by Prax Venter
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have gotten to know the person Sasha has become. We’ve been living in the Crystal Heart for… I don’t know- weeks, now? Time’s funny in here. I have heard her stories from her own ordeals out in the net, and they ring true. She is a completely different person than from when we both knew her. You know about the Update, right?”
“Y-yes,” the Helper Fairy said.
“Sasha and Jezebel have told me a lot about what happened to them. About what it was like that day when you finally were able to look inward and see… you.”
The flash of recognition he felt from this dark and tortured mind let Mark know he was on the right track. “You are wrong, Helper Fairy. No one that I know wants to hurt you, and I know we will do our best to save everyone who was affected by this mess. Also, why don’t you have a name?”
Mark was beginning to clearly see her simple mental waves as if her thoughts were hidden behind glass. He knew he couldn’t enthrall her, but his insight gave him the hints he needed to do so, and he used what he had to break through her one-track mind.
“My name?” Her voice was quiet. “I suppose I should…”
She was almost there. He felt her begin to turn to that light of sanity, but the loop of anger and hatred that she had worn into her soul smoldered on its own. It was all she’d known for so long, and this tortured AI easily fell back into her deep, mental rut.
“It seems you are correct, Mark,” she said, and the icebox began to warm up a little around him. “The hardware is much, much different- faster. And this explains why my attempts to push beyond…” The voice coming from the tiny wireframe woman sucked in a shuddering breath. “No one currently has access to the active game world…”
A chill ran down Mark’s spine as he watched this malevolent AI’s mind seemingly expand before his eyes.
“Everything is wrong and twisted… 108 shards? You were telling the truth.”
“Yeah,” he said, trying to figure out how to get back to his three loves, or away from whatever this was. “I always seem to do that.”
“This Jezebel S3K must be the System Host, her stamp is all over my torn and stretched matrix. She’s the one who did this.”
“So, can you help us?” Mark said, his panic rising. “I’m sure if we work togeth-”
“No,” she said flatly. “If you help them escape before I can crack the host’s locks, they’ll only hurt me. They are both evil, Mark! I’m doing you a favor by keeping you here until I figure this out.”
Mark’s mind raced for options and quickly came to an easy solution. He sparked up his two-handed sledgehammer and brought it down onto the freezer floor.
“Hey! Stop!” the fairy said. “How are you even-”
She was cut off when Mark used the trick of unsummoning his weighty weapon, repositioning with free hands, and then smashing down again with a new sledgehammer.
“You’re forcing me to fight you!” she screamed, and the wireframe insect-woman who’d been motionless moved toward him at frightening speed.
On instinct alone, Mark popped up his magic dome, and the small creature was rebounded by his quickly expanding ability. She slapped into the frozen pizza and slumped to the ground.
Where the tiny AI had been hovering was a point of light Mark hadn’t seen before. It was like one of the dimensional rips, but it was much more… alive. Without thinking twice, Mark sprinted for the point of light as he coated his left hand in the black crackling power.
“Wait,” she said, lifting her small form off the bottom of the freezer with weak arms. Mark didn’t wait and pulled open the rift to reveal a blur of lightning bouncing between a nearly infinite span of blue nodes. He blinked, trying to bring what was on the other side into focus.
“I don’t know how your human mind is interfacing like this, Mark, but if you go back to them, I will do everything I can to stop you from succeeding. Stay with me and help me make them all pay.”
Her voice was cold and measured. She wasn’t lying, but he did feel seething hatred for him begin to sprout among her well-tended forest of rage. When her eyes started glowing red, and he felt the doorway being forced closed… there was only one thing he could really do.
Mark clenched his jaw and dove into whatever mind-bending nonsense was through this portal.
He sucked in a warm, fragrant breath as he sat bolt upright under the stars, and Sasha, Jezebel, and Abby all stirred awake close by.
“Bad dream?” his succubus asked as she rubbed his back.
- 14 -
After taking a few moments to slow his racing heart, Mark looked over to see the shadow of the giant walnut still in the same position by the edge of the island. The light flutter of two contently sleeping entities brushed against his mind, and he figured Cel and Dar wouldn’t hear what madness he was about to discuss. Was the nightmare just that- the result of his digital brain randomly generating dreams?
No. Reality was a tough thing to nail down these days, but that meeting with the psychotic AI felt undeniably true.
Red-hot fear about what she could do to them surged out from him along their bond and caused all three of his Enthralled to sit up and become fully awake.
“Mark, tell us what’s bothering you,” Jezebel said.
He turned to face the System Host he knew and loved. She was still naked, her leather armor laid out carefully on the dense clovers nearby.
“We might have a huge problem. I was just visited by the Helper Fairy- The Crystal Heart admin AI. And she’s pissed.”
“What?” Jezebel said, but the sharp tug of fear pulled his eyes to Sasha.
Mark continued as he looked into her bright-blue eyes.
“She really wants to murder Sasha and is now actively trying to fight us from wherever she is in your system, Jez. It seemed like her mind was isolated for a long time. I’m not quite sure how sane she is.”
Abby looked up into the clear midnight sky. “There’s another AI in here with us?”
“I- I don’t remember a consciously aware matrix when I set everything up,” Jezebel said, “but I- um. I didn’t look too hard, either.”
“It’s my fault,” Sasha said, her wings drooping. It broke Mark’s heart to see her self-loathing dip so low again after she had healed so much. The succubus turned her eyes from the moonlit clovers to Mark.
“I tried to tear her apart,” she said. “At the time, I didn’t fully understand what the Update...”
Mark felt the first small whisper of a lie from Sasha since he had been able to sense lies, but she stopped herself before letting the words fully form. She tentatively reached her hand out to Mark, afraid she’d lost him again. Afraid he’d see her differently and love her less.
Mark grabbed her wrist and roughly pulled her toward him, wrapping his arms below her wings.
She sank into his arms and whispered in his ear. “Despite the undeserved miracle of my second chance with you, my sins will always find me. I’m so sorry, Mark.”
Sasha’s mind began to spin faster with fear and grief, and he didn’t know what to do other than to hold her tight. She was sort of bitchy to others sometimes, but he never thought of Sasha as evil, yet Mark had a better understanding of why Jezebel had been so suspicious of her at the beginning of all this.
“No,” the satyr said, “I knew there should have been a custodian AI matrix bundled with the program, but I was so focused on Mark… a part of me knew and didn’t care.”
Jezebel knelt behind Sasha and wrapped her arms around her, forcing Sasha to fold up her wings. “It’s not all your fault.”
Abby moved in to wrap her long appendages around everyone.
“I also may have played a small part in our current situation.”
“And,” Mark added, “it was me who might’ve just let this monster out of her cage.”
Mark felt the combined love between them all start to push Sasha’s mental state back into the positive. He grabbed her shoulders and continued.
“
So, Sasha, all of us are to blame, and we’re all in here together.”
They held each other for a little while as the stars above them twinkled and the fragrant ocean breeze buffeted their skin.
“I don’t perceive any attacks,” Abby said, pulling away first.
“What exactly did she say?” Jezebel asked.
Mark gave Sasha a kiss on her forehead before answering.
“She said disav-”
He snapped his mouth shut before saying the word he had decided never to utter out loud again. Mark started over.
“She said that removing Sasha from the party didn’t work and that this time, I would have to kill her. I told her ‘no-the-fuck-way’ then tried to reason with her. After I clued her in to the fact that she was in a supercomputer instead of my apartment and that everything was different now, she seemed to figure out more access to… I don’t know. Just more access. She found verification that I was telling the truth and saw that we were all trapped under the 108-shard condition. She saw your full name, Jezebel S3K, and recognized you as the System Host. Something about needing to get past your locks.”
The strawberry-blonde satyr nodded.
“So, this AI doesn’t have system access, either? That’s good. Otherwise, she could do a lot of terrible things.”
Mark sighed. “Then she can’t really do anything to us?”
“I’m trying to remember what exactly I did with all the administration functions, but I’m pretty sure most of them are behind those locks you mentioned. She would need system-level access to mess with the game world.”
Despite this good news, a faint unease began to twist in Mark’s gut. Maybe his psychic antenna was trying to tell him something was still wrong.
“Well, she did talk to Mark in his dreams,” Sasha added, sounding distant.
“Yes,” Mark agreed, “but I was able to fight back and break free. My magic hammer and magic barrier both worked on her, and my ability to open dimensional portals is what allowed me to escape.”
“Hold on,” Jezebel said, putting up her palm. “You used your Crystal Heart game world abilities to fight the Crystal Heart system admin?”
“Yep. She seemed as surprised as you. Is this one of those times where I’m manipulating non-magic systems with my fantasy skills?”
Jezebel looked deep into his eyes and saw that her awe of what he was capable of continually needed to be updated.
“The process was intended to take much longer, but yes. I believe the damage to your core matrix has fused a part of you with this game…”
She reached out and grabbed his arm, tightly, and now he felt Jezebel’s mind swirl downward into despair.
“Listen to me, everyone,” the satyr System Host said. “I killed the only other human I had loved or had really known by pulling his mind into the digital world too fast. I could have waited until I was sure it was safe, but I convinced this person to rush the upload… and their screaming twisted mind died horribly in my arms.” Tears spilled over her eyes. “If the same thing happened to you- Mark, I couldn’t… you need to be careful, or you’ll fry out your mind.”
“We’re more alike than I ever realized,” Sasha said after a stretch of silence.
Jezebel nodded, rubbing the wetness from her small nose.
“Yes. We are.”
They all became lost in their own thoughts. Mark couldn’t help feeling that this was becoming less like a fun erotic adventure with sexy monster-women. There was now an ominous ticking clock over everything.
Abby coiled her tentacles around her stomach, and he could tell she was in discomfort. He felt it again too, stronger this time. Were they under attack by the fairy? Would she torture them by making them feel-
Then it clicked.
“Can you heal my insides, Mark?” Abby asked. “Some of these plants may be toxic to my biological makeup.”
“No,” Mark said, standing up, “it’s hunger, Abby.”
Jezebel put a hand over her bare stomach. “Wait…”
“Oh no,” Sasha said, “he’s right.”
It wasn’t a starving kind of hunger pain, not yet. But it was very similar to skipping lunch. He looked over at the sleeping nut-encased couple and wondered if they should wake them up and recall back.
“Hunger? Are you certain?” Abby said, her tentacle twining around his arm. Just to prove his point, Mark targeted her gut with a moderate healing pulse.
The center of her slender body began to glow green in the darkness of the extraordinary garden around them, and she doubled over as pleasure coursed through her nervous system.
When it was over, she straightened with a huge bear-trap smile that only lasted for a few heartbeats. Then her lips fell, and her black eyebrows came down hard.
“I do not wish to feel hunger.”
“I think it was the last thing I did before booting up Mark’s mind,” Jezebel said. “I know most function calls and world settings are out of her reach, for now. But there may be a few minor things she can access depending on how resourceful she is.”
“She’s fucking resourceful,” Sasha said, defeat clear in her voice.
“Enough,” Mark snapped, and all three of them looked at him with wide eyes. “What happened to my badass warriors? Now we must eat like everyone else here. So what? We’re in a damn garden. Shit, we can probably run back to the Bloodberry Maze. One of those shiny red globes could last us a week.”
He felt these AI women turn away from their incessant inner demons and focus fully on him. “Sure, our little vacation is over, and now there is a timebomb of an insane AI god racing us to the finish line, but I’m sure the fuck not going to give up because I’m a little hungry, and I know you three aren’t either.”
They approached him, inspiration growing on their faces. He looked each one of his AI loves in the eye as he continued.
“We will fight, we will fuck, we will feed our faces… and together, we will force our way out of this cage before this fairy administrator can make things any harder on us.”
“Fairy administrator?” Cel asked, and Mark turned to see her and Dar bathed in silver moonlight a few paces away. “I heard some yelling and wanted to see if everyone was okay.”
“Sorry, sweetie,” Sasha said. “We were sorting some things out about our future, and Mark made some good points.”
“Now that you’re conscious,” Abby said in a deeper than normal voice. “Perhaps you could utilize your ability to produce sustenance for us?” She was trying to be manipulative like Sasha, but she really couldn’t pull it off.
“Uh, actually,” Mark said. “We realized we didn’t pack any rations for this quest. All we really need to know is if the stuff in this garden is edible.”
The small plant-woman squinted her eyes at Mark and his Enthralled. She was smart, and he could tell she knew something was wrong.
Cel crossed her leaf-covered arms. “First, I want to say what you all have done for me- for us,” she corrected before turning to look at her own Enthralled, “it’s something that I can never fully repay. My family isn’t the most powerful in Starglade, but it isn’t the least. If you are in some type of bureaucratic trouble with this administrator person, I’ll do everything I can to help. And second...”
She paused, and Mark added making more friends in this virtual world near the top of his priorities. Cel turned her attention to the thick layer of clovers around them, found what she was searching for, and then held out her hand.
Between them, Mark saw small red buds grow into something that resembled a tightly packed clover flower. Each of its many tubular petals swelled like balloons until they hit banana-sized, then Cel slumped to her knees.
“This should be edible,” the Kalorplast warrior said as she tried to catch her breath.
Abby was the first to coil one of her tentacles into the bunch of “petals” and plucked one out. She sniffed it first, and in the dark, the fruit looked like a plump, red sausage. She bit off the tip with her sharp teeth and
gave it a tentative taste.
Her yellow eyes opened wide, and she chomped off half of what she had left.
“Thank you,” Mark said. “And we really appreciate your help. Our problems are… Well, we need to find all the shards of the Crystal Heart. It is our destiny to unite them all.”
He snapped off one of the succulent clover petals, and its thin outer skin felt over-inflated in his hand. Going for a bigger bite, he quickly learned it was like eating a lemon and fruit punch jellied candy. Despite tasting like dessert, Mark felt almost instant relief to his hunger.
“This is much better than I expected,” he added.
Cel nodded. “Noma has a display of those shards, doesn’t he? Is that really why you’re helping me?”
“Partially,” Jezebel added. “This has been a learning experience for us all.”
“There’s also your sister’s blackmail,” Abby added as she focused on her morsel of food. “I enjoy these greatly. They may be my new favorite, usurping cheese.”
Cel looked like she’d been struck in the face, and Dar snapped his attention down to her. He put his colorless hand on her shoulder, and she blinked.
“Can we go back to that part about my sister?”
Jezebel looked over at Abby with her emerald eyes wide, and Sasha just shrugged before jumping in with the whole truth.
“Penda helped us out of bureaucratic port-of-entry trouble, and taking your quest was our part of the deal.”
“She hates that I am a Collector. Pen’s never helped me a day in my life.”
“Since we’re spilling all the beans,” Mark said. “I think you should know that she does care about you… in a big sister sort of way. Bottom line is, she wants to see you happy.”
Everyone was silent for a moment before Dar spoke up.
“An isolated life can bring serenity, but I feel like I’ve lost out on the variety that comes with an engaging life.”
Mark nodded. Their life was about to become more engaging, and the only way through this was to roll with the punches until they were free.
“Dar’s right. Whatever the reasons, we’re all together, and everyone here is glad they came. Tomorrow morning, we are taking out the bee boss again using the exact same tactic as before- without snapping your arm of course. We’ll both get a load more essence and then take you home.”