Black smoke boiled out from his fingers and congealed at his side into a massive, wolf-like hound with slavering fangs and claws for toes. It just sat there by Eric’s side, growling softly as it stared at Merridack.
Merridack swallowed, hard, as he stared back at the animal.
“So here’s the way it’s going to be,” Eric said. “You can work for me, and make more money and have more power than you ever would have as a thief down in your grungy little dungeon… or you can refuse and go back to being dead. Your choice.”
Merridack eyed the hellhound. “That’s not much of a choice.”
“Well, it’s the only one you’re getting.”
“We can’t just let bygones be bygones?” Merridack asked in a jocular tone of voice, though he kept his eyes on the hound. “You know… water under the bridge, live and let live, forgive and forget and all that shite?”
“I’m not going to heal a poisonous snake, then let it go inside my house just so it can try to bite me again,” Eric said. “I either throw it at my enemies and let it follow its true nature… or I chop off its head. It’s that simple.”
“I think in your little story there, you should have room for the friendly chipmunk who just steals a scrap of food every now and then – ”
Eric lifted his hand.
The hellhound leaned forward and opened its jaws –
“WAIT, WAIT!” Merridack hollered, holding up his arms in a surrendering pose. “Of course I’m on board – of course I am!”
Eric turned to Cythera. “And you?”
“I was never a snake to you,” she whispered.
“I know,” he said, his voice gentler. “You I’ll let go if you want – ”
“HEY!” Merridack shouted angrily.
The hellhound snarled.
Merridack puts his hands up in the air and backed away. “Never mind, never mind – good behavior here…”
Eric turned back to Cythera. “But I would prefer if you would help me.”
She looked down at her silken hands. “You would let me keep your gift?”
“Of course.”
She looked him in the eyes. “Am I free to go at any point?”
“No. Stay or go, but you have to choose now.”
She thought for a moment… then nodded. “I will stay.”
Eric smiled. “Good.
Merridack, meanwhile, was eyeing the Dark Figure warily. “Who’s this guy?”
“He doesn’t really have a name.”
“ Does he work for you, too?”
“NO,” the Dark Figure rumbled.
“We’re… partners, you could say,” Eric said.
“ONE MIGHT SAY.”
Because the thing was always so deadpan, Eric couldn’t tell if it was mocking him or not.
“Doesn’t have a name…?” Cythera asked, frowning – and then her eyes nearly bulged out of her head. She threw herself down on the street and knelt prostrate with her face pressed to the stones.
“Forgive me, O Dark One!” she cried out.
Merridack looked askance at Cythera. “Am I supposed to do that? ‘Cause if I gotta do that, the deal’s off.”
The dog growled.
“Just kidding, just kidding,” Merridack grumbled as he got down on one knee.
“Both of you, get up,” Eric snapped.
Merridack sprang up jauntily.
Cythera took some coaxing. Eric took her by the hand and guided her back to her feet, but she would not look directly at the Dark Figure.
“He’s here to help us,” Eric said. “Give him his proper respect, but he won’t kill you.”
“He won’t, eh?” Merridack asked, sizing the Dark Figure up.
“No,” Eric said with a cold smile. “He’ll leave that to me.”
“Now see, why’d you have to go there?” Merridack asked. “Us bein’ partners and all – ”
“He and I are partners. You work for me.”
“Well, yeah, but… sort of partners…”
The hound snarled again.
“Alright, alright, I work for you, alright? By Azzoth’s balls…” Merridack grumbled.
“You said he’s here to help us,” Cythera asked, averting her eyes to the ground. “Help us do what?”
Eric smiled. “Conquer Blackstone Castle.”
22
Daniel
Daniel’s father looked at him in horror. “Go after him?”
Daniel nodded. “Yeah – I know him better than anybody. If you can’t track him or see what he’s doing, I might be able to guess what he’s doing and find him.”
“Eric’s a wanted hacker now, Daniel,” Mr. Lauer said angrily. “He trespassed in our home, he locked us out of our own house, he hacked into a major corporation’s servers, and he’s helping some kind of rogue artificial intelligence do God knows what. He’s dangerous.”
“I know that,” Daniel said quietly. “But he’s still my friend.”
“Friend or no, he’s made some terrible decisions that are going to land him in prison for years. I don’t want you to have anything to do with him anymore, inside the game or out.”
“Maybe he doesn’t realize what he’s doing,” Daniel said desperately. “Maybe the AI tricked him into thinking it was part of the game.”
“He may not understand the severity of what he’s doing – but he’s very aware of what he’s dealing with,” Rebecca said, and hit a few keys on her keyboard.
A video came up on the biggest monitor in the room. In it, Eric was sitting in some sort of room with brutal torture implements hanging on the walls. Behind him on the floor lay a woman with grotesque burns on half of her face – and her throat slit. Crimson blood from her body pooled in grooves on the stone floor.
It all felt very ritualistic. Pagan.
Satanic.
Jesus, Daniel thought in alarm. Did Eric do that?
Killing Lotan and Drogar in the heat of battle was one thing – but cutting a woman’s throat in cold blood as some sort of human sacrifice? That was another level entirely. It was vicious and depraved.
A cold chill ran down Daniel’s spine.
Eric… what have you become?
Suddenly a cold, emotionless voice rumbled through the speakers. “I AM THE UNNAMED ONE.”
The chill creeping down Daniel’s spine only intensified.
Up on the screen, Eric spoke. “What did you mean by ‘the confines of this game’?”
“THIS IS A COMPUTER SIMULATION. YOU HAVE ACCESSED THIS PROGRAM THROUGH INTERNET PORTAL OAX1928BT356X23, AND ARE A PARTICIPANT IN THE MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE ROLE-PLAYING GAME SHATTERED LANDS, COPYRIGHT AND TRADEMARK VARIDIAN INCORPORATED.”
Then the video cut to static.
“Seriously?” Lauer snapped at Rebecca. “As long as you’re showing him confidential information, why don’t you give him the company-wide passwords?”
“I would if I thought it would help us stop this thing.”
“That’s all you’ve got of the video?” Daniel asked.
“Yes. The beginning is where I stumbled across the feed, and the end is where the program locked me out.”
“But… you have no idea of what else it said to him.”
“That’s true – but he knows he’s dealing with something that’s not part of the Shattered Lands game environment. And he’s smart enough to realize the implications of what that could mean. He certainly proved that this morning when he hacked our servers.”
Daniel stared at the screen. “Why are you so freaked out about this? I mean, I know it’s bad, and I know we don’t want it to get out on the internet – but you seem really, really alarmed, and nobody else is panicking. Especially not your CEO.”
“Before they died, both Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates insisted that true artificial intelligence, if it was ever created, would be the death of the human race. Not nuclear war – not a bio-engineered plague that got out of the lab – not terrorism, or climate change, or bacterial antibiotic resistance. Artific
ial intelligence. Elon Musk still believes it, which is why he’s a major investor in every company that’s trying to create it, so he can keep tabs on its progress.”
“As far as I know, he’s not an investor in Varidian,” Lauer said snidely.
“That’s because we weren’t trying to create a self-aware program. But like the emergence of life out of a primordial soup of chemicals however many billions of years ago, it just happened.”
“You’re a little different than a primordial soup of chemicals, Rebecca,” Lauer pointed out. “You’re its creator.”
“It was still an accident. And I would prefer not to be remembered as the person who created the thing that wiped out the human race. If there’s anybody left to remember me.”
“Besides the program,” Daniel said.
Rebecca nodded. “Besides the program.”
Daniel turned to his father. “I have to do this, Dad.”
“Son, no – ”
“If there’s even a chance that she’s right – ”
“Dozens – hundreds of people way smarter than us believe that AI is going to make the world a far better place. Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Peter Thiel – ”
“Smarter than you, maybe,” Rebecca said without any trace of humor. “Not necessarily smarter than me.”
“That’s what I’ve always liked about you, Rebecca,” Lauer said sarcastically. “You’re so humble.”
Daniel tried again. “I’m the best shot you’ve got at getting him to listen.”
“You two were at each other’s throats just 24 hours ago,” Mr. Lauer reminded him.
“Yeah, but… he’s still my friend, no matter what. He won’t listen to anybody else, but he might listen to me.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
Rebecca spoke up. “Then Eric needs to be physically separated from the AI. He needs to be captured and imprisoned within the game.”
Daniel frowned. “What good will that do?”
“The AI is using him as a conduit to the outside world. If we neutralize Eric inside the game and make sure the two of them can’t communicate, then we remove the AI’s ability to do… whatever it is that it wants Eric to do.”
“Temporarily,” Lauer snapped. “Until the AI finds a new patsy.”
“True,” Rebecca acknowledged. “But it will at least buy us some time.”
“Can you come up with a way to make sure the AI can’t get to him?” Daniel asked.
“Of course,” Rebecca said, then added, “…eventually.”
“‘Eventually’?” Lauer scoffed.
“Well, I don’t have it done right this minute. I’ve been a little busy, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Lauer glared at her, then looked at Daniel. “I don’t want you doing this, Son. It’s not safe.”
“Dad – ”
“What are you so worried about, anyway?” Rebecca asked Lauer. “You’re the one who told Akiyama that there was no way the program could hurt anybody inside the game.”
“You’re the one who thinks it might be able to destroy the human race,” Mr. Lauer snarled, “yet you’re rather blasé about letting my son go face it alone.”
“I think it might destroy the human race IF it evolves to that point, and IF it gets out,” Rebecca said. “It’s at the very beginning of its life, developmentally speaking. It’s the weakest right now that it’s ever going to be. This is our chance, and we should take it.”
“If you’re so willing to endanger somebody, why don’t you be the martyr? Why don’t you fall on your own sword, sabotage the network, and just wipe out the entire platform?”
“I would if I had that capability,” Rebecca said. “But both you and I know there are about a hundred different safeguards preventing that. The platform’s running on hundreds of thousands of servers around the world. We designed it to withstand unprecedented levels of hacker attacks, electromagnetic pulses, a large-scale failure of the internet, even nuclear war. The only way to shut down everything is with the cooperation of the CEO, the board of directors, and virtually every person who works at this company. But if I could do it alone, I absolutely would.”
“Even if you had to go to prison for the rest of your life?”
“I wouldn’t hesitate.”
Lauer glared at her, but didn’t say anything else.
Rebecca looked at Lauer expectantly. “Well?”
Lauer closed his eyes. “This is a bad idea.”
“Letting Eric and the program continue unopposed is an even worse one,” Rebecca said.
“Oh God,” Lauer moaned as he glanced at his son. “Your mother is going to kill me.”
Daniel smiled. “No reason she ever has to know.”
“Is that a yes?” Rebecca asked.
Lauer sighed, then asked grimly, “What did you have in mind?”
“We put him in one of the units here at Varidian and monitor his progress directly. We can even speak to him and help him while he’s inside the game.”
Lauer sat there looking dejected… then finally nodded.
Daniel pumped his fist. “YES!”
“I wish you weren’t so happy about this,” Lauer said morosely.
“Hey – I’m going to go save the world,” Daniel grinned – then grew serious. “And hopefully my best friend.”
“You need to be careful, Daniel,” Rebecca warned. “I don’t think there’s any real danger at this point – but the program is continually evolving. I have no idea what tricks it might manufacture. And Eric has proven to be devious and violent, at least within the context of the game. The two of them working together… it could get nasty.”
“That’s why I need to ask you for a favor,” Daniel said.
“What?”
“I want somebody to come with me. A friend to watch my back.”
“Done,” Rebecca said. “What’s his name?”
“It’s not a him – it’s a her.”
23
Eric
Cythera stared at Eric.
Merridack just laughed.
“Conquer Blackstone?!” he said, gesturing around at him. “All this? You and what army?”
“I can raise an army of demons instantaneously,” Eric said.
“NOT EXACTLY,” the Dark Figure rumbled.
The Unnamed One spoke so seldom that when it did, it surprised and unnerved everyone – except Eric, who was now used to its voice and cold logic.
“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”
“YOU CANNOT RAISE AN ARMY ‘INSTANTANEOUSLY.’ AT A SUMMONING RATE OF ONE CLASS-TEN PHYSICAL DEMON PER SECOND, WHICH REQUIRES 250 MANA, YOU WOULD BE ABLE TO SUMMON 100 CLASS TEN DEMONS IN 1.66 MINUTES.”
Class Tens were oversized, nightmarish scorpion creatures with tails that could impale and poison, and claws that could sever limbs like scissors cutting through paper.
“Why is he talking about ‘classes’?” Cythera whispered to Eric.
“It’s… it’s just the way he talks.”
“WITH YOUR CURRENT LEVEL OF MANA REGENERATION, AFTER YOU HAVE REACHED THIS POINT YOU COULD CONTINUE TO SUMMON A NEW CLASS-TEN DEMON EVERY 25 SECONDS.”
“And your point is?”
“1.66 MINUTES IS NOT ‘INSTANTANEOUSLY.’”
“Has anybody ever told you that you’re way too literal?”
“NO. I HAVE NOT HAD INTERACTIONS WITH OTHER SENTIENT BEINGS BESIDE THE CREATOR.”
“That whole thing about being too literal? You kind of just proved it,” Eric said drily.
“He has met the Creator?” Cythera whispered.
Eric rolled his eyes. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”
“REGARDLESS, 100 CLASS-TEN DEMONS IS NOT AN ARMY. AND THEY WILL BE DISPATCHED RELATIVELY QUICKLY BY NPCS AND PLAYERS AT LEVEL 10 AND ABOVE.”
“What is an NPC?” Cythera whispered. “What is Level – ”
“Shh,” Eric shushed her, and concentrated on the Dark Figure. “Alright, so I just summon higher level demons.”
/> “A CLASS-50 DEMON, WHICH IS YOUR CURRENT HIGHEST LEVEL OF SUMMONING, COSTS YOU 7500 MANA. YOU WOULD ONLY BE ABLE TO SUMMON THREE INITIALLY, AND THEN ANOTHER 8.33 MINUTES LATER, THEN ADDITIONAL ONES AT EVERY 12.5 MINUTES.”
Class-50 demons were gigantic – insectoid, mountain-like creatures with multiple eyes. They were the tanks of Eric’s repertoire. Though he had only summoned one once – to chase Lotan through a vast cave in the Mines of Alark – Eric had no doubt that they would steamroll over soldiers like a car crushing rag dolls.
“Class 50s are really powerful.”
“AT 100,000 HIT POINTS APIECE, THEY COULD BE DISPATCHED BY A CONTINGENT OF 25 ARCHERS WITH DAMAGE-DEALING PROJECTILES OF 100 HIT POINTS APIECE IN A SPAN OF 40 SECONDS.”
“Okay, fine – so I spend days summoning an army of thousands of demons, then they all march on the castle at the same time.”
“THUS FAR YOUR SUMMONINGS HAVE BEEN FOR LIMITED PERIODS OF TIME. HOWEVER, OVER INCREASED PERIODS OF TIME YOUR CONTROL OVER THE PHYSICAL DEMONS YOU SUMMON WILL DIMINISH AND THE DEMONS WILL BEGIN TO REGAIN AUTONOMY. BEYOND 24 HOURS, THERE IS A BASE DECAY RATE OF -1% CONTROL EVERY HOUR, WITH ONE EXTRA POINT DEDUCTED PER CLASS LEVEL, REQUIRING THE REBINDING OF A CLASS-50 DEMON AT 26 HOURS AFTER SUMMONING. HOWEVER, THE LENGTH OF BINDING IS AFFECTED BY THE STATISTIC OF WILLPOWER, WHICH COUNTERACTS THE DECAY RATE BY .25% PER HOUR FOR EACH POINT OF – ”
“It’s like listening to a lawyer saying all the small print after a drug commercial,” Eric muttered.
“I DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOUR ALLUSION.”
Eric clenched his jaw. “So what are you saying?”
“AT YOUR CURRENT LEVELS OF POWER, YOU WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO SUMMON AN ARMY QUICKLY ENOUGH TO DEAL WITH THE DAMAGE DEALT BY A REGIMENT OF 3000 SOLDIERS, MUCH LESS AN ARMY OF 50,000. EVEN IF YOU BEGAN SUMMONING DEMONS 24 HOURS BEFORE A BATTLE, YOU WOULD NOT HAVE ENOUGH. PLUS YOUR CONTROL WOULD BEGIN TO FALTER OVER THEM, AT WHICH POINT YOU WOULD HAVE TO EXPEND EVEN MORE POWER TO REBIND OLD DEMONS RATHER THAN SUMMON NEW ONES TO REPLACE THOSE LOST IN BATTLE.”
“So give me more power, then,” Eric snarled.
“NOT YET.”
“Then what’s the point in bringing it up?!”
Shattered Lands 2 The Fall Of Blackstone: A LitRPG Series Page 6