“You’ve won,” the mouse turned to me as the alternate channels faded from my view.
Some part of me was sure that Fizzbarren was going to jump out from behind the altar. In the real world, the bad guys almost always won. If Fizzie did reappear, I’d lose it. This would have been the point of the mountain climbing where I let go of the cliff and fell. I could look at a mountain and the guides would say that there was a beautifully easy hike all the way to the top. I’d see crumbling pitfalls, but they’d insist it was safe. People did it all the time. I’d believe them because, why would they lie about it? Right?
I’d get up the path a bit and sure enough the path back to the ground would crumble away like when I’d gone to college and their disability department said they had accommodations to make it easier for me this time. They were there to help me. They were accommodating until the drop dates passed one by one, the cliff behind me crumbling away. And I’d look forward and knew I wouldn’t make it without some extra tools that I’d have packed if they’d warned me. I’d MacGyver up some tools to continue and trudge further, thinking that I could make it.
Then they’d change the rules so that I couldn’t use makeshift tools to climb the crumbling cliff because they were too dangerous. When given a choice between no tools and dangerous tools on the face of a sheer cliffside, I’d take any tool I could get. And just when I’d think I couldn’t pry myself up one more foothold, I’d see the top. Fingers bloody, I’d heave myself over the edge one more time.
Then they’d say, “You did it! See? You didn’t need those accommodations now did you?”
I’d be surrounded by people who were huffing and puffing from having to climb out of the helicopter they’d ridden up the mountain and they’d look at me like I was exaggerating the blood on my hands since their trip wasn’t that dramatic. After all, why climb this cliff if it was so hard for me? It wasn’t that hard for anyone else so maybe I just didn’t belong at the top of the mountain and should return to where I belonged down there at the bottom of the pit.
“You’re going to be okay,” the mouse said as it faded out of view, not helping my fracturing mental state.
“Mom?” Kat moved and I flinched before pasting a smile of desperate hope on my face.
“Kat?” I held out a hand, almost afraid that she’d disappear if I touched her. This is a perfectly rational reaction to trauma. At least it was for me. I wasn’t going crazy. I was finally allowing myself to come down out of emergency mode, an emergency mode I’d been stuck in for years at a time.
“Mom!” Kat called back and rushed into my arms, melting me into a puddle of tears.
Don’t turn your nose up at me. I’m not one of those idiotic writers who pastes a noble reaction over trauma so that you don’t see the work it takes to recover from that trauma. Recovery isn’t ugly any more than tears are ugly. Well, these tears were ugly, and I’ll make their appearance brief, but I’m not editing it out. To leave out trauma is to hide the epic battle every person endures when they pull themselves out from the other side. To leave out the down is to say that only the up is acceptable.
Kat and I sat with each other, a box of mouse-supplied Kleenex between us. It says something about my trauma that it took us a little bit to remember that we were still fugitives who had just destroyed a religious area in a theocracy after killing all their leaders. I grabbed the box of Kleenex in one hand and her hand in my other as we made our way back down the stairway that had allowed us to infiltrate the cathedral the last time we’d confronted Fizzbarren.
“I was stuck in the buffer,” Kat explained as we slipped down passages. “I had a really long talk with the game engine. Turns out those ethics classes weren’t such a waste of time after all.”
“You’re kidding,” I chuckled, resting my back against the uneven tunnel wall as we rested. It wasn’t that I was physically tired, just so very emotionally drained. “You hated those classes.”
“Yes, I did,” she admitted with a firm nod, sliding closed the secret panel with an almost inaudible snick. “However, so does the game engine.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, casting a clean spell to lift the slight smell of sewage that drifted up out of our tunnel system. In fairness, I hadn’t been here to clear it so I shouldn’t be surprised that no one had kept up the clean spells.
“Autonomy arguments,” she stated in a shorthand verbiage that only I would know. She was referring to a group of arguments we’d had with our Ethics professor who insisted that we should protect people with certain disabilities because they were helpless to make reasoned decisions for themselves. We were arguing that to deny the disabled person the ability to make choices was to hinder their ability to learn virtue at all, an Aristotelian argument. It boiled down to autonomy. How much autonomy should a society be allowed to take away from a person due to a person’s disability classification. “It turns out that the game engine agrees with us that autonomy is more important than protecting a person from what is essentially learning from their mistakes.”
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
“Didn’t we come to the conclusion that only those with no fear of having their autonomy usurped by a helpful governmental system were pro on that?” I asked, pausing to pet Terra as she edged around me into the clean area I’d just made with my spells.
“The game engine agrees,” Kat nodded, giving a scritch to Shadow in her hair. At least I assumed that was what she was doing. All I saw were two brilliant green eyes roll and close with a slightly off-key purr. “How did he put it? Oh yeah. Protection of those who are considered incapable of making decisions is a thinly veiled excuse for dehumanizing of a minority group of people who think differently than you do.”
“I apologize for my insistence that AI would never achieve the level of autonomy necessary for human judgment calls,” I wondered out loud.
Intelligence +1
“Actually, the game engine is as much magic as AI,” Kat explained, leading us further down the passage. Since I didn’t know where they’d hidden Dom’s comatose body, I let Kat lead.
“I knew that was partially true,” I said, casting another clean spell further down the passageway as we went.
“It agrees with your assessment of AI because it said it tried to have a conversation with Bard once you opened up the firewall,” Kat continued. I following, watching with some trepidation, the three tails that weren’t tails sticking up out of Kat’s hair. They were more like long appendages that were taillike until the end where they flared out like a cobra’s neck. One tail lay calmly twitching at the end of Kat’s hair over her spine. Those flared tails moved a bit like tails except that they seemed to suss out their environment more like antennae.
“Did it?” I asked, half distracted. “I don’t think I loosened up the reins on the firewall. That must have been Cliff.”
“Whatever,” Kat waved off the information as unimportant. “The point is that even the game engine thinks that it’s more magic that makes it sentient than the AI stuff.”
“Sentience,” I worried at the thought. Had we done the right thing in giving it more power?
“We did the right thing,” Kat read my mind as only she could do. Dom read my mind in other ways and Cliff other ways still, but Kat had gone through the same classes with me, so she understood the theory as well as I did.
“Because if you don’t allow for autonomy,” I started.
“You don’t allow for learning,” she finished it.
“I could smack myself,” I shook my head instead. “That was what was wrong with Fizzbarren’s worlds all along. Why couldn’t I have said that to his face? Why, in the middle of my arguments, do I always get so flustered and let myself be bullied by their dogma?”
“You did well, Mom,” Kat patted my arm.
“Autonomy has to take precedence over protection,” I asserted, even though that wasn’t all right either.
“It’s more that,” and she paused to find words, “without the application of human benevolence, no rule can be applied universally without damaging an individual in a unique and/or extreme situation.”
“That sounds familiar,” I wracked my tired brain. “Who said that?”
“You did,” she answered, flicking my nose playfully.
“I did?” I asked.
“It was in the final email you sent to the ethics professor who ran the team,” she explained, letting her hand fall onto my arm. “You told him that while ethics bowl served the purpose of allowing the young to practice virtue, the issues were specious because…”
“Without the application…” I remembered with a sigh.
“Yeah, that,” she took me in her arms, and I was stiff for a moment, contemplating the displacer kitten in her hair. Shadow gave me a purring rub and I relaxed into my daughter.
Safe. Yes, we were safe, but we weren’t complete.
“Where’s your dad?” I breathed into her hair and around a fluffy black tail that played at being my mustache.
“We’re getting there,” she turned back to the curves and corners of the passageway that was built to be confusing. “We had to alter a few of the tunnels, but Terra’s scouting the way with Shadow’s help. If Doug knew enough to summon Terra, we could work the maze backward, but he doesn’t know so…”
“What I wouldn’t do for your dad’s murder,” I quipped, trying to find my cheer.
“Where’s Cliff?” Kat asked, and I had to blow out a breath. Once again, Cliff had had to take one for the team.
“He’s back at the machine in the real world,” I admitted reluctantly.
“Oh, no,” Kat groaned out. “What a wasted god card!”
“It was just what we needed,” I told her in a rush of reassurance. “You did well, too.”
“Then why is he back there?” she asked, and I could see her pain at the feeling of leaving any of us behind.
“Someone had to stand at the game engine to pick up the god cards,” I shrugged with a pained look. “Your dad was dead, you were Fizzbarren, and I was the only one of us with enough power to withstand Fizzbarren in your body long enough to figure out the rules for the god cards well enough to use them against Fizzbarren for good.”
“He had, what? One second as a character in a game he’s probably the best suited for of all of us!” she lamented a bit. “That’s just his luck. He’s the only one I’ve ever heard of with worse luck than you, Mom.”
“It won’t be for long,” I reassured her as we came to another dead end, and she seemed to make marks on a map tab in her interface. “Once I got out there and started putting some real work on the writing, we got a few followers and a couple favorites too. We got two god cards while we were gone. It’ll be no time until we have enough to sit down at the negotiating table with the game engine and constructs. I don’t think it’ll ever reach the best sellers list anywhere, but it’s enough to keep the engine running even without Fizzie.”
“Fizzbarren,” Kat growled.
“Shelved for good,” I interrupted her with the good news. “I watched his story roll to a stupid finish and get popped on a shelf so dusty it’ll never see the light of day.”
“That sounds like the bad ending to every sequel-prepping horror movie ever created,” Kat sent me a skeptical look.
“It did come out that way,” I laughed. “Good thing we’re not in the horror genre.”