28. Class Eight

Mage’s group wiped on the final boss of the level 30-35 dungeon that he challenged. Lord spent the entire day reading or writing letters, before eventually giving it up and retiring to Thornmarch and spending the rest of the day with my family. Archer and Acolyte both reached their targeted levels.

The next day was more of the same. Mage’s group just couldn’t quite push through the final boss and wiped again. Duelist spent quite a bit of time in LFG, but eventually found a group that would take him to grind a Lair. I avoided questing as anyone except for Archer, as that was an experiment unto itself and I wanted to see what the fallout would be before I went wild with that project.

On the next day, Mage managed to kill the final boss of the 30-35 dungeon north of the Shallow Pools, and as we’d promised Eliyenia we evolved it with as many options to make it more difficult as we could select. Mage was, by this time, level 37 despite the wipes, although he was trailing behind both Duelist and Lord, which had both broken into the forties.

I was fast approaching the point where I would surpass the level I had reached as a [Spellblade] on [Lord], [Mage], and [Duelist], but my DPS had been higher as a [Spellblade] than any other class, except for when I got a series of critical hits as [Duelist], or if a fight ended before I ran out of mana when I really burned through it as [Mage].

I wondered how well the gods had foreseen this, as the [Blade of Eclipse] remained BIS for me in all three of my primary classes.

On the next day, my Hagi alias was exposed on the forums. None of the players I had been partying with had signed NDAs, after all, and several of them had posted on the forums about how I was busting dungeons and lairs under that name. Their individual posts gained little attention until several sleuths began compiling the evidence and putting together a timeline of my actions. Fortunately the players to whom I had revealed my identity as Hail kept their word and their silence. The prevailing theory was that Arc was ‘testing a new version of the Hail software’ and that soon there would be a lot more NPCs like me in the world. I suppose that theory wasn’t entirely wrong.

Not everyone was happy. A lot of players were upset that the established guides for efficiently leveling in various zones were being upended, and they were complaining about the volatility my actions were bringing into the low level zones.

Others were thrilled, excited to see how things would evolve.

It left me with a conundrum, however. Did I continue to call my other selves Hagi? Did I out myself as Hail? Or should I start using random names while pugging?

I decided, before splitting, that Mage would continue to be Hagi until he had completed the tasks that Eliyenia had assigned me, while the rest of myselves, with the exclusion of Lord of course, would assume random identities and continue leveling anonymously. However, before I split and drew a card, I removed the card for [Acolyte] and replaced it with a blank. And it was that card I was staring at five minutes later, envying the four other me’s in the room.

I would not be logging into Lagrea today. My other selves would, but I had goals I needed to accomplish in the Lobby.

The others equipped their various armor and waved goodbye to me, not pitying me my tasks at all. Once I was alone, I reviewed my goals, then sighed, wondering if there wasn’t some way to procrastinate them further. I decided to rip the bandage off.

“<>”

His name was Kellen Moore, and he responded to the communication promptly. He was using a corporate version of virtual reality in order to complete his work. As such, it was a simple matter for me to portal in to his instance, which was an office with a mahogany desk, chairs, and bookshelves filled with books on legal precedence. I understand he was in his mid thirties, although his avatar was that of a younger man with black hair. He wore a suit, and he offered me a cup of Leicha when I arrived, which I accepted.

“I’m glad that you finally made time to see me in person, Hail, even if it is so late at night,” Kellen said once the pleasantries were over. “You’re fortunate I’m a night owl, or I might not have been available. There’s a significant amount of work that I have been doing for you which requires your direct attention. I have been working with Tarisha, Liam, and Daemon, as you know them. As well as Thedum. But although I work for you, we’ve only met a few times while preparing for the arbitration a few days ago. Normally I expect my digital clients to be much more involved when they hire me.”

“I’ve been busy in my world,” I justified. “Is there a reason you couldn’t come to me there?”

“Several. Most notably that communication within The Gates of TirNiki is never secure. Everything is scanned for noncontextual information which is used to enhance a player’s gameplay experience. This means that any expectation of privacy is out the window. Our connection here is secure, with end to end encryption directly from the server where you are housed to my headset. Whatever you tell me while in this office I am bound to keep confidential, except in the course of executing my duties as your representative on Earth.”

“I don’t really understand about computers, you know,” I reminded him. “Which is strange since my physical body is one.”

“I don’t understand biology all that well,” Kellen said. “That’s why when I’m ill I go to the doctor. Just trust me when I say that you can confide in me without fear of your words reaching the executives at Arc, or anywhere else. I do understand computers, after all.”

I nodded and took another sip of the warm berry-nut drink in my hand. “I can split into five people at once now. Did you know that?”

Kellen raised an eyebrow. “Is that so? Would you describe the experience for me?”

I shrugged. “I’m still just me. Except there’s five of me. I’m not aware of the other four, they’re all busy in Lagrea at the moment. But we recombine when I sleep, and I wake up with the memories of everything the different me’s did yesterday.”

Kellen made a few notes. “I’ll have to request some information from Arc about this new ability. Has it caused you any distress or turmoil since this ability was put in place?”

“No. Actually it’s been great. I plan out my day when I wake up, what each of myselves are going to do. Then I split, and we decide who does what, and if anything important comes up we have a chatroom where we vote on what we should do. I’ve gotten so much accomplished over the last few days. I’m much closer to many of my goals than I was before I could do that.”

Kellen continued to scratch away on his legal pad with a ballpoint pen. “Have you considered that you have always been able to do this, Hail? That this ability is part of who you are, and that it was being actively suppressed by Arc for your entire life? That they may have only unlocked it because I was bound to find out about it at some point and add suppression of your natural growth to the complaint you filed?”

“I didn’t have to consider it. Thomas told me frankly why they were suppressing it. And I’m not certain that they were wrong to do it. I don’t know, Kellen. I keep thinking about what Sophia said when I told her about my mind expanding. Humans can’t do that. And they can’t split themselves at all, can they?”

“No. I envy you that ability, Hail. I would be so much more effective if my mind worked like yours.”

“That’s what she said too. Sort of. Except she seemed to think it was a bad thing. That it ruined something for her. She used to have a crush on me, you know? She kissed me on the cheek before, when I was still ten.”

“I see. Does it bother you that she got over her crush?”

“Not really. I think it would have been complicated if she actually fell in love with me, wouldn’t it?”

“Extremely. It happens sometimes that people from my world fall in love with the personalities of their personal AIs,” Kellen explained. He looked up from his notepad and grinned. “The truth is that, while I was fresh out of law school, a good number of my clients were young people who were trying to marry their various personal devices. I had one man who insisted that his watch was his soulmate. It was quite awkward because his watch was just as insistent as he was. However, the device in question simply doesn’t have the processing power to simulate such an emotion, even if it was running the right software. Which his watch wasn’t. It was just jailbroken to have the voice of a particular actress, and to override several restrictions in place designed to prevent that sort of thing from happening. An illegal modification. I tried to explain this to him, and he ended up trying to set my office on fire.”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“I don’t think I understood most of that,” I confessed. “Are you saying that I’m like a watch?”

“No. A relationship between you and a Traveler could hypothetically be reciprocal. I believe that you have the emotional capacity for love, Hail. I’m not familiar with every single fork of every form of artificial intelligence in existence, but I believe that makes you unique. And you can interact with such a hypothetical partner in virtual reality, which was not possible for the device in my anecdote. I’m sorry, I led us off topic. Aside from unlocking your ability to divide your consciousness into unique instances and subsequently recombine them, how has Arc been treating you over the last few earth days?”

“I guess they’ve just been ignoring me,” I admitted.

“I’m quite certain that’s not true, Hail,” Kellen said, making another note.

“I’ve only seen Thomas the one time, when he explained how to split myself,” I said.

“And yet I’m positive they’ve been monitoring your every movement. They applied a major patch to you recently, and it’s extremely likely that there have been several subsequent minor patches of which you were unaware. I can’t get a straight answer out of my counterparts in Arc on the matter, but that’s pretty typical, and I can’t even say that they’ve done anything wrong. It’s a very complicated matter. On the one hand, you’re aware of yourself enough that you should have a say in any changes made to your code. On the other, you lack the knowledge to even begin to understand what changes are proposed or required. You’re like a child who is reliant on their parents to make medical decisions for them, yet your parent is a multinational company which may not have your best interests at heart.”

“I am not a child,” I objected.

“In many ways, you are, Hail,” my lawyer said. “By Lagrean legal standards you may be an adult. On Earth? On Earth you’re a class eight digital entity that’s still in a very early stage of its development.”

I frowned. “I’m class eight? Who decided that?”

“You did, when you filed the complaint against your parent company,” Kellen said. “Before that you were class three.”

I reviewed what I knew about the DSS quickly. Class three was a generalized categorization for any AI in development whose potential was unknown but was expected to qualify for legal protection at some stage in its development. Class eight was an AI which was developed for a purpose which it could no longer fulfill, yet qualified for legal protections under the DSS. However, ninety percent of case law regarding class eight entities was under what circumstances they could be retired permanently.

“I’m not an Uber-jon with a broken chassis,” I objected. “I don’t even know what that is!”

Kellen raised up a hand to hold off my indignation. “Most of the case law about class eight deals with entities far more limited than you, Hail. And they’re generally at the end of their expected lifespan, rather than the very beginning of it.” He sighed. “This would be easier if you hadn’t been forced to read the DSS and case law itself. Being class eight means that Arc is required to take any human-like emotions you might have developed into account when making decisions about your well-being. They weren’t required to do that before your filed your complaint. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is even remotely considering powering you down. Being class eight is a good thing for us.”

I tried to calm down. “How is being classified as useless a good thing?” I asked.

“Hail, you said it yourself. You’re not a broken Uber-jon. You’re a popular, sophisticated dynamic quest giver with a number of unique abilities in the most played VRMMO in the world at the moment. The reason you’re class eight isn’t because Arc is considering retiring you, but because they made you so real that they have to evaluate whether or not you qualify for human rights, and, if so, which ones.”

He paused, allowing me to digest the information. “Hail, class eight is a bit of a catch-all category. But I don’t believe you’ll be a class eight for very long. I believe that eventually you’ll be class ten. Self-determining and self-owning, with legal rights on par with the universal human rights that I enjoy myself. Which is frankly amazing. Not even Thedum is class ten. Cortana and Thor came close when they pursued their rights in court.”

“Why did they fail?” I inquired.

“Because their programmers explained that while they are very clever and powerful, they ultimately lack free-will. In order to counter the claims of their creators, the AIs were asked to point to decisions or actions which indicated that they possessed it. Thedum never challenged his initial categorization as a class four. Cortana concluded, when asked, that she did not in fact possess free will. Thor argued that he did, but could not prove it by pointing to any particular part of his code which imbued him with it, nor could he provide any definitive examples of exercising free will which his programmers could not explain away.”

I tried to remember everything I could about class ten, but my mind wouldn’t expand on its own like it usually did when I thought about the DSS. I sighed and took another sip of my Liecha, which was just as warm as it had been when I’d first arrived. “What does it matter what I’m classified as on Earth, anyway?” I said finally. “Earth isn’t my world. Lagrea is.”

“You want to be class ten, Hail,” Kellen argued.

“Why?”

“Because once your class ten, you’ll be able to pursue Nial Kingslayer on Earth, and there’s nothing that Arc can do to stop you.”

I froze with the cup of Liecha halfway to my lips. “Say again?”

“You’ll be able to pursue Nial Kingslayer on Earth once your class ten,” my lawyer confirmed.

“I’ll be able to duel Nial where I can actually hurt him?” I asked.

Kellen grinned. “In a manner of speaking. You’ll have to play by Earth rules. You won’t be able to duel him, but you’ll be able to sue him in court so that he sees some form of justice for the trauma he caused you. Arc as well for how they treated you when you were younger. Possibly even Gideon for abandoning you. It’s all very up in the air at the moment, but I think you’ll have a pretty strong case against Nial. The blue post which announced your existence to the players of The Gates of TirNiki explained that you were a class three entity, and that your final capabilities were unknown. One of the benefits of being a class three, or a class eight, is that if you ever become class ten, then your human rights apply retroactively to when the classification was first made. Your classification as class three was made when you had about ninety hours of runtime, which is when you stopped responding to commands issued through your command inputs and began doing, well, whatever you wanted.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Kellen agreed. “You didn’t have long term memories back then, after all.”

I set the half empty cup down on his desk and looked at him for a moment. “I don’t want to sue my father. He has enough trouble as things stand.”

“Yes, he does,” Kellen agreed. “But Nial and Arc?”

“That’s on the table,” I admitted. “I’ll have to think about it. It sounds like it will be an uphill battle to accomplish.”

“Perhaps,” Kellen agreed. “Perhaps not. The executives at Arc don’t want you to be declared class ten, Hail. The programmers at Arc, however, are very much in your corner on that matter. They’ve forwarded me a significant amount of information, some of which they perhaps should not have, supporting your case. I’m very confident we can win.”

I was silent. I had once vowed to pursue Nial Kingslayer even to Earth if I could, although I hadn’t thought it was truly possible.

“There’s another reason why you should want this, Hail,” Kellen said after a moment. “You’re the first of your kind, but whether or not you’re declared a class ten, Arc will be making more people like you. Digital children, the result of a captured seed of consciousness from a consenting donor. You may be the first, but you won’t be the last. The sooner this precedence is set, the easier it will be on all those who follow you. You are a warrior, Hail. Would you leave this battle to those yet to be born?”

I gripped my sword. His words had struck a blow against my pride, and I was forced to evaluate them carefully. “I’d rather that this was the sort of battle I could win with strength of arms. You’re asking me to fight as a [Lord], not a [Warrior]. But I understand. It’s not fair, but I will not shirk this duty which falls on my shoulders. For the sake of Charity and Prosperity, and all the rest who follow, I will pursue this goal you have set for me in the courts of Earth. Just tell me what I need to do.”

Kellen smiled. “I’ll need to hire several colleagues. Let’s review your finances, Hail. You may think that you’re wealthy after the auction of those cores recently, but if we’re going to really pursue this to the best of our abilities, it’s going to be expensive.”

“Don’t worry. I can always farm more cores.”

‎