Unbound

by Shawn Speakman

  Your life snuffs out like a candle, and the kernel of my heart crumbles between my fingers. I--too late--know I have been a fool, reached for immortality and the chill of power unleavened by emotion, and all that remains in me now is horror, swiftly fading.

  The creatures watch me without feeling--the feeling that I endowed them with by my fancy and the empathy by which I bound them, now as dead as you are. What I saw as weakness was the sinew and fiber that binds resilience to power into true strength, and what remains without it is as brittle as ice. I have deceived myself to my own doom and slaughtered you for nothing.

  The crystal in my other hand goes black . . .

  Now they come for me, heart of my heart.

  The Game

  Michael J. Sullivan

  Jeri Blainey’s blissful ignorance shattered before dawn on the morning of July 30th when the “Ride of the Valkyries” ringtone jolted her awake. She fumbled for the glowing iPhone, charging on the hotel room’s nightstand.

  “Yeah? What? Who is this?” she asked, pressing the smooth glass to her cheek.

  “What the hell did you do, Blainey?”

  Even groggy and disoriented she recognized Brandon Meriwether’s voice. She sat up, wiped her eyes, and noted the clock’s red LED digits shining 5:04 in the dark. She managed the math . . . two o’clock in the morning in Oregon.

  Why the hell is he calling at this hour?

  The convention wouldn’t start for another five hours, her meeting with FiberNexSolutions wasn’t until eleven, and her presentation was at two. Any last-minute changes could wait.

  “Mr. Meriwether?”

  “Blainey, if this is an advertising stunt, you should have cleared it through Dickerson. Are you doing this, or is it someone on your team? People think it’s real. They’re freaking out. I want you to shut it down. Now!”

  “I’m sorry. I . . . I honestly don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t give me that, Jeri. This is serious. Have you seen the news? This isn’t the 1930s, and you’re no Orson Welles. Publicity is all fine and good, but people can be pretty unforgiving about having their chains yanked so hard. And oh how they love to litigate! It’s practically an American pastime. Amnesty International already has more than 68,000 signatures on a petition at the White House’s page. I just dodged a call from there—the freaking White House, Jeri!”

  “The President phoned—and you didn’t pick up?” Her fingers groped across the top of the nightstand. Finding the lamp, she switched it on.

  “No, not him, some staffer. I need answers first. If a petition gets 100,000 signatures in thirty days, the White House has to respond. Did you know that? I looked the damn thing up!”

  “Mr. Meriwether, I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Are you running Troth?”

  Troth? The Realms of Rah character? My god, is Brandon drunk?

  “Troth? No. I was sleeping until you woke me.”

  “Then who is? Ajit? Get him to stop. Shut the game down if you have to. But I want this nonsense to stop. Right now!”

  “Mr. Meriwether, you’re not making any sense. No one on my team is in the game. We’ve been working sixteen-hour days the last five weeks. Everyone is exhausted. Maybe you should back up a bit and explain.”

  A long silence followed. Jeri could hear him breathing—hard, heavy puffs.

  Jeri stuffed a pillow behind her back and realized she needed to urinate.

  “Troth is off the script,” he said, his tone deadpan serious.

  Maybe this is a dream?

  A software bug in a massive multiplayer role-playing game wasn’t cause for phone calls from the White House and petitions from Amnesty International.

  “Troth?” she asked. “He’s the NPC that starts the Spectral Robe quest.”

  “I guess.”

  Jeri drew hair away from her face. “What do you mean he’s off the script?”

  “Which word didn’t you understand?”

  “Are you saying Troth isn’t giving out the quest anymore?”

  Jeri couldn’t fathom how this could be a problem. The game always had glitches. If Meriwether had called to say the game was completely error free, that would be noteworthy. She couldn’t make any connection between the virtual world and the White House.

  Unless terrorists are using the game as a meeting place to chat and plan. She’d heard of that happening, rumors at least. But what does that have to do with Troth?

  “No, Jeri, he’s not giving out the quest anymore,” Meriwether said. “The last report spotted him in the Chimera Tavern in the Forest of Dim.”

  She almost laughed. Being president of DysanSoft, Meriwether wasn’t a developer and didn’t know anything about the way things worked.

  “That’s impossible. NPCs can’t—”

  “And he’s been asking questions.”

  Her desire to laugh died. “What do you mean he’s been asking questions? Asking who? Asking what?”

  “Players. From the reports I’ve seen, he started by talking to other NPCs but gave that up because players have been more responsive.”

  This was tripping well past bizarre, and Jeri doubted if even her unbridled subconscious could dream up this concoction. “What kind of questions?”

  “Jeri . . . he asked, ‘Is this a game?’”

  “No way.” Jeri switched on the phone’s speaker and dropped the device on the bed. Then she powered up her portable Wi-Fi hub and grabbed her laptop.

  “I saw a YouTube video. Looked pretty authentic. I need answers, Jeri. You understand me?”

  “Already booting my rig. I’m on it, and I’ll call you back.” She hung up. As bizarre as the conversation had been, one point was cause for real concern, and she was certain Meriwether had no idea what that was.

  * * * * *

  While Jeri waited for her computer to boot, she found the television remote, and the flat panel came on. Jeri typed her logon name and password, then rushed to the bathroom while the machine finished loading.

  “. . . that would kill Troth, wouldn’t it?” a male voice from the television asked.

  Troth! Holy shit! They’re talking about Realms of Rah on TV!

  “That’s unclear,” another man responded.

  “I think we should repeat that a lot is unclear at this point. DysanSoft has yet to make any statements other than to say they are looking into the situation,” said a third person, this time a woman.

  Jeri didn’t recognize the voices, but it didn’t matter. Morning news shows were all the same: a bunch of men in suits and a blond woman in a skirt.

  “It’s probably just some form of guerrilla marketing. Some gimmick to get free advertising. Well, I guess it worked, but it could end up backfiring. If your brand scares people, it becomes toxic. The creepy Burger King commercials lost the fast food giant market share,” added one of the men.

  “Well I, for one, am plenty scared,” the woman said. “I’ve never cared for video games and don’t let my kids play them. They’re dangerous—they really are. How many Columbines do we need before people start realizing this? Millions of kids are being desensitized to violence, losing what little social skills they might have, and becoming psychopathic shut-ins. Am I right? I mean if Congress would have passed some legislation to regulate gaming, we wouldn’t be here. We have no idea what this Troth guy might start telling our kids. With all the hype, they’re bound to listen to him. This could be the start of some online cult, a way to mind-control our children!”

  “Well, if it is a person or a corporation that’s doing the puppeteering, for whatever reason, that’s one thing,” one of the men interjected. “But let’s go back to the idea that it might be real. That changes everything. In a way it’s like discovering life on Mars, right?”

  “I think it’s dangerous and should be turned off, unplugged, or whatever the heck they need to do to protect our children.” The woman again. Her voice grated.

  There must be
thousands of applicants for every opening on television. Why do they have to hire every reactionary, irritating moron with a teeth-drag-on-fork voice?

  “But if it isn’t a hoax—and again I want to repeat for our viewers that nothing has been confirmed—let’s consider the possibilities. Artificial intelligence may have advanced to the point of achieving sentience, and Troth is—”

  “What do you mean by sentience?” the woman asked.

  Jeri cringed. Are they paying her to act stupid?

  “I mean I know what it means,” the woman said, and Jeri imagined she had gotten some rolled eyes from the others. “But I’m sure someone in our audience isn’t familiar with the term. It’s just not that common of a word, you know?”

  “Self-aware,” someone else said. “Troth appears to be self-aware, the definition of intelligent life. That would mean he would have rights, including the right to exist. Turning off the server could be interpreted as murder.” This voice wasn’t as clear as the others, and Jeri guessed they had a specialist weighing in via satellite.

  “Which brings us to the Amnesty International petition which now has over 325,000 signatures.”

  Jesus, how long has this been going on? I only went to bed six hours ago!

  “Which is just ridiculous,” the woman said. “I still think the person behind this is a pervert trying to lure our children away, or some cult leader. But even if Professor Hubert is right about this whole awareness thing, it doesn’t change the facts. This Troth character is not alive. He’s a bunch of electronic dots, or what do you call them? You know, pixies.”

  Several people laughed.

  “Pixies?” Jeri said to the bathroom tile, which gleamed under the overhead light. “C’mon. “My grandmother is seventy, and even she knows computers aren’t made of fairies.”

  “Pixels,” someone corrected.

  “Whatever. As I said, I’m no expert on video games. I thought I established that.” Her tone was defensive. “But this Troth doesn’t even have a body, so how can he be alive?”

  Any doubt that the woman was more than a talking head vanished. No journalist would tarnish her own industry this way, just as no priest would admit the Bible was on his to-read stack right under Fifty Shades of Grey.

  “An amoeba is alive; a germ is alive, and they don’t have bodies—not like we do, at least.”

  “But this Troth thing can’t exist outside of a computer.”

  “And people can’t exist outside Earth’s atmosphere, either.”

  “Of course they can!” the woman nearly shouted. “They’re called astronauts.”

  “Astronauts aren’t existing outside the atmosphere, they bring it with them, contained in ships and suits. Troth could do the same thing. Just put a laptop running Realms of Rah on a spaceship.”

  “But that’s not the same. Troth can’t build a spaceship and pilot it.”

  Jeri flushed the toilet and rushed back to the bed without taking the time to wash her hands. She checked the bars on her portable hot spot, logged into the DysanSoft network, and started downloading the most current version of the game. Once the progress bar was snailing along, she grabbed her iPhone. Normally a dedicated text-based life form, Jeri shied away from calls, but she made an exception this time. Muting the television, she held down the iPhone’s power button.

  After the musical chime, she said, “Siri, call Ajit.”

  The iPhone’s virtual assistant echoed back, “Calling Ajit.” The irony was impossible to miss.

  Two-fifteen in Portland and Ajit picked up on the first ring. “’Bout time, Jeri.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “We’ve got nothing back here. Customer Service woke me about four hours ago because of a flood of support tickets. Forty-five minutes later Twitter exploded. I got the team together within an hour.”

  “So it’s not you or anyone else messing around?”

  “Nope. We’re all in the conference room, and this kind of interactivity can’t be programmed. The conversations are fluid and responsive.”

  “How many servers are we talking about?”

  “Just Angoth. Troth is well behaved in staging and he hasn’t done anything freaky on the other servers.”

  “Sounds like a hack then. Danny maybe?”

  Jeri felt the list of possibilities dwindling fast. Despite what she’d told Meriwether, she suspected it was someone from her team—someone retaliating for so many long hours leading up to this weekend’s GDC East. She expected the guilty to step forward and apologize profusely. Then she’d take care of smoothing things over with the brass and write a carefully worded press release. The possibility that a hack might originate outside DysanSoft was a bigger concern.

  “Danny wouldn’t do it,” Ajit replied.

  “He might.”

  “He was pissed about being fired, but he wouldn’t. I don’t even think he could. Jeri, Troth isn’t in even in Eridia any more. He’s in another zone. Hell, I wouldn’t know how to do that. Do you?”

  And there it was. The elephant that had been in her room since Meriwether’s call now waved hello with his trunk.

  “Jeri . . . Jeri? You still there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here. Just checking my download. Almost done. So what’s going on now? What’s the current status?”

  Jeri tabbed out of the download window and brought up Chrome. Doing a search on Troth returned 323,000 results. “Is this a game?” was in the title of the top seven.

  “It’s late, but it didn’t take long for people to swarm to the Forest of Dim,” Ajit said. “We were afraid of a crash with so many players in a single zone. Game play was laggy as hell. So we kicked everyone off the server and disabled logins. Only Zach is in there now.”

  One more possibility down. The thought of a hacker was a thread she had been holding onto, but now even that tendril to reality snapped. Or has it? Anyone who could figure out how to puppet a non-player character across zone boundaries might be bright enough to have their own hidden access. Right?

  “Can Zach still interact with him after kicking everyone off? Is Troth now on what appears to be a programmed script?”

  “Nope, no change. Zach and Troth have been having quite the conversation.”

  “Tell her about the parents.” Steve’s voice came from the background.

  “What’s that?” Jeri asked.

  “Well, of course, we wanted to see things firsthand, so Zach hailed Troth. Sure enough, instead of giving the cloak quest he says, ‘Hi, my name’s Troth. Nice to meet you.’”

  “At least he’s friendly.”

  “Oh, he’s that all right. Then Zach says, ‘I’m in search of the Spectral Cloak.’ You know, to see if that would jar anything. Guess what Troth does?”

  “He doesn’t give the quest, I take it.”

  “He asks Zach if he remembered what his parents looked like.”

  “You’re shitting me!”

  “No! But that’s not all. The two of them have been having a conversation for hours—hours—about families and memories. I gotta tell you Jeri, I’m no Turing judge, but if I were, I’d say Troth passed with flying colors.”

  “What does Steve say? He’s the AI egghead.”

  “Steve has been feeding Zach prompts, and he concurs.”

  “You’re telling me a guy with a PhD from MIT can’t tell if Troth is real or code?”

  “No, not at all. I’m saying he can tell, and he’s convinced Troth is alive.”

  “Alive?”

  “Sentient.”

  Ask me if I know what sentient means and I’ll fire your ass right now. She actually paused to see if Ajit would.

  He didn’t. Instead, he lowered his voice and said, “Things are kinda freaky back here, Jeri. I’ve asked security not to let anyone out of the building, and you wouldn’t believe the number of news trucks in the parking lot. Pinkerton has called in extra officers. And Samuel is roaming the halls proclaiming the Good News of Troth like John the Baptist.”

  “Our Sa
m? Samuel Mendelburg, the atheist and professional skeptic formerly of Staten Island? That Sam?”

  “A total convert now. He actually called it a miracle. I shit you not.”

  Samuel famously refused to accept that the country of France existed, because he’d never personally been there. When Julie from the quality assurance team explained she’d had a layover in Paris the previous summer, he replied, “That doesn’t prove anything. All you know is that you sat inside an airport for a few hours. They all pretty much look the same. You could have been anywhere.”

  Jeri sighed. “Let me guess. You guys have been glued to the television and Internet sites, haven’t you?”

  Ajit sounded defensive. “Well, yeah, a bit, of course, but I wouldn’t say glued.”

  “I think you’re getting wrapped up in all the hysteria that’s out there. Maybe you should try doing something more constructive. Of course Troth can pass the Turing test—because a real person is puppeteering him. I want you to go through all the files on the server and compare them to the files in the staging area. My guess, you’re going to find something that’s been changed, or shouldn’t be there in the first place.”

  “Jeri, we aren’t complete morons. We did that already. The code is exactly the same. And before you ask, all the firewalls are in place, and there are no connections except for Zach’s, and he’s logged in through a hardline. I’m telling you there is no one running Troth, and the mirror system has him doing exactly what he’s supposed to.”

  “Well, there has to be something. Maybe there’s a trigger that sets Troth into some subroutine and he just seems self-aware. My money is still on Danny.”

  “If Danny added this sub before he left, then firing him was the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, because Danny has to be a genius. I mean he’d make Einstein look like Homer Simpson, seriously. But I don’t think our systems even have the computing power needed to do what Troth is. It’d take something like IBM’s Watson, and even that falls short of what I’ve been watching these last few hours.”