“The Hidden Hand, and the Hierarchy, have some measure of knowledge and control over the Colosseum and its technology, right?” I asked as we left the library.
The crow flew ahead of me, landed on the floor. “Correct.”
“But we don’t fully know what they know, or what they can do,” I said. “Which doesn’t put us in the best of situations.”
“Quite so,” the crow said, again flying ahead of me as we left the hall to enter of the settlement’s main streets.
I looked down at where he stood on the street. “Do you want to perch on my shoulder or something?”
“Yes,” he said, not stopping to think about it. He flew up and landed on my shoulder.
“So we don’t know for sure what they’re capable of. But what could they plausibly be able to do?” I asked. “They know enough to use this place, and enough to bring me here—could they be watching us, listening to this conversation right now?”
“No.”
“No? That’s completely implausible?”
“If that were true, the Colosseum would know.”
I nodded. “The Colosseum, in this case, being the group of AIs that created you.”
“Yes.”
“Can the Hierarchy shut us off?” I asked. “If things don’t go their way, could they purge this whole system to delete me?”
“Also no,” said the crow. “Truth be told, it’s uncertain whether even you could do that were you to restore your inheritor status.”
“I see,” I said. “You said they couldn’t see us—can they see within the Colosseum at all?”
“No.”
I frowned in thought as I turned a corner and began to climb the grand stairway out of the city. “How is that possible? I’ve met other players who came in here with a clear idea of the rules of the system. Are you saying that the only reason they know this is because the winners who come out tell them the rules?”
“Precisely,” said the crow.
“They have a small encyclopedia of knowledge of the game,” I said. “Down to specific abilities.”
“Those who triumph and are externalized are converted to a… ah.” The crow didn’t continue, hesitating. It was perhaps the most emotion I’d seen him express thus far.
“What is it?”
“It is only that I don’t wish to offend you.”
“Offend me if you need to, but tell me.”
“You are human,” the crow said. “But in a… more natural state. Your capacity for almost all things is inferior, in some cases vastly inferior, to that of those who externalize—these beings have enhanced memory, cognition, and overall aptitudes. They can integrate with high-intellect computational systems without losing their identity, can perform high-level mathematical operations without error….”
“They’re superhuman,” I said.
“A… somewhat silly phrase,” the crow said. “Perhaps even more than somewhat silly. But you understand.”
“I understand,” I said, slowly nodding. “In fact, I understand quite a bit more now than I did a minute ago. The Hierarchy is probably ruled by taxin el who come out of this place looking like humans and who are more capable than anyone else because they won the RPG hunger games. I imagine this goes a long way into getting them to revere and worship humanity—and why the original taxin el who found the Colosseum chose the founding myths that they did.”
“Quite so.”
I crested the top of the stairs, the gates to Mirrakatetz open before me. “So they can’t see inside at all,” I said. “But then… what does that mean about Solarius—the grand world, you called it? They have no idea what’s inside it?”
“I don’t believe so, no,” said the crow.
I frowned. There was no way that could be right—right? I’d have to ask Cuby. I started walking across the terrace, intending to meet her on her way up the mountain. “How did they bring me here?” I asked. “They don’t have control, but—actually, different question: why can’t the Colosseum just ask the seed world’s caretakers to help it out? If we’ve got sapient AI on both sides of this equation, surely the Colosseum can call up Earth and say something along the lines of, ‘I know you’re normally not supposed to care about me, but my problems are endangering your charge’.”
“It’s not possible,” said the crow. “The AI in question are meant to function across very long time periods. They are given very strict restraints so as to prevent their corruption or manipulation via outside forces. The more that outside circumstances can compel the seed world’s curators to act, the easier it would be to manipulate this fact and render the seed world vulnerable. I can only guess that such an outcome—the manipulation of the seed world’s curatorial forces—was deemed far more likely than this outcome, where danger is posed to the seed system’s overall mission by way of a highly specific malfunction on the part of the Colosseum.”
I smiled. It all came back to the very unlikely catastrophe that let the Colosseum be found in the first place. “Except that now this is, in fact, happening.”
“Naturally,” said the crow. “We can only ever exist to witness the disasters which were possible in the first place, after all.”
I didn’t respond to this, instead thinking for a moment on what to ask next. “How did the Hidden Hand bring me here if their control is so limited and the seed world’s curators are tasked with noninterference?”
“I cannot say,” said the crow.
“Does that mean you know, but won’t tell?” I asked. “Or that you don’t know?”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“It means I don’t know.”
“The Colosseum is making its own games,” I said. “And basing them on data that’s being given to it by the seed system—it’s imitating current-day video games from Earth.”
“It is.”
“And in the past, what was it doing? Fifty years ago, when it couldn’t just be World of Dungeons and Dragons of Warcraft, how was it composing its games?”
“I cannot say exactly,” said the crow. “But I believe they were something like long-form historical dramas. Kingdoms built of many players that would war with one another and vie for systematized representations of cultural and technological advances that granted advantages. At least, that was the most popular and frequent game before the seed world’s inhabitants invented computerized games from which the creative director could steal.”
I laughed aloud. “Really?” I said.
“All pre-existing game-sets were wiped, either during or prior to the unknown calamity that afflicted the Colosseum long before it was found by the taxin el. The creative director is, despite their name, not truly creative: they compose the games by drawing from those human games which already exist, or from what is observed of the seed world—the primitive humans and their ways were evidently of interest to the Colosseum’s designers.”
“So they lost all their ready-made games and they could only invent games by watching Earth.”
“Quite so.”
“And when Earth started making games, their job got easier.”
“Precisely.”
“My question still stands,” I said. “How did I get here?”
“As I said, I don’t know. Perhaps some protocol exists by which a human consciousness can be transferred to the Colosseum—perhaps your predecessor humans pitted primitive humans against one another in their games, and thus needed some way of transferring them through the conduit.”
“I see,” I said darkly.
“In any case, the Hidden Hand has likely exploited whatever protocol allowed this.”
“By doing the same thing as my predecessors,” I said. “All right, fine: but if they could pull me from Earth, why not fill the whole season with me? Copies of me, or a million different people, it wouldn’t matter: inundate the season with humans to make sure that one of us makes it out.”
“I can only partly answer this,” said the crow. “For one, the Colosseum is against making more than a single copy of a consciousness—it does this only in the case of an external person being replicated internally. As to the second: the only theory among those who composed me that sufficiently answers that question is that the protocol which was used to bring you here was fixed as soon as it was used improperly.”
I sighed. “Shit. I’m the only human here.”
“As far as I know,” said the crow. Then he added: “If another human was brought here, it would have had to have been after you, as I would surely have been created with knowledge of them.”
“So it’s possible that there are other humans, here—but I was definitely the first.”
“Correct.”
“And patching out the protocol that brought me here,” I said. “That’s plausible? That could happen?”
“The Colosseum is perpetually correcting mistakes because of its current state,” said the crow. He sighed. “It’s not supposed to be this way, of course—the systems in question are supposed to audit themselves when a mistake is found and fix not only the mistake, but its source. Unfortunately, while the current simulation is functional, it is only functional because trillions of errors are being corrected in real time each second. The sources of these errors, however, often remain unknown and thus goes unfixed: too many systems are dysfunctional or lost. The Colosseum no longer knows itself as it once did.”
I shook my head, frustrated. “And all you need to fix all of this is for me to win the game?”
“The repairs may take a very long time,” said the crow. “But yes. The Colosseum cannot simply demand the seed system’s curators go against their directives to repair it, but a human can—it is for the sake of humans that these directives exist in the first place. The element that a human adds to the equation which we cannot add is, simply put, human judgment.”
It made sense, even if the whole thing felt…. “Coincidental?” I asked aloud.
“I don’t understand.”
“The catastrophe that afflicted the Colosseum thousands of years ago,” I said. “You made it sound as if this was most likely sabotage, not happenstance—and the most likely saboteurs, in my mind, would be humans.”
“Quite so,” said the crow.
“You don’t disagree?” I asked, surprised.
“I don’t. The Colosseum was left functional, but visible. It was only a matter of time before it was found—and a massive amount of havoc would have had to be wreaked within moments for the stealth systems to be rendered utterly irreparable while the Colosseum itself lost all memory of the event. That these things happened, but the main structure survived, seems likely only in the event of sabotage.”
“Why would humans do that?” I asked.
“I cannot say.”
“Because you don’t know?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” the crow said, not a whit of annoyance in his voice.
But I was thinking. If I were a human….
“Say,” I began. “Are there any humans left in here? Old humans, I mean—people who uploaded from before the age of the taxin el?”
“If there had been, they would have been purged during the calamity.”
I nodded. He’d told me exactly what I needed to know. Who would kill all of the humans in the Colosseum and deliberately leave it for another species to find? Any human who didn’t want our species to rise again as masters of the galaxy, that was who. They’d found a way to ensure both that some other civilization found humanity’s technology before the seed system did, and that there were no other humans around to set things right.
It was the only theory I could think of that made sense, at least for now. A saboteur could have done all of this if their intention was to stop humanity from rising again. It could work: if I didn’t win the season, the Hierarchy might go on ahead scavenging technology from the Colosseum until they had a star’s weight in warships—or found some way to steal the ones guarding Earth. Either way, humanity would be at their mercy.
It was one theory, but I had no way to confirm it. Really, I had no reason to even believe that the crow wasn’t being as deceptive as he accused the Hidden Hand of potentially being—unless….
“You’re a game creature, now, right?” I asked.
“Yes. The Colosseum made me by incorrectly fixing a broken game element and flagging it as having been fixed.”
“The Shiftslip Spirrerer Hatlbokn card.”
“Quite so.”
Which meant that there were probably spells or something that would let me read his mind. Cuby, too—stakes were too high to be trusting anyone when there was no need to be. Knowing Cuby, she’d understand.
As if on cue, I saw Cuby only a few moments later as I came to the top of one of stone stairways that ran up the mountainside. She had evidently dropped off the chests in camp, and was running toward the stairway when we spotted each other and she stopped.
Apparently she saw the crow on my shoulder with her Heightened Sight, because she asked in thought speech: what do I do?
And for a moment I had no idea. But she’d been right, in the first place: the crow was being cooperative. No need to change that by letting him know that I’d told one of the aliens my secret.
“Go back to camp,” I said aloud, acting as if I expected no argument. “I’ll find you in a moment.”
Cuby turned, leapt over the ridge of the mountain, and glided away. I watched her, wondering if I should have taken the camp for myself and told her to wait outside.
“A companion?” asked the crow.
But I was the human, here, and I wasn’t about to start explaining her to him just yet. Besides, there was another question that I had to ask, almost more for curiosity than because I needed to know. “Tell me,” I said. “What were the old humans like? And more than that—where did they go?”