'Troy, did you grow up in an area close to a road?` was sent through the earpiece, causing the young man a little surprise. It was not every day that Adam wanted to know something like that about him. In fact, he could find little reason for even asking questions like that. Was… was he trying to make small-talk?

No, it could not be! That did not make any sense. Then again, questioning the mental facilities of an entity based in a whole other perspective than anything he had ever experienced for himself was a fool’s battle from the start. It would have been like explaining the colour-grading of paper to a blind person.

“I guess I did,” Troy answered bluntly, the mental image of his old homecoming into mind. “I lived on the outskirts of one of the smaller cities. Only a few million people, honestly. Nothing to tell about at home.”

It was not every day somebody asked in his past life. There had been some initial questions of it all, back when he started his advanced education. Though, when it was revealed that his background was a bit lower than the average, he was allowed to have his own little corner of space, a figurative wall securing itself around him. His old classmates would not have dared to speak to a commoner, of course, lest they get that grimy poverty on their hands.

'Did you like living next to a road?` Adam sent to him, the young man not truly understanding the weird phrasing used. Did he like to be near a road? Sure. Maybe? That road did next to nothing for him. His family never had any cars to speak of. Once in a new moon, one of those automatic taxis would come to pick up some of the neighbours for routine questioning, yet that pristine road never saw much use outside of it. He did fall on it once. Troy got his left knee scraped half a meter along with it, having wrongly positioned his foot while sprinting. There was a chance he still had the scar, though it might have been too old to really notice.

“I had nothing against it,” Troy said, gliding his fingers along with one of the road barriers. It felt weird, touching that particoloured safety feature for the first time in his life. It had been removed several decades ago, the need for it disappearing when manual cars began to get put out of production. They were likely still used somewhere in the world, but that more just those governments not wanting to remove them due to the costs. Yay for budgeting. “It had its uses. Stopped helicopters from coming around, when somebody had a medical emergency.”

'Were there any other means of transportation, outside of vehicles requiring the use of a road?`

“There were a couple that we could use if there was a need for it, but we mostly just had to use the two feet that were supplied to us at birth,” Troy answered, thinking back to the many days spent roaming the neighbourhood aimlessly, never having any real destination. Walking around and doing nothing had been more of just a pastime, where he would get to be to himself. It certainly beat the Tuesdays where his uncle would come over for dinner.

Those thoughts carried him the last few steps before he reached the wall of the building. Looking at it, he could once again not find any end to it. Originally, he had thought it a simple illusion of him being too close, yet the same problem was found with all the towers around. Even those a good hundred meters away had no end to them. There was no cloudline to hide the end. They just never stopped in their height.

That was possible inside the puzzle-room, Troy supposed. Nothing here was real, only an illusion put forth by an incredibly advanced system. Everything far away was just an illusion, put into the right perspective to seem alive. It was only upon getting close to him that it even had any real effect on him. Though, there was not a big difference from the real world in that aspect. It really just was a tad over his level of understanding, yet the subject was just too interesting to not speculate about. He might never grasp how it all worked, but the sheer fact that it was possible spoke more than a little good for humanity. In a short two hundred years, they had gone from discovering a weird phenomenon that would make cracking sounds to making a full room capable of emulating almost everything found in the natural world.

Yet it could also do more than just the natural world, making buildings look infinite in size, transforming an archaic city into what seemed like a world transmuted by an angry alchemist. It was a wonder to witness. If the experience itself was marketed, millions could be made on allowing people to see it for themselves. Troy knew more than a few rich people who would love to try the puzzle room out.

No… that would not be possible in the current day. The technology was there, but it had not yet advanced to the point where it could be sold. With how much the doctor had ranted about the difficulties in getting it all to work, it was clear that a large degree of technical experience was required to handle the beast. And it was a lost cause to even get started on the buy-in, the price of how much it costs to create the puzzle room itself. If he had to make a comparison, Troy estimated the cost to be about four or five of the higher skyscrapers. In the last decade, a frenzy of getting the largest heights had been started. When the latest finished getting built, it was supposed to top out at… something over one thousand and five hundred meters? The young man estimated the prize in the puzzle room to be about the same. Both were engineering marvels, if only in two different fields.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

'Could you provide me with examples of what could be used instead of normal foot-traffic?` Adam sent the thoughtful man. In the meantime, Troy had begun another state of thought. All of the buildings around them. They looked to be infinite in height. While it was very unlikely that they were, the possibility of it was still very much there.

Dr Fidelis was intending for today to be a test of destruction, to see what Adam would do when he was unleashed upon a city. If one ignored the very foreboding moral complications with that, it became an interesting discussion on just what would happen to the buildings if they were manipulated in any way.

If there was an infinite mass, would the earth shatter the moment the building gained momentum? If the AI destroyed the lower twenty meters, would everything be destroyed by the shockwave that would come after gravity had taken hold of it? Seeing as the doctor had been forced to provide him with extra protection, that might just have been the case.

“Are you sure that you should be focusing on asking me these questions when there is a test to do?” Troy asked, trying to motivate the AI to move on from their casual talk. While he did not personally mind it, the doctor would not always be of the same opinion. It might also have been due to a liking towards wanting to see some very cool destruction of buildings. The young man had not gotten his fair share of action scenes in his younger years and had watched with rapt attention at every little bit of it he could. “If you remember, Dr Fidelis did mention that you will not be getting any more time for this than we already have planned for today. You need to schedule your activities with that in mind so that you do not miss out on anything important.”

This might have been a dirty argumentation. While Troy himself might not have had much respect for the doctor, he knew for a fact that Adam looked up to the man. He was the creator, after all. There was a reason he still acknowledged his mom as his mom. It was the title she had been given when he was small, and that had stuck to him ever since. Those formative years were as they laid themselves out to be, creating the foundations of personality for the rest of one’s life.

'I am sure in my decisions, yes. If we were forced to focus on my ideas fully, I believe we could be finished in less than an hour. However, it is clear to me that this is not our way of doing things around here, much time being spent on other activities. Also, as you might have noticed, we have no official directives on what is expected of me. I could do nothing for the rest of the test, and it would still be considered a valid result, if not an unexpected one. This test will play out according to my own choices. Nothing more. Nothing less. However, I am curious about what other motives you would have as to why you would encourage me to go away from your personal history. Is there something in the test which intrigues you?`

Sometimes… sometimes it was annoying to have an extremely intelligent AI as a friend. Troy could honestly not go ten minutes without one of his plots being found out. At what point did he need to create fake ones to hide the true reasons? Or would Adam realise the fake creation? It was something to try at a later date.

“You really are too perceptive sometimes, you know? Would it be possible for you to turn that dial down sometimes?” Troy suggested.

'Thinking of it as a dial is an extreme simplification of the actual process, so no, I would not be tampering with my own inner workings to please. Also, please answer my question, instead of trying to move onto another topic,` Adam immediately fired back, stopping the man from gaining any ground. It had been a losing battle from the start, yet there had to have been at least one attempt.

“... I wanted to see buildings explode into dust, like those that would be seen in movies. I just thought it would look cool,” Troy answered, being a bit sheepish about it. A part of his inner child was allowed to come out, that side of him wanting to experience the action movies in person. How many films had their grandiose piece on top of a skyline, the people jumping from building to building as it all began to fall apart.

Adam was silent for some time after that. In his mind, the young man imagined that the AI was speeding up his thinking by a million so that he could laugh at him for a year straight. It might not have been what was happening in reality, but that did nothing to stop the idea of it from being planted firmly in his subconscious.

'Is this scene the only reason why you want me to focus on the test?` Adam asked.

“Yes,” Troy answered straight up, his dignity already having been lost by the previous statement. To think that he had made himself utter those words in tandem. He was sure Dr Fidelis was laughing his ass off outside. “It is.”

'Then you have no reason to worry. With preparation, I should be able to imitate this scenario to a decently accurate degree. As a bonus, this will not require much attention from my side for the first few hours, so I see no reason to discontinue our talk.`

“What is expected for me at that time exactly?” Troy asked, not liking the lack of work Adam would supposedly be doing. What was that little bugger scheming inside that little nutshell of his?

'You said yourself that you desired a scene akin to one witnessed in blockbuster movies. From my database, I can deduce the camera angle to commonly be a bird-view. As I have no way to propel you up in the air, the task of getting a high vantage point is up to you. I would recommend that you enter the building, and go up the emergency staircase. We should be able to reach the top by a few hours time.`

The AI wanted him to walk upstairs for the rest of the day… well, it could have been worse. If he complained to Charlie later in the day, the man would probably allow him to skip out on some of the leg-presses. He just knew he would be sore by the end of it, though.

So, with the goal of seeing some buildings getting destroyed, Troy mentally prepared himself to take more steps upstairs than he had ever done before. Not five minutes ago had he wondered if the building was infinite in size. By the end of the day, he would certainly know the answer.