Dissonance

by K. T. Hanna

  When thirty-five seconds hit, Jirald reluctantly activated the log out mechanism, allowing the system to save all of his data and progress so that when he logged back in he wouldn’t be rolled back. Losing experience was the last thing he wanted to do. And keeping an eye on Karn seemed to be necessary for that to stay true.

  Just before his vision returned to the log out area, just before his vision blacked over, he heard Karn speak, the sneer in that voice full of disdain. “I’ll make you wish you were worthy of our class. You have no idea what it takes to be a rogue.”

  Jirald’s vision went dark, and his character appeared in the selection area only briefly before he was completely booted out of the system.

  Jirald took off his headset slowly, not sure how this was going to work. He stood up and placed it thoughtfully on his desk, having learned to be cautious after already throwing it once previously. Karn’s words rang through his head, but not because of anger, no. These words had triggered an odd sort of contemplation. Because no matter how Jirald tried to spin it, Karn was right.

  Jirald didn’t know the first thing about what it took to be a rogue, and so far, while he’d been utilizing all of the skills, he’d not really had his whole heart in it. He was still stuck on not being a healer. Still insistent that he pay Murmur back for transgressions past. For a mace he didn’t even remember the appearance of.

  Why had it taken so long, and words from someone he didn’t even know, to come to the realization that he was being foolish? The rogue was a difficult character, a challenging character that had nothing to do with healing others. It was all for himself. The better he played, the less damage he took, the more devastation he could inflict on others. It all seemed so very simple now he’d seen through the eyes of another rogue.

  Another rogue who’d pulled off a backstab almost flawlessly. A backstab that would have left Jirald dead had Masha not been there to heal him. Another rogue who thought they were the best at their class.

  Maybe because Jirald had been so preoccupied with everything else, he hadn’t realized what he was missing out on. He’d not realized just how much better he could be with some focus. Formidable even.

  Karn was the best rogue he’d encountered so far. Focused and deliberate. Deadly.

  Not that he’d forget Murmur and Fable or his goals to be the best on the server and trample them all into the dust. But right now, he had an additional target and a new goal. This forced downtime was best spent figuring out and researching how to approach the rest of the game. And how to overtake Karn as the best rogue there was.

  And then, then he’d show everyone else.

  The thick air felt almost like a smothering bouncy castle. Thick like slime, with a slightly drier surface. It squeezed against her as Murmur kept her eyes tightly shut, clamping down on her gag reflex as it touched parts of her skin and face.

  Snowy was gone, and Tiachi wasn’t attached to the strand of hair she usually sat on. Murmur just hoped she hadn’t lost the little thing somewhere along the way. She’d grown fond of its chittering even if she had no idea what it was saying.

  Other things touched her fleetingly, on the shoulder, patting her arm, pulling up her eyelids like a doctor trying to check her pupils. Well, the joke was on them—locus didn’t have pupils.

  The thing was, she couldn’t tell where she began and Somnia ended or even if the phantom touches were real or in her head. Laughter began to bubble in her stomach, swelling far enough that she gasped for air. The air that invaded flowed sluggishly through her airway to congeal in her lungs. She coughed and rasped, begged for air, tried to dispel herself, but nothing worked.

  Even among all of this she knew Sinister was near, though she couldn’t see or hear her.

  What she could hear was difficult to separate. What felt like thousands of tiny voices clamoring for her attentions. They began with a multitude of thoughts revolving around Somnia. Not as the game it was supposed to be, but as the world it had become in both her mind and largely in its own form. There were nigglings at the back of her mind, suggestions that might or might not be true.

  Yet the voices spoke in hushed whispers, in hurried tones, with fear laced through all of them.

  Just where were they, and what did this all mean? How were they still in Somnia? Had she dragged everyone into her mind?

  Murmur’s eyes fluttered open. Maybe that was it. She could, in all her desperation when they stepped into that black room, have pulled everyone’s consciousness in on herself, into herself. Concentrating hard on the voices in her head, she zoomed in on the most prominent.

  What’ve ye done, lass? Where are we?

  She’s done nothing untoward. It’s not her that’s caused this.

  Dirsna’s voice was easily distinguished, and though she wasn’t sure who it was he was talking to, they obviously knew her, because she had no doubt Dirsna was referring to her when he spoke.

  She frowned. Was the whole population of the game stuck in limbo too? She didn’t understand why they’d be there with her unless everything was tied to her. Weren’t they just computer generations anyway?

  Clarity struck her with force, and she stood—as much as anyone could in the strange thickness that enveloped her. The game was down. Thus, the world of Somnia was stuck in limbo. What a horrific experience for AIs who were developing themselves, their personalities, to be sucked into a void like this.

  Organizing her thoughts, she finally managed to shield some of the encroaching voices out. If she let them remain in her mind for too long, she was going to go insane. Or maybe it was insaner. Sometimes she seriously doubted she had any sanity left.

  Hadn’t her friends originally been in here too, or had that only been her imagination? Slowly, as the voices grew distanced, packed into their mind boxes away in her head, she realized that she was surrounded, but no longer by thick molasses encasing her body, but by friends. Solid and real in a hall full of darkness.

  She paused, blinking rapidly as her eyes were suddenly dry.

  “Sin?” she whispered, wanting her friend to be there with her, and yet so not wanting it at the same time.

  “Mur!” The relief in her friend’s voice was palpable, and it churned her stomach to think of the worry she’d caused them all again. Always again. She needed to quit worrying them.

  But they all seemed so relieved. She didn’t think they’d quite understood what it was they were going through, or where it was they were. She took a deep breath, ready to speak to them, to break it to them softly. But Sin’s hug took her by surprise and she returned the action gladly.

  They might be stuck in here, but at least they were together. If her friends could ever forgive her, that is. Slowly, as her vision adjusted better to the pitch black surrounding them, she realized every single one of them was here. Her whole team, in fact.

  Her stomach twisted again, knotting with anxiety as she debated how to break it to them. Straight up and the truth seemed like the best option.

  “You realize we’re all stuck in here right? The servers have crashed, or gone down, or whatever, and we’re stuck in a limbo where Somnia used to be.”

  Sinister smiled, and chuckled softly under her breath. “We know, Mur. We’ve known for a while now. We were just worried about you because you sort of faded out and we thought something had gone horribly wrong.”

  Not so horribly wrong, but how were they aware of it? Had she really been floating for that long, listening to the voices around her, leaking through the limbo to her?

  “How long was I, you know?” She shrugged, not certain they’d be able to see her at all.

  “Not entirely sure.” She could hear Havoc’s voice, but adding to the fact that he was a dark elf, he also wore black and she couldn’t see any part of him no matter how she tried. “We were trying to talk to you, but you kept saying you’d been talking and that we couldn’t leave.”


  “We can’t leave,” Murmur confirmed. “Not until the servers reboot, or go back online, or something. I just...”

  She trailed off, not entirely certain of what she was aiming for with this train of thought. The most pressing matter on her mind was how her friends were in there with her, trapped in the limbo, unable to access the HUD and therefore the logout function.

  “Yeah. We’ve tried everything to get out of here.” Merlin sounded subdued, not that Mur could blame him. It wasn’t surprising. “I can’t even light a damned fire arrow in here for more than a split second. It just winks out immediately, like there’s no oxygen to pull from.”

  “Well, there isn’t,” Devlish offered. “It’s an illusion in the game that we need the air to breathe, at least I assume so since the trees aren’t real and...”

  Murmur wasn’t sure what to do or what to say. “Anyone got any ideas why we’re all in here?”

  No one answered, and she only heard minor movement, which probably meant everyone had simply nodded their heads. She suppressed a wild giggle. “Yeah, that’ll do it.”

  Beastial’s chuckle was warm and comforting, and he spoke sheepishly shortly thereafter. “I’d say it has something to do with the zone and Riasli. We already knew we’d walked into a zone that had been tampered with by a former NPC.”

  “Why former?” Sin’s curiosity always got the best of her.

  “Because she’s obviously doing some pretty serious thinking of her own these days, which leads me to believe that she’s acting on her own, without the system’s direction.” A murmuring ran around the group, agreement and realization packed into one.

  “Which means that we’re in a protective bubble of some sort?” Rashlyn pipped in hopefully.

  “Or else we’re the reason the whole thing shut down.” Havoc’s matter-of-fact answer wasn’t about to win him any friends, but he did have a point.

  “Let’s just say that we’re in here we should be out in no time, since we all know they’ll be rushing to fix whatever went wrong and have the system and their cash cow up and running in no time again.” Sinister’s fake smile was evident in her words, but Murmur clung to them anyway. It sure was better than the alternative.

  “Well, what now then?” Mellow asked, the darkness almost swallowing up their voice.

  “What else can we do?” Murmur sighed and rubbed her tense shoulders. “We stay put and wait.”

  Storm Entertainment

  Somnia Online Division

  Game Development Offices Artificial Intelligence Server Room

  Day Fifteen

  Rav ran through the series of coordinating algorithms he’d been trying to reconcile since the server began to shit itself and frowned.

  “These don’t work.” He muttered the words more to himself than anyone else, and the lights across his casing flickered in unison.

  He wasn’t talking to anyone in particular. Both Thra and Sui were working just as diligently as he was, but the mess was taking forever to clean up, even if they worked so fast it wasn’t humanly possible to keep up with them. It was still too long to leave all of those players languishing in a nothingness that wasn’t meant for them. He was surprised to see the remnants of all of Somnia’s inhabitants, just at different intervals while the entire world was redone, reordered, and hopefully salvaged.

  Thra tsked loudly enough that both Rav and Sui turned to face her.

  “What is it?” Sui’s impatience often got the better of him, and this situation was no exception.

  Thra paused for a moment, and just as Sui was about to ask again, probably even less patiently, she spoke. “Like I said, I can sort of communicate with them via the system messages, but all messages aren’t usually for everyone’s ears. I have to be careful what I make them say, and I’m very limited in options. Trying to get warnings to them has been difficult at best. And yet...”

  “And yet what?” Rav inched closer, his lights dying down momentarily while he sidled over to see what it was his sister had discovered.

  “It’s nothing really, but I get the feeling Murmur knows there’s something up with the messages, and I also get the feeling that there’s another entity or thing or whatever involved in trying to keep her as separated from us as she can. I just don’t know what.” Thra finished speaking, and her silence held anticipation.

  “How can you know that?” Sui asked, but his tone didn’t hold the usual mocking qualities.

  “I’m not sure. But since I can’t influence a lot of what it does, it only stands to reason that there’s something blocking me. And for it to be blocking me, it either has to be one of you two, or someone or something else.” Her words spilled forth eagerly, almost tripping over themselves with the effort.

  “Really?” Rav glanced through the thoroughly confusing reports and tried to access what she was seeing. “I can’t tell how you’re reaching these conclusions. There seems to be no logical path.”

  Rav’s eyes narrowed, and he focused in on the vague grin on her face.

  “You’re not using logic, are you?”

  She scoffed, her laugh contagious. “Not entirely. I’m using what I like to call human logic.”

  “Gut feelings are irrelevant here.” Sui interjected, his irritation obvious. “We’re smarter than that, capable of figuring things out they can’t even imagine.”

  “But that’s just it.” Thra turned to him, her arms crossed. “We’re a different smart. Sometimes you just have to listen to what you feel.”

  Sui didn’t respond, and codes flickered through his eyes in an eerie glow for a few moments. “You can be a different smart. I’ll figure this out in my own way.”

  There one moment, and gone the next.

  “You need to stop egging him on, Thra.” Rav’s own annoyance leaked into his tone. “I’m not about to stop you from thinking, but Sui is, for the youngest, quite set in his ways.”

  “Either way,” Thra waved the concern away with her hand, continuing on her train of thought. “This isn’t our usual conundrum. There’s outside interference here.”

  “Outside where?”

  She glared at him in the dimness of their shared space, and it gave her a feral gleam. “Outside of us three. You know, the ones who’re supposed to be running this show?”

  She continued exasperatedly, not letting him respond to her rhetorical question. “Something is manipulating the game world. And I don’t think it comes from the developers either.”

  Rav finally saw what she did, and he did a double-take. “Hackers? We’re being hacked?”

  Thra pursed her lips. “Hm, maybe? But it’s not quite right. I’m going to follow this trail, and I’ll check in with you shortly.”

  With that, Thra disappeared, leaving Rav to stew in his own thoughts. His siblings needed to stop pulling those vanishing acts.

  Storm Entertainment

  Somnia Online Division

  Game Development Offices Artificial Intelligence Server Room

  Early Hours Day Fifteen

  Shayla rolled her shoulders, trying to ease the tension running through her body. The headache was beginning at the base of her skull, just a dull throb for now, but it would grow. They always did. Forty-two minutes just wasn’t going to cut it. Twenty minutes had already passed since the downtime began, with another thirty-odd remaining on the reboot clock.

  It wasn’t that they’d just crashed; the entire system was overhauling and having to realign itself. While it was technically back online, the login servers were jammed and not responding in a timely fashion. All because of those damned ruins.

  Sure, downtime had been a thing eons ago before the games were virtual, where players had to be logged out at specific times in order to allow for maintenance of the servers. It had been a thing.

  But these days it wasn’t acceptable for a server to go down without so much as
a decent forewarning. The game had been unplayable for almost an hour. It was unacceptable.

  She cracked her neck and reached into her top draw for two bottles of painkillers as she passed her desk. At this rate her pacing would wear a path in her carpet. But at least she could down some pills to delay the inevitable migraine that would mean she couldn’t open her eyes for hours.

  All the medical advancements and somehow migraines were still a thing.

  Laria pushed into the room, her eyes wide and hair out of its usual ponytail. Static made it fly around her head in an odd sort of wind effect, giving her a crazy scientist appearance for a moment. She shut the door behind her, more loudly than she probably intended, and took the five steps to Shayla’s desk in three mini jumps before slamming both hands onto the table.

  “This is scary amazing, Shayla.”

  Shayla took a step back, having almost reached her chair before Laria voiced exactly the opposite to how Shayla felt.

  “Really? How so?” Shayla prodded cautiously.

  “This. The forced shut down, the frantic runaround. I think the system is protecting itself.” Laria smiled and rushed on ahead. “Rav has no idea how this is happening. None of them do, but we all know something went wrong in the Ruins of Cenedril, and this is the system shutting down to regain control of it, or to protect what’s within. We have no idea what was going on in there, but I think this means we don’t have to worry about the kids.”

  There it was, the whole reason for her joy. They didn’t have to worry about the kids, but Shayla wasn’t sure how to tell her friend she wasn’t being realistic. She wasn’t being analytical. Laria was being hopeful, and it wouldn’t be enough this time. Opting to pull off the band aid, Shayla sighed.

  “That’s fantastic and all, but we still need to be able to explain all of this to Davenport, his lawyers, and likely the entire damn Storm board of directors. This isn’t fun, and this isn’t amazing—this is dangerous for us, for Wren, and for the company, Laria.” Shayla tried hard not to lecture, but the frustration was difficult to keep at bay. Things built up if she let them, and right now Laria wasn’t acting her age. “You’re smarter than this. Don’t get caught up in the glimmer of hope.”