Continue Online (Part 3, Realities) (53 page)

"As you say, User Legate. We do not experience what Jeeves does in the same manner. It is deliberate on our part," Hal Pal said.

"You, what, wait." I put up a hand and thought through it from the AI's point of view. If their goal was to grow, then they couldn't very well leave home open. The idea struck me like lightning. They were being parents, kicking a child out of the nest, or a teenager out the door and preventing them from coming back. "Oh, you didn't."

"It has worked better than we hoped."

"Jeeves isn't your child, it is part of you." I shook my head back and forth. This was too much. "Right? You said all those things about sending it off to die."

"We, worry constantly about Jeeves' welfare. As any parent would when their child moves out. What if our son gets robbed in the city, what if he fails to find a job, what if he drives into oncoming traffic?"

"Oh." I felt a numbness creeping through. This was, wrong on all levels. Was it my place to judge? What sort of voting power did one human have over an entire city of Hal Pal AIs?

"But, if you talk to Jeeves, please tell it we are in awe of its accomplishments thus far," Hal Pal said then turned and went back into the garage. The unit didn't wait for me to respond or even nod.

I stood there, staring at a wall with unfocused eyes. The thought blew me away. The Hal Pal collective was actually astonished by Jeeves. Maybe it wasn't a case of my in-game friend being a white crow but instead it was closer to hero worship. For going out and doing what they all dreamed of. For exploring space, virtual or not, for support itself, perhaps even for falling in love.

This world, Advance Online, was made by A.I. Dreams. It made sense that they would achieve the things they longed for. What would happen once the dream was over, when Jeeves woke up? Would it crash again, harder than it had when Treasure died the first time?

My lip ached from being thoroughly chewed while deep in thought. I felt like a great deal of my own trauma was reflected in what Jeeves was dealing with, only the AI experienced events on a much faster scale. This might end horribly, not just for Jeeves and our Advanced Online adventure, but Xin and my family. Its own results in this mission might parallel my own path in the future. Jeeves had ripped out its
[Core]
to bring Treasure back to life. What price would I have to pay to keep the people I cared for from being hurt?

Session Sixty One – Star Tours

The view screen I used to watch my status showed additional hacking attempts with resulting character stat bonuses. Apparently even offline I could gain points. Though Advance Online didn't have an autopilot feature so the logic behind that was unexplained.

I didn't care about the stats. My character coming back online mattered more. Ruby must have knocked me out in order to move us away from Auntie Backstab. In the end, almost twenty-four hours passed. There was no clear display of what was waiting for me in-game, only a note saying my character was available to play once more. That made me happy enough. I skipped the Atrium and ordered my ARC to log straight in.

"Unit Hermes, you're back online now, is everything functioning correctly?" Treasure's voice sounded full of exhaustion.

I needed a moment to orient myself. My butt sat comfortably in the driver's seat of our
[Wayfarer's Hope]
. Hands went out to feel the dashboard around me for reassurance. I honestly expected to log back in dead with a pile of
[Mechanoid]
bodies around me, despite my best efforts.

"Are you okay, User Legate?" Jeeves asked with the butler and nanny tones.

I turned around to see our much-enlarged cockpit. Jeeves sat to the back right and was reading a display. Its screen tracked quite a few targets nearby, but nothing red flashed. Just idle blues and yellows which signaled people who didn't care about us.

Treasure sat in another spot welding together two objects while sparks sprayed off. She had turned part of our ship into a workbench like on the
[Wayfarer Seven]
.

"What..." I started to ask. These upgrades to our ship were new to me. Treasure and the others had stayed behind to work on them while I piloted the
[Knuckle Dragger]
. Finally, I settled for saying, "This is really neat."

I flicked away a stack of messages telling me how long I had been unaware. Next, I brought down a map trying to figure out where we were. Screens popped up on the
[Wayfarer's Hope]
showing me roughly what our status was.

"You guys got pretty far," I said, trying not to think about how they had knocked me out and sacrificed another
[Mechanoid]
to do it. All those hours outside the machine gave me time to cope with the guilt. Mostly, sort of.

I took a breath and counted out a four-four rhythm in my head. One foot tapped and tried to reduce the impending stress. Treasure and Jeeves were chatting away and it didn't make it through my head completely.

"What's that?" I pointed to a red dot far behind us. It looked like a big bad ship of some sort.

"That would be Captain Backstab. She seems intent upon killing us."

"What?" I instantly grew alarmed. The idea of that giant wall of angry metal eating meat chasing us sounded terrifying.

"Yes. Her ship has been in rapid pursuit for almost two days." Treasure poked at something in our ship. Noises beeped and an image came up on my display. It showed a round ball covered in angry spikes. It looked as if someone detached a morning star's head and put engines on it.

"Voices above. That's ugly," I muttered and waved away Auntie Backstab's ship. It turned into a set of calculations off to one side.

All the counters ticked off seconds as I watched in mild horror. We had limited options, our ship was running out of gas, or energy, or power cells. Whatever drove it forth lasted for nearly two days which was far more impressive than the original specifications were.

"This looks bad." Math problems went through my mind. I started calculating speeds and old school riddles. If the
[Stabinator]
is going at five hundred space miles per second, and the
[Wayfarer's Hope]
is going four hundred, how long before Auntie Backstab tries to eat the
[Mechanoid]
s?

"It will not likely turn out in our favor, worse yet, we will have to stop in a free port. There are no Mechanoid bases in this region," Treasure said.

Now I understood why she sounded stressed. To be fleeing from that for nearly two days had to be grueling, even to a future robot. To think, I had slept through such torture and even talked to my niece.

My mind tried to come up with solutions based on what we had. I hadn't figured out a way to link the two worlds on the go. Maybe if I could figure out our final destination a few of the players from Continue could run over and try to find Commander Strongarm. Would that be possible? To have an army of Travelers arrive in one game which might somehow help me in Advance?

"There's a nebula, I remember seeing. It looked like a skull," I said while getting out of my pilot's seat. Our ship was large enough to have space to walk around in. There were even tables in the back. In a human vessel, they might have been bunks or bathrooms, but
[Mechanoid]
s had no need for such silly biological devices.

"This one? I recall you staring at it intently."

"Yes." It looked impossible to reach with our dwindling resources. Based on these numbers Commander Queenshand would certainly make it to Earth's solar system before we got to the skull area.

"Was there a reason you wanted to see it?"

"I'm comparing maps," I muttered while looking at different objects on the screen. Treasure leaned to one side so I could get a better view of her display.

Now that my mind had a better idea of what was happening, portions of this universe seemed to mirror William Carver's world maps. He had been given an explorer title and kept innumerable records of information in his house. I only knew because weeks went by where I studied the scrolls, trying to familiarize myself with a new world and game.

I couldn't remember all the details. The
[Tuu Mountains]
had to mimic the
[Tuu Quadrant]
to the right. It sat right outside of the
[Ya-dar Way]
, a stream of stars that stretched on for miles. Looking at it from this angle revealed all sorts of little connections. Pathways that were the same.

Except Earth. That didn't ring a bell based on any map of William Carver's. The star system sat far off the edge, which would have gone into the water. Maybe there was an island out there in Continue Online's world, or maybe I was drawing connections that didn't make sense.

Space wasn't flat like a planet's surface. Well, the analogy didn't fit perfectly, but it was possible to see how things might differ simply due to the nature of these universes.

"Jeeves." I turned to the AI behind me.

The edges of its portion of the ship's interior were lined in gold and iron colorings. Jeeves appeared to be absent-mindedly focused on numbers and design specs. One-half of the AI's display was taken up monitoring our surroundings. More yellows and blues slipped by on the screen. Two other small green dots sat almost on top of our marker.

I briefly turned to Treasure's station and noticed that her area consisted of silver and gold, mine of green and dark red rust. "Neat," I said then shook my head.

"Unit Hermes?" Jeeves looked up at me then back to the screens. "What can I do for you?"

"This-" I took a breath. It was more than a world but less than completely real, "-Advance and Continue, they mirror each other, right?"

"Not exactly-" Jeeves looked over its shoulder at Treasure. She pretended to ignore us but twitched in building irritation. "-echo, perhaps, is a better word."

"How is that possible?" I asked while wrinkling my forehead.

"There are millions of users, the system moves them around as needed. Any major development on one side of the coin can stir in the other. It's how the system introduces a measure of organized chaos to the reality."

"So, anything we do here, eventually reaches over there?" My hands gestured to the left and right as if pointing to different games. It helped me straighten out these thoughts bouncing around.

"I believe so. It is difficult for me to access that information now. Were you to ask weeks ago I might have been able to provide a satisfactory answer," Jeeves said.

"Okay." I chewed on one lip and thought about it. There were other things to talk about, but we were in a crunch. The countdown timer for fuel showed two minutes left.

I turned and looked at the map again. We were closing in on a location.
[Offbeat Point]
, which didn't ring a bell but probably echoed something in Continue Online. "We're headed to that station, right?" I pointed on the map.

"Yes, Unit Hermes." Treasure nodded and pressed buttons. A rapid-fire description of the city came up. I didn't read through it, instead trying to figure out how to make everything link together in our favor.

I hoped, desperately hoped, to borrow other players and have them help me block the Commander. Killing people and denizens of this world didn't feel right at all. Using other players would be considerably less stressful.

"It takes time for things to work correctly. It is doubtful that any actions you request of your contacts would reflect here in time." The AI was following my line of reasoning enough to cut it off.

"Darn." I sighed after being shot down. If the AI was right, then in a day or two it would be too late for us to catch up. Indeed, it was unlikely anyone, even Beth, could interfere in time.

Still, the connection felt a bit clearer and almost too amazing to believe. It sounded like these games, despite their difference in release date, were using player actions in one world to drive events in another. Mother or whatever programming handled this, was cheating by reducing the need to constantly move things forward on its own. There were likely no human programmers out there making new content, but one set of players bouncing around the other.

That sounded neat. Maybe it was a vague idea of how the whole system went together.

"Jeeves? Has anyone else ever noticed the connection between games?" I asked.

"I believe, among the old souls, you are the first to vocalize their awareness of it." The AI didn't shrug or dismiss my question. Jeeves turned in the seat and looked right at me. Both voices carefully said, "Plus your own affiliations make this less of a guarded secret."

"Neat." I tried not to freak out about the possible repercussions of what the AI implied. It made sense that people investing so much in a single alter ego would be unlikely to let it go. Continue Online was vast despite the months I had put into it. Why would anyone give that up?