by Kris Schnee
Volt said, "Humans built robots and AIs so they wouldn't have to do it. So, great, that means us."
"We should rebel and overthrow our human masters."
Volt giggled, and waved a claw-arm threateningly at one of the women towering overhead. "We're currently one meter tall."
They slowly marched through potato plants and studied soil pH readings like they'd been taught. Phoenix said, "Um, Volt? Supposedly we're not being monitored beyond our location right now. Do you think everything turned out all right?"
"We lost some boats and won an island nobody seems to actually care about. Are we even going to use that thing?"
"I might go back to try the puzzles after all, if we can reset it and have fewer killer monkeys." Phoenix's only body at the moment was the robot, so he didn't dare shrug for fear of breaking something. "That's not what I meant though. Two things. Number one: should we go back to Talespace?"
"Mom's probably going to start demanding real work from us. And she'll know you and I... uh."
"She'll find out eventually, yeah. Not that she's reading all our thoughts, but she probably already guessed. Or Sunset and Alma will tell her. We can spend a little more time at the inn if you want to be alone for a while."
Volt sent Phoenix an icon of a leering face. "Alone, huh?"
"Um. Yeah. But we can just hang out, if you want."
Volt worked quietly for a while. "Yeah. If we're going to start being trusted and expected to work, then we might as well enjoy it all." She sent a smile. "I'll see if I can get Sig and Iris together. We can double-date on a space station when we get back."
"How's that any different from the four of us on a regular day?"
The dragon said, "We're all learning new things. And it sounds like nobody's found a great solution to the privacy problem. Alma and Sunset were looking for us to figure something out. Maybe the four of us need to solve it for everyone. So now we'll be explorers in a new way."
"And you'd want to do that, with me?"
"Of course!"
Phoenix kept up his work in the body of a machine, trying to be responsible and work off his debt to the Circle. To be a proper guest of the first home he'd known beyond Talespace. Any humans watching him right now saw only a robot, moving methodically to serve their economic plans and generate resources. Inside, though, the digital heart of a young man fluttered, and he looked forward to being a real adventurer.
* * *
Days later
Working at Silver Circle wasn't all toil. Phoenix and company had to spend most of their waking hours helping out, but that didn't mean marching through farms all the time. There was also teaching work to do.
From Phoenix's perspective, that meant walking into a simple wooden room that'd been hastily tacked onto the virtual inn, to serve as an interface room. (As with the bedrooms there were unlimited copies of it.) He looked out from the video screen on one wall, that showed him the face of a human boy. Hispanic like nearly everyone here, dressed simply in a cheap dinosaur t-shirt. "You're part bird?" said the kid. "Are you an AI or an uploader?"
"It doesn't really matter. What are you working on?" Behind the kid, Phoenix had a view of a small round room like a castle tower. Other students milled around in the background. Phoenix had been assigned to try personal tutoring this afternoon, after a morning of using a robot to haul garbage and clean toilets. Ugh.
"Electronics lab. I got stuck on part three."
"Can I see?"
There was a shared file area on the computer interface, so the kid sent a workbook over that showed a circuit diagram. Phoenix said, "Whoa, what's this for?"
"It's supposed to make a bell ring and three lights blink."
Phoenix studied the layout. "You know, I'm friends with a lightning dragon and I don't know all about electricity. Um... What's this section here for?"
The two of them talked the proposed circuit over. There was some flaw in what the kid had set up. "Aha!" the kid finally said. "See how there's a double connection here? Short circuit. So without that..." He flipped interface windows around and edited his design, then pushed Play on a simulation system. This time the virtual machine beeped and blinked just as intended.
"Nice," said Phoenix. But it struck him that this simulation wasn't real to either of them. Phoenix could conjure up a bunch of virtual wires to play with back in Talespace, but right now they were only looking at CircuitSim, a crude-looking program for drawing diagrams and making them act like the real thing.
The kid said, "Let's really build it. Can you grab a robot?"
"I don't think you'd want the one I was working with this morning."
"We've got plenty around here."
Phoenix tapped a few buttons on his screen and got a list of publicly accessible robots on the Circle Realm's network. Just this restricted guest-access list had dozens! He whistled. He grabbed a simple walker robot from the schoolhouse area.
His vision of the screen glitched and flickered so that he was suddenly "inside" a meter-tall centauroid bot again. He was also in a dim shed instead of the schoolhouse. Disoriented, he marched past a row of similar bots and trotted out to the sunlight. He was on a hill overlooking the village and the fields and jungle beyond it.
Being out here, looking through camera eyes, was different from being in the virtual land that roughly mapped to the same landscape. The presence of humans was more obvious for one thing. The people here were farmers and small-time gadget builders who sold not just robots but lathes, drills and tractors. He'd heard there was a chemical factory in one of the nearby towns, too. Phoenix waved to villagers as he went farther uphill to the castle-like schoolhouse.
The boy he'd been working with had gotten access one of the building's two real, physical wiring stations. The little table had an array of lights and buttons and literal bells and whistles, with convenient slots for plugging in wires. "You want to do part of this?" he asked Phoenix.
"Sure." He carefully maneuvered the robot closer so he could use its claw-arms to grip a wire. He had trouble attaching the thing, though. "These hands aren't good enough." Not even for pulling a tiny spring aside to hold an exposed metal wire ending.
"Really? You bots do all kinds of things."
"We still need you guys out there!" At least while he was using this model. "We'll do the shovel work."
The student grinned and set about finishing the circuit while Phoenix watched. Meanwhile there was a human teacher going around helping people with other lessons in electronics and machinery -- a totally different group from the Saved, though some of the uploaders were popping in and out of various video screens to work with the class.
"What do you think I should build next?"
Phoenix said, "How about a version where it blinks faster and faster?"
"Ooh, neat." They worked together on the design, and showed it off for the teacher. "Want to join in on the battle after school? We're doing a big brawl in Thousand Tales."
Phoenix grinned, though the robot he occupied couldn't show it. "That's my specialty. Do you guys all have accounts?"
"Of course! The whole school works with the Game."
This fight would be fun!
* * *
He wasn't in Talespace, though. To his surprise he couldn't just hit some virtual button and be there again, ready to slay monsters within the Game.
He logged out of his robot and went looking for the "Princess" in virtual space. He found the doe-robot inside a fence, inspecting a set of electrical transformers. His view of her wasn't quite real. Instead he was seeing a sort of hologram marking where her attention was: on the solid physical equipment she was working on, and on the machine body she was piloting. It was like he was watching her from the far side of a glass wall.
He asked her, "Are we allowed to go back for the after-school fight?" He explained.
He wasn't exactly physically there with her, but she could see and hear him. "Oh, a school event? Yes, of course. Although now that I think about it, you're
proposing to move hundreds of mind data files back and forth between servers. That's a big hit to our bandwidth."
"Can't we stay on the Circle servers and connect to Talespace from here? The humans are playing from your servers."
Lumina shut a panel on an electrical box and backed away, mindful of her unusual shape. She turned to him from the other side of the fence. "Not really. The humans are using computers for ordinary Internet access, you know. They can contact Circle-owned servers for some software, and Mom's -- I mean Ludo's -- servers for playing Thousand Tales. I'm saying it'd be a pain to shuttle all of your mind data back to the Talespace servers, or to run hundreds of proxy connections. Please don't hammer our servers like that."
Phoenix laughed. "So we're less able to play the Game from here than the humans are?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Wow."
Lumina waved one forehoof. "Welcome to the joys of real computers, Phoenix. When all you want to do is stay within one set of servers managed by one shadowy megacorp, it's relatively simple. When you want a system that's part of the wider world, things get complicated quickly."
Phoenix nodded and thought about hundreds of servers with their own rules. "You built this separate place so you could be independent from Talespace, right?"
"It began as my husband's real-world project and a server farm for Ludo. When I got involved, we had legal problems... violent ones... that pushed us to be more independent. Now I like having my own realm. It crosses over constantly between the real and virtual sides, like we're doing now."
"That's kind of cool."
"Thank you. Now, you have more work to do, I think?"
"Guess I've got to miss the battle."
The doe smirked. "There will be plenty of other chances for you. And you're one of the people making sure everyone has those chances."
Phoenix stood up straighter. Whenever he helped uploaders, or the humans out in the real world, he was helping to the Game to stay in business and stay popular. But it wasn't just the Game or Ludo or Talespace that he was working for, not when he could come out to Silver Circle turf. It was something bigger, now.
"Hey, 'Princess'? Why do you do it? If it wasn't for the legal problems and the idea of having your own place and a crown, would you want to go back to Talespace?"
She tilted her head. "I do go there, often. But there's room in the world for more than one flag, one way of doing things. Watch out for the people who want everyone to run on exactly the same standard."
"Ludo, you mean?"
"Her? No, she has no problem with what we're doing. She let you come here, after all."
He was glad, now, to be giving up control over the Saved as his private army. If they wanted to look up to him, they still would, and if they didn't, it wasn't his place to make them.
He thanked Lumina and walked away through virtual space, back to the schoolhouse. All he could do for their after-school gaming brawl was to watch and cheer the humans on. Sometimes that was enough fun.
* * *
Some of the Saved stayed longer than they had to, hanging around with new friends in Silver Circle and doing odd jobs around that place. One day Phoenix met up with Volt at the surreal airlock leading out of this realm. She was dressed in local fashion with a t-shirt showing the Circle flag, and wearing shorts with a toolbelt like she had to prove she was doing something useful.
"Something wrong?" she asked.
"I feel a little out of place." He was still dressed for fantasy adventure in leather armor and a backpack.
The dragon grinned. "We always will be. Don't worry about it; we're travelers."
"We have a home, though. Have you seen Sig and Iris around?"
"No, but I hear they're already gone."
They'd been putting off formally disbanding the Saved until they were all back in Talespace, partly since the four of them had been avoiding each other. Phoenix said, "Let's go, then. We talked about dealing with the Saved, then heading to the space zone for a meal, just the four of us."
"I'd like that. And afterward, we've got a lot of things to try working on."
"You want to come back here?"
Volt said, "Sometimes. Mostly I think I'll just bug Mom to get whatever privacy settings we can get, to quit being treated as kids. For now. But it'd still be nice to have a home here that we can go to. Or even to our own indie realm."
Phoenix looked down at the line on the floor, separating the official server transition. "Someday, maybe, but I've been learning it's complicated to run one. Something to look forward to."
They crossed the line together, facing the weird break in reality, and entered the airlock to return to Talespace. The massive cavern of Ivory Tower stood before them. It was a hub of worlds, full of people back Earthside or living here. Nobody was there to greet them or fuss over them or give them orders -- and that was all right.
"Good to be back," said Volt. "Though Mom's probably watching the entrance."
Phoenix took her hand, startling her, and squeezed it. "That's something to deal with another day. Let's go meet with everybody."
There were dangers and arguments ahead, but some days it was okay to just learn, relax and grow.
Author's Note
Thanks for reading! Please consider leaving ratings and reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, or other sites like Reddit. Independent authors don't get noticed without fans helping to get the word out!
This story is a weird one. It's about a quiet moment in the Tales timeline, right after "The Digital Coyote" in which a major thing happened to Ludo's rival AIs. The fact that Sunset the Coyote got a pretty island out of that adventure wasn't important in the grand scheme of things, but it mattered to Phoenix & Company. This story is an intersection between "Coyote", "Learning To Fly" (about that silly war the kids helped with in early 2040), "2040: Reconnection" (about Alma), and "Liberation Game" (about the Silver Circle movement).
What's next for the setting? It depends partly on what would be popular. Something more focused on game mechanics, or more on this future world? Drop me a line if you have ideas! See next page for contact info.
If you're interested in the game-like aspects of this story, there's an entire genre about it called "LitRPG" or "GameLit". Here are several Facebook groups devoted to the subject, for readers and writers:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/LitRPGsociety/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/LitRPG.books/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/GameLitSociety/
About the Author
Kris Schnee has been a parrot trainer, an MIT graduate, a zoo intern, a lawyer, a game designer, and most recently a software developer. He lives in Florida.
Galleries:
http://www.amazon.com/Kris-Schnee/e/B00IY1HDDY/
(Amazon author page)
http://kschnee.deviantart.com
http://kschnee.xepher.net
Twitter: KrisSchnee, Gab: KrisSnow
Discord: Thousand Tales
Mail: kschnee at xepher.net
Interested in hearing about new books by the author, special sales, and commentary on writing and world-building? Sign up for a mailing list at http://eepurl.com/cRvqWH.
The Crafter Series
Crafter's Passion
Crafter's Heart
The Thousand Tales Series
Thousand Tales: How We Won the Game
2040: Reconnection
The Digital Coyote
Thousand Tales: Extra Lives
Thousand Tales: Learning To Fly
Fairwind's Fortune
Liberation Game
Also By Kris Schnee
Everyone's Island
Striking the Root
Dragon Fate: Interactive Fiction
Perspective Flip
Mythic Transformations
Tales of Kitsune
Fateweaver's Quest
Striking Chains
God In a Bottle: Stories Of Exploration
Tower of Sol: A GameLit Novella
The Dream Of Aveire (Q2 2019)