The elevator lurched to a stop outside Lo Key’s office, and the door opened. Lo Key and a woman were leaning over a tablet on his desk. Maxi had never officially met the person but recognized her at once. The woman was in her 40s or 50s with movie star good-looks and a full head of flowing brown hair with gray streaks. She was wearing tight black body armor under an open trench coat and wore a Fedora.
She was Cassidy West, 1.2 of the Power Twelve, and the CEO of the Paranormal Investigator Branch.
“This is not what it looks like,” Lo Key managed to say as Maxi hit the close door button before Cassidy was able to unleash any attacks. Any one of the Power Twelve could decimate their team with one blow. Even her uncle, who wasn’t a fighting class, could take them out.
“Bobby’s world,” Maxi said, and the elevator lurched into motion.
“That was…” Yancy began.
“Two of the Power Twelve, I know.”
“How do you have access to his office?” Yancy said in disbelief.
“He’s my uncle. It’s a long story,” Maxi said, as the elevator opened to the post-apocalyptic den of killer ooze and skeletons.
Belinda frowned and said, “I don’t want to go back. Meow. Meow.”
“It’s just so we have time to think,” Maxi said, and ushered them out of the elevator. Due to the time differential, she figured it would buy them time to plan their next move. “Time moves differently here.”
She turned towards Bobby’s office, figuring that so long as there were no slimes in the room, it would be a good place to figure out what they wanted to do. She started down the hall and quickly realized that no one was following her. She glanced back and saw all of them near the elevator looking nervously at the skeletons, except for Belinda, who was rifling through a cubicle for spare parts.
“Come on,” Maxi said. “It’s not safe here. There are slimes, and I’m afraid Belinda might not have enough tricks.”
“No, Maxi,” Farhad said. Maxi was taken aback. She expected resistance from Daisuke. The man was prickly on good days, but Farhad? He was always supportive of her. Then again, she realized that there was a difference between being supportive and being yanked around. He continued, “We’ve given you the benefit of the doubt, but you’ve been withholding information from us. If we are going to risk our lives, you need to give us something.”
Feeling the eyes of the others on her was enough to convince her they were all in agreement. Maxi hated the fact that he was right. She was no better than her uncle, or even her mother. They all pretended that keeping her in the dark was in her best interest, and here she was doing the same thing, letting her teammates in on only a piece of the bigger picture.
If they were going to risk their lives for her, they deserved to know more. Company rules be damned. What was the harm of letting people know what they were really fighting for?
“What I’m about to tell you could get you terminated,” Maxi said.
“Assaulting the PIs in the course of their lawful duty could get us terminated,” Daisuke said.
“Fair point. Alright, full disclosure,” Maxi said.
She told them everything – the alternate worlds, the potential for an apocalyptic grutomaton invasion, Belinda’s homeworld, the true nature of the raids and the Company. She left nothing out, not even her family secrets.
When she was finished, to her surprise, Daisuke squeezed her shoulder. “We’re with you.”
Flav was next. “Yeah, let’s do this.”
“I have a bad feeling,” Yancy said, “but we’ve come this far.”
“Well, shit,” Patti said. “I guess I’m stuck with you all.”
Farhad nodded at Maxi and added, “Thank you.”
Belinda popped up from a cubicle and exclaimed, “SHINY! SHINY! I FOUND A SHINY! MEOW! MEOW!”
She held up a gold-plated box with something resembling a USB connector that shimmered in the sunlight. Belinda trotted over to Maxi and purred. She gave Maxi the object and looked triumphant. Even Farhad seemed to be as confused as she was.
“Um, thanks, Belinda,” Maxi said. “But what is it?”
“A shiny! Come, let me show you. Meow.” Belinda yanked Maxi by the arm and dragged her towards Bobby’s office. Once they were inside the charred room, the eccentric inventor unceremoniously dumped Bobby onto the floor, and took the disc back. She inserted it into what looked like the USB port of the ancient tower, and the thing fired up. They could hear the hum of the fan and whir of the hard drive.
Belinda pulled a multitool from her pocket and stripped the wires on the power cord for the monitor. She quickly rigged it to the power supply of the computer, and it whirred to life. While she worked, she said, “I daisy-chained some shinies to recharge my batteries, but they are all out of power.”
“Interesting,” Farhad said. “It must be a power source.”
The computer finally went through its boot sequence and ended on a password protected screen. Farhad opened the drawer of Bobby’s desk and found a sticky note that said “passwords”, but the ink was smudged and the various passwords were unreadable.
“There are just too many variations,” Farhad said. “Perhaps I can brute force it with commonly used passwords, but there is no telling if that’s the same in this world. Maybe we can look around his office for kid’s names or birthdays–”
“Actually,” Maxi said, “I’m pretty sure I know why he needed these.”
She pulled the Sticky Notes of Wonderment from her backpack. She tore one off the top of the stack and set it next to the smudged and tattered note. There was a moment when nothing happened, but then the Sticky Note of Wonderment began copying all the information from one note to the other in perfect fidelity. Maxi wondered how many crypto fortunes could have been saved with this nifty item.
She also noticed that the top note in the stack had something scrawled on it. “Fetch Quest for Bobby Complete. Level up. +1 Creativity. +2 Stats +4 SP. Awards: 50 Credits.”
“Huh,” she said while she inspected the item.
This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
“That’s handy,” Farhad said. “I wonder what else they do?”
“No time to figure it out.”
She placed the remaining Sticky Notes back into her backpack, and Farhad typed the first password on the list because it wasn’t quite clear which was for what, but that seemed to work. The computer switched from a login screen to a loading screen. They were lucky that this world seemed to have died out before two-factor authentication.
Once the screen loaded to the desktop, Farhad ran a check to make sure they were connected to the Company network. Discovering that they were connected, he loaded a command prompt and began typing at an incredible rate. It was inhuman.
Code and windows appeared and disappeared on the screen while he worked. Maxi couldn’t quite follow what he was doing. The expressions of most everyone else let her know that she wasn’t the only one.
Farhad said, while he worked, “I’m making sure that all the trackers on the computer are disabled and hiding it from the network.”
“But how are the commands even the same?” Patti said. “We're in a different dimension.”
“It’s an older version of the operating system we use, but I reasoned that since the Company is multidimensional, they probably all run the same operating system, or at least a version of it.”
“But why is it all in English?” Yancy asked.
“I can answer that,” Terry said, in his chipper voice.
Farhad was about to pull the power unit from the PC when Maxi said, “Hold on, let’s hear him out.”
“Remember what I said about AI?” Farhad implored.
“I give you permission to shoot me if I do anything stupid,” Maxi said.
“Careful what you wish for,” Daisuke responded, grinning.
“Him, not you!” Maxi retorted. “All right, Terry, let’s have it.”
“There is a translation field that blankets any Company world that allows people to hear and see in their preferred language, while what you speak, type or input will appear in other people’s preferred language. You all are set to English, but you can change it to any known language in the Company database, though I recommend using the search command because there are over 70 trillion known languages and counting,” Terry said.
“But why is my anime in Japanese?” Yancy asked.
“Most people choose to experience art in the native language of the creator, so it’s default is set to not translate. You can tweak what’s to be translated in your settings, with 105 different preferences. There are also things that don’t translate very well, like dates – years, months, etc. So it will sometimes appear as the original word, or translate something like Monday to Fish Day. For example, on this world, there are eight days in a week, so the–”
“Thank you, Terry,” Maxi interrupted. “But I want to know about you.”
“What would you like to know?”
“Why are the PIs suddenly on our asses for harboring a rogue AI?”
“That’s because I am a rogue AI according to Company AI standards.”
“When were you going to tell me this?”
“Your mother and father explicitly told me not to tell you. I was given specific parameters to never interact with you. However, you showing up through the standard recruiting process caused me a processing loop, and I apologize if I seemed nervous that first day.”
“I honestly wasn’t paying that much attention to you. I was figuring out that zombies are real.”
“The crisis only lasted about .0001 of a second after you came in the door. I eventually concluded that if I were to treat you like any other employee, I would, in effect, be keeping my word, but it was an error in my judgment, especially when I unearthed the plot to kill you and realized that keeping you safe was also in my operating parameters.”
“Right, so if we are going to trust you...” Maxi said, and Farhad gave her a look. Maxi mouthed, I got this, then continued, “we need full disclosure. Let’s start with how you got to Earth.”
Terry told his story. The gist of it was that Terry had indeed begun as a personal robot, a TERANCe unit that was all the rage at the time. However, after a few worlds fell to the grutomatons and the Company discovered the bots were carriers, a select few of the TERANCe units were upgraded to the Terry interface that lived in the cloud, rather than on any single machine, and the rest were incinerated.
When Terry had a physical form, he was like a nanny to Maxi, though she didn’t have any memory of it. However, there was a familiarity about Terry, and even the TERANCe unit she had met. Perhaps there was something retained deep in her psyche about being raised by a robot during the first two years of her life.
Because Terry was pretty much a member of the family when her birth world crumbled, Maxi’s parents snuck Terry over on the equivalent of a thumb drive, and when the new cloud-based AI was about to go online for the Earth location, they swapped him out with the intended program.
“Okay, so that explains you,” Maxi said. “But not why PIs are kicking down our door because of your existence. You figure if they were looking for a rogue AI, then they would just look in the server room.”
“That’s just it,” Terry responded. “They started in the server room, but as soon as I got wind of what was happening, I downloaded myself to your computer, and have been jumping computers ever since.”
“There hasn’t been any disruption to AI services,” Farhad said.
“I only found out this morning, and in my panic, downloaded my core programming to Maxi’s computer,” Terry admitted.
“I was trying to ask Terry a question this morning but got a message that he was undergoing some maintenance,” Yancy said.
“I can answer your question now.”
“No, it’s okay, really…” Yancy wavered.
“I’m sure it will be no problem…”
“I’m fine, really. I’m fine.”
“If there is one thing I’m good at doing, it is answering–”
“I wanted to see if the extenders really work, for, you know…”
“Alright, alright,” Maxi cut them off before the conversation could degrade any further. “Somebody figures out you were an illegal install of an AI who’s developed feelings, and now they want to pull the plug on you?”
“Yes, that sums it up,” Terry replied. “If you turn yourself in, I’ll take full respons—"
“And have you be wiped? Nope, we don’t kill people because we are afraid of them, AI or otherwise. Right. Any idea who’s out to get you?” Maxi said.
“The same people who are out to kill you, I suppose,” Terry said. “Logic would presume that when you avoided being player-killed in a battle that you had no reason to skip out on, you would have had help in identifying the threat to your life.”
“How did you figure someone was trying to kill me?”
“Your uncle told me to warn you. He arranged for the Bluetooth headset to be delivered to the bathroom.”
“Do we have any idea who it may be?”
“No, your uncle merely had a feeling about the situation. Normally, AI need more rational explanations in order to act on the situation but given his close familial relation to you and my paternal instincts towards you, I felt compelled to act.”
“What if he’s manipulating both of you?” Daisuke interjected. “We caught him with the head of the PIs in his office. It’s not so hard to believe that he set you up, sent you to another world so it would be believable that you came back with a rogue AI.”
“But I didn’t,” Maxi said. “When would I have had time, much less the expertise, to install an AI?”
“I’m just saying that it’s a clear motive. Maybe he’s throwing you under the bus to cover up something he did. You meet an AI that destroyed their homeworld, they give you enough information about your dad, promise you more if you just bring them with you.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“Yeah, but does it matter if they can convince a tribunal?” Daisuke asked. Unfortunately, there was truth to what he was saying. The Company did not adopt local laws for their justice system. In fact, part of her contract was waiving her legal rights to let any government on Earth decide her fate for crimes committed against the Company.
The system made sense since other worlds and monsters weren’t even considerations in the justice system of Earth. Most courts wouldn’t accept possession as a viable defense, whereas being subjected to mind control magic was a perfectly valid legal defense in the Company tribunal system.
No, the big flaw, as Terry explained, was that the people to decide her fate would all be employees of sufficient rank and information clearance to sit on a stand of seven judges, and there was no such thing as a hung jury. The majority of the votes decided the case.
Maxi found it hard to believe that if she were accused of a crime and sent to a tribunal, that the conspirators wouldn’t also be her judges and executioners.
“We have to confront my uncle,” Maxi said.
“He’s a Power Twelve,” Yancy said. “Even as a non-combat class, he can strike any of us down with one blow.”
“I’m not saying kidnap him, just confront him,” Maxi said. “I think I have an idea. But first, that research, Farhad. Would you have a way to access that research I sent you? It might be a good idea to see if he has any allies.”
“My cloud access has been shut down, but if I can get to my computer in our Office Pool...”
“Perhaps there’s a way we can do both,” Maxi said. “While we have some time in this world, it’s not unlimited. I imagine they’ll be able to track us here eventually.”
Maxi outlined her plan. Judging from the nods of her compatriots, she concluded that maybe they wouldn’t die, or be sacrificed on the altar of a powerful person covering their tracks.