by Kris Schnee
Talespace imitated certain aspects of Earthly life well, allowing for his changed body. He didn't entirely recall the details. That didn't matter, though, as much as who he shared that time with.
Robin wandered out of the suite with a vague idea of getting breakfast for them. When he reached the elevator, though, he was tempted enough that he pushed the button labeled "Adventure".
The elevator whirred, then opened onto a garden full of exotic birds and flowers. A camera sat atop a treasure chest with a sign saying, "Collect 100 photo points to unlock!"
Robin recalled that his watch was missing, but a note duct-taped to the sign added "20:1". Sure, why not? He crept around the winding trails, trying to snag the best possible shots of skittish creatures posing on equally colorful blooms. There were even a dodo and a giant moa. He made it back to the entrance to check his score, and the chest popped open with a fanfare. Inside was a bag of coins and a note: "Congratulations! This was Quick Adventure #390, by Stephanie. Rate this scenario?" A thumbs up/down icon blinked on the paper.
Robin tapped his approval and left, smiling. Talespace was evolving so that people like him could jump into something fun, then get back to more serious things. If that part of this world was prominent enough to have hundreds of possibilities already, then he wasn't the only one who wanted to avoid being completely sucked into one life, one narrative.
He hit the elevator button again and spent a subjective hour shooting demons on Mars.
* * *
Robin found Lumina still in the hotel room, reading. "I got distracted," Robin said.
"It's all right," said Lumina, looking aside with her ears low.
"You know I need to go back to Earth, sometimes. It's my job. But there's so much here, too, and I want to see it all. It looks like it won't just be playing, either, especially with your help."
Lumina nodded, then stood and wrapped her arms around his upper waist. "Are you here, then? Can you be happy while you're doing things in my world?"
Robin grinned and tossed her the bag of coins he'd earned, about as much as she'd given him earlier. "Before I take you back to the Outer Realm, how about if we do more exploration? I've been having fun so far."
Lumina hugged him. "Let's go. Together."
"For a long time, I hope."
19. Lockdown
Lumina felt suddenly confined by being in a robot body. She was still dazed from the whirlwind tour with Robin, and from spending time as an organic creature and... all that. Now she was booting up in the Outer Realm again, and this form of metal and plastic felt a little like a hard shell of armor instead of really being her.
She'd left Robin with time still on his damned clock before he was allowed to come back here, but it was on better terms than she'd feared. "Do something fun for yourself," she'd said, "and I'll check on things at Golden Goose. I'll bring you back early if there's a disaster." So he'd gone off to play, hopefully, while she went to see how bad things really were.
Ludo sent her a status report as soon as she trotted out of the robot lair. [Welcome back, Lumina. Golden Goose is on lockdown because of the MRCS outbreak. We have four possible infected humans in Santa Rosa's quarantine unit and two more who are probably fine. Nobody wants to spend time in person with other humans.]
[Are they going to die?]
[We don't know yet.]
Lumina pushed aside her worries for the humans, and went to knock on the door of Edward's trailer. "It's Lumina, sir."
The door opened, showing a haggard Edward wearing a paper mask over his mouth and nose. "How is he?"
"Alive and well, if... frustrating, sometimes. He'll be along soon. How can I help?"
The acting director said, "Everything is at a standstill. I'm talking with people by video, but the schoolhouse is closed and we've got the roads blocked and all the robots going around helping to deliver food and do crop-tending that can't wait."
"But all the businesses, the shops... What about Tres Aguas and the other towns working with us?"
"Locked down, too."
"Wow, diseases are horrible. How long do we have to wait?"
Edward said, "Because we had a known infection -- Robin's test result came back positive -- and probable cases, we're under orders from the governor to stay down for at least a week after the last suspected new case. The good news is that MRCS works quickly enough to burn itself out."
"You mean it kills people so fast they don't have much time to run and infect anyone else."
"That's one way to put it. Diseases tend to evolve and get slower for that reason. Which is fascinating, but right now we've got a lot of scared people and I'm mostly sitting here making phone calls so that I don't get infected and have to join Robin in the brain th... the clinic."
Lumina said, "Then I can be a go-between and supervise the bots. I guess this is a test of our self-sufficiency."
* * *
Edward had been doing some supervision, and on his own initiative had talked Talespace residents into helping to run the bots, but with her taking charge of that she had better knowledge of how to use them. She borrowed Nocturne and Kai to help her tend the most needy plants and keep the machinery from breaking down. Since the Saints had never fully rebuilt their food stockpile, it was running low now and it was impossible to import more. The experimental algae "food" generator got thoroughly disinfected and then restarted with a bigger tank to try cultivating more calories for the humans.
"It's eerie around here," Lumina said to Kai in the robot beside her. "Just us walking the streets. Even the hospital and clinic staff are mostly living in their work buildings."
Kai helped to take readings from the algae tank. "In some places this is how it's going to be from the start. There's a base underway in northern Canada for instance, and there's the Iron Harvest site in France, and talk of taking over the Chernobyl area. As for this food gadget, I'm still not convinced this sludge is more efficient than growing potatoes."
Lumina shrugged. "Depends on how you measure, and it ought to be more efficient once it's perfected."
"So now I'm helping to make cuisine worse."
"Think of it as a study in contrast. We're under emergency conditions right now and humans will be grateful for whatever we can provide."
Kai worked quietly for a while. "We're starting a long global emergency, really. Now that uploading is getting cheaper, there's going to be a rush for the Gate to get in."
"That's why we're standing just on the other side of it and reaching back, to make sure the transition goes well."
* * *
She returned to Talespace and was caught off-guard by being fleshy again. "Oh, right." She was in the hotel room, too, and with her limited version of a nose she could smell Robin's scent.
"Hey. How's it going?" Robin was there, hefting a bow and quiver. He tried to look nonchalant, but she could read nervousness on his face and in the flicking of his newly long, cervine ears. His little tail flagged high, too.
Lumina said, "They're alive, but there are several infected people. It's under control and the town's in quarantine."
"Then I killed those people."
"Diseases kill, Robin. We don't even know you were the one who infected them. Besides, Ludo is going to pay for their brain preservation."
"More people vanishing," he said. His long body turned aside as he looked out to the balcony, at the cavern beyond. "Have any of these frozen brains actually been revived?"
"A few. We're all waiting on more money, more computers, to bring them the rest of the way in. It's mostly under control, though. What have you been doing?"
"I'm glad to hear you've been on site and helping, even while I wasn't." He looked down at his new weaponry. "I did Midgard again. It's very different being there in person, even compared to a VR rig. It was silly, but I followed some adventurers and picked off goblins for them."
Lumina smiled. "In that form? Or did you turn back to human first?"
"No, I kept using this body. Do you u
nderstand how strange this is? It feels like I'm walking tiptoe and I keep getting surprised and thinking, that's me back there?" And then there are these things." He reached up and touched the small set of bony antlers attached to his scalp and sweeping gracefully backward. He gave the impression of a king of fairyland.
"Ha, I can sympathize a little." She broke her gaze away from his antlers and looked at one of her own fuzzy arms. "I tried being a human for a little while during a party. I'll do it again if you want to change too and, um, do anything."
Robin trotted awkwardly forward and held her around the waist. "I'll take you up on that. For now though, can we get back to 'Earthside' work without you feeling slighted?"
She nodded and nuzzled into his chest. "Okay. We do have work to do. But remember that we live in both worlds now."
* * *
"I feel short," was Robin's first complaint. He wasn't used to the new body that was the best available to him now. And that was the relatively big and fancy model Lumina normally reserved for herself.
They walked around town checking in on people. There was no fear of them inhaling germs, though they stopped occasionally to spray themselves down and make sure no one's cough had left anything contagious splattering their hides. A few people had to get their brains removed, as though that were a normal way to deal with a deadly disease.
The crisis passed. Due to the quick imposition of quarantine and the use of robot labor, none of the towns in Robin's orbit suffered a serious outbreak. But as the self-imposed siege lifted and people emerged to start tilling the fields and running shops and factories again, Lumina felt that something had changed.
"Today we're doing pipe-laying," she told an assembled work gang of ten human adults and three teenagers getting some more formal instruction for school. They stood at the edge of town where there was a growing network of sewers and irrigated fields. Expansion had paused during the quarantine but more people were rumored to be on the way, seeking to join Golden Goose whether or not they'd seen any formal job postings.
One of the men was among those who were employees of Golden Goose. "You machines should be doing this grunt work."
Lumina used a mental command to speed up her thought process for a few seconds and gain more time to think, a trick she'd come to appreciate in awkward conversations. With seemingly quick poise she answered, "Humans continue to be more efficient at some work than us. Also, most of our robots are treating the acid soil in the south fields this week."
"But you don't need us," said one of the others. "Build more robots instead. We watched you handling everything while we were hiding."
"Sure, but if we do that and your work isn't required, we don't need to pay you either." She was glad that Robin had insisted on some form of money rather than declaring all food and housing to be free of charge. Humans understood money, a little, but they still assumed that robots were wish-granting genies with infinite magic.
That shut everyone up for long enough to get them started on the day's work, but eventually one of the kids spoke up with the innocent question, "Do you get paid?"
"I don't need to." She had her electricity taken care of from the local reactor, and as a... well, in legal terms she was property of the Silver Circle trading network. As that, she had her real-world needs provided for, and it was trivial to connect to Thousand Tales and have whatever luxuries she wanted in there.
"So are you poor, or super rich?"
Is space hot or cold? somebody had asked during a school lesson she'd attended. She'd been surprised to learn that the most accurate answer was not hot nor cold nor in between, just insulated like a vacuum flask. The practical answer depended on the situation.
"Neither," she said. "My situation is different. I have to work but I can sort of have whatever I want."
"Then I'm gonna upload too, as soon as I can do it. How many credits does it cost?"
* * *
"He asked about a price in credits," Lumina said. Their robot bodies were still at work doing trivial farm tasks, while their minds met up within Lumina's personal sanctum, the waterfall cave. She was keeping her organic form lately, for Robin's sake.
Robin stared through the waterfall at Ivory Tower dimly visible beyond it. "Ludo has never accepted our toy money for payment. But the kid's got a point: if we're paying them in credits, human employees will never be able to buy their way in. I'm creating a two-class system between the people who started their own businesses and the ones who signed up to work for me directly. I might as well be paying them in skee-ball tickets."
"It's their own fault for walking into that situation. They demanded a place here."
"True, but I don't want them to be trapped in it by economic rules we made up during a crisis." He stamped the floor and called out, "Ludo, I could use your input."
A text message told them both, [I'm reachable within the Tower, you know.]
"I'm not fighting through two floors of whatever traps you've got this time just to ask a question. This is important."
Ludo appeared in a swirl of mist, pouting. "Oh, fine. What is it?" She listened to Lumina and Robin explain. "Tricky. I could start accepting credits for my services, but the cost would still be prohibitive for people who are doing manual labor. Even after the next price drop, which I expect late this year."
"It doesn't seem fair," Robin said.
She gave him a teasing look. "You have your own currency, a power grid that's mostly independent, a network of trade and favors, and your own security force."
"Only because Leopold was fricking useless about providing cops, until I gave up asking him to spend money on us."
"He's been pretty good about not killing Golden Goose, though," said Lumina.
The gamemaster said, "I have a proposition for you. I could accept your credits at some exchange rate and at least begin to give some long-term hope to residents who want to upload. In return, though, I'd want you to take the next logical step. Citizenship."
Robin said, "What do you mean? I'm not authorized to grant anybody citizenship in Cibola, and most of our residents already have it."
"In Silver Circle, I mean. Not in Cibola, not in Golden Goose specifically. And that includes granting it to AIs who choose to have their main mind-hosting done in Circle territory."
Robin's ears flicked in confusion. "But we don't rule any territory." And then he backed up a step, saying, "Deer God."
Lumina said, "What?"
"Before we met, Lumina, Ludo asked me whether I was willing to stand up to Governor Leopold if he tried to snatch away control of Golden Goose. He was maneuvering to use the Mosquito incident as an excuse." He turned toward Ludo again and said, "You've been encouraging me in that direction all along, haven't you? You said we might become 'mostly autonomous', but you imagined that at some point we'd have special money, borders, a power grid we controlled. All the things that make a country."
"What's the one thing that most defines a country, Robin?" Ludo stood with her hands clasped behind her. "If the British Isles sank into the sea but were evacuated first, would a United Kingdom still exist?"
"I don't know. In some form, maybe. They'd have their king and their people and their skills and traditions. They might find someplace new."
"Right. What we've been building up to is that you're creating a country one step at a time. With, most importantly, a shared culture."
Robin threw up his hands. "What culture? Our humans hang out in a handful of towns, arguing about this credit system and playing video games half the time even as part of their work. Edward tells me the church services are getting warped into something resembling a Cult of Ludo despite his efforts."
"I'm not too keen on the cult part, but I do have influence, and joining the ranks of the uploaded is becoming a viable life goal. If you make this deal with me it'll be available to even more people. What I ask in return is that you become one of the first leaders to openly say AIs and uploaders can be citizens."
"Why would you want t
hat? It'll mean they'll get sued and arrested for things, and I have no idea how that'd be enforced."
Lumina saw the answer first. "Because right now, most of us AIs and uploaders are stored on Ludo's own servers. You and I are exceptions and even that is a legal dodge. We're basically on 'your' server rack inside her data center. So for most of our kind, Ludo is the only real authority figure. If there's no country that accepts us openly as real people and that provides a real-world power base, then... Ludo is our goddess. We're dependent on her, and all the humans who want her help are trying to become so."
Robin shuddered. "I want to build up a prosperous little economy and act like a sane human being and responsible citizen of Cibola. But if I keep doing that, then I create a new problem. You get pushed into being the new God. You're the only one who has the convoluted legal and business structure and the technology to provide immortality and protection. You even work 'miracles' and I bet people practically pray to you already."
Ludo nodded. "They don't want to admit it, even to themselves. But when you have a human averting their eyes, clasping their hands, and asking a powerful immaterial creature to do things no human can do, what else can you call it? The trouble is, I have weaknesses. You know well what some of them are, like my data centers and my lack of infinite money."
"Then you don't mind being a god, but you want to wait until you're more powerful?"
"I didn't say that. You know I have to tread carefully. Just to give one example, people ask if I'm part of 'God's plan'. If I say no, it sounds like I'm denying their God's existence and power over me. If I say yes, I look messianic. Avoiding the question makes me mysterious; I've been focusing on that angle. So there's no policy I can take that doesn't create some sort of cult image around me."
"But you can still shape it."
