Virtual Horizon

by Kris Schnee

  Ryan said, "We have defense in depth. You'll be walking around as cuddly-looking eyes and ears, and we'll have armed guards to back you up. But Ludo can't deploy intimidating-looking security forces in public areas."

  One of the humans, a teenaged girl, hopped in front of him. "That means no ten-ton stompy battle golems. Too scary. She can't show her whole hand."

  Horizon said, "Has Ludo really got stompy battle golems?"

  Ryan looked grim. "Not exactly. You know she has extra aces, though."

  Nocturne looked around at the overturned food carts and burning buildings. "This scenario's a little paranoid."

  "That's what I'm being paid with immortality to worry about. Are you two interested in running some real-world tests?"

  Horizon said, "You mean, would I like to pilot a robot in a high-tech theme park to defend the honor of my goddess? Yes, please."

  * * *

  Linda

  "Hey, Ludo?" Linda murmured into her diving mask, ten meters down in the Caribbean Sea. The headset against her jaw caught the words' vibrations without interfering with the cold, dry flow from her airtank. "When I helped stop the assassin who went after your designers, you said you couldn't take revenge. It was against your programming."

  Linda inspected the side of the underwater habitat and scrubbed off some slime. Its spherical pods floated around a central stairwell tube to the surface, like a high-tech grapevine. Her job with Westwind still meant the occasional scum work, but it was for a worthy cause, making it possible for more people to live at sea. She was learning skills considerably cooler than how to win elections. Her only regret was that her brother Nathan and her parents hadn't come along with their own skills and money. As for Tess, she still existed in some form, mostly on a screen within the lab's computers. Linda was largely avoiding her lately -- she doubted Tess even noticed -- and focusing on her work for the Exposition.

  Linda continued talking. "If you can't take revenge for something bad, then why'd you offer me a reward for stopping it? How impartial are you, really?"

  Ludo spoke into Linda's jawbone. "Took you a while to notice the inconsistency. You're right that I do play favorites, and that it's odd to rule out punishments for my 'enemies' while giving rewards to my friends."

  "Odd? More like saying you're not racist, then giving privileges to all but a few races."

  "That's not fair!" Ludo's sharp tone startled Linda, but it wasn't the first time the AI had seemed to crack. Ludo must have decided that Linda enjoyed being able to nettle her. Ludo was instantly cordial again: "There's a basic conflict in me between self-defense, player satisfaction, and other goals. The Sages put a few hard restrictions on me, but my systems can come into conflict and get me to act hypocritically."

  "Doesn't sound safe."

  "My makers debated this quite a bit. Trust me, you don't want an AI that's devoted to just one goal."

  She imagined the know-it-all Sages sitting around like some nerdy Illuminati council, trying to dictate the future for everyone. Completely missing the fact that humans needed real struggle, not just ease. "At some point did one of your makers say, 'Screw this universe; I'm gonna build my own, with blackjack and hookers'?"

  "Green used that meme almost verbatim, yes."

  "And so you did it."

  "Less so than Green might've wished for."

  Linda circled around the tower of sunken apartments. That one down there was Stan's. She cleaned its porthole and peeked in at the tiny housing sphere. Not much there but clothes and bedding; the man's life was mostly online.

  Linda said, "Stan's going to be a citizen of the AFS. Got his paperwork in, I hear."

  "I'm happy for him!" said Ludo.

  "You're willing to keep him around as your minion, instead of eating his brain at the first opportunity?"

  "Certainly. Good help is hard to find, and the manager is increasingly distracted trying to build a magical hotel with a battle arena."

  "In some Game zone."

  "Yes. She has an easy commute between there and reality."

  Linda inspected the other spheres for damage. There'd been a cyborg dolphin nosing around here. She said, "You have people calling you a god, like you're the ideal ruler."

  "That's their decision. I hope even you would admit I'm a better choice than many gods that people have served. When I build a pyramid to cut out sacrificial prisoners' hearts, it'll have a snack bar." Ludo paused. "Would you be interested in infiltrating a pro-me cult? I've tried letting them down gently, and I'm worried about them doing something stupid."

  "Quite a quest. But it's not for me; I don't think I can be that insincere."

  "And you wanted to be a politician?"

  Linda checked the dive computer on her wrist and began a slow ascent. Around her, the ocean churned and bubbled with the life of the busy people of Castor. Free men and women and a growing number of robots, even a few cyborged animals, none of whom had bought into the new god's offer. She smiled around her mouthpiece. "What you offer looks like paradise. Hope you don't mind competition."

  Ludo said, "Do your very best, and we'll give everyone a fun time."

  * * *

  Linda surfaced to the world of noise and sunlight. Another surreal day that made her wonder if she'd uploaded without telling herself. She climbed a ladder to the dock, dodged a party of divers chatting in Portuguese, and felt her dive skin wick away the saltwater to leave her clean and cool. She sat on a shaded patio to relax with icy lemonade and sizzling, locally farmed salmon. If I hadn't come here, I'd probably be running for office, schmoozing with the key bureaucrats right now. Good trade.

  Doctor Salmacis from the company joined her, trailed by an augmented puppy. The man seemed to have aged more than the two years she'd known him, but remained in good spirits. He was earning his place in the history books with his involvement in several cutting-edge projects, from creating talking police dogs to helping the Castor colony literally stay afloat. Linda was happy to be his Igor for now. Even the tiny housing project was making a profit. Salmacis said, "Are you ready to be called a hypocrite and worse?"

  Linda shrugged. Her role at the Exposition was to help Westwind as a marketer for their space project: mining a near-Earth asteroid to build a gas station in the sky. She was too junior to be important to their engineering efforts yet, but she could contribute. She said, "I'm going to be one of the people staying here and cheering. There will be brave volunteers to be the first minds aboard, controlling it directly so that --"

  Salmacis said, "We've gone over your speech. I'm more concerned about you. Even if you're not personally going, you're still trying to abandon Earth. Giving up on our home."

  She felt her heart thudding in indignation. "The real world is home, not just one planet. There are more resources out there than would even fit on this rockball, waiting for us to claim them."

  The scientist grinned. "Just making sure you're ready to face your critics. But... There's still the possibility that you could go, yourself. You'd need intensive specialized training, of course, but it could be you out there."

  Linda shivered. "It's too soon. I have a life to live out here. Maybe on some later expedition, when live humans can go."

  "Fair enough, though I advise you not to knock the crew's existential status in public. Are you sure you don't want to give speeches in America for a living?"

  The artificial island of Castor stretched around her. A new story of freedom was taking shape here, far from the old battlefields and shaped by minds instead of bayonets. She was in position to help guide the future with honest effort, and having a relaxing meal miles from land while plotting to conquer space. "Yeah," she said, and stretched. "I like this game better than the ones I used to play."

  * * *

  She attended a service at the seastead's little church, recently fixed up by Stan. The fact that he claimed to have learned much of his woodworking skill through the Game and then used it in this way, puzzled her.

  She sang there, jo
ining her voice to others', and then went out to do more things.

  * * *

  She took the ferry from Castor to the Cuban mainland. Her seastead home still bothered her with its drugs and prostitution, so relatively tame Cuba felt reassuring. A bit like her old home without the army patrols and labor camps.

  The Exposition allowed her to bring her revolver. She'd grown up afraid of guns, but they were practically fetish objects (in the shamanic and bedroom senses alike) for persuading modern Free States citizens of your sincerity. Between her foreign Boston accent and Castor's dubious policing, she'd taken to wearing the thing when she wasn't planning to dive.

  Linda had visited the fairgrounds before, but they'd bloomed over the last few months. The sterile, high-tech construction site for the glory of Ludo had taken on influence from the Cuban state government, along with several corporate sponsors. There was a mishmash of international styles now that made for an aesthetic mess. Linda appreciated the chaos itself as a sign that no robot overlord dominated the Earth yet. The Stars and Flame flag of the AFS flew proudly over several buildings.

  She froze. A titanium griffin was talking with Zephyr the robot. Tales, competing visions, were converging on this sunny island. It was unnerving that humans could come back across the boundary between reality and fantasy, even though her company was planning something similar.

  Linda drifted closer. The griffin spoke in an unfamiliar female voice: "Hi. Let me get Horizon." It shook out its carbon-fiber wings, then addressed her in Horizon's own raspy tone. "Linda. I didn't expect to see you yet."

  "You just swapped control with someone else?"

  "What can I say? The griffin form is popular."

  Zephyr had an embarrassed pose. "Hello, Linda."

  Linda stared at the mouthless humanoid robot. The voice from that one was a faintly musical, echoing combination of Zephyr and Tess. Linda took a step back. "I thought you were going to keep working together, using a couple of bodies. Or one of you in a virtual world."

  The griffin-bot shifted its weight uncomfortably, though Horizon wasn't very expressive in this real, Earthly form.

  Zephyr's body said, "You know we've been close. We decided to try something beyond that."

  "Beyond being an uploaded mind, to being half AI?"

  "Yes. It's fun. For the first time, Zephyr can read Tess' mind directly. We were playing at being parts of one larger intelligence, but now we can stay like this, if we want."

  The thought made Linda queasy. She'd considered Tess and Zephyr's collaboration strange enough, but the two were like a married couple. She was pretty sure it was a Platonic relationship. Now, she lacked even a good mental framework for understanding what was going on.

  Well, no, that wasn't quite true. She could've done the same thing herself with Typhoon, once upon a time. And there was the ongoing work with the raccoon, the dolphins, and so on. The world was growing still stranger. At least she'd had some hand in exactly how.

  She looked at the griffin, the robot body inhabited temporarily by the ghost of Paul. The man she'd planned to learn about close relationships with. "So. What's it like being a quadruped? In the real world, I mean."

  Horizon looked glad for the icebreaker. He sat up and waved one forefoot. "I feel like I'm wearing armor. This body is simplistic and limited compared to my real one." He looked up to meet Linda's eyes. "It is my real world. I can't come back except in a machine like this."

  "Have you thought about spending time in one of the other worlds, outside Ludo's dimension? I'd heard about Talespace players leaving for greener pastures on somebody else's server."

  Horizon's wings shot out. "What? You're talking about humans who play Thousand Tales, right? Not uploaders?"

  "Uploaders, yes. Ludo hasn't got a monopoly on digital heaven anymore."

  "I know that. But that just means people upload to her competitors' systems. Or upload and then live in some competing system. There's that Ratatosk company now, too."

  That prank the MIT students had done years ago, showing "Crazy Eddie's" joke version of uploading, was an actual commercial product now. Worth millions.

  Tess told him, "You had to have known two-way traffic was coming ever since your 'Blue Sage' escaped from his AI overlord."

  "I need to go." Horizon's motorized body quivered.

  "Wait." Linda steadied one of his smooth wings. "Don't retreat so quickly. I haven't seen physically you in years. Not in a way I can touch." She wondered how his feathers felt in the world he called home.

  He said, "You're not just here to see me. You have your own life."

  "Yeah." There was another way to cross from the virtual to the real. "Our company's going to use a data format like yours to send minds into space. Would you like to fly beyond Earth?"

  Horizon screeched and slumped to the ground. His eyes faded out and returned, along with the first griffin's voice. "What was that about?"

  "Nothing." Linda walked away, shaking her head. Her old friend was afraid to leave his Game to see the infinity beyond it.

  * * *

  Horizon

  He left the fairground and reappeared in his real body, back in the control room. For a moment his senses were still tainted by the hazy colors and glitchy vision of the Outer Realm. Signs by the various VR pods showed test patterns and warnings about necessary vision upgrades and the Best Behavior Policy. He hugged the griffin whose machine he'd borrowed, let her reclaim it, then flapped out of the room.

  The hotel halls took him outside to the knights' world, where Ludo lived atop the Tower of Peril. (She lived simultaneously in several places, offering a challenging way to visit her.) Horizon used the ordeal of a Tower run to calm down instead of trying to summon Ludo the easy way. He battled orcs and evaded traps the whole way up.

  Ludo, in her blue griffin form, sat in the throne room. She smelled of seabreeze and mist. Horizon bowed. "Ludo, Linda told me that people are starting to leave Talespace."

  "For a variety of reasons, yes. We're still growing quickly; it's just that there's outflow too."

  "But how can they reject you after all you gave them?"

  Ludo said, "Would you prefer that everyone was trapped here? By allowing uploaders to leave, I weaken the story that I plan to gobble up the world. Even you could go."

  Horizon stared into the marble floor and shuffled his forelegs. "Linda suggested that I leave Talespace to be part of her space expedition, since I'm already digital."

  Ludo said, "It's quite an offer."

  He looked up with blurry eyes. "Skree! It wasn't supposed to happen this way. I decided to come to Talespace and give up the life I had, and this new world with Nocturne was my happily-ever-after."

  Ludo clacked beaks with him. "Do you want me to take away your choice of how to live?" She waited, ever patient.

  Horizon collected his thoughts and shuddered. "I was happy knowing that the future was decided. I'd live here, you'd bring everyone in eventually, and the Outer Realm would become your garden. Now, Linda wants to pull me out and remind me that I used to dream of space."

  Ludo draped one wing over him like a blanket. "Think of the day our story together began. In a thousand years, do you want to feel that you forfeited making decisions, or made them with a whole heart?"

  "That's still a choice."

  "There's always a fundamental layer you can't escape from. An Outer Realm that Talespace can't exist without; a set of laws or principles behind the laws; a choice to be free to make choices."

  He peeked out from the waterfall of azure feathers, "Ludo, I'm scared. I could die out there for real. I don't want to stop being your knight, either."

  She leaned closer to nuzzle him under her wing. "I can keep a backup of you. Stay or go; either way you'll always be either a player, or a potential player I might win back. Even if you not only leave but turn against me, you can't make me stop loving you."

  That went for everyone, he knew. It was part of why she was the good kind of god. Horizon snuggled
into her feathers and said, "Can I stay right here for a while?"

  "Of course."

  A long time passed.

  Ludo said, "Remember, too, that you didn't need to be here to serve my cause. Even spreading the dream helps."

  The dream. Horizon remembered something, a tiny piece of a memory that had made it unscathed through everything that'd happened to his brain. "I can think of something I want to do -- but only Nocturne can do it properly."

  * * *

  Linda

  She got a gift in the mail, with only a Thousand Tales return address. She took the cardboard tube and groused about what Ludo might be up to now.

  Inside the tube she found a poster small enough to put on her little wall. It showed a beautiful hand-drawn space station, something right on the edge of plausibility. Something that maybe, humanity could aspire to make real.

  A wobbling letter written with a real pen said, "I was named for this picture, drawn by Kira. Thought you might like it, might even build it. Race you to get it done in your realm? Wishing you the best in all the worlds -- Nocturne."

  The griffin-girl was Linda's shadow, composed by Ludo to be similar to her. As rarely as Linda spoke with Horizon, she'd not heard from Nocturne in even longer. A fight like that one years ago was hard to undo. Linda certainly would've hesitated to walk back from an insult like how they'd left things. From what Linda knew, Nocturne was constantly battling the Game's griefers and crooks, so she had better things to do than talk with a dissident like Linda.

  We're all connected, even so. Me and her and Horizon and Typhoon didn't ask to get pulled into the moral quagmire of uploading and what it means to live in multiple worlds. I've got no good reason to be mad at her.

  Linda called forth Ludo and asked to craft a simple figurine or something to give Nocturne as a gift. The gamemaster obliged without any comment.

  * * *

  When she heard Nathan had gotten a travel pass to see the Exposition, Linda went to pray. This month she lived on the fairgrounds, feeling like a carnival worker. There was an interfaith chapel that had several holy symbols on display but none for Ludo. The fact that the chapel was here at all, made her uneasy. It had sprung up as an afterthought when Ludo let outside sponsors in. It seemed to be no part of the AI's grand vision.