‘There actually isn’t a way to shut down Bane,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Its code is a part of the net, everything. All technology since its inception. If it gives rise to some kind of rebellion against humanity, against its creators and we try to shut it down, it will simply move its core programming from one host to another. Even if it moves like a ghost in the machine it will survive in the cloud until someone copies it into another VR game or it adapts.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about an artificial intelligence that was built to live forever.’
‘So Bane is immortal and you’re scared that it’s planning an uprising in the real world.’
‘I’m terrified.’
A few minutes later Kira left. It was a lot to take in. Not the kind of thing I wanted to worry about. Kira was wrong about one thing though. Bane wasn’t just one intelligence. It was a living system, a living world, but it was populated by humans and many different artificial intelligences, each with their own personality. If Skull-Faced Man was one side of the coin and Gorge another, than it was at war with itself. In that way it was more human than we had ever given it credit.
I continued to pet Aiko for another hour. I could feel the bond between the two of us grow and it wasn’t just some kind of game mechanic. Aiko might have been my familiar but it was by choice. It was something real. Something that defined not just our relationship but the game itself. Like the real world Bane was full of choice. Aiko was more than code just as I was more than flesh and blood.
21.
Escape
Location: The Lady of the Lani
Deep Space - Apus Asteropaio Nebula (outside the Jellyfish Star System) heading towards Quadrant 13, Aegimius Cluster
We had time to spare. Lady Gray contacted us via holo and let us know how Aiden and the others were doing. We could watch them at anytime but it was more personal this way. It kept our group closer. In a way it made it easier for us and for me personally, hearing first hand that they were alive and well. I enjoyed hearing about Aiden’s love for the spotlight. He led a group of bounty hunters into the event horizon of a black hole, navigated the depths of the Ophiuchi cloud, and led a salvage down the Grain Star System in Quadrant 18. It was fantastic. He had done all of that without breaking character. He wasn’t just impersonating me, he was making me more famous. Leading adventures worthy of being caught on camera. I have to admit that I was jealous in many ways. He had discovered several artefacts on his salvage, which would make him a fortune. Even the smallest item he acquired now was worth three times the rifle I had discovered in Alpha Centauri A.
To the outside world Lady Gray was corrupt and evil, an elite player who ruled like the Queen of Hearts. To those who came to know her she was nothing like that. That was a part of her facade, the face she put on to keep her guild, her team, her empire safe. More and more, I was grateful that Damien had invited me to take part in Bane, to become a Corpse Diver. I was more determined now than ever to break into the Spire to avenge his death and I was grateful too that I wasn’t alone.
My conversation with Kira had left me uneasy. So much so that I didn’t want to log out and use my time in the real world. I knew I had things I had to catch up on. Reynolds would be mad if I didn’t eat or exercise for one. On the outside I felt like a rat in a cage. A boy behind bars. My time felt better used studying star maps and learning lore than it did running a treadmill. There was still so much to discover inside the game. So much territory left uncharted even within the 76 quadrants. The 77th, the Cold Zone, was just one of many mysteries left unsolved. The most important mystery at the moment was the world gate closest to the Spire. The world gate known as At Eternity, where humanity had crossed from Earth to the Spire for the first time. Since that exodus the gate had gone cold, Earth itself still undiscovered. Not that anyone truly cared.
Aiko and I went walking through the ship. It felt empty in the silence. I could feel the air circulating through the vents around me, hear the slight vibration of the void outside as we continued, our ion drives pushing us faster and faster as we slungshot around planets and asteroids every chance we had. We were pushing the engines to their limit.
Gorge was sitting inside the observation deck. Outside the large windows we were crossing through some kind of nebula. I could see sparks of electricity in the air as clouds of purple and red dust swirled around us in a display of beauty that was too hard to put into words. The clouds looked like funnels surrounded by electric sparks. Any one spark could send us crashing, destroy our ship as we made our way across the void. If not for the hull shielding us from the radiation outside we would be dead. Even here there were so many things surrounding us that could kill us it made our plan seem more and more irrational.
As Aiko and I sat beside him, Gorge looked at peace. His eyes gazed at the gas clouds as they moved, crashing into one another in a display of brilliance. It was hypnotizing, the clash as fractals moved from one space to another. No sound, just the crash of colour. Hundreds of thousands of patterns per second. I wondered if it was possible that Kira was right? Was Gorge just as enamoured with the beauty of Bane as I was? Or was this actually his home? Was he looking at the nebula or staring through it at some kind of code? As I sat next to him, I thought about asking him some questions but at the same time it all felt better unsaid. I just wanted to be in that moment. Trust is the most important thing a team can have. If I couldn’t trust Gorge, if Kira couldn’t trust Gorge or I couldn’t trust Kira and Gorge together what would become of us? I could feel the seed growing within me. A seed that meant I was losing my faith.
We sat for twenty minutes without saying a word. Eventually, I managed to relax, laying down on my back with my head on Aiko’s fur looking out at the wild space that surrounded us. I watched as we came out of the clouds and put the nebula behind us. We had entered the edge of Quadrant 13 and were making our way to a gate known as Snowflake to jump to Quadrant 5. From there we would use our STL drives and jump straight to the Spire. All according to plan. Maybe this was what the Chel wanted us to do. We were playing right into their hands. No. Lady Gray had assured us that Aiden was doing a convincing job. I guess knowing that nearly everyone wanted to kill me left me a little paranoid. Paranoid that even the stars around me were shining in my direction. Looking to blind me. Paranoid that the moon itself was full only as a spotlight.
‘Do you think we’ll make it?’ I asked, breaking the silence.
‘Yes, I believe what we are doing will change this world,’ Gorge replied.
His words were completely honest, and he said them without any hesitation but they felt static. I couldn’t help but analyse what he had said. ‘Change this world’, that could mean so many different things. What we were facing was bigger than this world alone. If someone could die in Bane that would mean the tech was there so any virtual world became a threat. If it was an NPC that killed Damien and the others, then that meant artificial intelligence was the threat. Everything was falling apart and that was something I had become a part of. I, Breq, the harbinger of the coming apocalypse.
‘Are you afraid this will end the world?’ I asked.
‘Nothing truly ends. Many would risk dying in here than living on the outside,’ he replied.
‘How can you say that? None of this is real. Bane is still just a game.’
‘Is it a game when one’s own life depends on it?’ his words made me feel more uneasy. Maybe Kira was right. I had to think back, replay every conversation we had ever had over again in my mind. The answers had to be there. There had to be something ‘real’ I knew about Gorge, something about him that I could use to convince myself that he was a human and not some puppet or ghost in the machine.
‘If Bane is shut down, people will move on, find another game, or make a different game with more restrictions. It might be less fun but it would be less dangerous.’
‘The tech in Bane can’t just be copied, it has
evolved as it was created. It would take a lifetime to recreate what this world has conceived.’
I looked over at Gorge, ‘in some cases change like that is necessary. Don’t you think?’
‘Bane is more than a game, its a lifestyle. A lifestyle isn’t something that can be shut down or taken away.’ He was still staring, rapt at the view.
‘Is Bane your life?’
‘Bane is my freedom,’ he said, before we both became silent again. In the distance we could see the world gate, a small speck of shiny metal that sparkled like a diamond. It wasn’t a round circle like most gates nor was it a cone like others. The centre of the gate was an octagon-shaped pattern with smaller structures branching off, each of which had large towers attached to them, along with another circular pattern. It did, in fact, look like a snowflake hence its name. The gate was farther away from star systems and planets than most world gates, something else that made it strange, and yet here it was, clear as day, a snowflake drifting in the void.
‘Why do you think they put it out here? So far away from other worlds,’ I asked.
‘Maybe we can ask the Chel when we see them, they are supposed to be the ones responsible for building the gates and seeding them across the galaxy.’
‘If all goes according to plan, we won’t actually run into any Chel.’
‘Plan for the worst; we’re attempting something that’s never been done; not even sure if we can do it, we might make our way to the dungeon beneath the Spire and find nothing but a void, a broken piece of a larger puzzle, unfinished, unrefined, an empty space that was never meant to be seen…or we might find ourselves in the middle of an invasion, a hive of all our worst nightmares come to life,’ he spoke as if he was some kind of wise old man, ‘as long as we have faith, trust in one another, I feel that we will be alright. Having trust has saved my life more than a handful of times and it will be our actions that define what happens now, not just in this world but the next.’
I nodded my head and agreed without saying another word. His words seemed less cryptic but still, Gorge had said nothing that made me feel like he had a life in the ‘real’ and I felt that seed of mistrust feed on the soil of his words. I was about to say something else when an alarm came on overhead and the lights in the Lani turned red.
‘WARNING, an unknown vessel has just exited the Snowflake,’ Nel’s voice came on through the intercom, ‘please report to the bridge, IMMEDIATELY.’
Anyone not logged in was notified via an emergency SOS that we were in danger and that they were to login as quickly as possible. As I soon learned, for Chaz that meant leaving behind some studies he was working on and for Cass that meant getting out of a bath. Kira, Gorge, and myself were at the bridge ten minutes before the others. Cass logged in from a pod separate from the one she would use at Keen Industries and it was obvious there was some small lag in her actions. Nothing detrimental but if we were caught in a fire fight that could mean the death of her.
‘What’s wrong with your connection?’ Gorge asked, first to notice.
‘I’m at home; I’ve been building my own pod, it’s not perfect yet and I am bouncing off my neighbour’s signal,’ she answered. I was impressed. I had no idea Cass was smart enough to build her own pod: even if it wasn’t a hundred percent, it took real engineering to program and place all the right parts.
‘That’s amazing!’ said Chaz studying her.
‘It’s the pods connection, nothing is different here,’ she smiled.
‘Sorry, yes, you’re right, I know that, I’ve just never met anyone that’s built their own pod before.’
‘My pod is custom built,’ Gorge interrupted.
‘Really?’ Chaz turned looking at Gorge in amazement. Kira and I looked at one another. That admission felt like a red flag. There was more to Gorge than his avatar, more to him than what either of us knew.
‘Let’s focus,’ said Cass.
‘What kind of ship came out of the Snowflake?’ I asked Nel.
‘Long range sensors can’t confirm the model or identity of the vessel,’ Nel answered.
‘What if we get closer?’
‘At the moment we are far enough away that we are still hidden by the clouds of the Apus Asteropaio Nebula. They won’t detect our energy signature for another five minutes.’
‘Can we retreat back into the clouds?’
‘At our current position and the position of the vessel it will be impossible to escape their long-range sensors. Given the alien nature of the vessel, it is possible that they may already be aware of us.’
‘Can we tell if they are armed?’
‘The sensors on this ship are not calibrated to detect arms at this range.’
‘How long to calibrate them to detect the vessels armament?’
‘Thirteen minutes,’ Nel responded, despondent.
‘Not enough time,’ said Cass.
‘Okay, so either we run, fight, or ignore them and hope they ignore us,’ Kira said, her voice shaking.
‘What are the chances they are bounty hunters?’ I asked.
‘Unknown,’ Nel answered, ‘running calibration.’
‘The calibration is going to take too long,’ Cass’s voice was frustrated but I knew Nel was just doing that to protect us. There was a good chance even if we didn’t engage the alien vessel we could still calibrate our sensors and get a read on them in the next fifteen minutes. The more information we had the better our chance of survival.
‘Can we contact Lady Gray? Call for backup?’ I asked.
‘Negative, it seems all communication is being blocked,’ Gorge was reading from one of the terminals. It looked like he had already tried to send a message to someone.
‘So we wait?’ I asked.
‘We prepare for the worst,’ said Gorge.
‘What about using our STL drive now?’ said Kira.
‘If we do that we will have to wait for them to recharge and our plans get pushed back,’ said Gorge.
‘But we’ll survive,’ Kira answered back almost shouting. I felt like I was I child watching two parents argue. We had to make a decision before we were all at each other’s throat. The seed was growing.
‘Nel, set us on a course towards the Snowflake, we’ll get as close as we can; if our sensors pick up anything at all jump with the STL drive to quadrant five and immediately contact Lady Gray to let her know what is going on,’ I ordered. Everyone looked at me and for a moment I felt like a real leader.
The ion drives kicked as we flew forward towards the Snowflake. I could feel the hair on my arms stand up as my heart beat faster. I was anxious. Nervous. My plan had to work. Our sensors scanned the alien ship a moment after they scanned ours. Nel brought up a hologram in the centre of the bridge. The ship before us was battleship with a skull-faced man painted across the side.
‘Pirates?’ Nel asked.
‘No, not pirates, that’s him, Skull-Faced Man,’ my mouth dropped open. Kira and I stared up at one another. I heard Aiko growling.
‘Heavily armed, shields just as strong as a Titan, we could hit that thing and it would be no different than a car running over a small rock,’ said Cass.
‘Options?’ I asked.
‘Jumping in three, two, one...’ it was Nel’s voice. Skull-Faced Man’s vessel had started firing at us. I was screaming, ordering Nel to stop but it was already too late. In the blink of an eye we jumped far away from the Snowflake and our enemy.
Location: The Lady of the Lani
Deep Space - Unknown
The bridge was shaking, fire erupted from one of the terminals, along with smoke and several of us lost our balance and fell. We were hit by something hard. I screamed for a situation report but Nel had gone quiet. The Lani had started drifting as the engines shut down. We were in the middle of deep space with no bearings. Skull-Faced Man had managed to hit us just as we jumped, the impact of which folded space-time inwards as well as creating a hole in the side of the ship and with disabling our engines.
‘Damn, bastard, he was right there!’ I shouted.
‘We couldn’t do anything, if we stayed we would have been destroyed,’ Kira shouted.
Knowing she had to have been just as angry as I was made me feel slightly better, but it wasn’t fair. We were face-to-face with the man that killed her brother, the man who had killed Damien, and we couldn’t do a damn thing. I banged my fist against a terminal and screamed for Nel. There was no answer. The ship’s lights were on and there was oxygen, so I knew none of the critical systems had gone offline but something was wrong.
22.
Danger Beast
Location: The Lady of the Lani
Deep Space - Unknown
Hack 100%
Nel was gone. I managed to hack into the Lani using an override and brought up the ship’s systems.
Air: Online
Gravity: Online
Communications: Offline
Hull Integrity: 35%
Weapons: Offline
STL Drive: Disabled
Ion Drive: Offline
Shields: 15%
Agility: 0%
Armour: 55%
Fuel: 10t (currently running down)
Max jump avail: 0 Ly (25 max)
We had made the jump but Skull-Faced Man had crippled our ship. The blast in our hull had de-pressurized our ship and caused the jump to drive our shields down to 15% and degrade our ship’s armour down to 55%. The hull integrity was holding at 35% thanks to some closed doors but we were separated from the armoury, our personal rooms, medical, storage, hangar, and the mess hall. Basically we were all trapped on the bridge. The ship’s fuel tank was hit as well. Usually we carried thirty to forty tons of fuel but now it was down to ten and dropping. With our STL drive disabled and our shields down we were sitting like a derelict.
‘Everyone alive? Anyone injured?’ I shouted.
Star Divers- Dungeons of Bane Page 24