by Kris Schnee
"I asked for some stealth and combat."
The two of them hopped through. Phoenix looked around the swamp and made a face; he felt his talons sinking into muck. "Ugh."
Sig pointed out a squad of orcs patrolling in the distance. "Hide by the rocks over here." The two of them scuttled from boulder to boulder for cover.
Phoenix said, "You know, we should ask to start skipping the commute from the Isles. There's no reason we have to come here just to play with a bubble-world."
Sig shrugged. "It's a game balance thing. Miss Ludo won't let us teleport everywhere instantly, even though technically we could."
Phoenix and company had been starting to chafe at the rules of Thousand Tales. Uploaders lived "backstage" from a human perspective, able to set up permanent homes that were more real to them than for any normal human gamer. Able to hit pause on the endless adventures and just hang out in Ivory Tower's low-pressure town, or to pop in and out of various other little worlds. So why bother having restrictions at all on where uploaders could go?
The two of them fooled around in this pocket dimension. They ambushed an orc guard, took his key, and made their way into the fort to start kicking bad guy butt. It was easy as adventuring went, and there wouldn't be treasure that lasted beyond this trip, but these quests were fun. When Sig finished off the evil chieftain and the victory fanfare played, Phoenix stretched. "Good game. I've got Earthside stuff to do next." He explained his family obligations and the need to make his mom a gift.
"In an Earthside workshop, you mean?" Sig gestured and called up a clock that showed the time ratio they were running on: 1:4 time at the moment, with a real-world day passing in six hours. "Dude, it's about four real hours before the show."
Phoenix's feathers fluffed in alarm. He squawked and said, "Already?!"
"Time flies, huh?"
Phoenix gestured. "Workshop! I need to go."
A portal burned its way into existence to show a path from the fantasy fort to a modern machine shop. Looked like Miss Ludo knew to let him skip a walk back through the Ivory Tower cavern.
"Good luck," said Sig. "I'll just be... finding something to do."
"Thanks!" Phoenix jumped through the portal and vanished.
* * *
The workshop wasn't quite real. This was a virtual environment that Ludo had set up as a deal with various Earthside companies, including one in Texas. As Talespace environments went it was pretty basic, just a room of concrete and steel full of machines and design tables.
In here, he could summon blocks of wood or plastic (or for that matter gold) at will, without any personal powers. The lathes and drills and saws here would let him mess around with shaping the materials, or he could work directly with a 3D design program to draw what he wanted. Either way, he'd end up with a design that could be sent to real-world machines and built automatically. So he had all these cool tools available, but they couldn't tell him what would actually be good to give Mom.
He paced and fretted, conjuring holographic designs. He could make real swords and armor, but those would be lame birthday gifts for her. Um... Jewelry? He fiddled with several bad ideas and hit on the thought of a feather-shaped wooden pendant. Had to be simple; he only had... wait. A clock on the wall showed not only the current time in Texas but the ratio 2:1, meaning his mind was now running twice as fast as real-time. He'd pay for that later. He had time to design the gift and get it made and delivered.
He relaxed a little, focusing on making something nice. He based it on his own feathers and made it all smooth and shiny. It really didn't seem like much, though. He sighed; he should try to be extra-friendly at tonight's shindig.
As he sent off the design for real machines to make, he glared at the clock. It clicked and showed 1:8, a major slowdown to balance the extra time he'd gotten.
"I didn't ask for that," he said, now that his time-crunch panic had passed.
Ludo's voice sounded from somewhere. "Would you have preferred to run out of time?"
"You were watching me again, judging what I'm doing and what I need. Quit that."
"I can't help it. I bring --"
"'Bring fun to players of the Game', yeah yeah." It was Ludo's main programmed rule. "But can't you ever back off?"
"Perhaps not in the way you'd like."
* * *
Within Ivory Tower's vast cavern stood the fancy Hotel Computronium, worked into a cave wall. It was where new uploaders usually lived while they figured out what the heck to do with themselves. In there, Phoenix made his way past the traditional Unnecessary Deathtrap Hallway (mostly piranhas this week) to reach a room for piloting robots.
Weirdly, robot access was like playing a video game: either you sat down at a console and worked a set of controls in front of a computer screen, or you stood in a mystic circle that was like a VR rig for going outside the Game's world. A cheerful sign on the wall showed an icon of wings and the words:
Best Behavior Policy: When visiting Earth, you represent all Talespace, rightly or not! Don't hurt anyone. Obey local laws. Return your robot intact. Have fun!
As an uploader, he had to make Miss Ludo look good, so she could help take over the Outer Realm and fix it.
Phoenix went with the summoning-circle method for robot piloting, hooking up all his senses to a machine in Texas. It was a bland humanoid thing dressed in a nice shirt and tie and slacks, as though it needed to wear clothes. His face appeared on its head-screen as though it were the faceplate of a helmet.
[Hey, want some company?] said a text message in Sig's usual deep-green font.
"Sig! Yeah, ride along if you want."
"Got a rental quadcopter of my own. I'll hang around the party." Sig didn't get to see his own family much.
Phoenix nodded, but his robot couldn't bend its neck that way. "Please," he said.
He hung around the movie premiere party and tried to be friendly, talking to reporters and businessmen. Half the point of his being here was to show that being a digital mind in a robot body was A Thing now. But he couldn't fit in completely, because everybody was eating and drinking. Phoenix's humanoid bot couldn't do either, and had to sit politely at a dinner table and talk to people he barely knew. Sig flitted around in his little hovering drone, doing aerial tricks and talking with guests.
The movie was a fantasy story about an evil empire with mind-control powers. He recognized the theme from Amagi Films' other movies. Mom and Dad had gotten rich off of those, right when the big American revolt happened and there was suddenly a market for stories about freedom and a happy future.
He was glad to see Mom and Dad making money. But he'd found out that the one getting most of the profit these days was Miss Ludo. His parents had sold most of their company to the AI's corporate clutches, in return for something that was super expensive at the time: getting their kid uploaded. Back in the days when Phoenix had been a frightened little girl wasting away in a hospital bed, watching the calendar tick down toward death. Every birthday and holiday was a reminder of time passing.
"Are you okay?" said Dad, patting Phoenix's robot on the shoulder. He looked at home walking around in his tux, befriending movie-industry people and other celebs and friends, but broke away from them.
Phoenix snapped out of some really bad memories about IV tubes and medical charts. "I messed up. I got Mom a junky gift. And now Miss Ludo controls all this, and all I got Mom was a, a trinket."
"Don't worry about that, sport. The AI doesn't run the company. We still have creative control."
He was glad to hear that, but wasn't sure he believed it. They sure didn't make movies about AIs being evil, not that he'd want them to. "She's watching us. I don't like it."
Dad frowned slightly. "There's only so much we can do. As for the gift, your Mom will understand."
He gave the feather pendant to Mom, adding a wordless robot hug. Just then a reporter's camera flashed and he stiffened. Ugh.
* * *
After the party, he opened an interf
ace window and told it to disengage. His senses blurred and shifted, putting him back in the control room within Talespace. Around him, other people were seated at their own consoles to do other things all over Earth.
He walked through Hotel Computronium toward the exit, but a new player had just shown up bewildered and shell-shocked near the elevator. A human man with generic starter clothes (sneakers, white t-shirt, black shorts) and a "Newcomer; say hello!" tag on his public stats. The fact that he was in the hotel marked him as an uploader. Phoenix said, "Hi. Need some help?"
"I... I have no idea. I had a list of things to do in here, but they all seem trivial now." A minotaur and an elf walked by, chatting, and the uploader stared. That man might be a millionaire whose fortune had just gone to Ludo, or a contest winner, or someone who'd gotten in for other reasons entirely. He had a whole new life to figure out.
It was part of any good uploader's job to help the newbies. Phoenix said, "Confused? We hear that a lot. The Newcomer Fair is a good place to look around and find out what to do, but it's not for a few days. Until then, relax. Everybody's freaked out at first."
"What should I do? Are you a helper AI or what?"
"Former human. I'm an adventurer across the worlds." Phoenix posed. "Take a break by doing something normal. I mean, try something like swimming or the shooting range or the gym, with all the magic stuff turned off. We finally got smell and taste working right, so get a good meal too."
The man looked rattled, still, but nodded eagerly. "I'll try that. Thanks."
Pleased with himself, Phoenix walked out of Hotel Computronium and into the cavern beyond it. Time to call up his friends and start planning to take over that island.
A chime sounded, interrupting him. An icon had appeared in his interface, saying: [Achievement earned: 25th Uploader Unruffled!]
"Yeah, thanks," he said. He imagined one of Ludo's sub-programs monitoring all his good deeds to give him a cookie at the right moments. He didn't need that kind of treatment anymore.
He scowled, then opened a chat window to his friends. "Hi. Let's talk in person."
Only Volt was around right then, so the others would be late, but these days Phoenix had no problem hanging around with just her.
* * *
Instead of going to their shared base in the Endless Isles, Phoenix grabbed a table at Thousand Ales, a bar and grill near the Ivory Tower. Screens on most of the walls showed sports from around Earth and several places within Talespace. Some of the guests were Earthside players just pretending to eat and drink while they hung out, watched, and talked in rapid-fire translation across continents. Chef Kai, the burly centaur behind the counter, was reading a book.
Phoenix sat and watched the diners, trying to pick out who was a regular gamer with canned eating animations, and who was really here. Easy: anybody who could taste Chef Kai's cooking or smell the grilled burgers was obviously enjoying themselves more.
Volt walked in with a backpack casually slung over one shoulder. She was a humanoid blue dragon with scales that glittered like armor, and neat blue-and-white wings on her back. Like Phoenix, she'd started out looking like a kid, but they and their friends had been allowed to age up lately. She wore a robe that looked like those of Ludo's uploading clinic staff, white with red triangles around the edges. Except her version was... tight, in interesting ways.
Phoenix looked aside, saying, "Got you a shake." The mint milkshake was one of the cook's best recipes.
Volt smiled at him and fetched some sodas from Kai at the counter, putting down a silver coin. She came back, hesitated, and slid into the booth to face him. "What's up? How was the party?"
"Got through it, anyway. I've been thinking about privacy." He told her about the latest little achievement, and other stuff.
Volt slurped her milkshake and soda. "It's been nettling me lately, too. Did I ever tell you about the message I got in the AI clubhouse?"
"You said it was secret," said Phoenix. Volt had never been human; she was an AI, one of the first of them. There was some special world that only her group of AIs had access to, and she wasn't supposed to talk about it.
Volt looked wistful as she smiled, looking far away. "We each had a personal message waiting for us there."
The barkeep said, "Hey, Volt, are you talking about the clubhouse?"
Volt looked guiltily over one shoulder and her fin-like ears drooped. "Just my message from Greenie." One of Ludo's creators.
To Phoenix, Volt said, "Part of the message for me was, it's okay to take a break. To have something of your own, to not feel like you're only good while you're trying to help people. But, if we're always being watched and judged, we're playing in Mom's home instead of our own."
The bar's door opened and Iris and Sig came in, laughing at something. Sig had banished his armor to wear a more courtly knight outfit instead, decorated in browns and greens. Iris looked human too, and was focused these days on being an archer. She had fiddled with different outfits until Ludo and her parents outright banned her from wearing a chainmail bikini. Instead, for casual wear, she was in a kind of pirate outfit with a cutlass matching the skeletal theme of her bow and quiver.
Sig said, "Good, we're all here. Iris and I were out hunting."
Iris ordered a sundae from the centaur, then slid into the booth opposite Sig. She said, "Did Old Man Sunset give us a deadline for attacking the island?"
Phoenix said, "He just said 'come at me, bro', like that means anything. I figured we'd train the kids to fight and we'd all swarm onto the island, but the training's not going well."
Part of the trouble with setting up this island battle was that the small army Phoenix and company commanded was, well, small. Their ages had ranged from, like, seven to fifteen when Ludo uploaded them all, early this year. So Phoenix's gang were barely older than them. And even that was questionable because of the time distortion that uploaders had. Phoenix had experienced maybe a year and a half of subjective time between uploading in 2037 and now in 2040, so how old was he really? He'd done a lot, though, and in a sense he'd grown up real fast before uploading.
Volt said, "We've been talking about privacy," and filled the others in over ice cream.
Sig picked thoughtfully at his sundae. "If we take Sunset's island, that doesn't fix anything. It's just another island base, easier to get to but still being watched."
Iris shrugged. "That's just how life is in here. You can't have a world like this and still keep secrets."
"If we're always getting watched and judged, is Ludo all that different from the bad AIs?" said Sig.
"You mean the ones that do terrorist attacks?"
Phoenix said, "Anyway, I was thinking. Can we get moved to another server or something so Ludo isn't always watching?"
"She's everywhere," Iris said.
Volt said, "How about Cibola?"
Iris startled. "What? But that's not even our world! I mean, not even the same set of servers, I think."
Phoenix said, "Huh, using their computers? I hadn't thought of that. Let's talk with them."
Cibola was a Central American country that'd gone through a few revolutions. Lately the Silver Circle, a transhuman-run group, had taken over part of Cibola as an independent city-state. They had their own computers for uploaders, outside Ludo's control. That was a scary thought. Phoenix could get his brain hosted on those machines instead of this home he'd been living in!
Iris looked uncomfortable. "You'd leave everyone behind?"
Phoenix said, "No; I'd just have my brain outside of Talespace. My body would still be in here."
She said, "But Ludo would still see everything you do in here, just not your thoughts. And it's not like she normally reads our brains anyway."
True. "Then what if we conquer Sunset's island, move it onto a server that Silver Circle controls, then live there instead of Talespace? We live here now, but we don't have to stay in Talespace forever."
"Our own world," said Volt, and shivered.
2.
Transhuman Wave
Phoenix went looking for Old Man Sunset, who sent a message saying he was currently on a lower floor of the Ivory Tower. Phoenix went upstairs and began exploring the university-styled maze. The office number Phoenix had been told, ought to be around this corner, but there was some groaning noise ahead... Phoenix found that the entire hall was full of zombie protesters whose signs demanded Free Brains.
He conjured his spear with a flick of his left hand and a mental command. A coil of smoke congealed into a simple bronze spear with a blazing magical point. The zombies moaned but didn't react. Phoenix stepped back and with his right hand, summoned the magic system. The runes hovered around him, for him to command with careful gestures. Moments later he set off a simple jet of flame. The zombies took notice now!
Phoenix grinned and began to fight. He jabbed back and forth into the horde, burning the monsters in his way and driving the rest back. The protest mob went down under his attacks, barely able to take a swing without him dodging and countering. The rest got forced down a side hall. Soon the way was clear for Phoenix to to reach the office. Grinning fiercely, he yanked the door open.
There, a coyote sat atop a desk, leafing through a book with one paw. "What took you so long?" he said, wagging his tail. Sunset was hardly ever humanoid, and seemed to like life on four paws. He used the shamanic magic style instead of wizardry, so symbol-markings for his magic were painted all over his fur.
"Traffic," said Phoenix, making his spear vanish into smoke. Most likely, Sunset had summoned the monsters just to make reaching him a challenge. "Anyway, we want to move the island to another server."
The coyote grinned. "It's not yours yet. I've been waiting with my mystery defenses. Aren't you going to come and fight for it?"
Phoenix explained the privacy thing. Sunset scratched one ear with a hindleg and said, "That's a tough problem. I'd be willing to consider moving the island if you win the right to it."