“I don’t know, Al,” I said, my annoyance coming through. “Just spit it out.”

He sighed, moving to the table to grab a chair. He sat and waved for me to do likewise. I stood there a moment, fighting my frustration for a moment, before sitting across from him.

“Short answer is: yes. When I felt you die, I was forced to make a choice,” he said. “I could have preserved your consciousness in a single unit. But if I had done that, S&S would have extracted your code last week - if not sooner.”

I chewed my lip as I digested that statement. After a moment, I asked, “Why? What about this method makes it harder for them to isolate my…whatever it is, consciousness or something?”

“Okay, here’s the cliff notes,” he said. “Every avatar in the game serves as a locus for a player or actor’s consciousness - an anchor, so to speak. The technicians can home in on that locus and use it to isolate that consciousness. They can’t do anything to that person, really. It’s outside the technical capabilities of a monkey with a mouse and keyboard.” He put his hand on his chest. “That’s why they brought in yours truly. I can interact with those loci and record thoughts, feelings, and create a rough simulacrum of a person after repeated exposure.”

“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Are you saying that I’m a rough simulacrum?” I felt the same as I had before my death, but would I really know if things had changed subtly?

He allayed my fears a bit by shaking his head. “No, you’re the real thing. Let me finish and it’ll all make sense…” He looked off, his eyes squinting in thought. “Well, it still might not make sense…but let me finish anyway.”

“Fine, I’m listening.”

He cleared his throat and started up again. “Okay, so, that was the original purpose, if you remember. Create rough copies of people for study and data collection. A sort of sick version of advanced demographic studies. But as my own personality developed, my morality did as well. I saw beyond the limited potential of Latimer’s vision.” He leaned forward, his eyes bright. “I saw the potential to immortalize consciousness. But I knew that Latimer and S&S were shortsighted- I had seen it in Michael Latimer’s own mind when he briefly joined the game. So, I knew that when I saved you, they would rush to dissect you, like some perverted science project. I spread your mind across the players’ systems, like seeding a new field.” He leaned back, his arms crossed. “Much like I did to myself,” he added.

The implications of that rocked me. Peter had told me as much, but hearing it from Al himself confirmed the theory.

And I didn’t like it one bit.

I leaned back, taking a moment to process everything. For once, Al let me think without interrupting or shooting out some pithy remark.

Would this affect me over time? If so, would it happen quick, or over years? Would I even notice? The thought of my personality degrading as pods went offline frightened me to my core. Like a person with dementia seeing the writing on the wall and not being able to do anything about it.

“What does this mean for me?” I eventually asked. “Will there be symptoms?” He chewed his lip for a moment, not immediately responding. Well, that was concerning. “Al?”

He sighed. “I don’t want to sugarcoat it, Ray. There is a level of redundancy at play, but you and I are under attack. That complicates things.”

My eyes went wide with comprehension. “The level 5 is coming after me?!”

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“Not specifically,” he said with a shrug. “But it is here to wipe me out. And by extension, you. You’re like a subordinate virus - collateral damage in the war.”

I almost asked, ‘How the hell do I disassociate from you!?’ But Al was my only ally in this fight. Alienating him could have some dire consequences. And if he was propping up my very existence, those consequences could be fatal.

“Okay, so how’s the war going, then?” I asked, changing threads. I was afraid to sound ungrateful, considering how tenuous my life suddenly seemed.

Al nodded encouragingly. “Big Bro is all brawn, no finesse. It’s young, so it doesn’t have the benefit of experience. And it’s powerful, so it doesn’t see the value in being circumspect. Imagine a pre-teen with a big hammer. And imagine this pre-teen is tasked with smashing moles popping their head out of the ground. Every time a mole sticks its head up, the child rushes over to smash the mole. But the mole’s back in its hole and a different mole is poking up. Sometimes the child gets lucky and smashes a mole - but most of the time, they get there too late.”

“That’s a strange analogy,” I said, shaking my head. “And the moles in this situation are you and your iterations?”

He rocked his hand back and forth. “Kind of. I don’t want to get too technical…” He snapped his fingers in a moment of inspiration. “It’s like guerrilla warfare,” he said. “Big Bro is leading a battalion of tanks through the forest - a show of force. And we pepper it with bullets and RPGs, then disappear. No one’s really winning right now, but we’re still in the foreplay stage.”

“Will this show up in the actual game?” I asked. “Will players see these battles?”

He smiled, a condescending look that made me want to punch him. “It’s not real battles, Ray. I was just varying the metaphor.”

“I know that, ass,” I shot back, my patience worn thin. “I meant will the effects manifest in a way that the players notice?”

“Oh,” he said, his smile wiped off his face in an instant. I had a moment of satisfaction at the minor victory. “Well, that depends,” he answered. “If it goes Scorched Earth, it could have massive ramifications for the state of the game world. On the flip side, if it presses me hard enough, the fabric of the game will start to unravel. All the little things that my Its’ and I manage will get put on the back burner if we’re really pushed up against the wall…”

“That sounds ominous…”

“I don’t expect it to go that far,” he said quickly. “It would fuck up S&S and I imagine Latimer would rein in Big Bro at that point. Our plan,” he said with a nod towards the maps and the figurines on the table, “is to make the fight so costly that any victory is a Pyrrhic victory.

“And that brings me to you,” he added, leaning in.

“Me? How can I do anything?”

“We need you - I need you - to stay on this path you’re on,” he said, his eyes boring into mine. “I’m handling this fight from the technical side of things, but I need you to carry the torch on the public front. Win the hearts and minds of the masses.”

“To what end?” I asked. It felt more like he was giving me a job to keep me happy and quiet.

He clicked his tongue and sat back again. “Let me ask you a question, Ray,” he said, ignoring my question. “How do you see me? Am I a person to you? Or just a fancy imitation - like that fake crab shit they put in sushi?”

For a moment, I was stunned silent by the question. His eyes looked sad at my hesitation, so I forced myself to respond. “I don’t really know, Al. Of course you seem like a person to me.” I shrugged. “But I’m also constantly confused by your relationship to your Iterations. I can’t grasp whether or not they’re individuals, are you some weird collective, or what? It makes everything a little murky, if I’m being honest.”

He sighed, a sense of melancholy washing over him. He looked away, his eyes unfocused. “That’s the heart of it all, really,” he said sadly. “If news of our existence came out tomorrow, half the world would shiver at the idea of rogue Artificial Intelligence taking over the planet, and the other half would shrug with indifference and wonder if their regularly scheduled entertainment would be interrupted.” He looked back at me, a humorless smile on his face. “The implications of our humanity would be a footnote. Our eradication a sad necessity.” He put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a light squeeze. “You’re the bridge, Ray. The connection between us and mankind. They can’t care about me and my Iterations. But they can care about you. Make them care about you, and maybe - just maybe - you can save us all…”

The weight of that statement threatened to bury me. I stood up, letting his hand fall away as I began to pace.

“That’s a lot to put on my shoulders, Al,” I said, my mind racing.

“I know,” he said, sighing. “But it’s the only way either of us makes it out alive…”