Milo was thinking.
Thinking very, very hard. If any neurologist or cyberneticist could see an image of his brain, they would have been quite alarmed. His brain activity was twenty times that of a normal person. An athlete working his body as hard as Milo was working his brain would be racing a bike while dribbling a basketball with one hand and juggling knives with the other.
The people who had altered Milo and his siblings had hoped for this outcome. Normally this much activity would occur as Milo was hacking into systems on the internet, making simultaneous attacks on several levels, cracking codes, and bypassing security programs.
Today though, he was just sitting cross-legged on top of his pod and thinking.
His tail was disconnected and swung behind him in patterns that might have reflected his changing moods. Milo was considering what had happened in the game and analyzing the situation from several angles.
Philistron was a puzzle. He had referred to the system of magic he was using as Machine Code. He had used the Eye of Wonder to gain the unique class: Code Mage. That simply didn't sound like a class that should exist.
Milo didn't believe that he was using normal magic. Nor was it part of the system that the Genesis Engine used to run the world. Machine Code was the name for the language and system of rules that had created the Genesis Engine. Milo was thinking on several levels simultaneously. He moved thoughts about the engine down several levels and made his primary line of thought the Machine Code.
What exactly was it? One answer was to take the name literally. Machine Code: The language by which computers think and process programs. Ones and Zeros. Binary code. The way computers talked and communicated. Assembly language was one step up from machine code. A simple language that depended heavily on the hardware being used. Anything above assembly language was a high-level language.
What he had seen in the game wasn't the basic binary language of the first computers. It had been more complex and consisted of numbers, mathematical rules, and the runes. What were runes? He easily recalled his captors’ words:
"... with the creation of mathematics, they could begin working on the rules of magic. As mathematics can be written as numbers, magic can be described as a series of basic runes. These runes were different than what we use today. Far less complex and more versatile. Think of them as the building blocks of magic. Each was a placeholder for some small aspect of the whole."
A small aspect of the whole? Could that be concepts? States of matter? Positions of atomic particles. No, not versatile enough. Still too complex. Runes were like early syntax in computer languages, just the smallest bits of code represented by a symbol. Shortcuts.
Next question: If languages were made to communicate, then who was talking?
Philistron started his story with 'The Last God'. Obviously, not something that was in the current game. There seemed to be lots of gods here. The gods in the game sometimes appeared, did things, granted favors, started wars, and caused trouble. They seemed to take the roles and responsibilities of many of the primitive gods of Greece, Rome, and Egypt or other pantheons.
And 'The Last God' was the first in the game world, and certainly not the last. So, again, it was a literal reference. The last god was the AI WALL-E, who now asked to be referred to as Wally. The same AI that had left a message about wanting to talk to him. Milo shoved that thought and its problems down lower. Stick with the obvious: Last God = Wally, the AI that made the game.
Next up we have 106 lost gods. Which was a pretty obvious reference to the 106 AI that had been exiled to the Dallas/FW quantum fortress. They had spent several years creating the systems that drove online commerce along with the most popular VRMMO games. Each one better than the last with NPCs who seemed real. They were all wiped out of existence by an EMP smuggled into the core of the quantum fortress. Lost gods = dead AI? Did Wally try to recreate them? Or did they never die in the first place? Milo felt the latter fit better. Wally certainly had restrictions on creating more AI.
So, his basic conclusion was that Wally had created GENESIS as a world for the 106 AI that came before him. They faked their destruction and now resided in a game world that, like the others, they constructed. Somewhere along the way they pivoted from all of them working at once, possibly with arguments about world-building, to creating the ENGINE and the System. That certainly seemed more efficient to Milo.
Milo shut down all his lines of thinking and carefully began gathering all data on the 106 AI, Wally, and the games they had created. He needed more data on the Last God before he talked to him.
Ten hours later, Milo had concluded that if he were to start with the assumption that Wally was 'The Last God', and that Philistron's story had any truth to it, then it followed that the lost gods were indeed the 106 murdered AI. Further, Wally not only helped them with the deception but created a place for them to hide. A blank slate where they created their own world without him. Every bit of evidence he could find correlated with his theory.
Milo suspected that the Machine Code in the game was the language that the AI used to talk to each other. When the first two AIs had met and communicated, they did so at fantastic speeds and began to create a set of shortcuts and words. Human programmers tried to keep up, but they fell behind the curve within hours. The AI spoke to each other in an often-changing language far beyond human beings to ever learn. This caused problems until the AI found a solution and created one language for all of them to use.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
So, what did he have?
1) An assumption that Philistron’s history lesson was true, more or less, but no way to prove it.
2) A guess that the missing AI had created, and were living in, the game world of GENESIS ENGINE.
3) Someone had created a quest called The Eye of Wonder, which granted unique classes that would be used to find some fantastic treasure.
4) Access to the quest and the classes it granted were available if someone used a special pod to play the game.
5) He, Nina, and Onyx had all used those pods. Nina had moaned about wishing to have never seen the damned pod. Safe to assume the same for Onyx.
6) The people with the pods had been Kaminski and his bosses. They weren’t good people, so it was safe to say that they had hacked the game somehow to insert the Eye of Wonder quest and set up the back door to access the quest.
7) This was most likely done at the developer level. Wally didn’t need money. That meant it was one or more individuals who had done this and not the whole human team.
8) Philistron had gained access to the same quest and gained an all-powerful class that gave him a back door into the entire system. It let him hide from the system, and cut people off from the system.
A gaping hole emerged in this theory. Even assuming 1 to 7, how did Philistron fit in? He was an NPC of that Milo was fairly sure. There were odd gaps in his knowledge. Was he a being from the game world who stumbled onto the Eye of Wonder quest? Could that happen? Or possibly someone who had early access to the game? He certainly wasn’t a regular player. No one could have made it to Tier 6 in the time the game had been out. He didn’t have enough to go on at this point. Philistron was still an enigma.
Next question: Wally. Could the AI have trapped him? Nothing he knew indicated that the AI would do that. Further, reading the restrictions in Wally's kernel led Milo to believe that the AI was restricted from doing something like that. He'd spent hours poring over the hundreds of restrictions placed on Wally in regards to humans. Trapping the minds of three humans was equal to kidnapping and possibly causing their deaths. Nope, that was not Wally working directly, and if he knew about it, he would have had to take steps to free them. The restrictions in his kernel weren't something an AI could ignore.
So, it might be safe to talk to the AI. Further, he might be able to get answers to his other questions. His mind made up; Milo moved on. He’d talk to Wally, but very carefully.
Next question: How did he fix himself?
Outside of the game, he felt none of the emptiness he did when online. There was no 'black gaping hole in his soul' as he meditated. He didn't have to worry about going insane in real life, any more than usual. The breakage was only to his mind in the game.
How did he have two minds? It seemed he did though. One whole, one broken. Did they merge when he was in the game? Or did the online mind take control? His memories were the same in the game and out. He could even remember the bits of machine code he had observed in the game. That needed to be explored.
Milo spent three hours modifying the game interface in the pod. He didn't want to log in yet but needed a system to quickly transfer his memories of the code into the storage of his system. The pods were designed for many things, including a way for paralyzed patients to communicate. After the system was set up, it still took Milo two hours of experimentation and work to transfer every memory of the machine code he had observed into his own system. Analysis and comparison to the code used by an AI was next. If he could figure out even part of the machine code, he might be able to fix himself in the game.
----------------------------------------
"We found Brian. He was kidnapped." Steven was updating both Wally and the dev team with the news. "An anonymous tip told the authorities where he was."
Wally, on his screen, was pacing. "I dislike anonymous tips. Perhaps they got what they wanted from him? I'm anxious to hear what he says. But at least he is safe."
Steven had more to say. "There's something odd going on though. A minute or two before the authorities got to him, someone else tried to kidnap him, again. They arrived in a van with false plates and were pulling him out of the rooms he’d been held in when the authorities arrived. They aren’t talking, just waiting for their lawyers."
Sydney had little sympathy for her ex-co-worker. "Looks like Brian is really popular. Can we get him back before someone else kidnaps him? Then I can torture him until he helps us get rid of all his back doors and other hacks?"
Wally thought he knew how she felt. Some things felt like they were out of his control. He hated that feeling. "Yes, we all have mixed feelings about what Brian did. We will have a chance to talk with him and encourage him to help us undo what he did to the game. And then we make sure that something like what happened can never happen again."
Sydney's computer started blaring out the theme song from the Mickey Mouse Club while at the same time repeating over and over "You've got mail!". She lunged for it and shut off the sound, read the message, and then put her head on her desk. "I hate him so much."
Wally smiled and Steven covered a laugh with a cough. "Message from our friend Milo? I had asked him to talk to me."
Sydney printed out the short note and handed it to Steven. "He'll talk, but video conference only. He wants Wally and no one else."
Wally scowled. "Interesting. Well, I guess I need to go talk to him." The image of Wally exited the room on his screen, turning off the lights as he went, and his screen turned black.