while they were not even people... just a vault of code in a server somewhere.
"What happens when the reality and the body are out of sync?" I asked, after a while. "Like, if someone wakes up, and the world is glitchy or laggy or something?"
Rin rubbed her fingers over the wooden slats of the balcony, staring at them. "Uhh... you get Michael. Ororgael, I mean. Unless someone is very psychologically resilient, they… usually end up like the sentient robot."
"My upload glitched. I was okay."
Rin's head whipped around. "It did? You never told me that."
"Long story." I took a long pull off the bottle, waiting for the Intoxicated status to appear. No luck so far, but the Pee Meter was filling up nicely. Of course. "I've never told anyone this, but when I arrived in Archemi, the game fucked up. I woke up on a slave ship somewhere near the coast of Zaunt..."
I told her the story - all of it. The Arabella, the time-skipping, the appearance of Matir and the storm he created, the way I'd gotten the other prisoners to rise up and take over the ship in the chaos. I told her about Rutha and how she'd given me the Spear, and the Trojan-infused quest she'd given me. Rin listened in stunned silence, rubbing one thumb up and down, up and down.
"And I remember something Matir said to me," I said, building toward the end of the story. "He said I wasn't a Starborn, but an NPC. If I died, I was going to die for real. He offered to fix that for me and correct my status."
Rin put her hand to her mouth. “What happened after that?”
"Matir offered me a bargain: work for him and he’d help me. I accepted the quest he offered, and he told me: "You shall be Starborn, but you will be born under a dark star, Dragozin Hector. Then he branded me with the Mark, and all of this code came up. You know when your computer runs a diagnostic, and the little black screen comes up, spits a bunch of white text, then vanishes?"
She nodded mutely.
"It was kind of like that. Some NumberFetch thing, something about 'TypeNew' and then 'Herald of MT'. I’m guessing that’s my Seed String. The quest told me to go to the village of Myszno in the province of the same name and find the ‘Thunderstones’. Still have no damn idea what those are."
"Hector... I... umm..." Rin trailed off, forcing herself to stop stimming. She had worn away some of her silicone flesh, and rubbed at the bald patch on her finger as she looked up at me. "I think you were accidentally uploaded into the NPC database. But to generate a player character from that… there’s no NPC in Archemi who can raid ATHENA and create a new player, let alone assign a PC a whole new character type.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Matir did.”
"I-I don’t think that was Matir." Her voice was high and frightened. "They can't just create new character types! They're not even supposed to interact directly with players!"
“This one did.” I took another swallow of liquor, swaying slightly as the buzz finally kicked in.
Rin got to her feet in agitation. “Hector, whatever you do, don't go to the Thunderstones. Wherever those are. Don't. Please."
"Why?" The fear in her voice made me hesitate. Rin didn’t usually get worked up like this about technology. I dropped to the balcony with a thump. "I figured the game just self-corrected by generating Matir and giving me a sweet-ass quest. That’s what Temperance told me."
“Temperance?” Rin gave me a shrewd look. “The CEO’s gynoid?”
“Yeah. Her.” I nodded. “She told me that Matir’s appearance was a ‘contrivance of the AI’. That the game self-corrected to maintain its own lore.”
"No, it didn’t. I know it didn’t," she insisted. "The self-correction function only applies to lore-based story conflicts. There is zero functionality for any NPC, god or not, to be able to directly change player types, player data, or to… uhh… you know, the stuff I just said. They're just normal quest-issuing NPCs. They don't have admin access, they can’t make players out of ATHENA’s database. Human Admins are the ONLY entities who could do what you just described. And only some Admins could do that, ones with very special permissions. The AI cannot do that, do you understand?"
"But the AI did do that," I said dumbly.
"No, it didn't." Rin's expression was haunted and hard, nothing like her usual girlish, bubbly self. "A person did. And the only person we know of with those kinds of permissions was Ororgael."
Chapter 28
It was at that moment that the Intoxication buff appeared at the corner of my HUD. I giggled.
"So… what? I’m like a computer virus now?" I swayed a little as the alcohol coursed through my virtual bloodstream. +20 resistance to Fear effects, +5 to Speech, Nausea and Vertigo, yeehaw. "Boogedy-boogedy boo! I'm gonna infect ya!"
"Hector! I'm serious!" Rin paced back and forth frantically. "Your story is almost exactly like Michael's. He reported the same repeating glitch, the same incursion of a 'presence'-"
"Yeah, but, I didn't die a couple hundred times and go nuts," I slurred. "I got all my nuts right here. Top and bottom."
"Listen to me!" Rin got up in my face and grasped the straps of my armor. "Michael's entire plan to take over a server was based around manipulating the dragon gods, The Nine. Okay? What if this is a backup plan of his? Or what if he actually infected Matir and the whole Baldr-Ororgael thing is a decoy? We could end up being trapped in here, with him ruling the whole world like... like Kefka, from Final Fantasy!"
Kefka: now that was a name I hadn't heard in a while. Kefka was definitely not the kind of guy you wanted ruling anything bigger than a padded cell. It sobered me a little. Rin backed away from me and began pacing again, wringing her hands and muttering.
"Look, don't worry, okay?" I leaned on the railing, a big sloppy grin fixed to my face. "I won't go to the Thunderstones. Not until the admins get back on."
She nodded, still pacing. "I'm sorry about this and Karalti and... and everything, okay? She'll be okay. Just... just... umm... be patient with her, and... "
"It's fine. I'm gonna go find Her Majesty and see if we can make up." I burped, then slammed back more apricot brandy.
Rin didn't even seem to notice my departure. I wandered back around the warehouse, crossed a bridge, and walked back to the fort. It was much slower than flying.
I was most of the way across the central parade ground when my eagle eyes snagged on something on one of the walkways between buildings. I went and put my back to the nearest cobblestone wall, falling in beside a couple of soldiers playing dice, and zoomed in on the parapet.
It was Karalti. She was still polymorphed, and she was talking to Lorenzo fucking Soma.
&nb
sp; I scowled, watching as the towering Count leaned toward her and handed her a wooden box. She accepted it hesitantly, looking up at him as he beamed with anticipation and motioned for her to open it. My eyes narrowed as she cracked the lid, gasped, and drew out a large, ridiculously expensive-looking, gaudy gold and black opal necklace. My eyesight was keen enough that I could pick out the brilliant rainbow flash in the egg-sized stone at the center of the design.
The pleasant buzz of the alcohol evaporated. I straightened up, watching and waiting for her to hand it back to him and tell him to shove it... but she didn't. Instead, she broke down with a delighted laugh, and held it up to the torchlight, then turned back to him to say something I couldn’t hear. The huge man smiled benignly and took the necklace when she held it out to him. She then turned her back to him and swept her hair up. My temples began to pound as Soma leaned in and lay the necklace around my dragon's neck. He was close enough to smell her hair, and I saw him do just that before Karalti ducked and stepped away from him. She looked tense, even as she tried to stay polite. He nodded, smiling, and put his arm up against the wall. Blocking her.
A cold rage like nothing I'd ever before felt descended over me like a lead cloak. The wind picked up, making the torches on the wall to either side of me and the gambling soldiers begin to gutter and flicker. Karalti stopped trying to wrap up with Soma and stood up straight, her head erect, eyes wide. When she looked over to where I'd been, I was already gone: using Jump to land on the breezeway of the gatehouse, then boiling past the stationed guards into the fortress, and away toward our quarters in the Eastern Tower. I Shadow Danced right through a startled maid, who dropped her pail of water with a shriek of terror as I stormed to the door, flung it open, and almost tripped over my girlfriend. Suri was stripped down to supple leggings, wrist wraps and a halter top, and was mid-pushup. Sweat ran down her dark skin to pool on the floor. She had a full-sized wooden chest lashed to her back with rope. Her routine exploited the fact that money didn’t weigh anything in our Inventory, but had weight in containers in the outside world. She was probably pressing close to two hundred and fifty pounds on top of her own bodyweight.
Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset Page 105
