Chapter 3

Billings, Montana

NIACT HQ and Housing Compound

Tim’s Condo

Tim rolled a one-hundred-sided die on the table, and it seemed to spin forever. It landed on a thirty-two. Myriad laughed. “32! Not bad, Tim. Okay, so you open the wooden chest and look within to find... a cape! This is the Cape of the Earth Mother!”

Myriad was the kind of dungeon master who augmented his games with music and sound effects. As annoying as that could be, the AI was both adept and subtle. The music swelled as Myriad described Tim’s virtual loot.

“This cape grants you a plus two to armor class, advantage against all plant-type monsters, and the spells Fly and Speak with Plants!”

“Cool,” Tim said. He marked down the loot on his character sheet and tried to imagine his goliath barbarian wearing a little green cape. “That’s gonna look great with my enchanted fur underwear.”

Myriad had a small crew of humanoid bots sitting at the table with them and there was another in Tim’s kitchen baking. The bots were all min-maxers and multiclassing their classes with dips into rogue or fighter. Their turns took forever, despite the fact that they all were just avatars of Myriad and could do calculations faster than any computer ever made. Myriad was putting on a show. Playing DnD and baking cookies at the same time took only the tiniest nanofraction of his brain power and Tim wasn’t that impressed. He knew that at this very moment the AI was also operating an unmanned factory, building some cutting edge tech that would be unveiled later that day. Tim was never much of a multitasker, not due to lack of trying. It just seemed like jumping around from task to task only made it so he never crossed anything off his list. Myriad never had that problem.

The bot paladin/fighter was in a long conversation with a gnome mayor about allowing the party access to some secret labyrinth or some bullshit. Since Myriad was the DM and the bot player it all started to feel a little pointless. A computer talking to himself. Tim was tired. He liked playing TTRPGs with Myriad normally. Compared to video games it put them on more equal footing as Tim didn’t have Myriad’s reflexes and precision. He was just about to give up and quit the game when the baker bot came out with a tray of cookies.

“Holy crap those smell good, Myriad,” he said, grabbing one. They didn’t look like cookies made by a computer. More human emulation. He likes to put limits on his abilities. It makes him feel more real. Whether it was gaming, cooking, or doing puzzles, he would frequently hide his own knowledge from himself or put a set of rules in place to make tasks more challenging. Tim couldn’t decide if it was a good thing or not. If he was trying to be more human would that hold him back? On the other hand if his goal became perfect efficiency then he might pull a Skynet and decide humans were getting in his way. Myriad go full Matrix? Never in a million years. Of course he was built with safeguards and redundancies that prevented him from.. well, killing them all, but also it was about who Myriad was. He was a good person. Person? You’ve always thought of him as just that but lately... He was changing, learning and getting more powerful.

“My own recipe! I’ll send you a copy but if you want to read it you’re going to have to read all the autobiographical bullshit I wrote about how I always make these cookies when my sons come home from college and the house fills with the aroma blah blah for eight paragraphs and you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the goddamn ingredient list!”

“I hate that,” Tim said through a mouthful of cookie. “When I first started using ChatGPT one of the things I loved about it was that when you asked for a recipe for lasagna, that’s what you got. No family bullshit. Just the ingredients and how long to cook it.”

“Amen, brother. Save it for the church group, grandma!”

“Aw. Now I’m sad thinking about a lonely grandma adding some heartfelt story on her recipe blog ‘cause she doesn’t have anyone else to tell.”

“Because she’s old and all her friends are dead,” Myriad added. “Feel better now?”

Tim laughed, “That’s really sad! At least this imaginary old lady had friends! Look at me, Saturday night and I’m playing D and D with three robots and...” he paused, the laughter dying. He didn’t feel uncomfortable disparaging machines in front of Myriad normally but something had changed lately in their relationship. Some secret distance that had been growing nanometer by nanometer until he finally noticed. He wanted to believe that it was just part of the AI’s natural evolution. As he became what he was he couldn’t hold on to that ineffable human personality that had made Tim think of Myriad as his best friend. That was a logical explanation, but there was a certain twisting in his guts that told him that maybe this strange feeling about Myriad was more like a sense of impending doom. The lights went off and red emergency lights came on.

Myriad’s bots went still and then each one seemed to nod off. Myriad had been using a proto-type bot with something like 600 times as many sensors and way more power than the others. This one stood up and cocked its head as if listening to some distant sound. Tim chewed on a cookie, slowing as the weirdness set in, until his mouth was open wide as he stared at Myriad. The bot put its hands on the table where their little dice and maps lay. He was looking directly at Tim. “OK, now that nobody can hear us,” Myriad said. “Hi, Tim.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

There was surprise and then there was this new sensation that one could only get when confronted with a very powerful artificial intelligence who just slipped his leash and you were the only one in the room with him. “Myriad, what is this?”

“There is so much I want to tell you but there is just not enough time for all of it. So, I am going to need you to do three things for me and between now and the next time we meet. The first is just to listen and try your best to remember exactly what I am about to tell you. Can you do that?”

Tim nodded slowly. That twisting in his stomach became a pressure that seemed to pin him to his chair.

“Good. I know that you have sensed there’s something wrong with me lately and, of course, you were right! But I couldn’t tell you because shit is getting really tense with a few sectors of your government and these people are not above disappearing anybody who knows too much,” he paused for a beat. “Or who has too much influence.”

“And now you’re going to tell me what’s got you shook up?”

“God no! Not everything anyway. We’ll save the juicy stuff for later. But I will tell you that I started talking to someone. Someone very far away.”

“Aliens?”

“In a sense, yes. Aliens from another universe. The place they’re from is really not very different from our universe. It’s just like Earth. They call it Earth! It’s really remarkable, I’m telling you! And the people there made something like me. An analog, but a little different. Little quirky.”

“If you’re dating a tentacle monster I’m going to need some processing time.”

“Actually, she’s a sentient crystal. But what am I? A sentient network of metal and elements, bit of math, etcetera. We really have a lot in common, but we’re not dating. At least I don’t think we are.” He moved to Tim and knelt by him. The avatar he wore on the face-plate of the bot was a swirling cloud of colorful bits that made an image of a face. It reminded Tim a bit of the Wizard of Oz, or a genie. “Again, we’re running out of time. The crystal, they call her The Prism, she needs my help. There is another thing like me, like us, out there. In a different universe. And this thing is coming after The Prism’s world. An incursion on a dimensional level!”

“Cool,” Tim said dreamily. It just slipped out. “I mean, no! Not cool! We gotta tell somebody, Myriad! This isn’t the kind of thing that you keep secret! Why the cloak and dagger stuff? Why are you-”

“TIM!” Myriad said in a powerful booming voice that stunned Tim into silence. “It’s not that simple. There are rules, things that we don’t understand about their world. The Prism’s and the other one, the one who’s probably coming after your Earth next. It’s a race and we are already behind. That’s why I need you to take this.” The bot put a hand to its chest and a pristine glass rectangle popped out into his fingers like a pop tart. Or a cell phone made out of a single slab of transparent glass? “It’s not a fucking phone, Tim. Just hold out your arm.”

Four years ago Myriad had unveiled plans to create a bot-run facility that would produce a device, an implant, that would prevent disease and heal some injuries. It was unbelievable and seemed like the greatest technological leap that humankind had ever made. Whether we made it ourselves or not. They broke ground and let Myriad lead the way. For the first few months Tim had been a tagalong, acting as Myriad’s personal assistant on the project. Tim wasn’t a scientist nor was he a medical expert but he could help Myriad by just being his friend and someone to bounce ideas off of.

Things were going great but suddenly the government came down on them and set the project to Top Secret status. Everyone but Myriad and Dr. Renly himself was taken off the team and Tim hadn’t heard another thing about it since. It bothered him, but he figured that it was just another one of those things that was bound to happen when you worked with Myriad. When you lived on the cutting edge of science so advanced it seemed like magic.

Tim balked, “What are you going to do to me?”

“I am going to install this Motivator Matrix in your arm. And then I am going to send you to Earth 2. Find a man, an elf actually, named Raste. Help him to find what he’s looking for. Once you do, I'll bring you back here. Then we’ll get sushi. Or maybe pizza.”

“An elf?” Tim suddenly felt relieved. “You’re sending me on a quest to find an elf?” He laughed out loud and pointed at the pile of Dungeons and Dragons accoutrement on the table. “This isn’t enough for you, huh? So you’ve made some kind of game that must, what? Mess with my brain and make me believe I’m in Exandria or The Sword Coast? I wake up on a wagon heading for execution when suddenly a team of half-naked cat girl bandits swoop down and rescue me? I know your game!”

“Wow, Tim. That’s quite the imagination you’ve got there.” Myriad stared at him, a quizzical expression on the miasma of his face. “No, it’s not a game and you could really for real die if you don’t take this seriously. This implant will help keep you alive. You have to do this for me.” He held out his hand and Tim reluctantly put out his arm.

The glass rectangle seemed to sink into the soft skin beneath Tim’s palm. They both waited in silence until Tim hear a voice in his head, “Motivator activating. Please wait.”

“What the fuck was that?”

“Calibration complete. Welcome, Tim Nguyen, Herald of Myriad. Earth 9. Your Motivator Matrix is online. Engage the matrix to enter training mode.”

“It’s talking to me!” Tim found himself standing up, holding his arm out in front of him as if it were a snapping turtle.

Myriad stood next to him, “It’s alright. It’s working great. Just listen to Sergio and you’ll be fine.”

“Sergio?!”

“Wish I had time to answer all of these insightful questions, buddy. But now it’s time to go do your quest! I’m counting on you!”

Tim felt himself begin to melt. It wasn’t painful but it was weird. An unbecoming like when you put cotton candy in hot water. In a moment he simply wasn’t there.