by Arthur Stone
He checked the bodies for loot automatically, without even thinking about it. Hey! Well, at least there were some trophies—talons, a beak, feathers of some sort, and an eggshell. So this beast was a bird, after all, even though it resembled a hybrid between a dinosaur and an unknown monster.
There was an unusually even rock formation in the thicket in front of Ros, and he had strong suspicions that it did not come into existence in the natural way. He must have reached the very ruins where PKs had lots of fun, and the noobs they killed got a lot of grief.
But there were noobs and noobs, and Ros had an unprecedented level of self-confidence. The things he used to fear about the game were getting farther and farther behind. He didn't even break out in cold sweat at the thought he might be identified at some point. This already happened a few times, but he'd always manage to avoid the gravest problems. He had also gotten a lot smarter since then, and knew where he could and could not go; which places were dangerous, and which ones weren't. He was as experienced a noob as they came.
Still he looked around him. He didn't see anyone, but he had absolute certainty that Thyri was following him and would provide support whenever he'd find himself overwhelmed.
Therefore, he should keep moving. The area was pretty hostile, and he had no reason to linger. Those were the thoughts going through Ros's head as he took another step forward, when an arrow flew right past his ear, disappearing in the shrubs covered in clusters of small white flowers.
Ros occasionally used the bow himself, and he had enough experience with archers to realize the arrow wasn't just lost in the bushes. It definitely hit something. And the sound didn't resemble wood or stone.
The arrowhead pierced a soft body covered by hard leather or a thin armor.
"You kill Junkie3524. XP received: 35. Points left until the next level: 897979."
The shrubs trembled for a moment. Then a tall pointy-eared body fell out, dropping a nondescript bow that rolled across the rocky ground. The fact that the character was deceased was not merely announced by the system message. You could tell as much if you took a single look. The body was motionless, with the rear part of a long and thin arrow that had run through his head sticking out of the right eye.
As for the character's name, the lettering was as red as any overripe tomato.
Ros turned around and made an elaborate bow; then he blew a kill. However, Thyri remained invisible.
She was really good at it…
Well, never mind. He was happy that she kept an eye on him. No one knew how strong the archer might have been, come to think of it. Ros didn't even expect that a potential killer could get this close to him. And his Perception was leveled up all the way to 37. Even level 200 players rarely had such stats.
So, what could he do now? Well… searching the bodies for loot seemed like the first obvious thing to do. As for the second…
"You kill Bite-Bite-Bite04. XP received: 42. Points left until the next level: 897937".
"You kill Archer6341." XP received: 29. Points left until the next level: 897908."
Well, now… It looked like a real cool party, and neither Ros, nor Thyri seemed to have been invited. He had to admit that the girl's tenacity was well-founded—it would have been tough for him otherwise. There were at least three adversaries hiding in the bushes next to the ruins, and Ros didn't even manage to spot one.
In fact, he only got to see a single body. The others were somewhere in the thicket, so his only awareness of the dramatic events that took place came from system messages and the hiss of arrows shot.
He instantly decided against checking the bodies for loot. No one knew whether or not he would get an arrow or a magical attack in one of the gentler parts of his anatomy once he bent down. Anyway, red-names were unlikely to have any worthy loot. Their entire concept of gaming implied the risk of frequent death and inevitable property loss. It made no sense to splurge on expensive items only to have someone else pick them up. Their main opponents were helpless noobs, at any rate. Their level and stats would be much lower, and even if they were around your level, you could always choose a class particularly vulnerable to your attacks and ambush the other player. With such a strategy, even the most basic weapons and equipment would suffice—the stuff you wouldn't mind leaving behind in case of trouble.
However, Ros still bent down and picked up the bow. He barely managed to rise when he heard a suspicious crackling in the bushes to his left. Someone was clearly trying to get through them and making a poor job of being circumspect about it. Either Thyri missed someone, or it was a local mob. At any rate, the potential menace had to be taken seriously. Then Ros turned toward his invisible enemy and surrounded himself with a magical shield that could absorb some of the damage dealt to him, and prepared himself for using something out of his deadly arsenal at the first sign that they might attack.
A player got out of the bushes—it was a light elf holding a long purple staff, followed by a girl of the same race, and armed similarly. The elven maiden's appearance testified to the fact that someone utterly devoid of taste and artistic talents would do much better if they just chose one of the thousands of ready-made models. They would probably do better if they just chose to alter their hairstyle, and the color of their eyes and their hair. Otherwise you got monsters such as this one, with bright red fleshy lips in a permanent duck face expression, with a tiny button-shaped nose above them, looking suspiciously like what a plastic surgeon would do in a case of years-old syphilis, and a pair of manga eyes above. The overall effect resembled the head of a horribly mutilated dragonfly.
Once the elves saw Ros, they didn't draw their bows or shower him with spells. Instead, they stared at the body at his feet. The girl squeaked in delight, unable to control herself,
"One down!"
"You've done a good job there for sure," said the elf approvingly, mistakenly assuming Ros to be the victor in the recent fight. "Hey! He lost his bow, too! Now, is that cool or what?!"
Ros threw the weapon into the bushes as far as he could, explaining,
"It's a primitive item that he must have made by himself. Virtually worthless. Anyone can make something like that. All you need is to level up your Carpenter skill to two—or, perhaps, one will be enough.
"It took him just two arrows to kill Tyke from this bow," said the elven maiden sadly, and then added, "The three of us used to level up together, it was pretty convenient. The skeletons barely managed to reach us."
"Sure," the elf confirmed. "We're light elves, after all, so the undead can't do much against us."
"The archers can, nevertheless," said Ros to sum things up.
The couple started nodding at once, and the elven maiden acknowledged it dejectedly,
"Archers are the worst in our case. We have no protection at all. They can kill us using the most primitive weapons."
The body of the dead player disappeared, leaving another item behind—a ring that wasn't particularly shiny and looked like it was made of lead. Ros didn't even have to bend his back to realize as much, as well as the fact that the item in question wasn't worthy of being picked up by a self-respecting player.
It was utter junk.
However, the elf had a different opinion on the matter,
"You're sure you don't want it?"
"Pretty sure."
"Would you mind if I took it?"
"Sure, go right ahead—I have no need for it."
"Are you on your own here?"
"Why are you asking?"
"Well, you know. "You're a weird one. Your level is pretty low, and you hunt the likes of these." The elf pointed towards the place where the body had just disappeared into thin air.
Ros shrugged.
"I don't normally provoke anyone, but if they provoke me—well, you know, anything can happen."
"These guys are from the Red Names clan. They keep hanging around these parts, and they seem to be having a field day right now. We should get out of here before more of them come ove
r. They message each other when they run into trouble. Will you come along?"
"Where are you going?"
"We're always headed toward a quiet place, even though there might not be much to do over there."
The elf pointed in the direction Ros had come from. They were clearly planning to head in different ways. Ros shook his head.
"Nope, that's where I've just come from. I need to go to the capital."
"You won't manage it right now. You'd have to come across the ruins, and there are lots of red-named players there right now. We've barely managed to get away, and they killed Tyke, the bastards. And they wouldn't give up—they kept chasing us and looking for us all over the thicket. Thanks for helping. But you better stay away. You're a low-level mage, and they have a shitload of archers. Might as well stick with us if you don't want to get killed. We'll just have to wait for an hour or two, tops. Then some real cool folks will arrive and send the reds back to their respawn point. Then you can come out again and level up until the next raid.
"What kind of real cool folks?"
"Are you completely new here?"
"Well, yeah, something like that."
"There are two real cool clans hunting here. The APK and the White Avengers. All they do is roam the ruins from dawn until dusk, chasing the reds. They can gather in a jiffy if they have to, and they leave no stone unturned. Then it's quiet for a while—the reds are afraid to come back. After all, they don't like to buy it, either. So you'd really better join us. The likes of us have nothing to do there until the reds are wiped out."
Right, so that's how it was. Ros was uncommonly good at getting into all sorts of adventures on a regular basis, and he must have just found another one, which could potentially send him to his respawn point a long way off in the Locked Lands. And he would have to retrace his steps all along. That was an unpleasant prospect, and he preferred not to consider it.
Just an hour or two, was it? He would wait much longer to get to the capital at last.
"All right, I'm in. It's more fun together, anyway."
"Exactly," the elf grinned happily. "Should I just call you Bubble? Or maybe Bubbeleh?"
"Bubble will do just fine. I like the name, anyway."
"Hey, did I say anything against it? It's just rad. I'm Daddy Cool, and my girlfriend here's White Plague, but friends call us just Daddy and Plague. You can call us that, too. Let's get out of here before somebody else arrives. It's dangerous here, too. The reds already know where the archer had been killed."
* * *
Morgan had no idea what to think. Worst of all, he didn't know how much he could report to his superiors and how much he could keep hushed up.
And they would inevitably ask about it. And he would be held responsible. Second World, Inc., was not just the game, even though it was the corporation's primary asset. However, there were also military contracts—training facilities, the sort of simulators that Michael Silber had worked on at the beginning of his career, medical programs of all sorts, scientific research, state-of-the-art systems for controlling complex machinery such as nanobots used for surgery, intelligent autopilot systems for all kinds of vehicles, and lots of other stuff.
All of that relied on electronic components in one way or another. And Morgan was the corporation's most important and perfectly singular expert on electronics. He was the High Priest of silicon crystals and the unworldly quantum flux of the electrons, and the Supreme Lord of electrolytic capacitors and variable resistors.
When strange stuff started to happen to the intellectual components of Second World's servers, Morgan's subordinates were the very ones to be tasked with finding a solution. He had to admit that so far the sum total of their results was zilch. Worse than that, they kept getting mired in a host of far-fetched hypotheses and ridiculous suggestions.
Morgan more than earned his keep. He could just take a look at a device, without even using any instruments, find the defective component just by pointing his finger at it, and then having it refurbished or recycled. He put great stock in the idea that all systems should function without a single glitch, always. He kept returning prototypes he deemed unworthy to contractors, with whole teams of developers going ape about it, but he would not relent until the result satisfied to his needs.
All the electronic components of the governing AIs were completely sound. They were tested most rigorously before they would get used, and controlled throughout the entire process. Right now they were disassembled almost into molecules, with every nut and bolt accounted for. Yet the reason for the fatal error was never discovered.
The error was of the kind that would make the executives climb walls just to plunge their teeth into Morgan's liver—and those of his subordinates as well. One always needed to find a scapegoat, after all, and those responsible for the hardware were a prime target.
However, the hardware part was not to blame. What had failed was only partially in Morgan's area of competence.
So what could it be?
That was a good question, and Morgan suspected that only a single person in the whole world could answer it.
Aurelio Barbarossa liked to be referred to as a professor of psychology. That title was one of the reasons for his notoriety—it was received by a dubious institution that had hardly actually taught anyone, but constantly provided some news for the tabloids. However, neither Morgan, nor any of the others, cared one whit. Barbarossa was the man who had created the synthetic consciousness theory from scratch. It was one of those rarest spontaneous insights that only true geniuses are known for. So what if he was the only one who could fully understand it? The principles devised by Barbarossa were used in the production of artificial intelligence. Not the crude hack jobs known under that name since much earlier, but intelligences fully capable of abstract thought, which were perfectly similar to humans in some ways, yet retained all the most important features of machines.
Barbarossa's AIs could not be made with a soldering iron and a bunch of Chinese microchips. Even though they did need electronic housing, just like their predecessors, but they were much like humans in that respect—very similar bodies could belong to a genius and a complete imbecile, respectively.
Barbarossa never used to say they created AIs. His favorite phrase was "to raise a synthetic consciousness." He coddled them like babies. None of his creations resembled any of their predecessors, and they were impossible to copy, unless one spoke of basic IT components—the substrate used for growing an intellect. The window of technological opportunity was very narrow. An extra inch in either direction would result in the creation of a stupid and incoherent artificial entity. They you'd have to grab a large jar of lubricant and explain to your superiors just how you had managed to waste a lump sum with so many zeros in it.
All the latest-generation AIs were Barbarossa's creations. And there was but a handful of them. Some worked for Homeland Security; others formed the governing elite of the Second World AIs—the top-tier group. It was also known as Mr. Ruckus to the airheads and clowns working in development.
Others, too.
The notorious system of threes, for example, when three lower-tier AIs are controlled by another from a higher tier, also linked to two of its neighbors, all of which were, in turn, controlled by an AI from an even higher tier. The developers made the hierarchy, but they got their basic communication principles from Barbarossa, as well as many other things. He was the only one who knew all the details of how this extremely convoluted network really functioned.
The three highest-tier AIs were Barbarossa's masterpiece. The summit of his career. He didn't manage to produce any further models. He was the equivalent of a helicopter parent when he was growing those intelligences. Morgan had very vivid memories of the professor staying in his lab for weeks on end without taking a shower once. His diet was a subject of morbid speculation, too.
Nothing and no one stood above those three in the Second World. They held all the reins in their digital hands. The fact that th
ey hardly ever pulled them didn't mean a thing. It was just that the three governing AIs only got involved when the accursed balance was critically endangered, or when unforeseen factors result in scenarios where the basic rules of the game may be broken.
Tonight, Morgan's team lost the last AI of the three. The electronic components were perfectly sound, just like in every other case. They could dismantle them until only the tiniest particles were left and find no serious defect. But without a synthetic consciousness all the hardware was just so much junk that the tireless Chinese industry could produce in thousands of tons.
A consciousness would have to be grown. From scratch. The only one who'd managed to accomplish it so far was Professor Barbarossa. The oddball who disappeared five months ago, and there hasn't been a whiff of him since.
He is said to have eloped with some hottie. His wife was supposed to have nagged him too much. But Morgan would sooner believe that the world was ruled by the hamsters his youngest son kept in his room. It was absolute BS.
Artificial intelligence was Barbarossa's only passion. He could pontificate for hours, sending showers of spittle all around him, that it would never be exactly the same as human intelligence, pointing out the pros and cons of either. He could spend weeks among arrays of electronics, subsisting on stale food without so much as looking at the fresh Playboy centerfold that some joker had hung on the restroom door.
Even that amazing babe with D-cups who had always tried to lean against him whenever he'd be glued to the computer monitor, pointing out the critical intersections of variable lines in blocky transitions, Barbarossa's heart didn't skip a beat so much as once.
The professor would never have just run away and leave his favorite toys unsupervised. Barbarossa was dead. He died five months ago, and Morgan had already buried him, no matter what everybody else said.
Mentally, that is.
