“I can’t believe you murdered someone,” James said, staring at me like I was an alien.
“You’re one to talk. You were the one designing guns to take Dave out. So, what if I was the one to pull the trigger?” I snorted.
“As a last resort.”
“Whatever. Guns only have one function. If you made it, you were planning to use it.”
I was not going to have my ex-boyfriend sit there and judge me, especially when I knew he would have done the exact same thing if given the opportunity.
“Besides, everyone thought he was dead in our world anyway. It’s not like the cops are going to come after me. And he was going to kill Bastion. He tried to kill us all. He was going to ruin this whole world.”
“I’m not complaining,” James hedged. “It’s just… surprising. I’m used to thinking of you as someone who cooks and does laundry and works in accounting, not someone who can fire a shark out of her bare hands and kill enemies without a moment’s hesitation.”
“I think you’re just describing the exact reasons I dumped you,” I said, my eyes narrowing at him. The days of being James’ live-in girlfriend who cleaned up after him were long gone. Since landing in this world, I’d not only found a whole harem full of boyfriends that were infinitely better than James, but I’d also found my confidence. “The question now is, what do we do next? This world is clearly still pretty messed up, and I don’t know the first thing about coding or AI, so unfortunately, I still need you to fix things.”
“We’ll have to go back, of course,” James said. “I can do some minor editing with my laptop, but we kind of need to fix the actual stories and source information that the Genesis is using as source material and that can only be done from out there.”
“The Genesis?”
“It’s what the modelling engine Dave built is called. It’s running on my computer. It’s running… well, all of this. There’s no way we can fix everything from inside.”
My heart filled with a feeling of impending doom. Go back? But I was happy here, more or less.
I looked around the room where Brick, Bruiser, Bastion, Nightfall and Jackal were standing, listening to the conversation that would decide their futures with more patience than I could muster. Even Bonaparte, Bruiser’s dire-weasel friend, was sitting quietly with his head cocked to the side like he was listening.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“I don’t want to leave them. What if I can’t get back, or something changes them when we update the world?”
“I thought you wanted a few changes to them,” James said quietly. “You already made Jackal less accident prone and Bastion a recovered alcoholic. They’ll change for the better, if you write it properly. I mean, some of them are based on sketchy character sheets or fanfics I wrote when I was fourteen. If you wrote their stories, you could put whatever you want in there.”
“They’ll only change the things they want to change,” I said forcefully. “We won’t go making any changes to them without their consent. I can’t believe you still don’t understand how wrong that is.”
“Alright, alright,” James said, holding his hands up. “And you will be able to get back, I promise. I’ve made several trips here and back over the past few months. I’ll have to adjust the Nexus – the body converter machine - since you’re in a Dungeon Fantasy body instead of your own.”
I wrinkled my nose in distaste. James and Dave, his ex-university-classmate-turned-evil-villain-turned-corpse, had figured out a way to generate a version of themselves in this world, whereas I had accidentally fallen here and landed in an unused character – Mitsy the succubus.
“This Nexus machine,” Nightfall interjected. “Could it allow us to travel to your world?”
James frowned at the dark elf. “I don’t know. You might appear in our world, or you might just disappear. There’s no way of knowing for sure. Why would you even want to come to our world? You belong here.”
“We belong with Emma,” Brick said gruffly. “Where she goes, we go.”
I chewed on my lip. “I don’t know, guys. If it isn’t safe, I’d rather you sat tight here and waited for me to come home.”
“Emma…” James said, stunned. “This isn’t your home. This is… it’s an escape. You can’t live here.”
“Why not?” I hissed, my nostrils flaring. “I like it here. I like them. And this world needs someone in it to point out all the messed-up bullshit, otherwise they’ll never know what needs to be fixed.”
I really didn’t want to go at all. Everything about my life here was better. I didn’t have my toxic family to deal with. I didn’t have to go to my mind-numbingly boring job. I didn’t have my stupid boyfriend, who could never remember to take the trash out or pick his underwear up off the bathroom floor.
And all my favourite people were here.
“Look, I promise we’ll fix this,” James said seriously. “I didn’t intend to create sentient life, but now that I have, I’ll do my best to fulfil my obligation to them to making their world functional. But I’m really going to need your help on this out there. If anyone can figure out how to make everything work, I know it’s you.”
I felt the weight of everyone’s gaze fall on me, and I felt my stomach sink for a whole new reason. Me? Be responsible for fixing the whole world without even knowing how to write a single line of code?
I was perfectly happy pointing out the absurdities and complaining about things, but actually fixing them? I wouldn’t know where to start.
“How can you be so sure?” I asked.
“Because I know you,” James said confidently. “And you were always amazing at farming and sim games. That’s what this world needs. Balance and harmony, not action and drama.”
Great. My qualifications for saving the world were the embarrassing number of hours I’d sunk into playing sim games, many of them ironically when I was procrastinating doing more important jobs or studying for exams.