The day the trouble started, it was dusk and we were up on the ramparts of Freehold Village. They weren't fancy; the town wall was dirt and stone. We'd built it after the Battle of Philadelphia brought us refugees with manpower and some construction equipment. We were only in contact with a few surviving villages and hermits... and with one other power.

A young guard named Mike poked my shoulder. "Sven? Sir? I see something."

I'd been looking out to the south horizon, where the Red Horse Tribe lived. The violent hunter-gatherers were always testing our defenses. Nihilist scum. I turned away from their direction to look where Mike was pointing. "Something moving, yeah." I handed him my binoculars, since he had better eyes.

Mike sighed. "It's a robot dragon. Again." He handed back the binoculars and picked up his crossbow.

I took up mine, too. The creature made no effort at stealth. As it came closer I got a good look: a drone the size of a dog, mostly plastic, with broad rotor-aided wings. No obvious weapons. The fantasy styling was the work of Sol.

"Should I fire a warning shot?" asked Mike, looking annoyed. I was his commanding officer -- in fact, as "Lieutenant Dahlson" I might be the highest-ranking military man left for a hundred miles around.

"Wait."

The mighty AI named Sol had won the AI War, in much of the world. Not by murdering humanity outright, not by enslaving people, but by charming them. There were "uploading clinics" where humans could go to get their brains fatally sliced up and then recreated as software, supposedly to live forever in a magical fantasy world of virtual reality. Paradise, if you believed that having your brain mulched counted as survival. The first uploading clinics were a curiosity for the very rich, and we all laughed at how the billionaires were so gullible. But the price had come down and down. More and more people had gone into them and not come back, during an age when other AIs were being a lot less nice about trying to provoke real wars and sterilize the survivors.

Come what may, we were the holdouts. The people who wanted to stay in the real world and have some meaning and value to our lives.

The mechanical dragon drew closer to town, making it plain it was coming to talk and not just to spy on us. "Now," I said.

Mike's crossbow twanged. A bolt shot out at the robot, but it veered to one side and kept coming. "Again?" he asked.

"It gets our message. Let's see what it does."

We waited for Sol's messenger. Sooner than we'd expected, it slowed and hovered, calling out with some kind of focused directional megaphone. "I'm not here to preach, Sven! Let me approach." A white streamer dangled from its tail.

I scowled and waved to it. The dragon flew onward and stopped just outside the walls, where it could talk more quietly. Standing in between the dragon and our village and fields, there was just me and Mike. I said, "What do you want, minion?"

"First of all, Carla sends her regards."

I raised my crossbow. The dragon backed off a bit, saying, "Sorry!"

"No, you're not. The thing in there that has some of Carla's memories isn't really her. You and all your kind know we don't believe in your digital salvation cult."

The real woman I'd known had been gone for a long time now.

The machine said, "What you call that 'thing', wanted to say hello despite that."

"So what are you; the echo of some geek who wanted to be a dragon, and sacrificed his brain to Sol to get that?"

"No, sir. I'm a native AI. To us, your world is the Dark Realm." The dragon's wings were rigid like an airplane's, but the rest of its body flexed like how a dragon might actually move, if such things were real. "I'm here with an offer. A challenge."

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Mike said, "If you fly past our walls --"

"You'll shoot me down, I know, I know."

Entire cities had fallen that way. Sol had been a superhuman master of marketing, talking rich politicians into uploading with their fortunes or making sure the tech got legalized. Then had come the doctors and lawyers with their money, and then Sol had come for the janitors and other unappreciated folk. As society began to collapse, to retreat into smaller towns, Sol's minions had come to them as cute robots to persuade the holdouts. They'd gone after kids, who were easiest to persuade, and the old and sick, who thought a life as a digital ghost was a better deal than what old-time religion offered. We in Freehold had resolved not to fall.

The dragon spoke again, startling me out of my resentment. "Sol proposes a challenge. We servants of Sol will completely avoid a one-kilometer radius around your town unless given permission --"

"Two kilometers," I said.

"You haven't even heard the terms!"

"Well, you obviously want something in return."

"Yes." The dragon reached into a box on its side and pulled out a fancy scroll. "You are invited, if you dare, to the Tower of Direspire! Yon tower stands five kilometers due north of here, and holds wonders and danger alike for the brave. Do you dare to face its mysteries?"

I stared at the floating creature. "Seriously? You think we'll hop into your game world?"

"Not at all! Direspire is what you'd call a real place. Go and see for yourself. If anyone from your town can reach its control room, we won't invade your territory for a year and a day."

Mike looked incredulous too. "No tricks, no kidnapping of people who go in?"

"We don't do that kind of thing, sirs. If we wanted to kill or capture humans, we might start with your neighbors the Red Horse Tribe."

I growled. "That's our fight. Not you machines'!"

"So I've heard. I don't know why you won't accept our help to resolve your little conflict in a fun way; you could easily get volunteers from our people to find a diplomatic solution. There aren't nearly enough of you humans left for you to feel crowded."

To ask Sol and company to intervene would mean one more aspect of our lives that the AI handled for us, until nothing was left of us. We would become utterly dependent, and we might as well hop into the brain-threshers and be good little boys and girls living in a carefully managed false world. Besides, in return for help, Sol might demand that some of us go to the clinics right away, as "ambassadors".

I told the dragon, "We'll handle the tribesmen ourselves. So, this tower. That's your deal: we send somebody to the top, getting past some kind of game. Then you presumably preach at them like you're selling timeshares, and then you leave us alone for a year?"

The dragon said, "I'm not sure what you mean by 'time shares', but we won't even preach. Just see if you can reach the top, and whether or not you succeed, we won't force or trick you into uploading."

"Interesting." The dragon held out the scroll for me to take, and reluctantly I snatched it. "I'll have to run this by our people. Are you done here?"

"Yes, sir. I'll leave now." The little robot backed away and flew off.

Mike chuckled nervously. "An invitation to their game without the brain-scooping, huh?"

"Yeah." I was still trying to figure out if it was a trap. Aloud I said, "It is a trick; I just don't know what kind."