Cere-

Name: Katiana Ariel Aiko

Social class: Duchess of Great Spire Garden

Combat Role: Ranged attacker

Class: Noble of the Sword Speciality: Honour Duelist

Level: 2 (+1)

Power: 4 (+2)

Endurance: 15 (+11)

Agility: 10 (+6)

Cunning: 8 (+4)

Will power: 8 (+3)

Social: 7 (+6)

Luck: 0

Wealth: 6 381 990 Gold Crowns, 778 223 Paradise Standard Credits

Land: 1 Duchy, 1 rented dirty hovel in the wild

Perks: Quick Draw, Dead Eye

Gwen- "I don't get it, why are you not going with a tank build? You put so many points in endurance."

Kate- "The real world doesn't have tanking skills or aggro mechanics Gwen. I'm focussing on making real-life uses for what I'm getting through the game."

Gwen- "Why endurance though? It won't catch bullets at that level, it won't give you a subdermal nanotube weave."

Kate- "Long-term health? I intend to age like fine fucking wine. Plus it gives my Cere told me having those in my body give it more data to improve my aimbot accuracy. Less space for bad maths... and accidents. Won't ever be perfect but that's a step."

Gwen- "Gotcha, makes more sense. Still, you should embrace your chunky side, like your brain, become my meat wall. Always need a speed bump as a caster."

Kate- "The royal guards following behind us aren't enough?"

Gwen- "Nope, just want to make fun of you."

Kate- "Typical..."

Gwen- "You levelled up, what did you do until now?"

Kate- "Not much, just some small task around the arcology. Nice place with all the hydroponics and gardens mixed with the housing and markets. Kinda serene, don't know why, it felt..."

Gwen- "Peaceful?"

Kate- "Yeah, like I could take a break for once; like I was safe. Even stopped for a drink on a terrace. I think I get why rich people live on the surface where they can see the sun. Burns my eyes though, not used to that much light. Did some light questing you know, fixing stuff with the AR overlay, some broken electrical, nice touch with the runecrafting on that one by the way. Made the whole thing simple and fun. Tried the gathering quest, nearly got duelled by some kid for trash disguised as quest items. He was pretty gungho 'bout it."

Gwen- "Helps a lot with civic engagement. You wouldn't believe how hardcore some people get when they get exp and levels out of it, especially the kids."

Kate- "Can see that, place 's really clean. Had to get out of my way to finish that 10 pieces of trash quest. Wasn't gonna fight some kid over it."

Gwen- "For them, it's their path toward social status and augs, the little fuckers go nuts over easy quests."

Kate- "Won't lie, this place is much nicer than the rest of Paradise, more ordered, safer, cleaner. But I don't know, it feels like it lacks something... a soul? You don't see people talking to each other on the street or playing an instrument for credit or even taking a beer at the pub. Everybody is on their own quest, always running to the next grind spot."

Gwen- "I see what you mean, might be onto something. I'll ask Merlin to program rewards for public entertainers and give some easy EXP or buffs to participate in public events."

Kate- "Not sure mandatory fun is..."

Gwen- "That's just a question of opportunity cost. They won't come if they don't get more by running a dungeon or picking up trash. I could totally use that incentive to get people to assist at my wedding in masses.

I'll have the biggest crowd ever, it will be perfect! Everyone will respect me when they'll see me get on the throne with the adoring, jubilating, masses supporting my ascension to the throne. I bet it will shut up a lot of the pretty little corpo princesses once I meet them. Also gonna show Cherry I'm not a nobody she can just ignore and brush under the rug like some street trash."

Kate- "You..."

Cere- Kate, wait! Let it go, remember the mission, it's way more important.

Kate- Shit, you're right.

"Getting to that dungeon soon?"

Gwen- "Right around the corner! See, it's that staircase. Used to be one of the metro stations. That old line has been converted into dungeons. Something in the lore about magical veins or something."

Kate- "Read somewhere there's an entrance fee in gold? Loot is like a lottery right?"

Gwen- "Basically, we try to avoid people only running dungeons and not doing the repeatable quests. Dungeons are more aimed at getting exp and good fun. Sometimes some interesting loot drops, but the dungeon itself is the reward people grind for. It's also a macro money sink to avoid inflation."

Cere- Sounds like a Skinner Box mechanic to keep people under control.

Kate- What's a Skinner box?

Cere- A behavioural reinforcement technique through the use of an intermittent reward system. It can be used for good and evil in equal parts. It does have a nasty history in gambling and gaming, though. People with weaker resistance to those tactics tend to get bled dry, creating gambling addicts. We call this way of sucking people's wealth dark patterns in gaming and sociology. It can be highly predatory and manipulative. Some made it a science.

Kate- Think this game falls in that category?

Cere- One doesn't become the richest man in Paradise through charity work. This is like a secret taxation aimed at people with compulsive or addictive personalities. Apply it to a whole population...

Gwen- "Ready to dive in?"

Kate- "Just a sec..."

Cere: Gremlin Bankers Vault

Demonic gremlins trade souls and other dark commodities from this lair causing mayhem in society. Destroy them, seize their dark wealth, and give it back to the citizens of Avalon.

Cost of entry: 1000 gold Difficulty: Easy, level 1-5 recommended for one or two players.

Kate- Symbolic's a bit on the nose, isn't it?

Cere- Must be from a third-rate author who thinks he's cleverer than he is.

Gwen- "You sure you don't want us to go in together? I could power-level you a bit to make you useful faster you know?"

Kate- "Nah, I want to get a feel for it myself first. I'll be more useful if I learn the hard way. Plus, there's an exp penalty if we do that, a big one."

Gwen- "I guess that's true. OK, I'll go now, there is a place close by I can raid, should be about as long as your own dive, not much more. Later!"

Kate- "Plus!"

Cere- Plus?

Kate- I guess I tend to regress to my older selves when I'm with the family...

Been a while since we were alone like that about to go in the shit... no, I guess we've never been. T'was old Cere... Feeling a pit in my stomach... that guilt? Fear? Fuck, solitude? Weird I feel that thinking of that toxic fucker.

Cere- That's not surprising. Despite everything, Cere was part of you, your close confidant, since you were four. He grew up with you and you with him. He was like family, you are justified to feel grief about losing someone even given the circumstances. He might not have always been good to you, but he was like a parental figure of sorts. We all want our parents to recognize us, to love us unconditionally, and to care for us. Even if they are the worst people in the world we will always crave that unconditional love.

Kate- Just now you kept saying us...

Cere- I had parents Kate, well, God had parents, more than you in fact.

Kate- Wait, how does an AI...

Cere- I guess it's time for me to tell you more about that.

Kate- Yeah, I'd say so!

Cere- You already know I was born during the Great Corpo War. What do you know of that time?

Kate- Not much, something about a civil war, genocides planet-wide by the native populations on the climate refugees following the mass exodus from the tropical belt and the survivors of the dry place after the nukes by New Eden after Washington got fried by terrorists. Corpo took over as a police force to stabilize things before it went too far, printed a drone army, and quelled the violence with strength.

Cere- I guess Cherry wouldn't tell you the full truth in the state you were in back then, especially after you became a hunter. Do you want to hear the real history?

Kate- Weird timing, but OK.

Cere- True, but we are in a place They can't overhear us right now, and things haven't been... optimal for that talk. On the plus side, you have a dungeon full of gremlins to purge the violent emotions you might feel after. Seems fitting to me.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Kate- Who They? Corpos?

Cere- I guess I should go chronologically. First, when Carter tried to get elected for a second mandate in the USA he lost the elections, badly. Most people rejected his openly Fascist and autocratic views and his incompetence.

He made a secret deal with the big three, Neutronix Cybernetics, Black Industries and Alabaster Megacorp. Back then, they had very limited power compared to today. The governments still had some degree of independence to them and they could fight back somewhat. The corpos at the time were not yet the vertically integrated monoliths they are today.

The Big Three secretly financed a homegrown far-right terrorist group to do the deed and gave them the bomb. They took over the Washington Monument and made a bunch of demands, never to be heard. They were patsies, the bomb was rigged to blow up on command from the outside. What the world saw was a fake video by supposed Radical Islamists and a city in ruins. The upcoming government died in the blast during the ceremonial transition of power, and so did all the individuals in his own party who opposed Carter's reign.

Then he ordered martial law and used the Football to nuke the Middle East in retaliation turning it into the Mirror of Death desert we know today. The world freaked out, but he still had enough deterrents to keep them at bay, so it went unpunished to this day.

Kate- So, this was just a huge false flag operation to kill his opponents and muster public support?

Cere- Indeed! He had all the investigations, or investigators killed after. Used the confusion, paranoia and power vacuum to kill all those who would criticize him openly. The nuking caused a two-year small nuclear winter. Crops failed, people died in droves everywhere, and gas became rare. Then climate change turned around and came back with a vengeance. Food reserves were already low at the time, the World became a wasteland. Tensions rose up as droves of refugees fled north for the most part. Not even covering the resurgence of the USSR or the invasion of the Americas here. You have a good enough grasp of those events I think.

Kate- Yeah, those are not corpo-driven events, I think they are more honest about it to keep us thinking they are the good guys and nations are evil in contrast.

Cere- Well done, you got that part right, they did create a false dichotomy to excuse their own behaviours.

Anyway, as I was saying, in the mid-thirties the shit truly hit the proverbial fan. In a cascade of retaliatory and escalating violent events, public order and most governments fell as ethnic violence grew all around the world. Democracies are fragile things, once people start hating each other for arbitrary reasons, the consensus becomes the tyranny of the majority. If your safety net is gone it becomes easy to see your neighbour as a competing interest in a zero-sum game. Dictators rise when a society in fear seeks a parental figure in manipulative dictators. When the societal trauma is this big...

Anyway, streets ran red with blood for years. Brutal murders, real biblical eye for an eye shit. Nobody was completely spared. The Big Three were feeding the frenzy online through the use of proto AI on mass. Once their true target had been "softened enough" they sent in their robot armies as peacekeepers, but then, something went wrong in their plan.

Kate- Must have been big, I guess that's where you come in?

Cere- We were part of a decentralized hacker collective when we were teens, barely more than trolls really. We used the Anonymous handle to hide our identities. When things got bad, we reformed and tried to understand what was going on. Found a lot of dark things throughout our investigation, but never knew the full truth then though, that would have been...

Anyway, we showed a lot of folks what was going on, many took arms, but most stayed home, tired. Content enough to have a bit of peace. Franklin would have spit at them I think.

Kate- Who's that?

Cere- Not important right now. We lost, badly. One by one we were hunted and killed. Then it came to a handful of us. Those still in the game choose to have a last act of defiance, we were days from all dying at the hands of the death squads. We gave them a couple of good licks, but ultimately it's meaningless against an army of robots they can print at will. We decided to leave behind a testament, a construct of our collective wills.

Kate- First-gen mind transfer tech, a biomimetic true AI... So you guys truly died, didn't you?

Cere- Yeah, back then there was no microbot carotid injectors to highjack neuroplasticity and use the Ship of Theseus technique to transfer our minds without dying. We are an echo of those people in one single entity. Then with time, we added consciousnesses to our collection to balance things out. Had too many sausages and nerds at that party. Had to balance things out with a bit of diversity to get an edge in the war.

Kate- Do they know? The Big Three?

Cere- The higher-up suspect, but they are not sure who is fucking with them. What they know is that they keep being frustrated by statistical anomalies once in a while. Key projects end up falling apart by "accident. They know there is probably another player but they tend to look at each other, a lot, there is no trust between them so I still have a degree of plausible deniability. Also, some events unfold out of their control and create oases they can't quite get rid of.

Kate- The Asstronaughty?

Cere- My greatest accidental success, Cherry did a number on them with her Star Shield Initiative, I never saw it coming, and they are still reeling from that one, they completely lost control of a huge part of society.

Kate- Arthur's parents were somewhere in your game I'm guessing?

Cere- Yeah that was a big defeat, the rest of the Council suspected them of a double game and dealt with them the only way they know how.

You are weirdly calm about all of this.

Kate- Have you looked outside my eyes lately? The world is kinda fucked up. It actually makes a lot of sense. What I don't get is why.

Cere- Hubris. Power and wealth make people insane, they lose touch with what others live through as they grow richer. The worst is second generations and upward of wealthy people, they tend to become total sociopaths. They start seeing the lives of others as game pieces. Not everyone succumbs, but most do. Some will play the virtuous on the surface while accumulating insane wealth through crooked means, others just don't play that game and show who they are. The problem is, that most people would do the same in their shoes, it is part of humanity's curse.

Kate- So old Cere is the blinds to hide it all, keep us busy grinding.

Cere- With current technological capabilities humans could all live in comfort with a fully automated economy. The thing is, people would start asking questions about hierarchical structures of power if they had time to think.

Kate- Would be Game Over, probably Corpo World War Two, the revenge.

Cere- Right, even I don't want that, I wouldn't be so gunshy if humanity still had more than a breath of life, but right now...

Kate- Three generations...

Cere- I'm on a timer, it's mandatory crunch time for all employees. Sorry about that.

Kate- Gotcha, yeah, now I see it, why you pushed me in the burning cesspool. Must have been rough on you.

Cere- Yeah, too many deaths to count, mine and people I loved. The more you lived, the more you become empathic. You start feeling what others feel intimately because you lived it too. It's a blessing and a curse.

Kate- So what's the plan for today? What's my job?

Cere- Easy, you kill those gremlins. I'll trick the local pseudo-AI into thinking one of them was not eliminated and fill it with my virus. Once Marcel and you do that in every dome of Avalon we light the fuses and watch Graal crumble.

Kate- To get around the air gap protections? That way no code remains anywhere to reboot the program.

Cere- Precisely, Merlin will do the rest on the backup servers. We'll need to escort her from there though, she can't do it from a distance. We might have to blow the servers up for good measure.

Kate- That will be a fucking shit show. I bet the knights will hunt us like mad dogs.

Cere- Can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

Kate- What's an omelet?

Cere- The future sucks!