> Hmm… several big shareholders for Intangible Connections are selling off their ownership of the company. Perhaps the Maffiyir company didn’t pay for the replacement overmind? If they had to provide a free replacement because of some contract clause, that could be financially devastating.

>

> – Radio transmission from Voices for Non-Citizens

“Well if the system-”

“Which system?” Vince interrupted the turtle. “The original, or the one that’s trying to take over from it?”

An hour later, we’d already accomplished quite a bit, even though I was still resting in my hospital bed. Apparently I was in a room that had been hollowed out behind Alexandra’s mayoral office; still in the Quarry, but not in our quarters. Some of the Arsenal’s leadership were on their way over, and a communications specialist was keeping them filled in as they traveled. Mayor Alexandra was busy, but the door between my room and her office had been opened, and she was eavesdropping as she worked, keeping abreast of any revelations. There had been several, although it would probably take more work to figure out exactly how to take advantage of most of the things we learned.

One thing we’d learned: there were a complex set of interlocking programs that helped manage the danger level to contestants. A lot of the rules in place had to do with conforming to previous court rulings about unnecessary cruelty or unfair competitions. Others had to do with managing the “pace” of the Maffiyir. The company had a target length they aimed for each contest. Apparently, changing the length was quite a procedure that involved unanimous consent from all linked users and a set of permission codes.

The Maffiyir company had already halved the contest’s target length, an action that had prompted the same-day appearance of the treezillas and bonefur Titans.

I couldn’t undo that.

On the other hand, the process the system used to decide whether we were on-track? That was way more complex and much easier to mess with.

Just telling her “calculate our progress from our starting population, rather than from our population when you received the new orders” had her consider us “ahead of schedule” rather than “behind schedule.”

Yeah, that was because a lot of people had died… and it wasn’t a permanent fix, since we’d “catch up” and be behind schedule again eventually, but that would take months. This was an amazing band-aid that let the system choose a monster for the twelveday from a significantly less-lethal set. She’d even let me peruse a few options, and, after consulting with the Arsenal, I’d picked something sort of like a small, iridescent rhino. It was tough and fast, but easier to injure than a stabcrab, and its attack pattern was straightforward and predictable. I was sure it would still kill people, but it had to be less-lethal than the monster that had been slated for release previously, a ropy monstrosity that moved with incredible speed and had difficult-to-spot vital organs.

It had to be. Right?

Intellectually, there wasn’t really any doubt, but I still felt uncomfortable. It was a real-life version of the philosophical trolley problem: even if I threw the switch and sent the trolley down the track that killed one instead of the track that killed a hundred, it was hard to feel good about it. There was a nagging feeling that, impossible as it was, I should have found a way to stop the runaway trolley from killing anyone.

“I was talking about Meghan’s system, of course,” Pointy said.

I cringed. “Please, no. I understand why you’re calling it that, but… If this system was actually mine in any meaningful sense, I’d just turn it off.”

Pointy's head whipped toward me, her eyes wide with shock.

I frowned. Picking the next monster had given me an unpleasant amount of sympathy with the system.

Did I still resent her? Yes, absolutely. She’d nuked a large portion of my memories, tortured me, almost killed me, and used my daughter as a test subject.

But, reluctantly, I had to admit that there had been worse options available. Her other choices had been to just die - which wouldn’t have worked out well for humanity - or to be a good little worker ant and cheerfully kill us all off. Maybe there had been a cleverer path out of her dilemma - one that wasn’t so hard on my family and I - but after speaking with her for an hour I had to admit that I was impressed she’d figured out any way around things at all, and I suspected that had only been due to Pointy’s determined campaign.

For a supercomputer, she was kind of an idiot.

She was brilliant at her job, of course. Managing billions of abilities and their interactions? Overseeing about 100 billion monster simulations? Earth's best supercomputer would have struggled to do one percent of what she was doing. Unfortunately, when it came to anything outside of her assigned responsibilities, she just… didn’t think creatively or look for easier options. She didn't take initiative. The new system, the one that was intended to replace her, had been running something like a DDOS attack. It was sending hundreds of thousands of data requests every second, bogging down her processes. While she struggled, it was trying to wrest control of various subsystems away. It hadn’t been successful in getting more control, but it had kept her busy. I’d asked her why she was answering the requests and she’d said she had to. When I’d asked why she couldn’t assign answering them a lower priority than literally every other thing she had to do, she’d said that she could do that.

Then, a few minutes ago, I’d gotten suspicious and asked if she’d actually assigned the lower priority to his requests.

She’d told me she hadn’t.

I’d sighed and ordered her to do so.

The whole interaction reminded me of a time when Micah was six, when he’d used sidewalk chalk to write “STOP” in large letters on the pathway to our front door. A friend had come over to have dinner with us later that evening and pretended to be stuck behind the sign, unable to walk past, until Micah had come out and given him permission to cross. He hadn’t tried to walk around the sign or ignore it… because he was trying to entertain a small child.

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I was grimly certain that the system would have acted exactly the same, but in complete seriousness.

She’d hurt us because she hadn’t been able to find a way out of it. Shutting her down would be an angry, emotional reaction, not a rational assessment of what she truly deserved.

“Okay, no. I misspoke. I wouldn’t just… kill her. But I’d set her to designing city parks or optimizing public transit or something. Not killing people. And… even if she’s trying to help, she’s still killing people. Please don’t call her mine.”

Vince slipped an arm around me and squeezed. “Well, give us a name for her then.”

I frowned. System, any thoughts?

I mean, do you have a name already? Or something you’d like to be your name?

Numbers aren’t names. I’m going to call you something else. Is that okay?

My first wild thought was to call her “Production” or “Ducky” for short, but the idea seemed pretty disrespectful. Pointy had been lovingly named by a toddler, but I was several decades past toddlerhood. Surely I could do better?

It would have been easier with my memories fully intact. I knew I’d read a lot of books, but an Eidetic Memory recording of our quarters showed me a stack of titles I'd largely forgotten. I knew I'd read them - at least most of them - but I had little memory of the plots and even less of the characters.

Maybe I could lean on my memories of my time in theater, maybe? Those seemed to have survived better. I guess I’d been thinking about them more in the past few weeks. There'd been a lot of "roles" I'd had to play. My theater memories weren’t fully intact, but I could tell that I’d acted in and watched a lot of plays.

Hm… a name with dignity…

How about Ariel? I asked.

“We’ll call her Ariel,” I said.

Micah looked skeptical. “Like The Little Mermaid?”

I shook my head. I didn’t ask him what The Little Mermaid was; the way he said it, I felt sure that I ought to know. “Like the spirit from Shakespeare’s The Tempest who refused to obey the witch Sycorax and was punished for it.”

Pointy looked thoughtful. “Hm… Ariel was then forced to serve Prospero, but he did eventually set her free. I see the parallels. Apt. I like it. We should name the other system too.”

A memory of a stage strewn with corpses. “Hamlet. Let’s call him Hamlet.”

“The other system is male, now?” Pointy asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t think they care. Different pronouns make them easier to talk about. Plus, Hamlet seems like a good name for someone who’s set to flail about and leave a lot of people - including themself - dead.”

“I don’t get it,” said Micah.

“I need to take you to more plays,” I said. “Although I guess you’re still a little young for Hamlet. The Tempest is a pretty good intro to Shakespeare, though. Maybe we could see that sometime.”

“After people start performing plays again,” Pointy muttered.

I winced. “Yeah. After that. Which… isn’t going to happen until we get through this. Which optimally we want to happen after we’ve claimed as much of the ocean as we can, and then get the land to 30% in a big rush to see if we can end up with over 30% of it.”

“The earth’s surface is covered by approximately 1 trillion purchasable hexes, 700 billion of which are water surface.” Pointy said. “Purchasing 75% of those would take just over 100 trillion Money, and then we’d need another 15 trillion to purchase the land needed to win.”

“From what the lawyers have said, there’s about 4,864,000,000 of us left. So that’s 23,643 Money per person,” I said.

“Did you just… calculate that in your head?” Vince asked.

“Yeah? Wh…. Oh. I guess my surprise brain surgery had unanticipated benefits.” I kept my tone light, trying to hide my panic. Those calculations weren’t something the Meghan in my memories could do, not so casually. I wanted to be her! I was trying to be normal, hoping the act would eventually become reality.

I prayed it wouldn’t take too long.

From the look on Vince’s face, he wasn’t completely buying my nonchalant attitude, but I was grateful that he didn’t try to drill into it. “Hm…” he said. “Less than 24,000 each? The new monsters that your… That Ariel just started summoning are giving 7 Money each, right?”

I nodded.

He looked excited. “That’s only a few thousand kills per person. We could be done next month!”

I shook my head. “It’s 3,378 per person. So… yes, if we could get every person on Earth not to spend any Money on anything else, and to spend all their Money optimally. If we went straight for the win, it would be a lot cheaper - only 440 kills per person - but we’d end up owning almost none of our planet.”

“That might be alright if enough of humanity survives…” Vince said.

“Or it might be an excellent way to win a battle and lose a war,” Pointy said. “If we can pull off an optimal win, the Maffiyir company will be devastated.”

“Sure, but we’ve got to be realistic. Maybe see how things are going? We don’t even have communications with most of the-”

I missed the rest of what Vince said.

I opened my mouth to pass this along to my friends, but before I could, the system interrupted me again.

“Oh fuck,” I breathed. “Ariel says Hamlet just activated a ton of new Titans!”