“Kat sneaked slowly away from the Cardinal’s dead body and into the room where Fizzbarren lay. Resurrection stones lined the walls. Fizzbarren’s still body lay in a bed fit for a king. The bed where Fizzbarren’s young form lay was bedecked with the richest linens that the kingdom could provide as if Sleeping Beauty lay there waiting for her handsome prince to save her with true love’s first kiss. It was the king’s bed so that worked. Kat didn’t even pause before running her glimmering knife across the nakedly vulnerable throat of their despised arch enemy. The body of their enemy lay helplessly dying on the bed slowly draining of life’s viscous liquid. As the listless form on the bed’s countenance faded from healthy pink splattered with artistic slices of red as deep as the lips of Snow White to a ghostly parody of beige, Kat took her due by claiming the spoils of war in the form the disintegrating body of her foe, looting the game, as was her due.”
This was why AI wasn’t ever going to be able to replace writers. Maybe bad writers, but not real ones. That paragraph was what I read off the typewriter as it came out. I’m going to rewrite the rest of this for you because, well, it’s just that we’re part of the Writeathon on Royal Road and AI assisted writing isn’t allowed, even when it’s being used as a really bad example. As my author-self became reassured of my artistic worth beyond AIs, my mother’s heart beat so fast that I worried my old body couldn’t handle it.
Kat had killed Fizzbarren. It was over. But then why had the game paused?
“Sammi!” Kat called out to the bench, and I wondered how it had never disappeared from the workshop like the Quill did when going in and out of the game. She had looted Fizzbarren’s corpse and had gotten the two god cards as a drop as Fizzbarren’s corpse disintegrated. “I want to choose my reward of Cliff as my loved one and I want to use this god card to summon my mom back into this world exactly as powerful as she was when she left!”
This all sounded great to me, but Cliff was here, and I was still here. And my life doesn’t work this way.
“Perfect,” came Fizzbarren’s voice from Kat’s mouth and I nearly lost my mind. Since my losing my mind didn’t go over so well last time, how about we skip my mental flip-flops and I’ll stick to the next conversation.
“Oh, no,” I echoed Sammi’s tone and comment with a bump toward the more doomsy side.
“The good news is that the game pauses when someone is summoned into it,” the typewriter explained.
“More good news is that it will stay paused until you and Cliff can be summoned into that world without any witnesses,” Sammi put in from their bench form.
“The bad news?” Cliff had sidled around the machine to read next to me.
“Oh, there’s lots of that,” the typewriter moaned out. “First, I think we paused more on a technicality than a real thing and the Quill and the game engine and I have been debating whether we had the right to pause it at all, since the reason for the rule was to make sure that no one was around to see the person disappear, but both of you would disappear at once making it irrelevant if you saw each other do so.”
“In this case, I’m for following the letter of the law rather than the intent,” Cliff told the typewriter with a threatening wave of his soldering iron.
And this was my life. Just when I was sitting back discussing the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, I’m struck with an emergency that is too distracting to allow me to see some wonderfully lovely answer. If it hadn’t been Kat and Dom’s lives on the line, I might have stubbornly sat down and gotten to whatever grisly ending there was to that line of thought, but life had a way of making sure you had just enough incentive to look away from that final truth. It doesn’t matter how wise or intelligent you are, life will make sure you don’t solve that one.
“If you unpause before I have a chance to figure out my next move, I’m going to set this workshop on fire from within the game,” I growled out.
“I’m not sure that would be possible?” the mirror protested, but I could see that none of them were quite sure that I could not do exactly that. There was no doubt in my mind that I couldn’t as Fizzbarren certainly would have and he had more power than I did in this world, but there was no need to reassure the constructs.
“Try me,” I glared at the mirror, who responded to its programming to back down from authority.
And then I understood why people didn’t like the construct characters in the book. I hate to harp on my SINGLE review but it’s really all I’ve got to work with aside from the sparse comments below the chapters, which have dried up like my CMS since Dom had died. That’s good though, since sex was also deemed against the rules for the Writeathon, and I didn’t want to take any chances. The problem with the constructs, even Sammi, was that they were rather shallow characters. They were shallow characters though because they were AIs, or at least they were close enough for government work. The constructs weren’t liked because I described them too accurately. That’s why Sammi had seemed to be such a bad character. They were supposed to be shallow and I just wrote that so accurately that they reached that uncanny valley state.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
If you’re not a writer, you probably just want to skim that paragraph and let it go. I’ll put away my writer-aha moments for now and get back to the story where you want to be.
“It’s paused!” the typewriter shivered and winced as much as it could seeing as it was attached to a big box. “I won’t unpause it until you say so.”
“Yeah,” the bench jumped into placating us, but I eyed the constructs like Suzanne Warren in Orange is the New Black. “When in doubt, we are supposed to let you know and let you make the real decision.”
Which is how AIs were supposed to work. When in doubt, consult your programmers who are human beings, thus negating any use for a computer to gain AI status.
“Technically, we’re supposed to wait for instructions from Fizzbarren,” the mirror dared to whisper to the bucket who was hiding behind the mirror.
“Shut up, shiny, or you’re going to find out what happens when I lose my temper,” I snarled at the mirror and shot a hot glance at the bucket just for good measure, feeling like I’d just realized that Hal has control of the bay doors belying my previous belief that AIs would not have the ability to make my life horrible. “My daughter and husband are in there! If they die, you die!”
“I’ve saved their characters,” the typewriter tried to be soothing in its own way. It did not help since I remembered what Lily and Chester had looked like after being shelved as failed characters for the main story.
“Shut up!” I yelled at the room, my hands in my hair and my eyes closed, trying to concentrate on the real business at hand instead of the constructs’ inane AI banter. “Do we have another god card yet?” We had gotten our first god card when we’d gotten our first review. We were waiting on the tenth rating, our twentieth follower, or our ten thousandth view.
“Yes,” the pillow answered, using her tassels to shuffle over to the stool where there sat a golden card under my discarded headphones. “It spit out last night, but I didn’t want to bother you since you didn’t seem to be in a very good mood this morning.”
When I thought of how I’d jostled around it half the day, my stomach sank with dread. I scrambled across the floor and snatched up the card like a three-year-old going after the pinata candy, like there were a dozen other sugar-starved five-year-olds competing with me. The card wasn’t actually golden like the Willy Wonka ticket, but more like an ornate playing card. It didn’t even have any directions on it. Of course, Fizzbarren only thought he was going to be using them so why would they need instructions? I reasoned to myself.
“Will it go into the game with me?” I asked quickly, not sure how long the constructs would stick to their current version of how all this should be handled.
“Yes,” the mirror answered carefully.
“Of course,” I muttered to myself. “Otherwise, how would Fizzbarren get them?”
“Can’t you use it from out here?” Cliff asked.
“Well,” the pillow twitched her tassels with nerves but was the only one to answer. “Not without magical mana to activate it and you only have that in the game.”
“How long is the game paused?” I asked, trying to nail them down on that idea.
“As long as neither you nor Cliff are alone,” Sammi assured us.
“And suddenly, I have to go to the bathroom,” Cliff’s eyes widened.
“That’s not funny,” I closed my eyes and counted slowly, knowing without him saying anything that he wasn’t joking.
“I’ll hold it,” he grimaced, and I might have laughed if it wasn’t so serious.
“What’s happened to Kat?”
“Technically, she’s been expelled from the game because Fizzbarren took over her body,” Sammi answered. “It’s a god card thing. His god cards are programmed with a failsafe so that no one can steal them.”
“So, she ends up here?” I asked, ignoring the rule-breaking garbage for now.
“We’re thinking? Yes?” Sammi hedged, and it was like they were still discussing ethics like it wasn’t my life and my family on the line. It wasn’t like I’d lost my desire to support their little AI ascension into autonomy in an instant of selfishness. I was prioritizing my family and the life-or-death nature of the situation over their inane banter and to say it should be given serious thought on whether or not my actions were ethical was to pretend we were still in ethics class.
“Will I be able to take my god cards in there?” I asked, adding the newest one to the other one in my pocket.
“Yes, because you earned them,” Sammi said reasonably, as if all of this was based on solid logic, reminding me again of my ethics professor.
“Is that how you think it should work or how it will really work?” I didn’t have a lot of faith in shoulds.
“The game engine is set on that,” the typewriter assured me, not that it really made me feel better. “The owner of the god card is the one who earned it.”
“It’s in the code just like that?” I pressed it.
“Yes,” the typewriter’s space bar gave a decisive snap.
“You have two god cards and all your old powers to take down Fizzbarren,” Cliff spread his arms with a supportive smile that I knew had no basis is the reality that I knew of as my life. “You’ve got this, babe.”
“I need to use one god card to save you, so I only have one god card,” I listed my pessimistic reality to the room and myself.
“But-“ Cliff started to say something noble like how I could let him die but I cut him off.
“That’s one god card left,” I stated firmly. “You are going to be a level one and rather than let Fizzbarren fireball you in the first instant, I’m using the first god card to send you to watch over Dom wherever he still is.”
“Oh,” Cliff frowned. It wasn’t easy to learn that you were useless, but I didn’t feel like I had time to plump his ego back up. Instead, I just tried to focus on necessities for life right now and we’d all solve the existential crises later, when we could sit around laughing about the whole thing. After getting our hands on the same type of drugs they must use to get Survivor participants to forgive each other by the reunion show.
“You’ll have all your powers,” Sammi tried to sound hopeful. I knew better. Hope didn’t work in my life.
“And Fizzbarren has all of Kat’s powers,” I blew out a breath and closed my eyes. “All the powers and levels and professions that I helped her get. He’s got all that.”
“My money’s on you,” Cliff rallied to say.
I sent him a very insecure and watery look. “I’ve never been enough before.”
“You are for us,” Cliff reminded me.
Okay, look. This is another meltdown area that I know doesn’t look good on paper, but I’m a human being, not some AI that can roll with the punches. We discussed waiting for another god card. We discussed strategy. Who am I kidding? I cried and then got my shit together. Nuff said.