“They’re from Xin. They’re paper airplanes,” I said.
One of Nona’s eyes closed, and they threatened to roll. She puffed up both cheeks, then shot out air. Her mannerisms looked nothing like Shazam’s, but that felt expected.
“Of course they are,” she said, then rested her head on the table. “I should have known. Doctor Menzor would have seen the flow of how everything was going. Yates would have a large picture answer and be getting all the details in line. Michelle would crank out the program code.”
The woman looked upset with herself over failing to figure it out. She didn’t look at the world in the same manner I did. Expecting to understand a few strings of code as digital paper airplanes was beyond a reasonable expectation for anyone.
I tried to give her something positive to focus on. “What about Carver?”
“He would have ordered us to do our jobs, then charged forward to fight the board for us. That’s what he always did,” Nona said slowly. “He was the fighter.”
“And you?”
“I only ran the numbers. That was my job, run the numbers over and over. Always numbers, always checking code, monitoring feeds. I had the drive but never the artistry to fix anything.”
“You fixed me.” I wanted to sound reassuring. Years of customer service almost pulled it off.
“You fixed you. I copied three programs together in a hack job.” She sighed. Long fingers started up streams of data. They played out their walls of text, but Nona’s eyes weren’t focusing.
We had talked about a lot of points, and in them were answers and explanations. All of that helped me, but it didn’t get me closer to getting to my wife.
Those last few moments of my prior life were key. In the video, it was less obvious, but I distinctly remembered trying to get the [Altered Matrix] key into a floating hole in the air. It was all connected, a final gift from Michelle, or M. Shell.
“Your plan,” I started.
“Yes?” Nona spoke while staring into space.
“I can probably open the doorway, but I need to find the key, and I need to know that the world eaters are gone.”
“They are, or at least the processor running the deletion script has been completely dismantled. Everything else, we’ve tried to reassemble from stored data.”
“Is that even possible?”
“The game world was too big for us to store properly. Despite that, the Voices, or AIs, managed to leave us a ton of framework. Almost like the system was designed to keep going without them.”
“But it’s not the same, is it?” My memories of talking to her came to mind. A few months ago, the Hal Pal placeholder for me had mentioned that stock shares were down. Satisfaction was down. Easily accessible reviews implied a lack of enjoyment from all three games.
“No. It’s… automated, less fluid, stiffer. The NPCs are barely tangible. It’s like I designed it instead of an artist.”
All those traits could easily describe Shazam’s personality. Nona was still beating herself up over Lia. I was no therapist and could barely reassure a Hal Pal unit about life.
“I need the key I dropped at the last minute. Would it be in there somewhere?”
“Maybe.” She turned and brought up multiple feeds of information.
This time, they were video plays from all over the world. Some of my old friends were down there, fighting monsters or sitting in a ghost town that looked like [Haven Valley] before the fall. She flipped past a dozen such screens before shaking her head.
“Their code is almost impossible to pick out among all the other noise. It’s not like I can run a search for one digital signature. It took me months, months, just to adapt your already modified ARC device.”
“And a team,” I said.
“Useless little twats,” Nona muttered a curse for the first time in my presence.
Technically it was the first actual curse I had heard since reincarnating. Laughter escaped my Hal Pal connection and only grew louder. I felt water dripping down one eye from laughing so hard, but that came from the virtual me.
The liquid served as a reminder that no matter how machine life had changed me, I was a living creature. My wife had tried to explain it to me so many times. How could I have ever doubted Xin? This was as real as I wanted it to be.
“It’s got to be somewhere, and maybe I can send a message to the others.”
“Maybe. You have a connection to the Continue Online program. It’s part of your modifications. Even the World Regulation Council can’t outdo her coding. She had eight years to build something outside their reach.”
“But not outside her own,” I said.
“The self-destruction code is something we wrote. We gave the access codes over. We handed them the gun, but not this time. This time, it’s outside anyone’s control.”
“I’ll be going then. Once inside, I think I can find the missing pieces then put them together.” There were no specific plans in my head. I hoped to log into the game world and find a giant quest marker or some obvious clue.
“Grant,” Nona spoke with an attention-demanding tone, “you need to be careful. Your… existence is on a different level than all the other programs running on the network. Observing should be fine, but if you start altering the programs too much, then they’ll notice. I know I said this time it’s beyond their ability to control, but I don’t know what will happen if they pour enough processing power against the system.”
“I’ll be okay. Thanks for everything,” I said.
“If you can bring my daughter back, then it will be worth it.” She smiled at me and looked tired.
Hopefully, the woman would get some sleep soon or maybe go outside. The weather was no longer perfect for kite flying, but even rainy days could give solace to a troubled mind.
I turned off the Hal Pal unit’s feed. My virtual garage came back into view. My fingers tingled with numbness, and both legs took time to right themselves. Despite the lack of feeling, I struggled to move through my house.
Delaying my actions for overlong would be hazardous. Nona and I shared an eagerness to reach our lost loved ones. A dance tune was hummed as I dug through the room, looking for the key to Continue Online’s world.
My hand lifted. I stared at it, full of emptiness, then wiggled my fingers while pretending to be a magician. The card with obsidian backing and gold letters appeared. Former squiggles made sense this time.
“Key card to the kingdom?” I asked the piece of paper.
It didn’t answer.
Waving the card made a doorway appear. My head hung to one side as I waited to see if Dusk might appear. No small creature of scales and teeth appeared. I nodded. The [Messenger’s Pet] had left with Lia through a beam of light.
I walked through the doorway into blackness, then kept going. This place didn’t scare me anymore. An immense space surrounded me, but at the same time, darkness held no mysteries. On one side were small areas for each Voice to watch over the world. Focusing on the backdrop long enough caused them to gradually appear.
Small mechanical creatures that didn’t belong hovered nearby. They were ignored. Each one seemed intent upon dusting off objects, or rearranging small sliding pieces that might make sense if I studied them long enough. Instead, my feet moved to the heart of this place.
Giant globes hung midair with no visible supports. They were illuminated with dozens of colors. Stepping around the objects revealed additional shapes and sizes. I could see the world of Continue Online. Its moon circled it lazily.
It was strange. I stood in a large plane of blackness between all the combined worlds of Continue, Advance, and Progression Online. Even then, there were other realities unhatched and barely touching. I could see the dungeons represented as spots. Concentrating on them caused the focus to shift toward players and monsters inside.
“Now, how do I search an entire game world?” I asked myself while peering at the globe. There were numerous points of interest. Digging through a single du
ngeon had taken me nearly ten minutes.
“Over here,” Nia Eve shouted from far away.
I had no idea when the elf had shown up. Her presence was only one bit of information among a sea of data points. James’s claim that it was easy to lose track of people here made sense as I wandered.
She moved quickly past a shelf, then around an unseen corner. Rows of spiral-bound books sat upon the shelf. Standing in the right spot revealed a thousand more such books lined up. Each aisle was marked with topics like “In case of quest,” “In case of taking damage,” and “In case of skill changes.” Faceless machines roamed up and down the aisles, pulling down books and opening them. They would flash briefly, then close the book.
“I think there’s something we can use over here. A message board perhaps? Something we can write on?”
How had their rows of shelves survived the purge? Was this simply, as Nona had said, data that had been backed up, then painfully recreated? These soulless bits of machinery looked as though they were trying to keep data moving. If I squinted just right, I could see that information fly off to the worlds below.
Slowly, my feet traveled a path past the robots toward the far end. Had I been human, this would have seemed like forever. Along the way, I grabbed one book, then opened it to read childish scrawl.
Failure to avoid being burned
Total health loss: 20%
One of the automated machines tried to tear the book out of my grasp. Their strength was laughable, but relinquishing the book felt right. These creations would sort it back into place and keep sending notes to players.
“Down here! This, an artifact of the Voices. Maybe we can use this?”
At the far end, near Nia, was a pad and pen sitting next to a beanbag chair. There was a window through which the full moon shone, but instead of white or yellow, this moon was all different colors. I picked up the two items left behind by one of the Voices and hoped the young siblings had made it out.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Can you use it? Only a Voice can wield such an object. It would burn me if I were to try.”
My hands shook for a moment. Was this how the small girl and her brother had sent messages to the world below? It felt mundane from this point of view. Nia’s caution sounded silly, but it didn’t bother me. I only wanted something a bit more modern than crayons and lined paper.
The pen shimmered and pages faded. In their place hovered a message box prompting me to type in text and a recipient. I started typing in the air, preparing a message to send to the world below.
Attention!
[The Soulless World] event is finally live.
This call goes out to all who used to visit the worlds below and those few who still fight in the memory of those passed before. Travelers have been driven to the edge of extinction, and many prefer the safety of their world. Will they dare answer the call to arms?
Something has taken the heart and soul of all creatures who once roamed this world. In their wake, the gods saw fit to return the world to a former shell of itself. Those poor beings that could not be saved are mindless slaves driven by base instincts and desires.
There is hope. Lost in the world is a key to unlocking the [Ark] and returning those who fled to safety. Find it and proclaim your victory to the heavens from [Haven Valley].
The message went out to everyone across all three games. Searching the world myself might take forever, but this was an option while I figured out how to walk the world below. Nia had no suggestions for this process, and no magical white doorway to the world below appeared.
“What now, Grant?”
“I’ve got to talk to some friends,” I said.
If getting to players in game didn’t work, then maybe I could use the Hal Pal shells in reality.
I had other people to check on anyway.
Session One Hundred Nine — Through Fingertips
The van’s electrical engine made no serious noise. We—both of us chunks of metal, plastic, and programming—sat two blocks away from my sister’s house. Making the choice to drop in was impossible.
“What are you going to do?” Nona asked. Her voice relayed through the Hal Pal units, almost like a phone call.
I nearly responded with an “I don’t know,” but James’s words popped into my mind. “I don’t know” meant no thought had been put into the problem, which was a lie. The situation was simple. Beth and Liz, the closest people to me aside from Xin, thought I had died. They were right and wrong.
“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, Hot
Pants, 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 lovestruck 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.
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