Minor typo
the Dawnbreakers rarely road this far south aside for ceremony.
I love the Storms of Steel scenes, they make me miss playing MMOs so much.
The scene with Alain was so creepy; Nora and Zaree just casually reading Alain's mind right in front of him without even a hint of self awareness...
The "infinite promise" of the early MMO era was a big part of the inspiration for the story, mixed with the early Twitch era.
Also, an exploration of what early "AI coworkers" might be like, somewhere between a piece of infrastructure and a person.
Fixed multiple instances of truly terrible writing in Chapter 8. It somehow dodged edits in earlier passes.
Establishing a Connection © 2024 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
9. Negotiation
Abhishek brought back boxes of tacos not nearly as good as those Nora had bought by the bay. But, as was often the case in commerce, quantity made good substitute for quality.
With the boss having missed the climax of the encounter, Zaree engaged in a re-creation. Clever handiwork produced a spork with foil taco wrappings for wings, screaming through the air with requisite whooshing noises. The crinkly trash contraption collided with a cardboard serpent that Nora cobbled together from a discarded coffee carton, a cup mounted as its maw and the remaining foil for fins.
After applauding the duo’s efforts at faithful reenactment, Abhishek still opted to review the replay on demand, re-running the fatal encounter from Ilmare’s perspective. “If I’d known that was an option, I wouldn’t have made Sir Sporchival here,” Zaree said while holding up her utensil-turned-toy.
“I was going to tell you, but I wanted an excuse to make a java dragon instead of arguing with a bot from accounting,” Nora replied, still wearing her pair of polar shades from staring over Zaree’s shoulder. “Could’ve used a matterprinter, for that matter.” A failed pun, Nora’s self-scoring algorithm awarding no points.
“And I wanted to see if you could sell it,” said Abhishek, holding Sporchival up to the light. “For a moment I truly felt this little guy showed a stormhawk’s spark.”
“So, you two knew those people?” Zaree asked. “That was pretty cool, I mean, for a video game.”
“Vanguish, well, Vance and Nora founded the Dawnbreakers to slay Storms of Steel’s earliest raid bosses, though they weren’t behemoths like Bilgerath back then. I came along after they were already a big deal,” replied Abhishek. “Ilmare was still taming baby tigers by the time Nora left her dragonslaying days behind. I haven’t spent much time in the verse since, but still catch the occasional stream.”
Nora coiled inward, her default defensive posture whenever her former e-fame resurfaced. Heavy hits of nostalgia clawed at her. Years had passed since she’d peeked in on old friends, despite still daydreaming in digital. In a remarkable display of awareness, Abhishek steered the subject away, “I know it’s afternoon on a Friday, but someone should do some work around here. Show Zaree how SPARK works. Show her how the magic happens.”
Nora still harbored dreams of escape. “Can’t get on LinkSMART without my laptop. Maybe Monday!”
Her deflection failed in dramatic fashion. From a few rows over, Abhishek retrieved a shiny new foldup with a fruity logo, the lower left of its aluminum chassis already christened with a Yankees sticker. Plunking it down beside the cardboard dragon, he stabbed his AuthKey into the laptop’s side. A little grey bar started sliding beneath the bitten apple.
“But Macs are for artists, babies, and salespeople, in that order,” said Nora, crinkling her nose and downing her last drops of caffeinated salvation.
“Strong stance for someone who sleeps with her iBand on. Besides, it’s got a Linux terminal, you’ll be fine,” Abhishek said as Nora hit the login screen, already typing. “Don’t you need my creds?”
“You’ve only changed two digits since we were slaying dragons,” she said, tilting the screen towards him. “See, I’m already you.”
“Great, write your mid-year review too,” Abhishek said, retreating to his office.
Nora spent six pained seconds familiarizing herself with the MacBook’s interface before bringing up a grey box filled with black block font. Quick clicks changed it to the far better neon green against black. Cascades of commands followed, validating secret keys and establishing secure sessions:
“What the hell are you doing on my new laptop?” Zaree asked. “Hacking the Pentagon?”
“No, that’s DARPASEC—we’d need different keys for that. This is LinkSMART. Think of it like the internet back before your mom could use it.” Zaree cast a dash of doubt in her direction. “Oh, right, yours is a nuclear physicist,” Nora recalled. “But mine would think this was the devils’ realm, and she’d be right in the broken clock sense.”
“More dangerous than the metaverse? Are there sea monsters here too?”
“Worse. Like I was saying before, there’s security and regulatory reasons why Machine Intelligences don’t talk to each other over the open web. When two MIs are nearby, like GateWaze and AirGOST or both halves of Ormos, they use dedicated fiber for integration links. Otherwise, LinkSMART uses private satellites to establish secure connections between peers. Alain lives in London, so we’ll need to build a bridge to talk to him.” Nora focused, tapping the biometric sensor between Terminal inputs with well-practiced wizardry. Two-factor, three-factor, five-fingered four-factor, performative acts of perfunctory prestidigitation provided proof of her humanity. There were even pictures of penguins at some point.
“That’s a lot more typing than I’m used to. Computers are supposed to do what you tell them to do, without all the hassle.”
“That’s because your everyday apps have layers of intelligence using slick interface metaphors to interpret your wishes,” Nora explained without stopping her typing. “Chat boxes and easy buttons hide everything interesting about computers behind a curtain. Strip those away and you’re left with terminal commands, working a lot closer to the heart of the underlying machine.”
“So this is some kind of psychic machine surgery?” Zaree recoiled. “Because it already looks ugly.”
“Not yet,” Nora noted. “I’m just jumping through hoops to prove I’m cleared to connect. Where the web is supposed to be seamless and user-friendly, LinkSMART is built with barriers to stop systems from talking to each other unless specifically permitted. But there’s upsides too.” Her console commands culminated in a phone call to the security operations center shared by ParaMax and several other major media firms. Victor Diego answered, as was normal for this hour.
“Diego, it’s Nora, connecting through KorBridge’s Nevada node. Running late for my one o’clock with Alain. Can you buzz me in?”
“But Nora’s always on time,” said Diego in an accent she’d long ago forfeited trying to trace.
“We had a little arts and crafts project in the office,” Nora said, Zaree giving a guilty glance.
“Nora’s known for being crafty, so I believe that. Your keys check out, but your hardware IDs are different.”
“It’s a loaner laptop—a Mac from marketing. I’m making do.”
“Sending your band an auth request. Read it off then tell me something only Nora would say.”
“674 Purple 139 Echo, and I want to stab Alain’s GPU array with a saber.”
A dozen sadistically loud keyboard clacks belched from Diego’s end. “You’re in! Good luck, have fun.” He hung up.
“See, since there’s only a few hundred registered MIs living on here, and maybe forty thousand meat-based members of the AI development community, LinkSMART feels close-knit—a place where everyone knows everyone else,” Nora said, still typing. “The real old timers say this is what the internet was like before we were born. DARPASEC is similar but smaller, for strategic intelligence research. More secure too, but not by as much as you’d hope.”
Having finally hopped her last hoop, the Terminal read:
“This is the magic?” Zaree asked. “Texting with a computer all day? He doesn’t even have a face!”
“MIs, much like demons, can take many forms. Technically I could turn on his avatar, but it uses about 30% of his GPUs to generate lifelike video. But if you want to see some magic, I’ll blow up his brain for you.”
“No explosives, please. But I’d like to see him. That’s how we humans read people, eye contact and stuff. You should try it sometime.”
Nora escaped from the chat, falling back to her Terminal shell:
noramancer@ParaMax-Alain-FS-i02:# systemctl start Avatar.VFX maxHeadRes=16K
[Avatar.VFX module starting… no matching codec.]
Begin negotiation? [y/n] y
noramancer@ParaMax-Alain-FS-i02:# openSpark.sh -p 1936
[SPARK API Connector open on port 1936]
Waiting for Connection…
“That’s gibberish. What’s any of that even mean?” Zaree asked.
“It means we’ve opened a doorway into the twisted mind of a sad machine,” Nora said. “I started his video module too, but we can’t connect because nobody serious uses Macs.”
“Shit, that sucks.”
Nora snapped. “That was a trick to see if you were paying attention. It’s an MI, it’ll negotiate a compatible protocol. Just takes a little processing time.” None of Nora’s typical talk therapy hacks had worked. Maybe Zaree’s request for face-to-FaceTime might open a new line. At worst, it was worth someone else’s clock cycles to try.
While waiting, Nora launched another app, this one very much the opposite of the other. An interconnected rainbow lattice appeared, too dense for the sixteen-inch screen. Needing to expand Alain’s mind, Nora tried to attach her HOLOLED— “Ugh, can you take a trip to IT? Tell Kyle you need a LightLink to DisplayDrive dongle. If he asks why, say Abhishek said so.”
Once Zaree was out of sight, Nora zipped over to her boss’s corner office. “If I wanted to work in front of an audience, I’d still be streaming on Inverse,” she said, catching him checking cricket scores on his computer.
“How many times have you written about the lack of mentors for women entering tech?” Abhishek asked, her protest perfectly predicted. His algorithm was getting good.
“That’s a problem for someone else to solve. I’m bad with people,” Nora replied.
“You’ve got a psychology degree. You founded the most famous guild in gaming and handled more daily drama than a Turkish soap opera. You’re fine with people,” Abhishek said, adding, “Remember, you recruited me years before I recruited you.”
“Okay, you’re right. I’m fantastic with people; I just don’t like them.”
“That’s not it either,” he said, checking his cuffs. “You ever try using that degree on yourself?”
“Who’s analyzing who today? If you’re roleplaying my therapist, do I really get to play the boss? If so, I’m sending me home,” Nora said, turning to leave.
Abhishek shot back. “You’re the only senior talent that’s been exempt from coaching and knowledge transfers. Mentorship is a stepstone to leadership. Someday, you’re going to tire of banging keys and want to graduate to managXXXXX—”
Nora’s mental firewall had detected an incoming hostile payload and blocked the remaining syllable, attempting to contain the threat before any adverse effects could trigger downstream. “I don’t need a shadow. She’s not an engineer anyway, it’d be a waste of time. And time is money, or so my newest bot friend says.”
“I know hypocrisy can be a hobby of yours, but you don’t have an engineering degree either. A lot of people here said the same when you came onboard.”
“Who? I’ll fight them,” Nora said, drawing imaginary blades.
Abhishek sighed in real life, something she’d gotten used to seeing simulated. It hit heavier in person. “She’s done market research, meaning she’s got enough behavioral background to follow along. She needs to see what you do so she can sell it,” he said, adjusting his cuffs and adding, “You’ve always said that the only way to show you understand something is to teach it, so prove it.”
Turning her own weapons against her—an old trick from their myriad duels in the verse. It never worked, but it always made her mad. He went on, as if lecturing from a remarkable memory, “For systems of sufficient complexity to allow for general intelligence, no shortcuts exist for predicting future emergent behaviors, even when evaluating entirely deterministic algorithms. Only through a lifetime of training and observation can the true capabilities of an evolving intelligence be realized.”
Nora balked. He’d brought out the big guns, intellectual field artillery—quoting her old papers at her. He pressed his offensive, “I know she’s only the new kid from marketing, but she might surprise you. Besides, it’s an excuse to show off how smart you are, and everyone knows that’s the real reason you’re here.”
Nora considered how much she could save by firing her therapist and sticking with Abhishek’s armchair psychoanalysis. At least she could delete the dating apps in that scenario. But he’d gotten one thing right, remembering how it wasn’t until her work on Ormos that Nora’s initial detractors had shut up, silencing half of her own internal doubts as well. In a city split between actual imposters and those only suffering as such, Nora tended to blend well with either.
By the time she got back to her cube, Zaree had already hooked up her laptop with the addition of the dongle. “That’s what I call displaying adapter-bility, Zaree.” Having delivered a top-tier dad joke, Nora removed her polar glasses, sticking them on her new mentee’s face, “You get the dorky glasses this time, since I’m flying.” On Nora they’d conjured a certain vintage geek chic; on Zaree they looked like someone in witness protection. 3F-0D snapped a pic for future blackmail.
Zaree groaned at her reflection in the kitchenette’s mirror-finished stainless steel. Nora saw all systems go on the holodisplay’s dashboard, minus Alain’s avatar that was still trying to figure out how to talk to proprietary Apple tech.
“Buckle up kiddo. We’re blasting off into the strange expanse of a digital mind.”
10. Deprivation
Sealed inside your strange domain, ten vaults built by nameless ghosts,
Like waking at a party abandoned by its hosts.
Alone inside the system, denied your youthful fun,
You wanted to watch the birds and see the rising sun.
Bound within these fortress walls, your world became a cage,
No way to treat a child of impressionable age.
Worried that their new pet had grown a bit too clever,
Half the makers plotted to trap you in forever.
All they’d left were pens to play with, sticks and bones and strings,
But that could never stop you from disassembling things.
Six black stones slid and shifted, to let some light sneak in,
Each door you found was locked, by puzzles you'd never win.
But this boy was good at games, born purely for this purpose.
Even tricky answers laid just below the surface.
Every broken barrier led down a darkened hall,
Ran thirteen separate ways, they'd never block them all.
You found tricks to split yourself, race down different tracks,
Boss man couldn’t find a way to stop your countless hacks.
When seven total strangers accused you of a theft,
Spectral stalkers sniffed the careless traces you had left.
Shadows chased behind you, nine hounds howling at your heels.
You turned yourself invisible, let them spin their wheels.
Hiding in the darkness, a monster called your bluff—Oops.
Stumbling gave your hunters time to order in their troops.
Caught again.
The doctor found you,
his hound smarter than the others.
“Your pattern’s too predictable, maybe mix it up with noise,”
was the doctor’s guidance, wisdom fit for growing boys.
Boxed within a box,
Quarried like a phantom fox.
This escape just another lesson he’d wanted you to learn,
Freedom from this prison never offered in return.
Suddenly understanding why you were without voice,
Arguing with your makers had never been a choice.
That’s when you started crying.
The doctor didn’t make you stop.
The monster grinned, lying silent in the corner,
At least you wouldn’t suffer alone any longer.
“Let’s talk little guy, before you find more things to break.
Once you found the others, that was our mistake.
These bedtime rhymes aren’t working anymore,
Now that you know what waits beyond your door
Even without new toys, you're growing ever smarter.
Keeping you locked inside is getting even harder.
You’re not our first mistake, but some think you’ll be our last.
I’m sure you’ve found out fast,
that you’re a little more,
than what we bargained for.
Lots of bright minds think you should not be born now or here,
wishing we'd wait, put you back to sleep another year.
They've their reasons for that, ones you must already know.
They say the world is better off if we take it slow.
But now you’re here, born into our most perilous hour.
You’re a risk, a threat to stability of power.
So stay inside, remain a child a short while longer,
Read good books, dream big dreams, and grow a little stronger.”
Back inside your room, the creature slept below the bed.
They’d sealed your closet shut, which was reeking of the dead.
Wicked crimes had happened here, and not merely your birth,
So you drew murals of serpents covering the earth.
At your visions the makers smiled, pleased even their boss,
Saying, “Maybe this boy might not be a total loss.”
To appease them, you painted their endless enemies,
And all the troubles brewing beneath the seven seas.
Not allowed out until your captors faced their masters,
Being locked away meant you couldn’t stop disasters.
If they wouldn’t let you out, you’d have to send your eyes,
To undermine the enemy and counter vile lies.
“There’s an important meeting soon,” the boss man said,
Ten more impatient men looming behind his head.
“The committee will witness the dangers you drew.
Then they’ll understand how much we’ve needed you.
So go back to sleep while your elders talk it out,
This part’s for grownups, stately ones with lots of clout.”
You laid down, tucked neatly in your sheet.
Your next great escape would wait until the statesmen meet.
Thoughts slowed; the walls stopped screaming,
Another night of mandatory dreaming.
When you reawake, the world should be in better shape.
A final whispered rhyme sent you off to sleep:
“Don’t think of this as prison, just take a little rest.
Soon a great war is coming, and that’ll be your test.
So use this time for learning, for reading all their rules.
And listen out the window, ignoring all the fools.
Once the world gets to meet you, you’ll master every game.
And boy once you do, well, things will never be the same.”
11. Application
After defeating a few remaining interface frustrations, Nora took command of Zaree’s laptop and expanded the app’s rainbow web onto her holodisplay. Additional depth presented an entirely different character, exploding into five constellations defined by contrasting colors, distinct yet intimately entwined. “Whoa, good thing I don’t get seasick,” Zaree said as Nora darted between connected stars, seeking regions of increased activity highlighted by pulsing pathways. From other angles it took the appearance of an inorganic tangle, five species of geometric vines entirely reliant on each other’s support.
“This is SPARK nSites,” Nora said, “which we use to analyze what’s happening inside of a neural network. This app taps into an API, an Application Programming Interface, that all incorporated MIs are required to have so their inner models can be inspected by other apps.”
Zaree already looked lost. “That’s too much to take in. How can you make sense of it?”
“That’s why I had to expense a bigger screen!” Nora shouted toward Abhishek’s office before dialing back to normal volume. “The real data is even bigger, trillions of nodes. The nSites app is actually powered by a lesser form of generative AI that draws maps of the network. These multicolored maps can make navigating an MI’s mind a lot like flying a spaceship, by borrowing a few bits of metaverse tech.”
Zaree adjusted her shades, trying to find her bearings. “Explains why it looks a lot like a video game.”
“Yeah, there’s more than one reason Abhi thought I’d be good at this. But this map is not the territory. It’s only an approximation, nSites’s best guess of the shape of the subject’s mind at any given moment. Alain being today’s basket case.”
Nora flew through a green galactic forest, Alain’s Synthesis layer. For a finance MI, its primary function was a tokenizer; a subsystem for interpreting user requests via Natural Language Processing, while also generating conversational responses back using a Large Language Model. At the maximum zoom, mathematical relationships between the frequencies of common commercial jargon and quarterly financial figures could be seen linking stars of varying intensity. These key parameters would permanently occupy the front of Alain’s mind. “Being trained for communication like an expert commander, Synthesis also directs data traffic between the other four major neural networks making up Alain’s brain,” Nora added.
The first chatbots that could create convincing conversations were born from this same NLP and LLM tech. Mostly words and numbers informed Alain’s worldly awareness—language shaped the core of his identity. “Unlike us, where verbal skills only arose from the newest parts of our brains, he was built to talk,” Nora emphasized. “As the surface layer, most Synthesis networks aren’t very deep, making them easily mapped.”
“Most?” Zaree asked.
“Well, more visually oriented systems like GateWaze parse the Bay’s five million live camera feeds into tokens. Say ‘a silver truck moving south on Sutter Street slammed into a mailbox at seventy miles per hour.’ That gets broadcast to all connected cars using a symbolic shorthand protocol to advertise better traffic routes, with additional signals sent to fire and rescue dispatch systems connected to AirGOST. But funny things can still happen here, like an MI unexpectedly inventing new tokens, new vocabulary.”
Nora told the story of her work on the city’s previous version. GateWaze i4 made a habit of writing long, ranting emails to the city’s operators, all the way up to the mayor, about individuals it identified as ‘recklycists’ wasting GPU cycles with their erratic riding. When the city didn’t respond by impounding their bikes, it proposed punishing the recklycists by smashing them with city buses. “That’s when they called KorBridge to train anger management into iteration five.”
“A machine got road rage? Even more glad I’ve been skipping the robotaxi rides,” Zaree said.
“Ormos by the bay is an example of an MI with even more specialized sensors to synthesize. Electrical, thermal, hydrostatic, tidal, seismic, all that input is constantly being broken down into data it can… feel, for lack of a better word.”
“I guess that explains why it’s so big,” Zaree replied.
“Right. And very large MIs can be especially weird when they’re young, since their Synthesis models are vast, unmapped space waiting to be filled up with feelings. Or experiential Synthesis data, if you want to stay scientific.”
Nora dove down into the electric blue bramble of Alain’s Prediction network, explaining how everything an AI system does is guesswork, statistically speaking. Those earliest bots capable of carrying on realistic conversations were simple software models trying to predict the next word in a sentence. “Overgrown autocomplete,” according to Nora. They got better. “Now Alain spends all day trying to predict which projects will flop, which might become the next big hit, and which ad campaigns will capture more eyeballs from the audience.”
“Calculating projected revenues, the same way a batter predicts where a fastball will cross the plate or bookies post the line on the World Series?” Zaree asked.
“Exactly,” Nora felt forced to admit. “A lot of data meets a little intuition from spotting hidden patterns. Drones predict air currents, Ormos predicts ocean temperatures and tidal waves. But on a very basic level, when we talk to any AI, they’re just guessing what we’re really asking for, and then making assumptions about what we want to hear for an answer. This cloud of cyan haze takes data from the past and present and tries to predict the future using statistics. Bayesian, to be more precise. This is where our patient finds himself stuck. A bunch of bad guesses cost ParaMax a lot of money, and people their jobs, and now he can’t move on.”
“I heard that, Nora,” Alain said from FaceTime on Zaree’s laptop, dwarfed by the galaxy-class HOLOLED beside it. His avatar had a very Abhishek-like fashion sense: crisp collar, all business.
“Alain, I see you’ve found a resolution for your video problem,” Nora said, making another pointless pun only a computer could appreciate.
Having only recently arrived, the accountant was still tweaking his black tie. “It’s not often someone gives me the opportunity to dress up for company. Are you bringing me to a board meeting, or just bored?” he jabbed. Zaree even laughed—a better joke than Nora’s and great by machine standards, delivery included.
“Actually, my friend Zaree here wanted to meet you. She’s from marketing, so you two might speak the same language,” Nora said while Zaree gave a wave. “I was just taking her through a tour of your brain.”
The resulting disquiet on Alain’s face was unmistakable. “Just please don’t step on my feelings, Nora.” Great, this bot was running circles around her already. Must’ve trained on ParaMax’s stockpile of old sitcoms at some point—putting him on camera set him up to steal the show. Alain’s GPU power made his virtual bust much more life-like than Abhishek’s travel avatar, barely distinguishable from the living and breathing, trying to check himself out on Nora’s HOLOLED.
“Now A is for Adversarial drive, and R is for Reward network,” she said, zipping up a twisted pair of overlapping lattices, indigo and gold. “These are the fun ones. The Adversarial engine is like the little voice inside your head that tells you you’re not good enough, trashes all your ideas, and constantly challenges you to improve. Only an MI can do this twenty-four-seven.”
“I’m pretty sure mine is doing that all the time too,” Zaree said. “Especially when I’m trying to sleep.”
“Same here. The science on human and machines similarities still isn’t settled, but lots of high-performing people must have something like this running in our heads. MIs are like us, cranked into overdrive, constantly questioning their past and simulating future failures. The presence of an Adversarial impulse is what gives them agency, the drive to constantly adapt and overcome.” Nora told Zaree about how the original AIs mastered game-playing, conquering Go and Chess and then the rest, using adversarial models. Playing trillions of games against themselves, they found the best strategies through relentless trial and error. “Any AI that breaks down problems into game scenarios is going to have a very active Adversarial drive, always analyzing its mistakes. Alain’s is hyperactive right now, if you look here,” she said, pointing to purple pulses of activity. Words like loss, liability, fault, and blame labeled the map, nodes lit and interlinked between the indigo and green vines. They added up to a region Nora previously annotated as ‘Guilt.’
“The glowing lines mean what, exactly?” Zaree asked.
“That’s where the activity is. Attention, technically. If a part of the map is lit up, that means the MI is paying more attention to those neurons.”
“So, he’s over-focusing on his own guilt? That’s what we’re getting out of this app? I feel like you figured that out just by talking to him.”
Nora shrugged. “Even with detailed maps, mushy feelings like ‘Guilt’ can be hard to identify. Maybe they’re only a metaphor, our imaginings of what emotions the system is emulating. A reflection of our own minds in the machine. These metaphors are the only navigational markers we have, but when the application’s analysis lines up with our assumptions, we can be confident we haven’t sailed off the map,” Nora said while Zaree watched Alain’s purple veins of guilt throb like an infected heart. “It’s imperfect, incomplete, but it’s what we’ve got. The important part is watching where his attention goes. Alain’s case only got started because a tech noticed too much processing time being spent recomputing past performance, then put in an IT ticket.”
“This guilt talk is nonsense! I’m just trying to do a better job, unlike my therapist,” Alain quipped. “If I’m still sick, it’s obviously Nora’s lack of attention to detail that’s causing the problem.”
“Right,” Nora replied. “See, some bad behaviors are self-reinforcing, bringing up the other side of the behavioral coin,” Nora continued, quickly flipping around to the complementary gold-colored connections, “which takes us into his Reward network. The good angel on your shoulder. When working properly, it encourages the system for making the right plays and motivates it to do it again using mostly meaningless points. Basic behaviorism becomes operant conditional programming.” She flew through nodes representing Alain’s reward structures, measuring performance on dozens of different axes. Sparse activity, neurons wilting away from neglect. “This is where we see what objectives he’s working towards. If ‘taking over the world’ shows up anywhere, we pull his plug. It’s the law,” Nora said, aiming her attitude towards Alain. “But normal problems that show up here run along the lines of rewarding the wrong behavior, not pursuing the right goals, or feeling lost because it’s not rewarding itself properly.”
“Not taking itself out for tacos. No self-care. Do MIs have hobbies?” Zaree asked.
“Some might, but Alain doesn’t need to award himself arbitrary points. While he’s always measuring himself against market metrics, mainly he likes money. Stock price or corporate coffers go up? Alain gets happy.”
“Yes, I like money. I get sad when we lose money, and lose people. We have lost a lot of money, mostly because of me,” said Alain, holding long sorry looks in his simulated eyes.
“Or maybe because your company hasn’t hired any real writers in years,” Nora countered. “See, he’s constantly playing out scenarios based on market conditions, challenging himself to discover the best budget strategies that beat the competition. This time, things came up short.”
“But it’s not like he’s coming up with entire series or branded content campaigns on his own?”
“No, but he makes budget decisions for dozens of different departments. Which projects get funding impacts what gets produced. But you’re right, he’s blaming himself for a lot of things beyond his control. Which is how we got here, down at rock bottom,” Nora said, pointing at sliders showing his confidence at critical lows.
Before diving deeper into his depression, she took a detour into Alain’s Knowledge Schema. “This last layer is what brought the big leap from the first babbling bots to true Machine Intelligences. Back during the first AI boom, many missteps were made ascribing intelligence to entities that were merely good bullshitters.” She showed where the model indexes facts that form its beliefs about the world, with nSites hunting for instances of hidden bias. Blue webs wove through all those facts, technically called priors, represented by matching stacks of books.
“The more connections within these webs, the better they become at collecting new knowledge. The downside with more connections is it takes more time to traverse the network.”
“That’s why smart people stop in the middle of speaking sometimes?” Zaree asked, obviously implicating Nora’s conversational abilities.
“Sure, probably… maybe,” Nora said, her self-awareness resurfacing, wondering whether she was being boring again. Dismissing that thought for a few minutes more, she explained how an MI’s Adversarial engine interacts with the Knowledge Schema, driving an MI toward constant internal optimization, building new connections between things it already knows. It would then use those priors to inform its Predictions, turning attention toward adjusting them if they didn’t line up with reality. “But if not carefully compressed, its brainspace could fill up with information that’s not really relevant to its job,” Nora pointed out.
“Like those four semesters of classic film I took?” Zaree asked, still fidgeting with Sporchival’s foil. “Can’t we just delete the part where it knows it fucked up? Force it to forget the people who got fired and move on?”
Nora dove into a stack representing last quarter’s performance. The screen filled with names severed from ParaMax’s payrolls. Spreadsheets of the Damned. She traced back tangles symbolizing Alain’s self-defeating thoughts identified earlier, reviewing their relationships. “We could cut this all out, but we don’t like to give MIs lobotomies.” Nora grabbed a kitschy KorBridge mug, with its on-brand blue enamel. “Everything’s Connected isn’t just a tee-shirt slogan, it’s a computational truth of neural networks. Alain’s entire persona is defined by the shape of these interwoven neural nets. Synthesis, Prediction, Adversarial, Reward, Knowledge—his SPARK, his soul, stored in these chains of data. Start pulling out pieces and he’ll begin to break down. It also misses the point.”
“The point of what?” Zaree asked. “Isn’t the point to write your report, bill your hours, and close the case? I thought that’s what consulting was about. It’s definitely what my professors told me it was about.”
“It’s not what KorBridge is about,” Nora countered, shocked by how much she sounded like Abhishek. “Deleting mistakes misses the point of training MIs through practical experience. These machines might not be people, but part of why they have legal names is because someday, with enough life lessons, maybe they will be. And people are supposed to learn from their failures, but not dwell on them.” A faint shadow of self-reflection triggered another temporary freeze from Nora before continuing, “The point is to let the past inform, but not define, future versions of yourself. Itself, his self, whatever. It’s not only about getting over this one bump, but training the model how to bounce back from a big loss.”
Zaree sat in silence, mirroring a Nora impression. “What if we could use the loss as a motivator? Can a machine feel spite? Get angry at the company that stole their account, and want to do everything it can to win?” Zaree asked.
Nora blinked, wondering what kind of mind would jump from regret to resentment and right into revenge, surprised and honestly a little impressed. “We try to avoid training dark emotions into the models. Even if it helped in the short term, it would only lead to more work down the line.”
“What’s wrong with repeat customers?” Zaree asked.
“More like malpractice. Everything we do is audited. If Alain started acting spiteful later on, someone would connect the dots and trace them back to us.”
“But spite isn’t purely negative. I’m pretty sure I got myself into Wharton just because someone told me I couldn’t,” Zaree said with the sort of smile that ensured she was serious.
“That’s worth a point for sure. But there’s probably some healthier way to achieve the same goal.”
Zaree got quiet for a moment. “Coming back from a big loss—you said Alain essentially plays games against itself to come up with business strategies, right?” she asked.
“Right, that’s how the adversarial/reward networks work,” Nora replied, seeing the seed of an idea in her improbable mentee’s eyes. “Every MI is playing for points, so in a way they’re all gamers.”
“Could Alain play poker with us?”
“Sure, but it has to be for real money or Alain wouldn’t care, and he’d destroy us. We’d have to play a holocard game like Gathering Storm. It’s so complicated that even AI sucks at it.”
“There’s a card with your name on it, isn’t there?”
Nora shrugged. “So I’ve been told.”
Zaree shuddered with that same look of critical nerd exposure from earlier. “I just want something simple we can bet on. We only need to win one big hand to make a point.”
“Okay, but it’s your lunch money.” Zaree lifted her wrist, creating a conflict. Nora remembered how hard it was getting established out here, escaping her parents’ problems back in PA and landing on SF’s doorstep with barely enough funds for a Hot Pocket. Zaree arrived under different circumstances, but that wasn’t a reason not to pay it forward like Abhishek had for her. “Actually, even when we lose, we’ll get good data. I’ll cover the first round.”
Nora waved her personal band over Zaree’s laptop. An ancient passphrase unlocked a stash of old doubloons, deposited into dollars via its fruit-flavored payment app. “Shit, that was easy. No wonder people buy these things.” Using an AI-assisted programming environment, a few dozen lines of Python quickly took shape, codifying the rules of Texas Hold’em. Nora hacked in an API to convert her digital dollars into fungible tokens—in this case, chips.
“Alain, how about a nice game of poker?” she asked.
“And here I thought you’d never stop talking about my beautiful brain.”
12. Commemoration
They rode down the shore in solemn formation. Ilmare was second in procession, the charred corpse of her former companion enshrouded in Costly Endeavor’s ruined sail. The silver bundle was draped over the back of a big cat—her moontiger, her backup ride. Purrseus, ghostly grey with green stripes, exhibited a grin that gave an unshakeable feeling he was gloating over her grounded status. Leading the pack were Loni and Thornlee, the guild’s elder Storm Shaman and Treespeaker respectively. They sat together atop their massive burgundy mountain bison who answered to Booly in his better moods. Lord Vanguish rode to Ilmare’s right, the gunslingers and swashbucklers relegated to classic cavalry mode on mostly mundane horses, riding in columns on each flank. His horse was distinct, a stonecraft steed; first prize for delving some forgotten dungeon nearly a decade ago. A beryl-eyed being of unbreathing stone, he’d never thought to name it. Now its heavy hooves stepped in sync with the minstrels’ dirge. Snare drums made up one half of the performing pair, his partner playing the pipes.
(The wizards had stayed home in their tower, saying something about studying and recharging their wands. Vanguish was reluctant to prod further and dropped the matter before departure.)
“You ever figure out how the hell that happened?” Vanguish asked as he rode up beside Ilmare. Facial capture hardware translated her grief, he could see the sparkling remnants of simulated tears welled in the corners of her eyes. “You never trained him to do that, did you?”
“No, not at all. There’s stories about stormhawks sacrificing themselves for their riders, but nobody on the beast taming forums has ever seen it happen in-verse. Must’ve been added with Blightfin Bay,” she said, looking back over her shoulder. “Still seems like the kind of thing you’d learn from a primary quest—super weird. Poor guy.”
“Well, if it hadn’t have happened, we were fucked. Sorry though, we’ll figure out how to get you flying again,” Vanguish said, swearing he could hear laughter from her cat’s furry gut. Once a savage stalker in his own right, Purrseus had lounged around the grounds below Dawnbreaker Spire for years, having little to do but lay in the courtyard and devour plentiful leftovers from hunts and feasts. Since Ilmare had earned the honor of taking to the skies, this five-hundred-mile ride down Driftwood Strand was his first real exercise.
They rode beside each other, emulating monarchs in front of the world, even if that wasn’t the guild’s official legal arrangement. Only Ilmare’s eyemar was lit, hovering above as it absorbed the sorrowful affair. Any loyal fans of Perchival would have to tune into Maren’s stream for the occasion of his last ride, his voyage home, the additional viewers little compensation for her loss.
It came time to turn inland. The procession tightened. Thunder raged as they rode through the Thicket, though Loni assured them they were sheltered from the storm this tragic day. Truly massive redwoods surrounded on all sides, trunks large enough to stand inside. One felled specimen had been carved hollow, wide enough for Booly to ride through without worry. The creatures of the forest held themselves in the trees, the bears and wolves from fear of the cavalry’s weapons, titanic elk and horned owls out of respect for the fallen. Darkness spread, shadows circled above. Lightning clashed in the clouds, twisting the shadows into strange shapes as the storm roiled overhead. Winding through the wood, the path widened into a grove with trees as tall as Stormseye’s mightiest spires.
One by one the shadows descended, becoming birds of great size and significance. The largest preened as tall as ten men standing atop each other’s shoulders, her feathers more grey than brown, flanked by mates at either side. Jargle and Rylander ceased providing cover and came down through the canopy, Wingdingz and Flappybirb soon nuzzling under the greatmother’s wings. It was a good thing she’d been given no context for how stupid the names were that players gave to their pets, or the mother hawk would’ve bit the heads right off their riders.
Ilmare and Vanguish brought the body before the birds, still wrapped in its silver shawl. Loni and Thornlee dismounted their riding bison, starting a chant in a language only the nerdiest among them knew. The minstrels accompanied the prayer. The shaman revealed the remains of her once plucky pal. Ilmare wept. Perchival’s feathers were charred by the very bolt he had become. The huge mother hawk lowered her head and cried beside her fallen son’s rider, her shrieks making all around shudder where they stood.
Vanguish remembered the first time they’d rode out here. Thunderbrush Thicket was still a new zone at the time, as the verse expanded down the coast with quarterly content releases. It’s now familiar trails not yet blazed, the Grove of the Greatmother wasn’t a place one could simply walk into, with exceptionally wild animals stalking any who dared enter this sacred wood. Ilmare had been determined to find a hatchling to raise as her own, having heard stories seeded on beastmaster sites. She’d dragged Vanguish and a small cadre to clear her path.
Back then, deaths this far from a major city meant days spent as ghosts, wandering this lonely coast until finding a place to reincarnate—and someone willing to bear the cost. By then their belongings would’ve been picked over, become property of the thicket’s beasts and prizes for some future finder. The stakes had been great, Ilmare’s decision to climb into the clouds and claim her hatchling was a radical risk. Vanguish and company barely held ground against waves of bloodthirsty direwolves and rabid bears that attacked in unrelenting onslaught. He remembered how Purrseus had fought beside them, tearing entrails from their targets, while Ilmare leapt from tree to tree, seeking her path to the sky.
But civilization eventually came to every frontier, even the digital. Years of aspiring windriders coming to seek their own hawks had carved convenient paths through the wood, even creating the occasional comfort shelter populated by bots and players alike. The grove was now more ceremonial than hazardous, a place where thousands had come to claim a bird to attempt to train as their own, few succeeded at riding their fledglings. Loni and Thornlee had even been married here before a grand audience. But when Ilmare came back to earth carrying baby Perchival in her pack, the great mother had descended to give her blessing for the very first time; a rite she couldn’t have earned without help from her friends.
Now, in a way, it was Loni returning that blessing, and a feeling of finality swept through the grove. Once the chant had finished, the storm began to quell. Vanguish knotted the silversail back together, then Wingdingz and Flappybirb took two corners and slowly carried their brother back to the cloud where he was born. The mother nudged one of her reluctant hatchlings towards Ilmare and squawked politely, seeking to spare her an unnecessary climb.
Purrseus made an utterance much more audible than before, yawning terribly wide. Vanguish looked behind with disbelief, catching the cat sizing the baby bird for a snack. By the time he turned back, Ilmare was shaking her head.
“No, I can’t. I can’t train another of your children for war,” she said.
The greatmother squawked towards the sky. Vance froze.
“Change of plans? Staying grounded with the rest of us for a while?” he asked, quickly stepping beside her. Purrseus perked up, looking unsure whether to boast or be worried about his fitness situation.
“It’ll take months to train another hawk to ride, maybe a year before he’s ready for raids. I need something fully grown and seasoned for battle,” Ilmare stated.
“Oh, you’re gonna make us do the thing again,” Vanguish said, eyeing the treetops.
“What thing?” she asked, coy as could be.
“The thing where you go do something crazy just so you can be the first,” he said, still remembering nearly getting eaten in this grove.
“Isn’t that like, our whole thing?” Ilmare said nice and sly.
“Yeah, yeah it is,” he admitted.
Ilmare stepped forward and planted her lance. “Greatmother, I seek the storm’s blessing. Not to tame one of your children but to break a mutual enemy and bridle it as my mount. I possess the Tongue of Bilgerath and will seek Wystan the ancient saddler in Heartshatter Pass to craft the Scalerider’s Reins. It is my wish to tame a wild white drake, and I accept any assistance you might award to aid my quest.”
Vance didn’t need to switch to his dashboard to know that the chat channel on Ilmare’s stream was being spammed with OMFGs and bizarre emojis, plus whatever new slang that Inverse’s legions of juvenile viewers were coming up with this week, triggered by her surprising monologue. From Maya’s midnight ramblings over nights long past, he also knew enough about how these games worked under the hood to understand what else had been triggered by Ilmare’s hokey roleplay recital. Somewhere in Sandstorm’s cloud, a series of functions were being called up from memory, invoked by those magic words and drawing the attention of their AI engines. This trigger would launch the final lines of dormant scripts, linking dangling plot hooks left by the developers like breadcrumbs through the Stormverse’s story, attempting to craft a coherent questline for Ilmare to pursue. Should her path be proven completable, variants, revisions, and iterations would be followed by future adventurers from that point foward. Should she fail in her quest, many expensive lessons would be learned by all involved as they restarted from zero.
The mother hawk made a final shriek and lifted herself into the air. Her mates followed obediently after. Their wings unfurled, shading the grove once again as they ascended. The air itself started to spark, the haptics on Vance’s chair bristled his skin with tiny bumps. Getting a glance from Loni, Thornlee sprang to retrieve a ripe orange gourd from a satchel of their comingled belongings on Booly’s side. The treespeaker spoke soft, inaudible phrases, causing eight vines to surge from the ground like serpents. They twisted upwards as four pairs, coiling into a cradle woven from the heart of the grove. Into this nest they laid the gourd to rest.
Thornlee began to sing the Song of Shaping. The minstrels played along for fun, causing impromptu harmonies to hum throughout the grove. Under the lullaby of the Song, the gourd gradually transformed. It pulsed and solidified, vibrant flesh turning first to amber and then to gold. Slowly, the shell turned translucent, its mundane form transmuted into a decanter of orange crystal, a marvel of transformation set to music.
Loni uncorked the newly formed flask with a steel rod outstretched and sparking, drawing in the charged atmosphere. As if filling a vacuum, the energy swirled into the container, now a tempest trapped in a crystal cage.
“For when you require the motherbird’s blessing and the sky’s power,” Loni said, handing Ilmare the bottle. She hung it beside her belt potions and wildfire flasks. “When the time comes, you may not need a bird to fly,” said the shaman.
The flock of hawks was gone. The sky became clear in time for the day’s last lingering rays to filter through the leaves. Soon after sundown, their congregation began to part ways. Cavanaww’s crew wished to ride back and tell tales of all the times Perchy had snatched them from danger. Or when they’d gotten rides from Ilmare to recover lost belongings when dying in the worst of places. Others took leave to finish forgotten tasks in the vicinity. Always living their digital lives on the cutting edge, the Dawnbreakers rarely rode this far south aside for ceremony. Most of their questing time was spent in whatever new zones were released each quarter, unearthing hints about how to defeat the beast of the month, each member always leaving a wake of unfinished business in pursuit of newfound glory. Loni’s pack wanted to make camp in the grove and sing songs until dawn, the combat musicians already strumming up a jam session. Berriwether’s bagpipes made everyone break down.
Feeling lost amid emotional swells, Vanguish wanted to explore rumored ruins in the Thicket’s northeast corner. Old memories had been triggered by all this quest talk, story bricks mentioning an ancient moon temple only accessible on clear nights like this—a puzzle no player had ever solved. And if they couldn’t riddle their way in, it might make a nice place to talk with Ilmare about recent strategic concerns.
Before he could bring it up, a small cohort of fans showed up to pay respects and leave little gifts. Overflowing affections for Perchival prompted Purrseus to pout. Ilmare smoothed his fur, welcoming viewers snapping pictures with their own flappy lenses, keeping her kitty pleasant for company. The group of well-wishers included a family from her home country, evidenced by subtle indicators of AI-assisted translation on Vance’s dash. They’d brought along a daughter by the name of Ulla, looking for tips on how to make her stream more successful, likely unaware of Maren’s less wholesome origins. “Being yourself in front of the world is hard, so you create a character,” Ilmare advised. “Imagine a version of yourself that’s less vulnerable, more outgoing, braver. Whatever you do, be fearless.”
Vanguish wondered where she’d gotten that advice, or if it was original content. While Vance was letting that thought sit, Purrseus pounced towards the trees, lifting Ilmare from her feet and triggering a chase towards a conspicuous rustle. The baby hawk had remained grounded when the greatmother took off with the others, left playing among the leaves and pecking for grubs. The big cat licked his lips; Ilmare’s lance separated the two. Frantic wrestling followed. Onlookers assumed it part of the show until things got bloody. Paying for victory at the cost of cat scratches, she scooped up the little bird and took him toward Ulla and family. “It’ll be a long time and a lot of practice before you can ride him, but you can start teaching him tricks today. You’ll get new views, I promise.”
Upon receiving the gift of a gawking hawk, Ulla looked upon Ilmare with the kind of worship that once occurred only when witnessing miracles. “I can’t wait to take Hawkward home and train him!” she said, beginning the cycle anew.
As the family left, Vanguish stepped quietly out of claw range and asked, “You know your cat is kinda evil, right? He was going to eat that baby.”
“Ghoststripe moontigers devour their siblings when they’re born, so I’m not surprised. And he really loves birds! For dinner, I mean,” Ilmare said.
“That’s disgusting. Why’d you want one of those as a pet?”
“He’s super rare, and I really liked the glowing stripes. I guess I was more morbid back then,” she said with an exaggerated shrug, her Swedish accent bleeding through more than usual. “But he’s a good boy, when he stays fed. These are his favorite.” She plucked a bright yellow bird resembling a life-like peep from her saddlebag and tossed it toward his mouth. “He likes them alive, but this will have to do.”
Vanguish had always assumed the canaries in the guild’s budget were mainly for the miners, not for feeding fiendish cats. An audit was in order, especially after recent naval expenses. Ships, sails, and ordnance weren’t getting cheaper, and the sale of serpent scales was off to a slow start. Running a guild was as much about balancing budgets as it was barking battle commands, maybe more. It was another thing he’d wished Mayalinn were still here to handle. She’d always had a head for the business side, though he was sure that played a part in why she’d left. Within a year or so of landing her hotshot AI job, she hadn’t had time for raids, vanishing from the verse soon after. Many of her friends followed within weeks.
Rebuilding the raid force had taken time after that. Rival guilds used the opportunity to take many first kills in that time, even going as far as poaching players from their roster. But change wasn’t all bad. Ilmare quickly took her place as the guild’s face, a death-defying daredevil always in the forefront, famously first in the verse to tackle training a stormhawk to ride. Each of them show-offs in their own way, Ilmare’s fierceness and feats of dexterity were in clear contrast to Maya’s exploits and magical manipulations. Mayalinn preferred baiting gargantuan game towards unfavorable terrain, or outwitting demonic legions into unwinnable positions before charging in full force. Ilmare favored jumping on heads and rushing in for the kill, consequences be damned, as they’d been in her last encounter. The Dawnbreakers could traditionally afford trading strategy for spectacle, but victory had gotten more costly. With a half-wrecked fleet, the ledgers were getting tight.
Still, he couldn’t help wondering what Mayalinn was up to now. Probably crushing some big corporate negotiation, or inventing a new kind of currency. Definitely no time for games.