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

Archemi’s a game, not a second Earth. It wasn’t meant to be used the way we’re using it. It’s why... that’s why...”

He looked to Suri again.

“You didn’t think you were hurting anyone,” Suri said.

“Yeah. But you were different. You were a DHD we trimmed down and rewrote,” Jacob said. “Human datasets can be turned into NPCs, but NPCs can’t be turned back into DHDs.”

“I see people here take independent actions all the time.” I crossed my arms and shook my head.

“They’re not. They act like they are, but if OUROS stopped giving them directions, they’d just stop and stand there,” Jacob said. “They’re like... like mirrors. Or puppets that act like a mirror. If OUROS quit running the game for some reason, every person in the world who wasn’t a DHD uploaded via GNOSIS would freeze.”

Well shit. I’d seen that before. Cutthroat had done it once, when the server in Alaska had been nuked and the game rebooted from the satellite server Ryuko had thoughtfully put in space.

“Explain what OUROS is,” Suri ordered.

“OUROS is probably the most advanced simulator AI in existence,” Jacob said. “Michael worked with the Ryuko Contract Division team that developed the military version for the government, which they called Project Acanthis. He didn’t talk much about that stuff, obviously. The system we worked with used the same basic neural structure as Project Acanthis, but our OUROS doesn’t have any other connection to it. It’s a great big storyteller system that manages everyone and everything here. But it’s not self-aware, and neither are the NPCs.”

“Prove it,” Suri said. “As Hector said: the people we know here are really fucking complex.”

The admin made a sound of irritation. “If NPCs were really sentient, they wouldn’t have any reason to issue us quests. They’d just talk to each other and fix their own problems, not wait around for heroes to come along and do it. They’d make their own heroes and throw us in the trash.”

“They have made their own heroes,” I said. “Vash, for one. He’s solved a bunch of problems here all by himself. Mayor Bubek, for another. He’s a merchant NPC who stepped up to save his city from undead. All of that happened independently of what we did here.”

“You don’t know that. Chaos is math, math is the language OUROS uses to predict our actions and shape storylines. It can accurately predict those kinds of variables in like... two hundred milliseconds.” Jacob shifted uncomfortably. “I... I admit I thought Vash was a player character at first. He reminds me of my Rabbi. Anyway, you wanted to know about Michael, not me. Well, uhh... let me think. Okay. Well, he was religious, I remember that. He was at church every Sunday and in the gym working out every morning. Apparently he had a real shitty childhood, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at him. Someone else told me that.”

“Who’d you hear it from?”

“Steve.” Jacob’s eyes flicked to me. “He knew Michael the best. I wouldn’t say they were friends, but they were the smartest guys on the team. They respected each other, you know?”

I shrugged.

“Steve said Michael was a civil war orphan. He survived in the border camps up north,” Jacob continued. “He joined the Army to get away from that life, fought his way up from nothing. He hated mess and dirt. Like, if anyone working under him left an empty coffee cup on their desk where he could see it, he’d freak out on them. He wouldn’t let anyone into the office if they were sick. And when he found out about the cancer... he was angry. He wasn’t sad at all. He was pissed.”

Suri glanced at me. “Sounds like he wasn’t that stable to begin with.”

“Yeah. And when he was uploaded, yeesh. It was awful.” Jacob drew into himself a little more, frowning. Some of the cringing air had abated, though he still flinched whenever Suri moved. “Nick was the only one who wasn’t wrecked after Michael’s upload fucked up. I was there when we spoke to him after, though. He was... something had changed. He wasn’t the same person. He had this thousand-yard stare, and he said... uhh...”

“Go on.” Suri urged.

“He said the Drachan spoke to him. Showed him things.” Jacob’s voice dropped, becoming softer and more urgent. “War stuff. People getting blown up, dying of disease, all kinds of shit. He said they were trying to destroy him. That there was something evil and fucked up here. Demonic. That was the word he used. He tried to fix it from the inside, and as far as I knew, he succeeded. After that, he didn’t talk about it again. But then, when he began trying to take over the world and started fucking around with ATHENA’s core database to change all these characters and things, and we realized he was still going on about the Drachan. He tried to erase them from the game. I never really understood why. He just told us they had to go.”

“Anything else you remember?” Suri asked.

“Steve was the one who had to delete him and wipe the server. He took it real hard,” Jacob replied, shifting his gaze between the pair of us. “Steve was always a hard worker, but after Michael’s death, he practically lived in the office. I’d come to work in the morning and Steve would already be there. He ate at his desk. He’d still be in there working by the time I left around six or seven o’clock. I’m pretty sure he slept in his chair more than once. He never said anything, but I figured he felt responsible for what happened to Michael.”

“I guarantee you he did.” It was my turn to look away.

“Is there any way OUROS could be making the Drachan do what Ororgael claimed?” Suri asked him.

“Psst, no.” Jacob rolled