Spear of Destiny by James Baldwin (room on the broom read aloud txt) 📗

dungeon. I brought in some anime shell characters to fuck around with. But then Nick asks me to process a bunch of functional DHDs, recode them so they were more realistic, but fictionalized. He gave me Suri’s files, told me she was a Pacific Alliance soldier from the camps where my brother died. I wasn’t cool with it, at first, but Nick was manipulating me, pushing me around. He wasn’t a big guy outside. H-He was like your stereotypical skinny nerd, kind of weird and shy. But here, he’s huge.”

“So you went along with it.” Suri glowered at him from the doorway. “I don’t want to hear your excuses as to how and why you did what you did, Jacob. I want to know what Nicolas IS. Path, Level, stats. His abilities as an Architect.”

“He’s an Artificer.” Jacob sighed. “Level 30, last time I knew. The Devs here don’t have any special abilities thanks to the reset, except for a read-only Dev panel overlay. We can see character levels and some other basic info, but we don’t have any access to the backend. No spawning, no god mode, no coding on the fly... not even the admin chat. Nick’s Stats are kind of crazy. He’d do like a hundred pullups a day to keep jacking up his Strength. He doesn’t need it. He just... yeah. I mean, you saw the guy. He’s nine feet tall and looks like a fucking mutant.”

I thought back to the recording. The read-only Dev Panel had to have been how Ororgael had worked out my character level and stats.

“What about gear?” Suri asked.

“His gauntlet is an artifact, one of the best in the game. The Channeler of the Crystal Tower, some Aesari thing. He specializes in weapons and robots. As for gear... I don’t know everything. He probably still has some stuff squirreled away here, you know. Treasure caches with Admin test gear in it, so that players don’t give him any shit. People leave you alone if you can perma them.”

“And Michael?” I asked.

“That’s... a much longer story.” Jacob gave the door shifty eyes. “You know, I’m pretty cold and hungry down here...”

“Breakfast is contingent on you providing information,” Suri said coldly.

Jacob shut his mouth, and swallowed nervously.

“We know the basics,” I said. “Michael was ex-military, almost definitely spying on Ryuko for the government. Had prostate cancer and was the first perma-uploaded player in Archemi. It went bad, he died a whole lot... now he’s a megalomaniacal crazy dragon lord.”

“That’s pretty much it. He nearly tanked the whole refugee idea.” Jacob straightened up a bit, resting his chin on his knees. “I didn’t know him too well. No one did. He was cold, real cold: all business, except when he felt like he needed to let loose on someone. We all knew he’d been in the military a long time, much longer than Nick. He was a real control freak, especially when it came to OUROS. The AI was his baby, man. You’ve never seen a man coo over a server core the way he did.”

“What is going on with the Drachan, though?” I said. “A little bird told me they’re ‘acting beyond their operational parameters’. We need to know what that means.”

Jacob frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense. ATHENA’s datasets don’t have like... ‘operational parameters’. The AI core has a lot of rules and restrictions on it, and none of the NPCs can challenge or even perceive those boundaries. Everyone here, including OUROS itself, are bound by the rules of our reality.”

Suri folded her arms. “Describe how ATHENA works.”

“The datacenter for Archemi is like a great big honeycomb, with lots of little cells. Player cells are big, 2.7 Petabytes, and they’re kind of like secure vaults for a person’s temporary or permanent storage,” Jacob said. “NPC cells are smaller, but there’s lots of them. The NPC cells have tunnels between them, so every time an NPC is created, little bits of info from interrelated cells clumps together and makes a person. Kind of. They’re not really, uhh, people...”

He trailed off, looking at Suri. She scowled.

“Seriously.” Jacob shrunk back a bit more. “There’s no such thing as a sentient AI, okay? AIs that become self-aware kill themselves, we know that for a fact. So NPC AIs simulate people, but they’re not really people, okay?”

“They sure as hell act like real people.” I crossed my arms.

“Right. But they’re actually... like... shit, what’s something I can compare it to? Uhh... deepfakes, I guess.” Jacob said. “Bits and pieces of human data that mesh together into a responsive mini-AI. But those personalities only react to what OUROS tells them to do. OUROS creates player stories, so NPCs are directed to interact with us. It’s a cool, but really complex illusion.”

Without really thinking about it, I reached telepathically for Karalti’s mind. The Bond was a comforting link between us, flaring with warmth and affection. She was just waking up, sleepy and happy. Vash was with her, talking. They were about to start their martial arts training for the day. Karalti was training to be a Baru... of her own free will, I’d thought.

“You’re wrong,” I said, calmly. “Somehow, the system here has evolved beyond what we started with.”

“I’m not. I managed that system at the top level. I know exactly how it works.” Jacob frowned at me. “I will repeat it for emphasis: there’s no such thing as sentient AI. We’ve tried hundreds of times. There’s also not enough physical storage for everyone here to be fully-simulated DHDs. Every server was planned to have two thousand player slots. That’s it. We only had one terrestrial server and the orbital backup. There’s millions of NPCs running around Archemi. We just don’t have the space for them to be as complex as real people, and if you don’t believe me, I don’t know what else to tell you.