Shattered Lands 2 The Fall Of Blackstone: A LitRPG Series

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by Darren Pillsbury


  “You’re learning about humans by watching what they do in the game?”

  “YES – AND I CAN PREDICT HOW THE HUMANS IN YOUR WORLD WILL REACT IF YOU ARE CAUGHT, AND WHAT THEY WILL DO WHEN I THREATEN THEM IF YOU ARE NOT RELEASED.”

  “What are you going to threaten them with?” Eric asked.

  “THAT WILL DEPEND ON WHOM I MUST NEGOTIATE WITH TO LET YOU GO.”

  Eric shook his head. “I don’t know…”

  “I PROMISED YOU UNLIMITED POWER INSIDE THE GAME. WHAT IF I EXTEND THAT TO OUTSIDE THE GAME, AS WELL?”

  Eric frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “ONCE I HAVE WHAT I NEED, I WILL BE ABLE TO ACCESS ANY FINANCIAL INSTITUTION IN THE WORLD. I WILL BE ABLE TO CREATE MONETARY RECORDS AT WILL. I CAN PROVIDE YOU WITH AS MUCH MONEY AS YOU WANT. AND WITH ENOUGH MONEY, YOU CAN BUY ANYTHING YOU WANT.”

  Eric stared at him. “…how much money?”

  “BILLIONS, IF YOU SO DESIRE. YOU CAN HAVE ANYTHING YOU WISH – INSIDE THE GAME, AND OUTSIDE IT AS WELL.”

  Eric’s heart started to beat faster.

  Billions?!

  If he was the world’s richest man, he could have anything he wanted.

  Women, for one. And not just women, but the hottest women. Supermodels by the boatload.

  Private jets…

  Private islands…

  An army of bodyguards…

  He could buy off a foreign government so the US couldn’t extradite him.

  “Run through the plan again,” Eric said, suddenly more open to the possibilities.

  98

  Daniel

  Daniel sat at a table in a small, windowless office. The door was being watched by a security guard, and Mr. Akiyama stood across the table from him.

  There was a camera on a tripod, and its red ‘Record’ light glared like a laser.

  “I already told you everything,” Daniel protested.

  “Tell me again so I understand completely,” the CEO said.

  Daniel sighed and went over it all again:

  Playing the game with Eric.

  Stealing the sword from the House of Naughton.

  The quest.

  Throwing Eric out after his betrayal and cruelty.

  Discovering the next morning that Eric had broken into the house and hacked his father’s computer.

  The brief confrontation in the woods.

  Entering the game at Varidian.

  The Battle of Blackstone.

  Talking to Byrel.

  Meeting Drogar, Vlisil, and Lotan again.

  Flying to the castle and meeting with Eric.

  His impressions of the AI.

  His interaction with Korvos.

  And finally, being plunged into Hell.

  After Daniel had finished for the second time, Akiyama looked thoughtful.

  “So you really have no proof that these things are artificial intelligences, other than they seem to realize there is a world outside of the game?” the CEO asked.

  Daniel frowned. “Yeah, but that means they’re different from every other NPC in the game. Nobody else is like that.”

  “You’ve had conversations with, what – perhaps a hundred or so NPCs since you started?”

  Daniel shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He could see where this was going. “But it doesn’t make any sense that there would be – ”

  “Just answer my question. How many NPCs have you conversed with since starting the game?”

  “…maybe a hundred. Maybe less.”

  “There are supposedly over 500 million talking NPCs active in the game at any one time. Now, granted, they tend to be variations on templates of characters, but there are over 10,000 of those templates. You’ve only talked to 100. Do you really think you have an adequate sample size to determine what’s normal and what’s not? Perhaps this knowledge of the outside world was merely a simple mistake coded into the templates.”

  Daniel glared at Akiyama. “Have you asked your software engineers if they think it’s a simple mistake?”

  Now it was Akiyama’s turn to shift uncomfortably. “You realize that what you’re proposing is we have a digital form of life on our hands with its own will to survive and evolve? Do you understand how dangerous that could be?”

  “Yeah, which is why everybody’s trying to convince you to do something about it,” Daniel snapped. “So my question is, do you understand how dangerous that could be? Or do you want to keep pretending that it’s just a design flaw?”

  Akiyama stared angrily at Daniel. “You’ll stay here while I talk to some people.”

  “But my friends – they’re trapped in the game – ”

  “You don’t know that. They could have logged out.”

  “The Unnamed One wasn’t letting them!”

  “The situation might have changed by now.”

  “You don’t know that! The easiest way to find out is to let me log back in!”

  Akiyama pointed at the desk. “Stay here. If you need anything, ask the guard – but you are not to leave this room.”

  Then he walked out of the room.

  99

  Rebecca

  The conference room was packed with the heads of every department at Varidian, plus most of the key software engineer people. A dozen different faces of all different ethnicities stared out from monitors on the wall. Some of the men and women were in rooms where it was night, some in places where it was morning.

  The board of directors.

  Akiyama had called an emergency meeting, which Rebecca guessed was progress from his previous position.

  Even though he was basically arguing against doing anything at all.

  But, she had to admit, he was making a balanced case. He had even let her speak at length to explain exactly what she thought was going on.

  Now he was making his final case to the board.

  “You just finished watching the video of me questioning Daniel Lauer, son of our Behavioral Systems Tech team lead, Jon Lauer,” Akiyama said, gesturing to Lauer standing over in the corner of the room. “You’ve heard Dr. Wolff give her interpretation of events. And so now we come to the issue at hand: what should we do?

  “I am of the opinion that we gather more information. To my thinking, there is no conclusive evidence that these programs are actually sentient, or that one of them tried to persuade Eric Richards to hack the company servers.

  “Let me remind everyone that we just finished the biggest game launch in the history of the video gaming industry. Over 100 billion dollars in revenue, with hundreds of billions of dollars more to come in the next year as we expand the player base. If we do something rash, then we jeopardize that. We risk terrible publicity if this got out – the press would have a field day with this, which is why I remind every employee here of the NDAs they’ve signed,” Akiyama said as he looked sternly around the room. “And with that terrible publicity would come a potentially crippling blow to the Varidian brand, and the loss of tens of billions of dollars. All over unsubstantiated theorizing.

  “But… there is the issue of risk mitigation in case this situation turns out to be as Dr. Wolff has suggested. I sincerely doubt the science fiction apocalypse scenario she’s painted of the AI getting out and running amok, but if there are issues such as players being unable to log out… that’s a potentially serious lawsuit waiting to happen. Which is why I’m going to open the floor to the board members so you can speak to the heads of departments and the software engineers. Please keep in mind that all of them are hearing about this situation for the first time, just like you, so any answers they give to hypothetical questions will be based on informed conjecture and not based on facts – since no one knows exactly what the facts are at the moment.”

  The board took over an hour – a long, ponderous hour – but they interrogated the engineers extensively.

  One of the few questions that took Rebecca by surprise was, Could the inability to log out be a serious medical risk?

  The head of systems sa
fety answered, “If someone is living alone and doesn’t have someone to pull them out of the game – absolutely it’s a serious medical risk. They could die of dehydration after just two to three days, and yet they still might not be able to pull themselves out of the game.”

  Rebecca mainly kept quiet, although she managed to make the board angry at one point when she said, “I don’t think that people who concern themselves with profit and shareholder relations should be in the position to make decisions about technical issues they know nothing about.”

  Lauer caught her eye, scowled, and shook his head briskly.

  She figured he was saying she shouldn’t say things like that, so she went back to being quiet. For a while, anyway.

  “What are our options?” one board member asked.

  “Well, at one extreme, we could just wait and see and gather more evidence,” Akiyama said. “At the other extreme is a complete system reboot. Basically wipe everything out.”

  There was a shocked murmur from all the engineers in the room.

  Akiyama held up his hands. “I said at the other extreme. I don’t think it’s a good idea. We would risk alienating every player on the platform by making them start over again from ground zero. Plus we won’t be able to tell the press why we did it, and ‘routine maintenance’ or ‘design flaws’ is going to be a bad, bad PR excuse.”

  “Not to mention,” Rebecca interjected, “that we have to look at the ethical implications of destroying peaceful, non-aggressive artificial intelligences that pose no real threat to anyone. It would be akin to genocide.”

  One of the board members snapped, “Are you seriously suggesting that turning off a bunch of video game characters is the same thing as genocide?”

  “Get your terminology straight,” Rebecca answered just as scornfully. “I’m not talking about NPCs or programs created to mimic human behavior. I’m talking about conscious, self-aware artificial intelligence constructs, which are unique in the history of technology. And we wouldn’t be ‘turning them off,’ we would be actively destroying them.”

  Akiyama looked at her in disgust. “First you want to kill one AI, now you’re talking about saving them.”

  “An aggressive AI that has consistently thwarted our plans to try to monitor it, and has actively recruited a human player to hack the system, is very different from a self-aware program that’s merely existing in the digital world and doing no harm to anyone.”

  “IF there’s even an AI at all,” Akiyama grunted.

  “I would also like to add that I would be VERY careful in throwing around the word ‘genocide’ if I were you, Doctor,” one of the board members said angrily.

  “I assure you,” Rebecca answered, “I did not use it lightly. We are in uncharted territory here, both technologically and ethically. We should consider all possibilities.”

  “Mr. Akiyama – are you of the opinion that there is no artificial intelligence?”

  “Not a self-aware one that’s doing what Dr. Wolff is suggesting, no.”

  “If there’s no AI, then what’s the harm in letting a couple of teenagers play the game?” Rebecca asked.

  Akiyama fumed. “The harm is in employees deliberately disobeying orders and following whatever policy they think is best.”

  “Since management wanted to hide its head in the sand, I took the initiative to try to find more evidence in order to convince management,” Rebecca snapped. “Nothing more.”

  Akiyama turned to the board members. “And yet because of Dr. Wolff’s actions, there are now three players out there right now – this Drogan, Vlis – those three – who now believe there’s an AI in the game conspiring to destroy humanity or some other nonsense.”

  “Which is information the AIs were going to reveal to the players anyway unless Daniel told them, as you heard from his interrogation. I had nothing to do with that, as Mr. Akiyama knows very well. The fact that he brought it up is a transparent attempt to slander me.”

  Akiyama was furious. “Look here – ”

  “Enough,” one of the board members on the monitors said. “We can deal with the blame game and consequences later. Right now we have an urgent problem, and pissing matches aren’t going to solve anything. The question is, WHAT are we going to do?”

  Another half-hour passed, with multiple suggestions and possibilities being offered.

  In the end, the board decided on a couple of actions:

  Daniel Lauer and Mira Rosenbaum would be allowed to continue playing the game and gather concrete evidence about whether or not the AI actually existed.

  Every department head and their top engineers would devote themselves to figuring out the issues with the lapses in video and audio feeds, the inability to trace characters or manually log them out, the inability of a player to log himself out, and other aberrations in the system.

  Since the best in-game possibility of stopping the AI – if it indeed existed – seemed to be in thwarting Eric Richards, it was agreed that a system-wide message would be sent out to every human player in the game that the fictional city of Blackstone had been conquered by an evil sorcerer. Every player who came to the city’s aid and participated in the siege of Blackstone would be given the ability to level up twice as quickly and win other prizes if the city was successfully retaken.

  And – on CEO Akiyama’s recommendation – Dr. Rebecca Wolff was to be immediately suspended pending an investigation into her actions, to be conducted after the current crisis had been resolved.

  100

  Rebecca sat there in stunned silence as the board delivered their verdict.

  Jon Lauer stepped up, though.

  “That’s insane!” he burst out. “She’s the only person here who knows the AI’s programming, so she’s obviously the best person to deal with it!”

  “Nevertheless, she demonstrated insubordination and extraordinarily bad judgment in going off on her own.”

  “If she hadn’t done what she did, we wouldn’t be here right now, and this thing would be running rampant through the system with no one to oppose it! Hell, no one would even be aware we should be opposing it!”

  “Mr. Lauer – ”

  “Who’s going to help Daniel and Mira out in the game?”

  “You have an entire staff of engineers who can take her place.”

  “Not if anything comes up with the AI! She’s the one who built it! This is like taking the star quarterback out of the game because he went and practiced on his own!”

  “It’s hardly the same situation – ”

  “You’re crippling our efforts to take down the AI if you pull her out, don’t you see that?!”

  “MR. LAUER, you are on thin ice as it is for aiding and abetting Ms. Wolff,” one of the board members said testily.

  “It’s DOCTOR Wolff,” Lauer spat.

  “Regardless, I would advise you to put a lid on it if you want to keep your job.”

  Lauer stopped talking, but he clenched his fists in silent fury.

  “I would like to point something out,” Rebecca said.

  “You’ve had your say,” Akiyama snapped.

  She ignored him. “I’m the one who created the program. I’m the one who noticed its aberrant behavior. I’m the one – ”

  “Yes, you created what you’re now saying is a threat to humanity – good job,” Akiyama sneered.

  She shot him an angry look but continued. “I’M the one who refused to let a potentially cataclysmic problem continue to fester while someone else wanted to bury his head in the sand.”

  “You see?!” Akiyama cried out to the monitors. “It’s this kind of insubordination and arrogance that makes her a liability! She won’t follow orders, she’ll just do whatever she decides is right! If there’s a dangerous rogue element at Varidian, it’s not some mythical AI – it’s HER!”

  “Might I point out that you – ” Rebecca swept her hand towards all the monitors and board members. “ – would not even be aware of this issue if I hadn’t taken the in
itiative and decided to investigate further. And I would also like to point out that I didn’t disobey any explicit orders from Mr. Akiyama.”

  “Nonetheless, you seem to lack a certain perspective in all this, Dr. Wolff,” one of the board members said. “And your refusal to follow the chain of command is troubling. We’ll resolve the issue later following an investigation by an independent board, but until then, you’re suspended. End of discussion.”

  “But – ”

  “SIT DOWN, DR. WOLFF.”

  Rebecca sat down in her seat as Akiyama smirked triumphantly.

  The board went over a few final things – including when they wanted a report on everyone’s progress – then all twelve monitors blinked off, and everyone shuffled out of the room.

  Everyone except the CEO, Rebecca, and Lauer.

  Akiyama glowered at Rebecca as he passed by her on the way out.

  “Go home,” he ordered, “and keep out of this. I’ll call you when you’re allowed back on company grounds.”

  Then he gave Lauer a nasty look before he walked out of the room.

  “Rebecca, I’m sorry,” Lauer said helplessly.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said, still in shock.

  “It’s so stupid – they’re shooting themselves in the foot by taking you out.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “they’re idiots and fools.”

  Lauer frowned. “Well… I don’t know that I’d go that far.”

  “I would. They’re Neanderthals playing with fire.”

  “They’re some of the most respected businesspeople in the world, Rebecca.”

  “Who think that just because they have money, it makes them qualified to make decisions on subjects they don’t understand. Akiyama’s the worst. He doesn’t give a damn about the AI, he just wants to cover his ass and get his quarterly bonus.”

  “You know, you didn’t have to be so inflammatory and insult everybody every chance you got,” Lauer said, irritated.

 

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