“Why do I hear it like it’s not related to me?” Zack asked.
“Because you’re a loser drowning in self-pity,” AliceX said. “I’m curious about your story though. It sounds promising to me, in a way. I’d rather see what’s next. I mean, what if it’s real, I ask myself. Curious. It doesn’t make you my hero or anything. Ok? Don’t get any wrong ideas.”
Zack smiled behind her back. “It’s enough for me,” he said.
It was not nearly enough in fact, but it was something he was used to live with when girls were involved. They had a very strange concept of what’s romantic and who’s a loser. Zack totally disagreed with her opinion and her image of him. His life was at stake now, however. And this girl, she had just saved it.
But no, he was not a loser at all.
“Let’s do this,” Zack said, fingering the bulk of Potions of Dizziness on his belt.
And he followed AliceX into the moonlight outside.
“What is he doing here?” Conan asked the moment he saw Zack emerging. “Why didn’t you finish him off?”
“I sorta wanted to give him a shot,” AliceX said.
“A shot at what?” Roxxor moved in, his blade a long crooked shadow. “At murdering us? Or being murdered by us?”
“Yeah, whatever.” AliceX looked at Zack and rolled her eyes tiredly. “Well okay, I brought him here so you could kill him yourselves, since you’re men and you’re so strong and all.”
WHOOSH! Zack popped a Potion of Dizziness in front of them. Him and AliceX were the only two unaffected, though he was the one to feel the terrible acrid smell this potion turned out to produce, and Zack’s stomach now felt full of butterflies, and not exactly because he was in love.
“Alice, I have about ten seconds to run away,” he said. “Please come with me.”
“That’s too little.” She frowned. “I am not a fast thinker.”
“Okay,” Zack said. He popped two more potions: WHOOSH! WHOOSH! “Thirty seconds. More like twenty five by now. Okay?”
“And still, you want to run away like a loser…”
BOOM! Zack popped a fat green clayish thing he had looted from the Orkish Shaman’s corpse – a Noxious Bomb.
“Now they’re not just stunned, they’re debuffed and suffering Poison damage,” Zack said. “I have two more. I could kill them if you want. Probably. But I may also die.”
-=Conan=- took 5 Poison damage!
Roxxor took 7 Poison damage!
-=Conan=- took 4 Poison damage!
Roxxor took 7 Poison damage!
AliceX stood there, her little brow frowned under a crown of golden locks. She was visibly thinking hard, listening to the poison sizzling away Conan’s and Roxxor’s hit points.
“Alice, don’t you dare and betray the party,” Conan said. “If you do, you’re out. We’re done. You understand?”
“I’m thinking,” she said.
“You shouldn’t have brought him here in the first place,” the Barbarian retorted. “Don’t you listen to my orders at all?”
“Okay, I’ll go,” AliceX said instantly. “Kid, aren’t you a bag of surprises, huh? Move it, they’ll timeout soon.”
They made their way into the maze of bushes and briars. AliceX suddenly turned around, then threw a thin veil all over him, dressing Zack in night shadows.
“The Nightshade Potion,” AliceX said. “I’ll tell you the recipe. Basically a stealth buff.”
“Tell me the recipe?” Zack whispered. “Why so kind all of a sudden? And how will this recipe work if it’s not unlocked?”
“It means it’s discovered,” she whispered. “They want you to experiment, silly. They want us to talk about stuff in a functional way, to communicate things to each other. So if I tell you this recipe – and this is: three Nightshades, the purple horse radish kind of thing you see especially prominent in the grass during night, plus three Sourberries which you know, plus three of those glowing mushrooms, the Radiant Fungi you ignored in the mines. Once you mix this for the first time, it will unlock the recipe and give you plus one to Alchemy. Cool?”
“You’re with me,” Zack said. “This is what’s cool.”
They cut through the forest, carefully avoiding one Swarm of Enraged Wasps, two Packs of Wolves, a couple Spiders, and one Enraged Wasp Nest. Alice’s Ranger skills were excellent. It was impossible to ambush their party while she was scouting ahead.
“I was just so bored with Conan’s tone,” AliceX admitted. “I play this game as a statement, see. It allows me to be truer to myself, to my Elven nature. I’m an alien, you know. Boys don’t like me much.”
“Are you crazy?” Zack said. “Why?”
“I get offended easily,” she said. “I am very modern and rebel so I play as an Elf. I don’t like Humans.”
“Why?”
“Well, just listen how their faction’s called. Empire of Man. Isn’t it offensive to women? I think it is. And did you see the Human female characters? They all wear these steel bikinis. I find it ridiculous. Now Elves, they fit me fine. I always wanted to be like Galadriel. She is my role model. I mean Galadriel by Cate Blanchett, not the cartoon version or something. She was AMAZING, right? Totally an alien, like I am.”
“The altar is near,” Zack said.
“I know, thank you, I respawned there just recently,” AliceX said.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault, come on,” she said, visibly annoyed. “You only offed Conan and stole our stuff. It’s fine. I’d kill him myself. He is such a MAN.”
She said the Conan’s guy gender like a curse. This made Zack slightly more confident.
“Look, Alice,” he said. “I also always thought I’m an alien amongst…”
“You’re merely a loser, and this is why no one likes you, and you think it’s because you’re very complex and special,” AliceX said. “I am not THAT kind of an alien, okay? People don’t shun me. People like me. It’s not them, it’s me.”
“Oh, okay,” Zack said, feeling completely obliterated by this girl. The fact that he had to rely on her companionship was a constant pain. She seemed very simple-minded, self-assured, and harsh. No wonder she had problems with people, unlike Zack, who never even mixed with people. And still, he had to rely on her. Zack had no one else in this crazy fantasy world so far, no one who would remotely believe him or care for what happened to him next. This brutal girlie, she was slightly interested at least.
“So you do realize,” he said, trying to keep his best impression and charm steadily applied to this nutcase his life now depended on. “You do realize it was the same people, the ones who worked on Elves and the ones who designed these steel bikinis you hate, and probably the ones who named the Human faction an Empire of Man, huh? Not to mention it’s all stolen from Warhammer.”
“Maybe not the same people,” AliceX said. “Maybe it was two different creative minds put in charge of two ideologically different factions. Maybe it was two different competing design teams who created the core game and the Elven DLC.”
“I think CIA is definitely involved here, and there’s a high chance FBI and Homeland Security also are,” Zack said. “I was hijacked and locked inside this game on purpose, I swear. This is a test of some kind, all of this.”
“You know what they do in this game?” AliceX said. “They run a competition between AI designers. So one team of programmers and designers develops, say, a wolf, and another a bull, right? So these NPC animals, their stats and behavior, they have to make sense, like a five level bull must be able to beat a five level wolf, say, fifty times out of a hundred. So they make these fights. And their AIs, they learn from each other. They fight for their lives, die in great numbers, and evolve just like real animals, through natural selection which is simulated to happen very fast. And it’s like, every two creatures in this game are linked through this challenge, and all of them are connected into this global ecology. So the wild nature here, the mob s
pawns and everything, it’s all a bit level-dependent, right, but there’s always a safety net around you, which keeps you say around 2 remaining HP, giving up a bit when you’re nearly dead, letting you win. Did you notice? It’s all SO rigged. But it happens naturally, through the ecology and not some explicit tinkering. If Wolves harass you, they spawn a Bull of proportional stats to distract them. And so on.”
“How do you know so much?“ Zack asked, suddenly quite suspicious of her. “Who are you, Alice? Are you with THEM?”
“I was a beta-tester of Aetheria,” AliceX said. “I know a lot about how it was made.”
“Uh huh,” Zack said. “So you’re not some spy or anything? Not FBI? This meeting of ours, was it prearranged? Was it absolutely random?”
“It very much was,” AliceX said, ruthless as ever. “And I swear, if you keep intruding into my personal space with your paranoia, I will turn around and leave. I am a complicated person. I told you, I get offended easily.”
He sighed and fell silent. Zack couldn’t complain after all. He had a companion, finally. And so what if she knew so much about how the game worked? Given Zack’s new circumstances, he should have been thankful for this expertise.
The rocky path slowly grew steeper, and the surroundings looked more and more familiar. Zack even seemed to recognize some of the smaller rocks he had displaced on his way down. The altar wasn’t all that far after all, it’s just now he had to walk in silence, always uphill, and the Stamina drain associated with the climb manifested in Zack as the feeling of an endless chore, climbing a mountain little by little, one foot in front of the other. When the familiar pile of broken marble sans magical fountain finally appeared in their view, Zack even felt a great deal of relief, though the altar was broken still, and there was little to feel relieved about.
“Look, here’s the altar!” Zack pointed at the distant ruins. “And there was this old man, Dante, but I don’t see him anymore.”
“So what?” AliceX asked.
“The altar!” he said, urging her towards the heap of marble, its runes now visible, smoldering all around the pieces of broken stone like dying embers. “You see it? It’s destroyed and totally inactive.”
“Is it?” She raised her eyebrows.
“It is!” Zack said, and then hesitated. What if he was terribly wrong all the time? What if this pile actually worked, and he could disable the Permadeath mode here?
“Okay, let me try,” he said, and then shouted: “SETTINGS! PERMADEATH! OFF! Open settings. Yes, you see, inactive. Nothing happens.”
“I see it as totally functioning,” AliceX said, walking around the altar. “And totally active. Are you sure yours is broken?”
“Yes!”
“Well, you know,” Alice said. “They store your world in chunks. We may see small bits of it different. Right? I don’t have Permadeath on, you do.”
Zack was really scared now.
“So it’s only broken in my own world?” he asked. “My own special hell…”
“I’m afraid so,” AliceX said.
Zack swung back and forth, then sat, exhausted. This worried Alice.
“This was not a macro,” she said. “Do you like, really feel it? Tired for real? And you can sit down like that? How can it happen?”
Zack sighed. He wished he knew what to tell her. And how. He tried to relay his adventures carefully, trying to sound like someone who is not a loser and not a scoundrel at once, despite the fact Zack had killed the Barbarian he had revived and then stolen the Legendary Aetherium Shard just because he hoped to escape with it, and then failed even at that. He tried to explain how he was played and lured into a trap, his greed exploited. Zack told her about the college money. He skipped the part about his mom buying him the rig though. As far as he knew Alice, she would merely call him a mama’s boy. Zack finished the story with the Eater of Worlds bringing the shrine down on his head; and how he woke up at respawn and found out everything was happening to him for real now.
“Or maybe it’s all a dream,” Zack said. “You’re not a dream, are you?”
“Who, me?” AliceX smirked. “Do I look like a dream?”
In fact, she did; she just didn’t act like one. He kept this part to himself though.
“This Marduk thing,” Zack said instead. “It felt like it saw me. It sensed me.”
“Yeah, and then a thousand more old clichés by Stephen King,” AliceX cut him off. She sat across him and looked him in the eye. Her Elven face framed by golden Galadriel curls was serious and attentive. “I know you from somewhere.”
“I mean, only one thing would make sense if it’s not a dream,” Zack said. “If it’s not, then it’s all actually a mind control virus, a secret project…”
“…of the evil government, which is out of control now. More Stephen King.” AliceX looked genuinely skeptic. “Nah but… It’s AMAZING! Okay, I’ve got some bad news.”
Zack felt colder despite the unchanging calm of the night that engulfed them with a starry dome above and the air full of fragrances, all around them, smells of pears and pines, of earth and grass, quite pleasant in fact. Once in a while, Aetheria felt comfortable to Zack.
AliceX was quick to part with the bad news. “So, we are from the same city, yeah? A big storm yesterday?”
“Yeah,” Zack said carefully, his back propped against one of the fallen altar columns. He thought of how the face-scanning lasers relayed every emotion on her real face to this Elven character’s cartoonish features, in great detail. Judging by AliceX’s face, she had just discovered something exciting yet genuinely disturbing. Zack felt infected by her mood before she even talked. He seemed to feel all the burning runes now with his back.
“So there was this post on Aetheria’s public forums and the VR hardware manufacturer’s site,” AliceX said. “They strongly discourage people from playing during thunderstorms now. You see, a few players were hit by lightning yesterday, while playing the game. Apparently it wasn’t supposed to happen, and nothing is wrong with the rig, but there was some weird chain of coincidences, like, you know these theories that lightning has a mind of sorts?”
“What do you mean, struck by lightning?” Zack asked, cold with many sudden feelings remembered, something that he easily may have felt in a hospital, faintly. Was he crazy then, or raving somehow? “Are you real then? I am not hallucinating, am I?”
“OMGee,” AliceX said, studying his face. “Are YOU real? OMGee.”
“I feel weird,” Zack confessed, his stomach full of butterflies again.
“You are in a coma,” AliceX said. “You are in a hospital and yet you’re here, and I still can talk to you. This has something to do with digitized human consciousness. It happened. Somehow it did. I have no idea. But this is SO amazing.”
“I don’t want to believe it,” Zack said. “But I feel you may be right. And maybe it IS an afterlife of sorts. Maybe you met a real ghost. All things may be possible with this kind of immersion. I feel everything. May I touch you?”
“Absolutely not,” AliceX said. “And please stop it. I mean it.”
“Will you follow me then?” Zack asked. “Friendzone me if you must. Right now, I only care about waking up from whatever you say I’m in.”
“And this means?” Her Elven face was freckled, now he noticed. Freckled and skeptical as ever, human features reading under the digital makeup. She was a shy girl, Zack figured.
“This means a big quest,” he said. “I’m going into the Swamplands.”
“But that’s enemy territory.”
“Exactly. This is why I could use your help.”
AliceX shook her head. “This is crazy. You wanna access settings at their altar? Instead of ours?”
“Must not be hard once I get there,” Zack replied. “It’s low-level Orkish lands. School zone, like this place.”
“Hello?” AliceX said. “Didn’t you hear about the Grand Demon Event? No land is safe now. Knowing yo
u so far, you’ll get killed in there straight off. I mean okay, you are interesting. You were struck by lightning. Sort of makes you a chosen one, huh. Maybe a superhero. But also a really, really unfortunate loser. Hmm.”
“I’ll tell you more,” Zack said. “Imagine this. You said they made AIs fight each other and learn.”
“They have this big neural network rented, neither by Google nor Apple but kinda an aggregator thing,” AliceX said. “It runs the AIs based on character matrices and more. I wrote in my beta review at first I was all uncanny valley with them, you know. Like, at first it all felt FAR too alive. Scary. Very addictive and demanding, emotionally, so okay, I was hard on them, and maybe criticized them some. So they thanked me, and they didn’t want me for the next focus test, and we were through.”
“I’ll tell you this,” Zack said. “What if they made one Angel AI and one Demon AI, totally supreme beings both of them, one AI based on everything righteous and good, and another on everything evil?”
“What’s good and what’s evil?” AliceX asked, remote as ever. “Fair is foul and foul is fair. The world is more complex than good and evil, or even order and chaos, isn’t it? Like, chaos is supposed to be evil. Take these Orks for example, they’re Chaos by definition, and they’re an evil mess, right? While Order is supposed to be, like, a good thing, a righteous thing. And now remember how life is. Order is a terrible thing; it’s oppression, like police states and so on. And chaos is like you’re with your family, or with someone you like, and you can be yourself, and it feels good. No rules.”
Zack wasn’t really listening. He felt he was onto something, so he went on: “But these were two character-driven AIs, they’re stupid and direct-thinking, that’s the point!” Zack said. “Like Elon Musk warned everyone about feeding The Godfather to a robot, but they didn’t listen! So they made these two AIs, one super-good and another super-evil, what if they made them fight and learn from each other, like you just told? You see? This Demon AI, well it’s Marduk himself! Like a bull and a wolf helping each other evolve organically, yeah? Character-driven level-dependent demon AI. I swear it, this Marduk was Level 99.”
The Alchemist of Aetheria: A LitRPG Adventure Page 14
