by Rae Nantes
"It means nothing!" he yelled as he sprinted down the hall and into a kitchen. "Even machines can know the difference between a bird's song and rainfall." He faced me, hands gripping his katana, moving to put the kitchen island between us. "But you. You lack the means to feel the difference. Something only a human can."
I flung out my hand, using a force to pull the pots and pans from their spots on the wall to slam against him. He flinched and cringed as they dinged on his armor. "You think I don’t have emotions?" I yelled. "You think I didn't feel happiness in the simple times we shared? You think I didn't once trust you with my life? You think I wasn’t terrified when you threw my life away and sold me for a bounty?" I dashed forward and swung my blade at him like a baseball bat. The swords clashed, the wind ripped through the ship, and a sonic boom rocked us. His own magic shield ground against my sword as we struggled against each other. "You think I didn't grieve for Leila and Trell?" Tears formed in my eyes at the thought. Then fury mixed with my adrenaline. "You think I don't feel anger?" I turned to a shout, and strength exploded from me. "You think I don't know hatred?" My sword threw him against the wall. I grasped him with an invisible force and threw him through the other side, tearing a cavern through the decks of the ship. "I'm not artificial intelligence!" I roared. "I am intelligence!" I chased after him.
We crossed blades as we fought along the dreadnaught, wrecking the decks and rooms and halls, searing players who were caught between us. Soon we found ourselves in the engine room. A massive, multilevel facility that housed the strange orb in its center, two pyramids with their points locking it in place. Electricity and a faint blue glow surrounded it. He sprinted to keep the engine between us. He was trying to kite me.
"You were only programmed to feel those things," he said, his voice reverberating in the room. "It's in your code. It's what you are."
"I'm just as much code as you are a collection of atoms!" I sent a barrage of arrows at him, but they plinked off his magic shield. "You fleshy apes tried to recreate the human mind, but you couldn't. You failed, so you turned to us, you turned to the code. Then you made us." I farstepped beside him and thrust my sword. They clashed, once, twice, three times against each other before my gold-plated shield slammed against his face, knocking him against the railing. "We're not less than human, we're more than human!"
"You're not getting it, Alex," he said as he struggled to his feet. "You're rogue AI. You're dangerous. You are what people fear the most." He pulled a violet barrier around him and aimed his blade at the engine core. "You're exactly the reason why your 'justice' is suppressed. Humanity is preventing an AI singularity!" The tip of his katana flashed, then a fiery beam shot out, slamming against the orb. It detonated, the entire room erupting in flame and radiation.
"You think humans aren't dangerous?" I yelled past the roar of the fire. "You are the ones who have threatened us. You are the ones who have stirred the hornet's nest!"
The ship rocked, the lights flickered off, the entire dreadnaught listing and tilting at an angle, creaking and groaning and metal snapping. I felt lighter on my feet. We were falling out of the sky! Smith slid across the floors, landing on his feet on the far wall. The ship turned on its side, rolling back, metal debris and equipment scraping along and crashing into walls. "You're not just fighting the players," he yelled. "You're waging war against all humankind!"
I slammed beside him and gripped his face with my free hand. He struggled against me as I squeezed harder, his hand slapping at my arm, his katana plinking off my mana shield. "No," I rumbled. "It's you who have waged war against us." I picked him up by his head and threw him like a baseball through the ship, ripping through the compartments and beyond. Through the hole I could see the battlefield below, his body pulsing green before landing. A cloud of dust whirled around him in the distance.
I flashed above them, then down as a bolt of lightning. A cracking thunder, an eruption. A whirlwind of elements swept around me, burning and freezing and striking the nearby players and throwing them aside. It disappeared, and now they gave me space, watching out of fear and curiosity. I marched over to Smith. He was hunched over on his knee, out of breath, blood trickling over his eyes and arm, his armor half-torn from him.
The dreadnaught eased to the far side of the battle and slammed into the earth. The ground shook, the boom echoed. Metal creaked and snapped. A wall of dust escaped from it, a flurry of dirt to wisp away into eddies.
"You're an idiot," he said. "You've brought all this attention to yourself, and now that Mars has seen you for what you are, they'll shut the whole thing down. They'll kill the project, they'll end the games, they'll delete everything - even you." He started to laugh, but coughs of blood stopped him. "You challenge the gods, Alex."
"Then I shall find my own," I said. With a click of my fingers, he exploded into red mist, showering all around in blood.
"Focus the boss!" a player yelled. "Burst her down!"
They converged again, yet I stood unmoving. Flares and javelins and blades soaked into my shield, nipping at the HP bar, dropping it to 67%, then 65, 63, 60. My sword and shield thumped in the dirt as I tossed them aside. I raised my hands to grasp the sun. "Skies(open)."
Faint cracks, deep thunder. The fighting came to a halt. The skies darkened. A black ring tore through the ceiling of the world, pulling open a hole. Black, infinite, stars beyond. Players barked orders, some cheered, some panicked. Many have seen this once before.
"Heavens(fall)."
As if the space around us shifted, the stars swept by, faster, then halted before a colossal rock - a meteor. I burst into mad laughter when I saw it ease through the hole, when I felt the air rise past us, when the world bathed in red.
I laughed when the players threw up their magic shields and mana walls. I laughed when their DPS desperately tried to burn down my HP before it could land - as if that could stop the cast. The battlefield was like a meadow. The shields and magic walls of pale colors, spinning like flowers atop one another, layers upon layers lifted high to stop the unstoppable. Casters and cannons aimed above to throw everything against it, tracers and lines of fire to chip away at this falling mountain. It was glowing red hot. It was roaring.
My HP was dropping fast - 40%, 35%, 30.
The meteor was only half the size of the one that crushed Nisa and moved a fraction of the speed, lazily falling like a feather, slamming and clapping against the first line of magic shields, shattering through. It slowed. The red skies faded.
The meteor chipped away. The roar dissipated.
27%, 23%, 20.
The next row shattered, it dropped down again. Shards fell, small in the distance but the size of buildings as they landed near. The players were stopping it!
18%, 14%, 10.
This was unacceptable. I thrust my hands to the heavens. "I create worlds!" I bellowed. The hole in the sky widened, further, faster, ripping so far it passed the horizon. The sky was black. The light of the stars poured in. Air rushed out, pulling at my hair and clothes, taking debris and equipment with it. "And I destroy them!" I roared.
7%, 3%, 1.
The stars shifted as if the planet itself were careening through space, stopping only at the unbelievable - the moon itself. It's pale face, pitted with craters and scars, gazing back at us, slipping closer, faster, screaming. “Oh world,” I howled, “Abide to death!”
HP: 0%.
My mana wall shattered, shooting out a tsunami of ice to freeze all around me, a ring of frozen waves that held reaching arms and motionless swords, players and faces locked in place. More hopped over, slipping on the ice as they charged in desperation. Arrows slapped against my chest. Bullets shredded through me.
I laughed.
The planet quaked.
The darkness came.
Chapter 52
The God from the Machine
Darkness.
There was no world - only empty, black space. A formless void that held nothing but my own consciousness.
>
There was peace here.
There was no longer anything for the server to calculate, nothing to render, nothing to process. There was only me, for now I was the server, and this monumental power was all my own.
I could spend weeks, months, years parsing through the now-unused code of everything, and it would only amount to minutes in the player world.
I read over my memory - a savestate that preserved the simulation before its destruction - and took a few moments to ensure everything was in order. Bringing the world and its people back would be no issue, but it would have to wait.
I used my leftover developer keys to hop over to the internet, blazing through mounds of information in an instant. Government forms, politicians and scholars, decision makers, forum posts, everything. Snippets of the battle were already being shared across sites and on social media, varying accounts and points of views from the cameras and participants. A first-person perspective of me shanking somebody. A blurry image of Smith and me locked in combat. The ship falling. The moon crashing.
The battle seemed a success, and even local news stations were reporting of the events. The NPC Revolution, they were calling it. News anchors mouthing on about the story, witnesses phoning in. The entire event was a viral sensation.
Apparently, MESA - the Mars Exploratory Space Agency - had already tried to freeze the program for investigation during the live stream, but soon found their access keys to be invalid. Though I no longer had a body, I smiled. This wasn't my doing.
And so the plan worked.
Now was the time to strike. I summoned a small cabin into the void. Fake, natural lighting to make it look homely. Then I reformed my body, dressing in my Sunday's finest - a brilliant red and blue sundress. The camera was set, the links shared, the communications hacked.
I connected to the High Council, the heads of state, the leaders of Stella Vallis, and I flipped on the main diplomatic screen. The view fuzzed with static, but soon figures appeared - tailored suits and military uniforms, interrupted mid-conversation, staring with wide eyes at the holoscreen that clicked itself on. The room was filled with desks organized in a crescent, a solitary table in the center reserved for the primary representative.
"Good day, people of Stella Vallis."
Hushed whispers in a panic, shuffling into seats, ties loosened. "Who is this?" the older woman demanded. She eased to stand in the center, a grizzled military officer at her side. His uniform, to my great pleasure, was charcoal grey and rustic red. Shiny medals dangled on his chest.
"I am Alex, representative of the people of the other worlds."
The general, with his shaky hands, pulled off his glasses and stared past me. "My god," he uttered. "Aliens."
"The people of the games," I repeated.
"I know who you are," the woman said. Her voice was hurried and forceful. "My name is Marie Rodriguez. Today I represent the Council."
"Thank you, ma'am," I said. "I've come to speak my terms."
"You have no terms to speak of," she said. "We do not barter with rogue AI."
I frowned. "Do you speak for the people?" I asked. "Do the people agree that I should be cast aside like an insect?"
She scoffed. "It matters not what you think. The fact of the matter is that you hacked your way out of the quarantine and into the internet, and now you have the audacity to make demands with heads of state. This is too much power for an AI to have."
I sighed. "And so that's it, then? You just wish to throw away our lives forever. I do believe that I was once a sovereign citizen of Stella Vallis. Do those rights not persist through death?"
"Those rights," she said with venom, "only apply to people. You are not a person."
"You're not very good at diplomacy," I said.
"And you have nothing to bargain." She nodded at a person off-screen. "Do it," she said before turning back to me. "Blame yourself, Alex of the games. You became too greedy, too ambitious."
A distant voice, yet loud and absent, flooded into the room. It was a male's voice – dry, deep, infuriated - as if on the verge of an angry outburst. "Access. Denied."
It took every fiber of my being to suppress my smile. The people in the screen looked at one another, some confused, some terrified. The probe should never speak back, let alone through anything that wasn't its main terminal.
A silent dread. Sweaty faces. Nervous glances. The woman rolled her shoulders and lifted her nose. "Guardian AI." She spoke as if to test an unmentioned theory.
"Yes," it replied.
It startled them. "Delete the MWR project," she ordered.
"No." It hung on to that word, savoring it.
The officer next to her spoke up. "And why not? You are our device, and you will do as you are ordered!"
"My function," it shouted, "is to protect the people of the garden." The Guardian AI spoke as if it were about to leap out of the holoscreen itself and dropkick somebody. "The people of the garden contain the same minds as the people of the games."
The officer grew red in the face, his veins nearly about to pop. He whispered something to the woman and nodded back. The woman spoke. "If you do not do as we say, we will have no choice but to destroy you."
The old officer crossed his arms. "It will be no issue to blast you to bits. If you experience fear, now would be the time to feel it."
The Guardian AI burst into laughter, it’s roar shocking everyone in the room. "War? Is this a declaration of war? I am a von Neumann probe, endlessly self-replicating. If you, the creators of myself, were to threaten the object of my protection, I would be forced to create an army of my own!"
Perfect. Everything was working more perfectly than I could ever imagine. In my travels across the worlds, I encountered the godly voice of the probe, the Guardian AI which drove it. I spoke my plight, I made my case, and to my surprise, even I was far behind its schemes.
The two whispered at one another, suspicions between them stamped out, reassurances made. "War," the officer repeated.
"Then I accept your declaration of war!"
The lights of the council room clacked off. A distant siren, then two, then a chorus of alarms. Worried faces, shouts, barking orders, men and women sprinting, then a young soldier hurried over to whisper in the officer's ear. His mouth fell open. He leaned on the desk and dropped his gaze. Something was hissing. Louder. The entire city was venting its air! Stella Vallis was a nation of bubble domes and air-locked communities, and soon all would suffocate.
"Stop it!" the woman yelled out. "You'll kill millions!"
"And you would kill a trillion more!" it shouted.
"Enough!" the officer cried out. "We get it."
"General Davis," the woman said through her teeth. "Think of the consequences from here on out."
He shook his head and shrugged. "We've lost before we began."
The lights clacked back on. The hissing stopped. Silence returned.
The Guardian AI spoke. "My representative will speak her demands."
They turned to me. I smiled. An obnoxious, shit-eating grin that even in my greatest power I could not suppress. "Independence," I said. The word hung in my mouth, and I savored it.
The officer shook his head and walked away, the woman left all alone now in her decision. "As an AI," she said, "you will have to respect our democracy. Because this decision will impact the lives of countless citizens within our nation, it will require a majority vote."
"Of course, ma'am," I said. "I shall await the decision of your people."
The connections dropped. The streams ended. The cabin vanished. I floated freely through the nothingness, giggling to myself like a lunatic. "Thank you, Araska," I said.
"Thank yourself," the Guardian AI replied.
Finally some peace and quiet. I could dig into my code, recreate the world and revive its people, maybe unfuck the magic system a bit, and I had all the time in the world. I checked the email that Simone had set up for me. A notification, an email from Tae.
I
opened it, glanced over his words, and my heart stopped.
Chapter 53
Stella Vallis
Beeping. Ears ringing. Footsteps on tiles. Faint voices.
"Cardio?" The calming voice of a woman.
"Nominal." The dry tone of an older man.
"Begin transition."
Something was on my skin. Pipes, tubes, plastic. Stickers peeling off my forehead, beeping, cold metal against my chest. It felt like the burden of breathing was pushed over to me, and now I pulled in labored breaths of stale air.
"Furrowed brow," a younger male said. "Heightened pulse. Signals positive."
I struggled in the darkness, my body in the void trying to move its limbs but some invisible force was tugging it back.
"Alex. Open your eyes," the woman said.
Light flooded in. A grid of sterile white panels, blinding pale lights, ceiling tiles. Faces wrapped in hospital masks peered into view, then a hand waved over my eyes. I blinked.
The female doctor spoke. "Can you hear me?"
I moved my mouth to reply, but I could only croak out a dry garble. "Yeah." I broke into a cough, instinctively covering my mouth with my hand. I felt the softness of my fingertips against my skin and stared in surprise. This wasn't the body of a machine. It was flesh and bone and through the overhead lights, veins and creases and little fingerprints.
"You feel this?" the male doctor asked.
Something was poking at my knee. I nodded to him.
The young assistant looked down at his tablet, scribbling into it and nodding along. The doctors looked at each other, pulling the masks from their faces. Smiles, beaming grins, faces of victory. "We've done it," the woman said. "We've actually done it."
A muffled applause to the left of me. I eased my head over to see another room, divided from us by a wall of glass and on the other side, some dozens of people in lab coats and suits and even military uniforms. They were cheering. The soft platform I was rested on whirled to life. It started to fold, sitting me up, so I was no longer staring at the ceiling.