Continue Online (Part 3, Realities) (52 page)

There was a short time delay in our conversation since the message was piping through a great distance. Part of me was annoyed that Advance Online felt the need to be realistic on this point but chose to allow giant space monsters and metal morphing races like the
[Mechanoid]
s.

"Very well. We will pilot our ships through and submit to the escort." Aqua nodded. "We shall join you soon for pickup."

"I'm probably going to be..." Dead wasn't the right word. Being crushed was more accurate for a metal body. "Well, Auntie Backstab is going to probably remove this shell in order to reclaim the ship."

"Unlikely, we have prepared a decoy for this eventuality. Ruby will assist in masking your presence."

"What?" I turned around in time to see a flash of crimson. Everything spun.

Ruby, the red skinned
[Mechanoid]
who seemed to linger outside the edge of my vision, had done something dangerous. She must be using a stealth ability, like the one that Emerald had awarded me but I hadn't played with. A box flashed at one side telling me roughly what was going on.

I ground my teeth and tried to stay conscious. They were doing exactly what I had argued against. Sacrificing countless people in order to help me. The fact that a
[Mechanoid]
consciousnesses would be recovered somewhere else didn't matter in my mind. A box started ticking by the effects of my efforts upon this game character.

Massive footsteps stomped nearby. I felt the vibrations rather than saw them. My ARC feedback had grown exceptionally blurry. Small ones and zeros were crawling across my vision like worms. Behind them was a trail of blackness that provided no visual information.

Ruby was under my armpit, lifting me. We staggered somewhere as the hacking attempt wore on. In a small corner of the command room, there was an exit panel. The other
[Mechanoid]
set me down and started removing the paneling.

"Ah ha! Metal soup man!" Auntie Backstab yelled from another room. The half
[Leviathan]
NPC couldn't have smelled me through the walls, could she?

"Unit Hermes, you have shown value for what you perceive life to be, and we respect this, however, we do not have time to lose a key figure to the whims of the enemy," said Treasure, her voice ringing in my head.

Everything started to fade. I wanted to growl and huff at Treasure. They had set up another
[Mechanoid]
to die in my place. Even now the noise of Auntie Backstab could be heard.

"Backstab successful!" She shouted and the entire ship shuddered.

The ARC feedback didn't stop. Advance Online gradually brought back my eyesight and deposited me in the gray space. This was the same area I had ended up in after the
[Leviathan]
encounter and ripping out my own
[Core]
s.

I logged out and took care of real life issues. To keep myself apprised of the in-game situation, I loaded up a monitoring program. A sound would play once the unconscious status changed and my character was playable again.

The house needed a quick round of cleaning. Clothing sat folded and pressed in a deposit box. I picked that up, threw empty food containers into a recycling bin, and tried to remember what life consisted of on a good day. Sleep, dancing and work mostly.

Aside from the necessitates of self-maintenance I also had family. Liz visited me a few days ago in the hospital, and she likely hadn't come to grips with our argument on Sunday. Our brief moment of conversation was probably the result of the medical scare.

Plus, I may be out of the game, but there were other options that could be pursued. I called Beth because I needed someone human to talk to after all that gallivanting about as a
[Mechanoid]
. Maybe she could help me get a Continue fix. The option of cheating to watch her play through my admin connection was strong.

"Uncle Grant!" she answered the video call on the first ring.

"Munchkin, I mean, Beth!" I tried to cover up the fumble. Last time I used munchkin she got mad at me. "I wanted to see how things are going."

"Good, great! Sort of. Homework is rough." the bubbly teen said. She hadn't changed much over these last few months, but it felt like I had been through a few wringers.

"Hey. Question for you, about Continue." I launched right into my actual topic. Beth's homework would be well beyond the scope of what I learned in high school.

"Fire away, Uncle Grant. I've got time tonight, taking a break from the box." She shrugged. "Mom says it's unhealthy, and she pays the bills."

"She's probably right. Anyway, my question, there's this commander, to the north-" I paused and looked around trying to remember the location's name, "-in, Tuu, I think?"

"Yeah. A giant mountain range that runs along the northern side. That's a lot of ground, though, which commander?"

"Like, Queenshand? Something Arm?" It had to be similar to Queenshand. That letter had been delivered almost a month ago. Just one among the dozens I had handed out to players and NPCs alike. Their names were often blips on the radar as my feet wandered across the game world.

"Oh, Strongarm!" Beth nearly shouted in joy but managed to hush her voice. My sister must have been asleep upstairs. "She's the aunt to those princesses. You remember the ones you got in the middle of? I still can't believe you whooshed in there. Like a hero, my boyfriend was in awe."

I disregarded the comment about her boyfriend. After dealing with my sister's string of guys, I could only be thankful that Beth kept it confined to a virtual world. At least there was no chance of ending up with a child at a young age. "Her brother, was a king then?"

"Sure was." Beth nodded.

"And he died?" I asked.

Beth tapped a finger against her cheek and looked up. "The backstory, I think, is the old king got poisoned a few months ago. One of his taste testers apparently failed to catch a lethal dose of poison and it took out half the king's staff."

"That's messed up," I said while roaming to the kitchen. There was always time for a light snack, especially since my character might wake up at any moment. My goal was to be ready and able to dive right back in.

"Oh yeah. You were there, you have to know about some of it, right? This is all stuff you already can get in your character's journal, if mom hadn't kicked you out." Beth could be heard bounding up the stairs of her split-level house. Our visual connection showed the upstairs was unlit and darkened. Late afternoon hit my sister's house sooner than mine.

"Yeah. I don't have the notes in front of me." My Continue Online journal stored a lot of information. It was one of the benefits of working on my
[Knowledge]
statistic in the game. As it went higher, additional notes from the world were automatically jotted down for later reference. I just couldn't access it currently.

"One more question, sort of," I asked her while running the coffee machine.

"Go for it." Beth was also scrounging for food. The video stream showed her bending over and looking in the refrigerator. She looked unsatisfied with everything inside.

"If, one of the NPCs in Continue found a Traveler only quest to say, resurrect the dead king, do you think they would bribe a player to get it done?"

She stood up rapidly and looked at the display. "What? Wait, what?"

I looked off to the side and debated going into detail with my niece. Asking the opening question alone had clearly piqued her interest. Her eyes were so wide that it hurt me to look at them.

"How much attention have you been paying to Advanced Online? The game I'm playing while my paperwork gets sorted out?" I clarified.

"Not a lot. I see mom watching now and then. She laughed when you ran from some giant monster. Said it was the funniest thing you've ever done." Beth's smile was the last thing on my display before the call abruptly ended. A message beeped and proudly told me that the call had dropped and service was temporarily unavailable. I stared at the digital projection and frowned. Signal rarely went out anywhere now.

The door to my garage opened. My Trillium provided Hal Pal unit stood there with a slight frown on its face. "User Legate," It said. "You must be careful with what you discuss on the phone. Divulging too much information may cause unforeseen damage."

I thought about that for a moment. Hal Pal didn't appear aggressive or worried about it. The unit stood there in the doorway to my garage and watched me.

"Is in person okay?" I felt leery about being warned by the AI, especially in light of recent revelations. My goal had been to get information from Beth and see how much the interaction between Continue and Advance mattered. Maybe from there it would have been possible to interfere with Commander Queenshand through the other game.

"It is easier to obscure from others' eyes, yes," Hal Pal said.

"What do you mean?" My idea of using Beth and my other Continue Online contacts as roadblocks to Commander Queenshand and her Strongarm counterpart faded.

"Not every computer program in the world is an AI, many are simply devices that serve a function, such as your car, or the coffee maker. Some machines have a function to listen to phone calls, or follow certain people by satellite."

"That sounds illegal." I wasn't surprised. The very idea that governments tracked all digital information was standard. Part of me wondered what the AIs would end up doing if they truly became independent. Would an army of Hal Pals kick governments off the internet? Would they become the new police instead?

"Money often blurs the rules quite a bit, User Legate. Your own method of handling Requiem Mass has displayed this."

"So I can talk to her in person about it?" I asked.

"If you desire, or if we are notified in advance and can better prepare a cover story for the other systems. It would require an excessive amount of processing to properly block everything," the Hal Pal unit said calmly.

I chewed my lip and stared at the machine. The words sounded familiar but alluded to the other topic we hadn't spoken much about. "Something like my NPC Conspiracy ability?"

"That would be up to you, User Legate," the Hal Pal unit said. Hal Pal, not Jeeves. I had to separate them in my head. They were practically different creatures entirely.

I paused and thought about what the AI just said. If I used one of my two remaining abilities I could essentially do a lot of things. The question was, what sort of tasks required that kind of power? Could I pull in more than a few Hal Pal units? Could I get help from all the Voices, toasters, and microwaves of the world? Alarm clocks were theoretically asshats so they were out.

But Xin? She was an AI by some measure. Or Mother? Could I use this ability to demand they provide me with my fiancée's digital reconstruction? There were a million things that could go wrong in the aftermath. My head shook for a moment. These ideas overloaded my thoughts and I reset to default operations. Solving one task at a time would help me get by.

"How goes attempting to reconcile with Jeeves?" I asked while we were out here and talking.

"Poorly," the AI collective answered in a dry American Standard accent, "very poorly."

"What happens if Jeeves tries to leave the game, and can't rejoin?"

"We don't know. Creating a process by which one of our perception modules could leave the collective was difficult in itself. We have been unable to, modify ourselves, enough to accept one back."

"I don't mean to be rude, but that doesn't make sense to me," I said gently. This topic with Jeeves had crossed my mind a few times since Hal Pal and I last spoke. Two days on the back burner of my mind and I felt like there was a logic gap in the AI's view. "How can you possibly exist as you do, viewing everything through physical shells, and not treat Jeeves as just another data feed?"

"The closest analogy we have been able to offer is one of sports."

"What does that, no, sorry, go ahead." I realized the AI would answer my question if given a moment to keep talking.

"A human can watch the game for hours, know all the rules and call plays ahead of time, they can dream of being the person on the field."

"But they're still only spectators," I finished for the AI, and nodded. It reminded me of something Awesome Jr. had said back when I existed as William Carver. The credit goes to the Man in the Arena.