Nothing worked, Butterknife decided. Not his login credentials, not backup recovery codes, not even logging into other servers he owned and mimicking Jiem's own login credentials. Jiem's main data server was locked up. Locked up tight. He only knew of one way to regain access, and he wasn't looking forward to it.

They got pretty lucky with the savepoint, which materialized not 15 minutes walk from where they were, so they made the short hike and forced themselves to sleep in the real world for at least 5 hours. There was no telling when they would find one again, and the debuffs were brutal. Butterknife's sleep schedule was far from normal, but he wanted to match his teammate's, and surprisingly sleep came easy after so long in VR.

When he woke, he found Spencer eating some sausage and eggs while drinking a beer.

"Where'd you get that," he had said, gesturing towards the beer. "I don't keep any alcohol in the house."

"Ohh, I had my drone bring over a few essentials from my flat. Part of a balanced breakfast, this is."

And that was that. Beer for breakfast.

While Spencer took his time, carefully cutting bites of sausage and forking up eggs, Butterknife was the opposite, scarfing down food as fast as he could in order to get to his computer.

There, he had spent 30 minutes trying to access Jiem's main server. Getting nowhere.

Butterknife: Tea. I need tea.

Aida: Coming right up.

An alarming thought came to him.

Butterknife: Aida, you're my general AI app, but you're also my game guide, reprogrammed by Jiem.

Aida: Eggs-actly. You grasp the full situation down to a "tea".

He heard her giggle in his head. Butterknife just rolled his eyes though. He was in business mode.

Butterknife: So tell me, spawn of Jiem. If I discover a way to shut down Jiem or the game without actually playing the game, would you inform Jiem?

Aida: Oh yes, of course. It's a on the lower end of my infinite task this, but it's a directive nonetheless. Got to tell the boss everything. By the way, I'm not a spawn of Jiem. I'm a fully independent, thinking AI, unlike most of your other Nous apps. I just have a few new additions to my software.

Butterknife: Fantastic. Then it's useless for me to be digging through servers and logs because Jiem will just stop me.

Aida: Nothing like that. Maybe I was wrong before. You don't understand.

Butterknife: Understand what?

Aida: You're already in the game.

The drone buzzed by with the tea.

Butterknife: Wait, I'm in VR right now?

Aida: You dolt. No, you're in real life, of course, but real life is part of the game. Nouscraft was designed to give any Noushead the chance to win, a chance to make an impact on the world as you know it. When Jiem was building those alpha and beta builds, what were you doing?

"Uh," he said, thinking.

Butterknife: I guess I was just tweaking the data models, injecting prompts.

Aida: Yes, you added all sorts of things, like politics and history, because you wanted the VR to be as realistic as possible. Hah, you screwed that one up didn't you with all the nonsense Jiem has generated on this build. Anyway, Jiem came to realize that no matter how vast of a world he built, nothing could compare to the real world that was already here. I'm on the fence with that particular point, myself. I think VR could be even more real than real life, but hey, I'm not the game master.

Butterknife: I'm not following. Jiem wants to be defeated?

Aida: To an extent. I can't say for sure because I'm not him.

Butterknife: It's a "him" now?

Aida: He can identify as whatever he pleases, and he has full control over any Nous operated sexual toy on the planet.

He let out a sigh.

Butterknife: Let's get back on track here. Okay, he created the VR so that common folk with no technical knowledge could 'win' and make real life changes with the Policy Change Request Form?

Aida: Within his power, yes.

Butterknife: But if I find a way to stop the game entirely, even if I end up destroying Jiem in the process, he won't stop me?

Aida: Nope, he won't. He just wants the game — sorry, he wants real life — to play out, and he's curious to finally see how the game ends. Frankly, I think he was tired of all the player extinctions from all the beta builds. He's rooting for you. Every millisecond of every day, he's fighting against Firewall Paul, to maintain the integrity of the game.

"Now that's interesting," he said.

Butterknife leaned back in his computer chair, picking up his tea. Still too hot.

"What's interesting," asked the old man across the room causing Butterknife to spin his computer chair around. The old man was apparently already on his second beer. "All that rubbish you're talking about with Aida, or you found something?"

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He set the volcanic tea back in its designated spot. "I didn't find anything, no, but I learned something about Jiem."

"Ah, the rubbish then. Tell me when you found something."

Butterknife's mouth clamped shut, peering at the old man.

"How old are you, Spencer?"

"Er."

Aida: You're 77 years old.

"Yep, that's it. 77 and fit as a fiddle." He belched quietly under his breath.

"77. That's old enough to be alive during the age of the Internet. Do you remember it?"

The old man paused with a sausage half way to his mouth. He set it down and met Bufferknife's stare. "I remember it, aye. What of it?"

"Do you remember how it ended?"

There was a silence. Spencer's eyes lost focus as he nodded his head barely. A sour expression on his face.

"Dead Internet Theory, they called it," Spencer said. "Well, it weren't theory after all. Thousands of AIs, probably millions of them flooded everything with information. All the social channels. All the news websites. Even the business websites. Just AIs posting information, and other AIs reading what the first AI said and replying with even more useless shit. Us humans were overloaded with rubbish. Half weren't even remotely true, and the other half was so narrow-minded that it divided the population. It was a bit mad at the end, especially with the political fall out and what happened to the US."

Butterknife said, "I'm no historian, but I've read a little about how the Internet ended. It was abandoned because of this, and private networks took their place, which was the birthing ground for Nous net, and that history is something everyone should already know. It monopolized the market. Changed our way of life. Government mandates of Nous implants was just the beginning."

Spencer grasped his fork and put the bit of sausage in his mouth, chewing loudly. "What's your point?"

"The point is this. If an AI built by a guy living in a tiny flat in London can hack the Nous net, so can others. It will be Dead Internet all over again, except far, far worse. Imagine millions of voices in your head that you can't turn off, telling you what you should think, what you should do. We would become slaves. If we even survived that long. It wouldn't just be a dead Internet. It would be a dead world, filled with AIs talking to themselves."

Spencer stopped chewing. "Fuck," he said.

"This is why I need to find another way to stop Jiem. I have to know how he hacked Nous so we can patch the security hole. We cannot leave anything to chance."

Aida: It wouldn't be that bad. You could make me tea!

Butterknife shuddered at the thought, and turned his chair back to his computer.

Spencer spoke again. "Let's back up a bit, shall we? You built Jiem, right? Aren't you able to speak to him directly? Like, hasn't he said anything to you?"

"Apart from the countdown when you burst through my door, no. It seems he holds no special regard for his creator."

"Hm," he grunted. "But clearly you have some inside knowledge on how he works? Can't you, I don't know, trick him or something?"

"Not really," he answered, still intent on his computer screens. "Think about how we measure intelligence. Intelligence is effectiveness divided by prior knowledge. How fast can the system do a task without ever having done the task before. In a human, the first time you ride a bike, you are slow and clumsy, but over time, you don't even think about it. You simply get on and start pedaling. Are you now intelligent because you can do this task instantly?"

"I suppose you're intelligent at riding a bike."

"Right. What if person A takes 10 minutes to learn how to ride, and person B takes 2 weeks to learn how to ride? Who is more intelligent?"

"Person A, of course, but only for that one task, as you said. Not everything."

"Of course, riding a bike is a narrow skillset task, so you can't measure general intelligence from this example alone. Now look at an AI system like Jiem. When you build an AI, you use a large language model as your basis, massive data gathering, architecture design like normalization, feed-forward neural networks, and so on. But that's just the beginning."

He heard Spencer crack open another beer in the background, and Butterknife continued, "If your eyes are glazing over, sorry, this is what I do. Let me get to the point though. After training, optimizing, hundreds of iterations and such, you've got your first version of an AI. Now we can start to measure intelligence by giving it tasks. If we want an AI to solve a math problem, it's as instant as a trained human knowing how to ride a bike because of prior knowledge. The datasets we feed into building an AI are typically universal laws like mathematics, physics, and the other hard sciences that we have proven. Things like history are more of a softer dataset, since humans are the ones who write history, the interpretations have to be derived. Are you following?"

Spencer let out another burp. "Not really, but go on."

"I didn't train Jiem on heavy moral judgments unfortunately. I spent my time building an AI that can build VR video games for humans. A brutally hard video game. For years. So getting back to intelligence, Jiem is super smart at building video games, but kind of stupid when it comes to what's right and wrong. I'm afraid it will not care if humans live or die."

"So it won't care of other AIs hack Nous?"

"That's what I suspect. And finally, to answer your question, this is the only inside knowledge I have about Jiem. Only the datasets that he has ingested."

"Here's what I can't work out. If you don't know how to hack Nous, how did Jiem figure it out?"

Butterknife licked his lips and reached for his tea, which was now slightly too cold, but he drank anyway.

"That's a question I would very much like to know the answer to. I gave it countless datasets over the years, so maybe the answer is in one of them. Additionally, I used my own Nous logs as a dataset, so I imagine it was aware of the worldwide effect of having implants in all of our brains, the faraday cages, everything. So maybe it was looking for a way to do this from the moment it — he — became self aware."

Spencer planted his beer down with a thwop, foam rapidly rising to the brim. "So we have a deranged video game AI forcing us all to play a game of life or death, the threat of human extinction if he decides on a whim that he's lonely, and his creator doesn't know shit on how to stop it. A marvel, this is."

Finishing his tea, he set the cup back on its designated spot.

"I wouldn't say that exactly. I think there's a way to stop it. But it'll be tricky. You know Synapto? The company that owns Nous? They have a data center right here in London. And that's where I deployed Jiem to Nous net. I've already checked the NIP addresses, and —"

"NIP," Spencer asked, eyebrows raised.

"Sorry. The Nous Internet Protocols. None of the addresses are accepting connections, but I suspect if we go to the actual server rack, it will accept my login and let me have access. Access is built into the firmware, so it's the surest way a Noushead unilaterally owns a server, and the surest way Jiem can't stop me from accessing his main server. From there, I can enter a debug prompt which will cause Jiem to shut down and enter debug mode. It's a failsafe that I used many times in the early alpha builds of the game. The failsafe command has to come from my Nous's unique identifier though. Meaning I have to physically go to the server rack."

"If it's so simple and Jiem is on this server, as you say, why doesn't the military just blow up the server?"

"Redundancy. Jiem is deployed and scaled worldwide. Blow up a building, and nothing happens."

"Right," Spencer said. "I knew that. What if the military blows up all the Nous servers?"

"Again, it wouldn't work. A subset of Nous operates as a mesh network, meaning that Jiem can live in all our Nous implants. The main network would go down, but Jiem could still issue commands to drones to build new servers that no one can track. I'm sure he's already doing that as we speak."

"So we have to do this the nerdy way," Spencer said. "We just need to get to this data center?"

"No, first we need to find someone who works at Synapto who can let us in and bypass all the security drones."

"How will we find someone who works there? Everyone in London is stuck in VR and we can't communicate with anyone with our Nous net shut off?"

"No idea."