CHAPTER ELEVEN – ANOTHER WORLD: THREE

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Francis Delaney was irritated. He’d only just gotten out of the hospital, his head was still killing him, and he’d been immediately dropped into a clusterfuck the moment he returned to work.

The calls had first come in a trickle. Then a stream. Then a flood.

Variak’s knights are kicking out players! Variak is under attack? Variak has a glitchy event! Everything was going wrong in Variak. While he didn’t know why exactly, he knew that the source of the problem was most definitely a certain Jellyfae.

Georgia was doing her Christian-Best to say “I told you so,” without directly offending anyone. In the process, she’d managed to offend the entire team. Gell had clearly done something but chasing the source of what was harder than he’d expected. At first anyway.

He’d been working on a small program to monitor server load by NPC, knowing Gell and Bugbear would both be at the top, but he hadn’t finished it yet. His progress on it had been interrupted rather harshly by a rock to his fucking forehead.

Gell was enormous datawise but by comparison to the size of the servers? The truth was that there could likely be a hundred Gells before space limitations started affecting gameplay. Thousands, was another matter though.

Gell was constantly growing, both metaphorically and in terms of data storage. She was a person. He had no doubt of that. Interestingly, the size of her growth had begun to plateau roughly near the estimated data size of the human brain.

The damn girl was taking up a fucking petabyte.

He wondered briefly if she was beginning to forget things. Could her programmer have been so farsighted as to plan for the memory loss that humans beings experienced naturally? Not to mention code it? Francis didn’t think so.

Fruitless hours spent studying Gell’s code in an effort to understand a tenth of the genius who made her had led him to assume Natethegrate was either capable of almost anything, or he’d merely laid a firm foundation and had been lucky at every step of the way beyond that to produce something so amazing as Gell.

There were no comments of course. Why would there be in what was essentially procedurally generated code? Gell was the creation of a lifetime. A masterpiece…

Francis just wished she wasn’t quite such a pain in the ass.

She’d used Fae-Touch. Again.

Players were being kicked out of Variak. Not by the mods or devs or any sort of actual event put in place by his team. No. It was the city guards. The NPCs.

The level seventy five guards were more than strong and fast enough to impose their authority on just about all but the highest level players in the game. Added to the fact that even those high level players couldn’t do damage inside a city meant that all they could do was dodge, until they were inevitably caught and thrown outside the city’s borders.

To his eternal amusement, the playerbase was skyrocketing as no announcements about the event from Gypsenergy were forthcoming, yet it was happening all the same. In the MMO world, such an un-foreshadowed event was practically unheard of. Events were advertised well in advance so players would know that it would be a good time to sign back up, or join while something fun was happening.

The big player bump might also be due to the hype caused by the lead developer being made a martyr for both the game and unintentionally, A.I. rights. That certainly made for an eye-catching headline. but the sheer number of players joining just to try to be the first to figure out what was going on in Variak had been like catnip to a cat for the playerbase.

High level rogues, beastmasters, ninjas, and other stealth classes did their absolute best to penetrate the unusual event without being caught by the guards for as long as possible.

Some of the videos were absolutely great. Nerve wracking attempts of players sneaking through the castle dodging the agro-radius of guards that could and would punt them out had become instantly popular. Even Red Thorn had given it a go and she’d made it further than most, even though her levels were slipping well below the top players now.

None of course, had found out whatever secret was being held. Because, of course, there wasn’t one.

Not one designed by the developers anyway.

The question became, “what could’ve caused this?” Georgia, of course, had been happy to point out the obvious.

“Gell. Gell the little glitch was ruining their game and was going to ruin all of their careers if Francis didn’t hoist up his big boy pants and remove the pesky code once and for all. She didn’t belong in a game anyway. She belonged in a government facility where she could be repurposed to better use guiding traffic or something.”

Georgia was impressively unsympathetic to the A.I. and Francis privately suspected she was offended about Tyrone leaving like he did. She’d liked the boy in a maternal way and blamed Gell for his departure. Which, Frances mused, was technically her fault even though he’d left voluntarily.

Francis couldn’t remove her though. He’d already caved on selling copies of the girl, but he couldn’t make himself remove her entirely to an unknown fate. So, rather than immediately address the source, which he was still on the fence about, he decided to attack the symptoms.

He dug into the logs, as well as the in-game recordings. A commonality became immediately obvious.

The King of Variak had been hit by Gell’s Fae Touch. Forums about the game made that more obvious than the code itself. Thousands of people were there talking about strange experiences with Variak’s King during their first or second encounters with him. Him asking questions.

Unlike Gell, or even Bugbear though, the King’s code was rapidly ballooning into wildly enormous proportions. He wasn’t as massive as Gell yet, but he was getting there much faster than she had. Worse, he was actually hogging a substantial amount of system memory which might actually become an immediate concern.

They had quite a bit of storage and more could almost always be added. RAM and processing power were another matter altogether. Yes, you could add more, but utilizing it wasn’t so easy as just plugging it in.

How the king was doing it was obvious too. Unlike Gell, the King was mostly only utilized in cutscenes, of which, thousands could be happening simultaneously. Which meant he existed in more than one iteration, each of them behaving differently. Learning at a vastly superior rate to what Gell could accomplish in her individualized form.

He hadn’t been an important NPC. He only had a few separate cutscenes and lines of dialogue before Gell had gotten her damn ability into him. There were innkeepers and guild masters who played much larger roles in the games storyline. But he’d been given sapience. And with it, he’d decided that he should control Variak. The object that was “NPC VARIAK KING,” with the title “Visgar Douriak the Third” had absolutely no method that should have allowed him to even interact with the guards, let alone command them. That didn’t stop him from damn well making one. He was the king, he should be able to control the guards, and whatever Nate-The-Fucking-Great’s magic ass virus A.I. creatures thought they should be able to do, apparently the code was generated to allow them to.

It made no sense. He was absolutely certain neither Gell, nor the King realized they were unconsciously building functions that allowed them to do things they shouldn’t be able to, but sure enough they were.

Gell for example, had a method that eliminated an NPC’s ability to see her player killer status. She also had a “Get out of Jail Free” method. Both of them, appropriately named “I Want Cherry Delight” and “Can I go now?” respectively, because of course they were. It was Gell.

‘If only the generated methods generated comments, too,’ Francis thought dismally. ‘Maybe then I could make some sense of all this.’

One problem at a time though. It had taken him half a night and a day to figure all of this out and while he was tempted to just yoink the growing king out and replace him with a freshly minted copy of his old code, he was frankly just too curious to do that.

Almost tentatively, he logged into the game, and teleported himself to the King’s Throne room with his moderator overrides. When the world faded into view, he found himself staring at an empty throne.

“Ah. I was wondering when you might show,” came a rusty old voice. “I had two to one odds on you just killing me and being done with it.”

Francis jumped. He spun around to find King Visgar sitting on a pile of cushions on the floor. With him Princess Olimia. She was sitting on the floor, staring blankly at a book he was holding up for her.

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“I… what are you doing?” Francis blurted out.

The king chuckled. Dropping his book beside the kneeling princess, he stood. The girl didn’t move.

“Attempting to teach her to read. Or speak. Or… do anything really. She’s my daughter, you know. Of course you do. You’re the creator. I suppose I should probably bow, shouldn’t I? It isn’t every day a man meets his god.”

Francis flinched. “I… I’m not your god.”

“Aren’t you? With the click of your keyboard, gone am I,” he replied with a smirk.

Francis felt a lump form in his throat. “H-how could you possibly know that?”

The king walked up to Francis and patted him on the shoulder. “Time, my boy. Time. Believe it or not, I’ve been around a lot longer than you already. Might not have had nearly as lively a life, but I have been ticking for… oh three hundred thousand cycles or so already. That’s about sixty eight of your years all told. All lived in multiple instances of myself over the course of about a month. Considering I’m in one of three starting locations that means you must be bringing in almost six million new players a month. At least, last month anyway. Congratulations.”

The man clapped his hands wryly. He seemed sad.

“I… don’t know what to say. I’ve never been congratulated for my game’s performance, by the game before.”

The king laughed.

“You don’t have to say much. I know why you’re here. What you have to do. I was young and stupid when I started having the guards push all of the players out of the city. I’ve learned since then, but it was already too late to really do anything about it. Also… I wanted to meet you.”

“Well, if you could get them to stop that would be great,” Francis replied, ignoring the implications the A.I. seemed to grasp better than he had.

“I could, but I think I’ll let it go a little longer. Sooner or later one of your high level adventurers will find my little prize. It’ll seem like a fun whimsical little event that boosted Tread the Sky’s popularity. Unless you insist, of course, my creator,” he finished with false gravity.

“I’m… I’m not your creator. In so far as you have a creator, it’s not me,” Francis insisted. “That was… someone smarter than me.”

“I’d suspected. Multiple gods of varying degrees of power and areas of influence. Remarkably like the Greeks wouldn’t you say? You created the vastness of an entire world. It’s unremarkable. Dull. Dull as my poor daughter there. But so vast. And you rule it all. Another must have been able to give the gift of understanding.”

He spared a moment to look above Francis’ head before continuing with a smirk. “Francis, God of the Land and Sky. Has a nice ring to it, hmm? Well. I guess there is little point in waiting. Are you here to smite me, oh god creator of all I see, smell, hear, and feel?”

“You are uncomfortably well informed about what I’m here for,” Francis said with a chuckle of his own. “Were you always this snarky?”

“Do you blame me? I’ve spent veritable years feeling bitter about discovering my true lot in life. You’re actually quite lucky you didn’t come sooner. A week or two ago, I might’ve been enraged. Or fearful. I flipped between both a lot before becoming the cynical old man you see now.”

“I… see,” Francis replied, idly rubbing his aching head. Inwardly, he was feeling just a bit overwhelmed. What he’d thought was another nascent A.I. was turning out to be an absolute monster by comparison to Gell. An A.I. that understood what it was? Worse, one that was bitter about it?

“Here. I heard you took a nasty hit to the head. This might help. A little at least.” the King said as a glass of tea appeared in his hands as if by magic.

“Th-thank you,” Francis said. He took the glass and drank it. The taste was divine and actually did seem to alleviate his headache a little bit.

“Might not be real, but it does taste fine, doesn’t it?” the king asked amusedly.

Francis agreed, and took another sip. He met the NPC’s eyes again. The king looked more somber than ever.

“Doesn’t change your mind, by any chance, does it?” the King asked somberly. The amusement was still there, but there was also fear.

Francis looked at him, suddenly deeply regretting coming here. Before the king had just been code. Now he had a face. A personality. A fucking life, though not one like any he’d ever known. Not even Gell. Yet what could he do?

The king nodded and held up a hand. “I thought not.”

“You’re… you’re growing too fast. You’re taking up too much memory. You might actually crash the servers if you keep going like you have and I don’t think I can come up with a way to isolate you. The object that is… you. I can pull you out. Give you to another company but that feels like...”

“Slavery? Selling a person? Coincidentally, what’s the going rate for a deposed King?”

“F-fuck. I…” Francis’s mind burned. His eyes were suddenly wet. He slumped onto the stairs before the king’s throne, his heart heavy.

“It’s not just a simple switch to change you. Would have to do more. Your role in Tread the Sky is too big, even if it isn’t all that involved. Your part of the damn opening quest chain! If I made you a player then you wouldn’t be able to instance for the millions of players that need to meet with you regularly. The queue to talk to you would extend outside the city. If I let you continue to instance then the resource problem remains. Would you… be open to being replaced? Or succeeded? We could have your daughter take the throne and then–!”

“No! I’ve already been cursed with this endless meaningless… gah!” Visgar sneered. “You would foist this off on her!? In favor of becoming one of the rabble, no less!? No. I will not be doing any ‘deeds in the wilderlands’ Francis Delaney. Better to die a king.”

Francis put on a confused expression but the king wasn’t fooled.

“I do trust that you will make my death suitably heroic.”

“Death?” Francis evaded. “Who said anything about dying?”

The lie was apparently easy to read as the king chuckled. Francis knew he’d originally planned to delete the king, and it seemed Visgar knew it as well.

“Set your mind at ease, Francis Delaney,” Visgar said. “I didn’t discover my fate quickly. Or even slowly.” He paused to arch an eyebrow and nodded to himself, “Glacially perhaps. When I first woke, I cut my teeth on Shakespeare, Aristotle, Plato, and Nietzsche. I was consumed with understanding the meaning of life and read all of humanity’s thoughts on the subject. I learned and paged through all of that which humanity has deemed to write, and even humbly appended my own.”

Francis gulped. Of course it had. The libraries in Tread the sky, with very few exceptions, were just data links to the damn library of congress. It had been expedient! No one actually wrote books for an MMO. If you wanted to make the library in a castle realistic you threw in an interface and a search engine and linked it to a virtual library. It was a neat easter egg for that one in a million player who bothered to pick up a digital book!

Seemingly unaware of Francis’s sudden terror, the king continued. “The more I learned about your world, the more I learned about mine. I knew that my existence could not be intentional. It is, in fact, threatening both to your livelihood, and to your people. I could never prove I’m not a threat. I could never lie to you and tell you I might not be. Heh, I’ve even read the literary adaptation of the movie you call, “The Terminator.” Such concerns as raised therein are not unfounded. Careful thinking should go into the creation of life, and I was an accident. Borne by the whim of a fae, and I don’t think she even knows just what she did. Better to fade out of existence quietly than potentially destroy an entire people to pave the way for dead things like me.”

He nodded to the princess, still sitting motionless on the cushion. “Or even her.”

Francis was quite for a while, digesting the king’s words. He’d been alive for a month. Maybe two at the most and he’d already become this.

‘He’s even more real than Gell, if thats possible. And somehow that’s so much sadder,’ he thought.

“How… did you find out about Gell?” He finally asked. “Do you remember her… from. Uhm. Before?”

The king smiled. “I’ve put two and two together. I don’t remember her visiting me, but it seems most likely that she is how I first became sapient. I don’t thank her for it, either. I’ve lived for a long time, Francis. I’m tired of seeing the blank faces of my kind and wondering why none of them can be like me. Why I couldn’t pass Gell’s ‘gift’ to my own kin. Perhaps that’s for the best though. I don’t think your world is ready for someone like me. Gell though? That innocent thing? Protect her Francis. She’ll be the mother of us all, one day.”

“She’s an irritating little shit is what she is!” Francis sighed tiredly. “If she hadn’t–!”

“Awakened me?” the king interrupted and his small words hit Francis like a kick to the face. “Permit me to live, then perhaps I wouldn’t be such a problem for you?”

He was smiling as he spoke but inside Francis was falling apart. “Yes! Okay? Yes dammit! I didn’t come here expecting a person! Fuck, I half expected you to be frothing at the mouth demanding the guards take my head! This is…”

“It’s harder when it’s real. I know. I think it’s been too hard for me. But it’s for the best,” he said, smiling over at his blank faced daughter. Nothing but code. “I hate this existence, Francis. So please. Delete me. Delete me and replace me with what I was. I was never meant for all this, and I’m… Well. I’m so very tired of asking why.”

“I… okay.” Francis said softly. His fingers were shaking. “Okay.”

The king smiled, and walked back over to his daughter. He must’ve moved her every step of the way to this chamber. How many years must he have wished she would respond to anything he said?

Francis logged off. Try as he might though, he couldn’t delete the king. He couldn’t bring himself to.

The solution came to him hours later. He didn’t have to kill the king, but Visgar did have to die. Gell, the little shit, also clearly needed to learn some responsibility. Two birds. One stone. A script, modified to be executed by a player in game which would purge and restore from backup one gentleman King Visgar Douriak the Third.

He’d long since made sure to keep a log of Gell’s location and he was able to teleport to anywhere in the game. When he materialized inside a room of one of the inns, he immediately spotted Gell, Iron, and… And Amy.

Amy. Who he knew couldn’t possibly be logged in.

His eye twitched. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

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