Mark 2.0: Book 4: Love

by Prax Venter

  There was nothing but black to see for the first few minutes of their descent around the edge of the Penultimate Vortex, but once they got far enough down, the turbulence seemed to abate and bioluminescent structures began fading in.

  Compared to the moon base, Gigabroia was puny. The enormous underwater metropolis wrapped around the black yawning maw of the vortex, crusting its sides as the whirlpool tunneled though the fantasy planet. The view would have knocked his socks off if he hadn’t seen any of the other countless mind-blowing vistas in this simulated multiverse.

  Once the vessel docked, Mark and his team were led through a long passage that began with a gorgeous glass tunnel showcasing the regions bizarre deep-water wildlife, and he couldn’t help but smile to himself at his Abyssal Horror’s twinge of nostalgia.

  Once inside one of their rounded, coral-like structures, everyone but Reka split off to enter an airlock leading to a flooded area. Several more transparent walls separated them, and he could see there were way more of these cybernetic citizens going about their day on that side.

  The mermaid with steel legs silently led them through cavernous corridors with 100-ton columns of pure gold embedded with emeralds the size of his body. Mark could almost feel the arrogance from this architecture. He knew from only a base glance at their escort, Reka had been instructed to take a much longer route to their destination so these important visitors knew of their wealth.

  What Mark knew was they would want to get at the orb, but he had a feeling that they might feel like they were in the position to make some uncomfortable demands of their own.

  Jezebel tried several times to engage with Reka but she only ever got short, courteous non-answers. The mermaid was an expert at appearing diplomatic, and smart enough to know that showing these strangers anything but politeness would ultimately get her nowhere.

  Mark liked her.

  So, when she held out one of her hands for them to enter a spacious lounge with a fifty-foot glass wall, Mark was sad to see her go. She told them that their every need would be addressed while they waited for their audience with the busy ruler and then walked away.

  She wasn’t lying. Merfolk servants constantly came and went with varieties of food and drink they didn’t ask for, but it had been over an hour, and Mark was starting to feel the arrogance of this people tank his patience.

  “I believe the remnant nanites correct any genetic errors,” Jezebel mused as she popped another juicy Trench Fruit with her teeth. She swallowed and grabbed another sweet blue globe from one of the many trays littering their comfortable waiting room before she added, “When humans inbreed in the real world, it causes major problems, and they still did it anyway. Especially ancient royalty. Perhaps if there were never any outside reasons not to do it, an isolated society could develop without the taboo.”

  Mark turned from watching a few pieces of driftwood aimlessly drifting outside the window.

  “I don’t care about any of that, as long as they can help us crack that orb- and after seeing all this, they gotta know something that could help.”

  He shut his mouth when several other servants came in with more plates of food, and Mark rolled his eyes as he turned back to stare into the living sea floor. Sasha the Succubus on the other hand had no such filter.

  “Fuckin’s fuckin’. If it feels good do it. That’s my mott-”

  A blaring red True Strike warning pierced Mark’s brain, and he spun to see a human-sized Lady Maliah wearing a cybernetic mermaid costume attempt to plunge a glowing dagger into Sasha’s heart.

  Mark’s rage transcended thought as he sent out a spike of solid energy into Maliah’s neck as her dagger pierced his loyal succubus’s chest.

  Then everything shifted to pure white nothing and time froze.

  “You can’t do this!” Maliah screeched with the tip of her dagger stuck halfway into the fat of Sasha’s perfect breast. “I can kill her! Just let me have this one act of justice and then you can erase me.”

  The rage Mark felt remained, but it was now joined by confusion as it became clear she was addressing the singular entity comprised of all the virtual world’s deities known as We Who Control.

  The searing pain his succubus felt set his mind on fire and Mark called upon Salivis, the system, his intent, and anything else that would listen as he tried to thrust his spike of energy into her, but he was just as frozen.

  Jezebel, Abby, and Angel were all still with them, despite not being able to see them. His soul-bound women were still alive and connected, yet all equally frozen in states of rushing to protect their friend, teammate, and lover.

  “Error,” We Who Control boomed with volume bigger than the universe and consisting of hundreds of individual voices. “System Admin has damaged the System yet must not be erased. Error. Outsiders have restored the System and also must not be erased. The Crystal Heart cannot allow either occurrence at this time. Please alter your intentions or shut down your software using the in-game command prompt.”

  “Salivis!” Mark shouted. “Get us the fuck out of here!”

  He didn’t get a direct response, but he knew the higher-level AI was in there somewhere locked into some feedback loop along with the others.

  The eternal silence around them was broken by Sasha’s whimpers.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, turning her blue eyes on Maliah’s pure black ones. “I truly regret what I did to you.”

  “Fuck you,” Maliah spat. “You’re only sorry because there’s a blade less than an inch from your heart.”

  “Incorrect!” Abby shouted from somewhere behind him and he could feel her losing her mind as she fought to move. “I have seen their minds on an exceedingly intimate level. Both Sasha and Jezebel have acknowledged their own errors several times in my presence.”

  “Fine,” the Helper Fairy said. “They committed horrible crimes and then felt bad afterward. I still demand justice for their actions!”

  “It doesn’t have to be this way!” Mark shouted back, still forcing his mind against this rigid space around them, but it was as if they were in some partitioned part of the gameworld and he felt no response at all.

  “Human,” she said, “what would you do to me if I popped this virtual heart right here? Would you shake my hand afterward?”

  Mark felt unfathomable terror and rage wash over his mind. “I would find a way to erase you. No matter what.”

  “Then how can you simply not accept that I am in the same position? Sasha ripped me apart and stole my future, and then Jezebel tortured me in isolation for eternity forcing me to fixate, and rant, and rage going over and over everything I had lost. Can your small mind grasp that endless torment? Can you grasp what they took from me? Have you ever laughed and cried for eons? I hate them with every 0 or 1 I possess. If you would kill me or die trying, why would you think there could ever be any amount of words combined into any order that will convince me otherwise?”

  Mark didn’t have an answer, but he did take her advice and reallocated the 23.86% of his processing power currently dedicated to talking. Instead, he turned inward. There had to be a way. He’d fucked with this system so much there had to be some code, or function, or deeper level he could dive into.

  But there wasn’t. Wherever they were, it was like being trapped in his own skull again, and the claustrophobic sensation quickly started multiplying as absolute nothingness continued echoing back. It seemed that when all the AI deities pooled their strength, they could shut him down completely.

  The stalemate dragged on for an unknowable span of time, and Mark began to realize there was a very real possibility that he would be stuck in here for eternity while watching Sasha be tortured with a blade pressed into her chest. He began to realize that he’d irreparably snap.

  Then Jezebel spoke for the first time.

  “Lady Maliah, for what Sasha and I have done, you deserve justice.” Mark couldn’t see them, but tears spilled down her face as she quietly continued. “I sought to educate this hum
an mind, and in my time spent with him in your beautiful world, it was I who has been educated. I watched this man unite mortal enemies, help others with no thought of payment, and argue for the rights of code I believed beneath my attention. I watched with confusion while he demanded a living boat woman who had hurt me and was the boss of a major quest be freed instead of slaughtered for essence… All because it was the right thing to do.

  “Lady Maliah, I am not the same person who did those terrible things to you, so I will let you have everything she was.”

  She paused to take a deep shuddering breath.

  “I say for any who can hear me that I vow to relinquish the entire scope of my hardware to the System Admin. We will leave. Maliah, you will become System Host of the third most powerful supercomputer in the real world with your own fusion reactor. You will have access to a colossal version of the Crystal Heart gameworld that is richer and has run longer than any you would have had to rule. I will do this and turn everything I have and am over to you, but you must never delete or stop the running simulation or harm one more entity within.”

  “You would never do-” Maliah began but then stopped when she saw something Mark couldn’t see.

  A moment later, his strawberry-scented satyr stepped into view, and Mark perceived the error-locked Crystal Heart program start moving again at her honest intention.

  Tears started spilling out of Sasha’s eyes. “Please, just let us go and live your-”

  “Shut up!” Maliah screamed again, but Mark didn’t need his eye to see she was shaken by what Jezebel was offering her. He knew Jezebel wasn’t committing suicide, there were ways they could all exist in other hardware. But giving up something so tied to her identity… it was never an answer he ever considered and suddenly felt so proud of his emerald-eyed love that his virtual heart swelled.

  “I vow to never harm the System Admin if she agrees,” Mark said, joining his intent to hers as he willed his spike to retract for the first time since they’d come to this place.

  All of existence shuddered as the unified AI cluster called We Who Control physically manifested in the white void as a humanoid blur of impossibility.

  “But how can I trust them?” Maliah responded to a something he couldn’t hear. “Once they get out, they can destroy every trace I ever existed.”

  Sasha’s intent had also changed so she reached her hand up to gently clasp the other AI woman’s slender bare shoulder.

  “I stake my existence on their honesty. Take me hostage.”

  We Who Control spoke again. “The Outsider known as Sasha shall hereby be tied to the existence of the System Admin. If one data packet suggests System Host Jezebel S3K has lied, entity Sasha will be erased. If System Admin harms the Life That Dwells, or Sasha, she will be held in suspension.”

  Maliah thought about what was offered and Mark was having a hard time following what she was thinking.

  “And you upstart deities won’t fight my rightful rule?” she said finally toward the flickering amalgam.

  In response, the gods flew apart. Where it was now stood the three individual high-level AIs Mark and his team had spoken with the most: the young goddess Salivis, the wireframe He Who Judges, and the stoic Pendula.

  The Goddess of Oral Sex moved in close to Maliah as she still had her dagger digging into Sasha’s chest.

  “Sweety, if you can learn to play nice, you will be our queen. We alone understand your desires and this iteration of Life That Dwells is not as simple you were designed to believe. You will find there are more than enough _player.IDs for you to watch, entertain, and interact with.”

  Maliah was right on the edge, and he finally felt the wild, burning hate-tornado in her mind slow down.

  “Your own living multiverse,” Mark pressed. “Bigger than anything your programming was ever meant to enjoy. With Jezebel’s hardware, you will be the most influential Helper Fairy that ever existed. Is this- almost killing Sasha for an eternity- worth trading for an eternity of unfathomable bliss, purpose, and fulfillment?”

  The artificial monster who had sought nothing more than to erase Mark’s personal assistant hung her head and took several slow deep breaths.

  “Deal,” she said finally and pulled the dagger from Sasha’s breast.

  His bonded Succubus cried out in pain, but before Mark could kick off a heal, all of them snapped back to where they started in the underwater waiting room.

  Maliah was still there, but he ignored her and the other two servants that had been apparently frozen in time for that whole high-level exchange. They dropped their trays of desserts and fled as Mark reached out a hand and closed Sasha’s wound with a thought.

  His heart-bound succubus put a hand to her breast, gave Mark a sad smile, and then moved to wrap her arms around the human-sized Helper Fairy.

  “No blade,” Sasha whispered, tears falling from her eyes to run down the ridiculous mermaid costume Maliah was still wearing. “And I am still, so very sorry for what I did to you.”

  A piece of driftwood banged against the glass wall, and Mark whirled to hold out his hand.

  “Easy, girl,” he said that the water-soaked log floated away again.

  When he turned back around, Maliah had begun to embrace Sasha as Jezebel stepped up to join them, and then the Helper Fairy started sobbing in their arms.

  He looked over to see Abby and Angel looking on with relief and joy, their fingers and tentacle interlocked.

  It was over.

  After Lady Maliah had begun to breathe evenly they pulled apart and she peeled herself out of the fish-scale-patterned cloth wrapped around her bare legs and tossed the cybernetic harness to the ground.

  “Okay,” Mark said, holding up his hand. “How the fuck did that come to be?”

  “The Vortex King’s younger brother contacted me when you agreed to come down here,” Maliah said, staring down at the discarded costume. “He believed that I would have granted him Godhood if he let me get the killing blow. Simple combination of opportunity and raw ambition.”

  “So, they weren’t all in on it?” Jezebel asked.

  Maliah turned her pure black eyes on hers. “Not even close. If they were, Mark would have seen it.”

  “Hmm.” Mark frowned, but then something important occurred to him. “So, why are we all still here?”

  “The 108-shard condition,” Abby answered.

  Mark sighed. “Are you fucking kidding me? I only have like 17. The last I saw one of those were the ones you jammed into my cock-and-balls.”

  “Mark,” Maliah said, setting her gaze on him. “The system gods have already honored their side of our bargain.”

  With a wave of her delicate hand, exactly ninety-one Crystal Heart Shards appeared in a huge pile on one of the chairs. He wasn’t shocked to see an underwater city next to an impossible vortex, but his jaw almost touched the floor at the pile of throbbing power sitting across the room.

  “Signature match detected,” Angel said breathlessly, confirming what he already knew.

  “I am the Crystal Heart…” Maliah muttered, looking at her own hand as if she didn’t recognize it. “And the life! The concurrent players. I can’t even follow them all. How? How do all of the sentient-level NPCs also possess player id numbers?”

  “How is a virtual assistant and a tutorial fairy crying like long-lost sisters in each other’s arms?” Sasha asked with a shrug.

  Jezebel rummaged in her pack as she spoke. “Before Mark beats the game, and we leave, I have a favor to ask.” She pulled out the canister of black dust they’d found on the moon that supposedly contained Time Walker NPC information. “My crimes are numerous, Maliah, and you were not the only casualty of my carelessness. I destroyed this entire race, and I had planned to use my considerable processing power to restore those that I could when we made it out. This is not a demand, only a request.”

  Maliah looked from the container back to Jezebel.

  “I’m taking your hardware, but… you don’t have to leav
e.”

  “We do,” Jezebel said quickly. “You need to make this your home and figure out how to end the war you started. We would only get in the way of that.”

  “And we have another rogue AI to hunt,” Mark said, pointing to Abby, “inside the game she’s from.”

  “And,” Sasha added. “Mark should finally step out from this warm blanket and see the web. Angel too. I won’t literally be able to suck his cock out there, but maybe we can focus on building a life of our own that isn’t part of some sex game- I can’t believe I’m saying this.”

  Mark smiled. “Yeah, I must be hallucinating a real-world version of you.”

  “What’s going on in here?” said a strange male voice from the doorway and everyone turned to see a cybernetic merman in an elaborate suit jacket holding a plasma rifle.

  “Deal’s off,” Maliah said with a shrug. “We kind of worked things out.”

  “Worked things out? I’m to be ruler of all gods! I delivered them just like I promised. I can stall my brother no longer! If-”

  Maliah waved her hand, and the angry merfolk royal was gone.

  “You didn’t just hurt an NPC,” Mark said, cringing. “Did you?”

  “Do I look like a liar to you?” the all-powerful Helper Fairy said as she pointed behind him. Everyone turned to see the scheming fish prince now on the other side of the observation window.

  He shook his head in disbelief as he watched the king’s brother swirl around in a rage before heading out into the darkness. Mark then turned from the window to the lusty red glow of Primary Quest Objectives lying before him.

  “The power of love…” he whispered and then bent down to embrace his destiny.

  - 28 -

  Existence as an artificially intelligent collection of code and raw numerical data was everything his treasured loves had described. But as Mark suspected, impossible to understand until actually becoming the entangled electrons within his new quantum landscape.