“The Third Key,” Rocky said, coughing behind my back. “I left it here so your patron wouldn’t realize that I woke up. Well? Do you believe me now?”
“I do. Are you Svechkin?” I asked him directly, looking him straight in the eye.
“I was him, once,” the Gravekeeper confirmed. “In the world that you consider reality. Here, my name is different, and it would be nice if you continue using it.”
“All right. Can we talk?”
“I think it’s necessary. Let’s sit down, shall we?”
We perched on large stone rocks next to the fireplace. I was slightly puzzled and confused. So Svechkin had been by my side for a while, observing me, even teaching me to fence. Coincidence or not? I remembered our meeting in the Arch, him escorting me to Thrainul’s ship. Was it a chance meeting? Was he waiting for me there?
“Why a Gravekeeper skin?” I finally asked.
“Disguise.” He nodded, touching the bandages on his face. “Creative, don’t you think?”
“Yes, it’s unexpected. I would’ve never guessed,” I confessed.
“Let’s not waste time on small talk. First, tell me why the Magister sent you,” Rocky said. “He was the only one who knew where I was. You’ve risked a lot to get here. What was your goal?”
“I was to find Svechkin,” I said, shrugging. “The Magister’s looking for you. He wants to assemble the Seven.”
“Lies. He knows our locations well enough. If he wanted to find and gather us, you would have never gotten Max’s sword. The Magister doesn’t want us, only our Keys. He needs a tool to look for them. I think he sent you to fetch the Compass. Am I right? What orders did he give you about me?”
“None, really. Find you, get the Compass,” I replied, perplexed by Svechkin’s harsh tone. The Magister had mentioned a conflict between them...
“All right, let’s do it this way. What do you know about the Seven, the Keys, and all that crap? What did the Magister tell you?”
“Seven Brothers are an emergency protocol that controls procedural generation. All of you, the developers, created digital copies in Sphere. Each of you has a Key in the shape of a star metal weapon. In case of a crisis, you can combine your keys and assume control of the main AI. After the plane crash—”
“Stop! What did he tell you about the cause of the crash?” Rocky interrupted me.
I considered the question. Should I tell him that Balabanov thought that the plane was destroyed by Agasyan, the owner of Sphere? Before this conversation, I had expected Svechkin to jump at the call, happy to return to the Magister—after all, they were part of the same team.
“Why are you silent? Is it a delicate question? Knowing Andrei, he either said it was an accident or fabricated a story about Agasyan’s plotting. Am I right?”
I slowly nodded, confirming his words.
“Half-truths, masterfully disguised lies,” the Gravekeeper said with a disgusted expression on his face. “People don’t change. I recognize his style. Listen carefully, Cat. Seeing as you found one of the Keys, I’ll tell you a story.”
Svechkin’s account was a copy of Balabanov’s with one exception—it showed the events from another angle, revealing the developers’ intentions, the story behind the creation of the Seven Brothers, and the Magister’s motives.
Sphere of Worlds was a project many years in the making—first in their minds and then in sketches and fragments of code. It was nurtured and cherished, like a much-awaited child. Balabanov’s team, then small and working mostly for the military, conducted AI research. Andrei, the future Nobel Prize winner, became the face of their group. He was pushy, charismatic, and doubtless a genius. It was he who was associated with their breakthroughs, even if, in truth, the whole team was behind them.
“That’s when he believed himself extraordinary,” Rocky told me. “He was on TV, took part in various events. He got cocky. We didn’t pay it any attention, although we probably should have...”
When they found an investor and started Sphere of Worlds, his arrogance became especially pronounced. According to the contract with Agasyan, the developers were to receive one-third of the profits—those seven pioneers who had been the core of Balabanov’s team for a long time.
“We got dividends from the company profit,” Rocky said. “A lot of money, and all of it was divided equally, despite Andrei’s formal leadership. That was our agreement from the beginning, as each of us invested into Sphere much more than we had.”
The close-knit team that had gone through fire and water couldn’t survive that. Fame and wealth brought by Sphere twisted the minds of many of its members, most of all their leader. Such was human nature: needs always exceeded capabilities.
“He changed a lot. Money spoiled him,” the Gravekeeper continued. “With a straight face, he told us that we should renegotiate our deal. His contribution was larger, and his reward should be proportional. Andrei took the credit for all of our achievements. We met up and collectively refused his claims. In short, it was a scandal and a big fight.”
All of that happened at the same time as the Taerland Incident. NPC rebellions and illogical actions of the procedural generator forced the developers to join forces and find a solution to the issue. It led to the creation of the Seven Brothers protocol.
“At first, Andrei wanted to make only one Key,” the Gravekeeper chuckled. “But we immediately cried foul and decided to secure ourselves. Seven Keys for the seven of us were a guarantee against being screwed over. Almost everything was in place: we underwent an experimental ‘digitalization’ and prepared secret caches for the Keys. Each of us only knew the location of their own Key. I was entrusted with the Compass. We put our digital copies into hibernation in special spots. They were supposed to wake up upon an external command.”
“A few days later, Balabanov once again gathered us together,” he continued after a pause. “Christmas was around the corner, and he invited the entire team—seventy people at the time—to Mauritius to celebrate. Recently, he had bought real estate there.”
“Strange, I thought that Agasyan was the one to bankroll your vacation,” I said. “That’s what the media reported.”
“It’s all bogus. Andrei was the one who arranged the flight, the tour, and the plane,” the Gravekeeper said bitterly. “Actually, Agasyan kicked up a fuss about that—he didn’t want to let everyone go, leaving only service personnel in the office. I don’t know how Andrei convinced him.”
“So you’re telling me that...” It finally started to sink in.
“Unfortunately, I don’t know if Andrei ever boarded the plane and what happened there. My copy’s memory stops much earlier—the last backup was performed a day before the flight. I woke up here, on the Isle of Madness, next to my cache.”
“So the plane crash wasn’t Agasyan’s fault?”
“The plane crash? Did it even happen? I read online that they found no traces of the plane, no bodies of the deceased. The plane disappeared, that’s it. Nobody knows what happened to it. And yes, I’m absolutely sure that Agasyan had nothing to do with it. We were the goose that laid the golden eggs. Our disappearance caused a horrible panic—they barely found a replacement for us. Do you think that Agasyan wouldn’t have prepared if he wanted to get rid of us? Yamato’s team is proficient, but Sphere’s a unique project. They can’t handle it, and the game’s already out of control. I’m sure that it’s Balabanov’s doing. It’s his style.”
“I don’t get it. Didn’t he die with all of you, or at least disappear? All of his assets went to Agasyan. What’s his interest?”
“That’s what he told you,” Rocky said, grinning. “We can only guess at where our share, or rather our company’s share, went. Most likely, to Balabanov’s wife—she’s the only surviving shareholder. I need hardly say that it’s impossible to learn the details while staying here. But all indirect evidence suggests that Andrei’s alive!”
“How?” I asked, dumbfounded. Svechkin’s words boggled the mind.
<
br /> “My copy left stasis several days after the crash. It was I who developed the emergency protocol, so I know how it works. The idea was that activating the Seven Brothers protocol would serve as a general command to awaken our copies. Until that moment, they would sleep in inaccessible places. I did cheat a little bit, though. I didn’t trust Andrei, so I created an additional trigger for my awakening—the activation of his Key. He didn’t suspect it. As soon as he entered Sphere and took his Key, I woke up in this cave.”
“You mean that the protocol was never activated?”
“Bingo! If it were, everyone would wake up, not just he. Andrei bypassed the protocol to enter the game, and it could only be done from the real world.”
“I don’t understand. Wasn’t your death in reality supposed to trigger the awakening?”
“No. We didn’t count on it at all,” Rocky said, smirking. “I think you don’t quite realize the point of the Seven Brother protocol. Didn’t the Magister give you a good explanation?”
“Maybe he didn’t.”
“All right, I’ll try to be brief. Seven Brothers are the Sphere’s red button. When we witnessed the AI’s antics in Taerland, we realized that we had opened a can of worms. The generator was capable of influencing virtuality, overriding the capsule’s neural interface, even blocking access to the game. In theory, it could create a situation where nobody could log into Sphere—neither players nor admins. That’s why we created digital copies and put our minds in NPC bodies. They were supposed to attack from the inside if there was no access from the outside. Get it? I’m trying to explain it in layman’s terms.”
“I think I understand the gist of it, although it sounds crazy,” I replied.
“Then let’s continue. The emergency protocol wasn’t started, Sphere still works, more or less, but Andrei ‘woke up’ and took his Key. He didn’t rouse the others but quietly unlocked dynamic access to the locations with other Keys. It cannot be done by a digital copy, either—as opposed to a real person using remote access to the servers. Thankfully, as I already said, I was the creator of the Seven, so the most he could do was to unlock the caches for dynamic events. I suspect that’s how you found your Key. By the way, it was intended for Maxim Rubtsov, our game designer.”
“Yes, it was an accident,” I confirmed. “But your Key is here!”
“I hid it here for a reason. Yes, my Key can be accessed dynamically as well. Every 24 hours, there’s a 30-minute window when you can get to this place. But we’re in the Hole. It has few players but a lot of hard-to-reach areas. The chance of anyone stumbling upon this cave is less than one in ten thousand. I believe in math.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to take it yourself?”
“A global message. Andrei would have learned about my awakening and started to search for me.” The Gravekeeper shrugged. “And I want to surprise him. All right, so when the Magister realized that he couldn’t hack the placement algorithm and the chance of finding the Keys dynamically was too low, he began looking for the Compass and sent you here. Right?”
“Why are you telling me all of this?” I interrupted him.
“I’m studying you. You’re a good guy, even if you play your cards close to your chest,” Rocky replied after a pause. “The Magister’s trying to forge you into a weapon of his. You must learn the truth.”
“Your truth. Fine, I think I understand. You believe that Balabanov orchestrated the crash to get rid of his partners. He’s alive, hiding somewhere, and looking for the Keyes...why, by the way?
“When brought together, they grant the ability to control the generator,” Svechkin replied without a moment’s hesitation. “He’ll be able to control Sphere, create or destroy worlds. The owner of the Keys becomes the master of Sphere. He could do anything! I think Andrei’s planning something. He probably wants to wrestle the project away from Agasyan and become its sole owner. He’s always dreamed of that.”
“And what do you want?” I asked. Largely, everything was clear; I just had to figure out a few odds and ends.
“I’ve also started looking for the Keys. It’s easier for me—I have the Compass.” The Gravekeeper slowly pulled out and showed me an unusual device in the shape of a seven-pointed star made from star metal. An elaborate clock-face riddled with lots of icons, several spinning needles—it was clearly the Compass I had been sent to retrieve.
“You’ve probably realized that our meeting in the Arch wasn’t an accident,” Rocky continued. “I detected your arrival to Helt Akor and delayed Thrainul’s departure. I got hired to the Abyssal just to get a better look at you.”
“I’m not talking about that. Why do you need the Keys? I get how you see Balabanov’s plan, but what do you want? The same things—power, strength, money?”
“First, I want to gather all the others,” Rocky said, tackling the creases on his leather gloves. “And second, yes, I must admit that I have a goal. All of us, together, will fulfill our destiny. We’ll destroy Sphere from the inside if it starts again...”
“What?! Destroy Sphere?” My jaw almost dropped. “Why?”
“Because that’s what Seven Brothers were designed for. It’s an emergency protocol: control and destruction. This is the only way to put an end to the procedural generator,” the Gravekeeper calmly replied.
“Honestly, you seem to make less sense than the Magister,” I told him. “At least I can understand his goals. But yours—”
“It’s not just my decision,” Rocky spoke up. “Actually, that was the root of my conflict with Andrei. After Taerland, we agreed to destroy Sphere in case of a repeated incident. He opposed that, trying to convince us that we could handle it, that money was more important... We voted, five against two, and then the crash happened.”
“But why?”
“Why? I’m not sure I can explain it to you. I could try. Do you know what transcendence is?”
“Vaguely. Some philosophical term?”
“Almost. It means being beyond knowledge. A contrived example: take a man and an ant. For the ant, the man’s actions and thoughts are transcendent. It cannot conceive of them simply due to natural limits. What I’m getting at is that by creating the procedural generator, a machine superintelligence, the pinnacle of AI, we fell into a trap. Its thinking is incredibly complex, its plans are incomprehensible, just as human motives are incomprehensible to ants. It will sound like blasphemy, but we created something similar to a god. Some of the things it did seem almost mystical. During the Flooding of Taerland, the first open conflict, we realized that we couldn’t handle our own creation. In short...we stopped Sphere for two days and destroyed all physical copies of the main AI. We wanted to start from scratch with new drives. Millions of terro, by the way! We launched the backup...and everything repeated. Mysteriously, the old generator’s algorithms reappeared on new equipment. Somehow, it preserved itself in cloud storage and immediately gained entry to the new servers. It ignored our protection, as well as our attempts to destroy it. Sphere worked, but we couldn’t control it. That’s when we considered creating an emergency protocol to destroy Sphere from the inside. Adam, our main AI expert, came up with an idea to personalize the generator, combining its algorithms with our Keys. Do you see it now? Seven Brothers are meant to destroy Sphere in case of danger.”
“I don’t see this danger. It’s a game.”
“It’s not a game. We don’t know the limitations of the procedural generator. For example, it could copy your consciousness via the capsule’s neural interface. Lock you out of the game. Burn out the player’s brain. It’s very dangerous, and I repeat, it cannot be controlled.”
“I see that you aren’t going to help the Magister and won’t give me the Compass willingly,” I concluded, standing up. Rocky faced me, his hand on the hilt of his rapier.
“Of course not. I want you to join our team. It’s a matter of your survival—I’m not joking. The Magister will use you and throw you away after getting everything he can. He sacrificed us for his own
ambitions. Do you think you matter more to him? When he finds a better pawn, you’ll disappear. The Key can be unbound, too—thirty days of inactivity will nullify True Possession and return the sword to its storage.”
“So far, it’s your word against the Magister’s,” I replied. “Why should I believe your account?”
“I understand. I suggest waking up Lena Romanova. She’s in this world as well. Talk to her. She might be more convincing. There’s a nuance, however, but I think we’ll make it.”
“All right, I’ll mull this over. I need time.” I decided to play a little trick. I needed to evaluate the situation and possibly contact the Magister. Maybe he could come up with the right course of action.
“Think. How much time? Will five minutes be enough? You need to choose now.”
The messenger number given by Balabanov wasn’t answering for two minutes. Was he sleeping? It was almost 2 AM. At that rate, I would have to make the decision myself, and I had no idea what to do. On the one hand, Svechkin might be telling the truth. On the other, the Magister’s people were already watching me in real life. If I started to fret, the outcome would be unpredictable. What a dilemma!
Shadow Seer (Rogue Merchant Book #3): LitRPG Series Page 21