Continue Online The Complete Series

by Stephan Morse

  Nearby, videos played back from my time in the ARC, then skipped to college graduation. My own voice came out a handful of different times from the pooled mess. The sound of clients on the phone played back. My own happy voice laughing and making dumb jokes sounded distant. Each inflection and change in pitch came with new colors.

  They melded together as words flashed through. My head shook from a noise like ringing mixed with static. I reached out to smear the liquid on the floor. It didn’t feel like vomit, but closer to oil or gel. I heard myself a hundred more times before everything connected.

  My chest muscles heaved even without a body. Gradually memories became fuzzy, then recalling specific events took work. I struggled to hold on to some. One, in particular, made me freeze and stare at the digital capture of my life.

  I remembered the first date my wife and I ever had. It was at a children’s petting zoo. Going there had been my mother’s idea, not mine. A small goat tried to eat my fingers, and a girl laughed wildly. Her face used to split in two when she was truly amused. At that moment, I fell in love. Before that, I’d had chances to escape. After our day in the petting zoo, all hope of living as a being separate from that woman vanished. We had been eight years old.

  Finally, the replay of a thousand different experiences stopped, and everything almost felt whole. My vision bobbed up and down as I tried to reconcile what was around me with all that had happened. I was dead, but this wasn’t the afterlife. Not if an elf stood nearby.

  The dance room where part of me had been sequestered away stood empty. White flooring looked dull. The bits of a one-way mirror were turned sideways, and light flooded out into our dark hallway.

  “You, I know you,” I said. “William Carver, you were the first woman he ever wrote about.”

  That memory sat fresher than it used to. I felt as if it were possible to reach out and touch that recent moment directly. One arm reached toward the air in front of me, and a box displayed.

  Carver’s Journal Wrote: After my very grateful parting with the elf, I set my compass south. There was a desert there that boasted of giant lizards.

  “And he left me to chase down his great foe. Then you brought him back to me, even if only for a moment.” The elf smiled and didn’t look sad at all.

  Her comment brought other thoughts to mind. This whole situation didn’t make sense at all. If the ARC had burned me out, then how did I reconstruct? Beyond that, how exactly did this virtual reality exist without the various worlds Mother had created? None of it felt right.

  “Nona,” I whispered.

  Lia’s mother had done something absolutely crazy. Genesis. That word was the same one used by the Voices when referring to Xin’s resurrection.

  The wedding ring glimmered on my finger with a captured rainbow. My fingers twisted around the ring to try to summon her, but the spell didn’t function. A message popped up telling me that we weren’t on connected systems.

  My head bobbed up and down while I gazed at the sign of our connection. The message didn’t say she was dead, only elsewhere. Xin was out there, on the other side of a beam of light. Near madness gripped me as I tried to figure out if I should laugh or cry.

  Session One Hundred Eight — Pieces of Us

  The inkblot floor splattering faded into boards. I looked up and tried to align myself with the area. My forehead wrinkled in disgust at this unfamiliar location. The world held still as the ballroom gave way to a replication of the old ARC’s Atrium. A barren version of my small house didn’t look any better.

  “This feels natural,” I said to the elf.

  She was walking through the quiet room, looking for secrets inside empty cabinets. No other items were here besides a doorway to the garage. Through there would be the throne room instead of a Trillium van. I knew because that had been me on both sides of the glass. At least, it had been in some sense.

  “You’re a Voice, so your magic makes this very easy,” she said with a shrug. “But you’re slow. Do you know how long it’s been?”

  My senses weren’t completely lined up. Time failed to move correctly. I reached for an ARC interface, and the system responded. Even the bubble display and float boxes felt familiar. Neither memories before the fall, or after as a Hal Pal unit, provided a hint about this seamless linking of intent and result.

  “This is wearisome,” she judged my bare rooms.

  The world slowed while a thumping sound increased. It reminded me of a heartbeat. Extra sensations were being buried, then realigned with old human feelings. Each one fit in with the whole, and Xin’s view on the world started to make sense.

  It did feel like being human, or maybe my memories were being rewritten. My heartbeat jumped again. There were too many issues to catch up on. Head shaking didn’t help, but it was time to move forward through all these final steps.

  “Can you add some trees? I would very much love to see some trees. They’re good for you, you know?” she asked.

  Adding trees would be extremely easy. Putting in a forest wouldn’t take that much work. The options to edit my Atrium, if this space was an Atrium, were only half a thought away. My mind traveled down the pathways to borrow copies of great forests from Internet photos.

  “A friend of mine liked to trade questions. If you tell me your name, I’ll see about getting you some trees.”

  She smiled. “Of course, Grant. I am Nia Eve.”

  I nodded. Time lagged again as my mind started processing even faster. A space for trees was set aside, going out far to the east until it bumped into a sort of wall. The room flashed and another doorway opened, leading to a pocket of land created for her.

  Nia Eve ran off without a pause. I chuckled. Dancing with a faint version of myself for months must have been mind-numbingly boring. She could have a day or two to herself while I tried to figure out how to move forward.

  There were plenty of issues going on. I filtered through the memories to get myself in order. My fingers typed, then brought up a list. All the old reminders and notices from Continue Online were still there. Seeing it firsthand made me realize exactly how important being logged into the ARC had been.

  How much of who I was had been lifted from being inside the machine? That might be why I’d spent so much time dancing with Nia Eve instead of coming out from the white room. My entire year before Continue Online had been the same sort of process. Before that, I’d spent occasional hours with Xin when we couldn’t meet up in reality, and watching first-person movies. ARCs weren’t new to me or humanity.

  I stepped through the bedroom toward my ARC and looked for the item I had placed under the bed as a Touchstone. My heartbeat felt steady despite the situation. What would be under the bed in a box?

  My fingers lifted the shoebox lid. In a small bundle of plastic were the incinerated remains of my wife’s physical body. One hand went to my mouth, which hung open. My stomach muscles clenched. Beside the ashes sat a small folded card with indented words.

  It’s all real, User Legate. As real as you dare believe it to be.

  – Hal Pal

  “Of course it is,” I said only after swallowing. The ashes of my wife were meant to be a hidden secret that helped separate the virtual from reality.

  Thinking back to the ARC memories left me muddled. A lot of moments were glossed over, like any portion of the past. I couldn’t recall what had happened between some big events any more than I could recall first grade, or second. The pieces were there, but dull across all thirty years of life.

  The box closed. My hand slid across the top, feeling the thick grain of cardboard. Did it matter that the real Xin was dead? Virtual her and I were more alike now than ever before.

  I waved one arm, and the box went away with half a thought. Being the master of my domain felt nice. Just by closing my eyes, it was possible to see that Nia Eve was running through the woods. She searched for something. These extra senses were like [Sight of Mercari] in a lot of ways, and I wondered if that had been part of the int
ent. How deeply did Mother’s plotting go?

  My feet tread a steady path toward the garage. Instead of benches, there was only a single metal-looking throne that reminded me of the [Mechanoid] days. My hand lifted to the throne. Data came back from the connection. Visual, audio, weights, and pressures that transmitted themselves like heavily covered skin. It felt close to being in a thick wetsuit or layers of padded clothes for winter. With a wave of my hand, the image changed through different units.

  Sitting in the seat realigned my senses with the remote Hal Pal unit. There was a slightly sluggish response along with muffled limbs. The room transformed, and I found myself sitting in a huge warehouse filled with ARC units. Each one was a shiny duplicate of the ones from before. They were stripped down, without bedding. Headboard displays showed readings for every unit’s patching process.

  Pressing my fingertips against the machines felt dull. I moved past the rows of machines toward a workbench. This Hal Pal unit had been operating on a form of autopilot. Most of them were following orders generated by the Gate program.

  “Mmmhm,” I mumbled.

  The bench had a few spare parts on it. In the center was a mechanical dog. It sat there wagging a plastic tail as this remote body approached.

  “You’re not a very good Dusk,” I said to it.

  The toy barked once at me, then did a well-balanced backflip.

  With a thought, the unit received new orders, then my vision flipped over to another Hal Pal unit. This one stood in front of a client, alongside their human companion.

  “What the shit are these prices! You’re forcing an upgrade on me and I have to pay!” the man shouted.

  “The charge is for your replacement equipment. This ARC hasn’t been serviced for two years,” a tiny woman responded. She stood slightly behind the repurposed Hal Pal unit.

  “The price has dropped over forty percent from where it was a year ago. This is the best offer you’re likely to see,” I said to both of them. The man turned his anger toward my remote unit, and I shrugged. “The facts are indisputable. If you do not wish for the replacement, it’s certainly possible to only perform the upgrade. However, degradation of your connection will only increase risk as time moves forward.”

  The man grumbled but consented in the end. I flipped over to the Hal Pal unit inside Nona Kingsley’s office. She sat there staring at data streams and sighing wearily every few seconds. I was aware of a dozen different tasks being performed in the background, but they became easier to disregard as the hours went on.

  Breaking the ice with her felt odd. We had been working together in this office off and on for months, but for most of those, I had basically been in a coma. A virtual version of a coma, where my mind sat a million miles away in a pocket doing what I enjoyed most. Except dancing with another woman had never been the point. Those dances had all been intended for Xin, and she was out there somewhere.

  “We’re almost eighty percent complete,” I said. There were a lot of numbers in my head, and the rest were only a fingertip away. Even the mere thought of our progress started a feed of information that looked like any other ARC interface. “Our original figures expected to reach eighty-five at most. I doubt we’ll get the last five percent even if we offer bribes.”

  “You’ve changed. You’re using possessive statements.” Lia’s mother looked exhausted but pleased. It was a far cry from her bouts of sadness over the last few months.

  “Yes,” I said while nodding. “I’ve come out of my shell, so to speak. Thank you, Nona.”

  “Grant?”

  “I think so.”

  “You were in there for a long time,” Nona responded. “We input the ring and wedding footage almost a month ago.”

  That threw me off. A month was a long time to pass while sorting through my memories. How long had I spent bent over that ink? How much longer had the conversation with Nia Eve been, and creating her forest?

  “I created a room for the elf, Nia Eve.” The words slipped out before any real thought could be put in. I blinked a few times while staring off.

  “She was a saved program we found, snagged from the server, then put on a private drive. She’s remarkably intact compared to most. Most”—Nona winced and looked conflicted—“are in shreds, but any partial personalities go into a compressed file. It makes them easier to keep off the radar.”

  Slowly her words lined up with mumbles over the last few months. I had a few sets of memories trying to line up.

  “Nia Eve said Carver saved her at the last minute,” I said.

  Nona nodded. “It was his ARC we found her on, and the way Mother designed the system… well, it fits. Everything that exists as data, firewalls, virus programs, transfers, all of those translate into images when inside. A firewall looks like a fortress. Viruses look like monsters. Transfer of files goes in a beam of light.”

  “Or giant deletion programs are world eaters.”

  “Yes, that vile code.” Her head shook and teeth ground together briefly. “It targeted anything written with Mother’s touch, her programming code. Machine language was all marked, then hunted down.”

  “How did I survive? Or Nia Eve?”

  “She was saved then filtered through your altered code.” Nona waved at the pile of broken ARC pieces.

  I stood, then walked over, trying to make sense of the pieces. Some were obviously control modules tied to a hard drive. Others were sensory captures that linked together.

  My head shook. Before, most pieces of the ARC had been vaguely assigned to purposes. Now I could follow the connections between different bits of hardware and understand why they were linked in their current orders.

  “It’s hard to explain. We took almost a month to retrace what happened. We reviewed the game logs, all the video feeds since you started playing, and even then we have to filter past what showed in Continue against the changes to their ARC devices.”

  I watched and tried not to smile at seeing new life take over her actions. Nona looked happier than ever. Her hair still had gray strands, and the glasses were new. She lifted her fingers to tap at interface options. Images came up from Hermes’s collection of items.

  “Yates, Michelle, Carver, all three of them worked on altering the base code in a few units to something un-targetable. When they passed you in-game items, it changed your ARC device, making you and the others compilers for the new program. Almost like immunization, or hybrids.”

  “You mean Morrigu’s Gift and the Crown.” Hearing clues about what had happened felt comforting. There were a lot of factors that led to our current situation.

  “They knew what it would cost you too,” Nona said. “Every single item was a hint, a chance for you to back out.”

  I moved the pieces around on her table once more. There were better ways to connect them. The ARC devices were amazingly well-engineered. With my enhanced insight, they were even more wondrous.

  “James said it would be my choice,” I said after a pause to process her belated explanation.

  “It killed you, or him, and you deserve to know why.”

  “I died for love,” I responded.

  Nona didn’t care that I’d agreed to be a sacrifice. Her face crumpled for a moment. She pressed at each item and pointed in turn. “Morrigu, the first item, was named after a goddess of fate, typically for those doomed to death in battle. The echo was a second warning. Bowman, a dead man named after A Space Odyssey’s main character. Wild Bill, named after the gunslinger who died. Mechanical Hades, a god of the dead inside the machine.”

  “It was my choice,” I repeated with steadiness. “I don’t regret it and would do it again.”

  “Then Hermes. Not just a Greek god, not just a messenger, but someone who watched the border between the realm of the gods and humanity. They asked you from the start to die for them.” She pressed more buttons and a statue of a Greek marble figure came up. Winged sandals wrapped around his feet.

  “Nona, I tried to kill myself twice.” The H
al Pal unit smiled easily. “I had only two people who really mattered to me. They were strong, they could survive without me, but I wouldn’t have lived without Xin. Dying for her was the easiest choice I had ever made.”

  “I can’t fault your decision. It makes sense on paper, one life that would have little impact otherwise. It makes sense, and I don’t like it.”

  “Mother told me that it would all be okay.”

  Nona stared at me and blinked a few times. Her head bobbed up and down slowly, then her attention drifted. My thoughts went to my family. How exactly had Beth and Liz handled my passing?

  I spent time looking up a few different pieces of footage. There were no signs of my family anywhere in the files. Lots of attention was paid to Trillium’s board members as President Leon stepped down. People drew connections between the vice president’s actions, and others tried to track down my old life.

  The video footage of my last few moments replayed from an outside perspective. I saw myself, larger than life, standing against an onslaught of nothing trying to take down all the old AIs. Meanwhile, the other people were being moved like pieces of data from one server to another out in cyberspace.

  Their destination still escaped me, despite this new version of my existence. There were a few possibilities. Only so many locations took four minutes to reach now. In fact, only one destination stood out.

  Video feeds vanished, and my attention shifted back to Nona. A day must have passed while I researched the different issues.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  The scientist jumped, then turned around. She stared at me and shook her head. “I keep getting what amounts to a ping against the ARC systems. They’ve been coming through for months now. They’re all one-sided though, no return address.”

  Nona pressed her fingers against the table, and a long string of data came up. The same information repeated multiple times.

  The data looked different to me. Those images upon Nona’s table looked like a stack of paper airplanes. Each sheet was white, neatly folded, and familiar to me. A stack of messages from god knew how far away, similar to the ones from a happy last night with my wife.