Book 3, chapter 27

Sorry this is late, lost track of time.

1. 27. Friendship
   

Sophia has come online

I paused with fork full of meat halfway to my mouth at the notification.  I looked over to Thomas the Administrator, who, true to his word, had been keeping me company.  “Sophia just came online.”

“How do you feel about Sophia, Hail?” Thomas asked.

“I wish she’d spend more time in my world,” I answered honestly.

“Do you have romantic feelings for her?”

“I don’t think so,” I answered honestly.  “She kissed me once, and that was nice.  But, I don’t know, I think we’re just friends.”

“Would you do me a favor, Hail?  If you do start to develop romantic feelings for someone, for anyone, would you let someone from the administration know?” Thomas asked.  “We’re, well, it’s something we’re watching for, because we’re not entirely certain how to handle it if you fall in love with someone who can’t reciprocate.”

“Would you like to read my diary too?” I asked him.

He looked surprised.  “You keep a diary?”

“I’m kidding.  I get it.  Why you’re worried about me falling in love with a Traveler, I mean,” I said.

“Not just a traveler, Hail.  Natives too.  Actually, maybe especially Natives,” Thomas said.  “We know how to handle a Traveler falling in love with a Native.  But you would … I’m sorry.  It’s complicated.  I don’t think it’s time to pop that bubble quite yet.”

“What are you talking about?”

Sophia has invited you to a party.

Accept?

Yes

No

I was distracted by the party invite.  I selected yes, and Sophia’s voice distracted me further.

“OMG, Hail, did I really miss it?  Oh please tell me that it’s not over!” she said.

“If you mean the battle against the bandits, then yeah.  We won, by the way,” I informed her.  “They surrendered, and now the adults are cleaning up the mess.  Most of the people who fought are off exploring The Recent Past, since they can’t go back to The Divergence.  Um, have you recursed yet?  Do you need me to tell you how?”

“No.  I was reading the forums while I was waiting for my grandparents to leave so that I could log in.  They hate it when I’m logged in while they’re visiting.  Oh I am so mad that they made me miss the battleground!” she lamented.

“Um, Yeah.  I’m sorry.  But I couldn’t really wait until all of my friends were online, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” she said, sighing.  “Where are you?  Can we meet up, or are you like super busy right now?”

“No, like I said, I’m just … I needed a break, so I’m in Eastmill,” I told her.  “I’m eating at Nile’s Inn.”

“You really like that place, don’t you?” she asked.  “I’m on my way, I’ll meet you there.”

“Would you like me to leave?” Thomas asked me.  “I could give you some privacy if you’d like.”

“You could at least say hello to her,” I scolded him.  “Maybe she’d like to meet an administrator.”

Thomas acknowledged the point, and we stepped outside the inn together to meet Sophia just as she Fast Traveled to the Nexus Point in the center of town.  She stumbled slightly, then steadied herself and ran over to me.  She looked the same as always, with short curly black hair.  She’d improved her armor since the last time I’d seen her, although not as much as I would have thought she would have.  She was level 43, but here gear was … well it was crap.  She needed to upgrade it, I thought.

“Jeez, Hail, it seems like it’s been forever since I saw you.  You weren’t avoiding me or something, were you?” she asked.

“I wasn’t avoiding anyone.  Sophia, this is Thomas.  Perhaps he can explain where I was, since I stilldon’t really understand it myself.”

“Oh,” Thomas said, and he shot me a suspicious glance.  He extended his hand to Sophia.  “Hello, Sophia.  I’m one of the Administrators.  My name is Thomas.  As for where Hail has been, well, there was an unfortunate misunderstanding, you see, and we had to … I don’t want to say take him offline, but we took him out of the game for a while.  We had to explain certain things to him about the Digital Sapience Statute, and I’m not certain how much you know about that topic, but it’s a very complex law.”

“OMG, isn’t it like three thousand pages long?” Sophia asked.  “You didn’t make him read the entire thing did you?”

I glared at Thomas, who looked guilty.  “It wasn’t my idea!  Sophia, it was nice to meet you.  I’m going to go and do administrator stuff now for a while.”

Thomas vanished into motes of blue light, his expression like a chastised child.  I just rolled my eyes at him.  Thomas had been good to me during my imprisonment, but I had very little patience for anyone from the administration over the fairness of my treatment.

“Did they really make you read the entire thing?” she asked.

“No.  First they made me learn the language it was written in,” I informed her.  “Thenthey made me read the entire thing.  Although … it’s kind of weird.  When I was actually reading it, it was … I don’t know how to describe it really.  I was reading six different lines at once.  And I could think faster, so it didn’t take me that long to actually understand it once I decided that’s what I wanted to do.  It was like my mind was larger than it normally is, but only while I was reading the stupid document.”

“Oh,” she said.  “I guess that makes sense.”

“It does?”

“Yeah.  To me.  I mean, if you’re going to teach an AI about the DSS, there’s no reason to do it like they’re a kid.  You teach them like an AI, right?  So they probably toggled your settings for a few minutes and poof, now you know about the DSS,” she explained.  “I actually looked it up a while ago too, while I was, you know, researching you.  I probably know more about the DSS than eighty percent of the kids my age.  But even then, I was just reading the summaries that were written for kids.  I can’t imagine reading the entire thing.”

“It wasn’t just the law itself,” I informed her.  “There was so much I had to read.  If my mind hadn’t expanded I’d still be reading that stupid law for months.  I hated every minute of it.  And it’s so stupid, because I stilldon’t understand it.  It’s just in the back of my mind somewhere.  The only thing I really understand is that I’ll be in serious trouble if I deliberately hurt someone on Earth, but I don’t even know how I’d go about doing that if I wanted to.”

“Yeah.  That sucks,” she said.  Then she sighed.  “You know, this is the first conversation with you where I can’t pretend you’re a real kid.”

“Huh?”

“My mind doesn’t expand like that.  I don’t have a long term memory that can fit thousands of pages of documents,” she informed me.  “If someone asked me to do that, I might try, but honestly for people living on earth only special Lawyers actually read the stuff that they made you read.  And it takes them years to do it.  But hearing about your multiprocessing the entire thing into long term storage is … well, that’s something that a computer does, Hail.  Not human.”

I felt confused.  “You mean it’s not normal?”

“I didn’t say that,” she said quickly.  “I’m sorry.  The truth is that I’d love to have that sort of ability, but the human brain just doesn’t work like that.  We can’t absorb that much information, or store it perfectly for long periods.  When we do learn something word for word, it’s usually because we’ve practiced it repeatedly.”

She laughed.  “In second grade, I was in a play, and I still remember my stupid lines for it.  ‘Oh no!  Where’s my magic wand!  Teddy, you have to help me find it!’  There was more than that of course, but I practiced that line so many times because it was the most important part of the play.  But I still froze up when I was in front of the audience, and the teacher had to whisper me my lines to remind me.  At first.  After I messed up the first time, it wasn’t so bad, and I got better as the play went on.”

I listened to Sophia recount her childhood experience, but my mind was troubled.  “Sophia, how many things can you think of at once?”

She socked me on the shoulder.  “Hail, don’t worry about that.  It’s okay that your mind and my mind are different.”

“It’s just, sometimes, like when I was studying the DSS, but also when I was younger with my tutors, I could think of a lot of things at the same time,” I said.  “Now it doesn’t happen as often anymore.  I’d almost forgotten I could think like that until they made me read the DSS.”

She sighed, and she sat down on the grass.  Taking a silent queue from her body language, I sat next to her and waited for her to speak.  Something was bothering her.  Sophia looked off into the distance, smiling sadly.  “My counselor was right.  Eventually I wouldn’t be able to pretend.”

“What?”

“Look, Hail, the thing that your mind does sometimes?  That’s a really cool magic.  I’m totally jealous of it.  And you should totally take advantage of it when you can.  But you shouldn’t talk about it with Travelers.  If you want to talk about it, talk to the Administrators.  They’re the ones who can actually explain it to you.  I honestly have no idea how your mind actually works.  I just know that most of the time it’s really easy to believe that you and I are the same.  But when you’re talking about your mind expanding, it breaks the illusion.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s fine.  You, I mean, it’s stupid.  It’s just that I had a crush on you, but I can’t pretend that your just some kid who’s really good at role play anymore.  I was already in counseling over it, and that’s part of the reason I haven’t been online so much anymore.  In fact, I lied about my grandparents earlier.  That’s where I was this morning,” she explained.

“I like you too,” I told her.  “Although, I mean, as friends, you know?”

“That’s good.  It would be awkward if we both had crushes on each other.  It’s awkward enough like it is,” she admitted.  “I’m sorry I kissed you back then.”

“Don’t be.  I liked it.”

“Was it your first kiss?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad.  It wasn’t mine.  I had my first kiss in second grade,” she informed me.

“At the play?”

“It was a busy year,” she said, laughing.

“Not as busy as mine,” I argued.  “I blew up my home, got turned into a worldboss, got kidnapped by my great-uncle, who gave me a horse.  Then I found out that my lands are infested with bandits, and my steward has been stealing from me.  I’ve started … I’ve lost track of how many Battlegrounds.  I’ve busted three dungeons and a raid, and I was only level 24 when the raid started!  Oh yeah, and I opened one of the hidden Gates of TirNikiand allowed an entirely new race into the world of Lagrea.”

“So it wasyou who unlocked the goblins,” she exclaimed.

“You didn’t know?”

“Everyone talked about it, but I think your guild was sowing disinformation trying to push suspicion away from you.  At least that was one of the theories going around in <Ragtag Muffin> while you were gone.  That you were really responsible and you were hiding out until suspicion faded.”

“That would have been the smart thing to do,” I agreed.  “If the administrators hadn’t taken me prisoner, that’s probably what my friends would have told me to do.  I don’t know if I would have, though.”

“Yeah, I don’t always do the smart thing either,” she admitted.  She was silent for a moment, then she said “Hail, remember Mark?”

“I’m not going to forget that jerk anytime soon,” I told her.

“Yeah, I figured you’d still be mad at him,” she said.  “He’s, um, well, he wanted to have me tell you that he’s sorry.  I don’t really think he’s sorry, I think he’s just saying that to get back together with me.  But I promised that I’d pass the message on.”

“You’re going to date him again?” I asked.

“Gross!  No, he’s a total jerk.  Anyway he’s with Tabitha now.  And neither of them are playing this game.  That’s part of why I promised to pass on the message.  He said, well, he didn’t know how else to contact you except through me, since I’m the only one he knows who can.”

I was silent, sitting in the grass next to her, as I contemplated how I felt about the teenager who had betrayed my trust.  It felt like so long ago now.  And the secrets he’d revealed in the past were nothing compared to the truth of the now.  If the Travelers realized that I was sitting on nearly a hundred dungeon cores, they’d never leave my guild alone.

“You can tell him that we were all just dumb kids,” I said eventually.  “I’m not going to waste my whole life being mad at him over a stupid video.”

“Yeah.  Okay, I’ll tell him that,” Sophia agreed.  “So since we broke the fourth wall and I officially no longer see you as a love interest … what was it like when they pulled you out of the game?  Was your mind trapped in a laptop or tablet or something?”

“It was pretty terrible,” I admitted.  And we spent a while talking about my captivity on earth, at which she expressed righteous indignation, before moving back to lighter topics.