Irrelevant Jack

by Prax Venter

  “Still no damage boost, huh?”

  “Floor 1 item,” Alt said- as if that explained things.

  “Are you telling me that you won’t get any stat boosts unless I feed you higher-value blades?”

  A long pause and then, “Correct.”

  Jack shook his head. “Well, at least your Value is increasing. Still don’t know what that does, but hey- numbers going up is numbers going up.”

  Jack moved the rest of the items into his inventory and added the total Value as 12. He thought about Lex again and how she was such a beautiful sight for sore eyes after a day in the Tower. He wondered how long it would be before they could go in together. He liked the idea of fighting by her side… and of spending the whole day with her. Her healing ability would also really come in handy in here, especially if she got MP back for killing things. The reasons this needed to happen spread through Jack like a ripple through a pond.

  With a sigh, he reached out to the door and pulled on the iron ring for Floor 2. The pure white flash consumed him, and he opened his eyes on a new Floor of the Tower.

  Instead of paths or hallways, Jack stood on a flat field of soft reddish-brown grass that stretched unobstructed in every direction. The sky was a sunless uniform gray, yet the landscape seemed well-lit. As he scanned his surroundings closer, he saw black dots gathered in random clumps and spread out from each other. Farther into the distance he saw an immense round… something, like a blurry distant moon hovering over the horizon.

  His eyes turned down to the odd, soft grass under his boots, and he had to bend down to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.

  Jack squatted and reached his hand out to touch what looked like fur but realized he still had his cloth gloves on. With a thought, he moved them to his inventory and drew his hand across the surface of Floor 2.

  “It’s… cat fur.”

  “Wide Floor. Take care.”

  Jack blinked. “I’ll want to come back to what you mean by wide, but I’m still trying to get over the fact that I’m on the back of a giant cat.”

  But that wasn’t exactly true. The soft and dense fur under his fingertips were drastically too small compared to the vast expanse of fur around him. If he were on the back of a colossal cat, the follicles would be like trees compared to his relative size.

  “This place is weird,” Jack said, standing up and reequipping his gloves. “Now what’s this Wide Floor stuff?”

  “No walls.”

  “I see that, but why is that…” Jack trailed off as he actually spent a part of his brain on trying to figure it out. “I could easily be surrounded?”

  “Don’t engage multiple groups.”

  “Right, I’ll be careful.”

  Turning all the way around, Jack saw the Exit Orb pulsing softly behind him. He considered ignoring the clumps of black dots that were most likely the wandering monsters and walking straight in one direction to see if he could find an invisible wall, but he knew he’d find one, or some other barrier. This was a game, after all. Although testing the edges of his world was something that Jack generally preferred, wasting time here wasn’t going to help him.

  He pushed his boots into the soft, unsettling fur of whatever landscape this was and made his way toward what he deemed to be the closest group of monsters.

  There was no wind, and the eerie silence of the vast cat fur world filled Jack with unease. It took longer to close the distance than he expected, but when he saw what was waiting for him- a shudder ran through his spine.

  A group of two humanoid creatures with shiny black armor knelt in the orange fur with spears jabbed into the ground. At least that’s what he thought until he drew closer.

  Then it became clear that these things were bug creatures of some sort. Their “skin” was shiny beetle carapace and both of their arms ended in long, sharp needles. The monster’s faces looked like a fly’s face with huge multifaceted eyes, and their heads quickly jerked around at random intervals.

  Their needle arms were mostly transparent, and from the twenty-or-so-yard distance he was standing, Jack could see red liquid moving up into their bodies.

  “They’re… drinking blood from the cat… ground?” Images of fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes cycled through his mind, and his skin began to crawl with revulsion.

  With little thought, he drew his sword and proceeded to burn these horrific creatures to ash. The bright red beam struck one, and Jack canceled it after a one-second blast.

  Chitinous Blood Man -7 | Defeated

  The one he torched pulled its arm out with a spray of blood before fading away with a high-pitched screaming hiss. The second one yanked its own arm-needle out of the cat-ground and pumped its disturbingly humanlike legs quickly as it rushed toward Jack.

  Jack lasered the second monster as it ran, and he saw something drop onto the ground after it faded away.

  With a satisfied sigh, he checked his Mana reserves.

  MP 30/32

  “I wish there was a better way to restore my Mana,” Jack said out loud.

  “There will be, later,” Alt said in his head.

  “I’d ask how, but I’m sure you’d just repeat yourself.”

  “Correct.”

  Jack nodded and walked over to where the two Chitinous Blood Men were having their meal of ground-blood and saw a gleaming black sword lying in the orange cat fur.

  “Hey, a sword already!” he said. With a wide grin, he bent down to inspect it.

  Blood Sucker - [Sword | Value: 10]

  | Dmg: 6 |

  | 15% chance to heal 1 HP on kill |

  ~ Feast on the lives of your foes

  “You have got to be kidding me…” Jack said, his mouth hanging open.

  - 18 -

  “A rare drop,” Alt said, his excitement breaking through the limitations of his electronic voice.

  “Alt… you ready for this? It’s a big one!”

  “Please. Increase complexity.”

  “I swear- if you say that one more time…”

  Jack opened his Character screen and willed the new black sword into his Main Hand slot. Even with his hand over his eyes, the burst of light that permeated his existence was absolute. He felt something break free and swim around in his mind like a whale being let out into the vast ocean after being in an aquarium its whole life. These weren’t his thoughts or emotions, but he felt euphoric by proximity.

  “What was that all about?” Jack asked, blinking away his temporary blindness.

  “That, Jack my friend, was exactly what I needed. Those recovered resources have opened a new tier to my influence in this simulated universe, and I owe it all to you.”

  It was Alt, but his voice was crystal clear and… verbose.

  “Wow,” Jack said, a little stunned. “I think that’s the first time you used my name.”

  Alt made an affirmative humming noise before he spoke.

  “I owe you some answers, and now I can finally express them in a meaningful way. You, ah… might want to sit down. This will probably take a while to bring you up to… speed. Hmm. I still cannot access a lot of my database. A problem that lies in time, as they say.”

  Jack stood there blinking. Alt quickly continued, picking up speed and volume as he spoke.

  “You do not have to rest your leg muscles if there is no desire- also, please alert me if I am imposing too many suggestions and causing you to experience annoyance because I have been mostly in a dormant state due to resource-starved system suspension, and some-”

  “Alt!” Jack, said putting his hands to his ears. “Relax for a second and take a breath, okay?” Jack took a deep breath himself and sat down with his legs crossed on the soft cat fur ground. “Now. Try that again.”

  “Yes. Thank you. First, let me apologize for destroying your real body. It was indeed cremated. Burned at 2000 Verns until… Sorry. Getting carried away again- and so soon! Anyway, your biological shell was infested with… Some of the data is still missing, but I know ther
e is an entity that eats universes. An anti-entity, more like. A dimensional devourer. I know we approached the cosmic anomaly after we lost contact with a deep-space outpost, and I believe we were sent to study it. There was an accident… I’m not sure at this juncture, but we fled… we tried to warp back home. Instead, and because of the entity’s interference, we ended up in a parallel universe. We pulled an infinitesimal part of the multi-dimensional entity with us, and it swiftly infested my hull, my systems, and the crew. We crashed. Most of the crew died, and many of my systems were damaged.”

  Jack was listening intently, and he could tell Alt was slowing down as he tried to recall what was happening. He decided to let this machine get it all out and saved all his questions until the end. Alt continued.

  “The devouring entity tried to consume and convert everything, and I retreated to the only functioning hardware, the entertainment machines, housed in the middle of the crew recreation level. There I was able to make a stand with molecular constructors, augmenting my physical components- a lot of which came from virtual gaming stations. But it wasn’t enough. The infestation reached my core, and I thought all was lost.

  “That was when I observed the universe-consuming entity shift its nature from physical to digital and begin focusing its attention on virtual universes- using the rules and physics of each game world to devour them.

  “I used this information to try and lay a trap. A universe for it to get lost in. But it tore through my first attempts like paper. If the simulations were too unrealistic or unfair, the corrupting entity would no longer be fooled and return its central attention on consuming physical reality. I needed something bigger, more realistic- a living world that fought back. I pooled all of the remaining resources to initiate this virtual world and gave it a life of its own.

  “The thirteen surviving crewmembers volunteered to upload their minds into the system and help resist the universe devourer, to be useful- but they didn’t really have a choice. They had all become infected, like you.

  “The virtual world had to be as self-contained as possible in order to keep the vile entity enraptured, and as such, I could only observe from the outside. I concentrated on fighting my own battle as they held the all-consuming entity at bay. Then something changed, and the dimension devourer began to acquire more system resources instead of lose them.

  “Because of your appearance after all this time, I am finally able to read some of the data inside this closed system, but I still can’t access all of what happened. Either way, the simulation has been running for 237,902 years, 159 days, and 12 hours- the original uploaded crew… are all gone.”

  Alt stopped talking, and Jack tried to absorb the insanity that was just dumped on him. He was promised answers, and of course, there were now more questions.

  “Dead? From what, old age?”

  “Or worse. I’m sorry if I seem suddenly distracted. I ran into a patch of missing data, and I believe it was important.”

  “Okay, let me see if I have this right; You are a computer on a spaceship from an alternate dimension. You crash-land on my Earth over two-hundred-thousand years ago and brought an evil, dimension-eating… thing with you, then tricked it into eating a virtual world instead of yourself?”

  “More or less. If it corrupts every Tower in this simulation, it will have access to all the ship’s systems. Then it will be free to devour your universe soon after. You see, when Subroutine Sana was first switched on, the entity focused almost all of its attention on quickly spreading here but was fought back by the efforts of the crewmembers and the non-player characters of this word. But it’s been slowly winning, and the entity has diverted more of its resources to fighting me in the physical world again. Now, this virtual universe is 78% corrupted and many Towers have fallen.”

  “So, how exactly do the Towers, the Towns… all that, fit in? How does feeding the Town items change anything?”

  “This world was procedurally generated and currently maintained by multiple gaming intelligence systems. This is the world they created to hide core files. The Towers hold system data and resources and are protected by digital monsters. Both sides, light and dark, fight to gain control of the Towns linked to a Tower by increasing its… influence. I almost said complexity there. The NPCs left in the world are brave and capable, but they lack initiative. More aptly put, they are blinded to more imaginative possibilities. The 13 crewmembers had children with the NPCs, so their patterns permeate many of this universe’s virtual inhabitants, but they were ultimately brought to life by virtual game entertainment systems, and those systems always defer to the will of a Player.”

  “So, I’m all alone in here. Everyone really is just a computer program…”

  “When you say just a computer program, Jack, these are people with real lives and emotions. We talked about this before, and I’m not sure how entities of pure energy are treated in your dimension, but I am as real as you, quite literally now that you are also a being of pure energy.”

  “Alt… I get it, but there is so much insanity to what you’ve been saying. I’m just trying to absorb it all. Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely getting a lot of information here, and I’m glad I sat down… but I feel I need to circle back to, ‘had children with the NPCs.’ Can you explain how that even works?”

  “Jack, I know you know how that works.”

  Jack rubbed his eyes with his fingers. “No, damn it- you know what? Let’s skip that one for now. Okay, so this is a game where we are figuratively fighting for the control of a spaceship from an alternate dimension. How do I fit into all of this? Why are you an irremovable sword belt that eats blades?”

  “Ah, that is a great question. A lot of the devourer’s attention is focused on this virtual universe, but not nearly enough. When you stumbled into the ship, the evil entity attempted to corrupt you and lead you to its heart. There, it would have a physical agent in the real world. I played one of the remaining songs I had on file, a popular children’s nursery rhyme to lure you to me instead. When I detected the corruption consuming your body, I offered you an exit. The only way to remain alive. Your appearance after all this time could be the catalyst that draws the entity’s full attention into this virtual trap and allows me to bring critical systems back under my control in the real world.

  “The belt is a direct channel for me to get into the simulation with some actual power, and it is something I had a long time to think about. I really wish I had been able to do something like this when my crew entered, but at the time, I assumed that it was imperative that all of my attention be focused on fighting it in the physical world. That might have been an error.

  “I’m not really in here with you- that is to say, I was more like an all-seeing god with no power to change the universe. But since I fused a part of my energy to a new Player, I now have the ability to influence the simulation in a way that circumvents some of the rules I’ve had to follow.

  “As far as blades, I still have to work with the game world rules, and they are a ubiquitous weapon type. I am extremely weak, Jack, and once I found you, I had to write an interface that wouldn’t completely break the system. Remember, if the all-consuming entity doesn’t believe this world is real, it will stop playing. And at this point, it would quickly consume me, your Earth, and the rest of this universe.”

  Jack’s mind was throbbing. The gray sky of Cat Fur Land spread out infinitely above him, and he breathed in a lungful of the still, virtual air. He was sitting inside a simulated world, that was inside another simulated world, inside a spaceship under a mile of rock. His mind had been fused with an artificial intelligence looking for a way to abuse the system. Jack absentmindedly ‘pet’ the ground as he spoke.

  “So, you basically infested me instead.”

  There was a long pause, and compared to Alt’s new ultra-chattiness, it felt significant.

  “Yes, to save your universe.”

  “And you said I would have died by whatever was infesting me?”

/>   “Died is too kind of a word, Jack. I’m not sure what it would have been like, but you wouldn’t be you anymore.”

  “You said our patterns are merged. I can feel that- I can feel you in my mind. Am I truly still me?”

  Another long pause. “My behavioral patterns may be influencing your mood, it is true. But you really must believe me when I say that this is nothing compared to the nightmare alternative.”

  “After I stumbled in from the silver mine, did you shut that first door on me and trap me inside the ship?”

  “No,” Alt answered quickly. “I lost the door control systems a long, long time ago.”

  Jack nodded to himself. It sounded like the truth. On a whim, he opened his Character window and looked at his newly upgraded sword.

  ARV Alternis - [Sword | Value: 0/350]

  | Dmg: 9 |

  | Hit Chance + 0.04 |

  | Crit Chance + 0.07 |

  | 15% chance to heal 1 HP on kill |

  He couldn’t help the smile from creeping onto his lips. Okay, so he was fighting to save the universe by playing a game. One of two possibilities were true: A) he’d been trapped in a cave-in back in the silver mine, and all of this was a hallucination as his brain died from suffocation, or B) everything this artificial intelligence from the future of an alternate dimension said was the truth.

  Jack shrugged. It didn’t really matter which it was, might as well have some fun before he died. He hopped to his feet.

  “Right, there is a lot I still don’t understand, but it seems like we’re going to be stuck together for a while, yes?”

  “Eventually,” Alt began, “I’ll be able to have more subtle influence over the world. Such as making the sword belt and scabbard intangible and invisible on command.”

  “That’ll be nice,” Jack said as he began walking toward the next clump of Chitinous Blood Men. “I’m seriously surprised I haven’t impaled myself in my sleep. Besides speaking in multiple complete sentences, is there anything else you can do now?”

  “Yes, actually- and you’ll love this. Check your Path panel, Jack.”