Raine VS The End of the World (9 page)

“It’s your first day and you’re telling me you met
the
SBB?” Gerrit exclaimed. “Sorry, not buying it. I’m pretty sure he and the other AI hosts were deleted from the
‘Verse
long ago.”

Raine hid her red cheeks by keeping her gaze low. “I’m glad you’ve heard of him, at least. But you’re wrong. He’s alive and kicking, all right. I think he needs my help, or I need his. It’s just a strong hunch, and my hunches are usually pretty good. Not that I need to tell you that. Unless you feel like helping me find him.”

Alive? Do AI even ‘live’? SBB will probably exist only as long as I stay asleep. And the same goes for you, too, Gerrit. There and gone again, like so many fictional friends I’ve encountered in my dreams.

“Sounds like a reasonable quest, but I don’t work for free.”

“Oh? How much do you want for the job?”

Gerrit stuck out his chin, evidently trying for the part of the hard-boiled detective.

“That’s talk for another time, doll. You’re hot off the forge and I haven’t even agreed to anything yet. Got any leads?”

“Er, I think I saw him way over yonder!” Raine exclaimed, pointing across fields, deserts and plains to a mass of lumpy, unremarkable foothills.

“That deserted patch of nothingness?” Gerrit considered. “That’s… heading towards Atmoya. Past the borders of the Empire. The roads are in disrepair, plus there’s no teleporting past HC – er, Helium-Corneria. Not exactly the safest place to travel. You sure it was him?”

Gerrit didn’t look so confident in her powers of deduction.

“Positive,” Raine bluffed.

“Cool story
,
bro.”

“Um, thanks?”

“Ah, it’s a troll… n-never mind. You’re not just another fangirl chasing look-alikes, are you?”

“I’ll have you know, I saw him with my own two eyes, and more than once, too!”

Just then Gerrit’s watch beeped, putting an end to the act. He gave the private screen above it a quick glance.

“Tell you what,” he continued, intrigued at her story. “You’re one of the most interesting newbies I’ve ever met. I’ve gotta help divide the spoils, but afterwards my guild mates and I are bowling downtown. How’s about I add your username to my Friends List and we’ll chat tomorrow?”

A small menu popped up in the corner of Raine’s peripheral vision.

It read, “Approve friend request from
NinjaMageKnight99
? Say ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”

Raine tried politely to decline his offer non-verbally without contorting her face too strongly.

“You can always ban me later, anyway. Just think about it. I’ve got a mount,” he insisted. “He’s a dragon. Ever wanted to fly? I’ll give you the full
Avidya
tour.”

She rolled her eyes. That, at least, sounded pretty cool.

“Fine.”

The menu screen took that as a confirmation and chirped out of existence.

Gerrit gave Raine a thumbs-up. He would have fist-pumped if it were socially acceptable. But everything changed after last month’s mass fist-pumping disaster.

“Great! TTYL!”

“Tee-what?”

If she had known him a little better, Raine might have realized that Gerrit was absolutely glowing.

He pulled out another small glass wing from a compartment in his belt pack and threw it on the ground. A sound like the
flaming elevator from
Die Hard
falling down a shaft and exploding roared from the portal that popped into existence.

Still smiling, Gerrit leapt into it with a wave and vanished.

Raine sighed. Boys, no matter what dimension they were from, were a waste of precious time.

V. Queen Lorelei

“I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds, and chords, and harmonies.”

- Napoleon Bonaparte

The view from the top is something beyond elegant. It is the ultimate power trip.

This, Queen Lorelei knew.

She lived on a plane all her own, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

At almost four thousand feet in the air, her office sat at the very top of the
Spire
. The plasma-shielded balcony loomed over the cyber-metropolis of
Neo Eden
, whose foundations were constructed from the inside of a hollowed-out mountain and encompassed what the Old World once referred to as Naples, Italy. It offered a gorgeous ocean view of the Mediterranean, and had played host to six of Lorelei’s top ten sunsets.

She was now thirty-four. At twenty, she became the supreme ruler of the civilized world. And she had been running it now for almost two centuries.

How did she do it, one might ask?

Even for those resting comfortably at the top of her social pyramid, her great ability was a secret never to be revealed.

It was a handy little thing called time travel, and though it tended to make things very, very complex, it also allowed her to accomplish feats that challenged the notion of impossibility.

Her mid-morning coffee finished, she retreated across the marble balcony and through the arch, drawing the silk curtains to a close over clear Venetian doors.

Queen Lorelei strode through her bedroom and into the adjoining office, kicked off her high heels, and practically dropped into her dog-fur chair. She crossed her long, ivory-white legs on her glass desk and lit a cigarette to begin her work.

First, it was time to inspect the progress reports. She had a look at the resource management screen embedded in the desk. In stark contrast to the mess that the
Metaverse
had become, her Overseer AI ran smooth as butter. Silver, silicon, oil, and plutonium mining and refining all functioned acceptably across the globe, especially considering the fact that most of her production zones were deserts with little to no water or topsoil, stricken with absolute drought.

Maybe conjuring up a few tropical storms might boost production,
she figured.
Hope proves useful in sporadic installments, tragedy even moreso.

“The destruction of Sector Thirty hasn’t dampened their spirits. The assets require another reminder of their mortality,” she intoned to the program. “Prepare to ravage Sectors Fifteen through Seventeen with a hurricane, and pull our medics out. Let the insurgents deal with the cleanup. Also, lay off on the palladium refinement in Sector Nine. Divert assets to uranium in Twenty-Two.”

The Overseer’s interface, a bearded, elderly man bound by innumerable tethers to the Network, gave a slight nod, its expressive face pained by the tasks at hand. “It shall be done.”

With more than a little satisfaction, Lorelei swiped two fingers across her desktop console, dismissing the Overseer; holo-vision population reports switched to security feeds showing hundreds of locales from the three primary
Endless Metaverse
servers. As usual, it seemed that
Avidya
was in specific need of attention, with Templar units requesting backup to deal with rebel factions on both North and South continents. Usually, such petty problems were best left to the hired help, but these days, no virtual concern was too small to ignore.

Despite my best efforts, the
Metaverse i
s far from a perfect system, and I can’t afford to be sloppy. Not now, of all times.

Next on the agenda: fill the position of
Avidya
Junior Network Manager. It was a most important wartime job, and she’d made the unusual request of asking to personally interview the candidates. But that could wait for now.

She placed a delicate circlet over her head and leaned back in her office chair.

“Plug me in,” she said, and closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, Lorelei beheld a virtual office near indistinguishable from her real-life one.

“Miss Guggell, your presence is requested,” she intoned.

A ghostlike replica of the Queen materialized in the elegant mahogany chair across from her desk. They were identical, except that HRM Lorelei was clad in a form-fitting dress and lathered in make-up, whereas the modest Miss G program was decked out in its usual attire: sleek glasses, a blue blazer over a shirt and tie, and a formal skirt; her outfit never changed – that was the easiest way to ensure that no one confused the fashionable real Queen for her virtual double.

“Your Majesty,” it echoed in the same silky voice, “how may I help you?”

Queen Lorelei studied the apparition. Miss Guggell played a central role in the execution of her masterpiece, The End of the World, 3.0, known to the public as
Endless Metaverse
. It was essential that the artificial intelligence be purged of all possible errors, and that it should remain loyal and obedient at all times. The Queen pressed her finger to her own temple, blinked twice, and closed her eyes. Miss Guggell followed suit, triggering the microscopic nano-machines in the Queen’s brain that linked her consciousness and wishes with her virtual self’s programming.

In this state, while Miss Guggell was updating its priorities, the Queen could detect errors in the AI, browse lists of major bugs discovered in the
‘Verse
, and check and reassign tasks as she saw fit. As an added bonus, every once in a while she could tell when her virtual replica was trying to hide something.

“
Maya
and
Tanha
seem fine. Third-party servers and primary backups are cluttered as always, but at least they’re doing their jobs. Tell me what’s going on in
Avidya
,” the Queen demanded, glancing over recent bugs and unfiltered taboo data. “The eggheads suspect a few bad leaks.”

Miss Guggell furrowed its pixellated brow.

“Yes, very recently there have been some unprompted data storms, and it appears that some of the information they are bringing into the
Metaverse
is taboo. Perhaps one of the assets is running an older client inadvertently and polluting it with their personal data?”

“Whatever it is, take care of it quick,” Queen Lorelei bemoaned. “I expect a report within the day. Also, patch me into Wrathman’s private connection. Audio only.”

“As you wish,” Miss Guggell bowed.

Ω

After the neural connection was cut, Miss Guggell disappeared, and re-emerged in the
Avidya
command dome in the center of the real-world
Endless Metaverse Control Nexus
, a rather minimalistic, high-security fortress adjacent to the
Spire
.

It came into being as a hologram on its seat at the foot of the Queen’s towering throne. Five hundred men and women seated in spiral clusters around the elevated central platform held their breaths for news. These were the Lead Developers.

Avidya
Lead Alphonse Hoshua turned from arguing with a colleague and greeted the AI with a little trepidation. “Cheers, Guggell.”

“I am under direct orders from the Queen. We are to investigate the info leaks and get to the bottom of these data storms. Prepare to relinquish control. First breaks will be in three hours. Counting down now. Ten… nine… eight… seven… six…”

This was the cue for all three hundred Developers ranked C-class or lower to stop whatever they were doing and place their index fingers on the circlets around their heads, eyes closed.

“Five… four…”

Miss Guggell’s digital self detected the bodies, performed all the synaptic tests. It had already triple-checked its calculations for optimal resource usage. It assigned a hundred Developers to filter and censor the leaked info, seventy to monitor recently created accounts, ten to scan the crime scenes with Templar units, fifty to compile probability reports, and the rest to spread disinformation and quell public unrest.

“Three… two…”

The men and women felt their minds disassociating from their bodies, temporarily retreating into a place in the subconscious where they became mere observers.

“One… zero.”

Miss Guggell lifted its hands up in the air, a digital puppet master preparing for a grand show. Three hundred bodies straightened, marionettes without strings, and worked furiously at their consoles as one living, breathing unit.

↕

Meanwhile, Queen Lorelei’s display switched to an overhead feed showcasing Mister Senior’s avatar, sitting at a virtual wedding behind one of the
Tanha
server’s royal families.

Noticing that the Queen had opened a Private Channel,
Endless Metaverse
Chief Operations Officer Jonathan Wrathman placed a finger in his earpiece and transmitted a neural message, worded by his thoughts and translated across the Network by nano-machines in his brain.

“My Queen, what can I do you for?”

What’s with Jon lately? He’s so boring these days. Perhaps I’ve been too harsh, or given him too many masks to wear; his true self has no energy left to even make an effort.

“Jon, organize the Happy World Commission for a meeting tomorrow at the usual time. I’d like to crack down on the hackers in
Avidya
.”

“Affirmative. Anything else?”

“Smile. You’re on camera.”

“Of course. Over and out, ma’am.”

Two tasks done, Queen Lorelei leaned back into her seat and craned her head in her hands. So, things were finally about to get interesting. Before today, it was a bit too quiet for comfort; even the incompetent lackeys in Server Maintenance were back to addressing graphical errors. She flicked her wrist, utilizing subtle motion-tracked hand gestures to cycle between multiple virtual cameras and news stories. Here was a quickly quelled riot against Templar power abuse. There were ruffians protesting for the legalization of user-programmed psychedelics. Hackers trying to access the source code or hop across servers were now commonplace. And of course, there was the revolution, which as of late had been bursting with recruitment and needed constant management.

Those would-be anarchists were a necessary faction of her virtual society,
one that most were socially engineered to despise. Great care was spent on the cobbled streets and public forums, ridiculing them via countless character assassinations and straw man attacks. The rebels’ marginalization and severe punishments ensured that they’d function as cautionary tales to the other enslaved, but for the most part, the media kept all unauthorized operations under wraps.

Generally, the most problematic players were the spiritual seekers, whose clear minds made them all but immune to propaganda and cognitive dissonance. Some Truth-seekers found ways to bypass their nano-bots, dig deep into their subconscious, and catch unregulated glimpses of the outside world. Supposedly there were still some memories that her algorithms couldn’t touch. For that, they needed their accounts transferred to other servers and their memories reset.

One problem caught her eye: an alarming bug report in this particular server’s instance of Clyde Castle Town. One of Miss Guggell’s agents had reviewed that morning’s event boss, some Giant Acid Crab. It seemed that a player involved in the battle was remotely connected to the
‘Verse
from an untraceable source, and all signs pointed to her being the origin point for a litany of minor Network glitches.

Eyes closed and fingers against her temples, Lorelei downloaded relevant real-time data from her assistant. A pirate data storm appeared to have some undesirable effects on the locals. It’s possible the two could be connected in some way, but the player seemed genuinely surprised by it, so results were inconclusive.

Right now, that player was skipping down a little-used path towards the Wall of Secrets, shadowed closely by her Level 50 Rainbow Cat.

What was a low-leveled newbie doing with such an expensive pet? Queen Lorelei removed her interface circlet and hit the button on her console that instructed a servant to bring her some coffee. The next step would be to probe the girl’s collected cache of memories.

The board had been set two hundred years ago. If this was Lily’s first move, it was long overdue.

It’s a tricky business,
she reflected,
trying to keep the peace in a world so remarkably insane, so selfish for enlightenment
. Human nature, after all, was so hooked on freedom and curiosity it took intelligent, determined, far-sighted people like her to do something about it.