You’re an NPC.

I stood there, staring at her in the morning sun, unable to respond. Truthfully, a spark of hope had flared in me when she’d spoken the words, hope mingled with shame—maybe, maybe I could get away with it for just a little longer. Maybe I could keep lying to her… if I just changed the lie I was trying to tell.

“I told you I wasn’t a fool,” said Cuby. “Of course I’ve noticed that you don’t know anything, anything at all about the Hierarchy. I could put you to the test, if you like—ask you to name a homeworld other than mine, or tell me what a vrindex is, or even just ask you questions about your old assignment—but why bother? We both know you couldn’t answer them.”

I was silent. Cuby shrugged and looked away from me, out at the valley below us. “You didn’t need to adjust to the new body, the new expressions, and you seem to know everything there is to know about being a human, at least in this world. You act like you don’t know the system, and maybe you really don’t have the knowledge that you would if you’d read the Archivect before you uploaded—but you didn’t upload. NPCs can gain levels and classes just like players, so why not chosen boons?”

She glanced over at me, her expression still kind and even a little sad. “That part I can’t figure out. Did a chosen spawn in front of you and you bashed their head in with a rock before they woke up? Why were you level one, when we haven’t seen any level one NPCs? What settlement did you come from, and were just… faking like you didn’t know what Oromar’s Bastion was, or had you really never been there?” She shrugged again. “Maybe there was a malfunction, and you did just get a free card. Your stats still aren’t following the rules, and I didn’t know that NPCs had anything that did that—but I didn’t know anything about NPCs before I uploaded. None of us do. We pay them no mind at all….”

She seemed to drift away into thought for a minute, as if bothered by something. I stayed silent, waiting for her to finish, my mind reeling as I tried to work through my own moral dilemma: did I just go along with this?

“When the deaths in Oromar’s Bastion upset you so much, I thought for sure that you ought to be an NPC—because why would you care otherwise? But… they’re starting to upset me, too, and that’s new. Just like it’s new that I want an alliance built upon… friendship, I suppose. Loyalty, not just a good deal where I can see all of the motivations. I….”

She trailed away, then stared at me for a few uncomfortable seconds, saying nothing. “We can do it your way if you like,” she said. “I know how to do it that way best, really—I just want to try doing things differently, now. I want you to tell me the truth.”

And she waited, finished her speech.

I had no idea what to do; it was my turn to talk. To either tell her, or pretend to tell her and lie by saying I was an NPC, or simply tell her that she was nothing more than a means to an end.

So much was at stake… my life, potentially even Earth, though it made no sense to me how this could be the case—and perhaps most importantly, my sanity.

My sanity. God, I was so alone in this place. How was I supposed to do this without a single person I could trust? But I couldn’t risk telling her I was human when I didn’t even know what I was risking.

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But human beings were social creatures, and Cuby was psychologically part-human, now. Surely she could consider me a part of her tribe?

And what if she saw me as a means to an end, instead? A way to potentially reform her entire society? A human, returned?

In the end, the thing that decided it for me was simpler than all these circuitous thoughts: I thought of how I’d felt when I watched the devil bring her down to zero. I thought of how much it had hurt and terrified me to think my friend was dead.

“I did have a life before this one, Cuby,” I said, my voice almost hoarse. “And it wasn’t as an assisting AI who worked in waste management.”

“Mhmm.”

“It’s only… I had loyalties of my own. There are people who I would want to see protected.” Such as the entire population of Earth.

“And you’re worried that if you tell me, I’ll somehow get them hurt.”

“Yes, Cuby. I’m very, very worried.”

“I’m not a karox, Alatar,” she said, cocking her head at me. “I’m not loyal to the taxin el or the Hierarchy forever.”

“But then what are you loyal to?” I asked.

“Myself,” she said. “And my word, though that’s just a way of being loyal to myself. And I’ll be loyal to you, if you ask it of me.”

Her smile had vanished, replaced with a simple, earnest expression. I wanted to trust her, but….

“And can you think of anything, anything I might say that would change your mind?”

Cuby seemed pensieve for a second. “If you told me something that I knew would hurt me, or the phrenodine. Well, not just any phrenodine, or a given number of phrenodine—but something that would diminish us in the Hierarchy, lower our position. I have loyalty there still, I think—but that’s my species. That should go without saying.”

“Okay,” I said, nodding. “Anything else?”

“I suppose… I don’t know, Alatar. It’s hard to think of, but everything that might make me betray you would have to be on such a scale….” she sighed. “If you said you were going to make Tax Eli go supernova in a year, I might feel compelled to tell someone. It’s not that I’m loyal like a karox, or that I would care so much like a lamue, or that I’d be afraid of losing my position like a telorian… it’s that I’d feel it was a waste.”

My mind reeled. Maybe it was just wishful thinking… but it sounded like Cuby was on my side. She didn’t want large-scale catastrophe—and wouldn’t that mean that she’d be fine with agreeing with me, with keeping my secret to stop a kind of galactic-scale social upheaval through all the Hierarchy?

“Okay, Cuby,” I said, bottom dropping out of my stomach for a moment as I realized what I was about to do. “I’m going to tell you something that at first you may not believe.”

Cuby smiled a small smile. “Come now, Alatar. I’ll bet I already guessed the most of it. Just tell me.”

I linked her the pane:

Player Race – True Human

Human beings are the rightful masters of the galaxy and the creators of the Colosseum. As a human player, you gain additional benefits:

Cuby read this pane. Then she read it again. Then she stepped closer and seemed to read it a third time, her eyes flicking back and forth faster and faster, as if she didn’t understand. She made a wordless, confused noise as she looked past the pane, at me.

It would appear I had some explaining to do.