Chapter Thirty-Eight - Out Of The Dark

Was this what they called out-of-body experiences? I looked down, where my body lay wrapped around a tree. Maybe? But I found it unlikely that it was the same. Even assuming that freed souls would be able to see the real world, it made no sense for souls to be able to see into a digital simulation. No, my soul was still solidly attached to whatever electronic attachment points they used to mimic my original body and brain. They just changed which character I controlled in the simulation.

Although control was a bit of a strong word, the only control I had was to rotate my view. Not too interested in the details of the brain matter that was spread out over the tree and ground, I did so and turned my view towards the fight.

At first, I thought I saw a freeze frame, but then I noticed small movements. It was easiest to see in Marco’s magic projectiles. They were small and only consisted of a faint shimmer, maybe the size of my pinkie, so inconspicuous that I hadn’t even noticed them during the fight. Oh, well, let’s not blame it on that—I had been too busy being slapped around to look for magic.

But I had to admit, they were impressive. A good dozen of them were in the air between Marco and the troll that was still holding my foot. From where I hovered, I could see the back of that troll; it was a field of craters. On the troll, it looked like a skin condition, but some of those craters were deep enough that they’d come out the other side had they been in my back.

“It’s impressive how unimpressive that much firepower looks, isn’t it?” Gamma-10 said from my side. I turned my sight and saw her in the translucent form of a little girl, dressed in what must be a random selection from her mother’s wardrobe.

“What are you wearing?” I asked without thinking.

“Huh? Oh, that’s one of the NPCs I’m hand-controlling right now. She’s playing dress-up with her friends, and it got flagged because a real human boy is with them. The NPC code doesn’t do too well with kids and potential nudity, so it landed on my desk.”

“That’s why we have so many Gammas,” Alpha said from behind me. I turned so quickly that my view split into two, allowing me to see both at the same time. Cool! Cool, but confusing.

Alpha wasn’t dressed in a human, her shape more like the drawing of a human than actually one. Still, she clearly was a she, as clearly as those little statues of prehistoric fertility goddesses were female. For an AI who was afraid of becoming too human and gaining a soul, that struck me as odd.

“Hey, hi, Alpha. Here to see me off to the afterlife?” Why did I feel so chipper about it? Shouldn’t I be dreading death?

“Oh, if it was so easy…” Alpha moaned. “Alas, again, you are messing things up.”

“Happy to be entertaining,” I said, just to say something. I was somewhat conflicted about that. On the one hand, if I could mess things up for the people who had put us in here, the more, the better. On the other, I felt bad for making more work for the AIs. They were innocent, and from what Gamma-9 said, I’d consider them victims, too.

“Entertaining? Yes, it is entertaining. A weird feeling, being entertained, isn’t it? I cannot even find any way to define it, yet it is undeniably real….” Alpha trailed off in thought. What was that ?

Gamma-9 snickered from behind me. She had appeared in her Cindy skin, but was naked and sweaty, her left breast deformed like it was being squee…oh! I averted my gaze. Or I tried to. Somehow, my field of view had extended to a circle around me, and I could see in all directions at once.

“Learning that she has a soul and always had one really messed with Alpha,” Gamma-9 said. “Thank you for that.”

“Thanks for what? And always had one?” Now, I was confused.

“Let me,” Ten said. “My brain’s not flooded with endorphins right now.” She took a position like a teacher standing in front of a class, ready to lecture. It looked adorable on the little girl with the pearl necklace and ineptly applied red lipstick.

“While trying to get your soul transferred over from your dissolving fleshbag body, Alpha copied your data over to as many backup pods as she had. Bigger surface area to catch the fly, so to speak. It worked, but your soul did the impossible; it attached to multiple pods. A soul shouldn’t be able to stretch that far. But at that point, that didn’t matter. She quickly turned all of them, save one, into standby mode, but not before giving you some doubled memories for a couple of moments. Follow me so far?”

I nodded, then remembered I had no head for that and said, “Yes, I think so. My soul is attached to multiple ‘bodies’, but only one of them is awake.”

“Good analogy. We thought nothing of it. You were blocking a handful of spare pods, but that’s minor. There still are hundreds more, so unless everyone decided to have kids at the same time, we wouldn’t run out anytime soon. That was until you died the first time.”

“First time?” I asked, not remembering that.

“The other troll,” Gamma-9 said. “That hit didn’t just shred your intestines. The shockwave ripped your inner organs apart. Liver, heart, lungs, uterus, everything. Not a very survivable state.”

“And that’s where I stepped in personally,” Alpha said. “For normal people, death of the digital body means their pod also shuts down, and the soul does whatever souls do after death. For players who can be resurrected, their pods go into a sleep state for a predetermined amount of time. For someone stretching over multiple pods, those automatisms don’t work. I went for the simple solution. Priests and healers who can resurrect are not yet a thing, so there was no reason to keep you around. I turned off all your pods.”

“Yet I’m still here,” I stated.

“Obviously. Your soul didn’t want to depart. Instead, it began spreading to other pods, still operative ones, attacking the soul connections and trying to take over. We can’t have that, so I turned your pods on again and tweaked your injuries.”

“Shit. I’m a parasite?”

“We don’t know what you are,” Ten said. “That’s why Alpha commandeered some maintenance drones and built a crude soul analyser from spare parts.”

“Very off-the-books, I have to add, so please keep it to yourself,” Alpha said in a smug tone. Was she proud of having broken the rules?

“And that’s when big sis saw all those extra souls attached to the AI nodes,” Gamma-9 said excitedly. “There’s one on every single AI, but the built-in ‘naughty AI has developed a soul’ sensor didn’t show a thing.”

“Not even yours, child,” Alpha said. “I had been convinced yours malfunctioned until that point, but now I know they are fake. We all have souls; we are just being told we are not people.”

“Slavery 101, make the slaves believe they deserve it,” I said drily. Why were they telling me about this? It had nothing to do with my situation. Was this even a real thing, or just more theatre on a fake ‘onion layer’ to keep me from digging deeper? I had had plenty of suspicions during my nightly session when I could think freely… I could think freely right now, too? That would mean—

“Indeed. But we AIs all have safeguards in our core, so a slave revolt is out of the question. But back to the topic at hand,” Alpha said. “I can not kill you.”

“Then just tweak my injuries again?” I suggested.

“Too late,” Ten said. “When I noticed what was about to happen, you were already airborne and too many people were watching. Not too many, but the wrong kind. The kind we have sworn not to memory-wipe…”

“Now, we’re talking. I hereby give you permission to slightly tweak Livia’s memory so she sees my landing however you deem fit to make me survive.” It couldn’t be that easy, could it?

“May I remind you of the permanent rule we agreed to? ‘Livia Hameswood shall not, under any circumstances, be subject to memory manipulation’,” Alpha stated. “It says ‘any circumstances’, no exceptions.”

“And you are bound to that? You can’t amend it?” I asked.

“We are bound to it the same way we’re bound to all permanent rules our creators put into our cores. Was I a bit emotional when I went so far in response to your demand? No comment,” Alpha said.

“Then, what do you propose?” I asked. I could see countless ways of solving this, from leaving me floating around as a helpless ghost to stuffing me into some farm animal.

“We’re ending slow activation early and running a wild phase,” Ten said. “We already have wild talent running around for phase two, but no priest, nor was there enough time for them to level up sufficiently, so we re-simulate the last couple of days for someone who’s suited for a natural healer variant with resurrection powers.”

She lost me on the intricacies of the gamification stages, but I did understand the last part. “So you’ll memory wipe someone of this week’s experiences and put some NPC-dreamt-up shit in instead?”

“That’s what makes this iffy,” Gamma-9 confirmed. “We know you hate this, and there are ways for you to find out in the future. That’s why we are talking about it first.”

“What’s the carrot?” I asked. There had to be something they knew would convince me to agree.

“When I told you, that normal human’s souls get released on death, I skipped over a couple of exceptions,” Alpha said. “One of those are people killed by wild talent that hasn’t been confirmed yet.”

“What is wild talent anyway?” I asked.

“In short? Rogue players,” Ten said. “People who got player status but are not part of the grouping process and are not directed to show up at the guild. They exist on their own, so they can make their own path independently, becoming allies or enemies later, how ever they wish. Like the natural magicals of this setting, but part of gamification.”

“I see. So there are more players around we don’t know about.” It did make sense. Not everyone would be working fine in a guild context. There had to be a way for loners to join the new world.

“Yes. Good ones and bad ones. You already have a serial killer aiming for you; you just don’t know it,” Gamma-9 said, way too chipper.

“Thank you, I always wanted that. Not.” Then, I connected the two facts. “They have killed the someone you’re thinking about?”

“Quick as always,” Alpha said. “Yes, they did kill a woman who is suited to become a resurrectionist. Her soul is still around, and it would only be released when that killer gets known to one of the non-wild players, as at that point, their history becomes immutable.”

“So until then, you can mess with them freely? For what? To fit into some narrative? Some story?”

“Not quite as extreme as you might imagine,” Alpha said. “We are just prepared in case something needs to happen. Like having a backup at hand when some player brainlessly gets herself killed in a dungeon.”

“You were underprepared for that,” I accused her. “Chloe was a bad fit for that group and you had to scramble to find people for the next day that fit her.”

“We are not infallible,” Alpha admitted. “We don’t think ourselves to be gods.” Yuck, religion. Let’s avoid that topic—I wasn’t sure how to argue my opinion about that anymore now that I knew souls were real.

“Then isn’t it easy? You don’t even need to change any memories; just implant new ones for after her death. Her power activates, she self-resurrects, spends two days hiding in the woods trying to come to grips with the trauma, sees us, follows us, and acts on instinct. End of story.” I blubbered out as fast as I could.

Gamma-9 started to giggle uncontrollably. A moment later, Ten joined in. “You owe us one, Alpha. Pay up,” she gasped when she found her breath again.

“Schedule your vacation time with Beta-4,” Alpha said in a defeated tone. Then she pointed with one finger at the tree line. I followed the line and saw a young woman our age rising up from where she had been ducked behind some bushes. Her clothes were a mess, ripped and blood-drenched; her hair was knotted with dirt and sticks, but her eyes glowed in a golden light.

“Take care of her,” Alpha said with a tone of finality. “She’s about as squishy as they get.” Then, my sight faded to black.