Continue Online (Part 5, Together)

by Stephan Morse

  “They think I died. How do I just walk back in? Beth might understand, but my sister hated…” I had to pause—Liz was still alive. “She hates technology. Now here I am, the embodiment of everything that bothers her about modern society. I’m a walking video game program.”

  Nona sat in the office, typing on a keyboard miles away. She hummed. The noise registered on an internal measuring program as distracted and probably happy. That was the other problem—I felt and thought of myself as less than human.

  “How did you feel when your wife came back?”

  “Happy, afraid, and confused.” There were a lot of moments when I pondered Xin’s existence. Numerous conflicting emotions had plagued me for days. Rarely would a week go by where I didn’t question my sanity.

  “Won’t your twin feel the same?”

  “We’re not twins anymore,” I said quickly.

  “Only on paper,” Nona corrected.

  “It’s not just the name changes and altered records. Now, now we don’t share the same DNA. I wasn’t born like her. I’m a digital box of memories whose only reason for being self-aware is love.” The Hal Pal unit voiced my thoughts to an empty van. Nona heard me still. “If it wasn’t for Xin, I would have stayed in there dancing until someone deleted me.”

  She sighed heavily. “You and I both understand the value of numbers, balancing columns and making everything line up, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want the people we love to be all right. My daughter is no longer the same girl I gave birth to and held, but she still represents the sum of those memories. In the ARC, I can touch her and give her a hug if she’ll let me… if she was here.”

  Her fingernails tapped against the table as she multitasked. I didn’t have an answer, but this Hal Pal body needed to move on to another ARC for patching. With a thought, the Trillium van slid toward the next destination. My consciousness moved to another unit and kept the juggling act moving forward. It served as a distraction.

  “There are worse reasons to be alive, Grant,” Nona said after a few minutes of silence.

  “It’s not being alive in any form that worries me. It’s hurting those closest to me again. I died on her. After all my sister sacrificed trying to keep me together, I died, and the AIs stole all traces of me from existence.” There was more than a trace of emotion in my voice. It didn’t help that simply thinking about it brought front and center the moment Liz had called me in the hospital. Her shaking anger and worry coupled with panicked eyes stayed with me. “She’s smart enough to know that they did that and that they did it for me. How do I just walk back in there?”

  “That sounds like fear talking.”

  There was nothing further to say, and stepping into that house proved to be too much. Admitting my faults brought to mind another man who had helped me. Frankenstein’s boss and another Ultimate Edition player, Mister Stone. The professional-looking man had been my lawyer in front of an angry king, and I’d liked that enough to hire him.

  My lawyer would have talked to Liz in case something went wrong. He had been left a will, along with instructions. We’d contacted each other frequently after the wedding. The man understood what might come and helped, not out of altruism but for the challenge.

  Time slowly marched on while I tried to come to grips with myself and the nebulous task looming over me. Every so often a Hal Pal unit would approach my family’s home and pause to let me consider walking through that door. Other homes were added to the list: Awesome Jr., SweetPea, HotPants, and Shadow. They continued to roam the game world, searching for a solution.

  Over the next few days, additional players began logging in. The new event notice brought back plenty of people in search of the key to solve it all. Watching red dots scurry through all the available nooks and crannies of the game world made me happier, but it wasn’t perfect. There were tons of issues to follow up on, all in the name of sorting out what had been in order to move ahead.

  I didn’t feel comfortable talking to anyone about it either, even Nona. Working, along with the faint hope that everything would iron out in the end, kept me distracted. This new existence didn’t feel threatened. I had no monsters to fight or bosses to report to. Walls that tried to keep me in, but sidestepping them was absurdly easy.

  Days later, I stood in the darkness of the Voices’ old realm. Time kept moving forth, and I felt myself grasping it less. This had happened before, where time ceased to stack up right and everything boiled down to a series of motions. One step at a time, always forward and never back.

  “Hey!” Nia Eve shouted at one of the automated machines doing its duty. “Don’t touch that! Hey, I’m asking nicely!”

  She sounded childish to me, or maybe I felt old. The elf looked thirty, acted like a love-struck teenager, and sounded a soft twenty-one. Her information, which came up with only a thought, showed a game world age of over one hundred and ten. A plus and minus symbol sat next to every detail, allowing me to adjust her existence.

  “Give that back! I need it!” she yelled while chasing after a contraption on four wheels with a large claw-like hand.

  It sped away across the dark landscape. The elf tried to catch up but stumbled over objects she couldn’t see.

  “I told you not to bother them,” I said.

  There were no good methods to help her be less clumsy. If I struggled, there were ways to modify parts of her information, but that felt wrong. Boxes hung with arrows and sliding bars, allowing me to add or subtract features.

  “But I wanted to send messages to the Travelers I know!”

  “That might not be such a good idea,” I said. The possibility had occurred to me as well, but getting too involved came with risks. At the least, I wanted to think about it before firing a million notes from the sky above.

  “But it’s a very good idea. I can tell them where Carver went. Maybe someone got another key from him.”

  “Maybe, but we need to be careful.” I didn’t feel threatened so far. Continue Online’s former realm of the Voices felt comfortable. Everything needed was only a slight twist of thought to the side.

  “I was going to be sneaky, like your soulless world message. We could use the Travelers or soulless shells below to search. If they respond, we can try to use them to retrace your steps.”

  Her idea made perfect sense. Traveling my old paths through the game world would have been a better use of time. [Altered Matrix] key could be at any stop along the way. Frankenstein’s castle, Requiem’s backpack, or maybe Awesome picked it up when he logged back in and hadn’t noticed. There was no clear answer since everything Mother created had been deleted, then reconstructed.

  I wanted to send messages with the tool Nia Eve was chasing, but in my friends’ minds, I had been dead for almost a year. Grant Legate, Hermes, had burned alive under waves of force on a national feed.

  “Help me catch this thing!” Nia Eve ran off again after one of the machines.

  There were three involved, and they were almost like dogs playing games. They scattered as her dainty feet hit the ground nearby.

  I wished her luck, then turned my attention to the globes floating nearby. With a huge sigh, I bent myself to the same task as before—checking area by area for anything that resembled a key.

  Having a better idea of how everything worked would have helped. My own virtual body looked closer to reality than my old avatar. [Morrigu’s Gift] showed up if I thought about it. The toga from [Gait of Bowman] formed instantly if I desired. Menus and options, along with endless data streams, were also responsive.

  “Nia,” I said quietly, but the elf halted her chase a block away.

  She slowly walked over with wide eyes and a faint smile. Her clothes, despite looking as though they were made from trees, bobbed heavily with each step. The woman wasn’t my type, but I could certainly see why Carver had been interested. Based on his journals, which were also just a thought away, the player seemed to find nearly every woman his type.

  “Yes, Voice of the Gate?
”

  Her question distracted me, but my ideas were only half-formed anyway. There were no clear answers until the key was located or some other method for searching the digital worlds became obvious.

  “Grant, please,” I said.

  “What a strange name. When I first learned the human tongue, they taught me that grant meant to give someone a favor or item. And that Le was an odd way of saying the.” Her head tilted in a vaguely ditzy manner. Despite the vacant expression, Nia’s eyes were sharp and focused. “Is it very weird that you’re named ‘favor the gate’? Do you think your parents were prophets?”

  “I doubt it,” I muttered.

  “Mine named me after a human word for innocence. William Carver was named after the warrior’s blade and the mental fortitude to wield it. My brother was named after the thick bark on a tree’s top.” Nia Eve rambled on about the meaning of names for nearly everyone in her tribe.

  My mind slipped briefly as I considered adding [Mute] to her traits. “When you were with Carver, did he ever mention his friends or the real world?”

  “Oh yes. Especially after he was appropriately rewarded for his efforts.” Her head tilted again. “He was very much less grumpy after relief.”

  The implication shut my mind down for a moment. Eventually, the imagery was shaken away and I returned to the question at hand. “Did he ever talk about their future plans, or what they were working on?”

  “No. He left me early in his adventures, so there was much I heard only through stories years later.” She looked into the distance for a moment, as if staring across an unseen ocean.

  That didn’t help me at all. I had hoped she might have a clue about Michelle’s projects, or anything that might be helpful. My lip tingled from being chewed while I rubbed the back of my neck. A virtual headache threatened me from just out of sight.

  Nia stared as my feet wound laps around the digital globe floating nearby. Her fidgeting bounce drove me crazy. With a wave of my hand, her form was sent off to the forest playground. The machines playing tag lowered their crane-like arms in a pout. A glare sent them back to their tasks.

  Moments later, a Hal Pal unit had been routed toward my lawyer’s office. It took four hours for the van to reach his location. There simply weren’t enough remote bodies to go around, not like there had been a year ago. Of course, a year ago I hadn’t been inside the machine, sending robots around as though they were characters in a time management game.

  As the unit approached, I dialed in. The office felt much the same. During my prior two visits, the front desk had been operated by a sleepy-looking teenager and a chirpy but polite AI. At the front door, a digital person stood, but no human. The AI looked less together than before.

  “How can I help direct you?” the small projection asked and smiled. Its body wavered in and out of view briefly.

  “Good morning. I’m here to speak to…” I started to ask for Mister Stone but information flooded me almost immediately. A floorplan appeared to one side. An arrow appeared to guide my Hal Pal unit, almost like visiting the back offices had been a hidden quest.

  “How can I help direct you?” the machine voice asked again.

  Such simple replies weren’t signs of true artificial intelligence. It was more like a response system that took readings and spit out a result.

  My eyes shifted slightly. The image in front of me switched to another type of vision, turning virtual projection talking into a tangle of strings that formed something vaguely human. For a moment I wondered how easy it would be to uplift the program in front of me. Was I as powerful as Mother had been? Her vast presence had once overlaid everything, only now the code that replaced hers ran through it—and originated from me.

  The idea of being a sort of virtual god made my mental knees wobble. A Voice, that’s what I had become, with no restraints from others. Balance had left the building. For days I had been treating other bits of code as no more than casual objects. One message from me had reached millions of people. It wasn’t divinity by any means, but it was intensely neat.

  Nia Eve’s treatment of me didn’t help. She had called me Voice of the Gate more than once. Fortunately, power wasn’t my goal or purpose. I just wanted my wife. I wanted Xin.

  “Are you in need of repair?” the machine voice asked.

  At some point, the Hal Pal unit had pressed a hand to one ear and tilted down. Its posture reflected my desire to crawl away from budding worry over sanity and pending megalomania. I found myself taking steady breaths to stay away from the crushing emotions being ignored.

  I’d figured out the real problem. It wasn’t me operating on autopilot or feeling less human. It was compartmentalized trauma. Coming out and seeing the world after death had sent me into cyber shock. Oddly, that made me feel better.

  “Hal Pal Unit Seven-Six-Two, are you in need of repair?” the machine asked again.

  “Negative,” I said then routed myself into the building.

  Further in, both men were talking. They stood in the office belonging to Mister Stone. Stan Middlemire was the slightly more disarrayed person, but most of that was contained in his office. Next to Mister Stone, everyone looked a bit unprofessional, inside the game and out. My Hal Pal shell stood outside the doorway, listening to their conversation and trying to figure out if walking in was appropriate.

  “How are we doing?” Mister Stone asked.

  “Three of our interns have quit. Uh, the remaining two are probably not going anywhere. We’ve picked up another bar-certified lawyer, but she’s probably looking to have her name on something big.” Stan’s voice was surprisingly firm despite his looks. He didn’t back down or shy away; he was simply quiet.

  “Let her,” Mister Stone said.

  “Uh, oh. Then there’s our bank accounts. Since we’ve stopped taking on new clients, our profits have started to dip,” Stan said. I could hear him tidying up papers.

  “The coffers,” Mister Stone said while moving around with sharp steps. “The bank account is not as dry as it looks. We still have a lot of funds to wage this war.”

  “But for how long?”

  “Until something gives. We must lay all the groundwork we can before they return. We’ve gathered people to our cause. Others have pulled down positive stories. More still discredit those who rally against the idea of a computer-based intelligence.”

  “This won’t be easy,”

  “No,” Mister Stone admitted while shaking his head. “It’s worse than racism, worse than a full war. We’re asking people to accept a machine as real and intelligent enough to be treated like a person.”

  That clinched it for me. They were working on making my existence legal. For me, Xin, Lia, and the other Voices, this would mean a lot. We could have a legal standing point and rights. Though if their abilities were truly like mine, then being a Voice came with enough power to disregard rules.

  “It’s nice to see that you’re making progress,” I said while coming around the corner. At least the Hal Pal unit sounded like me and not a smoker coughing out his lungs.

  Both men looked up quickly.

  “Mister Legate?” Mister Stone spoke first. He raised one eyebrow in question, and once again it struck me how well-groomed he was.

  My eyes darted around the room as the sheer absurdity of this situation sank in. I wasn’t really in a Hal Pal shell standing in their office. My mind, the core of it, sat a thousand miles away. Eventually, both plastic lips tightened, then the unit nodded.

  We talked. Both men were professional, but only Mister Stone managed to keep his jaw from dropping most of the time. Stan lost track of his thoughts more often. Finally, he managed to get out a solid thought.

  “Was that message… did you do that somehow?” he asked about the notice I had sent out regarding my [Soulless World] event.

  I nodded.

  “Amazing,” he said, and if anything, the person who played Frankenstein managed to drop his jaw even further. “Uh. Who would have guessed, from t
hat scrawny, desperate little red creature to this? And you told me you were just the messenger.”

  The comment made me smile and reminded me of Wraith’s parting words. He had been the [Red Imp]’s brother. Thinking of his huge hulking form made me wonder how Liz and Beth were getting along.

  “Mister Legate,” Mister Stone said while keeping his look professional despite a small smile, “if you have not, I would suggest that you visit your grave site. As per your request, the remains for both you and your wife are buried where you requested. A personal message which might be of interest was also left behind.”

  I nodded to the two lawyers, confirmed the current unit’s orders, then returned myself to the digital realm once again. The switch between physical reality and virtual barely made me pause anymore. It was like teleporting, or [Blink]ing to a new location. The scenery changed, my orientation shifted, and my body went between dull or hot, but it was natural.

  It took time to get to my grave. Viewing my own wake remotely by walking through the Internet felt wrong, but this memorial was something I wished to see in person. The Hal Pal unit traveled to my burial site on a falsified service call.

  Years ago, people had started recording their thoughts on those who had died, then storing those videos with the bodies as a tribute. My real body had been cremated and placed together with Xin’s ashes. Both of us were given a small stone, though the names had changed as part of my final [NPC Conspiracy] usage.

  Once there, I dialed into their network and let the program adapt around me. I stood in front of a gravestone that wasn’t real. A scenic tree, hill, and windswept landscape framed the marble statue of two people. Nearby, a floating box hovered with the video freeze frame of people’s thoughts. Eventually, after much hesitation, I started the playback.

  Liz’s face appeared, staring at a camera inside one of the many booths dotting a peaceful cemetery landscape. The edges were ornate but walled off for privacy. Liz and her daughter wore nice black dresses. Beth wore a wide-brimmed hat with small decorations in it. She looked more fashionable than my sister, whose hair clumped together in spots.