V tugged somewhat ineffectually at the hem of his borrowed sweater. Alex was shorter than him by a good foot and a half, and the too short sweater barely covered his stomach, which unfortunately left him standing around in a pair of borrowed underwear because there wasn’t a chance Alex’s pants would fit him, and well, he’d been going commando.
The person in question snorted. “Maybe you would have been better off in your messed clothing.”
Grumbling, V grabbed a blanket from the back of the sketchy looking sofa and wrapped it around himself, hoping that it had been washed recently—he’d been in enough staff areas of various businesses to know the furniture and blankets had usually seen more than their share of sex. Thankfully, Emilia either hadn’t had this thought or didn’t care, the woman blinking up at him from where he and Alex had dropped her onto the couch.
Alex had then proceeded to disappear, intent on both getting V his ill-fated change of clothing and something to help Emilia sober up. So, V had stripped. Emilia had giggled more, making comments about his body that he rather hoped she would repeat once she saw the current him in her real mind and body. He had at least had the decency to turn away while stripping out of his pants, which ended with Emilia whining about not getting to see the good stuff and him flashing Alex, who had mercifully just raised a delicate eyebrow at him and thrown the change of clothes in his general direction.
“No more butt…” Emilia sighed, reaching out as though she intended to peak into the confines of the blanket to see his ass again.
“Stop that,” V grumbled, lightly smacking her hand away and earning him a combination of giggles and despondent sighs.
“I don’t remember her being this touchy with you during the war,” Alex noted as he attempted to haul Emilia upright to force-feed her the remedy that would hopefully sober her up… or knock her out. V was still undecided as to which was the better option.
“She’s not herself,” V said, sitting as far from the handsy woman as he could. Sober Emilia could choose to touch him. Drunk Emilia didn’t need any regrets, regardless of whether she’d remember it or not.
Snorting, Alex made a remark about both her general state of intoxication and PTSD being a great combination for making her not herself. “Is that how you two ended up together? Trauma buddies?”
V contemplated his former teammate for a moment. Usually, inside raid dreams that were this vivid, it wasn’t recommended to tell the people you happened across they were in a dream. Most human minds—even those that were digital copies—couldn’t comprehend that they were themselves and yet only a fragment of a memory, destined to be erased the moment the dreamer woke. Mostly, they’d just unravel into insanity. It wouldn’t hurt the real person, just leave the dreamer to deal with a self-destructing AI copy of them.
Alex wasn’t the type to unravel, though, and V easily told them what had happened—what the dream was, what they were.
Alex barely blinked. “I see…” they breathed out, face scrunched up into the same thoughtful expression they’d always worn while contemplating the intricacies of AIs within the unit’s training system. Where they had learned so much about AIs and artificial humans, V wasn’t sure any of them had ever found out, but Alex had been the one primarily responsible for creating the AIs for the monsters of the training system, although they had refused to cooperate with Hail in creating the more-human AIs that now populated virtual raids.
No one in their unit—not even Helix, as far as V knew—knew how those AIs had been created, something that itched at his brain from time to time, a part of him knowing that something about their existence was wrong—shouldn’t be.
“You say the raid is messing with people’s brains? That shouldn’t be possible,” Alex said as they coerced Emilia into drinking more of what was most certainly a disgusting concoction. “Are you sure it wasn’t just AIs taking over hero avatars? I’ve heard about that in blackaether raids, although…”
Although all that had ended badly. Depending on the year, the true horrors of that whole situation might not have come to light yet. “What year is it?” V asked, his own Censor refusing to give him any information other than that it was the Eve of the Astral Storm.
Alex shrugged, saying their Censor wouldn’t tell them either, but they had only started seeing Emilia in raids around town recently. “We don’t really hang in the same places, and Emilia doesn’t like raids, so avoids them and keeps to herself and her friends.” In other words, she hadn’t noticed Alex during those raids, and they’d had the sense to leave her alone. “Seems to have found herself a couple of good friends at the university. I think they’re only in their second or third year? I think…” Licking their lips, Alex seemed to be sorting through their memories, trying to figure out what year it was.
It didn’t really matter, other than that with a year, V could specifically ask Emilia if she remembered getting drunk in the Piketown slums on the Eve of the Astral Storm on this particular occasion, or if this entire situation had been fabricated by the system.
“Forget I asked,” V finally said. “I was just thinking, you don’t have memories of what happened with the AIs taking over hero bodies in blackaether raids?”
“Well, all I know is it's a thing a few raids were doing,” Alex said, settling in beside Emilia and smiling gently when she proceeded to fling herself into their lap and fall asleep. “I assume by the time you exist, something bad happened?”
V hummed, telling Alex some of the gory details of what had gone down. They’d never confirmed if it had been the goal of the raid maintainers of not, but some of the heroes who had let AIs take control of the avatars within blackaether raids too often had begun to experience memory loss. This had, rather unfortunately, corresponded with the time when he himself was dealing with PTSD-related memory loss. He hadn’t been playing these particular blackaether raids often, but he had played them on occasion. Worrying that something within the raids was causing it, V had sent anonymous information to Hail and Helix.
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Generally, heroes who raided on the blackaether had a code: you don’t involve Hail. He had broken that code for selfish reasons, but in the end, the raids hadn’t been what was affecting his memory. Selfish reasons or not, he would never regret altering Hail—who had then alerted The Black Knot—about what was happening.
It wasn’t just memory loss, but bits of the AIs who had been supposedly only taking over the virtual avatars of heroes leaking into the real world, taking over their real bodies for increasingly long periods of time.
“Yikes… what happened to them?” Alex asked, eyes flicking like they were sorting through the people they knew who had spent any time inside those raids.
V shrugged. “It depended on the extent of the damage and what the AI had done. A lot of the AI remnants were just removed, but a few were too ingrained, and a few… well, even if it’s not your mind killing someone, it's difficult to forget that your body did those things. Once they realized they were caught, many of the AIs flooded their host with memories of what they had done with their host’s body.”
“So… the homes for the crazies the war created ended up with a few more occupants?”
“Yup.”
“Awesome. Gotta say, I’m glad I don’t raid much.” Alex laughed, eyes fading off as they thought of something. Most likely, it was the same something they had often seemed to think of during the war, especially when they had to interact with the OIC directly. It was strange, and V could only chalk it up to their friend being on the older side—although they’d never actually said exactly how old they were—and extremely private at that. No one really knew much about Alex or their past, and most people just assumed when they were being weird it was because of whatever strange past they had and refused to talk about.
“Why not?” V asked, not really expecting an answer, but unsure of what else to talk about. This wasn’t Alex. This was Alex. Emilia was out cold, drooling onto Alex’s shoulder without a care in the world.
Why his dream had allowed him to come here, he had no idea. Simply following the flow of the conversation was the best he could do.
Alex didn’t answer him, but neither did they brush him off, as they usually did whenever anyone asked about their reason for one decision or another. Alex was a genius at brushing conversations aside, at redirecting or beginning to spin stories and theoreticals in a way that made everyone extremely uncomfortable.
Instead, they just watched him, assessing, searching for something.
“Because I don’t like the potential raids have,” they finally said, fingers dragging over the bare skin of Emilia’s thigh and making her giggle in her sleep, tucking herself further into their neck. Annoyingly, it also made V both extremely jealous and amused.
“Potential?” V asked, smiling as Emilia wiggled in her sleep, half-heartedly complaining about meanies.
“Like this,” Alex said, motioning around them. “The fact that raids can retain so much of us that I can be here, feeling entirely like myself, is dangerous. Who's to say this couldn’t be turned further, used to make copies of me without my consent to do gods know what? Same with the situation in this raid you’re in. People being taken over by some AI? Being affected by something power within the raid in ways that might chase them back to the real world? Burning stars. That’s ominous as fuck.”
V couldn’t exactly disagree. In theory, there were supposed to be limits on what raids could and couldn’t do with a person’s mental imprint, but he had spent decades inside blackaether raids and knew how much those limits could be bent and broken. Legal raids were supposed to be safe, but at the same time, when had the government or the asshole behind Hail ever been safe or ethical?
“Do you think it’s possible, for an AI to fully merge with the host?” V asked.
Out of all the people he knew, Alex had always known the most about AIs, about the theory behind each different type and ethical concerns in particular, and when they said yes, they did think it was possible, V’s heart clenched.
That wasn’t good.
That so wasn’t good.
“Do you think it can be undone?” he asked, thinking about how his own mind had felt pressured under the power and influence of the heartcores. That pressure had faded in the days since he’d touched so many back to back, but wasn’t that part of the horror of it all? That something could have dug itself into his brain so perfectly that he had quickly grown to ignore it?
Alex sighed as they continued harassing Emilia, although they’d moved onto her back, hand slipping under her shirt to trace shapes over her bare skin, dragging little squirms and moans out of her. She was cute, and V was 100% going to be doing this to her later, so he could more ethically source the little sounds she was making for later use.
“Maybe,” Alex finally said, giving the three of them a little wave with their free hand. “You’re real. I’m not—probably, anyways. I suppose we have no proof I’m not actually in a raid having a nap at the moment. Emilia may or may not be real. My point is that the raid system keeps bits of us inside it, whether we want it to or not. In theory, that means if it can insert an AI inside us, it should be able to insert a copy of our former self inside us in turn.”
A sardonic smile stretched over Alex’s mouth as they waited for V to compute that. It wasn’t hard. For the same reason most people couldn’t accept something like this situation—being reanimated within a raid dream—most people wouldn’t be able to tolerate their mind being overwritten with a past version of themself.
It was, effectively, a death of their former self. They’d have all the memories of their past—at least until the point the copy had been created—yet know the person they had been while making those memories was gone.
Even now, contemplating his own mind being pressured by the heartcores he wondered: had the pressure disappeared or had the system overwritten his mind, erased whatever had been affecting him at the cost of his life? Given him freedom from the thing that was the heartcore in exchange for a complicated death and rebirth?
He shuddered, and Alex was already pulling him closer, tucking him into their soft chest alongside Emilia.
“You’ll contact someone at Hail? Or maybe The Black Knot would be better?” Alex whispered into his hair, their hand scratching into the nape of his neck. “I don’t know if you’ve contacted people—”
“I haven’t,” V interrupted. “Do you think you still work here?”
Under him, Alex shrugged, saying they probably did, since they owned the store. “Gonna come visit me?” they asked, voice clipped at the end like they’d been about to say his name but were respecting Emilia’s silly wishes.
“Do you want me to?” V asked, an edge of nervousness entering his voice. The idea of stepping back into the lives of his former teammates was… terrifying. At least with Alex, he knew where he sat. They’d been friendly, and one-time hookups. Alex was sweet and kind. Everyone else was complicated. He had never fully meshed with the unit, no matter how hard he tried, and in the end, he had run from them just as much as he had his family. Where the unit had been friend and family to so many of the members, to him, most had only ever been acquaintances.
V supposed that part of it was that he hoped if they met today, they could be more—that he could be friends with them, just like he had hoped during the war.
“Of course,” Alex breathed out, lips pressing into V’s forehead as the world and his friend’s words faded. “I always want to see my friends, no matter how many centuries pass.”