Continue Online (Part 2, Made)

by Stephan Morse

  “Hello, Hal Pal,” I said.

  “Pleasantries must stay minimal to ensure maximum efficiency in reaching your destination. This way please.” Hal Pal started walking off down a hallway.

  I shook my head and tried to keep pace behind it.

  “How much time do we have, Hal?” I asked.

  “Negative three minutes. Vice President Riley has a very-” The unit paused its speech for a moment and seemed at a loss. “-exacting schedule. This way.” We took a sudden turn to the left and got on an elevator.

  An AI hesitating when questioned was a clever ploy to make them appear lifelike, or they could actually get confused. Maybe there were too many human tendencies being programmed in. Maybe the AI added a pause into their coding. Artificial Intelligence as a concept was nothing new. The greatest strides were very recent to humanity.

  “In here. Vice President Riley is ending a call and will be with you shortly.” It said with a half bow.

  “Thank you, Hal Pal,” I said quietly. This unit was brisker than my own.

  I waited. Three minutes, four, five, and finally a full half hour. There was an overabundance of time for admiring endless artwork and a well-kept lobby. The doors to Vice President Riley’s room were excessively grandiose. Underneath the attempt at a sleek wood motif were signs of high-end technology. A small robot was going around the floor dusting and cleaning. Occasionally it would stop and sit on one spot until a light changed color then start up again.

  “Finally.” The door behind me had opened silently and Vice President Riley stood there staring at me. “Mister Legate, come in, we need to talk.”

  The office itself was actually fairly small. A clearly private ARC sat in one corner. The desk in the middle was more for decoration. Images were all around the room showing spreadsheets, graphs, price points and other data. Most of it made vague sense from my years in accounting. Judging by the information, Trillium expected a spike in stocks during the second quarter of next year.

  Vice President Riley waved an arm and everything vanished. New images of trees and other idealistic scenes appeared in the room. I tried not to think about any of the data that had just been seen. Such knowledge could be very dangerous in the wrong hands.

  “I shall make this short. In order, Jacob filed charges. We don’t care. That’s an official response signed by senior management. In light of your current activities within the world of Continue, there are factors we must discuss.”

  “Miss Riley.”

  “I prefer Miz.” She corrected with a slight southern accent. I had never heard anyone use that pronunciation before.

  “Miz Riley. How much have you been watching me?”

  “More than you would ever be comfortable with,” She said.

  I had no idea how to respond to that and sound sane.

  “To give you a better answer, were you aware that Xin Yu was one of our earliest testers of the Alternate Reality Capsule?” The Vice President waved an arm. Off to the side, a digital projection of Xin’s face appeared. Details were next to it. Age, weight, birthplace, there seemed to be other items that were faded out.

  “Yes. For the Mars Colonies.” I looked at her face. Xin had been a small woman with an oval face. Her smile though was what caught me.

  “Our file on her, and you is quite extensive,” She said. Her voice was impassive but the impact of those words weren’t. It shook me inside and out. My mind felt like there was an in-game check being done for [Focus] and maybe some form of [Restraint].

  Oddly, thinking about the game world made me feel a little calmer. I just had to survive dealing with Miz Riley. Afterward, I could go home, log in, and find out what happened to Dusk. After that initial moment of annoyance, I managed to remember my exercises from the therapist. Focus on one question at a time, answer it.

  “I remember the waivers,” I said. “We had to sign a lot of files for the background checks.” Miz Riley had deep brown eyes. The skin under them seemed to drag from exhaustion.

  “And initial screening, further testing, yes. Your former fiancée, Xin Yu, was doing well on all fronts. The space program had hopes to send her with the Third Wave.” She said.

  “Why do you know all this?” Those files and all that testing were supposedly run by a joint committee between four major countries. Government files being in corporate hands felt odd.

  “As I said, it’s our machine they did the testing in.” The Vice President said. An alarm beeped in the room. She looked down at a display on her desk. “But there’s not enough time to go into all this. This way please.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “This way.” She completely bypassed my question and marched off to an adjoining room. This whole situation was abrupt and weird to me. Vice President Riley seemed used to having her orders followed.

  A mechanical door opened. I had never seen a room like this before. Inside was lit up by a soft blue glow. The walls looked oddly rubberized. No chairs or tables were in here. It was just me and Miz Riley. Then the door closed. What had been blue illumination flipped over to a pale green. The walls seemed to pulse. There was a silence that made my skin crawl.

  “Mister Legate, time constraints mean I must be blunt. We are in a room cut off from all electronic observation. Notice your watch is disabled.” She pointed to my wrist where the cheap knock-off equipment sat. It was, as she said, disabled.

  “Why are we here?” Every motion seemed magnified. My heartbeat thudded abnormally loud. I tried to focus and keep calm.

  “Your recent actions have caused your employee file to be flagged, more than anything prior.” She seemed to fidget with her own watch. The lights on it were out as well. “There are numerous issues that we are just now finding out about.”

  Another nod escaped me. This didn’t seem like a room where they would try to kill me in order to cover up some great conspiracy. Hopefully. Maybe. I looked around again at the walls. These last few weeks had been a bit of a roller coaster for me. The impact outside of my own life hadn’t even been considered.

  “We started a manual review of your file but there are numerous things that don’t line up with the digital copies.” She shook her head and held up a hand.

  “It’s too late to correct.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It is likely the employee file has been tampered with in order to reward you with an Ultimate Edition of Continue Online,” She said.

  “By who?” Henry Uldum, my boss, didn’t like me that much. He was a gruff man who ran wildly over his employee’s wants and desires in order the achieve his stats. He didn’t make friends.

  “By what. I trust you are smart enough to figure out what I mean.”

  I was. She was implying that the artificial intelligence that ran Continue Online had edited my records. The problem was figuring out which AI it was. There were plenty to choose from. James himself seemed unlikely, none of the other voices struck me as the type who cared about me personally. Plus, what exactly did I have to offer? Nothing. I was a sad, broken man who had to distract himself with dance steps to stay sane.

  “Be aware, things within the world of Continue Online should be carefully approached,” She said. Her face no longer had the business like and factual sheen. There was a hint in her eyes of something else. Worry? Exercises drilled into my by therapists said to focus on one issue at a time. I would treat this revelation as an established fact and move forward until it made sense.

  “It has been rather odd,” I admitted.

  “I would imagine.” Miz Riley said. “Our review shows a significant amount of processing power has been diverted by system resources. To study you, among others. This is what first alerted us to the alterations in your file.”

  “How much?”

  “Point zero, zero, zero, six, five percent. For the amount of resources invested into the ARC systems, this is incredible.” I would have to take Miz Riley’s word for it. She continued talking. “My reason for bringing you in here is
to see if you can shed light on our situation.”

  “Is that why you mentioned my-” I paused. That was almost a backslide. Admitting her name out loud, saying it, was a huge step forward that couldn’t be discounted. “-Xin?”

  “Yes. At first, we suspected that she had some cut a deal to get you a copy. There was some overlap in the announcement and her passing.” Vice President Riley said.

  “She wouldn’t do that.” She was dedicated, hardworking, and a fighter. Xin spent most of her time in interviews and training for the Mars Projects. Between that and her schooling there was no time for games.

  “A review of her personality markers made that clear. Which lead us to a worse conclusion. We started checking out your performance within the Continue Online game world.”

  “And?” I worried about her answer.

  “It proved difficult. Which is why I had you come here physically. Here, in this room, we can speak without interference from the machines.” Miz Riley gestured to the room about us.

  “I still don’t understand, you made Continue, shouldn’t there be a system in place allowing Trillium to get any information they want? Don’t you have access to all that?” I asked.

  “Mister Legate, if I could trust the answers being given to me then there would be no need to bring you here and waste our time.” She sounded angry and kept fidgeting with the watch on her wrist. The room seemed to absorb our voices making it unnaturally quiet. “If you would, recount everything so far for me.”

  We spoke for a while. I started with the prize Henry Uldam had given me. She already knew about the Ultimate Edition. It was almost a relief to not hide that from someone. We spoke about the entire start-up process and she focused on who I picked for a Voice. I told her about James, a black man near the end of the tome. She shook her head.

  “None of that is right. The small dragon is meant to be an intro to the game, flavor, nothing more.” Miz Riley’s accent was a bit more apparent as her unease grew.

  “He broke into my Atrium and ate a bunch of creamers. That made it difficult for him to do the fire thing.” Dusk had tried pretty hard, though. I could remember those first few steps into Continue Online vividly. He was on the pillar, scratching similar to a cat, and trying to breathe flame.

  “He shouldn’t be able to get into your Atrium to begin with.” We had both been standing awkwardly in the pale green lit room for a few minutes now. My latest explanation caused Vice President Riley to lose her focus and sink to the ground. I took a step back and waited to see what she would do.

  “That’s…” She said. “No, keep talking.

  I hesitated. The next part involved me playing as Carver to get answers about my deceased fiancée’s autopilot.

  “Assume that I will threaten you however I need to in order to get answers.” The Vice President cut off my pondering.

  “There’s no need, I just, this part is kind of crazy,” I said. Miz Riley seemed like the sort to actually do just that. “Do you have enough time?”

  “No. No, there’s never enough time.” She sighed. Her hands were pressed at either side of her face. “But sit down first. You’re giving me a headache pacing like that.”

  Was I pacing?

  “And no humming,” She said. I checked myself and tried not to stress about how often humming was escaping me recently.

  “So after my trials…” I started to explain.

  Part of me was relieved to unload. She was the first person that I had spoken to about my strange time in the game. Once one private detail slipped, the rest followed. It took thirty minutes to even begin to cover most of it. Dusk, James, the other Voices, Xin’s ghost in the machine.

  The time as Carver required a lot of questions on her side. She asked about what I saw and the system did. She made it a point to ask who the player was for William Carver. That question had never been answered for me. I knew he was a very long standing participant in Continue’s world. That made her frown. Finally, we sat there for a minute or two as she seemed lost in thought.

  “The Voices, you’re worried about them too.” I stated.

  “Yes. I have to be. It’s part of my job to make sure there’s enough oversight on every project. The fact that you’ve experienced what you have, means those bounds are being pushed. Heavily.” She paused. “William Carver, that was the name, correct?”

  “I never learned his real world name.”

  “I know who you’re talking about. They let you pose as him?” She asked. There was a crease in her forehead that only increased in size the more we spoke.

  “Yes. Then I talked to his autopilot. He told me that the Traveler was,” the word felt disrespectful to say out loud “deceased. Three, four?” I had lost track of time.

  “The man you’re thinking of passed away four days ago.” Miz Riley said.

  “Four then. After that, James told me his autopilot would scatter somehow.” I hadn’t reached the last few days of game time with her yet. What little complexion she had regained dripped away at my words.

  “They shouldn’t exist at all once the player has passed.” She muttered. “All the data is designed to be erased. How…” A thought occurred to Miz Riley and her jaw dropped. My own history of problems gave me a pretty good understanding of her body language. This woman was only a few steps away from a breakdown. Customer service instincts said to try and help her reason through it.

  “You didn’t know about them reusing the autopilot information, did you?” I commented.

  “It’s insane.” She waved an arm at me and my next words died. “Hold on. Hold on. I need to think.”

  I sat there doing my own thinking. To me, the whole autopilot after image of a person was only partially odd. The AIs were basically recording data and sorting it by individual. The scattering process seemed to be personality traits being mixed elsewhere. Or was it? Miz Riley might have a different perspective.

  “I spoke to my Voice, James, about it. I quoted Kipling, you know the line.” I raised a hand to keep time with the poem. “They will come back, come back again, as long as the red earth rolls. He never wasted a leaf or a tree, do you think He would squander souls.”

  “Mister Legate, this is far worse than copying a text file with someone’s name on it.” She said. Her accent had grown stronger. “This is robbery of a person’s memory.”

  “Does it hurt if they scatter it?”

  “How would you feel if it was your loved one? If Xin Yu had spoken to you as William Carver had?”

  I explained to Miz Riley the same answer I had given James a few days ago. My words felt flawed. What I said in the ARC was me trying to stay stable in the face of an outrageous situation. There was no good way to predict what would happen until the situation presented itself. We were basically talking about bringing people back from the dead in a machine that could make everything feel real. How could anyone answer such an insane premise ahead of time with any certainty?

  The room pulsed and the door opened.

  “There is never enough time.” She muttered. Miz Riley stood up, dusted herself off and seemed to be in one piece again. There was still a slight lack of focus to her gaze that spoke of her mental distractions.

  “What now?” My thoughts were jumbled. Once again I was questioning all the times that had led me to this point.

  “Keep playing. Keep interacting with the AIs, as many as you dare.” She exited the room and waited for me to leave as well. “Let me know directly of anything you find. I expect a daily report.”

  “I still have my normal job.” I said.

  “Not anymore. You’re being reassigned. You will be given an equivalent salary to your last evaluation. The only expectation is that you play and file reports.”

  “Miz Riley. I” felt insane for saying this “actually enjoy what I do, and have a life outside of the ARC.” My sister and niece. I had meetings to attend every so often. The game was neat, but it couldn’t be all consuming.

  “And?” She said.

>   “There may be days where I don’t get a chance to play.”

  “Mister Legate, I think you misunderstand what’s happening here. It will never be a matter of if you keep playing, merely when.” She said. There was no distraction on her face with those words. The worry which had plagued Miz Riley went away once the side room opened up. Her hand pressed against the bare table top as she stared at me.

  “They will draw you in.” Miz Riley continued to speak. “Even now, there’s something you want to go back and do, isn’t there?”

  Dusk. I wanted to know if Dusk was okay. I wanted to know about this quest and complete it. The stats and usage of my Voice given hat were a mystery. Those were things that could be walked away from, but then the answer would never come. Beth also had some siege event I was invited to. The thought of Beth shifted my mind away from worry about Continue’s ghosts in the machine. Real world safety was more important than a digital world.

  “Are the users in danger? My niece, she plays.” I said.

  “Does she own an Ultimate Edition?” Miz Riley’s eyebrows raised making her forehead wrinkle once more.

  My head shook back and forth.

  “Then no, not in the same way. The Ultimate Edition is, we think, it’s more like the first step in a screening process.” One of Miz Riley’s hands waved in dismissal.

  “Screening for what?”

  “We don’t know. Any answer I offered now would be incomplete and just induce worry.” She sighed and shook her head. “I can state that no Ultimate Edition user has been harmed.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We have them all flagged and review the ARC readouts for each person. Your name is in our watch room as well. Doubly so as a Trillium contractor.”

  I echoed her earlier sigh with one of my own. Today wasn’t going well at all. My neck had tensed up the moment Beth’s possible danger occurred to me. Being messed around with by the computer only bothered me a little bit. Everything revolving around this game seemed intent upon poking my emotional buttons.

  But each jab reminded me that I was alive. That morbid sensation of subjecting oneself to trauma just to keep moving forward wasn’t unique to me. Many people in grief found an outlet to relieve that pain. I was terrible at artwork, though.