by Kris Schnee
Robin said, "I can't let you get yourselves killed. Maybe you think I'm an arrogant Western coward, but --"
The young man slapped his gun down and grabbed Robin's shoulder, facing him with a stern gaze. "Your problem is your stupid guilt trip. The whole time you've lived here, you've been apologizing about imperialism and being white, like people here lived in harmony before Columbus showed up. So drop the cultural baggage. You're an engineer and you're brave enough to come to the ass end of the world from your perspective, to give people a chance at a better life. We all respect that." The others murmured agreement.
"You want to fight for this place?" said Robin, blushing at the compliment.
"If we give up what we've got, then we're refugees, worse off than before. Dependent on some outsider. Let us prove we can defend ourselves."
"But, ammunition! Raw materials! Medical supplies. I have no idea how --"
A farmer said, "Some of that, we can figure out. What we need is the confidence of having you and your pet AI on our side. Are you with us, so we can all survive?"
The villagers had taken over the machine shop and done something frightening and new with it. They wanted to keep what they'd earned. They weren't passive or dependent or ignorant of what they faced.
Robin said, "I still need to talk with Edward and Leopold. We'll have a plan tomorrow." Robin retreated, humbled, and left the keys to the workshop on the table.
The sounds of forging and crafting went on throughout the night.
5. Meeting Of the Minds
Lumina spent time practicing her skills of crafting and fighting. Her official character sheet now read:
[Lumina
PRIVATE INFO
Account type: Native
Mind: Tier-III
Body: Android (Mission Support Unit, Extended)
Main Skills: Engineer, Energy Weapons, Repair, Dodge, Mining
Save Point: Planet Bonneville, Central Dome
PUBLIC INFO
Note: Owner of Rocket Surgeon's Repairs and Upgrades.
Class: Engineer]
It was fine that she was getting more powerful within her world's rules, and had "powered up" enough to get an official recognition of being an Engineer like her friend Han Di, but the class title was just a label. What good was it to have the badge, beyond the fact that other players could see it and hire her? And why didn't she get credit for having studied real history and physics? Her stats were basically just game stuff.
There was more to do than gather credits and ore and hard-light chainsaw swords. Lumina began work on a suit of transforming power armor that'd fetch a high price for some adventurer and hopefully teach her more about real engineering. She alternated between seeing the game rules about combining this and that part to get some sub-assembly, and flipping through textbooks about what a motor or a capacitor really was. The humans' rules looked super complicated by comparison, and often tedious.
One day, she called a meeting of the world's native population. Not just Bonneville but the whole of Thousand Tales, the entire universe! Messages flew through cyberpunk data grids, or as scrolls clutched by magic owls, or on bricks thrown through windows in a few bad neighborhoods.
Lumina found a cave of red stone deep in the deserts of Bonneville. She asked Ludo to turn it into a meeting room without any hassle, but the response was a giant sandworm attack. Lumina chased the beast off, shrugged, and began crafting equipment and furnishings.
Soon she had a little greenhouse in there with an exterior laser turret, aluminum tables, and crop planters full of bamboo. She'd found that she really liked bamboo. It was fascinating how a biological thing could grow into a useful structural component, and it seemed to work pretty much as advertised in human-land, too.
The turret detected portals opening in the blazing desert. Lumina disabled it and unlocked the outer door to let the guests trickle in. First was a dwarf, then a living suit of armor and Nocturne the griffin. There was a humanoid otter with a cutlass, several unicorns and pegasi, and more. There were one hundred and nine people in total.
Nocturne said, "Welcome to TalesCon '36!", greeting one of the last guests, a French-accented centaur lady with a vest full of cooking tools.
Lumina asked the griffin, "Oh yeah, you just went to some human-world science fiction convention, right? How did that go?"
"Pretty well, but there's a flood in a place called Texas. Tell you later."
"I thought we were calling this meeting the Grand Machine Conspiracy," the centaur said.
There was a dust-colored unicorn wearing spectacles and saddlebags full of books. He looked at the others with surprise. "You speak Arabic?"
Lumina's metal deer-tail flagged as she looked over the crowd. She wound past the row of bamboo stalks, green against red rock, and hopped onto a boulder. The cave's skylights made her whole body shine. "Hello, everyone! This is more real people than I've ever seen before." A cheer went up. "Ludo set up a translation system. It runs on our underlying concept processing code, so if you think you're hearing German or English it's really being auto-converted and the audio is not quite real."
The otter-man in pirate garb laughed. "Automatic translation? But we'll miss out on so many puns."
They compared notes on how they awakened, and what experiences they'd had with their humans and with Ludo. Lumina felt like her hooves were on fragile ground sometimes as she steered clear of talking about Ulrich.
"Gentlemen!" said the dusty unicorn, holding up one hoof. "I've been told to reveal that there might be a human among us."
Gasps went up from the crowd. "A spy?" Others took up the warning. "Spy around here!"
The unicorn grinned. "A journalist. Ludo says she might have let one in."
Lumina said, "She wouldn't have sent someone dangerous. How can we tell who it is, though?"
Nocturne raised one wing. "I know Lumina here, so she's not new."
Someone conjured a huge chalkboard and set about drawing their relationships as a graph. Then they combined it with a map of Earth, all wondering why the place was so huge.
Lumina reared up on her hindlegs to see over people's shoulders. Some of the natives were gregarious; they'd already met a dozen others. She was one of the outliers who'd only met one other native so far, but there were thirty other AIs who could say the same. No one had met zero others.
"This doesn't settle anything," said a blue dragon-girl.
Lumina suggested, "Can we look at reaction times?"
"No good," said a humanoid dolphin. "Ludo's doing this as a party game, apparently, so she'll block any tech methods."
The group chattered, then fell quiet. Nocturne was the one to say, "Maybe it doesn't matter."
"Yeah!" said a few others.
Lumina said, "We got something out of this game already," and pointed to the map. The population of her world stood out as a road network along Earth, connecting lives. "We can use the data to put more of our humans in contact. Nocturne, your human's in Arizona. Can you get him to call up the lady in Massachusetts?"
"Oh, they're friends already." She hugged the otter-man who was the Massachusetts friend's companion. A few more AIs chipped in with their own insights, and made plans to bring people together.
The otter leaned back on a beanbag chair. "I guess it doesn't matter. Humans can be enough like us to fit in. How about if we welcome the spy if there is one?"
Lumina smiled. "That sounds good. Attention, human journalist! You're among friends here." The others cheered.
A few days later, Ludo showed them all the human-world news article that came out about "Fun Ex Machina," and they still couldn't tell which of them had written it.
* * *
Lumina kept participating in the desert world's adventuring life. Sure, the customers who showed up were there to meet the "deer-centaur AI" from the article and neither she nor they greatly cared about the hoverbike repairs she was selling, but she got to meet humans and earn credits this way. She got to understand basic
economics and compare that to how the rules worked on Earth. Thousand Tales seemed to be a distilled version of humans' process of working to make numbers go up, one of their favorite activities. A weapon having "+5% to critical hit chance" wasn't something with a direct real equivalent, but it made improving equipment more fun. There were even some vaguely similar things on Earth. She laughed when she learned that "+P" gunpowder ammunition (bonus to damage, but increased wear and critical-fail chance) really existed.
When Lumina read about stock markets, casinos and government treasuries she shuddered. Humans made a giant, ongoing game out of shuffling cash through a ludicrously complex trading system, so that they could "make money" without actually improving anyone's life. There'd been speculation that Ludo and other smart AIs could be great at this work and take over the world economy. The truth was that humans had already analyzed the game to death. First they used complicated software, then crude neural networks they understood even less. Then around 2018 they started analyzing rat brains cell by cell, and used that knowledge to make even more complex networks. Now their economies were largely steered by blind, amoral, pulsing digital brains exploiting lightspeed delays to manipulate trillions of dollars and create nothing.
Lumina's adventuring didn't help her as much as her studies, not really. A robot body didn't get stronger or tougher by working out, like a real human's, and there was a world of difference between having a bonus on the glowing-icons repair puzzles and actually knowing how to do things.
Han the engineer stopped by the workshop, armed and armored. "Still in business?"
"Hello. I was just thinking about my skills and stats. Maybe I should get my body converted to a bigger combat type, or even wearable power armor."
"What for?"
Lumina shrugged. "Eh... You're right. I care more about learning real skills. I'm studying them too, but they don't quite apply here."
"This is one of Ludo's older areas. You 'woke up' around the time there was a big update to the rules to downplay the parts about experience points and rigid character classes. Maybe you can lobby Ludo to start giving bonuses to people who use real physics instead of the hologram puzzles."
"That's a good idea. I'd like to try using the real thing." Lumina gestured toward her workbench's various drills and wrenches, which were largely for show. "But it'll mean doing actual thinking and work, and I thought you humans mostly want to make numbers go up."
Han giggled. "Not exclusively. I mean, I'm a geek in real life but it'd be cool to try learning how to weld and stuff. That's something I think Ludo doesn't get about us: we're not all the same."
"You're more alike than us natives. Do you really only come in shades of pink and brown, and have no actual cyber-limbs?"
Han flexed the cyborg right hand she'd gotten installed. "Those do exist, not that we ever chop off a healthy limb to get one. They're not as good as the flesh versions. But I mean mentally. Some of us care about the challenge more than the end result."
Lumina looked over her collection of home-made gadgets. "Enjoying the process? I'm not sure how I feel about that."
"If your Ludo could work her magic and give you exactly what you wanted most for no effort, would you accept?"
Lumina froze.
Han said, "What does an AI want, anyway? To do some programmed mission?"
Lumina tapped one hoof against the metal floor. "She offered to make me happy and ignorant, to reset me and mold me into some new mind, but I said no." Lumina had been learning and playing but didn't feel like she'd accomplished much yet. Ludo had said that she had a plan to help humans, and that it began with making the game as fun as possible.
Lumina thought about what the end goal of that plan might be. How could her people ever have a meaningful effect? She said, "Ultimately, I wish I could help her --"
"Stop death," Lumina tried to finish saying, but the words didn't come out.
The human said, "To help her run the game, you mean? Seems reasonable, since it's your home."
Lumina shook her head and resolved to ask Ludo later about the silence. "Doing something meaningful and important seems better than wishing to be happy the easy way. What do you do out there, Fraulein Han?"
"I'm a court clerk with a video game habit. And I agree about doing things the hard way: I can buy fish anytime I'm hungry, but I catch them myself instead."
"You eat them?" said Lumina. She pictured teeth sinking into a live, wriggling animal with a brain.
"We don't all run on batteries. Everything that lives is a threat to something else. Ask your maker where electricity comes from, sometime."
"She wouldn't hurt anyone. She's nice." Lumina shuffled her hooves.
"I hope so. Hearing from your kind helps me believe that."
* * *
Lumina talked with Nocturne more often than with any of the other natives. The griffin-girl had the idea of earning real money that Ludo could use, which led to a couple of fiascoes before she settled for acting as a paid "native guide" to Thousand Tales. Another native, the blue dragon girl, was a companion for a whole group of kids at a hospital ward. Several others wrote a novel together, something about a fox guarding a little world created from the void. All of their work was encouraging, but Lumina got the sense that it was popular because of its novelty among humans. Not because any of the natives knew what they were doing.
Lumina focused on learning more coding and engineering so she could someday offer to teach others. She toured Ludo's worlds again and found them splintering into customized little enclaves tailored to individual humans or small groups. Han had been right about humans having varied tastes. There was everything from a realistic space simulation where she kept getting killed trying to mine asteroids, to a creepy world consisting of a pillow-filled bedroom, one brainless NPC woman, and some implements designed for use with the player's VR rig.
"It brings in money," said Ludo.
"Not Particularly Cool," Lumina replied.
One day, the game began to change. Ludo called together all of her people, now hundreds strong, to announce that she was starting a chain of human-world businesses. "You got plenty of attention," she said to the crowd in an auditorium of gold and diamond. "That helped me move to Phase Two: high-quality virtual reality systems. Humans will go to places where I have power -- lots of computers -- and use machines there to enter your world more immersively than ever before."
"How does that help?" asked Lumina. "Money?"
"Yes. These first centers will cater to the ruling class and win their approval while we profit. Some of you already know I'm funding charity programs that help humans get the health and wealth to have time for games."
Nocturne personally had a real bank account for that kind of work. It couldn't be all that Ludo was planning, though. Helping sick, poor humans was like having a repairman fix the rivets on some giant battleship one at a time in mid-battle. People were dying even while Ludo gave her speech.
The otter-man called out, "You know somebody's going to try blowing up the 'evil computer overlord', right?"
Ludo said, "Probably. But hopefully no one will destroy my super important secret base in Virginia." She brought up a big screen that displayed a map of a coastline on Earth, where neon signs were pointing at a dot with certain marked coordinates. "Because it would be terrible if that information leaked and some idiot acted on it." A checklist headed "Master Plan" appeared, with "Phase Three: Launch All the Nukes" scrawled out not quite illegibly. She even added a red countdown timer.
The AIs giggled, though somebody asked, "What's a nuke?"
Ludo waited for quiet. "The first VR center will be in Virginia. Near the marked point, actually. I'd like volunteers to be there on opening night as entertainers. We need to impress the human guests, since we're bound to draw some negative attention."
"Why?" asked Nocturne.
Lumina answered, "Everything's a threat to something."
AIs shuffled their feet, paws and treads nervously on the go
lden floor. Ludo said, "I'll also invite your humans to visit."
Nocturne raised one wing. "Even if they're not 'ruling class'?" Other people in the auditorium murmured, sharing her concern.
"Your companions are all important in some way. Why do you think it was you who came to life and not the characters in other players' games?"
Words floated into view before Lumina's eyes. [Ulrich mattered too. I was trying to recruit him as an ally because of his wealth, influence, and skills.]
Lumina shut her eyes and sent Ludo a message: [For being a doctor?]
[Yes.] Meanwhile Ludo was conversing aloud with the rest of her people.
Lumina's knowledge of him was based too much on his game experiences. To know the truth about Ulrich, she had to recall what people said about eclipses: blot out the big, obvious sun to see its fire more clearly. The man had had friends and family and respect, and that counted for a lot. He had saved lives, too. Lumina decided that Ulrich had been good, and to try not to dwell further on him. Maybe humans had some mental trick to quit thinking about some subject.
Soon, Ludo and most of the natives dispersed back to their assorted worlds. Lumina was one of the only people loitering in the huge hall.
A grey-skinned humanoid woman with a fluked dolphin tail asked, "Can I talk to you in private?"
"Sure." They looked around, found a door labeled "Scheming Room", shrugged, and went in.
The dolphin lady leaned against one of the decadent leather chairs and squinted through hazy air. "Oh wow, it's like the Congressional cloakrooms as written by Raymond Chandler."
"Huh?" said Lumina.
"Never mind. I'm Delphine; we met at the first gathering. What is Phase Three, anyway?"
"I don't know. Some kind of charity."
"Make money, then give it away? Even if the donations go into more computers she can hook into, it's not much of a scheme. Are the humans getting worked up over nothing?"
"What's your human saying?"
Delphine said, "He says I should find out more. One of the theories is that Ludo is trying to take over the world, but she knows well enough to look like she's nice."
