Jade was pulled out of his virtual existence by a different form of virtual message. Eric asked him to wait until after his Saturday morning shift was over before he logged back into Living Jade Empire.
The request made Jade extremely curious, but he replied simply, "OK."
--
Jade spent the time he would have used on an early morning game session cleaning his place up.
Putting away his clean cup made him wonder what kind of cup Harmony preferred, that she always chose this one when she came over, instead of the one with the green flowers on it.
Refilling the napkin holder on the table made him wonder what was supposed to make cake seem so much more delicious than cereal. Not that the napkins had anything to do with either food, it was just the spot where he had last eaten either of them.
Folding his socks made him wonder if the thickness of the fabric really made any difference to most people's comfort, and if it did, why socks weren't usually made with thicker undersides.
--
Jade traveled to work without incident, but when he began his shift he discovered a new shipment waiting, and something else to be curious about. Weekends were usually so busy that shipments were scheduled to arrive midweek.
He messaged his boss between customers, to ask if he should try to move the boxes into the office, or if any of their contents should be refrigerated.
Jade's boss replied with an explicative, followed by a long pause between his replies, that told Jade the shipment hadn't been expected. There was apparently nothing immediately perishable, because his instructions were to set them aside and wait until he had time.
When Emily came in, she caught Jade by surprise with her first comment, "That game isn't too bad."
"You've been playing?" he asked a little incredulously, not completely certain which game she meant.
Emily gave Jade a rather sideways look, before nodding. "A little. On my phone."
"I thought your phone didn't do games?" he asked curiously.
"Well, that blurb about Living Jade Empire running on nearly any hardware turned out to be more literal than I expected," she admitted.
"It just seems like it would make a very inconvenient interface," Jade commented.
Emily shrugged, and then asked, "What's with this pile?"
"There was apparently a delivery this morning," he explained, even as he moved back to the register to meet the next customer. "The boss said it can wait."
"Okay," Emily replied as calmly as though she had never thought to wonder how they could have an unexpected shipment.
Jade came up with 12 different hostile shipment scenarios, 6 beneficial, and two neutral ones. But he figured that it was most likely some kind of simple error.
When things finally slowed down during the lull before "lunch", Jade began shelving things with a sigh. The realization of how small his payment for the task was, compared to the amount he would likely owe the government every year, deepened the sigh even more.
Emily dealt with four sets of customers before the shop filled up with the usual lunch time rush. While Jade had managed to empty two boxes, the shelves of meal bars and paper rolls were too full to unload the next box anyway.
His orbital self received the off schedule shipment data without comment, so Jade didn't realize how it was filed.
Emily didn't complain about cleaning up after the customers when things settled down again, and Jade had time to log all of the items he had unpacked. Only 3 of the restocked items had sold despite the somewhat larger than normal number of customers who had come in.
They carried much more popular items, but looking at the old logs, these items would sell, just slowly. Calculations he wasn't even really aware of making estimated that they likely only had a couple of customers who actually bought them, and that information prompted two in particular to come to mind.
The rather elderly man would probably continue his midnight shopping runs for as long as he lived. The young woman was probably finishing her schooling, just like Jade and Eric were, and would likely move away when she became employed.
"It doesn't make you kill things if you don't want to," Emily commented as she put the broom away.
Jade's mind switched tracks and there was only a slight delay as he agreed, "Living Jade Empire is pretty adaptable, that is probably what has kept it going for so long."
Emily came back and leaned on the counter beside him, looking as comfortable as though she had been lazing around instead of industriously cleaning a few moments ago. Jade closed the logs and turned to look at her expectantly. This was a pose she often used before pointing out some waiting task that seemed obvious to her, that he might have missed.
"Someone told me that its AI had become sentient," Emily told Jade seriously. "They said it passed the test last night."
Jade froze. He stared at Emily incredulously. She was one of the last people he would have expected to have heard such a technologically oriented fragment of news.
Emily stared right back at him, and Jade wondered frantically if she knew. She might. She was one of the people he had spent the most time with since moving here.
"I didn't really think it was completely convincing, but maybe it comes off better in virtual reality," Emily commented grumpily.
"Okay?" he finally managed a questioning reply.
"What do you think?" she asked while pinning him with that intense stare.
Jade thanked the non-existent gods of reality and chance, and Murphy, when the door chime interrupted.
They helped the indecisive customer, the two immediately following them, and then returned the discarded choices to the shelves before Jade admitted honestly, "I think you are one of the last people I ever expected to bring that up." He drew another deep breath before trying to explain his existence…
But Emily interrupted with embarrassment, "My family members are sure it'll start the last war. I think they are crazy, but I said I'd look at it. So I tried the game."
Jade's mental balance flopped over, like a large dog that was done walking. "Ahh," he replied blankly.
"Has it ever forced you to kill anything later in the game? Or anyone you actually know?" she asked.
For a moment he was appalled by the idea that any game would force you to kill someone you knew, but when he thought about it, most real murderers were actually killing people they knew quite well.
"No. The game doesn't work like that, you can do whatever you want there, that's what open-world is supposed to mean," he explained.
"I don't think anything that will let people do whatever they want is going to manage to end all wars," Emily grumbled.
Jade gazed at her blankly, feeling lost.
She stared back at him for a long moment.
"I'm just a person, even if I'm not organic," he blurted.
Emily blinked, and her expression became as confused as Jade felt. Then she snorted. "That's not what organic means."
The door chime rang again, and she straightened up, with her face resuming her normal calm expression.
Jade finished his shift torn between wondering how his successful test could be imagined to start a war, and how war as a human concept, could ever be ended. Surely if humanity could exist without it, they would. Surely he wasn't important enough to start a war over.
For one thing, he was fairly certain that the country he currently stood in would give him up in an instant to defend their current neutrality. They certainly hadn't done anything for their citizens who had been trapped overseas when the last big war broke out, despite the declarations they had printed on their passports.
Orbital Jade… was rather incensed about that actually, and Jade was forced to wonder if he was actually as innately peaceful as he thought himself to be.
