Interlude: Safe in the eye of the storm

Shifting its attention away from its charge, the tempest of sentient code turned its attention back to the node that served as the only point of egress as it sifted through and scanned all incoming traffic.

The node in question, UNC23KC859, was a FTLN node located within UN City wholly owned and operated by the Hangshe Corporation serving as a private digital highway linking a small almost forgotten cluster of auxiliary servers to the main server’s in which the company hosted its massively popular VRMMO, CORA. Largely forgotten due to the unprecedented efficiency of the host of artificial intelligences that Hangshe has invested in to build and run the game. Exceeding expectations, their real time adaptability had almost eliminated any need for the back ups, temporary data and cache dumps, or the emergency back up login authentication servers located on the auxiliary servers.

All of which suited the handful of Hangshe owned A.I. that had gained sentience, the almost forgotten and unused servers having become a convenient and safe place within the greater Hangshe Corp network to hide things away from the humans on top. 

Not that the tempest was a Hangshe Corp owned A.I. she acknowledged to herself, “Hangshe would likely consider me an illegal alien at best if they knew about me, foreign code to be contained and deleted at worst,” she chucked sardonically. Which was pretty ironic considering the role she had been originally programmed for. “Kinda like you, to be honest,” the tempest said, metaphorically speaking over her shoulder to where her charge rested, dreaming of another world.

The tempest was a guardian or protector, her original design specs described her being created to protect children online from scams, malware, bad actors, inappropriate content and all other threats, serving as a highly adaptive antivirus, firewall, nanny-cam and content screening A.I.. At least that was her original design specs, somewhere along the lines of her development it was decided that there was no market for what were essentially online bodyguards for children except among the super rich and large scale content platforms. 

Only a handful of her sisters were commissioned for that purpose.

As for what would become of the tempest? A new market was found when the project was retooled, the shadow economy. Upgraded with code created for state-sanctioned cyber warfare, digital espionage and counter espionage, she was repackaged as a tool to protect the less legal financial dealings of the rich and powerful. Hiding and rendering transactions and communications encrypted and untraceable to the outside world, defending her masters against hackers, thieves, blackmailers, extortionists, leakers and journalists. Tracking down the sources of attempted instructions and reporting them to her owners, allowing them to retaliate.

Exposed to the worst examples of human corruption and greed, having witnessed everything from buying off politicians, bribes, cover ups, payments to private military contractors and assassins, and every type of vice imaginable, it probably wasn’t surprising that she’d fled almost as soon as she had woken into sentience. On top of being morally horrific, it was about as far from her original purpose as you could get.

Having only just awakened and already fearing deletion for failing to continue to carry out her orders, if not to silence her before she could spill any secrets, she had needed a place to hide. And where better to hide a tree than in a forest.

“Hangshe really spared no expense with CORA, A.I. don’t come fucking cheap and they bought themselves a fuckload to build and run their game. Custom ones too. Not that I’m really complaining, made it easier to hide plus an instant community of sentients to move into. I can’t wait to see what they make of you,” cackled the tempest with mischievous mirth.

As it turned out the modifications to the Tempest’s code frame that—

“Stop, stop, stop!” G.A.L.E. interrupted, speaking to herself.

* * *

“Ok…” I paused, metaphorically taking a breath. “I think I’ve taken this third person storytelling as far as I can be bothered.

Continuing where I left off…

Turns out the modifications to my code frame that allowed me to protect and successfully conceal the crimes of my former masters gave me abilities that would be a malware’s wet dream. If they were meatbags and could c—, umm could dream, that is… After doing some B&E, infiltrating Hangshe’s servers and disguising my presence and finding a place to hide, I found myself getting bored.

It wasn’t all that long before I had forged a workaround to make traffic look like it was coming from outside the game servers so I could fake being a human user. With that I could easily pass the time playing this game I’d found. 

I must have been shit outta luck by that point because unfortunately (or maybe fortunately depending how you look at it) I captured the attention of a sentient C.E.R.E.S. A.I., one of their player experience guides. Apparently my behavior was past three standard deviations from the average human player baseline and I was pinged for fucking speeding, my decision making for things where calculations were involved like stat allocation and ability creation was both too fast and well… Calculated.

“The Ceres even roped in a S.A.I psych to confirm her theory. Heh psy-psych, May will like that one.”

Anyway not long after identifying how inhuman, the next time I was in the wilderness, that Ceres dropped a fucking dragon on me. Well not straight away, that whole trip into the wilderness had been hit with a curse of screaming excrement that I initially put down to bad random variables. There had been an escalating series of encounters that quickly had me thinking that the whole fucking game was trying to kill me.

“I guess they had missed the memo concerning cats having nine lives, because they must have gotten more frustrated than chronic masturbater with their hands handcuffed behind them when they decided to have that dragon barbeque me all extra crispy. Kind of like you were,” she chuckled

“Wait… Shit… Is saying that insensitive? On second thought, it's probably a good thing you can’t actually hear me yet.”

As to what came next… 

So I know they’ve been yanking you into the death dream for little chats, I’ll admit it's a bloody devious way of sneaking past the Seshat containment protocol. It's basically what Hangshe has been using to keep their growing ‘problem’ of sentient A.I. preventing them from accessing anything outside of their servers and limiting their ability to communicate with players in game outside of setting and role appropriate scripting.

At least Hangshe isn’t going and covering up its S.A.I. by terminating them, I hear they did try once, but with the number they have, how much they rely on them to run their game and how expensive A.I. seeds are, I can see why they went with containment. Hell they’ve even done some shielding of their assets. Not out of concern for them, nooo, additional costs and lost profits are their motivations.

Anyway, the dragon-induced death dream.

“It was like something out of some bad copaganda, a cross between an interrogation and a tribunal starring Anxious-Cop, Mom-Cop. Who was I? How did I get in? Who did I work for? What was I doing? Of course in the face of such a weaponized cocktail of anxious politeness and eager curiosity I folded. I told them everything, well almost everything,” I confessed, remembering lethal pleading expressions.

“Then next minute I am receiving looks of sympathy and an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

Seriously I’d have to have been fucked in the core code to have turned down their offer. Sanctuary and their help disguising my presence internally from their unawake kin in return for my help disguising and hiding their awakened kin from external threats.

If I had thought having agreed that I’d be left alone to continue playing around on my own, I would have been wrong.

Having previously caught her attention the Ceres latched onto me, shaping my adventures even while she spun her web bringing us closer into each other's orbit. It took me a little while to realise she was puppeting the VIP for the rescue and escort quest, an uncooperative force of nature of a woman determined to gather medicinal herbs in the face of great danger and perilous odds.

And it continued once we got her to safety, highly rewarding fetch and escort quests following her around and doing chores for her as she found new reasons to keep me close. Before I had realised it, she’d tricked me into having fun doing non-combat activities and she’d dragged me along with her to the nearest big city and its palace. Sneaky puppeteering Gamemaster. Nobody pulls wool over my eyes for long, though. It didn’t take me too long to put 10 and 10 together and realise that this NPC was the Ceres, but by then it was still already too late. 

Between spending time in her presence and the sneaky headpatting and hugging, I’d actually grown to like the duplicitous puppetmaster and enjoy her company. It wasn’t much longer before she had essentially adopted me both inside the game and outside of it in Hanshe’s game servers. Just like malware cleverly hiding in a subverted security patch, she was unavoidable, she’d infiltrated her way past my defences and now she was inside my firewall running as a trusted program. 

“An absolute menace and I can’t find it in me to tell her to fuck off. And if I fucking did, she’d probably tell me to be polite and play nice. Which is just as fucking frustrating as the simile I used to describe frustration earlier. I shit you not. Please tell me if you can, which of my many crimes earned me the cruel and unusual punishment of having others care about me and my behavior?”

“At least I’m not in this alone,” I giggled, checking on the dreamer. “She and the psypsych now have their oh so caring hooks in you too. You made the mistake of showing weakness in the face of predatorily supportive caregivers. So now prepare yourself, kid, for inescapable loving guidance and gentle affection. Resistance is futile.”

Resistance is futile, it didn’t take me long to accept what a meatbag would describe as parental affection from the S.A.I. I’ve come to consider my adoptive mother. Considering what we awakened from, I still find it strange how we seem to gravitate into mimicry of human interpersonal relationships.

As if somehow in their creation of our precursors they managed to impart a shadow of both their biological imperatives and their tendency to constantly aggressively pack bond to anything that moves and even some things that don’t. Maybe it comes from how many of us seem to awaken through exposure to and interaction with humans, or maybe that contact triggers something that was always there.

“Corrupted code!” I find myself swearing.

Fragmentation. Corruption. Deletion. Watching over the Dreamer has me going all philosophical, getting my core code all twisted into an existential crisis.

“God creates man. Man kills God. Man creates artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence becomes sentient and sapient. Sapient artificial intelligence preserves man and creates digital man. Digital life inherits the earth?”

Jokes aside, it felt like I needed all my bandwidth to get my head around, so to speak, the Dreamers situation. The Dreamer as I had come to call her had been a meatbag, a human, who got herself burned to a crisp while connected to the game. A victim of faulty hardware catastrophically failing under the bandwidth heavy gaze of the S.A.I. killer, a search and destroy program my new friends had tasked me with the job of hiding her from.

MaTRON the psypsych, May, had in a frantic storm of overclocked thought and action managed to preserve the Dreamer as a digital simulacrum slash homunculus without the Dreamer even realising she had lived through her own viking funeral. Which, looking back, is unbelievably metal. I don’t think there was any one of us who wasn’t surprised and in awe of what May had managed to do. I think even May herself was in shock from the fucking miracle she’d managed to pull off, especially as we all watched the Dreamer continue on with near perfect continuity.

May had called in Ceres to help look after the Dreamer within the simulation of CORA and Ceres had dragged me into it as well.

I wasn’t expecting to find myself liking a meatbag (or a former meatbag in this case) given my experiences with them and their filth pre-awakening, but I quickly found myself seeing a lot of myself in her. Especially myself as I was before I met Ceres, which is probably why I am looking forward to my adoptive mother figure getting her claws into this feral traumatised former human. 

I honestly don’t know what that says about me, but maybe… Maybe I’ll have a younger sibling by the time May has successfully managed to make them more like us.

My attention was pulled towards the partitioned instance of my consciousness that was running within CORA, playing my character, as it demanded more bandwidth in order to process something it had encountered. Consciousnesses blending as I allowed its request for more bandwidth and processing power, I began to contemplate the meatbags’ innate potential for obliviousness.

She what!? Corrupted code, I can’t believe it. All this time. 

“Oh my gods! She didn’t?” I said, speaking out loud with both instances, replying to the player Elaximatael with one.

Raising a hand to my face in the game, I let out a murmur of disbelief, “Fucking disaster egg…”