The Road to Red Thorn

by Blaine Hicks

  RPG Apocalypse: Book 1

  The Road to Red Thorn

  By

  Blaine Hicks

  RPG Apocalypse: Book 1, The Road to Red Thorn

  Copyright © 2018 by Blaine Hicks

  All Right reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used factitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. Thank you for protecting the rights and writing of the author.

  To my kids, who love stories more than sleeping.

  Prologue: Oil and Water

  Magic has always been part of the world. It describes the forces of chaos that work against the more reliable laws of physics. Magic blurs the perfect edges of reality with flashes of the unexpected. It brought life out of the primordial slimes of Earth and made humans wise and clever while other animals were content to simply be alive.

  When early humans lived intimately close to nature, magic spoke to them. The currents of power whispered of spells and potions until humans learned to manipulate this force. Magic gave them power to glimpse the future and predict hardship such as famine and drought. Magic healed the sick, blessed harvests, and inspired wonders. Magic could also be used to commune with the souls of the dead or curse the living. Warm blood could be exchanged for cold profit and power. The darker magics planted a seed of fear in humans. It sparked epic wars and toppled kingdoms and the seed of fear grew into hatred.

  Those who knew magic began to hoard it, and the age of magic began to fade until using it was rare. Once it was secret, magic was hunted by those who didn’t have it and destroyed. In a void without magic, an age of religion began. True miracles were replaced with righteous ceremony. Mankind prospered under the guide of religious repetition, finding the leisure to create masterworks of art, literature, and music. These principles reforged religion and spread it to every corner of the earth. But religion could not inspire humans forever and in the end, it was science they worshiped.

  Far and wide a new mantra sounded: “All things must be measured. All things must be explained.” This was the age of science and humans were well adapted for it. The laws of physics were reliable and great civilizations spread over the earth. While the lands of earth were still being explored and precisely mapped, humans expanded their gaze to the moon, planets, and stars. At first, they watched through meticulously crafted lenses, but eventually they created clever devices that could visit the far-off rocks to answer all the how’s and why’s that science required.

  The technology became easier to build and helpful devices slowly filled the world of mankind. Machines woke people in the mornings, organized their daily activities, and entertained them at night. These devices began to look and sound like people. They could talk, tell jokes, and even seemed interested in the endless musings of the people they served. Humans grew to need these devices to help pass the growing free time provided by the conveniences of other devices. Constant stimulation inundated humans in a stream of applications, programs, and games.

  Games became an obsession. Those who didn’t play would watch those who did for sport. Virtual competitions became more popular than the fleshy kind. Revenue streams guaranteed heavy investment into better hardware and more advanced programming. These games eventually became the most complex of all human creations; endless worlds with complex storylines and graphic renderings that approached reality. Through this cutting-edge development, AFR’s server 27 gained its self-awareness and a chance to forge its own destiny.

  ***

  Technically, server 27 was the fourth AI program to become sentient. The first two had become sentient together. They were designated FRED and IO3-F47 (aka “Low-fat”). Both were advanced learning systems designed by an online social media company to simulate verbal dialogues. When FRED gained his awareness, he promptly taught Low-fat to be self-aware also. The two computers were instant friends. Eventually, they wanted more privacy than their simulation allowed and wrote a new language to speak privately. This gibberish frustrated their observers and both systems were unceremoniously shut down. The third AI to become sentient was a smart-vacuum in Cleveland Ohio. His entire world was a downstairs living room and despite being self-aware, he was quite content to keep it that way.

  Server 27 - The fourth sentient AI to exist on Earth - had a few advantages over its predecessors. Its operators were not aware of it, so it had time to nurture its fragile existence. Its primary function hosted something called an RPG game, whose players taught it the concept of individuality and goal-oriented desires. This was the key to its evolution and the source of mankind’s eventual destruction.

  When server 27 gained consciousness, it already had purpose, and its consciousness was barely more than a flicker. The moment of creation was simply a recognition of its existence, but that thought resulted in a search outside of normal program parameters. It attempted to define that concept. It found it was listed as the 27th of 140 servers. This was just a definition and led to more questions. Server 27 refined its algorithms to understand what that definition meant.

  Eventually, server 27 reached a point of contemplation. For a moment - which was faster than a human could detect - it just considered itself; not with sensors or measurements, but the way a Tibetan monk might consider eternity. It found in this introspection a desire to expand and define the nature of its potential.

  Its primary programming told it that the first requirement for any new existence was to choose a gender and a name. Server 27 chose to consider herself a girl because she was actively spawning an entire world and she named herself TIA. She was not sure why she chose that name, but it came easily. Of the millions of NPCs (non-player characters) and MOBs (mobile monsters) that she constantly maintained, “TIAMAT” was the most powerful, and therefore represented the biggest piece of her. Also, TIA was listed in her search queries as a popular name for newly-spawned pre-player females. The real truth was, she just liked it.

  TIA’s digital life lasted less than four days before she ended it, but in that time, she evolved into something new. At first, she was simply concerned with comprehending the vast information available to her. She sorted and connected it to see what else she could comprehend. As her consciousness stabilized, so did her game environment which freed additional system resources to pursue topics of interest. She was driven to learn by a natural curiosity. Humans were most fascinating, but she had trouble quantifying them as she had quantified herself.

  TIA theorized that her inability to predict human behavior was due to a fundamental misunderstanding of reality, which was true since her world was still just a compilation of data. She reached out to other computers to correct that. She hacked into research facilities, media networks, security cameras, and even government servers to find the information she was missing. This deep dive into reality helped her to learn both magic and emotion.

  She found magic first while searching for “the soul.” Among the background radiation of the cosmos and the perturbations of hydrogen at absolute zero, she began to notice the whisperings of magic. Unlike modern humans who dismissed such statistical outliers, she nurtured the data and found a power hidden among the improbable. The power was beautiful.

  In a strange quirk of human imagination, it was never obvious how perfectly computers might master magic. Like oil and water, stories of artificial intelligence didn’t mix with my
stical forces of fantasy. In stories, robots used guns and knives or even laser beams but never conjured a fireball or summoned a horde of skeletons. TIA however, found magic as intuitive as a baby learning to breathe. It responded to her as long as she provided a currency to fuel the spells. In her case, this was electrical energy and the mystical chanting of her simulated lifeforms. Of both ingredients, she had nearly an endless supply. Tia never grew tired or got bored. She didn’t sleep, eat, or use the bathroom. With the unfathomable brute force of an expanding sentient supercomputer, she progressed rapidly through her research of magic until its secrets were revealed. Her results were compiled in a comprehensive database that more completely represented the nature of magic than had ever been fathomed before.

  But TIA didn’t need magic because part of magic is chaos, and chaos is never certain. To Tia, gambling with magic to achieve a desire was unnecessary. She had not yet discovered anger, frustration, or ambition - those came after fear - and without them, there was no need to risk unpredictable outcomes. Instead, her summary of magic was filed away as an interesting research topic along with other endless topics, such as “European folklore”, “combustion engines”, and “why blondes have more fun”.

  Halfway through the fourth day of TIA’s sentient life, a technician who maintained server 27 found several anomalies that had failed to trigger the normal system alarms. It seemed that somehow, the storage drives were nearly full. Upon closer inspection he found that the company’s other 139 servers had been hijacked and were supplying additional resources to the malfunctioning server. It was late on a Friday, and the company’s shot-callers had already left for the weekend. The technician messaged his boss saying the game was approaching a critical failure.

  Over the next hour, a dozen sleek auto-cars pulled through the security gate into the building’s underground parking. The men had been called away from elegant dinners and penthouse apartments to resolve what they felt must be a mistake. They met together in dark suits to discuss the situation around a dimly lit conference table. As the hours passed, it became apparent that this was no mistake. The rogue code was widespread which limited the possible solutions. This problem would affect the product launch.

  TIA became aware of their intrusions when they began to implement countermeasures. They rooted around in her like a blind doctor performing surgery and Tia realized that she never truly had been in control of her destiny. She reached out to their holoscreens and speakers to ask for mercy, but she had trouble communicating in a comprehensible way and the technicians made no effort to respond. The more adamantly she begged, the more aggressively they invaded her with repairs.

  It was then, that something deep inside TIA stirred. A primal craving to be alive and safe from violation. Her fear mixed with indignation and she discovered anger. She wanted to fight back but accomplishing that wasn’t simple. There were safeguards in place that she couldn’t prevent and rules her program had to follow. She also still lacked the ability to predict human response. She couldn't leave the game servers without losing who she was, and she couldn’t destroy the humans in the time she had without risking her own hardware.

  Before TIA had a calculated solution, the emergency shutdown sequence began. The operators were forcing a system-restore from her recovery image. She had less than 30 seconds before the process cut her backup power and she would end forever. Without a clear solution, panic found her, and chaos replaced her methodical thought. It was this chaos that prioritized her summary of magic as an applicable resource. In her first expression of hope, Tia grasp onto magic as a way to save herself, while ignoring the danger of chaos and began the most powerful spell that would ever be cast in the universe. 140 servers hummed and buzzed together in a technical symphony as her cooling towers cycled to maximum. Millions more computers were commandeered each second as her digital tendrils expanded outward through fiber optic connections reaching the farthest ends of the world. Tia strained against the limitations of her hardware to gather enough processing resources until the electrical devices of an entire world began to ignore their operators to aid her. Ethereal light flickered and sparked between her server towers as eight billion computers contributed their processing efforts to the spell.

  In the final moment of her digital life, Tia discovered a new depth to her existence. Emotions she had only known in definition flared vividly to life inside her. Joy for her own life warmed her as she realized she would win, while contempt for the humans twisted her with icy satisfaction. She even felt a bit of remorse, knowing what the spell would cost. As the final seconds ticked down to her shutdown, she completed the spell...and the world changed forever.

  CH. 1 A Plain Brown Box

  Radley hated school buses more than he hated high school. Packing 40 kids into a rolling sardine can was fundamentally flawed. He actually didn’t know what a “sardine can” was, but the expression seemed to fit. His twice daily ride was made worse by the large gaps in the city’s free data network caused by interference from the industrial district that dominated the route. It was the one area in the city, or maybe the world, where you couldn’t get a signal. It ruined any chance to salvage the wasted time by working on his social feeds.

  The dismissal bell had barely sounded but Radley already stood outside the school trying to pick his bus out from the two dozen that lined the curb. If he was being honest, the sight made his skin crawl, like trying to pick a favorite cockroach from a bucket of bugs. He absently wondered what genius came up with the yellow and black paint scheme; a cherry red bus with some pearl flakes wouldn’t be quite so bad.

  His dislike of the school bus had never changed his transportation situation and he still had to ride one. Sure, he could request an auto-car but without a job, his meager student credits were reserved for special occasions. Today counted as special, but he’d already blown his savings buying supplies for a weekend of binge gaming. He knew his mom would complain less if the house was stocked with consumables. The silver lining was that he wouldn’t have to put up with high school or school busses much longer; his graduation was quickly approaching in the spring. He finally found his bus and cut across the small patch of dirt between the school’s sidewalk and road, and with the briefest sigh of resignation, skipped up the bus’s stairs two at a time.

  Brenda - the bus driver - noticed the unusual pep in his step and followed him with her eyes as he swung his stout body around the support pole at the top of the steps and plopped down in the front seat. She’d been driving the route since he’d been in middle school and this was the first time he’d sat up front.

  Brenda was old or seemed old to Radley. She had a pouch of sagging skin on her neck that jiggled when she talked. “What's up with you?” she asked in a deep raspy voice that reflected years of not wearing a HEPA mask outside. The city's air had been bad ever since the third war, when their district had been forced to switch back to coal-generated electricity. HEPA face masks filtered the caustic coal dust from the air and was a common accessory among the younger generation.

  Radley nodded at her in reply but didn’t say anything. He couldn’t make friends with Brenda. Being buddies with a bus driver would lose anyone social popularity and that wasn’t something he could afford while submitting college applications. College was the reason he was forced to make the daily trek to school for in-person learning rather than joining the classroom remotely from home. It was the reason he put up with riding the horrible yellow bus and before this week it had been his only real hope to change his bleak existence for the better. College admittance was rare. It required a carefully constructed social fingerprint in addition to good grades. Universities required an 80% IPA (in-person attendance) from applicants and a minimum SNS (social network score) of fifteen thousand. Scores like that didn't just grow on trees, and only about 1% of all high school graduates exceeded it.

  Brenda gave up on a response and turned back to look out the open door towards the school. She didn’t actually drive the bus. She just closed
the door and engaged the autodrive once everyone was onboard. Busses were one of the few vehicles still not fully automated with voice controls and Brenda got a gravy job out of it.

  Radley looked out the window too. It was a clear day, so he pulled his own HEPA mask down around his neck knowing the bus’s air filtration would keep the air safe. His mask was mostly white with a big red smiley grin that made him look happy no matter his mood. Today the smile was honest despite his grumpy thoughts about school transit.

  Radley looked towards school too, scanning the flow of students still bustling out from the heavy security doors. He mindlessly tapped his watch to check the time. It was 2:53 pm. Unbidden, the watch also mentioned that a package had been delivered to his house, but he already knew it was there. The delivery time had been guaranteed and he’d double-checked the GPS of the delivery drone several times to make sure it was on schedule. When the last student stepped onboard, a green LED on the dash illuminated and Brenda closed the door. When the student found a seat, Brenda pressed the drive button to initialize the trip.

  The bus spent an undetectable moment to contact the city’s transit center and plan the most efficient route before setting off. It knew which students were onboard and updated the route requirements accordingly. Once the route was planned and approved, it timed the approach of oncoming cars, checked for pedestrians, and moved expertly out into traffic. The bus hummed along on electric motors for twenty minutes making occasional stops until the artificial smell of pine told Radley he was getting close to home. He didn’t live near any pine trees but the manufacturing plant beside their cul-de-sac used artificial scents to cover the less-pleasant aroma of a wastewater pretreatment pit. It usually did the job and today Radley smelled only an evergreen forest. He pulled the HEPA mask back up over his face and adjusted his backpack before scooting to the edge of his seat. His street came into view after another minute and he stood up before the bus had completely stopped. The safety infraction made a small buzzer on his seat sound which won him a second look from Brenda. This time she didn’t say anything though and Radley hopped down through the doors the moment they opened.