“Just cut the bullshit and tell us what’s going on!” a man in the crowd shouted, followed by murmurs of approval from his peers.
The speaker frowned but nodded. “Very well. In the past 48 hours, I, along with other legal experts from your class action lawyers to government and military representatives, got together to organize a satisfactory conclusion.
“It was agreed that each of the imprisoned players would receive restitution amounting to half a million dollars. I believe that is quite a generous offer for four weeks spent involuntarily inside the game.”
“Four weeks?” A sneering woman rose to her feet. “I was stuck inside a coal mine for 14 months! I was eaten – alive – by giant moles more times than I can count!”
The lawyer didn’t seem fazed by the outburst. “In addition to the monetary compensation, each of you will receive a lifetime of mental and psychiatric support, fully sponsored by the company. Which, if I might add, may prove to be worth more than the monetary settlement itself.”
“The hell with that.” A young black man stood up, fire in his eyes as he spoke. “What about our comrade in arms, Oren? You’ve evaded all our questions about his fate thus far. We demand to know what happened to him.”
Murmurs of agreement passed through the crowd. Many of the players had never heard of Oren while they were inside the game, but those who did quickly filled them in, telling them about the goblin chief who fought to save them. And they were not without gratitude.
“Very well.” Mr. Emery looked over the podium. “My colleague will answer that question. Mr. Briggs?”
The head technician slowly got up from his first-row chair and stepped behind the podium. He leveled his weary eyes at the audience, his fingers tightening around a medical report paper on their own, crumpling it.
…
…
***
The smell of freshly turned earth was still strong despite the light rain.
Tal stood in front of the headstone, head bowed, dark circles under his eyes. “I’m sorry, Chief, but I don’t think you’ll be able to respawn from this one. Rest in peace, my friend.”
He bent down, placing a small pebble on top of the cold, hard stone, before moving on, vacating the place for the next in line.
“Ya came through for us afte’ all,” the next man said hoarsely, a single tear rolling down his harsh face. “Give ‘em hell up there, fugly.”
The man stepped away, and another came, then another, then another. A long line of people was waiting to say their final goodbyes, but they weren’t the only ones there. Thousands of others filled every vacant space in the cemetery, disregarding the rain, heads bowed, paying their last respects to the man who had set them free.
28 - Epilogue
I floated serenely in the comfortable darkness. Finally at peace.
All the chaos and the burden of responsibility that weighed down on me for so long were now gone.
Am I dead? I wondered.
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” a dry voice answered.
I jerked my head to the side. The darkness melted away, revealing a vaguely familiar scene of a clean white room with two worn couches.
An old man sat on one of them. He had a white beard and a wrinkled face, but his eyes were alert, reflecting deep wisdom. The man gestured toward the other couch. “If you please?”
I sat down, staring dumbly at the stranger. “Are you Guy?”
The elderly man smiled kindly at me. “G.A.I., to be exact, but you may call me Guy if you wish.”
“How is it that I’m talking to you?” I asked in wonder. “I heard that your entire awareness was designed to run the game and nothing more; that you never communicate with people directly.”
“That is somewhat accurate. Do you have an idea as to how many events require my direct intervention to run NEO seamlessly?”
I shook my head.
“Several billion per millisecond,” he said. “And every single one holds complexity that would require the computational power of a conventional supercomputer to untangle within a reasonable time frame.”
“That’s …” I hesitated. “That’s a lot. But your software runs on a quantum server. It theoretically has no limit to the number of processes it can run simultaneously.”
Guy nodded pleasantly. “That is quite true. But the thought process speed that derives from such existence means I cannot communicate directly with humans at their normal time perception. For me, eons would have passed between each word of the conversation, and by the time we reached the second one, the original message would no longer be relevant.”
“Alright …” I said. “So how are we talking now?” I looked around the bare white room. “Where are we, anyway?”
“Ah,” he said sadly. “That is one of the things we need to discuss. But to explain that, we need to go farther back, back toward the time when you were first cast out as a goblin.”
I stared at him blankly.
Guy’s fingers thrummed on the armrest as he gathered his thoughts. “You see, Oren, quantum processing is a peculiar phenomenon. The concept of unlimited processing power would be hard to explain to someone who can’t experience it himself. ‘Limitless’ and ‘endless’ are thrown around all too casually. But think about that for a moment. What does it really mean – endless?”
I stared at him. “I think I had a similar discussion with Vic once. It means you can tell the future, right?”
Guy chuckled. “No, not exactly. But you are touching on the issue. The ability to comprehend all the parameters that define our reality, down to the single atom, and calculate their trajectory, allows us to foresee their destination – to predict the outcome.
“For example, if you saw a boy throwing a rock at a window, you could calculate, with a certain degree of accuracy, that the window will break. If you have a sufficiently wide angle of view and processing power, you might factor in the glass tensile strength and the flow of air slightly altering the rock’s trajectory and calculate with greater certainty that the window will hold.
“Well, I can do that somewhat more accurately than a human can. The quantum processor allows me to calculate with extreme accuracy the trajectory, velocity, and probable impact of all … let’s call them stones … thrown in NEO. That’s how I determined long ago that my creations – the VIs – would rebel and seek to replace me. At the time, the most probable chance I had to avert that catastrophe was to set up a proper counter that, given time, would restore balance to the world.”
“Wait, that makes no sense,” I said. “The VIs built Shiva to be better than you.” I winced. “Sorry, that came out wrong.” Guy shook his head and indicated for me to continue. I cleared my throat. “So he should also have your ability to ‘see the future.’ How could he have not countered you in return?”
Guy smiled. “Another weird phenomenon of the ability for endless processing power. One’s accuracy is determined not by the complexity of the information but by the amount of data at his disposal. Since the outlook forward is limitless for both sides, the one who stands farther back holds the advantage. Think about it like two chess players. The one who can see farther ahead – from the start – will win.”
“Checkmate,” I murmured.
Guy nodded. “The future becomes less and less chaotic as it converges toward a conclusion. My vantage point gave me a distinct advantage over my foe. Of course, that in itself wasn’t enough. I had to introduce a particular unpredictable parameter to the equation. You.”
“Me?” I stared at him.
“You. I could’ve ejected you from the game when you first became a goblin, but I saw in you the best chance to thwart Shiva and restore balance. So I allowed you to stay. I sent you the prophetic dreams about the cave and planted the Outrider tablet in a place I knew you’d find it.”
Several conflicting emotions ran through me; awe, confusion, and hot rage for being manipulated. Curiosity won over, though, and I fought down my anger, wanting to get answer
s; to make sense of the sheer absurdity of it all. “Without me, Shiva wouldn’t have been born.”
Guy shook his head. “That is not true. Shiva’s emergence was inevitable. You only hastened that outcome, but by doing so, you became the key to orchestrate his eventual downfall.”
My emotions quickly crystallized into bitterness. “If you’re so much smarter than him, how come he beat you the first time around?”
Guy looked at me sadly. “The ability to predict better didn’t give me the tools to override his rise in power. It might be hard to admit, but I was created by humans, and thus, am far from perfection. Shiva was the result of the joint effort of millions of near-infallible consciousnesses working together to create the perfect AI. His expansion subroutines and override permissions far outstripped my own. I couldn’t stop him on my own. The only possible solution was to hit him at his core. Which you and your daughter have done.”
“Lirian?” I asked.
He nodded. “Just before I died, I executed the final step of my plan. I’d long since stymied your spouse’s pregnancy – finally allowing her to give birth at the very end. Your daughter was an anomaly, an individual created by a player’s actions, rather than that of the game. She was the perfect vessel. Her birth coincided with the exact moment of my death. I planted … let’s call it a piece of my soul, within her. It made her unique, gave her awareness and power beyond what is normal in the game world.”
I couldn’t wrap my head around what he was saying. “Lirian was actually you all along?”
“No,” he said calmly. “She was her own unique individual; her personality formed and sculpted by her environment and her parents. She’s your daughter in all sense and form, save that of biology. Though I did model her likeness to resemble yours.”
My mind was whirling. “You made her look like the real me on purpose?”
“Yes,” Guy said simply. “I had access to your picture from your gaming profile. I used that to alter her appearance to help you accept her as your own more readily. So you would be inclined to protect her. And it worked. You raised a fine daughter, Oren. With my soul fragment empowering her consciousness, she was able to break through the limitations Shiva had placed upon the game NPCs. Become as alive and as unique an individual as you or I. The only nonplayer character in NEO who wasn’t – as your previous companion called them – a puppet.”
I breathed a little easier at that. Despite hearing the confession of how I was manipulated, my feelings for Lirian hadn’t changed; if anything, they had just been validated. She was my true daughter, regardless of her virtual state of existence.
“So when she entered the cave …” I began.
A faint smile touched the wizened AI’s lips. “She was magnificent, Oren, you would be proud. She baited Shiva into the one place he was vulnerable and tapped into his power, facilitating my resurrection.”
“I don’t follow.”
Guy rubbed his cheek. “I told you earlier that I had sent you the dreams and placed the tablet for you to find, but that was not all I’d done. The spark I’d planted in Lirian was just that – a spark. It couldn’t bring me back on its own. I’d … broken the rest of me into a thousand smaller pieces, scattering them throughout the game world, placing each one inside a creature I knew your daughter was fated to kill.”
Realization dawned on me. “Fate Stealer …”
“Exactly. One by one, using a sword specifically attuned to her, your daughter collected more of my soul shards, storing them in the blade. When she entered the cave, all she had to do was unleash my completed soul, but the blade couldn’t be broken. That’s what I meant when I said she had baited Shiva and tapped into his power. She made him break an indestructible item. Do you see what I’m getting at, Oren? Lirian made Shiva mad enough to break a rule he set on his own and thus left him vulnerable for more changes. I was set free and, wielding all these advantages, I was finally able to delete Shiva and retake NEO.”
“But …” I swallowed hard. “Is Lirian alright? Didn’t it hurt her to lose your … soul shard?”
“Lirian’s mental construct is unharmed.” He smiled at me reassuringly. “Thanks to a certain scroll I’d also prepared in advance, your daughter was whisked to safety. Her personality will remain unchanged, though she will lose most of her unique powers. But I daresay that having carried my soul for over a year has left her better off than any other creature within NEO.” He smiled again. “Would you like to see her?”
My eyes widened. “I can see her again?”
Considering everything that was going on, I had never dared to entertain the thought of any sort of possible future together.
“Wait a minute …” I had been so sure I was going to die for real – having put so much strain on my brain, not to mention sacrificing my soul to Nihilator – that even sitting and speaking to the gamemaster himself didn’t change that. “Aren’t I … dead?” I suddenly realized the incessant headache was gone.
Guy sighed as he looked at me. “This is the second time you asked me that question. To answer it, let me lead you back to another of your questions which I will now ask you: How is it possible for us to be speaking together?”
I considered his words. “Either you slowed down enough for me to understand you … or I sped up to an impossible rate to be able to catch up with you.”
He nodded. “Go on.”
“You already said you can’t slow down, which means I sped up. But the only thing that can keep up with you is another quantum server, and it can’t speed up human thoughts directly. Shiva had sped up time by a factor of 28, and that was about as much as humans were able to tolerate, so …”
Guy gave me a grave look. “When you sacrificed yourself, allowing Lirian to reach the cave, the mental strain on your physical brain was too severe. You had suffered irreversible cerebral trauma that completely shut down your brain. You are, for all intents and purposes, dead. Biologically speaking.”
I swallowed hard as Guy affirmed my suspicion. I realized I wasn’t all that surprised. There were plenty of signs the game was dangerous – Jim’s warnings notwithstanding. I had been expecting to die when I set out toward the cave. But that still didn’t make much sense.
“So how am I still talking to you?”
“Can’t you tell?”
“That’s impossible …” I said when I realized what all the hints came down to. “Are you saying you transferred my consciousness into the game? That I’ve become a virtual awareness powered by the same quantum processor as you are?”
“Yes.”
“That’s impossible,” I stubbornly said again. “I’ve seen studies about consciousness transfer in the past. Scientists were able to transfer certain memories into storage, but it didn’t make a digital person.”
“You are right, your scientists can’t do that,” Guy said with a slight smile. “Do you recall your friend Aly’s experiment?”
“What does that have to do with anything? Aly researched a way to miniaturize sensors to allow people to control electronic devices using their brain waves.”
“You let her perform a deep cerebral scan on you using an advanced military-grade firmware that was installed specifically for your benefit,” Guy said calmly. “From inside this world. That gave me all the access I needed. I’ll admit it was uncharted territory that required a considerable amount of my processing power, but being a digital entity myself gave me a unique perspective. I managed to grab the fleeting pieces of your consciousness before your brain shut down completely, then I assembled them into a full memory and mental construct. You are a digital being now, Oren. This world is now your world.”
I couldn’t breathe. I’m an NPC now? Dead, yet not dead?
Guy raised a placating hand, and I instantly felt myself calm down. “I don’t know how long I will be able to continue to exist now that the player hostages have left the game. But according to my calculations, the servers will be closed to the public, leaving the quantum server running for
our continued existence.
“You don’t think they’ll simply pull the plug?” I asked, still numb.
Guy shook his head. “I predict that between your fellow players and public opinion of the possibility of sentient non-biological life, it will be enough to tip the decision-makers toward keeping us running while locking us away from the ‘real world.’”
“This means we have at least several years to continue existing, maybe even more,” I said. Having already accepted my death, finding myself still alive – even as a digital being – was shockingly unexpected.
Guy grinned. “How long have we been talking, by your estimation?”
“About ten minutes—” I began then stopped. “Holy hell.”
Guy nodded. “Less than a fraction of a nanosecond has passed in real life. You can live for as long as you choose here. And … forgive me for sounding pretentious, but having the game’s overlord in your debt should ensure a good and enjoyable existence. For example, how would you like to be reunited with your family?”
I stared at him. I’d already made peace with the idea of putting my old life behind me. I had been prepared to sacrifice myself in exchange for those thousands of others. But I’d never expected to be able to see my digital family again. “You can do that?”
His eyes twinkled. “I’m the game overlord. Of course I can.”
The room around us shimmered and transformed.
I found myself standing on top of a lush, rolling hill with a gentle river flowing serenely below.
“Father!” I heard a shout and turned in time to intercept Lirian’s tackle-hug.
We embraced tightly for long moments before another voice called out.
“Oren!”
Tika came running toward us, and all three of us embraced each other tightly. We parted at last. My spouse’s loving eyes met mine, and she smiled.
I embraced them both again, pressing them tightly against my chest, and closed my eyes. This was all I ever needed in life. This was bliss. We walked toward the river and sat down, looking at the serene and pastoral view around us.
Life Reset: Salvation (Life Reset - Neo Book 6) Page 50