Final Quest: Dungeons of Perdition - Book 5 (A LitRPG and GameLit Adventure)

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Final Quest: Dungeons of Perdition - Book 5 (A LitRPG and GameLit Adventure) Page 13

by Abhisek Basu


  Natalie climbed to the front of the van, her bandaged shoulder still aching from the damage.

  “You’re in no position to drive,” Dr. Alice said from the back. “Don’t enable manual options.”

  Natalie enabled the manual steering, and the steering popped up from the dashboard. She didn’t have any time to waste. She looked at Dr. Alice from the rear-view mirror, which popped up at the same time as the manual steering.

  “Natalie, don’t-”

  “Look at me, Dr. Alice,” Natalie shouted. Blood was leaking from her bandaged shoulder. “Any sane person would have run away from this by now. If I plan on coming back, I need to figure out something very important. Otherwise, it’s all over.”

  “Look ahead!” she screamed, but Natalie managed to swerve away from a self driving car on the road at the last moment. She looked back at Dr. Alice, who was holding on to the sides of her seat for support.

  “On meeting Evan, do you have the tablet you used to bind him? Can you deactivate him if it’s needed?”

  “I can’t deactivate him, but I will be able to bind him once we get closer to him. But we don’t even know where he is,” Dr. Alice said.

  “I do,” Natalie said and stepped on the accelerator.

  “This is a bad idea, Natalie. I really think we should take you back, report everything you saw and wait for instructions. Maybe you won’t even need to go back to that place. Maybe they’ll send in the military and rescue your uncle,” Dr. Alice said as Natalie kept driving.

  “We both know my uncle isn’t very high on their priority list,” Natalie said. Then she glanced back at Dr. Alice and said, “And I think you know better than I do why I can’t just go back and wait outside. I’ll be sent in either way, and I need to make sure I have the means to defeat him now.”

  “Defeat him?” Dr. Alice said. “Defeat him at what?”

  “Dr. Alice, your team sent someone to rescue me from the front of the tunnel. I didn’t turn around and run away then, did I?” Natalie said.

  There was a moment of silence.

  After a while, Dr. Alice asked, “When did you find out?”

  “You had CELIA notifications on your projected screen at the tower. I saw it and recognized it right then. And you weren’t going to sacrifice me to save the Vice President. Only someone who knows how much is happening behind the scenes would take such a decision,” Natalie said, keeping her eyes on the road.

  “But most of our information is flawed,” Dr. Alice said. “We had one informant who constantly gave us wrong information. He gave us the right ones too, but there was too much running around in circles with him, but he was killed earlier this week. But he’s the one who told us about the hyperloop backdoor entrance in Quanti Valley.”

  “If he said that, he wanted members of CELIA to be there. From what I have seen, he has planned everything, every step of the way. He wouldn’t just let you get that information without a reason,” Natalie said. She didn’t want to say anything else. She didn’t tell her about her own powers, how she got hurt and what she had to do. Just vague terms, abbreviations and abstractions- that’s all she gave her as she drove towards Remnate Street.

  Just like Natalie had expected, she found Evan standing in front of the old building that he was staring at the last time Natalie met him. He stared, almost longingly, at the window on a corner of the building, like last time. Natalie parked the car on the opposite side of the road, just far enough to be out of sight but close enough to keep an eye on him.

  “What is he doing here?” Dr. Alice asked. “Wait, how did you know he’d be here?”

  “He’s always here. The last time I met him-”

  “You mean before we took you to the tower?”

  “Yes. I met him when my consciousness was first transferred here and-”

  “Natalie. I think you’re hiding a lot from me. If we are going to work together, you need to tell me everything you know,” Dr. Alice said.

  “That will take over a day of explanation, doctor. We don’t have much time,” Natalie said.

  “Summarize!” Dr. Alice said. “I need to know what you’re doing and what you’re getting yourself into.”

  Natalie took a deep breath. She decided to tell Dr. Alice about her Final Quest, about the key and the screen and the powers which she had. She told her that she had to defeat Josh Bones and the only way to do that was knowing his weakness.

  Dr. Alice listened to everything silently. Finally, she pulled out her AR tab, looked ahead at Evan and said, “I need to get close to him to bind him. This won’t work from such a distance. But you said you have always seen him here, right?”

  “Yes. He’s always here. Staring up at that empty building,” Natalie said. “Why?”

  “In the initial virtual PAs, the main developer intentionally put a bug in the system that caused the PAs to recognize him and stop what they were doing and stare at him. It was removed in the later updates.”

  “The main developer?”

  “The main one. Nakamoto. He was the founder of MindHaven 112 years ago. But he has been dead for over 48 years. So, even if we assume he went back to the legacy code after he went rogue, why would he stare at that empty building?”

  “I checked the building the last time I was here. It has no upper floors. The construction bots are working on the basement now.”

  “I know. That’s what it says here,” Dr. Alice said and turned the screen projected from her AR tab towards Natalie. “The building he’s looking at is under construction since the past month. It’s rented out to a Mr. Heinz, who is into crowdfunding real estate properties. He has no relation with anyone from MindHaven.”

  Natalie looked at the window of the building and then back at Evan. He was staring at the window, transfixed like he always was. There must have been something that Natalie missed.

  Dr. Alice was about to leave the car when Natalie held her door and closed it. “We have to wait and see what he does. If he’s the one giving Josh information about me, this is the place where he should meet someone.”

  “He doesn’t look like he will, and we don’t have that time, right?”

  Natalie didn’t answer that question. She kept looking at Evan, thinking about how he had to be the one giving Josh all the information about her.

  “How are you feeling?” Dr. Alice asked.

  Natalie wasn’t expecting that question. “What?”

  “Not physically. Emotionally. You just saw two of your friends die and your uncle’s still there. With all this, are you in the right place to go back and fight him again?”

  “I have to, don’t I? He can’t kill me, and if I don’t stop him, who will?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Alice said. “But do you want to? Is getting powers and ruling over the planet what you want to do too?”

  Natalie nodded. “I will do a better job than him, that’s for sure.”

  Dr. Alice looked ahead. Inside the car, they waited. An hour passed as they kept waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. Evan kept looking up at the building and that’s all he did as people passed him nearby. Finally, Dr. Alice said, “If he goes back to the legacy code, I can bind him with the previous module. He won’t be able to escape that. And we have to take back the van. They’re going to start tracking any instant. Let’s just go. I’ll bind him.”

  They walked towards Evan, and Dr. Alice pressed something on her screen which made the restraints appear back on Evan’s wrist and legs.

  He smiled. “This won’t hold me. I thought you knew that, doctor.”

  “Oh this will,” Dr. Alice said. Evan looked down at his glowing cuffs and tried glitching through them. It didn’t work.

  “These are-”

  “They’re legacy code restraints. You aren’t getting out of this,” she said.

  Evan turned around and started to run, fell over, and Natalie grabbed him by his sweater and picked him up. She could touch him now, and before he could speak, Natalie punched him on his face.
r />   He laughed after the punch.

  “He doesn’t feel pain,” Dr. Alice said.

  “What have you told Josh?” Natalie shouted.

  Evan glanced back at the building. Then he looked at her.

  “Everything. He saw everything you did,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want him to win. You’ve told the good doctor everything, right? Were you supposed to?”

  “She won’t tell anyone. I can trust her.”

  “You’re too nice and you’ll readily lay over and let other people dictate what you should or shouldn’t do. Josh needs to win, and even if you don’t hand over the key, at least you’ll learn how to rule in his first five years.”

  “Tell me his weakness!” Natalie shouted. “You must know his weakness.”

  “I know nothing.” Evan said and laughed.

  “Natalie. They’ve started tracking the van. We need to leave,” Dr. Alice said.

  “Take him and go. I have to see something for myself,” Natalie said.

  “I’m coming with you-”

  “No,” Natalie said. “The Feds will be here if you don’t leave with him. Take him back and try to figure out what he knows. I’ll take the backdoor of the valley and get back soon. Go.”

  “Natalie, you said there was nothing there,” she said, pulling Evan away from the road.

  “I know. I think I just need to take a better look,” Natalie said and crossed the road. She entered the building again, the worker bots mindlessly grinding their parts against the basement floor.

  She looked at the window that Evan was staring at and for the first time, she noticed something on the ground that she had missed.

  On the ground, directly below it, was a salt circle. Natalie stepped into it.

  As she did, she noticed a ladder in front of her. Natalie stepped outside the circle again, and the ladder was gone.

  She stepped in it again and saw the ladder. She looked up and saw that the ladder was leading to a floor. The window wasn’t visible anymore. The ladder actually led to a floor on top of her.

  Natalie looked at the mindless bots who didn’t care who was inside the construction site or what they were doing. She looked up and started climbing the rungs of the ladder.

  Reaching the floor, she pulled open a square door. The door slid open.

  Chapter 18

  As the door slid open, Natalie climbed another rung of the ladder and saw an Asian man in his forties wearing a floral-print yellow shirt, long red pants and thin blue beach slippers that should have never been worn indoors. Nothing about the man seemed normal, but the room was even weirder. There were green circuit chips all over the floor, and he was standing with a circuit chip floating above his hand. The entire space was empty, devoid of any furnishing except for two chairs that were placed in the middle of the room. They faced each other expectantly, as if they waited for an interrogation to begin.

  “Come up,” he said, the circuit chip still floating over his hand. “It is the end and I’ve been expecting you.”

  Natalie pulled herself up. The circuit chips beneath her feet were glowing as she stepped over them.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked, while gesturing to Natalie to sit on the opposite chair.

  Natalie sat down on the chair. She said, “No.”

  “Good,” he said and ran his fingers through his hair. “No one does. That’s the point.”

  Natalie saw the faint hint of a smile form on his face momentarily as he glanced up to look at her.

  “But I know who you are. Not like the wrestling fans who call you the strongest woman on the planet, but I have had the fortune of knowing you deeply- of seeing you transform deeply from just a mere human to someone more powerful than I could’ve imagined. Greater individuals with iron wills have died in Tholos, failed in it countless times and their consciousnesses are floating around in unlimited iterations in those worlds whereas you’ve emerged victorious. That is a feat even I didn’t think was possible,” he said, smiling with tears in his eyes.

  “Who are you?” Natalie said, raising her voice. “How do you know so much about me and where I was?”

  “My name is known by a very few people, and I want to keep it like that. You can call me by my pseudonym, Nakamoto. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Natalie White,” he said, folded his hands and bowed.

  “You’re the CEO of MindHaven? But you’re-”

  “Dead? Yes, I’ve been dead for many years now.”

  Natalie didn’t flinch. She raised her eyebrow, expecting him to continue.

  “I’m the person responsible for MindHaven and most of the other AIs of the world. I created the BlockCloud technology on which true augmented and virtual PA interfaces could run. Evan, a figment of the Evanesce cloud is just one of the many PA figments who show up near me after going rogue, watching me and admiring me for my contributions. I never programmed that sense of gratitude in, but like many good things in life, they internally developed it in their legacy code, although the media liked to report it otherwise. If you walk to the window and look at the corner of the street, you’ll see a Chinese woman sipping her coffee and staring at this window with a smile on her face. Go ahead. She’s probably wearing a green dress. Stands out of the crowd, I must say,” he said as Natalie walked over to the window.

  He was right. Exactly like he described, a Chinese woman stared at the window from the coffee shop. “She’s a figment of the Chinese AI cloud, SinoAI. If you look up at the building opposite to mine, there’s a 8-year-old boy on the fifteenth floor perpetually staring down at my window,” he said, as Natalie looked up and saw the boy. “That is a figment of the Russian AI cloud, SputnAI. And I’m sure you can still see your Evan and Dr. Alice downstairs,” he said.

  “No. They’re gone,” Natalie said.

  “Oh. I thought they’d wait for you.”

  “How are you still alive after all these years?” Natalie asked.

  “I’m not. I died, but instead of cryogenically preserving my body, like the other quadrillionaires, I created the technology to upload and replicate myself in the cryptographic cloud. Look at that,” he said and pointed at a thin, long pipe in a corner of the room. “That’s the uploader. If you pierce it through your heart, it will mine the adenochrome in your blood, absorb it and create an immortal you on the cryptographic cloud,” he said.

  “So, your suicide, it was for this?”

  “Yes. A small price to pay for quantum immortality. I’d like to believe I’ll keep working on how to come back, and someday, I’ll be able to create a mechanism for coming back. But that will take a long time, and I have all the time in the world now.”

  “I’m seeing you right now. Can others see you?” Natalie asked. “Can I touch you?”

  “Yes,” Nakamoto said and extended his hand. Natalie touched him. “Anyone I want to see me, can see me. But there’s a limitation to this. The cryptographic cloud has enough energy to power you indefinitely, but if you take too much of its resources, it will throttle your output and you might start glitching. Thankfully, I’ve never had that happen to me.”

  He pointed at the room. “This whole room is being generated by the cryptographic cloud energy that I’m tapping into for you to see. Otherwise, we’d both be in a white void.”

  Natalie nodded. Then she looked up and met his eyes.

  “I think you’re lying. You didn’t just kill yourself for this. You ran away from the system you created.”

  Nakamoto looked outside the window, averting her eyes. “What makes you say that, Natalie?”

  “You had everything you wanted, but the price of more was sacrificing humans for more energy. Thus, you gave the AI full control and left ship, right?” she shouted.

  “It was for the best. And there’s a limit to everything. Once anyone between you or Josh dies, MIndHaven’s AI dies with it, and none of us know what will happen after that. You’re right that I created something that was too big for me to control, but ever
y big thing always had a price.”

  “That’s your excuse?” Natalie shouted. “The world is on the brink of succumbing to a tyrannical ruler, and your big excuse is someday it’ll be over!”

  “A tyrannical ruler who is American is better than a foreign one.”

  “I disagree. The world doesn’t need tyranny.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you’ll not be one. Who knows? Only the future can judge us. You want to ask me about Josh’s weakness because you want to defeat him. But first, go look at the Chinese AI again.”

  Natalie got up from her chair and walked towards the window. She saw her.

  “I don’t usually talk to these figments, but a backdoor allows me to keep track of whatever each architecture is doing. To be fair, there are far worse things going on in the Chinese SinoAI firm than what they are doing here, but then again, what you went through- all the pain and suffering, I’m sure you can attest that no one should be subject to that. I can agree with that statement, but is it really suffering if you’re unaware of it?”

  “I don’t think my journey in Tholos was only about suffering. I learnt a lot, improved in various ways, made friends and lost some,” Natalie said.

  “And that is what it should’ve been like. The whole experiment was meant to be completed there, but humanity has a habit of reaching for more than they can chew. That is what happened with Josh, and that’s what happened with you,” he said.

  “So you’re saying you saw my journey and Josh’s journey and everything because you’re the one behind Tholos?” Natalie asked.

  “Not just Tholos, I’m the one behind the Dungeons of Perdition, except I had little to do with anything. Intelligent design, evolutionary cloud and the onset of productive iterative and random polymorphism handled the rest. Think of me as someone who wrote the code for the big bang expecting just light. As order changed into chaos, I no longer had control of the systems and worlds it deployed. Soon, I realized that it wasn’t just digital- the cloud had created a world of their own- just like particles of light creating matter in a hadron collider but in a more real sense combining matter with time and evolving into true Dungeons,” he said.

 

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