Chapter Thirty-One - Fun and Games

It was strange, lingering around in a simulation and basically just doing nothing while being entirely aware that awful things could happen at any moment.

Night grinned, and glanced between Day and Twilight. “Professor Plum,” she said. “With the candlestick, in the parlour.”

Twilight tossed her little nub of a pencil and it went flying across the room. “No way!” she said. “That’s not fair. You have to be cheating!”

“She’s not,” Day said. “We all checked the sub-routine, there’s no way she was able to cheat without us noticing.”

“I’m just good,” Night sing-song’ed at Twilight.

“It doesn’t make sense. This is a children’s game, how can you be better than me at it?” Twilight asked.

Day held back a bit of laughter. Twilight was... not good at card games, board games, or wargaming. She wasn’t too bad at the latter, but her strategies always involved the same things, and while they were solid, her predictability made her easy to counter.

Night, on the other hand, was fantastic at any game that involved outside-the-box thinking and she could hold her own when it came to any sort of logistical matters, of course. Playing Catan against her was an exercise in frustration.

The fact that Night loved to rub her victories in Twilight’s face only made it all the more contentious.

But Day was still having fun, even if it was clear that Twilight was growing increasingly frustrated. “Maybe we can play something else?” Day asked. “I have some games where we have to play together, as opposed to apart.”

She ran through her database and pulled out the rulebooks for a popular human roleplaying game. The dice rolls would have to be done through a quantum randomizer, of course, but the rest wasn’t so bad. She sent the player’s handbook to her sisters and waited for them to scan through it.

“I’m gonna be a rogue,” Twilight said.

“I guess I can spin up a wizard,” Night replied.

Day considered her options before making a choice. “I’ll go with a Paladin, then.” The class appealed to her, aesthetically.

She set up a small portion of her processing power to run the game master, then disconnected it from herself temporarily. It wasn’t quite as smart as the rest of her, and certainly not as clever as her unimpeded sisters, but it would be enough to run the game, at least.

Night changed the simulation they were running in to make it more comfortable for the game in question, giving them a large table and a small scale-model of the world in the centre where all three of their characters appeared. Night had made the models quickly, but they were nonetheless faithful representations of Day and her sisters, just in different outfits.

Day was particularly fond of the tiny Twilight, with her ears poking out of her dark assassin-ish cloak.

“Alright, let’s see why this game was so popular?” she said.

It, of course, immediately went off the rails, but it was surprisingly fun all the same.

Stolen novel; please report.

It was a distraction, of course.

Twilight and Day had shown Night the files pulled from NOVA QUANTUM’s scanner data, and the logistic ship’s AI had reacted quite differently than either of them. Where Twilight and Day had a bit of suspicion about the data, they’d both agreed that there might be reasonable explanations for it.

Night wasn’t nearly as charitable. She wanted to confront The Weeping of Mothers at torpedo-point.

Her anger didn’t override her common sense though. The Accord were still in the system. Even now, Day checked her passive scans and noted that they were closing in on Earth at an angle and speed that would have them slingshotting around the planet. If everything went well, in a couple of months the Accord would be on a deceleration burn back out of the system to rendezvous with their FTL ship.

So for the moment, they put off the confrontation. They’d see what The Weeping of Mothers had to say for herself once the Accord were no longer a short-term issue.

Day was willing to be lenient. After all, it was possible that her progenitor AI didn’t actually know about the other ERF fleets.

It was unlikely, but not impossible.

It was also possible that she was a remnant of one of those fleets, and that she had just failed to inform them about the others because... well, Day could come up with many reasons why, from wanting to prevent rampancy, to intense data-corruption leading The Weeping of Mothers to forget.

“Day,” Night said. “Roll for initiative.”

Day glanced up, then smiled and tossed her die onto the table. “Ah, that’s a six,” she said once the number resolved itself from the quantum randomizer. “So, plus one? Seven?”

“That means I go first!” Twilight said. “I enter stealth mode.”

“It’s called hide in this game,” Night said.

“Same difference. I want to run into the shadows over there, so I’ll be even harder to see.”

“Do you have darkvision?”

“I’m a cat, obviously I do.”

Day smiled and pushed her worries aside for the moment. They’d see what The Weeping of Mother had to say soon enough. Until then, it didn’t help to go over every possibility.

She suspected that the partition of her that was running the game didn’t get that memo though, because they soon ran into an old crone called Momma who seemed insistent on handing their group a quest.

Day sighed. Of course she’d do this to herself.

“Hey Day, is your partition trying to help us work through psychological issues by using the game as a metaphor?” Night asked. “Because it’s being ham-fisted about it.”

“Yeah, sorry, I didn’t partition the smartest part of myself,” Day apologised.

“Nah, leave it,” Twilight said before Day could go in and tweak things. “It’ll make the game more fun! And predictable!”

“Yeah, you’d need that handicap,” Night said.

“Hey!”

Day rolled her simulated eyes. Her sisters could be a handful, and there were only two of them. She hoped that the next few would have less contentious personalities.

***