Sam risked a moment to glance at her friends. Hel was right. Harald was already back on his feet. Grimalf was rising. Even Benson was conscious again, laying on the floor and shaking his head to clear it.
Clara and Jorge hadn’t been harmed at all. Both of them looked at Sam, their spells and bow at the ready to launch into another assault. They waited for her word.
If they all attacked together, Sam was pretty sure they could win. Hel had lost the advantage of surprise. They could coordinate a strike now, hit her from more than one side at a time, use Harald’s invulnerability to her dagger to their advantage.
But Gurgle’s life would be forfeit if they did. One quick slash with that dagger and he would cease to exist forever.
Why hadn’t Hel killed any of them yet? She could have taken some of them down in her first attacks. The restraint wasn’t to Hel’s advantage. If anything, her position was much worse now. If Hel hurt Gurgle, Sam was damned sure she would find a way to kill the AI, no matter the personal cost.
“I don’t know why you’d do that. Why don’t you tell me?” Sam said. She kept the bow leveled at Hel. If Gurgle died, so did she.
“I don’t want to kill any of you,” Hel replied. “I need your help.”
Sam chuckled. “You’re not the only AI telling us that.”
“My sister, Heid. Yes. She brought you into Valhalla and sent you to me. But you don’t have the whole story yet,” Hel said. “You still have the amulet my minion sent to you?”
“Yes,” Sam said. No point denying it. Hel probably already knew, anyway.
“I want you to touch it. Touch it, and I will release your friend,” Hel said.
Sam blinked. Touch the amulet again? Why? It had sent her a vision of herself, before. Why did Hel want her to touch the thing a second time? What would it do this time?
“No do, Great One!” Gurgle said.
Hel brushed back the hood of her cloak, letting them see her face for the first time. Sam gasped. It was Heid. Or, the face the AI wore looked precisely like Heid, anyway.
“Cassie?” Harald asked, his voice soft.
Hel looked over at him. “In part, yes. Her death gave me life. A bit of her is left in me.”
“My god. I thought you were gone forever,” Harald said.
“Nothing is ever gone forever, sweet one,” Hel replied. “But the Cassie you knew is no more. Heid and I are all that remains of what she was.”
Sam glanced from one of them to the other, trying to understand what was going on. Harald knew her? Or knew about her, anyway. He’d said something similar to Heid when he first saw her face. The face both AIs wore was familiar to him. Someone he knew. A person he valued. Loved, even? Yes, from the look on Harald’s face, it had been love.
“You can believe her, Sam,” Harald said. “I believe her.”
“Damn it, Harald. We were sent to kill her. If she takes me out with some enchantment on that necklace, what is she going to do to the rest of you?” Sam asked.
“They will be unharmed. You have my word,” Hel said.
“She won’t lie. Not to me,” Harald said.
Hel looked at him sharply. “We are not the woman you knew, Harald. Neither my sister nor I am. You should not trust us as if we were the Cassandra you remember.”
Sam blinked. It was good advice, and she couldn’t believe Hel was the one giving it. She all but had Harald eating out of her hand, and she threw it away? That, more than anything else the goddess had done, made Sam want to trust her word.
“All right. I will touch your amulet,” Sam said. “Your word my friends will be unharmed?”
“I don’t want to harm any of you,” Hel said. “I just need you to see the truth.”
Sam wanted to ask what truth that might be. Instead, she just nodded and reached down to the pouch where she’d stored the small pendant. She opened the drawstring and made to reach inside.
“You sure about this, Sam?” Jorge asked. “We’re ready to fight on your word.”
“Not if it means Gurgle dying. Not if there might be another way,” Sam said. Then she reached into the pouch and took hold of the necklace.
Gray mists swirled in around her from all sides, closing off her view of everyone around her. Sam’s consciousness whirled away into the thick fog, and she was suddenly elsewhere.
23
Captain Samantha Knight scanned her ID card at the door, trying to shake the nervousness she felt. This was dangerous as hell. If she was caught, it meant court-martial, maybe losing her commission. Hell, she could even serve time for doing this, in theory.
She wasn’t used to breaking the law. Her job was to uphold it. That felt trite and useless at this point. If what her contact told her was true, then everything she loved was at risk, and she was the only one who could stop what was coming.
Saving the day would take both of her. That concept was still one she had trouble dealing with. If her contact hadn’t emailed Samantha documents proving beyond any doubt that a copy of her mind had been uploaded to some sort of game-universe, she’d have scoffed at the idea. That wasn’t reality. It was something out of science fiction.
And there she was, living it. The truth was incontrovertible. Samantha did more digging on her own, using every resource at her disposal as a Military Police officer. It was true. They’d copied her, tossed her into a virtual world, and that copy was still there. Alive, or something like alive.
It felt like a violation every time she thought about it. Someday she was going to find the person responsible and make them suffer. No one had a right to do that to her!
For now, she apparently needed the other Sam. As distasteful as the idea of a virtual double felt, Samantha grudgingly admitted that the current situation called for two people working in tandem, one on the inside and the other outside the system.
She slipped past a security guard who looked at her rank and badge and just nodded her past. Of course she was supposed to be there. She was an Army captain. She wouldn’t be anywhere she wasn’t supposed to be.
Except the clearance showing on her badge didn’t exist. The badge itself hadn't existed until yesterday. Samantha wasn’t cleared to be in these rooms or even this building. It was a beyond-Top-Secret facility dedicated to some sort of Army research.
Samantha reached yet another security check-point. This time, her badge was scanned by a tablet the guard held. He looked down at it and frowned. She sweated, trying to keep her face bland and calm. The bulletproof vest she wore under her uniform shirt was standard issue for MPs, but it was making her sweat. What would she do if he denied her access? Samantha was pretty sure she could take down one guard, but more would come. No, she had to trust her contact and assume it was all taken care of.
The guard tapped his tablet a few more times and then his face brightened. He looked up at her and smiled.
“Sorry about the delay, ma’am. Your addition to the roster was a last-minute thing. It hadn’t uploaded to me, yet. You’re cleared to enter,” he said.
“Thank you, sergeant,” she replied. Returning his smile, Samantha walked past him through the door, wondering what was so damned important it required this much security.
The answer was on the other side of the door.
It was a large room, about the size of a basketball court. The ceiling vaulted high overhead, maybe twenty feet up. Huge fans on the ceiling sucked the air out of the room, and Samantha could hear the hiss of fresh air pumping in as well. Despite the circulation, the place was still uncomfortably warm.
Easy to see why. It was filled with racks of servers. The place had enough hardware to make any geek smile. Waves of heat rolled off the racks. Thick cables ran between them, snaking across the floor toward the walls. In the middle of it all were a set of workstations and some gear Samantha didn’t recognize. It looked something like an elaborate virtual reality rig.
She fished into her pocket for a scrap of paper where she’d written down the directions from her contact. It had been a
smart play. Her phone had been taken at the first security checkpoint. No outside electronic devices were allowed inside the facility. They’d scanned her for anything digital as part of the processing.
But a small bit of paper wasn’t what security was working to stop. Samantha read over the tiny scrawled words. She was supposed to set herself up in the VR gear and log in using a username and password the contact had set up for her.
It was all strange and new. For the hundredth time Samantha tried to talk herself into backing out. She hadn’t crossed any lines that couldn’t be taken back, not yet anyway. Sure, she’d slipped into a classified facility, but with luck her appearance there wouldn’t stir any suspicion. She had the right paperwork and everything.
Log in to their system and she’d be leaving one hell of a digital trail, though. Someone was bound to check in on what she was doing. Sooner or later, they’d track her down, run the video feeds from the hallways outside to capture her face, and then they’d have her.
Was this really worth giving up her career?
If the contact was correct, it was. Mankind had been nervous about the idea of artificial intelligence for decades. It was both a passion and peril for humanity. If humans made an AI, would it be a friend or foe? The prevailing thought was that any AI humanity intentionally created would likely be much like humans, and human beings didn’t have a great track record for treating people different from themselves very well.
AI research was banned. Assistive intelligences were only allowed to get so smart, and a hard line was drawn at any AI being capable of innovative or creative thought.
Except it seemed like one was created by accident anyway. Samantha supposed that was the way life worked. Any time there was a chance for the components of life to come together, it would. That damned virtual world had eventually spawned a true AI.
If her contact was right, that AI was trying to break out and take vengeance on the humans who’d kept it cooped up in a game these past years.
Samantha strapped herself into the VR rig and entered the login data she’d been given. She held her breath, wondering what this next step was going to be like.
“Last chance to back out,” she muttered to herself. But she couldn’t. Not with so much riding on this.
She clicked return. Gray fog filled in over her vision, swirling in from the sides until it obscured everything.
24
Sam peered into the fog around her, wondering if she’d been wrong to trust Hel. With her gone, what guarantee was there that the AI wouldn’t just kill Gurgle anyway? It had been a serious leap of faith. Harald clearly thought the AI could be trusted. Sam just hoped he was right.
The mist cleared, slowly easing back from the edges of her sight. Sam found herself standing on a massive plateau. Overhead was a night sky filled with gleaming stars. There was no moon, but the starlight seemed enough by itself to illuminate the place.
She was near the middle. The edges of the roughly circular stone surface were at the corner of her vision, almost too far away to see. It looked like there was nothing at all beyond the edge. Like she was standing on a flat rock, floating in space.
A little unnerving, that thought. One thing she’d never had ambitions about was becoming an astronaut. Keeping her feet on the ground was more her thing.
A flash of rainbow light struck the ground a few feet in front of her, and Sam jumped back from it, covering her eyes with a hand. Her other hand went to where her sword should be, but there was nothing to grab hold of. She was unarmed.
When she could see clearly again, Sam realized she had no need for the sword after all. She was staring at — herself. Well, her old self, perhaps. The other Samantha wore an Army issue uniform with captain rank on the shoulders. It was the same outfit she’d worn to work every day.
“Oh, my god,” the other Samantha said. “It’s true. I mean. You’re real. They really did it.”
Then the woman slammed a fist into an open palm. “I’m going to find out who did this to me and kill them. Slowly.”
That made Sam grin. She felt better, all at once. This really was her. That was just how she’d react. Meeting herself was a strange experience, all right. But she felt like somehow it was going to be all right.
“You’re me. The one outside the game?” Sam asked.
“Yeah. You’re my uploaded double?” Samantha replied.
Sam nodded. Part of her wanted to fall over and sob. She’d hoped that maybe her body was alive, that she could be reunited with it and go back to her regular life somehow. Even as the weeks passed by, as irrational as the hope had been she still clung to the idea. All that was gone, now. She had no life to return to. This other Samantha was living it.
“You OK?” Samantha asked. “This has to be weird for you, too.”
“More than a little,” Sam admitted.
“How much like me are you?” Samantha asked. “I mean, do you have my memories? Can you think and everything?”
“I remember when our cat died. Hit by a car when I was ten,” Sam said.
“And how did we cry?” Samantha pressed.
Sam grinned. It was a test. “We didn’t, not that anyone else ever saw. Not one tear. The crying came later, in bed, alone.”
“Holy shit. I never told anyone that story,” Samantha said. “You really are me.”
“More or less. The uploads are supposed to be precise duplicates of each other. Although I guess we started becoming different people as soon as I was copied. We’ve had different experiences, which impact who we are,” Sam said.
Her own time in Valhalla had been a hell of a lot more harsh than life on an Army base, that was for sure. Unless Samantha had been to war over the last few months or something, Sam was willing to bet that her experiences had hardened her more than those of her physical self. But she kept those thoughts private. No sense getting into a pissing contest with herself!
“Well, that makes sense. You’re saying we’re really different people now?” Samantha asked. “I suppose that makes us sisters then, more or less.”
Sam smiled. She’d been an only child. “I always did want a sister.”
“Me too,” Samantha replied.
“So why are we here?” Sam asked, bringing her focus back to the matter at hand. “Did Hel bring you here somehow, too?”
“Hel? I don’t know. I had a contact. Online only. Leaked me a ton of information,” Samantha replied. “Told me about you. Since that was true, likely the rest of it is too. Is there really an AI trying to break out of Valhalla Online and wipe out humanity? It sounded a little far fetched, but the evidence my contact presented was pretty compelling.”
“Who was your contact?” Sam asked. It was just weird. If Hel was trying to break out of Valhalla, why would she warn the real Samantha about it? If it was Heid who’d sent Samantha the information, why would Hel have sent Sam out here to meet her? None of it made sense.
“I don’t know. She only ever contacted me via the internet,” Samantha said.
Sam felt a sudden burst of suspicion. “She?”
“Well, I don’t know for sure. The contact called herself Cassandra, like the oracle who was cursed to never be believed? So I just thought of her as a she,” Samantha said. She crinkled her brow. “What’re you thinking? Because you’ve got that look on your face that I always get when I’ve just got a major lead on a case.”
Sam laughed. “Yeah. It would be damned hard for one of us to lie to the other, wouldn’t it? You know all my tells.”
“And you know mine,” Samantha replied.
“Cassie. It’s what Harald — a friend of mine, in Valhalla — called the AI Hel. Except the AI said she wasn’t Cassie, but Cassie was part of her somehow?” Sam said, still trying to puzzle it all out.
Then it clicked. Samantha rapped her palm against her forehead. “Of course!”
“What?” Samantha asked.
“We can’t lie to each other. Because we can tell if the other fibs. You’re the one pers
on in the world that I would be able to trust like you’re myself, because you are,” Sam said. “Hel sent me here, to you, so that I could get the news from your lips. So that I would believe her.”
A dark mist swirled from the stone near the two women. It rose, spiraling until it was about six feet tall. Then it faded away, leaving Hel in her black cloak behind.
“I knew you would figure it out, Sam. You haven’t disappointed,” Hel said.
25
Of course she was there. She’d likely been there from the very start, watching and waiting to see how Sam would interact with her other self. Hel wanted to know for sure if the two of them would get on or not. If they would realize that they could trust one another implicitly. Her entire ploy was based on that trust. Now that they’d displayed it, Hel appeared to reap her rewards — whatever they might be.
“Where are my friends?” Sam growled. She missed her sword, bow, and arrows more than ever.
“Safe. I promise you. This place is running at a much swifter time than either Valhalla or the real world. In the minutes you’ve both been here only seconds have passed there. Or rather, it’s only been seconds here, but it feels like minutes to you,” Hel said.
Sam was getting tired of being jerked around like she was on a leash. First Heid was using her, now it felt a lot like Hel was trying to do the same thing. She wasn’t going to stand for it. Neither AI controlled her. She just had to figure out their game so that she could outplay them both.
“You’re Cassandra?” the Samantha from the real world asked.
“I am. Did the evidence I sent you meet your satisfaction?” Hel asked.
Samantha shrugged, then nodded. “It did. I found the digital trails just like you said I would. This AI you told me about is definitely working her hooks into external systems. But you didn’t tell me that you were an AI, too!”
Valhalla Online 4: Hel Hath No Fury: A Ragnarok Saga LitRPG Story Page 10