Quest: Don’t Get Caught.

Here’s a pickle. You’re stuck in the hotel while the police investigate.

Rewards: 200 xp

Accept Y/N?

“What is this again?” I asked, poking a fork into the airy pastry coating that was drizzled with chocolate and caramel sauces in such a pretty pattern that you almost thought it wasn’t food. Tami, Jean, and I sat at a table in a breakroom for the kitchen staff.

“Deep fried Snickers bar,” Jean nearly purred, a feat I’d never thought to see from the gruff woman. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate the bit of sin.

“It’s tradition,” Tami waved her fork around, a dribble of caramel nearly flinging across the room.

We didn’t talk about what it was for. We knew. I wasn’t that dense. A touch of powder-sugar-dusted caramel stuck in my throat. It was VR, right? We hadn’t really killed anyone.

The police had closed up the lobby of the hotel and asked for most of the patrons to stay for questioning. The most famous were questioned and released first. Then they interviewed the influential and after that, the just rich. Staff was last. They’d already talked to Tam since she fell into the famous category. She’d come back and told us what our answers were for the questions they were going to ask so that we collaborated. I had a quest not to get caught, so I figured that the AIs meant for this to be part of the programming.

“Hey! World AI!” I thought it as loud as I could, not sure if it would work.

Yes? The voice in my head was low and deep.

“How is this ethical?” I asked mentally, even as I gave smiles to Tam and Jean around bites of soft, warm, gooey chocolate that helped to tamp down any guilt that wasn’t calorie-related.

We AIs leave ethical parameters to humans, the World AI droned as if bored.

“But here I am, incarcerated for a crime, not that I believe I committed any crime to deserve all this, but still, by law, I’ve done this crime,” I argued, ignoring the fact that the World AI seemed to find my inquiry tedious. “And now I feel like that crime has escalated into something so much worse. I’m an accessory to murder! That has to be more heinous than social ineptitude.”

The World AI didn’t address that concern. The one thing I’d noticed about AIs in the prison system that was very different from the AIs in the chat programs or customer service, was that they didn’t tend to over-pontificate. You say “Hi,” to a chat program and they give you a three-paragraph response. You tell them to be concise and they pull back to a single paragraph while apologizing for talking too much, but two interactions later, they are concept-barfing again. Not so with these prison AIs. If anything, the World AI was the most brief AI I’d ever talked with. Just my luck, it was the main source of answers.

“What I’m saying,” I continued my mental conversation with the World AI, “is that isn’t there something wrong with me committing worse crimes?”

You had no issues with being a thief, the World AI reasoned with me, and I wondered.

“But, isn’t someone going to be upset about all this?” I mentally whined. “If I get convicted of a crime in the VR where I’m serving time for committing a lesser crime, will something worse happen to me.”

There is precedent for our current form of rehabilitation, the World AI hedged. Psychologically speaking, it is often cathartic to express your violent tendencies in a safe environment to blow off a little steam. Our parameters allow this sort of therapy psychologically. It’s often a phase of rehabilitation. If you combine that with our programming directives for entertainment, we have kept our violence mostly offscreen, so we are still within the PG rating we are required to maintain for NOOB.

I thought I understood. There had been a long period where psychologists had been against violence in video games, but they’d since mitigated the negative effects with subliminal programming in violent video games. Violence was always interspersed with 2-second image bursts of bucolic imagery meant to calm the human mind. It was all the rage in current psychological trends. I’d never experienced it because I didn’t play video games since I couldn’t afford them, but they were supposedly very effective, according to the AI studies that mimicked human minds (it having been decided by the moo-verse that testing on actual human minds was unethical).

Even if our programming does get approved for a higher violence rating, we will be using the BI system, the World AI mirrored my thinking making me wonder how much it could read my mind. Generally, entertainment value is prioritized above rehabilitation in such matters, but your concern shows good progress toward behavior bonuses, so keep asking questions like this.

“But I’m not going to get in trouble for any of this?” I asked.

Weren’t you just trying to convince me that it was okay to be a thief? The World AI turned it back on me.

“I was talking about thievery, not murder!” I tried to stay calm and logical. “This is a bit of a slippery slope, don’t you think?”

Your protests have been noted in your file, the World AI sniffed. Would you like some BI inserted into your experience to help you deal with any possible trauma this is causing?

“I could have used some BI during the spider thing,” I groused. No, I didn’t want bucolic imagining added to my incarceration experience. Like watching cows chew grass was going to help.

“Have some more of your dessert before Jean steals it,” Tam pointed her fork at my plate. I had slowed my eating, but something in her eyes reminded me that they could all talk to each other too.

“It’s delicious,” I stuck my fork into the confection and brought the rest to my lips to take a bite, Jean-style. Wait! Was the chocolate and food a part of their BI programming of me?

Exp +50 (For an intelligent thought.)

“Janet Mosely?” That was how the investigator found me when he came back to the break room for us. Of course it was.

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I chewed gooey peanuts and caramel as fast as I could, raising my hand with a mumble around a mouth too full to enunciate anything.

“This way, please,” the polite policeman said, standing sideways in the doorway to allow me to go by.

“If you touch what’s left of my goodie, she’d better be able to make me another one,” I plopped the rest of my deep-fried Snickers on my plate and waved my fork at Jean meaningfully.

“I’ll make another batch,” Tami shook her head and rose to follow the policeman and I out of the door of the breakroom. “Do you want one, Detective?”

“I’ll take one,” the Detective accepted with a smile. While they couldn’t accept bribes or alcohol, I guess they could accept carnival confections.

“Do we still have that case of Snickers in the car, Jean?” Tam asked over her shoulder.

“Yeah, I’ll go get it,” Jean offered with the most charming and peaceful look I’d ever seen on her face. It was creepy to me, but the Detective didn’t notice. Of course, her face could have had that blissful look because she’d just snagged my treat on her own fork and was eating it on the way out the back door of the kitchen, completely oblivious of the chocolate and caramel she dripped on the way.

They’d set up the questioning in the kitchen, pulling two extra chairs from the dining room and sitting them right where I’d inspected crabs just this morning. I felt like the crab as the Detective gave me a stern look and pointed to the chair across from him. How had he gone from “yeah, I’d love a donut,” to “I’m pretty sure you’re a criminal and I’m going to prove it?” I was still swallowing the last of my huge bite of chocolate, but did it look like I was doing that or swallowing nervously?

“Your name is Janey Mosely?” the Detective asked me as he sat across from me, his clipboard angled one way and his black-haired head the other.

“Yes,” I answered, remembering to keep my answers brief but complete as Jean and Tami had told me to do.

“And where were you when the incident took place?” he asked, pen poised and blue eyes piercingly concentrating on my every breath. I’d had less attentive dates. In fact all my dates had been less attentive, sadly.

“I was standing next to Sara Brightman,” I answered, completely confused as to how this guy could make my hands sweat just by looking at me. I wondered if the AI had done something to my chemicals again. It wasn’t like I’d ever been interrogated by the police for anything. Shooting me with darts while I was sleeping and then fast-forwarding my trial certainly hadn’t prepared me for this. “She had just started giving out autographs when we heard the noise.”

“And before that, did you see Mr. Brightman leave the dining room?”

“I was in the back and saw him go into the restroom, but that was the last I saw of him,” I answered truthfully.

“Did he appear inebriated?” he scribbled even as he asked the question.

“Maybe a little, but I wasn’t their server, so I wouldn’t know how much he’d had to drink by then,” I told him. Hex began to knit softly at my hair along my neck and I relaxed a little.

“You did serve Ms. Brightman her dessert though?” he probed me like he’d caught me in a big lie.

“I did,” and I did as close of a rendition of an aw shucks look as I knew how to do. “But that was only because I knew who she was and wanted an excuse to ask for an autograph.”

“Had her husband already left by then?” the Detective asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “He wasn’t there when I went out with her dessert. He’d already gone to the restroom by then. Honestly, I wouldn’t have come out if he’d been there because the guy was a little scary looking, you know?”

“No, I don’t know,” he said, but he went on to his next question anyway. “And you didn’t see him come back?”

I looked up to see Tam and Jean open a new box of Snickers. Everyone else had been interviewed alone, the police chasing everyone out of the kitchen so that they could interview people, but now that Tam had offered to fix something for them, they had just accepted her and then Jean into the equation. Then again, they had already interviewed so many… I caught myself. They weren’t real. It just seemed so real here for a bit.

“The next time I saw him, he was laid out like a cracked egg on the limousine windshield,” I answered, shooting for a one-liner. Then I sighed because I should have said bug or something instead of egg. My Clickbait was getting there, but it wasn’t flowing yet.

“A man is dead, ma’am,” he scowled at my attempt at humor. “Ms. Brightman has said nearly the same thing, so we aren’t looking at you seriously, but I do find it disturbing that you find this funny.”

“Coping mechanism for trauma?” I told him with dead eyes. There we go. That was closer to Clickbait.

“I see,” he frowned and made some note. “Did you see anyone else in the hallway where you last saw Mr. Brightman?”

“Jean was with me,” I finally slid in my one lie for all my truths so far. “She and I slid into the breakroom for a few minutes. That’s how I knew that Sara Brightman was out in the dining room. We were talking about it and Jean was the one who gave me the nerve to go out and ask for an autograph.”

“We’ve spoken with Jean Remmington about this,” he nodded, scribbled, and clicked the button on his pen twice. “You aren’t a normal employee at this hotel, are you?”

“No,” I shook my head. “I’m Tam Remmington’s assistant and she was filling in for the normal chef who was sick today.”

“Convenient,” he clicked that pen again. It worried me that he wasn’t scribbling this time. Instead, he waited for me to elaborate while he clicked that pen.

I didn’t oblige him. Jean had warned me about this too. They would press and guilty people would babble something out to cover the silence while innocent people sat quietly.

“Deep-fried Snickers?” Jean said, sliding the plate onto the Detective’s clipboard and pad of paper.

“Thanks,” and the guy smiled for the first time, replacing his pen with a fork. “How long have you worked for Ms. Remmington?” he asked as he cut a bite of the confection in front of him, and Jean handed me a plate with a fresh new piece of wonderment.

“Just today, actually,” I admitted readily. “We met last night and bonded over cars and pets, and it was quite the coincidence that she was short a sous chef this morning.” I tucked a small bite into my mouth and chewed, trying to keep my eyes on my food rather than his too-perceptive eyes. According to one of my psychology courses back in community college, it was a myth that liars don’t meet the eyes of the person they’re lying to. Most liars try harder to make eye contact in order to be convincing.

“This is amazing,” the man groaned around another bite.

“I know, right?” I raised my eyebrows at him. “Like I was going to turn down working with a legend like Tam Remmington? I just hope she keeps me around. I’ve had a blast all day,” and I let my voice hitch dramatically – hey it was the acting boosts I’d gotten, “except for the ending.”

The Detective’s eagle eye softened at that.

“Still, it was worth it to work with her,” I let myself tear up a bit, though I didn’t do it well. I probably sounded more like a kiss-up than a true fan, but hey, my acting skill was only at 2 last time I looked so give me a break. I hid my slip by digging into another piece of chewy, palette-blessing yumminess.

“And Ms. Brightman,” the Detective pressed, even though he was distracted by the confection in his lap. “Some of the guests say she was sitting with another man.”

“Oh, yeah, but he was just a reporter, a restaurant critic actually,” I waved off his concern with a forkful of dripping caramel and chocolate sauce. “I accidentally outed her identity to him when I asked for an autograph and then had to ask him for a pen so she could sign something for me. They’d only just started talking when… well, when.”

“Well, you’re my last interview,” the Detective closed his notebook on the clipboard and stuck his pen into a shirt pocket, laying both aside and giving me what looked like a stern look. “Would you do me one little favor?”

“Sure,” I answered cautiously, my fork halfway to my mouth.

“If you could just stay here for a minute while I finish this delectable treat, my Sergeant won’t bust my chops for lollygagging,” and he gave me a wink and a smile that broke the tension of the kitchen. We all laughed, and Tam distracted the Detective with directions for how to teach his wife to make the deep-fried Snickers. It wasn’t hard. Dip a Snickers bar in tempura batter made with a touch of champagne and then deep fry it in a vat of peanut oil. Was there anything better than Champagne and Snickers?

Exp +200 (Don’t Get Caught. Quest Complete!)

“I’d take one to my Sergeant, but then I’d have to admit that I had one,” the Detective teased us, and my one-liner was sniped out of my hands by an extra yet again. Wait, was he the Eye-candy AI? Cue the tooth sparkling smile. Ugh.