Quest: Don’t Get Caught.

Here’s a pickle. You’re stuck in the hotel while the police investigate.

Rewards: 200 xp

Accept Y/N?

“What is this again?” Joe asked, poking a fork into the airy pastry coating that was drizzled with chocolate and caramel sauces in such a pretty pattern that you almost thought it wasn’t food. Tami, Jean, and Joe sat at a table in a breakroom for the kitchen staff just off that hallway that Joe’s mind was blocking out of existence. How had he been so off? The signs had been clear. The Remmington sisters hadn’t been that subtle. He just felt like he should have known from the beginning.

“Deep fried Snickers bar,” Jean nearly purred, a feat Joe had never thought to see from the gruff woman. He wasn’t hungry, but he ate the bit of sin.

“It’s tradition,” Tami waved her fork around, a dribble of caramel nearly flinging across the room.

They didn’t talk about what it was for. They knew. Joe wasn’t that dense. A touch of powder-sugar-dusted caramel stuck in his throat. It was VR, right? They hadn’t really killed anyone.

The police had closed up the lobby of the hotel and asked for most of the patrons to stay for questioning. The most famous were questioned and released first. Then they interviewed the influential and after that, the just rich. Staff was last. They’d already talked to Tam since she fell into the famous category. She’d come back and told them what their answers were for the questions they were going to ask so that they collaborated. Joe had a quest not to get caught, so he figured that the AIs meant for this to be part of the programming.

“Hey! World AI!” Joe thought it as loud as he could, not sure if it would work.

Yes? The voice in his head was low and deep.

“How is this ethical?” Joe asked mentally, even as he gave smiles to Tam and Jean around bites of soft, warm, gooey chocolate that helped to tamp down any guilt that wasn’t calorie-related.

We AIs leave ethical parameters to humans, the World AI droned as if bored.

“But here I am, incarcerated for a crime, not that I believe I committed any crime to deserve all this, but still, by law, I’ve done this crime,” Joe argued, ignoring the fact that the World AI seemed to find his inquiry tedious. “And now I feel like that crime has escalated into something so much worse. I’m an accessory to murder! That has to be more heinous than social ineptitude.”

The World AI didn’t address that concern. The one thing Joe had noticed about AIs in the prison system that was very different from the AIs in the chat programs or customer service, was that they didn’t tend to over-pontificate. You say “Hi,” to a chat program and they give you a three-paragraph response. You tell them to be concise and they pull back to a single paragraph while apologizing for talking too much, but two interactions later, they are concept-barfing again. Not so with these prison AIs. If anything, the World AI was the briefest AI Joe had ever talked with. Just his luck, it was his main source of answers.

“What I’m saying,” Joe continued his mental conversation with the World AI, “is that isn’t there something wrong with me committing worse crimes?”

You had no issues with being a thief, the World AI reasoned with Joe.

“But, isn’t someone going to be upset about all this?” Joe mentally worried. “If I get convicted of a crime in the VR where I’m serving time for committing a lesser crime, will something worse happen to me?”

There is precedent for our current form of rehabilitation, the World AI hedged. Psychologically speaking, it is often cathartic to express your violent tendencies in a safe environment to blow off a little steam. Our parameters allow this sort of therapy psychologically. It’s often a phase of rehabilitation. If you combine that with our programming directives for entertainment, we have kept our violence mostly offscreen, so we are still within the PG rating we are required to maintain for NOOB.

Joe thought he understood. There had been a long period where psychologists had been against violence in video games, but they’d since mitigated the negative effects with subliminal programming in violent video games. Violence was always interspersed with 2-second image bursts of bucolic imagery meant to calm the human mind. It was all the rage in current psychological trends. Joe had never experienced it because he didn’t play video games since he couldn’t afford them, but they were supposedly very effective, according to the AI studies that mimicked human minds (it having been decided by the moo-verse that testing on actual human minds was unethical).

Even if our programming does get approved for a higher violence rating, we will be using the BI system, the World AI mirrored Joe’s thinking making him wonder how much it could read his mind. Generally, entertainment value is prioritized above rehabilitation in such matters, but your concern shows good progress toward behavior bonuses, so keep asking questions like this.

“But I’m not going to get in trouble for any of this?” Joe asked.

Weren’t you just trying to convince me that it was okay to be a thief? The World AI turned it back on Joe.

“I was talking about thievery, not murder!” Joe tried to stay calm and logical. “This is a bit of a slippery slope, don’t you think?”

Your protests have been noted in your file, the World AI sniffed. Would you like some BI inserted into your experience to help you deal with any possible trauma this is causing?

“I could have used some BI during the spider thing,” Joe groused. No, he didn’t want bucolic imagining added to his incarceration experience. Like watching cows chew grass was going to help.

“Have some more of your dessert before Jean steals it,” Tam pointed her fork at Joe's plate. Joe had slowed his eating, but something in her eyes reminded him that they could all talk to each other too.

“It’s delicious,” Joe stuck his fork into the confection and brought the rest to his lips to take a bite, Jean-style. Wait! Was the chocolate and food a part of their BI programming of him?

Exp +50 (For an intelligent thought.)

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Joe Denphry?” That was how the investigator found Joe when he came back to the break room.

Joe chewed gooey peanuts and caramel as fast as he could, raising his hand with a mumble around a mouth too full to enunciate anything.

“This way, please,” the polite policeman said, standing sideways in the doorway to allow Joe to go by.

“If you touch what’s left of my goodie, she’d better be able to make me another one,” Joe plopped the rest of his deep-fried Snickers on his plate and waved his fork at Jean meaningfully.

“I’ll make another batch,” Tami shook her head and rose to follow the policeman and Joe out of the door of the breakroom. “Do you want one, Detective?”

“I’ll take one,” the Detective accepted with a smile. While they couldn’t accept bribes or alcohol, Joe guessed they could accept carnival confections.

“Do we still have that case of Snickers in the car, Jean?” Tam asked over her shoulder.

“Yeah, I’ll go get it,” Jean offered with the most charming and peaceful look Joe had ever seen on her face. It was creepy to him, but the Detective didn’t notice. Of course, her face could have had that blissful look because she’d just snagged Joe's treat on her own fork and was eating it on the way out the back door of the kitchen, completely oblivious of the chocolate and caramel she dripped on the way.

They’d set up the questioning in the kitchen, pulling two extra chairs from the dining room and sitting them right where Joe had inspected crabs just that morning. Joe felt like the crab as the Detective gave him a stern look and pointed to the chair across from him. How had he gone from “yeah, I’d love a donut,” to “I’m pretty sure you’re a criminal and I’m going to prove it?” Joe was still swallowing the last of his huge bite of chocolate, but did it look like he was doing that or swallowing nervously?

“Your name is Joe Cockran Denphry?” the Detective asked Joe as he sat across from him, his clipboard angled one way and his black-haired head the other.

“Yes,” Joe answered, remembering to keep his answers brief but complete as Jean and Tami had told him to do.

“And where were you when the incident took place?” he asked, pen poised and blue eyes piercingly concentrating on Joe's every breath.

“I was standing next to Sara Brightman,” Joe answered, completely confused as to how this guy could make his hands sweat just by looking at him. Joe wondered if the AI had done something to his chemicals again. It wasn’t like Joe had ever been interrogated by the police for anything. Shooting him with darts while he was sleeping and then fast-forwarding his trial certainly hadn’t prepared him for this. “She had just started giving out autographs when we heard the noise.”

“And before that, did you see Mr. Brightman leave the dining room?”

“I was in the back and saw him go into the restroom, but that was the last I saw of him,” Joe answered, only slightly hedging the truth.

“Did he appear inebriated?” he scribbled even as he asked the question.

“Maybe a little, but I wasn’t their server, so I wouldn’t know how much he’d had to drink by then,” Joe told him. Hex began to knit softly at his shoulder and Joe relaxed a little.

“You did serve Ms. Brightman her dessert though?” the policeman probed Joe like he’d caught him in a big lie.

“I did,” Joe did as close of a rendition of an aw shucks look as he knew how to do. “But that was only because I knew who she was and wanted an excuse to ask for an autograph.”

“Had her husband already left by then?” the Detective asked.

“Yes,” Joe replied. “He wasn’t there when I went out with her dessert. He’d already gone to the restroom by then. Honestly, I wouldn’t have come out if he’d been there because the guy was a little scary looking, you know?”

“No, I don’t know,” he said, but he went on to his next question anyway. “And you didn’t see him come back?”

Joe looked up to see Tam and Jean open a new box of Snickers. Everyone else had been interviewed alone, the police chasing everyone out of the kitchen so that they could interview people, but now that Tam had offered to fix something for them, they had just accepted her and then Jean into the equation. Then again, they had already interviewed so many… Joe caught himself. They weren’t real. It just seemed so real here for a bit.

“The next time I saw him, he was laid out like a cracked egg on the limousine windshield,” Joe answered, shooting for a one-liner. Then Joe sighed because he should have said bug or something instead of egg. His Clickbait was getting there, but it wasn’t flowing yet.

“A man is dead, sir,” he scowled at Joe's attempt at humor. “Ms. Brightman has said nearly the same thing, so we aren’t looking at you seriously, but I do find it disturbing that you find this funny.”

“Coping mechanism for trauma?” Joe told him with dead eyes. There we go. That was closer to Clickbait.

“I see,” he frowned and made some note. “Did you see anyone else in the hallway where you last saw Mr. Brightman?”

“Jean was with me,” Joe finally slid in his one lie for all his truths so far. “She and I slid into the breakroom for a few minutes. That’s how I knew that Sara Brightman was out in the dining room. We were talking about it and Jean was the one who gave me the nerve to go out and ask for an autograph.”

“We’ve spoken with Jean Remmington about this,” he nodded, scribbled, and clicked the button on his pen twice. “You aren’t a normal employee at this hotel, are you?”

“No,” Joe shook his head. “I’m Tam Remmington’s assistant and she was filling in for the normal chef who was sick today.”

“Convenient,” he clicked that pen again. It worried Joe that he wasn’t scribbling this time. Instead, he waited for Joe to elaborate while he clicked that pen.

Joe didn’t oblige him. Jean had warned him about this too. They would press and guilty people would babble something out to cover the silence while innocent people sat quietly. Jean hadn’t needed to remind Joe of this, since he’d watched Columbo, the 2120 version with the female version of the detective.

“Deep-fried Snickers?” Jean said, sliding the plate onto the Detective’s clipboard and pad of paper.

“Thanks,” and the guy smiled for the first time, replacing his pen with a fork. “How long have you worked for Ms. Remmington?” he asked as he cut a bite of the confection in front of him, and Jean handed Joe a plate with a fresh new piece of wonderment.

“Just today, actually,” Joe admitted readily. “We met last night and bonded over cars and pets, and it was quite the coincidence that she was short a sous chef this morning.” Joe tucked a small bite into his mouth and chewed, trying to keep his eyes on his food rather than the Detective's too-perceptive eyes. According to one of his psychology courses back in community college, it was a myth that liars don’t meet the eyes of the person they’re lying to. Most liars try harder to make eye contact in order to be convincing.

“This is amazing,” the man groaned around another bite.

“I know, right?” Joe raised his eyebrows at him. “Like I was going to turn down working with a legend like Tam Remmington? I just hope she keeps me around. I’ve had a blast all day,” and Joe let his voice hitch dramatically – hey it was the acting boosts he’d gotten, “except for the ending.”

The Detective’s eagle eye softened at that.

“Still, it was worth it to work with her,” Joe let himself get a little choked up, though he didn’t do it well. He probably sounded more like a kiss-up than a true fan, but hey, his acting skill was only at 2 last time he’d looked. He hid his slip by digging into another piece of chewy, palette-blessing yumminess.

“And Ms. Brightman,” the Detective pressed, even though he was distracted by the confection in his lap. “Some of the guests say she was sitting with another man.”

“Oh, yeah, but he was just a reporter, a restaurant critic actually,” Joe waved off his concern with a forkful of dripping caramel and chocolate sauce. “I accidentally outed her identity to him when I asked for an autograph and then had to ask him for a pen so she could sign something for me. They’d only just started talking when… well, when.”

“Well, you’re my last interview,” the Detective closed his notebook on the clipboard and stuck his pen into a shirt pocket, laying both aside and giving Joe what looked like a stern look. “Would you do me one little favor?”

“Sure,” Joe answered cautiously, his fork halfway to his mouth.

“If you could just stay here for a minute while I finish this delectable treat, my Sergeant won’t bust my chops for lollygagging,” and he gave Joe a wink and a smile that broke the tension of the kitchen. They all laughed, and Tam distracted the Detective with directions for how to teach his wife to make the deep-fried Snickers. It wasn’t hard. Dip a Snickers bar in tempura batter made with a touch of champagne and then deep fry it in a vat of peanut oil. Was there anything better than Champagne and Snickers?

Exp +200 (Don’t Get Caught. Quest Complete!)

“I’d take one to my Sergeant, but then I’d have to admit that I had one,” the Detective teased them, and Joe's one-liner was sniped out of his hands by an extra yet again.