Liberation Game

by Kris Schnee

  Liberation Game

  by Kris Schnee

  © 2018 Kristopher M. Schnee. All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Zachary Adam Martin.

  This book is part of the "Thousand Tales" series, which can be read in any order.

  See https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01KM98TJW/ for more.

  Ratings and reviews are important to independent authors. Please consider rating this book so others can find it!

  Contents

  1. Heroic Medical Efforts

  2. Golden Goose

  3. Lumina

  4. The Arsenal

  5. Meeting Of the Minds

  6. Vermin

  7. Freiheit

  8. Confluence

  9. Fun Zone

  10. Let's Play Earth

  11. White Mages' Village

  12. Rising Tide

  13. Silver Circle

  14. Swamped

  15. Transhuman Resources

  16. Power

  17. Symptoms

  18. Knight's Holiday

  19. Lockdown

  20. Maneuvering

  21. Brinksmanship

  22. Liberation Game

  23. Men of Silver

  Author's Note

  About the Author/Other Works

  1. Heroic Medical Efforts

  Munich, Germany, 2036

  Herr Ulrich Wald had just sliced out a tumor from a girl's brain, but he'd come within millimeters of hitting healthy flesh and making a dent in her soul. His masked face showed no emotion as he guided surgical robots through the final skull repair and sterilization procedures. He'd been at work for hours but could finally turn things over to other specialists. He stepped away at last, scrubbed, and sat in the locker room, shuddering.

  "Are you all right?" asked Klaus, a "resident" doctor studying surgery.

  Ulrich rubbed his eyes. "I nearly gouged the frontal lobe. Smashed a piece of her memories, her feelings."

  Klaus said, "But you didn't; the control software worked. You saved a life today. We'll also analyze the near-miss at our review meeting. So, no harm done and we'll all learn."

  "And when the machines learn enough, they won't need us at all. Very soon now."

  Klaus patted Ulrich's shoulder. "There'll always be a need for people. For now I'm prescribing you a few hundred CCs of ethyl alcohol solution to help you relax. Are you up for some gaming too?"

  Ulrich nodded and stood. "A beer? All right." Besides, there was one machine in particular who he wanted to see.

  * * *

  Ulrich sat around drinking and playing as the sun set over Munich. Klaus had brought another of his resident friends, saying "This is our free time for the week!" The three of them sat around a bar table with their laptops.

  Klaus had been the one to introduce him to "Thousand Tales" a few months ago. It was an odd hybrid game that combined the giant multiplayer worlds of his youth with more personalized experiences run by one of the first true Artificial Intelligences. Ulrich had fooled around casually with the game until he realized that the manager AI, Ludo, was not just good at conversation and game management. She was also a master puppeteer.

  His screen lit up with the sun-baked sand of colony planet Bonneville, as seen from inside a garage made from titanium and holograms. A sign outside advertised "Rocket Surgeon's Repairs and Upgrades."

  Klaus and his friend pulled up outside on a hovertruck with a laser turret on the back and fuzzy dice on the mirror. "You ready?" said Klaus, talking from the other side of the bar table back in reality.

  "One minute." Ulrich had his character cross the metal floor to push a button.

  A robot climbed out of the nearest repair cradle. Its titanium body was centauroid and styled like a deer, with hooves and a narrow muzzle. Its eyes glowed blue as various storage panels flicked open and closed and it flexed its hands. "Good evening, Herr Ulrich," it said in a synthetic, musical voice. "How may I help you?"

  "Where'd you find that?" said Klaus. In the game he looked like a mercenary with an eyepatch.

  "This is Lumina, a support android. Found her in that abandoned mine after our last group mission, and fixed her up here. We've done a few quests since then."

  The robot's hooves clicked as she approached the other players and bowed. "Mission Support Unit, Extended. It looks like you're planning to explore the wasteland. Would you like help with that?"

  Ulrich smiled. "Lumina, would you mind taking a look at their vehicle first?"

  "Of course." Lumina walked around it and raised one hand, emitting a blue glowing grid. "Slight damage to the right rear panel. Lifters are low quality. Power plant is inadequate for that class of laser; you won't be able to move while firing."

  Klaus said, "Everyone's a critic. Is this what you had in mind when you were talking about surgery?"

  Lumina turned and hefted a sword, causing its blade to glow with solid-hologram chainsaw teeth. "Your friends' comments remind me: I upgraded your weapon, Herr Ulrich."

  Ulrich took the thing, hoping that the android could see his grin. He checked the sword's stats briefly and was impressed, not that he cared about the exact numbers the game used for damage output and speed and the like. "Thanks. But why did you do it?"

  "You want better equipment, and I have the Mechanic and Repair skills and access to necessary materials. Were my actions wrong?"

  "No, no, this is good."

  Klaus said, "I guess the gamemaster decided to give you an early birthday present."

  Ulrich answered, "I don't think so. Lumina seems to act on her own."

  "She's just an NPC." A Non-Player Character was a puppet, in this case controlled by the Ludo AI. Klaus added, "Still impressive though. Are we going to go adventuring or what?"

  Together they soared along the alien desert, fighting a giant sandworm and getting into a tense standoff with some cyborg dune-pirates. Ulrich wielded his chainsaw sword with no attempt at precision. Lumina covered him with pinpoint strikes from a laser pistol while his friends manned the turret and Klaus' custom rifle. They made it back to Ulrich's shop with some skill points, bounties, and assorted salvage.

  Ulrich stretched; he'd finished his second beer long ago. He said, "It's getting late. Don't you youngsters have work in the morning?"

  The others groaned. "Yeah, another shift," Klaus said. "Gotta work hard or your bot will jump out of the game and take my job."

  "Heh." Ulrich told Lumina, "Go do something fun before you have to relieve Klaus!"

  He logged out of the game and paid for everyone's drinks, then left the bar. One of the nice things about his salary was that he could live within walking distance of the hospital. The streets were busy tonight with a Friday night fair he'd forgotten about. He smelled fried dough and listened to a Neo-Wagnerian band in Prussian uniforms blaring about how nobody understood them. He breathed deeply and let himself wander on the way home. A carousel stood in the park. Ulrich approached to watch the kids riding it. It was nice to see that older forms of entertainment hadn't died out!

  A man in a long coat was shouting at them and at the parents and couples nearby. Ulrich didn't recognize the language at first, but like most Germans he was able to pick out the Arabic phrase, "Allah akbar!"

  He ran toward the thug while others fled. In what felt like slow motion, Ulrich tackled him. Then a wave of force lifted Ulrich up and everything became fire and pain. The world became very quiet, and finally dark.

  His last thought was from the Oath of Maimonides he had taken, seemingly ages ago:

  Grant me the strength, time and opportunity always to correct what I have acquired, always to extend its domain; for knowledge is immense and the spirit of man can extend indefinitely.

  2. Golden Goose

  Nation of
Cibola, Central America

  The day blazed. Sweat stung Robin's eyes as he filled burlap sacks with dirt, the latest high-tech construction method. One of them, anyway, being tested out in this steamy part of the world.

  "Hey, Chief," said Miguel, who estimated his age at eighteen for lack of surviving parents to tell him. "Boss-man wants to know if we're planting more coffee next week."

  The village of Golden Goose existed by a strange partnership. The Latter-Day Saints (or Mormons) had pumped money into Cibola in the hopes of winning over some of the local Catholics. The government had eagerly deeded them some land to start economic reconstruction. Robin himself had initially cared more about travel and adventure and damn good local coffee.

  The village's other partner wasn't human: Ludo the gamemaster AI.

  Robin said, "Please tell Edward yes, but it's lower priority than the new pipes." Miguel ran off to spread the word as though the order was urgent or it wasn't ninety degrees out.

  His town had a few hundred residents, using land that had once been considered too acidic for farming. Machines and chemicals worked wonders, but it was the townsfolk themselves who'd done the work. They'd flocked to the Saints' business offer and become glorified plantation workers. The local coffee and cocoa plants were just starting to produce this year, and the beans got slapped with various fair-trade, sustainable labels that helped boost the price abroad. There was a trickle of tax money, some good publicity, and oh yeah, an actual improvement in people's lives.

  Today, making that last part happen meant dirt sacks. One drawback to colonizing near-vacant land was that it didn't come with much infrastructure. Refugees from the violent collapse of "el presidente's" regime had been living in rotting urban slums for over a year before the Golden Goose project began. Now they lived here and had a motley collection of cheap housing and other buildings to be proud of. There were the old metal half-cylinders, simple wooden shacks, and plastic-based shelters designed by the Ikea furniture company. No mansions yet, but no homeless either.

  A couple of men came over to grab the bags Robin filled and weld them into weatherproof walls using a new concrete-like goop. This spot would become a warehouse within days.

  "Hey Chief, what is this stuff anyway?" one of the men asked, wiping off his hands.

  "Mostly wood pulp." It'd been marketed as a 3D printing material to be applied by shiny, perfect robots to crank out artsy townhouses by the dozen. "Which reminds me, I need to check on the machine shop. Have you got this under control?"

  Of course they did. Robin was around more to do paperwork and odd jobs than to actually run the place.

  He left the construction site and crossed one of several coffee-shrub groves, to the Quonset hut containing what passed for a factory. The hut was a long steel half-cylinder with a door at each end. Inside, he nodded approvingly at the rows of equipment. The original stuff was all hand-me-downs, like a lathe, drill and welder.

  Then there was the Global Village Construction Set. Instead of buying cheap old equipment and fixing it up for use or resale (though they did that too), Robin's people had been using a set of open-source designs. The GVCS equipment was minimalist in style, built from standard metal bits and plastic from a 3D printer. Here was the hay baler; beside it stood a dirt brick maker. None of it was the latest, most efficient design, but you could start a poor society off with it. Some other attempts to help the world's poor had gotten tangled in legal troubles because you couldn't so much as save your crop seeds or repair a tractor without a licensing agreement.

  Robin made sure everything was in order for tomorrow's government visit, and checked the log of who was using what this week. Somebody had left the hand tools in disarray so he re-organized them. Because the tools were owned by the Golden Goose organization, maintaining them was always someone else's problem, usually his.

  He went next to the north road. Road-building tech hadn't changed much in the last century: you dumped gravel mixed with tar, then crushed it down. As a trained civil engineer he could rattle off details about drainage and grading, but the Romans had figured out most of that. He had helped lay the path leading north from Golden Goose so that anything up to a small cargo truck could come in. The cool part was that his people had done a lot of brush-clearing and used the roadway to plant tons of vetiver: a man-high grass that grew quickly, could outlive an apocalypse, and could be used for everything from erosion control to making perfume and animal feed. The grass-lined avenue looked like it led to the home of people who knew what they were doing, who weren't "third world".

  He crouched at a few points for photos and soil samples, to see how the de-acidification was going. He waved to a car heading south to the village. Tourists; he'd checked the schedule. One day it'd be routine to have them.

  He let the front man, Edward Apery, do the meet-and-greet with them. Robin was happier in the dirt and grease. Still, Edward caught him in the cocoa fields and called out, "Robin, come and meet our guests!" Golden Goose's official director always seemed to be on safari, in blindingly white clothes including a pith helmet with a tiny built-in fan. As a representative of the Latter-Day Saints, Edward was God's man in the village, too.

  Robin put down his shovel between two rows of trees with still-green seedpods. He came over to shake hands with the Chinese couple with three kids who were sweating and looking around. "Hey there. Robin MacAdam, site manager."

  "He does most of the work," Edward said. "Robin, I was just telling them about our power grid and all we've done to set that up."

  Robin shrugged. "That was mostly the AI people's doing. Their equipment gives them electricity to spare, so they split it."

  "Are you a real farmer?" asked the couple's young girl.

  "I sure am!" said Robin, grinning. "These trees are where chocolate comes from -- but somebody has to work to get it."

  They chattered for a minute until the father had to spoil the mood: "Aren't you worried about the Mosquito?"

  Edward's face flushed. "He's not even in the same country."

  Robin said, "Yeah, that's... that's not in our league to deal with. Luckily we're plenty far away and his dispute is more with the government next door."

  "And by next door, my colleague means many miles of jungle away. The problem is being taken care of."

  The mother frowned at her husband for bringing the topic up, and brought the conversation back around to cocoa and coffee and other nice things.

  The Mosquito was a man with his own army, rampaging through Central America in the wake of a recent civil war. He'd also been nicknamed "the new Duvalier" after a Haitian tyrant known for voodoo and death squads. But he'd attracted the attention of several national armies to keep him in check. Robin's countrymen back in the US were hopefully going to buy the man off somehow before he stirred up more trouble. Robin was eager to focus on the task of building up one thriving community, and to let others deal with the roving lunatic.

  Once the tour group moved on, Robin finished some weeding and went back to his home to take a lukewarm shower. He'd personally installed the tiny water heater and the air conditioner in the twenty-foot cargo container he lived in. There was barely space to walk around, since a few steps took him from his front door to the bathroom in back, but he had enough and that was an achievement. In his childhood he'd read about people here fighting over the best scraps of garbage, raiding trucks on the highways like Mad Max, and running out of fuel in a country that had lakes' worth of oil. So, to put it mildly, they'd been open to new ways of running things.

  Clean and relaxed, Robin unfolded his bed and sprawled across it. He had an hour before he was on call to help cook dinner. He picked up his laptop, put on a cheap VR headset, and logged into Thousand Tales.

  One of the data centers that ran the video game was located not fifty meters away. It wasn't just convenient for Robin to jump into the game occasionally to see what the fuss was about; it was actually part of the deal for having the game company as a business partner. The town
's name had been a requirement too, on the grounds that it was a "protective ward".

  * * *

  The game's title screen showed him a hill overlooking a fantasy land of castles. Instead of pushing the start button he said, "Hey, Ludo, how are the processors humming?"

  A woman's soft voice said, "Quite well, thank you. There's nothing to report today, and the official government inspection tomorrow should show that our end of the operation is fine." Ludo, the master AI, materialized on the screen as a woman with deep sea-green eyes and surreal hair like a flowing waterfall. She spoke with a teasing note: "Shall I conjure up a corporate boardroom so you can continue to fret about the latest agricultural figures, or will you actually play my game tonight?"

  Robin cracked a smile. "I've been busy. I could do the generic fantasy kingdom again, for an hour."

  "Generic! If slaying dragons doesn't appeal to you, perhaps you'd like to try a private world? I can tailor it to your interests." A dozen bubbles appeared around Ludo's avatar, depicting miniature realms of spaceships and elves and ninjas.

  "You don't have to redesign the game just for me. The dungeon-delving stuff is fun once in a while, as a break from work."

  Ludo smiled. "You agreed to be a player of the game, Robin." She said it as though he'd signed on to be a Mason or was more than a casual Mormon. "It's my responsibility to help players have fun. Besides, small custom worlds are actually more my forte than the giant shared ones."

  "Let's see something educational, then. You'd been talking about helping the village kids with their schooling; let's see what you've got."

  "As you wish."

  Ludo vanished and the screen rippled to show a new scene. There was a lush field now, with a set of crates. A circle of silver flame appeared and became a portal, through which hopped a black-feathered griffin. It looked around and then up at the camera, and waved with its bird talons. "Hello, human! This village needs its farm reorganized. Touch the tools and materials to get started!"