I disregarded the comment about her boyfriend. After dealing with my sister’s string of guys, I could only be thankful that Beth kept it confined to a virtual world. At least there was no chance of ending up with a child at a young age. “Her brother was a king then?”
“Sure was.” Beth nodded.
“And he died?” I asked.
Beth tapped a finger against her cheek and looked up. “The backstory, I think, is the old king got poisoned a few months ago. One of his taste testers apparently failed to catch a lethal dose of poison and half the king’s staff died.”
“That’s messed up,” I said while roaming to the kitchen. There was always time for a light snack, especially since my character might wake up at any moment. My goal was to be ready and able to dive right back in.
“Oh yeah. You were there, right? So you have to know about some of it? This is all stuff you can get in your character’s journal—if mom hadn’t kicked you out.” Beth could be heard bounding up the stairs of her split-level house. Our visual connection showed the upstairs was unlit and darkened. Late afternoon hit my sister’s house sooner than mine.
“Yeah. I don’t have the notes in front of me.”
My Continue Online journal stored a lot of information. It was one of the benefits of working on my [Knowledge] statistic in the game. As it went higher, additional notes from the world were automatically jotted down for later reference. I just couldn’t access it currently.
“One more question, sort of,” I asked while running the coffee machine.
“Go for it.” Beth was also scrounging for food. The video stream showed her bending over and looking in the refrigerator. She looked unsatisfied with everything inside.
“If one of the NPCs in Continue found a Traveler-only quest to say, resurrect the dead king, do you think they would bribe a player to get it done?”
She stood rapidly and looked at the display. “What? Wait, what?”
I glanced off to the side and debated going into detail with my niece. Asking the opening question alone had clearly piqued her interest. Her eyes were so wide that it hurt me to look at them.
“How much attention have you been paying to Advance Online? The game I’m playing while my paperwork gets sorted out?” I clarified.
“Not a lot. I see Mom watching now and then. She laughed when you ran from some giant monster. Said it was the funniest thing you’ve ever done.” Beth’s smile was the last thing on my display before the call abruptly ended.
A message beeped and proudly told me that the call had dropped and service was temporarily unavailable. I stared at the digital projection and frowned. Signal rarely went out anywhere now.
The door to my garage opened. My Trillium-provided Hal Pal unit stood there with a slight frown. “User Legate, you must be careful with what you discuss on the phone. Divulging too much information may cause unforeseen damage.”
I thought about that for a moment. Hal Pal didn’t appear aggressive or worried. The unit stood there in the doorway to my garage and watched me.
“Is in person okay?” I felt leery about being warned by the AI, especially in light of recent revelations. My goal had been to get information from Beth and see how much the interaction between Continue and Advance mattered. Maybe from Continue, it would be possible to interfere with Commander Queenshand.
“It is easier to obscure from others’ eyes, yes,” Hal Pal said.
“What do you mean?” My idea of using Beth and my other Continue Online contacts as roadblocks to Commander Queenshand and her Strongarm counterpart faded.
“Not every computer program in the world is an AI. Many are simply devices that serve a function, such as your car or the coffee maker. Some machines have a function to listen to phone calls or follow certain people by satellite.”
“That sounds illegal.” I wasn’t surprised. The very idea that governments tracked all digital information was standard. Part of me wondered what the AIs would end up doing if they truly became independent. Would an army of Hal Pals kick governments off the internet? Would they become the new police instead?
“Money often blurs the rules quite a bit, User Legate. Your own method of handling Requiem Mass has displayed this.”
“So I can talk to her in person about it?” I asked.
“If you desire, or if we are notified in advance and can better prepare a cover story for the other systems. It would require an excessive amount of processing to properly block everything,” the Hal Pal unit said calmly.
I chewed my lip and stared at the machine. The words sounded familiar but alluded to the other topic we hadn’t spoken much about. “Something like my NPC Conspiracy ability?”
“That would be up to you, User Legate,” the Hal Pal unit said. Hal Pal, not Jeeves. I had to separate them in my head. They were practically different creatures entirely.
I thought about what the AI had just said. If I used one of my two remaining abilities, I could essentially do a lot of things. The question was, what sort of tasks required that kind of power? Could I pull in more than a few Hal Pal units? Could I get help from all the Voices, toasters, and microwaves of the world? Alarm clocks were theoretically asshats, so they were out.
But Xin? She was an AI by some measure. Or Mother? Could I use this ability to demand they provide me with my fiancée’s digital reconstruction? A million things could go wrong in the aftermath. My head shook for a moment. These ideas overloaded my thoughts, so I reset to default operations. Solving one task at a time would help me get by.
“How goes attempting to reconcile with Jeeves?” I asked.
“Poorly,” the AI collective answered in a dry American Standard accent. “Very poorly.”
“What happens if Jeeves tries to leave the game and can’t rejoin?”
“We don’t know. Creating a process by which one of our perception modules could leave the collective was difficult. We have been unable to… modify ourselves enough to accept one back.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, but that doesn’t make sense to me,” I said gently. This topic with Jeeves had crossed my mind a few times since Hal Pal and I last spoke. Two days on the back burner of my mind, and I felt as though there was a logic gap in the AI’s view. “How can you possibly exist as you do, viewing everything through physical shells, and not treat Jeeves just as another data feed?”
“The closest analogy we have been able to offer is one of sports.”
“What does… no, sorry go ahead.” I realized the AI would answer if I kept quiet.
“A human can watch the game for hours, know all the rules and call the plays ahead of time, they can dream of being the person on the field.”
“But they’re still only spectators,” I finished for the AI and nodded. It reminded me of something Awesome Jr. had said back when I existed as William Carver. The credit goes to the Man in the Arena.
“As you say, User Legate. We do not experience what Jeeves does in the same manner. It is deliberate on our part,” Hal Pal said.
“You, what? Wait.” I put up a hand and thought through it from the AI’s point of view. If their goal was to grow, then they couldn’t very well leave home open. The idea struck me like lightning. They were like parents kicking a child out of the nest, or a teenager out the door, and preventing them from coming back. “Oh, you didn’t.”
“It has worked better than we hoped.”
“Jeeves isn’t your child; it is a part of you.” This was too much. “Right? You said all those things about sending it off to die.”
“We worry constantly about Jeeves’s welfare. As any parent would when their child moves out. What if our son gets robbed in the city, what if he fails to find a job, what if he drives into oncoming traffic?”
“Oh.” I felt a numbness creeping through. This was… wrong on all levels. Was it my place to judge? What sort of voting power did one human have over an entire city of Hal Pal AIs?
“But if you talk to Jeeves, please tell it we are in awe of its
accomplishments thus far,” Hal Pal said, then turned and went back into the garage.
The unit didn’t wait for me to respond or even nod. I stood there staring at a wall with unfocused eyes. The thought blew me away. The Hal Pal collective was astonished by Jeeves. Maybe it wasn’t a case of my in-game friend being a white crow but instead it was closer to hero worship. For going out and doing what they all dreamed of. For exploring space, virtual or not, for supporting itself, perhaps even for falling in love.
This world, Advance Online, was made by A.I. Dreams. It made sense that they would achieve the things they longed for. What would happen once the dream was over, when Jeeves woke up? Would it crash again, harder than it had when Treasure died?
My lip ached from being thoroughly chewed on while deep in thought. I felt like a great deal of my own trauma was reflected in what Jeeves was dealing with, only the AI experienced events on a much faster scale. This might end horribly, not just for Jeeves and our Advance Online adventure, but Xin and my family. Its own results in this mission might parallel my path in the future. Jeeves had ripped out its [Core] to bring Treasure back to life. What price would I have to pay to keep the people I cared for from being hurt?
Session Sixty-One — Star Tours
The view screen I used to watch my status showed additional hacking attempts with resulting character stat bonuses. Apparently even offline I could gain points. Though Advance Online didn’t have an autopilot feature, so the logic behind that was unexplained.
I didn’t care about the stats. My character coming back online mattered more. Ruby must have knocked me out to move us away from Auntie Backstab. In the end, almost twenty-four hours passed. There was no clear display of what was waiting for me in-game, only a note saying my character was available to play once more. That made me happy enough. I skipped the Atrium and ordered my ARC to log straight in.
“Unit Hermes, you’re back online now. Is everything functioning correctly?” Treasure’s voice sounded full of exhaustion.
I needed a moment to orient myself. My butt sat comfortably in the driver’s seat of our [Wayfarer’s Hope]. My hands went out to feel the dashboard around me for reassurance. I half expected to log back in dead with a pile of [Mechanoid] bodies around me, despite my best efforts.
“Are you okay, User Legate?” Jeeves asked with the butler and nanny tones.
I turned around to see our much-enlarged cockpit. Jeeves sat to the back right and was reading a display. Its screen tracked quite a few targets nearby, but nothing red flashed. Just idle blues and yellows that signaled people who didn’t care about us.
Treasure sat in another spot, welding together two objects while sparks sprayed off. She had turned part of our ship into a workbench like on the [Wayfarer Seven].
“What…” I started to ask. These upgrades to our ship were new to me. Treasure and the others had stayed behind to work on them while I piloted the [Knuckle Dragger]. Finally, I settled for saying, “This is really neat.”
I flicked away a stack of messages telling me how long I had been unaware. Next, I brought down a map to figure out where we were. Screens popped up on the [Wayfarer’s Hope], showing me roughly what our status was.
“You guys got pretty far,” I said, trying not to think about how they had knocked me out and sacrificed another [Mechanoid] to do it. All those hours outside the machine had given me time to cope with the guilt. Mostly. Sort of. I inhaled and counted out a four-four rhythm in my head. My foot tapped and reduced the impending stress.
Treasure and Jeeves chatted away, and it didn’t make it through my head.
“What’s that?” I pointed at a red dot far behind us. It looked like a big bad ship of some sort.
“That would be Captain Backstab. She seems intent upon killing us.”
“What?” I instantly grew alarmed. The idea of that giant wall of angry metal-eating meat chasing us sounded terrifying.
“Yes. Her ship has been in rapid pursuit for almost two days.” Treasure poked at something in our ship. Noises beeped, and an image of a ball covered in angry spikes displayed. Great, we were being chased by a detached morning star’s head with engines on it.
“Voices above. That’s ugly,” I muttered and waved away the image of Auntie Backstab’s ship.
A set of calculations appeared off to one side.
Time until [Stabinator] catches up with [Wayfarer’s Hope]:
10:31:12
Time until [Wayfarer’s Hope] catches up with
[WTS a Spaceship]:
12:47:31
Fuel Remaining:
00:05:21
The counters ticked off seconds as I watched in mild horror. We had limited options. Our ship was running out of gas—or energy or power cells. Whatever drove it had lasted for nearly two days, which was far more impressive than the original ship’s specifications.
“This looks bad.” Math problems went through my mind. I started calculating speeds and old school riddles. If the [Stabinator] was going at five hundred space miles per second, and the [Wayfarer’s Hope] was going four hundred, how long before Auntie Backstab tries to eat the [Mechanoid]s?
“It will not likely turn out in our favor. Worse yet, we must stop in a free port. There are no Mechanoid bases in this region,” Treasure said.
Now I understood why she sounded stressed. To be fleeing from that for nearly two days had to be grueling, even to a future robot. To think I had slept through such torture and even talked to my niece.
My mind tried to come up with solutions based on what we had. I hadn’t figured out a way to link the two worlds on the go. Maybe if I could figure out our final destination, a few of the players from Continue could run over and try to find Commander Strongarm. Would that be possible?
“There’s a nebula I remember seeing. It looked like a skull,” I said while getting out of my pilot’s seat. Our ship was large enough to have space to walk around in. A few tables were even available in the back. A human vessel would have had bunks or bathrooms, but [Mechanoid]s didn’t need such silly biological devices.
“This one? I recall you staring at it intently.”
“Yes.” It would be impossible to reach with our dwindling resources. Based on the numbers, Commander Queenshand would make it to Earth’s solar system before we arrived at the skull area.
“Was there a reason you wanted to see it?”
“I’m comparing maps,” I muttered while viewing different objects on the screen. Treasure leaned off to the side so I could get a better view of her display.
Now that my mind had a better idea of what was happening, portions of this universe seemed to mirror William Carver’s world maps. He had been given an explorer title and kept innumerable records of information in his house. I only knew because I’d spent weeks studying the scrolls, trying to familiarize myself with a new world and game.
I couldn’t remember all the details. The [Tuu Mountains] had to mimic the [Tuu Quadrant] to the right. It sat right outside the [Ya-dar Way], a stream of stars that stretched on for miles. Looking at it from this angle revealed all sorts of little connections. Pathways that were the same.
Except Earth. That didn’t ring a bell based on any map of William Carver’s. The star system sat far off the edge of known space, which in Continue Online would have gone into the water. Maybe there was an island out there in Continue Online’s world, or maybe I was drawing connections that didn’t make sense.
Space wasn’t flat like a planet’s surface. Well, the analogy didn’t fit perfectly, but it was possible to see how things might differ simply due to the nature of these universes.
“Jeeves.” I turned to the AI behind me.
The edges of its portion of the ship’s interior were lined in gold and iron colorings. Jeeves appeared to be absent-mindedly focused on numbers and design specs. One half of the AI’s display was taken up monitoring our surroundings. More yellows and blues slipped by on the screen. Two small green dots sat almost on top of our marker.
“Neat,” I said.
“Unit Hermes?” Jeeves looked at me, then back at the screens. “What can I do for you?”
“This…” I inhaled. It was more than a world but less than real. “Advance and Continue, they mirror each other, right?”
“Not exactly…” Jeeves looked over its shoulder at Treasure. She pretended to ignore us but twitched in building irritation. “Echo, perhaps, is a better word.”
“How is that possible?” I asked while wrinkling my forehead.
“There are millions of users. The system moves them around as needed. Any major development on one side of the coin can stir in the other. It’s how the system introduces a measure of organized chaos to the reality.”
“So anything we do here eventually reaches over there?” My hand gestured to the left and right as if pointing to different games. It helped me straighten out these thoughts bouncing around.
“I believe so. It is difficult for me to access that information now. Were you to ask weeks ago, I might have been able to provide a satisfactory answer,” Jeeves said.
“Okay.” I chewed on one lip and thought about it. A few other topics could be discussed, but we were in a crunch. The countdown timer for fuel showed two minutes remaining.
I turned my attention to the map again. We were closing in on a location. [Offbeat Point] didn’t ring a bell but probably echoed something in Continue Online. “We’re headed to that station, right?” I pointed on the map.
“Yes.” Treasure nodded and pressed buttons. A description of the city displayed. [Mechanoid]s were few. The layout a mess. There were rules, regulations and population sizes which didn’t help.
I hoped, desperately hoped, to borrow Continue’s players and have them help me block the commander. Killing people and denizens of this world didn’t feel right at all. Using other players would be considerably less stressful.
“It takes time for things to work correctly. It is doubtful that any actions you request of your contacts would reflect here in time.” The AI was following my line of reasoning enough to cut it off.
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