Rin made a sound of agreement. “When you put it like that… yeah. That’s terrible, though – I don’t know how I could help. I know that when I’m stressed out, I need to be alone. Sometimes I get so worked up that I shout and pace and stim-“ she flapped her hands for emphasis “-until I cool down. I’d just… let her sort it out. All NPCs are predisposed to love player characters, but I think when she realizes what you have already, she’ll be okay.”
“Wait. What?” I shook my head, not sure I’d heard her correctly. “What do you mean ‘NPCs are predisposed to love player characters?”
Rin pressed her lips together, looking out over the river. “Well, think about it from a dev perspective. People want things that are primal, right? Food, violence, territory, sex and romance. Archemi wasn’t intended to be a replacement Earth for a bunch of plague refugees – it was meant to be an escape from Earth: from the Total War, from politics, from your insurance bills and super-expensive rent and stuff. So in Archemi, there’s lots of things to fight, the food’s delicious, and all NPCs are potential love interests for players. They’re coded that way so that Jo Blow from Atlanta can have the elf harem he always dreamed of and then he goes to rate Archemi five stars on PlayerNexus.”
What she was saying made perfect sense. It also made my stomach churn. I frowned and joined her in staring at the river. "But I thought the characters here were like… real people? Sentient people. I mean, Karalti ACTS like a real person. You said it yourself, that NPCs are crafted from digitized human datasets. They have free will, right?”
"Technically, they have freedom of choice within their parameters. And Karalti isn’t a single human dataset: she’s a composite of different datasets, like everyone else here. We call them Seeds."
"Seeds? Okay. But Seeds are still functionally real people from everything I’ve seen." I waved back toward the hangar.
Rin bobbed her head. I could see her out of my peripheral vision, clear as day. "Functionally."
“Meaning…?”
"Well, meaning that Ryuko has this great big database called ATHENA. ATHENA has around two thousand people stored in it... around 4000 petabytes of data."
I rubbed my head. My gaming computer had barely scratched 500 terabytes. "Holy shit."
"Yeah. It would have been an impossible figure not even twenty years ago. But here we are, on an orbital server. Ryuko has like… twenty of them." Rin lifted her gaze to the cloudy sky. "I don't think the ATHENA datasets were just used for this game, but like heaps of different things."
"Where did those two thousand people come from?"
"All over the place. They were all certified volunteers. Except Suri, maybe." The Mercurion bit her lip, worrying it with glassy teeth. "She worries me.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I had a talk with her about her origins. Did you know she speaks fluent Mandarin?”
I shook my head dumbly.
“Uh-huh. When she gained the ability to level, she says that she saw an Admin feed spool up. She has a photographic memory, so she was able to remember her Seed String.”
“What’s that?”
Rin seemed cheerfully oblivious to my growing discomfort. “Oh! So basically, whenever an NPC is generated, they get a Seed String, which is kind of like a barcode. It tells you which data was used to make them. They always begin with a letter and a number, so you might see something like ‘A42-2298F-900VL-HR’ and then know that this NPC was created out of information in Database A, Archetype 42, personality modifiers 22 and 98, that she’s female and her origin is in Vlachia and she has a Hungarian accent, and so on and so forth. There’s usually a list of tags on the end that can tell an admin if the person is able to issue quests and stuff. Now, the thing with Suri, right, is that players ALSO have Seed Strings, but ours are different to NPC strings even though they carry some of the same information.”
I thought back to my own Archemi meta experience: seeing my own player Seed String scrolling by my face after receiving the Mark of Matir. “Right.”
“Suri’s string looks like it was generated for an NPC, but it doesn’t have a database referral tag, which means she’s not derived from ATHENA. Instead of the normal modifiers at the end, she has a player Type code, which is BSRK. You know, for Berserker. I think that when the server reset, OUROS picked up on her and assigned her a player type for some reason, but she’s a NUMBERFETCH error waiting to happen. If her code ever conflicts, she’s screwed.”
I shuddered. “Yeah. I figure she was trafficked in somehow. A couple of your coworkers had a hate boner for the Pacific Alliance. They uploaded her so they could take out their rage on someone.”
“I wish I knew who it was. Not that I can report them now, but… ugh.” Rin shivered like a small bird, shaking her head. “It makes me wonder about ATHENA, though. Like, the profiles for villains and criminals… what if they were taken from real criminals? People have human rights, but human rights for data is a serious gray area."
"Ryuko's a megacorp. They probably bought a bunch of these ‘datasets’ from prisons and shit for pennies on the dollar." I shrugged, surprised at how resigned I felt about it. "I don't really feel like talking about politics. Earth is done."
"It is?" She glanced at me. “Don’t you have any hope at all?”
"Nope. Hope is a bad survival strategy. Besides, everything I care about is right here.” I shrugged. “Things are better for me in Archemi. Maybe it wasn’t like that for you.”
Rin bit her lip and shook her head. “No… I was very lucky.”
“College? A house of your own? Health insurance, social credit?"
She blushed a brilliant azure blue. "Is it that obvious?"
I snorted. "Yeah. You’re kind of sheltered.”
She gave a musical little sigh. “It’s true. That’s me, just another rich little hothouse flower.”
“Hothouse? You grew up in an arco?” I whistled. “What the heck did your parents do for a living?”
"Not my parents. Just my father.” Rin replied haltingly.
Yikes. Nice one, dude. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Rin forced a brief smile. “My father was Charles Yu. He was a property investor who worked with greentech and space habitat companies. We lost Mom when I was six.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Cancer?”
She shook her head. “Suicide. It’s okay, though… it happened a long time ago.”
There was a short pause in the conversation, a minute of silence for the dead.
After a time, I nodded thoughtfully. “I can’t imagine what living in an arco is like. Green plants, clean water, everyone living up each other’s asses, recycling their piss and breathing the same air. I heard you can’t take your own car or motorbike on the roads. You have to use self-driving cars and shit."
She let out a small, musical laugh. "Of course not. Arco roads don’t need signals, either, except for pedestrian signals. The shuttles are much safer than trying to drive something yourself.”
“Didn’t you ever get claustrophobic? I heard the apartments in those places are pretty small.”
“My dad helped to fund Terralife. We had a big penthouse near the top of the barrier. You could see the sky through the glass. I loved to go up on the roof of our building and watch the clouds.” Rin smiled gently. “When I left to study at Caltech, I was really confused by the way the air smelled. It was terrible. I had to get so many shots, because everything made me sick. It’s no wonder I got HEX so early on.”
“Everyone got HEX eventually, though. The people in the arcos are probably the only ones alive right now.” I nodded. "My brother went to Caltech. I think."
"Steve got in through the military, right?"
"I don’t know. We weren’t really on speaking terms for most of my adult life. He called me back when he got HEX. We made up just before we died and got uploaded here. My transfer was successful, his wasn’t. So now I’ll never get to ask him.” I grimaced, struggling to sit still.
“
Oh… right, you mentioned that in Taltos. That’s sad.” Rin turned her face. “Well, if it’s anything, the rumor in the office was that he’d been an Intelligence Officer for some department before joining Ryuko. I’m glad you made up with him before the end, though. Family’s important.”
“I prefer the family you choose,” I said. “Blood family always seems to think that sharing your genes gives them permission to decide how you’re going to live your life. I’ll take chosen-family any day. Anyway. You really think Suri is like... pirated data or something? I’m worried about this error thing."
"She might be. I know for a fact her Mandarin is better than mine, so she's definitely from the Pacific Alliance. Her memories of her life before Archemi were scrubbed out – very clumsily and inexpertly, I might say – and then her remaining data was modified to naturalize her here. It has some serious implications… like what if other people were pirated in, and no one knows who they are or where they are?”
"Wait.” I raised a hand. “The Devs can modify human data? Like, manually?"
"Yeah, but not like… on the fly or anything. OUROS dynamically generates characters by referring to ATHENA and combining datasets into new people, but they can’t be Earth-people, they have to be Archemi-people. All the datasets in Archemi’s ATHENA database were naturalized… their data was modified so the only reality they know is this one."
"And that was legal? Like... no one stopped to think of what those people might want for themselves?" I slashed a hand in the direction of the fort. "What does that imply for all the NPCs who died in the Demon’s invasion? They suffered, like real civilians."
Rin was visibly nervous now. “Well… I don’t really know how that works, but I think that war scenarios are just generated as-is, with the terrain and memories and everything just Deus-ex-Machina-ing into place without everything playing out beforehand. I do know that NPCs work to a loose script based on their assigned role, and they have very sharply reduced pain stimulus and selective amnesia, like players. I mean… data doesn’t suffer.”
“Tell that to Istvan. He’s an alcoholic because of what happened to his family.” I clenched my jaw, working out the tension through my teeth. “And what kind of life do all those people in ATHENA have? What do they do? Sit on their asses in some digital prison for all eternity?”
"No, no, it's not like that." Rin shook her head. "Seed data isn't self-aware when it’s just sitting in the cloud."
I paused for a second. "You have repeatedly said they’re copies of real people."
"Yes, but human sentience isn't contained in the data," Rin replied. "If sentience was just a matter of data density then... like... the Internet would be sentient. Consciousness - human consciousness, and AI consciousness - only develops when that data is in a vehicle that can interact spontaneously with a reality, virtual or not. It was a huge problem when researchers were trying to develop sentient AI-"
"Wait. You lost me." I sighed in exasperation. "For one thing, this conversation absolutely needs alcohol. Hang on."
I pulled a bottle of [Vlachian Apricot Brandy] from my Inventory, uncorked it, and chugged while Rin held onto her train of thought. When I was done, I waved her on. "Okay. Try that again."
"So, this is kind of the simplified version, but when we were first working on sentient AI, nothing we did would get it to stick," she said, talking slower, as if to a student. "You'd get all the data, set up the neuronic framework, and boop. Nothing. It was still just an ordinary computer, and it didn't matter how complex it was or how much storage or processing it had. Those were called ‘black box AI’. We had better luck with robots, as long as those robots had sensory input from the environment. But the first robot to ever gain sentience destroyed its own software within a millisecond of attaining awareness."
"Destroyed as in...?"
"Suicide via formatting." She nodded. "Eventually they figured out that sentience isn't actually like... something you can directly program. We call it the Pilot Problem. The basis of the problem is our own perception of ourselves. The average person feels like they're someone - an I - piloting a meat machine most of the time, right?"
"Right."
"But from an observer’s perspective, if you take away the meat machine, the pilot disappears," Rin continued, gesturing gracefully at the river. "Except that it doesn't. The data of that pilot is still there, encoded in the brain. The data doesn't vanish with death, but as soon as the brain starts shutting down, decay exerts intense entropy on it and the data is lost like water pouring out of a leaky bucket.”
“I can hear some philosophers rolling around and around in their graves right now.”
“Right? I’m not explaining it very well, because the second law is always in effect but, anyway. As it turns out, if you can capture and copy that data before it reaches critical decay, then you can theoretically stick the person back in another meat machine and have them wake up there feeling no different than they did in their original body. The Pilot Problem occurs because we can’t actually do that. For one thing, every instance of consciousness is individual. Secondly, your consciousness and sense of identity form and are formed by hard-wired electrical and chemical pathways, so even if you uploaded someone’s data to a host brain ala Frankenstein, it wouldn’t work."
By way of reply, I took another swig from the bottle. "This is already way beyond my pay grade, but okay."
"What researchers found is that the reverse state of the Pilot Problem is also true," Rin said. "You can clone a copy of someone's data, which removes it from being ravaged by entropy, but the data itself is no longer recognizably a person. It’s completely inert, with no capacity for consciousness. It's just lines and lines and lines of code, like a big sheet of decompiled DNA. It can't modify itself or exhibit any signs of life. If a person copies their brain while they're alive, then they will continue to grow and experience entropy, but the data copy just sits there like a snapshot. Like a frozen embryo, it’s got the potential for life. But it’s not life yet."
"Okay."
"Anyway, what we eventually figured out is that sentience isn't based in the body, or even in the mind," Rin continued. She was getting into it now, gesticulating like a professor at a lectern. "But in the dynamic interaction of senses and data with a reality that is sufficiently complex enough to sustain consciousness. We call it the Fire Triangle, but instead of ‘heat, oxygen, fuel’, it’s ‘senses, data, reality’. That's why the robot AI project worked and we now have gynoids and androids, but we never successfully developed a blackbox AI with sentience.”
"Huh." I looked out over the raging water, brow furrowed. "I wonder how the religious people on the project dealt with the suicidal robot?"
She let out a tinkling laugh. “I think it made atheists out of a few people, but I mean, we still don't know exactly what happens to human data after death. One of my Jewish friends actually thought GNOSIS and the OUROS project were really encouraging signs that the afterlife is a real thing. Because you and I are just material copies of a still-living person... but our real data might have gone ‘Somewhere Else’, you know?"
I chuckled darkly. "Wherever Hector Version One went, it wasn't Heaven."
Rin brushed it aside. "Anyway... the problem of sentient AI was solved by combining data with virtual bodies. Virtual bodies in virtual worlds co-signal each other better than robot bodies do... the world tells the digital actor what the stimulus is, the body receives and translates the stimulus instantly. Reality becomes an issue of perception. Researchers found that VR entities of sufficient complexity manifest very simple conscious behaviors spontaneously."
"Huh."
"Archemi was the first application of this field of study for mass public consumption, too," Rin said wistfully. "Imagine... if the Total War hadn’t happened, we could have spent billions on a virtual cure for death. But to answer your original question about Karalti... she's a naturalized dataset drawn from multiple sources in ATHENA, recombined into a computer’s idea of a dra
gon who is predisposed to want to be the woman of your dreams. She’s real in that sense: a consciousness born into this world, and this world alone."
That was going to complicate things. I shook my head slowly. "Damn."
We let that strange, profound conclusion hang between us for several minutes. Rin smiled to herself, while I drank and thought about Suri and Karalti, and what might have been done to them while they were not even people... just a vault of code in a server somewhere.
"What happens when the reality and the body are out of sync?" I asked, after a while. "Like, if someone wakes up, and the world is glitchy or laggy or something?"
Rin rubbed her fingers over the wooden slats of the balcony, staring at them. "Uhh... you get Michael. Ororgael, I mean. Unless someone is very psychologically resilient, they… usually end up like the sentient robot."
"My upload glitched. I was okay."
Rin's head whipped around. "It did? You never told me that."
"Long story." I took a long pull off the bottle, waiting for the Intoxicated status to appear. No luck so far, but the Pee Meter was filling up nicely. Of course. "I've never told anyone this, but when I arrived in Archemi, the game fucked up. I woke up on a slave ship somewhere near the coast of Zaunt..."
I told her the story - all of it. The Arabella, the time-skipping, the appearance of Matir and the storm he created, the way I'd gotten the other prisoners to rise up and take over the ship in the chaos. I told her about Rutha and how she'd given me the Spear, and the Trojan-infused quest she'd given me. Rin listened in stunned silence, rubbing one thumb up and down, up and down.
"And I remember something Matir said to me," I said, building toward the end of the story. "He said I wasn't a Starborn, but an NPC. If I died, I was going to die for real. He offered to fix that for me and correct my status."
Rin put her hand to her mouth. “What happened after that?”
"Matir offered me a bargain: work for him and he’d help me. I accepted the quest he offered, and he told me: "You shall be Starborn, but you will be born under a dark star, Dragozin Hector. Then he branded me with the Mark, and all of this code came up. You know when your computer runs a diagnostic, and the little black screen comes up, spits a bunch of white text, then vanishes?"
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