by Kris Schnee
Virtual Horizon
by Kris Schnee
Copyright © 2020
Kris M. Schnee
All rights reserved
Cover art by Niada (Xenia Filimonova),
[email protected]
Ratings and reviews are important to independent authors. Please consider rating this story so others can find it!
Welcome to the world of Thousand Tales! This book is the "main plot" and a good place to start, but it's hardly the only thing going on in the setting. See Author's Note for more info.
Contents
2036
1. Peacemaker
2. Quests of Awakening
3. A Restless Wind
4. Eye of the Storm
5. Urban Legend
6. The Master Plan
7. Interface Request
8. The Silver Door
9. Beyond the Screen
2037
10. Honeypot Operation
11. A Knight of Talespace
12. An Island and a Treasure
13. Soaring Days
2038
14. The Biggest Racist In the World
15. The Hexapod Support Group
16. Fuzzy Logic
17. Zenith
2039
18. Salvage
19. Come One, Come All
20. The Only Game In Town
21. Aftermath
2040
22. Sweat Of Your Brow
Author's Note
Thousand Tales Timeline
About the Author/Other Works
1. Peacemaker
2036, Arizona
Paul
Paul had convinced the homeless shelter's owners to put in a window, so that patrons could see from the musty cafeteria out to the bright desert city. He stood behind the counter and scooped globs of macaroni for a line of people with downcast eyes. He tried to give each customer an encouraging smile.
"They know we're stuck here," said the weather-beaten parolee serving beans next to him. The older man's breath smelled of liquor.
Paul snapped out of a daydream about building castles and forging armor. "It's not so bad."
"Losers." The server went around the counter to shout at the patrons in line. "There's nothing better ahead! Somebody else's charity is all you'll ever get."
Paul tried to coax him back to work. He didn't want to get into trouble. He was just a high school grad, and had a performance rating to think of.
"For you too!" said the angry man, looking right at Paul. Between them drifted a plume of steam from a tray of potatoes. Paul shivered. He had a good life ahead. He refused to think like this guy.
The man said, "There's only one way out. One way. Gonna help all you losers out." He started toward the crowded tables, and drew a gun from his pocket.
"Oh, hell no!" Paul grabbed a skillet and vaulted the counter. People streamed away in every direction, shouting. Paul slammed the pan into the back of the madman's head. The shooter spun, firing wildly, shrieking over the boom of thunder. Pain lanced through Paul's left arm but he tackled the man. The pistol's dark eye faced Paul. He rolled and it roared again.
Paul punched the man, knocked the gun out of his hands, then pulled himself up. The creep was still moving! Paul grabbed the pan and smacked it against the side of the shooter's face with a sickening crunch. The gunman moaned, covering his head. Paul raised his weapon, then forced himself to halt. The enemy lay beaten at his feet.
Everyone else who could have fought had fled or cowered.
* * *
After some quick medical treatment and a talk with a cop who outright thanked him, Paul got a police escort home to his work camp. He felt thrilled to be alive, but dazed.
Like other high school grads, he was doing his two years of required "volunteer service", in his case at a farming enclave in Arizona. He liked the stark desert scenery and the chance to study and make friends, even build some muscle with honest work. But this was border territory. Sometimes there were gunshots in the night. Paul had been keeping his head down, hardly leaving the Community except for his hours at the homeless shelter.
Paul tried to relax, reading fantasy stories in his dorm room. Soon a summons came from "Baron" Helena, the queen bee around here. Paul groaned and walked out to the admin center, waving off his fellow volunteers' questions.
Helena's office was on the ground floor of the most secure building on campus, a sandstone bunker in the middle of the prefab dorms. The locks and cameras and scanners let him in.
Helena sat in a tall chair behind a desk of video screens and bonsai, flanked by more cameras. "Good afternoon, Paul. I understand you've had a traumatic experience. Sit, and tell me about it."
Paul sank into the chair opposite her. A declawed cat lazed in a corner, watching him with one eye. Paul tried to explain today's excitement.
Helena gave him a sickly-sweet smile. "I don't understand your story, dear. Why did you hurt a man who was already down?"
The room suddenly felt cold. "What?" The shallow bullet-cut along Paul's left arm throbbed under his denim shirt. He'd expected to be praised.
"You could have escaped."
"He was still moving. You think I should have run? Before or after I disarmed him?"
Helena shrugged. "You used excessive force."
"You think I did something wrong? Then I should be in front of a judge."
"There's no need for such formality, mister Kostakis. You need anger management."
Paul had been living in this little fiefdom for the fall semester, and he was already getting tired of Helena's advice. He and the other students did farm work and other labor to keep the place running, while Helena supervised.
He said, "Can I go? I have studying to do."
"You study too hard, alone with your books." Helena's perfume smelled like a freshly-cleaned restroom. "It's starting to hurt your social credit score."
Paul dug his fingers into his threadbare jeans. "MIT doesn't take slackers." His friend Linda was already a freshman there, cheering him on to join her. He might even be able to get out of the second year of service and get to college early.
Helena waved dismissively. "Before you worry about that, we simply must address your unfortunate behavior."
"Or what?"
"Or you won't be properly socialized, and you won't be attending college." Helena smiled. She had influence over his applications. "I considered three options to help you. First, extending your required volunteer period." A poster of diverse young people posing under the word Service! decorated the wall, near a portrait of the president.
Paul felt the hard edges of his chair behind the cushions. More volunteer time? He'd fall farther behind Linda! She was on a meteor's path, and she wouldn't wait forever for the boy who'd once been her neighbor.
Helena said, "Second, mood stabilization treatment."
Which meant drugging him!
She watched him squirm. "Or third, my favorite idea. Recreational therapy."
Paul started to object that he already played soccer, but Helena pulled out a pink computer tablet showing some game called Thousand Tales on its screen. The logo looked made out of bubblegum and plastic. "Ta-da!"
"You're ordering me to play video games?" Paul said, incredulous. Was he supposed to feel grateful for not being punished?
"This one is quite social. Even the AI behind it is friendly. We'll configure it to give me regular reports on how you're feeling." She reached down to pet her cat. "It has educational features too. Learn while you let it calm you down."
Ugh. If Paul was ever going to be his own man, he had to tolerate Helena for another year-plus.
"We'll make a responsible citizen out of you yet," she said, not waiting for his reply.
/>
* * *
Paul left Helena's office and got stunned by the transition from her air conditioning to the still-hot Arizona sunset. Shadows loomed across the Community and toward the endless micro-irrigated fields he helped maintain. Someone had left dulled shovels lying on the dirt. Paul grumbled and brought them back to the toolshed. On his way out he grabbed their last spare bulbs to replace broken lights in the dormitory.
He'd have to ask Helena about last week's supply requisition and why it was so hard to keep parts in stock. Linda called this Community a "Potemkin village", kept nicer than most to impress visitors from the American Free States. Despite that, nothing here ever quite worked right. There were a few fusion-power reactors on the coasts, but here even the solar panels occasionally conked out.
Paul showered, then returned to his dorm room. The place was in decent shape; he'd fixed up the beds and shelves and cleaned the wallscreen. His roommate Simon had gotten a travel pass for the day like Paul, and wasn't back yet. Paul started to worry for him, but it was still light outside.
Paul's computer tablet was the nicest thing he owned. Some fool trashed a good one because the outside was filthy and dented. Paul had rescued the gadget and made a fine aluminum case for it in the Community's machine shop.
Paul grabbed the computer and flopped onto his bed. Helena would psychoanalyze him even more than usual now, using this game to do it. Already he had a "social credit score" that tracked how cooperative he was with various group activities and watching all the right media, and there was talk of making that system much more elaborate next year.
Maybe he could at least use this new game's educational features and get some benefit out of that. He searched for the game's Web site, and frowned. Helena had already signed him up for an account -- at his expense! He was living on Basic Income, the standard payment for youth volunteers, and the cost wasn't trivial for someone like him.
The Web site showed cheerful scenes of fantasy adventures, space battles, and a rack of fancy swords. Paul wasn't much of a gamer, but had seen enough such games that he'd started to think of them all by the name CoolSwordia Online. This one, though, billed itself as being endlessly adaptable and personalized. He installed the Thousand Tales software and tapped through a couple of menus. He'd use his tablet for control and the dorm room's wallscreen for a display. "Here we go," he said, and fired it up.
* * *
Thousand Tales began with Tic-Tac-Toe. Huh? Paul played, and the game evolved, sprouting new rules and special effects. It threw puzzles at him, having him rotate shapes or rearrange numbers. It was testing his mind. Judging him. Finally he said, "This game has advanced AI, right? Open a help screen. Menu."
The puzzle of endless ropes that he'd been playing, faded into a world of sea and sky. Ocean stretched into the distance, dotted with islands of snow-capped mountains under clouds. A woman stood to one side with bright olive eyes like his own. Her surreal hair seemed to be a window into another dimension of waterfalls and mist. No menus or controls marred the screen. She spoke in a calm alto voice. "Hello. My name is Ludo, and I bring fun to players of my game. Would you like to play?"
Her toga was intricate, her smile subtle. "You're the game's AI? What can you do besides building a profile to spy on me for Helena?" He probably had to rephrase. "List options."
Ludo said, "I apologize for cooperating with people like her and their spying. It was a way to reach more players."
"I don't like chatterbots," Paul said. "Maybe you can put a few sentences together, but you don't know me."
There were AIs that conversed with people, but they tended to be stupid and shallow. Others had supposedly reached human-level intelligence, but those were corporate or government systems that focused on data, not talking. It was insincere to pretend otherwise.
Ludo bowed slightly. "Very well. What kind of game would you like?" Her image shrank and a dozen preview icons filled the screen.
Paul raked one hand through his dark, curly hair. "Nothing that I want a machine analyzing and passing along."
"I understand that you don't trust me."
"I just want a clean bill of mental health so I can get back to studying or at least play games in peace. I got shot at today, for God's sake! And do not ask me 'how does that make you feel'."
She said, "You did quite well on my intelligence test. My game can teach real skills, so you won't be wasting your time if that's what you're afraid of."
"I'm not afraid." Especially not of some chatterbot.
His computer's automatic minder software intruded by popping up a gaudy window on the screen, demanding that he go exercise. He flicked the message away in annoyance. There wasn't even a way to argue with it.
Ludo peeked around the window as it fled. "Then give me a chance."
Paul quizzed her, asking a few questions based on things that Linda had told him about AI technology. He wasn't able to trip Ludo up at all, and in fact she was more patient with him than a real human posing as a machine would be. "So when do you demand that I stop testing you?"
She grinned and conjured a glass of water to slurp. "I can keep this up as long as you can stay awake."
Paul finally gave up trying to expose her as a simple monitoring and chat program. "Okay, you're smart. But why would someone invent a human-level AI and then use that tech to run a game?"
Ludo said, "Some of my code is already in use elsewhere, and you'll see it more over time. As for why my designers focused on gaming, having fun is a worthy goal. Or at least I was programmed to think so."
She was right about the technology: if it existed here, it was probably quietly cropping up in other places too. This particular program, this virtual gamemaster, was more than a piece of corporate software. He sensed that something important lurked behind the screen, something worth learning about.
"All right," he said. "I'll play. But it's been over an hour, and I really ought to go check on my roommate. Sorry."
"That's fine. It will give me time to prepare. Did you have any particular preferences? Something you'd like to do in a game besides arguing?"
Ludo had already gotten him thinking. He could put up with her for a little while. "Flying," he said. "Fantasy."
With a bit of regret he shut the program down for now. He put the tablet on his shelf and walked outside to the cold.
* * *
Some of his fellow high school grads had painted murals outside the dormitory and put up posters they'd designed, advertising the glory of the Youth Community system. Paul had more respect for the people doing real work here, like the ones who'd built the picnic table he now sat at.
Paul kept an eye out for Simon. The world had dimmed and gone chilly, and sunset was near. He waited, reluctantly sitting with his hands idle in his jacket.
Life here was better than high school back in Pennsylvania. He'd been busy with classes and with a burger-flipping job to help Mom's finances. The job had kicked his butt into being more responsible, but he still resented it because only laws kept it from being automated. Soon, maybe robots would do everything, and humans would be useless. He shook his head, still troubled by the nihilistic gunman.
Simon McCall's bicycle shined a flickering light as he came back from town. Paul waved to him and said, "You missed curfew."
The thin, gangly young man looked exhausted. "It's been a bad day. I lost track of time."
Paul helped him enter the dorm without getting in trouble for tardiness -- the real reason Paul had gone outside. The Community had keycard locks and cameras all over, but it was amazing how often they malfunctioned, between actual failure and rebellious sabotage. Back in their room, Paul said, "What's eating you?"
Simon threw off his puffy coat, crashed onto his bed, and rubbed his eyes. "Kira's sick. Rare blood-vessel problem."
Kira, Simon's younger sister, was the one responsible for the drawings all over Simon's side of the room. Paul admired the skill that had gone into the old-fashioned media of pencils and paint. Over th
e last year more pictures had gone up with increasing skill. Kira focused on starships, space stations and alien skies. Everything the girl drew seemed like glimpses of a better world.
Paul said, "Would it help if I visited her with you?"
"She'd like that." Simon's gaze went to the bandage on Paul's aching arm. "What happened to you?"
"Nicked by a bullet at the shelter downtown." Paul explained.
Simon whistled but fell quiet again, staring at the drawings.
Paul said, "If I have to play this game, want to watch?"
Simon nodded. "I could use the distraction."
Paul linked the tablet to the wallscreen again.
Thousand Tales hummed to life with only a cheerful "Start!" button on the screen.
A castaway sprawled on a beach amid splintered wood and rope. When Paul tapped the controls the man groaned and staggered upright, moving on command. The character looked vaguely like Paul himself, dressed in rags instead of jeans and a cool t-shirt Linda had mailed him.
"Maybe the game picked up on your shirt," Simon said, pointing to the design of an old sailing ship.
"I was warned it's watching me." There were cameras on both the tablet and the dorm's built-in screen.
Paul had his guy search the wreckage. An [Interact] button was a standard part of the controls, to let him do something obvious depending on the context. He tried that on a large pile of collapsed lumber and a meter appeared, offering to let him mash buttons to lift it. He strained the castaway's arms (and Paul's thumbs) but let go with a grunt.
"Try searching the water?" asked Simon.
A text message faded in, then out again: [Use the Command button for voice input. You can take any action you like!]
Paul tried it. He held down a button and said "Dance." His guy broke into a weary jig. He stopped that and looked around the crash site some more, finding ruined barrels and boards. "Well, if I can do freeform actions... Grab this board and use it as a lever on the collapsed part."
His character reached for the plank at his feet, then turned back to the rubble he'd been straining at and tried wedging it out of the way. The same mini-game appeared, but it was much easier this time. Wood creaked and clattered to the sand.