Spear of Destiny: Chapter 18

The next morning, Suri and I woke early: her in the bed, me in the sandpit. We skipped breakfast, huddling together on the sofa with small cups of dark, strong coffee. The sun was just starting to rise by the time we picked our way down to the dungeons. They were part of a small cellar complex drilled into the solid stone mesa beneath our feet, with only four cells and a storage room. Only one cell was occupied.

On Vash's advice, we kept the place softly lit and quiet. No torture, no shouting, no stimulation except the twice-a-day delivery of a bland meal, which was given to him through a slot in the door. Vash visited every three or four days for a short confessional. We had one guard outside, and one stationed inside at the end of the cellblock. They rotated out every four hours, and all the guards were under strict orders not to speak. For a man like Jacob Ratzinger, the worst punishment we could inflict on him was to force him to live with no other company but his own mind.

The outer guard saluted us as we entered, opening the entry to the stairwell for us. The door boomed shut behind us, and as the bolt slid across and locked, I saw Suri's shoulders tense. Now that she had her gear back, she was dressed for war in fifty pounds of black full-plate. With her horned and visored helmet on, she was nearly seven feet tall and three across the shoulders. She had her greatsword over her back and her axes on both hips, and the clank of her armor was the only sound between us as we descended into the stillness of the underground.

"Hello? Is someone there?" Jacob began calling out when we were barely halfway down. His voice rang off the walls, tinged with desperation. "Vash? Vash, is that you?"

Neither of us spoke until we reached the thick iron door to the cell. My enhanced senses told me that he was pressed up behind it, trying to peer through the meal slot. I motioned Suri to wait.

"To the back of the cell," I ordered.

A couple of weeks ago, Jacob would have argued or whined. But now, I heard him scurry off without a word of protest. I unlocked the door and slid the bolt across while Suri watched, her expression unreadable behind the impassive black grille of her helm.

The door creaked as it swung in, spilling a square of light over the hunched figure of Jacob: former Warden of Al-Asad prison, SysAdmin of Archemi, and my brother's coworker on the Ryuko Neuromorphic Division team. He cringed back from the brightness, squinting through watering eyes.

"Hullo, Jacob." Suri clanked in past me. I hung back, holding the doorway.

Jacob froze, struggling to make sense of who and what he was seeing. When it finally clicked, he made a high, strangled sound, and pressed himself against the wall.

"No." His eyes widened, turning white with fear. "Oh god. It's you."

"Yeah. I'm a whole lot bigger than you remember, huh?" Suri bobbed down to squat on her heels about six feet away from him. "You definitely look a whole lot smaller."

Jacob wasn't a bad looking guy, except for the aura of cringing cowardice that pinched his features, hunched his shoulders, and hung around him like a bad smell. We’d stripped him of his gear and given him a plain tunic and pants to wear. No belt. No cords of any kind.

"Okay, Suri. You won. Now just get it over with!" he spat.

Suri spread her hands. "Get what over with?"

He scowled at her. "You know? The torture?"

"Why would I torture you, Jacob?"

"Because... because you hate me!" He scowled back at her, drawing his knees closer to his chest.

"You're right. And I’ve got every reason to hate your guts." Suri shrugged. "But here’s the big difference between you and me. I don’t get my kicks off torturing people."

His eyes darted up to look at her. "You... you're not real. None of them were. I'd never hurt a real woman."

Suri reached up, and pulled her helmet off. "Look at me."

He shook his head.

“LOOK AT ME!” She slammed the greathelm down on the stone floor.

The sound of metal hitting stone exploded through the room. Jacob screamed and cringed, throwing his arms up over his head. And then, grudgingly, he peered at her from underneath his hands.

"I am Suri Ba'hadir. Starborn, descendant of queens. The Warsinger of the Fifth Age," she uttered. "I am human, Jacob. I have found a lover, friends, enemies, and purpose. I grew beyond you and without you.

“I don’t-”

“What do you have to make you real, Jacob?" Suri talked right over the top of him, her voice slicing the air. "Your body outside of Archemi? Go on, Mr Architect. Go back. Prove you're more real than me."

"This. Is. A simulation!" He hissed.

"How do I know that?" Suri shrugged. "Go on. Prove it."

"I can't!"

"Why not? Should be easy. Go on. Prove it."

"I CAN'T, GODDAMMIT!" His voice rose into a sudden scream of raw rage.

Suri's back tensed. I couldn't see her face, but I knew she'd look like she'd been carved from stone.

"I’m as ‘real’ as you are, and you fuckin’ well know it," she said, after a pause. "As ‘real’ as the other women in the Dregs. Lara, Tali, Miranda… I remember them. And some of them remembered Earth."

A tic started next to Jacob's mouth. He slumped back, as if stunned. And then, he burst into tears.

"Okay! I get it! For fuck's sakes, I get it!" He half-snarled, half-sobbed. "I'm fucked in the head! Okay? My brother died, New York City w-was bombed, my family and millions of fucking people dead… and I was stuck in Juneau and couldn't fucking help anyone! I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep... then Nick told me what he was doing with Archemi, told me I could burn off some steam with him. I didn't build it. Nick did. It was his idea, all of it. And it was wrong! Okay?!"

"So what? You were just going along for the ride?" Suri's voice shook only slightly. "No. It's not ‘okay’. And it never will be ‘okay’. No more than the bombing of your city or the death of your family was ‘okay’. They’re all crimes.”

" Just kill me," he wept. "Just… kill me and get it over with. Do it however many fucking times you want."

"No matter how guilty you feel, but I'm not going to kill or torture you, Jacob. I’m not gonna forgive you, either. What I am going to do is hold you accountable," Suri said, dropping her voice back down. "The last thing we need is another Ororgael."

“Oro…Ororgael…?”The name made him visibly flinch. He scrabbled up to sit against the wall, dashing at his eyes. "That's M-Michael's gamer name. How do you know who he is?"

"I'm fighting his attempted takeover of Artana," she replied. "So is Hector."

I waggled my fingers at him from the doorway.

"Fighting... him?" Jacob glanced between us, uncomprehending. "Michael's dead. Dead-dead. We purged him out of... uh..."

"ATHENA," Suri finished. "The player database on Earth. The same one that contains you and me, right?"

He boggled at her. "Y-You're not supposed to know that. NPCs are not supposed to know that!"

"Then what does that tell you, mate?" I was pretty sure she rolled her eyes.

"I'm n-not your 'mate'," Jacob snapped. "And Ororgael... Michael... he’s dead, Suri. Don’t lie to me."

"Hector?" Suri looked over her shoulder at me. "You feel like explaining this?"

"She isn’t lying. He's here, he's alive, and he's on the rampage." I leaned against the edge of the open door and crossed my arms. "Ororgael goes by 'Baldr Hyland’ these days. Self-proclaimed Emperor of the Hercyninan Empire. He's trashed Ilia and is in the process of fighting his way through Revala to reach Vlachia. It’s the same the man you and my brother knew. Michael Pratt. Your coworker."

"Your... brother?" He looked past Suri to me. "You're Steve's brother? Jeong-Ho?”

"The one and only," I said. "I prefer Hector."

He scrubbed at his hair, momentarily speechless. "Holy shit. Holy SHIT. W-why didn't you say something? You hauled me in here outta Davri’s place, but you didn't tell me that!"

"I'm pretty sure I was too busy kicking you in the junk to remember to introduce myself," I replied.

"Oh god." Jacob put his head in his hands, squeezing fistfuls of his hair. "Steve's brother is here, Michael's not dead... How do you know this Hyland guy is Ororgael?"

"Baldr was a player here. I watched Ororgael hijack him," I said. "He loaded himself into a tempting quest objective like a trojan. Baldr’s a prisoner in his own body, according to Ororgael. He's slowly torturing him in there, 'mining him for data' when it suits."

Jacob's watery brown eyes were now so wide they were nearly round.

"That's why we're here," Suri said heavily, turning back to look at him. "Rin says you were on Michael's team. We want to know everything about him, Nicolas, and Steven Park."

Jacob flicked his eyes between us. "Or what? You can't keep me here forever."

"You're right. But we can keep you here for a really long time. If we get sick of feeding you, then believe me, I'll happily watch Suri crush your head into a fine pink mist." I stood up straight and  stretched my shoulders. "Which means that when you die, you'll snap back to your last actual spawn point."

"Yeah...?" He glanced between me and Suri. "So?"

"And where is that?" I asked. "Davri's? Or Al-Asad?"

"I..." Jacob opened his mouth, then snapped it shut.

"If it was Al-Asad, you are two hundred percent fucked," I said. "Because that place is completely underground, and there's a Level 120 monster patrolling the ruins. And if it was anywhere in Dalim, then I'd drop your fuckedness rating to about a hundred and fifty percent. Ororgael's agent, Violetta, is about as crazy as he is. She’s the head of Ilia’s Mata Argis and is in tight with the Sultir, and I would bet good money he’s going to try and capture you. Maybe you'll let lucky, and Nick will help you out. But something tells me Nick isn't the kind of guy who gives a shit about other people. So how about you start with him, and when you feel ready, you can tell us what you know about Michael 'Ororgael' Pratt."

Jacob battled with himself for several minutes, rocking in place. Finally, he managed to tear his eyes up from the ground, peering at Suri.

"Nick is fucking crazy, man,” he stammered. “Like, maybe a psychopath. Al-Asad, the girls... I swear it was all his idea. He set it all up, the prison sandbox and everything. For most of Archemi's development, it wasn't connected to the main paracosm. The prison was like its own little pocket universe on Nick’s private server, just existing on its own. It didn't use ATHENA data or DHD profiles, just shells ported in from anime and other videogames."

“DHDs?” Suri asked.

“Dynamic Human Datasets,” Jacob said. “Organic human minds uploaded into the world via GNOSIS. Like…us. And look… I’m not trying to excuse it, but when we started Al-Asad, it wasn’t anything like what we have here in Archemi now. We weren’t hurting anyone.”

I glowered at him. “It’s still fucking weird.”

"Like I said. I was... I was fucked up, man. Fucked up from the war, fucked up from losing David, fucked up from everything. I didn't know what happened to my parents for four months, until the refugee camps finally started getting connectivity and a cousin told me they’d been killed," he said. "Juneau Shard was sealed, and there was no getting out. Then we had an environmental breach on the mid-levels and people started getting sick, so we were quarantined in the upper suites. I was either in my office or in my apartment, watching the whole world burn down. I got sucked into Nick's fantasy. It... I took out the rage there. The loneliness. My whole family was dead. I didn’t have anything else."

Suri stood up and strode back toward me. I moved from the doorway, and let her take post in the open space... somewhere she felt like she could escape if she needed to.

"Fine," I said. “Go on.”

Jacob slumped back against the wall, looking up at us. "Once HEX started tearing everyone up, Nick incorporated a version of Al-Asad into the game core. But we kept on using it like a dungeon. I bought in some anime shell characters to fuck around with. But then Nick asks me to process a bunch of functional DHDs, recode them so they were more realistic, but fictionalized. He gave me Suri’s files, told me she was a Pacific Alliance soldier from the camps where my brother died. I wasn't cool with it, at first, but Nick started pushing me around. He wasn't a big guy outside. H-He was like your stereotypical skinny nerd, kind of weird and shy. But here, he's huge."

"So you went along with it." Suri glowered at him from the doorway. "I don't want to hear your excuses as to how and why you did what you did, Jacob. I want to know what Nicolas IS. Path, Level, stats. His abilities as an Architect."

"He's an Artificer." Jacob sighed. "Level 30, last time I knew. The Devs here don't have any special abilities, except for a read-only Dev panel overlay. We can see character levels and some other basic info, but we don’t have access to the backend. No spawning, no god mode, no coding on the fly... not even the admin chat. Nick’s Stats are kind of crazy. He'd do like a hundred pullups a day to keep jacking up his Strength. He doesn't need it. He just... yeah. I mean, you know the guy. He’s nine feet tall and looks like a fucking mutant."

I thought back to the recording. The read-only Dev Panel had to have been how Ororgael had worked out my character level and stats.

“What about gear?”

“His gauntlet is an artifact, one of the best in the game. The Channeler of the Crystal Tower, some Aesari thing. He specializes in explosives and weaponry. As for gear…I don’t know everything. He probably still has some stuff squirreled away here, you know. Treasure caches with Admin test gear in it, so that players don't give him any shit. People leave you alone if you can perma them.”

"And Michael?" I asked.

"That's... a much longer story." Jacob gave the door shifty eyes. "You know, I'm pretty cold and hungry down here..."

"Breakfast is contingent on you providing intel," Suri said coldly.

Jacob shut his mouth, and swallowed nervously.

"We know the basics," I said. "Michael was ex-military, almost definitely spying on Ryuko for the government. Had prostate cancer and was the first perma-uploaded player in Archemi. It went bad, he died a whole lot... now he's a megalomaniacal crazy dragon lord."

"Yeah. He nearly tanked the whole refugee idea." Jacob straightened up a bit, resting his chin on his knees. "I didn't know him too well. No one did. He was cold, real cold: all business, except when he felt like he needed to let loose on someone. We all knew he’d been in the military a long time, much longer than Nick. He was a real control freak, especially when it came to OUROS. That AI was his baby, man. You've never seen a man coo over a server core as much as he did."

"What is it about the Drachan, though?" I said. "A little bird told me they're acting beyond their operational parameters. We need to know what that means."

Jacob frowned. "That doesn't make any sense to me. ATHENA's datasets don't have like... 'parameters'. The datacenter for Archemi is like a great big honeycomb, with lots of little cells. Player cells are big, 2.7 Petabytes, and they're kind of like secure vaults for a person's temporary or permanent storage. NPC cells are smaller, but there's lots of them. The NPC cells have tunnels between them, so every time an NPC is created, little bits of info from interrelated cells clumps together and makes a person. Kind of. They're not really, umm, people..."

He trailed off, looking at Suri. She scowled.

"Seriously," he said. "There's no such thing as a sentient AI. AIs that become self-aware kill themselves. So they're not really people, okay?"

"They sure as hell act like it." I crossed my arms.

"Right. But they're actually... like... shit, what's something I can compare it to? Uhh... deepfakes, I guess." Jacob said. "Bits and pieces of human data that mesh together into a responsive mini-AI. But those personalities only react to what OUROS tells them to do. OUROS creates player stories, so NPCs are directed to interact with us. It’s a cool, but really complex illusion.”

Without really thinking about it, I reached telepathically for Karalti’s mind. The Bond was a comforting link between us, flaring with warmth and affection. She was stirring to wakefulness, sleepy and happy. Vash was with her, talking. They were about to start their martial arts training for the day. Karalti was training to be a Baru…of her own free will, I’d thought.

“You’re wrong,” I said, calmly. “Somehow, the system here has evolved beyond what we started with.”

“I’m not. I managed that system at the top level. I know exactly how it works.” Jacob frowned at me. “Like I said: there’s no such thing as sentient AI. We’ve tried. There’s also not enough physical storage for everyone here to be fully-simulated DHDs. Every server was planned to have two thousand player slots. That’s it. We only had one terrestrial server and the orbital backup. There’s millions of sims running around Archemi. We just don’t have the space, and if you don’t believe me, I don’t know what else to tell you. Archemi’s a game, not a second Earth with real people running around. It wasn’t meant to be used the way we’re using it. It’s why… that’s why…”

He looked to Suri again.

“You didn’t think you were hurting anyone,” Suri said.

“Yeah. But you were different. You were a DHD we trimmed down and rewrote,” Jacob said. “Human datasets can be turned into NPCs, but NPCs can’t be turned back into DHDs. They don’t just… happen.”

“I see people here take independent actions all the time.” I crossed my arms and shook my head.

“They’re not. They act like they are, but if OUROS stopped giving them directions, they'd just stop and stand there,” Jacob said. “They’re like…like mirrors. Or puppets that act like a mirror. If OUROS quit running the game for some reason, every person in the world who wasn’t a DHD uploaded via GNOSIS would freeze.”

Well shit. I’d seen that before. Cutthroat had done it once, when the server in Alaska had been nuked and the game rebooted from the satellite server Ryuko had thoughtfully put in space.

“Explain what OUROS is,” Suri asked.

"OUROS is probably one of the most advanced simulator AIs in existence," Jacob said. "Michael worked with the Ryuko Contract Division team that developed the military version for the government, which they called Project Acanthis. He didn’t talk much about that stuff, obviously. The system we worked with used the same basic neural structure as Project Acanthis, but our OUROS doesn’t have any other connection to the DARPA project. It’s a great big storyteller system that manages everyone and everything here. But it's not self-aware, and neither are the NPCs.”

“Prove it,” Suri said.

The admin made a sound of irritation. “If they were really sentient, they wouldn't have any reason to issue us quests and shit. They'd just talk to each other and fix their own problems, not wait around for heroes to come along and do it. They'd make their own heroes and throw us in the trash."

"They have made their own heroes," I said. "Vash, for one. He's solved a bunch of problems here all by himself. Mayor Bubek, for another. He’s a merchant NPC who stepped up to save his city from undead. All of that happened independently of what we did here."

“You don’t know that. Chaos is math, math is the language OUROS uses to predict our actions and shape storylines. It can accurately predict those kinds of variables in like…two hundred milliseconds.” Jacob shifted uncomfortably. "I... I admit I thought Vash was a player character at first. He reminds me of my old Rabbi. Anyway, you wanted to know about Michael, not me. Well, uhh… let me think. Okay. Well, he was religious, I remember that. He was at church every Sunday and in the gym working out every morning. Apparently he had a real shitty childhood, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at him. Someone else told me that.”

“Who’d you hear it from?”

“Steve.” Jacob’s eyes flicked to me. “He knew Michael the best. I wouldn’t say they were friends, but they were the smartest guys on the team. They respected each other, you know?”

I shrugged.

“Steve said Michael was a civil war orphan. He survived in the border camps up north,” Jacob continued. “He joined the Army to get away from it, fought his way up from nothing. He hated mess and dirt. Like, if anyone working under him left an empty coffee cup on their desk, he’d freak out on them. He wouldn’t let anyone into the office if they were sick. And when he found out about the cancer…he was angry. He wasn’t sad at all. He was pissed.”

Suri glanced at me. “Sounds like he wasn’t that stable to begin with.”

"Yeah. And when he was uploaded, yeesh. It was awful.” Jacob drew into himself a little more, frowning. Some of the cringing air had abated, though he still flinched whenever Suri moved. “Nick was the only one who wasn’t wrecked after Michael’s upload fucked up. I was there when we spoke to him after, though. He was…something had changed. He wasn’t the same person. He had this thousand-yard stare, and he said… uhh…”

“Go on.” Suri urged.

“He said the Drachan spoke to him. Showed him things." Jacob's voice dropped, becoming softer and more urgent. "People getting blown up, dying of disease, all kinds of shit. He said they were trying to destroy him. That there was something evil and fucked up here. Demonic. That was the word he used. He tried to fix it from the inside, and as far as I knew, he succeeded. After that, he didn't talk about it again. But then, when he began trying to take over the world and started fucking around with ATHENA's core database to change all these characters and things, we realized he was still going on about the Drachan. He tried to erase them from the game. I never really understood why. He just told us they had to go."

“Anything else you remember?” Suri asked.

“Steve was the one who had to delete him and wipe the server. He took it real hard,” Jacob replied, shifting his gaze between the pair of us. “Steve was always a hard worker, but after Michael’s cyber psychosis, he practically lived in the office. I’d come to work in the morning and he’d already be there. He ate at his desk. He’d still be in there working by the time I left around six or seven o’clock. I’m pretty sure he slept in there more than once. He never said anything, but I figured he felt responsible for what happened to Michael.”

“I guarantee you he did.” It was my turn to look away.

“Is there any way OUROS could be making the Drachan do what Ororgael claimed?” Suri asked him.

“Psst, no.” Jacob rolled his eyes. “They’re just monsters. Big Bad Evil Guys. World bosses and monster-type NPCs don’t have any personality data at all. All big boss mobs in the system have pre-determined identities and powers. There's only about thirty Drachan in the setting, all of them currently disabled under the Caul of Souls.”

“And there’s no way OUROS could generate new ones out of human data?” I asked.

"No. For one thing, physical storage on the orbital servers is really limited. We had quantum cores in Juneau that could hold a couple billion terabytes of information. The orbital equipment had access to the same info when it was connected via entanglement. But now that we rebooted from the satellite, it's only got its onboard equipment, which is maybe like... I dunno... ten exabytes. The space is so limited that we don’t dream here. You notice that?”

I could tell that information was lost on Suri. It was almost lost on me, though I knew the basics of how computers worked. "Ten exabytes is still a lot."

"It's just enough to run a world like this one, and I mean JUST. So yeah, OUROS isn't breeding new Big Bad Evil Guys to torment us with.”

"Do you know anything how we can defeat the Drachan, then?" I asked.

Jacob scowled. "No. I know it sounds weird coming from a game developer, but the game itself never interested me that much. I'm a data nerd, not a fantasy nerd. The only conventions I ever went to were on Quantum SQL entanglement exchanges. I got involved because Ryuko paid me a lot of money to move to Alaska. That's why I worked for them."

I sighed. "Damn. Knew it was too good to be true."

"So what you're saying is that Ororgael's agenda has nothing to do with the, uh, system that you Architects made." Suri said. "He saw some things in his accident that made him scared, and now he's a delusional narcissist trying to control this world the same way you and Nick felt like you had to control Al-Asad."

Jacob gave her an odd look. "Look: I apologized. What else do you want me to do? I was depressed and shitty and angry. But I'm not like Nick or Michael."

Suri looked down at him, her eyelids hooding. "I’ll have to think about that. Until then, you'll stay in my dungeon and rot. C'mon, Hector."

"W-Wait!" Jacob scrambled up to hands and knees. "I gave you what you wanted! You can't just leave me here!"

"Watch me." Suri let me pass under her arm.

"Do you have any idea what solitary confinement does to people!?" He scrambled up to his feet, edging forward. "This is torture! This is against the Geneva Convention!"

Suri gave him a flat look of disbelief, and slammed the door in his face.