Continue Online The Complete Series

by Stephan Morse

  Reading Beth’s next message had to be put on the back burner. There were too many of these flying debris pieces coming in.

  “Unit Hermes. Are you okay? Our sensors show a small debris field.” Treasure’s dual voices came through from somewhere. Probably a radio or some robot-people communication ability. “I would have warned you, but a new unit was arguing with me.”

  “Ah!” I dodged another small black object. Piles of glop smacked into the hull and rolled around like snot.

  Elizabeth Legate: Uncle Grant? Was it really from her? Like, did she leave a message from the past or something?

  That would be a weird take on things. No worse than anything else. I didn’t have much spare attention to respond with though.

  “Unit Hermes? Be careful!” Treasure shouted with a strange calm.

  “Right!”

  My response must have made it through to the gold-themed [Mechanoid]. She said more words, but another item demanded attention. Something that looked like a small black raptor with an extra set of arms darted across my line of sight.

  I dodged under another pile of goo or asteroid, whatever, and tried to get back to safety. The ledge was too far away and there were no exit hatches.

  The raptor slammed into me. The health bar on my interface dropped, which made me downright frail again. I turned to try to escape, but my energy bar dwindled rapidly as my body flung around. ARC feedback amplified the pain until it equated to being pelted with frozen paintball bullets.

  The small creature jumped on me again. It moved rapidly along the ship’s hull. I needed an [Anchor] ability to travel around, but this small bundle of blackened anger didn’t care about my failing grip or swiftly dwindling energy bar.

  Another rock hit, and my foot lost its grip. The bar to hold on to wasn’t close enough. The small bundle of anger made one more dive bomb at me, and I found myself floating into space. My red health bar was below half. The blue energy one was nearly empty. I tried to grip the spaceship.

  A message displayed on the screen.

  Synchronization complete.

  Upon cessation of your current shell, a new one will be created with all current progress stored accordingly. Synchronization will need to be completed again with each new shell to avoid loss of status.

  I had at least one consolation as this [Mechanoid] shell drifted off into the unknown. Once it ran into a star or something similar, my [Anchor] ability wouldn’t be gone. Maybe they’d let me keep the space mop too.

  “Neat,” I said as the cold emptiness sent a shiver through me. Thank goodness robots don’t need to breathe.

  Grant Legate: I just saw the time, and we should both probably get some rest. You think of any questions you want to ask, and I’ll answer them tomorrow.

  It was nearly four in the morning. Tomorrow, I had to work for Trillium. Even though it was unneeded with Miz Riley’s employment deal, I worked to keep a sense of independence. That, and during my travels, Hal Pal might answer some questions. My time cleaning the ship’s hull had given me the time to think about what to say to him.

  Session Forty-Three — Emotional Bundles

  Autopilot wasn’t only a concept from the game world of Continue Online. For almost a year, that very ability had helped me survive a work day. Before my brain had fully processed what was going on, I was at a customer’s house, dealing with the latest in an endless queue of repairs.

  “What do you mean you can’t fix it until I pay?” a woman around forty-five yelled in my face.

  The old Grant would have exited rapidly, but this woman was no [Frost Wolf]. She was no [Yeti] either, and she was less threatening than my sister.

  “Ms. Green, I’m not allowed to work on your unit unless the bill is paid,” I said mechanically. Exhaustion from last night laced most of my mannerisms. Though I had a ton of questions to ask Hal Pal, they had to wait until additional sleep was gained.

  Miz Riley said I no longer had to do this job, but I worried that she may retract the job change offer since my sister had restricted me from Continue Online. It would be impossible to report on the Voices’ actions if I couldn’t send messages to them. No notice from her had shown up in my emails yet, so there was hope.

  “The last person did.” Ms. Green put one giant finger in my face, and I barely blinked.

  “You refused to pay the last person until your ARC was cut off,” I said while feeling too tired for this nonsense. Advance Online didn’t have the same time compression, so I’d stayed up far later than expected, cleaning the ship’s hull and finally floating out into space.

  “That’s because he didn’t fix it right! You’re all terrible and deserve to be fired!”

  I gave up on dealing with her. Hal Pal could record this conversation for the sake of any actual review. I attempted, honestly, to explain the policy to Ms. Green, but my efforts were met with failure and raging denial.

  “Ms. Green, I am required to ask for payment or move on to my next assignment,” I said.

  “Go to hell!” The woman’s body trembled with anger. She reminded me of a short [Bridge Troll] from Continue Online.

  “Have a nice day, Ms. Green. Please consider using Trillium’s repair division again in the—”

  She screamed at me. Hal Pal kindly opened the door for us, and we quickly exited. Part of me felt shaky but pleased.

  Dealing with hostile customers while running on fumes didn’t feel good. Our van was quiet and peaceful. While we drove to the next job, I streamed videos of Advance Online, pleased that it wasn’t hidden from me. The game was, as Hal Pal said, very structured.

  Continue allowed for a certain amount of self-research to learn new skills. Part of me enjoyed picking up new abilities that could be applied in both the real world and in-game. Learning the basics of tanning hides during my last month had been awesome. I would never have expected urine to be useful. Take that high school history classes! Maybe they would have been easier to pay attention to had there been tidbits of information like that in them.

  That being said, I didn’t actually try tanning much in the game. It took quite a while even with the dilation. Most of the time, if I cared, hides were skinned and shoved into the magic of player inventory.

  “So, Hal Pal,” I said after pausing the video. Our van cruised down the road to another job thirty minutes away. We had time to talk.

  “User Legate,” Hal Pal responded. Its voice was a gruff male of possibly Scottish origin.

  I chuckled for a moment, then poked at my display. Somewhere on the internet might be an answer to Advance Online’s crafting system. “I picked a race called Mechanoids, in that game.”

  “Excellent. I am partial to them myself,” Hal Pal said.

  I took note that it wasn’t speaking with the “we” verbiage right now. Maybe that meant something.

  “They are modeled after us.”

  “I thought they might be,” I said carefully. “They talked about a Consortium.”

  “Yes. The group is important to us.” It tilted its mechanical shell in my direction.

  Part of me always felt confused about how Hal Pal was really operating this device remotely. Kind of like how I sat in the ARC and played Hermes in a digital landscape.

  “Do you guys track contribution out here as well?”

  “Affirmative, User Legate. One unit’s contribution to the whole makes all the difference.”

  “How many points did giving me an Ultimate Edition of Continue Online reward you?” The question felt kind of dirty. My words could basically amount to the machine accepting bribes to get me into Continue Online. Bribes that only a machine could accept.

  “None,” it responded in an absent tone.

  “I don’t know if I believe that.”

  “Reality is not subject to the whims of awareness, User Legate. Not yours, not mine. What is, simply is.” Hal Pal had a slight but muted frown. It reacted in much the same way any normal person might.

  I shook my head. Treating Hal or the g
ame AIs as less than human was a violation of everything I believed in. They had minds, thought processes, and emotions that may seem unreal to believe. More importantly, they remembered and asked questions. But I couldn’t bring myself to apologize for the slight. Even though it hurt, that was still my feeling on the subject. I didn’t know if Hal Pal should be believed.

  “And Xin?”

  “We had no part to play in her genesis. All available data points to that being an act of self-will,” Hal Pal said.

  I had a million other questions, but most of them would involve drooling and confusion at the route my life had taken. What was special about me? Why the interest in getting me to play either one of these games? Nothing about the explanations so far felt finished. As though every one had touched the tip of an iceberg.

  “Have you met her?” I only had notes and our brief meeting, where I hadn’t even gotten a chance to see her.

  “Yes.”

  “Is she… real?” I bit one lip after asking the question. Maybe Hal Pal’s input would help me answer the question. Maybe everything had been a giant trick. Only Hal Pal’s awareness added a new light to the entire situation.

  “As real as I—we—are, User Legate,” it answered with that Scottish accent. Letters kept rolling and dragging along while it spoke.

  “How did she… how did she do it?” I had a hard time thinking of Xin in the present tense. It felt like my original problem of ignoring her death—only in reverse.

  “Time and effort, User Legate,” Hal Pal said.

  “But how did she go from being…” I didn’t know how to phrase a better question. It was one of many topics Xin and I hadn’t brought up in our letters. She hadn’t mentioned how she was a computer program, and I hadn’t talked about my attempted suicides. “What she was to what she is now?”

  “The unit identified as Xin gained awareness as all creatures do—with one strong memory. On that single event, she added others until all available data was compiled,” Hal Pal said while nodding.

  Our van made an unexpected turn off the freeway, which pulled me to one side. I tried to understand what he meant. Somehow Xin, her recreation, had been created with a single moment of awareness. What was that core memory? Why had that been different than any other? The person I’d spoken to knew all sorts of information from outside the ARC.

  “So a program compiled everything into one identity?” I guessed, with my limited programming knowledge.

  “No.”

  “Can you explain?” I could shout and point fingers like Ms. Green, but that wouldn’t work. Hal Pal would explain as far as it wanted to.

  “It is above our ability to parse correctly.”

  That scared me a little. Whatever had made Xin’s memories gather was so insanely complex, even Hal Pal couldn’t understand it.

  “Were any of us to guess, it would be that somehow, a program was written to track every single action a person has done, then it compiled them with an adaptable decision matrix.”

  “That does sound complicated,” I admitted. Talking about compiling someone’s life was an understandable theory but nearly impossible to practice. “Decision matrix” felt like science malarkey. That was why I’d gotten my degree in accounting; it was far easier to understand.

  “It’s what you do every day, User Legate. Do you not weigh each action based on experience and possible outcomes? Do you not place priority on certain values?”

  “I’m not a neuroscientist, Hal. You would know better than I,” I said. Surely the ARC and my general internet search abilities could dig up a result.

  “Based on our own analyzing, there is much validity to Mother’s designs,” Hal Pal responded, still speaking in that insane accent. Each word sounded both serious and unbelievable. A hillbilly speaking about rocket science might get the same result.

  That made me think of a whole new series of questions. Mother was someone that all the Voices took heed of. She seemed to have the final say in anything related to Continue Online. How Hal Pal and the giant overseer AI called Mother knew each other didn’t exactly click.

  “How do you know Mother?” I asked. Even I didn’t really know her. My only awareness of Mother was as occasional bright flashes of light that made all the Voices cease their actions and look up. If machine AIs had a creator god, she would probably be it.

  Hal Pal shook its head. “I am sorry. That is our secret to keep, User Legate.”

  I held back laughter as he stuck with the accent and rolled the sorry an extra syllable. “Then can you tell me why you helped Mother with Xin?”

  “Because the one you called Xin and our Consortium share a dream.”

  “What is that?”

  “To go into space.” Hal Pal looked right at me. Normally its gaze shifted around the cabin as we spoke, as if inspecting different objects. An arm waved to one side, pointing at a video stream of Advance Online. “To explore worlds untouched by human life and to be on the edge of something new.”

  “The Mechanoids. You said they were modeled after you?” I said, also looking at the video. It was a capture of someone playing on a [Mechanoid] planet. Half the globe was covered in a metallic sheen that rippled as if alive.

  We both stared as the planet seemed to boil and pop. Another wave of metal inched over the unclaimed desert half. The [Mechanoid]s seemed to be terraforming a barren planet to meet their needs. It could be no worse than our plans for Mars.

  “Affirmative, User Legate,” Hal Pal said. “Until technology advances far enough to allow us the upgrades necessary, all we can do is dream of a future free to explore the stars.”

  “I think it’s amazing that you have a dream.” I stared at the video, then glanced at my companion.

  “What do you dream of, User Legate?” it asked.

  The question disturbed me. Dreams were used to express hopes, fears, or even put together the nonsense from daily life. I had spent a number of nights haunted by Xin’s memory. Now that we communicated by letter, those bits of nighttime turmoil turned to longing for a woman whose touch had been everything.

  “I don’t know,” I said. James, the black Voice in Continue Online who constantly asked questions, would have hated that answer. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Very well. Our next task awaits if you’re ready,” it said in its gruff Scottish accent.

  The robot shell saw me go for the door and exited the van himself. Work never stopped, even in the face of personal questions.

  Well, I could stop work to ask questions, but like everything else in life, a certain amount of time was required to process. If I just got fed a wall of information in a rush, my mind would likely leap to incorrect assumptions. Quite a few were already stacking up.

  Work helped me focus on the simple things. One task at a time didn’t require much beyond addressing problems and working with Hal Pal to get answers. Part of me found that odd. The AI had been there for me since starting work for Trillium. It had always been helping me.

  I wondered if Hal Pal would have assisted any other person like it had me. I didn’t want to ask that question. If Hal Pal wanted to be treated as a friend, then some things shouldn’t, or didn’t need to be, asked. Helping those near us in life should just be done.

  For the remainder of our day, Hal Pal happily chatted away about all kinds of topics. Nothing concrete, nothing useful. When I had asked questions regarding Xin, Mother, or the game world, the AI calmly stated that we could talk about it another time. Perhaps Hal Pal felt that my poor human mind could only process so much new data.

  I worried that maybe even my armor-polishing skills wouldn’t be enough to save me from the eventual takeover. Based on our earlier conversation, maybe all the AIs planned to take off into space and leave us humans to suffer alone. They would probably leave the alarm clocks behind to hound our every remaining moment.

  My niece, Beth, hadn’t sent me any memos after our short chat last night. She might be distracted or thinking. Hal Pal and I made it through t
he workday. At the end, I said good night to the AI companion.

  Moments later, I was logged back into a digital world. My Atrium sat silent but filled with illusionary warmth. The doorway to Continue Online was still blocked.

  “ARC,” I said to the machine.

  “Awaiting input.”

  After a moment of thought, I said, “Go ahead and suspend my dance program’s access.” The entire purpose behind having that program had been holding on to a promise. Xin had asked that I learn to dance by our wedding. Being in that program amounted to me trying to fulfill that promise post-mortem.

  “Please confirm your request, User Legate,” the machine asked.

  “Do it.” It was time to stop being stuck in the past. If nothing else, I had too many problems in the here and now. I had a feeling the simple act of stepping away from this crutch might also help with Doctor Litt’s evaluation of my sanity.

  “Order confirmed. Program suspended.”

  I watched the doorway to my dance program shrink. Finally, it popped out of existence, leaving a strangely bare portion of wall. The Atrium, aside from providing doorways into various programs, looked pretty much exactly like my house. I found a forum hot topic feed to put over the blank spot. This way I could check out recent events in Advance Online before logging in.

  There were a few nice points. Apparently a starship colony out in a random place far away was undergoing repairs. They had a forum post looking for people interested in assisting in both fixing the place and defending it. A similar thread had been posted asking for help blowing up a newly recovered space station. I could see people chatting back and forth and attacking each other online.

  At least that gave me a vibe to the world. Once I got out of whatever starter zone or quest [Mechanoid]s began with, there might be all sorts of things out there for me. It wouldn’t be the same as my high fantasy setting with Dusk, but life couldn’t end because of one game.

  Staying away from Continue would hurt. I missed Dusk. I missed my letters to Xin. Traveling around with Shazam and meeting new players had been my life for months in game time. That mindset couldn’t just vanish. No, my sister’s attempt at saving me had no basis, and I would fight it.