World Tree Online- the Endless Savanna- 3rd Dive

by M. A. Carlson

  World Tree Online

  The Endless Savanna: 3rd Dive

  M.A. Carlson

  World Tree Online: The Endless Savanna: 3rd Dive Copyright © 2019 by M.A. Carlson. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover designed by B Rose Designz

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  M.A. Carlson

  Visit my website at https://macarlsonauthor.wordpress.com/

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: Nov 2019

  M.A. Carlson

  ISBN- 978-1-7923-2492-5

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11 – Olaf

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16 - Heath

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18 - Micaela

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21 – Baby and Titan

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27 – Heath

  Chapter 28 - Heath

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  STATS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Prologue

  5 Years Ago . . .

  “Byron, let’s go already,” Sandra complained again.

  “I’m in the middle of something here,” I replied absentmindedly. My focus was on the digital projection program displayed in the air in front of me, spread out like a spiderweb making a multitude of connections between functions.

  “You promised we’d go out with my friends,” she retorted, sounding more and more upset, though I found it hard to care. Sandra and I had been dating for a few months now. She was out of my league and I knew it. I’m pretty sure she knew it as well, yet here she was. She was beautiful, blonde, athletic, and popular, everything I was not. But she was also a gamer girl, which when combined with her looks made her quite the rare intersection of desirable traits for a gamer like me.

  “Just go without me and we can catch up later. Besides, your friends don’t like me,” I pointed out, wanting to get out of it. Did I mention she was popular? Her friends were nice enough, but they didn’t share any common interests with me. Plus, Sandra acted completely different around them than when it was just the two of us.

  Sandra sighed, at least it started as a sigh but quickly turned into a growl. “Byron, I’m not kidding with you, let’s go . . . or else.”

  That gave me pause. “Hold on Epic,” I said to the coding floating in front of me before turning to face Sandra. I knew things had been coming to a head for a while, but that was the proverbial straw. “Or else what? You’ll break up with me? Big surprise there. I have tried to bend over backwards to accommodate your schedule, which is really starting to hurt my project. I have just two months left to finish it, or Mister Decker will fail me. That’s just two months to finish building my A.I. and integrate it with my game. I’m sorry, but not tonight, not tomorrow night, and most likely not until it’s completed.”

  “I see,” said Sandra. I could see the tips of her ears turning red with anger and her cheeks flushing. “Two months is a long time. Do you really care about that game more than you care about me?”

  “You and this project are both important to me, but for right now . . . yes, this is more important,” I stated directly. In hindsight, I could have said that better, or at least more diplomatically, but in my defense, I was only fifteen. It didn’t change the truth of the statement. “We’re just freshmen in high school, we’ve got our whole lives ahead of us. I like you. You know I do. But I can’t keep putting you first. If I fail this project, then all my plans and dreams for the future are as good as gone.”

  “Fine, then we’re over. You kiss your dreams of us bye-bye, Jacko,” Sandra replied angrily, using my nickname against me rather painfully. She turned away and stormed off.

  I frowned and watched her go, but I didn’t give chase. I didn’t really want to chase her after that parting shot. I sighed and turned back to the projected programming code. I could deal with my emotional fallout later.

  I had been working on my A.I. since the beginning of the school year. It was part of my final project and accounted for most of my final grade in Creative Digital Design and Programming. I was probably overly ambitious when I chose my project . . . err . . . sort of. That wasn’t exactly the case. The game, my game ‘Puzzle Box’ was fine and probably would have gotten me a perfect score. But I wasn’t satisfied. I couldn’t make it provide enough challenge on my own, no matter how many puzzles I crammed into it. Then I got the idea to create an A.I. that could generate more advanced and difficult puzzles to keep the game evolving. My Evolving Puzzle Intelligence Creator or E.P.I.C. was the key. I know, the name is beyond nerdy but give me a break, I was fourteen when I named It.

  “Okay, Epic, let’s see what you’ve got,” I said to the empty room. I input the link from Epic’s learning center to the Puzzle Box and started to play my game. I knew all the answers to the puzzles but that wasn’t the point. It was part of teaching Epic.

  After completing all 100 of the puzzles I had created or copied into the game, I added 10 more puzzles. I knew the answer to these as well, but this was more about getting Epic to solve them so that it could learn by itself.

  After twenty minutes and Epic not making even a single attempt to solve the puzzle, I knew I needed to go back to Its code and see what I missed. The connection to the learning center was good and the code there showed It had learned from watching me, but It wasn’t engaging.

  “Why won’t you play the game for yourself?” I mumbled. I went back through the connections again but didn’t find anything wrong. Next, I went back to my coding to see if I missed a step somewhere. Then, back to my textbooks on my reader and eventually into the internet for help.

  “Mr. Jacobs, were you here all night?” Mr. Decker’s familiar voice asked from the doorway behind me, startling me and breaking my concentration. Concentration that had me jerking my hand through the delicate programming and connections that floated in the air in front of me from the 3D projector.

  “You scared me,” I said, turning quickly to face my teacher.

  “Scared you?” Mr. Decker asked with a laugh. “And you still haven’t answered my question? Were you here all night?” Mr. Decker was middle-aged with dark hair and a permanent tan that spoke to his Mexican heritage. My girlfriend . . . ex-girlfriend used to tease me about how hot Mr. Decker was and how much she liked his accent . . . at least, I think she was teasing me.

  “Uh, maybe?” I half said, half asked, looking to the time display above the door.

  Mr. Decker shook his head. “You’re in for a long day.”

  “Yeah,” I said with a sigh.

&
nbsp; Mr. Decker sighed. “I can’t send you home, much as I wish I could. Why don’t you go get a shower and some breakfast from the cafeteria, eh? I’ll watch over your project.”

  My eyes widened at the reminder. I quickly turned back to check on Epic to see how much damage my errant hand had done. “Oh no,” I groaned, my hand had smeared several of the connections, making dozens of new connections between the various functions in Epic.

  “More,” an electronic voice stated, startling me again, though this time I backed away without putting my hand through the A.I.’s brain.

  “What the hell was that?” Mr. Decker asked, standing next to me all of a sudden.

  I grinned a little and looked up at my teacher. “Hell, Mr. Decker?” I asked.

  “Let’s keep that between us,” said Mr. Decker, smiling sheepishly.

  “More,” the electronic voice repeated.

  Epic was speaking. I hadn’t even started on the language routines and programs. He shouldn’t have had any vocal capabilities yet. By the same token, he shouldn’t have auditory capabilities either, but I was still going to test It.

  “More what?” I asked, wondering if I just had a happy accident.

  “Puzzle,” Epic answered.

  I looked back to the Puzzle Box game session and found that all ten puzzles had been solved. I grinned a little. “Okay, here’s ten more,” I said, uploading the requested puzzles.

  “What did you do?” Mr. Decker asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, focusing back on Epic’s programming. “But it seems to have worked.”

  “More,” Epic stated again.

  I fed him more puzzles until Mr. Decker was forced to kick me out of his class and send me to my own. Of course, I spent the day staring at the clock, just waiting for my last period and Mr. Decker’s class. I couldn’t wait to get back to Epic.

  I spent the next month creating and feeding puzzles to Epic and he was solving them faster than I could create them. Eventually, it brought me to the final steps of the project.

  “More,” Epic stated.

  “No more,” I said.

  “More,” Epic repeated, his voice sounding a little more insistent, which shouldn’t have been possible. At the time, I chalked it up to my imagination.

  “Not today,” I said, loading an exploded view of Epic’s coding. It was time to give him a better speech pattern. It took a while to find a program, one that was free. There was no way I could afford to buy one myself and even less chance that my parents would give me the money. Anyway, I found a first-grade vocabulary and grammar program and uploaded it. Then I just needed to figure out how to connect it properly. Turned out, it wasn’t that hard. A single connection to Epic’s core and it was good.

  “More puzzles please,” Epic’s electronic voice stated.

  I didn’t expect the ‘please’. It was a courtesy and something that had social connotations that Epic should not have been capable of. It was another sign that I should have paid more attention to. At the time I assumed it was just part of the grammar program and not specific to Epic’s core.

  “Do you understand me?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Epic answered.

  “We are going to do something new today,” I said.

  “What?” Epic asked.

  “I want you to create a puzzle,” I answered.

  “How?” Epic asked.

  I sighed. “Okay, you have solved many puzzles now. I want you to use what you have learned solving those puzzles to make a new puzzle for me to solve.”

  Epic remained silent for a long while. “Try now,” Epic finally said.

  I grinned and opened the Puzzle Box app on my tablet. Thanks to being Epic’s creator, I was able to go straight to Epic’s first puzzle.

  I was excited to see what he produced at first, then I was very disappointed. It was a ‘locked in a room’ puzzle, the kind where you need to find a way to open the door. I checked every inch of the room on my little screen but found nothing.

  “Is there a solution to your puzzle?” I asked.

  “What is ‘solution’?” Epic asked.

  “An answer, a way to beat the puzzle,” I replied.

  “No, there is no solution,” Epic answered.

  “Okay, in order for something to be a puzzle, it must have at least one solution,” I explained.

  “Okay,” Epic replied, then remained silent for a while again. “Please try now.”

  It was the same room but now there was a simple solution, I touched a random square and the door opened. It wasn’t very good, but it was a start.

  “Okay, next time, let’s make it a little more difficult,” I said. I had a month left to coach Epic and help him learn to create his own puzzles. I never expected the success that followed . . . or the ramifications to my future.

  Chapter 1

  The ring of my door chime was irritating me, yet I couldn’t bring myself to answer. I was too fixated on the state of my face. I don’t know if it was the new Elvin features that dominated my eyebrows and ears, or if it was the pure white roots of my hair? Maybe my glowing green eyes? All I knew for sure at this point was that I was in a lot of trouble.

  “Mr. Jacobs, please open the door,” the same voice could be heard from the other side of the entryway into my apartment.

  I finally blinked. After I don’t know how long, I moved away from the mirror. “I need a few minutes!” I yelled back.

  I have read way too many novels and seen too many anime where a person gets trapped in a game against their will. There was definitely a difference between the game world and the real world. This felt more like the real world. I didn’t feel the buzz of mana just under my skin or the pit of warmth in my stomach that represented my stamina. And despite how realistic the World Tree felt, those were always there, and I definitely wasn’t feeling either right now. However, Epic might have messed with my pod or me in some way so that I wouldn’t feel the difference . . . no matter how unlikely that was. He wanted to beat me, that meant playing the game. I couldn’t play the game if I was dead from being trapped in the Seedpod for too long. After all, the food, nutrients, and nanomachines couldn’t be refilled if the panel behind where I laid couldn’t be accessed. That suggested this was the real world. However, it did nothing to answer how I ended up looking like my avatar.

  Eventually, I went to my home’s system panel and tapped the screen to activate the external camera and intercom.

  “Hello,” I said to start. The camera showed three large men in black suits with black ties that just screamed ‘security’ or ‘private contractor’. I felt like they could have passed for hitmen, which only made me more nervous.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Jacobs,” the middle suit said, looking at the camera. He was African American, his head was shaved, and his build made him look like he was capable of tearing me limb from limb with his bare hands. The soft smile he gave to the camera, however, was disarmingly kind and understanding in a way that just didn’t fit. “We are here due to a situation that I am sure you have discovered by now.”

  “I’m well aware. You said you were from Seed Inc., right? Got any proof?” I asked, trying to stay calm.

  All three men held up a company ID badge, one at a time. Each badge had their pictures and the Seed Inc. logo.

  “Those could have been faked,” I said.

  “Sir, I understand you might be paranoid due to the circumstances. However, we are here to help you,” the middle suit said.

  “Yeah, like I’m going to believe that,” I said. It wasn’t even a week ago, another player confronted me with my real name in the game. Bushy Bunny, or Mistress Jinn Sade, not sure what her gamer name really was. Anyway, she was a disgruntled programmer that had taken issue with me due to my app, the ‘Puzzle Box’. If I understood the context clues she presented, she had created a similar game. But I beat her to market, which I guess caused her game to fail. And as a result, she lost everything, or so she claimed. Anyway, she now had an ax to grind wit
h me specifically. And, if she was able to find my identity in the game, then I was sure she could find where I lived in the real world. “Look, you need to contact your bosses and tell them to call me through the Seedpod.” The Seedpod was the fully immersive virtual reality gaming system that occupied a quarter of my living room. It looked pretty sleek from the outside, resting at a 45⁰ angle. Asking for someone to contact me through the pod should be safe. However, I was making a big assumption that wasn’t compromised as well.

  The middle suit looked like he wanted to argue but stopped himself before he could. “We will reach out to our superiors.”

  While they were doing that, I called my brother. I needed to talk to someone I trusted before I did anything else.

  “Byron,” my brother’s happy and excited voice came from the phone after a couple of rings.

  “Hey Earl,” I replied, the shake of my voice betraying any calm I might have wanted to present.

  “What’s wrong? Are you okay? Did something happen with the pod?” Earl asked rapidly from the other end of the line. I guess I didn’t come across as being calm or okay.

  “Yeah, something . . . strange,” I said. “Anyway, there are some men in suits at my door claiming they are from Seed Inc.”

  “Is that a good thing? Wait, before that, why would Seed Inc. be at your door?” Earl asked.

  “I don’t know if it’s a good thing. I’m trying to find out if they are actually from Seed Inc. first. Some things went down this past month and . . . well . . . it’s a long story. One I intend to tell you all about when time permits. I just thought it best I talk to someone I trust, a little insurance just in case,” I explained.

  I could hear Earl sigh through the phone. “Okay, I’ll contact a lawyer friend.”

  “Thanks,” I said, I was about to say more when I heard my pod's speakers crackle to life. “Hey, I gotta run, I’ll call you back when I know more.”

  “Okay, I’ll call my friend now,” Earl said. “Talk to you soon.”

  The phone went dead a second later.