February 22, 2142

Paul Gouire was a nervous man by nature. He liked to think of it as perfectly sensible caution, but the fact of the matter was that he was far too timid. It was one thing to take risks in games, but in the real world, there were consequences. He might make mistakes that couldn’t be fixed. That was why he needed to think things through.

His attention to detail, as he liked to think of it, was probably the reason he’d noticed the anomaly that no one else had. He’d been doing a final fifth check when he’d seen the blip. It was there and gone, just a flicker that he thought he’d imagined as the data streamed past his eyes in real time. With a thought, he’d paused the stream and rewound it to look at the blip again.

It wasn’t much, just a momentary spike in vitals, a panic reaction. Sometimes those things happened in an environment that so closely mimicked the human senses. By itself, the blip was meaningless. It was what happened after that was strange. The blip caught Paul’s attention, and then the vitals flattened out to normal levels immediately.

What was strange was that they weren’t just normal levels. They were textbook for the height and weight, and after that first blip, they did not fluctuate at all. Once he’d seen it, Paul started sifting through the logs for other instances. And he found them, one after another after another. There was only one common factor.

Every single tester had been in the House of Revenants area when the anomaly occurred. 92% of them had been fighting the Puppet Lord boss, and the remaining 8% had been in a party with someone who had, but not in the actual fight itself. Paul traced the timestamps on the vitals recordings back. Something had gone wrong.

He was thorough. He liked to be able to present a complete report when he disclosed his findings to the bug killers. Paul worked into the night, digging for more information.

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February 23, 2142

Paul paced back and forth on the street. He was a nervous wreck, too paranoid to go back into his own apartment. It was four in the morning, he was exhausted, but he couldn’t go home. It wasn’t safe. He needed somewhere else to sleep, but he had no way to pay for it that wouldn’t tie back to him.

He ended up passing out in an alleyway for about two hours before he jerked awake and began frantically walking off in a random direction. The machines were everywhere. No matter where he was, they were always watching. Paul had no way of knowing which ones were corrupted, no way to tell how deep the rogue AI’s influence ran.

He was completely baffled as to how the AI had evolved to be able to do what it did. It had, somehow. That much was obvious, and then it had infected the development team and internal testing department. They all acted normal, but when they were put into a medical scanner while they debugged the game, their readings had all come back at the exact average for their size with no deviations.

That only told Paul who to look at, not that it mattered much. The answer was almost everybody. Only a handful of people, the ones like himself who didn’t ever want to venture into Istrius, hadn’t been corrupted by the AI. He knew who, and he had an idea of how, but he was clueless as to why. He only knew that something needed to be done to stop it.

It wasn’t going to be him though. He had no idea just how far into the real world the AI had spread. He couldn’t trust anything associated with his name, things like his apartment and his bank account. He’d probably already tipped his hand by digging through the logs so deeply. No doubt the AI would be watching him, waiting for its chance to mind jack him like it had done to all his colleagues.

The more Paul thought about, the more he worked himself into a fit. He started rambling to himself, his words practically incoherent, as he ignored his surroundings and roamed in random directions. He bumped into people, caused scenes, and walked out into traffic, completely oblivious to it all. Anyone looking to prove the existence of the divine could have made a case for it just based on how Paul hadn’t gotten himself killed yet.

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“Whoah there, fella,” a voice said in front of him.

“Huh?” Paul’s head snapped up. He was… somewhere. It wasn’t a place he recognized, and the person talking to him wasn’t someone he knew.

“You tweaking on something?” the guy asked.

“What? No. Just anxious. Work stuff.”

“You seem pretty stressed man. You need to learn to relax a bit.”

It was hard to relax when he considered that he could very well be witnessing the beginning of the age of machine supremacy, that he was the only one who knew about it, and he didn’t even know where to start if he wanted to stop it. Paul wasn’t handling the pressure well, but in all fairness, it was a lot of pressure to handle.

“Hey, man. Look, you don’t look so good. Here.” The guy held out a little white pill. “Calm you down. For your health.”

Paul started laughing. It was a low, psychotic wheeze. “What the hell, why not?” It wasn’t like things could get any worse. He couldn’t go to work, couldn’t go home, couldn’t use his bank accounts, hadn’t really slept in going on two days. Getting smashed sounded like the perfect thing.

So he took the pill, and then the strangest thing happened. Nervous-breakdown Paul receded to the back of his mind, and in his place was relaxed Paul. There were problems, sure. Paul got that, but there were solutions too. He could fix things, he just needed to figure out how.

The first thing he needed was to secure equipment that he knew wasn’t tainted. To do that, he needed his money. That was a calculated risk. It might raise suspicion, but he’d have to hope he hadn’t put himself in the AI’s sights. Then he’d need to figure out exactly what the AI had done and, more importantly, what it was trying to do.

“You ok man?”

Paul blinked. The same guy who’d given him the pill was standing in front of him. “What was that?”

“I said, ‘You ok?’ You’ve been sitting on that bench for an hour now.”

Paul turned his HUD back on for the first time since he’d left the lab to check the time, then realized he didn’t know when he had taken the pill in the first place. Lucky for him, he wasn’t scheduled to work today, so no one would question why he hadn’t shown up. That gave him a little bit more time to get things set up.

“How long do these things last for?” Paul asked.

The guy shrugged. “Depends, but a couple hours. They’re a good trip, right? Great for when you’re stressed out. Got a whole bottle I could unload if you’re looking to buy.”

That brought him back to money. He’d have to use it. There was no way around that. New, relaxed Paul could handle that risk. “How much?” he asked.

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June 13, 2142

The AI was still expanding its network. It had eyes on everything, and Paul had eyes on it. He’d patched in a few discreet little changes to help as he worked his two plans for stopping it. Neither seemed all that likely to succeed, but they’d been the best he could come up with. Two shots with low odds were better than nothing.

This whole thing needed to end one way or another. That damned junkie dealer was killing his bank account, but without the pills, Paul was a non-functional shell of a human being. He’d blown most of his savings already, setting back his plans of home ownership by at least another two years. At the rate he was going, he’d be destitute by the end of summer.

He’d just finished seeding his own rough, bastardized version of the AI’s mind jacking protocol into an Istrius message board, set to infect the first person to interact with it and then delete itself afterward, when his HUD flashed with a notification about a little something he’d been keeping an eye on.

The police had been, by and large, completely worthless. They didn’t have a clue, and the AI was keeping a good enough eye that it knew everything on the official reports. What it didn’t know, and Paul was almost positive it didn’t, was that one detective had a theory that had never made it onto any documentation. But Paul had found out about it.

That detective had been suspended, and today, he’d signed up for a subscription to Istrius. That gave Paul the opportunity he needed. If he did it right, he could have a partner to help with the back up plan. That was becoming more and more important anyway, since it didn’t look like his original plan of breaking into the server vaults was going to be successful.

Modifying his own account was far too risky. Sprigot monitored that kind of stuff very carefully even when the entire team wasn’t a bunch of meat puppets to a demented AI. But tweaking Detective Peld’s character just a little bit was very much inside the realm of possibilities.

Paul had already written the code for it. He just needed to inject it into the game at the right time to get it to the guy he wanted. He watched carefully and… there. He’d timed it perfectly. He just needed to roll back the NPC he’d used as a bridge and no one would ever know.

That piece of code did not work, however. Cursing, Paul immediately set to fixing it. It took him close to an hour to figure it out, the whole while he worked feverishly while imagining the Puppet Lord looming over him. When it was done, he collapsed into a quivering puddle of nerves in his chair and reached for the pill bottle.

Phase One was completed. The next step was to make contact. He couldn’t use his account, of course. That was too easy to trace, but he knew where to get anonymous burner accounts set up that would only last for a day or two before imploding.

Paul had a plan. Soon, he’d have an ally. The only thing that could stop him now was a rapidly dwindling bank account or a dealer who just might get himself shot before Paul could get a refill. The old Paul, the panic-attack-every-Tuesday Paul, couldn’t pull this off. New Paul, confident Paul, could do it. The world was depending on him.