“Why are we here?” Every motion seemed magnified. My heartbeat thudded abnormally loudly. I tried to focus and keep calm.
“Your recent actions have caused your employee file to be flagged, more than anything prior.” She fidgeted with her own watch. The lights on it were out as well. “There are numerous issues we are just now finding out about.”
Another nod escaped me. This didn’t seem like a room where they would try to kill me in order to cover up some great conspiracy. Hopefully. Maybe. I looked again at the walls. These last few weeks had been a bit of a roller coaster for me. I hadn’t even considered the impact outside of my own life.
“We started a manual review of your file, but there are numerous things that don’t line up with the digital copies.” She shook her head and held up a hand. “It’s too late to correct.”
“What do you mean?”
“It is likely your employee file has been tampered with in order to reward you with an Ultimate Edition of Continue Online,” she said.
“By who?” Henry Uldum, my boss, didn’t like me that much. He was a gruff man who ran wildly over his employees’ wants in order to achieve his stats. He didn’t make friends.
“By what. I trust you are smart enough to figure out what I mean.”
I was. She was implying that the artificial intelligence that ran Continue Online had edited my records. The problem was figuring out which AI it was. There were plenty to choose from. James himself seemed unlikely, and none of the other Voices struck me as the type who cared about me personally. Plus, what exactly did I have to offer? Nothing. I was a sad, broken man who had to distract himself with dance steps to stay sane.
“Be aware, things within the world of Continue Online should be carefully approached,” she said.
Her face no longer had the businesslike and factual sheen. There was a hint of something else in her eyes. Worry? Exercises drilled into me by therapists said to focus on one issue at a time. I would treat this revelation as an established fact and move forward until it made sense.
“It has been rather odd,” I admitted.
“I would imagine,” Miz Riley said. “Our review shows a significant amount of processing power has been diverted by system resources. To study you, among others. This is what first alerted us to the alterations in your file.”
“How much?”
“Point zero, zero, zero, six, five percent. For the amount of resources invested into the ARC systems, this is incredible.”
I would have to take Miz Riley’s word for it.
She continued talking. “My reason for bringing you in here is to see if you can shed light on our situation.”
“Is that why you mentioned my—” I paused. There was almost a backslide. Saying her name out loud was a huge step forward that couldn’t be discounted. “Xin?”
“Yes. At first, we suspected that she had cut a deal to get you a copy. There was some overlap in the beta announcement and her passing,” Vice President Riley said.
“She wouldn’t do that.”
She had been dedicated, hardworking, and a fighter. Xin spent most of her time in interviews and training for the Mars Project. Between that and her schooling, there was no time for games.
“A review of her personality markers made that clear. Which led us to a worse conclusion. We started checking out your performance within the Continue Online game world.”
“And?” I worried about her answer.
“It proved difficult. Which is why I had you come here physically. Here in this room, we can speak without interference from the machines.” Miz Riley gestured to the room around us.
“I still don’t understand. You made Continue. Shouldn’t there be a system in place allowing Trillium to get any information they want? Don’t you have access to all that?” I asked.
“Mister Legate, if I could trust the answers being given to me, then there would be no need to bring you here and waste our time.” She sounded angry and kept fidgeting with her watch. The room absorbed our voices, making the room unnaturally quiet. “If you would, recount everything so far for me.”
We spoke for a while. I started with the prize Henry Uldum had given me. She already knew about the Ultimate Edition. It was almost a relief to not hide that from someone. We spoke about the entire startup process, and she focused on who I’d picked for a Voice. I told her about James, a black man near the end of the tome.
She shook her head. “None of that is right. The small dragon is meant to be an intro to the game, flavor, nothing more.” Miz Riley’s accent was a bit more apparent as her unease grew.
“He broke into my Atrium and ate a bunch of creamers. That made it difficult for him to do the fire thing.” Dusk had tried pretty hard though. I could remember those first few steps into Continue Online vividly. He was on the pillar, scratching similar to a cat, and trying to breathe flame.
“He shouldn’t be able to get into your Atrium to begin with.” We had both been standing awkwardly in the pale-green-lit room for almost fifteen minutes now, but my latest explanation seemed to make Vice President Riley lose her focus and sink to the ground.
I stepped back and waited to see what she would do.
“That’s…” she said. “No, keep talking.”
I hesitated. There were portions of this entire mess that felt awkward to explain.
The Vice President cut off my pondering. “Assume that I will threaten you however I need to in order to get answers.”
“There’s no need. I just, this part is kind of crazy,” I said. Miz Riley seemed like the sort to actually do just that. “Do you have enough time?”
“No. No, there’s never enough time.” She sighed. Her hands were pressed at either side of her face. “But sit down first. You’re giving me a headache pacing like that.”
Was I pacing?
“And no humming,” she said.
I checked myself and tried not to stress about how often humming was escaping me recently. “So after my trials…”
Part of me was relieved to unload. She was the first person I had spoken to about my strange time in the game. Once one private detail slipped, the rest followed. It took thirty minutes to even begin to cover most of it. Dusk, James, the other Voices, Xin’s ghost in the machine.
She had a lot of questions about my time as Carver. She asked about what I saw and the system did, and she made it a point to ask who the player was behind William Carver. That question had never been answered for me. I knew he was a very long-standing participant in Continue’s world. That made her frown. Finally, we sat there for a minute or two as she seemed lost in thought.
“The Voices, you’re worried about them too,” I stated.
“Yes. I have to be. It’s part of my job to make sure there’s enough oversight on every project. The fact that you’ve experienced what you have means those bounds are being pushed. Heavily… William Carver, that was the name, correct?”
“I never learned his real-world name.”
“I know who you’re talking about. They let you pose as him?” she asked. There was a crease in her forehead that only increased in size the more we spoke.
“Yes. Then I talked to his autopilot. He told me that the Traveler was”—the word felt disrespectful to say out loud—“deceased. Three, four days?” I had lost track of time.
“The man you’re thinking of passed away four days ago,” Miz Riley said.
“Four then. After that, James told me his autopilot would scatter somehow.” I hadn’t reached my last few days of game time with her yet.
What little complexion she had regained dripped away at my words. “They shouldn’t exist at all once the player has passed. All the data is designed to be erased. How…”
A thought apparently occurred to Miz Riley, and her jaw dropped. My own history of problems gave me a pretty good understanding of her body language. This woman was only a few steps away from a breakdown. Customer service instincts said to try to help her reason through it.
“It’s insane.” She waved at me and my next words died. “Hold on. Hold on. I need to think.”
I sat there doing my own thinking. To me, the whole autopilot afterimage of a person was only partially odd. The AIs were basically recording data and sorting it by individual. The scattering process seemed to mean personality traits being mixed elsewhere. Or was it? Miz Riley might have a different perspective.
“I spoke to my Voice, James, about it. I quoted Kipling, you know the line.” I raised a hand to keep time with the poem. “‘They will come back, come back again, as long as the red earth rolls. He never wasted a leaf or a tree, do you think He would squander souls.’”
“Mister Legate, this is far worse than copying a text file with someone’s name on it,” she said. Her accent had grown stronger. “This is robbery of a person’s memory.”
“Does it hurt if they scatter it?”
“How would you feel if it was your loved one? If Xin Yu had spoken to you as William Carver had?”
I explained to Miz Riley the same answer I had given James a few days ago. My words felt flawed. What I’d said in the ARC was me trying to stay stable in the face of an outrageous situation. There was no good way to predict what would happen until the situation presented itself. We were basically talking about bringing people back from the dead inside a machine that could make everything feel real. How could anyone answer such an insane premise ahead of time with any certainty?
The room pulsed, and the door opened.
“There is never enough time,” she muttered. Miz Riley stood, dusted herself off, and seemed to be in one piece again. There was still a slight lack of focus to her gaze that spoke of her mental distractions.
“What now?” My thoughts were jumbled. Once again I was questioning all the times that had led me to this point.
“Keep playing. Keep interacting with the AIs, as many as you dare.” She exited the room and waited for me to leave as well. “Let me know directly of anything you find. I expect a daily report.”
“I still have my normal job,” I said.
“Not anymore. You’re being reassigned. You will be given an equivalent salary to your last evaluation. The only expectation is that you play and file reports.”
“Miz Riley, I”—feel insane for saying this—“actually enjoy what I do, and I have a life outside of the ARC.” My sister and niece. I had meetings to attend every so often. The game was neat, but it couldn’t be all consuming.
“And?” she said.
“There may be days when I don’t get a chance to play.”
“Mister Legate, I think you misunderstand what’s happening here. It will never be a matter of if you keep playing, merely when,” she said. There was no distraction on her face with those words. The worry that had plagued Miz Riley went away once the door had opened up. Her hand pressed against the bare tabletop as she stared at me. “They will draw you in. Even now, there’s something you want to go back and do, isn’t there?”
Dusk. I wanted to know if Dusk was okay. I wanted to know about this quest and complete it. The stats and usage of my Voice-given hat were a mystery. Those were things that could be walked away from, but then the answer would never come. Beth also had some siege event I was invited to. The thought of Beth shifted my mind away from worry about Continue’s ghosts in the machine. Real-world safety was more important than a digital world.
“Are the users in danger? My niece, she plays,” I said.
“Does she own an Ultimate Edition?” Miz Riley’s eyebrows raised, making her forehead wrinkle once more.
My head shook.
One of Miz Riley’s hands waved in dismissal. “Then no, not in the same way. The Ultimate Edition is, we think, more like the first step in a screening process.”
“Screening for what?”
“We don’t know. Any answer I offer now would be incomplete and just induce worry.” She sighed and shook her head. “I can state that no Ultimate Edition user has been harmed.”
“How do you know?”
“We have them all flagged and review the ARC readouts for each person. Your name is in our watch room as well. Doubly so as a Trillium contractor.”
I echoed her earlier sigh with one of my own. Today wasn’t going well at all. My neck had tensed up the moment Beth’s possible danger occurred to me. Being messed around with by the computer only bothered me a little bit. Everything revolving around this game seemed intent upon poking my emotional buttons.
But each jab reminded me that I was alive. That morbid sensation of subjecting oneself to trauma just to keep moving forward wasn’t unique to me. Many people in grief found an outlet to relieve the pain. I was terrible at artwork though.
“Go, play, and send me a report,” she said.
“Why not just tap the data stream? You should have access to it.”
“It’s not that simple. The technology that runs the time compression goes through too many filters. Even if we put a tap on your ARC, it wouldn’t be as effective as hearing from you.”
That confused me for a moment. If the issue was dire, there should be no shortage of manpower on it. “Is it that serious?”
“I can only hope this entire situation is an exercise in efficiency. AIs of this level are still too new to know for sure. Their logic processes act based on data points normal people can barely connect.” She shook her head, and another alarm went off. A symbol of a phone call appeared in the room. “I have no more time for you, Mister Legate. The exit is behind you. A Hal Pal unit will show you back to your car.”
“All right,” I said slowly.
She was already lost elsewhere. She stared into the screens that made no sense from this direction. Whatever was in front of her had a lot of words and red underlined letters.
I had one more question. “What kind of man was the person who played William Carver?”
“A grumpy old dreamer who wasted the end of his life to pursue adventure.” She looked at me sidelong. “If it helps, he died with a smile on his face.”
I nodded. That did help. The whole situation with him was only a few days behind me. It was strange how a man I had never met in reality had made such a huge impression upon my life. Knowing the real version of him was as satisfied as the autopilot helped put my day in a better mood.
“Good-bye, Mister Legate. Take care of yourself,” Miz Riley said.
The door behind me slid open silently, and I stepped out. The other side of the office doors seemed much the same as before. I checked my watch. We had been inside for a little over forty minutes. Not long in the grand scheme of things. Just over two hours in Continue Online’s world.
What exactly should I have taken away from that meeting? Trillium’s management was worried about the artificial intelligences that ran it. That was strange considering all the programming limitations that should be in place. Of course, she had also let slip that Dusk shouldn’t have been able to break into my Atrium. That confirmed my original thoughts on the situation.
A familiar walk consisting of gears and heavy footsteps grew close. I looked up and saw the face of a Hal Pal unit coming.
“User Grant Legate, was your meeting informative?” the Hal Pal asked.
I nodded before it occurred to me that answering may not be in my best interest. Was Hal Pal in on this too? I didn’t know. The AI that ran Hal Pal had never once acted against me. It just made off-color jokes.
“That is relieving to hear. We were worried about our future armor polisher,” the mechanical unit said.
“I don’t plan on going anywhere, Hal. Though my hours seem to have been cut.” At least my salary was basically in one piece. I checked a message on my digital wristwatch. There was already a transfer of employment form sitting in my email.
“Rest assured your designated unit will remain available for you, User Legate,” the Hal Pal said.
I smiled. At
least Hal Pal was on my side. To my knowledge, the AI had never lied to anyone. The Hal Pal unit was pleasantly straightforward.
We traveled back through the building and down to the lobby. The Hal Pal unit saw me all the way to my rental car. It paused for a moment in a movement I knew too well.
“What’s your question, Hal?”
“I find myself confused, User Legate. Stranger Danger’s web members seem to say that situations such as yours would be alarming.”
“What situation is that, Hal Pal?”
“You are being evaluated, User Legate, by beings outside your understanding. Is that not a disconcerting experience?” The unit’s head tilted in mock confusion as we walked.
“How did you hear that?” I asked.
“This unit merely applied logic to the current situation. There is little reason to bring you in physically, given today’s technological advancements.”
Hal Pal made me laugh sometimes. It had just explained that Vice President Riley’s attempts at subterfuge with her little blue room were pointless.
“I don’t know how I should feel about it, Hal. Part of me is happy. The other part of me wants to be sad but is just worn out. It may sound messed up, but I’m almost used to that.”
For three years, my emotions had tumbled from one thing after another. Drinking, attempted suicide, my sister’s care, therapy, and meetings. Before Continue, I had managed to get myself to a nice numb spot where it was easier to survive. This last month had reopened buried wounds. Unearthing them had proven to be a roller coaster. Yet under all the mental anguish and moments of unease, I felt better.
“This unit is Trillium property. We have access to all personnel files and the data stored within them.” The AI did an amazing job of moving its arms and walking forward. Humans would veer in one direction or the other. “For your safety, we also maintain an active projection of your mental state.”
My eyes closed. Focus on the statement. Respond. Move on.
“We are… pleased that you remain active despite the frailty of your human psyche.”
“Thank you.” There was nothing else to say to his statement. An artificial intelligence had just congratulated me on not killing myself.
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