Gideon Lachlann was bored. And frustrated. And he wanted to cut something in two with his sword. Except he couldn’t, because he was in the real world now, and he hadn’t been able to log into virtual reality for almost a week. He knew they said that VR games weren’t anymore addictive than any other sort of video games, but everyone who’d ever gotten sucked into them knew that they totally were. And he was currently going through withdrawal.
He was playing a little game on his phone to try to pass the time, but he had another meeting with Heather, his AI attorney after work, and by the time he got home it was unlikely he’d be able to log into Blade’s Edge for more than twenty minutes before the health system in his helmet alerted him that he was skirting the exhaustion threshold.
That was one of the unpleasant aspects of his deal with Thedum. While he’d gotten a new VR helmet out of the arrangement, it was set up with the most restrictive time and health management features in place. His old helmet hadn’t cared whether or not he would be exhausted the next day. It would let him play until he was literally nodding off. He was an adult, after all. And playing The Gates of TirNiki had literally been his job.
But part of allowing Thedum into his life was allowing the old AI to manage his life for him, and Thedum had a thing about making sure humans were operating at their maximum capacity. He doubted there would be any serious repercussions should he skirt the rules and, say, develop a reading habit that kept him up at night in lieu of virtual reality. But he was exhausted enough just dealing with all of the legal bullshit that his old employers kept throwing his way.
And that was with Heather and Thedum handling ninety-nine percent of it.
He completed the puzzle and the multicolored fruits exploded, filling the screen with fireworks which formed into the words “You won! Play again?” He was about to enter the next level when the door chimed, drawing his attention back to work.
Tito’s Mexican Bar and Grill wasn’t named for his current employer, but the founder of the family establishment. They just happened to have the same name, being nieto and abuelo. Abuelo Tito was long retired, although he still stopped by now and then to make sure everything was being done up to code. Abuelo’s code, not city code. The man was far stricter than any city inspector.
Two men and a woman came into the restaurant. Gideon recognized one of them immediately, and guessed the employer, if not the identity, of the other two simply by their association with him.
“David Baker,” Gideon said, grabbing three menus and motioning towards one of the empty booths. “I hope you’re just here for the best tamales in the city.”
“Did they win an actual contest for that, or is it just one of those advertisement things?” the woman asked. Then she extended a hand for Gideon to shake and introduced herself. “Rebeckah Hansworth.”
“Wasn’t just one contest,” Gideon said, shaking her hand. “There’s a wall of plaques in the back for all of the competitions they’ve won over the years. It’s really a great place to eat. Especially since I get to work for free.”
“I’m Thomas Richtor,” the other man said, and Gideon shook his hand as well. “Beckah and I are both heavily involved in Hail’s development.”
“I see,” Gideon said. “So, not just here for the tamales, then? Has something happened?”
“Nothing to be alarmed about. Did we catch you at a good time?” Baker asked.
Gideon glanced at his watch. “I do have a break coming up. If this is going to be a thing, would it be okay if I take your orders and we all ate together? It looks slow right now, but in about forty minutes this place will be hopping.”
“Sounds good to us,” Thomas confirmed, and the others shrugged their agreements.
“I’ll clear it with the boss-man, of course,” Gideon continued as he saw them seated. “Do you need some time to decide what you want?”
“You eat here every day, right? What’s good, aside from the tamales?” Baker inquired.
Gideon grinned. “We have a sampler platter. It’s got a little bit of everything, and it just so happens to serve four. If you all don’t mind sharing with the help, that’s what I’d recommend.”
“Sounds good,” Beckah agreed, and the others handed the menus back to him. He went back to the kitchen to place the order and inform Tito III. of his plans for his break.
Fifteen minutes later, he delivered the platter and four plates to the table, taking the open seat. Grabbing one of the tacos, Gideon promptly took a bite while Beckah and Baker had their heads lowered, each saying their own flavor of grace.
“So then, what brings you in today? Aside from eating lunch, I mean,” Gideon asked. “I mean, it must be something important if I’m being read into the situation.”
The others began filling their plates from the platter. Baker said “Before that, I figured you might want to know a little bit about my companions. They both have played major roles in your son’s life, after all.”
“Is that right?” Gideon asked. “I suppose that means you’ve already got some strong opinions about me. I know I didn’t make the best show of myself insofar as Hail’s childhood goes.”
“I already chewed you out for that in the game,” Thomas said. “Remember? I don’t look much different from my digital avatar.”
Gideon squinted at him, then nodded in recognition. “Oh right. Before the castle raid, I remember you. Sorry, you said your name was Thomas? What exactly do you do for Hail?”
“Officially I’m his liaison with Arc,” Thomas explained. “Whenever we have to communicate with him, I get sent in to be the face to the company. Unofficially, I’m also sort of a counselor. Whenever the team detects that he’s in emotional distress, I get sent in to try to calm him down and help him through it. I sort of volunteered myself for that position after you rejected him during that parade incident and got stuck with it.”
Gideon sighed. “Yeah, that wasn’t my finest moment, was it? Wish I’d known at the time that he thought like a real kid. If I had known that, instead of thinking he was just a regular NPC, things might have been different.”
“You’re not still making excuses for yourself, are you?” Beckah asked.
“No, I’m done with that. There’s a difference between making excuses and just wishing you hadn’t been such a jerkweed in the past, isn’t there? My own father was mostly absentee, when he wasn’t drunk. I can imagine how Hail must have felt when he finally met me face to face, only for me to seemingly reject him,” Gideon said. He took another bite of his taco, masticating his thoughts and food at the same time. The others sensed that he wasn’t finished and let him think.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“There’s a lot of things I’d do different, if I could go back in time. Being more involved with Hail is pretty high on that list. Not throwing my life down the drain in a moment of pique is another, but I doubt you really care about that.”
“We do, actually,” Baker insisted. “Your case is setting precedent on guild ownership and management within our game. Our current TOS states that the guild is fundamentally owned by the primary guild leader, which is always an individual. There are many methods of guild leadership available, from a counsel type setting to a hierarchy of officers, but while the ownership of guilds can be transferred to a different account, they cannot be broken up into little bits and sold piecemeal. Despite making this as clear as we could in the TOS, your former employers are challenging it and suing us for damages in allowing the settings to be as they were when you had your little temper tantrum. According to them, we should have stopped you before you even thought of the idea.”
“Yeah? Is that going to cause issues for you?” Gideon asked, unhappy to hear that his employers were going after Arc as well as getting their pound of flesh from him.
“No,” Baker predicted. “The TOS is ironclad. Your lawsuit might change how some of the pro-guilds are managed; at least the startups like yours.”
Gideon nodded grimly. It had been a mistake not to turn over full management when he had started selling shares in his guild, he knew that now. His ego had prevented him from relinquishing control over the guild that he had started. He decided to change the subject. “How about you, Miss Hansworth? What do you do for my son?”
“It’s Mrs., but call me Beckah” she corrected. “I used to be his nanny, but obviously he’s moved past the stage where he needs one. I was heavily involved in the early days of teaching him how to act like a child and not a rogue AI.”
Gideon raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Wait, Hail is rogue?”
“Of course he is. That’s exactly why he’s so fascinating,” Beckah explained. “I mean, he’s a completely different animal from Thedum or any of the Thedum-forked entities. In terms of a threat to society, he’s basically somewhere below Grumpy Cat XXIV. The fact that he slipped the leash was the very reason why we classified him as class three to begin with. Because the Digital Sentience Statute is what it is we have to have contingencies in case he ever does become a threat, which is what caused that hiccup of justice when his in-game nemesis suffered real life troubles and blamed it on him.”
“Was it actually Hail’s fault?” Gideon asked. “Last I heard they never caught whoever it was that broke Nial’s windows.”
“The vandals were arrested. It’s going to trial, but we’re privy to some of the details,” David Baker explained. “The kids responsible were players, unfortunately, but they weren’t so lost in the fantasy of the game that they believed it extended into the real world. They weren’t even on the quest that Hail issued. They just hated Nial for flipping the chessboard over. You know, introducing the dark side, resetting everybody’s reputation with King Rain, causing the current upheaval in Yuikon. They knew what they were doing was wrong and it had nothing to do with Hail at all.”
“I personally wouldn’t have been upset even if Hail did mean for it to happen,” Gideon said, leaning back as he loaded his plate with some of the chips and salsa con queso from the platter. Both the chips and the salsa were handmade in the restaurant, and they were simply amazing. “I mean, I don’t want him getting in trouble, but the world he believes is real is a very different place. It makes sense if he thought he could resolve issues that way.”
“We agree with you,” Baker said. “Unfortunately, that’s why we had to take things as seriously as we did. The fact is, Gideon, we don’t know what Hail’s final form will be. He might not be limited to The Gates of TirNiki forever. Especially now that he’s been reclassified.”
Gideon sat up straight at that news. “He’s not class three anymore?”
“Class three is by its definition a temporary classification while a program is in development,” Beckah explained. “The modern Uber-jon was class three for its first twenty-years of production, but it ended up as class five once the legal system determined that, while they undeniably develop individuality and personalities of their own, they’re ultimately simply machines following a code. They don’t love, hate, fear, hunger or feel pain. Even when they’re decommissioned, they show no fear of nonexistence. Unlike your son.”
“I thought Hail couldn’t feel pain,” Gideon said.
“He could, if we allowed him to,” Thomas explained. “In fact, when he was younger, we provided low levels of negative feedback as necessary to simulate the bumps and bruises that a normal child might experience growing up, but once it became clear that he was going to be an action character, we separated that sort of stimulus from his health pool.”
“Of course you assholes didn’t tell him that,” Beckah scolded.
Thomas sighed. “It wasn’t my decision, Beckah. I wanted to reach out to him, but the others were still worried about maintaining the veil.”
“There remains low-level feedback when he’s low on health,” Baker explained, “But it’s quite low-level. Theoretically, he’s capable of experiencing the same level of agony as a human. But since we control his sensory input, testing his capacity to experience pain and his response to it would amount to torturing him for our own curiosity. Bumps and bruises aside, nobody wants Hail to imagine what a sword to the stomach would actually feel like to a human.”
“I think we got off track,” Beckah said. “Mr. Lachlann, the reason we’ve come today is because Hail is, well, he’s sort of going through an AI version of puberty. Or at least that’s the best analogy I can come up with. We’ve applied a patch to him which will ultimately remove many of the restrictions that were in place to slow his growth. We’re uncertain how the change will affect him, and there’s a chance that at some point, your involvement might become required. Due to the agreement you reached with Thedum, we’d like you to have at least some idea of what is going on if Hail reaches out to you in the short term future.”
Gideon glanced at his watch. “I’ve only got ten minutes left in my break.”
“That’s enough to sign an NDA,” Baker said. “After that, we’ll give you the bullet points.”
“I’ll need my lawyer to look at it before I sign it,” Gideon insisted.
“We forwarded it to her already,” Thomas said.
Gideon frowned and tapped his watch. After a few minutes, he found the message from Heather that not only informed him that Arc would be sending representatives, but approving him to sign the NDA and discuss the topics that they wished to discuss with him. “I should have checked with her before I even sat down with you, shouldn’t I have?”
“Probably,” Baker said. He pulled out a sheet of paper from his briefcase and put it before Gideon. Gideon scanned it, but it was a very basic NDA specifying that he wouldn’t talk about a certain patch applied to Hail, with the exception made for his lawyer-bot. The information about the patch was obviously the carrot, while the stick was that future confidential communications between himself and Arc would be cut off should he violate the agreement.
He was familiar enough with legal documents by this point that he could see why he was approved to sign it. Just to be sure, he sent a quick message to Heather with a picture of the document attached. She responded immediately, because of course she did. She was AI.
Once his signature was drying, he leaned back and sighed. “So, AI puberty, eh? Does that mean he’s going to start liking girls or what?”