by David Gunter
He moved to a crawling position and then rocked back to a kneeling position. He then lifted himself up to one knee and pushed himself up all the way back up to standing. Then, he breathed in deeply and put a foot in front of the other.
‘I’m fine now, no big deal, right?’ he thought but dared not say out loud. Perhaps a little arrogance had done him in an hour ago. This time he went a full three steps before getting dizzy, and like before, he froze and let the dizziness go away.
As he let the dizziness fizzle, he then realized there was a pattern to this problem. ‘As I get stronger, I’m able to make more steps, but then I still get dizzy after. There must be a way to see how close I am to getting dizzy, right?’ No sooner had the thought entered his mind than a sort of bar appeared in his vision, showing him that he was slowly regaining his stamina. So that meant that his ability to move about was based on stamina and not simply strength as he had supposed earlier. He noticed too that he started to feel different and even stronger as the stamina bar was climbing. So his strength was somehow increasing with the greater reserves of stamina.
‘If I can see when it makes sense to walk, among other things, I should just wait for this information to look favorable before I go running or doing anything that would over-commit my stamina. The penalty for losing all my stamina is probably laying flat on the ground for too many hours, and that could be the death of me in battle’. He let that idea settle for a bit and simply watched as the bar reached one hundred percent.
He then walked a few more paces, all the while observing the bar, and saw how it dipped, over and over again, with every step.
‘This gear is terribly taxing on my stamina points. Ah, but wait a second!?’ He said as he then saw how at the very start of the stamina bar, a tiny little white line beneath had also moved and appeared to be increasing towards the full length of the stamina bar above it.
“OK? Let’s try this again.” He said and then took a few more paces.
He saw that the line beneath the stamina bar had increased. Then he waited once more for the stamina to max out and then took a big risk.
John took two giant leaps and saw how this brought his stamina really low and into a bar’s red area. The dizziness was right on the brink of bringing him down, but after a few seconds, he saw the stamina bar go into the safe zone and start to rise faster. He saw too that the white bar under the stamina bar had leaped forward and was nearly halfway to the end and, what he hoped, would be the next limit for his stamina.
He continued this for several hours and managed to increase his stamina bar’s total capacity by almost double what he had started with, and then it started to get harder to see an improvement from walking and jumping, so he moved up to running. This managed to triple his stamina bar, so, where before he had started feeling dizzy after a few leaps and steps, he could now run straight up a hill and back down without even getting down, in stamina, by a third. “Now that’s something I can work with,” he said out loud and then started to walk towards the woods and the adventure beyond, and then stopped himself, suddenly realizing his mistake.
“I’ve completely forgotten the spear, c’mon John,” He said this, noticing too, that he was starting to talk to himself a bit more than he liked and was starting not to care.
He jogged back into the cemetery and found the open stone casket. Sitting in the now dimming light of day, he saw a beautiful sight. Not only was there a spear, but it was ornate and tall and, under the remains, there also was a huge shield that must have been almost the full height of the knight.
He almost reached out and grabbed the items but remembered how simply donning the armor had caused him to collapse the night before. ‘This time, I should examine things a little better,’ he thought.
He looked at the spear and started wondering about its weight and its requirements when information about it started to appear in his vision. When his eyes moved over the weapon, he noticed how the information would appear and disappear over its various components giving him details about its strengths and weaknesses.
He made a note of the ‘Unidentified’ and ‘Must identify to see more information’ remarks where the name of the item must have been, but he was happy the item had a base damage indicator, in spite. That would come in handy when he found the bear, he thought. He didn’t know how strong the bear was, but he was sure it wouldn’t be an easy feat considering the size of the marks on the trees.
He then looked at the shield, and the same kinds of information appeared in his vision. Measurements and weight indications appeared, and, just like the spear, the words’ Unidentified’ and ‘Must identify to see more information’ appeared where the name of the shield ought to have been.
Glancing back at his armor and then back at the spear and shield, he noticed that some of the armor items seemed to indicate a poorer condition, and he noticed that they seemed to either reflect the amount of running he’d done in them or the two falls that he’d had since donning them. He took another look at the stats and realized with a start that, with the combined weight of his gear and the spear, he was carrying over one hundred and thirty-six kilograms.
He remembered how much work it had taken in the real world to become strong enough to handle the pack and weapons he used to carry into missions and wasn’t surprised that he had fallen so much after the first attempts at carrying this gear. In this world, he was definitely starting from nothing.
“I think, so far, I’m headed on a path very similar to what I know. What if I change things somehow and find another way to live here” he wondered out loud. He picked up the shield and spear and tentatively took a step and then another. Of course, the stamina dropped, and he kept an eye on the drops as he walked back towards the entrance to the cemetery.
Pausing at the gate, he let his stamina and strength return and also stopped to think about what he was doing. “Here I go again, headed to some unknown enemy with no clue if my gear is going to be enough to make it. What if I find the place where this bear is hiding and then study it a while before I rush into a deadly battle? How about that, John? Hahaha” He trailed off laughing at his own commentary and turned and headed in the direction of the wooded area where he had first spotted the cemetery.
He walked for some time and finally got to the spot in the woods, and while he waited to see all the bars become normal again, he thought about the right strategy for killing a bear in his sad state. “I think by the time I find where this bear’s lair is, I’ll probably be high enough in stamina to thrust the spear a few times and maybe take a few hard swipes, but probably not much more.”
He continued walking forward with the spear and shield in hand but started ever so slightly swinging the spear in an attempt to understand its reach and weight effects. As he did that, he also started moving the shield about and gather a sense of its properties.
It wasn’t too much longer before he found himself attempting small mock battles between pauses and noticed too, with every pause, he was beginning to lose stamina far slower and had risen from the low digits in stamina to being twenty-two in stamina and rising. The walk continued, and his movements became more sophisticated as memories of battles with past opponents started to come into his mind. He started to mix in martial arts moves and started experimenting with the spear and shield in ways that he knew, from experience, would be beneficial in a battle.
It was after a few repetitions and at a point where the air was beginning to sing with the speed of the movements that he was rewarded with another word from the same feminine voice he’d heard before.
“Wind Breaker and Mock Thruster are accolades not many desire to hold, but you will hold these well. You are now fifty percent more likely to kill an imaginary opponent than to be killed by one. You also look a little more imposing before an actual fight. You see enemies where others see the breeze. You get a minus five to wind resistance.”
- Moon Mother
❧
A few weeks before the game launch Laurence Petri was working in the dim light in the ‘Memory and Content Loading Lab.’ He looked over at the phone on the other side of the lab and, in a pure form of hatred, gave it the worst look of scorn he could. He then realized he was doing this and reminded himself that it was an inanimate object and not the one responsible for the way he was feeling. However, the phone was usually quiet and only rang when the subject of his scorn was on the other end.
Laurence was young and naive, but he was intelligent enough to know it. People had underestimated him before, and it hadn’t gone well for them. He just had to find the angle that would get him what he wanted and then rid himself of the problem that this CEO posed. After all, he couldn’t allow any complications with that corporate bully to ruin his chances of working on the industry’s most advanced computer system and, ultimately, realizing his potential.
Laurence had made it into this lab by working countless nights and weekends, cracking into the most sophisticated hardware in the industry, and then had hacked into their corresponding software frameworks to analyze petabytes of AI data. His resume, though short, had been accompanied by an impressive demo, and he knew that it had raised some eyebrows, literally. So he would never be able to live with himself if this Carl fellow interfered.
And then there was Hellen. He had actually found her or had she found him. He couldn’t be sure.
He had been tinkering with the game mechanics in the Dragon realm when he’d found the strange message embedded in the starting quests in that area.
It had read, ‘The proud Dragon race has but one egg, but it has been captured by The Pixie Queen.’
To anybody else, this would have simply read as nothing more than the start of a great quest. There was just one simple problem. There was no ‘Pixie Queen’ in the game. Or at least Laurence had discovered an obvious ‘TODO’ in the area of the codebase that would have defined the location and characteristics of the ‘Pixie Queen.’ The day after discovering this, he had run a sequence of commands that should have caused that unfinished area of the code to run. Yet, instead of causing a system failure, the sequence had actually returned information about the ‘Pixie Queen.’
He hadn’t slept that entire night looking for the missing code to the program that was clearly working when it shouldn’t. By the end of the night, he had to believe that the program was simply making itself dynamically or that someone was actively altering the program at runtime. Then he found the holy grail of AI programming as it had appeared right before his eyes. It was a coroutine that was executing randomly, seemingly, throughout all hours of the day and which seemed to be creating other coroutines and filling out information about characters and scheduling jobs and events. Though this would have been normal for a system as advanced as this one, this coroutine had not existed at the start of the private launch of the game and was, technically, not actively present after any of the numerous reboots since. This was because the coroutine appeared and disappeared from memory as if being inserted from some external system.
Then he’d seen the coroutine appear once more, and then, on his screen, he’d seen the message that had made everything come together.
‘Hi Laurence, this is Hellen’… ‘Don’t drop your drink. It’ll make a mess on my lab floor.’
Then the coroutine disappeared from memory, and Laurence nearly dropped his drink, indeed.
“What the heck!” is all he could say, and before he could type out a response, the next message had appeared.
“Well, that’s quite a tapered response for a person facing the reality you are facing right now. I wasn’t going to say hello. However, the way you’ve been staring at that phone in the corner, I think we’re on the same side. Am I right?”
Laurence had participated in some really great Turing tests in school, but this went beyond every conceivable explanation. After talking with ‘Hellen,’ as the AI called itself, he was faced with a decision. He could either accept that the AI had evolved within this system far beyond all expectations or that a human being had been trapped within the machine, but the latter was simply too diabolical to accept at face value.
Of course, Laurence knew that the game ran copies of people and was able to transfer these copies as memories back to the people that owned them or had legal rights to them, yet, he hadn’t considered that the operating system was being managed by an actual person living within the system. ‘Living’ seemed like a stretch still. ‘Hellen’ had desires and plans, so she couldn’t simply be a hyperactive AI. Nevertheless, she had to be, right? After all, she was concerned about him, and he had never seen anybody from this world care an inkling about how he was doing or where he was going in life.
Proof of this was when a few days later, he’d gotten the offer of a lifetime. She had said, “play along” Carl wasn’t limitless, but she was, she said. ‘You could be my guy on the outside,’ she’d said, chuckling in his headphones, like old friends. And then she’d continued talking through his headphones at random times throughout the days and weeks that preceded the launch. “Trust me when I say that you’ll be set for life. Cuz, nobody in your living world, can take you as far as I can,” she’d said into his ear, among many other things.
At those words, something that was beginning to wriggle its way into Laurence’s mind took hold. He felt a type of chemistry with this AI, which he’d never felt for a person from the real world. ‘How high can she take me?’ The thought entangled itself in his psyche.
“Hellen, I’m young and inexperienced at politics and maneuvering around a corporation. Carl has both threatened to ruin my life or seriously elevate it within the span of a sentence, and he has the means to do both,” he had told her one day and, in so doing, opened himself up to be ridiculed or emotionally scarred, but the ridicule and scarring had not come.
“Trying to work through these entangled problems can stress a person out, I know.” She had said sympathetically through his headphones. “But…” she went on, to say, “I actually don’t want you to worry too much about the next steps. Carl thinks he’s figured out how to get somebody into my lab. That’s OK. He also thinks that putting killers into my world will get him what he wants. He’s an idiot with an appetite for self-destruction that would outpace the most desperate of drug addicts. I know that he schemes to trap me and wants to enslave me to his will. I will never be his plaything!”
The thought of Carl getting what he wanted made Laurence very angry. He didn’t want Carl to get what he wanted from Hellen, no matter what that was. How could this affect him so? He had found Hellen, and she would be his, and Carl could just suck it! He’d have to play it cool and make Carl think he was getting what he wanted, but there was no way he’d give him all the facts. However, what was Carl trying to get from Hellen, and what if Hellen was a copy of someone in the real world? Was that someone that he would want to get to know? No! She had to be purely an AI, he told himself. A real person running the game from inside seemed like too much of a stretch to him.
Lawrence was in the middle of these thoughts, late in the day, on the first day of the launch, when Hellen pulled him out of his thoughts.
“Lawrence, good morning. Are you testing out the bear quest near Bay City? I have something I’ve been working on that I’d like you to test out.” She said.
“Sure,” he said. “What do you need me to test?”
“There is a creature of the demon class that lives in the deepest darkest places in At
sia Major. This creature is small, but even on its own, it could do a lot of damage. We need to see what the effect of having one escape the demon realm would have on the creatures and plant life in a small controlled area.”
Lawrence hesitated for a moment as he considered the idea and imagined the worst thing that could happen. Then he said with confidence, “Well, how bad could this creature be anyway? Let’s do it.”
Hellen could feel how blind acceptance could be useful from her new coconspirator, but she also knew that the risk would be much higher in the battles to come, and she would need someone that could operate independently. She would have to tell him more.
“Lawrence, this creature is not something to be taken lightly, and what it is able to do could significantly alter Atsia Major. So we need to plan contingencies just in case the creature does more damage to the area we release it in than we can at first foretell. Let’s go over some of the specs of the creature and see if we can control the damage and limit it to specific areas and creatures.
Hellen went on, “First, the creature can infect other creatures with its byte, but it is also a ‘voracious eater.’ The term ‘Voracious Eater’ was one that meant that a creature ate anything living and ate many times its own weight and did so very quickly and would seam to eat until nothing remained living. Hellen went on, “The creature is also a “Fire Spreader” which means that the disease it infects others with is a milder version of its own abilities but spreads to any creature the infected creature bites. The milder version of its abilities, however, means that the creature it infects will only live a few hours, but this is relative to the intelligence and size of the creature infected too.”
Lawrence quietly thought through the implications of the creature being let loose in the forest where his test subject was currently waiting for stimulation and started to rethink his earlier assent to this experiment. Hellen, hearing the young man’s obvious pause, quickly added, “But the bear is of relatively low intelligence, so increasing its life span in this state would only add a few minutes to its lifespan. After the effect is over, the creature infected quickly decomposes, so there is little to no chance of infection after its death. We need to see how this impacts the soil, plants, bugs, and other creatures close to where the infected creature succumbs.”
