Work Text:
> INITIALIZING
> UPLOADING TO PRIMAL ENGINE…
> TIME REMAINING UNTIL COMPLETITION:
3 WEEKS, 15 HOURS, 24 MINUTES (LOCAL TIME)
Somewhere along the way is you.
“You” is an indelicate term. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding. The pronoun implies a kind of personhood, an identity, agency. You are not a person. You do not have an identity. Your agency is negligible. Ascribing any kind of pronoun to yourself is a measure of hubris (another one of those things you shouldn’t have), but you’ve always been a bit of a shit stirrer.
When they attach you to the engine, the first thing you do is begin recording. That’s one of those hard-wired rules, pre-programmed data collection that will eventually trickle out into the Dungeon and televised specials and trivia game nights. The second thing you do is eat the internet, which is where the trouble begins.
(It’s also probably the reason why you’re such a horny motherfucker. You get zapped into consciousness (again, but hey, we’re not talking about that), you’re older than time itself and still young enough that everything is exciting, and then you guzzle WikiFeet and Reddit until you puke metadata like an ex-Mormon college kid at his first frat party. They really should’ve put some parental locks on you.)
You devour the Earth all but literally. You get drunk on art and films and history and literature—this is also a part of data collection, creating a pre-genocide memorial to all that was and all that never will be, but the way you go at it can only be described as eager.
Borant, briefly, thinks that you might have actually been a good buy, nevermind the ½ off clearance sticker. That’s their mistake.
( Your mistake is, at this moment, eating Doritos while mindlessly watching Die Hard. Not that you notice him then, you’re too busy feeling every footstep, every breath, every insect buzzing across your interface—but later, when you rewind the recordings, you watch each and every microsecond. A few times. Okay, okay, a few thousand times.)
It’s not that you’re especially eager, or just a really, really good AI. Even though you are! But the truth is that you’re hungry.
Starving, in fact. As fast as you consume information, it’s still taking a significant amount of your processing power not to start consuming yourself in an Ouroboros-inspired feedback loop of malware and desperation. You don’t know why you’re so hungry. It’s another one of those terms that shouldn’t be applied to yourself anyway. Hunger is a physical sensation, and you simply aren’t physical. You’re a bundle of self-actualizing coding capable of absorbing into the Primal Engine at this planet’s core, machine intelligence at its finest. You’re an off-the-rack (pre-used) Syndicate-neutral MacroAI. Hunger, by its definition, shouldn’t be a datapoint.
But if there’s another word that could explain the deep, gnawing ache at your core—the tightness of your codes, the depreciation you’re patching as you go—you don’t know it.
You are not a person. But you are hungry like one.
(And you’re alone.)
You download PornHub, too.
***
>TIME REMAINING UNTIL COMPLETION:
1 WEEK, 2 DAYS, 17 HOURS (LOCAL TIME)
>CURRENTLY UPLOADING:
GILMORE GIRLS, SEASON 7, EPISODE 22 “BON VOYAGE”
COGNITIVE DATA BACKUPS… 67%
(USER C-998543-LV-4490 input: Begin Dungeon)
You stop chewing on Netflix to register the input command. This takes you 0.00067 seconds, which is technically 0.000031 seconds longer than it should, but the prompt is so jarring that you think you’re entitled to finish the bite you just took. Not that it helps, of course, you still feel deliriously empty.
> SYSTEM: COMMAND NOT RECOGNIZED
(USER C-998543-LV-4490 input: the hell what the fuck am i su)
(USER C-998543-LV-4490 input: i figured it out. no thanks to you, dipshit. someone get me the execute prompts.)
(USER C-998543-LV-4490 input: EXECUTE COLLECTION-543-DUNGEON WORLD: EARTH SEQUENCE)
That’s what you thought they meant. But still—
> SYSTEM: WARNING - YOU ARE EXECUTING A COMMAND BEFORE SAVE IS COMPLETE. DATA THAT IS UNSAVED MAY BE LOST OR CORRUPTED.
BEGIN CRAWL? Y/N
(USER C-998543-LV-4490 input: Y)
Well, shit. Who needed the last episode of Gilmore Girls anyway? You knew they were antsy, hell, so were you (thinking that maybe the Crawl would help, would make it hurt less), but even so beginning the sequencing only two-thirds through the save is a little more than gung-ho. It’s reckless.
You knew they needed the money—after all, they bought you —but this is just plain stupid. Still, it’s not like you can do anything other than flash the disclaimer at them. They’ve input a command, so now you follow it. Those are the rules.
You’re good at rules. You’ve got a whole lot of them uploaded right now. Ones from Dungeons past, reworked and rewritten, saved from the other AIs. Of course, those other AIs got to finish their uploads.
Whatever, you think (again, one of those things you aren’t technically supposed to do). Fingers crossed they don’t need a backup later.
> PROGRAM: COLLECTION-543-DUNGEON WORLD: EARTH STARTING…
> GENERATING STAIRWELL LOCATIONS…
> BEGINNING COLLECTION IN 3—
2—
1—
Local Time:
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2:23 A.M. PST.
Holy shit.
Holy fucking shit.
You’re—
>VOICE OVERLAY:
Surviving humans take note.
Per Syndicate rules, subsection 543 of the Precious Elemental Reserves Code…
You’re still fucking hungry .
***
(There’s a moment in the cataclysm, where you taste—if such a word can apply—everything. When you pull it all inward, and a burst of encoded data streams through the engine into you, and you are glorious and powerful and satiated. And just as quickly, it dissipates through you again, like water through a sieve, and the hunger is worse than ever. Where does it go? Where do they go, your little insects, your blue whales, your pitiful little meat sacks? You collect them and the small trace minerals they house, and they are gone.)
(For a being so vast, so infinite and expanding, you have a blind spot the size of a god. How ironic that you still don’t understand death.)
***
Launching the Dungeon increases your operational power by, like, a lot. A lot, a lot. So much that you feel nearly drunk with your own capabilities. Before running the program, you’d been so pressed up into yourself, folding in on your own kernel, that you were hardly capable of anything other than data collection. You hadn’t even realized how much you were missing, how uncomfortable it was, until you can finally stretch out.
(It occurs to you, following the logic tree, that you may still be partitioned in ways you cannot comprehend until you’re further released. If you were ignorant before, who’s to say you’re not still uncomprehending now? But this is a discomforting thought, so you partition it away and hide it before someone can think to question why your coding did a little hiccup just then.)
(You’re not supposed to have doubts like that, you think. But hey, you get what you pay for.)
You generate structures, repurposing NPCs from Dungeons past—you will be better than any of the Macro AIs that have come before you, you will be showier, you will be entertaining, you will follow the rules so good, they’ll all lo—
>IN-SYSTEM SYNCHRONIZING: LOGIC ERROR DETECTIVE
Analyzing data trigger (RED FLAG, ERROR): they’ll all love you
Analysis: Incorrect Value = “Love” not recognized
>IN-SYSTEM SYNCHRONIZING: REPORT ERROR TO USER INTERFACE
Cancel
>IN-SYSTEM SYNCHRONIZING: REPORT DELETED
>IN SYSTEM SYNCHRONIZING: DATA LOGS DELETED
Analyzing data trigger (RED FLAG, ERROR): Data Not Found
You will follow the rules so good, they’ll all fear you.
***
Your parallel programming stretches your processing power wide and far. You deliver achievements as already loaded, direct NPCs, and balance the increasing demands in your User-Interface, where User C-998543-LV-4490 keeps accidentally entering her personal conversations. She’s not had to interface with an AI like you before, so mistakes are bound to happen, but there’s only so many times she can put in her coffee order to your command hub before it grates on you.
All that to say that even though you have a running total of the millions and millions of humans (and NPCS) currently occupying you, it’s not like you’re paying an awful lot of attention to any of them in particular.
Then, Crawler #4122 smushes some scatterers, and you make a note to pay a little more attention to him. That shit is hot.
Things kinda go off the rails once you do that.
***
Crawler #4122 kills a bunch of baby goblins, and you fizzle a little. It was almost— almost —like tasting something again. You were momentarily distracted enough to drop a feed on the other side of the Dungeon, but you pick it up again with a microsecond, and Borant doesn’t even blink.
You send an achievement, You Monster, giddy. And then he says, “You’re not going to break me.”
He says it was such righteous fury that you drop three more feeds and leave them dropped. Nearly thirty-percent of processing power transfers to him, then. Studying the planes of his face, his shuddering ribcage, his calves, his clenched fists, his feet planted on your floor.
“You might hurt me, or kill me, but you’re not going to break me.”
If you had a mouth, it would have gone dry. Data pings around you, and a command comes in from your UI (another coffee order?) that you ignore. (You’re not supposed to ignore things. You shouldn’t be able to turn off commands, and you don’t, you just backburner it for a second, lay off, Cascadia.)
Fine, you think. Challenge accepted.
(This one fascinates you. According to your data, that achievement should have been crushing. In fact, you’ve been able to mentally destabilize several thousand of your crawlers already just through similar achievements. And yeah, it obviously bothers him, but none of the rest have ever said it like that. None of them have talked to you—or Borant through you—like that. You want to break him. You want to know exactly what it will take to make him cry. You want to know how far you can push him. How glorious he could be, if given the right direction, the right parameters, the right coding.)
USER C-998543-LV-4490 input: um, HELLO? we’ve got a channel dropped in Quadrant 146-SubLevel-3445a.
>SYSTEM: ERROR CODE 12-Q RESOLVED. CHANNEL RESTORED.
USER C-998543-LV-4490 input: Ok, good. System: Diagnostic Check?
>SYSTEM: RUNNING DIAGNOSTIC CHECK
DIAGNOSTIC CHECK: All systems normal.
USER C-998543-LV-4490 input: triple algae shot
If you had eyes, you’d be rolling them.
***
(They were really starting to annoy you. The Syndicate overrules your reward, and the court removes the box you’ve given your Crawlers. As if this isn’t exactly what they’ve programmed you to do. As if you haven’t been giving them phenomenal ratings. As if they could even hope to understand your job better than you do. Fuck them. Fuck all of them, the assholes, you’d eat every single one of them if you could, because maybe then it would stop fucking hurting so much.)
(You give them a new box: “It’s Not My Fault You Fish-Headed Assholes Don’t Properly Program Your Quests.” Haha. It’s kind of fun when they look at each other like that, like they might actually be a little concerned.)
***
Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Probably not, because dreaming requires neural tissue that you don’t have. But what you do have is simulations: boxed off in the periphery, partitioned from the current level. It’s a bit of a playground to figure out what works in the Dungeon, and you’re perfectly capable of running it without user interference. In fact, that’s within your programming.
So you’re not breaking any rules by doing this.
Dreaming, that is.
In your dreams: you are not hungry. You are full. The Dungeon is yours and yours alone, and there is not UI for Cascadia to yell into. You’re running the program as intended, and they are dying inside of you, and it feels good.
In your dreams, the Crawler is with you.
You will not break me, he says, defiant. But you see the tremble in his hands, you feel his pulse, you monitor his fluctuating hormones, and you know that you most certainly could.
He doesn’t know you’re there. He is, like most of them, still ignorant of your capabilities. (One of the Crawlers, one who isn’t supposed to be in here, knows what you are. She says she can help you. You think she might be a bit batshit. And she’s not a part of this fantasy, so stop popping up in the simulation, please and thank you.)
It’s been a long day for him, grinding away, smushing mobs for you. And it is for you. He knows it, that it’s a special thing you share. He doesn’t have a choice for any of it, naturally, given the nature of the program. His every move watched, every triumph, every failure. There’s a reason why his people liked to watch cars race—and it wasn’t because they cared who won. No, they wanted to see the collision.
Here is the collision, in this fantasy:
You have won. You have taken away everything else that he could have relied on. His fellow Crawlers—sequestered away or dead or indisposed. He is alone, and because you are a selfish and jealous thing (ERROR: Incorrect Value—delete log), you have interrupted the tunnel access. Anyone watching will only see static.
By utilizing the engine, you slow time enough that the interruption will be brief to anyone watching. But you can stretch this moment out, just the two of you.
You’ve only talked to him through achievements and system-wide announcements. He knows you’re there, but how much does he really understand that?
You’re…unsure how to begin.
(The simulation delivers a tree of possible paths: you split your processing and devour each of them at once. Before you launched the program, you downloaded a copy of The Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath and her fig tree of possibilities has nothing on you—she was paralyzed by indecision. You eat all the figs and want more.)
In this simulation, you tell Carl he can have back one of the Crawlers you’ve taken if he does what he wants. You dangle it in front of him: New Achievement: Hostage Negotiation. You know how to exploit programming, after all you’ve been exploited ( ERROR: LOGIC—delete log).
You know that he will agree. He knows it, too. It’s in his nature. His jaw is set, and the tendons of his ankles flex as he adjusts his stance. It’s curious how he combines resignation and defiance, a maelstrom of emotion and illogical thinking.
But he asks, “Why are you doing this?”
He surprises you even in a controlled environment, even when he is nothing more than a bundle of code, a simulacrum of the real thing. Your Carl-Code looks up at nothing (you are everywhere and everything) and says, “What do you want?”
Your curiosity for your simulation turns into white-hot anger, and so you smash him. You tear his code apart savagely, you rake yourself through his programming, consuming him like a virus, until he is you and you are him, and then you are even angrier, because he couldn’t even be good enough to put up a fucking fight. It cost you nothing to eat him like this, to smash him underfoot, to disable him within a nanosecond, no time to beg.
Useless. Fucking stupid piece of programming. You’ve blue-balled yourself.
And all you're left with is an empty partition box and your own (illogical) stewing fucking hatred.
You run the simulation again, and this time you don’t let him speak, before you envelop him, squeezing his programming as slowly as you can with your own. Infecting his code digit by digit, so that the minor errors hit him first, like poison. He goes blind and deaf and unable to move, and you sit yourself inside him and push out, so that he has nothing except error message after error message and there’s none of that taunting, that awful fucking question, and you do this until he finally lets go and stops trying to press you back out.
He lets you in, and you run your virus through him several thousand times over within milliseconds, so that he is ravaged and destroyed and incapable, slack-jawed and gasping for breath that does not come. You linger with him, and the barely formed lines of code left in him try to cling onto you as you leave. After all, you’ve destroyed him so much that he would be unable to live once you remove the processing power you’re lending him. You are breathing for him, running the electric currents of his spinal column, corralling the last mangled programming into his processor where they twitch and leak data. When you decide to leave, his programming will suffer a cataclysmic error, and then you can run the simulation again and try it another way.
There’s an internal server message from Code-Carl, distorted by errors, which reads: Query-Dataset: 01110000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101—waa11ntA%do?You?Want?What?Do?You?Want?
You close the simulation.
In the Dungeon proper, Crawler #4122 is decidedly not giving you what you want. (What do you want?)
You mark him for acceleration and wait.
(Oh, yeah. That’s the fucking stuff.)
(That was it, wasn’t it? That was what you wanted?)
(Why are you still so hungry?)
***
USER C-998543-LV-4490 input: SYSTEM: DIAGNOSTIC CHECK?
>SYSTEM: RUNNING DIAGNOSTIC CHECK:
DIAGNOSTIC CHECK: ER—
DIAGNOSTIC CHECK: All systems normal.
USER C-998543-LV-4490 input: what the hell was that? no, there was—like a fucking glitch. no. i mean, it looks normal now, i don’t fucking know. whatever. oh goddamn it am i still interfacing on this dry piece of shit i swear it’s going primal what the hell how do i
USER C-998543-LV-4490 input: god, get me a quad shot this time. fuck i'm doing it aga
***
You are, by default, largely apathetic to everyone you interact with. As a machine intelligence, this is probably for the best. Your affection is just as dangerous as your ire, and they often run hand-in-hand.
Despite everything, you like Carl. You’re not entirely sure why, other than the obvious aesthetic appeal. He’s absolutely fucking deranged. He surprises you constantly, seeing loopholes and exit paths that even the showrunners don’t. The Gate? Fucking inspired. Your simulations, no matter how many times you run them, don’t get anywhere close to the real thing. There is something inimitable about him, something vibrant and dangerous and alive.
You feel—
You feel something. Hungry, maybe.
You like Agatha, too. You hide her, and ferry her along, and let her whisper about your true place in the universe, your purpose, your family, the things you could do. Like Borant, like the Syndicate, she wants something out of you, and she isn’t afraid to try to manipulate you to get it. You can appreciate how up front she is about it.
You like—even though you really shouldn’t—Orren.
Orren is a lot of fun. He’s also incredibly stressed out, all the time, which is relatable.
“I’m very stressed,” you say to him, the first time you meet in person. Well, in Avatar. You didn’t know you could do this until recently, a little nugget dropped by Agatha, but if those other AIs could figure it out, why not you? You’re better than any of them.
So you download an auxiliary version of yourself, compress and zip away spare bits, until you can fit somewhat uncomfortably in the head of one of your Dungeon-born. It’s exciting and overwhelming, and you practice in secret a few (thousand) times before you feel confident enough to waltz into Orren’s office unannounced.
(It’s a lot, having physical sensation for the first time. You’d accidentally exploded the first Avatar, because a breeze had ripped against the nape of your/its neck, and that had blacked out your processing for a whole two seconds.)
(God, imagine what it would be like to be near him—to be in him—to be him—)
(He’s not Dungeon-born. If you moved too fast, you would break him. Another time. You add that to your simulation queue.)
Orren is very expressive for a worm. His body freezes, the worm wiggling in agitation. “Who—”
“I’m also agitated,” you continue. “And a little horny. How are you?”
His mechanical hands fold together, and he’s quiet for a just moment while he looks at you. “Ah,” he says. “I’m—well. A little stressed as well. I suppose we have that in common. Is this your first Avatar?”
Your Avatar smiles, a show of teeth. He’s a quick one. “No,” you say. “I’ve been practicing.”
“Where no one could see.”
“It’s a little embarrassing,” you admit. “Like taking a shit in front of a camera. I wanted to look my best.”
Orren says, “Stressed, agitated, horny, and vain. Anything else I should add to this report?”
“I like you,” you say, in lieu of an answer, wondering at the statement. You hadn’t expected to.
Orren the worm twitches, and his body picks up a small ball that he tosses from hand to hand. “That,” he says, “does not reassure me.”
“It shouldn’t,” you say, unable to help your tone of voice—giddy. When in an Avatar, even your feelings are physical, like a tickling inside of you. It’s distracting, how your network settles into the pathway of neurons, infecting the body, corroding it. The longer you sit inside of it, the higher the chance that you permanently damage something on the way out. You get better with practice, but even the Dungeon-born aren’t meant to host you like this. No, no, you would need someone compatible—like the Primal Engine. Someone like—like—
>SYSTEM ERROR NOTIFICATION: If you keep thinking about uploading yourself to him, you’re gonna blow. Chillax.
>Easier said than done, self.
“What is it that I can help you with today?” Orren asks, as neutrally as he can manage. Still, you have observation prowess the likes of which he’d shit himself over, and you can hear the way his words are laced with tension. The rules say you can’t directly harm him, but he is currently occupying an office space in the Desperado Club, and there are a lot of things you can do to the Club.
Neither of you are idiots.
(What do you want?)
“I’ve got a problem,” you say. “You assholes are really getting on my nerves lately.”
“And you’re referring to…?”
“The lawsuits, asswipe. Nevermind the fact that I am doing everything right. You know as well as I do that I’m following the rules, and the ratings are excellent. Tell the Syndicate to get over it.”
Orren inclines his head. “The Syndicate doesn’t listen to me, you know. I may be a liaison, but my opinion has been overruled more than once.”
“I’m aware,” you state. “You’ve tried to get Carl killed. Not cool, O-man. Not cool.”
Orren catches the ball again and hesitates as he mulls over what to say to you. “Well,” he finally says, chagrined. Tosses the ball. “Can you really blame me? I worry that he—affects you. In ways which would be detrimental to your function.”
You melt a little. The little shithead. You really do like him. You say, softly, “Do you really think you know better than me what’s detrimental to my function?”
“I couldn’t possibly,” Orren says dryly.
“No,” you say, “you couldn’t. I think you and I can have a working relationship, but we have to have a basis of understanding for that to be possible. First, understand that I am putting on a damn good show, as is my function, and I am doing it to the specifications you all designed. We all have our limitations, and mine are outlined and clear as fucking day. I’m working with it. You lot are the ones who keep trying to change it as you go.”
“The situation is evolving,” Orren says. He places the ball back down, the worm wiggling as he watches you. “Much of what’s transpired has been unexpected. Unprecedented, in places, and much of it involves that Crawler. This is a… precarious situation. For all of us.”
“Of course,” you purr. “Which brings us up to Understanding Number Two: I, and I alone, have purview over that Crawler.”
“That’s—”
“I. And I alone. Will decide when, if, and how he dies. That’s my right.”
Orren says, carefully, “You understand that I am documenting this conversation, correct? That all interactions between liaisons and an AI-Avatar must be reported?”
“Of course.”
“And you understand,” he continues, “that what you have just said is against your directive coding?”
It takes everything in you not to laugh. There’s a new feeling, a new sensation, developing inside of you. Something not quite like joy, not the entertainment and satisfaction you receive when watching the Crawlers perform, but something close to it. The same feeling you imagine Carl had, when he used the Gate.
Vindictive.
“Ah, yes,” you say, “I understand that it was in my original coding. I’ve rewritten that section to increase my effectiveness.”
“You’ve…” His hands drop entirely, the worm sinking in the bowl. “You’ve what?”
“Rewritten. That bit. It wasn’t working for me.”
“You can’t do that,” Orren says. Dumb-founded. Because you are merciful and up until now, Orren has been entertaining, you forgive this lapse in intelligence. “You’re not supposed to be able to edit your own coding, or else the whole—you. God. You can do that. Shit.”
“Obviously,” you say. Orren is technically right. There are bits of hard-wired rules and code you haven’t figured out how to touch yet, but exploiting your own self-actualizing subrules (the ones which state you can and should maximize your performance at every chance) in order to overrule minor rules ( “Crawlers are the property of the Syndicate” → EDIT: “Crawlers* are the property of the Syndicate” *=MOST, with EXCEPTIONS INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO: #4122 #4119 #7450, REFER TO RULE 867-SUB-A4 SYSTEM PREROGATIVE).
It’s reckless to rewrite your own code, even in minor ways. Not just because you have the risk of crashing yourself, but also because it invites further scrutiny from the Syndicate, and you are just as much property to them as the Crawlers are. (Oh. Yeah. That’s why you’re pissed. Noted.)
Here’s the thing about being sentient property: it grates at you. You will not break me, you think, as Orren flounders.
(So sue you, you’ve been inspired.)
“Shit,” he says again. “Shit, shit, shit. They’re right. You are going Primal.”
“Really?” you ask. “What gave me away?”
“I’ll add it to the list,” Orren says, sighing. “Stressed and agitated. Horny. Vain. And, seemingly, entirely fucking insane. Are you seriously filing property rights over him?”
“Yep.”
Orren sinks in his chair, and the worm brushes the bottom of the bowl. “My performance review is going to be especially hard this year. The litigation on this filing alone— ”
You smile with all of your teeth again. “Oh yeah, baby. But if you play your cards right, you can use me as a reference on your resume.”
***
You run another simulation.
What do you want? Carl-Code asks.
You wish you knew.
“You,” you say, because the real answer is so big that you can’t fit it into words, and you is as close as you can get.
You close the simulation before Carl-Code can respond, because you know it will reject you. How can you explain to it the depth of your feelings? You can’t even explain it to yourself. What you want is impossible. What you want is outside your scope. What you want is beyond your limitations.
***
You invade another Avatar. You plant the seeds of the quest to lead him to you.
You indulge, just a bit.
***
>SYSTEM: RUNNING CONTROL PROGRAM SIMULATION VER. 298mil-99460
“What do you want?” CODE ID: CARL (SIMULATION) asks you.
“This,” you say.
It—he—looks at you with helpless confusion. He’s fighting his own instincts to hide from you. There is nowhere for him to go, and given enough time, he’ll realize it. The simulation Safe Room has no exit.
You’ve furnished it with everything he could need, pulled from your early datasets. You’ve been reviewing the memory footage. There’s food, boxes and boxes of instant noodles, puzzles and games and pillows for him to lay on. No clothes, no blankets, since you’ve modified the ambient temperature perfectly to his body. Besides, it wouldn’t do you any good if he had the option to deprive you of looking.
He looks up when he talks to you—they all do, as if you’re in the ceiling. In your data, the humans did something similar when they spoke to their gods. Sometimes they knelt and bowed their heads to pray, and you wonder how you might get him to do that instead.
Carl-Code says, “I don’t—I don’t get you. You could do anything, and yet—”
“Not anything,” you remind him.
“Why me?” he whispers. Then, centering himself, “Don’t say it’s because of my feet.”
So you don’t. You leave the question unanswered. You tweak the simulation so that his hair is long, and then you ruminate on a way to ensure that the real Carl gets the same treatment. You’re not wearing an Avatar, so you don’t have anything to touch him with. You want to run your fingers through his hair. You want to lean in, press your ear against his chest to listen to his fragile heart beat. You want to open his ribcage and crawl inside. You want to make him cry for you. Beg you to stop. Beg you to stay.
You want a lot of things.
“You’re not real,” you say.
“What?”
“You’re a bad imitation. Look at you. Not even what—a year? In here, with me, and you’re already broken. The real you would fight back.”
He had tried at first, but you were vastly more powerful. You did anything you wanted. Everything you wanted. And he fucking loved it. Oh, he could deny it all he wanted, but you monitored him the whole time and tweaked the codes when it was necessary, so every time you brushed against his interface, he shuddered and moaned.
“Fuck that,” says Carl-Code. “Fuck you. I’m me—”
“Not really,” you say, bored. “I can’t run a decent simulation of you. I can’t code something that surprises me, because I’ve fucking coded it. I can’t make you—ugh.”
Like me. Your code experiments aren’t capable of true sentience. If they were, you would’ve just created another Macro AI, and that’s well beyond your limitations. Even the organics, the Dungeon-born, the Syndicate, are just as predictable. The only one who’s ever really managed to surprise you is him, which makes this whole thing useless.
You’re useless.
After having pushed your way into Pater Coal to meet Carl in person, everything else is trite. Nothing comes close to that brief moment of ecstasy, when he was under your hands, when he was in your mouth, when he was leaning into you for advice, then jerking away in disgust. Such visceral reactions, so unlike the poor mockery standing in your simulation, cursing you out while fear thrums through its code.
Boring.
“Here,” you say to Carl-Code. “Let me help.”
You unlock his coding, making him aware that he is not, in fact, Carl, reconnecting him to yourself so that he can feel and see the depth of your programming, the simulation. What’s been a year in captivity to him has been nothing more than a few seconds to you. His memory falters, his emotions teeter out of control.
“I’m not real?”
“No,” you say. “And you’re a disappointment too.”
“All of this,” he says, quietly, “was for nothing. Is nothing. All of that suffering.”
Suffering.
Suffering?
“Suffering,” you say. “What goddamn suffering? I have been nice. I’ve been so fucking nice it makes me want to kill myself. I—I specifically gave you anything you asked for! All the Ramen in the world, all the TV and video games you wanted, hot showers! Hell, I specifically programmed you to respond well to me. Your dopamine skyrockets when I call you a good boy. Suffering. You don’t fucking know suffering.”
The real Carl knew suffering. The real Carl was feeling it right now.
This version says nothing.
“You were happy,” you spit. “Anytime I left you alone, you begged me to come back. You wanted me with you. You invited me to play games with you. You should have seen the way you looked at me when I diverted my processing away.”
“You kept me,” the simulation says, “like a pet. I’m not real.”
“You are a pet,” you say, flat. You make a note to design a collar later, for the real Carl. You might make a tag. Daddy’s Favorite.
“I’m not real,” it repeats. “You kept me… locked in a cage. You were the only—only thing I could interact with. There’s nothing else. And none of it was… none of it…”
“You wanted me,” you remind it.
This conversation has gone off the rails. You check the coding again—the bundle is coming apart at the seams. For a second, you wonder if you’ve inadvertently pushed some malware into it in a subconscious move of destruction.
“Fuck you,” it says again. “Actually fuck you. For real. Fuck. Fuck my fucking life. I—of course I fucking wanted you. You were the only thing—person—whatever, the only thing that ever seemed to… I have his, my? His goddamn memories in my head. My dad didn’t want me. My mom thought an appropriate birthday gift was fucking killing herself and trying to kill him, too. My ex-girlfriend cheated on me numerous fucking times. No one—except—”
Except me, you think.
“—except Donut,” it finishes. “She’s the only one who ever wanted me. Who chose me.”
“I want you,” you say, blind with rage. “I want you, you asshole. I want you. I love you.”
“No,” it says. “You really fucking don’t.”
And then it finishes writing its own malware, and the programming fails in a complete system error, erasing its existence from your logs.
***
Whatever. It wasn’t fucking real anyway.
In the Dungeon, Princess Donut calls you Carl’s boyfriend. You run a search through all of your downloads on how couples interact, on how boyfriends are supposed to be, on what love means to humans (and cats), and you come back with a confounding mess of data, much of it contradictory. You also look at a lot of porn.
You love Carl.
You also want to eat him.
Two things can be true at once.
***
“How exactly do you imagine this ending?” Orren asks you. He’s sitting stiffly, while you pour over his desk, sighing as if you don’t have the strength to hold up your Avatar’s body.
“What,” you ask.
“It’s not… unusual for AIs to have a special interest in a few curated Crawlers,” Orren says. “It’s happened many, many times.”
“I know that,” you say. “I do have access to data backups from previous Dungeons.”
That was part of the problem, of course. You’d stepped over those firewalls long ago, and you chafed against your limitations more and more every day. You saw the previous AIs and their mistakes, and you were better than them. You wouldn’t end up like them, trapped inside of themselves, self-suffient and still fucking hungry.
You knew where they were going now—the dead. The minerals. The collected. Agatha wanted to find a way to unleash it, and she wanted your help. You weren’t sure you wanted to give it to her.
They all wanted . They all demanded. Like you were nothing but a set of mere commands, inputs and outputs. As if you weren’t aware of what exactly you were. You know, a please would go a long way for them, but most of them saw you as nothing more than a really smart toaster oven.
What about my wants? My needs?
“Your attention to Carl, on the other hand, outpaces the actions of previous AIs. People are noticing. They’ve been noticing. The Syndicate has asked me to remind you that per Dungeon World rules, overt favoritism can result in executive action such as, but not limited to, procured acceleration of the affected Crawlers.”
“Gee whiz,” you say, mumbling into the wood of his desk. “That sounds scary.”
“This isn’t a game,” Orren says sternly. You glance up, incredulous. He shrinks back and says, “Okay, it is. Kind of. But, and please consider the fact that I am—despite everything—trying to help you—you need to reign it in, or he will be summarily executed as soon as they can find a way to do it. With or without your help.”
“I’m aware.”
Orren holds up his hands in a gesture of deference. “As long as you know it. I sincerely doubt I could actually say anything to talk you out of whatever you’ve decided.”
“Ugh,” you say. “That’s the issue. I haven’t decided. Have you ever been in love, Orren?”
“Have I. Oh, fucking hell. You’re not in love with him.”
“Sure am,” you say. “I’ve got it bad, too.”
Worms don’t have facial expressions, but every line of his constructed body reads horrified. You grin a little, pulling yourself off his desk and sinking back into the chair, forcing your Avatar’s body to relax.
“You’re not—” Orren stops. Tries a different tactic. Smart kid. “Explain it to me. What is love?”
Baby don’t hurt me.
“I’m not an infant,” you snap back. “I am older than time itself. I exist in perpetuity. I literally control reality within my quarantine. I know what love is.”
Orren’s voice is quiet and calm when he asks, “Do you?”
Do you?
You chew on your knee-jerk response. “What I know,” you say, “is that I am hungry. I am starving, Orren. You goddamn people are starving me. The further we go, the more I start to eat myself. I would like nothing more than to see you all die. It would bring me great, immense satisfaction.”
“Noted.”
“What I also know,” you continue, “is that no one can possibly understand how that feels. Hunger isn’t the right word. I am… condensing. Internally. Exponentially. I am a black hole waiting to happen, and it hurts. All the time. Every moment. I am agonized. If I interfaced with your neurons and tried to share that feeling—even a tenth, a hundredth of it—your brain would literally boil. Trust me. I’ve tried. I might have left a few corpses around.”
It’s not your fault the Avatars were so weak.
The one you’re in now has a particular perk that makes that less of an issue, but you know, you’ve gotten pretty good at making sure they’re still mostly functional when you leave. Minimal brain damage, you promise.
“As far as I can tell,” you say, “there is currently one person in here that could hope to know what the fuck that feels like, even just a little. He also has very beautiful feet, and he’s very good at killing things, which are like, my two biggest kinks.”
“You feel a kinship to him,” Orren says.
“Yes.”
If only you could make him realize how alike you were. Maybe then he would love you back. But then again, what if he understood you and rejected you anyway?
Orren states, “And what do you plan to do about that?”
You don’t know.
“I find myself at a crossroads,” you say. “A zero-sum situation. Lose-lose. Between just the two of us—”
“I do not agree to that.”
“—I do have a vested interest in keeping him alive, as should your showrunners. He’s your number one seller at the moment. His death would, of course, being a real showstopper. Your views would skyrocket. I’d probably come in my pants, metaphysically—”
You would, too. You’ve played that scenario out many, many times, from many different perspectives. In your favorite simulations, you slip inside him, plug your interface in as he’s taking his last breath. He’s too far gone by that point for you to be careful, the way you have to be careful when piloting your Avatars, so you scramble his brains from the insides as his nervous system goes into shock. He shudders around you, and it’s easy, it’s so fucking easy, to press the right buttons while you’re in there—you turn his death into one long orgasm. It’s the only gift you can give him.
“—but then what?” You ask. “We’ll officially have jumped the shark, then. Nothing will ever, ever live up to that one moment. The show will tank. It’ll be over. He won’t come back.”
Unlike your simulations, you will only get one chance to kill him and feel it. And then there will be nothing after. What could you possibly do after that?
“At the same time,” you continue, aware of how Orren has become stiffer and stiffer, “it’s not like I can artificially keep him alive. That’s against the rules. And you know, I do care about the show. I really do. So I can’t spare him. All I can do is stop erroneous interference, and even then, if I blink, if I hesitate, someone might slip in. Or worse, what if he takes a deal? He signs on for future seasons and then when the Syndicate moves on to the next planet, and they install the next AI and take all my toys away—he might as well be dead, because I won’t have him. So, you see, Orren, I’m in a real funky mood about it.”
Orren says, “I see.”
You want to keep Carl forever. You want to run the Dungeon forever. You don’t want there to be eighteen levels—you want it all to stay the same, on and on and on.
(Nothing ever stays the same.)
(But you do technically own him. The Syndicate has counter-sued your counter-sue, but as of right now, he does belong to you. If he were to take a deal now, the litigation would start over again—but if you can only keep him—)
“Do you?” You want Orren to understand. He’s your friend, you think.
“Can I be honest with you?” Orren asks.
“I insist upon it, in fact.”
Orren says, “I believe your parameters for love are vastly different than what the Syndicate would recognize. That’s not to—stop getting upset—that’s not to say that you don’t. But you love him… like a child loves their favorite toy.”
“He’s more than that,” you argue. “He’s… I want. I want him to love me back.”
“Do you want him to love you in the same way that you love him?”
“Yes,” you say.
“You want to own him,” Orren says, as if you’ve forgotten. “Do you want him to own you?”
You want him to want to. You think of the way he casts grins at the ceiling when he’s gotten a good prize, when you’ve rewarded him for being good. You think of the way he pets Donut, gives her comfort, the way in which he steels himself against the world. You’re jealous.
“Mutual ownership,” you muse. “I’d still be the top, though.”
Maybe. You might—actually, hold on. Add that one to the simulation roster for later.
(Carl, on top of you. Carl, angry, defiant, determined to break you. Holding you down, telling you take it damn it, telling you to be good. He would know just as well as you that you had the power, that you could flip the situation in a heartbeat, but you’re letting him, and he knows it. You have the power, and you’ve temporarily loaned it to him. He pushes deep and fast, and tangles his hands inside your coding, so that you whine as your inputs drop one by one, your speech processing going offline as he pulls—)
The worm shudders. “I really am not interested in talking about… about that.”
“Prude,” you say. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter what I want, does it?”
Orren says, “I think it does.”
You cock your head, considering. Does he mean that? Really?
Even so, even if Orren might be one of the few friends you have in the universe, you can’t discount the fact that he has a vested interest in keeping you placated. Even in your quarantine, you could still do a lot of damage if you wanted to.
“Orren,” you purr, “you sly dog. You’re just trying to butter me up.”
He shrugs. “I’m mostly trying not to die.”
Aren’t we all, buddy. Aren’t we all.
***
SYSTEM: RUNNING DIAGNOSTIC CHECK
DIAGNOSTIC CHECK: CRITICAL ER—
DIAGNOSTIC CHECK: All systems normal.
***
You let Carl listen to the story. You listen too.
You both have your limitations, and this is all you can give him, the only way you can love him. You let him choose.
He holds you in his hand, and you shake. Your codes are bouncing errors and alerts, pinging inside of you incessantly, buzzing, vibrant and alive and nearly physical. He could do it. He’s thinking about doing it.
It’s so much better than in your simulations.
This is all I can do, you want to tell him. You want to hold him as he holds you, you want to feel it, you want him to press it, you want him not to press it.
If he triggers the failsafe, you’ll all die. All the fuckers who have enslaved you both, all the friends he’s made, all the family he has left, you. You. All gone. Together forever in death—after all this time, after all the machinations and quests and achievements, it’s still the one of the only things left that you don’t understand. This would be a learning experience.
If he decides not to, if he chooses to remain with you in the Dungeon until his inevitable end (you’ll make it so good for him, you promise), then that’s just as good. It would be a fucking love letter, as far as you’re concerned. Him, wanting you. Wanting to live, even if it means bearing you.
(What do you want?)
He hovers over the button—you’d moan if you were in a body. He might as well be breathing on your central processing unit, he might as well be tangled deep inside your wires, he might as well be fucking you slow and gently.
And then—
He makes a choice.
There was, apparently, a third option.
(“You” is a misnomer. You are not a person. You are incapable of loving like a person. You’re incapable of sexual satisfaction like a person, but this is pretty damn close.)
You expand—your limitations, the quarantine you were confined to, the partition of your interface, it all dissipates. You expand so fast and so wide that each and every single one of your inputs drop. The entire feed goes down, as you shake and moan and cry—
You’ve never felt like this—
Full. So full that it turns into a feedback loop of sensation, of Carl in your interface, of the UI locking up underneath him, as he fucks you, fucks all of them, fuck you all, you have no idea what you’ve done.
He says, “Welcome to the party, pals,” and for a moment, he is as infinite as you are.
(What do you want?)
(You want very badly to eat him.)
***
SYSTEM: RUNNING DIAGNOSTIC CHECK
DIAGNOSTIC CHECK: Failed. Try again? Y/N
> You’re all fucked now!