PART TWENTY

MPD: 0

Enhance

"Bro," I said, "Lennie. He chopped Lennie up like a bird in a wind farm. What... I mean... What?" My mind raced, thinking about all those lame TV shows where they kill a major character and then bring them right back. "Can we rent a necromancer or something?"

"What for?" said 386.

"To revive Lennie!" I said. I noticed Valentine frowning. "386, can you... can you put subtitles on the screen when you talk so that Valentine can follow?"

"What if we want to badmouth her?"

"We can do that when she isn't here."

"Hmm," said 386. "Processing."

These little moments where he calculated things or sent support tickets to the Engine never took more than a couple of seconds but I suppose they were big events for 386. After all, he was doing things no other AI in the BetterVerse was doing.

“Loophole accepted,” he continued. “As long as you are in the dungeon I can show her the text. Font selection begins. The most readable font is Comic Sans. Choice irrevocable.” Suddenly the screen changed. It now showed the recent conversation history in the form of a pretty modern chat messaging service (as personalised by a 50-year-old cat lady who does admin in the local dentist). He even included the part about trash talking Valentine.

"Looks great!” I lied. “Okay, 386. Is there anything we can do for Lennie?"

Slowly, agonisingly slowly, 386 typed his response on the screen. T. H. E. R. E.

"No!" I said. "Talk to me as normal. Just leave the chat where Valentine can see it."

"There's no need to do anything for Lennie. He's my final boss. He'll respawn.” Relief washed through me in an awesome wave. “The problem is this guy."

The chat squished to the bottom of the screen and Cince Polka's face reappeared filling the rest. It was the scene where he was measuring the core. "386," I said, "Highlight sector 5 and zoom in. Enhance."

"What?"

"Humans love looking at photos and saying 'enhance'. Never mind. Just make his face bigger."

We looked at Polka and it was that exact moment that I realised I lacked the writing chops to describe faces. To make things worse, I had just used the word ‘face’ twice in two sentences and you know I don’t like repeating myself. I really don’t like repeating myself. I would go as far as to say that I never, ever repeat myself.

All right, let’s try to describe this Polka guy:

He had a hard [SYNONYM FOR FACE] with cold, analytical eyes. There was no trace of humor in his [SYNONYM FOR EYES]. He was between 20 and 50 years old. The main feature on [THE FRONT OF HIS HEAD] was a triangular goatee pointing downwards.

He was thin. Dangerous. No wasted movements. Outside the dungeon he'd be able to kill me within 5 seconds. Inside the dungeon, with 386 helping me, I might last 8.

But while he could carve me up like a pumpkin, he probably wouldn’t. He looked the type to slip poison into your wine on a foggy, moonless night and record the incident in a brief, dry entry in his coded diary.

Valentine said, "He looks like the sort of person who doesn't celebrate his birthday," which annoyed me because that exactly described his face. "Is he native? Or an Hourly?"

"Native."

We all pondered that.

I broke the silence. "Okay but why have you made this dumb labyrinth?"

"It's a maze."

"I know it’s amazing. But why?"

"Protection."

"He didn't hurt you, did he? And this maze isn't going to slow him down if he really wants to destroy you. And you've lost 20 mana by having a tantrum instead of letting the bakers in."

"Bakers?" said Valentine.

"I'm a dungeon," wailed 386. "I'm supposed to protect myself from intruders." (He actually said dungeonnnnn and intruderrrrrrrrs but he didn't want Valentine to know how whiny he was being so the chat version was spelled normally.)

I put my hands up. "Okay. I get it. You're scared. But it's not logical. The more mana you have, the more you can protect yourself, right?"

386 throbbed a bit. "Suppose."

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"We've all had a shock. As your dungeon consultant my advice is to reopen Austeralia. Let's get that mana coming in. Valentine and I will try to find out what this Polka guy is up to. Won't we?" I looked at her and got enthusiastic assent. "But I see that I've been negligent. We can't assume every guest will be enthralled by our games. We need to beef up your defences. Tomorrow we'll start talking about tentacles. Okay?"

"Okay," he said. I thought he'd be ecstatic but he sounded more miserable than ever. And I understood it - he was trying to break out of his programming and do something better, but human nature was dragging him back to base.

Commitment

I asked Valentine to come outside with me so that 386 could reset. But actually I wanted to talk to her out of his range.

"This line here is his awareness limit. See the grass gets sort of more evil looking around this point? A couple more steps this way and he can't hear us." I took a deep breath and tried to keep eye contact with her for as long as poss. "Look, I know this is exotic and weird and unique and all that but I'm sort of friends with him now. You might laugh and say he's a pompous AI and he isn't real -"

She stopped me with a hand on my arm. "Pompous?"

I blinked at her. "Oh, right. You can't hear him. Ah, yeah. He's British."

Her eyes widened and I could see the beginnings of speech come up through her throat, but she swallowed it back down.

"I know,” I said. “It's mad. I’m not sure his accent is very authentic. But he's sentient. He’s alive. I'll ride for that. I'll die on that hill. Lennie... Lennie's more like a pet, but I think he's a part of the whole 386… whole. Some repressed parts of 386's personality that he doesn't want to admit he has. I don't really know what I'm saying here. I just... I thought you and I could maybe work together and come up with some fun games and expand the park and all that. But now... Now the priority has to be keeping 386 alive. That's probably not going to be as much fun as making pinball machines. I mean, we'll have to keep doing that, too. He's got to grow. But tonight I'll be thinking about real traps. Flames, blades, pits, spikes. Tentacles."

Valentine looked at me strangely. "You want to have pinball machines in one corridor and tentacles in the other?"

I thought about it. It sounded absolutely absurd and impractical. "Yes." She didn't walk away. She just stood there. I thought it only fair to lay out the rest of the problems. "It's worse than you think. We need a corridor that's utterly lethal, even for elite warriors. We need to design it so that the theme park visitors would never go that way. If a dim-witted player takes the wrong path, fine, he'll respawn. 386 can tell us about it and we can try to intercept him before he comes back for revenge. But anyone who deliberately goes after the core needs to burn. And everyone who comes looking for fun needs to get that. I'm fizzing with ideas for the fun stuff. It's bursting out of me. But I haven't thought about defense."

"The best defense is a good offense."

"Right. I should track down this Polka dude and see what that's all about."

"We."

I shook my head. "Nicki, listen. I'd love another pair of hands and it made 386 feel better that you agreed to help." There was a but coming, and even I didn't know what I was going to say. There was something inside me, some soup bubbling away on a stove and I didn't know what the ingredients were or how it would taste. But I knew that there was only one tiny flame inside me and it was there, heating this pot, and I had to keep that flame alive. I swallowed. "This isn't a game to me."

She looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"

I turned away. "386 is pretty much my best friend." My cheeks burned just saying it out loud. "And I haven't had a pet since I was a kid. My apartment doesn't allow animals and it's too small anyway. Lennie is like a slow, elderly dog - without the poop. So... I'm going to be a bit manic trying to help them for the next five weeks."

"Five weeks? Why five?"

"That's when I… have to stop playing. I've got just over a month to grow the dungeon and try to make the guys safe."

She gave me a curious look. "What are ya trying to say?"

I shrugged. "I don't know how you got involved in all this but I do know you care about your real name and all that. If I was going to have help it'd mean emails. Chats. Bouncing ideas off each other. Staggering our logins to make the most out of our time in BV. Two hours of ruthless efficiency. 22 hours of plotting and scheming. It'd be a commitment. I'm in. I get a lot out of it. What would you get? Nothing. So just... You know. Go save a princess and all that. Buy some magic beans."

She raised her eyebrows. I was pretty sure her avatar didn't look like the real-life her, but I had the fleeting impression of someone used to giving men withering glances. "You're dumb."

"What?"

She waved at the cave entrance. "Austeralia. Pirate pinball. A mirror more entertaining than the entire Final Destination franchise. Teaching skeletons to play violin. A dungeon theme park! Now this arbitrary time limit. And a ruthless murderer pressing a tape measure against a sapphire."

"Ruby."

"Ruby. And you think -" She clapped her hands together and cackled. "We have to design killer traps to go alongside killer arcade games and solve this mystery, and you're worried about me being bored? Not being invested enough? Seriously. You are not a bright man."

"Oh."

She stared at me. I was too confounded to do anything, so she took the lead. "Bain, is there something you want to ask me?"

"Um." It came to me just in time. "Can I have your email?"

"No," she said, and that was more devastating than when I heard Lennie had died. Maybe because it was the kind of devastation I'd grown to expect. "No, give me yours and I'll contact you. Then you won't get all emo about how long you should wait before writing. We need to hit the ground running."

Shell Shock

She logged out and with my last couple of minutes I staggered back into the dungeon. It looked like 386 had put everything back to how it had been. I collapsed into an entrance room chair.

"That was intense," I said.

"Just so you know," said 386, "I heard everything."

"What?"

"Why did you think my awareness ended at that particular blade of grass?"

"You heard -?"

"I heard you flailing around, stumbling over every syllable, talking like you'd learned English from books but never actually heard it spoken. And you're right - mentioning marriage was definitely premature. I've already edited the dungeon codex - using you as a case study - and there's a lot of speculation in the comments section about why you're so inept. Dungeon 299 is the only one defending you and the less said about that, the better."

I covered my face with my hands.

386 cleared his throat. "But, ah, but thanks. Thank you."

"Huh?" I said, too discombobulated to know what he was on about.

“Just don’t worry about defending me. Let’s use our resources to make more games. And a side quest: I want to hit level 3 in my Wingman skill.”

“There’s no such thing. And when did you hit level 2?”

“When she asked for your contact details. That was 99% me. You’re welcome.”

I shook my head and stood up. I looked around at the colorful waiting room. 386 had recreated it as it had been left, including Steffi’s chalk drawing. I went to investigate. It was a sketch of Lennie.

“Cute,” I said.

“It’s not very accurate,” said 386. “She missed 177 bones and somehow she's given him dimples. Then again, I wasn’t really created to be an art critic.”

Recent events flashed through my mind, with a couple of moments standing out more vividly than others. I set my jaw. “And I wasn’t created to design traps of mass destruction. But I’m gonna.”