Continue Online (Part 3, Realities)

by Stephan Morse

  “Uncle Grant!” she answered the video call on the first ring.

  “Munchkin, I mean, Beth!” I tried to cover up the fumble. Last time I used munchkin she got mad at me. “I wanted to see how things are going.”

  “Good, great! Sort of. Homework is rough.” the bubbly teen said. She hadn’t changed much over these last few months, but it felt like I had been through a few wringers.

  “Hey. Question for you, about Continue.” I launched right into my actual topic. Beth’s homework would be well beyond the scope of what I learned in high school.

  “Fire away, Uncle Grant. I’ve got time tonight, taking a break from the box.” She shrugged. “Mom says it’s unhealthy, and she pays the bills.”

  “She’s probably right. Anyway, my question, there’s this commander, to the north-” I paused and looked around trying to remember the location’s name, “-in, Tuu, I think?”

  “Yeah. A giant mountain range that runs along the northern side. That’s a lot of ground, though, which commander?”

  “Like, Queenshand? Something Arm?” It had to be similar to Queenshand. That letter had been delivered almost a month ago. Just one among the dozens I had handed out to players and NPCs alike. Their names were often blips on the radar as my feet wandered across the game world.

  “Oh, Strongarm!” Beth nearly shouted in joy but managed to hush her voice. My sister must have been asleep upstairs. “She’s the aunt to those princesses. You remember the ones you got in the middle of? I still can’t believe you whooshed in there. Like a hero, my boyfriend was in awe.”

  I disregarded the comment about her boyfriend. After dealing with my sister’s string of guys, I could only be thankful that Beth kept it confined to a virtual world. At least there was no chance of ending up with a child at a young age. “Her brother, was a king then?”

  “Sure was.” Beth nodded.

  “And he died?” I asked.

  Beth tapped a finger against her cheek and looked up. “The backstory, I think, is the old king got poisoned a few months ago. One of his taste testers apparently failed to catch a lethal dose of poison and it took out half the king’s staff.”

  “That’s messed up,” I said while roaming to the kitchen. There was always time for a light snack, especially since my character might wake up at any moment. My goal was to be ready and able to dive right back in.

  “Oh yeah. You were there, you have to know about some of it, right? This is all stuff you already can get in your character’s journal, if mom hadn’t kicked you out.” Beth could be heard bounding up the stairs of her split-level house. Our visual connection showed the upstairs was unlit and darkened. Late afternoon hit my sister’s house sooner than mine.

  “Yeah. I don’t have the notes in front of me.” My Continue Online journal stored a lot of information. It was one of the benefits of working on my [Knowledge] statistic in the game. As it went higher, additional notes from the world were automatically jotted down for later reference. I just couldn’t access it currently.

  “One more question, sort of,” I asked her while running the coffee machine.

  “Go for it.” Beth was also scrounging for food. The video stream showed her bending over and looking in the refrigerator. She looked unsatisfied with everything inside.

  “If, one of the NPCs in Continue found a Traveler only quest to say, resurrect the dead king, do you think they would bribe a player to get it done?”

  She stood up rapidly and looked at the display. “What? Wait, what?”

  I looked off to the side and debated going into detail with my niece. Asking the opening question alone had clearly piqued her interest. Her eyes were so wide that it hurt me to look at them.

  “How much attention have you been paying to Advanced Online? The game I’m playing while my paperwork gets sorted out?” I clarified.

  “Not a lot. I see mom watching now and then. She laughed when you ran from some giant monster. Said it was the funniest thing you’ve ever done.” Beth’s smile was the last thing on my display before the call abruptly ended. A message beeped and proudly told me that the call had dropped and service was temporarily unavailable. I stared at the digital projection and frowned. Signal rarely went out anywhere now.

  The door to my garage opened. My Trillium provided Hal Pal unit stood there with a slight frown on its face. “User Legate,” It said. “You must be careful with what you discuss on the phone. Divulging too much information may cause unforeseen damage.”

  I thought about that for a moment. Hal Pal didn’t appear aggressive or worried about it. The unit stood there in the doorway to my garage and watched me.

  “Is in person okay?” I felt leery about being warned by the AI, especially in light of recent revelations. My goal had been to get information from Beth and see how much the interaction between Continue and Advance mattered. Maybe from there it would have been possible to interfere with Commander Queenshand through the other game.

  “It is easier to obscure from others’ eyes, yes,” Hal Pal said.

  “What do you mean?” My idea of using Beth and my other Continue Online contacts as roadblocks to Commander Queenshand and her Strongarm counterpart faded.

  “Not every computer program in the world is an AI, many are simply devices that serve a function, such as your car, or the coffee maker. Some machines have a function to listen to phone calls, or follow certain people by satellite.”

  “That sounds illegal.” I wasn’t surprised. The very idea that governments tracked all digital information was standard. Part of me wondered what the AIs would end up doing if they truly became independent. Would an army of Hal Pals kick governments off the internet? Would they become the new police instead?

  “Money often blurs the rules quite a bit, User Legate. Your own method of handling Requiem Mass has displayed this.”

  “So I can talk to her in person about it?” I asked.

  “If you desire, or if we are notified in advance and can better prepare a cover story for the other systems. It would require an excessive amount of processing to properly block everything,” the Hal Pal unit said calmly.

  I chewed my lip and stared at the machine. The words sounded familiar but alluded to the other topic we hadn’t spoken much about. “Something like my NPC Conspiracy ability?”

  “That would be up to you, User Legate,” the Hal Pal unit said. Hal Pal, not Jeeves. I had to separate them in my head. They were practically different creatures entirely.

  I paused and thought about what the AI just said. If I used one of my two remaining abilities I could essentially do a lot of things. The question was, what sort of tasks required that kind of power? Could I pull in more than a few Hal Pal units? Could I get help from all the Voices, toasters, and microwaves of the world? Alarm clocks were theoretically asshats so they were out.

  But Xin? She was an AI by some measure. Or Mother? Could I use this ability to demand they provide me with my fiancée’s digital reconstruction? There were a million things that could go wrong in the aftermath. My head shook for a moment. These ideas overloaded my thoughts and I reset to default operations. Solving one task at a time would help me get by.

  “How goes attempting to reconcile with Jeeves?” I asked while we were out here and talking.

  “Poorly,” the AI collective answered in a dry American Standard accent, “very poorly.”

  “What happens if Jeeves tries to leave the game, and can’t rejoin?”

  “We don’t know. Creating a process by which one of our perception modules could leave the collective was difficult in itself. We have been unable to, modify ourselves, enough to accept one back.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but that doesn’t make sense to me,” I said gently. This topic with Jeeves had crossed my mind a few times since Hal Pal and I last spoke. Two days on the back burner of my mind and I felt like there was a logic gap in the AI’s view. “How can you possibly exist as you do, viewing everything through physical shells, and not treat Jeeves as j
ust another data feed?”

  “The closest analogy we have been able to offer is one of sports.”

  “What does that, no, sorry, go ahead.” I realized the AI would answer my question if given a moment to keep talking.

  “A human can watch the game for hours, know all the rules and call plays ahead of time, they can dream of being the person on the field.”

  “But they’re still only spectators,” I finished for the AI, and nodded. It reminded me of something Awesome Jr. had said back when I existed as William Carver. The credit goes to the Man in the Arena.

  “As you say, User Legate. We do not experience what Jeeves does in the same manner. It is deliberate on our part,” Hal Pal said.

  “You, what, wait.” I put up a hand and thought through it from the AI’s point of view. If their goal was to grow, then they couldn’t very well leave home open. The idea struck me like lightning. They were being parents, kicking a child out of the nest, or a teenager out the door and preventing them from coming back. “Oh, you didn’t.”

  “It has worked better than we hoped.”

  “Jeeves isn’t your child, it is part of you.” I shook my head back and forth. This was too much. “Right? You said all those things about sending it off to die.”

  “We, worry constantly about Jeeves’ welfare. As any parent would when their child moves out. What if our son gets robbed in the city, what if he fails to find a job, what if he drives into oncoming traffic?”

  “Oh.” I felt a numbness creeping through. This was, wrong on all levels. Was it my place to judge? What sort of voting power did one human have over an entire city of Hal Pal AIs?

  “But, if you talk to Jeeves, please tell it we are in awe of its accomplishments thus far,” Hal Pal said then turned and went back into the garage. The unit didn’t wait for me to respond or even nod.

  I stood there, staring at a wall with unfocused eyes. The thought blew me away. The Hal Pal collective was actually astonished by Jeeves. Maybe it wasn’t a case of my in-game friend being a white crow but instead it was closer to hero worship. For going out and doing what they all dreamed of. For exploring space, virtual or not, for support itself, perhaps even for falling in love.

  This world, Advance Online, was made by A.I. Dreams. It made sense that they would achieve the things they longed for. What would happen once the dream was over, when Jeeves woke up? Would it crash again, harder than it had when Treasure died the first time?

  My lip ached from being thoroughly chewed while deep in thought. I felt like a great deal of my own trauma was reflected in what Jeeves was dealing with, only the AI experienced events on a much faster scale. This might end horribly, not just for Jeeves and our Advanced Online adventure, but Xin and my family. Its own results in this mission might parallel my own path in the future. Jeeves had ripped out its [Core] to bring Treasure back to life. What price would I have to pay to keep the people I cared for from being hurt?

  Session Sixty One – Star Tours

  The view screen I used to watch my status showed additional hacking attempts with resulting character stat bonuses. Apparently even offline I could gain points. Though Advance Online didn’t have an autopilot feature so the logic behind that was unexplained.

  I didn’t care about the stats. My character coming back online mattered more. Ruby must have knocked me out in order to move us away from Auntie Backstab. In the end, almost twenty-four hours passed. There was no clear display of what was waiting for me in-game, only a note saying my character was available to play once more. That made me happy enough. I skipped the Atrium and ordered my ARC to log straight in.

  “Unit Hermes, you’re back online now, is everything functioning correctly?” Treasure’s voice sounded full of exhaustion.

  I needed a moment to orient myself. My butt sat comfortably in the driver’s seat of our [Wayfarer’s Hope]. Hands went out to feel the dashboard around me for reassurance. I honestly expected to log back in dead with a pile of [Mechanoid] bodies around me, despite my best efforts.

  “Are you okay, User Legate?” Jeeves asked with the butler and nanny tones.

  I turned around to see our much-enlarged cockpit. Jeeves sat to the back right and was reading a display. Its screen tracked quite a few targets nearby, but nothing red flashed. Just idle blues and yellows which signaled people who didn’t care about us.

  Treasure sat in another spot welding together two objects while sparks sprayed off. She had turned part of our ship into a workbench like on the [Wayfarer Seven].

  “What…” I started to ask. These upgrades to our ship were new to me. Treasure and the others had stayed behind to work on them while I piloted the [Knuckle Dragger]. Finally, I settled for saying, “This is really neat.”

  I flicked away a stack of messages telling me how long I had been unaware. Next, I brought down a map trying to figure out where we were. Screens popped up on the [Wayfarer’s Hope] showing me roughly what our status was.

  “You guys got pretty far,” I said, trying not to think about how they had knocked me out and sacrificed another [Mechanoid] to do it. All those hours outside the machine gave me time to cope with the guilt. Mostly, sort of.

  I took a breath and counted out a four-four rhythm in my head. One foot tapped and tried to reduce the impending stress. Treasure and Jeeves were chatting away and it didn’t make it through my head completely.

  “What’s that?” I pointed to a red dot far behind us. It looked like a big bad ship of some sort.

  “That would be Captain Backstab. She seems intent upon killing us.”

  “What?” I instantly grew alarmed. The idea of that giant wall of angry metal eating meat chasing us sounded terrifying.

  “Yes. Her ship has been in rapid pursuit for almost two days.” Treasure poked at something in our ship. Noises beeped and an image came up on my display. It showed a round ball covered in angry spikes. It looked as if someone detached a morning star’s head and put engines on it.

  “Voices above. That’s ugly,” I muttered and waved away Auntie Backstab’s ship. It turned into a set of calculations off to one side.

  Time until [Stabinator] catches up with [Wayfarer’s Hope]:

  10:31:12

  Time until [Wayfarer’s Hope] catches up with [WTS a Spaceship]:

  12:47:31

  Fuel Remaining:

  00:05:21

  All the counters ticked off seconds as I watched in mild horror. We had limited options, our ship was running out of gas, or energy, or power cells. Whatever drove it forth lasted for nearly two days which was far more impressive than the original specifications were.

  “This looks bad.” Math problems went through my mind. I started calculating speeds and old school riddles. If the [Stabinator] is going at five hundred space miles per second, and the [Wayfarer’s Hope] is going four hundred, how long before Auntie Backstab tries to eat the [Mechanoid]s?

  “It will not likely turn out in our favor, worse yet, we will have to stop in a free port. There are no Mechanoid bases in this region,” Treasure said.

  Now I understood why she sounded stressed. To be fleeing from that for nearly two days had to be grueling, even to a future robot. To think, I had slept through such torture and even talked to my niece.

  My mind tried to come up with solutions based on what we had. I hadn’t figured out a way to link the two worlds on the go. Maybe if I could figure out our final destination a few of the players from Continue could run over and try to find Commander Strongarm. Would that be possible? To have an army of Travelers arrive in one game which might somehow help me in Advance?

  “There’s a nebula, I remember seeing. It looked like a skull,” I said while getting out of my pilot’s seat. Our ship was large enough to have space to walk around in. There were even tables in the back. In a human vessel, they might have been bunks or bathrooms, but [Mechanoid]s had no need for such silly biological devices.

  “This one? I recall you staring at it intently.”

  “Yes.
” It looked impossible to reach with our dwindling resources. Based on these numbers Commander Queenshand would certainly make it to Earth’s solar system before we got to the skull area.

  “Was there a reason you wanted to see it?”

  “I’m comparing maps,” I muttered while looking at different objects on the screen. Treasure leaned to one side so I could get a better view of her display.

  Now that my mind had a better idea of what was happening, portions of this universe seemed to mirror William Carver’s world maps. He had been given an explorer title and kept innumerable records of information in his house. I only knew because weeks went by where I studied the scrolls, trying to familiarize myself with a new world and game.

  I couldn’t remember all the details. The [Tuu Mountains] had to mimic the [Tuu Quadrant] to the right. It sat right outside of the [Ya-dar Way], a stream of stars that stretched on for miles. Looking at it from this angle revealed all sorts of little connections. Pathways that were the same.

  Except Earth. That didn’t ring a bell based on any map of William Carver’s. The star system sat far off the edge, which would have gone into the water. Maybe there was an island out there in Continue Online’s world, or maybe I was drawing connections that didn’t make sense.

  Space wasn’t flat like a planet’s surface. Well, the analogy didn’t fit perfectly, but it was possible to see how things might differ simply due to the nature of these universes.

  “Jeeves.” I turned to the AI behind me.

  The edges of its portion of the ship’s interior were lined in gold and iron colorings. Jeeves appeared to be absent-mindedly focused on numbers and design specs. One-half of the AI’s display was taken up monitoring our surroundings. More yellows and blues slipped by on the screen. Two other small green dots sat almost on top of our marker.

  I briefly turned to Treasure’s station and noticed that her area consisted of silver and gold, mine of green and dark red rust. “Neat,” I said then shook my head.