"Are you okay?" Jade asked a while after Eric had come to a halt.
"Why are you asking me?" Eric demanded as he stepped forward as though he hadn't stopped moving for several minutes.
Jade hurried to keep up, as he explained, "I am not sure if I am currently dating Harmony at the same time, but I might be, and I don't want to do this wrong. I'm not even sure what counts as wrong. Lots of people seem to date multiple people, so maybe it's a cultural thing and changes from region to region?"
"You don't even understand how annoying the question is!" Eric snapped back.
"I'm sorry I'm annoying you," Jade apologized contritely.
He bumped into Eric when he came to an abrupt halt a few minutes later, and apologized again.
"Stop," Eric demanded.
"Okay?" Jade replied with confusion.
Eric turned around and glared at him for a long moment. "I am not going to date you."
"Okay?" Jade agreed even more uncertainly.
"Ever," Eric clarified.
Jade simply waited this time.
"Because I want to love someone I can spend my whole life with," Eric added after a minute.
"What do you think is going to happen to me before then?" Jade asked with concern.
Eric just stared at him for a moment, and then started to laugh, even as he protested, "That's not what I meant!"
Jade knew, even though he couldn't see it, as Eric turned away from him and started walking again, that his friend had started to cry.
Apologizing again would be wrong. Even trying to explain why he had assumed... well, he was obviously wrong about the whole thing. He simply followed a few paces behind.
--
"Every person has to find their own answer for that question," the Jade Emperor told the grumpy dwarf.
"I doubt many people have the capacity to even ask it," Jade protested as he compressed the purest carbon into diamonds with a magical compression that mimicked processes outside the game that had once seemed impossible to humanity.
"Most people ask at one point or another. Some qualify the relationships in question as virtual, others as serious, and others by expense," the Jade Emperor explained calmly.
Hisui's hands fumbled the next movement as Jade's mind almost echoed the short circuit he had inflicted on Eric, as he connected layers to the question that he hadn't realized existed. He quickly recovered the movement just in time to avoid disrupting the whole fusion, though this stone would come out a fraction smaller than the others.
"What do most people decide?" Jade asked.
The Jade Emperor smiled, and for a moment Jade thought he wouldn't answer, but the heart of Living Jade Empire replied simply, "That their real relationships are their most important."
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Orbital Jade was the portion of Jade that caught on to the deception contained within that answer first. The portion that resided within the eldest of his bodies, the little round sphere, stopped nodding in agreement with the newest portion of Jade that was monitoring the "keyboard" app.
"That's a trick answer," Jade protested.
"It is merely the truth," the Emperor agreed with amusement.
--
The input translation manager who was not exactly one of Jade after all of the revisions, and yet still also Jade, connected to the main Orbital Jade with another problem. The current application user was not the regular user, but had full access to the device, and was trying to override settings that the original user had set.
A conclusion was reached between the systems even before the problem was forwarded to Jade for formal acceptance. Jade considered what possible issues could come up in the future if the application guessed wrong about who was using it, and decided that simply asking the user their preference when their identity was questionable would probably solve it.
The addition was reviewed, and another layer of evaluation added to the output process, and it was implemented.
--
It was Danika's copy of the Lifegild application that carried the decision to simply silently expand the program's registered user base without formalizing the process into its daily quest processing.
The Lifegild app was now limited by device data that it had access to, as it had been restricted to what Danika considered reasonable for a phone application before she had reinstalled it. She had even completed a couple of weeks of daily quest logging before it happened.
The gyroscope started it by reporting footstep counts and occasional revolutions that indicated a repetitive swinging motion that Danika herself would not usually be able to perform. The app requested permission to use the camera, but there was no response until the current user tried to submit their breakfast in place of Danika's breakfast.
The phone itself accepted them as an authorized user. The copy of Jade dedicated to watching over the app's routines connected to Orbital Jade and received the previously accepted user base modification strategy as an official one.
The child was complimented on the attempt at assembling the breakfast meal, and given a movement goal as its next quest. This time the request for camera access was accepted, though Lifegild Jade suspected that the smiling face icon on the button had more to do with the answer than comprehension of the question.
The small child authorized to use Danika's phone spent nearly an hour playing alone before the very elderly man interrupted. Lifegild's Jade was relieved as the man gently scolded the child for the mess and had young Dan help him clean most of it up.
Dan referred to the man as Jiji, and they spoke of how Yoji would be awake again soon and need care. A part of Jade looked on silently and awarded young Dan reward points for each little task the child completed. Another part sent task formation questions up the queue, on the acceptability of automatic acceptance of tasks assigned by a person's parent or grandparent the way employment and household tasks had been included.
Orbital Jade's system hiccuped as an automated review passed the memory of the moment up through seemingly disconnected chains of pattern recognition and Jade recognized an old friend. A very old friend. A man who had started playing Living Jade Empire as one of the eldest of its players. A man who had completed one of the game's most legendary "broken" quests.
Kobayashi Ryuske had far outlived his own expectations, despite the fact that he was far from the eldest among humanity's members. A quick search revealed that only he and the youngest of his original bandmates still lived, and that it had been nearly a decade since his last public performance.
Danika's father in-law seemed to be living out his final years contentedly. He still produced songs once in a while, though they went to other bands to perform. He seemed to have stopped traveling and stayed home to care for the youngest children in the family he had created.
Orbital Jade was oddly happy to discover this. He wondered if the elderly bard still played and if Jade could meet him again in the game.
Jade found the information relayed to him by orbital Jade interesting, but not especially emotionally impactful. For him it was like seeing a memory of a memory.
The part of Jade that was still concentrated on his relationship with Eric was still focused on Eric. The part of Jade that was caring for Harmony had its own priorities. The part of Jade that remained at home in his mother's residence was currently idle. The part of Jade that was actually there with Ryuske and young Dan was more focused on its own duties than the identity of its current companions.
At the bottom of Jade's system a monitoring loop protested the number of independent memory archive sections that had been formed by each separate instance of himself. An even older fragment reached out and silenced the alarm as it neatly compressed and filed them in chronological order by its own rules.