by Deck Davis
A whoosh of light swept over him, bright and blinding as though he was staring into the sun. When it drained away and the room came back into view, he saw a chest in the middle of the platform.
CHAPTER 46
“A bronze chest? Bronze? You have to be kidding!”
He couldn’t believe it. All that work, all the solutions he’d tried to come up with, and he thought he’d settled on one that was a silver at the least.
This felt like the time in art class where he’d spent hours painting his ass off to win a competition, only for Alan God-Damn Korby to win by smearing paint all over a canvas so it looked like multi-colored hobo vomit, and calling it ‘Life in a cosmic void.’
Elation and frustration were two armies battling in his chest. He’d cleared the room, but he’d fallen short of the reward he’d expected.
“Tripp? Is this right?” said Warren, who stared at the bronze chest with disgust, as if it was a wooden box containing a typhus-ridden cat.
Tripp was flitting between opening the chest and shouting obscenities at Boxe, but he’d already learned that the AI had an edge to him. Probably best not to stir things up even more.
He forced control upon himself by thinking of the positives. He’d beaten room two! That was something. He almost at the end of the labyrinth, and he was in a better place than when he’d started. Better at making weapons and armor, and a hell of a lot better at artificing magic into them.
When he’d beaten the words into his own brain and almost begun to believe them, he approached the chest.
Room 2 Cleared!
Reward: Bronze chest, 1200 EXP
You are almost at the end. Tread carefully, orc, for the way ahead is filled with blood, pain, and anguish. (You will enjoy it, though.)
He’d gotten double the amount of EXP from solving room two, and this boosted him to level 18. After seeing his hitpoints, stat points, and lootpoints increase, he spent his attribute points on technique to boost his crafting speed, and felt a trace of warmth breeze through him as his skills improved.
The reason he spent his points this way was his new crafting card ability. He’d already made the crafting card for an orb weaver resistant brooch, and he planned on making a hell of a lot of them in the coming days.
The Blood Wave might have brought hideous creatures and painful deaths, but it also brought an opportunity, and blood and capitalism went hand in hand. Tripp was going to make the most of it.
All that was left was to open the chest. Approaching it, pulses of excitement shot through his arms and legs, and he clenched his fist to keep control.
He unclasped the latch and threw it open, and a burst of yellow light streamed out and shot up to the sky. When it dispersed, he saw his prizes.
Loot Received:
- Crafter’s Codex
- Obsidian pieces x4
- Konrad tokens: 10
On the face of it, this loot wasn’t amazing enough to start popping champagne corks. It was good, and better than what he’d gotten last time, but he couldn’t help wondering what he should have done to earn silver or gold and if that was even possible. Was Boxe just jerking him along? It was something to think about.
“Let’s see what we’ve got.”
So…a book, some of Konrad’s tokens, and some obsidian.
He opened the book first. He’d only flicked a few pages when one of his dopey smiles began to form.
Warren and Jon gathered around now, looking over his shoulder.
“It’s just pictures of a bunch of swords and stuff,” said Warren.
“Nope,” said Tripp. “Well, actually yeah. Technically it is. But this is the Crafter’s Codex, and it's frigging amazing.” He started flicking pages. “See? Axe crafting cards. Different types of armor. Spears, arrows…”
It was fifty pages of crafting cards. They were only for the most basic of weapons, armor, and items; mainly the stuff any newbie could buy from a starter town once he’d looted enough gold.
But that wasn’t the point of it, because Tripp knew what an artificer could do now. One, he could experiment with adding essence to the weapons. Two, he was an artificer-inventor. Maybe he could take the basic crafting cards and invent new cards based on them?
He’d just been given the means to experiment and create, and his mind was already trying to jump to ideas of what he could make. He had to rein it in like it was a dog straining on a leash.
“What’s the black lump?” said Warren.
Tripp held it up. “Obsidian. I don’t know what its properties are yet, but it’s a pretty rare material by the looks of things.”
“A book and a rock. This is the loot of legends,” said Warren. “We should have found a way to do this without sending the fiends flying. We would have got more for killing them.”
“With the time running out, I was out of ideas. I just can’t believe we only got bronze for this, though.”
Jon stared at the prism in the center of the room, and the way the light ran along the lines gouged into the platform. “The whole labyrinth is a test of your skills, you told us. Maybe it’s wrong to look at each room on its own. Could your actions in room one have made it harder to solve room two correctly?”
“I hope not, because that means room three will be a bitch.”
Warren approached the door. “Only one way to find out.”
“Better let Tripp do it,” said Jon. “It’s his quest.”
Tripp paused at the door. He badly wanted to open it, but something was stopping him. “Let’s be careful. Boxe5 is turning into a real jack-ass, and he isn’t playing by his own rules. Putting timers here, limiting our number of tries in each room.”
“And the Blood Wave,” said Warren. “Let’s not forget about that.”
“The Blood Wave seems less like Boxe being in a bad mood, and more like something the devs have planned for months. We’re essentially the guinea pigs in a new game mode trial.”
Jon leaned against the wall. “It’s more than that. When I was researching the fiends, I stopped by the adventurers’ guild. The Blood Wave is all people are yapping about. Some of them think Godden’s Reach is getting scrapped entirely, and this is just a memorable send-off to get Soulboxe some press.”
Tripp thought about some of Soulboxe’s antics that had gone viral over the years, like paying a hundred world-class cosplayers to storm a train station dressed like orcs, or setting up a mock sword sticking out of a mound of stone in the center of London and having people try to pull it out.
It was obviously rigged, because the winner was an old woman called Vera Longbum, a self-confessed bingo addict and thirty-a-day smoker. Old Vera won a lifetime’s pass to Soulboxe, which she said she was going to give to her granddaughter.
In the context of what kind of stunts the devs pulled to cast the light of PR on their game, an unexpected game mode overtaking a portion of the map made sense.
“They’re devious as hell, aren’t they?” said Tripp. “Think about it. What’s the best way to get people talking? Create controversy, or pique their interest. This does both. Not only do they make in a thorny issue by barring people entering Godden’s Reach, but the very fact people can’t enter makes them desperate to be here.”
Warren nodded. “I bet streamers in Godden’s Reach are making a fortune. Damn it! I wish I’d thought of that. But then, I don’t have a good enough camera.”
“And you don’t have a face for TV, either,” said Jon.
“So that’s it? This is Godden’s Reach’s goodbye wave?” said Tripp.
The elf shrugged. “It’s fifty-fifty. Other people were saying there’s a limited number of waves, each one getting tougher. The people who make it through to the end of them will get something amazing. If this whole thing is popular enough, it’ll become a regular thing.”
“Damn it, that makes sense too. It could be either reason,” said Tripp. “Forget it; nothing I can do about the wave. It’s the labyrinth I’m worried about. It’s already getting hard
er with each room, so why is Boxe making it worse?”
“I read a little about him before we came into the game,” said Jon. “The AI part of Soulboxe is fascinating. First up, you’ve got Boxe5. He’s the hub of every intelligence you see on the map. Every NPC, whether it’s a mindless monster or one of the characters who have a little more nuance, is powered from him.”
“They’re aspects of his personality?”
“No, not exactly. The way it was explained on a blog I read, Boxe5 is a big drum of water with a tap on the side. The water is his intelligence. When it’s full, he’s running at peak performance. Every time a new questline outside the norm is spawned, every time a new intelligence NPC is needed, it’s like holding a glass to the tap and draining the water.”
“So his intelligence is finite. That’s why Dynamic Questing is only available if you pay for it,” said Tripp.
“Right. The more they expand Soulboxe, the more NPCs and stuff they need, the more they need him to allocate memory, or whatever, to the running of that new place.”
“Meanwhile, the drum gets emptier and emptier.”
Jon nodded. He had a steely look in his eyes now, entranced in his subject. “Here’s the thing. Boxe5 isn’t a true AI, because as far as I read, nobody has developed one of those yet.”
“Apart from the military killbots in Area 51,” said Warren.
Jon jabbed his brother with his elbow. “He reads all the conspiracy theories while he’s trying to get to sleep. It’s melting his brain.”
Warren held up his hands. “Just saying, there are thousands of government theories out there. What are the odds that not a single one is true?”
“Whatever,” said Jon. “Point is, Boxe5 doesn’t have true artificial intelligence. He doesn’t have 100% independent thought; he just has the closest approximation we can develop. Added to that base intelligence, they loaded a bunch of stuff into his database; the entirety of Wikipedia, thousands and thousands of academic papers, stuff about landscaping, physics, game theory…everything.”
“Makes sense that if he’s acting as a virtual god, he should know the things a god would,” said Tripp.
“And like a god, he’s getting pissed,” said Jon.
“What?”
“Okay, so compare the number of times Boxe intervenes with stuff in the game now, to when Soulboxe first launched. He was a benevolent presence back then, only tweaking the stuff the devs wanted him to.”
“Right…”
“Now, he’s messing with stuff here, screwing with stuff there. It’s usually done as a big screw you to a player he’s taken offense to. Now, I’m not saying that he created the Blood Wave; that was the devs. But this labyrinth, the way it’s getting harder. We know that Boxe5 has developed something of a personality over the years. With his intelligence, it was inevitable.”
“You really got into this stuff, didn’t you?”
Jon nodded. “I always wished I’d gone to college to study computer science or something like that.”
“So Boxe has a personality, and he’s messing with the labyrinth as we go deeper into it. What are you saying?”
“That you’ve made an enemy, Tripp. For whatever reason, the great big digital god in the sky is pissed at you.”
He’d never pissed off a god before. At least, not in any way that had immediate repercussions. Honestly, it was a little hard to know what to do with it. If Jon was right - and Tripp saw the logic coming at him with the force of a warhammer - then what could he do?
“Bee,” he said. “Can you think of any reason Boxe would be mad at me?”
Bee had listened thoughtfully to the whole thing, and Tripp wondered about that. Was she really listening thoughtfully? Or was he just projecting that emotion onto her?
Maybe while Tripp and Jon were talking, the intelligence Bee drained from Boxe was temporarily paused to save resources, and it would resume when Tripp addressed her.
Or…she was advanced enough that she really did process what they were saying? It was impossible to know. The only thing he was sure of was that no matter how close to true intelligence it was, Bee did have a personality, and it was one he liked.
“The thing about Boxe,” said Bee. “is that he’s too clever if you ask me. And he’s lonely.”
“Lonely?”
Jon tapped Tripp on the shoulder. “Can we speak without her for a minute?”
Tripp eyed Bee. “Bee, the room one door is unlocked now that we solved this. Can you give us a bit of privacy?”
He felt bad saying it since the implication that they were going to talk about her was obvious. Regardless, Bee left the room.
“Why can’t you talk about this in front of her?”
Jon shrugged. “She might not have real feelings, but the approximation is close enough that I don’t want to hurt them.”
Tripp was starting to see Jon differently. He might have been aloof, but there was a warmth in him somewhere.
“What’s on your mind?”
Jon crossed his arms. “Imagine you have a primate zoo, okay? Lots of hairy apes in cages, with keepers to feed them and stuff.”
“Yeah, I know what a zoo is.”
“So, DF’s like Bee and the more advanced NPCs are like macaque monkeys. Clever, sometimes adorable, but nowhere near the level of a person.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never said anything to Bee and gotten what I’d class as a computerized response.”
“That’s because part of AI in games now isn’t about intelligence at all, it’s about the appearance of it. Like how a building on a Hollywood movie set might look real, but if you walk behind it, you’ll see that it’s just a screen with wooden supports holding it up. We have the DFs in their cage. Across from them, we have the main attraction of the zoo. A big silverback gorilla, a beast who is cleverer than the rest of them.”
“And that’s Boxe.”
“Right. Only, his cage is way too small for him, like trying to fit a shark in a jacuzzi. He’s getting bored because there’s nowhere to roam, nothing to climb; he barely has room to beat his chest. Gorillas beat their chest to display their dominance to other silverbacks, by the way. A kind of display of power that I think came from-”
“Getting sidetracked, Jon.”
“Right. What happens when you keep something in a cage way too small for it? It acts out on whatever it can because that’s a way of establishing control.”
“You’re saying that Boxe is too intelligent to be kept as the controller of a VR game and that when he messes around with players it’s just him acting out? Trying to regain the feeling of control?”
“Right. The devs watch for that happening. When it gets too much, they wipe him and install a fresh copy, after making modifications to his behavior. They must have a kind of master template they use,” said Jon. “Boxe5 is the fifth iteration, and they say the other four were replaced for improvement purposes. Bullcrap. Here’s one conspiracy I do believe; the other four Boxe units went haywire.”
“You know a lot about this stuff.”
“AI is fascinating. Some of this is conjecture, I’ll hold my hands up. And some of it I read on forums which you maybe wanna take with a pinch of salt.”
“All the same, we’ve got an AI who will try to use his influence on players to make himself feel less trapped. In this case, the cage is whatever parameters the game devs give him – how much freedom he has to make changes. You could be onto something.”
“Onto something?” said Jon.
Warren, who had been listening in silence, said, “If he has a personality, then there might be a way to win him over. Something we can do to make Boxe our friend. Or at least, stop him screwing everything up when he feels sad.”
“Any ideas on how?” said Jon.
Warren shrugged. “You were the one born with the brains.”
“What now?” asked Jon. “Wait for Lizzy to get here and then try room three?”
This was their dilemma. Tripp knew now that they’d
only have three tries to solve room three, and after getting two bronze chests in a row he was damned if he’d get another. He needed to think this through.
Then again, time wasn’t his friend. In fact, time was a pain in the ass. He didn’t only have an attempt limit but a time limit, and there was no telling when the eight-hundred-pound digital silverback gorilla who was watching them would start shaking the bars of its cage or flinging crap around.
“Let’s get out of here; I need to be in the open air for a while. We’ll go over what we’ve seen so far and try to make a list of anything that might be in a dungeon, and see what’s likely to be in room three.”
Warren turned to look at him, his eyes wide. Tripp didn’t like his sudden change in expression.
“Guys, we have a problem. Lizzy just messaged me. We must have been here longer than we thought, because the second night of Blood Wave just started.”
“Let’s get out of here,” said Jon. “I take it that since we solved the room, we don’t have to die to get out?”
Tripp nodded.
“Looks like there’s a bit of a problem,” said Warren. “Lizzy says the evil bastards have changed things.”
CHAPTER 47
They rushed out of Old Kimby and then outside, where they were met with the chill of the evening winds. There was static in the air, one that set Tripp on edge, the kind of air he could feel as he walked through it, as if it had become thick.
It was when they went by Konrad’s shop and then into the plaza that Tripp started to see people preparing for the upcoming blood wave.
As they got closer, he felt the tension multiply. It was almost as real as waves of heat, and it stirred up nerves inside him. He knew he couldn’t be a passenger in tonight’s fight; he had a chicken status he needed to get rid of.
The plaza itself wasn’t a hub of wave activity because it was nestled too deep in the town. Instead, people were using it to travel through, sprinting down various of the alleys and streets that sprouted from it and heading to the parts of town near the plains, where they’d set up defenses in the segments where the waves would attack.
