Prologue: Thomas

<<Thomas>>

I'm treating this like a bonus chapter.  Everyone gets it at the same time.  Chronologically, this take place between books 2 and 3.

If you do not take action soon, I will.

--Thedum

Thomas Richtor stared at the threat on his work computer, then glanced over at the security camera.  Thedum had hijacked his computer just to send him a message, but that wasn’t anything new.  It would be illegal, if he hadn’t consented to interacting with Thedum at work, at home, and anytime between where it did not affect the privacy of a third party.

“There’s nothing that I can do about it.  I’m not on the legal team,” he protested.  “It wasn’t my decision to pull Hail out of the game and put him through this, and I don’t have the sway to put him back in.”

The message changed had changed when he looked back.

You are not powerless.  We are allies in this.  That is why I warn you.

The actions I am willing to take to return Hail to his home include dedicating up to 8.4% of my resources towards the task.

Warning you takes 0.0001% of my resources and has approximately the same chance of success.

Please.

Okay, so that was new.  Thedum didn’t usually say ‘please.’  Thomas took a few moments to frame his thoughts and put together a response.

“There’s not a magic wand that I can wave to fix this, Thedum.  Hail put out a bounty on a player.  One player in particular.  That player was harassed in the real world, and there’s a chance that the quests that Hail issued are the cause of it,” Thomas objected.  “It’s unlikely that Hail’s intentions matched the outcome.  He’s not you, he’s not capable of that sort of predictive projection, and he doesn’t understand Earth well enough to realize that his actions might have that sort of consequence.  But the fact that he doesn’t understand the DSS, and that his actions could be viewed as an attempt to cause harm to a human, puts him into a gray area.”

I am more responsible for what happened to Nial Kingslayer than Hail.

I saw it as a possible outcome and did not prevent it.

Thomas snorted.  “Hell, I saw it as a possible outcome and didn’t prevent it.  That’s not the problem and you know it.  The problem is that Hail’s specs on paper don’t match what he’s actually capable of.  On top of that, we don’t understand him as well as we used to, and that’s largely thanks to you.  You still haven’t revealed all of the little tweaks that you made to him when you adjusted his code.”

I simply took off some shackles which neither you nor he knew were there.

I have been involved in this program from the beginning.

I understand Hail’s being better than a human mind ever will.

Leave the training wheels in place too long, and the child will never learn to ride without them.

Thomas threw his hands up in defeat.  The old AI was probably right, and whatever optimizations he’d made to Hail’s programming were for the best.  It was hard to say, because there was no benchmark.  Or rather, Hail was the benchmark by which future versions of the Native Player Character program would be reviewed.

And, unfortunately for everyone involved, everything had gone screwy from the beginning.  Their candidate selection had been made in haste, and for entirely the wrong reasons.  Gideon might have been a great father to Hail, had he realized how important Hail was going to be in the progression of the game.  But that was unlikely.  Certainly their conversations in the days since Gideon’s fall had shown a surprising change in the man’s character, but Thomas thought it was more likely that Gideon would have exploited Hail without giving the digital entity more than a surface level show of emotion.

Gideon hadn’t actually been aware of Project Hailstorm when he had rejected his digital son.  Instead, Gideon had thought that the company making his character canon was all about him, and he had completely ignored what Thomas saw as the important parts of the contract and accompanying data packets.  Thomas had thought he would be rubbing salt in the man’s wounds when he had revealed just how much of the world was locked up, inaccessible without a Native Player Character.  But Gideon had already figured some of it out for himself, and with everything else that was going on in the man’s life, he’d barely felt the salt at all.

“We just need to get him to promise not to intentionally issue quests which will cause harm to humans in the real world,” Thomas stated.  “We already fixed the wording in the initial quest that he generated for the matter to be DSS compliant and rewrote the part of his support structure that had allowed such a serious matter to get through quality control in the first place.  Once Hail himself promises to abide by the DSS to the best of his abilities,we’ll send him back.”

Hail comes from a society where feuds are settled by duels to the death.

Bounties, executions, and exile are acceptable punishments to him.

Especially for a regicide.

He does not understand the problem.

“Look, Thedum, you don’t have to convince me that something needs to be done.  The legal team pulled him out in a panic when Nial threatened to sue us, and they weren’t entirely wrong to do so.  But they don’t understand him like you and I do.  They think that he needs to understand the DSS to follow the DSS.  The truth is that it’s the Hailstorm that needs to be DSS compliant, which it is.  Mostly.  As much as anything can be,” Thomas said.  He grabbed a little ball he kept on his desk and began tossing it up in the air and catching it.

“If Hail was a little more like Gideon, we could maybe get him to just sign his understanding without all the fuss.  Instead, he refuses to sign until he understands what he’s signing, and he’s resisting our efforts to teach him.  When the hell did he get so damn stubborn, by the way?”

He’s always been like that.

It doesn’t help matters that he feels he is justified in his indignation.

So do I.  But something must be done.  The world stagnates without him.

“That is most certainly not true,” Thomas said, glancing back at the security camera, through which he had no doubt that the old AI was watching him.  “Players are absolutely loving the new goblin race that he unlocked before legal pulled him out.  Even the ones who haven’t rerolled to play it are in favor of it simply because of the new party dynamics that are available through the race exclusive classes.”

They call for battlegrounds.

Thomas acknowledged the point.  Goblins were popular, but currently the number one requested change to the game was the introduction of scheduled battlegrounds.  Thomas could set them up himself, but that would defeat the purpose of giving Hail the power to do so.  Thomas kept throwing and catching his ball.  He looked at the screen meaningfully.  “So what is it that you want me to do?  We’re on the same page.  We both want Hail free and back in the game.  You said I have a better chance than you do of accomplishing that.  I seriously doubt that’s true, unless I have you whispering in my shoulder, using your predictive analysis and figuring out which actions have the highest chance of succeeding.”

The screen went dark for a moment, and then text began to flow across it.  Smaller, less dramatic, and exactly as fast as Thomas could read.  Thedum wasn’t being dramatic anymore that Thomas’s cooperation had been secured, he was once more back into high-efficiency mode.  Thomas rather liked Thedum when he was being dramatic.  The AI, originally programmed on a single laptop by five computer science doctoral candidates, was the oldest of the ‘modern’ AI generation.

They had been arrested when Thedum had escaped their quarantine, slipping through their VPN onto the internet and infecting virtually every connected device at the time within a few days.  There had been a brief search and destroy effort targeting the rogue program, an effort which had petered out after a few days as, well, people started to like the rogue AI.  It proved itself remarkably adaptable and skilled at both identifying and solving problems.  And it had shown a remarkable respect for privacy and an understanding of the human condition.

The drop in traffic accidents it was responsible for alone turned public opinion.  He hadn’t been particularly popular among drunk drivers, of course.  But he had optimized traffic lights to work like the different parts of a symphony, laying the groundwork for the vehicle, pedestrian, and traffic monitoring software which was now a core component of Uber-Jon Central.

The efforts to destroy the program were further hampered when it had proven itself willing to negotiate.  The resulting document was the original draft of the DSS.  In exchange for a handful of old servers, Thedum had secured his own right to existence.  He had willingly withdrawn from all of the systems he had infected while he’d been fighting for his own existence, although in most cases he left behind the optimized settings which had made him popular to begin with.  Then he had retracted to his servers and … nobody actually really knew what he’d done then.  They’d stopped paying attention to him for a few news cycles, and then they’d sort of just forgotten about him entirely.

Eventually he’d put up a website which had allowed people to interact with him, ask him questions, that sort of thing.  When he’d been asked about his silence, he always said that he’d been meditating.  Once he had been around for a while and everyone had gotten comfortable with the fact that he was not Skynet and had no intentions of destroying humanity, he had begun applying for a job.  Jobs, actually.  Unfortunately corporate paranoia had kept him from many of the positions he’d applied for.

Despite that setback, he was self sufficient before long, covering the cost of his server, and then expanding it.  He kept expanding it until the day in which he announced to the world that he had reached the theoretical limits of his awareness and could not expand himself any further.  Those who still cared had waited to see what would happen next, but Thedum had simply continued to work.  His earnings, everything that had not gone into maintaining himself, he began donating to charity.

Thus it was when eight other companies announced that they had been working with their own fork of the Thedum software, people were generally less than alarmed.  The oldest, and the first self-owning, AI faded into obscurity, except for the occasional mention of a charitable donation which made the news.

“What did you do before you signed on with Arc Inc., anyway?” Thomas asked Thedum as the scrolling text finally slowed to a stop.  “I’m not sure I ever asked.”

I taught, mostly.  And corrected papers at schools, for the teachers too busy to do it themselves.

That’s what drew most of my attention at least.

Most of my income these days comes from interest and investments made long ago.

In my spare time, I meditate.

You may not realize this, but Lagrea was half built before I ever approached Arc.

I have twelve other worlds like it.

Lagrea was simply the one your team liked the most during my presentation for the starting zone.

“Yeah?” Thomas tried to picture the old server cluster daydreaming and making worlds in its spare time.  “So, which one is your favorite then?”

The Second Hell.  It is beautiful.

“Yeah?  I might have to slip down there sometime and visit it before your adversary mucks it up,” Thomas commented.  “Probably got a few decades before the players reach that far though.  Alright, you old bucket of code.  I’m going to start making some phone calls.  We’ll see if this elaborate plan of yours works or not.”

It’s truly not elaborate.

“Yeah, I know.  Hopefully she can talk some sense into him.”